Red Icon (18 page)

Suddenly a new voice entered the conversation. It was Speer. For the past few minutes, he had been nervously tapping a pen upon a leather briefcase lying on the table in front of him. ‘It is irrelevant,’ he announced, ‘whether the Russians or the Americans or the British have this weapon.’

For several seconds, Hitler studied his Minister of Armaments, as if trying to decide whether to take offence at the abruptness of his remark. But he seemed to think better of it, and only asked, ‘How so?’

‘If we deploy one of these compounds against them,’ replied Speer, ‘no matter how devastating the result, it will only be a matter of time before their scientists have collected samples from the battlefield, brought them back to their chemical warfare facilities and replicated the synthesis.’

‘Time,’ said Hitler. ‘How much time?’ He looked across at General Scheiber. ‘What do you think? A year? Six months?’

Scheiber breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘Something like that.’

‘And what do you say to that, Speer?’ asked Hitler.

‘Two weeks,’ Speer replied flatly.

‘That is impossible!’ shouted General Scheiber, slapping his palm hard against the tabletop.

But Speer was in no mood to back down. ‘If I gave Professor Meinhardt a sample today, I am confident that he could have a chemical breakdown ready for me, as well as a synthesis chart, in ten days.’

General Scheiber glared at him.

‘Well, Scheiber?’ demanded Hitler. ‘Is my Minister of Armaments lying to me?’

Scheiber’s jaw muscles clenched. He looked as if he was tied to his chair. ‘Possibly not,’ he muttered.

‘With a fully operational facility,’ continued Speer, ‘the likes of which the Allies are known to possess, they could begin production in under two weeks. So you see, whatever damage we could do to our enemies with this new weapon, would be visited upon us tenfold, and any strategic advantage we had gained would quickly be reversed. So it is settled.’ Hitler closed the file laid out before him. Then, without another word, he turned and walked out of the room.

There was a moment of silence.

‘I don’t understand,’ Meinhardt said quietly. ‘What is settled? What will happen to the Sartaman Project?’

General Keitel, who had said almost nothing up to this point, breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘Nothing will happen. Does he have to spell it out for you?’

One by one, the men rose to their feet.

Meinhardt wondered how he was ever going to get home again, or if he was going home at all.

As if in answer to the question, General Scheiber walked up to him. ‘You ride with me,’ he said. It did not sound like a request.

The two men left the building and climbed into a waiting Opel staff car. They sat side by side in the back seat. Neither man spoke as they progressed through the various checkpoints until at last they reached the open road again. It was only when they were several kilometres beyond the Rastenburg compound that Scheiber ordered his driver to pull over.

By now, they were on a long, straight, well-paved track, with thick pine forest growing on either side.

‘Out!’ Scheiber barked at the professor.

It occurred to Meinhardt that perhaps Scheiber intended for him to walk the rest of the way back to Leverkeusen.

But Scheiber climbed out with him.

‘With me!’ snapped Scheiber. Followed by Meinhardt, the general strode ahead of the car for a minute, so as to be out of the driver’s range of hearing. Then he stopped in the middle of the road.

For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind blowing through the tops of the pine trees.

Then General Scheiber spoke. ‘Do you realise, Professor, that you have just singlehandedly destroyed the entire chemical weapons programme? Do you have any idea how much money you have cost us? And why didn’t you explain to the Führer that we are still attempting to stabilise the soman compound? That might have bought us some time.’

‘I didn’t tell him that,’ said Meinhardt, ‘because I am not going to risk another catastrophe like the one that killed half a dozen of our research assistants!’

It seemed, for a moment, that Scheiber was ready to continue the argument indefinitely. But then the fight seemed to go out of him suddenly, and he let out a long, whistling sigh. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Get back to Leverkeusen. Transfer existing stocks of sarin and tabun to the Citadel Armoury at Spandau. Order all production and development to cease immediately. Cancel the Sartaman Project.’

Alexander Mikhailovich Kratky, a representative of the People’s Court, third class, stepped out of his office after a long day of reading depositions. As he turned to lock the door behind him, he heard someone moving about on the floor above, where Inspector Pekkala kept an office, along with his colleague Major Kirov from the shadowy Bureau of Special Operations.

In spite of the fact that they had been working just one floor apart for a number of years, it was only recently that Kratky had actually encountered the Emerald Eye.

To meet the great Inspector was both the fulfilment of a dream for Kratky, and at the same time completely terrifying. This was, after all, a man so steeped in legend that there were still people who, when Kratky confided to them that he worked in the same building as Pekkala, refused not only to believe that it was true but went on to claim that Pekkala was only a figment of the Tsar’s imagination; some mythic creature conjured into being in order to terrify his enemies and perpetuated for that same reason by none other than Comrade Stalin.

For a while, Pekkala had proved to be so elusive that even Kratky had begun to doubt the Inspector’s existence. Many times, when he heard footsteps on the landing outside his office, he had rushed to the door and flung it open, only to find himself face to face with Mrs Vedenskaya the cleaning lady, or the tall and rosy-cheeked Major Kirov, who appeared, at least on the surface, a most unlikely colleague for someone as lethal as Pekkala.

On the day he actually met Pekkala, Kratky had been so preoccupied with some important paperwork which had gone missing that, as he left his office, he barely noticed the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs from the fifth floor. Withdrawing the key from the lock, he turned to see a tall figure in a heavy, thigh-length coat step down on to the landing. Even though Kratky didn’t know what Pekkala looked like, since no pictures of the man were ever published, he had no doubt that this must be the Emerald Eye.

‘Good evening,’ said Pekkala. He stood head and shoulders taller than the lawyer.

Kratky spluttered out a greeting.

‘You work here, don’t you?’ asked Pekkala.

The words seemed to bounce off Kratky’s face like dried peas. ‘I do,’ he answered breathlessly, as if confessing to a crime.

For a moment, the two men stood awkwardly at the top of the staircase, waiting to see who would go first.

‘Perhaps,’ said Pekkala, ‘we should both walk down together.’

This they achieved, although there was not really enough room for two men walking side by side.

At first, Kratky had no idea what to say. He had often wondered when and if he would ever cross paths with the Inspector, and he had composed dozens of questions for when that moment came. But now that it had arrived, Kratky’s mind became a thrumming emptiness and he could not recall any of the things he’d planned to talk about.

Pekkala, meanwhile, seemed quite content to say nothing at all.

‘The food,’ Kratky stammered out at last.

Pekkala glanced across at him. ‘What food?’ he asked.

‘The Friday food. The food on Friday.’ Even as Kratky struggled to give shape to his thoughts, his mouth filled with saliva at the thought of the wonderful smells of cooking that filled the hallways at the end of every working week. This ritual had been going on for years, but who did the cooking and why had remained a mystery to Kratky.

‘That’s Major Kirov’s tradition,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Comrade Kirov cooks the food?’ Kratky could not believe what he was hearing.

‘Oh, yes,’ Pekkala assured him. ‘The major is an excellent cook. If you are hungry on some Friday afternoon, you should come up. Kirov always makes a little extra.’

Kratky nodded thanks and the two men parted company.

Ever since then, at quitting time on Fridays, Kratky would try to summon the nerve to go upstairs and join the meal, instead of making his way home to the cramped apartment where he lived with his aunt and ageing parents.

And yet, at the last moment, his courage had always failed him. At least, until today. What made things different was the news he’d just received that he was being transferred to an office in far-away Ulyanovsk. If Kratky did not go, the chance would never come again and he knew he would always regret it, even if no one believed him when he told the story afterwards.

There are moments in a person’s life when the things he has achieved, some of which are so small that they seem beyond all reckonable calculation, suddenly come together and he can glimpse, in that rare moment, the triumphs and the failures that have made him who he truly is. For Kratky, this was one of those times, and in that instant he became the master of his fears. Standing first on one leg and then on the other, he rubbed the toes of his shoes against the backs of his calves to polish them up. Then he began to climb the stairs.

The smell of food had not yet drifted down the stairs. Kratky was glad to arrive before the cooking began, because he had brought with him a small bottle of Georgian Mukuzani wine, saved since before the war broke out, with the idea that they could drink it as an aperitif as the meal was being prepared.

The door to Pekkala’s office was open.

Kratky stopped at the doorway, cleared his throat to announce his presence and said, ‘Hello?’

There was no reply. The room seemed to be empty.

‘It’s lawyer Kratky from downstairs,’ he announced, and, hesitantly, he stuck his head into the room. ‘I come by invitation!’ added the lawyer, with a formality which seemed to him appropriate for the occasion.

What happened next took place so quickly that the lawyer barely understood the meaning of events.

Kratky saw a large shadow stretch across the floor, and he perceived that it was the shadow of a person. He turned to look and saw, for a fraction of a second, a tall man standing just to the right of the door.

He did not have time to study the stranger’s face. In the next instant, he felt something like an electric shock, which seemed to travel from his chin down to his feet and back again. He raised his hand to his throat and, to his terrified amazement, his fingers slipped into a gaping hole which had suddenly appeared in his neck. Kratky heard a roaring in his ears, as if he had been cast into a fast-flowing river. He tried to hold his breath but there was none to hold. The river seemed to flow right through him, its current dragging him down. Soon he was deep beneath the surface and, even in his confusion, it was clear to him that he was never coming back. The last thought Lawyer Kratky had in this world was that he wished he could have told someone about the day he summoned up the courage to have dinner with the great Inspector Pekkala.

Returning from their second trip to Karaganda, Pekkala and Kirov discovered that their office on Pitnikov Street had been sealed off as a crime scene. Multiple strips of red cloth tape were pinned across the doorway, making the place look as it had been wrapped inside a spiderweb.

Kirov called the city police, and it was some time before they were able to gain access to the room.

‘The investigation is ongoing,’ said the officer who arrived to let them in. He was a young, honest-looking man, tall and thin and freckled, with a shock of short-cropped ginger hair. ‘It may still be a few days before you can move back in.’

‘This was a robbery, I assume,’ said Pekkala.

‘I’ll let you be the judge of that,’ replied the officer, ‘but we have been focusing primarily upon the murder.’

‘Murder?’ asked Kirov, and as he spoke the blood drained from his face. They had arrived such a short time ago that there had not yet been time for him to see Elizaveta. ‘Who was murdered?’ he shouted. ‘For God’s sake, tell me!’

The officer pulled out a notebook, and glanced at one of the pages. ‘A man named Kratky. Lived downstairs.’

Kirov’s breath trailed out. ‘I thought . . .’

‘What was Kratky doing up here?’ asked Pekkala.

‘We thought he might be checking on the place, since you’ve been out of town.’

Kirov shook his head. ‘No such arrangement was made.’

‘How did he die?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Had his throat cut,’ answered the officer, as he removed the tape, wrapping it carefully around the knuckles of one hand, like a boxer preparing for a fight. Then he opened the door. ‘See for yourself,’ he said, pointing to a large bloodstain on the floor.

The office had been ransacked. The drawers of the desks had been pulled out and the desks themselves turned over. Books had been swept from the shelf and floorboards prised up in the corners of the room. Even the walls had been gashed open with a knife.

‘He must have heard the intruder,’ suggested Kirov, ‘and come up to see who it was.’

The officer nodded. ‘That’s probably it.’

‘If you’ll let us look around,’ said Pekkala, ‘we should be able to tell you if anything’s been taken.’

The officer waved his hand into the room. ‘Be my guest, Inspector. I’ll wait out here for you.’

‘Someone must have been looking for the icon,’ Kirov murmured to Pekkala, keeping his voice low so that the officer would not hear. ‘Whoever broke in here and killed the lawyer must be the same person who mailed that poison.’

Pekkala continued Kirov’s line of thought. ‘He knew we would return to Karaganda to investigate Detlev’s murder. Then, when we were gone, he’d have no trouble breaking in to steal the icon. The only thing he didn’t factor in was that we’d have it with us.’

The two men returned to the hallway.

‘Well?’ asked the officer.

‘Nothing has been taken,’ said Pekkala.

The officer looked into the room and shook his head. ‘Just some thief trying his luck. The lawyer must have caught him by surprise before he had a chance to rob the place. I’ll file my report this evening, Inspector. You should have your office back by tomorrow. Before then,’ he smiled sympathetically, ‘you might want to find something to cover up that bloodstain on the floor.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Stalin glared through narrowed eyes at his two visitors. Late-afternoon sunlight filtered in beneath the thick red curtains, which had remained drawn across the windows of Stalin’s study. ‘I send you to find out what happened to an icon and you return to me with stories of a chemical weapon?’

‘That is correct,’ said Pekkala.

‘And have you identified this substance?’ demanded Stalin.

‘Samples have been sent to Professor Arbusov at the School of Organophosphorous Chemistry in Sosnogorsk,’ explained Kirov. ‘You should have the results in a couple of days.’

As Stalin considered this new development, he smoothed out his thick moustache with his thumb and index finger. ‘And you believe that the killing of this priest and the break-in at your office might have been carried out by the same person, in order to steal back the icon?’

‘That is correct,’ answered Pekkala, ‘although we have yet to figure out how he came to know that we are in possession of
The Shepherd
.’

‘Whoever he is,’ said Stalin, ‘I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. I’ll send some men to keep an eye on your office, as well as your apartments. In the meantime, find out who would value this old relic so much that they would be prepared to kill for it.
The Shepherd
led this murderer to you. Now let’s see if it can lead you back to him. But be quick,’ warned Stalin. ‘If whoever made this weapon decides to test its full potential, we will need a greater miracle than any icon can provide.’