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Outside the battered metal door of Archive 17, Pekkala stood in the rain.

He had knocked several times, but there was no response. And yet he could see through the transom windows at the top of the wall, that the lights were on inside. Someone was there, and he knew that someone was Vosnovsky.

He turned up the collar of his coat as a cold breeze swept along the empty street, ripping the puddles like stucco.

With a low growl, he stepped up to the door and pounded on it once again.

Nothing.

‘Vosnovsky!’ he shouted. ‘Open this wretched door!’

But his only reply was the wind, moaning through the broken windows of the abandoned warehouse across the street.

Pekkala paced out into the road, picked up one of the stones which had previously been hurled at the archive and prepared to pitch it at the door. But then he thought better of it and dropped the stone. Instead, he breathed in deeply and began to sing.

He belted out a piece from Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya
, in which a woman who is lost in the wilderness of the Kerzhenskii woods dreams that she has awoken in paradise. In February of 1907, Pekkala had accompanied the Tsar to the opera’s premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. He did not want to go but the Tsar had insisted.

‘Pekkala, my wonderful savage,’ said the Tsar, ‘it is time we civilised you just a little.’

It was Pekkala’s first time at the opera. Although his seat was too small, the music too loud for his taste and he felt overwhelmed to be packed in with so many people, he did enjoy the evening, even in spite of himself.

The song of the Kerzhenskii woods had tattooed itself into Pekkala’s mind, as the songs from his childhood had done, and he sang it as best he could, which was not particularly well.

The reason Pekkala bothered at all was that he had suddenly remembered the way Vosnovsky, in his previous incarnation as conductor on the Imperial Russian Railway line between Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, had sung operas while marching up and down the aisle of the rattly little train of which he was inordinately proud.

Pekkala had not been yowling long before the door to the Archive suddenly flew open and there stood Vosnovsky, eyes wide in astonishment. ‘Rimsky-Korsakov!’ he shouted.

‘Actually,’ said Pekkala, ‘it’s me.’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Vosnovsky. ‘Don’t stand there in the rain. Come in!’

Inside the Archive building, Vosnovsky spread his arms to take in the hundreds of filing cabinets. ‘Just say a name, Inspector!’

‘Detlev,’ answered Pekkala. ‘If he’s in here, he should be in one of the old Okhrana files.’

Vosnovsky turned sharply and strode away down one of the cabinet-lined avenues. ‘Okhrana!’ he said. And then he said it again, and again, and before long he was singing the word in a voice that echoed through the rafters of the Archive.

Once more, Pekkala recalled the proud conductor of the Petrograd-to-Tsarskoye train line, a double row of silver buttons shining on his dark blue tunic, bellowing out arias as he strode up and down the aisles of the carriage.

Then Vosnovsky came to an abrupt halt. ‘Here!’ he announced. ‘D. Detlev.’ He slid out one of the file drawers and walked his fingers across the brittle, dog-eared ranks of files. Smartly, he yanked out an envelope and was just about to hand it to Pekkala when the satisfied expression on his face suddenly faltered. The envelope rose and fell as he weighed in in his hand. ‘There’s something wrong,’ he said.

‘It’s empty,’ remarked Pekkala.

‘Why, yes,’ agreed Vosnovsky. ‘It almost sounds as if you knew already.’

Pekkala nodded wearily. ‘I thought there was a chance that the contents might have found their way home.’

Confused, Vosnovsky looked back into the crammed contents of the file drawer. ‘Well, Inspector, unless you know who might have taken it, I’m afraid there is very little chance . . .’

Vosnovsky’s words snagged like a fish hook in Pekkala’s brain. ‘We could try the Blue File,’ he said.

Vosnovsky turned to him, startled. ‘The Blue File!’ he echoed in a whisper. ‘No one has asked to see that in a very long time, and if the request were coming from anyone other than you, Inspector, I can assure you that request would be denied.’

The Blue File was one of the most secret collections of documents in all of Russia. It had been compiled by the Tsar, and contained lists of agents whose identities had never been revealed. Code names were used, and the names of the men to which they had been assigned were known only to the Tsar himself. These included not only top-level Okhrana operatives on special missions for the Tsar, but also spies who had been tasked to infiltrate their own secret service, as well as to perform other duties the Tsar considered too sensitive to reveal even to his closest and most trusted confidants.

After the Tsar and his family had been banished from Tsarskoye Selo, beginning the long journey which would ultimately end with their murders in the far-away city of Ekaterinburg, the file was discovered in a secret compartment of a desk in the Tsar’s study by agents of the newly formed Bolshevik Secret Service. It became known as the Blue File because all entries had been made in blue pencil in the Tsar’s own hand.

Rather than simply remove the file, the entire desk had been transported from Tsarskoye Selo in the hopes that, contained somewhere within this finely constructed piece of furniture, there might exist some other document, in which the real names of the agents might be found. But no book decoding the names had ever been discovered. If such a thing had even existed, it was likely that the Tsar had simply burned it before his departure, leaving the unsolved riddle of the file to torment those who had toppled him from power.

Even though the Tsar’s Secret Service, the Okhrana, was gone forever, and the men who once worked for the Tsar had either fled the country or were dead, access to the Blue File was still restricted only to those who had been granted the express permission of Stalin. The reason for this was not so much to protect what the Blue File contained, but to keep hidden its very existence. The very fact that such a file had been created might have led people to wonder if there might be another such file, one kept in Stalin’s own hand, and hidden away from the world. Stalin knew, as did the Tsar before him, that the best secret was not one whose answer was kept hidden by the strongest lock and key. The best secret was one which nobody knew existed.

‘Did the Tsar make you aware of Detlev’s code name?’

‘No,’ admitted Pekkala.

‘Or even that he was on special assignment for the Romanovs?’

Pekkala shook his head.

Vosnovsky regarded him solemnly. ‘Then why . . . ?’ he began.

Pekkala fixed him with a stare.

Vosnovsky’s mouth snapped shut. Motioning for Pekkala to follow, he made his way down the aisles of cabinets until he came to a locked door. The door was made of metal, painted in the same grey colour as the walls, and was as solidly constructed as the door that led out to the street. The only difference was that it had no handle, only a lock, which meant that it had not only to be unlocked from the outside, but that anyone entering was then expected to lock themselves in. Rummaging in his pocket, Vosnovsky produced a large bundle of keys and fiddled with it for some time before he found what he was looking for. Then he slid the key into the lock. With a heavy clunk, the deadbolt slid back and the door slid open with a groan of its seldom-used hinges.

The desk was the only piece of furniture in the room, which had no windows or ventilation. It appeared to have been some kind of storage room, or else a workplace deliberately set aside from the main floor in the days when the Archive had been a foundry.

Vosnovsky walked around to the back of the desk, crouched down and slid out a large compartment which contained the file. He lifted it up on to the desk. The file comprised thousands of pages, each particular set of documents separated by a small tab containing the code word by which the individual agent was known. As Pekkala squinted at the tidy collection of manila folders, each one marked with the code names of agents likely long since dead or living far away in carefully maintained obscurity – Angel Wing, Aldebaran, Balalaika, Carousel – he recognised the Tsar’s handwriting, and even the faint blue colour of the pencil which the Tsar had also used to make margin notes in the sheaves of documents supplied to him each week by his parliament, the Duma. Suddenly, Pekkala paused. There, jammed in between Carousel and another agent, code-named Dromedary, he saw a crumpled collection of pages, with no folder or anything to mark the agent’s name. He lifted them out and placed them on the desk.

It was the contents of Detlev’s Okhrana file, clearly showing his arrest in June of 1910, incarceration in the fortress of Peter and Paul and then his release only one month later. But it was the reason for his arrest that caught Pekkala’s attention. In a raid on a guesthouse suspected of being the residence of a bomb maker named Kachalov, municipal police had come across a man, later identified as Detlev, in the act of creating a forgery. But this was not just any forgery. It was a study of a figure contained within Titian’s
Burial of Saint Sebastian
, one of the most famous paintings in the Tsar’s private collection. Although Titian produced many detailed studies of characters he later incorporated into his masterpieces, almost none were known to have survived. Upon interrogation, Detlev confessed that he was working for an art dealer named Kramer, who owned a well-known gallery in St Petersburg and who had furnished the Tsar with several paintings over the years. Well aware that a previously undiscovered canvas relating to the
Burial of Saint Sebastian
would prove irresistible to the Tsar, Kramer had commissioned the forgery, intending to make a small fortune off the sale. Having learned of Detlev’s arrest, Kramer left the country before police could track him down. But Detlev was sentenced to hard labour for a term of no less than twenty-five years, a length of time few prisoners survived. And then, quite suddenly, and only a few weeks later. Detlev found himself a free man, by order of the Tsar. There was no mention in the Okhrana report as to why the Tsar had ordered his release, but there, at the bottom of the page, faintly written in the Tsar’s own hand, Pekkala found the answer. It was a list of other paintings forged by Detlev. Among them, he saw
Communion of the Elders
by Crespi, and Rosa’s
Court Musician
, which he knew had been part of the Romanovs’ extensive art collection. As far as Pekkala knew, the true provenance of these paintings had never been revealed. According to the rest of the world, these paintings were all original. The only person left in Russia who knew the truth was Detlev. Having got word to the Tsar that the forgeries were part of his collection, Detlev had done what few men had ever been able to accomplish – he had struck a deal with Nicholas II. Detlev had traded his silence for freedom. In doing so, he had taken an extraordinary risk. The safest way to ensure a man’s silence was to have him put to death, something the Tsar could have accomplished easily, quietly and efficiently. If word had leaked out that the Tsar had paid such mighty sums for paintings that were worthless, it would not only have made him a laughing stock but would have cast his entire collection into doubt. So why keep the forger alive? The Romanovs must have seen that a man with such extraordinary skills might come in handy some day. In the meantime, the Tsar had kept him close at hand, as a priest in the Church of the Resurrection on his own estate. Detlev might have believed that he had put his past behind him, thanks to the benevolence of the Tsar, but the day had come when his old skills were needed again. With access to the original, something almost never granted to a forger, Detlev had created a near perfect copy. It was this forgery that Stefan Kohl had received that day on the Potsuleyev Bridge and which, years later, the Skoptsy had died trying to protect.

Pekkala thought back to the day when, with the stitches from his knife wound still new and painful on his forehead, he had gone to the Alexander Palace, to make his report to the Tsar. He recalled how the Tsar’s fingers had drummed across the top of his desk, this same desk on which Pekkala’s knuckles rested now. If Pekkala could only have reached into the drawer, he would have found the missing contents of Detlev’s criminal record, recently removed from Okhrana headquarters, perhaps by one of those same agents whose code names were listed in the file which lay before Pekkala now.

Whether or not it had been the Tsar’s idea, or that of the Tsarina, to begin secret peace negotiations with his enemies, the Tsar had nevertheless been drawn into it. To pay the Skoptsy’s asking price, he had played his role in the deception. And worse than that, the Tsar had stopped his own investigator from finding out the truth.

Vosnovsky’s eyes grew rounder and rounder as Pekkala told him the story.

Afterwards, Pekkala wrote down the list of paintings in his notebook and Vosnovsky returned Detlev’s record to the Tsar’s secret file before placing it back inside the drawer.

Then the two men left the room, locking the door shut behind them.

They were walking back towards the entrance when suddenly Vosnovsky stopped and turned. ‘But the original,’ he asked, taking hold of Pekkala’s arm. ‘Who has the original now?’

‘Ha!’ Stalin boomed exultantly, grasping the icon with both hands and raising it above his head. ‘I knew it!’

Kirov and Pekkala stood before him, wincing as Stalin brandished the work of art.

‘I knew that first one you brought in here was a fake,’ Stalin told them. ‘I’ve got the knack, you see. The
instinct
!’ He put the icon on his desk and wagged his finger at the shepherd in the painting, as if to scold the white-robed man for hiding all these years. ‘That’s why I said I didn’t like the other one. It was a forgery. I told you so.’