The Beast in the Red Forest (9 page)

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’

‘And yet, Moscow would now like me to assist you in locating a single man who
might
be living with the partisans, even though neither you, nor I, nor God himself, knows where to find him?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’

Andrich sighed angrily. ‘I suppose you had better start by telling me his name.’

‘Pekkala.’

The wounded officer turned to stare at Kirov. ‘Pekkala, the Inspector? The one they call the Emerald Eye?’

‘That’s him,’ answered Kirov.

‘I heard he was dead,’ said Lipko, scratching at the collar of his coat as if the fur was his and not stripped from the back of a goat.

‘So did I,’ added Fedorchak. ‘A long time back.’

‘I have reason to believe that he may still be alive,’ Kirov assured them. ‘Have either of you heard any mention of his name out there in the forest?’

‘No,’ replied Fedorchak, ‘but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. When people join the partisans, their real names are often kept secret, so that their friends and families, or sometimes the whole village where they lived, would not be put to death if their real identities were discovered.’

‘So now,’ said Colonel Andrich, ‘you can see what you are really up against. To find a man who may or may not be dead, without a name, living among partisans no one can find, sounds to me like an exercise in futility.’

‘He was a Finn, wasn’t he?’ asked Lipko.

‘That’s right. Why?’

‘I heard a Finn was living with the Barabanschikovs.’

At the mention of that name, it grew suddenly quiet in the room.

‘Who are these Barabanschikovs?’ asked Kirov.

The partisans kept quiet, shifting uneasily in their corpse-robbed boots.

It was Andrich who replied. ‘Let’s just say, that if he’s with the Barabanschikovs, then your task may be even more difficult.’

‘But if you know
who
they are, then surely someone must know
where
they are.’

Fedorchak laughed. ‘Oh, we know where they are, more or less. They’re in the Red Forest.’

‘I don’t recall seeing that name on the map,’ said Kirov.

‘That’s because it isn’t there,’ Fedorchak told him. ‘The Red Forest is a name the locals gave to a wilderness south of here, where hundreds of maple trees grow. In the autumn, when the leaves turn red, the forest looks as if it has been painted with blood.’

Kirov looked anxiously from one man to the other. ‘Will you take me there? It’s still light. We could set off now.’

The partisans both shook their heads. ‘That land belongs to Barabanschikov.’

‘Then just point me in the right direction,’ shouted Kirov, ‘and I’ll go myself!’

‘You don’t understand,’ Lipko told him. ‘No one in their right mind goes into the Red Forest.’

At that moment, the phone rang. Colonel Andrich picked up the receiver, pressing it against his fleshy ear. ‘Damn!’ he shouted and hung up.

‘What is it?’ asked Kirov,

‘Another air raid.’ The words were not even out of his mouth before they heard the rumble of multi-engine planes. The droning of the unsynchronised motors rose and fell. Kirov could tell they were German. Soviet bombers had synchronised engines, so that the noise they made was a steady, constant thrum, instead of this.

Soon after came the first deep shudder of explosions in the distance. The bombs were falling in clusters. Kirov flinched at each detonation. The floor trembled under his feet.

‘This is the third time in two days,’ muttered Colonel Andrich, staring grimly into space.

The next volley of explosions seemed to happen all at once. The building shook. A crack, like the path of a tiny lightning bolt, appeared in the ceiling above Kirov’s head.

The lights flickered.

If one piece of hot shrapnel hits these crates, thought Kirov, we will be falling from the sky in pieces as small as rain.

The colonel swore and grabbed hold of the sides of his desk.

The next sound was like a huge flag billowing in the wind. The shock nearly dropped Kirov to his knees and panic washed through him at the thought of being buried alive.

The candle went out, and was followed by darkness so complete, it was as if they’d all been struck blind.

A dry, snapping boom shook the building.

That blast was followed by another, but this one was more distant than the last. As the seconds passed, bombs continued to fall, each one further away than the last.

It’s over, Kirov thought to himself.

But, in the next instant, the room was filled with deafening explosions.

Kirov’s first thought was that some of the loose ammunition must have exploded, but then he glimpsed the splashing light of a gun muzzle. Somebody had opened fire, but he couldn’t see who held the gun. In the flickering glare, Kirov watched Fedorchak go down, his blood splashing in an arc across the ceiling.

Kirov turned to run, hoping to reach the stairs which led up to the street, when suddenly he felt a stunning blow to his side. The impact threw him against the wall. He stumbled and fell to the floor, gasping for breath. The whole upper part of his body felt as if it had caught fire.

The firing stopped and, a moment later, a sabre of torchlight punctured the dusty air.

Someone stepped over to the doorway.

Kirov heard a metallic rustle as the gunman slid an empty magazine from his pistol, letting it fall with a clatter to the floor. Unhurriedly, he replaced it with another, then chambered a round in the breech.

Kirov struggled to focus on the man, but his eyes were filled with smoke.

At that moment, there was a sound at the end of the excavated hallway.

The gunman aimed the beam of his torch down the tunnel, just as the two typists made a run for the exit.

The gun roared again, twice, three times, and the women fell in a heap at the base of the steps.

Spent cartridges clattered down. One of them bounced off Kirov’s cheek, searing the flesh.

The gunman heard him gasp and suddenly the torch beam was burning into Kirov’s face.

The man bent over him.

Blinded in the glare, Kirov felt the hot muzzle of the gun pressing against the centre of his forehead. Cordite smoke sifted from the breech. Kirov knew he was about to die. The clarity of that thought cut through the shock of his wounds, but where Kirov had expected to feel terror, there was only a strange, shuddering emptiness, as if some part of him had already shrugged itself loose from the scaffolding of flesh and bones that anchored him to the world. He closed his eyes and waited for the end.

But the shot never came.

The next sound Kirov heard was the soft tread of the man’s boots as he made his way along the earth-walled passageway, stepped over the two dead women, climbed the stairs and was gone.

Kirov lay in the dark, unable to move, tasting blood at the back of his mouth and wondering why the gunman had left him alive. Perhaps, he thought, I am so badly wounded that he knows I’ll be dead before help can arrive. Although Kirov knew he had been shot, he wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. The pain had not yet focused and his whole body felt numb. Feebly, he dragged his fingertips across his chest, searching for a tear in his uniform where the bullet had gone in. But his strength began to fail him before he could locate the wound. A velvety blackness sifted through his mind. He struggled against it, but there was nothing he could do. The darkness seemed to overflow his skull and pour out through his eyes. His last conscious thought was that he might have been dead after all.

Kirov regained consciousness just as he was being wheeled into an operating room. He sat up suddenly, startling the nurses who were moving the gurney towards the surgery table. Ignoring their protests, he began to climb down, but when his feet touched the floor, he found that he could barely stand. It felt as if his bones had been removed.

One of the nurses took hold of Kirov’s shoulder, trying to push him back, but Kirov, in his morphine-fuelled delirium, punched her on the chin and laid her out cold on the red linoleum floor. Then the other nurse attacked, kicking his shins with her blunt-toed shoes and pulling his ears while she called for the doctor.

Angry and completely confused, Kirov fought against the woman, staggering around until his legs gave out from under him. His head struck the floor with a crack.

From where he lay, Kirov noticed a pile of severed arms and legs heaped into the corner.

The face of a man appeared above him. He wore a white smock smeared with blood. ‘You fool!’ he shouted, as he pressed something cold and wet against Kirov’s face. ‘These people are trying to help you!’

A sickly sweetness, smelling like paint thinner, filled Kirov’s lungs. ‘Damn you,’ he managed to say, before he tumbled back into oblivion.

Kirov woke with the sun on his face. His chest was covered with bandages and his bare feet poked out from under a grey army blanket.

He was by himself in a small room, which appeared to have been converted from some kind of closet. It had one window, against which the ice-sheathed branches of a tree tapped as they jostled in the breeze. The walls of the room were a pale brownish yellow, like coffee with milk that had been left in a mug and gone cold. The only thing aside from his bed was a collapsible chair in the corner.

Vaguely, he remembered hitting somebody. A woman. No, he thought. That can’t be right. I would never have done such a thing.

Then he leaned over and threw up, surprised to find a bucket already waiting on the floor beside his bed. He groaned, still hanging almost upside down, and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his hospital pyjamas. Although Kirov’s sight was blurred, the sunlight melting into rainbows everything on which he tried to focus, he was relieved to see his boots standing at the foot of the bed, along with the canvas bag containing Pekkala’s revolver.

As he lay back, Kirov noticed a movement on the other side of the room. A man was standing there, hidden until that moment by the glare of light pouring in through the window. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked.

The man did not reply.

‘Do I know you?’ demanded Kirov.

The man walked towards him, still masked in the flare of the sun.

In that silhouette, Kirov thought he recognised Pekkala’s shoulders, like plates of armour slung across his back, but his vision was blurred and his mind kept skipping, like a needle jumping on a record.

The man reached out and Kirov felt the warmth of a hand pressed against his forehead.

‘Sleep now,’ whispered the stranger.

As if the voice compelled him, Kirov slipped from consciousness, wading out into the black lake of his dreams.

The next time he woke, it was evening.

A nurse was tucking in the blanket, her back turned towards him.

‘Where am I?’ asked Kirov.

‘In the hospital,’ the nurse replied, ‘not far from Rovno, where you were wounded yesterday.’

‘I dreamed I hit someone,’ said Kirov.

Now the woman turned to face him. ‘Is that so?’

Kirov gasped as he caught sight of her black eye.

‘I must have had that dream as well,’ said the woman.

‘Forgive me,’ muttered Kirov.

‘In time, perhaps,’ she told him

‘There’s something else I dreamed,’ he said, ‘or thought I dreamed, at least.’

‘What was it?’

‘A man, standing right over there by the window.’

‘I was on duty all afternoon, and nobody came into the room apart from me. But don’t think you’re going crazy. They gave you morphine for the pain. That stuff can play tricks with your mind.’

‘I saw him, too,’ said a voice.

Kirov glanced towards the doorway, where a man sat in a wheelchair. He had lost both his legs halfway down the thigh and one of his arms at the bicep. With his one remaining hand, he steered the chair by gripping one of the wheels.

‘Return to your room, Captain Dombrowsky,’ commanded the nurse. ‘Leave this man alone. He needs his rest.’

Grinning but obedient, the man manoeuvred himself back into the hallway and creaked away back to his bed.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ said the nurse. ‘His limbs aren’t the only things he’s lost. The Captain was transferred here from another hospital right after the Germans pulled out. He made such a nuisance of himself at the other place that they passed him over to us. And now we’re stuck with him.’

‘How did I get here?’ asked Kirov.

‘Some soldiers brought you in. They found you in a bunker after the air raid. They said you had been in a gunfight, but against whom they didn’t know.’

‘I don’t know, either,’ said Kirov. ‘Someone just started shooting. How are the others?’

‘You are the only survivor,’ replied the nurse. ‘When the soldiers carried you in, you were covered in so much blood that I thought they’d wasted their time. Turns out, it wasn’t all yours. The soldiers told me that, apart from you, they found three men, all of them dead. Two were obviously partisans. The third man had a Soviet identity book, but was wearing civilian clothes. They didn’t tell me his name.’

‘That must be Colonel Andrich,’ said Kirov, ‘but there was also a Red Army officer in the bunker with us. Did they find him, too?’

The nurse shook her head. ‘Whoever he was, it sounds like that’s the man who shot you and your friends.’

‘And there was a driver. He waited outside during the meeting. How is he?’

‘No one mentioned anything about a driver. He might have been killed in the air raid.’

At that moment, the doctor walked in. It was the same man who had dosed Kirov with ether when he tried to get down off the gurney. The doctor’s apron had been cleaned, but still showed the marks of blood stains in the cloth. Without any smile or greeting, the man unclipped a chart from the foot of Kirov’s bed. Still glancing at the chart, the doctor reached into the pocket of his white hospital coat, removed something about the size of a cherry stone and tossed it on to the bed. ‘Major, you’re a lucky man,’ he said.

Kirov squinted at the object, which had landed on the blanket just above his chest. It was a bullet, or what was left of one. Kirov stared at the gnarled mushroom of lead and copper.

‘The bullet must have ricocheted,’ explained the doctor, ‘which explains its deformed shape. By the time it hit you, the force was almost spent. We removed it from under your collar bone. If the round had been going any faster, it would have torn away your shoulder blade.’

A shudder passed through Kirov as he thought of the bullet ripping through his skin.

Seeing Kirov’s discomfort, the nurse picked up the piece of lead and tucked it into the pocket of his tunic, which was now draped over a chair in the corner of the room. ‘I really don’t know why you hand those things out,’ she told the doctor.

The doctor smiled. ‘A reminder to be more careful next time.’

‘I really should be going,’ said Kirov. ‘You see, I came here from Moscow to find someone.’ As he struggled to sit up, he felt a dull, tearing sensation across his chest and slumped back with a groan.

‘Be patient,’ warned the doctor. ‘Even for a commissar, willpower alone is not a cure. You’ll be back on the street soon enough. In the meantime, allow my nurse to make your life miserable for a few days. It’s the least you can do after punching her lights out yesterday.’

‘I have already apologised.’

‘Knowing her,’ said the doctor, as he replaced the chart, ‘I think it might take more than that to earn forgiveness.’

When the doctor had gone, the nurse finished tucking in the bed. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ she told Kirov. ‘He likes to stir up trouble.’

‘So you won’t be making my life miserable?’

‘When the morphine wears off,’ she assured him, ‘your life will be miserable enough without my help.’

And she was right.

In the long, sleepless night which followed, blinding flashes of colour exploded behind Kirov’s eyes and pain rose from the fading haze of morphine, shuddering through his body as if some cruel phantom was prising at his joints with screwdrivers. He listened to the Morse-code tap of the branch against the window and the whimpering of soldiers whose amputated limbs still ghosted them with agony. The more Kirov listened, the louder the noises became, until he had to press his hands against his ears or else be deafened by them.

Kirov had no sense of having slept, or for how long, but in the morning he woke bathed in sweat, to the sound of a creaking wheel as Captain Dombrowsky steered himself into the room. ‘The nurse told you I was crazy, didn’t she?’

‘More or less.’ Kirov’s throat was dry. He wished he had something to drink.

‘Do you know what those nurses call me behind my back?’ asked Dombrowsky. ‘Their name for me is Samovar, because that’s what I look like with no legs and only one arm. To them, I am nothing more than a glorified teapot. Maybe I’m insane, but I know what I’m talking about.’

Kirov fixed him with a bloodshot stare. ‘And what
are
you talking about, Dombrowsky?’

‘About the man you saw. He appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost, right when the nurses were changing their shifts. He went straight to your room and as he walked he made no sound. No sound at all!’

‘What did he look like, this man?’

‘He was tall.’

‘That’s all you can tell me?’

‘He wore an old-fashioned coat, of a kind I haven’t seen since before the Revolution.’

Maybe I wasn’t hallucinating after all, thought Kirov.

The nurse appeared in the doorway. ‘What did I tell you, Captain?’ she scolded. ‘Now leave Major Kirov in peace! And stay away from the stairs! I saw you this morning, and you were much too close to the edge. If you try going down in that wheelchair, you’ll kill yourself.’

‘I’m going! I’m going!’ Meekly, Dombrowsky wheeled himself away, but as he passed by Kirov’s bed, he turned his head and winked.

That night, Rovno was bombed again. This time, it was the outskirts that received the full force of the destruction. Above the burning houses, the sky turned pink as salmon flesh and, at the hospital on the other side of town, shockwaves caused the windows to tremble like ripples in a pond.

Kirov drifted in and out of sleep. The fever had broken and now his discomfort centred on the livid purple scar beneath his collarbone. He found it difficult to lie in any one position for long and each time he moved, the pain would jolt him awake.

With a moan, Kirov rolled on to his back. His eyes flickered open and the darkness took shape around him – the light bulb in the ceiling, the crack in the bottom left pane of the window, through which he saw the sky punctuated by the flash of high explosives in the distance.

That was when he realised there was someone standing right beside his bed.

This time, there could be no doubt.

It was Pekkala.

For a moment, Kirov was too stunned to speak. Even though he had believed all along that the Inspector could have survived, he had always been guided more by faith than certainty. Now, at last, Kirov’s mind was no longer shackled by doubt. ‘I knew it!’ he shouted. ‘I knew they couldn’t kill the Emerald Eye!’

Pekkala responded by slapping his hand over Kirov’s mouth. ‘Quiet!’ he hissed. ‘Are you trying to wake the dead as well as the living?’

Kirov blinked at him in silence until Pekkala finally removed his hand.

‘How did you know I was in Rovno?’ asked Kirov.

‘The clues I left with Linsky,’ explained Pekkala, speaking so matter-of-factly that it was as if no time at all had passed since the two men parted company. ‘I knew they’d lead you here eventually.’

‘So you really were in Moscow!’

Pekkala patted his new coat. ‘And I did not leave Moscow empty-handed.’

‘But why did you wait so long?’

‘I came as soon as the German army pulled out of this area,’ explained Pekkala. ‘Before that, it was not possible to travel.’

‘But why leave clues for me to follow you out here?’ demanded Kirov. ‘Why didn’t you simply come to the office?’

‘You were being watched,’ explained Pekkala.

‘Watched?’ Kirov remembered the feeling of uneasiness which had pursued him almost to the point of madness. ‘By whom?’

‘From the look of them,’ answered Pekkala, ‘I’d say they were NKVD Special Operations.’

‘Our own people?’

‘Stalin knew that his best chance of catching me was if I came back to look for you. That’s why he had you followed.’

Now it all began to make sense. ‘And why every assignment I’ve been given since you disappeared has kept me in Moscow. He wanted to make sure you could find me.’

‘But Stalin grew tired of waiting. That’s why he finally allowed you to leave the city, hoping you’d lead him to me.’

‘All this time,’ Kirov muttered angrily, ‘I have been nothing more than bait in a trap.’

‘There’s a way around every trap,’ said Pekkala, ‘and my way around this one was Linsky. For several days, I had been shadowing the same people who were following you. They had staked out the office, your apartment, even your friend Elizaveta. But they had no one watching Linsky. I knew he would recognise who placed the order, even if I didn’t leave a name. I gambled that, as soon as Linsky realised I was still alive, he’d find a way to get in touch with you, and for you to pay a visit to a tailor would not arouse the suspicions of NKVD. In the meantime, I couldn’t stay in Moscow. It was too risky. So I left behind that tobacco pouch, trusting that the tanner’s mark inside would lead you here to Rovno.’

‘There was one other clue, Inspector.’

‘Oh, yes? And what was that?’

‘Your pass book and your gun were found on that body at the site of the ambush, but the emerald eye was missing.’