Hunched over his desk, Pekkala laid a piece of parchment paper over the canvas. Then, using a pencil, he traced every line on the painting, including the tree branches in the background and the flecks of colour which had been daubed across the wings of the moth. He handed the tracing to Kirov. ‘Pin this on the wall,’ he said.
After that, Pekkala made a tracing only of the background, leaving the double-heart shape of the moth as a blank in the centre of the picture. This, too, went up on the wall.
Next, Pekkala traced only the lines within the wings of the moth. ‘Pin this.’
Then he traced only the flecks and followed it with a sketch containing just the horizontal lines, and another with only verticals. All of these, he pinned up on the wall. Finally, when Pekkala could think of no other way of breaking down the framework of the picture, he stood back and surveyed the now-crowded cork board. The strange, skeletal images seemed to flutter through the air, brought to life by the motion of the oil lamp’s flame.
‘Do any of those look like a map to you?’ he asked Kirov, who had retreated to the chair behind his desk and now sat with his heels up on the blotter.
‘Honestly? No.’
Behind him, faint breaths of steam seeped from the brass samovar’s spout, as if it too were considering the situation.
Pekkala went over to the bookcase, from which he retrieved a folded map of the entire country. ‘Is this the only one we’ve got?’
‘We’d have room for more if you would get rid of those railway timetables,’ replied Kirov.
It was true, the twenty-four volumes did take up half the shelf, but Pekkala chose to ignore the comment. He spent a minute unravelling the map which, like some complicated piece of origami, at first resisted all attempts at being unfolded. Having finally completed the task, Pekkala laid the chart on the floor and stood in the middle of it like a giant, one foot in the Ukraine and the other in Siberia, peering down at the arteries of rivers — the Volga, the Dnieper, the Yenisei — and at the dense muscularity of the Ural and Stanovoy mountains. ‘Somewhere,’ he muttered, ‘the lines on that wall overlap with the contours on this map.’
‘If what’s hidden is even in Russia. And even if it is‚ you’ll never find it, because the lines in that painting might represent a single street in a village so small it isn’t even listed.’ With that pronouncement, Kirov got up from his chair and headed over to the samovar, whose steady jet of steam had travelled to the window, painting it with beads of condensation. Then he set about preparing tea. From the window sill, between two kumquat trees whose orange fruit stood out against the blackness of the night beyond the windowpane like meteors hurtling to earth, Kirov fetched out an old tin, containing his precious supply of tea, from which he selected a pinch of black crumbs and sprinkled them into the samovar. ‘Not much left,’ he muttered, peering at the dwindled contents of the tin.
The dealers in the market had taken to shrugging their shoulders when Kirov chanted out the names of teas — Mudan, Jin Zan, Karavan — whose abundance he’d once taken for granted.
While the tea brewed, both men stood before the wall of sketches.
‘The Germans already have maps of our country,’ remarked Kirov. ‘Maybe, instead of trying to figure out where this map is supposed to be, we should be asking ourselves what they need a map of that they don’t already possess.’
Kirov’s words snagged like a fish hook, trolling through Pekkala’s brain. ‘So what this is,’ he began, advancing to the wall and touching his fingertips first against one tracing and then another, ‘is of a place for which there was no map before.’
‘Or else a place that has been changed,’ suggested Kirov.
‘The layout of a fortress, perhaps, just like the one drawn by the British spy.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Kirov, ‘but what fortresses exist in the path of the German advance?’
‘None,’ admitted Pekkala.
The two men sighed as their train of thought ground to a halt.
The tea had brewed by now. From the drawer of his desk, Kirov brought out two tea glasses, each one nestled in a brass holder. He poured a small amount of tea into each one and added some boiling water to dilute the strong mixture, which would otherwise have been too bitter to drink.
Reaching across the map, he handed one glass to Pekkala.
‘No sugar?’ asked Pekkala.
‘We have run out of that, as well,’ Kirov replied gloomily.
As Pekkala breathed in the smell of the tea, its smoky odour reminded him of his cabin in Siberia, where, in the winter, he sometimes returned from hunting so frozen that he would curl up in his fireplace and warm himself by lying in the embers.
When the sun came up three hours later, splashing like molten copper across the slate rooftops of Moscow, Kirov and Pekkala were still staring at the wall, as helpless as they’d been when they first set eyes upon the painting.
‘There must be some way of looking at them which we haven’t tried yet,’ said Pekkala.
Kirov tilted his head to the side and blinked at the wall.
‘I doubt you have found the solution,’ said Pekkala.
‘I wasn’t looking for one,’ replied Kirov. ‘I am simply too tired to hold my head up straight.’
Equally exhausted, Pekkala let his eyes droop shut for a moment. All the maps he’d ever seen crowded into view inside his skull. The lines of streets, the paths of rivers and the thumbprint contours of mountains flickered behind his eyes like a pack of shuffled playing cards. ‘Go home, Kirov,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep.’
Kirov was too tired to argue. ‘Very well, Inspector. But what about you?’
‘I’m not tired,’ lied Pekkala.
‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’
Pekkala listened to the heavy tread of Kirov’s boots as he made his way downstairs. Then came the bang of the heavy door at the front of the building and finally the rumble of the Emka as its engine sprang to life.
For a moment, Pekkala stared longingly at a chair in the corner. Two years before, Pekkala had salvaged the chair off the street after spotting it lying in the snow outside the Hotel Metropol. Before the Great War, the hotel had been famous as a meeting place for gamblers, spies and black market millionaires. Pekkala himself had often met there with the former Moscow Bureau Chief of the Okhrana, a fleshy man named Zubatov. Although Zubatov had been forced out of his position in 1903 by Interior Minister Vyachyslav von Plehve, he continued to work for the Okhrana as a field agent. He often smuggled himself into neighbouring countries with the help of a shadowy branch of the Okhrana, known as the Myednikov Section, who specialised in infiltrating foreign Intelligence networks. Using a variety of disguises and forged identities, Zubatov would hunt down any plots which might endanger the life of the Tsar. Rarely did he return without news of some conspiracy. His paranoia proved infectious, and it wasn’t long before he had convinced the Tsarina to order the construction of hidden passageways within the Catherine and Alexander Palaces. These tunnels emerged in groves of trees outside the buildings themselves or even beyond the grounds of the estate. But it did not stop there. At Zubatov’s urging, secret hiding places were built in all the residences at Tsarskoye Selo. Behind invisible doors, staircases carved out of the bedrock led to rooms deep beneath the ground. In these tomb-like chambers, members of the Romanov family, and anyone who worked for them, could vanish from the guns and knives of those who might come to do them harm.
Pekkala returned to the estate one evening to find the Tsar’s horse tied to a fence post outside his cottage and the Tsar himself emerging from the front door.
‘Pekkala! I have left you a present inside.’
‘That is very kind of you, Majesty.’