‘Even if it was,’ said Kirov, ‘what good would the knowledge do us now?’ He opened the rear door of the Emka for Churikova, who climbed into the back seat. Then he opened the passenger side door for Pekkala.
‘I must return to Lubyanka,’ said Pekkala, ‘for another conversation with Semykin.’
‘That may prove difficult,’ replied Kirov. ‘It was hard enough getting him to talk on our first visit. You’ll be lucky to get anything out of him at all this time.’
Pekkala nodded. ‘It will be an uphill climb, for certain, but I think I might be able to persuade him. There’s no need to drive me. I’ll walk.’
‘All the way to Lubyanka?’
‘There is some business I must attend to first.’
Kirov realised from the tone of Pekkala’s voice that it would be no use trying to persuade him otherwise. ‘Very well, Inspector.’
Pekkala nodded towards Churikova. ‘Where will you take her?’
‘Back to the barracks, I expect,’ replied Kirov. ‘There must be someone who can reassign her to another cryptographic unit.’
Pekkala cast a glance at Churikova, his mind a confusion of pity and regret, then turned and walked away across Red Square.
‘Oh, it’s you again,’
‘Oh, it’s you again,’ said Fabian Golyakovsky, curator of the Kremlin Museum, as he caught sight of Pekkala wandering amongst the icons.
Pekkala had stopped before The Saviour of the Fiery Eye, now safely re-hung upon the wall. ‘I see that he found his way home.’
‘Yes.’ The curator laughed nervously and reached his hand out towards the icon, as if to trace his fingers down the long dark hair of the prophet. But just before he touched the work of art, his fingers curled in upon themselves. ‘I must admit you had me worried, Inspector.’
‘And I regret I am about to worry you again.’
‘Oh‚’ he replied faintly.
‘Do you know a man named Valery Semykin?’
‘Of course! Everybody in the art world knows Semykin, and I can tell you with equal certainty that everybody hates him, too. He is the most pompous, arrogant, self-satisfied. .’ the curator gasped for breath, and would have continued with his tirade if Pekkala had not leaned towards the twitching Golyakovsky and, in a lowered voice, explained the reason for his visit.
The colour drained from Golyakovsky’s face, as if someone had pulled the plug on his heart. ‘Oh, no, Inspector,’ he gasped. ‘Oh, please. I beg of you. .’
‘You will see to it then?’
For a moment, Golyakovsky looked as if he might refuse. His eyes began to bulge. His fists clenched at his sides. Then the futility of all resistance seemed to dawn on him. Golyakovsky’s shoulders slumped and he sighed like a leaking balloon. ‘I will see to it.’ Then, with a final burst of indignation, he called out, ‘But under protest!’
One hour later‚ the door to Semykin’s Lubyanka cell slammed shut, leaving Pekkala locked in with the prisoner.
Semykin had been facing the wall, in keeping with prison regulations. Now, as he slowly turned around, his eyebrows arched with surprise when he saw who’d come to visit. ‘Inspector! Back for another consultation?’
Pekkala noticed a fresh coating of blood daubed on the wall, which seemed to show two women, each accompanied by a child, standing in a sloping field of tall grass with a house among trees in the distance.
‘It is Monet’s Les Coquelicots,’ explained Semykin. ‘I have branched out into Impressionism. I don’t have enough blood left in me to be a pointillist. So!’ he clapped his butchered hands together. ‘What brings you here this time, Pekkala?’
‘Does the name Gustav Engel mean anything to you?’
‘It might.’
Pekkala nodded slowly. ‘Your sense of civic duty is unchanged.’
‘Civic duty?’ Semykin laughed angrily. ‘My sense of duty is neither more nor less than it should be.’
‘Have you considered what might happen to you if the Germans reach Moscow?’
‘I have,’ replied Semykin, ‘and I suspect that anyone who was considered an enemy of the Soviet State is likely to be welcomed with open arms by the people who smashed it to bits. And the men who run this jail might find out for themselves what it feels like to be inmates. It has happened before, Pekkala, as you have witnessed for yourself. And if things are as bad as I think they are out there, there’s little to stop it happening again.’
‘That may be true, Valery, but you wouldn’t live long enough to see it.’
Semykin frowned. ‘What do you mean, Pekkala?’
‘Before your jailers take to their heels, they’ll kill every convict in this prison.’ Seeing the look on Semykin’s face, Pekkala knew he’d struck a nerve. ‘You hadn’t thought about that, had you?’
Semykin did not reply at first. He stared at his most recent work of art, as if, for a moment, he believed that he might walk through the wall and vanish into the crimson universe beyond. ‘Gustav Engel,’ he said, ‘is the curator of the Konigsberg Museum‚ and a world expert on amber.’
‘Why would such an expert find himself in Konigsberg?’
‘That city is the ancient capital of the amber trade. For centuries, the Baltic coast has been one of the most reliable sources of amber, but the truth is it is difficult to find no matter where you are.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because, unlike gold or silver, it does not tend to exist in large deposits. It is fossilised sap, after all, and because a good portion of it washes up on those windswept beaches, the location is determined by the motion of the waves, not where it originally formed into the amber. A mineralogist can look at a soil sample and calculate whether gold might be found in that place, but you cannot look out over the waves and know where the amber is lying beneath them.’
Pekkala thought of the long, windswept beaches of the Baltic coast, the scudding foam and greybeard rollers coughing up their treasure piece by piece.
‘So!’ exclaimed Semykin. ‘Has the red moth yielded up its secrets?’
‘Some‚’ he replied‚ ‘but not all.’ Pekkala went on to explain about the map they’d found embedded in its wings.
‘Have you been to Spain?’ Semykin asked suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Spain,’ he repeated. ‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No. One day, perhaps, but. .’ Pekkala replied‚ confused at the abrupt change of topic.
‘When you do go,’ Semykin told him, ‘you must visit the city of Granada.’
‘What does this have to do with Gustav Engel, or the Amber Room?’
‘Everything,’ Semykin assured him. ‘In the city of Granada, there is a palace called the Alhambra. It dates back to a time when the Moors controlled Spain and inside this palace is a mosque whose walls are so ornately carved that if you try to absorb them in a single glance, you will inevitably fail. You have no choice but to study the details instead. And so it is, the Moors believed, with the idea of God. You try to see him all at once, and you will not succeed. So you focus on the details, knowing that you cannot fathom the picture as a whole. It is the same with the Amber Room. You have seen it for yourself, have you not?’
‘Of course,’ replied Pekkala.
‘Then you know that it is not possible to grasp the vast complexity of those thousands of fragments of amber. You might as well try to comprehend the very fabric of the universe. Once in a thousand years, we forget about butchering each other just long enough to create a work of art so much greater than ourselves that it becomes a symbol of achievement for the entire human race. The Amber Room is such a thing.’
Although Pekkala had visited it on many occasions during his time of service to the Tsar, and had seen the amber-laden panels for himself, he had never learned the history of the room. The Tsar had thousands of possessions, most of them priceless and all of them with elaborate tales of provenance. It had always frustrated the Tsar that Pekkala placed so little importance on these works of art, or even on the thousands of bars of gold he had kept hidden in a cell dug deep into the ground beneath the Alexander Palace.