It was nine years before the opportunity finally presented itself, when the newly promoted Lieutenant Kirov arrived at Borodok, bearing the offer that would release Pekkala from the forest which had been his prison. Kirov, who had since become Pekkala’s assistant at the Bureau of Special Operations, returned to him not only the Webley and its holster but the badge which had been Pekkala’s mark of service to the Tsar.
The badge was fashioned from a disc of solid gold, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Across the centre was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disc and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large, round emerald. Together, the white enamel, the gold and the emerald formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. As the Tsar’s investigator, Pekkala had been granted absolute authority. Even the Tsar’s own secret service, the Okhrana, could not question him. In his years of service to the Romanovs, Pekkala had become known to all as the one man who could never be bribed or bought or threatened. It did not matter who you were, how wealthy or connected. No one stood above the Emerald Eye, not even the Tsar himself.
Since Pekkala’s release from the gulag, he had formed an uneasy alliance with the ruler of the Soviet Union.
Stalin, for his part, had always known that Pekkala was too valuable to be liquidated‚ as millions of others had been.
Outside Pekkala’s apartment
Outside Pekkala’s apartment‚ shoulders hunched in the rain, stood Major Kirov. He was tall and thin, with high cheekbones that gave him an expression of perpetual surprise.
Their car, a 1939 model Emka, waited at the kerb, its engine running and windscreen wipers twitching like the antennae of some nervous insect.
‘Your belt is upside down,’ said Pekkala, as he walked out of the building.
Kirov glanced down at the brass buckle, whose cut-out pattern of a five-pointed star emblazoned with a hammer and sickle was indeed facing the wrong way. ‘I’m still half asleep,’ he muttered under his breath as he undid the belt and strapped it back on the right way.
‘Is it the Kremlin?’ asked Pekkala.
‘This time of night,’ replied Kirov, ‘it is always the Kremlin.’
‘When does Stalin expect us to sleep?’ grumbled Pekkala.
‘Inspector, you lie on the floor in your clothes, occasionally lapsing into unconsciousness, and in between you memorise railway timetables. That does not count as sleep. Where was it this time? Minsk? Tbilisi? Were all the trains running on time?’
‘Vladivostok,’ replied Pekkala as he walked towards the Emka, buttoning his heavy wool coat against the chill of that damp night. ‘Change at Ryazan and Omsk. And my trains are always on time.’
Kirov shook his head. ‘I can’t decide if it’s genius or madness.’
‘Then don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Decide,’ replied Pekkala as he climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door. Once inside the Emka he breathed the musty smell of the leather seats, mixed in with the reek of Kirov’s pipe tobacco.
Kirov slipped behind the wheel, put the car in gear and they set off through the unlit streets.
‘What does he want?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Poskrebychev said something about a butterfly.’
Poskrebychev, Stalin’s personal secretary, was a small, slope-shouldered man, bald on top and with a band of thinning hair worn like the leafy garland of a Roman emperor. Poskrebychev, who wore round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs, was rarely seen without his dull brownish green uniform, the short mandarin collar buttoned tight against his throat as if it was the only thing to stop his head from falling off. Unremarkable as he was in his appearance, Poskrebychev’s position as assistant to the Supreme Leader of the Soviet Union had placed him in a position of extraordinary power. Anyone who wanted to see Stalin had to deal first with Poskrebychev. Over the years, this influence had earned him countless enemies, but none who were prepared to act on it, and risk losing an audience with Stalin.
‘A butterfly?’ whispered Pekkala.
‘Whatever it is, Inspector, it must be important. He has asked to meet with you alone.’
For a while, neither of them spoke. The headlights of the Emka carved a pale tunnel through the night, the sifting rain like veils of silk billowing past them in the darkness.
‘I heard on the radio that Narva fell to the Germans today,’ remarked Kirov, anxious to break the silence.
‘That’s the third city in less than a week.’
In the distance, over the slate rooftops, gleaming like fish scales under the blue-black sky, Pekkala could see the domes of St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin. All across the city, the skeleton claws of searchlights raked the sky for German bombers.
Earlier that day
Earlier that day, the surviving members of the 5th Anti-Aircraft Section of the Red Army’s 35th Rifle Division had been ordered to take up defensive positions on the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. After two months of fighting, the section had been reduced to four men, one Maxim machine gun and a single 25-mm anti-aircraft piece which was towed by a ZiS-5 army truck.
For weeks, they had travelled across a landscape which the war had laid open like a medical cadaver. Death was everywhere, lying crumpled in the ditches of Osmino, floating lazily and bloated in the lake by Kikerino and pecked by ravens in the barley fields of Gatchina. Along this route, most of their vehicles had either broken down or were reduced to smouldering heaps by the strafing runs of Messerschmitts.
In charge of the section was Commissar Sirko, a career officer with small, hostile eyes, a shaved head and two rolls of fat where his neck joined the back of his skull.
Second in command was Sergeant Ragozin, whose deep and reassuring voice did not belong with the bony, pinch-faced man who owned it. Lacking any military bearing, Ragozin fitted like a scarecrow into the baggy riding breeches and flared-waist tunic which made up his military uniform. Ragozin had been a radio announcer in his other life and ran a Sunday evening music show on Moscow Radio. During the 1930s, as the list of approved songs shrank, grew and shrank again without any pattern Ragozin could understand, he resorted to playing the same handful of tunes over and over until finally, in 1938, the authorities ran him off the air. Convinced that he would soon be denounced for anti-Soviet sentiments, he did the only patriotic thing he could think of and enlisted in the Russian Army just as the war broke out.
Gun loader Corporal Barkat, a strawberry farmer from the Ukraine, was a slope-shouldered man with a bulging Adam’s apple, nervous, effeminate hands and a hacking laugh which made him sound as if he were trying to cough up a fish bone.
The last and lowest-ranking member of the squad was Rifleman Stefanov. His tasks were to maintain the weapons, drive the truck and monitor the radio, which left very little for the others to do except complain and eat their rations.
Stefanov was a heavy-set man, whose shoulder blades hung like the yoke of an ox across his back. His hair, which normally grew thick and curly, had been shaved in the manner of all Red Army soldiers. This baldness made his large, round eyes seem big as saucers, and gave him the indignant expression of a baby owl which had been pushed out of its nest. Like Ragozin and Barkat, Stefanov was not a career soldier. He had been called up in the first week of the war. Since then, it had occurred to Stefanov that even if this wasn’t his first job, it would most likely be his last. The gentle, quiet Rifleman had little to say for himself, so little in fact that the other members of the section wondered if he was mentally impaired. Stefanov knew exactly what they thought of him, and he let them go on thinking it rather than explain the complicated past which had forced him to take up this silence as a barricade against their curiosity.