Pekkala had been issued a set of vials, but he had never carried them. No one had ever insisted, or even asked him why, which was fortunate, because he would have found it difficult to explain. It wasn’t the fear of taking his own life at a time when his death would otherwise be certain. The method was simple. The poison was quick. For Pekkala, that was the real danger of owning the cyanide vials. What Pekkala truly feared was that the darkness in his mind might one day become unendurable and he would give up his life with no more effort than a shrug.
Although he carried a revolver, the fact that he had been trained in its use and had seen for himself the terrible damage it worked upon the human body, had built a kind of mental barricade against any instinct to point the Webley at himself. So far, the barricade had held. No one, not even Kirov, was aware that such thoughts had ever entered Pekkala’s head, because there were no witnesses to the times Pekkala had sat at the bare table in his apartment in the middle of the night, the brass-handled gun placed before him, fists clenched tight against his chest, while the demons in his skull chanted their anthems of despair.
‘Did you hear me, Pekkala?’ asked Kovalevsky.
‘Potassium cyanide. Yes.’ Pekkala paused to glance up at the searchlights, tilting back and forth across the night sky, like giant metronomes marking time for the movement of the planets. He thought back to the Northern Lights he’d often seen draped across the heavens as a boy. It appeared on nights of bitter cold, when frost would beard the inside of his bedroom windows. He would lie bundled in his blankets, staring through the ice-encrusted glass at the curtains of green and pink and yellow, billowing out in the darkness. These searchlights, too, were beautiful in their way. It was possible to forget, even if only for a moment, the grim fact of their purpose.
Pekkala’s dreams were interrupted by the sound of a car backfiring in the street.
Both men flinched and Kovalevsky, tripping on the sidewalk, would have fallen if Pekkala had not reached out and caught him.
‘It’s all right!’ laughed Pekkala. ‘I’ve got you.’
Kovalevsky slipped through his arms and collapsed in a heap on the pavement.
‘Kovalevsky?’ Slowly, as if he were still in that dream of himself, long ago, with the Northern Lights pulsing in the sky, Pekkala realised what had happened. It was no car backfiring. Instinctively, he reached for his Webley, fingers clawing across his chest, but the weapon wasn’t there. He had left it at the office. Stumbling back against the wall of a house, Pekkala searched the darkness for a shooter. People continued to make their way down the street, silhouettes as black as blindness. Pekkala knew from experience that it took three shots before most people even realised that a gunfight had broken out. Unless the gun was visible, most people passed off the sound of the first shot as a door slamming. Or a car backfiring. Nobody was running. Nobody cried out. A man sidestepped the place where Kovalevsky lay, glanced down at the still form and kept on walking.
Pekkala knelt down beside Kovalevsky, rolled the man over and stared into his face, which had become a mask of blood.
Kovalevsky had been hit in the throat. He was already dead.
‘Help me!’ Pekkala called out to the shadows walking by.
At first, nobody stopped.
‘Let him sleep it off,’ advised one man.
‘Please!’ yelled Pekkala. ‘Will somebody find the police?’
Only then did the flow of passing figures seem to ripple. Voices echoed through the night. Shadows converged around the dead man. Arms reached out. Shouts turned to screams. At last, a police car arrived.
Two hours later, Pekkala was back in his office. As he explained to Kirov who Kovalevsky had been and why he had gone to meet with the former tsarist agent, diluted splashes of the teacher’s blood dripped from the heavy wool of his coat, dappling the floor.
‘It could have been a stray shot,’ Kirov suggested. ‘A soldier on patrol could have misfired his weapon. It could have been an accident, Inspector. These things do happen.’
‘No,’ whispered Pekkala. ‘It was no accident. The traitor must have followed me.’
‘But even if you’re right, Inspector, why would they have gone after Kovalevsky? As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he’s just a harmless school master named Shulepov. Nobody knows his real identity. Nobody who’d want to kill him, anyway.’
Pekkala did not reply. Gently, as if to wake the man from sleep, Kirov reached out and touched Pekkala’s shoulder. ‘Inspector.’
Pekkala started, his eyes wild, as if in that moment he no longer recognised his colleague. It lasted only a second. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘All these years, I had thought Kovalevsky’s bones had turned to dust. I had only just gotten used to him being alive again. And now. .’ Pekkala shook his head and his voice trailed away into silence.
‘Perhaps Elizaveta and I can cook you a meal tonight, Inspector,’ Kirov said. ‘It’s late, but there’s still time. Wouldn’t that be better than going back to your apartment alone?’
‘Don’t you see, Kirov? I have to be alone. And so should you.’
Kirov’s face paled in confusion. ‘I don’t understand, Inspector. I thought you liked Elizaveta.’
‘I do! And I know you do, as well. That’s why I’m saying you should stay away from her. Look at what happened this evening. It could just as easily have been me who was shot. Or it could have been you lying there in the gutter with your throat torn out. Our lives are too fragile to be shared, especially with those who love us. I learned that lesson a long time ago, Kirov, but by the time I had figured it out, I was in a rail car full of convicts crossing the Ural mountains into Siberia. And then it was too late. If you do love her, Kirov, or if you even think you could, don’t do to her what I did to my fiancee when I kissed her goodbye at the Leningrad station and promised we still had a future.’
The phone rang.
‘Answer it,’ ordered Pekkala.
Kirov picked up the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Right away.’ Then he hung up and looked at Pekkala.
‘Stalin?’
Kirov nodded. ‘He says he wants to see us right away.’
They spoke no more about Elizaveta.
As they left the room, Pekkala picked up the gun belt from where it lay on his desk. He strapped it on beneath his coat as he made his way downstairs, following the Morse-code trail of Kovalevsky’s blood which he had left upon the worn-out wooden steps.
With no idea how far he had to go
With no idea how far he had to go before he reached the Russian lines, Stefanov made his way towards the east. Still carrying the body of his friend, he tramped along roads whose yellow dust settled on his clothes and in the corners of his eyes. Hour after hour, the only sound he heard was of his footsteps and bumblebees and the thud of distant cannon fire. It was hot. The sky gleamed pitiless blue.
Late in the afternoon, Stefanov took a short cut across an open field. The grass was as tall as his knees and flecked with wildflowers. Burrs clung to his trouser legs.
In the middle of the field, beside an old zinc cattle trough which was overflowing with algae-covered water, he came across a crop of blackberries, like tiny knotted fists. Laying Barkat’s corpse upon the ground, he plucked the berries from the shelter of their spear-point leaves and stuffed them into his mouth. Purple juice ran down his lip. And afterwards, he sank his hands into the trough, ladling aside the green ooze of the algae, and drank.