Stefanov stared down at Barkat. The rain had pooled in his eye sockets. All they had been through together in the past months flickered through Stefanov’s mind, as if a pack of playing cards were being shuffled before his eyes. The pictures vanished as abruptly as they had appeared and suddenly he was back in the town of Chertova, surprised to feel his heart still beating in his chest.
As Stefanov ran to catch up with the doctor, he was already carrying the memory of Barkat, like a body on a stretcher, down a long dark corridor towards the ossuary in his mind where others lay whose paths had crossed his own, their lifeless faces shimmering like opals.
‘Stefanov!’
‘Stefanov!’ bellowed Gorchakov. ‘Have you gone deaf?’
Stefanov raised his head. ‘Colonel?’
‘Get over here.’
Stefanov shambled over to Gorchakov and saluted. Dried mud clung like fish scales to his boots. His eyes fell on Pekkala. It can’t be, Stefanov thought.
‘Listen to me,’ said Gorchakov. ‘You just came from the Catherine Palace, didn’t you?’
‘I was there, Comrade Colonel, but it was several days ago.’
Stefanov continued to stare at Pekkala. ‘My eyes are playing tricks on me,’ he murmured. ‘I could have sworn you were. .’
‘Say hello to the Emerald Eye,’ said Gorchakov.
Stefanov opened his mouth but no sound came out. Suddenly, he was thrown back through time to that day when he stood with his father on the fence by the compost heap at Tsarskoye Selo. Solemnly‚ he bowed his head towards Pekkala. ‘I am the son of Agripin Dobrushinovich Stefanov, the gardener at Tsarskoye Selo.’
‘Never mind that!’ growled Gorchakov. ‘Do you know where the enemy has concentrated its forces between here and Catherine Palace?’
‘I cannot say for certain, Comrade Colonel.’
‘But you crept right through their lines last night.’ Gorchakov turned to Pekkala. ‘And carrying a dead man on his back. At least, that’s what I heard.’
‘It’s true I made it through their lines,’ stammered the rifleman. ‘But I was just lucky. That’s all.’
‘Luck is worth plenty out here,’ Gorchakov told him, ‘and since you’ve done it once, it shouldn’t be much trouble doing it again.’
‘Doing what, Comrade Colonel?’
‘You will be guiding the Inspector back.’
‘Back? You mean to the Catherine Palace?’
‘That is what I said.’
Stefanov looked from one man to the other, certain that he must have misunderstood. ‘Comrades, the Fascists have reached Tsarskoye Selo. We can’t go back.’
‘Gather up your things,’ Gorchakov replied matter of factly, ‘and be ready to go in five minutes.’
‘I have no things, Comrade Colonel.’
Gorchakov reached out and skewered a finger against Stefanov’s chest, as if he meant to bore a hole into his heart. ‘Then you are ready now!’
As the colonel’s order finally sank in, Stefanov’s first reaction was to turn and run away. What prevented him from doing so was not the fear of summary execution at the hands of Gorchakov’s men, but rather the presence of Inspector Pekkala, at whose side he felt a peculiar assurance that no harm could come to him.
Now Pekkala turned to Stefanov. ‘Before the Germans attacked, did you go inside the Catherine Palace?’
‘We had orders not to trespass,’ began Stefanov.
‘That’s not what he’s asking,’ barked Gorchakov. ‘What he wants to know is if you went inside, not whether you had permission to do so.’
‘Yes,’ admitted Stefanov. ‘I went inside the palace, but I did not take anything. I swear!’
‘Do you know where the Amber Room is located?’ asked Pekkala.
The words shot through Stefanov’s brain. He remembered what his father had said about Pekkala being conjured from its walls by the god-like powers of the Tsar. So many times he had envisaged the man who stood before him now materialising from the fiery collage on the walls of that room, that he no longer knew for certain whether it was something he had imagined or whether he had somehow glimpsed a moment which lay beyond the boundaries of his life. ‘I know where it is, Inspector.’
‘And did you go in there?’ demanded Gorchakov. He had no idea why Pekkala would be interested in the Amber Room, but he nevertheless felt that he should be a part of this interrogation, and so the colonel fixed upon his face an expression of total awareness.
‘I did.’
‘And what did you find?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Nothing, Inspector. The room was empty. They were all empty, except for picture frames and pieces of broken furniture. So, you see,’ he tried to reason with them, ‘there can be no point in going back.’
‘What you have just told us,’ said Pekkala, ‘is all the reason we need.’
Turning away from the bewildered rifleman, Gorchakov addressed Pekkala. ‘Your ride will take you to the front, where you will rendezvous with Captain Leontev. He has been informed of the situation. He will do what he can to get you through the lines. But you must hurry. The Germans will be here in a few hours. We are falling back to a new defensive line.’
Leaving the town, they drove by the old schoolhouse which had been converted into a field hospital just as a truck pulled up at the main gate. The canvas flap was thrown back. A squad of Frontier Guards, with distinctive blue-green bands on their caps, piled out into the muddy street and made their way into the schoolhouse.
Stefanov remembered what the doctor had told him — how the wounded could not be moved. He saw the flash of the first shot, lighting up one of the rooms on the first floor, and then the building slid out of view behind them.
They passed ramshackle houses at the edge of Chertova. Peeking through a tear in the truck’s tarpaulin roof, Pekkala saw women in headscarves, wearing blue-and-white-striped dresses like the cloth of mattress covers. The women stared at the truck as it sped by, their eyes filled with contempt now that the army was abandoning them to their fate.
Kirov paced back and forth
Kirov paced back and forth along the street outside the Cafe Tilsit. He stared into the gutters and out across the crooked cobbled street, his gaze snagging on every cigarette butt, bus ticket stub and crumpled cough-drop wrapper.
Passersby regarded him suspiciously, sidestepping out of his way.
After several passes along the entire length of the block, Kirov gave up looking at the pavement and switched to the walls and shop fronts. He knew that Kovalevsky had been shot in the throat at close range, in which case it was likely that the bullet had passed through his neck and struck against one of these walls. Since Kirov already had the spent cartridge from the round that had killed Kovalevsky, he knew that the bullet itself would add little to his knowledge. What he wanted to find out was the angle at which the bullet struck and, from that, to extrapolate where the killer had been standing at the time.
A few minutes later, he discovered what he thought must be the mark of the bullet. Something had struck one of the bricks outside a cobbler’s repair shop. The brick had been gouged by a projectile, and several cracks radiated out from the centre of the impact point. With the use of a pencil fitted into the conical indent made by the bullet, Kirov was able to trace the path of the bullet to a place roughly halfway across the road. The shot had been made from a greater distance than he had first supposed, which made him wonder if the shooter was a trained marksman. From his own days in NKVD training, Kirov recalled being told that the average recruit, even on completion of his or her training with a hand gun, could hit the centre mass of a stationary man-sized target only once in every five shots at a distance of thirty paces. This shot had been made in the dark and at a moving target. It had brought a man down with one bullet on a part of the body so difficult to hit that NKVD range instructors discouraged even aiming for it, in spite of the fact that to be hit in the neck was almost always fatal. The fact that the shooter had been confident enough of his aim to cease firing after the first round convinced Kirov they were dealing with a professional.