They had now been marching for more than ten hours and stopped to rest near the old concert hall. A shell burst had split one of its four columns in half, like a tree struck by lightning, and chunks of white marble lay strewn across the ground.
Through the sweat in Stefanov’s eyes, memories shimmered like mirages. He saw himself one late spring afternoon, the air heavy with the smell of lilac and honeysuckle, heading home from school along the path which ran beside this concert hall. From somewhere behind its candle-lit windows came the sound of children’s voices as they practised for the concert given each year to the Tsar and his family when they arrived in June to take up residence in the summer palace. And there he was again, in summer now, trudging along beneath the turquoise banners of the evening sky and returning to his father’s workshop with the ladder he had used to catch his first and only glimpse inside the Amber Room.
Even though Stefanov knew these memories belonged to him, so much had happened since then that they seemed to have come from someone else’s life, a hundred or a thousand years before.
Although Pekkala, too, had often passed this way, he was in too much pain to lose himself in memories. His heels had been rubbed raw in the ill-fitting boots. He was afraid to take them off, in case the damage was even worse than it felt, and he might be unable to get his boots back on.
Noticing the pain, which had creased itself into the Inspector’s face, Stefanov produced a lump of soap from his pocket. He had spotted it in the kitchen of the farmhouse where they changed their clothes and immediately pocketed it. Before the war, he had not been a thief. But now he pilfered everything he could lay his hands on, whether it was a piece of electrical wiring which had been used to bind a cracked gravestone in the cemetery at Chertova, or the stub of a pencil he found on the floor of the truck which brought them to the front, or a lump of soap from that farmhouse. He had become like a magpie, hoarding any unattended scrap, convinced that it might come in handy somewhere down the road. And usually he was right.
‘Rub this on your feet,’ said Stefanov, as he handed the lump of soap to Pekkala. ‘It will help.’
Pekkala tugged off the knee-length boots. His grey wool socks were stained with blood. Wincing‚ he peeled them off. As Pekkala rubbed the soap into the wounds, he squinted through a screen of trees towards the Catherine Palace greenhouse, which had been known as the Orangerie, due to the fact that the Tsar had once grown tangerines beneath its glass-paned roof. Although the greenhouse had been completely destroyed, peach-coloured roses, purple and pink lupins, fire-orange birds of paradise continued to grow among the wreckage.
To his right, across the manicured garden, stood the palace itself. Familiar as Pekkala was with the building, the sight of it still took his breath away. As long as a city block, at first glance its blue and white facade seemed to be made up almost entirely of windows, some twice as tall as a man, opening on to balconies fenced in by ornate black railings. Much of the glass was broken now. Shards, like giant shark fins, lined the empty frames.
To Pekkala, it no longer looked like the residence of the Tsar. Instead, the building resembled a fortress after a long and bloody siege, its front lawn now a parking lot for armoured cars, Kubelwagens, Panzers and muddy, dented Opel Blitz trucks.
Churikova sat against the splintered column, blue eyes glowing in her wind-burned face. ‘Do you really intend to destroy the Amber Room?’ she asked Pekkala.
Pekkala had been staring at the ground, but now he raised his head and looked at Churikova. ‘I hope it will not come to that.’
‘But what if it does?’ she persisted. ‘I overheard that officer explaining how to use the detonators. I understand enough about explosives to know that you have enough in that canister to obliterate the room and half of the palace as well.’
‘With luck-’ he began.
Churikova cut him off. ‘I am not talking about luck. I am talking about what you will do if the Germans attempt to relocate the amber back into their own country? Will you go through with it? Will you carry out your orders?’
Pekkala looked towards the Catherine Palace, where German officers in finely tailored uniforms stood on the balconies, some with the red lapels of generals, looking out over the grounds. ‘We will know that soon enough,’ he said. And then he explained to them the plan which had been brewing in his head ever since they set out from the Russian lines. ‘We must set a trap for Engel, but first we have to wait for him to arrive. That might be in hours or it might be in days. There’s no way of knowing‚ so we’ll take it in shifts to keep the palace under observation. The first thing he’ll come looking for when he arrives at the estate is the Amber Room. That is where we’ll intercept the professor. The difficulty will be in isolating Engel from those around him, so we can make the arrest and bring him back with us. For that, I’ll need both of you to help me.’
‘What do you want us to do?’ demanded Churikova.
‘You and I will enter the Palace and either contact Engel directly or else send word to him that a Russian deserter has provided us with information about art works hidden on the grounds of the estate. That, and the fact that Engel will almost certainly remember meeting you here before the war, should be enough to lure him out of the palace.’
‘What should I do, Inspector?’ Stefanov asked.
‘Do you know the old Pensioners’ Stable, at the north-east corner of the estate?’
‘Of course.’
‘Beside it, just off the path, is a small cottage.’
‘I know it well,’ said Stefanov. ‘That is where you used to live.’
Pekkala nodded. ‘That is where Churikova will tell him the art works have been stored. Wait for us there.’
‘What if there’s already someone in the cottage?’
‘Tell them to get out or‚ if you don’t know the words‚ just jerk your thumb at the door. They won’t stop to question a military policeman.’
Pekkala had opened his mouth, ready to ask if they had any questions, when suddenly Churikova sat forward, as if the ground had moved beneath her feet.
‘There he is,’ she whispered.
Kirov stood at attention
Kirov stood at attention, his eyes fixed on the wall.
Stalin sat in his red leather chair. On the desk in front of him lay a stack of police photographs which had been taken at the brothel after the shooting. One was of Serge Bakhturin’s corpse, lying beside the unmade bed. The man’s face, crumpled by the bullet which had killed him, resembled an old mask made of papier mache. Another picture showed Bakhturin’s leg, pale and welded to the floor with blood, the limb cut nearly in half by the bullet that had shattered his knee.
There were shots of the room, in which shadows seemed to hover about the camera lens as if the air was filled with ghosts. One photo showed the view from the window, looking out across a crooked sea of rooftops. There was even a picture of the girl, still in her blood-spattered night dress. She stared directly into the camera, hypnotised by the cyclops eye of the lens.
Stalin set aside all the pictures except the ones of Bakhturin’s body. These he studied closely, with a look of intense concentration on his face. Finally, Stalin sat back in his chair and pushed the photograph away, turning his gaze at last to Major Kirov. ‘This is the first time you have killed a man, isn’t it?’
Kirov did not reply, but remained at attention, staring at the wall behind Stalin’s desk.
‘I know what must be going on inside your head, but you must let your conscience rest. This man,’ Stalin jabbed the photograph of Serge Bakhturin’s face, as if to stir his finger in the wound, ‘was a traitor! He admitted it to you. It is over. It is done. Go home. Get drunk if you need to. Get some sleep.’