Engel had reached the same conclusion. ‘The amber!’ He leaped up from his bed of moss. ‘Does he realise what he’s done?’
‘You can ask him yourself when he gets here, which shouldn’t be long now. Now sit down before I shoot you in the leg. I don’t want to have to carry you all the way to Moscow.’
Stunned, Engel flopped down again on to the ground. The blood had drained out of his face. ‘He did it‚’ muttered the professor. ‘He actually did it.’
They waited.
Stefanov kept his eyes glued to the point on the horizon from which he knew Pekkala would be coming. He stared until his eyes dried out. As the minutes passed, and the Inspector did not appear, he began to worry that something might have gone wrong.
Engel no longer seemed to care what was happening to him. He sat with his face in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, mumbling to himself in words too soft to hear.
When half an hour had gone by and Pekkala had still not arrived, Stefanov climbed to his feet. ‘We have to go back.’
Slowly, Engel raised his head. ‘Back there? To the truck?’
‘I’m not leaving him.’
‘Are you insane?’ Engel demanded. ‘We can’t go back. It won’t be long before the whole countryside is crawling with German soldiers looking for that convoy.’
‘I thought you would be glad of that,’ replied Stefanov.
‘You don’t understand,’ Engel told him. ‘I already sent a telegram to Berlin, telling Hitler that the panels are now safely in our possession and on their way to Konigsberg, where they will wait until construction of the Linz museum has been completed. That amber was my responsibility. Hitler will kill me himself when he learns what has become of it. Take me to Moscow. I have all the information Stalin needs to know about art acquisitions by the German Army in the Soviet Union. Just get me out of here before those horsemen come looking for us!’
Stefanov pointed to the cloud of smoke, which now had almost disappeared into the sky. ‘Not without Pekkala.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ snapped Engel.
‘But not out of bullets!’ replied Stefanov, waving the Luger in his face.
The two men clambered down the slope, the professor stumbling over roots and mud in his polished knee-high boots. Running the rest of the way to the place where Engel’s convoy had been halted, they covered the distance in less than twenty minutes.
By the time they reached the truck, the fire had almost burned out. The spilled fuel had ignited, wrenching the vehicle apart. The windscreen had melted out and only springs remained of what had been the seats. The doors had been blown off completely. One of them lay in the ditch and the other was nowhere to be seen. The rear section of the truck was only a skeleton now, its wooden floorboards and its canvas roof incinerated in the blaze. The grass on either side of the road had been scorched down to the bare earth. It continued to smoulder, smoke drifting across the ground.
‘Where are the remains of the amber?’ asked Stefanov.
‘Destroyed,’ Engel replied bitterly. ‘What did you expect?’
‘But there’s no trace of it, or the panels. Wouldn’t there be something left?’
‘Not after a fire like this,’ Engel told him. ‘The panels were made of wood which had been treated with linseed oil to make it weatherproof. Linseed oil is highly flammable and amber itself is a resin, with a melting point under 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This fire must have burned at twice that heat. And amber isn’t like glass or precious metals, which would leave a residue. It burns away to nothing. It’s gone, Rifleman Stefanov‚ along with your beloved Inspector Pekkala‚ who is probably on his way back to Moscow, intending to blame you for this.’
‘No.’ Stefanov was staring at something on the ground. ‘He’s lying over there.’
In front of the truck lay a body, which had been caught in the blast and consumed. Only a husk of flesh and bones remained, the legs shrivelled to sticks inside the carbonised leather of the boots. Soot covered the carcass like a layer of black velvet.
‘How do you know that’s him?’ asked Engel, unwilling to approach the incinerated corpse.
Stefanov bent down and rummaged in the brittle fans of what had been a rib cage.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Engel, his voice filled with revulsion.
Stefanov gasped, his fingers searing as they closed around the object of his search. Out of the ashes, he lifted the frame of a revolver. Its handle had remained intact due to the fact that the grips were made of solid brass, which had not melted. The cartridges contained in the cylinder had ruptured, skewing the barrel. But there was no mistaking Pekkala’s Webley. ‘The vapours from the gasoline must have exploded before he had a chance to get clear.’ Then he reached into the coat pocket and removed the scorched remnant of Pekkala’s NKVD pass book. ‘It is him,’ whispered Stefanov. ‘This proves it absolutely.’
‘There’s nothing you can do for him now,’ said Engel. ‘We have to go now, or you and I will both be wishing we had died in this fire.’
This time‚ the two men were in agreement.
Stefanov tucked the burned pass book into his chest pocket. Then he jammed the ruined Webley into his belt. He nodded towards the Russian lines, somewhere far to the east. ‘After you,’ he said.
In a tiny, windowless room
In a tiny, windowless room on the fourth floor of NKVD Headquarters, three women sat on empty filing crates, drinking tea out of green enamel mugs.
‘Of course he hasn’t called you!’ exclaimed Corporal Korolenko, stamping one foot and grinding her heel into the floorboards, as if to crush an insect which had strayed into her line of sight. ‘I saw what he did, down there in Lubyanka Square. He kissed you and then he turned around and ran away! What did you expect?’
‘Shut up, Korolenko!’ bellowed Sergeant Gatkina, waving her hand through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘If your brains were the size of your backside, you would be running this country by now. But you know nothing.’ She leaned across and bounced her fingertips off the corporal’s forehead. ‘Nothing!’ she said again. Turning her back on the bewildered corporal, Gatkina leaned towards Elizaveta, who sat very still on her crate, mug of tea clutched in both hands, looking frail and worried. ‘Now, my dear,’ said Gatkina, in a very different voice from the one she had used on the corporal, ‘what you need to do is make piroshky.’
‘Pastries?’ Elizaveta’s voice quavered between fear and confusion.
‘Yes!’ Gatkina was deafening in the cramped space. ‘I like the ones filled with green onion and egg, or salmon and rice if you can get it.’
‘But why?’
Gatkina raised one finger. ‘It is a test. You make the piroshky and, while they are still warm, you put them in a bag with a thermos of tea and you bring them to this major. Tell him you have brought this meal but that you cannot stay. Sergeant Gatkina, the bitch that is me, has ordered you back to work.’
‘I give him the pastries and then I leave?’
‘Yes.’ Gatkina paused. ‘And maybe no.’
‘Comrade Sergeant, I do not understand you at all.’
‘You tell him you have to go, yes?’
Elizaveta nodded.
‘And if he says thank you and goodbye, then you know it is finished. But if he asks you to stay, because no man with a heart would just say goodbye to a woman who has brought him fresh piroshky, then you know you are not finished, after all.’
Kirov sat in his office
Kirov sat in his office, a stack of untouched field reports laid out in front of him. He had tried to keep busy, hoping that the drudgery of paperwork would keep him from focusing on Pekkala and his own helplessness. He expected, at any minute, to receive news of the Inspector’s death. Every time the door closed down in the lobby, adrenalin cut through his stomach as if he had been slashed with a razor. He kept checking the telephone to make sure it was working. His loud, frustrated sighs stirred the dust that pirouetted through the air in front of him.