At the end of the corridor, another soldier greeted him and opened the double doors to Stalin’s reception room. It was a huge space, with eggshell-white walls and wooden floors. In the center of the room, like life rafts in the middle of a flat, calm sea, stood three desks. At each desk sat one man, wearing a collarless olive-green tunic in the same style as that worn by Stalin himself. Only one man rose to greet Pekkala. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief secretary, a short, flabby man with round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs. Poskrebyshev appeared to be the exact opposite of the stripped-to-the-waist, muscle-armored workers whose statues could be found in almost every square in Moscow. The only thing exceptional about him was his complete lack of emotion as he escorted Pekkala across the room to Stalin’s study.
Poskrebyshev knocked once and did not wait for a reply. He swung the door open, nodded for Pekkala to enter. As soon as Pekkala walked into the room, the secretary shut the door behind him.
Pekkala found himself alone in a large room with red velvet curtains and a red carpet which lined only the outer third of the floor. The center was the same mosaic of wood as in the waiting room. The walls had been papered dark red, with caramel-colored wooden dividers separating the panels. Hanging on these walls were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, each one the same size and apparently painted by the same artist.
Close to one wall stood Stalin’s desk, which had eight legs, two at each corner. On the desk lay several files, each one aligned perfectly beside the others. Stalin’s chair had a wide back, padded with burgundy-colored leather brass-tacked against the frame.
Except for Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was spartan. In the corner stood a large and very old grandfather clock which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.
Comrade Stalin often kept him waiting, and today was no exception.
Pekkala had not slept, having arrived back in the city only an hour before. He had reached that point of fatigue where sounds reached him as if down the length of a long cardboard tube. His only nourishment in the past fifteen hours had been a mug of kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread, which he’d bought from a street vendor on his way to the meeting.
The vendor had handed Pekkala a battered metal cup filled with the sudsy brown drink, scooped from a cauldron kept warm by coals glowing in a grate beneath. As Pekkala raised the drink to his lips, he breathed in its smell, like burnt toast. When he had finished it, he turned the mug upside down, as was customary, emptying out the last drops, and handed it back. Just as he was doing so, he noticed a small stamp on the bottom of the cup. Looking closer, he saw it was the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, a sign that it had once been in the inventory of the royal family. The Tsar himself used to drink from a cup like this, and Pekkala thought how strange it was to see this fragment of the old empire washed up outside the Kremlin like the flotsam of a shipwreck.
The Tsar was sitting at his desk.
The dark velvet curtains of his study, drawn back to let in the light, gleamed softly around the edge, like the feathers on a starling’s back.
The Tsar lifted the heavy mug to his lips, his Adam’s apple bobbing while he drank. Then he set the mug down with a satisfied grunt, picked up his blue pencil, and began to tap out a rhythm on a stack of unread documents.
It was the autumn of 1916. After taking over command of the military, the Tsar had been spending most of his time behind the stockade fence of army headquarters at Mogilev.
In spite of the Tsar’s having taken command, the Russian army continued to suffer more and more crushing defeats on the battlefield.
The blame for this had fallen as heavily on the Tsarina as it had on the Tsar. A rumor had even surfaced that the Tsarina, without consulting the Russian High Command, had begun secret peace negotiations with Germany, using one of her German relatives as an intermediary. The rumor spread, threatening the Tsar’s credibility as commander of the military.
On a rare visit to Petrograd, the Tsar had summoned Pekkala to the Palace and ordered him to conduct an investigation to determine whether the rumor was legitimate.
Pekkala had known from the start that something was not right. Although the details of the investigation itself were to be kept secret, the Tsar had widely publicized the fact that he had ordered the investigation. Information about Pekkala’s work even appeared in the newspapers, a thing the Tsar rarely allowed.
It did not take Pekkala long to discover that the rumor was, in fact, true. The Tsarina had, through an intermediary in Sweden, made contact with her brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was serving as a high-ranking officer in the German army. A visit by the Grand Duke had taken place, as near as Pekkala could reckon, sometime in February of 1916.
Pekkala was not surprised to learn of the Tsarina’s meddling. Alexandra had kept up a constant barrage of letters to the Tsar while her husband was in Mogilev, insisting that Rasputin’s advice on military affairs should be followed and that anyone who disagreed with it should be sacked.
What did surprise Pekkala was to learn that the Tsar had known about the Grand Duke’s visit all along. Nicholas had even met with the Tsarina’s brother, probably in the very room where Pekkala and the Tsar were meeting now.
Once he had concluded the investigation, Pekkala made his report. He omitted nothing, not even those facts he’d uncovered which incriminated the Tsar himself. Once he’d finished, Pekkala unfastened the Emerald Eye from the underside of his lapel and laid it on the Tsar’s desk. Then he drew his Webley revolver and set it beside the badge.
“What’s this?” demanded the Tsar.
“I am offering my resignation.”
“Oh, come now, Pekkala!” the Tsar growled, flipping his pencil into the air and catching it. “Try to see this from my point of view. Yes, I admit we discussed the possibility of a truce. And yes, I admit this was done in secret, without the knowledge of our High Command. But damn it all, Pekkala, there is no truce! The negotiations fell apart. I knew the Russian people wanted answers about whether these rumors were true. That’s why I put you on the case—to put their minds at ease. The thing is, Pekkala, the answers they wanted were not the ones I knew you’d find.”
Sunlight illuminated the gilded titles of leather-bound volumes on the bookshelves. Pekkala studied them before speaking.
“And what would you have me do now, Majesty, with the information I have uncovered?”
“What I would have you do,” replied the Tsar, tapping the point of his pencil against Pekkala’s revolver, “is get back to work. Forget about this whole investigation.”
“Majesty,” said Pekkala, struggling to remain calm, “you do not employ me to provide you with illusions.”
“Quite right, Pekkala. You provide me with the truth. And I decide how much of it the Russian people need to hear.”
PEKKALA WAS BEGINNING TO WONDER IF STALIN MIGHT KEEP HIM waiting there all day. To pass the time, he rocked gently back and forth on the balls of his feet, his eyes on the wall behind Stalin’s desk. From previous visits, Pekkala knew that hidden somewhere in those wooden panels was a secret door, impossible to see until it opened. Behind the opening stretched a low and narrow passageway, lit with tiny lightbulbs no bigger than a man’s thumb. The floor of this passageway was thickly carpeted, so that a person could move the length of it without making any sound. Where it led to, Pekkala had no idea, but he had been told that this whole building was honeycombed with secret passageways.