Eye of the Red Tsar (10 page)

“It will be over soon, Excellency,” said Pekkala. “By tomorrow, the terrorists will have been arrested.”

“This is about more than just one group of terrorists,” replied the Tsar. “It’s the war which has brought us to this. I think back to the day it was declared, when I stood on the veranda of the Winter Palace, looking out across that sea of people who had come to show their support. I felt that we were indestructible. The notion of surrender had not even crossed my mind. I could never have imagined the defeats we would suffer. Tannenburg. The Masurian Lakes. The names of those places still echo in my mind. I should have listened to Rasputin.”

“What has this to do with him?” Pekkala had met the Siberian mystic, who supposedly possessed the magical ability to cure the hemophilia that afflicted the Tsar’s only son, Alexei. In Pekkala’s judgment, Rasputin was a man who understood his limitations. It was the Tsar, and even more so the Tsarina, who had demanded from Rasputin a wisdom he did not possess. He had been called upon to judge matters of state about which he had little knowledge. The best he could do, most of the time, was to offer vague words of comfort. But the Romanovs had fastened on those words, stripping them of vagueness, turning them to prophecy. It was no wonder Rasputin had become so hated by those who sought the favor of the Tsar
.

Pekkala had been there, on a bitterly cold morning in December of 1916, when the Petrograd police fished Rasputin’s body from the Neva River. Rasputin had been invited to a private party at the house of Prince Yusupov. There he was fed cakes which, with the help of a doctor named Lazoviert, had been laced with enough potassium cyanide to have killed an elephant. When the poison appeared to have no effect, Yusupov’s accomplice, a government minister named Purishkyevich, shot Rasputin several times and stabbed him in the throat. Then they both rolled him in
a heavy carpet and dumped him in the water where, in spite of everything which had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning
.

“Grief without end,” said the Tsar. “That is what Rasputin said the war would bring us. And look how right he was.”

“All wars bring grief, Excellency.”

The Tsar turned to him, trembling. “God spoke through that man, Pekkala! Who speaks through you, I’d like to know.”

“You do, Excellency.”

For a moment, the Tsar looked stunned. “Forgive me, Pekkala,” he said. “I did not have the right to speak to you that way.”

“Nothing to forgive,” replied Pekkala. It was the only lie he ever told the Tsar
.

KIROV’S VOICE SNAPPED Pekkala back to the present.

“What about Grodek?” asked Kirov. “What became of him?”

“When Okhrana agents surrounded the safe house, a gunfight broke out. The Okhrana found themselves under fire from weapons they themselves had supplied to Grodek. After the battle, of the thirty-six members of the terrorist cell, the Okhrana found only four survivors among the dead. Grodek was not one of them, and neither was Maria Balka. The two of them had simply disappeared. That was when the Tsar sent for me, with orders to arrest Balka and Grodek before they had the chance to kill again.” He let out a long sigh. “And I failed.”

“But you did find him!”

“Not before he had killed again. I tracked them down to a small lodging house on Maximilian Lane in the Kasan district of Petersburg. The owner of the house had remarked on the difference in age between the woman and the man. He assumed they were simply having an affair, a thing proprietors of places like that are sometimes obliged to overlook. But they kept bringing boxes into their room, and when the owner asked what was in them, Balka told him it was only books. Now people who are having an affair do not spend their days shut away and reading books. That was when the landlord notified the police. Soon we had the house surrounded. I waited at the back of the house. Okhrana agents went in the front, expecting that Balka and Grodek would try to leave through the rear, where I would apprehend them.

“Unfortunately, having been trained in police work, Grodek noticed the agents moving into place. When the agents kicked down the door to the room, they set off a bomb which tore away the whole front of the building. Grodek had made it, killing the same people who had trained him in the art of bomb making. We lost four agents and sixteen civilians in the blast. I myself was knocked almost unconscious. By the time I got up, Balka and Grodek were running out of the back of the building.

“I chased them along Moika Street, by the banks of the Neva. It was the middle of winter. The streets were ankle deep in slush, and snow had piled up on the sides of the road. I could not get a clear shot at them. Eventually, Balka slipped. She must have broken her ankle. I caught up with them on the Potsuleyev Bridge. Police were coming from the other way. There was no cover. I had them in my sights. They had no place to go.” Pekkala paused. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And what I saw next, I have never been able to get out of my head. They stopped at the crest of the bridge. I could hear the police shouting at them from the other side. Balka was obviously hurt. Grodek had been alternately carrying her and dragging her for several blocks, and he had become exhausted. It was clear that they couldn’t go on. I called to them. I said it was time to give up. Grodek looked at me for a long time. Balka stood beside him with her arm over his shoulder. Then Grodek embraced her, lifted her up and set her on the stone rail of the bridge. The water below was choked with ice. I told him there was no escape that way.”

“What did he do?” asked Kirov.

“He kissed her. And then he pulled a gun and shot her in the head.”

Kirov rocked back. “He shot her? I thought he was in love with her.”

“I did not understand how far he was prepared to go. Maria Balka fell into the river and drifted under the ice.”

“And Grodek? Did he surrender?”

“Only after he had failed to kill himself. He put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger, but the cylinder had jammed.”

“Why didn’t he jump?” Kirov asked. “He might have been able to escape.”

“Grodek was afraid of heights. Even though the distance to the water was only three or four times the height of a man, Grodek became paralyzed by fear. He tried to rush past me, and I knocked him out with the butt of my gun. It put a gash in his forehead. For the entire length of his trial, he refused to wear a bandage. The scar, with its line of dark stitches, looked like a purple centipede crawling up into his hairline. Every day as he left the proceedings on the way back to his holding cell, Grodek would shout to the journalists who had gathered outside the courthouse that the police had tortured him.”

“And Balka? What happened to her body?”

“We never found it. In the winter that river runs fast below the ice. The current must have carried her out into the Baltic Sea. I had a team of divers search that river more than a dozen times.” Pekkala shook his head. “She had vanished without a trace.”

“And Grodek? After what he had done, why did they put him behind bars? Why did he not receive the death penalty?”

“He did, at first, but the Tsar overruled the decision of the judges. He believed that Grodek had been a pawn, first of his father and then of Zubatov. Grodek was still a young man. In a different world, the Tsar felt, it might have been his own son facing execution. But it was clear to the Tsar that Grodek could never go free. So he was locked up for the rest of his life with no chance of parole in the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress.”

“But I thought all prisoners were released during the Revolution.”

“Political prisoners, yes, but even the Bolsheviks would have known better than to set free a man like Grodek.”

“What made Grodek so different from the other killers they set free?”

Pekkala thought for a moment before answering.

“Almost anyone,” said Pekkala, “can be driven to kill if the circumstances are forced upon them. But there is a difference between those people who react to situations and those who create the situation for which murder is the outcome. Those are the ones we have to fear, Kirov, because they enjoy the act of killing. And in all my years as a detective, I never met a killer who enjoyed what he did more than Grodek.”

The fire wheezed and crackled.

“Where will you go when you are free?” asked Kirov.

“Paris,” he replied.

“Why there?”

“If you have to ask that question, you have never been to Paris. Besides, I have unfinished business there.” It felt strange to think of the future. Each time he watched the sun go down in the valley of Krasnagolyana, he knew he had outpaced the odds of his survival. He had measured his survival in increments of days, not daring to hope for more. The idea that he might stretch those increments from days to weeks, to months and even years, filled him with confusion. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that what he was feeling was actually hope, an emotion he had once believed that he would never feel again.

At last, Kirov’s breathing grew heavy and deep.

Lightning flashed in the distance.

Pekkala slipped away into the river of his dreams, while thunder rolled across the clouds.

BY SUNRISE THE next morning, they were on the move again.

Their route intersected with a road known as the Moscow Highway which, in spite of its grand name, was only a two-lane strip of dirt laid out across the undulating steppe.

While turmeric-colored dust blew in through the open windows, Anton sat with the map, squinting at the thumbprint whorls of hills, the veins and arteries of roads, and the dense bone mass of forests.

By noon, they had reached the intersection Anton was looking for. Without any signposts, it resembled nothing more than a horizontal crucifix of mud. “Turn here, Kirov,” he ordered. “Turn here.” And then again. “Turn here.”

Their course took them away along the edge of a shallow stream and through a grove of white birch trees before the ground opened out into a field. The woods which ringed the field were dark and gloomy-looking. Kirov eased the car along an old wagon track which cut across the field, the Emka’s bumper swishing through the tall grass.

An old shack stood in the middle of this field, a tin chimney leaning drunkenly out of its roof.

Anton turned his map one way and then another, struggling to get his bearings. “It’s over by that house, I think.”

The car’s springs creaked as it lumbered over the bumpy ground. When they reached the far end of the field, the three men got out and started looking for the mine shaft.

It did not take them long to find it. The shaft was little more than a hole in the ground, about five paces wide, above which perched a rusted metal pulley. Clumps of luminous green grass hung over the edges of the hole. The first section of the mine shaft had been neatly bricked, like the sides of a well. Beneath that was bare rock and earth, from which tiny rivulets of water seeped down into the black. Bolted to the walls on either side were two rusted iron ladders. Most of the rungs were missing. The bolts which held the ladders to the wall were loose. There was no hope of using them to get down into the mine.

“Are you really going down there?” asked Kirov. “It’s pitch-black.”

“I have a flashlight,” said Anton. He removed it from the glove compartment of the car. The flashlight had a leather casing around its metal frame and a goggle-eyed crystal for its lens. He slung it from a cord around his neck.

Searching for a way to lower Pekkala into the shaft, Anton examined the pulley. The twisted threads of cable wound onto it were rusted together, beads of water resting in places where oil still clung to the metal. Sticking from the side of the drum was a large, two-man hand crank for raising and lowering the cable into the mine shaft. He took hold of the crank, pulled it, and the lever snapped off in his hands. “So much for that,” he muttered.

But Kirov was already removing a length of hemp rope from the trunk of the car, which had been placed there in case the vehicle broke down and needed to be towed. He looped one end around the Emka’s bumper, then walked to the edge of the pit and threw the rest of the coil down into the shaft.

The three men listened as the rope unraveled into the darkness. Then they heard a wet slap as it reached the ground.

Pekkala stood at the edge of the pit, the rope in his hand. He seemed to hesitate.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Anton asked.

“Give me the flashlight,” Pekkala said.

After Anton had handed it to him, Pekkala leaned back on the rope, testing its strength. The hemp creaked around the bumper but held firm. While Kirov lifted the rope, so that it would not drag at the edge of the mine shaft, Pekkala stepped to the edge, then leaned out backwards over the emptiness. With his hands white-knuckled around the line, he stepped down into the shaft. In a moment he was gone.

The two men on the surface watched the flashlight’s glow yawing back and forth across Pekkala’s chest, one moment illuminating his feet, then the rope, then the slippery sides of the mine shaft. The light grew smaller and smaller, and the sound of Pekkala’s breaths faded to a hollow echo.

“He looked afraid,” said Kirov.

“He is afraid,” replied Anton.

“Of the bodies?”

“The bodies don’t scare him. It’s being closed in that he can’t stand. And he’ll never forgive me for that.”

“Why is it your fault?”

“It was a game,” said Anton. “At least it started out that way. Once, when we were children, we went to a place our father had made us promise never to go. Deep in the woods behind our house, there was a crematory oven which he used for his funeral business. It had a tall chimney, as tall as the tops of the trees, and the oven itself was like a huge iron coffin built up on a pedestal of bricks. On those days when he used the oven, I would go to my bedroom window and see smoke rising above the tops of the trees. Our father had described the oven to us, but I had never seen it for myself. I wanted to, but I was far too scared to go alone. I persuaded my brother to come with me. He would never have gone otherwise. He was too obedient for his own good, but he is younger than me, and at that age I was able to convince him.