Eye of the Red Tsar (5 page)

“And where is this man?”

It was raining harder now, the storm a constant roar upon the roof, like a train riding through the air above their heads.

“In a place called Vodovenko. It’s an institution for the criminally insane.”

“Criminally insane?” Pekkala grunted. “Does this mine shaft even exist?”

“Yes. It has been located.”

“And the bodies? Have they been found?” A shudder passed through Pekkala as he thought of the skeletons lying jumbled at the bottom of the mine shaft. Many times he had dreamed of the killings, but those nightmares always ended in the moment of their deaths. Until now, he had never been tormented by the image of their unburied bones.

“The mine shaft was sealed off as soon as news reached the Bureau. As far as we know, the crime scene has not been touched.”

“I still don’t understand why they need me for this,” said Pekkala.

“You are the only person left alive who knew the Romanovs personally and who is also trained in detective work. You can positively identify those bodies. There is no margin for error.”

Pekkala hesitated before he spoke. “That explains why Stalin sent for me, but not what you are doing here.”

Anton opened his hands and brought them softly together again. “The Bureau thought it might help if a familiar face passed on their offer to you.”

“Offer?” asked Pekkala. “What offer?”

“On successful completion of this investigation, your sentence at the Gulag will be commuted. You will be granted your freedom. You can leave the country. You can go anywhere you want.”

Pekkala’s first instinct was not to believe it. He had been told too many lies in the past to take the offer seriously. “What do you get out of this?”

“This promotion is my reward,” replied Anton. “Ever since the Romanovs disappeared, no matter how hard I worked, how loyal I showed myself to be, I was passed over. Until last week I was a Corporal in some windowless office in Moscow. My job was to steam open letters and copy down anything which sounded critical of the government. It looked as if that was all I’d ever be. Then the Bureau called.” He sat back in his chair. “If the investigation succeeds, we’ll both have a second chance.”

“And if we don’t succeed?” asked Pekkala.

“You will be returned to Borodok,” replied Anton, “and I’ll go back to steaming open letters.”

“What about that Commissar? What’s he doing here?”

“Kirov? He’s just a kid. He was training as a cook until they closed down his school and transferred him to the political academy instead. This is his first assignment. Officially, Kirov is our political liaison, but as of now, he doesn’t even know what the investigation is about.”

“When were you planning on telling him?”

“As soon as you agree to help.”

“Political liaison,” said Pekkala. “Apparently your Bureau does not trust either of us.”

“Get used to it,” said Anton. “No one is trusted anymore.”

Pekkala slowly shook his head in disbelief. “Congratulations.”

“On what?”

“On the mess you have made of this country.”

Anton stood up. His chair scudded back across the floor. “The Tsar got what he deserved. And so did you.”

They stood face-to-face, the desk like a barricade between them.

“Father would have been proud of you,” Pekkala said, unable to hide his disgust.

At the mention of their father, something snapped inside Anton. He lunged across the desk, lashing out with his fist and striking Pekkala on the side of the head.

Pekkala saw a flash behind his eye. He rocked back, then regained his balance.

Anton came out from behind the desk and swung again, hitting his brother in the chest.

Pekkala staggered. Then, with a roar, he grabbed Anton around the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides.

The two men tumbled backwards, plowing through the office door, which gave way with a splintering of flimsy wood. They fell into the narrow corridor. Anton struck the ground first.

Pekkala crashed down on top of him.

For a moment both of them were stunned.

Then Anton grabbed Pekkala by the throat.

The two men stared at each other, their eyes filled with hate.

“You told me things were different now,” said Pekkala, “but you were wrong. Nothing has changed between us.”

Unable to contain his rage, Anton wrenched the pistol from his belt and jammed the end of the barrel against his brother’s temple.

The same day he arrived in St. Petersburg, Pekkala enlisted as a cadet in the Finnish Regiment of Guards
.

He soon learned the reason why Anton had been thrown out of the corps
.

Anton had been accused of stealing money from the footlocker of another cadet. At first, he had denied it. No evidence could be brought against him other than the coincidence that he suddenly had money to spend, at the precise moment when the other cadet’s funds went missing. But that same evening, as the cadet recounted his loss to the recruit in the neighboring bunk, he noticed something on his bedside locker. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and leaning over so as not to have to raise his voice. As he spoke, his warm breath passed over the polished surface of the locker and a ghostly handprint shimmered into view. The print was not his own, nor did it belong to any of the other six cadets who bunked in that room. The sergeant was called and he ordered a comparison of Anton’s handprint and the one upon the locker
.

When the handprints were seen to match, Anton confessed, but he also protested that it was only a small amount of money
.

The amount did not matter. By the codes of the Finnish Guards, within whose barrack walls no doors were locked and no keys were kept, any theft was punished by demotion from the ranks. When Anton returned from his hearing with the Commander of the regiment, his bags had been packed already
.

Two senior officers walked Anton to the gates of the barracks. Then, without a word of good-bye, they turned their backs on him and returned inside the compound. The gates were closed and bolted
.

On his first full day as a cadet, Pekkala was summoned to the office of the Commandant. He did not yet know how to present himself to a senior officer, or how to salute. Pekkala worried about this as he walked across the parade square. Platoons of new recruits shambled past him as they learned to march, flanked by shrill-shrieking drill sergeants who cursed them and their families back to the dawn of time
.

In the waiting room, a tall, immaculately dressed guard was waiting
for Pekkala. The guard’s clothes were of a lighter shade than those of the recruits. Over his tunic he wore a belt whose heavy brass buckle was stamped with the double-headed eagle of the Tsar. A short-brimmed cap covered half of his face
.

When the guard raised his head and looked him in the eye, Pekkala felt as if lights were shining in his face
.

In a voice barely above a whisper, the guard instructed Pekkala to keep his back straight and his heels together when he stood before the Commandant
.

“Let’s see you do it,” said the guard
.

Pekkala did the best he could
.

“Don’t bend over backwards,” the guard told him
.

Pekkala couldn’t help it. All of his muscles were locked so tight he could barely move
.

The guard pinched the gray cloth at the tips of Pekkala’s shoulders, straightening the rough wool tunic. “When the Commandant speaks, you must not answer ‘yes, sir.’ Instead, you only say ‘sir.’ However, if the answer to his question is no, you may say ‘no, sir.’ Do you understand?”

“Sir.”

The guard shook his head. “You do not call me sir. I am not an officer.”

The rules of this strange world raced around in Pekkala’s brain like bees shaken from a hive. It seemed impossible that he would ever master all of them. At that moment, if someone had offered him the chance to go home, he would have taken it. At the same time, Pekkala was afraid that was exactly why the Commandant had called for him
.

The guard seemed to know what he was thinking. “You have nothing to fear,” he said. Then he turned, and knocked on the door to the Commandant’s office. Without waiting for a reply from inside, he opened the door and, with a jerk of his chin, showed Pekkala that he was to enter
.

The Commandant was a man named Parainen. He was tall and thin, with jaw and cheekbones so sharply angled that his skull seemed to be made of broken glass. “You are the brother of Anton Pekkala?”

“Sir.”

“Have you heard anything from him?”

“Not lately, sir.”

The Commandant scratched at his neck. “He was due back with us a month ago.”

“Due back?” asked Pekkala. “But I thought he had been expelled!”

“Not expelled. Rusticated. That’s not the same thing.”

“Then what does it mean?” asked Pekkala, and then he added, “Sir.”

“It is only a temporary dismissal,” explained Parainen. “If it happened again, the expulsion would be permanent, but in the case of a cadet’s first offense, we tend to show leniency.”

“Then why hasn’t he returned?”

The Commandant shrugged. “Perhaps he decided that this life was not for him.”

“That can’t be right, sir. It’s all he wanted in the world.”

“People change. Besides, now you are here to take his place.” The Commandant rose to his feet. He walked over to the window, which looked out over the barracks to the town beyond. The gunmetal gray of a winter’s afternoon lit his face. “I want you to know that you will not be held accountable for what your brother did. You will be given the same chances as anybody else. If you fail, as many do, you will fail on your own terms. And if you succeed, it will be because of what you did and no one else. Does that sound fair to you?”

“Sir,” said Pekkala. “Yes, it does.”

In the weeks that followed, Pekkala learned to march and shoot and to live in a place where there was no such thing as privacy except in those thoughts which he kept locked inside his head. Within the confines of the Finnish Regiment barracks, thrown in among young men from Helsinki, Kauhava, and Turku, it was almost possible to forget that he had left his native country. Many had never dreamed of any other life except to become members of the Finnish Guards. For some, it was a family tradition dating back generations
.

Sometimes, Pekkala felt as if he had woken up and found himself clad in the skin of a different man. The person he had been was receding into the shadows like the dead, whose final journeys he had overseen at home
.

One day, all that changed
.

WITH THE BARREL of Anton’s gun digging into his temple, Pekkala slowly closed his eyes. There was no terror in his face, only a kind of quiet anticipation, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Go ahead,” he whispered.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor. It was Kirov, the young Commissar. “That policeman has run away,” he said as he walked into the room. He stopped when he saw Anton’s gun aimed at Pekkala’s head.

With an unintelligible curse, Anton released his grip on his brother’s throat.

Pekkala rolled away, choking.

Kirov stared at them in amazement. “When you are done brawling, Commander,” he said to Anton, “would one of you mind explaining to me why the hell your brother is making everybody so nervous?”

Pekkala’s career began with a horse
.

Midway through their training in the regiment, cadets were brought to the stables for instruction in riding
.

Although Pekkala knew well enough how to handle a horse which had been hitched to his father’s wagon, he had never ridden in the saddle
.

The idea did not trouble him. After all, he told himself, I knew nothing about shooting or marching before I came here, and those things have not been more difficult for me than they were for anybody else
.

The training went smoothly at first, as recruits learned to saddle a horse, to mount and dismount, and to steer the animal around a series of
wooden barrels. The horses were themselves so familiar with this routine that all Pekkala had to do was not fall off
.

The next task was to jump a horse over a gate set up in a large indoor ring. The Sergeant in charge of this exercise was new to his job. He had ordered several strands of barbed wire to be stretched across the top of the gate and nailed to the posts at either end. It was not enough, he told the assembled cadets, simply to hang on to a horse while it performed tasks it could just as easily have accomplished without a rider
.

“There needs to be,” he told them, pleased at the boom of his voice within the enclosed space of the ring, “a bond between horse and rider. Until you can demonstrate this to me, I will never permit you to be members of this regiment.”