Eye of the Red Tsar (6 page)

As soon as the horses saw the glint of barbs along the top of the gate, they grew nervous, shying and sidestepping and clanking the bits with their teeth. Some refused to jump. Rearing up before the wire, they threw the cadets who rode them. Pekkala’s horse turned sideways, slammed its flank into the gate, and sent Pekkala flying. He landed on his shoulder, rolling on the hard-trampled ground. By the time he got to his feet, covered with flecks of old straw, the sergeant was already making marks in his notebook
.

Only a few animals made it across the first time. Most of these were injured by the wire, which cut them on their shins or on their bellies
.

The sergeant ordered the cadets to try again
.

An hour later, after several attempts, only half of the class had succeeded in getting their horses to jump the gate. The ground was sprinkled with blood, as if a box of red glass buttons had been tipped over
.

The cadets stood at attention, holding the reins of their trembling horses
.

By now, the sergeant realized he had made a mistake, but there was no way for him to back down without losing face. His voice was shredded from all the shouting he had done. Now, when he yelled, his shrillness sounded less like a man in charge than like someone on the edge of hysterics
.

Each time a horse collided with the gate—the hollow boom of the animal’s side connecting with the wooden planks, the scuffling of hooves and the grunt of the rider falling hard—the remaining horses and cadets would flinch in unison as if an electric current had arced through their bodies. One young man wept silently as he waited for his turn. It would be his sixth attempt. Like Pekkala, he had not cleared the gate even once
.

When it was time for Pekkala to try again, he swung himself up into the saddle. He looked over his horse’s head and at the distance between them and the gate. He could see gashes in the lower planks, where hooves had torn into the wood
.

The sergeant stood off to one side, notebook at the ready
.

Pekkala was about to dig his heels into the horse’s side and begin another run towards the gate. He had no doubt that he would be thrown; he was resigned to it. He was ready and then suddenly he was no longer ready to ride his horse against that gate, with its garland of bloodied iron barbs. As fluidly as he had climbed into the saddle, he climbed back down again
.

“Get back on your horse,” said the sergeant
.

“No,” said Pekkala. “I will not.” From the corner of his eye, Pekkala saw what looked to him like relief in the eyes of the other cadets. Relief that this could not go on, and relief that they would not be held responsible if it did not
.

This time, the sergeant did not scream and curse as he’d been doing all day long. As calmly as he could, he shut his notebook and slid it into the top pocket of his tunic. He tucked his hands behind his back and walked over to Pekkala, until their faces almost touched. “I will give you one more chance,” he said, his raw voice no stronger than a whisper
.

“No,” Pekkala said again
.

Now the sergeant came even closer, bringing his lips to Pekkala’s ear. “Listen,” he said, “all I am asking of you is to attempt your jump. If you fail, I will not hold it against you. I will even end the day’s exercise after your jump. But you will get on that horse, and you will do as you are told
,
or I will see to it that you are washed out of the cadets. I will personally walk you through the gates and see them bolted at your back, just as they were for your brother. That’s why it will be easy for me, Pekkala. Because people are expecting you to fail.”

At that moment, a tremor passed through Pekkala. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt, and he was not the only one to feel it
.

Both Pekkala and the sergeant turned at the same time, and saw a man standing in the shadows, near the stable entrance to the ring. The newcomer wore a dark green tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe running down the side. It was a simple uniform, and yet the colors seemed to vibrate in the still air. The man was not wearing a hat. Because of this they could see clearly that it was the Tsar himself
.

A SMALL FIRE crackled in the grate of the Police Chief’s Office.

“Detective?” Kirov paced the room, raising his hands and letting them fall again. “Do you mean your
brother
worked for the Tsar’s Secret Police?”

Pekkala sat at the desk, reading through the muddy brown case file with its red stripe running diagonally across the page. Written in black on the red stripe were the words VERY SECRET. The word
secret
alone had lost all meaning. These days, everything was secret. Carefully, he turned the pages, his face only a hand’s length from the desk, so lost in thought that he did not seem to hear the Commissar’s ranting.

“No.” Anton sat by the fire, hands stretched out towards the flames. “He did not work for the Okhrana.”

“Then who did he work for?”

“I told you. He worked for the Tsar.”

They spoke of Pekkala as if he was not in the room.

“In what branch?” asked Kirov.

“He was his own branch,” Anton explained. “The Tsar created a unique investigator, a man with absolute authority, who answered only to himself. Even the Okhrana could not question him. They called him the Eye of the Tsar and he could not be bribed, or bought or threatened. It did not matter who you were, how wealthy or connected. No one stood above the Emerald Eye, not even the Tsar himself.”

Pekkala looked up from his reading. “Enough,” he muttered.

But his brother kept on talking. “My brother’s memory is perfect! He remembered the face of every person he’d ever met. He put the devil Grodek behind bars. He killed the assassin Maria Balka!” He pointed at Pekkala. “This was the Eye of the Tsar!”

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Kirov.

“I don’t suppose,” said Anton, “that they would teach cooks about the techniques of criminal investigation.”

“A chef!” Kirov corrected him. “I was training to be a chef, not a cook.”

“And there’s a difference?”

“There is if you’re a chef, which I would have been by now if they hadn’t closed the school.”

“Well, then, Comrade Almost-Chef, the reason you don’t know about him is because his identity was suppressed after the Revolution. We couldn’t have people wondering what had happened to the Eye of the Tsar. It doesn’t matter. From now you can simply refer to him as the Eye of the Red Tsar.”

“I said
enough!”
growled Pekkala.

Anton smiled and breathed out slowly, satisfied with the effect of his tormenting. “My brother possessed the kind of power you see once in a thousand years. But he threw it all away. Didn’t you, brother?”

“You go to hell,” said Pekkala.

The sergeant sprang to attention
.

The cadets, in a single motion, crashed their heels together in salute. The sound echoed like a gunshot through the horse ring
.

Even the horses became strangely still as the Tsar walked out across the ring to where the men were standing
.

It was the first time Pekkala had ever seen the Tsar. Recruits in training did not usually set eyes on him until the day of their graduation, when they would parade before the Romanov family in their new, fine-cut gray uniforms. Until then, the Tsar remained distant
.

But there he was, without his usual bodyguards, without an entourage of officers from the regiment—a man of medium height, with narrow shoulders and a tight stride, placing one foot directly in front of the other as he walked. He had a broad, smooth forehead, and his beard was close-trimmed and sculpted on his chin in a way which gave his jaw a certain angularity. The Tsar’s narrowed eyes were hard to read. His expression was not unkind, but neither was it friendly. It seemed to hover between contentment and the desire to be somewhere else
.

More of a mask than a face, thought Pekkala
.

Pekkala knew he was not supposed to look directly at the Tsar. In spite of this, he couldn’t help but stare. It was like watching a picture come to life, a two-dimensional image suddenly emerging into the third dimension of the living
.

The Tsar came to a stop before the Sergeant and offered a casual salute
.

The Sergeant returned the salute
.

Now the Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Your horse seems to be bleeding.” He did not raise his voice, but still it seemed to carry through the wide space of the training ring
.

“Yes, Excellency.”

“It looks to me as if most of these animals are bleeding.” He looked at the Sergeant. “Why are my horses bleeding?”

“A part of the training, Excellency,” the Sergeant replied breathlessly
.

“The horses are already trained,” replied the Tsar
.

The Sergeant spoke at the ground, not daring to raise his head. “Training for the recruits, Excellency.”

“But the recruits are not bleeding.” The Tsar ran his hand through his beard. His heavy signet ring stood out like a knuckle made of gold
.

“No, Excellency.”

“And what seems to be the trouble with this particular recruit?” asked the Tsar, casting a glance at Pekkala
.

“He refuses to jump.”

The Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Is this true? Do you refuse to go over that gate?”

“No, Excellency. I will go over the gate, only not on this horse.”

The Tsar’s eyes opened wider for a moment, then returned to their normal squint. “I’m not sure that’s what your Sergeant had in mind.”

“Excellency, I will not continue to injure this horse in order to prove that I am capable of doing so.”

The Tsar took one long breath, like a man preparing to dive underwater. “Then I regret that you find yourself in a dilemma.” Without another word, the Tsar walked past Pekkala and down the line of horses and riders standing at attention. The only sound was of his footsteps
.

When the Tsar’s back was turned, the Sergeant raised his head and looked Pekkala in the eye. It was a stare of pure hatred
.

The Tsar continued past the gates, where he paused to study the bloody strands of barbed wire
.

When he reached the far end of the ring, he spun on his heel and faced the soldiers again. “This exercise is finished,” he said. Then he stepped back into the shadows and was gone
.

As soon as the Tsar was out of sight, the Sergeant snarled at Pekkala, “You know what else is finished? Your life as a member of this Regiment. Now return to the stables, brush down your horse, wipe the saddle, fold the blanket, and get out.”

As Pekkala led his horse away, the Sergeant’s shrill commands to the other cadets echoed across the ring
.

He led his horse into the stable. The horse moved willingly into its
pen, where Pekkala unbuckled the saddle and removed the reins. He brushed down the animal, seeing its muscles quiver beneath the silky brown coat. He was stepping out to fetch a bucket of water and a cloth for dressing the horse’s injured shins when he saw the silhouette of a man standing at the opposite end of the stable, where it opened out onto the barracks grounds
.

It was the Tsar. He had come back. Or maybe he had never left. Pekkala could see nothing of the man beyond an inky outline. It was as if the Tsar had returned to the two-dimensional form in which Pekkala had imagined him before. “That was an expensive gesture,” he said. “Your Sergeant will have you kicked out.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“If I were in your place, I would also have refused,” said the Tsar. “Unfortunately, it is not my place to argue with the methods of your training. If you had to do it over again, would you take your horse over the gate?”

“No, Excellency.”

“But you would clamber over it yourself.”

“Yes.”

The Tsar cleared his throat. “I look forward to telling that story. What is your name, cadet?”

“Pekkala.”

“Ah, yes. You came here to take your brother’s place in the regiment. I read your file. It was noted that you have an excellent memory.”

“That comes without effort, Excellency. I can take no credit for it.”

“Nevertheless, it was noted. Well, Pekkala, I regret that our acquaintance has been so brief.” He turned to leave. Sunlight winked off the buttons on his tunic. But instead of walking away, the Tsar came full circle, turning back into the stable’s darkness. “Pekkala?”

“Yes, Excellency?”

“How many buttons are on my tunic?”

“The answer is twelve.”

“Twelve. A good guess, but…” The Tsar did not finish his sentence
.
The silhouette changed as he lowered his head in disappointment. “Well, good-bye, Cadet Pekkala.”