The Red Coffin (31 page)

It was late in the afternoon when they reached a tiny village called Zorovka, the last Russian settlement before the road disappeared into the forest. Zorovka consisted of half a dozen thatched-roof houses built closely together on either side of the road running into the Rusalka. Indignant-looking chickens wandered across the road, so unused to traffic that they barely seemed to notice the Emka until its wheels were almost on top of them.

The village seemed deserted except for a woman who was tilling the earth in her garden. When the Emka rolled into sight the woman did not even raise her head, but continued to chip away with a hoe at the muddy clumps of dirt.

The fact that she did not look up made Pekkala realise that she must have been expecting them. ‘Stop the car,’ he ordered.

Kirov hit the brakes.

Pekkala got out and walked over to the woman.

As he crossed the road towards her, the woman continued to ignore him.

Beneath the marks of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves, Pekkala saw the tracks of heavy tyres. Now he knew they were on the right path. ‘When did the truck pass through here?’ he asked the woman, standing on the other side of her garden fence.

She stopped chipping at the earth. She raised her head. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I am Inspector Pekkala, from the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow.’

‘Well, I don’t know anything about a truck,’ she said in a voice so loud that Pekkala wondered if she might be hard of hearing.

‘I can see the tyre tracks in the road,’ said Pekkala.

The woman came to the edge of her fence and looked out into the road. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice almost a shout, ‘I see them, too, but I still don’t know anything about it.’ Then she glanced at him and Pekkala knew from the look on her face that she was lying. And more than this – she wanted him to know she was lying.

A jolt passed through Pekkala’s chest. He looked down at the ground, as if distracted by something. ‘Is he here?’ he whispered.

‘He was,’ whispered the woman.

‘How long ago?’

‘Yesterday, some time in the afternoon.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘I did not see anyone else.’

‘If he is gone,’ asked Pekkala, ‘why are you still afraid?’

‘The others in this town are hiding in their houses, watching us and listening at their doors. If anything happens, they
will blame me for talking to you, but I will blame myself if I say nothing.’

‘If anything happens?’ asked Pekkala.

The woman stared at him for a moment. ‘This man who drove the truck, he took somebody with him. Someone from this village. His name is Maklarsky; a forester here in the Rusalka.’

‘Why would he kidnap somebody?’ asked Pekkala.

‘At first the driver said he only wanted some fuel for his truck. But the thing is we are only allowed so much every month from the local commissariat. We only have one tractor in this village and what they give us isn’t even enough to keep it running. The amount of fuel he wanted was more than we draw in a month. So we told him no. Then he asked for someone to show him the way to the border. The Rusalka is patrolled by Polish cavalry. Our own soldiers come through here sometimes, once a month or so, but the Poles ride through that forest almost every day. The woods are full of trails. It’s easy to get lost. We told him he should go back out to the Moscow highway and cross the border into Poland from there. That was when the driver pulled a gun.’

‘What did he look like?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Broad shoulders, a big square face and a moustache. He had blond hair turning grey.’

‘His name is Kropotkin,’ said Pekkala, ‘and he is very dangerous. It is very important that I stop this man before he crosses into Poland.’

‘He may have done that already,’ said the woman.

‘If he had,’ said Pekkala, ‘we would know about it.’

‘This man said that people would come looking for him. He said we should keep a look out for a man with a black coat, who wore a badge shaped like an eye on his lapel.’

Pekkala turned up the collar of his coat. ‘He meant this.’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, staring at the emerald eye. ‘He told us if we kept quiet, he would let his hostage go. But I didn’t believe him. That is why I’m talking to you now. The others are too scared to speak with you. My name is Zoya Maklarskaya and that man I told you about is my father. The decision is mine whether talking to you now will do more harm than good.’

‘We will do what we can to bring your father back,’ said Pekkala.

The woman nodded at the churned-up road. ‘Those tracks will lead you to him,’ she said, ‘and you had better leave now if you want to find him before nightfall. Once the dark has settled on that forest, even the wolves get lost in there.’

As Pekkala turned around, he saw a face in the window of a house, sliding back into the shadows like a drowned man sinking to the bottom of a lake.

In fading light, they followed Kropotkin’s tracks into the forest. The ranks of trees closed around them. Sunset leaned in crooked pillars through the branches, lighting up clearings where blankets of grass gleamed as luminously as the emerald in Pekkala’s gold-framed eye.

The road itself appeared to mark the border.

On one side, they passed wooden signs written in Polish, indicating that they were travelling right along the edge of
the two countries. On the other side, nailed to trees, were metal plaques, showing the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union. From beneath the signs, where the nails had pierced the bark, white trickles of sap bled down to the ground.

From his hours of staring at the map, the Rusalka compressed in Pekkala’s mind until he had convinced himself that such a monster of a tank could never hide for long.

But now that they were in it, bumping along over washboard roads, eyes straining to follow the snakeskin trail of Kropotkin’s tyre tracks, Pekkala realised that a hundred of those tanks could vanish in here without trace.

Overwhelmed by the vastness of these woods, Pekkala’s memories of the great cities of Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev all began to feel like a dream. It was as if the only thing that existed on this earth, and had ever existed, was the forest of Rusalka.

When the sunlight had finally gone, the darkness did not seem to settle from above as it did in the city. Instead, it rose up from the ground, like a black liquid flooding the earth.

They could no longer see the truck’s wheel marks, and it was too dangerous to use the Emka’s headlights when Kropotkin might be waiting for them around every bend in the road.

They steered the Emka off the road, cut the engine, and climbed stiff-legged from the car. The dew had settled. Wind blew through the tops of the trees.

‘We’ll start looking again as soon as it is light,’ said Pekkala. ‘As long as it’s dark, Kropotkin can’t risk moving either.’

‘Can we make a fire?’ asked Kirov.

‘No,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Even if he couldn’t see the flames, the smell of smoke would lead him right to us. We will all take it in turns standing guard. I’ll take the first watch.’

While Pekkala stood guard, Maximov and Kirov lay down in the cramped space of the car, Maximov in the front seat and Kirov in the back.

Pekkala sat on the hood of the Emka, feeling the warmth of the engine, which sighed and clicked as it cooled, like the irregular ticking of a clock.

After years spent in the constant rolling thunder of underground trains snaking their way beneath the pavements of Moscow, the clunk of water pipes in his apartment, and the distant clattering of trains pulling into the Belorussian station, the stillness of this forest unnerved Pekkala. Old memories of his time in Siberia come back to haunt him as he stared helplessly into the dark, knowing that Kropotkin could come within a few paces before he’d be able to see him.

Beads of moisture gathered on his clothes, transforming the dull black of his coat into a cape of pearls which shimmered even in this darkness.

After a while, the back door of the Emka opened and Kirov climbed out. The windows of the car had turned opaque with condensation.

‘Has it been three hours already?’ asked Pekkala.

‘No,’ replied Kirov. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ He came and stood beside Pekkala, hugging his ribs against the cold. ‘How much time do we have left?’

Pekkala checked his pocket watch. ‘Fourteen hours. By the time the sun comes up, we’ll only have a couple left.’

‘Would it really be enough to start a war?’ asked Kirov. ‘One tank, driven by a lunatic? Even if he does manage to kill a few innocent people, surely the world would come to its senses in time …’

Pekkala cut him off. ‘The last war was started by a lunatic named Gavrilo Princip. The only thing he used was a pistol, and all he had to do was kill one man, the Archduke Ferdinand.’

‘An archduke sounds pretty high up.’

‘He may have had an important title, but was Ferdinand important enough to bring about the deaths of over ten million people? You see, the war began, Kirov, because one side wanted it to begin. All that side needed was a big enough lie to convince its own people that their way of life was being threatened. The same is true today, and so the answer is yes. One lunatic is more than enough.’

The car door opened.

Pekkala felt a rush of cold brush across his face, sweeping away the stale air inside the Emka. He had been asleep, legs twisted down into the seat well and head resting on the passenger seat. The Emka’s gear stick jabbed into his ribs. His neck felt like the bellows of a broken accordion.

Someone was shaking his foot.

It seemed to Pekkala as if he had only just closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe it was time to go back out on watch again.

‘Get up, Inspector,’ whispered Kirov. ‘Maximov is gone.’

Kirov’s words jolted him awake. He scrambled out of the car. ‘What do you mean he’s gone?’

‘I finished my watch,’ explained Kirov. ‘Then I woke up Maximov and told him it was his turn to go on. I got up a
few minutes ago to take a piss. That’s when I noticed he was gone.’

‘Perhaps he’s nearby.’

‘Inspector, I searched for him and found nothing.’

Both men stared out into the dark.

‘He’s gone to warn Kropotkin,’ muttered Kirov.

At first, Pekkala was too shocked to reply, stubbornly refusing to believe that Maximov had deserted them.

‘What should we do?’ asked Kirov.

‘We won’t find them in the dark,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Not out here. Until it gets light, we wait for them to come to us. But as soon as it is light enough to see, we will go looking for them.’

A short distance up the road from where the Emka had been parked, they set up the PTRD anti-tank rifle in the ditch and covered it with a camouflage of pine branches. In addition, each of them carried a bottle filled with the explosive mixture. The greasy liquid sloshed inside its glass containers.

They spent the rest of the night huddled in the ditch, watching the road. In the plunging darkness, their eyes played tricks on them. Phantoms drifted in among the trees. Voices whispered in the hissing of the wind, then suddenly were gone and had never been there at all.

In the first eel-green glimmer of dawn, they saw something coming towards them.

It did not seem human. The creature loped like a wolf, keeping to the edge of the road.

Slowly, Pekkala reached up to the edge of the ditch and eased his gun out of its holder.

Kirov did the same.

Now they could see it was a man, and a moment later, they recognised the bald head of Maximov. He ran with a long, steady stride, hunched over, his arms hanging down at his sides.

Arriving at the Emka, Maximov stopped and peered cautiously into the trees. ‘Kirov,’ he whispered, ‘Pekkala, are you in there?’

Pekkala climbed out of the ditch and stood in the road, keeping the gun in his hand. ‘What do you want, Maximov?’ In spite of what his instincts told him about Maximov, Pekkala had made up his mind to shoot the man if he so much as made a sudden movement.

Maximov seemed confused that Pekkala was not by the car. But then he realised what the two inspectors must be thinking. ‘I heard him!’ said Maximov urgently, as he made his way towards Pekkala. ‘I heard the sound of metal against metal. I followed. I had to move quickly.’ He came to a stop. Only then did he notice Kirov in the ditch, and the PTRD laid out under its covering of pine. He stared at the two men in confusion. ‘Did you think I had abandoned you?’

‘What else were we supposed to think?’ snapped Kirov.

‘After what that man did to Konstantin,’ Maximov answered, ‘did you honestly believe I would go back to helping him?’

‘You say you followed him?’ Pekkala asked, before Kirov could respond.

Maximov nodded. He pointed down the road. ‘He’s only about fifteen minutes away. There’s a clearing just off the road. The tank is already off the truck. It looks like he’s getting ready to head out as soon as it is light enough to see.’

‘Was he alone?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Did you see the man he took hostage?’

‘The only person I saw was Kropotkin. We must go now if we’re going to catch him. It will be much harder to stop that tank once he’s on the move.’

Without another word, Kirov gathered up the PTRD. As he climbed out of the ditch, he handed his Tokarev to Maximov. ‘You’d better have this,’ he said, ‘in case you can’t talk him out of it.’ Then he glanced into the sky and exclaimed softly, ‘Look!’

Maximov and Pekkala turned. A plume of thick smoke rose above the trees in the distance.

‘What is that?’ asked Kirov. ‘Is that the exhaust from the tank?’

‘It looks more like he’s trying to burn the forest down,’ said Maximov.

At the car, each man took a bottle of the explosive mixture and as much extra ammunition as he could carry. Then they set off running, Maximov in the lead, wolf-striding ahead of the two inspectors.

As they ran, the black smoke spread across the sky.