Red Icon Page 11

  ‘Poskrebychev,’ said Pekkala.

  The secretary nodded in greeting, but his face remained unchanged. Although Poskrebychev was a great admirer of the Emerald Eye, he worked hard to conceal his emotions. ‘You are to go straight in,’ he told them, and returned to rubber-stamping a pile of documents with a facsimile of Stalin’s signature. No sooner had the men entered Stalin’s office than Poskrebychev set aside the rubber stamp, fiddled with the intercom and leaned towards the black mesh of the speaker so as not to miss a word of what was said.

  Stalin sat at his desk, arms stretched out and hands laid flat upon the red, leather-padded surface. Directly in front of him lay a rectangular object wrapped in a dirty piece of oilcloth. He smiled as the two men walked in, the gesture almost hidden behind his thick moustache, since his eyes reflected no emotion. ‘Gentlemen!’ he growled affectionately.

  Kirov approached the desk and brought his heels together. ‘You sent for us, Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘I did indeed,’ replied Stalin, folding his arms across his chest. The moisture imprint of his hand remained upon the desk, evaporating from the edges like a leaf curling in upon itself. ‘What do you make of this?’ He nodded towards the package.

  Carefully, Kirov took up the bundle and began to unwrap it.

  As Pekkala waited for the contents to be revealed, he noted a smell, faint but unmistakable, almost lost among the fragrances of Stalin’s pipe tobacco. Initially, he could not place the odour but, whatever it was, it did not belong here, and its strangeness confused him at first. It was something sweet and musty which stuck in the back of Pekkala’s throat as if his body were trying to prevent it being drawn into his lungs. And then he knew what it was. It was the odour of human decay, which he knew well from those corpses, sometimes it seemed almost too many to count, whose murders he had pieced together fragment by fragment until the killers had been caught. But those were not the ones which bobbed to the surface of Pekkala’s thoughts. It was the killers who hadn’t been found, whose victims called out to him in his sleep. And when he woke to the sound of their cries, his lungs would be filled with the stench of cadavers.

  Letting the oilcloth fall to the floor with a rustle, Kirov held up the strange picture, with the sheep adrift on their tiny islands and the white-robed man peering out at them with pin-prick eyes.

  Pekkala shuddered when he saw what it was.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘The Shepherd,’ said Pekkala, and as he spoke the name, his thoughts tumbled into the past, like a man being swept away down the tunnels of an underground river, back to a winter’s evening in 1917. He was crossing that same square where crowds had cheered the Tsar on the day that war was declared. But that had been more than two years before. Since then, millions of Russians had died on the battlefield and hundreds of thousands of wounded, who might have been saved with adequate medical treatment, had perished from neglect. With his coat turned up against a bitter wind blowing in off the Baltic Sea, Pekkala glanced up through frost-covered eyelashes towards the empty balcony where he and the Tsar had stood what seemed like a lifetime ago. Icicles hung from the metal railings and driven snow had pasted itself against the west-facing pillars. In one corner of the square, a few crippled soldiers, discharged from the army and with nowhere else to go, huddled by an oil-drum fire. They teetered on their crutches as they passed a bottle of vodka, marked with the red diamond of the State Monopoly of Alcohol, from one man to another. A lone carriage rattled past, the driver whipping savagely at the old black horse. As it passed, the horse’s eyes locked with Pekkala’s, and in them he saw nothing but fear, as if it knew exactly what was coming. One week later, soldiers stormed the Winter Palace. The Revolution had begun.

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ laughed Stalin.

  ‘Either a ghost or a copy,’ replied Pekkala, nodding towards the icon, ‘since the original icon no longer exists.’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ replied Stalin.

  ‘Would somebody please tell me what I’m looking at,’ asked Kirov, ‘and why I should care one way or another?’

  ‘In your hands,’ explained Pekkala, ‘is one of the most sacred icons in all of Russia.’

  ‘At least it was,’ said Stalin, ‘until a mad priest destroyed it, apparently.’

  ‘I see you are familiar with the case, Comrade Stalin.’

  ‘I am now, thanks to this.’ Stalin lifted a grey file, crammed with tattered notes, and let it fall again upon his desk, raising a faint cloud of dust. ‘It took Poskrebychev nearly a week to dig this out of Archive 17.’

  Archive 17 was the graveyard of Soviet Internal Security documents as well as those which had been salvaged from the desks, sledge-hammered strongboxes and the dynamited safes of those who had been swept away by Revolution. Files on deceased criminals, mislabelled reports, unsolved cases and any other orphaned scrap of paper churned out by the Cheka, the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD and the Bureau of Special Operations eventually found their way to a warehouse at the edge of Moscow where, before the Revolution shut them down, sculptors had once fashioned bronze statues of admirals, generals and other sanctioned heroes of the Empire. Pieces of those sculptures, some of them too big or too heavy to move, still lay scattered among the endless rows of filing cabinets which filled the warehouse.

  ‘Then you will know, Comrade Stalin, that the case was closed by order of the Tsar himself.’

  Stalin nodded. ‘Which tells me, if I read between the lines, that you were not happy with its outcome.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ answered Pekkala.

  ‘But what does any of this matter now?’ demanded Kirov. ‘Even if, by some miracle, it wasn’t destroyed, who cares if it exists? Until today I’d never even heard of it!’

  ‘That’s because you were little more than a child when this icon was lost,’ answered Pekkala.

  ‘And its story had no place in the new country that emerged from our Revolution,’ added Stalin.

  Kirov looked from one man to the other. ‘But surely you don’t believe any of this antiquated fairy tale!’

  ‘Maybe not,’ answered Pekkala, ‘but others did believe, and their trust in its miraculous powers made that power real.’

  ‘And behold another miracle,’ said Stalin. ‘The icon has survived.’ Now he rose to his feet. For a moment, he stood there in silence, fingertips resting on the surface of the desk. Then, slowly, he began to speak. ‘Our forces are poised along the banks of the river Oder, ready to launch a final assault against Berlin. We have brought the war to the enemy’s own soil, and he will fight for it more fiercely than he has ever done before. Who knows what terrible weapons he has saved for this final duel between our nations? The days ahead may test our resolve in ways we cannot even imagine. We face the greatest challenge of our age, perhaps the greatest that the world has ever seen. You know where I stand on religion,’ he went on, ‘but I am not so foolish as to disregard the faith I know exists beneath the surface of this land. Such faith can work against us if we fail to harness its potential. That is why I have opened the churches again. That is why services can once more be held without fear of reprisal. And now this icon has reappeared. If people wish to see it as a miracle, so be it, as long as we control the power of its message.’

  ‘Who knows about the discovery?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘Other than the two men who found it, and their commanding officer, all of whom have been sworn to secrecy, the only people who know of it are standing in this room.’

  Just beyond the door, his ear pressed to the black mesh of the intercom, Poskrebychev bared his teeth in a smile.

  ‘When do you plan on making it public, Comrade Stalin?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘When I am certain that the story of this little painting has not been tarnished by some unspeakable misfortune during its long absence. That story, whatever it might be, could quickly become more important than the discovery of the icon itself. All too quickly, a miracle can turn into an omen.
That is why I want you to find out how this picture survived, whose hands it has passed through and how it ended up in a coffin in some country church in Germany!’ For a moment, Stalin lapsed into silence. ‘I must admit,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t understand why they would have thought so much of such a poorly executed painting.’ He brandished his hand towards the icon, which Kirov held against his chest in a gesture which could have been mistaken for reverence.

  ‘Poorly executed?’ echoed Pekkala.

  ‘I mean, just look at it!’ exclaimed Stalin. ‘What are those sheep doing floating about on those islands? What is that man doing, standing around in a nightshirt? It makes no sense. Not like my Repin!’ He pointed towards the far wall.

  There, between the two main windows looking out over Red Square, hung a painting by Ilya Repin, Stalin’s favourite artist. The painting was titled What Freedom! and showed a couple, dressed in clothing which clearly dated from before the Revolution. On a blustery winter’s day, they stood holding hands at the edge of the Neva River. The man held his arms out in a gesture of defiance to the wildness of the storm, and the woman, her head turned from the wind, clutched his hand tightly and smiled nervously at his exuberance. The glassy green waves of the Neva, sea spray curling from their crests, seemed to chill the very air around the painting.

  Stalin had a habit of removing paintings from various galleries in museums, and hanging them in that space where he could see them from his desk. The flare of light coming in from the windows on either side would often mask the painting from the view of people coming into the room, who naturally turned towards Stalin’s desk as they entered. This rendered the painting invisible to anyone but Stalin himself.

  A number of Repin’s paintings had found their way to Stalin’s private chambers. Until only a few weeks before, this particular work had been stored in a bunker, safe from bombing raids, in the city of Leningrad.

  ‘I like it because it makes sense,’ explained Stalin. ‘There is that idiot, standing too close to the river, and his fool of a girlfriend . . .’

  ‘It could be his wife,’ suggested Kirov.

  ‘No!’ growled Stalin. ‘No wife would do that. If she was married, she would have nothing to prove by risking her life for the amusement of her husband. She’d tell him to back away from the water and stop being such a bloody fool. No, Kirov.’ Stalin raised a stubby finger. ‘It’s a girlfriend. I’m sure of it. She has to prove that she is willing to follow him anywhere.’ Now Stalin aimed the finger at the man. ‘You would never catch me taking such a risk.’

  That much was true. Stalin rarely even walked the streets of the city where he lived. He seldom appeared in public and then usually only at military parades, at a considerable distance from the crowds who came to hear him speak. He drove everywhere in an armoured limousine, whose two-inch-thick reinforced windows were capable of withstanding a direct burst of machine-gun fire.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stalin, agreeing with himself. ‘I like that artist Repin. You can always tell exactly what he wants to say. Not like that thing.’ This time, he did not even point towards the icon but only jerked his chin in its direction. ‘To me, that’s just a waste of paint.’ Then he sighed. ‘Nevertheless, it’s worth a king’s ransom to others.’

  *

  ‘Where to?’ asked Zolkin, when the two men had returned to the car, which by now was filled with a cloud of Papirossi smoke.

  ‘The museum of the Kremlin,’ answered Pekkala, rolling down the window in order to let the swirling grey cloud escape.

  Minutes later, the Emka pulled up outside the museum, whose oak doors were as thick as a man’s fist, and strapped with heavy iron bands.

  Since the beginning of the war, the museum had been opened only a few days a month, and the timing of these openings was so irregular that most people had stopped visiting the building. In addition, many of the more valuable artefacts had been transported to Siberia back in 1941, when the advance of General Kleist’s Army Group Centre had come close to invading the city. As yet, none of these works of art had been returned, and the space left behind for them on the walls gave a melancholy feel to the museum.

  When the curator, Fabian Golyakovsky, answered the persistent knocking at the entrance, he opened a small door set into the larger double doors and peered out, squinting into the brassy evening sunlight, like the gatekeeper of a medieval fortress.

  Golyakovsky was a tall, stooped man with a tangle of curly reddish hair. As he did most days, Golyakovsky wore a dark blue suit and a cream-coloured shirt with a rumpled collar and no tie. In earlier times, the suit would have been cleaned and pressed, but such luxuries were hard to come by now and instead of looking dapper, as he used to, he gave the appearance of a man who had been sleeping in his clothes.

  The museum had closed half an hour before, but Golyakovsky and the few curators he had been allowed to keep on staff had not yet departed for home. Although Golyakovsky was annoyed by this rude pounding on his door, he was also curious. During the hours when the museum was open, he practically had to drag people in off the street to see what remained of his exhibits. Now here was someone, ill-mannered though they might be, who actually wanted to visit.

  He opened the door, caught sight of Pekkala, and let out a squawk of alarm. It was all he could do not to slam the door in the Inspector’s face and bolt himself inside. He thought of the staff of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad who had walled themselves up in the museum, rather than risk seeing it looted for firewood by the cold and starving population of the city. Even though, according to rumours, the Hermitage staff had subsisted for more than a year on a diet of wallpaper paste, at this precise moment, Golyakovsky wished he had followed their example and bricked himself inside the museum.

  The last time the Emerald Eye had paid a visit, he had left with one of the museum’s most valuable remaining artefacts: a priceless fourteenth-century portrait from the Balkans, originally located in the Cathedral of the Assumption and known as The Saviour of the Fiery Eye.

  When Golyakovsky had realised that these two men planned to take the painting with them, he pleaded with Pekkala, cradling the portrait in his arms, as if the Inspector had somehow awoken the man in the painting and now he meant to lull the Saviour back into his sleep of centuries.

  It did no good at all, and when Golyakovsky watched Pekkala walk out with the priceless work of art wrapped in brown paper and tied with a piece of string as if he had bought it from the museum gift shop, Golyakovsky was sure he would never see the portrait again.

  Even though the icon was returned soon afterwards, Golyakovsky’s fragile nerves had never quite recovered from the shock.

  ‘I trust,’ said Golyakovsky, his voice thick with indignation as he stood aside to let them pass, ‘that you have not come to make another withdrawal from our collection!’ But as he spoke, Golyakovsky noticed that, this time, Pekkala had brought something with him. His expression changed immediately. ‘Ah, Inspector!’ he crooned. ‘What treasure have you unearthed for me?’ With those words, he reached out to take the package.

  ‘Actually,’ said Pekkala, ‘I’m here to see Semykin.’

  Golyakovsky’s long-fingered hands curled in upon themselves, like snails withdrawing into their shells. ‘But I am the senior curator here!’ he protested. ‘If anything is to be examined, I should be the one to do it.’

  ‘Inspector!’ a loud voice echoed down the cold and musty-smelling hallway, and all three men turned to see a figure advancing towards them.

  The last time Pekkala had seen Semykin, it was in a small, windowless cell at Lubyanka, where Semykin had been sentenced to five years of solitary confinement. The charges against Semykin stemmed from his involvement with a certain People’s Commissar of the State Railway named Viktor Bakhturin, a proud, vindictive, petty man, whose name had come up in connection with several murders. Each case presented a clear triangulation between the victim, the killer and Bakhturin, but there was never enough proof to convict him of actual involvemen
t in the crime. He had also been tied to political denunciations of government officials, which had ended either with the execution of these officials, or else their deportation to Siberia.

  The previous People’s Commissar of the State Railways had been turned over to NKVD by his own wife for travelling in a railway carriage set aside for transportation of officials on government business in order to travel back and forth from Moscow to his holiday dacha on the Black Sea. Although the practice was widespread and usually ignored by NKVD, the fact that the commissar’s own wife had denounced him caused an embarrassment which could not be overlooked. The commissar received a twelve-year sentence in a Gulag on the border of Mongolia.

  The reason the commissar’s wife had turned in her own husband was that she suspected him of having an affair. The source of this rumour, which turned out to be false, was believed to be Viktor Bakhturin. At the time, Bakhturin had been a junior commissar of State Railways, but he quickly rose to take the place of the man now in Siberia.

  Semykin’s own troubles with Bakhturin began with a painting by the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianski, which the People’s Commissar had personally removed from the house of a railway official in Poland after the invasion of 1939.

  After showing a photograph of the painting to Semykin, Bakhturin had asked if he would sell it for him. Initially, Semykin had agreed to broker the sale, but on receiving the actual painting, he realised that it was, in fact, a copy. When Semykin informed Bakhturin of this, the commissar ordered him to keep his mouth shut and to sell the painting as an original. Semykin refused, and Bakhturin had him arrested on the charge of attempting to sell forged works of art. Semykin’s explanation that he was, in fact, trying not to sell a fake was lost upon the court and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

  For a man used to being surrounded by works of art, the bare walls of Semykin’s prison cell soon became an unrelenting torture. Unable to endure the terrible blankness any longer, Semykin had used blood from his own fingertips to reconstruct, from memory, Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece known as Une Baignade.