The Red Coffin Read online

  Chicherin did not reply. He continued to stare at the telegram, as if expecting more words to materialise.

  Kirov slipped the flimsy paper from between Chicherin’s fingers and set off across the dining room.

  This time, Chicherin did nothing to stop him.

  Niarchos stepped out of the way, his huge body swinging to the side as if he were on some kind of hinge.

  On his way to the table of Colonel Nagorski, Kirov paused to stare at various meals, breathing in the smells and sighing with contentment or making soft grunts of disapproval at the heavy-handed use of cream and parsley. Arriving at last beside Nagorski’s table, the young man cleared his throat.

  Nagorski looked up. The skin stretched over his cheekbones looked like polished wax. ‘More blinis for the caviar!’ he slapped his hand down on the table.

  ‘Comrade Nagorski,’ said Kirov.

  Nagorski had turned back to his meal, but at the mention of his name he froze. ‘How do you know my name?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Your presence is required, Comrade Nagorski.’

  Nagorski glanced towards the bar, hoping to catch the eye of Niarchos. But Niarchos’s attention seemed completely focused on polishing tea glasses. Now Nagorski looked around for Chicherin, but the manager was nowhere to be seen. Finally, he turned to the young man. ‘Exactly where is my presence required?’ he asked.

  ‘That will be explained on the way,’ said Kirov.

  Nagorski’s companion sat with arms folded, gaze fixed, his thoughts unreadable.

  Kirov couldn’t help noticing that although Nagorski’s plate was loaded with food, the only thing set in front of the bald giant was a small salad made of pickled cabbages and beets.

  ‘What makes you think,’ began Nagorski, ‘that I am just going to get up and walk out of here with you?’

  ‘If you don’t come willingly, Comrade Nagorski, I have orders to arrest you.’ Kirov held out the telegram.

  Nagorski brushed the piece of paper aside. ‘Arrest me?’ he shouted.

  A sudden silence descended upon the restaurant.

  Nagorski dabbed a napkin against his thin lips. Then he threw the cloth down on top of his food and stood up.

  By now, all eyes had turned to the table in the corner.

  Nagorski smiled broadly, but his eyes remained cold and hostile. Digging one hand into the pockets of his coat, he withdrew a small automatic pistol.

  A gasp went up from the nearby tables. Knives and forks clattered on to plates.

  Kirov blinked at the gun.

  ‘You look a little jumpy,’ smiled Nagorski. Then he turned the weapon in his palm so that the butt was facing outwards and handed it to the other man at the table.

  His companion reached out and took it.

  ‘Take good care of that,’ said Nagorski. ‘I’ll be wanting it back very soon.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel,’ replied the man. He set the gun beside his plate, as if it were another piece of cutlery.

  Now Nagorski slapped the young man on the back. ‘Let’s see what this is all about, shall we?’

  Kirov almost lost his balance from the jolt of Nagorski’s palm. ‘A car is waiting.’

  ‘Good!’ Nagorski announced in a loud voice. ‘Why walk when we can ride?’ He laughed and looked around.

  Faint smiles passed across the faces of the other customers.

  The two men made their way outside.

  As Nagorski walked by the kitchen, he saw Chicherin’s face framed in one of the little round windows of the double swinging doors.

  Outside the Borodino, sleet lay like frog spawn on the pavement.

  As soon as the door had closed behind them, Nagorski grabbed the young man by his collar and threw him up against the brick wall of the restaurant.

  The young man did not resist. He looked as if he’d been expecting this.

  ‘Nobody disturbs me when I am eating!’ growled Nagorski, lifting the young man up on to the tips of his toes. ‘Nobody survives that kind of stupidity!’

  Kirov nodded towards a black car, its engine running, pulled up at the kerbside. ‘He is waiting, Comrade Nagorski.’

  Nagorski glanced over his shoulder. He noticed the shape of someone sitting in the back seat. He could not make out a face. Then he turned back to the young man. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘My name is Kirov. Major Kirov.’

  ‘Major?’ Nagorski let go of him suddenly. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ Now he stood back and brushed at Kirov’s crumpled lapel. ‘We might have avoided this unpleasantness.’ He strode across to the car and climbed into the rear seat.

  Major Kirov got in behind the wheel.

  Nagorski settled back into his seat. Only then did he look at the person sitting beside him. ‘You!’ he shouted.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Pekkala.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ replied Colonel Nagorski.

  *

  Inspector Pekkala was a tall, powerful-looking man with broad shoulders and slightly narrowed eyes the colour of mahogany. He had been born in Lappeenranta, Finland, at a time when it was still a Russian colony. His mother was a Laplander, from Rovaniemi in the north.

  At the age of eighteen, on the wishes of his father, Pekkala travelled to Petrograd in order to enlist in the Tsar’s elite Finnish Legion. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers considered unimaginable before the Tsar chose to create them.

  In preparation for this, he was given over to the Police, then to the State Police – the Gendarmerie – and after that to the Tsar’s Secret Police, who were known as the Okhrana. In those long months, doors were opened to him which few men even knew existed. At the completion of Pekkala’s training, the Tsar presented him with the only badge of office he would ever wear – a heavy gold disc, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Across the centre was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disc and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large, round emerald. Together, these elements formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. Pekkala never forgot the first time he held the disc in his hand, and the way he had traced his fingertip over the eye, feeling the smooth bump of the jewel, like a blind man reading Braille.

  It was because of this badge that Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. The public knew little else about him. His photograph could not be published or even taken. In the absence of facts, legends grew up around Pekkala, including rumours that he was not even human, but rather some demon conjured into life through the black arts of an arctic shaman.

  Throughout his years of service, Pekkala answered only to the Tsar. In that time he learned the secrets of an empire, and when that empire fell, and those who shared those secrets had taken them to their graves, Pekkala was surprised to find himself still breathing.

  Captured during the Revolution, he was sent to the Siberian labour camp of Borodok, where he tried to forget the world he’d left behind.

  But the world he left behind had not forgotten him.

  After seven years alone in the forest of Krasnagolyana, during which time he lived more like a wild animal than as a man, Pekkala was brought back to Moscow on the orders of Stalin himself.

  Since that time, maintaining an uneasy truce with his former enemies, Pekkala had continued in his role as Special Investigator.

  *

  Deep beneath the streets of Moscow, Colonel Rolan Nagorski sat on a metal chair in a cramped cell of the Lubyanka prison. The walls were painted white. A single light bulb, protected by a dusty metal cage, lit the room.

  Nagorski had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Braces stretched tight over his shoulders. As he spoke, he rolled up his sleeves, as if preparing for a brawl. ‘Before you start firing questions at me, Inspector Pekkala, let me ask one of you.’

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p; ‘Go ahead,’ said Pekkala. He sat opposite the man, on the same kind of metal chair. The room was so small that their knees were almost touching.

  Even though it was stifling in the room, Pekkala had not taken off his coat. It was cut in the old style: black and knee length, with a short collar and concealed buttons which fastened on the left side of his chest. He sat unnaturally straight, like a man with an injured back. This was caused by the gun which he kept strapped across his chest.

  The gun was a Webley .455 revolver, with solid brass handles and a pin-sized hole drilled into the barrel just behind the forward sight to stop the pistol from bucking when it fired. The modification had been made not for Pekkala but for the Tsar, who received it as a gift from his cousin King George V. The Tsar then issued the Webley to Pekkala. ‘I have no use for such a weapon,’ the Tsar had told him. ‘If my enemies get close enough for me to need this, it will already be too late to do me any good.’

  ‘The question I wanted to ask you,’ said Nagorski, ‘is why you think I would give away the secret of my own invention to the same people we might have to use it against?’

  Pekkala opened his mouth to reply, but he did not get the chance.

  ‘You see, I know why I’m here,’ continued Nagorski. ‘You think I am responsible for breaches of security in the Konstantin Project. I am neither so naive, nor so uninformed that I don’t know what’s going on around me. That’s why every stage of development has taken place in a secure facility. The entire base is under permanent lockdown and under my own personal control. Everyone who works there has been cleared by me. Nothing happens at the facility without my knowing about it.’

  ‘Which brings us back to your reason for being here today.’

  Now Nagorski leaned forward. ‘Yes, Inspector Pekkala. Yes, it does, and I could have saved you some time and myself a very expensive meal if you had simply let me tell your errand boy …’

  ‘That “errand boy”, as you call him, is a major of Internal Security.’

  ‘Even NKVD officers can be errand boys, Inspector, if their bosses are running the country. What I could have told your major is the same thing I’m going to tell you now, which is that there has been no breach of security.’

  ‘The weapon you are calling the T-34 is known to our enemies,’ said Pekkala. ‘I’m afraid that is a fact you can’t deny.’

  ‘Of course, its existence is known. You can’t design, build and field-test a machine weighing thirty tons, and expect it to remain invisible. But its existence is not what I’m talking about. The secret lies in what it can do. I admit it’s true that there are members of my design team who could tell you pieces of this puzzle, but only one person knows its full potential.’ Nagorski sat back and folded his arms. Sweat was running down his polished face. ‘That would be me, Inspector Pekkala.’

  ‘There is something I don’t understand,’ said Pekkala. ‘What is so special about your invention? Don’t we already have tanks?’

  Nagorski coughed out a laugh. ‘Certainly! There is the T-26.’ He let one hand fall open, as if a miniature tank were resting on his palm. ‘But it is too slow.’ The hand closed up into a fist. ‘Then there is the BT series.’ The other hand fell open. ‘But it doesn’t have enough armour. You might as well ask me why we are building weapons at all when there are plenty of stones lying around to throw at our enemies when they invade.’

  ‘You sound very confident, Comrade Nagorski.’

  ‘I am more than confident!’ Nagorski barked in his face. ‘I am certain, and it is not merely because I invented the T-34. It is because I have faced tanks in battle. Only when you have watched them lumbering towards you, and you know you are helpless to stop them, do you understand why tanks can win not only a battle but a war.’

  ‘When did you face tanks?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘In the war we fought against Germany, and God help us if we ever have to fight another. When the war broke out in the summer of 1914, I was in Lyon, competing in the French Grand Prix. Back then, racing automobiles was my entire life. I won that race, you know, the only automobile race our country has ever won. It was the happiest day of my life, and it would have been perfect if my chief mechanic hadn’t been struck by one of the other race cars, which skidded off the track.’

  ‘Was he killed?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘No,’ replied Nagorski, ‘but he was badly injured. You see, racing is a dangerous game, Inspector, even if you’re not behind the wheel.’

  ‘When did you first become interested in these machines?’

  As the topic turned to engines, Nagorski began to relax. ‘I got my first look at an automobile in 1907. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, which had been brought into Russia by the Grand Duke Mikhail. My father and he used to go hunting each year, for Merganser ducks up in the Pripet Marshes. Once, when the Grand Duke had stopped by our house in his car, father asked to see the inner workings of the machine.’ Nagorski laughed. ‘That’s what he called them. The inner workings. As if it was some kind of mantel clock. When the Grand Duke lifted the hood, my life changed in an instant. My father just stared at it. To him, it was nothing more than a baffling collection of metal pipes and bolts. But to me that engine made sense. It was as if I had seen it before. I have never been able to explain it properly. All I knew for certain was that my future lay with these engines. It wasn’t long before I had built one for myself. Over the next ten years, I won more than twenty races. If the war hadn’t come along, that’s what I’d still be doing. But everybody has a story which begins that way, don’t they, Inspector? If the war hadn’t come along …’

  ‘What did happen to you in the war?’ interrupted Pekkala.

  ‘I couldn’t get back to Russia, so I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. There were men from all over the world, caught in the wrong country when the war broke out and with no way to return home. I had been with the Legion almost two years when we came up against tanks near the French village of Flers. We had all heard about these machines. The British first used them against the Germans at the battle of Cambrai in 1917. By the following year, the Germans had designed their own. I had never even seen one until we went into action against them. My first thought was how slowly they moved. Six kilometres an hour. That’s a walking pace. And nothing graceful about them. It was like being attacked by giant metal cockroaches. Three of the five broke down before they even reached us, one was knocked out with artillery and the last managed to escape, although we found it two days later burned out by the side of the road, apparently from engine malfunction.’

  ‘That does not sound like an impressive introduction.’

  ‘No, but as I watched those iron hulks being destroyed, or grinding to a halt of their own accord, I realised that the future of warfare lay in these machines. Tanks are not merely some passing fad of butchery, like the crossbow or the trebuchet. I saw at once what needed to be done to improve the design. I glimpsed technologies that had not even been invented yet, but which, in the months ahead, I created in my head and on any scrap of paper I could find. When the war ended, those scraps were what I brought back with me to this country.’

  Pekkala knew the rest of that story; how one day Nagorski had walked into the newly formed Soviet Patent Office in Moscow with over twenty different designs which ultimately earned him the directorship of the T-34 project. Until that time, he had been eking out a living on the streets of Moscow, polishing the boots of men he would later command.

  ‘Do you know the limits of my development budget?’ asked Nagorski.

  ‘I do not,’ replied Pekkala.

  ‘That’s because there aren’t any,’ said Nagorski. ‘Comrade Stalin knows exactly how important this machine is to the safety of our country. So I can spend whatever I want, take whatever I want, order whomever I choose to do whatever I decide. You accuse me of taking risks with the safety of this country, but the blame for that belongs with the man who sent you here. You can tell Comrade Stalin from me that if he continues arresting members
of the Soviet armed forces at the rate he is doing, there will be no one left to drive my tanks even if he does let me finish my work!’

  Pekkala knew that the true measure of Nagorski’s power was not in the money he could spend, but in the fact that he could say what he’d just said without fear of a bullet in the brain. And Pekkala himself said nothing in reply, not because he feared Nagorski, but because he knew that Nagorski was right.

  Afraid that he was losing control of the government, Stalin had ordered mass arrests. In the past year and a half, over a million people had been taken into custody. Among them were most of the Soviet high command, who had then either been shot or sent out to the Gulags.

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Pekkala, ‘you have had a change of heart about this tank of yours. It might occur to someone in that situation to try to undo what they have done.’

  ‘By giving its secrets to the enemy, you mean?’

  Pekkala nodded slowly. ‘That is one possibility.’

  ‘Do you know why it is called the Konstantin Project?’

  ‘No, Comrade Nagorski.’

  ‘Konstantin is the name of my son, my only child. You see, Inspector, this project is as sacred to me as my own family. There is nothing I would do to harm it. Some people cannot understand that. They write me off as some kind of Dr Frankenstein, obsessed only with bringing a monster to life. They don’t understand the price I have to pay for my accomplishments. Success can be as harmful as failure when you are just trying to get on with your life. My wife and son have suffered greatly.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Pekkala.

  ‘Do you?’ asked Nagorski, almost pleading. ‘Do you really?’

  ‘We have both made difficult choices,’ said Pekkala.

  Nagorski nodded, staring away into the corner of the room, lost in thought. Then suddenly he faced Pekkala. ‘Then you should know that everything I’ve told you is the truth.’

  ‘Excuse me, Colonel Nagorski,’ said Pekkala. He got up, left the room and walked down the corridor, which was lined with metal doors. His footsteps made no sound on the grey industrial carpeting. All sound had been removed, as if the air had been sucked out of this place. At the end of the corridor, one door remained slightly ajar. Pekkala knocked once and walked in to a room so filled with smoke that his first breath felt like a mouthful of ashes.