Sam Eastland - Eye of the Red Tsar A Novel of Suspense

Six hours later, Pekkala climbed aboard a train bound for Siberia.

ALEXEI STARED IN DISBELIEF. “CONSIDERING ALL THAT MY FAMILY HAS done for you, this is how you choose to repay us?”

“I am sorry, Excellency,” said Pekkala. “I am telling you the truth. We are in danger here.”

“I see no danger,” said Alexei, rising to his feet. “All I see is a man I once thought I could count on, no matter what.”

JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, KIROV WANDERED INTO THE KITCHEN. THE imprint of a tunic button, with its hammer and sickle design, was molded into his cheek where he had slept upon it. “I should have taken over from you hours ago,” he said. “Why did you let me sleep?”

Pekkala barely seemed to notice Kirov. He stared at the Webley, lying on the table in front of him.

“When do we leave for Moscow?” Kirov asked.

“We don’t,” replied Pekkala. He explained what had happened in the night.

“If he won’t go willingly,” said Kirov, “I have the authority to arrest him. We’ll take him to Moscow in handcuffs if we have to.”

“No,” said Pekkala. “He has been living in fear for so long now that he has forgotten how it is to live any other way. He has fastened onto the idea of his father’s gold as the only way he can protect himself. There’s no point trying to force him into changing his mind. I just need time to reason with him.”

“We need to leave now,” protested Kirov. “It’s for his own good.”

“Putting a man in handcuffs and telling him you’re doing him a favor is not going to convince him. He must go willingly or he might do something rash. He might try to escape, in which case he could get hurt, and with his hemophilia, any injury might prove life-threatening. He might even try to hurt himself. Even if we did get him to Moscow, he might refuse to accept the amnesty, in which case they would execute him just to save themselves the embarrassment.”

Kirov sighed. “Too bad we can’t uproot the whole city of Moscow and bring it here. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about transporting him.”

Pekkala stood abruptly. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, and dashed out into the courtyard.

Kirov went to the doorway, bewildered. “What’s not a bad idea?”

Pekkala grabbed the bicycle leaning up against the wall. Tendrils of dried pond weed still clung to the spokes.

“What did I say?” Kirov asked.

“If we can’t bring him to Moscow, we can bring Moscow to him. I’ll be back in one hour,” Pekkala said, mounting the bicycle.

“Remember, that thing doesn’t have any brakes,” Kirov warned, “and the back tire is flat, as well!”

Pekkala wobbled out into the street, on his way to Kropotkin’s office. His plan was to put in a call to the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow and instruct them to send out a platoon of guards to ensure the safety of the Tsarevich. Even if the guards left at once, he estimated that it would take several days for them to arrive. In the meantime, they would keep Alexei hidden in the Ipatiev house with as many police as Kropotkin could spare stationed outside. Pekkala would use the days between now and then to give the Tsarevich a chance to talk, and for Pekkala to regain his trust. By the time the escort arrived from Moscow, Alexei would be ready to go with them.

Pekkala pedaled as fast as he could. Without brakes, when he came to corners, he dragged his toes over the cobblestones in an attempt to slow down. Racing down narrow side streets, his senses filled with the tar-like smell of laundry soap, of ashes scraped from stove gratings and smoky tea brewed up in samovars lingering in the damp morning air. In picket-fenced gardens, he glimpsed bony stands of white birch, their coin-shaped leaves flickering silver to green and back to silver like sequins on a woman’s party dress.

He was so preoccupied that he did not notice the narrow road ended in a T. There was no chance to take the corner, or even to slow down, and there, spreading out in front of him as he emerged from the side street, was the familiar sapphire blue expanse of the duck pond.

Pekkala leaned hard on the handlebars. Jamming one heel into the ground, he skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, barely an arm’s length from the water.

When the dust settled, Pekkala saw a woman, standing among the reeds on the opposite bank of the pond. She held a large basket, which was filled with gray teardrop-shaped husks. She wore a red headscarf, a dark blue shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a brown ankle-length dress whose hem was slick with mud. The woman stared at him. She had an oval face with eyebrows darker than her streaked blond hair.

“My bicycle,” explained Pekkala. “No brakes.”

She nodded without sympathy.

There was something familiar about the woman, but Pekkala could not place her. So much for perfect memory, he thought. “Excuse me,” he asked her, “but do I know you?”

“I don’t know you,” replied the woman. She went back to picking through the reeds.

Yellow monarch butterflies flew around her, their bobbing movements like those of paper cutouts dangled from pieces of thread.

“What are you gathering?”

“Milkweed,” the woman answered.

“What for?”

“They pack it into life jackets. I get good money for this.” She held up one of the gray husks and crushed it in her fist. Feathery white seeds, light as a puff of smoke, drifted out across the water.

In that instant, he remembered her. “Katamidze!” he shouted.

Her face turned red. “What about him?”

“The photograph.” In the box of reject pictures, Pekkala had seen her just as she was now, by the side of this pond, that silver cloud like the ghostly blur of a face in the moment it was captured on film.

“That was a long time ago, and he said they were purely artistic.”

“Well, it certainly had a-” He thought about the pink splotched cheeks of the nuns. “A certain quality.”

“It wasn’t my idea to pose naked.”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Naked?”

“That old man Mayakovsky bought the pictures, every one of them. Then he started selling them off to the soldiers. Reds when they were here, Whites when they marched in. Mayakovsky didn’t care, as long as they paid. Maybe you bought one.”

“No.” Pekkala tried to reassure her. “I only heard about them.”

She hugged the basket to her chest. “Well, I guess everyone has heard about them.”

“You were standing right there.” Pekkala pointed at her. “Right there where you are now.”

“Oh, that picture.” She lowered the basket again. “I remember now. He said he wasn’t happy with it.”

“How well did you know Katamidze?”

“I knew him,” she began, “but not the way people say I did. He’s gone, you know. He doesn’t live here anymore. He lost his mind. That night he went to photograph the Tsar. He said he saw them slaughtered right before his eyes. I found him hiding in his attic, talking some gibberish about how he’d come face-to-face with the Devil.”

“Have you told this to anyone else?”

“When the Whites were here, they came to my house. But by then Mayakovsky had sold them some pictures. I never told them I’d seen Katamidze that night, and they never asked me about it. All they wanted to know was where they could get some more photos.”

“What happened to Katamidze after you found him in the attic?”

“He was in a bad state. I told him I would send for a doctor. But before I could do anything to help him, he ran out of the house. He never came back. A couple of years later, I heard that he had ended up in prison.”

“This person he came face-to-face with…”