Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

Her name was Lilya Simonova. She was a teacher at the Tsarskoye primary school, just outside the grounds of the Tsar’s estate.

Each time Pekkala glimpsed that photograph, he felt the same lightness in his chest, as he had done on the first day he caught sight of her at an outdoor party to mark the beginning of the new school year.

He had been passing by on his way from a meeting with the Tsar at the Alexander Palace to his cottage near the Old Pensioners’ Stables on the grounds of the estate when the headmistress of the school, Rada Obolenskaya, beckoned to him from across the wall. She was a tall and dignified woman, with grey hair knotted at the back, and a practised severity in her gaze; a tool of the trade for anyone in her profession.

‘Inspector!’ she called and, as she approached the wall which stood between them, a cluster of children fell in behind her. ‘Some students here would like to meet you.’

Inwardly, Pekkala groaned. He was tired and wanted nothing more than to go home, take off his boots and drink a glass of cold white wine in the shade of the apple tree which grew behind his house. But he knew he had no choice, so he stopped in his tracks and bolted a smile to his face.

It was in this moment that he noticed a woman whom he had never seen before. She was standing just outside a white marquee tent set up in the school playground for the occasion. She wore a pale green dress and her eyes were a luminous and dusty blue.

At first, he thought he must know her from somewhere but he felt quite certain that she was a stranger. Whatever it was, he couldn’t explain it; this sudden lurching of his senses towards an inexplicable familiarity.

‘Are you really the Inspector?’ asked a nervous, little voice.

Dazed, Pekkala looked down to see the face of a five-year-old girl peering from behind Madame Obolenskaya’s skirt. ‘Why, yes,’ he replied. ‘Yes, I am.’

And now another face appeared, framed by an untidy shock of red hair. ‘Have you met the Tsar?’

‘Yes,’ answered Pekkala. ‘In fact, I just saw him today.’

This produced a collective gasp of approval, and now half a dozen children broke cover from behind Madame Obolenskaya and crowded up to the wall.

‘Are you magic, like they say?’ asked a boy.

‘My mother told me they ride polar bears where you are from.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ muttered Pekkala. Then he noticed the twitch of a smile in Madame Obolenskaya’s normally immovable expression. ‘Oh, a polar bear, did you say?’

The boy nodded, as curious as he was terrified of what the answer to his question might be.

‘Well, of course!’ exclaimed Pekkala. ‘Do you mean to say you do not ride them here?’

‘No,’ answered the red-haired girl, ‘and the fact is I have never even seen one.’

‘I told you,’ the boy announced to no one in particular. ‘I told you that’s what he did.’

Throughout this, Pekkala kept glancing over Madame Obolenskaya’s shoulder at the woman in the pale green dress.

This did not escape the attention of the headmistress, and she turned to spot the source of his distraction. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you haven’t met our new teacher, Lilya Simonova.’

‘No,’ replied Pekkala, his voice falling to a whisper, as if his throat had filled with dust.

Madame Obolenskaya raised her arm and, with a flip of her wrist, waved towards the new teacher, like somebody hailing a carriage off the street.

Obediently, but not without a faint trace of defiance in her step, Lilya Simonova made her way across the school playground.

What Pekkala said to her in the few minutes of that first conversation was nothing of consequence, and yet the words came so slowly and with such difficulty that it was like talking with a mouthful of cherry stones.

Lilya was polite, but reserved. She spoke very little, which made him speak too much.

At some point, Pekkala heard a click and glanced up to see that Madame Obolenskaya had taken a photograph of the two of them, using a Kodak Brownie camera which she had bought from the DeLisle photographic studio in the arcade at the Gosciny Dvor in St Petersburg. Since it became known that the Tsarina herself possessed one of these cameras, which she used to photograph the daily lives of her family, they had become all the rage in the city.

Madame Obolenskaya had recently set about taking pictures of each class at the school, prints of which would be given out to each student and a copy hung on the wall of her office.

Under normal circumstances, Pekkala would have taken Madame Obolenskaya aside and politely explained to her that the film on which that image had been frozen would have to be destroyed. On the orders of the Tsar, no pictures could be taken of the Emerald Eye.

On that occasion, however, he simply asked if he might have a copy of the print.

One year later, having borrowed a rowing boat from the Tsar, Pekkala proposed to Lilya at the pavilion on the little island in the middle of the Lamskie Pond.

A date was set, but they were never married. They never got the chance. Instead, on the eve of the Revolution, Lilya boarded a train heading north towards Finland, on a long and circuitous journey that would eventually deliver her to Paris, where Pekkala promised to meet her as soon as the Tsar allowed him to depart. But Pekkala never did get out. Some months later, he was arrested by Bolshevik militia men while attempting to leave the country. From there, his own journey began, only one that would take him to Siberia.

Along with a scattering of images captured only by the shutter of Pekkala’s blinking eyes, this picture was all he had left to prove to himself that his most precious memories had not, in fact, been conjured from a dream.

These thoughts were cancelled by the ringing of the little bell, as yet another stranger tumbled in out of the night.

At that same moment, at the end of a dirt road on the windswept island of Usedom on the Baltic coast, a haggard-looking German officer stood looking out at waves which tumbled from the mist and rode hissing on to the pinkish-grey sand.

Clenched between his teeth was a short-stemmed briarwood pipe, in which he was smoking the last of his tobacco.

Another man, wearing the uniform of an air force non-commissioned officer, trudged up the road and came to a stop beside the officer. ‘General Hagemann,’ he said quietly, as if unwilling to intrude upon his master’s thoughts.

The officer removed the pipe from his mouth, clutching the bowl in his leather-gloved hand. ‘Tell me some decent news for a change, Sergeant Behr.’

‘The fog is due to lift very soon,’ Behr said encouragingly, ‘and the observation ship reports that visibility in the target area is good.’

A smile glimmered through the fatigue on General Hagemann’s face. Although he held a military rank, his heart was not in soldiering. He was a scientist by profession, and his work as head of the propulsion laboratory in the top-secret V-2 rocket facility located in the nearby village Peenemunde had taken over his life, costing him first his marriage, then his health and, he had recently begun to suspect, most of his sanity as well.

Since the first successful launch of a V-2 rocket, back in October of 1942, Hagemann had been working on a radio-controlled guidance system code named Diamantstrahl – the Diamond Stream. If perfected, the system could ensure the accurate delivery of the 1,000 kilograms of explosives contained within each 14-metre-tall rocket. The progress of the war had forced them to go ahead with launches against the cities of London and Antwerp, although, by Hagemann’s reckoning, only one in seventeen of these rockets, over a thousand of which had been fired to date, had hit their intended targets. That they had done significant damage to the cities in question was of little consolation to the general because he knew that, even now, as Germany was being crushed between the Anglo-Americans in the West and the Red Army in the East, the delivery of these devastating weapons, with the pinpoint accuracy he felt sure could be achieved, might still tip the balance of the war. And even if it was too late to avoid defeat, the V-2, in its perfected state, might still serve as a bargaining chip in negotiating a separate peace with the western Allies, rather than the unconditional surrender which would otherwise be their only option.