The Beast in the Red Forest (2 page)

Major Kirov stood at attention, his gaze fixed upon the blood-red wall behind the desk of Joseph Stalin.

For the past several minutes, Stalin had been ignoring the presence of the major. Instead, he carefully examined several files laid out in front of him – although whether Stalin was actually reading them or simply taking pleasure in making Kirov nervous, the major couldn’t tell.

By the time Stalin finally set aside the documents, the sweat had soaked through Kirov’s shirt.

Stalin sat back in his chair and raised his head, yellow-green eyes calmly appraising the man who stood before him. ‘Major Kirov.’

‘Comrade Stalin!’

‘Has there been any word from Pekkala?’

‘None, Comrade Stalin.’

‘How long has he been missing now? Two years, isn’t it?’

‘And three months. And five days.’

Pekkala 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 Chevalier Guard. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for special duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers that had been 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 his training, the Tsar gave to Pekkala 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 an unmistakable shape and it wasn’t long before Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. Little else was known about him by the public. His photograph could not be published or even taken.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, the most notorious in the entire Gulag system, located deep in the forest of Krasnagolyana.

There, they took away his name. From then on, he was known only as prisoner 4745.

As soon as Pekkala arrived at the camp to begin his thirty-year sentence for Crimes Against the State, the camp commandant sent him into the wilderness as a tree marker for the Gulag’s logging crews, fearing that other inmates might learn his true identity. The average life of a tree-marker from Borodok was six months. Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, these men died from exposure, starvation and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree-marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.

Everyone assumed he would be dead before the end of winter, but nine years later, Prisoner 4745 had lasted longer than any other marker in the entire Gulag system.

Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Paraffin. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, Pekkala had to fend for himself.

He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with a straight nose and strong, white teeth. His eyes were greenish-brown, the pupils marked by a strange silvery quality, which people noticed only when he was looking directly at them. Streaks of premature grey ran through his long, dark hair and his beard grew thickly over windburned cheeks.

He moved through the woods with the help of a large stick, whose gnarled head bristled with square-topped horseshoe nails. The only other thing he carried was a bucket of red paint for marking the trees which were to be cut. Instead of using a brush, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. These ghostly handprints were, for most of the other convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.

Only rarely was he seen by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they observed was a creature barely recognisable as a man. With the crust of red paint that covered his prison clothes and the long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its flesh and left to die which had somehow managed to survive. Wild rumours surrounded him – that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a breastplate made from the bones of those who had disappeared in the forest, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.

They called him the Man with Bloody Hands. No one except the commandant of Borodok knew where this prisoner had come from or who he had been before he arrived. Those same men who feared to cross his path had no idea this was Pekkala, whose name they’d once invoked just as their ancestors had called upon the gods.

In the forest of Krasnagolyana, Pekkala had tried to forget the world he left behind.

But the world he left behind had not forgotten him.

On the orders of Stalin himself, Pekkala was brought back to Moscow to serve as an Investigator for the Bureau of Special Operations. Since that time, the Emerald Eye had maintained an uneasy truce with the man who had once condemned him to death, but after his last mission, which took him deep behind the German lines, Pekkala had disappeared and was now presumed to have been killed.

‘But you, Major Kirov, are convinced he’s still alive.’

‘Yes, Comrade Stalin,’ he replied, ‘until I see evidence that convinces me otherwise.’

‘The fact that his personal effects were removed from a body on a battlefield has done nothing to persuade you. Some might consider that as ample proof that Pekkala is no longer with us.’

Those effects consisted of the Inspector’s identity book, as well as his brass-handled Webley revolver, which had been a gift from Tsar Nicholas II. They had been recovered by a Soviet Rifleman named Stefanov, the last survivor of an anti-aircraft crew which had been whittled down to almost nothing by the fighting around Leningrad. After wandering for days in German-occupied territory, he had at last reached the safety of the Soviet lines, only to be ordered to accompany Pekkala as a guide back to Tsarskoye Selo, site of the Tsar’s summer residence and the very battleground from which he had recently escaped.

The purpose of Pekkala’s mission had been to determine the whereabouts of the priceless inlaid panels of the Amber Room, the greatest treasure of the Romanovs, last seen hanging on the walls of the Catherine Palace.

Initial attempts by palace curators to remove the panels and transport them to safety east of the Ural mountains had met with failure. The glue which held the amber fragments in place was over two centuries old and had become too fragile to be moved. In desperation, since the German army’s advance threatened to overrun Tsarskoye Selo at any moment, the curators resorted to hiding the panels under layers of wallpaper and muslin cloth. Their gamble that the Germans might believe the amber had already been evacuated was reinforced by a broadcast made on Soviet State Radio, whose signal was constantly monitored by the Germans, that the amber was now safely in Siberia.

But locating the panels was only a part of Stalin’s orders.

If the amber had indeed been discovered, Pekkala had been instructed to destroy the contents of the room with explosives, rather than allow the panels to be transported back to Germany.

According to Rifleman Stefanov, by the time they reached Tsarskoye Selo, the panels had not only been discovered but were already being loaded into a truck for transport to the rail junction at Wilno. From there, Pekkala learned, the amber was due to be transported to city of Königsberg, where Hitler had decreed that it should remain until such time as the panels could be installed as part of the permanent collection in a vast art museum he had planned for the Austrian city of Linz.

Hoping to intercept the truck before it reached the railhead, the two men travelled all night through the forest of Murom and rigged a dynamite charge at a bridge on the edge of the forest.

At dawn, two vehicles appeared, one of them an armoured car, which was destroyed in the ambush.

Rifleman Stefanov had described to Major Kirov how he and Pekkala then came under fire from several German soldiers travelling as armed escorts for the convoy. None of the soldiers survived the gunfight which followed and Pekkala ordered Stefanov to head back towards the Russian lines while he himself prepared to destroy the panels.

After reaching the shelter of a wooded slope, Stefanov stopped to wait for Pekkala to catch up. That was when, he reported to Kirov, he saw a huge explosion from the place where the truck had been stopped. After some time had passed, and Pekkala did not appear, Stefanov became worried and returned to the site of the explosion.

What he found was a man lying dead in the road, his body consumed by the explosion. From the charred remains, Stefanov retrieved Pekkala’s personal effects and presented them to Kirov upon his arrival in Moscow.

‘Comrade Stalin,’ said Kirov, ‘that corpse was too badly burned to be identified. There’s a chance that it might not have been the Inspector.’

‘Surely, if that were true,’ argued Stalin, ‘then Pekkala would have surfaced by now. And yet, in spite of your best efforts to locate him, the man is nowhere to be found.’

‘I might have had more success,’ Kirov replied frustratedly, ‘but for the fact that every case to which I’ve been assigned since he disappeared has kept me here in Moscow, the one place I’m certain he is not!’

‘What makes you sure of that?’

‘Why would he come back here, when doing so would put his life in danger?’

‘In danger from whom?’ demanded Stalin.

Kirov hesitated. ‘From you, Comrade Stalin.’

For a while, Stalin did not reply.

Kirov’s words seemed to sink into the red carpet, into the red velvet curtains, into the hollow walls, behind which hidden passages snaked from room to room inside the Kremlin.

In the long silence, Kirov felt an invisible noose tightening, the bunched fist of the knot pressing against the back of his skull.

Finally, Stalin spoke. ‘Why would you say such a thing, Major Kirov? Pekkala carried out his orders, even if he himself was unable to return to Moscow. Such conduct might be deserving of a medal, if I could ever have persuaded him to accept it.’

‘But you have left out one thing, Comrade Stalin.’

‘And what is that?’

‘In the radio broadcast which reported that the panels had been safely removed to Siberia, you also declared the Amber Room to be an irreplaceable State treasure.’

‘True,’ Stalin admitted quietly, ‘but what of it?’

‘As you are surely aware,’ explained Kirov, ‘such a decree meant that the Amber Room was not allowed to be destroyed under any circumstances. And having made such a declaration, Comrade Stalin . . .’

It was Stalin who finished the sentence. ‘I would not want the world to know that I was also responsible for its destruction.’

Kirov knew he’d gone too far to turn back now. ‘Pekkala was to be sacrificed. He must have known that from the moment you gave him the order.’

To Kirov’s surprise, however, Stalin did not explode into a fit of rage, as he usually did when confronted. Instead, he only drummed his fingers on the desk, while searching for the words that might make sense of such a contradiction. ‘What you are saying may well have been the case when I sent Pekkala on the mission back in 1941. But things have changed since then. We no longer stand on the brink of destruction. After the defeat of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, the tide began to turn. Since then, the Allies have taken North Africa and are making their way up through Italy. Soon, their forces will begin an advance through northern Europe. It is only a matter of time before the German army is crushed between the pincers of our advancing forces. What happened to the Amber Room has now been eclipsed by the victories of the Red Army. But what happened to Pekkala has not. It is he who has proved to be irreplaceable, not the amber which I sent him to destroy. Since he went away, I have watched cases grow cold, and criminals slip away into the darkness, because only Pekkala could have caught them. Nevertheless,’ Stalin leaned forward, sliding his hands across the desk, ‘the fact that we have seen no trace of Pekkala since he disappeared obliges any reasonable man to conclude that he has finally vanished for good.’

‘Then you are calling off the search?’

‘On the contrary,’ replied Stalin. ‘I never claimed to be a reasonable man.’

‘Then what are your orders, Comrade Stalin?’

‘Find Pekkala! Scour the earth if you have to! Bring me that shape-shifting troll! From this point on, until the Inspector is standing here in front of me or else his bones are heaped upon this desk, you are excused from all other assignments.’

Kirov smashed his heels together in salute, then made his way towards the outer room, where Stalin’s secretary Poskrebychev was busily stamping documents with a facsimile of his master’s signature.

‘Major!’ exclaimed Poskrebychev, as Kirov entered the room.

Lost in thought as to how he could possibly accomplish Stalin’s orders, Kirov only nodded and moved on. He had just reached the end of the hall, and was about to descend the staircase which would take him eventually to the exit where he had parked his car, when he heard someone calling his name.

It was Poskrebychev again.

The stout little man, with his wispy garland of hair clinging to an otherwise bald head, was shuffling urgently towards Kirov in his slipper-leather shoes, which he wore as he moved noiselessly around his office, in order not to disturb Comrade Stalin.