The Beast in the Red Forest (3 page)

‘Wait!’ said Poskrebychev, as he came to a halt in front of Kirov, sweat beading on his forehead even after such a mild exertion. ‘I must have a word with you, Major.’

Kirov looked at him questioningly. He had never seen Poskrebychev outside of his office before. It was almost as if the secretary could not survive in any other atmosphere, like a goldfish scooped out of its bowl.

Hesitantly, Poskrebychev took another step towards Kirov, until the two men stood uncomfortably close. Slowly, Poskrebychev reached out and clasped the flap of Kirov’s chest pocket. As if hypnotised by the texture of the cloth, he began to smooth the material between his thumb and first two fingers.

‘What’s wrong with you, Poskrebychev?’ Kirov blurted out, pushing him away.

Poskrebychev glanced nervously around, as if worried that someone else might be listening. But the hall was otherwise empty and the doors nearest to them were closed. Behind them, the sound of clattering typewriters would have drowned out even a loud conversation in the hall. In spite of this, Poskrebychev now moved even closer, causing Kirov to lean precariously backwards. ‘You should pay a visit to Linsky,’ he whispered.

‘Linsky? You mean Pekkala’s old tailor?’

Poskrebychev nodded gravely. ‘Linsky can help you, Major, just as he helped Pekkala.’

‘Yes, I’m well acquainted with Pekkala’s choice of clothing and, trust me, Poskrebychev, he is the one who needs help in that department. So you see, even if I did want a new uniform, which I don’t, I can assure you that I wouldn’t go to Linsky!’ As Kirov spoke, he pressed the pocket flap back into place, as if worried that his wallet might be missing.

‘It’s just a little friendly advice.’ Poskrebychev smiled patiently. ‘Even the smallest detail should not be overlooked.’

He’s gone mad, Kirov thought to himself, as he watched Poskrebychev return to his office, slippered feet whispering across the polished stone. The man is completely insane.

After driving back across the city, Kirov climbed the five flights of stairs to his office. With movements made unconscious by years of repetition, he unlocked the door, strode across the room and slumped into his battered chair by the stove.

The silence seemed to close in around him as he stared at Pekkala’s empty desk.

Stalin’s orders had done nothing to raise Kirov’s confidence. His stubborn belief that Pekkala might still be alive had lately begun to seem less like faith and more like pure delusion. Surely, he thought, if Pekkala was out there somewhere, he would have found a way to let me know. Why can’t I accept that he is truly gone?

The answer lay in a single detail, to which Kirov had been clinging since the day he heard that Pekkala was dead. It wasn’t what Rifleman Stefanov had found on the burned corpse. It was what he hadn’t found – the emerald eye.

Kirov felt certain that, even if Pekkala had been forced to leave behind all of his other belongings, he would never have parted with the eye. The gold badge had been the Inspector’s most prized possession; the symbol of everything he had accomplished since the Tsar first pinned it to his coat.

When questioned about it, the Rifleman had insisted that no such badge was on the body, leading Kirov to suspect that Pekkala might have faked his own death and gone into hiding.

Since the day Kirov had set eyes on the crumbled remains of Pekkala’s identity book, and the heat-buckled ruin of the Webley, the question of the missing badge had swung back and forth inside his brain with the relentless ticking of a metronome. But Kirov was no closer to answering it now than he had been at the beginning.

If it hadn’t been for Elizaveta, he would long since have gone out of his mind.

Kirov had first met Elizaveta Kapanina just before Pekkala departed on his last mission. She worked as a clerk in the Records Department at NKVD headquarters. Their office was located on the fourth floor, and required such a trudge to get there that most people simply left their requests for documents with the secretary on the ground floor and stopped back the following day to collect the files which had been brought down for them. But those flights of stairs were not the only reason people stayed clear of the fourth floor. The director of the Records Department, Comrade Sergeant Gatkina, was a woman of such legendary ferocity that, for many years, Kirov had heeded the advice of his NKVD colleagues and kept clear of the fourth floor.

But the day had come when Pekkala had insisted that certain documents be found immediately. With no choice but to ask for them directly, Kirov made the trek to the fourth floor. He had no idea what this Sergeant Gatkina looked like, but by the time he reached the metal grille at the entrance, behind which the thousands upon thousands of NKVD files slept in dusty silence, Kirov had conjured something nightmarish into the forefront of his mind.

Cautiously, he rested the weight of his hand upon a little button protruding from a bell set on the counter. But he lowered his palm so slowly that the bell hardly made a sound at all. To remedy this on the second attempt, Kirov struck it smartly with his fist. The bell gave a jarring clang and jumped from the counter as if the force of his blow had brought it to life. The bell tumbled to the floor, clanging even louder than before. Before Kirov could stop it, the bell had rolled across the narrow corridor and down a flight of stairs to the third floor landing, ringing all the while with a demented clatter that seemed to echo throughout the entire headquarters building.

By the time Kirov had retrieved the bell, a figure was waiting at the grille.

Kirov could only make out the face of a woman, but he felt certain this must be the fearsome-tempered Sergeant Gatkina. As he drew closer, however, Kirov realised that if the person who smiled at him through the black iron bars was indeed Sergeant Gatkina, then the rumours about her equally fearsome appearance were surely untrue. She was slight, with freckled cheeks, a round chin and dark, inquisitive eyes.

‘Comrade Gatkina?’ he asked nervously.

‘Oh, that’s not me,’ replied the woman, ‘but would you like me to fetch her?’

‘No!’ blurted Kirov. ‘That’s all right. Thank you. I’m here to pick up a document.’ He rummaged in his pocket for the scrap of paper on which Pekkala had written the file number. Clumsily, he poked the crumpled document under the bars.

‘People don’t usually come up here,’ remarked the woman, as she tried to decipher Pekkala’s writing.

‘Really?’ Kirov did his best to look surprised. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘What happened to the bell?’ asked the woman. ‘It’s missing.’

‘I have it right here.’ Hastily, Kirov put it back on the counter.

‘That is Sergeant Gatkina’s bell,’ whispered the woman.

‘She has her own bell?’

‘Yes.’ The woman nodded.

For the next few moments, the two of them stared at the miniature silver dome, as if the dents might suddenly flow together, like mercury, and become smooth once again.

It was the clerk who finally broke the silence. ‘I’ll just fetch your documents, Major,’ she said, as she spun on her heel and vanished into the paper labyrinth of the Records Office.

While he waited, Kirov paced back and forth between two closed doors at either end of the landing. He began to wonder how it was that he had never seen this woman before, in the canteen or the lobby or on the stairs. She must be new, thought Kirov. I would have remembered that face. And he began to calculate how he might find his way back here more often and how it might be possible to learn her name and to lure her out from behind those prison-like bars.

A few minutes later, a figure appeared at the grille.

‘That was quick!’ said Kirov cheerfully.

‘What happened to my bell?’ said a gravelly voice.

Kirov’s guts lurched as he focused in on a solid and putty-faced matron, with a thatch of grey hair densely bristling her scalp. The collar of her tunic was tightly fastened, and the skin of her neck overflowed it like the top of a Kulich Easter cake. Wedged between her knuckles was a hand-rolled
machorka
cigarette, whose acrid smoke enveloped her so thickly that the woman’s whole arm appeared to be smouldering. So this is Gatkina, he thought.

‘My bell,’ repeated the woman.

‘It fell down,’ Kirov struggled to explain. ‘I picked it up. There’s no harm done.’ To reinforce this statement, he stepped over to the counter and gave the bell a cheerful whack but instead of a deafening ring, it responded only with a dull clunk of metal on metal.

‘Why are you here?’ demanded Sergeant Gatkina. She seemed to be questioning his very existence.

At that moment, one of the side doors opened and the dark-eyed girl appeared. ‘I have your document, Major!’

‘Thank you!’ muttered Kirov, as he hurriedly plucked the dull grey envelope from her hand.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

It was Gatkina who answered, her voice rumbling like a furnace. ‘He has ruined the bell.’

‘Comrade Sergeant!’ gasped the young woman. ‘I did not see you there.’

‘Evidently.’ Gatkina replied contemptuously. She fitted her lips around her cigarette, and the tip burned poppy red as she inhaled.

‘I must go,’ Kirov announced to no one in particular.

The young woman smiled faintly. ‘Just bring it back when you’re done, Major . . .’

‘Kirov. Major Kirov.’

This was the moment when he had planned to ask her name, and where she was from and whether, by chance, she might join him for a glass of tea after work. But the smooth and seamless flow of questions was interrupted before it had even begun by Comrade Sergeant Gatkina, who proceeded to stub out her cigarette upon the counter top, using short, sharp, stabbing motions, as if breaking the neck of a small animal. This was accompanied by a loud, whistling exhalation of smoke through her nostrils.

‘When you come back,’ whispered the young woman.

Kirov leaned towards her. ‘Yes?’

‘Make sure you bring another bell.’

Kirov did return, and it was not until this second visit that he learned the name of the dark-eyed woman. And he had been going back ever since, slogging up those stairs to the fourth floor. Sometimes it was on official business, but usually not. That pretence had long since been set aside.

It took him an annoyingly long time to find another bell exactly like the one he had destroyed, but he did track one down eventually. And when he handed the replacement to Sergeant Gatkina, she placed it on her outstretched palm and stared at it for so long that Kirov felt certain he must have missed some crucial detail of its construction. Setting it on the counter, Gatkina struck it with her clenched fist and before the sound had died away, she hit it again. And again. A smile spread on her face as she pummelled the new bell, deafening everyone in the room. Satisfied at last, she ceased her attack and allowed the noise to fade away into the stuffy air. The ceremony concluded with the old bell being presented to Major Kirov as a memento of his clumsiness.

By this sign, Kirov came to understand that his presence would be tolerated from now on, not only by Sergeant Gatkina but also by the other inhabitant of the Records Office, Corporal Fada Korolenko, whose small head perched upon her pear-shaped body in a way that reminded Kirov of a Matryoshka doll.

Together, Kirov and these women formed a tiny and eccentric club, whose meetings took place within a small, windowless space used to hold buckets of sand for use in the event of fire. Placed along the walls, these buckets formed a border around the room, their grey sand spiked with Sergeant Gatkina’s cigarette butts. In the middle of the room, Kirov and the ladies perched on old wooden file boxes, drinking tea out of the dark green enamel mugs which were standard issue in every Soviet government building, every school, hospital and train station café in the country.

Running into Elizaveta that day had been one of the luckiest moments of his life. With her, he sometimes even managed to forget the gaping hole in his life which had been caused by Pekkala’s disappearance.

But Kirov always remembered by the time he returned to his office, and he would find himself as he was now, staring across the room at Pekkala’s empty desk. It almost seemed to Kirov as if the Inspector was actually there, silhouetted in some grey and shadowed form. Kirov steadfastly refused to believe in ghosts, but he could not deny the prickling sensation that sometimes he was not alone. This left him with the distinct feeling that he was being haunted by a man who might not even be dead.

In spite of his stubborn convictions, as far as Kirov was concerned, if anyone had figured out how to transform himself into a wandering spirit, it would be Pekkala, for the simple reason that he had never been completely of this world in the first place.

Evidence of this was the Inspector’s utter disregard for even the most basic creature comforts. Although Pekkala had a bed, he usually slept on the floor. His meals, when he remembered to eat them, were always taken at the dingy, sour-smelling café Tilsit, where customers sat at long, bare wooden tables, surrounded by a haze of tobacco smoke. Seemingly impervious to temperature, he wore the same clothing every day of the year, no matter what the weather was outside:  corduroy trousers, a deep-pocketed waistcoat and a thigh-length double-breasted wool coat made from material so heavy that it would have been better put to use in the manufacture of curtains or carpets.

Kirov had abandoned any hope of unravelling the mystery of why the Inspector lived the way he did.

And if Stalin is right, thought Kirov, as he strode across to the window and looked out over the rooftops of the city, I must now devote my energy to solving the riddle of his death.

Catching sight of his own reflection in the glass, Kirov thought back to his bizarre encounter with Poskrebychev in the hallway of the Kremlin. Until Poskrebychev mentioned it, he hadn’t even considered buying a new tunic. But now, as Kirov surveyed his shabby appearance in the glass, he realised that the man had a point.

The cuffs of Kirov’s tunic were frayed and stained. Both elbows had been patched and the inside of his collar, polished by sweat, had turned from olive brown to a slick, gun-metal grey. Washing did little to help, except to shrink the cloth and fade what was left of its original colour.

Given the shortage of materials since the German invasion back in June of 1941, the idea of requisitioning a new uniform had simply been out of the question. As a result, the clothes he wore now were more than two years old and he had used them almost every day. But now that war aid was flowing in from the United States – everything from tanks to clothing to cans of blotchy pink meat commonly referred to as ‘The Second Front’ – the stranglehold on such items was slowly beginning to loosen and tailors like Linsky could find the raw materials to carry on their trades.

Kirov had previously convinced himself that he could perhaps get another year out of his present set of clothes. But if a man like Poskrebychev can notice the defects, he thought, then maybe it is time, after all.

And although Kirov hated to admit it, Linsky was a good tailor. It wasn’t his fault that Pekkala ordered him to make garments that were as much of a throwback to a bygone age as the Inspector himself seemed to be. Kirov took great pleasure in reminding Pekkala that Linsky was best known as a man who made clothes used for dressing corpses laid out at funerals. It only made sense that a man like Linsky should have ended up as tailor to the Emerald Eye, especially since Pekkala’s own family had been undertakers back in Finland.

Kirov’s good-natured mockery hid the fact that he was extremely self-conscious about his own appearance. He was tall, with a shallow chest and embarrassingly thin calves. His uniform cap made his ears stick out and his waist was so thin that he couldn’t get his thick brown gun belt, its buckle emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, to stay where it should across his stomach. Most shameful of all to Kirov was his thin neck, which, in his own opinion, jutted from the mandarin collar of his tunic like the stem of some pale, potted plant. Since joining NKVD, he had only ever worn issue clothing. His natural frugality prevented him from actually paying for a uniform when he could get one for free, even if the issue clothes never quite fitted as they should.