Authors: William Ryan
“Not you, scribbler,” Mishka said. “Just the strong arm of workers’ justice, if you don’t mind. You get to wait here with me.” Korolev put a reassuring hand on the writer’s arm as he passed. From outside the tumult of the race’s finish could be heard, but it seemed a long way from the stillness of the barn.
The waistcoat looked up as Korolev approached.
“I heard you wanted to talk to me.”
Korolev was surprised how cultured the voice was, its tone as deep and clear as an actor’s. Perhaps that’s where the “Count” came from, he thought. Kolya’s wide face was pale and clean-shaven in the flickering light, but his eyes were black and deep-set. His muscular neck emerged from a crisp white shirt that seemed all the brighter against the dark waistcoat. He was handsome in the way that athletes often were, with regular, well-defined features and charcoal hair cut close to his skull. The Thief raised a hand to his ear with fingers blue from prison ink and pulled at the lobe, returning the appraisal with interest. It felt as though Korolev was being calculated—added, subtracted and, finally, solved. An uncomfortable experience.
“And I heard you wanted to talk to me,” Korolev said. “I was surprised,” he added when the pause became uncomfortable.
“You should be. A man like me talking to a captain of Moscow CID? I ought to shoot myself.” There was a hint of a smile. Korolev noticed an expensive-looking overcoat hung on a hook like an advertisement of the man’s crooked ways.
“So why?”
Kolya considered his response, and then shrugged. “We felt it was an exceptional situation.”
“Exceptional?”
“I think that’s the correct word for the circumstances.” Kolya nodded, as if agreeing with himself, giving Korolev the feeling the Thief had made a rather dark joke.
“Your men agreed it was exceptional? You had a vote, did you?”
“They aren’t
my
men, Captain. I
represent
them, it’s true. But if I don’t represent them the way they like, the job goes to someone else and I get a bullet in the head as a pension. But, yes, we had a meeting, the senior Thieves anyway—the ‘Authorities,’ as we say—and the decision was a collective one. Very Bolshevik—you should approve. You know the saying: if all your choices are bad, you choose the one that hurts the least. So we chose to talk to you.”
“Why me?”
“You have a straight reputation, unlike many of your colleagues. And then it turned out you wanted to talk to us, which is always a good starting point.”
Korolev took a moment to remind himself what he needed from Kolya and what he was prepared to give. It seemed to him there wasn’t much point in being indirect.
“I can arrange for you to have Tesak’s body, and I can share some information about his death, but I want information in exchange,” he said, getting straight to the point.
“Tesak? Well, between yourself and myself, Captain, he deserved what he got. You could have cut logs on that fellow’s head, though he never knew it. But yes, we’d like to have his body; his woman is one of us still. The sharing of information is of more interest though. Is that authorized?”
“I’m authorized to speak to you, of course, but there are restrictions. Tesak’s body is from myself. How he lived his life is for God to decide on, but you can bury him like a Christian, if that’s what you do.”
Kolya nodded and gestured to a hay bale beside him.
“Sit then, Comrade Captain, and have a drink.”
They sat down and Kolya held up his hip flask, the silver flashing as he shook it gently like a fisherman’s lure. Korolev looked at it and then at Kolya and, not for the first time wondered how the hell he’d ended up, at this moment in time, with this person, having this conversation. He sighed, reached for the hip flask and took a long drink, the spirit’s warmth making him shiver.
“Either I’m cold or the Devil just walked over my grave. Drinking with you, I’m inclined to think it’s the Devil.”
“I’ve been called worse,” Kolya said, chuckling. Korolev reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes. They looked a little damp, but he offered the packet to Kolya anyway, who took one.
“So all this killing is to do with an icon?” Korolev said, exhaling slowly as he spoke and looking for any reaction to the question. He could feel the nicotine and vodka swirling down to his toes. Kolya nodded, but it was unclear whether this was agreement or something else.
“Tell me where you are with your investigation,” Kolya said. “I’ll make it worth your while from my side. You have my word”
“And I trust you?”
“I’m not the type to run squealing to the Cheka, if that’s what you’re worried about, and it’s in both our interests that you identify the killers, believe me.”
Well, the conversation had to start somewhere. Korolev didn’t tell him everything, but he told him who the dead woman was, about Schwartz and the NKVD’s interest in the investigation. In fact he ended up telling him more than he’d intended. When he’d finished, Kolya passed the flask to him once again.
“The torture—you think it was a professional?”
“Yes.”
“Cheka?”
“Who knows?”
“Did they talk?”
“Maybe. Possibly not the nun. She died from the torture itself. Tesak was shot, which would make me think they’d finished with him.”
Kolya seemed to consider the implications of Tesak having been broken. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and spat on the ground. “Tesak had a hard skin but a soft center—I’d say he talked.”
He turned back to Korolev. “Babel says you’re a Believer.”
“I don’t know where he got that idea.” Korolev couldn’t help glancing toward the door of the stall, thinking that if he could see that damned scribbler now he’d give him a look that would singe the hair off his fat meddling head.
“And yet you have a bible underneath the floorboards in your room and talk about God deciding how Tesak lived his life,” Kolya continued.
Korolev rose to his feet, but Kolya waved him down.
“Once you began to investigate the Holy Sister’s murder, and then Tesak’s, we needed to know more about you. And that lock you have needs replacing—Mishka was inside in less than ten seconds.”
Korolev could feel rage pressing at his ribs, like the air inside a balloon close to bursting, but he held his tongue. Kolya’s eyes were steady on his and they held each other’s gaze for a long moment.
“This is important to us, this matter. Very important. The icon looks over us, from long ago. You might read in books that St. Nicholas is the patron saint of Thieves, but Our Lady of Kazan is our true protector. That’s our belief.”
“Our Lady of Kazan? The icon is
Kazanskaya
? But there are a million Kazanskaya icons—every newlywed couple used to get one in the old days. Surely no one needs to die for such a thing.” Then he paused for a moment, catching the weight in Kolya’s calm gaze, as he waited for the penny to drop. “Tell me you’re not talking about the Kazan cathedral icon. But it was destroyed back in the tsar’s time—it’s just not possible.”
Kolya sat in silence, watching him, as Korolev thought it through. In the Orthodox Church, icons had always been venerated almost as much as the subjects they represented. Kazanskaya was an icon of the Virgin Mother and the infant Jesus, named after the city of Kazan in which it had been miraculously discovered by the Blessed Matryona. Ever since its discovery, it had protected Russia in its hour of need—it had been paraded by Pozharsky and Minin before their victory over the Poles in the seventeenth century, as well as before the battle of Borodino when Napoleon had been sent packing. Hell, he remembered marching past it on his way to fight the Germans back in fourteen. There were indeed millions of copies—each house had had one in the corner before the Revolution—but the original, the miracle worker, had been stolen at the beginning of the century and then destroyed by the panicked culprits, or so he’d thought. But then he remembered the image of the icon on Tesak’s body and it occurred to him that if anything was worth killing for, it was Kazanskaya—the icon that looked over Russia herself.
“My God,” Korolev breathed and had to bunch his hand into a fist to prevent himself making the sign of the cross. “I meant, hell’s bloody bells,” he corrected himself. “You kept it all this time.”
“Not exactly. You know something about us, I think. A
Ment
understands us better than a citizen. In our world there exists everyone else, and then us. We prey on the rest, but not on each other.” Kolya paused and considered this, after a moment raising his hand and twisting it from side to side, as if to say, “Not too much anyway.” He took a drink and passed the flask back to Korolev.
“We have rules—more rigid than any legal code, believe me—and if you break them you suffer. Every Thief knows what is expected of him. For example, robbing a church is acceptable, at least it was when they were worth robbing, but killing a priest is a death sentence. We have our own honor; we are
right thinking
people, judged by our way of thinking. Do you understand?” Korolev nodded in agreement. “So the Thieves who stole the icon brought shame on each one of us. They were caught, of course. And the icon’s cover was recovered.” He touched his heart. “But then we heard they’d burned the icon in their fear—well, if they were true Thieves they’d have killed themselves before doing such a thing. Instead they left us disgraced before the world and before heaven.”
He sighed and passed the flask to Korolev, inhaling on his cigarette. “So, we labored under a burden, maybe not all of us, but the men of honor, the Thieves-in-law, the keepers of the tradition—my uncles and my father among them. We wanted to shed blood to show atonement and so we hunted—the Okhrana had caught the men who stole the icon, but there were others. Men who had hidden them, women who had loved them, children who had been sired by them. We hunted them down.”
Kolya’s words were flat, but Korolev had no trouble imagining the savagery involved. Kolya looked up at Korolev and smiled, as if he’d read his thoughts. There was no gentleness in the smile.
“Then we found it. Almost by accident. In a whorehouse, believe it or not, hanging on a wall. The madame had been told to guard it with her life, but when faced with the choice she told us what she knew and we spared her. It was a miracle—we were forgiven. And we hid it, and have protected it for all the years since. When the priests were being shot in the street and Believers taken away to God knows where, when churches were being desecrated and worse, and cathedrals blown up with dynamite by Satan’s minions with the blood star to mark them out for who they are, all this time we guarded it and kept its resting place secret. And then, two months ago, the Cheka found the hiding place. The Devil’s work.”
Korolev wondered whether he was having his leg pulled. He searched Kolya’s face. “I don’t believe this,” he said eventually, shaking his head. Maybe it was the alcohol that was making his mind feel sluggish, but he just couldn’t take Kolya’s story in.
“You saw Tesak’s body? Where was his tattoo?” Kolya asked.
“On his arm, his right arm. The bicep.”
Kolya took off his waistcoat and opened his shirt, Christ’s crucifixion spread across his chest. He pulled the shoulder of the shirt down along his arm, revealing an image of an icon, the Virgin and the Child, Kazanskaya, Our Lady of Kazan. “Only the senior Thieves knew we protected her, but all our clan know she protects us.”
“What if it is the truth? What of it? What has it to do with me?”
“Maybe nothing. You want to catch the killer, am I right?”
“Of course. That’s my duty.”
“Even if he’s Cheka?”
Korolev considered yet again the course he found himself on and the insanity of it, the breath-stealing danger of it. But what choice did he have? He was a simple man and this was the road he walked. His job was to catch killers and assist in the administration of justice—he wouldn’t back away from his duty just yet. If it came to a choice between duty and death—well, he’d make a decision then, if he still could.
“I’m investigating the murders,” he managed to say. “If it’s in my power, I’ll bring whoever committed them to justice.”
“Soviet justice?”
“It’s as good as any. The system may not be perfect—I’m not blind. These are eyes in my head. But we work for the future, a Soviet future. And it’s as fair as any damned justice system the capitalists ever lied about.” He could feel his leg trembling against the bale of hay. Was it anger or some other emotion? He wasn’t sure of anything any more. But if he didn’t believe the leadership weren’t working for the People’s future—well, where would he be? What hell would he find himself in then—if it all turned out to be a blood-soaked lie? He spat on the floor to ward off the thought, and then fumbled for another cigarette. He put it in his mouth, reaching for his matches, but Kolya had already extended a lighter.
“Thank you,” Korolev said, hearing the gruffness in his voice. He offered the Thief the packet.
“You’re an honest man. And you are a Believer, aren’t you?” Kolya seemed to be weighing him up.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Maybe it isn’t. But what if, at some stage, you have to decide between your loyalty to the church and your loyalty to Comrade Stalin. How do you think you would decide?”
“I’m a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union.”
“But no Party member. Listen, our aim is to find the icon and see it returned to the Church. We don’t know who stole it from the Lubianka, but we want to make sure it ends up in the right place—we can’t keep it safe here, we know that now, and the icon is more important than our pride. But we’re not the only people trying to find it, as you know, and they’re the ones responsible for Tesak and the Holy Sister, and others besides. I have a feeling they are Cheka, these people, and they’ll stop at nothing. After all, there’s a lot at stake here—the icon is worth a great deal of money. But if we get to it first, we’ll see it safe—out of the country. Now you’ve a decision. Do you tell your bosses what I just told you, or do you keep it quiet?”
“I can’t see why I shouldn’t tell them.”
Kolya smiled. “Would you like to know the name of the Chekist commanding the search party? The one who took the icon from us?”