Red Moth (12 page)

‘Nothing,’ replied Stalin. ‘The file was only opened on him when he came to visit the Catherine Palace. Before that, it’s as if he didn’t exist.’

‘And after his visit?’

‘He vanished back to Germany and that’s the last we heard from him.’

‘Until now.’

Stalin closed the file, pushed it away to the corner of his desk and turned his attention to Polina Churikova. ‘That is if these two men are the same person, and I am beginning to think they are not. The man in this file is fifty-five years old, which makes him a little too old for someone with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Someone of this age would either have been promoted or would have retired by now. So you see‚ Comrade Churikova‚ it is clear you are mistaken.’

‘But, Comrade Stalin . . .’ she began, but then words seemed to fail her.

Stalin had made up his mind. Now he behaved as if Churikova was no longer in the room. He reached for his box of cigarettes and then began patting his pockets as he searched for his lighter.

Pekkala touched Churikova on the arm. ‘It’s time for us to go,’ he said quietly.

‘It
is
him,’ Churikova insisted to Pekkala as they stepped into the narrow side street where Kirov had left his car waiting. ‘It’s Gustav Engel.
That
Gustav Engel‚ I’m telling you.’

‘Even if it was,’ said Kirov, ‘what good would the knowledge do us now?’ He opened the rear door of the Emka for Churikova, who climbed into the back seat. Then he opened the passenger side door for Pekkala.

‘I must return to Lubyanka,’ said Pekkala, ‘for another conversation with Semykin.’

‘That may prove difficult,’ replied Kirov. ‘It was hard enough getting him to talk on our first visit. You’ll be lucky to get anything out of him at all this time.’

Pekkala nodded. ‘It will be an uphill climb, for certain, but I think I might be able to persuade him. There’s no need to drive me. I’ll walk.’

‘All the way to Lubyanka?’

‘There is some business I must attend to first.’

Kirov realised from the tone of Pekkala’s voice that it would be no use trying to persuade him otherwise. ‘Very well, Inspector.’

Pekkala nodded towards Churikova. ‘Where will you take her?’

‘Back to the barracks, I expect,’ replied Kirov. ‘There must be someone who can reassign her to another cryptographic unit.’

Pekkala cast a glance at Churikova, his mind a confusion of pity and regret, then turned and walked away across Red Square. 

‘Oh, it’s you again,’ said Fabian Golyakovsky, curator of the Kremlin Museum, as he caught sight of Pekkala wandering amongst the icons.

Pekkala had stopped before
The Saviour of the Fiery Eye
, now safely re-hung upon the wall. ‘I see that he found his way home.’

‘Yes.’ The curator laughed nervously and reached his hand out towards the icon, as if to trace his fingers down the long dark hair of the prophet. But just before he touched the work of art, his fingers curled in upon themselves. ‘I must admit you had me worried, Inspector.’

‘And I regret I am about to worry you again.’

‘Oh‚’ he replied faintly.

‘Do you know a man named Valery Semykin?’

‘Of course! Everybody in the art world knows Semykin, and I can tell you with equal certainty that everybody hates him, too. He is the most pompous, arrogant, self-satisfied . . .’ the curator gasped for breath, and would have continued with his tirade if Pekkala had not leaned towards the twitching Golyakovsky and, in a lowered voice, explained the reason for his visit.

The colour drained from Golyakovsky’s face, as if someone had pulled the plug on his heart. ‘Oh, no, Inspector,’ he gasped. ‘Oh, please. I beg of you . . .’

‘You will see to it then?’

For a moment, Golyakovsky looked as if he might refuse. His eyes began to bulge. His fists clenched at his sides. Then the futility of all resistance seemed to dawn on him. Golyakovsky’s shoulders slumped and he sighed like a leaking balloon. ‘I will see to it.’ Then, with a final burst of indignation, he called out, ‘But under protest!’

One hour later‚ the door to Semykin’s Lubyanka cell slammed shut, leaving Pekkala locked in with the prisoner.

Semykin had been facing the wall, in keeping with prison regulations. Now, as he slowly turned around, his eyebrows arched with surprise when he saw who’d come to visit. ‘Inspector! Back for another consultation?’

Pekkala noticed a fresh coating of blood daubed on the wall, which seemed to show two women, each accompanied by a child, standing in a sloping field of tall grass with a house among trees in the distance.

‘It is Monet’s
Les Coquelicots
,’ explained Semykin. ‘I have branched out into Impressionism. I don’t have enough blood left in me to be a pointillist. So!’ he clapped his butchered hands together. ‘What brings you here this time, Pekkala?’

‘Does the name Gustav Engel mean anything to you?’

‘It might.’

Pekkala nodded slowly. ‘Your sense of civic duty is unchanged.’

‘Civic duty?’ Semykin laughed angrily. ‘My sense of duty is neither more nor less than it should be.’

‘Have you considered what might happen to you if the Germans reach Moscow?’

‘I have,’ replied Semykin, ‘and I suspect that anyone who was considered an enemy of the Soviet State is likely to be welcomed with open arms by the people who smashed it to bits. And the men who run this jail might find out for themselves what it feels like to be inmates. It has happened before, Pekkala, as you have witnessed for yourself. And if things are as bad as I think they are out there, there’s little to stop it happening again.’

‘That may be true, Valery, but you wouldn’t live long enough to see it.’

Semykin frowned. ‘What do you mean, Pekkala?’

‘Before your jailers take to their heels, they’ll kill every convict in this prison.’ Seeing the look on Semykin’s face, Pekkala knew he’d struck a nerve. ‘You hadn’t thought about that, had you?’

Semykin did not reply at first. He stared at his most recent work of art, as if, for a moment, he believed that he might walk through the wall and vanish into the crimson universe beyond. ‘Gustav Engel,’ he said, ‘is the curator of the Königsberg Museum‚ and a world expert on amber.’

‘Why would such an expert find himself in Königsberg?’

‘That city is the ancient capital of the amber trade. For centuries, the Baltic coast has been one of the most reliable sources of amber, but the truth is it is difficult to find no matter where you are.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because, unlike gold or silver, it does not tend to exist in large deposits. It is fossilised sap, after all, and because a good portion of it washes up on those windswept beaches, the location is determined by the motion of the waves, not where it originally formed into the amber. A mineralogist can look at a soil sample and calculate whether gold might be found in that place, but you cannot look out over the waves and know where the amber is lying beneath them.’

Pekkala thought of the long, windswept beaches of the Baltic coast, the scudding foam and greybeard rollers coughing up their treasure piece by piece.

‘So!’ exclaimed Semykin. ‘Has the red moth yielded up its secrets?’

‘Some‚’ he replied‚ ‘but not all.’ Pekkala went on to explain about the map they’d found embedded in its wings.

‘Have you been to Spain?’ Semykin asked suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Spain,’ he repeated. ‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No. One day, perhaps, but . . .’ Pekkala replied‚ confused at the abrupt change of topic.

‘When you do go,’ Semykin told him, ‘you must visit the city of Granada.’

‘What does this have to do with Gustav Engel, or the Amber Room?’

‘Everything,’ Semykin assured him. ‘In the city of Granada, there is a palace called the Alhambra. It dates back to a time when the Moors controlled Spain and inside this palace is a mosque whose walls are so ornately carved that if you try to absorb them in a single glance, you will inevitably fail. You have no choice but to study the details instead. And so it is, the Moors believed, with the idea of God. You try to see him all at once, and you will not succeed. So you focus on the details, knowing that you cannot fathom the picture as a whole. It is the same with the Amber Room. You have seen it for yourself, have you not?’

‘Of course,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Then you know that it is not possible to grasp the vast complexity of those thousands of fragments of amber. You might as well try to comprehend the very fabric of the universe. Once in a thousand years, we forget about butchering each other just long enough to create a work of art so much greater than ourselves that it becomes a symbol of achievement for the entire human race. The Amber Room is such a thing.’

Although Pekkala had visited it on many occasions during his time of service to the Tsar, and had seen the amber-laden panels for himself, he had never learned the history of the room. The Tsar had thousands of possessions, most of them priceless and all of them with elaborate tales of provenance. It had always frustrated the Tsar that Pekkala placed so little importance on these works of art, or even on the thousands of bars of gold he had kept hidden in a cell dug deep into the ground beneath the Alexander Palace.

The Tsar had alternately ridiculed and admired the simplicity of Pekkala’s existence and had made a virtual hobby of trying to tempt Pekkala with ornate and expensive gifts as a way of luring him into the fascination held by so many for the lifestyle of the Romanovs.

The Tsar had always failed in this endeavour. In failing, however, he had come to realise that Pekkala was one of the only people on this earth whom he could really trust since those who were beguiled by wealth and exclusivity could never be counted upon when the time came to choose between what was right and what nourished the beast of their obsession.

‘Where did the Amber Room come from?’ asked Pekkala.

‘It was commissioned by King Frederick of Prussia, back in 1701. The work was completed by artisans trained in the art of carving ivory, since there had never been a project like this one undertaken before using amber. Unfortunately, the king’s son, Wilhelm, did not share his father’s tastes and gave the room away to Tsar Peter I as a gift. According to legend, it was in exchange for a bodyguard of Russian giants. Not only did Peter have no particular fascination for amber, he had no idea how to assemble the room and quickly gave up trying. As a result, it wasn’t until half a century later that the panels were installed in the Catherine Palace on the orders of Catherine the Great. It was her son, Peter the Great, who became obsessed with the room and its contents. In 1715, he toured the Baltic coast disguised as a regular army officer, buying up amber wherever he could find it. He later incorporated pieces from his own amber collection into the panels, including one containing the perfectly preserved body of a large moth‚ I suspect the same kind depicted in the painting.’

‘How did it end up embedded in the amber?’

‘In prehistoric times, the moth became trapped in the sap oozing out of a tree. The more it struggled, the more enveloped it became, until it was literally embalmed in sap. Over thousands of years, the sap was fossilised into amber, and the insect was preserved inside. Many such things have been discovered in pieces of amber – stones, pine needles, even fish scales.’

‘Where did this piece of amber come from?’

‘According to legend,’ replied Semykin, ‘it had been sold to a Viking by an American Indian on the island of Newfoundland some seven hundred years before. The piece had found its way back to Norway and, in the year 1700, was sold to a merchant in Königsberg by a Norwegian sailor who needed the money to repair his ship, which had been damaged in a storm. And Königsberg is where Peter the Great tracked it down. He paid his weight in gold for that one fragment and had it installed in one of the panels, high up near the ceiling. You can’t actually see the insect unless you get up on a ladder. Peter the Great considered it too precious to be viewed by those who did not value it as he did. Even among those who spent their whole lives working at the palace, most people didn’t know the insect was there.’

‘His weight in gold?’ gasped Pekkala.

‘He would have paid
ten
times his weight‚’ explained Semykin. ‘That is the nature of the collector. He must possess what he covets, no matter what the cost. It is one of the great failures of our species. Like war. Like the cooking in this prison.’

‘How large a piece of amber was it?’ Pekkala imagined a vast yellow slab, the size of a motor car.

Semykin held up his mangled hand, as if to show the insect embedded in his flesh. ‘No larger than this.’ Until now, he had been smiling, amused at Pekkala’s amazement. But suddenly his face grew serious.

‘How is Engel involved in this?’ asked Semykin.

‘Apparently, the painting was on its way to him when the plane that was carrying it ran out of fuel over our lines. You were there at the Catherine Palace, weren’t you,’ asked Pekkala, ‘when the curators were packing up the art work?’

‘Yes. As I told you before, I helped to prioritise which works of art should be removed first, in case we didn’t have time to transport them all to safety.’

‘Then you know they had to leave the amber behind.’

Semykin nodded grimly. ‘We were sworn to secrecy‚ but I guess none of that matters now. The panels were too fragile. We tried moving one of them, but the amber started coming loose from the panel. It was clattering down around us like hail. Sealing it beneath the wallpaper became our only option. That, and broadcasting on the radio that it had all been moved to safety.’

‘So whoever sent this painting to Engel was trying to let him know the amber’s real location.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Semykin. ‘Only someone very familiar with the history of the Amber Room would know the significance of that moth. And believe me, Engel would know. But this doesn’t change the fact that the panels still can’t be moved without destroying them and even if Engel would love nothing more than to get his hands upon the amber, he can’t just walk in under the noses of the German army and pilfer it like a boy robbing candy from a shop. He is a provincial museum director‚ not Herman Göring. Engel simply doesn’t have the credentials to pull off that kind of stunt.’

‘We believe he may have joined the military.’

‘What? No, you must be mistaken, Pekkala. Engel is not young and he is certainly no soldier! The day may come when the Fascists are desperate enough to enlist men of that age into their army, but as far as I know, it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘We have reason to believe he has joined the SS,’ said Pekkala, ‘although we can’t understand why he might have done so. Comrade Stalin is convinced that the man to whom the painting should have been delivered is not the same Gustav Engel at all, but a completely different man who just happens to have the same last name.’

A shadow seemed to pass behind Semykin’s eyes. ‘The SS, you say?’

‘What is it, Semykin? What’s troubling you?’

‘It may be nothing.’

‘Well, whatever it is, tell me now, before it’s too late.’

‘Long before the war,’ began Semykin, ‘Hitler spoke of his dream to build an art museum in the city of Linz. It was to be the largest of its kind in Europe, perhaps in the whole world. When I first heard about the project, which the Germans called
Sonderauftrag Linz
, I was glad. Many collections would be changing hands and there would be a need for authenticators like me. But then I heard a rumour that the Nazis had begun sending people all across Europe, posing as art students, but who were, in fact, members of a secret organisation whose mission was to catalogue the names and locations of artworks in every country which the Germans planned to occupy. Then I realised that, if that rumour was true, the Nazis would not be buying art. They would be stealing it. The task of this secret organisation would be to follow behind the German Army, seizing entire collections from private homes, galleries and . . .’

‘. . . and palaces. This organisation. Do you know what it was called?’

‘It is known by the initials ERR, which stands for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. But its existence was only a rumour, and there were so many rumours going around, nobody knew what to believe. The whole thing seemed too diabolical to be real, but if you are telling me that Gustav Engel is working for the SS, I think it must be true. That new museum in Linz will soon require a curator. What better credential than delivering the Amber Room to Adolph Hitler could a man like Gustav Engel ever need?’