The Red Coffin (2 page)

Chicherin’s forehead crumpled in confusion. ‘So you are looking for a job?’

‘No,’ replied the young man. ‘I am looking for Colonel Nagorski.’

Chicherin’s eyes widened. He glanced towards a table in the corner of the room where two men were eating lunch. Both of the men wore suits. One was shaved bald, and the great dome of his head looked like a sphere of pink granite resting on the starched white pedestal of his shirt collar. The other man had thick black hair combed straight back on his head. The sharp angle of his cheekbones was offset by a slightly pointed beard cut close against his chin. This made him look as if his face had been stretched over an inverted triangle of wood, and so tightly that even the slightest expression might tear the flesh from his bones.

‘You want Colonel Nagorski?’ asked Chicherin. He nodded towards the man with the thick black hair. ‘Well, there he is, but …’

‘Thank you.’ Kirov took one step towards the table.

Chicherin gripped his arm. ‘Listen my young friend, do yourself a favour and go home. Whoever sent you on this errand is just trying to get you killed. Do you have any idea what you are doing? Or who you are dealing with?’

Patiently, Kirov reached inside his jacket and removed a telegram, the fragile yellow paper banded with a line of red across the top, indicating that it had come from an office of the government. ‘You should take a look at this.’

Chicherin snatched the telegram from his hand.

All this time, the bartender Niarchos had been looming over the young man, his dark eyes narrowed into slits. But now, at the sight of this telegram, which looked to him so frail that it might at any moment evaporate into smoke, Niarchos began to grow nervous.

By now, Chicherin had finished reading the telegram.

‘I need that back,’ said the young man.

Chicherin did not reply. He continued to stare at the telegram, as if expecting more words to materialise.

Kirov slipped the flimsy paper from between Chicherin’s fingers and set off across the dining room.

This time, Chicherin did nothing to stop him.

Niarchos stepped out of the way, his huge body swinging to the side as if he were on some kind of hinge.

On his way to the table of Colonel Nagorski, Kirov paused to stare at various meals, breathing in the smells and sighing with contentment or making soft grunts of disapproval at the heavy-handed use of cream and parsley. Arriving at last beside Nagorski’s table, the young man cleared his throat.

Nagorski looked up. The skin stretched over his cheekbones looked like polished wax. ‘More blinis for the caviar!’ he slapped his hand down on the table.

‘Comrade Nagorski,’ said Kirov.

Nagorski had turned back to his meal, but at the mention of his name he froze. ‘How do you know my name?’ he asked quietly.

‘Your presence is required, Comrade Nagorski.’

Nagorski glanced towards the bar, hoping to catch the eye of Niarchos. But Niarchos’s attention seemed completely
focused on polishing tea glasses. Now Nagorski looked around for Chicherin, but the manager was nowhere to be seen. Finally, he turned to the young man. ‘Exactly where is my presence required?’ he asked.

‘That will be explained on the way,’ said Kirov.

Nagorski’s companion sat with arms folded, gaze fixed, his thoughts unreadable.

Kirov couldn’t help noticing that although Nagorski’s plate was loaded with food, the only thing set in front of the bald giant was a small salad made of pickled cabbages and beets.

‘What makes you think,’ began Nagorski, ‘that I am just going to get up and walk out of here with you?’

‘If you don’t come willingly, Comrade Nagorski, I have orders to arrest you.’ Kirov held out the telegram.

Nagorski brushed the piece of paper aside. ‘Arrest me?’ he shouted.

A sudden silence descended upon the restaurant.

Nagorski dabbed a napkin against his thin lips. Then he threw the cloth down on top of his food and stood up.

By now, all eyes had turned to the table in the corner.

Nagorski smiled broadly, but his eyes remained cold and hostile. Digging one hand into the pockets of his coat, he withdrew a small automatic pistol.

A gasp went up from the nearby tables. Knives and forks clattered on to plates.

Kirov blinked at the gun.

‘You look a little jumpy,’ smiled Nagorski. Then he turned the weapon in his palm so that the butt was facing outwards and handed it to the other man at the table.

His companion reached out and took it.

‘Take good care of that,’ said Nagorski. ‘I’ll be wanting it back very soon.’

‘Yes, Colonel,’ replied the man. He set the gun beside his plate, as if it were another piece of cutlery.

Now Nagorski slapped the young man on the back. ‘Let’s see what this is all about, shall we?’

Kirov almost lost his balance from the jolt of Nagorski’s palm. ‘A car is waiting.’

‘Good!’ Nagorski announced in a loud voice. ‘Why walk when we can ride?’ He laughed and looked around.

Faint smiles passed across the faces of the other customers.

The two men made their way outside.

As Nagorski walked by the kitchen, he saw Chicherin’s face framed in one of the little round windows of the double swinging doors.

Outside the Borodino, sleet lay like frog spawn on the pavement.

As soon as the door had closed behind them, Nagorski grabbed the young man by his collar and threw him up against the brick wall of the restaurant.

The young man did not resist. He looked as if he’d been expecting this.

‘Nobody disturbs me when I am eating!’ growled Nagorski, lifting the young man up on to the tips of his toes. ‘Nobody survives that kind of stupidity!’

Kirov nodded towards a black car, its engine running, pulled up at the kerbside. ‘He is waiting, Comrade Nagorski.’

Nagorski glanced over his shoulder. He noticed the shape of someone sitting in the back seat. He could not make out
a face. Then he turned back to the young man. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘My name is Kirov. Major Kirov.’

‘Major?’ Nagorski let go of him suddenly. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ Now he stood back and brushed at Kirov’s crumpled lapel. ‘We might have avoided this unpleasantness.’ He strode across to the car and climbed into the rear seat.

Major Kirov got in behind the wheel.

Nagorski settled back into his seat. Only then did he look at the person sitting beside him. ‘You!’ he shouted.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Pekkala.

‘Oh, shit,’ replied Colonel Nagorski.

Inspector Pekkala was a tall, powerful-looking man with broad shoulders and slightly narrowed eyes the colour of mahogany. He 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 Finnish Legion. There, early in his training, he had been singled out by the Tsar for duty as his own Special Investigator. It was a position which had never existed before and which would one day give Pekkala powers 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 Pekkala’s training, the Tsar presented him with 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 the unmistakable shape of an eye. Pekkala never forgot the first time he held the disc in his hand, and the way he had traced his fingertip over the eye, feeling the smooth bump of the jewel, like a blind man reading Braille.

It was because of this badge that Pekkala became known as the Emerald Eye. The public knew little else about him. 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, where he tried to forget the world he’d left behind.

But the world he left behind had not forgotten him.

After seven years alone in the forest of Krasnagolyana, during which time he lived more like a wild animal than as a
man, Pekkala was brought back to Moscow on the orders of Stalin himself.

Since that time, maintaining an uneasy truce with his former enemies, Pekkala had continued in his role as Special Investigator.

Deep beneath the streets of Moscow, Colonel Rolan Nagorski sat on a metal chair in a cramped cell of the Lubyanka prison. The walls were painted white. A single light bulb, protected by a dusty metal cage, lit the room.

Nagorski had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Braces stretched tight over his shoulders. As he spoke, he rolled up his sleeves, as if preparing for a brawl. ‘Before you start firing questions at me, Inspector Pekkala, let me ask one of you.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Pekkala. He sat opposite the man, on the same kind of metal chair. The room was so small that their knees were almost touching.

Even though it was stifling in the room, Pekkala had not taken off his coat. It was cut in the old style: black and knee length, with a short collar and concealed buttons which fastened on the left side of his chest. He sat unnaturally straight, like a man with an injured back. This was caused by the gun which he kept strapped across his chest.

The gun was a Webley .455 revolver, with solid brass handles and a pin-sized hole drilled into the barrel just behind the forward sight to stop the pistol from bucking when it fired. The modification had been made not for Pekkala but for the Tsar, who received it as a gift from his cousin King George V. The Tsar then issued the Webley to
Pekkala. ‘I have no use for such a weapon,’ the Tsar had told him. ‘If my enemies get close enough for me to need this, it will already be too late to do me any good.’

‘The question I wanted to ask you,’ said Nagorski, ‘is why you think I would give away the secret of my own invention to the same people we might have to use it against?’

Pekkala opened his mouth to reply, but he did not get the chance.

‘You see, I know why I’m here,’ continued Nagorski. ‘You think I am responsible for breaches of security in the Konstantin Project. I am neither so naive, nor so uninformed that I don’t know what’s going on around me. That’s why every stage of development has taken place in a secure facility. The entire base is under permanent lockdown and under my own personal control. Everyone who works there has been cleared by me. Nothing happens at the facility without my knowing about it.’

‘Which brings us back to your reason for being here today.’

Now Nagorski leaned forward. ‘Yes, Inspector Pekkala. Yes, it does, and I could have saved you some time and myself a very expensive meal if you had simply let me tell your errand boy …’

‘That “errand boy”, as you call him, is a major of Internal Security.’

‘Even NKVD officers can be errand boys, Inspector, if their bosses are running the country. What I could have told your major is the same thing I’m going to tell you now, which is that there has been no breach of security.’

‘The weapon you are calling the T-34 is known to our enemies,’ said Pekkala. ‘I’m afraid that is a fact you can’t deny.’

‘Of course, its existence is known. You can’t design, build and field-test a machine weighing thirty tons, and expect it to remain invisible. But its existence is not what I’m talking about. The secret lies in what it can do. I admit it’s true that there are members of my design team who could tell you pieces of this puzzle, but only one person knows its full potential.’ Nagorski sat back and folded his arms. Sweat was running down his polished face. ‘That would be me, Inspector Pekkala.’

‘There is something I don’t understand,’ said Pekkala. ‘What is so special about your invention? Don’t we already have tanks?’

Nagorski coughed out a laugh. ‘Certainly! There is the T-26.’ He let one hand fall open, as if a miniature tank were resting on his palm. ‘But it is too slow.’ The hand closed up into a fist. ‘Then there is the BT series.’ The other hand fell open. ‘But it doesn’t have enough armour. You might as well ask me why we are building weapons at all when there are plenty of stones lying around to throw at our enemies when they invade.’

‘You sound very confident, Comrade Nagorski.’

‘I am more than confident!’ Nagorski barked in his face. ‘I am certain, and it is not merely because I invented the T-34. It is because I have faced tanks in battle. Only when you have watched them lumbering towards you, and you know you are helpless to stop them, do you understand why tanks can win not only a battle but a war.’

‘When did you face tanks?’ asked Pekkala.

‘In the war we fought against Germany, and God help us if we ever have to fight another. When the war broke out in the summer of 1914, I was in Lyon, competing in the French Grand Prix. Back then, racing automobiles was my entire life. I won that race, you know, the only automobile race our country has ever won. It was the happiest day of my life, and it would have been perfect if my chief mechanic hadn’t been struck by one of the other race cars, which skidded off the track.’

‘Was he killed?’ asked Pekkala.

‘No,’ replied Nagorski, ‘but he was badly injured. You see, racing is a dangerous game, Inspector, even if you’re not behind the wheel.’