Eye of the Red Tsar

4

PEKKALA HELD THE CUT-THROAT RAZOR POISED BESIDE HIS BEARD-COVERED cheek, wondering how to begin.

It used to be that he shaved once a month, but the old razor he had nursed finally snapped in half one day as he stropped it against the inside of his belt. And that was years ago.

Since then he’d sometimes taken a knife to his hair, sawing it off in clumps while he sat naked in the freezing water of the stream below his cabin. But now, as he stood in the dirty bathroom of the police station, a pair of scissors in one hand and the razor blade in the other, the task before him seemed impossible.

For almost an hour, he hacked and scraped, gritting his teeth with the pain and rubbing his face with a gritty bar of laundry soap he had been loaned along with the razor. He tried not to breathe in the sharp stench of poorly aimed urine, the smoke of old tobacco sunk into the grout between the pale blue tiles, and the medicinal reek of government-issue toilet paper.

Slowly, a face Pekkala barely recognized began to appear in the mirror. When at last the beard had all been cut away, blood was streaming from his chin and upper lip and just beneath his ears. He pulled some cobwebs from a dusty corner of the room and packed them into the wounds to stanch the bleeding.

Emerging from the bathroom, he saw that his old paint-spattered gear had been removed. In its place he found a different set of clothes and was amazed to see that they were the same garments he’d been wearing when he was first arrested. Even these things had been saved. He dressed in the gray collarless shirt, the heavy black moleskin trousers, and a black wool four-pocket vest. Underneath the chair were his heavy ankle-high boots with portyanki foot wrappings neatly rolled inside each one.

Lifting the gun belt over his shoulder, he buckled the strap around his middle. He adjusted it until the butt of the gun rested just beneath the left side of his rib cage so that he could draw the Webley and fire it without breaking the fluidity of motion-a method which had saved his life more than once.

The last piece of clothing was a close-fitting coat made of the same black wool as the vest. Its flap extended to the left side of his chest, in the manner of a double-breasted jacket, except that it fastened with concealed buttons, so that none showed on the coat when it was worn. The coat extended one hand’s length below his knees and its collar was short, unlike the sprawling lapel of a standard Russian army greatcoat. Finally, Pekkala attached the emerald eye under the collar of his jacket.

Again he looked at his face in the mirror. Carefully, he touched the rough pads of his fingertips against the windburned skin beneath his eyes, as if unsure of who was looking back at him.

Then he made his way back to the office. The door was closed. He knocked.

“Enter!” came the sharp reply.

With his heels up on the desk, Anton was smoking a cigarette. The ashtray was almost full. Several of the butts were still smoldering. A cloud of blue smoke hung in the room.

There was no chair except the one in which his brother sat, so Pekkala remained standing.

“Better,” said Anton, settling his feet back on the floor. “But not much.” He folded his hands and laid them on the desk. “You know who has sent for you.”

“Comrade Stalin,” said Pekkala.

Anton nodded.

“Is it true,” asked Pekkala, “that people call him the Red Tsar?”

“Not to his face,” Anton answered, “if they want to go on living.”

“If he is the reason I’m here,” persisted Pekkala, “then let me speak to him.”

Anton laughed. “You do not ask to speak to Comrade Stalin! You wait until he asks to speak to you, and if that ever happens, you will have your conversation. In the meantime, there is work to be done.”

“You know what happened to me, back in the Butyrka prison.”

“Yes.”

“Stalin is responsible for that. Personally responsible.”

“Since then he has done great things for this country.”

“You,” Pekkala replied, “are also responsible.”

Anton’s folded hands clenched into a knot of flesh and bone. “There are different ways of seeing this.”

“You mean the difference between who is tortured and who is doing the torturing.”

Anton cleared his throat as he attempted to remain calm. “What I mean is that we have been on different paths, you and I. Mine has brought me to this side of the desk.” He rapped the wood for emphasis. “And yours has led you to be standing there. I am now an officer in the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“What do you people want from me?”

Anton got up and closed the door. “We want you to investigate a crime.”

“Has the country run out of detectives?”

“You are the one we need for this.”

“Is it a murder?” Pekkala asked. “A missing person?”

“Possibly,” replied Anton, still facing the door, his voice lowered. “Possibly not.”

“Do I have to solve your riddles before I solve your case?”

Now Anton turned to face him. “I am talking about the Romanovs. The Tsar. His wife. His children. All of them.”

At the mention of their names, old nightmares reared up in Pekkala’s head. “But they were executed,” he said. “That case was closed years ago. The Revolutionary Government even took credit for killing them!”

Anton returned to the desk. “It is true that we claimed to have carried out the executions. But, as you are perhaps aware, no corpses were produced as evidence.”

A breeze blew in through the open window, carrying the musty smell of approaching rain.

“You mean you don’t know where the bodies are?”

Anton nodded. “That is correct.”

“So it is a missing persons case?” asked Pekkala. “Are you telling me the Tsar might still be alive?” The guilt of having abandoned the Romanovs to their fate had lodged like a bullet in his chest. In spite of what he’d heard about the executions, Pekkala’s doubts had never completely gone away. But to hear it now, from the mouth of a Red Army soldier, was something he’d never expected.

Anton looked nervously around the room, as if to see some listener materialize out of the smoke-tinted air. He got up and walked to the window, peering out into the alley which ran by the side of the building. Then he closed the shutters. A purpling darkness descended like twilight upon the room. “The Tsar and his family had been moved to the town of Ekaterinburg -which is now known as Sverdlovsk.”

“That is only a few days’ drive from here.”

“Yes. Sverdlovsk was chosen because of its remoteness. There’d be no chance of anyone trying to rescue them. At least, that’s what we thought. When the family arrived, they were quartered at the house of a local merchant named Ipatiev.”

“What did you plan to do with them?”

“It wasn’t clear what should be done with them. From the moment the Romanov family were arrested in Petrograd, they became a liability. As long as the Tsar lived, he provided a focus for those who were fighting against the Revolution. On the other hand, if we simply got rid of him, world opinion might have turned against us. It was decided that the Romanovs should be kept alive until the new government was firmly established. Then the Tsar was to be put on trial. Judges would be brought in from Moscow. The whole thing would be as public as possible. Newspapers would cover the proceedings. In every rural area, district Commissars would be on hand to explain the legal process.”

“And the Tsar would be found guilty.”

Anton flipped his hand in the air, brushing aside the idea. “Of course, but a trial would give legitimacy to the proceedings.”

“Then what were you planning to do with the Tsar?”

“Shoot him, probably. Or we could have hanged him. The details hadn’t been decided.”

“And his wife? His four daughters? His son? Would you have hanged them, too?”

“No! If we had wanted to kill them, we would never have gone to the trouble of bringing the Romanovs all the way to Sverdlovsk. The last thing we wanted to do was make martyrs of children. The whole point was to prove that the Revolution was not being run by barbarians.”

“So what were you planning to do with the rest of the family?”

“They were to be handed over to the British, in exchange for their official support of the new government.”

To Lenin, it must have seemed a simple plan. But those are always the ones that go wrong, thought Pekkala. “What happened instead?”

Anton let his breath trail out. “We aren’t sure exactly. An entire division of soldiers known as the Czechoslovakian Legion had mutinied back in May of 1918, when the new government ordered them to lay down their arms. Many of these Czechs and Slovaks had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army in the early stages of the war. For years, these soldiers had been fighting for the Tsar. They weren’t about to throw away their guns and join the Red Army. Instead, they formed a separate force.”

“The Whites,” said Pekkala. In the years after the Revolution, thousands of former White Army officers had flooded into the Gulag camps. They were always singled out for the worst treatment. Few of them survived their first winter.

“Since these men were deserters,” continued Anton, “they couldn’t go back to their own countries. Instead they decided to follow the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the entire length of Russia. They were heavily armed. Their military discipline had stayed intact. There was nothing we could do to stop them. In every town they came to as they headed east along the railroad, the Red Army garrisons either melted away or were torn to shreds.”

“The railroad passes just south of Sverdlovsk,” said Pekkala. Now he began to see where the plan had gone wrong.

“Yes,” replied Anton. “The Whites were bound to capture the town. The Romanovs would have been freed.”

“So Lenin ordered them to be killed?”

“He could have, but he didn’t.” Anton looked overwhelmed by the events he was describing. Even to know such secrets put a person’s life at risk. To speak them out loud was suicidal. “There were so many false alarms-Red Army units mistaken for Whites, herds of cows mistaken for cavalry, thunder mistaken for cannon fire. Lenin was afraid that if an execution order was in place, the men guarding the Romanovs would panic. They’d shoot the Tsar and his family whether the Czechs tried to rescue them or not.” Anton pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”

“What happened?” asked Pekkala.

It was raining now, droplets tapping on the shutters.

“A call came in to the house where the Romanovs were staying. A man identifying himself as a Red Army officer said that the Whites were approaching the outskirts of the town. He gave orders for the guards to set up a roadblock and to leave behind two armed men to guard the house. They had no reason to question the orders. Everyone knew the Whites were close by. So they set up a roadblock on the outskirts of the town, just as they’d been ordered. But the Whites didn’t show up. The call had been a fake. When the Red Army soldiers returned to the Ipatiev house, they discovered that the Romanovs were gone. The two guards who had remained behind were found in the basement, shot to death.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded Pekkala. “How do you know that this is not just another fantasy to throw the world off the track?”

“Because I was there!” replied Anton, his voice exasperated, as if this was one secret he had hoped to keep. “I had joined the Internal Police two years before.”

The Cheka, thought Pekkala. Formed at the outset of the Revolution under the command of a Polish assassin named Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka quickly became known as a death squad, responsible for murders, torture, and disappearances. Since then, like Lenin and Stalin themselves, the Cheka had changed its name, first to the GPU, then OGPU, but its bloody purpose had remained the same. Many of the Cheka’s original members had themselves been swallowed up in the subterranean chambers where the torturers did their work.

“Two months before the Romanovs vanished,” continued Anton, “I received orders to accompany an officer named Yurovsky to Sverdlovsk. There, a group of us took over from the local militia unit who had been guarding the Romanovs. From then on, we were in charge of the Tsar and his family. The night they disappeared, I was off duty. I was at the tavern when I heard that the call had come in. I went straight to where the roadblock had been set up. By the time we returned to the Ipatiev house, the Romanovs were already gone and the two guards who stayed behind had been killed.”

“Did you conduct an investigation?”

“There was no time. The Whites were advancing on the town. We had to get out. When the White Army marched in two days later, they conducted their own inquiry. But they never found the Romanovs, alive or dead. When the Whites had moved on and we finally regained control of Sverdlovsk, the trail had gone cold. The Tsar’s whole family had simply vanished.”

“So rather than admit that the Romanovs had escaped, Lenin chose to report that they had been killed.”

Anton nodded wearily. “But then the rumors began-sightings were reported all over the world, particularly of the children. Every time a story surfaced, no matter how incredible it seemed, we sent an agent to investigate. Do you realize we even sent a man to Tahiti because a sea captain swore he saw someone there who looked exactly like Princess Maria? But all of those rumors turned out to be false. So we waited. Every day, we expected news that the Romanovs had surfaced in China, or Paris, or London. It seemed only a matter of time. But then years went by. There were fewer sightings. No new rumors. We began to think that maybe we had heard the last of the Romanovs. Then, two weeks ago, I was summoned by the Bureau of Special Operations. They informed me that a man had recently come forward, claiming that the bodies of the Romanovs had been thrown down an abandoned mine shaft not far from Sverdlovsk. He said that he witnessed it himself.”

“And where is this man?”

It was raining harder now, the storm a constant roar upon the roof, like a train riding through the air above their heads.

“In a place called Vodovenko. It’s an institution for the criminally insane.”

“Criminally insane?” Pekkala grunted. “Does this mine shaft even exist?”

“Yes. It has been located.”

“And the bodies? Have they been found?” A shudder passed through Pekkala as he thought of the skeletons lying jumbled at the bottom of the mine shaft. Many times he had dreamed of the killings, but those nightmares always ended in the moment of their deaths. Until now, he had never been tormented by the image of their unburied bones.

“The mine shaft was sealed off as soon as news reached the Bureau. As far as we know, the crime scene has not been touched.”

“I still don’t understand why they need me for this,” said Pekkala.

“You are the only person left alive who knew the Romanovs personally and who is also trained in detective work. You can positively identify those bodies. There is no margin for error.”

Pekkala hesitated before he spoke. “That explains why Stalin sent for me, but not what you are doing here.”

Anton opened his hands and brought them softly together again. “The Bureau thought it might help if a familiar face passed on their offer to you.”

“Offer?” asked Pekkala. “What offer?”

“On successful completion of this investigation, your sentence at the Gulag will be commuted. You will be granted your freedom. You can leave the country. You can go anywhere you want.”

Pekkala’s first instinct was not to believe it. He had been told too many lies in the past to take the offer seriously. “What do you get out of this?”

“This promotion is my reward,” replied Anton. “Ever since the Romanovs disappeared, no matter how hard I worked, how loyal I showed myself to be, I was passed over. Until last week I was a Corporal in some windowless office in Moscow. My job was to steam open letters and copy down anything which sounded critical of the government. It looked as if that was all I’d ever be. Then the Bureau called.” He sat back in his chair. “If the investigation succeeds, we’ll both have a second chance.”

“And if we don’t succeed?” asked Pekkala.

“You will be returned to Borodok,” replied Anton, “and I’ll go back to steaming open letters.”

“What about that Commissar? What’s he doing here?”

“ Kirov? He’s just a kid. He was training as a cook until they closed down his school and transferred him to the political academy instead. This is his first assignment. Officially, Kirov is our political liaison, but as of now, he doesn’t even know what the investigation is about.”

“When were you planning on telling him?”

“As soon as you agree to help.”

“Political liaison,” said Pekkala. “Apparently your Bureau does not trust either of us.”

“Get used to it,” said Anton. “No one is trusted anymore.”

Pekkala slowly shook his head in disbelief. “Congratulations.”

“On what?”

“On the mess you have made of this country.”

Anton stood up. His chair scudded back across the floor. “The Tsar got what he deserved. And so did you.”

They stood face-to-face, the desk like a barricade between them.

“Father would have been proud of you,” Pekkala said, unable to hide his disgust.

At the mention of their father, something snapped inside Anton. He lunged across the desk, lashing out with his fist and striking Pekkala on the side of the head.

Pekkala saw a flash behind his eye. He rocked back, then regained his balance.

Anton came out from behind the desk and swung again, hitting his brother in the chest.

Pekkala staggered. Then, with a roar, he grabbed Anton around the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides.

The two men tumbled backwards, plowing through the office door, which gave way with a splintering of flimsy wood. They fell into the narrow corridor. Anton struck the ground first.

Pekkala crashed down on top of him.

For a moment both of them were stunned.

Then Anton grabbed Pekkala by the throat.

The two men stared at each other, their eyes filled with hate.

“You told me things were different now,” said Pekkala, “but you were wrong. Nothing has changed between us.”

Unable to contain his rage, Anton wrenched the pistol from his belt and jammed the end of the barrel against his brother’s temple.

The same day he arrived in St. Petersburg, Pekkala enlisted as a cadet in the Finnish Regiment of Guards.

He soon learned the reason why Anton had been thrown out of the corps.

Anton had been accused of stealing money from the footlocker of another cadet. At first, he had denied it. No evidence could be brought against him other than the coincidence that he suddenly had money to spend, at the precise moment when the other cadet’s funds went missing. But that same evening, as the cadet recounted his loss to the recruit in the neighboring bunk, he noticed something on his bedside locker. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and leaning over so as not to have to raise his voice. As he spoke, his warm breath passed over the polished surface of the locker and a ghostly handprint shimmered into view. The print was not his own, nor did it belong to any of the other six cadets who bunked in that room. The sergeant was called and he ordered a comparison of Anton’s handprint and the one upon the locker.

When the handprints were seen to match, Anton confessed, but he also protested that it was only a small amount of money.

The amount did not matter. By the codes of the Finnish Guards, within whose barrack walls no doors were locked and no keys were kept, any theft was punished by demotion from the ranks. When Anton returned from his hearing with the Commander of the regiment, his bags had been packed already.

Two senior officers walked Anton to the gates of the barracks. Then, without a word of good-bye, they turned their backs on him and returned inside the compound. The gates were closed and bolted.

On his first full day as a cadet, Pekkala was summoned to the office of the Commandant. He did not yet know how to present himself to a senior officer, or how to salute. Pekkala worried about this as he walked across the parade square. Platoons of new recruits shambled past him as they learned to march, flanked by shrill-shrieking drill sergeants who cursed them and their families back to the dawn of time.

In the waiting room, a tall, immaculately dressed guard was waiting for Pekkala. The guard’s clothes were of a lighter shade than those of the recruits. Over his tunic he wore a belt whose heavy brass buckle was stamped with the double-headed eagle of the Tsar. A short-brimmed cap covered half of his face.

When the guard raised his head and looked him in the eye, Pekkala felt as if lights were shining in his face.

In a voice barely above a whisper, the guard instructed Pekkala to keep his back straight and his heels together when he stood before the Commandant.

“Let’s see you do it,” said the guard.

Pekkala did the best he could.

“Don’t bend over backwards,” the guard told him.

Pekkala couldn’t help it. All of his muscles were locked so tight he could barely move.

The guard pinched the gray cloth at the tips of Pekkala’s shoulders, straightening the rough wool tunic. “When the Commandant speaks, you must not answer ‘yes, sir.’ Instead, you only say ‘sir.’ However, if the answer to his question is no, you may say ‘no, sir.’ Do you understand?”

“Sir.”

The guard shook his head. “You do not call me sir. I am not an officer.”

The rules of this strange world raced around in Pekkala’s brain like bees shaken from a hive. It seemed impossible that he would ever master all of them. At that moment, if someone had offered him the chance to go home, he would have taken it. At the same time, Pekkala was afraid that was exactly why the Commandant had called for him.

The guard seemed to know what he was thinking. “You have nothing to fear,” he said. Then he turned, and knocked on the door to the Commandant’s office. Without waiting for a reply from inside, he opened the door and, with a jerk of his chin, showed Pekkala that he was to enter.

The Commandant was a man named Parainen. He was tall and thin, with jaw and cheekbones so sharply angled that his skull seemed to be made of broken glass. “You are the brother of Anton Pekkala?”

“Sir.”

“Have you heard anything from him?”

“Not lately, sir.”

The Commandant scratched at his neck. “He was due back with us a month ago.”

“Due back?” asked Pekkala. “But I thought he had been expelled!”

“Not expelled. Rusticated. That’s not the same thing.”

“Then what does it mean?” asked Pekkala, and then he added, “Sir.”

“It is only a temporary dismissal,” explained Parainen. “If it happened again, the expulsion would be permanent, but in the case of a cadet’s first offense, we tend to show leniency.”

“Then why hasn’t he returned?”

The Commandant shrugged. “Perhaps he decided that this life was not for him.”

“That can’t be right, sir. It’s all he wanted in the world.”

“People change. Besides, now you are here to take his place.” The Commandant rose to his feet. He walked over to the window, which looked out over the barracks to the town beyond. The gunmetal gray of a winter’s afternoon lit his face. “I want you to know that you will not be held accountable for what your brother did. You will be given the same chances as anybody else. If you fail, as many do, you will fail on your own terms. And if you succeed, it will be because of what you did and no one else. Does that sound fair to you?”

“Sir,” said Pekkala. “Yes, it does.”

In the weeks that followed, Pekkala learned to march and shoot and to live in a place where there was no such thing as privacy except in those thoughts which he kept locked inside his head. Within the confines of the Finnish Regiment barracks, thrown in among young men from Helsinki, Kauhava, and Turku, it was almost possible to forget that he had left his native country. Many had never dreamed of any other life except to become members of the Finnish Guards. For some, it was a family tradition dating back generations.

Sometimes, Pekkala felt as if he had woken up and found himself clad in the skin of a different man. The person he had been was receding into the shadows like the dead, whose final journeys he had overseen at home.

One day, all that changed.