Eye of the Red Tsar

6

A SMALL FIRE CRACKLED IN THE GRATE OF THE POLICE CHIEF’S OFFICE.

“Detective?” Kirov paced the room, raising his hands and letting them fall again. “Do you mean your brother worked for the Tsar’s Secret Police?”

Pekkala sat at the desk, reading through the muddy brown case file with its red stripe running diagonally across the page. Written in black on the red stripe were the words VERY SECRET. The word secret alone had lost all meaning. These days, everything was secret. Carefully, he turned the pages, his face only a hand’s length from the desk, so lost in thought that he did not seem to hear the Commissar’s ranting.

“No.” Anton sat by the fire, hands stretched out towards the flames. “He did not work for the Okhrana.”

“Then who did he work for?”

“I told you. He worked for the Tsar.”

They spoke of Pekkala as if he was not in the room.

“In what branch?” asked Kirov.

“He was his own branch,” Anton explained. “The Tsar created a unique investigator, a man with absolute authority, who answered only to himself. Even the Okhrana could not question him. They called him the Eye of the Tsar and he could not be bribed, or bought or threatened. It did not matter who you were, how wealthy or connected. No one stood above the Emerald Eye, not even the Tsar himself.”

Pekkala looked up from his reading. “Enough,” he muttered.

But his brother kept on talking. “My brother’s memory is perfect! He remembered the face of every person he’d ever met. He put the devil Grodek behind bars. He killed the assassin Maria Balka!” He pointed at Pekkala. “This was the Eye of the Tsar!”

“I’ve never heard of him,” said Kirov.

“I don’t suppose,” said Anton, “that they would teach cooks about the techniques of criminal investigation.”

“A chef!” Kirov corrected him. “I was training to be a chef, not a cook.”

“And there’s a difference?”

“There is if you’re a chef, which I would have been by now if they hadn’t closed the school.”

“Well, then, Comrade Almost-Chef, the reason you don’t know about him is because his identity was suppressed after the Revolution. We couldn’t have people wondering what had happened to the Eye of the Tsar. It doesn’t matter. From now you can simply refer to him as the Eye of the Red Tsar.”

“I said enough!” growled Pekkala.

Anton smiled and breathed out slowly, satisfied with the effect of his tormenting. “My brother possessed the kind of power you see once in a thousand years. But he threw it all away. Didn’t you, brother?”

“You go to hell,” said Pekkala.

The sergeant sprang to attention.

The cadets, in a single motion, crashed their heels together in salute. The sound echoed like a gunshot through the horse ring.

Even the horses became strangely still as the Tsar walked out across the ring to where the men were standing.

It was the first time Pekkala had ever seen the Tsar. Recruits in training did not usually set eyes on him until the day of their graduation, when they would parade before the Romanov family in their new, fine-cut gray uniforms. Until then, the Tsar remained distant.

But there he was, without his usual bodyguards, without an entourage of officers from the regiment-a man of medium height, with narrow shoulders and a tight stride, placing one foot directly in front of the other as he walked. He had a broad, smooth forehead, and his beard was close-trimmed and sculpted on his chin in a way which gave his jaw a certain angularity. The Tsar’s narrowed eyes were hard to read. His expression was not unkind, but neither was it friendly. It seemed to hover between contentment and the desire to be somewhere else.

More of a mask than a face, thought Pekkala.

Pekkala knew he was not supposed to look directly at the Tsar. In spite of this, he couldn’t help but stare. It was like watching a picture come to life, a two-dimensional image suddenly emerging into the third dimension of the living.

The Tsar came to a stop before the Sergeant and offered a casual salute.

The Sergeant returned the salute.

Now the Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Your horse seems to be bleeding.” He did not raise his voice, but still it seemed to carry through the wide space of the training ring.

“Yes, Excellency.”

“It looks to me as if most of these animals are bleeding.” He looked at the Sergeant. “Why are my horses bleeding?”

“A part of the training, Excellency,” the Sergeant replied breathlessly.

“The horses are already trained,” replied the Tsar.

The Sergeant spoke at the ground, not daring to raise his head. “Training for the recruits, Excellency.”

“But the recruits are not bleeding.” The Tsar ran his hand through his beard. His heavy signet ring stood out like a knuckle made of gold.

“No, Excellency.”

“And what seems to be the trouble with this particular recruit?” asked the Tsar, casting a glance at Pekkala.

“He refuses to jump.”

The Tsar turned to Pekkala. “Is this true? Do you refuse to go over that gate?”

“No, Excellency. I will go over the gate, only not on this horse.”

The Tsar’s eyes opened wider for a moment, then returned to their normal squint. “I’m not sure that’s what your Sergeant had in mind.”

“Excellency, I will not continue to injure this horse in order to prove that I am capable of doing so.”

The Tsar took one long breath, like a man preparing to dive underwater. “Then I regret that you find yourself in a dilemma.” Without another word, the Tsar walked past Pekkala and down the line of horses and riders standing at attention. The only sound was of his footsteps.

When the Tsar’s back was turned, the Sergeant raised his head and looked Pekkala in the eye. It was a stare of pure hatred.

The Tsar continued past the gates, where he paused to study the bloody strands of barbed wire.

When he reached the far end of the ring, he spun on his heel and faced the soldiers again. “This exercise is finished,” he said. Then he stepped back into the shadows and was gone.

As soon as the Tsar was out of sight, the Sergeant snarled at Pekkala, “You know what else is finished? Your life as a member of this Regiment. Now return to the stables, brush down your horse, wipe the saddle, fold the blanket, and get out.”

As Pekkala led his horse away, the Sergeant’s shrill commands to the other cadets echoed across the ring.

He led his horse into the stable. The horse moved willingly into its pen, where Pekkala unbuckled the saddle and removed the reins. He brushed down the animal, seeing its muscles quiver beneath the silky brown coat. He was stepping out to fetch a bucket of water and a cloth for dressing the horse’s injured shins when he saw the silhouette of a man standing at the opposite end of the stable, where it opened out onto the barracks grounds.

It was the Tsar. He had come back. Or maybe he had never left. Pekkala could see nothing of the man beyond an inky outline. It was as if the Tsar had returned to the two-dimensional form in which Pekkala had imagined him before. “That was an expensive gesture,” he said. “Your Sergeant will have you kicked out.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“If I were in your place, I would also have refused,” said the Tsar. “Unfortunately, it is not my place to argue with the methods of your training. If you had to do it over again, would you take your horse over the gate?”

“No, Excellency.”

“But you would clamber over it yourself.”

“Yes.”

The Tsar cleared his throat. “I look forward to telling that story. What is your name, cadet?”

“Pekkala.”

“Ah, yes. You came here to take your brother’s place in the regiment. I read your file. It was noted that you have an excellent memory.”

“That comes without effort, Excellency. I can take no credit for it.”

“Nevertheless, it was noted. Well, Pekkala, I regret that our acquaintance has been so brief.” He turned to leave. Sunlight winked off the buttons on his tunic. But instead of walking away, the Tsar came full circle, turning back into the stable’s darkness. “Pekkala?”

“Yes, Excellency?”

“How many buttons are on my tunic?”

“The answer is twelve.”

“Twelve. A good guess, but…” The Tsar did not finish his sentence. The silhouette changed as he lowered his head in disappointment. “Well, good-bye, Cadet Pekkala.”

“It was not a guess, Excellency. There are twelve buttons on your tunic, including the buttons on your cuffs.”

The Tsar’s head snapped up. “Good heavens, you are right! And what is on those buttons, Pekkala? What crest did you see?”

“No crest at all, Excellency. The buttons are plain.”

“Hah!” The Tsar walked into the stable. “Right again!” he said.

Now the two men stood only an arm’s length apart.

Pekkala recognized something familiar in the Tsar’s expression-a kind of hardened resignation, buried so deep that it was now as much a permanent part of the man as the color of his eyes. Then Pekkala realized that the Tsar, like himself, was on a path not of his own choosing, but one which he had learned to accept. Looking at the Tsar’s face was like studying his own reflection in some image of the future.

The Tsar seemed to grasp this connection. He looked momentarily bewildered, but quickly regained his composure. “And my ring?” he asked. “Did you happen to notice…?”

“Some kind of long-necked bird. A swan, perhaps.”

“A crane,” muttered the Tsar. “This ring once belonged to my grandfather, Christian the Ninth of Denmark. The crane was his personal emblem.”

“Why are you asking me these questions, Excellency?”

“Because,” replied the Tsar, “I think your destiny is with us, after all.”