Red Moth

Exhausted from his run

Exhausted from his run, Rifleman Stefanov arrived back at the Alexander Park. Until this moment, he had been so numbed by the relentless and deadly ritual of retreating, digging a foxhole, grabbing a few hours of sleep beneath his rain cape and then repeating the process again the following day that he’d barely had the energy to feel more than a vague sense of bewilderment at finding himself at Tsarskoye Selo, or Detskoye Selo, or Pushkin Village or whatever they were calling it these days. Only now was the focus returning to his mind, and as he stared across the untended grounds, the grass so deep it stood knee high in places, Stefanov was at last confronted with the past he had worked so hard to keep secret from everyone around him.

He had spent the first ten years of his life here, within sight of the Catherine and Alexander Palaces, as the son of the head gardener, Agripin Dobrushinovich Stefanov, whose family had worked on this estate for generations. Since the Revolution, he had lived in terror that this mere association with the Romanovs, however innocent, might, in the eyes of his comrades or, even worse, the Battalion Commissar, somehow constitute a crime against the State. This was why, when Sergeant Ragozin misread the map he had been given, insisting they were in the Alexander Park rather than the Catherine, Stefanov did not offer to help. Neither, when Ragozin pointed out the building which he referred to as the Japanese Pagoda, did Stefanov offer the correction that it was, in fact, known as the Chinese Theatre, having recognised it immediately from its bullet-shaped windows and gabled rooftops tweaked up like moustaches on old tsarist generals. It was only now, as he stumbled through the huge gates of the North Entrance, that Stefanov was awed to see again the huge oaks and elms which grew beside the Lamskie Pond, at the mildewed walls of the neglected Pensioners’ Stable and at the little cottage, with its buttery yellow walls and blue shutters, where the Emerald Eye himself had lived until vanishing into the snow one winter’s night in 1917, never to return.

Stefanov’s own departure had not been far behind. His father had continued to work at Tsarskoye Selo, even after the arrest of the Tsar and the incarceration of the royal family within the boundaries of their estate, until finally the Bolshevik guards who patrolled the grounds had warned him to leave, and take his family as well, if he valued their lives.

That same night, Stefanov’s father led one of the Tsar’s prize horses from the stable, harnessed it to a wagon and set off with his family to the house of his brother, a butcher in the distant town of Borovichi.

The last glimpse Stefanov had of Tsarskoye Selo was of the Catherine Palace, its rooftop gleaming like fish scales in the moonlight.

He never thought he would see the place again, let alone race along the Podkaprizovaya Doroga in a noisy army truck, with orders to defend the place from air attack.

It was just as well that Stefanov’s father had died years ago. The old man had spent years raking leaves from the riding paths so that they would not stick to the hooves of the Tsar’s horse as he cantered by, or composting the asparagus, potatoes and carrots which the Romanovs left from their meals, or pruning the juniper hedges so that the Tsarina, who liked to walk past them with her hand held out, flat as a knife blade, skimming along just above the deep green needles, could marvel at the precision of his blade. To see the grass this deep, the hedges wild and overgrown, would probably have broken the old man’s heart.

The place where they had chosen to deploy the 25-mm anti-aircraft gun stood at the edge of the Alexander Park, close by the Krasnoselskie Gates. Here, the wide expanse of open ground offered a good field of fire for any planes swooping low over the Pushkin Estate. The wheels of the gun carriage had been cranked off the ground, allowing the weapon to be placed on four outrigger posts, which provided a stable base for firing.

The blast shield had been painted with mud and dead leaves. This had to be done from scratch every time they set up the weapon. He could not rely on old, dried mud to do the trick. The colour of mud differed every time they stopped and the type of leaves might also give away a gun’s position if they were not properly matched to the environment. If the weapon was spotted and came under air attack, there was little they could do except grimly blaze away at the diving plane in a duel which rarely ended well for the crews of 25-mm guns, the smallest in the arsenal of Red Army anti-aircraft weapons.

When Stefanov returned to the shelter of the trees‚ the other members of the gun team‚ in an unusual display of tact‚ refrained from asking what he had just witnessed. The expression on his face told them all they needed to know. Taking up the shovel which served his three-man section as both foxhole and latrine digger, Stefanov began to hollow out a shelter for himself.

He worked quickly, and softly chanted the two-word prayer he had invented for himself when digging holes. No stones. No stones. No stones. To be effective, the hole had to be knee deep and large enough to accommodate his body when curled into a foetal position. Lined with a few strips of cardboard from a carton of tushonka meat rations and covered with his plasch-palatka rain cape, a properly dug hole would provide him not only with protection but a place to grab a few hours’ sleep before the order came to rig the gun for transport once again.

When the foxhole had been completed, Stefanov swept his arm back and forth around the edges, scattering the dark earth which might give away his location from the air. As he performed this ritual, his sleeve caught on something which tore into the fabric and jabbed him in the wrist. At first he mistook it for a twig but, lifting his arm, he realised it was a toy soldier. The soldier was frozen in a marching posture. Propped on his shoulder was a rifle, whose tiny bayonet had cut through Stefanov’s shirt.

Carefully, Stefanov removed the soldier from his sleeve, spat on it and rubbed away the dirt which had accumulated on the metal. He could still see the colours on the tunic: dark green with red piping, which, Stefanov seemed to recall, was the uniform of the Tsar’s Chevalier Guard.

He immediately recognised this little solider as having once belonged to the Tsarevich Alexei. Stefanov recalled the day he had been helping his father to push a wheelbarrow full of rotten apples destined for the compost heap, and the two of them had come across the Tsarevich playing a game with what had seemed to Stefanov to be hundreds of these soldiers, ranks of them lined up along the path. There were foot soldiers and soldiers on horseback and soldiers with bugles and others with flags and cannons and one tall man on a fine, white stallion who, by his gold-trimmed uniform, Stefanov supposed to be the Tsar himself. Beside that figure rode another, smaller but wearing an identical uniform. It was a moment before Stefanov grasped that this must be the Tsarevich. To be in the game, marvelled Stefanov, and not even have to pretend.

The soldiers had been brought outside in wooden boxes, in which special velvet-lined trays had been fitted to accommodate each piece. Sitting on the knee-high stack of boxes and smoking a short-stemmed pipe was the Tsarevich’s bodyguard, a sailor named Nagorny. He had high cheekbones and a long, sharp nose. His ears bent slightly outwards at the top, giving the sailor a slightly mischievous expression. Alexei had two bodyguards. The other man was a giant named Derevenko. Both men were sailors and often carried the Tsarevich when the boy’s haemophilia prevented him from walking on his own.

When the Revolution began, the giant Derevenko had turned upon Alexei, ordering the boy to run errands, just as the boy had once commanded him to do. But Nagorny had stood by the Romanovs, accompanying them in their exile to Siberia. He was shot, Stefanov had heard, for trying to prevent the Bolshevik guards from taking a gold chain that belonged to the Tsarevich.

The Tsarevich, on his knees in the middle of his toy army, looked up as Stefanov and his father moved past, leaving in their wake a trail of rotten apple juice which leaked through the wooden boards of the wheelbarrow.

Finding himself in the presence of the Tsarevich, Stefanov’s father removed his cap and bowed, then snatched the cap from his son’s head as well.

The Tsarevich blinked at them and did not speak. There was no sign of anger or impatience. He simply waited for them to pass by, as a person might wait for the passing of a cloud which had obscured the sun.

As soon as they were out of earshot, Stefanov’s father turned to him. ‘What were you thinking, boy?’ he snapped. ‘You know you should remove your cap in the presence of a Romanov!’

The answer to his father’s question, which Stefanov was wise enough not to say out loud, was that he had not been thinking about anything except the sight of that army of toy soldiers. He would have given anything for the chance to join that game, to set up his own army in that yellow dust.

Setting off again with their burden of rotten apples, they eventually reached the compost pile, which was hidden from view by tall hedges made of dense holly and barred by a wooden gate, held fast by a length of rusty chain.

Stefanov’s father would come to this heap of rotting vegetation whenever he wanted to be alone, because the reek of the compost guaranteed his solitude. He called it his thinking place, although what the old man thought about, if anything, remained a mystery to his son.

The compost pile was a black mound of leaves, potato peels, turnip tops, to which Stefanov now added his wheelbarrow full of apples. Although the smell was strong, it was not entirely unpleasant, since the compost contained only vegetation and no bones or scraps of meat. The father never seemed to notice it, but that odour filled the young Stefanov’s senses in a way he found quite overwhelming. It was heavy, sharp and seemed to spark along the branches of his nerves as if it was somehow alive.

Stefanov’s father sat down upon an empty barrel which had once held a shipment of slivovitz, the plum brandy so favoured by the Tsar that he had bought an orchard in the Balkans specifically for the purpose of keeping him supplied. ‘You can rest for a minute,’ he murmured to his son.

‘Did you see?’ asked Stefanov. ‘One of those soldiers was painted to look just like the Tsarevich himself!’

Stefanov’s father grunted, unimpressed, as he was unimpressed by most things which served no practical purpose. ‘Last year,’ he said, ‘the Tsarevich was given the opportunity to command a group of real soldiers. And do you know what he did? He marched them into the sea.’

‘And did they do what they were told?’

‘Of course! It was their duty to obey.’

Stefanov pressed his hands together, feeling the burn in his palms from holding the wheelbarrow handles. ‘I would like to march some men into the sea. They must have looked silly, standing out there in the waves.’

The father leaned across and cuffed him on the back of his head. ‘There is nothing to be proud of in ridiculing men who have sworn to give up their lives in order to protect you!’

Stefanov’s father always seemed to be losing his temper, and the young Stefanov never knew when the moment would come. He lived in constant fear of crossing the invisible limits of his father’s patience. ‘But the Tsarevich is only a boy,’ he remarked hesitantly.

‘That is like saying that the Tsar is only a man!’ barked the father.

Their conversation was interrupted by a quiet rustle on the gravel path which ran beside the hedge.

The father’s head snapped up. ‘It’s him,’ he whispered.

Stefanov’s heart slammed into his chest. ‘Who?’ he whispered back.

Rising from his barrel seat, his father peered through the hedge.

‘Who is it?’ Stefanov asked again, still afraid to raise his voice above a whisper.

The father beckoned to him, teeth bared with urgency.

It was hard for Stefanov to see anything through the screen of holly leaves, whose needly points jabbed at his forehead as he attempted to follow his father’s gaze.

A dark shape moved past on the other side of the hedge.

Stefanov held his breath. An inexplicable sensation of dread washed through his mind.

When the strange figure had gone, the father turned to his son. ‘That was him,’ he whispered. ‘That was the Emerald Eye.’

Stefanov had heard of Inspector Pekkala. Everyone on the estate knew of his existence, although few had ever seen him in the flesh. Many times, in the company of his father, he had walked past the little cottage where the Emerald Eye was said to live. Both had searched for any sign of the famous investigator, but no one ever seemed to come or go from that lonely little building. There were rumours among his friends at school that the Emerald Eye did not really exist, but was, in fact, just a figment of the Tsar’s imagination. Lately, Stefanov had begun to wonder if those rumours might be true.

Overcome with curiosity, Stefanov stepped over to the gate which separated the compost yard from the path which lay beyond it. With his feet on the lowest rung of the gate, he leaned out beyond the hedge, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Inspector.

What he saw was a tall figure in a dark coat, gloved hands clasped behind his back. The man walked with an unusually straight back and each of his steps seemed deliberate, like that of someone who was counting out his paces.

A moment later, Stefanov’s father appeared beside him. ‘See the way he moves? Like a phantom. He’s not even human, you know.’

‘Then what is he?’ demanded Stefanov.

‘A demon or an angel. Who can say except the Tsar who summoned him?’

Even at that age, Stefanov knew that he and his father did not live in the same world. They might breathe the same air, and clean the same dirt off their shoes at the end of every day, but for Stefanov’s father, nothing was as it appeared. Each gust of wind, or rumble of thunder in the distance, or the body of a dead bird lying on the path, to be removed before the Tsar or any of his family could glimpse its crumpled form, represented a sign of what was to come. The Tsarskoye Selo estate, whose earth and stones and trees the man had tended for so long that he knew the grounds better than their owners ever could have done, was only a shadow to Stefanov’s father. Only the portents it contained were real, and deciphering them was his father’s only defence against the terrible randomness of life and death which he witnessed in the world around him.

The young Stefanov had already learned to see with different eyes. For him, sometimes thunder was just thunder, the wind only the wind, and the body of a bird no more than the trophy of a cat.

‘Summoned him from where?’ demanded Stefanov, in a tone that almost taunted the old man, knowing full well that such a challenge might cause his father’s patience to snap yet again, and that he would then be hauled from the fence and dragged behind the compost heap for punishment. But Stefanov was past caring about the half-hearted drubbings his father administered, slapping the young boy as if trying to beat the dust out of a carpet.

‘I’ll tell you where he came from.’ The father raised his hand‚ jabbing a dirt-rimmed fingernail towards the Catherine Palace. ‘From there. From that room!’

Stefanov gazed in bewilderment at the hundreds of windows, each one of which blankly returned his stare, hiding the dozens of rooms which lay behind them.

Sensing his son’s confusion, the father continued. ‘The room whose walls are made of fire.’

Stefanov had never heard of such a room, nor did he believe that one existed. It belonged, he felt sure, in that world of half-realities with which his father made sense of the universe. His father had never set foot inside the Catherine or Alexander Palaces. For a groundskeeper, their polished marble floors lay beyond the dimensions of his work. The closest he, or Stefanov, had ever come was the back door of the Alexander Palace kitchen, where he collected the midday meal to which he was entitled.

Suddenly Pekkala stopped in his tracks. The only movement was a wisp of dust, which swirled around his polished boots.

‘He’s turning around!’ hissed the father. ‘He’s coming back!’

Stefanov and his father scuttled back behind the hedge and waited. Stefanov placed his hand over his chest, as if to muffle the sound of his heart.

The dark figure passed by, half hidden by the bushes, but only an arm’s length away.

At that instant, Stefanov heard a voice which seemed to come from inside his own head.

‘Good day,’ said Inspector Pekkala.

And then he was gone.

At his first glance of Pekkala, Stefanov had wondered if, perhaps, there was nothing so magical about the great inspector as an extraordinary man doing his best to lead an ordinary life, out for a stroll at the end of a hard day’s work. But now that Pekkala had spoken, Stefanov wasn’t so sure. There was something about the Emerald Eye which did not seem fastened to the world of flesh and bone.

As the memory evaporated from his mind, Stefanov found himself once again in the filthy cocoon of his foxhole. Realising that the toy soldier was still in his hand, Stefanov stood the tiny warrior upright in the dirt, then settled back, arms folded across his chest, and studied the figure, as if, at any moment, he might march away to battles of his own.