Red Moth

The Emka skidded

The Emka skidded into the Ostankinsky railyard just as the last carriage of the troop transport clattered away into the dark.

‘Damn!’ Kirov mashed his fist on the steering wheel.

‘Did you call them?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Of course I did, Inspector. I spoke to the stationmaster. He asked who I was looking for and I told him. Then I asked him to delay the departure of the train.’

‘And what did he reply?’

‘That he’d do the best he could.’

Both men fell silent as they watched the red light of the caboose growing smaller and smaller until finally it vanished in the black.

Kirov cut the engine.

Then they both climbed out and looked around the deserted platform, on which the only trace of the hundreds of soldiers who had crowded on to the wagons just a few minutes before were a few cigarette butts, smouldering on the concrete. The light of an oil lamp flickered in the station house — a long, squat building fashioned out of heavy logs and roofed with tar-paper shingles.

‘Maybe we can find out where the train’s next stop is going to be,’ Pekkala wondered aloud. ‘Perhaps we can get there before it arrives.’

‘The movement of military trains is classified,’ Kirov reminded him, ‘even for NKVD. By the time we’ve pulled enough strings to find out, the train will be at the front. We might as well face the fact, Inspector. We’ve lost her. But perhaps we can still get by without her help.’

Wind rustled through the pine trees on the far side of the tracks.

At that moment, the door to the station house burst open and a soldier strode out on to the muddy railyard. Bundled in a greatcoat against the chill of the night, the figure advanced upon the two men.

Only when the soldier had come to a stop in front of them did Pekkala notice it was a woman. She was tall, with long hair which stuck out from under her brimless pilotka cap, but more than this Pekkala could not tell, as her face remained cloaked in the shadows.

‘The stationmaster ordered me off the train,’ she growled, ‘and told me to wait here for someone named Kirov.’

‘That would be me,’ admitted the Major.

‘Well, there had better be a good reason for this!’ She pointed down the tracks. ‘My whole battalion’s just departed for the front. I have a job to do. I am needed where they’re going. And I didn’t even have time to get my rucksack off the train!’

‘You are needed here as well,’ Kirov informed her, ‘by the Bureau of Special Operations.’

‘Special Operations! You men are NKVD?’ The indignation vanished from her voice.

‘I am‚’ said Major Kirov.

‘What do you want with me?’ she asked‚ suddenly sounding afraid.

It was Pekkala who explained. ‘We have come into possession of a painting, which we believe might be significant. Valery Semykin advised us to ask your opinion about it.’

‘Valery Semykin is in prison.’

‘That is where we found him,’ confirmed Pekkala, ‘and he sends you his regards.’

‘Well, if Valery couldn’t tell you whether it’s important, believe me, nobody can.’

‘The importance might not lie in its artistic value,’ Pekkala told her. ‘That’s why he said you might help us.’

‘Now you are speaking in riddles.’

‘It is a riddle we are asking you to solve.’

‘We have the painting here.’ Kirov lifted the briefcase. ‘If you could just take a look at it and tell us what you think.’

‘I might as well.’ She nodded at the empty tracks. ‘It looks as if I’m not going anywhere for a while.’

They walked to the station house and stepped inside, stamping the mud from their boots on a rough hemp mat spread out on the floor of the little room which served as a conduit between the interior of the station house and the outside air. Both ends of this narrow passageway were blocked off by a door. During the winter, patrons would make sure that one of the doors was kept closed while the other was open, in order to keep out the cold. Now, since it was summer, the windows had been opened and the inner door was propped wide by an old army boot. Even with the added ventilation, the air was still thick and stale and smelled bitterly of Russian army tobacco.

It was only now, by the soft light of paraffin lanterns which hung from iron hooks along the walls, that Pekkala got his first look at Churikova’s high cheekbones and eyes the same dark blue as in Delft pottery. As he studied the woman his face grew suddenly pale.

‘Inspector Pekkala, is something the matter?’ asked Kirov.

‘Pekkala?’ echoed Churikova. ‘The Emerald Eye?’

‘Yes.’ Pekkala turned over the lapel of his coat. The jewel winked in its iris of solid gold. ‘That’s what they used to call me.’

‘Then this must be very important.’ As Churikova spoke, she removed her bulky greatcoat, which was standard issue for both men and women in the Red Army. The coats were made of thick olive-brown wool and fastened with black metal buttons, each one emblazoned with a hammer and sickle set inside the outline of a star.

‘It might be important,’ Pekkala told her. ‘And it might mean nothing at all. We are relying on you to tell us.’

The two men sat down opposite Lieutenant Churikova at a rickety table on which a red and white checked table cloth had been laid out, its pattern blotched with stains and cigarette ash.

Kirov removed the painting from the leather briefcase and handed it to her.

‘Where did you get this?’ she asked, as her eyes fanned across the canvas.

Over the next few minutes, Kirov told her everything they knew.

When he had finished explaining‚ Churikova sat back slowly in her chair. ‘What did Semykin have to say about it?’

‘That the painting was basically worthless,’ said Kirov.

A faint smile passed across her lips. ‘Semykin was right. Partly, anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Pekkala.

‘It is worthless as a painting,’ she replied, ‘because it is, in fact, a map.’

‘A map?’ the two men chorused.

‘You must be mistaken,’ said Kirov. ‘I had the canvas X-rayed and even ran it under ultraviolet light in case special inks had been used. We found nothing that looked like a map, Comrade Churikova.’

‘I did not say that it contains a map,’ explained Churikova. ‘The painting itself is the map. This is known as a Baden-Powell diagram. It was named after the British officer Robert Baden-Powell, who sometimes operated as a spy while posing as an eccentric butterfly collector, complete with a pith helmet, butterfly net and sketchbook. He even spied on our own fortress at Krasnoe Selo back in 1886, and escaped with details of our observation balloons and a new type of flare which had just been issued for the Russian military. He often employed the drawings of these butterflies as a way of encoding his information, contained within the wing structure of the butterfly. In the case of Krasnoe Selo‚ the speckles on its wings denoted where guns had been positioned‚ while the lines created the shape of the fortress walls. The next time you see a mad Englishman with a net and a sketchbook full of butterflies, take my advice and arrest him‚ Inspector.’

‘A map,’ whispered Pekkala, as he began to think it through. ‘But who made it? And why? Were the men in that plane picking it up or delivering it?’

‘And why,’ Kirov wondered aloud, ‘in an age of electronic messages, would someone resort to a technique as outdated as this?’

‘Sometimes the simplest techniques are the most difficult to crack,’ Churikova tapped her fingernail upon the crude wooden frame of the painting, ‘and, unfortunately for you, this one is virtually impossible to break. Even if you could decipher the matrix of symbols, you have no way of knowing what those symbols refer to, or where the object is or the scale of the map. It could be the size of something you keep in your pocket or it could be the size of Moscow. Without some pre-existing codex, which would have been agreed upon by the two people sharing the map, there is no way to determine what is hidden in this painting.’ Churikova rose slowly to her feet. ‘Perhaps you can take consolation in the fact that, at the rate the Germans are advancing, the location detailed in this map, wherever it was, is probably behind their lines by now.’

They walked out into the railyard. The Milky Way arched across the sky, like the vapour trail of a plane bound for another galaxy.

‘We can drive you back to your barracks in Moscow,’ offered Kirov.

‘There’s no one there,’ replied Churikova. ‘My whole battalion was aboard that train. I’d rather stay here and wait for the next one.’

A few minutes later, as the Emka pulled out on to the road, Pekkala glanced back at the station. In the darkness, he could just make out the silhouette of Churikova. She stood alone in the middle of the deserted railyard, staring up at the stars as if to decipher the meaning of their placement in the universe.