Red Moth

It was late at night

It was late at night.

Pekkala lay on the floor of his tiny apartment in Moscow, still wearing his clothes and boots. Against the far wall, neatly made, and with an extra blanket folded at the end, stood his bed. He never slept in it, preferring the floorboards instead. Neither did he wear pyjamas, since they reminded him too much of the clothes, known as rubashka, which he’d been made to wear in prison. A coat rolled up beneath his head for a pillow was his only concession to comfort.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a straight nose and strong, white teeth. His eyes were greenish-brown, the irises marked by a strange silvery quality, which people noticed only when he was looking directly at them. Streaks of grey ran through his short, dark hair and his cheekbones were burnished by years of exposure to the wind and sun.

He stared at the ceiling, as if searching for something in the dull white paint. But his thoughts were far away. In his mind‚ at that precise moment, he was charting a rail journey from the city of Kiev across the entire length of Russia to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. He made a mental note of every stop along the way, the places where he would need to change trains and the times of each connection. Pekkala had no intention of actually making the trip, but he had taken to memorising rail timetables in order to help himself fall asleep at night. Having acquired the entire twenty-four-volume set of timetables for the Soviet State Railway System, which he kept on the shelf in his office, Pekkala now knew the departure and arrival times of almost every train in Russia.

He had just stepped out on to the platform in the city of Perm and now had fifteen minutes to wait for the connecting train to Omsk, when the buzzer rang beside the door, indicating that someone in the street below was waiting to be let into the building.

Pekkala sat up suddenly, the journey evaporating from his mind.

Grumbling, he picked up the revolver placed beside his head. The weapon was an English Webley.455, and had been a gift from Tsar Nicholas himself. As Pekkala made his way down five flights of stairs to the street, he set the gun back in the holster which he kept strapped across his chest. The holster was designed so that the revolver lay almost horizontally across that place where the two sides of his rib cage joined to form an inverted letter V. The rig had been made according to Pekkala’s own specifications by the master armourer Emilio Sagredi, gunsmith to Nicholas II. The angle at which the gun was carried required a perfect fit inside its holster. To achieve this, Sagredi had soaked the leather in saltwater, placed the weapon in the holster and then allowed the leather to dry around the gun. The result was a fit so perfect that neither a flap nor a retaining strap was required to hold the weapon in place. The unusual angle at which the gun was carried allowed Pekkala to draw, aim and fire the weapon in a single fluid movement. It had saved his life on more than one occasion. One final modification, made on the suggestion of Sagredi himself, was a pin-sized hole drilled into the top of the barrel just behind the front blade sight. The large.455 round employed by the Webley meant that the gun would buck significantly when fired. This required the user to steady and re-aim the weapon each time he pulled the trigger. Sagredi’s adjustment permitted a small amount of pressure to be released vertically through the pinhole when the gun was fired, with the result that the barrel would be forced down with each shot, at the precise moment when the force of the escaping bullet caused the barrel to rise upwards. The two opposing forces allowed Pekkala to hold the gun more steadily, and thereby to aim the next round more quickly and accurately than he could otherwise have done.

At the time of Pekkala’s arrest one freezing winter’s night in 1917 on the Russo-Finnish border, both gun and holster were confiscated by the Bolshevik militiamen who dragged him off the train. Once Pekkala’s identity had been confirmed, he was transported directly to a prison in Petrograd. There, Pekkala underwent weeks of torture before being shipped to the gulag of Borodok, in the Valley of Krasnagolyana.

Unknown to Pekkala, Stalin had ordered the Webley delivered to him personally. He had heard about the weapon, whose solid brass grips had been added by King George V, when the English monarch had originally made a gift of it to his cousin the Tsar. The size, weight and power of the gun had proved to be, in the words of the Tsarina, too ‘sauvage’ for the more delicate sensibilities of the Tsar, and so he had presented it to Pekkala. Stalin had been anxious to see this weapon and considered holding on to it for his own use.

Reluctantly, the Webley, together with its holster, was surrendered by the militiaman who’d claimed it at the time of Pekkala’s arrest. Upon receiving the gun, Stalin retired to his quarters and secretly tried on the holster. But this new pairing of man and weapon did not prove successful. Stalin had always maintained an aversion to heavy clothing, or any garment that restricted his movements. This was particularly true of his boots, which he had custom-made from fine kid leather normally reserved for gloves. Although ill-suited for walking the streets of Moscow, Stalin rarely went out on foot and did not need to worry about freezing his feet in the middle of a Russian winter. After only a few minutes, the weight of the gun and the constriction of its holster caused Stalin to abandon the idea of keeping them for himself.

Rather than dispose of the Webley, however‚ Stalin placed it in storage. The reason for this safeguarding was that even as Stalin sent Pekkala away to what should have been a certain death in the notorious gulag, he was by no means convinced that Siberia could kill the man. One thing Stalin did know for sure, however, was that the skills of the Tsar’s personal investigator would prove profoundly useful to him, if Pekkala could ever be persuaded to employ them in the service of the Revolution.

It was nine years before the opportunity finally presented itself, when the newly promoted Lieutenant Kirov arrived at Borodok, bearing the offer that would release Pekkala from the forest which had been his prison. Kirov, who had since become Pekkala’s assistant at the Bureau of Special Operations, returned to him not only the Webley and its holster but the badge which had been Pekkala’s mark of service to the Tsar.

The badge was fashioned from a disc of solid gold, 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, the white enamel, the gold and the emerald formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. As the Tsar’s investigator, Pekkala had been granted absolute authority. Even the Tsar’s own secret service, the Okhrana, could not question him. In his years of service to the Romanovs, Pekkala had become known to all as the one man who could never 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.

Since Pekkala’s release from the gulag, he had formed an uneasy alliance with the ruler of the Soviet Union.

Stalin, for his part, had always known that Pekkala was too valuable to be liquidated‚ as millions of others had been.