Red Moth

At that same moment

At that same moment, somewhere in the bowels of Lubyanka, a guard swung open the door to Semykin’s cell. ‘Come with us,’ he said.

Out in the hallway, Semykin fell in between two guards, who marched him in silence to a cell on the other side of the prison. Both of Semykin’s hands had been wrapped in bandages, making it almost impossible for him to hold up his prison pyjama trousers. As he shuffled clumsily between the straight-backed guards, Semykin wondered what was happening, but he knew he could not ask.

Advancing down a corridor no different in appearance from the one they’d left only a few minutes before, the guards stopped outside a cell. The guard in front slid back the locking bolt and turned to face the convict. ‘You have unusual friends, Semykin, unusual and powerful friends.’

As Semykin entered the cell, he gasped in astonishment. The walls had been completely covered with works of art from the Kremlin Museum. He recognised them instantly — the fifteenth-century embroidered silk-and-damask veil showing the revelation of the Virgin Mary to St Sergius, the seventeenth-century wooden panel depicting St Theodore Stratilates, the sixteenth-century tempera-on-wood painting of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. And there, staring back at him once more, was The Saviour of the Fiery Eye.

Semykin turned and slowly turned again. As tears obscured his vision, the colours of the artwork blurred and sparkled, as if the paint on them was fresh, the silk just unravelled from the spool, and the breath of the artists, dead for centuries, still hovered before their creations.