Red Moth

Wearily, Kirov trudged

Wearily, Kirov trudged up the five flights of stairs to his office.

He had decided not to go home, as Stalin had advised. The thought of sitting around in his flat in the middle of the day made him restless. He made up his mind to keep working instead. There was plenty of paperwork to be done.

Disordered fragments from the night before flickered to life behind Kirov’s eyes. In the middle of this jumbled slide show, Kirov heard again the voice of Serge Bakhturin threatening to kill Gustav Engel with his bare hands, as if an echo of that moment, reverberating lazily across the rooftops of Moscow, had finally reached his ears.

Kirov puzzled over Bakhturin’s words. Why would Serge want to kill Engel? Had the man failed to live up to some part of their bargain? Had Serge not been paid? Or had the traitor himself been betrayed?

It was likely he would never know.

Ahead of him, a soldier plodded up the stairs, weighed down with a heavy pack which was crusted with mud.

Kirov wondered from what battlefield the man had just returned. He had never seen the man before, and thought perhaps he was the son of the old lady who lived on the third floor. But the soldier continued on past the third floor and now Kirov asked himself if it might be one of the lawyers who had maintained an office on the fourth until they were called up by the Army the year before. But he kept going past the fourth floor, too and eventually stopped right outside Kirov’s door.

‘Who are you looking for?’ asked Kirov.

The soldier turned, shrugged off the pack and dropped it on the floor. From his pocket, he fished out a piece of paper. ‘The name they gave me is Major Kirov, Special Operations.’

‘I am Major Kirov.’

The soldier nudged at the pack with the toe of his boot. ‘I have orders to deliver this to you.’

‘But that’s not my pack.’

‘It belongs to someone named Lieutenant Churikova and was salvaged from the wreck of a train that got bombed not long ago on its way to the front. It got sent to the Wrangel barracks here in Moscow. That’s where I work, in the supply depot.’

Kirov thought back to the night he and Pekkala had fetched Churikova from the train station, and how she had complained about not being able to retrieve her rucksack from the transport.

‘The pack arrived along with a load of other equipment which belonged to her battalion,’ continued the soldier. ‘It was all due to be reclaimed and re-issued, since there weren’t any survivors. At least, that’s what we thought. But then we received a message that this lieutenant wasn’t on the train when it got hit. Only her pack was on board. I called headquarters and they gave us this place as her forwarding address.’ Having completed his task, the soldier tramped downstairs and out into the street.

Kirov lifted the rucksack by its canvas straps, brought it inside and dumped it in the middle of the floor. With a sigh, he collapsed into the old chair from the Hotel Metropol and allowed his gaze to drift around the room, as if to reassure himself that everything was still in its proper place. He studied the potted plants on the window sills, the clutter on Pekkala’s desk and the battered brass samovar balanced on the stove. When his focus returned at last to the muddy rucksack on the floor, he realised there was something leaking out of it and into the carpet beneath.

Rising grumpily from his chair, he took hold of the pack and untied the drawstring which held it closed. The leaking was caused by a bottle containing a clear liquid, which he lifted out and set upright on the floor. The bottle had been sealed with a cork, which had then been covered with a coating of red wax. The wax seal had broken and the cork appeared to have been damaged, probably when the soldier dropped it on the floor. Now only half of the bottle’s contents remained. The rest of it had soaked whatever else was in the pack. Kirov touched the liquid, dabbed his fingertips against his tongue and realised it was vodka.

Maybe I will have a drink, he thought to himself. Those were Stalin’s orders, after all, and I’ll call Elizaveta, too. No. It’s too late. I’ll have a drink and then I’ll go to her flat. I’ll bring the bottle. By the time the lieutenant returns, I’ll have another one waiting for her.

Before he left, Kirov decided to empty the contents of the pack on to the floor, in order to give whatever had been soaked a chance to dry. It was a sad little collection — some spare clothes, a small canvas bag containing a toothbrush, nail scissors, and a standard manual of regulations issued to all Red Army officers, whose pages had absorbed much of the spilled vodka. Several pieces of paper had been stuffed between the covers of the manual, which were made of thin cardboard overlaid with green canvas. Kirov shook out the extra sheets of paper, in order to give them a better chance of drying. One of these sheets was a note from the director of the Kremlin Art Museum, Fabian Golyakovsky, granting Lieutenant Churikova access to both the archives and the laboratory of the museum, while the rest were travel passes from the Wrangel barracks, a pink requisition slip for a pair of 6x30 binoculars, and a map of the Moscow Underground.

Kirov poured himself a measure of the vodka, using the brass-framed glasses he and Pekkala normally reserved for tea. He was just about to drink it down in one gulp when he noticed that several ants had emerged from beneath the art museum document and were now crawling across the sheet of paper.

‘That’s all I need,’ he announced, ‘to have an office infested with insects!’ Setting down the glass of vodka, he carefully picked up the paper and went to the window, ready to shake off the ants into the gutter outside. The ants seemed to be multiplying as they swarmed across the page. He was just beginning to wonder whether he ought to sling the whole pack out the window when suddenly he stopped and stared at the paper.

They weren’t ants. They were numbers, materialising on the back side of the page, as if scribbled by an invisible hand. The numbers were appearing only where the vodka had soaked the paper. The rest of the page remained blank.

Baffled, Kirov fetched the bottle, set the page down on his desk and doused the rest of the page with the remaining vodka. After a few seconds, more ghostly numbers began to appear, until the whole back side of the document was covered in what appeared to be some kind of graph. One side of the graph was represented by a small circle, while the other had a symbol which resembled the Cyrillic letter for C or the letter U from the Latin alphabet, but instead of having the tail on the right hand side of the letter, the tail was on the left side.

Half an hour later, with the letter from Fabian Golyakovsky, still damp with vodka, clutched between his fingertips, Kirov arrived at the Kremlin Museum.