Red Moth

‘What treasure?’

‘What treasure?’ asked Stefanov. ‘Where could it possibly be hidden?’

‘There is a secret room under this house‚’ replied Pekkala. ‘On the recommendation of his head of security, the Tsar ordered hiding places built into every residence on the estate.’

‘Hiding places?’

‘He called them “priest holes”, after the ones that were built for Catholics in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The hiding place in this cottage was based on a design used at Rangeley Manor, a house visited by the Tsar during a trip to see his cousin, King George V. The original was built by a Jesuit carpenter named Nicholas Owen, who was later tortured to death on the rack at the Tower of London.’ Pekkala nodded towards the hearth. ‘The entrance is right over there.’

Stefanov stared at the empty stone fireplace. ‘But there’s nowhere to put a hiding place.’

‘So it was made to appear,’ Pekkala replied, ‘but in fact the wall there is twice as thick as any other wall in the house. It contains a narrow stairway that leads down to the hidden room.’

‘What’s it like, this room?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I never went down there, but the Tsar did. He knew I did not like to be confined so, as a challenge, he left behind a bottle of his finest slivovitz, hoping the reward of one of his precious bottles of brandy might lure me down into that tomb.’ Climbing to his feet, Pekkala walked over to the fireplace. Dropping to one knee, he reached up into the chimney. Tucked into a recess in the masonry, he found a metal ring attached to a chain. Pekkala grasped the ring and pulled, hearing the chain rattle somewhere deep inside the chimney. There was a dull clunk in the brickwork at the back of the hearth. He brushed his hand along the bricks until he came to the place where the bricks did not join evenly. With the tips of his fingers, he prised back a small doorway faced with brick‚ which had been set into an iron frame.

Behind him, Stefanov looked on in amazement. ‘Do you think the slivovitz might still be down there?’

‘Find out for yourself‚’ replied Pekkala. ‘But be quick. They could be here any minute.’

Stefanov struck a match and‚ holding it out in front of him‚ made his way down into the blackness of the priest hole. The wavering flame illuminated a flight of ten steps hewn into the khaki-coloured rock. At the base of the steps, a chamber opened out into the darkness.

At the sight of it, Pekkala felt his throat tighten. The blood began pulsing in his temples.

Moving away from the priest hole, Pekkala walked over to the window and peered through the gaps in the wooden shutters. As he looked out at the pathway which ran beside the cottage, a movement outside caught his eye. A figure walked slowly down the path. From the silhouette, he could tell it was a German soldier, his rifle unshouldered and held at the ready.

Pekkala’s heart slammed into his chest. Guessing that the soldier was likely part of a patrol and that they might decide to take a look inside the cottage, he ducked into the fireplace and slithered into the entrance of the priest hole‚ struggling against the claustrophobia which sent bile climbing into the back of his throat.

The glow of Stefanov’s match flickered at the bottom of the stairs. As Pekkala reached out to close the door of the priest hole, he could hear someone in hobnailed boots stepping into the house by the same entrance he had used. At that same moment Stefanov appeared from the shadows below, a dusty bottle gripped in his hand. He was smiling, but one look at the expression on Pekkala’s face told him that something had gone very wrong. With one sharp breath he extinguished the match and the priest hole was plunged into darkness.

Lying on his stomach, with his legs braced against the stone steps, Pekkala drew the Webley revolver from its holster. Although the door was closed, a tiny gap left between the brickwork and the floor, presumably for ventilation, showed as a faint, velvety blue line of half-light. Even with his head pressed to the floor, Pekkala could barely see out from under the gap, but he could make out the shadowy form of a man moving around the room. He heard the cautious pacing of boots upon the wooden floor. Then a second shadow appeared and after that a third.

Without a word spoken between them, the men searched the cottage, moving like ghosts from room to room. Then they met back in front of the fireplace.

‘Empty,’ said one of the soldiers.

One man paused to light a cigarette‚ flicking the dead match into the fireplace.

Pekkala let his breath trail out with relief, knowing that the patrol would now be moving on. A second later, however, he heard the voice of Gustav Engel.

‘Have you searched the entire building?’ snapped the professor.

And then he heard another voice. It was Polina Churikova‚ and the words she spoke made Pekkala’s blood run cold.

‘Pekkala told me they’d be waiting here,’ she said. ‘They have to be here.’

‘Maybe they were,’ said a soldier, ‘but there’s no sign of them now.’

‘You must find them, Professor,’ Churikova pleaded. ‘You can’t allow them to get back behind the Russian lines.’

As the words sank in, Pekkala realised that he had been betrayed.

‘Don’t worry,’ Engel reassured her. ‘They can’t have gone far. You’ll see. We’ll have them soon enough.’

‘The amber won’t be safe until Pekkala is dead.’

‘You worry too much, Polina,’ Engel tried to soothe her. ‘He is only one man, after all, with a single Russian soldier to command. We have killed a million of them already and we will kill ten million more before this war is done. Put your mind at rest. The amber is safe, thanks to you. To have come up with the solution for reattaching the glue in the panels was nothing short of brilliant.’

‘As soon as I heard about the problem from Semykin,’ she explained, ‘I felt certain that it could be solved. I began running my own experiments in the laboratory of the Kremlin Museum.’

‘Right under their noses!’ laughed Engel. ‘You still haven’t told me how you managed that.’

‘I discovered that modern glue would remain largely unaffected by temperature, due to chemicals used in its manufacture which didn’t exist two centuries ago. But the glue back then was primarily animal gelatine, and I realised that if it was possible to raise the temperature in the Amber Room by twenty degrees or more, as well as sharply increasing the level of humidity, the gelatine would soften rapidly, in spite of its age. This would allow the amber to re-adhere to the panels, which can then be safely transported out of Russia.’

‘The process of heating the room has already begun. I have commandeered the engine block heaters from every vehicle parked on this estate. The room has been sealed and water is boiling on three separate field-kitchen stoves. If your figures are correct, by this time tomorrow, the room will be on its way to Konigsberg. The truck is being readied now. The cases I designed for moving the panels have been unloaded and are waiting for their cargo. Special passage documents will be signed within the hour by Field Marshal von Leeb, allowing us unlimited access to fuel and the right to commandeer any mode of transport we see fit. In two days, we will be in Wilno, far beyond the gaze of this Emerald Eye. In four days, Polina, we will dine together in the great hall of Konigsberg Castle, surrounded by the Eighth Wonder of the World. And in a few years, when the Linz Museum has been completed and the Amber Room is there on permanent display, you and I will not have been forgotten as the ones who made it possible. That is the promise I made to you when we first met, and I intend to keep it.’

In spite of Engel’s attempts to calm Churikova, her voice was still riddled with panic. ‘I told you, Pekkala has orders to destroy the room if we attempt to move it. He has explosives. .’

‘The room is guarded on all sides. There is no way he can get to it now. I swear it, Polina. Do you trust me?’

‘Yes, of course. I know that the amber is safe now. It’s just that when I heard that the painting had been captured, I was afraid this day might never come.’

‘I wish I could have seen it,’ remarked Engel. ‘The red moth!’

‘When I volunteered to find you, I was terrified that Stalin would say no.’

‘How could he? Pekkala needed you to point me out. And after you gave them the Ferdinand code, you had them eating out of your hand.’

‘When you delivered the cipher to me, I was afraid you had gone mad, but I see now that it was a sure way of convincing them.’

‘The Ferdinand code had become obsolete. Thanks to the Enigma Machine, which is now in use throughout the German military, the information you gave them was practically useless.’

‘Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer,’ said a soldier. ‘The cavalry troop is here, as you requested. An officer is outside, waiting for your orders.’

‘Send him in,’ replied Engel.

A man entered the room. There was a crash of heels coming together.

‘They are on foot,’ said Engel. ‘They can’t have gone far.’

‘How many of them are there?’ asked the cavalryman.

‘Two.’

‘Two! Ostubaf, I have brought a whole troop with me. That’s more than thirty riders! If we are only going after a couple of Russians, I can dismiss half of my men here and now.’

‘You may dismiss them,’ Engel replied calmly, ‘after the two men have been caught. And only one of them is Russian. The other is a Finn named Pekkala.’

‘A Finn,’ muttered the cavalryman. ‘Then I may need the whole troop, after all.’

The floorboards creaked as the soldiers departed from the cottage.

‘Come,’ Engel said to Churikova, as the two of them walked out into the night. ‘Let us go back to the palace, and watch your genius at work.’

For a moment longer, Pekkala lay on the stone floor, his mind in a turmoil of anger and confusion at the depth of Churikova’s treachery.

‘Are they gone?’ whispered Stefanov, calling from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Yes,’ Pekkala answered. ‘How much did you hear?’

‘Every word, Inspector. There’s a ventilation shaft down here, which leads up beneath the floor. They were standing right above me.’

Cautiously, the two men crept out into the front room of the cottage.

‘You were right,’ said Stefanov.

‘No,’ muttered Pekkala. ‘If I’d been right, Engel would be in our custody by now, instead of hunting us with men on horseback as if we were a couple of foxes.’

‘Not about that. About this.’ Stefanov was holding up a bottle. ‘It was just where you said it would be.’

Pekkala nodded, lost in thought.

‘What will we do now, Inspector?’ asked Stefanov, the bottle still clutched in his fist.

‘I will carry out my orders.’

Stefanov tried to reason with Pekkala. ‘You heard him, Inspector. The room is guarded on all sides. They’d shoot us down before we even came close. If we leave now, there’s still a chance that we can get back to our lines before the cavalry pick up our trail.’

‘I have no choice,’ Pekkala told him. ‘Do you know what will happen to me if I return to Moscow empty-handed?’

‘No,’ admitted Stefanov, ‘but I can guess.’

‘And if I don’t get the job done,’ Pekkala continued, ‘Stalin will send someone else. And another and another until his wishes are fulfilled. It’s not the amber that is irreplaceable, Stefanov, it’s the lives that will be lost if I fail.’ Pekkala knew as he spoke how slim the chances were of his success, but they were still greater than the odds of his surviving Stalin’s wrath.

Stefanov knew that there was no point in arguing with Pekkala. He wondered if he had been wrong even to try. There seemed a clear and brutal symmetry that the man who, if legends were to be believed, had been conjured from the walls of that room should be the one who would consign it to oblivion.

‘I must move quickly,’ said Pekkala. ‘By tomorrow, those panels will be in a truck bound for Wilno. This will be my only chance to prevent that from happening. The last place they will expect me to head for is the palace. With any luck, those riders are already far from Tsarskoye Selo. Your orders, Stefanov, are to make your way back to our lines. It’s too dangerous for you to wait here any longer, and there is nothing more that you can do to help.’

‘There may be one thing,’ replied Stefanov.

‘And what is that, Rifleman?’

‘I know the road they’ll take to get to Wilno. My father and I travelled along it every weekend in the summer, to sell the vegetables he grew in his spare time. The road passes through the forest of Murom, which is uninhabited. The locals wouldn’t go there, even to hunt‚ on account of the bogs which can swallow a man without trace.’

‘Is there somewhere on that road where those trucks can be stopped?’

‘I think so. Yes. At the far side of the forest, just where the fields begin again, the road passes over a bridge. It is a small bridge, made of wooden beams, which passes over a stream that only flows there in the spring. The rest of the year, it is dry.’

‘And if I follow that road, how long will it take me to get there?’

‘If you stay on the road, you might not get there in time,’ Stefanov replied, ‘but if we cut through the forest, I can get us there by morning.’

‘I am not asking you to bring me there. You said yourself that it’s too dangerous. You’re free to go, Stefanov.’

In the moment that followed, Stefanov was surprised to hear coming from his mouth the same words spoken by his father on that cold night back in March of 1917. ‘I would rather help you now than spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have and didn’t.’

‘Very well.’ Pekkala nodded at the dusty old bottle in Stefanov’s hand. ‘Then the least I can do is offer you a drink.’

Stefanov opened the slivovitz and, as they passed it back and forth, the brandy spread like wings of fire in their chests.