“It’s just as Kolchak told you,” said Stalin. “We knew all along that the Tsar had given him the task of removing the gold to a secure location, but Kolchak gave us absolutely nothing. It is almost incredible, considering what we put him through.” He opened up the red box of Markovs, but this time he did not offer one to Pekkala.

“But how long had Kolchak been here?” Pekkala asked.

Stalin picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “Since long before we got our hands on you, Inspector.”

“Then why did you want his name from me? Everything you did”-he tried to stop his voice from cracking-“it served no purpose at all.”

“It depends on how you look at it,” replied Stalin. “You see, it is useful for us to know the point at which men like yourself can be broken. And it is equally important to know that there are others, men like Kolchak, who cannot be broken at all. Personally, what gives me the greatest satisfaction is that now you know what kind of man you are.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the floor. “The kind who can be broken.”

Pekkala stared in disbelief at Stalin, whose face appeared and disappeared in cobras of tobacco smoke. “Go ahead,” he whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“Go ahead. Shoot me.”

“Oh, no.” Stalin drummed his fingers on the briefcase which contained the relics of Pekkala’s life. “That would simply be a waste. Someday we may need the Emerald Eye again. Until then, we will send you to a place where we can find you if we need you.”

Six hours later, Pekkala climbed aboard a train bound for Siberia.

43

ALEXEI STARED IN DISBELIEF. “CONSIDERING ALL THAT MY FAMILY HAS done for you, this is how you choose to repay us?”

“I am sorry, Excellency,” said Pekkala. “I am telling you the truth. We are in danger here.”

“I see no danger,” said Alexei, rising to his feet. “All I see is a man I once thought I could count on, no matter what.”

44

JUST BEFORE SUNRISE, KIROV WANDERED INTO THE KITCHEN. THE imprint of a tunic button, with its hammer and sickle design, was molded into his cheek where he had slept upon it. “I should have taken over from you hours ago,” he said. “Why did you let me sleep?”

Pekkala barely seemed to notice Kirov. He stared at the Webley, lying on the table in front of him.

“When do we leave for Moscow?” Kirov asked.

“We don’t,” replied Pekkala. He explained what had happened in the night.

“If he won’t go willingly,” said Kirov, “I have the authority to arrest him. We’ll take him to Moscow in handcuffs if we have to.”

“No,” said Pekkala. “He has been living in fear for so long now that he has forgotten how it is to live any other way. He has fastened onto the idea of his father’s gold as the only way he can protect himself. There’s no point trying to force him into changing his mind. I just need time to reason with him.”

“We need to leave now,” protested Kirov. “It’s for his own good.”

“Putting a man in handcuffs and telling him you’re doing him a favor is not going to convince him. He must go willingly or he might do something rash. He might try to escape, in which case he could get hurt, and with his hemophilia, any injury might prove life-threatening. He might even try to hurt himself. Even if we did get him to Moscow, he might refuse to accept the amnesty, in which case they would execute him just to save themselves the embarrassment.”

Kirov sighed. “Too bad we can’t uproot the whole city of Moscow and bring it here. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about transporting him.”

Pekkala stood abruptly. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, and dashed out into the courtyard.

Kirov went to the doorway, bewildered. “What’s not a bad idea?”

Pekkala grabbed the bicycle leaning up against the wall. Tendrils of dried pond weed still clung to the spokes.

“What did I say?” Kirov asked.

“If we can’t bring him to Moscow, we can bring Moscow to him. I’ll be back in one hour,” Pekkala said, mounting the bicycle.

“Remember, that thing doesn’t have any brakes,” Kirov warned, “and the back tire is flat, as well!”

Pekkala wobbled out into the street, on his way to Kropotkin’s office. His plan was to put in a call to the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow and instruct them to send out a platoon of guards to ensure the safety of the Tsarevich. Even if the guards left at once, he estimated that it would take several days for them to arrive. In the meantime, they would keep Alexei hidden in the Ipatiev house with as many police as Kropotkin could spare stationed outside. Pekkala would use the days between now and then to give the Tsarevich a chance to talk, and for Pekkala to regain his trust. By the time the escort arrived from Moscow, Alexei would be ready to go with them.

Pekkala pedaled as fast as he could. Without brakes, when he came to corners, he dragged his toes over the cobblestones in an attempt to slow down. Racing down narrow side streets, his senses filled with the tar-like smell of laundry soap, of ashes scraped from stove gratings and smoky tea brewed up in samovars lingering in the damp morning air. In picket-fenced gardens, he glimpsed bony stands of white birch, their coin-shaped leaves flickering silver to green and back to silver like sequins on a woman’s party dress.

He was so preoccupied that he did not notice the narrow road ended in a T. There was no chance to take the corner, or even to slow down, and there, spreading out in front of him as he emerged from the side street, was the familiar sapphire blue expanse of the duck pond.

Pekkala leaned hard on the handlebars. Jamming one heel into the ground, he skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, barely an arm’s length from the water.

When the dust settled, Pekkala saw a woman, standing among the reeds on the opposite bank of the pond. She held a large basket, which was filled with gray teardrop-shaped husks. She wore a red headscarf, a dark blue shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a brown ankle-length dress whose hem was slick with mud. The woman stared at him. She had an oval face with eyebrows darker than her streaked blond hair.

“My bicycle,” explained Pekkala. “No brakes.”

She nodded without sympathy.

There was something familiar about the woman, but Pekkala could not place her. So much for perfect memory, he thought. “Excuse me,” he asked her, “but do I know you?”

“I don’t know you,” replied the woman. She went back to picking through the reeds.

Yellow monarch butterflies flew around her, their bobbing movements like those of paper cutouts dangled from pieces of thread.

“What are you gathering?”

“Milkweed,” the woman answered.

“What for?”

“They pack it into life jackets. I get good money for this.” She held up one of the gray husks and crushed it in her fist. Feathery white seeds, light as a puff of smoke, drifted out across the water.

In that instant, he remembered her. “Katamidze!” he shouted.

Her face turned red. “What about him?”

“The photograph.” In the box of reject pictures, Pekkala had seen her just as she was now, by the side of this pond, that silver cloud like the ghostly blur of a face in the moment it was captured on film.

“That was a long time ago, and he said they were purely artistic.”

“Well, it certainly had a-” He thought about the pink splotched cheeks of the nuns. “A certain quality.”

“It wasn’t my idea to pose naked.”

Pekkala breathed in sharply. “Naked?”

“That old man Mayakovsky bought the pictures, every one of them. Then he started selling them off to the soldiers. Reds when they were here, Whites when they marched in. Mayakovsky didn’t care, as long as they paid. Maybe you bought one.”

“No.” Pekkala tried to reassure her. “I only heard about them.”