Kirov smiled. “Not every rule, Inspector. You once told me to do only what I can live with. That was what you did back at the prison, and it is what I’m doing now. Let’s not speak of reports. Besides, if Nagorski’s killer is still out there, there is plenty of work to be done.”
“I agree.” Pekkala walked to the window and looked out over the rooftops of the city. The gray slates gleamed like copper in the evening sunlight. “They may have their confession, but they don’t have the truth. Not yet.” Then he breathed in and sighed, and his breath bloomed gray against the glass. “Thank you, Kirov.”
“And Major Lysenkova won’t be taking all the credit.” Kirov folded his arms and slumped in his chair. “What a bitch.”
“Because she happened to take advantage of you more effectively than you took advantage of her?”
“It’s not like that!” protested Kirov. “I was really beginning to like her!”
“Then she really did take advantage of you,” said Pekkala.
“I don’t see how you can be so jovial,” huffed Kirov. “I almost shot you today.”
“But you didn’t, and that is reason enough to celebrate.” Pekkala slid open a drawer of his desk, hauling out a strangely rounded bottle wrapped in wicker and plugged with a cork. It contained his supply of plum brandy, which he obtained in small quantities from a lovesick Ukrainian in the Sukharevka market. But as with many things in that market, he traded rather than paid. The Ukrainian had a girlfriend in Finland. He had met her when he worked on a trading ship in the Baltic. She wrote to him in her native language and Pekkala translated the letters in exchange. Then, while the Ukrainian poured out his heart, Pekkala wrote a translation for the Finnish girl. For this, and for his discretion, he received half a liter every month.
“The Slivovitz!” exclaimed Kirov. “Now that’s more like it!” He picked two glasses off the shelf, blew the dust out, and set them down before Pekkala.
Into each glass Pekkala poured the greenish-yellow liquid. Then he slid one over to Kirov.
In a toast, they raised their glasses to the level of their foreheads.
As he drank, a taste of plums blossomed softly in Pekkala’s head, filling his mind with the ripe fruit’s dusty purpleness. “You know,” he said, after the fire had left his breath, “this was the only liquor the Tsar would touch.”
“It seems unpatriotic,” replied Kirov, his voice gone hoarse from the drink, “to be Russian and not to like a drop of vodka now and then.”
“He had his reasons,” said Pekkala, and decided to leave it at that.
Pekkala stood out in the wide expanse of the Alexander Park.
It was an evening in late May. The days had grown longer, and the sky remained light long after the sun had gone down.
The pink and white petals of the dogwood trees had fallen, replaced by shiny, lime-green leaves. Summer did not come gradually to this place. Instead, it seemed to explode across the landscape.
After a long day in the city of Petrograd, Pekkala would finish his supper and walk out on the grounds of the estate. He rarely encountered anyone else this time of night, but now he saw a rider coming towards him. The horse ambled lazily, its reins held slack, the rider slouched in his saddle. He knew instantly from the man’s silhouette that it was the Tsar. His narrow shoulders. The way he held his head, as if the joints of his neck were too tight.
At last, the Tsar came up alongside him. “What brings you out here, Pekkala?”
“I often walk in the evenings.”
“I could get you a horse, you know,” said the Tsar.
And then the two men laughed quietly, remembering that it was a matter of a horse which had first brought them together. In the course of Pekkala’s training with the Finnish Regiment, he had been ordered to jump his horse over a barricade on which the drill instructor had laced a coil of barbed wire. By the time the exercise was halfway through, most of the animals were bleeding from cuts to their legs and bellies. Blood, bright as rubies, speckled the sawdust floor. When Pekkala refused to jump his horse, the drill instructor first threatened, then humiliated him, and finally attempted to reason with him. Pekkala had known before he said a word that a refusal to carry out an order would mean being thrown out of the cadets. He would be on the next train home to Finland. But it was at this point that the sergeant and cadets realized they were being watched. The Tsar had been standing in the shadows.
Later, when Pekkala led his horse back to the stables, the Tsar was waiting for him. One hour later, he had been transferred out of the Finnish Regiment and into a special course of study with the Imperial Police, the State Police, and the Okhrana. Two years and two months from that day when he led his horse out of the ring, Pekkala pinned on the badge of the Emerald Eye. Since that time, he had always preferred, whenever possible, to travel on his own two feet.
That spring evening, the Tsar removed a pewter flask from the pocket of his tunic, unscrewed the cap, took a drink, and handed the flask to Pekkala.
That was the first time he ever tasted Slivovitz. The aftertaste reminded him of a liquor his mother used to make from a distillation of cloudberries, which she gathered in the forest near their home. They were not easy to find. Cloudberries did not always grow in the same place year after year. Instead, they sprouted unexpectedly, and for most people, finding them was so much a matter of chance that they often did not bother. But Pekkala’s mother always seemed to know from one glance at the undergrowth exactly where cloudberries would be growing. How she knew this was as much a mystery to Pekkala as the Tsar’s reasons for making him into the Emerald Eye.
“It is my wedding anniversary tomorrow,” remarked the Tsar.
“Congratulations, Majesty,” replied Pekkala. “Do you have plans to mark the occasion?”
“That is not a day I celebrate,” said the Tsar.
Pekkala did not have to ask why. On the day of the Tsar’s coronation in May 1896, the Tsar and Tsarina sat for five hours on gold and ivory thrones while the names of his dominion were read out—Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Poland, Bulgaria, Finland. Finally, after he had been proclaimed The Lord and Judge of Russia, bells rang out across the city and cannon fire echoed in the sky.
During this time, a crowd of half a million had gathered on the outskirts of the city, at a military staging area known as Khodynka field, with a promise of free food, beer, and souvenir mugs. When a rumor spread that the beer was running out, the crowd surged forward. More than a thousand people—some said as many as three thousand—were trampled to death in the panic.
For hours afterwards, carts loaded with bodies raced through the streets of Moscow, while their drivers searched for places where the dead could be kept out of sight until the wedding cortege had passed. In the confusion, some of those carts, with the legs and arms of the dead lolling out from under their tarpaulin covers, found themselves both ahead of and behind the royal procession.
“That afternoon,” the Tsar told Pekkala, “before the wedding ceremony began, I drank a toast to the crowd on Khodynka field. That’s the last time I ever touched vodka.” Now the Tsar smiled, trying to forget. He raised the flask. “So what do you think of my alternative? I have it sent to me from Belgrade. I own some orchards there.”
“I like it well enough, Majesty.”
“Well enough,” repeated the Tsar, and he took another drink.
“It wasn’t your fault, Majesty,” said Pekkala, “what happened on that field.”
The Tsar breathed in sharply. “Wasn’t it? I have never been sure about that.”
“Some things just happen.”
“I know that.”
But Pekkala could tell he was lying.
“The trouble is,” continued the Tsar, “that either I am placed here by God to be the ruler of this land, in which case the day of my wedding is proof that we are living out the will of the Almighty, or else”—he paused—“or else that is not so. Do you have any idea how much I would like to believe you are right—that those people died simply because of an accident? They haunt me. I cannot get away from their faces. But if I believe it
