Red Moth by Sam Eastland

you heard what the lieutenant said. Without the codex, deciphering the map becomes impossible.’
    ‘ Virtually impossible. That is what she said.’
    With a sigh, Kirov turned down a potholed street which ran beside the Dorogomilovsky market and began the familiar bumpy ride towards their office.
    It was after midnight. The market stalls were empty. A few tattered awnings flapped in the cold, damp breeze. In the distance, the pale sabres of searchlights from anti-aircraft batteries stationed in the Kuskovo Park scratched restlessly against the night sky.
    Minutes later, they were trudging up the stairs to the fifth floor, the soles of their boots rasping against the worn wooden steps.
    Once inside the office, Kirov turned on the light switch but nothing happened.
    Pekkala waited in the hallway, the painting tucked under his arm, listening to the metronomic click as Kirov flipped the switch impatiently back and forth. ‘Must be our turn for a black-out,’ he grumbled.
    There had been several of these in the past weeks, mostly at night, rolling like waves of darkness across the city. Initially, the Moscow authorities denied the existence of any black-outs. These denials only led to speculation that these electricity failures were the work of German spies. Since then, the official line had been changed to assure the people of Moscow that all black-outs were deliberate, but nobody believed that, either.
    While Kirov lit an oil lamp, Pekkala cleared away every scrap of paper on the large notice board which covered one wall of their office, leaving behind a constellation of drawing pins in the cork backing.
    Then Pekkala cleared everything off his desk except for the painting, the oil lamp and a roll of waxy baker’s parchment which Kirov sometimes used for baking piroshky .
    Kirov lit a fire in the old iron stove in the corner of their office and lit the samovar to boil water for tea. For a while, the only sound was of the kindling, spitting as it burned inside the stove.
    Hunched over his desk, Pekkala laid a piece of parchment paper over the canvas. Then, using a pencil, he traced every line on the painting, including the tree branches in the background and the flecks of colour which had been daubed across the wings of the moth. He handed the tracing to Kirov. ‘Pin this on the wall,’ he said.
    After that, Pekkala made a tracing only of the background, leaving the double-heart shape of the moth as a blank in the centre of the picture. This, too, went up on the wall.
    Next, Pekkala traced only the lines within the wings of the moth. ‘Pin this.’
    Then he traced only the flecks and followed it with a sketch containing just the horizontal lines, and another with only verticals. All of these, he pinned up on the wall. Finally, when Pekkala could think of no other way of breaking down the framework of the picture, he stood back and surveyed the now-crowded cork board. The strange, skeletal images seemed to flutter through the air, brought to life by the motion of the oil lamp’s flame.
    ‘Do any of those look like a map to you?’ he asked Kirov, who had retreated to the chair behind his desk and now sat with his heels up on the blotter.
    ‘Honestly? No.’
    Behind him, faint breaths of steam seeped from the brass samovar’s spout, as if it too were considering the situation.
    Pekkala went over to the bookcase, from which he retrieved a folded map of the entire country. ‘Is this the only one we’ve got?’
    ‘We’d have room for more if you would get rid of those railway timetables,’ replied Kirov.
    It was true, the twenty-four volumes did take up half the shelf, but Pekkala chose to ignore the comment. He spent a minute unravelling the map which, like some complicated piece of origami, at first resisted all attempts at being unfolded. Having finally completed the task, Pekkala laid the chart on the floor and stood in the middle of it like a giant, one foot in the Ukraine and the other in Siberia, peering down at