The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland

almost reached the exit when he felt something nudge him in the back.
    Pekkala spun around.
    The man in the Homburg hat was standing there. He was holding a gun in his right hand. It was a poorly made automatic pistol, of a type manufactured in Bulgaria, which often showed up at crime scenes, since it was cheap and easy to purchase on the black market.
    ‘Are you who I think you are?’ asked the man.
    Before Pekkala could come up with a reply, he heard a loud clapping sound.
    Sparks erupted from the cylinder of the gun. The air became hazy with smoke.
    Pekkala realised he must have been shot, but he felt neither the impact of the bullet, nor the burning, stinging pain which, he knew, would quickly change to a numbness radiating out through his whole body. Astonishingly, he felt nothing at all.
    The man was staring at him.
    Only then did Pekkala notice that everything around him had come to a standstill. There were people everywhere, porters, shop pers with string bags, vendors behind their barricades of produce. And all of them were staring at him.
    ‘Why?’ he asked the man.
    There was no reply. A look of terror spread across the man’s face. He set the gun against his own temple and pulled the trigger.
    With the sound of that gunshot still ringing in Pekkala’s ears, the man fell in a heap on to the ground.
    Then, where there had been silence only a second before, a wall of noise surrounded him. He heard the guttural cries of panicked men, shouting useless commands. A woman grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘It’s Pekkala!’ she shrieked. ‘They’ve killed the Emerald Eye!’
    Carefully, Pekkala began to undo his coat. The act of unfas tening the buttons felt suddenly unfamiliar, as if this was the first time he had ever done such a thing. He opened his coat, then his waistcoat and finally his shirt. He prepared himself for the sight of the wound, the terrible whiteness of punctured flesh, the pulsing flow of blood from an arterial break. But the skin was smooth and unbroken. Not trusting his eyes, Pekkala ran his hands over his chest, certain that the wound must be there.
    ‘He’s not hurt!’ shouted a porter. ‘The bullet did not even touch him.’
    ‘But I saw it!’ shouted the woman who had grabbed Pekkala’s shoulders.
    ‘There is no way he could have missed!’ said the porter.
    ‘Perhaps the gun wasn’t working!’ said another man, a fish monger in an apron splashed with guts and scales. He bent down and picked up the weapon.
    ‘Of course it works!’ The porter gestured at the dead man. ‘There is the proof!’
    Around the head of the corpse grew a halo of blood. The Homburg lay upturned beside him, like a bird’s nest knocked out of a tree. Pekkala’s eyes fixed on the tiny bow of silk used to join the two ends of the leather sweatband.
    ‘Let me see that,’ the porter tried to take the gun from the fishmonger.
    ‘Be careful!’ snapped the fishmonger.
    As their fingers closed on the gun, it went off. The bullet smacked into a pyramid of potatoes.
    The two men yelped and dropped the gun.
    ‘Enough!’ growled Pekkala.
    They stared at him with bulging eyes, as if he were a statue come to life.
    Pekkala picked up the gun and put it in his pocket. ‘Go find me the police,’ he said quietly.
    The two men, released from his freezing stare, scattered in opposite directions.
    Later that night, having made his report to the Petrograd police, Pekkala found himself in the Tsar’s study.
    The Tsar sat behind his desk. He had been going through papers all evening reading by the light of a candle set into a bronze holder in the shape of a croaking frog. He insisted on reading all official documents himself and used a blue pencil to make notes in the margin. It slowed down the process by which any matters of the state could be accomplished, but the Tsar pre ferred to handle these things personally. Now he had set aside his documents. He rested his elbows on the desk and settled his chin upon his