Red Moth by Sam Eastland Page A

no time procuring better treatment for his incarcerated brother.
    Although Pekkala’s investigation put a stop to the black-market wagons, at least temporarily, he had made a permanent enemy of the People’s Commissar of State Railways, who would not soon forget the sight of his brother behind bars.

How exactly did you
     
     
    ‘How exactly did you get on the wrong side of this man?’ asked Kirov.
    ‘Bakhturin had a painting,’ explained Semykin, ‘which he had personally removed from the house of a railway official in Poland after the invasion of 1939. It was a painting by the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianski. He showed me a photograph of it and asked if I would sell it for him. I agreed, on condition that he obtained papers which legalised his ownership of the painting. While these were being drawn up by the Department of Cultural Affairs, I contacted someone I thought would be interested, a government minister named Osipov. Osipov was so taken with the picture I showed him that we agreed on a price before the painting had even touched our hands. When I told Bakhturin what I thought I could get for the painting, he was very pleased. But when the painting arrived . . .’ His voice trailed off.
    ‘What?’ demanded Kirov. ‘What happened? Was it a fake?’
    ‘Technically, it was a copy. Not a fake.’
    ‘What’s the difference?’
    ‘Wyspianski always signed his work, but he had the eccentricity of signing the back, not the front. So when I looked at the photo and saw that the work was not signed, that did not trouble me, because I assumed that the work had been signed on the back.’
    ‘But it wasn’t signed?’ asked Kirov.
    Semykin shook his head. ‘Someone had simply made a copy of a Wyspianski painting. He often made several paintings based on the same subject matter and I had assumed this was simply part of a series. Whoever this artist was, he or she wasn’t trying to fool anybody. If they had been creating a forgery, they would have put Wyspianski’s name on the back.’
    ‘If they had done that, would you still have known it was a fake?’
    ‘Of course!’ Semykin replied indignantly. ‘To tell which art is real and which is not, that’s what I have been put on earth to do.’
    ‘That much the Inspector did tell me,’ said Kirov.
    Semykin gave a snort of satisfaction. ‘Why else would you be here? And why else would I be here if not because I informed Bakhturin that his painting was a copy and that I would have to renegotiate with Osipov?’
    ‘And did you renegotiate?’
    ‘Before I had the chance an old colleague of mine, Professor Urbaniak‚ summoned me to the Catherine Palace. The poor man had been given the impossible task of packing away the hundreds of art works on display there before the Germans arrived. He knew it couldn’t be done in the time he had been given, so he asked me to help him prioritise which treasures should be transported first. The rest, we knew, might have to be left behind. It was a grim task, I assure you, like being forced to choose which of your friends should live and which of them should die.’
    ‘And when you returned from the palace,’ asked Kirov, ‘what happened with the Wyspianski painting?’
    ‘I had been hoping that Bakhturin might decide to forget the whole thing, but the commissar had other ideas. He ordered me to keep my mouth shut about the Wyspianski being a copy. He told me to sell it to Osipov as authentic, even to fake Wyspianski’s signature on the back if I thought that would bring in the money.’
    ‘And you refused?’
    ‘Naturally. And then Bakhturin had me arrested.’
    ‘On what charge?’ demanded Kirov.
    ‘Trying to sell forged works of art.’
    ‘But you were trying not to sell it!’
    ‘A subtlety which was lost upon the court, their minds no doubt swayed by the fact that the man who brought charges against me was a Senior People’s Commissar.’
    ‘You are lucky to be alive,’ said Kirov. ‘How long will you