Shadow Pass by Sam Eastland

of the brown-eyed woman.
    She wheeled. “What is it?” she cried, instantly afraid. “What do you want?”
    Pekkala jerked his hand away as if he’d just been shocked. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I thought you were somebody else.”
    Kirov was walking towards them.
    Pekkala swallowed, barely able to speak. “I’m so sorry,” he told her.
    “Who did you think I was?” she asked.
    Kirov came to a stop beside them. “Excuse us, ladies,” he said cheerfully. “We were just going in the opposite direction.”
    “Well, I hope you find who you are looking for,” the woman told Pekkala.
    Then she and her friend walked on down the street, while Kirov and Pekkala returned to the car.
    “You didn’t have to come after me like that,” said Pekkala.“I’m perfectly capable of getting myself out of embarrassing situations.”
    “Not as capable as you are of getting into them,” replied Kirov. “How many times are you going to go galloping after strange women?”
    “I thought it was …”
    “I know who you thought it was. And I also know as well as you do that she’s not in Moscow. She’s not even in the country! And even if she was here, right in front of you, it wouldn’t matter, because she has another life now. Or have you forgotten all that?”
    “No,” sighed Pekkala, “I have not forgotten.”
    “Come on, Inspector, let’s go have a look at this tank. Maybe they will let us take one home.”
    “We wouldn’t have to worry about someone taking our parking spot,” said Pekkala, as he climbed into the rear seat of the Emka. “We’d just park on top of them.”
    As Kirov pulled out into the stream of cars, he did not see Pekkala look back at the empty road where he had stood with the women, as if to see some ghost of his old self among the shadows.
    Her name was Ilya Simonova. She had been a teacher at the Tsarskoye primary school, just outside the grounds of the Tsar’s estate. Most of the Palace staff sent their children to the Tsarskoye school, and Ilya often led groups of students on walks across the Catherine and Alexander parks. That was how Pekkala had met her: at a garden party to mark the beginning of the new school year. He had not actually gone to the party, but saw it on his way home from the station. He stopped at the wall of the school and looked in.
    Of that moment in time, Pekkala had no recollection of anything else except the sight of her, standing just outside a white marquee set up for the occasion. She was wearing a pale green dress.She did not have a hat, so he could see her face quite clearly—high cheekbones and eyes a dusty blue.
    At first he thought he must know her from somewhere before. Something in his mind made her seem familiar to him. But that wasn’t it. And whatever it was, this sudden lurching of his senses towards something it couldn’t explain, it stopped him in his tracks and held him there. The next thing he knew, a woman on the other side of the wall had come up and asked him if he was looking for somebody. She was tall and dignified, her gray hair knotted at the back.
    “Who is that?” Pekkala had asked, nodding towards the young woman in the green dress.
    “That’s the new teacher, Ilya Simonova. I am the headmistress, Rada Obolenskaya. And you are the Tsar’s new detective.”
    “Inspector Pekkala.” He bowed his head in greeting.
    “Would you like me to introduce you, Inspector?”
    “Yes!” Pekkala blurted out. “I just … she looks like someone I know. At least, I think she does.”
    “I see,” said Madame Obolenskaya.
    “I might be wrong,” explained Pekkala.
    “I don’t suppose you are,” she replied.
    He proposed to Ilya Simonova exactly one year later, down on his knees in the same schoolyard where they first met.
    A date was set, but they were never married. They never got the chance. Instead, on the eve of the Revolution, Ilya boarded the last train heading west. It was bound for Paris, where Pekkala promised to meet