It seemed that Karl hadn’t been listening to what Särg said at all.
“Now I remember where I have seen you before,” he said. It’s nice when a person has something other than work and family in his life. For Särg this was his stamp collection.
He first got involved in this hobby some years earlier, and quite by chance. An international criminal network had been using rare postage stamps to move money across the border. The stamps were almost impossible to discover in customs checks, but it was subsequently not too difficult to turn them back into money using well-established channels. Since Särg was known for being the best amongst his colleagues at memorising large amounts of information, and for actually enjoying it too, he was given the assignment of infiltrating the stamp-collecting community. The first thing that came to Särg’s mind was a crime novel by the Polish writer Andrzej Piwowarczyk, which he’d read several times at university, called The Open Window, in which one captain Gleb chased a criminal who was operating amongst a group of philatelists. The very first time he read the book Särg had felt an urge to start a stamp album, but he couldn’t allow himself such an expensive hobby while he was studying. Things were different now though: the security services allocated him some money for the purpose, and he was also given a couple of confiscated stamp collections to use. He was able to put together a few items from these collections to start his own, which meant that he would be taken seriously at the club which met at the Teacher’s House and among those men who gathered under the arch beside the stamp shop at the Pärnu road end of Lauristin Street (now Roosikrantsi Street). From then on Särg seriously caught the stamp-collecting bug. The first things he made sure to get were the Zumstein and Yvert et Tellier catalogues which were gathering dust in the windows of the second-hand bookshop on Mündi Street so that he could establish the overall value of his collection. Then he bought a number of full series from the stamp club – a couple of rarer items with pictures of President Konstantin Päts, some with a mail pigeon on them, and some Soviet stamps bearing a Pernau postal mark, which stayed in circulation for a short time during the German occupation, before the “Estland/Eesti” series was issued. They cost a fair bit, since people hadn’t managed to send many letters in that short period of time, so the stamps were obviously rarer and more sought after. Some time later, when he and his collection were already better known in stamp-collecting circles, he would slip it into conversations that he could arrange the sale of some Elva stamps to anyone who might be interested, since he’d been offered them but wasn’t keen. These were the rarest stamps in Estonian postal history, some of them worth thousands of dollars. It was likely that the people he was trying to track down would be interested in precisely those kinds of stamps. But much to his superiors’ surprise, Särg refused to interrogate the criminals once they were caught, justifying this by his desire to protect his reputation in the stamp-collecting world. Who knew when his connections there might become useful again? There were a lot of murky goings-on in the stamp business. His superiors could see his point. Naturally he had to hand over the collection which had been bought with KGB money, but by then his own personal collection was actually better than that one, and so he carried on going to the Teachers’ House on Sundays before meeting Galina in front of Sõprus cinema.
As for Karl, he had a pretty decent collection of sports-themed stamps. Nothing exceptional, but all the same.
“You shouldn’t let them beat him up like that, Comrade Major,” said Särg. “It doesn’t produce any results.”
“I make the decisions around here,” Vinkel snorted. He actually agreed, but that didn’t mean he would let his subordinates tell him what to do. What’s more he was hungry, and his bosses had demanded a report from him, but he didn’t have any good news for them.
“In that case I ask for your permission to return to the sixth department,” Särg requested. “I’ve got a lot of work on with my own cases anyway, and it’s looking pretty clear by now that this case doesn’t have anything to do with economic crime.”
“Expressing our views, are we Comrade Captain?” Vinkel said with a wink. “You can actually be quite sure that you’ll soon be very interested in this particular case.”
Särg didn’t understand what was meant by that. Unlike us, dear reader, because we have reason to suspect that this Anton – the one who didn’t return to the cellar from the picket with the others but went straight home – and Captain Särg’s son, the history buff and self-proclaimed true Estonian, are one and the same person. And from that it is easy to draw conclusions about the company which Anton Särg kept and who his friends were, and then to conjecture that it was very probable Anton Särg would eventually end up in one of the pictures taken by those plain-clothed policemen with their long-focus lenses as they sat and observed the insurrectionary youth.
Chapter 19
Anton could not shake the fear that he would never be fully accepted as one of the gang, even when they started giving him tasks which involved a high level of responsibility. He was terribly ashamed of his slight Russian accent and occasional slip-ups with the partitive plural, even if all the rest of them were completely used to it and took it as nothing more than a personal quirk. It never occurred to anyone to call him a bloody Russky.
But this is how it had happened:
The history teacher, Comrade Kovalyova, had been ill the day when she was supposed to teach an extra lesson on the subject of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and explain that the information spread by Western propaganda radio stations regarding some sort of secret protocol hadn’t been corroborated; Soviet historians had searched the archives for the document, but since it did not exist, it could not be found. Moreover, at the moment when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression treaty it had been a necessary step, giving the leadership breathing room to prepare for the test of strength which was soon to ensue. And it was highly regrettable that so many people had allowed themselves to be misled, organising the so-called Baltic Chain and demanding the abrogation of something which didn’t even exist in the first place.
It was that cold, dark time of year, teacher Kovalyova was already getting on in years, and she was not in the best of health, so there was nothing surprising about her falling ill. But that lesson couldn’t just be cancelled: the order had come from above and it had to be executed.
So teacher Kovalyova had to give that lesson a week later, on the day on which Estonians celebrated Christmas.
The extra history class took place straight after the other lessons were finished. Teacher Kovalyova had been in front of a class of students since morning and was already really tired, but as far as she was concerned she managed to deliver her text pretty enthusiastically and convincingly.
“Are there any questions?” she asked. “Would anyone like any points clarified?”
One hand went up. It was Class 9b’s top student, Anton Särg.
“Go on, Anton,” said teacher Kovalyova.
“There is one thing I would like clarifying,” said Anton, standing up. “If it is really true, as you say, that this additional protocol never existed, then why is it that the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies declared it null and void today, with effect from the moment it was signed.”