Blackstone and the Endgame (24 page)

He looked around. The place was certainly opulently furnished. There were porcelain vases, inlaid chests, tables and carved wooden chairs. Persian carpets had been laid on the floors, and in front of a bronze and crystal crucifix was a magnificent bearskin rug.

‘This morning, the place was nothing but a gloomy basement – and look at it now,' Yusupov said, obviously proud of himself. ‘I selected all this personally from our furniture store at the back of the palace.'

‘And did you bring it here yourself?' Vladimir wondered.

Yusupov laughed. ‘Of course not.'

‘Then how did it get here?'

The question seemed to puzzle the prince.

‘It was brought here by the servants,' he said – as if it was obvious that when
anything
was moved, it was moved by servants.

‘And how many of them were involved in the operation?'

‘I have absolutely no idea. My major-domo supervised the whole thing.' He looked around. ‘I shouldn't imagine it was less than ten of them.'

‘Ah yes,' Vladimir said softly, ‘the fewer people who have suspicions there might be a conspiracy afoot, the better.'

‘There will be four of us involved in this exercise in vermin control,' Yusupov continued, missing the point completely, ‘though, of course, I will take the leading role.'

‘Of course,' Vladimir agreed. ‘Might I be so bold as to inquire who the other three will be?'

‘Can I rely on your discretion?' Yusupov asked.

‘Naturally.'

‘In addition to Grand Duke Dimitri, there will be Purishkevich, who is a deputy in the Duma, and a Dr Lazovert. The plan is that when Rasputin arrives, I will bring him down here straight away. I will tell him that my wife is entertaining some other guests upstairs – there will be a gramophone at the head of the stairs, so it will certainly sound as if she is having a party – but that they will soon be leaving, and when they do, she will come and join us.'

‘And have you remembered to supply some records for the gramophone?' Vladimir asked.

‘Naturally!' Yusupov snorted. ‘I am not an amateur, you know. But to continue: I will offer Rasputin some refreshment – wine and cakes – which Dr Lazovert will previously have poisoned. He will eat the cakes, and he will drink the wine, and then he will die. We will take his body and drop it into the Neva – we have already bought the chains to weigh it down – and the affair will be all over. Is that not a brilliant plan?'

‘Breathtaking,' Vladimir said. ‘With so much clever thinking behind it, I cannot see how it can possibly fail.'

Once they were back in the car, Vladimir said, ‘There is a complication that has only just occurred to me – though I should have thought of it long ago.'

‘And what complication might that be?'

‘In all that has gone on, I had quite forgotten that you are still a policeman. And you
are
still a policeman, aren't you?'

‘Not according to Scotland Yard,' Blackstone replied. ‘According to them, I'm nothing but an escaped criminal.'

‘Yet you are still a policeman in your head.'

‘Yes, I think I'll always be a policeman in my head.'

‘And as a policeman, when you hear that a crime is about to be committed, it is your instinct to try to prevent it.'

‘Yes.'

‘You cannot try to prevent this murder, Sam. I will not allow it. I will do whatever is necessary to stop you.'

‘I'm sure you will,' Blackstone agreed.

And he found his thoughts returning to the first – and only – murder he had ever witnessed.

Blackstone is still a young man – he has been told that he is, in fact, the youngest sergeant in the British army. He has not been in India long, and on this particular day – the day of the murder – he is out on a routine patrol with a corporal, an Anglo-Indian who has seen twenty years' service on the North-West Frontier.

They sense the tension in the air the moment they enter the small village. It is a strange mixture of anger, fear and excitement, and they know that something significant is about to happen.

A large crowd has gathered at the centre of the village and formed itself into a circle around two men. The larger of the two has a sabre in his hand and is swaggering around the edge of the circle, cheered on by the other villagers. The other man – who is smaller and skinnier – is kneeling in the centre of the circle. He is sobbing, and every time one of the tribal elders offers him a weapon, he shakes his head.

‘We have to put a stop to this,' Blackstone says.

‘What makes you say that?' his corporal asks.

‘The man kneeling down doesn't want to fight.'

‘No, he doesn't, because he knows he wouldn't have a chance,' the corporal agrees. ‘But whether he chooses to fight or not, he's already as good as dead.'

‘And
that's
why we have to stop it,' Blackstone says.

‘I'll give you three reasons why we shouldn't,' the corporal tells him. He starts to count them off on his fingers. ‘The first is that even though this particular tribe considers itself a friend of the British, we probably wouldn't get out of here alive if we tried to stop it.'

‘That's not a good enough reason at all,' says the idealistic young Blackstone hotly. ‘Your first concern must always be to do the decent and proper thing, even if that puts your own personal safety at risk.'

‘The second reason is that the man on his knees has raped and murdered three little girls,' the corporal says.

‘How can you possibly know he did that?' Blackstone asks. ‘We've only just ridden into this village.'

‘And how can you know he didn't do it – or something equally terrible?' the corporal counters.

Blackstone finds he has no answer to that.

‘What's your third reason?' he asks.

‘You don't have the
right
to interfere,' the corporal says. ‘Imagine you see a fox stalking a rabbit. You know the fox has to eat to live, so do you have the right to warn the rabbit?'

‘I do if it's my rabbit,' Blackstone says.

‘Exactly,' the corporal agrees. ‘But the man on his knees over there
isn't
your rabbit, is he?'

‘I shall want an assurance from you that you will not try to interfere, Sam,' Vladimir said, calling Blackstone's mind back from its time-journey to India.

‘Your hand is in your pocket,' Blackstone said. ‘Is it wrapped around your pistol, and is your finger even now on the trigger?'

‘It might be,' Vladimir said.

‘You can relax,' Blackstone told him. ‘I won't interfere. Rasputin's not my rabbit.'

It was near to midnight when a large car, with Yusupov sitting in the back, left the palace and disappeared up the street.

‘Felix has gone to fetch Rasputin from his apartment,' Vladimir said. ‘If he and his little friends can refrain from making a complete pig's ear of things, the whole business should be over in an hour or so.'

‘Something's been puzzling me,' Blackstone admitted.

‘Indeed? And what might that be?'

‘You asked Yusupov if he would tell you who the other conspirators were. You were very humble about it. But I could see, just from looking at you, that you already knew their names.'

‘Of course I already knew their names, but by asking for them as a favour, I made him feel as if he was in charge, and someone as unstable as Yusupov needs constant reassurance of that. There's a danger that he'll fall to pieces before he has killed Rasputin, and so I'm doing everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen.'

‘What about after he's killed Rasputin?'

Vladimir shrugged. ‘After he's killed Rasputin, he can sit huddled in a corner and eat his own shit for all I'll care.'

‘How many people
do
know about the plot?' Blackstone asked.

Vladimir shrugged again. ‘It's impossible to say. I have taken the precaution of reading some of the letters Yusupov has written to his wife and parents, and while he does not actually say what he's about to do, they would have to be idiots not to read between the lines. And Purishkevich is even worse. He's openly boasted in the Duma press room that Rasputin will be killed in the palace and that Grand Duke Dimitri will be one of the assassins – none of which is at all surprising from a man who sometimes wears a red rose in his fly to show his contempt for the socialists.'

‘And you don't think that the tsarina has heard any of the rumours?'

‘The tsarina lives in a crystal bubble. She does not even know that the people beyond her palace walls are starving, so she obviously has no idea at all of just how much Rasputin is hated.'

‘But when she learns of his death – as she must – she will want revenge,' Blackstone said.

‘Most certainly,' Vladimir agreed, ‘and there is at least one person who will be willing to exact that revenge for her.'

‘General Kornilov,' Blackstone said, remembering Vladimir's story of the young military attaché who had prepared Princess Alexandra for her future life as the tsarina.

‘General Kornilov,' Vladimir agreed.

The car returned at twelve fifteen, and now the conspirators had a new figure with them – a man in a fur coat and a beaver-skin hat.

Vladimir watched them walk across the courtyard and disappear down the steps to the basement.

‘It will soon be over and done with,' he said.

But to Blackstone's mind, he did not sound entirely convinced.

I
t was at around two o'clock in the morning that Yusupov paid another visit to the Renault parked next to the Moika Canal.

‘Rasputin has eaten two cakes and drunk two glasses of wine laced with cyanide, and it all seems to have had no effect on him,' he told Vladimir, with a hint of hysteria in his voice. ‘He asked me to sing him some songs. Do you hear me?
He asked me to sing him some songs!
'

‘Calm down,' Vladimir said.

‘The man can't be killed,' Yusupov replied, in what was almost a sob. ‘He has supernatural powers.'

‘He's a man just like any other,' Vladimir told him. ‘If the cyanide did not kill him, it was because the cyanide was no good.'

‘But Dr Lazovert assured me …'

‘Do you remember the story of what happened to the circus elephant, somewhere in southern Russia?' Vladimir interrupted him.

‘Yes.'

‘Then there you have it. The elephant did not have supernatural powers, did it? It was simply that the poison had lost its potency. And that must be what has happened in this case, too.'

‘But if I can't poison him, what
can
I do?' Yusupov whined. ‘You must tell me what to do, Count.'

‘It is not for a count to tell a prince how to act,' Vladimir replied. ‘But,' he added, ‘whatever you do, you cannot back down now – you have already gone too far for that.'

‘Yes, I have, haven't I?' Yusupov agreed. And then he turned and walked back towards the palace.

‘Tell me about the elephant,' Blackstone said to Vladimir.

‘Yes, it is quite an amusing story – unless you happened to be the elephant in question,' Vladimir replied. ‘This particular elephant was part of a circus, and his behaviour became so erratic that it was considered to be dangerous. It was decided to poison him, and since he was inordinately fond of cream cakes, a hundred of the cakes were purchased and laced with cyanide. The elephant ate them all – with obvious enjoyment – but it seemed to have no effect on him. So, in the end, they decided they would simply have to shoot him.' Vladimir paused for a second. ‘And, given time, even someone as stupid as Prince Yusupov will realize that is what he must do with Rasputin.'

At just after three o'clock, Yusupov appeared again.

‘Rasputin is dead!' he said excitedly. ‘I shot him twice in the chest. The others wanted to help me, but I insisted on doing it alone. I am the hero who saved Russia, and my fame will live for ever.'

‘You will certainly be remembered,' Vladimir replied ambigu-ously. ‘The important thing now is to get rid of the body.'

‘Oh, there will be plenty of time for that later,' Yusupov said. ‘First, Dimitri and Lazovert will drive to Rasputin's apartment – to give the impression that he had returned home – and then they will take his coat, hat and boots to the hospital train that Purishkevich runs, where Mrs Purishkevich will burn them.'

‘Get rid of the body now,' Vladimir said firmly.

‘You can't tell me what to do,' Yusupov said. ‘You are a mere count, and I am a national hero.'

‘He's a national idiot,' Vladimir said, as Yusupov returned to the palace. ‘And refusing to move the corpse now had nothing to do with establishing alibis or burning clothes – he just wants more time to gloat over his trophy.'

‘Isn't it about time we left?' asked Blackstone, who was heartily sick of the whole affair.

‘No,' Vladimir replied. ‘I want to stay and see just how many more mistakes they make.'

But even a man like Vladimir – who automatically always expected the worst – could not have anticipated just how badly things would go wrong after Grand Duke Dimitri had driven away again. Even Vladimir could never have guessed what was about to happen next.

A man, wearing a peasant blouse and baggy trousers, suddenly appeared in the palace courtyard at around four o'clock. He was staggering heavily and heading for the gate.

‘That can't be …' Blackstone gasped.

‘It's Rasputin,' Vladimir said grimly. ‘It appears that when our new national hero, Prince Felix Yusupov, said he had killed the man, he was exaggerating somewhat.'