Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (10 page)

Powerscourt was now seriously engrossed in his soup. It was thick, far thicker than any vegetable soup he had ever eaten in London. He thought he detected carrot and potato and garlic and maybe
tomato and maybe lemon juice and possibly sour cream, as well as the eponymous cabbage. It was remarkably filling, giving the impression that the consumer was not in a barrack-style restaurant near
the university but out in the great expanse of the Russian countryside, flat fields reaching to the distant horizon, an occasional tree providing a modicum of shade, a lone peasant pulling a
handcart along a dusty road, a sense of space stretching out till eternity, cabbage soup that tasted of the earth of Mother Russia herself.

‘People always think,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, ‘that they must have a battalion of grannies in the kitchen here, imported from the nearby countryside perhaps, who have inherited
this recipe from their grannies and so on, a direct line of grannyhood going back to the foundation of the city itself, hunched over their ancient saucepans, chopping and tasting and stirring and
checking their soup all day long.’

‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt.

‘There’s only two of them who make it, Lord Powerscourt. They’re in their early twenties and learnt the recipe from their mother. They’re the proprietor’s
daughters.’

‘A man could do worse than marry a woman for her soup, perhaps. What do you say, Mikhail?’

‘Indeed. And there are rumours that these two have been working on a surprise for Easter time. People say they’ve developed an entirely new borscht.’

‘Cabbage soup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, borscht on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You would live like a king.’

‘What I am about to ask you has nothing to do with soup or marriage, Lord Powerscourt, but with our plans today after the interview in the Interior Ministry this afternoon. Do you think
you will need my services after that, after I have taken you back to the Embassy, of course? It’s just that I have made a provisional arrangement to meet somebody for an hour or so at six
o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, please. If you need me I’ll translate for you all day and all night.’

Powerscourt wondered at the mental process by which his young friend had gone from soup and marriage to discussion of his plans for an evening rendezvous.

‘Forgive me for asking you, Mikhail, but would I be right in thinking you are going to meet a young lady?’

‘You are quite right, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mikhail went slightly pink as he replied. ‘It is a young lady and could I make a further suggestion? This has only just come to me, and
you may think it absurd.’

‘I’m sure I won’t think it is absurd, once I know what it is,’ said Powerscourt.

‘My friend is called Natasha. She comes from a very grand family here in Petersburg. Just now she is working as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and her daughters at the Tsar’s
country palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Do you think it might help if I told her about your mission and our work in pursuit of the vanished Martin? I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I went to
London. Her letters to me were very stilted and stiff as if she felt somebody was reading them, I think. But it has always been said that the best-informed people in St Petersburg are the servants
who wait at the Tsar’s table and his coachmen and suchlike people. She might hear something to our advantage.’

Powerscourt scraped the bottom of his bowl to extract the very last drop of cabbage soup. ‘Let me put it like this, Mikhail. Do you think it would be dangerous for her if she were known to
be close to the British Embassy?’

‘Dangerous, possibly. I don’t think she’d end up dead on the Nevskii Prospekt but I think she’d be out of a job pretty quickly.’

‘I think you must decide, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, looking serious all of a sudden. ‘I think it would be unwise to involve Natasha in the decision, however level-headed she
is. There’s nothing more attractive to some women than a whiff of danger. I think I would insist that she only listens. She never asks any questions. She doesn’t poke her nose into
areas that don’t concern her. Some women, mind you, would find even that limited prospectus hard to stick to.’

‘I will think about it before our meeting,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, trotting off to pay the bill. ‘I insist on paying for lunch, Lord Powerscourt. When we Russians introduce
distinguished visitors to our national cuisine, it is only fitting that we should pay. I insist, I really do.’

As they made their way across the river to their next meeting Shaporov told Powerscourt some of what he knew of the Interior Ministry. Most of his information, he said generously, came once
again from his father, some of it from his friends who had had dealings with it, some of it simply absorbed from the air and the streets of his city. Mikhail gave his English visitor the Russian
bureaucracy in numbers. Eight hundred and sixty-nine, the number of paragraphs in Volume One of the Code of Laws that defined the rules and conduct of the Imperial Civil Service. Fourteen, the
number of different Civil Service ranks, each with its own uniform and title. The top two ranks of civil servants were to be addressed as Your High Excellency. Those in ranks three and four to be
addressed as Your Excellency. The less fortunate in ranks nine to fourteen had to make do with Your Honour. White trousers changing to black, red ribbons changing to blue, even adding a stripe here
and there could mark momentous turning points in the orderly progression of the bureaucrat’s life. He could be promoted by one rank every three years from ranks fourteen to eight and one
every four years in ranks eight to five. Promotion – and Mikhail emphasized how typical it was, this interface between the autocracy and the bureaucracy that would only make it less likely
that either could function effectively – promotion to the last four ranks was at the discretion of the Tsar and carried a hereditary title. With great care not to displease, taking as few
decisions as possible in case they gave offence, a man might reach the top of the tree by the age of sixty. This carefully modulated bureaucracy, Mikhail said, was strangling Russia, strangling it
in a slow bureaucratic bear hug.

They could see several of these bureaucrats now, coming down the steps of the Interior Ministry building, some of them carrying briefcases.

‘They’re not going home already, Mikhail, are they? It’s just before three o’clock, for God’s sake.’

‘You don’t want to overdo it, if you’re a bureaucrat, Lord Powerscourt. It’s a very hard life in the Interior Ministry. Some of these fellows may have had to attend a
couple of meetings in the morning. Think how exhausting that must have been for them.’

Powerscourt had been inside a number of ministries in London where the splendour was reserved for the quarters of the minister and his most senior officials. The rest had been furnished with due
regard to the exigencies of the public purse and the dangers of newspapers launching crusades about governments wasting taxpayers’ money on luxurious surroundings for civil servants. But
nothing, he thought, could prepare you for the drabness of the interior of the Russian Interior Ministry. The floors were covered in something grey that might once have been the Russian equivalent
of linoleum. The walls were painted with a dark colour that looked as if it might have been originally intended for a battleship. A long hopeless corridor stretched out for a couple of hundred
yards behind the reception desk, manned by a small man with only one arm.

‘Mr Bazhenov, Room 467, fourth floor. Lift over there. Enter your names in this book before you go up.’

Every public building you went into in St Petersburg, Powerscourt was to discover, took down your name and address as if they proposed to establish a regular correspondence. He wondered briefly
about instituting a similar system in Markham Square.

The lift was gloomy and stank of sweat and urine. Mikhail Shaporov pressed the bell for the fourth floor.

‘Do you think the more important chaps live higher up, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Only ranks eight and above allowed on floor three?’

‘God knows,’ said Mikhail, sounding more cheerful than the surroundings warranted. ‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I have lived in this city most of my life and this is the
first time I have ever been inside a government building. It’s a revelation.’

It seemed that Room 467 must be at the outermost limit of the fourth-floor corridor where the room numbers started illogically at 379 opposite the lift. Clerks carrying files sauntered past them
on their way to unknown bureaucratic destinations. Their feet sounded loud on the grey floor covering that might once have been linoleum. One or two doors were open and Powerscourt and Mikhail had
brief visions of rooms filled with desks like classrooms for the grown-up and sad-faced men seated at them reading files or making entries in great ledgers. Through the dirty windows on their right
they could see a small courtyard below where figures seemed to march round and round as if on some everlasting ministerial treadmill. They passed a conference room with a fine table and
velvet-covered chairs round it, waiting for another meeting. Powerscourt thought he saw a thick layer of dust on the mahogany surface as if the last meeting had taken place some time ago, the
committee dissolved perhaps, the junior minister moved on. Maybe only ghosts had their being in there now, coming out only at night – God, what must this building be like in the dark –
taking ghostly notes of ghostly meetings and recording them in ghostly files.

Now they had reached Room 467. The name plate announced the presence of Vasily Bazhenov, Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, Administrative Division, Ministry of the Interior. Powerscourt
wondered what pain and humiliation had to be gone through to win these undistinguished spurs. He noted that the name plate looked very old as if Bazhenov had been in post for many years. Perhaps
promotion had passed him by. Perhaps the jump from Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary to Second Assistant Deputy Under Secretary was too much for him. Perhaps Vasily Bazhenov would be old and
crabbed and waiting for retirement.

But the voice that answered Shaporov’s knock and bade them enter was cheerful. So was the bureaucrat. He spoke quite slowly as if to give Mikhail plenty of time to translate. Powerscourt
and his friend were seated on one side of a circular table in chairs that did not have velvet upholstery but were perfectly respectable nonetheless. Bazhenov had a number of files in front of him.
He was about forty years of age with a wild shock of black hair that looked as if it repelled all attempts to control it. His eyes were grey, his nose small and his long black beard seemed to be
acting in sympathy with his hair. Powerscourt wondered if he had a wife who wrestled with his appearance before she despatched him every morning on his bureaucratic Via Dolorosa. The man could have
been taken for some wild Siberian preacher rather than a Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary in the Administrative Division.

‘You are interested in a Roderick Martin, I believe,’ he said to Powerscourt.

‘That is correct, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt, remembering Rosebery’s advice to promote all army officers, civil servants and policemen. ‘We were given to
understand that you might have some details about him here.’

Bazhenov sighed deeply. ‘In one sense, I have to disappoint you, Lord Powerscourt. I – we – cannot help you with this Martin. Under normal circumstances, there would be all
kinds of information about such a man. The time and date of his arrival and departure. The record of where he was staying. If he was an important person holding important meetings with important
government officials, there would be a record, as there will be of this meeting.’

The Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary smiled. There had been almost a note of irony, Powerscourt thought, of mocking as the bureaucrat detailed his lists of information, though it was hard
to tell in another language. Information, after all, was the currency he dealt in, wrested from the reluctant population to be stored in the unforgiving files of the Interior Ministry.

Bazhenov opened his hands wide. ‘But we have no records for the year 1905. No place of entry. No place of residence. I wish I could help you, gentlemen, but I cannot.’

The man’s lying, Powerscourt thought to himself. Surely he knows Martin came here and was killed here last December. He remembered the fat inspector with the red beard shouting at them in
the police station where his investigations in St Petersburg had begun. Perhaps they’re all liars. But he could see little point in an argument. Better to hear what the man might have to
say.

‘You are being as helpful as anybody could be, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt at his most emollient, ‘but I would ask you to consider things from my government’s
perspective. Mr Martin, a distinguished member of his ministry in London as you are of yours here in St Petersburg,’ Bazhenov half rose to his feet and bowed to Powerscourt at this point,
‘comes here last December and holds, we believe, a series of meetings, possibly with the Foreign Ministry, we are not sure. On the evening of the same day he is murdered. The death is
reported by a policeman in the police station nearest to the British Embassy. It is even committed to paper.’ That, Powerscourt felt, should have maximum appeal to the bureaucrat. The spoken
word, it was nothing, worthless as air. Pieces of paper, records, minutes, memoranda, these were his life’s blood. ‘Now the police deny all knowledge. They say the piece of paper must
be a forgery.’ Truly, Powerscourt said to himself, forgery would be the sin against the Holy Ghost of bureaucratic machines everywhere. It could cast doubt on everything it touched. It, or
the suspicion of it, could spread through the files like the Black Death. ‘They say Mr Martin cannot have come to St Petersburg. But he left London on a special mission to the Russian
capital. He has not returned. We have no reason to believe he is alive. We believe he is dead. You gentlemen say he never came here at all. Who or what are we to believe?’

Then Bazhenov produced one of the classic bureaucratic ploys, a Sicilian defence amidst the paperwork. ‘I wish I could help you, Lord Powerscourt. Leave it with me for a day or two.
Perhaps some information has been mislaid. Perhaps one of the other organizations of the state will be able to help.’