Death on the Nevskii Prospekt (34 page)

Even at the entrance gates, some hundreds of yards from the dockyards themselves, the noise was deafening. It was, Powerscourt felt, as he waited with Mikhail Shaporov for a
guard to take them inside, a harsh, clanging, brutal sort of noise. In times gone by the wooden ships would have been built to gentler tunes in wooden dockyards without this harsh screeching of
modernity. But Krondstadt was where some Russian ships were built, Krondstadt was where the battleship
Tsarevich
was being repaired, Krondstadt was where Lieutenant Anatoli Kerenkov would be
found. The earlier unease about Natasha Bobrinsky had gone, to be replaced with concern for her health after such a long sojourn looking after the Tsar’s daughters and helping out with the
sick little boy. She had written a very short note the day after the cable was sent to Powerscourt, explaining why she had not been able to leave the Alexander Palace. A further message said she
would be with them at lunchtime the following day.

A very dirty sailor came at last to escort them to the Lieutenant. His face and hair were filthy and it took some time to work out that his straggling coat must once have been green. A
foul-smelling cigarette hung from his lips. Powerscourt decided he must work in the engine room. He led them on to a sort of viewing platform high above a vast open hangar of a dock. Lying on a
huge metal cradle was a ship, shrouded in scaffolding. Men the size of tiny dots scurried along the planks, some making minor repairs to the sides or the hull, others, higher up, beginning to apply
fresh coats of paint. At the further end of the vessel, the prow, a huge crane was hovering some twenty-five feet above the deck. It was holding a vast grey gun, destined to be lowered into place
to serve as a warning and a siren of destruction for Russia’s enemies. A man in a red hat was directing the operations with a series of enormous bellows, punctuated, Mikhail whispered to
Powerscourt, with terrifying threats about the fate of anybody who caused the gun to miss its appointed place. Beyond the prow, just visible through the smoke of the various smithies, were the pale
blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. And on the southern side, eight or ten miles to the south-east, was a group of buildings as different in spirit as it was possible to be from this industrial
furnace and floating factory of death, the graceful eighteenth-century palace of Peterhof, built as a summer residence for earlier Tsars, famed for the glory of its fountains and cascades that
bounced the water down the hill towards the sea, a place where water nymphs danced in marble glory and the gods who had presided over past Russian victories stared out into eternity.

‘You are Powerscourt?’ a short bearded man in blue uniform greeted them. ‘Kerenkov.’ He was powerfully built with very dark eyes and a permanent scowl playing about his
features. He looked like a close associate of Blackbeard or one of the fabled pirates of the Caribbean, equally adept at storming treasure ships by day and their owners’ wives and daughters
by night.

‘How kind of you to spare us the time, Lieutenant,’ said Powerscourt, eyeing the gun handle that protruded from the man’s trouser pocket. ‘You must be very
busy.’

Mikhail was translating very fast this morning, as if he was on especially good form, or frightened.

‘Derzhenov told me about you,’ said Kerenkov.

Powerscourt wondered what the sadist had said about him.

‘Do you work for Derzhenov?’ Powerscourt asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Kerenkov replied with a scowl. ‘Do you?’

‘I do not. At present I am working for the British Government trying to find out who killed Mr Martin, as you almost certainly know, Lieutenant Kerenkov.’

Kerenkov spat viciously into the sawdust at their feet. ‘I did not kill the man, Powerscourt. He is not important. There are other people we Russians have to kill. Japanese for a start. If
we do not kill them they will kill us. It is now eleven months since my ship was damaged, barely able to limp home with its survivors. We threw fifty-seven Russians into the sea on our way home,
dead from the wounds they received, gone to enrich the ocean rather than the peasant earth of their motherland.’

Kerenkov paused and pointed at the hanging gun, now a mere fifteen feet from the deck. He planted a rough hand on Powerscourt’s shoulder. ‘Do you see that gun, man? It looks pretty
impressive, doesn’t it, you’d think it’s going to be a real help in the battles with the Japanese. Stuff and nonsense!’ He launched a vicious kick at the planks on the side
of their platform.

‘It’s virtually a waste of time sending it over to Japan,’ he went on, ‘bloody thing is obsolete even before it’s fitted. One of my jobs out there in Port Arthur
was to make a report on the Japanese navy. I tell you, those little yellow fellows have speedier ships, quicker guns that fire further and faster than ours, nastier torpedoes, more efficient
shells, the conflict should be banned under the rules of war as a totally uneven contest. Everybody back in St Petersburg thinks we must win, we’ll win when our Baltic Fleet finally sails
halfway round the world for a lasting victory, we’ll win because we’re European, or our elites are European, we’ll win because we’re a superior race. That’s all
nonsense.’ He paused, Mikhail’s young voice stopped a couple of phrases later, and Powerscourt felt for the man, a patriot without the means to defend his country.

‘Now I think about it, there’s a bloody ship of yours, Powerscourt, a British frigate, wandering about the Gulf of Finland. It’s been going up and down for weeks as if
it’s taking a holiday cruise. Do you know what the damned thing is doing here?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Do you know any history, man?’ Kerenkov seemed to be changing tack.

‘A bit,’ said Powerscourt, anxious not to give offence.

‘Do you remember that damned Crimean War?’ Powerscourt nodded.

‘I’ve been reading lots of history books lately, from then on,’ said the unlikely scholar. ‘We lost that war because we were so backward. So from then on Russia must be
able to defend itself. Russia must be able to produce the latest weapons, Russia must become modern, Russia must have huge capitalist factories to produce the guns and the bullets and the giant
pieces of artillery that could fire a shell across the Gulf of Finland. But that’s not Russia, Powerscourt, capitalists and middle class and workers replacing tsar and aristocrats and
peasants. Our poor country is being torn apart by the battle between conservatism and modernity, between change and not change, between the old and the new. I don’t like the new very much,
Lord Powerscourt, the only thing is that it’s not as bad as the old.’

An enormous crash heralded the arrival of the gun on to the deck. Sparks and dust temporarily hid it from view. The man in the red hat surpassed himself in the volume of his shouts. Various dots
at the front of the vessel seemed to be waving their hands in the air. Kerenkov peered forward to check it was success rather than a catastrophe. ‘Thank God that’s landed safely,’
he said. ‘Let’s pray we meet some wooden Japanese ship from the middle of the last century in the next battle.’ Maybe the safe arrival of the gun mellowed him slightly.
‘Sorry for boring you with my views,’ he said. ‘I just care about what’s going on.’

Powerscourt thought now was the time to ask his questions.

‘Forgive me for asking you, Lieutenant, about your relations with the late Mr Martin. Did you ever meet him?’

‘I did not, sir. I could see little point in shaking the hand of a man who has had intimate relations with my wife.’

‘Quite so, Lieutenant, quite so. I think on this last occasion you had advance warning of his coming to St Petersburg, is that not so?’

‘I did,’ said Kerenkov, ‘lots of people knew he was coming.’

Powerscourt suspected this was not true, but felt there was little he could do about it. ‘And why do you think, Lieutenent,’ he went on, ‘that Mr Martin kept away from your
wife on this occasion? He never had before, after all. Did you warn him off?’

Kerenkov looked at him blankly. He did not reply. ‘You were seen, you know,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘at the station, on the evening Martin was killed. Were you waiting for him to
come back from Tsarskoe Selo? Were you waiting to take him off to the Nevskii Prospekt? And then to kill him?’

Kerenkov turned red suddenly. Veins began throbbing in his temple. His hand moved ominously towards his pocket. ‘Look here, Powerscourt, I know I’m a rough sort of a fellow,’
he began, restraining himself with difficulty. ‘My profession is killing people, rather as yours is finding out who killed them. But the people I want to kill are Japanese. My country is at
war with them. We are not at war with England. Some people think I had every reason to kill Martin but in today’s St Petersburg that sort of morality has long gone. It’s melted away
like the snows in spring. I didn’t kill him, please believe me, and I have no idea who did.’

‘I do believe you, Lieutenant,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘but could you set my mind at rest about one thing?’

‘What’s that?’ Kerenkov asked, staring down below at the worker ants engaged on painting the sides of the ship.

‘Your presence at the railway station the night Martin was killed.’

For the first time Kerenkov laughed. ‘I’m not quite sure how to put this, Lord Powerscourt. Following the example of my wife perhaps? When in St Petersburg carry on as the St
Petersburgers do? I was waiting, Lord Powerscourt, for a lady who is not my wife.’

Successful voyage round the inner islands, Powerscourt said to himself as they set out back towards the city. Pirate strikes gold.

Natasha Bobrinsky was feeling confused as she sat in the train carriage bringing her back to St Petersburg. For well over a week she had been more intimately involved with the
royal household in Tsarskoe Selo than ever before, taking care of the four daughters, helping with Alexis, trying to provide care and support for the Empress Alexandra. Strange fragments of news
filtered into her part of the Alexander Palace. Natasha heard whispered conversations about strikes and industrial disputes, about the lack of enthusiasm for the monarchy, about peasant unrest in
the provinces. The previous evening the Empress seemed to have cracked. She did not sink to her knees in private prayer once she had emerged from caring for the sick baby as she usually did. She
stared at Natasha as if she didn’t know who she was and began attacking the aristocrats of St Petersburg. Vain, worthless, godless, hopeless, selfish, arrogant, self-indulgent, drunk, were
some of her kinder adjectives. None of them, according to the Empress, were fit to serve the Tsar, none of them truly fit to speak for the soul of Mother Russia. And on the peasants she bestowed
the blessings of the beatitudes: blessed were the poor in spirit for theirs was the kingdom of Heaven, blessed were the meek for they should inherit the earth, blessed were the merciful for they
should obtain mercy. These peasants, according to Alexandra, were the true supporters of the monarchy. They knew instinctively about the sacred relationship between Tsar, peasant and God that
sustained the Romanovs on their throne and kept the wheels of Russian society turning properly.

It was, perhaps, regrettable that Alexandra should have sounded off in this fashion, for Natasha had been feeling a growing sympathy for the Empress. Now, she thought, as the Tsar’s
countryside rolled past her windows, she was not so sure. Maybe it was unfortunate that Natasha’s parents chose to spend more of their life in Paris and on the Riviera than they did in
Russia. Natasha could see the appeal. Nobody said that her father, a man devoted to the joys of the table and the wines of Bordeaux, on which, indeed, he had written a short monograph for a Russian
publishing house in Paris, had to spend his time in St Petersburg or Moscow. A career in the public service, ascending the slow steps on the ladder of bureaucratic advancement, he would have
regarded as beneath contempt. And as for Natasha’s mother, she had never heard her speak of the Empress with anything other than a withering scorn about her German ancestry, her lack of
social graces and the vulgarity of her personality. Natasha would never have claimed to be an expert on the peasants. But one of her brother’s friends at university, in a fit of misplaced
zeal for the general advancement of mankind, had gone with some like-minded souls to live with a group of peasants, to try to improve their lot and welcome them into the joys of civilization. Their
reception showed little of the spirit of the meek or the merciful and plenty of that of the poor in spirit or, more precisely, poor in worldly goods. One of Natasha’s brother’s friends
had been beaten up so badly he had to be taken into hospital, their money and valuables were all stolen by the peasants, even their clothes were taken from them. Such people might embody the
Tsar’s support in his wife’s view, but Natasha wanted nothing to do with them.

She was carrying the one word she had heard from the doctors to pass on to Mikhail and to Powerscourt. She had looked it up in the big dictionary in the Tsarskoe Selo library and felt as she
read the entry that this particular page had been visited many times in recent weeks. As she left the station and set off to walk to the Shaporov Palace, the man in soldier’s uniform followed
her once again. Hello, missy, he said to himself, I haven’t seen you for a week or more, welcome back. And as Natasha crossed the street with a toss of her head, the soldier grinned. You
haven’t grown any uglier while you’ve been away, missy, that’s for sure. I do hope they’re not going to do anything nasty to you when they read another of my reports.