Field of Mars (7 page)

‘We should get into our places. Isn't this the aria?' Ryzhkov strolled toward the centre of the house.

‘Are you sure you're feeling well enough, Pyotr Mikhalovich?'

‘Everything's under control.' He tried his debonair new smile out on Dudenko, who was obviously upset. Well, it was a very involving opera, a very emotional story, especially for a Slavophile.

He led them nearly halfway along the long curving corridor. At each entrance to the theatre two shining Chevalier Guards were posted, their gleaming helmets pulled severely down over their eyes. The golden chin straps, originally meant to keep the helmet on during the fury of a cavalry charge, had atrophied so that they fell ineffectually below each young guardsman's lower lip. Now they couldn't even bend over without losing their hats. Something about the young, blank, obedient faces of the guardsmen suddenly caused Ryzhkov to feel weary. A fresh wave of depression flooded over him and his step faltered on the carpet.

Suddenly there were footsteps behind them. ‘Shit,' hissed Dudenko. Ryzhkov felt Hokhodiev tighten his grip, trying to hold him up straighter.

‘All right, that's enough! Enough!' It was the guards officer's voice, angrily taking charge. ‘You people are disgraceful! Get him out of here . . .' His diatribe got lost in a wave of applause. Suddenly there were young men in tailcoats rushing past them.

‘God Almighty!' the officer spat. The young men in tailcoats flung open the doors to the boxes and instantly came a screamed command. The guards snapped to attention.

And then . . .

The very atmosphere began to hum. It was as if an electric charge had been sent through the corridor. A rustling of silk, a dazzling flash of white as a fan of eagle feathers flicked in Empress Alexandra's hand as she swept out of the dark tunnel to the Imperial boxes. Simultaneously all of the men bowed, but Ryzhkov, caught dazed and unawares, could only stare at the Tsarina.

Empress Alexandra's features were frozen, her expression was a metallic mask—as dead as an ikon, her skin nearly as pale as the white lace she wore. Only the impatience of her step betrayed her emotions. Her eyes were dark and glazed, focused on nothingness, blankly staring ahead. Immediately behind her came a Cossack bodyguard carrying the young Grand Duke Alexei, heir to the House of Romanov. A few steps behind them, the Tsar strode out, deep in conversation with the Minister of War. All sound ceased except for the Tsar's voice softly fading as the Imperial entourage moved down the carpeted corridor between the ranks of gleaming soldiers, ranks so solemn that they could have been on parade for the dead.

Then, as abruptly as they had come, the Romanovs were gone, through the great doors and down the golden staircase, heading for their carriages at the front of the Marinsky. The tension instantly evaporated.

‘Finally.' The officer turned on the Okhrana men, pushing them back against the wall so they would be clear of the swarm of Russia's elite rushing toward the staircase. The corridor was suddenly full of gowns and jewels and bright uniforms. ‘What's your name?' the officer hissed. His face was red, angry.

‘Deputy Inspector Hokhodiev, sir.'

‘Get this one out of here. And you!' Now the guardsman whirled on Dudenko. ‘You make sure he does it! Now go!'

‘Take us to Glasovskaya Street then,' Dudenko called out to Muta.

‘Not all that far, eh, Dima?' Hokhodiev said sarcastically. ‘Only a few hundred miles across the Fontanka, way down there by the gasworks, tucked in beside the race track.'

‘God,' Dudenko sighed.

‘It's a nice
new
place, though, right? A little noisy, but still a nice place, eh, Pyotr?'

‘Yes. Nice,' Ryzhkov said underneath the rushing trees. Filippa had picked it out, the family had bought it for them. The best apartment in the best building on a second-rate street. Being from Moscow they'd known nothing about the neighbourhood.

‘You can keep this until the morning then, I suppose,' said Hokhodiev as he shifted the salter full of cocaine back into his pocket. Ryzhkov sat up a little, unscrewed the lid and stuck his finger in for another dab of painkiller. They were manoeuvring around a park and for a few moments he tried to decipher their location by the undersides of the trees as they clattered along.

Ryzhkov succumbed to a reverie that kept pace with the rhythm of their horse's hooves, only surfacing when he heard Hokhodiev tell Dudenko that the gendarmes' official explanation was that the girl at the bindery had been drunk and imagined she could fly. She had jumped out of the window in a fit of hysteria.

‘But she had marks,' Ryzhkov said. ‘Right around . . .' he tried to make a little circling gesture around his neck. ‘Marks,' he said again and closed his eyes, musing on the nature of suicide. She might have been sick. Lonely. She might have been tired, tired of the bad life. Tired of being a toy for any man with twenty roubles. There were plenty of reasons for the girl to want to die, but she hadn't strangled herself first, he knew that.

And now officially they were saying he should forget all about it. Forget the smeared lipstick, the transparent dress. Forget.

At Glasovskaya Street they helped him up the stairs, helped him fish for his key, helped him open his great creaking door. ‘It's almost time to wake up and go to the dentist . . .' he mumbled.

‘All right, have a good night then,' Hokhodiev said, Dudenko's hand halfway rising in salute as he closed the door behind them.

Ryzhkov started undressing but he ended up just taking off his shoes and socks, walking out to the front room, covering himself with a dressing-gown and collapsing on the chaise. After only a few minutes he got up and moved to the writing desk. Under the blotter was the running letter he had started a week earlier. He pressed the nib of his pen into the blotter and made a series of dashes over the paper until the ink began to run, then he began to finish the letter.

. . . only just returned now from the theatre. Unfortunately I have come down with a severe toothache . . .

His pen hung paralysed at the end of the sentence. The clicking in his jaw was the only sound he could hear. He let his eyes travel up an empty frame on the top of the desk. He had removed her portrait months earlier, unable to live with Filippa's relentless staring. What to say? What to say to a wife who was gone, gone away for good, gone away to Lisbon for how long?

Too long. For longer than necessary. Yes. Unavoidable. Gone for all the right reasons: to help her sister and her children cope while their mother recuperated. Oh, yes. She'd
had
to go.

It had turned out to be an extraordinarily long illness. Filippa's mother was unexpectedly delicate. She had suffered from misdiagnosis, and quarrelled with her doctors. Filippa reported on her medical progress in letters that arrived every two weeks or so. He'd found that if he jotted something each day he ended up with enough for a return letter over the same time period.

. . . as regards the Tsarevich, now the rumours are confirmed and something is obviously wrong with the poor boy's health . . .

She had been gone for . . . how long now? Nearly a year. One of the neighbours was probably keeping count of the months. Ryzhkov sat there and drew little cross-hatchings on the blotter while he did the mathematics of her leaving.

The calculations got too complicated and he closed the curtain against the constant light. Of course the marriage had been a mistake. It was obvious, should have been obvious on the wedding day itself. They had ‘grown apart' as one of their friends had said. I grow, you grow, we grow. Oh, yes, that's understandable. To grow apart, yes.

. . . there is an entire schedule of celebrations, so many that they will continue through the year . . .

He saw now that she'd always thought of him as a sort of
project
. Something that with a lot of work might one day be finished to satisfaction and mounted on the shelf. But after a dozen tearful attempts to push him into a series of more acceptable, more fashionable situations, she had abandoned him to the sordid world of policemen and criminals. ‘You're like them, you're just like them. You admire them! You want to be like them!' she'd screamed at him when she'd finally had enough.

Now it was her idea that all should be forgiven. No one should be blamed, no one should even get angry. It was a modern world now. A woman leaving her husband, what was new about that? They would continue on as before, only on paper.

In one of her most recent letters she had mentioned a possible return to Petersburg at Christmas, but naturally this would be prevented if her mother's illness continued. Someone, then, would have to stay in Lisbon to manage things. If so, did he have plans to join her?

No.

So, gone for a year in March, then. And gone for a lot longer than that, to be truthful.

. . . with my greatest consideration and respect, I remain . . .

Gone.

SIX

It was a grey Bulgarian dawn and Sergei Andrianov woke from his sleep in the back of the Rolls touring car the railway had lent him. It came with a chauffeur, a quiet Italian named Mattei, who had gone inside the shed to talk with the signalman. He checked his pocket watch and there was a simultaneous hoot of an engine's whistle. Right on time, he smiled.

He straightened in his seat, found his case and extracted a cigarillo. He had been travelling throughout Europe for nearly two weeks through the dying summer and he was tired. This train, about to pull into the tiny siding, only kilometres inside Bulgaria across the Rumanian border, was the climax of all that work. He had spent his time moving from railway stations to hotels, in and out of telegraphers' kiosks, and then done it all over again. He had eaten catch-as-catch-can, passed envelopes to men who would pass them to others, assured the timid, threatened the weak. Not for the first time he had wondered if he should empower one of his confederates to take some of the task off his shoulders, but whom could he trust? Not Gulka, he had his hands full with security back in Petersburg, not Evdaev, he was more figurehead than tactician, and much too much the ditherer.

No, the Plan was a spider's web, each strand with its own discrete connections, but all of them leading to the centre, with him in control of everything. The smallest tremor in the web would bring his attention to bear, he would move rapidly to the troublesome situation, deal with any problem that might arise.

And to bring someone in at this late date would mean more risk. A jealous second-in-command would recognize the Plan for what it truly was—an elaborate strategy to preserve the Andrianov business interests. Ideology, while important and sometimes synonymous with his success, was mostly a smokescreen. What he had to do was to provide the leverage, the ideas, and the impetus to bring Russia into a war for which it was ill-prepared. Only Evdaev would have advance warning and would emerge as a hero, but Tsar Nicholas would be humiliated. And a second defeat after Japan would be the last straw. Losers always change their leaders, and that would be his moment. Publishers had been paid, articles already prepared, politicians cosseted, all of them standing ready to inflame the population. With the Duma a madhouse, the right men would come forward at the critical instant and call for abdication and arrest; stripped of its intricacies, that was the Plan.

He stepped out of the huge vehicle and peered around the corner of the station. Now he could see the train approaching along the tracks from Rumania; there was another careful whistle and at the signal box he saw the points change as the switch was thrown that would shift the train on to the line leading from Bulgaria to Serbia.

‘Tea, excellency?' The chauffeur had come out. He was holding a tray with a single steaming mug on it. The fragrance of the tea was strong in the morning air, a scent of oranges and something darker. Everything was different in the Balkans . . .

He took the offering without a word and carefully sipped. Together the two men watched the train pull up to a watering tower. There was a great hiss of steam as the engine braked to a stop, a rumbling as the couplers collided with each other along the length of the train.

‘Do you want your boots, excellency?'

‘Yes, thank you.' They moved back to the car and he sat on the edge of the seat, took off his dress shoes, and laced up a pair of walking boots over his trousers. It was already getting warm, the mist was rising over the railway sidings and he could see clearly the trees beyond, the open fields extending to the east. The countryside was damaged from the recent movement of troops, even the station had not escaped. A fire had blackened one end of the building and there were holes where bullets had chipped the bricks around the entrance.

Andrianov fished into his pocket for the key and walked down the train to the first of the goods wagons. When he got to it he broke the Bulgarian military seals, and opened the doors.

He pushed his foot into a cleat and clambered up. Inside the wagon were two Schneider 122mm field artillery pieces nailed to the floor of the rail car and secured with chains and chocks. Their steel barrels were newly painted field grey. In the shadows at each end of the wagon, turned over with their wheels removed for cartage, were the guns' caissons. Andrianov checked the serial numbers, stood for a moment in the gloom, touched a finger to the lip of the muzzle of one of the pieces. It was raw metal, painted with thick grease to protect against rust. The finest product of the Putilov plants. The guns had been ordered to reinforce the Bulgarian army; only his money and Count Ivo Smyrba's willingness to betray his country had diverted them to this tiny shunting yard.

He turned to exit the wagon and saw a young man standing there. ‘Welcome to Greater Serbia, excellency,' the young man said. His accent was Serbian and something else, maybe Galicia. His hair was matted and his white shirt was spotted with soot. He hadn't shaved for weeks and he clearly had been riding along in the engine. ‘There's no need to check, further. Nothing's been touched.'