The Birds Fall Down (28 page)

Chubinov stammered, “What was the name of the villa?”

“What a thing to ask. I don’t remember. It was ten miles out on the Peterhof Road.”

“Ten miles out on the Peterhof Road. A corpse hung from a meat-hook in the ceiling. The tongue. Nikolai Nikolaievitch, that wasn’t Kamensky’s brother. It was a student named Valentine. A traitor. A shameful traitor. He had led the police straight to one of our printing-presses. It was no mistake. Gorin took his papers off the body.”

“The police found papers on the body which showed he was Kamensky’s brother.” Nikolai’s voice fell to a whisper. “If you had seen how Kamensky wept.”

The train stopped at a station and the two men did not speak again until the guard’s trumpet sent it pushing on.

“This is the end of my life,” said Chubinov.

“If I say that, it has no meaning, simply because it is true,” said Nikolai Nikolaievitch. “But in any case, I do not feel what you convey when you say that. It keeps on running through my head that the messengers came to Job and told him that fire had come down from heaven and burned up his servants. I do not feel that my servant Kamensky has done anything. I feel something has been done to him.”

Presently they began to talk like policemen again. “I have to admit,” said Chubinov hesitantly, “that there was always something mysterious about the case. We never actually knew who had performed the deed of vengeance, and it was premature. The committee was in the course of examining the proofs of Valentine’s treachery, but it had not come near to the stage of giving orders for his punishment. Then Gorin found an unsigned note at his lodgings telling that three of our members could wait no longer and had trodden the viper under their heel, and it gave the address of the villa on the Peterhof Road. Gorin picked me up at my home and we went there at once. It was a terrible scene. Gorin is exquisitely sensitive. I’ve often heard him say that while he would dare to commit any murder in order that the tyrants who are strangling Russia should pay for their crimes, he can never reconcile himself to the harsh necessity that to make a murder, a sentient being has to be murdered.”

“I see that’s awkward for him,” said Nikolai Nikolaievitch. “But don’t worry. He showed himself quite robust that night. For if he took Valentine off the meat-hook for you, he must have put him back on it for me.”

“I had forgotten, I had forgotten. But you don’t mend anything by your mockery,” said Chubinov.

“From our side,” said the other, “there was something odd. We found Valentine’s baptismal certificate in the Kharkov church records, and his school registration, but he had never attended Kharkov University. It turned out that Kamensky had never seen him there or had any proof that he was enrolled there. You see, I am like you, I slip back into thinking that he was honest. Well, the tale Kamensky then told us was that he supposed that the boy’s revolutionary friends had seduced him into consenting to spend his days, on some illegal activity before the term started, so he never went there at all.”

“You should have known what could have been behind that,” said Chubinov. “Some boy called Kamensky died after leaving high school and before getting to the university, and our people stole his identity for one of our workers.”

“Yes, that ghoulish trick I should have recognized by this time. But to get back to our loved one. He came into my office the next day, grief-stricken, enraged, alone, helpless, weeping—weeping again—and with a peculiarly touching quality about his tears. He asked if he might join your organization and report on its doings, so that he could expiate the guilt which lay on him for not having protected his young brother from your devilry. Well, as I said before, this reaction seemed neither unnatural nor dishonourable. I was then given to understand, and until you came into this compartment it was never suggested to me that I should doubt it, that he presented himself to your organization, pretended that he believed his brother’s disappearance was due to the Secret Police, gained your confidence, and thus enabled us to punish many criminals and avert many crimes. In my personal relations with him I experienced a curious pleasure. Now I know all about him, or more about him, the only virtue I can credit him with is courage, but he seemed to have all the virtues, and one more than is named, a kind of gaiety. And when I was disgraced he did not waver. I have come to love him. And I am not such a fool as you think,” he suddenly roared, “for he was on our side. Assuredly he was on our side. He must have been on our side, he gave us your Vesnin, Patopenko, and Komissaroff. Yes, and many others of your abominable breed.”

“He was on our side,” said Chubinov, changing his glasses. “He in his own person planned the executions of Dubassoff and Sipyagin and Plehve—yes, it was he who coached the cab-driver in getting his horse to move on slowly while he seemed to be trying to restrain it, so that Sazonoff could use it as cover up to the very last moment, when he ran out and threw the bomb which freed us from the butcher of Kishinev, the past master of pogroms. Without him the Grand Duke Serge would be alive today—”

“Do not speak to me of that death,” Nikolai begged him, with sudden gentleness. “Every time I hear of it I sin. I loathed the Grand Duke Serge, he was the incarnation of that evil which must not be blamed, since it arises out of stupidity, and is thus, God help us all to understand, plainly God’s will. When there is any mention of his assassination I fall straight into sin, I blaspheme, before I know what I’m doing I thank God he is dead. Again and again I’ve done penance for this, and again and again I offend. This too is part of the trouble you’ve made for all of us, you accursed murderers.”

“But it’s you, not we, who are the murderers. We are the instruments of justice. No guilt rests on us. There is blood on our hands, but it is turned to glory by the rectitude of our cause. How strange it is that one of us two should have lived a life which is like a noble poem and the other a life which is that poem’s ignoble parody.”

“One day you’ll learn which side it was that produced the parody,” Nikolai promised, “from the lips of the Lord himself,” he added spitefully. He called to an attendant who was going down the corridor. “What’s the next station we stop at? Grissaint? It is a big station? With frequent trains back to Paris? Good.” His eyes went back to Chubinov. “Forgive me, I shouldn’t mock a dead man. And you’re a dead man, Vassili Iulievitch.” “No,” said Chubinov. “Not yet.”

“I think you will be very soon. I’m going to die quite soon. Not at once, but quite soon. My granddaughter and I will get out at the next station, this Grissaint, or whatever it’s called, and take the next train back to Paris. My duty dictates that step, because there’s no more direct route I know of between Northern France and St. Petersburg, and that’s where I must go. If the Tsar wishes me to return to Russia in order to humiliate me and accuse me of a crime I have not committed, and insult me by pardoning my innocence, then to Russia I must go.”

“No,” said Laura, “no. Can’t you think for one single moment of Grandmother?”

“I’ve spent my whole life telling my inferiors that the Tsar’s will is sacred, even when it ordered their destruction. There’s no reason I can see why I should alter my attitude when it is myself whom he wants to destroy. So I must return to Russia and there I will die, either in prison or out of it, from rage. But it will take some time to wear me down to that. But you, Vassili Iulievitch, you will be dead quite soon.”

“You underrate me and the Party. I will get out at Grissaint too. Which is quite a large place. We have some members there. Some sympathizers, I should say. I will take the first train to Paris which is not an express, which stops at all stations. I’ll get out at the last but one stop before the Gare du Nord, or perhaps the last but two. Then I’ll walk and take a bus, walk and pick up a cab, and so on till I get to my hotel near Les Halles. I’ll have to keep in mind, of course, that at any moment Gorin may try to kill me, and dodge him while I get a telegram in code sent off to my committee in St. Petersburg, acquainting them with his treachery, and I’ll embody the same information in an express letter to the Paris representative. Oh, God, oh, God, do you know what I was thinking then? I was thinking that I must get Gorin to help me, he’s so good at drafting messages. But when I’ve done all this I’ll be able to take the train to Berlin, and on to St. Petersburg, without fear. We’re really very, very highly organized,” he said, taking off his spectacles and beaming through his tears, “and a man who has lodged an accusation against a fellow-member in the proper form will never be molested on his way to headquarters. It would make it look too bad for the accused person.”

“Imbecile of all imbeciles, you’ll never be granted the immunity which is ceded to a member who is lodging an accusation against a fellow-member of your organization, because already, as you sit in this compartment you are a member of your organization who has had a charge lodged against him by a fellow-member, the trinity of evil who is Kamensky who is Gorin who is Kaspar. Let me draw your maimed mind to some aspects of your situation which don’t seem to have occurred to you. Do you suppose that a police spy like Kaspar, well-paid and, what is more, in a peculiarly happy position, thanks to my folly—do you imagine for a moment that however disloyal he was, he could wish success for a plan to assassinate the Tsar at a naval review, or anywhere else, but particularly at a naval review, where a small number of conspirators would have had to be admitted to a restricted area comparatively easy to supervise? A police spy who let that happen would not only lose his job, he’d find himself in prison, possibly in Siberia for life. Of course Kaspar had to upset the
Rurik
plans as soon as you idiots had begun to carry them out. And of course he had to make it seem as if he hadn’t done the upsetting and someone else had, and that someone else is you.”

“Yes, I suppose that is the only reason why I had those beautiful days by Lake Geneva, with those marvellous young men,” said Chubinov indistinctly.

“With those blood-stained Benjamins. Yes. You can take it too that for the same reason you were sent off to London to fiddle about with your infernal printing-presses, churning out rubbishy lies under the shelter of a criminal democracy, and that for the same reason the actress was dispatched to London to tell the faithful there that the three conspirators had been arrested. And what a stroke of luck that was for Kamensky, for Gorin, for Kaspar that she looked into the courtyard and saw him and was able to tell that story in front of idiots of your own kind, while you gave yourself away with that fatuous face of yours, so honest that it’s past a joke, that it makes one vomit even if one’s on the side of honesty. All your expression gave away was that you had guessed the three young men were
Rurik
conspirators. But Kamensky, Gorin, Kaspar, had made certain that these English simpletons thought that what you were giving away was that you had arranged for their arrest. And they became so suspicious of you that you recognized it, even you who if you had been in Moscow when Rostopchin burned it wouldn’t have noticed that anything unusual was going on for at least twenty-four hours. By the way, how funny to think of you of all men being got into trouble by an actress!”

He guffawed, and Chubinov tried to laugh too.

“But Grandmother’s far more ill than you realize, you can’t go back to Russia,” Laura went on saying, but neither of them heard her.

“Already, at this moment, you can be sure,” Nikolai went on, “the startling news of your treachery has reached your fellow-members, not only in Paris, where by your own account they’re all loading their revolvers to take a pot-shot at you, but in St. Petersburg and in Moscow and everywhere else where your pestilential co-conspirators poison the air with their stench. By this time, you’ve no more chance of defending yourself than Judas if he came before a church synod. You lamentable ass, you’re already dead. In a few days some dupe no brighter than yourself or me will be taken to some villa which has been burgled by Kamensky and he’ll be shown your body hanging from a meat-hook in the kitchen ceiling, and listen gaping to some tale about how you handed over three innocent boys to the Cheka, long live the Revolution.”

“You put it odiously, but you are right,” breathed Chubinov. “But how well it has all been planned. It is, isn’t it, in a sort of abhorrent way?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Laura. “If you do something so awful that nobody could imagine you doing it, then nobody’s going to work out ways of stopping you.” But again neither of them heard her. They were sitting in a fog of solemnity, though surely what they had found out should have made them angry instead of impressing them. Were men perhaps no good? Even when things were still going well at home, she had suspected that though her mother loved her father she did not feel an all-out respect for him. Often Tania talked of her husband and her father as if they were magnificent horses, probably marred, though she was not yet certain, by some incurable fault, like a tendency to take off too soon before a fence. As for her grandmother, conflicting ideas about men were always passing through her head. Her manner to Nikolai was submissive, it proclaimed her readiness to obey him in all circumstances, but hardly concealed her lack of conviction that this would serve any useful purpose. One could see even more clearly how odd her feelings were when she was dealing with men servants and was more detached. She ordered them about imperiously, but always with a reservation, as if admitting that though here on earth she had the upper hand, there was another world of immaterial values, where superiority would be accorded to them simply because they were male. Nevertheless, when she spoke to them, her mouth was vigilant. She checked whether they had carried out her orders; she always entrusted any task demanding conscientiousness and reticence to her women servants, and not to the men; but she liked to have men servants about her, standing about the place, as if they brought good luck. She did not approve of that other world which accorded men a supreme value, but evidently she thought it might exist.