The Jewel of St Petersburg (26 page)

M
INISTER IVANOV DEPARTED WITH NOTHING MORE THAN curt nod to his wife and headed into the ministry on the Embankment, while Arkin turned the car around and drove back up Nevsky. Outside Madame Monique’s fashion house, he opened the Turicum’s door and though it was not his usual custom, he offered his hand to Elizaveta Ivanova to steady her on the car’s steps. To him she looked frail, the firm lines of her face blurred and uncertain. She accepted it, and before walking under the blue-and-white awning over the shop she thanked him.

“I’ll be an hour,” she said to him. “No longer.”

“Yes, madam.”

He bought a newspaper and read it in the car. But it told him little. An accident, they were calling it, a tunnel roof collapse. No mention of a bomb. No mention of an attempted assassination. Fuck the bastards. He cursed Tsar Nicholas for his fickle mind. Without the tsar, the corrupt regime would crumble because it had nothing to prop it up. When Minister Ivanov told him that His Imperial Majesty had gone ice skating that day with his children at Tsarskoe Selo instead of inspecting the tunnels, he’d wanted to howl. Where was the uprising? Where was the start of the brave new world Arkin had sold his immortal soul for?

Finally Madam Ivanova emerged, and he cranked up the engine. He waited for a tram to rattle past before pulling out in front of a monogrammed carriage, but the sight of all the extravagant shops and restaurants only deepened his sense of disappointment. He had truly believed these places would belong to the ordinary people of Russia today. He drove fast, needing to be away from there.

The noise, when he first heard it, startled him. For a second he thought he must have run over a cat. It was a single loud shriek that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Abruptly it ceased, but by then he’d realized it had come from behind him. He turned in his seat and saw Elizaveta Ivanova slumped forward, her elbows tucked into her lap, her face in her hands. She was moaning.

Arkin pulled into a side street and stopped the car. “Are you unwell, madam?”

The fur coat didn’t move. Just the low moan that went on and on. He stared at her crumpled figure and found himself breathing awkwardly. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and stood on the icy pavement, the wind snatching at his peaked cap.

“Madam?” he said.

The moaning broke off. Still the sable coat remained hunched forward, but quivers ran through it and quiet sobs began to leak between her fingers. Instinctively he slid into the seat beside her. It broke all the rules, but to hell with the rules. He sat next to her, not touching, not speaking, just being there. When the quivering finally ceased and one of her gloved hands reached into the small gap between them, he placed his own hand over it. Glove on glove, the faintest of comforts, and they remained like that. Minutes passed. Several pedestrians glanced at them with a surprised expression, but Arkin ignored them.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Slowly, Elizaveta Ivanova hauled herself back to an upright position and took a long shuddering breath. She didn’t look at him or remove her hand, but her back was ramrod straight once more and the tears had stopped.

“She may still be alive,” Arkin said quietly.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Don’t give up hope.”

Her mouth pulled into a faint parody of a smile. “I gave up hope years ago.”

“There’s no need to. Hope is what keeps us going.”

“Hope for what?”

“For a daughter still alive. For a life worth living.”

She turned her face toward him, and he saw the cold loneliness in her blue eyes. Her fur hat was crooked and a strand of fair hair had come unpinned, hanging in a curl across her cheek. He wanted to straighten both for her. To straighten her life for her.

“Is your life worth living?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She inspected him, taking in as if for the first time the dark spikes of his hair under his hat, the line of his mouth, and the careful expression in his eyes. Still her hand lay under his.

“Thank you,
Spasibo,”
she said again.

She sat back against the seat and closed her eyes. Beneath the almost transparent skin of her eyelids he could see her eyes moving, restless as his own heartbeat, and he waited quietly while she found in herself whatever it was she needed to go on. When it started to snow, he removed his hand, returned to the front seat, and drove her home.

J
ENS FRIIS CAME BACK TO THEM. VALENTINA WAS THE FIRST to sight the faint glow of the lamp, the first on her feet, the first to greet him and to see that the Jens who returned was not the same Jens who’d left them. His face had changed. In some indefinable way the bones sat differently, as if they had been taken apart while he was gone and reassembled by an unfamiliar hand. His eyes had sunk deeper in his head and a hard line ran down from each corner of his mouth. He was brusque. Unapproachable. He explained in brief sentences what he’d seen.

“The tunnel is completely blocked back there by rocks and rubble.”

Valentina studied his hands. Gloves in tatters, blood oozing down his wrist.

“It is too much to remove. The roof is unstable. No rescue teams will be coming that way because more of the tunnel roof could come crashing down at any time.”

“Did you find anybody?” Nurse Sonya asked.

The Duma man backed off to the gully and vomited into the water.

“There were bodies,” Jens acknowledged. His mouth was tight. No one asked for more.

“Now,” he said, “we wait.”

D
O YOU SWIM?”

Valentina’s stomach flipped over. “Yes.” In the creek in the summer, back in the days when her sister could kick. “Yes, I can swim.”

“Good.”

“Will it come to that?”

“It could.”

She imagined the cold water. “I don’t think my nurse can swim.”

“Then we shall keep her afloat between us. Don’t look so worried. It most likely won’t be necessary.”

“I hope not. Will the water be filthy?”

“Probably.”

W
HEN THE OIL LAMP WAS LIT, THEY LIVED IN ONE KIND of world. Valentina paced up and down the cavern to the limit of the lamp’s range, but she didn’t venture beyond it. That would be too much. She was thirsty, her throat dry. The older women remained seated on the damp ground, quietly discussing the desirability of a hot bath. Jens stood by the gully water and smoked cigarette after cigarette. His leather hat had disappeared and his red hair had turned a dirty gray, flattened to his head by the weight of brick dust. At intervals he walked over to the young surveyor, studied the flushed face, and exchanged a few words with Nurse Sonya.

When the lamp was off, they lived in a different kind of world, one that released the demons that fled from daylight. The small group sat in a circle again, feet touching.

“Try to sleep,” Jens ordered.

He crouched down beside Valentina, took off his coat, and draped it over her.

“Spasibo.
Let’s share it,” she said.

In the total darkness she felt the touch of his hand as he spread the heavy coat over their laps. As time crawled past and voices quieted, the incessant swirl and flow of the water filled her mind and she pictured it rising, slowly, implacably, until she was drowning in her sleep.

“Hush.”

Jens’s voice in her ear. Jens’s hand on her chin. Her eyes jerked open but met only blackness.

“Hush,” he murmured again.

She was aware of his body leaning over hers.

“You were whimpering. Bad dream?”

“Yes.”

“This place invites bad dreams.”

The blackness was thicker than pitch. She could make out no trace of his face, but she heard him swallow and felt the soft brush of his lips on hers. There one moment, then gone. So brief she wasn’t certain. Tentatively she touched his face and her fingers found the high forehead, the straight line of one eyebrow, and slid down to explore his eyelid and the dense fringe of eyelashes. She had never touched a man’s face before.

“When will the water come?” she whispered.

“Soon, I imagine. They have to evacuate the tunnels that we need to escape through and rid them of water.”

She breathed carefully, drawing in the air they shared.

“Do you know what I would like now?” he asked.

“What?”

“Four slices of cool refreshing pineapple, sweet and tangy. Two for you, two for me.”

She laughed with surprise.

“Sleep now,” he murmured. “No more dreams. Don’t worry, I’ll listen for the water.”

T
HE WATER CAME, JUST AS JENS HAD KNOWN IT WOULD. His sharp ears picked up the change in its voice, a sudden shift in note long before it reached them: a distant sound rattling through pipes and tunnels far off in the system. Water was being redirected, sluices opened and closed. Certain tunnels had to be emptied before the trapped group could escape, and now the sound of the water grew louder.

“Just remain calm,” he told them. “As soon as the water is through this chamber, we can all climb up into the higher tunnel and walk our way out. Watch your heads; the ceiling height will be low. Keep together and take a firm hold on the rope.” It wasn’t a rope. It was their belts fixed together into a long line to stop anyone being swept away.

“How deep will it be?” the nurse asked. Her teeth were chattering.

“Not deep at all. Hold on to the rope.”

They stood in a line behind him. The wounded surveyor was belted onto Jens’s back, just conscious enough to grip around his neck. He was a skinny young man, not too much weight, but Jens worried about the open wound on his leg in the foul water. Next to him stood the nurse, dropping prayers from her lips like rosary beads. Jens raised the lamp in one hand and took a grip on her arm with the other. On the far side of her stood Valentina. He would have given much to be able to seize her hand and not release it, but he had given his word to help her nurse. One on each side of her, he’d promised, but all the time he’d be watching Valentina. He’d put Davidov behind her, then Davidov’s wife, followed by the Duma couple.

When the water came, it rose out of the gully and sneaked across the floor of the chamber as black as oil, but no one panicked. There were raw gasps as the icy flow increased to a flood, crawling over their feet, sliding up their shins, and swirling around their knees. When it reached Valentina’s thighs, billowing her skirt around her, her eyes sought his. Her hands held tight onto the rope and onto Nurse Sonya as a rat swept past them, swimming frantically.