Loe raamatut: «A Game of Soldiers»

ONE

St Petersburg shimmered like a vast hallucination. It was three in the morning, but on this white June night the sun flared like a beacon over the deserted boulevards.

Lost in their dreams, the innocents slept. It was the hour of the prostitute and her final client, the hour when the drunk had collapsed into his nightmare, the hour when the suicide ceased his pacing. It was the hour of the thief and the hour of the investigator, the hour when tears had dried and laughter was just a memory. The hour of the predator and the hour of the victim.

Petersburg was a premeditated city. A metropolis with artificial neighbourhoods and preposterously wide boulevards that ran arrow-straight to the horizon. It was a place even a peasant could understand, its avenues designed for military parades, bisected by canals whose bridges could easily be blocked by cossacks.

Three centuries of Romanov rule had not mellowed the city’s master plan; there were the parks with their silent green foliage, cathedrals looming over statues of long-dead Tsars, garish sentinels protecting the most important circles and plazas.

An artist’s eye might linger on the barges moored against the embankments, the golden flash of the Admiralty’s spire, the leaden green light across the broad waters of the Neva, the row of red-painted government buildings interrupted by the gigantic yellow General Staff building. But no colours could enliven Russia’s purpose-built gateway to the world – a city built upon the corpses of serfs enslaved to the horrific aspirations of Peter the Great. A capital born with its cord anchored to a swamp – beautiful, on the surface.

On this garish morning two carriages were drawn through the heart of the empty city. Leading was an opulent troika pulled by white horses. Beneath its luminous black lacquer one could still detect the ornamental crest of the House of Romanov. At a discreet distance a threadbare izvolchik followed, with three members of the Okhrana secret police crammed inside. Beyond boredom, they had nothing to look forward to and no plans, for anything might happen at such an hour. They had raised the top of the cab to protect themselves from the glare and two were sleeping while their superior leaned his head against the window post and fought to stay awake.

Pyotr Ryzhkov watched the city glide by – a long blur of apartment blocks, office buildings and markets, most of them built in identical style, from identical materials to an identical height. The slow pace of the carriage gave him the illusion that he was falling – sinking into an eternal void.

Ryzhkov was the most ordinary-looking of the three. With unruly dark hair and strong brows, he looked like his father without the moustache. Eyes that were blue, but with dark pupils, as if always starved for light. He seemed a little older than his years, the hard life had done that. Here and there he had a scar; wrinkles of concern, and a slight frown that had etched itself into the mask he had worn as a face for too many years. He needed a shave and a few regular meals. He needed a vacation, some new clothes. To sleep. A new life.

Ahead of them the elegant troika slowed, turned off the embankment on to a narrow side street. Muta flicked his whip, and in a few seconds they reached the intersection in time to see the troika stopping at the entrance to an ornate office building.

‘All right. He’s decided to stop…’ Ryzhkov nudged Konstantin Hokhodiev awake. Kostya was a big man. He yawned and stretched and tried to straighten his legs in the small carriage. ‘Whose place is it this time?’ he groaned without opening his eyes.

‘I don’t know. Someone with money to spend, just looking at it,’ Ryzhkov said. Down the street a queue of expensive carriages and motorcars rested at the kerb, their drivers sleeping or standing about smoking. The windows of the mansion were open and there was a wash of sound: music, laughter, groans.

Dima Dudenko, the youngest member of their team, yawned and also tried to stretch his legs in the carriage. His feet got tangled in Ryzhkov’s and he woke with an irritated jerk, then realized where he was. ‘Good Christ, this is insane. Doesn’t Blue Shirt ever sleep?’

‘Here he comes…’ Ryzhkov muttered as the door of the troika opened and the mad monk – Grigori Efrimovich Rasputin – stepped down on to the pavement. The prostitutes were tipsy. They laughed and stumbled into the street behind him. Hokhodiev managed to blink himself awake just as Rasputin and his friends climbed the front steps. A sign hanging above the portico read Apollo Fine Papers & Binding. The front doors opened and Rasputin threw his arms wide as a blast of applause engulfed him. A clutch of men in formal dress stepped out to kiss his hand. Laughing, he was dragged inside.

They were in a fading neighbourhood, a little too far away from the canal, not close enough to the theatre, and much too close to the stench of the market on a warm day. Ryzhkov cleared his throat and spat out on to the cobbles. ‘This is…Peplovskaya Street, yeah, Muta?’ he asked the driver.

‘Peplovskaya, yes, excellency. Only a small street,’ Muta said in his thick Georgian accent. Ryzhkov had been along the little street dozens of times; still, he had never really noticed it. An uninteresting street, the kind that could only take you somewhere else.

‘Well, he’ll be in there for hours,’ Dudenko muttered. ‘Does anybody want something to eat? There’s a place down the corner, they might have something?’

‘Not me,’ Hokhodiev said, got out and walked a few paces out into the street and began to urinate.

‘Go ahead. I suppose he’s probably safe enough in there.’ Ryzhkov climbed out of the carriage to shake the stiffness out of his legs, took a moment to roll his head around on his shoulders.

Ostensibly the Okhrana were charged with watching over Rasputin to ensure that he did not come under the influence of foreign agents or revolutionary elements that might use him to gain access to the Imperial family, but really they were guarding ‘Blue Shirt’ – as the Internal branch knew him – from embarrassment in the newspapers. There was no detective work involved. Everyone knew the secret police were trailing the staretz, not because he was a threat to the Imperial family, but because he was their pet.

In less than a decade Rasputin had become a legend. He was thought to be a holy wanderer who could speak directly with God, a creature with unlimited sexual appetites who could cure illnesses with a simple caress. Everyone in the capital knew that if you wanted something – a posting to a particular ministry, special attention paid to your proposals, consideration when it was time to hand out military decorations – anything at all, you would need Rasputin as an ally. His favour was a necessity in order to ensure a successful career, his wrath could obliterate a cabinet minister in a single morning.

Thus, when their rotation came around Pyotr Ryzhkov and his men dutifully trailed Rasputin back and forth across the city. It amounted to a series of sleepless nights that only ended when Blue Shirt fell into his bed in the company of a final prostitute he would select from the group waiting at the entrance to his building. It was boring unless you enjoyed watching the upper crust humiliate themselves at the feet of a con artist, an exercise which Ryzhkov had long since ceased to find amusing.

His memory of the street gradually came back – apartments over shops down at the corner of Sadovaya, a couple of shabby wooden houses and a little warehouse up on the market end of the street – Peplovskaya. The only thing disturbing the peace of the street was the noise coming out of the Apollo Bindery.

‘Look at this,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Oh, yes, all you need is the money and you can buy a little taste of heaven…’ Hokhodiev joined him as he walked along beside the carriages. Painted on their sides were the crests of some of Russia’s most powerful families. At the head of the queue, the black troika of Prince Yusupov, behind it a carriage inscribed with the gold filigreed crest of the House of Orlovsky. A flaming fortress indicated the Evdaev family, next was the gleaming Renault of Prince Cantacuzène.

‘Well, they must be sewing together some extremely rare books. A very literate clientele, by the looks of it…’

‘High flying, even for our friend,’ Hokhodiev said. ‘You want me to get the numbers?’

‘Oh, yes, whatever the circumstances we must complete our paperwork. Do you have enough space in your book?’ The carriages and motorcars continued for the length of the street past the bordello, vehicles belonging to an assortment of devotees, perverts, aristocrats, power-mad debauchees of every stripe.

‘If I run out of pages, maybe I’ll go up and buy a new one from the management, eh?’ Hokhodiev laughed and walked away down to the start of the queue.

Ryzhkov stood in the centre of the street, fiddled for his watch and checked the time. Nearly four in the morning. The sky above him was a pearly white tinged with streaks of yellow. From above one of the prostitutes was crying out in pretend-orgasm. The chauffeurs looked over and he shook his head and they laughed. Down at the end of the street he watched Kostya gathering the meaningless licence numbers.

‘No point,’ he said. He sighed and headed back to their carriage, the most unkempt vehicle on the street. ‘No point whatsoever…’

Dima came back with rolls and a pot of tea. When Ryzhkov took a drink he flinched. ‘Are you all right?’ Dudenko asked, his narrow face frowning.

‘Oh, it’s just this tooth, it’s started up again. I’m fine.’ He took a sip from the glass of tea that Dudenko gave him. The heat brought another jolt of pain to his jaw.

‘You should do something about that, an infection can lead to serious illness, eh?’

‘Yes, yes, yes…’ He held the hot liquid on his jaw and waited for the pain to go away.

They sat in their shabby little carriage and shared out the food among themselves. Muta took the opportunity to fall asleep with the reins in his hand. After a few minutes Hokhodiev returned, opened the door of the carriage, sat on the step and smoked. They talked about the schedule for the next day. It should have been the end of a hellish week of Blue Shirt surveillance, but the Tsar was in the capital and the three of them were to augment the Imperial Guard at the Marinsky Theatre. What that meant was – less sleep all around.

Dudenko gathered their glasses and had taken only a few steps down the pavement when they heard the screams.

There was a sudden crashing that came from the end of the street. All the drivers and chauffeurs looked up. It sounded like one or two women – angry. A man’s voice, lower. Something crashed into splinters and shards.

‘What…what is this? Tell me he hasn’t gone and got into something stupid…’ Ryzhkov stood up in the carriage. Muta woke up and his pony took a nervous step forward. There was another long scream from the upstairs of the building.

‘It’s down there –’ Dudenko stooped and placed the glasses on the pavement, stood and peered down the street. Ryzhkov could see the drivers at the end of the queue looking at something masked by the edge of the building.

‘Something going on in the lane down there,’ Hokhodiev said.

Ryzhkov jumped out of the carriage, ran across the cobbles and down to the corner of the bindery. There at the beginning of the lane a group of drivers were standing still, serious expressions on their faces. In the distance sounded the shrill blast of a police whistle. He rounded the corner and saw what he first took for a bundle of clothes tossed on to the pavement.

And then –

One of the drivers had covered her with a jacket, but it was too small and Ryzhkov could see the fan of her blonde hair across the stones. Reflexively he moved closer and one of the drivers reached out to stop him. He shook the man off and held his Okhrana disc up for them to see. From the back of the building the cooks and servants had come running out. An old man was standing over the girl, rubbing his hands on his apron.

‘She fell…’ the old man said in a weak voice. He looked at them as if he hoped someone would help him find a better explanation for the dead child on the cobbles, for the sparkling wreath of broken glass all around them. ‘Yes, she fell, excellency,’ the old man said again. ‘From up there someplace –’ The old man pointed to the windows above them, and they all craned their necks trying to see up to the top floors of the building and the yellow sky beyond.

He walked forward and pulled the jacket off her, brushed the long blonde hair away from her face. An angel, was the first thing he thought of. An angel tumbled right out of the heavens.

Pale white body, tall for her age, he thought. Wearing a little night-dress that clung to her, a gossamer wrapper that had ridden up, making it look as if she were dancing. Leaping, with her arms to the sky, a pink satin ribbon around her waist, celebrating something that she’d never seen before. A long smear of blood down both of her legs, but nothing else. The long blonde hair wreathed around her, half-undone. All that was missing were the wings.

He pulled her hair back a little and, looking closely, saw marks around her neck. Rubbed, raw. Her face was smiling, almost. Only a little blood at the corner of her mouth. You might mistake it for lipstick gone awry.

Her eyes were open; eyes rimmed with dark orbs of kohl, rouge that had been brushed on, too dark for her skin. Skin pale as milk. An angry gash on her forehead that hadn’t bled very much, he thought. Her clear blue eyes open and staring out at the glass like diamonds sparkling all around.

‘Pyotr…’ he heard Hokhodiev behind him. ‘We have to find him and get out of here, eh?’

Behind him there were more whistles and the drivers scurried aside to let a St Petersburg Police Ambulance manoeuvre into the narrow lane. Ryzhkov pulled his eyes from the girl and saw three officers had run up from the other end of the alley.

‘Hey…Blue Shirt, Blue Shirt, Blue Shirt…’Hokhodiev prompted, giving him a little tug. He realized now that he was standing over her in a daze, staring at all of them, the officers, the servants, the drivers who had crowded into the lane.

‘Yes,’ Ryzhkov said. ‘Let’s find him and get him out.’

He started back on to Peplovskaya Street, his heart beating like a racehorse, Dima running ahead. Rounding the corner they saw a gallery of men in formal dress and varying states of intoxication leaving the building, pushing their way towards their carriages as quickly as possible. Men with money. No blood on any of them. None of the gendarmes was doing anything.

Right in front of him there was an angry shriek and Ryzhkov saw a young woman being pulled away from the gate. She was strong and she fought her way down the steps and out to where the men were trying to escape. There was the crack of a whip and a carriage bolted away in front of her; at the last moment someone jerked her out of the path of the wheels and she stumbled and fell into the gutter.

She got up. ‘No, no…no!’ Slapped her way free of the gendarmes, and started running down the pavement towards the lane. ‘Murder!’ she called with her face lifted to the high windows of the building. And then the police were upon her, wrenching her arm back so that her face contorted in pain.

On the entrance stairs a uniformed officer from the Life Guards was in conversation with a clutch of police. He was laughing, his hand extended to offer the overawed policemen cigarettes from his silver case. The madam of the house was there on his arm, her dazzling red hair piled up with feathers, a beaded dress with a décolletage that provided an easy view of her ample bosom. She was smiling through it all as she wished everyone goodnight.

Behind them Ryzhkov saw Hokhodiev and Dudenko pushing Rasputin out of the foyer towards the street. A little mob of aristocrats were jammed up there, all patting each other on the back and moaning their goodbyes.

‘Let them through!’ Ryzhkov growled at a gendarme sergeant who was smiling and bowing and apologizing for the situation. The man’s eyes suddenly went wide with fear and he backed up two steps when Ryzhkov held up his disc. Suddenly the knot of pleasure-seekers parted and Rasputin was right in front of him.

‘Unfortunately, we must be leaving, Holy One,’ Ryzhkov said, trying to take the sarcasm out of his voice as he reached out and grabbed Rasputin by his satin shirt. The man smelled of tobacco, body odour, and lavender perfume.

‘But, I thought we were here for the music?’ Rasputin was saying to the woman behind him. Ryzhkov had Rasputin by the shoulder and steered him down the steps towards his carriage. There was an enthusiastic chorus of goodbyes and blessings for a safe journey. The guards officer watched them go, smiling faintly.

‘What happened in there, Holy One?’ Ryzhkov asked Rasputin.

‘I don’t know. We haven’t even started and boom it’s all for nothing.’ He seemed genuinely perplexed by the whole thing. Hokhodiev looked over at Ryzhkov and shrugged. ‘But there’s always another party going on somewhere. Who knows? It’s probably for the best, eh?’ Rasputin said.

‘Perhaps, Holy One. Go, now…’ They pushed Rasputin into his carriage and the driver flicked his whip. Around them the policemen were helping the guests on their way. He and Hokhodiev stood there for a moment, looking down at the end of the building, both of them thinking about the girl. He didn’t want to go back down there.

‘Whoever did it has had lots of time to get out,’ Hokhodiev said quietly.

‘Yeah, yeah…’ Ryzhkov took a sharp breath, shook himself like a dog. His fingers had cramped around the knife he carried in his trouser pocket.

‘But Blue Shirt certainly was under control. I found him at the table, just like a gentleman.’

‘He has a sixth sense.’

‘Exactly, he can sniff trouble. He knows, I’m telling you…’ Hokhodiev frowned, put a big hand on Ryzhkov’s shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Yes…’ he said, but he wasn’t and they both knew it. A St Petersburg police officer was a few paces away and Ryzhkov walked over, flashed his disc. ‘Hey, who owns this place?’ The lieutenant shrugged, gave a thin smile and pointed to the sign over the portico. ‘Well, this isn’t a book factory, there’s obviously some kind of apartments up there. What about those?’

The lieutenant was still smiling. ‘Yes, a Finnish gentleman has leased the entire building. Unfortunately, he’s not on the premises. Tonight appears to be a private party, some friends of his.’ The young officer shrugged. He wasn’t going to give Ryzhkov much help no matter what service he was from.

‘Hey, who’s paying you off, pal?’ Hokhodiev stepped forward to intimidate the gendarme, but the lieutenant didn’t budge.

‘It’s a suicide, from what I’ve heard,’ he said. ‘Some little vertika tail-twister jumped out of one of the windows around the corner.’ They all looked down to the lane. ‘It happens more and more,’ the lieutenant said with a sad smile.

Suicide. Ryzhkov thought about it for a moment, tried to put it together with what he had seen in the lane. Maybe suicide was becoming fashionable, but he hadn’t realized that children were doing it. The whole thing was a lie, transparent as the dead girl’s dress. He turned and looked at the officer for a moment, gave him a smile of his own. ‘Sleep tight, little fellow,’ he said and walked back towards the alley.

The gendarmes backed away as soon as they rounded the corner.

Ryzhkov stood there, a little unsteady, looking down at the girl, memorizing it all. Maybe he had been thinking she’d wake up, or move, or say something. Maybe he’d been thinking that he could heal her somehow. He looked up to the opened windows on the top floor. There was still gramophone music playing up there, crazy, jangling ‘negro music’ that filled the street.

‘Ah…if we hurry, we can catch up with Blue Shirt…’ Hokhodiev said gently. Dudenko only shrugged.

‘Pyotr, she’s gone, and we have to go too,’ Hokhodiev said.

‘Yes,’ Ryzhkov said finally, backing away so that the attendants could free her from the pavement and roll her on to the stretcher.

A crowd had formed now; neighbourhood residents who had heard the commotion and had rushed to their windows, then thrown on their robes and come out on to the street. As they headed back through the crush he saw officers from both the Preobrazhensky and the Grenadier Guards regiments, and what he supposed were uniforms of at least two foreign countries. There was even a pair of court pages there, boys not yet grown into men, who strode away nervously, heading towards the busy intersection of Sadovaya Street.

‘Excuse me, sir –’ A nervous gendarme rushed towards the gates where several women were being briskly escorted off the property. Ryzhkov saw the same angry one among them.

‘There you have it, Pyotr,’ Hokhodiev mused. ‘An entire flock of whores, judging by the feathers…’ Six or seven of them, pulling on their brightly coloured robes, being rushed out of the building before they had time to finish dressing, hair undone, clutching their bags.

Ryzhkov saw that the angry one had fallen behind the others; she was spent now. No longer screaming about murder, just standing there alone. Hat jammed down over her head, clutching her bag across her breast, just staring down towards where the ambulance attendants were doing their work. He thought he could see her lips moving, talking to herself.

‘Are we ready, now? Have we done our careers enough damage now?’ Hokhodiev said, trying to make it all go away, trying to turn it into a joke.

‘Yes…why not?’ Ryzhkov said.

‘Good, while we all still have jobs, eh?’ Hokhodiev steered him out of the lane. Ahead of them Ryzhkov saw their cab drawn up at the corner by the teahouse.

It was a scruffy place, there was no sign above the shop, just a long arc of painted flames that spanned the width of the establishment. Muta was sitting there pretending to be calm, taking a pull from his pipe. The ejected prostitutes had gathered at the door and were talking with some of the customers and angrily pointing back to the bindery.

Hokhodiev pulled him across the cobblestones to avoid his being trampled as an expensive carriage glided by – inside Ryzhkov could hear the passengers laughing. Now that they had got away without arrest or embarrassment the whole event had become an exciting, giddy experience. Not something to tell their wives and children about, but nevertheless, a most unusual night. A thrill, even though somewhat frightening for a time, surely, but invigorating for all that, and even fun…

‘Hey!’ Dudenko suddenly cried out and rushed ahead to their cab. Two of the prostitutes were now angrily demanding a ride from Muta. Dudenko began waving them away but the girls simply parted and neatly circled him.

‘Thank you…thank you…ladies, I’m sorry we are full.’ Hokhodiev pushed the girls away, yanked Dudenko up on to the step.

‘This place looks like your home for the night, girls,’ Hokhodiev called out to them. The men at the door of the café laughed and one of the girls slung her bag at Hokhodiev as he got into the cab. Ryzhkov saw it was the angry one again, the same girl he had seen staring down the street. He watched as she pirouetted on the pavement in a complex negotiation between her friends and the laughing men in the doorway.

He could see her closely. She was even more dishevelled now, certainly intoxicated, hysterical from the shock. Her tears had made dark rivers down her cheeks. Her nose was red, from crying. Attractive, if you went for women of that type. On the thin side. Yes, certainly, somewhat attractive. Even beautiful in a lewd, trashy way.

Then suddenly there was the crack of Muta’s whip and she was gone.