‘Fontanka 16 and smart about it,’ Barclay snapped.
But the entertainment was well and truly over, the crowd drifting away, and for all the driver’s easy cursing, the brandishing of his whip, the carriage crept on to Zagorodny at no more than a walking pace. A file of soldiers was marching along the prospekt to the lazy beat of a drum and the driver was obliged to join the carriages trundling in its wake.
Barclay had spent twenty years in uniform with the army and then the Gendarme Corps. Secret policeman, guardian of the state, he sometimes wondered if his name and background had directed his choice of role, as if he had felt it necessary to prove his loyalty to the empire. The Barclays had made their money in the timber trade; worse still, they were ‘foreigners’ of Scottish descent. Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky was the same. He was a member of the hereditary nobility from Kiev, but his family was Polish – they were ‘foreigners’ too. After observing his new superior for a week, Barclay was inclined to the view that this was almost the only thing they had in common. Dobrshinsky was single and unattached, a curious state of affairs for a thirty-five-year-old gentleman who, if not handsome, was quite prosperous enough to be eligible. Of course, there were many senior government servants who preferred the society of the demi-monde but no one Barclay had spoken to suspected the collegiate councillor of an exotic private life. He was bookish, an academic by disposition and a lawyer by training, distant, even a little cool with colleagues, and yet he enjoyed a formidable reputation as an interrogator, not of the bullying sort but as a student of the mind, a follower of Professor Wundt and the German school.
Barclay was flattered Dobrshinsky had singled him out to join the special investigation, although a good deal of his enthusiasm was dissipating as the size of the task they faced became apparent. Dobrshinsky had explained in his quiet measured way that it was their duty to protect His Imperial Majesty, and if that meant arresting every radical in the empire then that was precisely what they were going to do. With good intelligence that would not be necessary; well placed informers, more agents and better trained, a complete shake-up of the Third Section. Failure was unthinkable, the consequences immeasurable.
The special investigation team at Fontanka 16 had begun to creep across the first floor. A score of agents was assigned to the inquiry, clerks, copyists, an archivist and even a dedicated telegrapher with one of the new Baudot transmitters. The Third Section had seen nothing quite like it since the days of Tsar Nicholas. From dawn until long after dusk, clerks scurrying from room to room with telegrams and reports from gendarme stations across the empire, plain-clothes officers taking witness statements or questioning known radicals, street superintendents flicking through photographs in an effort to identify ‘illegals’ in their districts, and at the heart of this frantic activity, the special investigator himself. Dobrshinsky was at a blackboard with an agent when Barclay stepped inside the main inquiry room. There was an unnatural hush; the officers bent low over their desks like schoolboys before their teacher. Cheap furniture had been crammed into the office to meet the needs of the investigation and the agents sat in a phalanx of desks pressed together in the middle of the room. Along one of the walls, three large sash windows with a view over the Fontanka; against the rest, wooden filing cabinets, bookcases, blackboards and tables.
‘Vladimir Alexandrovich, how timely,’ said Dobrshinsky with an expression Barclay took for a smile. ‘We have something of great interest at last, please . . .’ and he indicated with a look and a brisk sweep of the hand that the gendarme officer should follow him into his office. ‘And you too, Kletochnikov,’ he said, addressing the agent at his side.
‘A good show?’ Dobrshinsky asked as he settled behind his perfectly ordered and polished mahogany desk.
‘A large crowd, Your Honour.’
‘No need for formality,’ said Dobrshinsky, offering them both the leather library chairs opposite. ‘It was a pointless waste. In time, I might have won Soloviev’s confidence. Justice has not served us well in this case, a little too blind and impatient, I fear. But we have something . . .’
He reached into his drawer and pulled out a red leather-bound file, opened it and spread his hands on the desk in front of him in a gesture of satisfaction.
‘Yes, thank goodness we have something. Two valuable pieces of intelligence, the first, a report taken from a yard keeper on the Fontanka Embankment a short distance from here. The second, well, that is why Agent Nikolai Vasilievich is here.’
Kletochnikov coloured a little with embarrassment and glanced down at his hands twisting in his lap. Well, well, a secret policeman who blushes; Barclay suppressed the temptation to smile. The poor fellow seemed very young, no more than thirty, slight, round-shouldered, with a thin intelligent face and spectacles.
‘The dvornik was questioned by a local constable and he gave a remarkably good description of what was almost certainly an illegal gathering at a mansion opposite. It’s owned by a . . .’ Dobrshinsky glanced down at the file, ‘a Madame Volkonsky, a sentimental old aristocrat, a champagne revolutionary.’
It was a Sunday afternoon, which was why the yard keeper was sober, he explained. The old man puffed on his pipe and watched the comings and goings at Number 86 with keen interest and with a surprising eye for detail.
‘Students, some respectably dressed young women, a young man in tweed with an exotic blue tie, but of more importance, these two.’ Dobrshinsky took two small photographs from the file and slid them across the desk to Barclay.
‘The one on the right is Mikhailov – rather an old photograph, and on the left, the Jew, Goldenberg. The dvornik had no difficulty in identifying him. Mikhailov arrived and left with a young woman, petite, dark.’ Dobrshinsky paused, lifting his elbows to the desk, hands together as if in prayer, intense concentration written on his face. ‘Her description seems to match one we have of a woman seen leaving the square after the attempt on His Majesty’s life.’
‘Do you want me to arrest Madame Volkonsky?’ Barclay asked.
‘Leave her – for now. Keep the house under surveillance. Have her followed. I don’t expect Mikhailov tells her anything, but he may risk using Number 86 for another gathering. She’s probably giving him money. I think it’s fair to assume Mikhailov and Goldenberg are still in the city. And now, if you please . . .’ Dobrshinsky nodded to the young agent perched anxiously at the edge of his chair.
‘Yes, Your Honour.’ Kletochnikov looked unsure quite what was expected of him.
‘Tell Major Barclay what the city police have told you.’
‘It’s Popov, Your Honour, the student revolutionary implicated in the death of the informer – Bronstein. He’s been seen among the men at the Baird Works.’
One of the foundry hands had tipped off the local police, Kletochnikov explained. Popov and the Muscovite labourers with whom he shared the room at the Neva were organising political meetings in the homes of sympathisers, distributing propaganda, agitating for a secret trade union, and the socialist gospel they preached was attracting new recruits, although the city police could not be sure how many.
‘So, as you see, another opportunity,’ said Dobrshinsky, impatiently pushing back his chair and rising to his feet. ‘Which is well and good because General Drenteln and the Justice Ministry are impatient for results. Soloviev was a nobody. It’s the men who gave him his gun and sent him out that we want.’
He turned to gaze out of the window on to the Fontanka, and for a moment the silence in the room was broken only by the noise of a carriage clattering along the embankment below and the heavy tick of the French clock on the mantelpiece.
‘Popov may be close to Mikhailov – Bronstein saw them together,’ Dobrshinsky said, turning to face them again. ‘Let’s find out where he lives then pick him up. He’s a nobody but he may take us one step closer to the six on the hotel list. ’
With a nod and casual wave of the hand, the collegiate councillor drew the meeting to a close. He slipped back behind h
is desk and was pulling a file across it when, almost as an afterthought and without lifting his head he said, ‘Oh, Vladimir Alexandrovich?’
‘Your Honour?’ Barclay was halfway to the door.
‘Would you like my clock?’
‘I don’t understand, Your Honour?’
‘What don’t you understand? Would you like my clock?’ he asked again with an enigmatic smile. ‘It is an excellent clock. It never seems to wind down or stop.’
‘Thank you, Your Honour, I have one of my own.’
7
It was with more than a little trepidation that Frederick Hadfield stepped from the droshky on to the pavement at the foot of St Boris and St Gleb. Pressing five kopeks into the cabby’s hand, he plucked his father’s battered medical bag from the seat and turned towards the shell of the new church rising from a forest of scaffolding on the bank of the Neva before him. Three towers in the Byzantine style were almost complete, but construction of the central dome had barely begun. The low wharf buildings and the school adjoining the site were painted in pink dust and probably had been for every one of the ten years since the foundation stone was cemented into place. The city’s wealthier inhabitants were not inclined to reach very deeply into their pockets to pay for a church they would never visit. The Peski district had an unsavoury reputation for crime and drunkenness, and gangs of youths roamed its badly lit, rubbish-strewn streets at night, unchecked by the police. Behind the peeling facades of its old rooming houses, the poor lived from hand to mouth in cramped and unsanitary conditions. A warren of dark corridors and flats, with many families forced to share a single noisy insalubrious room, privacy a thickness of tattered curtain. The district was home to a class of society the city government tried to pretend it owed no obligation to – shop assistants, factory workers and their families, apprentices, students, the jobless and destitute. The poorest of all lived in ramshackle wooden buildings – some no more than huts but others of two or three storeys – thrown up on unclaimed ground between the mansion blocks. Hadfield had never needed to visit Peski although the Nikolaevsky Hospital was at the edge of the district and some of his patients were drawn from its streets. But a foolishly sentimental thought and an ambush at the opera placed him under an obligation to spend the day of rest in this most unappealing part of the city. The Times’s man, George Dobson, had inquired as to his mental health then accused him of being a dangerous radical.
‘How on earth did you get roped into it? When I write your obituary,’ he joked over lunch, ‘I will be sure to inform our readers that choosing to venture into Peski on a Sunday was not the selfless act they might think but a disgracefully vain one.’
They had dined well together and for too long at one of the city’s best restaurants and Hadfield was an hour later than promised at the church. He was to wait in front of the dusty scaffolding at the west end where he would be met and taken to the clinic. Swinging his medical bag a little to draw attention to his profession, he wandered to and fro in its shadow, scrutinising the faces of passers-by for a flicker of recognition. He was on the point of giving up when a boy of about ten, in a traditional belted shirt and with a shock of unkempt red hair, ran out of an alley at full pelt and across the square towards him.
‘Doctor?’ he asked breathlessly, his head bobbing in an awkward show of deference. ‘This way, please.’
‘You’ve been sent by Miss Kovalenko?’
‘To take you to the clinic,’ he said, wiping his nose with a dirty hand. ‘You’re late.’
It was all Hadfield could do to keep pace as the boy set off at a trot across the square. On into the dingy alley he had burst from with its galleried timber houses and shop fronts clinging to the mansion blocks like growths, damp and rutted underfoot, the air thick with the stench of rotting vegetable matter and effluent. On past a tavern, a drunk lying face down on the cobbles, the beery carousing of many rising from the cellar below. Right then left then right again, twisting and turning, laundry dripping from the balconies above, an old man in rags hobbling along with his stick, street urchins with bare feet playing with a simple wooden top in the filth, and a young woman with greasy hair, her face empty of expression. After fifteen minutes’ hard walking the boy stopped at the door of a long two-storey building rather older in style than the rest of the street and, judging from what was left of the plaster, once a blue-grey colour. Chunks of render had fallen from the wall, exposing the naked pink brick behind, and there were rusty bars before the windows, opaque with grime and bird shit. The boy’s fist was raised to the door but it opened before he could knock to reveal a babushka with three small children. Beyond them, a gloomy hall with at least twenty people standing against the walls or sitting on low benches, their faces turned towards Hadfield and the light.
‘They’re waiting for you,’ the boy said, pushing roughly past the old lady. A young man rose from a bench and rapped on a door at the far end. A moment later, Anna Kovalenko was striding across the floor to meet him, the sharp purposeful click of her heels echoing through the hall. She was wearing a white pinafore over her skirt and blouse and her hair was pulled back in a severe bun. The deep frown he remembered so well from their first meeting at the political salon creased her brow and he felt ashamed he had lingered long over coffee and a cigar when sick people were waiting to see him.
‘Doctor Hadfield,’ she held out her little hand to greet him, ‘thank you for coming.’
‘I’m so sorry I’m late. I . . .’
But before he could make an excuse she dismissed it with a wave: ‘Can we begin?’
Evgenia Figner was waiting in the treatment room. She restricted her disapproval to a sharp look and small shake of the head. The room was rectangular in shape, lit by two sash windows in the short wall opposite the door. A narrow white table stood in the centre with enamel bowls, scissors, strips of cotton cloth and medicine bottles on its scratched and pitted surface. A white bucket for medical waste had been placed on the rough boards beneath it. In one corner of the room a Russian stove, and along the wall a low table for patients’ clothes and belongings.
‘Is there anything else you need?’ The note of apology in Anna’s voice to explain there was nothing else.
‘No.’ He opened his medical bag and took out his coat: ‘All right, let’s begin.’
The first of the procession: the elderly and the very young, a pregnant woman with severe abdominal pain, a young bargeman with a knife wound to a forearm, a Tajik with infected gums. Burns, cuts, suppurating boils, and the sicknesses of poverty – rickets, malnutrition and a man with the telltale skin lesions of pellagra. Some patients he could refer to Anna and Evgenia for cleaning and bandaging, but most he was obliged to treat himself. At a little before five o’clock, he saw a boy of six with the acute onset of flaccid paralysis in his right arm. His face was pinched, the skin pulled tightly over his cheekbones, and he looked at Hadfield with careless eyes.
‘Where’s this boy’s mother?’
‘In the waiting room with her other children,’ Anna replied.
‘I think he has poliomyelitis. Ask everyone to leave the treatment room and bring her in. And I should look at her other children.’
It was Anna who spoke to the boy’s mother using the simple language of the village. The woman was dressed in a grubby purple and white striped dress, her full dark face framed by a red scarf, buxom, no more than twenty-five years of age, new to the city. Her boy was very sick, Anna explained, stroking the woman’s face tenderly with the back of her hand. He should be kept from other children, even his little sisters, clinging to their mother, their faces buried in the folds of her dress.
‘Do you have something to make him better?’ the woman asked, turning to Hadfield. ‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’ Her lips and chin were twitching with barely suppressed emotion.
‘Do you have a room where the boy can sleep on his own?’ Hadfield asked.
She shook her head and looked away, but not before Hadfield could see she was
biting her lip in an effort to hold back the tears. Anna touched his elbow and took a confidential step closer: ‘There are several families in one room. She shares a corner with her sister and her sister’s children.’
‘And the father?’
‘She hasn’t seen him for months.’
What could he do? The contagion would have to run its course. It might leave the boy a cripple for life or carry him away, but with nursing and good food there was a chance too of a full recovery. Lifting his medical bag on to the stool beside him, he took out a slip of paper and a pen and wrote a short note.
‘Take the boy to the Nikolaevsky Hospital tonight. Will she find it?’ he asked Anna.
‘I will send someone with her.’
Turning to the boy’s mother again: ‘Ask for one of my assistants, Anton Pavel, and give him this,’ and he handed her the note. ‘He will take care of your son. Be sure to ask for Anton.’
They worked on into the gloom of evening, the smoky light from the oil sconces casting Gothic shadows upon the walls. By seven it was clear there would not be time for the many still waiting patiently on the hard benches in the hall and he sent Evgenia to take some simple notes to identify the priority cases. Anna worked beside him in the treatment room and he was impressed by her dexterity; she was an able nurse, sensitive and quick to learn. As he was reaching for scissors to cut a dressing, he touched her cold hand and she looked up at him with a twinkling smile that left him trying to remember the task he was supposed to perform. They were treating their last patient of the day – a man in his twenties with the first bloody signs of consumption – when there was a loud knock at the door, and without waiting for a summons, Grigory Goldenberg walked into the treatment room.
It was more than an unwelcome intrusion. Hadfield felt as if a cold wind had swept in with him, lowering the temperature in the room. Goldenberg was at the clinic to treat no one. He was there to talk of revolution, dressed theatrically for the part in the belted red chemise and high black boots he had worn at the political salon. But Anna was not in the least surprised to see him and offered him her cheek and a warm smile in greeting.
To Kill a Tsar Page 6