Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky picked up the surveillance log and, balancing it on his knee, began to turn its pages, marking passages in pencil before transferring them to the notebook on the desk in front of him. It was after nine o’clock at night but Fontanka 16 was still bustling with agents and clerks, and through the open door he could hear the incessant chatter of the Baudot receiver with telegrams from gendarmeries all over the empire. The terrorists were summoning trusted supporters to the capital. It was gratifying in a way, because arrests in the city must have left them in a parlous state, but it was clear they were planning another attempt on the emperor’s life. Barclay had extracted this piece of intelligence with a relish quite ungentlemanly from the traitor Kletochnikov. But he had not been able to supply the when and the wherefore. For now, they were obliged to rely on surveillance and informers in the hope that the fresh faces from the provinces would be careless and let something slip.
Sunday 21 February 1881
Dr Hadfield left his apartment at 12.30 a.m. He took a cab to the Nevsky Prospekt then walked down the Malaya Sadovaya and joined the crowd waiting for His Majesty. At a little before 2.00 p.m. the emperor left the manège with his escort to return to the palace. Hadfield watched him pass then walked to 24 Malaya Italyanskaya Street. An apartment in this house is occupied by an English newspaper correspondent . . .
Why was a well-to-do doctor with distinctly liberal if not republican views waiting in a frozen street on Sunday for a glimpse of the emperor? The special investigator had been concerned about security at the Sunday parade for a number of weeks, and the guard about the royal carriage had been doubled on his recommendation.
Dobrshinsky picked up a little hand bell from the desk and rang for the clerk in the outer office. ‘Ask Agent Fedorov to step into my office, would you?’
‘Did you organise a search of the buildings around the manège?’ Dobrshinsky asked when Fedorov appeared.
‘Yes, Your Honour, and in Italyanskaya Street.’
‘The canal embankment?’
‘No.’
‘The Malaya Sadovaya?’
The agent shook his head.
‘See to it then, as soon as possible.’
Dobrshinsky dismissed him and returned to the surveillance log on his knee. The Englishman had done nothing else of interest in the days since, and had made no effort to lose his police shadows although he was clearly aware of their presence. He turned to the previous day’s report.
Sunday 21 February 1881
The suspect Trigoni was followed to Number 17 2nd Rota Izmailovsky District. He was seen leaving with a blonde woman with a big forehead. A police agent followed the girl but she eluded him on the Nevsky Prospekt. The suspect Trigoni returned to his furnished lodgings at 66 Nevsky Prospekt at 10.00 p.m. and did not leave it again that day.
The station in Odessa had warned them that Mikhail Trigoni had arrived in the city. He was another of the party’s gentleman revolutionaries, the son of a general, with a weakness for expensive clothes that made him easy to follow. In his testimony, Goldenberg had referred to him by his English nickname of ‘My Lord’.
Dropping the log on his desk, Dobrshinsky rose stiffly, fastidiously brushing the creases from his frock coat. This simple activity left him a little breathless, his heart beating faster than was comfortable. He was spending too many evenings at Fontanka 16 without the benefit of a soporifique. It was easier to think at home alone, easier to rest.
‘Are today’s reports ready?’ he snapped at the clerk as he walked through his outer office.
‘No, Your Honour.’
‘Why not?’
Barclay was at the blackboard in the main inquiry room talking to an undercover agent. Drygin was one of the section’s best, older than the rest, shrewder, with instinctive guile. He was still disguised as a country bumpkin in a dirty padded kaftan, his grey beard and hair unkempt. Something in his restless movement suggested he had news of importance.
‘Your Honour?’ Barclay had seen him at the door. ‘We have a fresh report.’
The collegiate councillor stepped over to join him at the board where the latest intelligence on the chief suspects was chalked alongside their photographs. Dobrshinsky had taken the idea of a rogue’s gallery from a French crime journal and it was proving a useful tool.
‘Drygin was following our friend Trigoni,’ said Barclay, pointing to a fuzzy photograph of a young man in a student’s uniform.
‘Yes, Your Honour. A busy chap today. Really put me to the test.’
Drygin picked up his notebook and turned slowly to the correct page: ‘The subject left his apartment late this morning – a long breakfast in bed, perhaps – then he walked along the Nevsky to a cheese shop on the Malaya Sadovaya. It is run by a couple called Kobozev. The shopkeeper is from somewhere near Voronezh—’
‘The superintendent of the block says his papers are in order . . .’ Barclay interrupted.
‘The subject left at approximately midday and strolled over to the public library on the Bolshaya Sadovaya where he met a young woman – small, about twenty-five, brown coat, brown hair, quite pretty—’
‘Anna Kovalenko?’ asked Dobrshinsky.
Drygin shrugged. ‘She gave him a note. They were together five minutes at the most. Then I followed Trigoni to a restaurant on Nevsky where he had lunch. At about 2.30 p.m. he took a droshky to the Nikolaevsky Hospital. He gave the note to a porter, with instructions that it should be delivered at once. The porter delivered it to me first. It was addressed to a Dr Hadfield, just a couple of lines – I’m sorry it’s been so long. Tomorrow 22.00. With my love.’
‘Good,’ said Dobrshinsky. ‘Then I want four of our best men with him tomorrow, and someone in the hospital. And no mistakes this time.’
The old man gave a respectful little bow then shuffled off in search of sustenance.
‘I want that cheese shop searched, Vladimir Alexandrovich,’ Dobrshinsky said when he had gone.
‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘And I want you to take charge of Kovalenko. She’s the one we want, but if we find them together we can bring him to trial too. Now,’ Dobrshinsky turned back to the rogue’s gallery, ‘do you remember the names on the list we found in the hotel room on the Nevsky?’
‘Bronstein’s list? I think so: Mikhailov, Kovalenko, Morozov, Presnyakov, Goldenberg and Kviatkovsky.’
‘All of them are dead or in prison except for Anna Kovalenko. Even this one,’ and Dobrshinsky tapped his finger on the face of Nikolai Morozov. ‘The gendarmes arrested him at the border last week. He was trying to cross into Russia on false papers.’
Barclay watched the special investigator, his chin in his hand, his little brown eyes flitting from photograph to photograph. He was greyer, thinner, wearier than when they had met over the body of the Jew in that dingy hotel room. The last two years had certainly taken their toll.
‘His Majesty’s still with us, of course,’ said Dobrshinsky. ‘For that we can be thankful. But are we any closer to winning? It isn’t possible, is it?’
‘It is possible to arrest the bitch Kovalenko,’ Barclay replied. ‘And there will be satisfaction in that after all this time.’
40
Anna could not take her eyes off the jar. It was sitting on the kitchen table in front of her, the size of a small amphora of wine but with all the nitro-glycerine they needed to send the tsar and his entourage to a better place. In a few minutes one of the men would collect it and pass it with great care along a human chain to the end of the gallery. Then it would be packed between sandbags to direct the charge into the street above. The enterprise had almost come to grief more than once. The police had inspected the premises and questioned the shopkeeper and his wife, then one of the tunnellers cut a sewer pipe and flooded the cellar with effluent. The stench lingered in the shop for days.
In those fraught weeks Anna had felt too unwell to be of real service to her comrades. She had tried to hide her sickness but her room-
mate had seen her more than once with her head bent over a bowl. And although she prevailed on Praskovia to say nothing, some of the others had noticed how pale she looked and that the slightest thing would bring her close to tears. No one was used to seeing Anna Kovalenko close to tears.
‘You’re suffering from nervous exhaustion,’ they told her. ‘You must rest.’
Exhaustion, yes, because they were all tired of standing at the edge. More arrests, the constant fear of informers and discovery, and security was not what it had been when Mikhailov was there to instruct them all.
‘You have to say goodbye to it.’ Andrei Zhelyabov had come into the room and was standing at her shoulder. His face and beard were flecked with clay, and it was caked on his shirt and trousers.
‘Goodbye?’ She did not understand.
‘Now don’t frown at me,’ he said with an amused smile. ‘I mean the jar. You were staring at it as if you were hoping to summon a genie.’
‘Wouldn’t that be wonderful,’ she said with feeling. ‘Then our problems would be over.’
‘Can you instruct a genie to kill someone, I wonder.’
‘We could magic him away.’
He pulled a chair from the table and sat beside her, placing his large mud-stained hand on top of hers: ‘Are you all right?’
‘I . . . yes . . .’ But at the warmth of his hand, his affectionate look – the easy informality of the village – Anna’s chin began to tremble and she had to fight the wild uncontrollable tide of emotion welling inside her. After a few seconds she was able to say in a strong voice: ‘Yes, fine. Really.’
Zhelyabov gave a heartfelt sigh: ‘You know, when this is done, I will escape. Go south. Rest. Spend the summer there. You should do the same.’
‘Will Sophia go with you?’
‘I hope so, yes. And you should take your English doctor.’
Anna bit her bottom lip hard in an effort to hold the tide again: ‘Can it happen? Vera Figner will call it selfish.’
‘Yes. And perhaps Sophia too. But two years of hiding, looking over our shoulders, plotting . . . there is something terrible about being a terrorist. It dominates your mind so much that it affects your freedom of judgement.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘But it will happen. You’ll see.’
Zhelyabov carried the bottle through to the tunnel entrance. The charge was packed in place and a firing line run along the length of the gallery. It would be ready for the next Sunday parade. They sealed up the wall with a board of painted plaster and rolled the cheese barrels back into place. The lookout in the street gave a knock at the window – the coast was clear – and alone or in pairs they left the shop, Anna with Zhelyabov. On the Nevsky he took her hand and bent to kiss her cold cheek: ‘Goodbye, Anna. Be careful. Remember our promise. Summer in the south.’
She watched him walk away, collar up against the biting wind, hat pulled low, the son of the serf with his princess, prepared to break all society’s codes. Would Frederick feel the same?
The droshky took her to the Nikolaevsky Station and from there she walked on by a maze of small streets, stopping at corners and in doorways to be sure there was no one dogging her steps. The freezing air and the need for vigilance helped settle her nerves a little. The old lady had heard her footsteps on the stairs and was waiting on the landing to embrace her warmly.
‘Just as well you arrived when you did or I’d have taken him for myself,’ she whispered in Ukrainian, her body rocking with barely suppressed laughter. She led Anna into the room by the hand like a village bride.
Frederick was sitting at the table, playing with the wax at the base of a candle. He rose at once with a broad smile of relief and pleasure: ‘Thank God. Why has it been so long?’
She stood at the door in her old brown coat and hat, waiting for him to draw her into his arms.
‘I’ve missed you more than you can imagine,’ he said, taking the hat from her and stroking her hair.
‘I’m sorry. Things have been difficult . . .’
She could say no more, she was beaten, her voice strangled with emotion, the strain of the secret suddenly too much. And before he was able to kiss her, even with the old woman in the room, she burst into tears, burying her head in his shoulder.
‘Darling, darling,’ he whispered, kissing her hair, holding her tight. ‘Shush, darling.’
He tried to wipe her tears, kiss her tears, but she did not want him to see her face. She was ashamed of her weakness.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Tell me.’
‘No.’
‘Tell me.’
She was not ready to tell him. Not yet. ‘Things are difficult. But I’m all right.’
He tried to lift her chin and this time she let him, and he kissed her wet cheeks and eyelids and then her lips. Drawing her to the table, he made her sit beside him, her hands small between his hands.
‘You look tired, have you been sleeping properly?’
No, she was not sleeping, and she admitted she had been feeling unwell.
‘Then you must let me examine you,’ he said. ‘Your personal physician, remember?’
‘Later.’
They sat gazing at each other in silence. He was trying to offer an encouraging smile, but there was something intense in his expression that unsettled her. ‘Anna, you know I love you,’ he said, and he lifted her hand to his lips. ‘I love you very much.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t be cross with me, but I know you’re . . .’
‘Oh, God.’ And her heart beat faster, her chin quivering as she fought the urge to dissolve into tears again. ‘I’m sorry, Frederick.’
He was clearly taken aback. ‘Perhaps we’re talking at cross purposes,’ he said gently. ‘What is it you think I know?’
She examined his face, his soft hazel eyes, a little smile of encouragement playing on his lips: ‘No, you speak.’
The smile disappeared at once and he took a deep breath and sighed, as if bracing himself for what he clearly thought would be a difficult conversation.
‘The cheese shop on the Malaya Sadovaya. I know, that is, I’ve guessed what you are doing . . .’
She felt a fleeting sense of relief. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. ‘You’ve told no one?’
‘No. But now I know, it has to stop.’
She must have been gaping at him in amazement because he could not help a small smile. ‘Please, Anna, understand, I can’t let this happen. I don’t want to betray anyone but I won’t have any part in the killing of innocent people.’
‘What are you talking about?’ And she flushed hot with anger, tearing her hands from his. ‘Frederick, you’re talking nonsense. It’s a shop.’
‘Tell me you’re not trying to kill the tsar.’
‘That’s the party’s business, not yours,’ she said, her voice trembling with fury.
He reached for her hand again but she would not give it to him: ‘What do you want me to do, Frederick? Tell my comrades my lover is threatening to betray them to the police. I thought you loved me.’
‘Please try and understand, I can’t let it happen. I won’t be party to murder.’
‘It will be the end for us, I won’t see you again,’ she said, her body rigid, her face white, fists clenched tightly beneath the table.
‘I would never betray you,’ he said, ‘but I won’t be party to murder.’
‘But knowing of the shop doesn’t make you party to murder. And it’s not murder. He’s a tyrant.’
‘And those who will be travelling with him?’
‘Stop it, Frederick,’ she said, almost pleading with him. ‘Stop it. Please, please stop it.’
He was at a loss to know what he could say to placate her, conscious too, perhaps, that he was in danger of taking an irrevocable step.
‘Stop it, Frederick,’ she said again. ‘Don’t. I thought you wanted me.’
‘You know I do.’
‘Then what are you thinking?’
The curtain rattled urgen
tly and the old woman was standing in the doorway hugging herself, breathless, quite terrified.
‘What is it?’ Anna snapped at her in Ukrainian.
‘They’re in the street . . .’ she stammered.
‘Calm yourself. How many?’
‘Many.’
‘What is it?’ Hadfield asked, touching her arm.
‘The police.’
He moved towards the window, but before he could reach it they heard the thump of a fist at the door below and someone shaking the handle, then the echo of voices and steps on the stairs. The old woman began to whimper with fear.
‘You must go.’ Hadfield was pulling at her arm. ‘Go, Anna. Leave here. Go now.’
‘You must come too. You can’t be found here.’
There was the sound of splintering wood.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll do what I can. Go.’
‘Frederick, I’m going to have a baby.’
He stood gazing in astonishment at her.
She reached for his hand and held it to her face and for a moment he bent to rest his forehead against hers.
‘Now go,’ and he snatched his hand free and turned to the door. And then she ran. Racing through partitioned rooms, sweeping curtains aside, pushing past anyone who stepped in her way, until she found the other stairs. Down and then on into the darkness.
41
SATURDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 1881
25 VOZNESENSKY PROSPEKT
Anna made her way to the flat on the Voznesensky. Vera Figner let her in without comment and led her by the hand to the couch, where she lay in the early hours rolling the same questions through her mind until the worst was all she was able to believe. Then, at nine o’clock the following morning, they had news that the gendarmes had visited the cheese shop again and she knew he had failed her. But she could not speak of it to her comrades. She lay curled beneath a blanket while Vera gave instructions to the scouts. She was frightened as she had never been before. Please God she was wrong.
An hour later they received word that Zhelyabov was missing. He had arranged to meet Nikolai Kibalchich and the four bombthrowers, but they had waited for an hour and were still waiting,
To Kill a Tsar Page 33