The Man From St. Petersburg

by Ken Follett

  She reached his house and climbed the stairs. What would his reaction be? He would be shocked, then elated; then he would become practical. They would have to leave immediately, he would say, for her father could send people after them to bring her back. He would be decisive. "We'll go to X," he would say, and he would talk about tickets and a suitcase and disguises.

  She took out her key, but the door to his apartment hung open and askew on its hinges. She went in, calling: "Feliks, it's me--oh!"

  She stopped in the doorway. The whole place was in a mess, as if it had been robbed, or there had been a fight. Feliks was not there.

  Suddenly she was terribly afraid.

  She walked around the small apartment, feeling dazed, stupidly looking behind the curtains and under the bed. All his books were gone. The mattress had been slashed. The mirror was broken, the one in which they had watched themselves making love one afternoon when it had been snowing outside.

  Lydia wandered aimlessly into the hallway. The occupant of the next apartment stood in his doorway. Lydia looked at him. "What happened?" she said.

  "He was arrested last night," the man replied.

  And the sky fell in.

  She felt faint. She leaned against the wall for support. Arrested! Why? Where was he? Who had arrested him? How could she elope with him if he was in jail?

  "It seems he was an anarchist." The neighbor grinned suggestively and added: "Whatever else he might have been."

  It was too much to bear, that this should have happened on the very day that Father had--

  "Father," Lydia whispered. "Father did this."

  "You look ill," the neighbor said. "Would you like to come in and sit down for a moment?"

  Lydia did not like the look on his face. She could not cope with this leering man on top of everything else. She pulled herself together and, without answering him, made her way slowly down the stairs and went out into the street.

  She walked slowly, going nowhere, wondering what to do. Somehow she had to get Feliks out of jail. She had no idea how to go about it. She should appeal to the Minister of the Interior? To the Czar? She did not know how to reach them except by going to the right receptions. She could write--but she needed Feliks today. Could she visit him in jail? At least then she would know how he was, and he would know she was fighting for him. Maybe, if she arrived in a coach, dressed in fine clothes, she could overawe the jailer . . . But she did not know where the jail was--there might be more than one--and she did not have her carriage; and if she went home her father would lock her up and she would never see Feliks--

  She fought back the tears. She was so ignorant of the world of police and jails and criminals. Whom could she ask? Feliks's anarchist friends would know all about that sort of thing, but she had never met them and did not know where to find them.

  She thought of her brothers. Maks was managing the family estate in the country, and he would see Feliks from Father's point of view and would completely approve of what Father had done. Dmitri--empty-headed, effeminate Dmitri--would sympathize with Lydia but be helpless.

  There was only one thing to do. She must go and plead with her father for Feliks's release.

  Wearily, she turned around and headed for home.

  Her anger toward her father grew with every step she took. He was supposed to love her, care for her and ensure her happiness--and what did he do? Tried to ruin her life. She knew what she wanted; she knew what would make her happy. Whose life was it? Who had the right to decide?

  She arrived home in a rage.

  She went straight to the study and walked in without knocking. "You've had him arrested," she accused.

  "Yes," her father said. His mood had altered. His mask of fury had gone, to be replaced by a thoughtful, calculating look.

  Lydia said: "You must have him released immediately."

  "They are torturing him, at this moment."

  "No," Lydia whispered. "Oh, no."

  "They are flogging the soles of his feet--"

  Lydia screamed.

  Father raised his voice, "--with thin, flexible canes--"

  There was a paper knife on the writing table.

  "--which quickly cut the soft skin--"

  I will kill him--

  "--until there is so much blood--"

  Lydia went berserk.

  She picked up the paper knife and rushed at her father. She lifted the knife high in the air and brought it down with all her might, aiming at his skinny neck, screaming all the while: "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you--"

  He moved aside, caught her wrist, forced her to drop the knife and pushed her into a chair.

  She burst into hysterical tears.

  After a few minutes her father began to speak again, calmly, as if nothing had happened. "I could have it stopped immediately," he said. "I can have the boy released whenever I choose."

  "Oh, please," Lydia sobbed. "I'll do anything you say."

  "Will you?" he said.

  She looked up at him through her tears. An access of hope calmed her. Did he mean it? Would he release Feliks? "Anything," she said, "anything."

  "I had a visitor while you were out," he said conversationally. "The Earl of Walden. He asked permission to call on you."

  "Who?"

  "The Earl of Walden. He was Lord Highcombe when you met him last evening, but his father died in the night so now he's the Earl. 'Earl' is the English for 'Count.' "

  Lydia stared at her father uncomprehendingly. She remembered meeting the Englishman, but she could not understand why her father was suddenly rambling on about him. She said: "Don't torture me. Tell me what I must do to make you release Feliks."

  "Marry the Earl of Walden," her father said abruptly.

  Lydia stopped crying. She stared at him, dumbstruck. Was he really saying this? It sounded insane.

  He continued: "Walden will want to marry quickly. You would leave Russia and go to England with him. This appalling affair could be forgotten and nobody need know. It's the ideal solution."

  "And Feliks?" Lydia breathed.

  "The torture would stop today. The boy would be released the moment you leave for England. You would never see him again as long as you live."

  "No," Lydia whispered. "In God's name, no."

  They were married eight weeks later.

  "You really tried to stab your father?" Feliks said with a mixture of awe and amusement.

  Lydia nodded. She thought: Thank God, he has not guessed the rest of it.

  Feliks said: "I'm proud of you."

  "It was a terrible thing to do."

  "He was a terrible man."

  "I don't think so anymore."

  There was a pause. Feliks said softly: "So, you never betrayed me, after all."

  The urge to take him into her arms was almost irresistible. She made herself sit frozen still. The moment passed.

  "Your father kept his word," he mused. "The torture stopped that day. They let me out the day after you left for England."

  "How did you know where I had gone?"

  "I got a message from the maid. She left it at the bookshop. Of course she didn't know of the bargain you had made."

  The things they had to say were so many and so weighty that they sat in silence. Lydia was still afraid to move. She noticed that he kept his right hand in his coat pocket all the time. She did not remember his having that habit before.

  "Can you whistle yet?" he said suddenly.

  She could not help laughing. "I never got the knack."

  They lapsed into quiet again. Lydia wanted him to leave, and with equal desperation she wanted him to stay. Eventually she said: "What have you been doing since then?"

  Feliks shrugged. "A good deal of traveling. You?"

  "Bringing up my daughter."

  The years in between seemed to be an uncomfortable topic for both of them.

  Lydia said: "What made you come here?"

  "Oh . . ." Feliks seemed momentarily confused by the question. "I need t
o see Orlov."

  "Aleks? Why?"

  "There's an anarchist sailor in jail--I have to persuade Orlov to release him . . . You know how things are in Russia; there's no justice, only influence."

  "Aleks isn't here anymore. Someone tried to rob us in our carriage, and he got frightened."

  "Where can I find him?" Feliks said. He seemed suddenly tense.

  "The Savoy Hotel--but I doubt if he'll see you."

  "I can try."

  "This is important to you, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "You're still . . . political?"

  "It's my life."

  "Most young men lose interest as they grow older."

  He smiled ruefully. "Most young men get married and have a family."

  Lydia was full of pity. "Feliks, I'm so sorry."

  He reached out and took her hand.

  She snatched it back and stood up. "Don't touch me," she said.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  "I've learned my lesson, even if you haven't," she said. "I was brought up to believe that lust is evil, and destroys. For a while, when we were . . . together . . . I stopped believing that, or at least I pretended to stop. And look what happened--I ruined myself and I ruined you. My father was right--lust does destroy. I've never forgotten that, and I never will."

  He looked at her sadly. "Is that what you tell yourself?"

  "It's true."

  "The morality of Tolstoy. Doing good may not make you happy, but doing wrong will certainly make you unhappy."

  She took a deep breath. "I want you to go away now, and never come back."

  He looked at her in silence for a long moment; then he stood up. "Very well," he said.

  Lydia thought her heart would break.

  He took a step toward her. She stood still, knowing she should move away from him, unable to do so. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes, and then it was too late. She remembered how it used to be when they looked into each other's eyes, and she was lost. He drew her to him and kissed her, folding her into his arms. It was just like always, his restless mouth on her soft lips, busy, loving, gentle; she was melting. She pushed her body against his. There was a fire in her loins. She shuddered with pleasure. She searched for his hands and held them in her own, just to have something to hold, a part of his body to grip, to squeeze with all her might--

  He gave a shout of pain.

  They broke apart. She stared at him, nonplussed.

  He held his right hand to his mouth. She saw that he had a nasty wound, and in squeezing his hand she had made it bleed. She moved to take his hand, to say sorry, but he stepped back. A change had come over him, the spell was broken. He turned and strode to the door. Horrified, she watched him go out. The door slammed. Lydia gave a cry of loss.

  She stood for a moment gazing at the place where he had been. She felt as if she had been ravaged. She fell into a chair. She began to shake uncontrollably.

  Her emotions whirled and boiled for minutes, and she could not think straight. Eventually they settled, leaving one predominant feeling: relief that she had not yielded to the temptation to tell him the last chapter of the story. That was a secret lodged deep within her, like a piece of shrapnel in a healed-over wound; and there it would stay until the day she died, when it would be buried with her.

  Feliks stopped in the hall to put on his hat. He looked at himself in the mirror, and his face twisted into a grin of savage triumph. He composed his features and went out into the midday sunshine.

  She was so gullible. She had believed his half-baked story about an anarchist sailor, and she had told him, without a second's hesitation, where to find Orlov. He was exultant that she was still so much in his power. She married Walden for my sake, he thought, and now I have made her betray her husband.

  Nevertheless, the interview had had its dangerous moments for him. As she was telling her story he had watched her face, and a dreadful grief had welled up within him, a peculiar sadness that made him want to cry; but it had been so long since he had shed tears that his body seemed to have forgotten how, and those dangerous moments had passed. I'm not really vulnerable to sentiment, he told himself: I lied to her, betrayed her trust in me, kissed her and ran away; I used her.

  Fate is on my side today. It's a good day for a dangerous task.

  He had dropped his gun in the park, so he needed a new weapon. For an assassination in a hotel room a bomb would be best. It did not have to be aimed accurately, for wherever it landed, it would kill everyone in the room. If Walden should happen to be there with Orlov at the time, so much the better, Feliks thought. It occurred to him that then Lydia would have helped him kill her husband.

  So?

  He put her out of his mind and began to think about chemistry.

  He went to a chemist's shop in Camden Town and bought four pints of common acid in concentrated form. The acid came in two two-pint bottles, and cost four shillings and fivepence including the price of the bottles, which was refundable.

  He took the bottles home and put them on the floor of the basement room.

  He went out again, and bought another four pints of the same acid in a different shop. The chemist asked him what he was going to use it for. "Cleaning," he said, and the man seemed satisfied.

  In a third chemist's he bought four pints of a different acid. Finally he bought a pint of pure glycerine and a glass rod a foot long.

  He had spent sixteen shillings and eightpence, but he would get four shillings and threepence back for the bottles when they were empty. That would leave him with just under three pounds.

  Because he had bought the ingredients in different shops, none of the chemists had any reason to suspect that he was going to make explosives.

  He went up to Bridget's kitchen and borrowed her largest mixing bowl.

  "Would you be baking a cake?" she asked him.

  He said: "Yes."

  "Don't blow us all up, then."

  "I won't."

  Nevertheless she took the precaution of spending the afternoon with a neighbor.

  Feliks went back downstairs, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands.

  He put the mixing bowl in the washbasin.

  He looked at the row of large brown bottles, with their ground-glass stoppers, lined up on the floor.

  The first part of the job was not very dangerous.

  He mixed the two kinds of acid together in Bridget's kitchen bowl, waited for the bowl to cool, then rebottled the two-to-one mixture.

  He washed the bowl, dried it, put it back into the sink and poured the glycerine into it.

  The sink was fitted with a rubber plug on a chain. He wedged the plug into the drain hole sideways, so that it was partly blocked. He turned on the tap. When the water level reached almost to the rim of the kitchen bowl, he turned the tap partly but not completely off, so that the water was flowing out as fast as it was flowing in and the level in the sink stayed constant without overflowing into the kitchen bowl.

  The next part had killed more anarchists than the Okhrana.

  Gingerly, he began to add the mixed acids to the glycerine, stirring gently but constantly with the glass rod.

  The basement room was very warm.

  Occasionally a wisp of reddish-brown smoke came off the bowl, a sign that the chemical reaction was beginning to get out of control; then Feliks would stop adding acid, but carry on stirring, until the flow of water through the washbasin cooled the bowl and moderated the reaction. When the fumes were gone he waited a minute or two, then carried on mixing.

  This is how Ilya died, he recalled: standing over a sink in a basement room, mixing acids and glycerine. Perhaps he was impatient. When they finally cleared the rubble, there was nothing left of Ilya to bury.

  Afternoon turned into evening. The air became cooler but Feliks perspired all the same. His hand was as steady as a rock. He could hear children in the street outside, playing a game and chanting a rhyme: "Salt, mus
tard, vinegar, pepper, salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper." He wished he had ice. He wished he had electric light. The room filled with acid fumes. His throat was raw. The mixture in the bowl stayed clear.

  He found himself daydreaming about Lydia. In the daydream she came into the basement room, stark naked, smiling, and he told her to go away because he was busy.

  "Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper."

  He poured the last bottle of acid as slowly and gently as the first.

  Still stirring, he increased the stream of water from the tap so that it overflowed into the bowl; then he meticulously washed away the surplus acids.

  When he had finished he had a bowl of nitroglycerine.

  It was an explosive liquid twenty times as powerful as gunpowder. It could be detonated by a blasting cap, but such a detonator was not essential, for it could also be set off by a lighted match or even the warmth from a nearby fire. Feliks had known a foolish man who carried a bottle of nitroglycerine in the breast pocket of his coat until the heat of his body detonated it and killed him and three other people and a horse on a St. Petersburg street. A bottle of nitroglycerine would explode if smashed, or just dropped on the floor, or shaken, or even jerked hard.

  With the utmost care, Feliks dipped a clean bottle into the bowl and let it fill slowly with the explosive. When it was full he closed the bottle, making sure that there was no nitroglycerine caught between the neck of the bottle and the ground-glass stopper.

  There was some liquid left in the bowl. Of course it could not be poured down the sink.

  Feliks went over to his bed and picked up the pillow. The stuffing seemed to be cotton waste. He tore a small hole in the pillow and pulled out some of the stuff. It was chopped rag mixed with a few feathers. He poured some of it into the nitroglycerine remaining in the bowl. The stuffing absorbed the liquid quite well. Feliks added more stuffing until all the liquid was soaked up; then he rolled it into a ball and wrapped it in newspaper. It was now much more stable, like dynamite--in fact dynamite was what it was. It would detonate much less rapidly than the pure liquid. Lighting the newspaper might do it, and it might not: what was really required was a paper drinking straw packed with gunpowder. But Feliks did not plan to use the dynamite, for he needed something reliable and immediate.

  He washed and dried the mixing bowl again. He plugged the sink, filled it with water, then gently placed the bottle of nitroglycerine in the water, to keep cool.