It all faded out with a warning about the danger of contracting blood poisoning as the dentist extracted from a drawer a long hose on to which was screwed a green rubber gas mask. The man continued to scold him as he fitted the straps over Ryzhkov’s swollen face, pinching hair, bringing tears, and then moved behind the chair out of sight.
Ryzhkov blinked the tears away and stared out of the little office window. He could just see the bell tower atop the Academy of Arts, the masts of ships moored in the Neva beyond …
‘Just take a few deep breaths,’ Tchery said from somewhere behind him.
… and across the water, the red brick façades of the New Admiralty buildings, where undoubtedly some young naval architect was drawing up plans for Russia’s latest dreadnought … where the wargamers were devising new ways of controlling straits, isthmuses, estuaries, peninsulas, archipelagos …
‘That’s good …’ the dentist had encouraged him from a long way away.
Beyond that, it was all a fog.
He got up and walked along the beds, to the high windows that fronted onto the embankment. Stood there, shakily, awed by the constant traffic on the river below him. Walked to the end of the ward, explored the corridor down to the balcony, stood there until his legs grew tired. Stared out through the windows until he was focusing on nothing, then retreated to his bed and looked out of the top of the windows at the indistinguishable white days and nights.
It seemed the world had gone on without him. Barges and schooners were busily steaming to and fro. On either side of the hospital were the great factories; names painted across their brick façades—Nobel, Lessner, Phoenix, St Petersburg Copper, St Petersburg Metals, Andrianov-Parviaine. Their names were so huge that you could even read them in the distance, where the Neva curved around the Petersburg islands. Boronovsky, Lessner II, Erikson—smoking, throbbing engines that were driving Russia’s meteoric industrial progress. Twelve per cent per annum, someone had told him—the fastest in the world.
A doctor came by and looked him over, smiled with satisfaction.
‘You’ve made progress,’ the doctor smiled. ‘More than satisfactory …’
After that they only let him stay one more night and then in the afternoon they sent an orderly around to help him get dressed and tell him that he was discharged. They gave him his possessions in a paper bag. The salter was still in his trouser pocket, but someone had emptied it. Once he had signed himself out the orderly walked him out to the tram stop, and left him there saying that now he could go back to being who he was supposed to be.
The way he said, it sounded like some kind of reward.
The building at 17 Pushkinskaya was one of several supposedly anonymous havens for agents and functionaries of the Internal branch. It was a drab three-storey trapezoid, occupying an unevenly sloping site in a corner by the Moika Canal, the courtyard pierced by three entrances through which agents could enter and leave with sufficient discretion. Ostensibly the ground-floor offices, set back from the street and barred by a gate that could be opened electrically from inside, were the headquarters of the Volga Metals Assurance Company.
In reality it sheltered the fiefdom of Chief Inspector Velimir Zezulin, Ryzhkov’s superior, a tired man who could pass for a shabby tradesman, judging by his perpetually uncouth appearance and the sour smell of yesterday’s vodka that enveloped him. He was rarely in, or if he was in, he was not to be disturbed.
Ryzhkov entered the courtyard through a narrow door off the embankment. There was a stable there, sheltered by a huge linden tree, beside it a shop where Muta and the other drivers spent their free time.
The front room of 17 Pushkinskaya was divided by a counter to separate the waiting-room from the office. There were glass cases with dusty fragments of minerals, a tiny model of a coal mine that lit up when you pressed certain buttons on a panel in front of it. Faded photographs of men standing in front of huge machines.
He had to show his disc to a new kid, a pimply-faced secretary that he’d never seen before. The boy checked his number, looked at his photograph, and smiled. Something that wouldn’t last long, Ryzhkov thought.
‘Oh, you’re Inspector Ryzhkov!’ The boy nearly clicked his heels and bowed, then came around and opened the gate for him. Something about the gesture Ryzhkov found irritating, the sort of kindness one showed to an old man, someone grown feeble. And then he was climbing the narrow stairway to the first floor, moving from the secular fantasy of the Volga Metals Assurance Company to the sacred realm of the Internal branch of the Tsar’s secret political police.
The first floor was divided into a clutch of offices, open warrens really, that filled one side of a large room on the south side of the building. Tiny, stale little cubicles separated by glassed-in partitions and counters. Izachik, their secretary, jumped up from his chair when Ryzhkov entered.
While making a fuss with Ryzhkov’s coat, he explained how External agents had raided a party given by the editors of the revolutionary newspaper Pravda. In the process several Internal informants had been arrested. It was all still being sorted out.
Konstantin Hokhodiev came in, right on Ryzhkov’s heels, still sweating from the summer streets.
‘Is he in?’ Ryzhkov pointed to the stairway that led to Zezulin’s sanctum. Izachik winced.
‘Yes, but, ah … sleeping, I think.’
‘Perhaps I could just …’ He sidled past the two men towards the narrow stairway to Zezulin’s garret-office. They both watched him go. At the top of the stairs he rapped against the door jamb. There was no reply. From inside he thought he could hear snoring. He eased the door open a crack and peered in. Zezulin was on the couch, a pillow flung over his face, mouth open, dead to the world; snoring like a man who was being choked to death.
The room was an archive, the place documents went to die. Piled all across the carpet were mounds of files. Each might represent a terrorist cell, a conspiracy, or a suspected assassination attempt. Propped on the end of the couch was a painted gypsy guitar. When Zezulin got drunk, he forgot where he was, then he would sing. It was pathetic.
Ryzhkov sighed and went back down the stairs. ‘Well, since you’re fully recovered and couldn’t stay away from us, you may as well surround yourself with the mountains of paper work, eh?’ Hokhodiev reached out with a huge paw and guided him down the narrow corridor towards the rear of the building.
At the back there was just enough space for one cubicle and a storeroom. The storeroom had been full since the days of Alexander II and the cubicle was Ryzhkov’s ‘office’. The room was less than ten feet square but it had a miniature desk, a cabinet for papers, a door for privacy, and—the real treasure—a single tall window that looked onto the courtyard. He stood there for a moment at the threshold and realised that he was actually glad to be facing another day in the tiny space. Inside it he could think, he could leave word that he was not to be disturbed, and, except for those occasions when Izachik thought it important, he wouldn’t be.
‘I’ll bring you tea, sir, or would that be too hot?’ Izachik cooed behind him.
‘No, they said it would help the healing to drink it, so …’
‘Excellent, sir.’ Izachik bowed. ‘You might be interested in the red folder, sir.’
‘The red folder?’
‘The one on the girl,’ Izachik said and left.
When he turned back to his desk he saw that beneath the standard Okhrana files Izachik had brought in a red folder from the Military Hospital. When he untied the seal he discovered a 3rd Spasskaya District St Petersburg Police report and a two page copy of a morgue report on the cause of death of the girl who had fallen out of the apartment on Peplovskaya Street. Lvova, Ekatarina
The police report told him nothing. The morgue report stated that Dr V. Bondarenko had examined the body. He had estimated the girl’s age as eleven or twelve. There was no address, names of relatives, or other details. The girl Lvova died from internal injuries due to falling from a third-storey window on the sou
th side of a building at 34 Peplovskaya Street in the 3rd Spasskaya district. The time of death was approximately three forty-five in the morning of the eighteenth of June. Behind the cover sheet was a diagram on thick yellow paper with the girl’s name and file numbers. Across the stick figure Bondarenko had drawn slashes to indicate the fracture of the skull, the broken back … the blood. Nothing on the neck or throat.
There was a column of boxes on one side of the paper that indicated whether the death was due to natural causes, foul play, contagion, or other. In ‘Other’ Bondarenko had scrawled an S.
Suicide.
He leafed through the rest of the papers that had accumulated on his desk, then piled the ones he didn’t need immediately on top of the cabinet by the window. He stood there for a moment watching the drivers hitch up a troika. The Okhrana had stables and garages all over the city. Somewhere in their collection could be found a sample of nearly every form of transportation. In their armoires Okhrana drivers had uniforms sufficient to impersonate cab drivers, tradesmen, or royal postillions. Their garages housed expensive lacquered motorcars side-by-side with undistinguished one-pony izvolchiks.
For a moment longer he watched the swirl of men and animals crawling about below him in the courtyard, then he picked up his telephone and got Izachik to have a carriage brought around.
‘Yes, sir,’ Izachik said, sounding a little puzzled as Ryzhkov gave him the destination.
‘Just as soon as you can,’ Ryzhkov said, and hung up.
Once again he found himself across the Neva, wandering through the maze of convalescent wards of the Military Hospital, this time heading downstairs to the morgue. Bondarenko was sitting at a desk in a corner of the room, filling in forms with a younger man, presumably his assistant. Ryzhkov took off his hat as he approached.
‘Doctor?’ Ryzhkov flashed his disc.
‘Yes, one moment, please …’ Bondarenko said, giving it a brief glance. An irritable man who obviously had little time for police officers, less for the political police.
The room was cold, dark. Low ceilings with stone arches that supported the upper floors of the hospital. The pillars had been whitewashed. It reminded Ryzhkov of the way they had painted the palm trees he had seen in the south of France. Something to do with killing the insects. There were footsteps and he turned to see the assistant vanish through the double-doors.
‘Inspector?’ Bondarenko stood, held out his hand and Ryzhkov shook it. ‘Have we met?’
‘Perhaps. I’ve been here on occasion.’ He didn’t elaborate.
‘Well, then … What do you need?’ Bondarenko said levelly; a tall man to whom a smile came rarely, a man who’d learned to wear a hard set to his chin. Flinty eyes behind the tiny gold-rimmed spectacles. Maybe he hated his life, too, Ryzhkov thought. Maybe he just wanted to get out of the chilly room. Bondarenko was wearing an acid-burned white coat to protect his waistcoat, and on top of that a thick sweater embroidered with the crest of St Petersburg University. The sleeves were stained from chemicals.
‘I wanted to ask about this girl, Lvova.’ He passed Bondarenko the envelope.
The doctor looked at it, sighed, gave the briefest shake of his head. ‘I don’t know what else we can do …’ He crossed the room to one of the heavy porcelain tables, reached up and flicked on a bright light, smoothed the pages out on the spotless white surface. ‘Ah, yes. Fall from a height, internal injuries, spinal injuries, fractured skull …’ Bondarenko shrugged, frowned.
‘And were there any cuts, or … ?’
‘Cuts? You mean like a puncture from stabbing?’
‘I was thinking of glass.’
Bondarenko looked at him for a second then back to the paper. ‘Hmm …’ he said and raised his eyebrows. ‘There’s nothing marked here, but that doesn’t mean anything in particular.’ He showed Ryzhkov the paper; there was an inked slash through the spine, another across the figure. Nothing on the arms.
‘Now … to be honest, Inspector, there may have been cuts, or other fractures that were not marked, but nothing unusual. We received the girl, they told us she was a prostitute who had thrown herself off a roof. Tragic perhaps, but it was obvious what had happened, so I … I didn’t test her stomach contents or anything dramatic. Besides, I thought we had taken care of all this.’ Bondarenko looked helplessly around the dark room.
Ryzhkov stood there for a moment. ‘Well, perhaps we have, but I’m only trying to make sure of the details.’
‘Yes, of course. Discretion, yes, yes. That’s all very clear.’ Bondarenko was still staring around the room. Uncomfortable.
There was a noise. Behind them the assistant came in pulling a wheeled stretcher. There was something wrapped in a stained bedsheet resting on it. Something waiting for Ryzhkov to leave.
‘So let me very clear,’ Ryzhkov said. ‘You saw nothing unusual at all. That would be your position if you were to be interviewed, or if you were expected to testify—’
Bondarenko looked around at him, suddenly shocked. ‘Testify?’
‘I’m only speculating, Doctor. If one day you might be asked, you could say truthfully that you saw nothing unusual, no cuts, no marks—’
‘What kind of marks?’
‘Bruises. Maybe from a rope, maybe just from—’ Ryzhkov put his hands up around his own neck for a moment.
Bondarenko looked at him, his frown deepening. ‘Absolutely no marks. As you can see in my report, there are no marks indicated, Inspector. Anyone who saw such marks may have been mistaken. Sometimes in the pressure of the moment—’
‘Yes … the pressure, yes …’
‘Besides she’s in Volkovo Cemetery now with two or three others on top of her. I’m sure someone could get an order to disinter, but they wouldn’t find anything.’
‘Well … I want to thank you again for your discretion, Doctor,’ Ryzhkov said quietly, unable to take his eyes off the assistant laboriously shifting a corpse on to the porcelain table next to them. It was a woman, grey hair come undone, her large body grown stiff in death. Bondarenko looked over for a moment, saw the assistant struggling, sighed again, stubbed his cigarette out, and moved to help the assistant shift the woman on to the table. Together they did it easily.
Bondarenko straightened and turned back to Ryzhkov. ‘I’m sorry, we’re short on staff here and, honestly, I’ve done everything I could, eh? But now if you’ll excuse me, please?’ Behind him the assistant was stropping a curved knife. It looked like the kind of tool you’d use to clean a fish.
‘Yes, well … Thank you for your time, Doctor,’ Ryzhkov said, and headed for the door so he would be out of there before they began their work.
EIGHT
Pyotr Ryzhkov spent the next week following Rasputin from whorehouses where his sexual appetites were indulged for free, to restaurants where they would tolerate his taking over the entire room and throwing his food on the floor, to mansions of the rich and addled where they submitted to his insults and religious instruction. When Ryzhkov wasn’t standing outside in the rain waiting for the Holy One to surrender to boredom, he was seconded to the ongoing effort to prevent Socialist Revolutionary terrorists from blowing up the capital or shooting its leading dignitaries.
Zezulin, acting on information from Internal agents who were certain that they had discovered a cell of SR bombmakers, had assigned Dudenko and his watchers to conduct surveillance on a suspected ‘explosives factory’, a bakery. He, Ryzhkov and Hokhodiev supervised the surveillance in shifts; in addition they were expected to devise a strategy for an eventual raid on the premises.
He read through all the reports, Dima’s carefully noted schedules. Apparently the bombers were well along with their work. Luckily for the Okhrana, when the plotters mixed their volatile chemicals the fumes became intoxicating, and they were forced to take frequent walks in the park. They were not thinking clearly at such times, they got lazy and were easy to see. Sometimes they would try to disguise their activities by acting casually, standing around wit
h a lit cigarette they weren’t smoking. A long stroll to a newspaper kiosk, trying to look like they were normal people leading a normal life. How many newspapers can you buy in one day?
The answer was right there in Dudenko’s cramped handwriting—seven.
The neighbourhood was grouped around a filthy little plaza, an unplanned confluence of narrow uneven streets somewhere in the Narva district. There was a brick ‘fountain’ in the middle of the octagonal square. It had a pedestal at its centre and the remains of a bronze statue that had gone missing or had been melted down. It was crowded. During the day people came and went constantly, the traffic falling into patterns of astonishing regularity. All of it synchronized to the steam whistles of the gigantic factories that surrounded the district; the Putilov armaments buildings, the Northern Boiler works, and the St Petersburg Freight Carriage factories.
There were no vacant apartments for rent, whole families were packed into two rooms; children were everywhere, running through the street like packs of dogs. The kind of place that was busy all the time, but nothing ever changed. Except that for the last few days, teams of repairmen (all Dudenko’s technicians) had been climbing the recently installed telephone poles. At night they’d rope off their wagon at the end of the street. Dudenko and his boys listened from inside the cart, taking it all down in shorthand.
Ryzhkov rode through the street a little after midnight, to all appearances just a drunk in a cab heading home, singing to himself as he admired the unfamiliar neighbourhood. There was nothing happening in the bakery. No lights. Nothing. Finally the plaza vanished behind him as his carriage clattered around a corner.
Taken as a whole it was exhausting work, and he’d fallen asleep in his tiny office, when there was a discreet cough, a quick rapping and Izachik popped his head in the door.
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