Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  And he is laughing, laughing.

  Waking the next morning, Vera turned at the sound of Pyotr’s breathing, his face only inches away.

  He looked frightened, she thought. Lost in some worried dream. But she thought his face … kind. So kind she wanted to kiss him. A little wave of tenderness that almost made her angry. Fine, so maybe he was a good man, one of the rare ones. A man who might be able to … A man who might turn out to be different from the rest. And if he wasn’t? If he was as big a fool as any of them, well, what did it matter, he’d be gone soon, or she would. So what, who cares …

  Maybe he was the kind who thought he was going to take care of her, be a new father for her. First he’d want to pull her out of the club, to stop her dancing, then it would be a whole series of little things; disapproval of how she cut her hair, the clothing she wore, her choice of fragrance. Then he’d forbid her drinking or smoking, or seeing any of her friends.

  He probably thought she was damaged. Well … she could understand how he might. He probably thought he could just give her a little polish and then she’d come to him out of gratitude. First he’d try and transform her into someone who was worthy of his attention, and once she was all repaired into an acceptable version of a bourgeois frau, he would ask her to be wife number two. From then on it would be a slow calcification; because he’d picked her up in a bar, he’d always look down on her. See her as something to be cleaned up and transformed, and then used. Something to feel grateful to its maker.

  Her big reward? She could be Ryzhkova. Then he could live out his remaining years sitting back and watching her enjoying the heaven he’d created for her. Maybe he’d want a few children in his old age, one after another. Little perfect boys, probably. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

  She slipped out of bed, gave the mirror a hard look, sniffed and started back through the rooms to get her clothes and leave. She had decided to get dressed without waking him, get out without any words or conversations.

  The telephone interrupted her as she padded through the cold front room looking for her shoes. She answered it in one lunge to stop the ringing.

  ‘Hello, who’s this? Is Pyotr Mikhalovich there?’ It was the gravelly voice of a big man, she could tell just from hearing it. The big man sounded surprised at getting anyone else on the line.

  ‘Yes … He’s sleeping’

  ‘Oh. Well, wake him up, eh?’ A big man in a hurry. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Important? Well, it all depends on how you look at it,’ the voice explained. Maybe she could just take a message and get out of there before he woke up and decided he was ready for some amorous adventures prior to breakfast.

  But it was too late, Pyotr had pushed his head under the pillow and flung out one arm across the covers. Probably crawling around looking for her, she thought. Was he sad to find all that empty space in the bed? Did he mind if she answered his calls?

  ‘It’s someone called Konstantin,’ she said, and watched him blink himself awake, watched him frown, watched him remember. She grabbed her clothes and was already moving out of his bedroom before he sat up.

  ‘He said something happened and somebody got to Baron somebody-or-other—I guess they need some paintbrushes.’

  NINETEEN

  Galleyhaven was one of the lesser quarters of the city. On the western low ground of Vasilevsky Island, way out past the 27th Line Street, a long way from the university. It was a neighbourhood of lofts and fishermen’s lodgings, where sailors too desperate to make it into the city spent their port-time in brothels that were phantasmagoric in their squalor. Galleyhaven had grown up at the edge of the docks, a perpetually shifting neighbourhood that served the demands of its particular slice of Petersburg’s maritime industry. The ‘streets’ that divided the quarter vanished into the mud of the Gulf of Finland. When the wind shifted and the Baltic tides combined with the spring thaws, there were floods that regularly drowned the quarter. Less than a hundred years before, all of Galleyhaven had been submerged to a depth of twenty-four feet, and when the waters subsided, rebuilt.

  His driver had to search for the address. It was on a point of boggy land at the end of Chose Line. Two sleepy gendarmes were waiting by a woodpile. They stiffened when they saw the Okhrana carriage heading towards them, and moved aside so it could pull up. Except for a dog barking in the distance everything was quiet. Ryzhkov saw Hokhodiev walking over to report. There was no reason to run.

  ‘It’s just in here.’

  They walked along the stinking treacherous ground to a long low building that was built on piles over a mud bank. The building looked like it had been built of salvaged materials. There were planks and logs of different dimensions and a variety of colours. On a square sign over the wide door was a large picture of a fish for illiterates who couldn’t read the name written under it in old-style characters: Baltic Prospector.

  By the door he saw Dudenko and more gendarmes waiting for him. He could tell just by looking at them that something had gone wrong.

  ‘At roughly nine o’clock last night the baron went out to dinner, all the way across town. He had his daughter with him—

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘We think that’s who it was. Personally, I’ve never seen her before.’

  ‘All right, go on.’ Ryzhkov was starting to grow worried.

  ‘The two of them ended up at a restaurant on the Kamenoovstrovsky Prospekt, the Niva, you know it?’

  ‘Not my type of food.’

  ‘Nor mine, brother. They got there, then they vanished. We had Diakun and Hrothgar waiting out front, but they got out the back. I had a man on it, but I don’t know. They got out somehow and we didn’t find out about it until after midnight.’

  ‘Oh, no … and?’

  ‘It turns out they got in a hired cab. I guess we’re lucky the daughter was there because one of the stewards in the cellars was just coming up and nearly ran into her, remembered them going through to a carriage in the back lane, and he got the number. Maybe he thought they were running out on their bill, I don’t know. It was just sheer caprice. He told us, we went around to the company and got the destination. So, Dima came out here and then called me …’ Hokhodiev turned aside to let Dudenko carry the story on from there.

  ‘Well, the driver says he was called to deliver them over here to the island. They came by themselves, straight down the Bolshoi Prospekt, heading towards the water, and on to Kosaya, and then he helped them inside this place with their bags. He said there was no other carriage waiting for them.’

  ‘Bags, what bags?’

  ‘Bags. That’s what he said.’

  ‘Right …’ So Lavrik had decided to make a break for it. ‘They must have been planning to get out on a boat. Have you been around by the water?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Dudenko looked down at his trousers which were ruined from crawling about in the mud under the pilings. ‘I don’t know what they were thinking. It’s too shallow for a boat. A dinghy could get in, pick them up and take them out, still …’

  Ryzhkov stood quietly for a moment, a growing hollowness spreading through his insides. Yes, it had all gone wrong, it was all over. ‘Let’s go,’ he said and they headed for the door.

  Inside Baltic Prospector it was warmer but the smell was worse.

  The building had been wired for electric lights but the power was off. His men moved slowly across the large open room ahead of him. In the lantern glow he saw three rows of wooden tables where they cut up the fish, a cluster of tin buckets where they dumped the entrails. It looked like it hadn’t been used for at least a few years. There was a thick film of grime and gull droppings on the tables. All the tools had been taken away.

  There was a small office with no typewriter, a spray of mouldering papers spread across the floor. Abandoned.

  In the corner there was a room for the watchman where the heat was coming from and they saw right away that the man was drunk, passed out and cradling a nearly empty bottle of vodka. Holding it cl
ose to his heart, like a Madonna with her baby from hell. The heat was coming from a bundle of rags burning in the furnace. The room smelled like someone had been too lazy to go outside and had decided to do their shitting in the corner.

  ‘Hey.’ Hokhodiev reached down and slapped the man by his foot. There was only a brief interruption in the snoring.

  ‘He’s dead to the world,’ Dudenko said.

  ‘Get him up. What’s burning in there?’ Ryzhkov went to the furnace and opened the vent. The room was suffused with a smell of wool burning.

  ‘It’s some clothes that are jammed up in here, just a second—’ He yanked the bundle out of the grate and kicked the smoking rags out on the floor. The cloth looked shiny and expensive, and after a moment he saw that part of it was what was left of a woman’s dress.

  ‘Well …’ Dima said, watching Ryzhkov separate the rags with the point of his shoe. A pair of woollen trousers with the remains of a charred pair of braces. Too wet from all the blood to catch fire; some silky material, white underclothing worked with lace— something that had belonged to the daughter Lavrik had cared for enough to take with him. He stamped out the flames on the burning lace, wondered what kind of thrilling childhood Lavrik’s daughter had. And after all of it she had still trusted him enough to go with him tonight. To get out. It had been a good idea that hadn’t worked, Ryzhkov thought.

  ‘Well, let’s get some light and find them,’ he said quietly.

  It didn’t take much longer. The gendarmes walked around with lanterns and torches until they discovered new bloodstains on the floor over by the farthest of the fish tables. Marks on the floor where things had been moved about. The loading door was open.

  Ryzhkov went outside and stood on the pier and lit a cigarette and before he was finished they had found the casks in the barge. Hokhodiev was the one who came and told him. He walked down the pier to the corner of the building. There was a gangway there, slippery with frozen algae and moss that had grown all over the boards. He carefully went down to a rotten barge that had been tied up there for so long that it was half-submerged in frozen mud. It was the kind of place where people piled their rubbish, where any shells or fish guts got flung. The domain of rats and gulls.

  There were two herring casks in there, right on top of the muck. They had just been tossed over the railing from above, no attempt to hide them. Nothing growing on them at all.

  ‘Be careful, Kostya,’ Dima said as Hokhodiev climbed over. He’d found a pair of wading boots and tucked his trousers into the tops of them; he reached out with a gaff to try and tease the first cask around where he could reach it.

  ‘It’s too heavy,’ Hokhodiev said, his breath making clouds of steam in the cold air. He stopped after a moment, shook his head, not wanting to walk further out into the barge because he was sinking in too deep.

  ‘Christ,’ said Ryzhkov under his breath. ‘Go and get the watchman,’ he said angrily, and went back up the gangplank. The gendarmes rushed ahead of him and went inside and pulled the man out of bed. When they hauled him out to the loading door he was just awake, smiling at the men who’d led him out on to the pier.

  ‘Wake up, you’ve got some work to do,’ Ryzhkov said and grabbed the man by his greasy collar. The fabric was rotten and the collar tore off in his hands. It made him so angry that he reached out and pulled the watchman away from the gendarmes and threw him down on the pier. The man started groaning like a sow giving birth. It was everything Ryzhkov could do to not kick him. He thought if he did actually kick him it would probably kill him.

  ‘Get him up.’ Two young gendarmes bent to do it. ‘I’m sorry … y’reckency … sorry …’ When they had pulled the watchman up to his feet, Ryzhkov slapped him hard across the face twice. It couldn’t have hurt that much because the man had a thick matted beard that cushioned the shock of the blows. Maybe it woke him up to the fact that he was in trouble.

  ‘Who was it that came here last night? Who?’ The watchman didn’t say anything and Ryzhkov hit him another two times. ‘Who came here!’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘Did they give you the bottle? They gave you the bottle, right?’ The watchman looked back towards the door; somewhere back there was his happy memory of the bottle, so he nodded.

  ‘Do you know them? Do you know their names? How many of them came here tonight?’ All of it was too complicated for the man, he bowed his head.

  ‘Srry … r’excence.’ Ryzhkov felt his fist draw back to strike the man directly on the nose. But instead he made himself take a step backwards to the railing of the pier.

  ‘Get him down there, put him to work getting those casks where we can reach them, then come and get me.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  He moved to the other end of the pier, as far away as he could get from the barge and the policemen watching the drunken watchman go about his labours.

  Lavrik must have gone to someone he trusted, someone he felt could organize an escape. He must have been desperate, spilled everything to his friend. Sure, the friend had said, I’ll do everything in my power to help you and your daughter get away. Here’s a simple plan; a boat to Finland in the middle of the night, slip past the forts at the Kronstadt in the cosy cabin of a little fishing boat I know … and freedom, eh? No more worries. I’ll take care of everything, leave it to me, Oleg.

  And Oleg had.

  And there had been somebody waiting to meet them, they would have already taken care of the watchman, sent the carriage away, and then, after it was done, the only way to get away would have been in a small boat. Three or four men at the most. They had assumed that Lavrik would be watched, suspected that he might be followed.

  It meant that they knew about the investigation he’d started under Zezulin’s signature. They had been informed somehow.

  Not good.

  He looked out at the Gulf. The light was growing now into a dark mustard-coloured morning, washed in the sound of foghorns as the boats began their day. Across the mouth of the Neva were the big docks at Gutuevskaya, in the Narva district, and only a little further upriver an entrance where the mouth of the Fontanka met a canal that ran past the Yekaterinhof Park. There was a little island there, Podzorni it was named.

  He tossed the cigarette stub over the railing and walked along the pier even further so that he was all the way around the corner of the cannery, with a view across to Podzorni, where the river was narrower.

  To get to Galleyhaven they would have had to row their boat directly across and tie up to the pilings just below him. After it was all over, they would have re-crossed south to the Narva side. A carriage would have been waiting, they’d be home and celebrating right now, he thought. Drinking away the chill of it all.

  He went back and pulled Kostya away from the group of gendarmes. They were standing there watching the tearful watchman as he slopped about trying to push the heavy casks through the icy muck to where they could reach over and haul them out. They were cursing and laughing at him; he was covered in sludge now, complaining that he had cut one of his hands which made it difficult to get a grip on the barrels.

  ‘Let’s put a call into the police stations at Kolomenskaya two and Narva three, see if any of their constables saw three or four men tie up in a small boat, near the little island, there—’

  ‘There at the canal?’

  ‘Somewhere near Podzorni there, I think. Perhaps at Galerni where the canal enters the river, somewhere around there. They would have left the boat and taken a carriage. Someone might have noticed something in the early hours this morning.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ Kostya said, and actually smiled, and headed out to find the nearest call box. Probably glad to get a chance to get away from the stench.

  ‘We’re ready now, Pyotr.’ Dima came up behind him.

  ‘Yes, fine.’ He walked back to the barge where the casks were being lifted out on to the dock. The watchman was too weak to get out of the barge. He had collapsed at the edge and was methodically beating
his head against the soggy wooden gunwale.

  ‘Take him, throw him in the water to clean him off, then carry him to the Vasilevskaya lock-up and hold him for questioning,’ Ryzhkov told the gendarmes.

  The casks were standing upright at the top of the pier now, and the men paused there waiting for his permission to open them. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other, but he picked one and one of the gendarmes set about knocking in the top and prying out the boards so they could get a look inside. The men lifted their lanterns higher.

  All he could see at first were the feet.

  Toes, cruelly bent back and squashed against the side of the wood; it looked all wrong and then he saw that the legs had been broken so that they could be wedged in.

  ‘More light …’ he said and someone shone a torch down into the cask and he was able to see it was a man they’d pushed down there. Naked. Lavrik.

  ‘Christ …’ he breathed. Lavrik’s face peered up at him, one eye half-open staring up from the bottom of the barrel. Locked away like a genie in a bottle. He tried to make himself feel happy about it but instead all he felt was cheated, as if something good had been stolen from him in the night. The monster was dead, but he’d wanted it for himself, he realized. He had wanted him very, very badly.

  ‘Christ …’ he heard himself say again. One of the gendarmes was staring at him. He stepped away so they could keep working.

  The top of the second cask came off and they had done this one differently. A woman, her brown hair spread out across her face, a slash across the neck where they’d cut her throat. Still a lot of blood smeared across her torso. The cut had opened up wide, like an extra smile under her chin, when they’d bent her head over to hammer the lid down.

  ‘Is that his daughter?’ Dima asked.