Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  As the disturbance is filling the street and preventing the tram from progressing, she decides to get out and make her way around the edge of the demonstration. Of course, men help her, a woman in distress. They can howl and shake their fists at the windows as much as they want, but a pretty face will still bring their eyes down to earth. She wonders if it will turn violent. No one is throwing anything at the façade, although it is an ugly enough building. The embassy is brand-new, with a headstone-like façade, long rectangular windows with shockingly muscled statues of naked men holding up the cornice. The whole thing is heavy and imposing, an edifice meant to inspire fear, and obviously designed to deliberately clash with its surroundings. Perhaps it was the design they are disputing, perhaps it is a mob of insulted young architects and their parents and friends who have come out to protest. Now that would be civilization.

  Swaying in the street above her are banners calling for an End to Teutonic Provocation! and Save Our Slav Brothers! Many of the banners are painted on red cloth, the mark of various union organizations or radical political groups, she knows that much! She moves through the crowd, who are chanting with arms linked as they move in a wide circle around the front of the hideous building. On the steps of the embassy a long double-line of St Petersburg gendarmes wait for the bravest of the firebrands to make a dash up the steps where they will be arrested and taken directly to the police wagons. In a way it’s beautiful, invigorating. Passionate.

  By the time she walks through the demonstration she has learned what it is all about. Everything can be read on the front of the Berliner Tageblatt—a long rant by the Kaiser, accusing Russia of deliberately fomenting a general European war. Of course, peace-loving Germany has no aggressive intentions or even any ill-will towards the quaint Muscovites, but should the Tsar succumb to his base instincts and unleash his dark hordes of cossacks, Germany would naturally be forced to defend herself.

  She almost laughs in disbelief. The tone of the article is nasty, insulting, the kind of thing men say in bars when they want to goad each other into a fight. Full of obvious incitements and taunts, and pitched to inflame Russia’s old inferiority complex about her Tartar past. On top of it is the smug assurance that should the irrational Muscovites succumb to their animalistic impulses and plunge the two nations into war, the efficient German General Staff will easily sweep the Tsar’s forces from the field. The Kaiser … what an ego-maniac, she thinks.

  Now she hears the clash of hooves against the cobbles and sees a troop of cossacks assembling at the end of the street. The crowd, if they knew what was good for them, would surely begin to disperse before the troops ride over them wielding their leaded knouts, it doesn’t do to infuriate those fellows, and so she pushes her way through the masses, hurrying away, angry and wondering all the time what he’s had to do with all this chaos.

  And then she finally gets back, and he’s still upstairs in his little snake-pit. Now all the laughter is gone and he is screaming into the telephone.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t find him?’ And then waiting for a reply. A curse. He runs one of his beautiful hands through his beautiful hair. He needs a bath. He needs someone to make love to him.

  ‘You’ve telephoned, have you sent someone around? What do the servants say?’ A pause, another curse. ‘Just do what you’re supposed to do, you know what’s expected of you,’ he says. His tone more controlled now, like talking to a stupid child. ‘No, I am troubled too. No one wants trouble. Yes. It’s very troublesome,’ trying to calm someone. It must be Nestor. He only talks to princes with that tone of voice. ‘I don’t know. They’ll have to replace him, probably, wouldn’t you think?’ he says, the sarcasm plain in his voice. Disgusted, she moves away into the bedroom. He hasn’t even noticed. Probably didn’t even know she’d gone out for a walk. Now something has gone wrong, someone is missing, someone isn’t where he should be, and all the conniving in the world can’t supply him with any answers. Happiness has taken flight and whatever he’s been up to, it’s all coming unglued.

  She knows that much.

  FORTY-TWO

  Princip was the name of the assassin. Gavrilo Princip. A student. An anarchist. A Serb terrorist. And now he was famous, now the name Princip was on the tip of everyone’s tongue all over the world. The details of the conspiracy were vague but there had been no fewer than a dozen anarchists, the newspaper claimed. Ryzhkov read the reports in a week-old version of Wiener Zeitung as he was steaming along the coast of the Black Sea from Rumania to Odessa. The decks were baking and the air was fetid. The fumes of coal smoke hung in the air and made a brown haze across the still waters. It was as if they were sailing across an infinite lake, on a voyage to nowhere.

  In Odessa he found what he wanted, a cheap hotel where he could wait while he changed identities again. A safe-house where he stored his single bag, hiding Kostya’s pistol beneath layers of his underwear.

  He prowled the city until he discovered a suitable bar, the kind of place where travellers came to drink and be relieved of their money by con-men and prostitutes. On the first night there was no one suitable so he went back to the hotel. Waited, bought more newspapers.

  The truth penetrated in scraps. Austria was bellicose, Serbia was looking for a way out. Rumours had it that war had already begun, that the British were on the march through Afghanistan.

  The city was too hot. Empty of tourists and the sane. No one would visit Odessa in the summer unless they had some compelling reason. Because of the heat he changed his schedule. Now he slept during the day and went out at night until he found the one he was looking for.

  He was about the same height, the same size. A happy fellow, a laugher and a storyteller. He was attempting to purchase land for the construction of a new hotel on the beachfront. But now, with international tensions, his investors were becoming hesitant. It was a waiting game, he explained sadly. The whole world was waiting. Ryzhkov agreed, stood him round after round of drinks. After a while they developed a plan, to visit the bordello that Ryzhkov said he had found. The best. The man smiled.

  It was dawn when they escaped the bar, the light made them squint and hold their hands over their eyes like outcasts from a doomed Old Testament city. He pushed the man down in the mouth of the first alley they came too, the empty bottle spinning its frantic glassy song on the paving stones. It only took a few moments for Ryzhkov to riffle through his pockets, dig out his papers and money and get away.

  He stopped at the end of the street and inspected the documents. An identity card, with a description that was close enough. A district permit to reside in Moscow. All of it looked genuine enough. He read the name over and over, memorized his new birthdate. It turned out he was from the city of Saratov. He had never been there, he would have to look it up.

  He tucked the papers into his pocket and looked around the street. The morning sun was behind him. It made his shadow long, made his legs look huge and strong. A giant, a super-man. A man ready to take on the world.

  Go then Pravdin, Pavel Vasilyevich. Go into the bloody new world.

  By nine o’clock he’d settled his bill at the hotel and was on the first train north.

  A light snapped on and the bottom tier of corridors at 40 Furshtatskaya Street was illuminated. The custodian straightened his jacket and tried to wipe the sleep out of his eyes, fumbled for his pen and keys and waited until his junior was in place behind the desk. The boy was tall and gangly with a faint smear of dark hairs across his lip that had ambitions to one day become a moustache. He looked up at the fox-like man who had arrived and his eyes were unblinking with fear and awe at being in the presence of someone so lofty. Everyone had heard that the commander was missing, everyone knew that changes were in the offing. And now Baron Rudolph Nikolsky was here!

  Yes there were rumours, even in such a clandestine organization as the Okhrana. Nikolsky had been recently elevated, tipped as the broom that was going to sweep the Okhrana clean, but no one knew who the Tsar would pick to replace Ge
neral Gulka on a permanent basis. Changes were in the wind, but knowing it all in advance still hadn’t prepared the custodian for the shock. He raised his pince-nez to his eyes, tried to find the location of the room Nikolsky was looking for.

  ‘I know where it is, excellency,’ the boy piped up. Nikolsky looked over at him. ‘All right then, you show me. Give him the keys. How do you know it?’

  ‘I was often on duty in the early hours, and General Gulka frequently used the room at those times.’

  ‘Do you know what he was doing there?’

  ‘No, excellency. He would arrive, sometimes stay for an hour or two—’

  ‘It’s all in the books,’ the senior man snapped. Nikolsky looked over at him, thinking that he was already on his way to an assignment on the border, he just didn’t know it yet.

  ‘Yes, it would be in the sign-in book,’ the boy said, and bowed reflexively and shut up. The older man handed him the keys and they went off down the long hallway.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Often he would ask for tea. I would bring him tea, take away the cart afterwards.’

  ‘He came alone?’

  ‘Yes. It would be in the book as well, excellency,’ he said quietly and then fell silent until they arrived at the door. ‘It is a special electrical lock, excellency. It requires a code before the key can be inserted.’

  Nikolsky sighed. ‘Of course. Very well, go back and call the men upstairs.’ He had brought two locksmiths, and when they were stymied by the lock and mistakenly fired it, so that it fused the metal together and they had to drill out the cylinders, he sent the custodian upstairs to keep everyone out of the halls and let the boy keep an eye on the men while they did their work. The door was sheathed in steel and to force it required a great deal of hammering. Nikolsky tried to doze in the chair at the end of the hall. Admittedly it was a superb chair; a warm, well-padded leather chair meant for passing long hours in the service of the Tsar, and sitting in it, Nikolsky could not honestly begrudge the custodian his lassitude. But they would all be much more fatigued yet, before it was over.

  Finally the boy came back. ‘They’ve opened both doors, excellency. I made sure they touched nothing.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ said Nikolsky, getting up and hurrying down the hall.

  ‘I saw nothing, excellency,’ the boy said, which Nikolsky thought was probably not the whole truth.

  The locksmiths were waiting halfway along, and Nikolsky had the boy make them wait; if there was a vault inside he would need them again. He went into the first room, really nothing more than an ante-chamber. There was a desk there, just as there would be if a clerk or receptionist were on duty, but it had been pushed back against the wall with no chair. Fixed into the corridor wall was a drop-box and Nikolsky went over and looked inside. There was a series of daily reports and he opened the one on the bottom, the earliest that Gulka hadn’t picked up; it bore the date of his disappearance.

  The second room was larger. Fitted out with a padded chair, even more comfortable than the custodian’s, and a settee with a pillow and blankets. A lamp for reading, a long table that held piles of paperwork, various files and dossiers. A glance at their spines told Nikolsky the level of secrecy. A thorough, ongoing investigation of … and then he turned and saw how Gulka had arranged the walls of the room, and the faces of the men he had been investigating.

  He recognized Andrianov immediately and had already started across to the bulletin board which held his own photographs and documents, when the other faces stopped him. Evdaev, whom he had not seen since the wedding reception at the Gorchakovs, looking as noble as a Lippizaner, a second man he vaguely remembered, a foreigner, an embassy official … Yes, the Bulgarian attaché, Smyrba, who had lately been recalled to receive instructions from his government. There were two more men he did not know. An older one, perhaps someone’s father, with white whiskers and a bare pate, and then a panel pinned with photographs of an ordinary man of the streets. His attention was drawn to it, purely because of its poverty and he moved across the room and looked more closely at the panel, then reached up and unpinned the man’s Okhrana identity photograph and put it in his jacket pocket.

  He had the men install new locks while he searched through the papers, bagged what he needed, lit a fire in the furnace in the corner and burned his own dossier that Gulka had begun to assemble. When they were done he snapped off the lights and closed the doors behind him, using his own code for the buttons. The custodian had come back and stood there with his clipboard. He was wide awake now, trying to smile and look competent. He ticked the rooms off the list.

  ‘I’ll hold on to these,’ Nikolsky said as he pocketed the keys and started down the hall.

  ‘Yes, excellency.’

  ‘My level, restricted just as before. If there’s an expanded list of recipients I’ll give it to you in due course.’

  ‘Yes excellency.’

  ‘It’s pathetic, you know that?’ Nikolsky said.

  ‘Yes, excellency?’

  ‘We recruit the best men in the service, everything is fine and then, suddenly …’ he shrugged. The custodian nodded in sympathy, as if he understood the great tragedy of human frailty within the secret services.

  ‘It just goes to prove that even good men, even the very best men can go bad,’ Nikolsky said. ‘Temptation,’ he intoned ‘say nothing about this, eh? You see … we may have a matter that goes before the special courts,’ he whispered, tapping the man on the chest and inclining his head down in the direction of Gulka’s secret rooms. ‘There are the requirements of evidence, you see?’

  ‘Ahh. Quite right, then entry is restricted to only you, excellency.’

  ‘Correct. I may have to seal the rooms, who knows?’ Nikolsky gave the man a smile, a reassuring pat on the back, then headed up the stairs. He would deconstruct Gulka’s labyrinthine investigation and, if what he learned caused a scandal that brought down a few nobles, or shook up a few ministries, so be it. The boy was waiting at the top. He bowed and made way for Nikolsky’s exit.

  ‘You’re working for me, now. You’re my assistant, understand?’ Nikolsky said, and took him by the arm.

  ‘Yes, of course, excellency. Thank you—’

  ‘Have this man brought to my office immediately.’ He fished in his jacket and handed Zezulin’s photograph to the boy. ‘He’s been reassigned somewhere I think, look it up, find him, have him arrested if you have to. Under my authority.’ He stopped at the desk and signed himself out, tossed his disc down at the barrier. The boy watched him for a moment and then did the same, smiling. Nikolsky handed the boy his card, wrote Zezulin’s name across the back, signed it and gave it to the boy. ‘Under my authority,’ he said and started towards the doors, the new keys making a disturbing weight in his trouser pocket.

  FORTY-THREE

  In Pyotr’s dream the world was burning.

  Above the ashes of the cities he could see the dismembered bodies of the citizenry. He could see children running, miraculously spared the fires, but terrorized by fear and abandonment; running like chickens caught in a yard with a weasel, chaotically, looking over their shoulders. Above them great winged vultures were soaring. Waiting, preparing to strike.

  Ryzhkov was with them, like all the rest, running away. Like all the rest, trying to escape the claws on the cobbles behind him, the hot breath of the advancing predator. Crying out, he spun away from his pursuers, and spun away into a different world, spun away into wakefulness.

  And that, he thought, in some ways was worse.

  The landscape was tedious, unending rolling fields of the Ukraine. The carriage was sweltering and he was dehydrated from all the drinking the night before. Pravdin, he remembered. Pavel Pravdin.

  In the dining-car he met an old woman with her blind granddaughter. The girl was fourteen, straight and serious. Her eyes seemed to look in different directions at once. Her hearing was very acute the old woman said, as she told their story. The girl found her food on the
plate by touch, her manners were impeccable. They were on their way to Moscow to consult a famous medium. The girl could see ghosts, the old woman said.

  ‘Truly?’ Ryzhkov asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘There are many riding with us in this carriage at this very moment.’

  He returned to his seat and fell asleep against the hot window. All the windows were open, and each time he awoke he felt like a dried prune. He ran into the old woman and her clairvoyant granddaughter in the station, and seized with a sudden wave of paranoia he sold the balance of his ticket in Kharkov and changed to a direct train for Petersburg.

  They had only just pulled away from the Kharkov Station when the executioner asked if he could share the compartment with him.

  The man wasn’t the least bit reluctant to talk about his profession. He told Ryzhkov about the mechanics of hanging, how they took the one who was about to die up on to the gallows, the physics of the noose and the drop. The condemneds’ attitudes towards the priests’ blessings, the last words. At Schlusselburg they used a gallows installed at one end of an old stable, the man said. It was always cold in that region and it was better to perform the executions indoors. Warmer, out of the rain. There was no danger the mechanism would freeze. It made it easier on everyone.

  Without his black mask the executioner was a smooth-faced man of middle age, a man who looked, Ryzhkov thought, like anyone else one might meet, a shopkeeper, or a minor bureaucrat. He had inherited the job from an uncle nearly twenty years earlier, he said, and during his career he had been called upon to hang exactly seventy-three persons, sixteen of whom were women.

  He said the number with a little smile, as if it was something that he was proud of, but didn’t want to boast about. The answer came easily, practised, one of the things everyone wanted to know about the job.