The People's Will

by Jasper Kent

  ‘Were you expecting any?’ Sofia’s tone was a little pointed.

  ‘I think we’d know by now if he’d talked,’ Dmitry replied.

  ‘And how would we know that?’

  ‘Because if he had talked, none of us would be here to discuss it. We’d all be under arrest.’ It was straightforward reasoning and Sofia should have understood too. Dmitry suspected that there was something more to her question.

  ‘Perhaps he’s only told them what they know already,’ said Sofia.

  ‘By other means,’ added Dusya.

  Dmitry noticed how he had become the focus of everyone in the room. True enough, he was the chairman of the committee, but that role had never previously drawn such attention. He chose to play the innocent.

  ‘Andrei’s clever like that,’ he said, nodding. ‘But eventually they’ll realize he’s not giving them anything new – and then we’ll have to act fast.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be the first to know,’ said Dusya.

  ‘Just as you were the first to learn of his arrest,’ added Rysakov, ‘long before the rest of us – before it even happened.’

  Dmitry grinned. It was now abundantly clear what this meeting was all about. He glanced at Sofia and saw she had a revolver trained on him. Kibalchich had moved to lean against the door, blocking it as an escape route. All eyes were on Dmitry.

  ‘Go on then,’ he smiled. ‘Tell me what you’ve got.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Sofia. She nodded to Rysakov who walked over to Dmitry, caressing a coil of rope in his hands. He went behind the chair and flipped a strand of the rope over Dmitry’s head and across his chest before tying it tightly. Dmitry’s arms were pinned to his sides and to the back of the chair. He gave the vague impression of struggling against his bonds, but he didn’t try too hard. That was best left as a surprise.

  ‘Now we can hear the evidence against you,’ said Sofia. ‘Dusya?’

  Dusya stood. ‘I saw you,’ she said simply. ‘I saw you outside Trigoni’s apartment. The gendarme spoke to you before they went in to make the arrests. You’d gone before they came out.’

  It was all a fabrication, and Dmitry could guess that it came at Iuda’s behest. There was no point in denying it – they had clearly made up their minds and anyway he had no desire to remain with them a moment longer. But even so, he’d rather his denunciation was based on the truth than a lie.

  He turned to Dusya. ‘Are you sure it was you who saw me, or was it Vasiliy Grigoryevich Chernetskiy?’

  ‘Vasiliy Grigoryevich is a prisoner of the tsar, as you well know,’ snapped Sofia. ‘And even if he were free, I’d happily take his word over yours.’ The gun in her hand trembled, but didn’t falter in its aim towards his heart.

  ‘Vasiliy Grigoryevich was released three weeks ago,’ countered Dmitry, ‘on the personal orders of the tsar.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Dusya. ‘But if anyone would know, you would, wouldn’t you, Colonel Otrepyev? You’re the man who put him there.’

  Dmitry shrugged. ‘That I won’t deny.’

  ‘You admit it?’ asked Bogdanovich.

  ‘I admit it. Otrepyev and I are one and the same.’

  ‘Do they know about the tunnel?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘They?’

  ‘The Ohrana – or whoever you’re working for.’

  ‘I work for no one,’ said Dmitry, wishing it were true. ‘Certainly not for you.’

  ‘Then you’re an enemy of the people.’

  Dmitry laughed. ‘The people? The people whose will you claim to represent? When it comes to it, you’ll find out just how little you understand the people.’

  Sofia shook her head and smiled. ‘It’s a shame you won’t live to see it,’ she snarled, ‘but it will happen. A brave few of us will begin it. We’ll kill the despot and yes, the people will be shocked, and saddened, but they’ll pause to think and then they’ll understand what has happened and the chance they’ve been given. And they’ll grab that chance with both hands and they’ll follow us. They will take the reins of power and we will guide them to a new future – free from hunger, free from tyranny. Free from monsters like you.’

  Dmitry’s nostrils flared. He breathed deeply. For the first time in many years he felt passionate. She knew nothing, none of them did, but he would tell them.

  ‘You brave few? Brave? Your brave plan is to skulk in tunnels like rats. You’ll wait for Aleksandr to come past so that you can kill him without having to face him. Then you expect the people to rise up and do the real work for you, and if they fail, you’ll stay hidden and let them take the blame. Brave?’

  ‘What would you have us do?’

  ‘Act like men, if you can. Stand up and shout what you believe, like we did on the quatorze, on 14 December 1825. Three thousand stood in Senate Square to end Nikolai’s tyranny before it could even begin. Three thousand faced canister and grapeshot as the tsar ordered his men to fire upon their comrades.’

  Dmitry knew that he was forgetting so much: forgetting that he was a vampire and should not care about such things; forgetting the fact that he himself had walked away from the square before the guns had begun to spit death. But he had not been a vampire back then. He was talking with the voice of the man he should have grown to be instead of the creature into which he had descended, and he enjoyed the deception, not least because he was deceiving himself.

  ‘They failed,’ sneered Sofia.

  ‘As you will fail. But at best, your failure will be forgotten. All the people will remember is the tsar’s bleeding corpse, ripped to tatters by your bomb. He will be a hero and his son – fool that he is – will bask in their mourning. If you go down in history at all it will be as cowards, as killers, as assassins. But we’ll be remembered. We who stood up to be counted, we who faced our oppressor and looked him in the eye even as he cut us down, we will inspire the future. We will have the streets and squares named after us. You will achieve nothing but death because you understand nothing but death. We deal in hope while you wallow in terror. We are Bonaparte – you are Robespierre.’

  Sofia laughed, quite genuinely. ‘You are Bonaparte?’ she shrieked. ‘You are mad! The Decembrists achieved nothing. They demanded nothing but an easier life. They stood for themselves, not the people. And yet you talk like you were one of them. Did you stand there in your mother’s arms, suckling at her teat as the guns opened fire? Did you toddle up to Nikolai, tug at his coat and mewl at him until he granted a constitution? You’re living a fantasy. You yearn for a past that never existed, like all who oppose change. You say we understand nothing but death? You’ll understand it soon enough.’ She raised the pistol to eye level.

  Dmitry breathed deeply. He did not know where his words had come from. However rambling and idealistic they were, he was proud of them. But he feared – he knew – that his predictable, pathetic self would return to him before long, and so he relished the moment all he could.

  ‘I was there,’ he said slowly. ‘I was eighteen years old. I stood on Senate Square with my father and we faced the guns together.’ Lies! Lies! All lies! Whose was the voice in his head that screamed? Zmyeevich’s? His own? He did not care, as long as he could ignore it for just a few seconds more.

  ‘Quite, quite mad,’ said Sofia, a hint of sympathy in her voice.

  Dmitry stood, spreading his arms to rip through the rope around him. The flimsy wooden chair collapsed under the strain and Dmitry hurled its fragments across the room. Sofia’s jaw hung open in limp surprise, but she held the gun steady. Dmitry took a step forward and it went off. The bullet hit him somewhere in the chest, passing right through, but he scarcely noticed it.

  ‘My God!’ whispered Sofia.

  Dmitry took another step. Bogdanovich and Rysakov threw themselves forward and grabbed Dmitry’s arms, but he cast them easily aside. Kibalchich looked on with detached fascination. Dusya failed to hide an appreciative smile. Had Iuda told her that Dmitry was a vampire when he had told her to denounce him? Had she come with
a more appropriate weapon than a revolver? It seemed not. Iuda did not want Dmitry to die – he merely wanted to demonstrate his power.

  Sofia raised her aim a little higher and fired twice more. She was a good shot. The bullets hit Dmitry’s face barely an inch apart. He felt blood on his cheeks and heard a gurgling, snorting noise when he tried to breathe through his nose. Sofia dropped the gun and raised her hands to her face, covering her silent scream. Only Dusya failed to show any shock. She grinned salaciously, relishing the moment.

  Dmitry could have killed them all there and then. Perhaps five minutes later he would have, but it would be an ignoble way to end his fine speech, wallowing in the death he had just condemned. He made for the door, against which Kibalchich still leaned. Even his veneer of detachment could not disguise his horror, but he had not lost his presence of mind. As Dmitry reached forward to drag Kibalchich out of his way, the young man stepped aside, opening the door with one hand and almost offering Dmitry an exit with the other. It seemed to mock Dmitry’s oratory, but he chose not to punish it.

  Moments later he was out of the room, down the stairs and running through the cool, dark night. He slowed to walking pace and laughed loudly, but soon fell into silence. His mind began to fill with unwanted intruders: the true memories of what had happened in Senate Square, a hunger for blood, and the presence of Zmyeevich, probing his thoughts, commanding his will. He knew that those first two interlopers would never be far from him, but Zmyeevich could be escaped. There was nothing in Petersburg for him now. Nothing in Russia, nor even in Europe. But it was a big world and Dmitry would travel across it until he was far away – far from Zmyeevich. He would seek out a new world, or a new continent at least. And when he set foot on it he would make it his home. He would live in a land that was what Russia should have been. And he would be free.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  KIBALCHICH WAS SMOKING a cigarette. It was forbidden anywhere near the tunnel, and therefore even in the living room – a rule that Kibalchich himself insisted upon, knowing full well how easy it could be to set off the nitroglycerin. In the shop itself it was allowed. Mihail had declined the offer to partake, but he enjoyed the smell of the fumes; it reminded him of his mother. There were two smells he associated with Tamara; one pleasant, the other foul. Both had the same cause.

  The pleasant one was what he experienced now, the smoke in the air, whether it wafted from the tip or was expelled from Kibalchich’s mouth and nose. Mihail breathed it in deeply, enjoying the way it tugged at his throat and lungs, a pale echo of the sensation he remembered from the few occasions when he had taken in the smoke directly from a cigarette. It had never become a habit for him, in no small part because of that other smell: the smell of his mother when she was not smoking; the stale, dirty stink that clung to her clothes, her hair and even her body. When she lit a cigarette the scent of the fresher smoke managed to hide the underlying stench, but added to it as well. Mihail always knew that it was there. When Tamara coughed he knew that her lungs were as filthy as her clothes. When she coughed blood he understood that such stains could not be washed away.

  That same stale stench clung to Kibalchich most of the time, but it was only noticeable when he and Mihail were close – when they were together in the tunnel. Up here it was masked by the aroma of cheese, but when a cigarette was lit, its smell obscured everything.

  Kibalchich was on his second now. There’d been scarcely a pause between stubbing out the first and lighting a new one. Mihail noticed how his hand shook. He’d seen the same in his mother, but only until those first clouds of smoke hit her lungs.

  ‘Nervous?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not!’ Kibalchich snapped.

  ‘You seem on edge.’ It was not just Kibalchich. Sofia and Bogdanovich were the same.

  ‘Excited.’ It sounded like bravado.

  ‘Anything come up at the meeting yesterday?’

  Kibalchich looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why should it?’

  He seemed terrified, but Mihail did not press it. ‘Was Dusya there?’ he asked.

  ‘She was. But don’t worry. She’s all right.’

  Mihail looked at him, puzzled, wondering why she might not have been all right. They fell into silence for a while. Kibalchich continued to smoke, but seemed to become calmer.

  ‘You’re happy to be here tomorrow?’ he asked at length, holding a lungful of smoke and then expelling it through his nostrils.

  ‘One of us has to be,’ Mihail replied.

  ‘So why did Sofia choose you?’

  Mihail could guess. He didn’t want to hurt Kibalchich’s feelings, but the reason was obvious. ‘You’re a man of thought, Nikolai, not of action. I’m a soldier, remember. I’ve done this sort of thing with enemy shells raining down above me. If you were here, you might suddenly see something – a rat nibbling at a bit of cheese – and you’d have an idea. You’d start wondering – I don’t know – whether rats could be trained to carry explosives, or whether cheese would be the best foodstuff for men travelling to the moon. And lo and behold, the tsar would have paraded past and you’d have missed your moment.’

  ‘Frolenko’s the one who’s actually on the switch,’ protested Kibalchich, but with little enthusiasm. He flicked his cigarette butt to the floor and stubbed it out with a twisting motion of his foot.

  ‘True. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘So when that rocket goes to the moon, it’ll be a man like you on board, and a man like me sitting and watching, hoping his calculations were correct.’

  ‘Getting distracted by rats eating cheese,’ Mihail added.

  Kibalchich laughed. ‘And you get all the fame?’

  ‘You want the fame for this?’ Mihail nodded in the direction of the tunnel.

  ‘I don’t know what I want from this – but no, it’s not fame.’

  ‘I think you’re going to be disappointed,’ said Mihail, ‘whatever happens.’

  They were interrupted by footsteps on the stairs and then the ringing of the bell as the opening door caught it. The scenario had been discussed and practised many times. Neither Mihail nor Kibalchich turned to see who had entered. They peered intently at the truckles of cheese on the shelves, occasionally taking a sniff. What else was there that customers in a cheese shop would do?

  ‘This one has a little more pepperiness to it, don’t you think, Nikolai?’ Mihail said.

  Kibalchich nodded in agreement. Mihail desperately tried to avoid catching his eye, knowing that it risked sending them both into fits of laughter, despite his comrade’s nervousness. He ran his fingers across the rind of the sample in front of him and then sniffed them, rubbing them together to release more of the aroma. The silence was discomfiting, but neither of them could do anything about it. Perhaps this would be his opportunity to get away.

  Bogdanovich emerged through the door from the storeroom, appearing smooth and unruffled. He was far better at this sort of thing than most of them, certainly better than Mihail or Kibalchich; that’s why he’d been chosen for the role of shopkeeper.

  ‘You two gentlemen still all right?’ he asked as he passed Mihail and Kibalchich, turning his head a little towards them.

  ‘Still trying to decide,’ said Kibalchich. ‘You have quite a choice.’

  Bogdanovich carried on towards the newcomer, still out of Mihail’s line of sight.

  ‘And how can I help you, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you Yevdokim Kobozev?’ said a gruff, familiar voice that Mihail could not quite place. He turned to take a glance. It was Mrovinskiy, the colonel through whom Mihail arranged his meetings with Konstantin, though today he was not wearing his uniform. He did not look in Mihail’s direction.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ replied Bogdanovich. ‘I take it that my reputation precedes me.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone would be proud of the reputation that put us on to you.’

  Mihail and Kibalchich both turned to look. Bogdanovich had managed to maintain his calm exterior, but it seeme
d impossible that this did not mean the end for operations at the cheese shop.

  ‘From what I hear,’ Mrovinskiy continued, ‘anyone swallowing a mouthful of cheese from here is likely to spend the next few evenings in the latrine, crapping their guts out.’

  For the smallest fraction of a second an expression of relief appeared on Bogdanovich’s face, followed immediately by one of professional indignation. His cheeks reddened. He spoke through gritted teeth.

  ‘I would ask you then, sir, to get out of my shop and take your custom elsewhere.’

  ‘I think not,’ replied Mrovinskiy. He presented Bogdanovich with his papers, explaining himself at the same time. ‘My name is Mrovinskiy – from the Department of Sanitary Engineering. I’m here to perform an inspection.’

  He stepped back towards the door and opened it, signalling up to the street. Two men thudded heavily down the steps to join him. They moved quickly. Mrovinskiy thrust the door to the storeroom open and one of his men went through. Another went across and into the living room, emerging moments later with Anna Vasilyevna.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Mrovinskiy barked.

  Bogdanovich didn’t waver in his performance. ‘This is my wife. We run the shop together.’

  ‘Anyone else?’ asked Mrovinskiy.

  ‘No, sir,’ said one of the men, with a little more of a clipped, military tone than might have been expected from a sanitation official.

  ‘Begin the inspection.’

  The men started to search the shelves, removing truckles and looking behind them. One took a pencil and began to poke at the cheese with it to see if there was anything hidden within. To Mihail it seemed obvious that the quality of the shop’s hygiene was not the true goal of the search, but he had the advantage of knowing who Mrovinskiy was. On the other hand, given how much was already known about what the shop was being used for, it was hard to understand why such artifice was needed. Why else, though, would Mrovinskiy be there?

  Having finished with the shop and the storeroom the inspectors moved on to the living quarters. Mihail glanced through and saw that all was in order. The usual planks were covering the entrance to the tunnel and a barrel had been pushed in front of them. On top of that was a cheese. Mihailov and Frolenko had been in there, but there was now no sign of them. They must have hidden in the tunnel. One of them would have the revolver clutched in his hand. If they were discovered he would shoot, first to kill whoever it was that had uncovered the tunnel and then at the parcel which still lay there, filled with nitroglycerin, destroying everyone in the place. If it came to it, Mihail would have to shout a warning, even though that in itself might be enough to trigger the suicidal act; best for now to remain silent. He wondered if any of his comrades had cyanide-filled nuts poised between their teeth, preparing to bite down if discovered.