The Last Rite (Danilov Quintet 5)

by Jasper Kent

  ‘Can you get up?’ she asked.

  I pushed myself into a sitting position, then drew my legs under me. She held my arm and I managed to get to my feet. I tried to take a step but lost my balance and almost fell. I looked down at my feet.

  ‘What the devil?’ For some reason I spoke in a whisper.

  With Nadya’s help I hobbled over to sit on the stairs, then examined my legs more closely. There was a rope tied around them – or half tied. The knots were not tight or complete. Evidently they’d been interrupted in the middle of it when Nadya had opened the door and turned on the light. I undid the knots and threw the rope into a corner of the hallway.

  ‘Why on earth would they do that? Why not just …?’ I hesitated to raise the concept with Nadya.

  ‘Why not just kill you, you mean?’

  I nodded, but she had no answer.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she replied instead.

  I rose to my feet again. Unthinking she went over to switch off the light.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re still out there. It’ll keep them away – for tonight.’

  We went up to the top floor. I could hear Polkan scratching against the living-room door, where Nadya had shut him in. Once we went in he seemed unconcerned, and lay down beside the hearth. Nadya poured me a brandy, then one for herself.

  ‘How did you know they were vampires?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ She seemed absent-minded. ‘Oh, I didn’t. I didn’t know, but what else would they be? Even if they were just thugs, the light might have scared them off.’

  ‘You got down quickly. I assume you heard the fight.’

  ‘No, I was watching for you. I always watch when you go out to see … him.’

  ‘Dmitry?’

  She nodded curtly. I recalled all those times earlier in the year when I’d gone to meet Dmitry. When I returned she’d always been sitting in her chair, pretending all was well. We fell into silence. I tried to make sense of what had happened – most particularly of why they had tried to tie me up. And why strangle me? It couldn’t have been to kill me – they had teeth for doing that. It could only be that they wanted me unconscious.

  ‘I recognized him, Misha.’ She blurted it out like a confession.

  My lips began to form the word ‘Who?’ but there was no point in playing the fool. Her own brother had been standing at the door, his hand at my throat. ‘Ilya, you mean?’ I said instead.

  She nodded. ‘I opened the door and you fell through, along with the other two. And he just stood there. He had a smile on his face. His hand was outstretched, as if he was about to greet me. For a moment I forgot what was happening. It was what I’d hoped for all these years; that he’d come and knock on the door and say that he forgave me. Or not even that, simply that he didn’t reject me; that he was my brother and that he loved me, whatever I’d done.

  ‘And then his face began to change. It was as if he’d come to this house at random, and hadn’t expected it to be me who opened the door, and when it was he couldn’t hide his look of disappointment. But it wasn’t that, of course. It was the light. His skin was weak. It began to fall from his cheeks. He pulled back his hand to shield himself, but the hand wasn’t there. What was left of it was blackened and burning. Then he ran, and so did the rest of them.’

  ‘I should have told you,’ I said.

  She looked at me, blinking. Her eyes were wet, but no tears spilled down her cheeks. After a few seconds she laughed, but there was no humour in it, only bitterness.

  ‘Don’t be a prostak, Misha. I’ve known as long as you. Almost as long. I’ve always been just a few days – a few hours behind you.’

  ‘But … how?’

  ‘You mentioned his name, remember? Back in February. You told me about how you’d seen a girl – Anastasia, it turned out – selling herself to a soldier. And then all out of the blue you asked me about Ilya, as if it was quite unconnected.’

  ‘It might have been.’ It was a feeble attempt to defend myself, but I felt affronted, as though I’d been tricked.

  ‘Not the way you said it. There was this tiny pause when you spoke his name, as if you were afraid you’d been caught out in a lie.’ She giggled. ‘It was just the same with me whenever I said your name in front of my husband.’

  ‘But that didn’t mean he was a … a voordalak.’

  ‘Not straight away, no. Then I just thought you’d stumbled across my brother getting his pleasure by screwing a pregnant girl in an alleyway. When I learned what she was, and worked out what he was, it was somehow … better.’

  I felt the urge to shout at her, to walk over and shake her, slap her across the face and talk some sense into her. How could being a voordalak be better than anything? It was a certainty that Mama had brought me up with, that she’d somehow inherited from Aleksei. It was one step away from the romanticism that could make some people actually want to become a vampire, to cheat death and live – exist – like that throughout eternity. It was precisely the maudlin foolishness that had led Dmitry himself to follow exactly that path.

  And yet Dmitry was the counter-argument to all that. However much I might loathe the voordalak as a concept, however much I might be revolted by the knowledge of how he gained sustenance, when I met him face to face I could only regard him as – insane though it sounded – a fellow human being. Whether I liked him or trusted him I wasn’t sure, but he was not a creature on to which I could pour the revulsion that I so sincerely felt for his kind. But none of that was of any concern to Nadya. If she chose to find solace in the fact that her brother was the victim of some external evil and not a weak-willed man who was happy to indulge his carnal desires, then who was I to attempt to disabuse her?

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ I said.

  We went out on to the landing and into our bedroom. Here it was darker, seemingly darker than usual in contrast with the stark, soulless whiteness that the Yablochkov Candles brought to the rest of the house. This was the only room that I’d left free of them. We made love for the first time in several weeks, and I felt closer to her than I had done for months – since I’d first lied to her about my encounter with her brother.

  The arc lights had burned out by the time we got up. They only lasted a few hours, but a few seconds was usually long enough for the purpose to which I put them. I replaced them with new ones, feeling certain that we would need to protect ourselves again.

  I spent most of the day at home, as I generally did now that the Duma was no more. It had been less than a month, but already retirement was making me lazy. I’d turned sixty since the revolution and was beginning to feel my years. When the Duma was dissolved I’d felt sure I’d want to stand in the elections for the Constituent Assembly when they happened. Now I wasn’t so convinced. Nadya still worked at the kitchen most days, and so my time was my own. Polkan was company enough.

  I’d tried to telephone Yelena and the Smolny Institute, but the line was still down. I managed to get through to a few friends, but none of them knew very much. There was a rumour that Lenin had returned from Finland and had managed to get across town in disguise the previous night to join his comrades in the Smolny Institute. I’d been walking not far from the route he must have taken. Perhaps I’d unwittingly walked past him. I’d only seen him in pictures, but his most prominent feature was his bald head. That would be easy to hide with a wig or a hat. There was a vague connection between us. His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He’d become political when his elder brother, Aleksandr, had been hanged for a failed plot to assassinate Tsar Aleksandr III. The attempt had been planned for 1 March 1887 – the sixth anniversary of the murder of Aleksandr II – by a group that continued to call itself the People’s Will, even though it had little direct connection with the original organization. I’d been a part of the original People’s Will back in 1881, though I’d escaped the arrests afterwards, thanks to my illustrious father. But if I’d managed to do what I should have done, and prevented my uncle’s death, then Aleksan
dr Ulyanov might not have been hanged and Vladimir Ulyanov might never even have bothered to come up with the alias of Nikolai Lenin.

  Nadya came home and we ate together. We both knew that I had to go and speak to Dmitry, but that didn’t stop either of us from worrying.

  ‘What if they come after you again?’

  ‘Dmitry’s the only chance I have of stopping that. They used to be under his command. He might have some idea what they’re after.’

  ‘It might be a trap.’

  ‘I’m as safe going out as I am staying here. They know where I live. All they have to do is hang around outside until there’s a power cut, and then we’re both in trouble.’ She paled. It was harsh of me to point out that the danger was to both of us, but she knew as well as I did that I was doing the right thing. I was merely curtailing the argument.

  ‘What are you taking?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve got my cane, and a wooden sword. And an arbalyet.’ I’d been in the storeroom upstairs for half the morning, gathering what weapons I could – cleaning and preparing them. None was as effective as the Yablochkov Candles, but those weren’t portable. On the other hand, there were still areas of the city lit by arc lamps, which I could use as a safe haven and perhaps even as some kind of weapon. ‘I’ll take my sabre too,’ I said as an afterthought.

  ‘You’ll look like something out of the last century.’

  ‘I’ll hide it under my coat.’ I’d already constructed a loop of cloth which I slung over my shoulder, allowing the pommel of my sword to nestle unseen in my armpit. I can’t have been the first to come up with the idea.

  ‘Did you find any of the … the things you lost.’

  I shook my head. After Anastasia had gone I’d discovered that more than I thought was missing from that room. Iuda’s notebooks for sure, but a couple of other things too, both of which I’d stolen, at different times, from Iuda. It was hardly theft, though – Iuda had had no right to either of them. One item I’d taken from the pocket of his jacket, after the body it surrounded had crumbled to nothing. It was a ring in the form of a dragon, with a body of gold, emerald eyes and a red, forked tongue. It had once been Zmyeevich’s. Somehow Iuda had got it from him, then I had taken it from Iuda and finally Anastasia had taken it from me. I cared little for its loss.

  The other item – strictly items – were more personal. They were six little bones: two distal phalanges; two intermediate phalanges; two proximal phalanges – the bones of the two smallest fingers of my grandfather’s left hand. They’d been severed in a gaol in Silistria in 1809. Somehow Iuda had got hold of them, but he had no right to them; neither did Anastasia. I was Aleksei’s heir, and they were amongst the few things I possessed that could make me feel directly linked to him, however macabre they might be.

  I’d looked for them again today, but I was in no doubt that she had them. I reached into my shirt and allowed my fingers to touch two further items that never left me. One again was a link to my grandfather: an oval icon depicting the Saviour, hanging from a silver chain that had once broken and been retied. Aleksei had been given it by his wife – not my grandmother – when he set out to fight Bonaparte. He’d given it to his daughter, my mother, Tamara, who had given it to me. The second item around my neck was similar, but instead of depicting Christ it displayed the picture of someone I loved far more dearly and trusted far more deeply – Nadya.

  There had been a time when I’d worn a different pendant around my neck: a locket containing twelve strands of blond hair that had once belonged to Iuda. After I’d killed him, I’d seen no reason to keep hold of them. I’d waited till the spring thaw and then hurled the locket into the Neva, along with his double-bladed knife.

  Nadya noticed my instinctive action and tried to smile. She knew how much the icon of Christ meant to me. I hoped she understood how much her image meant too.

  I set out in good time to meet Dmitry at half past nine. I wanted to go to the Winter Palace on the way and see if they’d improved their defences. Tonight the city seemed utterly normal – a typical autumn evening in Petrograd. It was only as I started getting close to the palace that I noticed things begin to change. Here once again there were groups of workers, but they were not simply loitering, looking for somewhere to protest. These were men of the Red Guard, a militia formed after the revolution – in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities – for the protection of the Soviets. Now it was the military wing of the Bolshevik Party.

  Groups the size of platoons – they were too shoddy to genuinely be described by a military term – were assembled in the backstreets around the Winter Palace, waiting. They made no attempt to stop me, or anybody, but it was clear by their presence that Lenin and Trotsky would be making their move tonight.

  I crossed Palace Square and quickly checked out the defences. At first glance they were unchanged from the previous day – armed men and women all along the front of the palace, facing out into the square. But perhaps on reflection there were one or two fewer of them. And I could see no marksmen at the windows as I had before. It was the same girl on guard as yesterday. She recognized me and let me in with a nervous smile, not even bothering to look at my papers. Worse still, she didn’t check my knapsack. I’d walked straight into the heart of the Provisional Government carrying a sabre and a crossbow. They didn’t stand a chance.

  Konovalov wasn’t in his office, but I asked around and soon found him, in a first-floor room that overlooked the Neva. He was alone, standing with his back to me, taking long intense drags on a cigarette. He was staring out of one of the tall windows, framed with velvet curtains that must have hung here for decades. I went and stood beside him. He gave a slight nod to acknowledge my arrival. I followed his gaze. There was only one thing he could have been looking at: the Avrora – still moored on the far bank of the river. The six-inch barrels of her guns were pointed towards us.

  ‘It’ll be tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s your biggest worry.’

  ‘Really?’ He seemed uninterested.

  ‘There’s troops of Red Guards waiting to make a move.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘A few thousand maybe – but they’re a rabble. You’ve got three thousand to see them off.’ In truth the women and boys guarding the Winter Palace were as untrained as the Bolsheviks outside. Only the Cossacks had any real experience.

  ‘Three thousand? More like three hundred now.’

  ‘You’ve had casualties already?’

  ‘No, no casualties. Merely desertions.’ He tutted. ‘That’s unfair. We can’t even feed them. Most of them have gone in search of a half-decent meal. But they don’t come back.’

  ‘What’s Kerensky going to do?’

  ‘Kerensky? He’s scarpered.’

  I could only laugh.

  ‘He went this morning,’ Konovalov continued. ‘He couldn’t even get hold of a car. In the end he just sent men out to “requisition” one. They stole it from outside the US embassy. It was still flying the Stars and Stripes when he left in it.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Who’s in charge?’

  Konovalov laughed. ‘In charge of what?’ Then he relented. ‘Officially it’s Kishkin. From charities minister to dictator in a day. And tomorrow – who knows?’

  He fell silent, staring out of the window and down to the river, looking at nothing in particular. I took a step closer to the glass, so that I could see down to the embankment below us. The wide ledge outside blocked my view, but I could make out the figures of men moving past, swiftly and purposefully, as if they had been deployed. On the ledge I noticed a little chip of missing stone that looked to me as if it had been caused by a bullet. But it was not recent; the edges were worn smooth by time. It was the remnant of some previous battle here – but the building would receive fresh scars before the night was out.

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ I asked.

  ‘W
e decided, collectively – the final act of the Provisional Government – to make a last stand. Anyway, where would we go to? You should go, though. You might still have time to get out.’

  I hadn’t been planning on staying. I shook his hand and then left. I went down to the palace’s central courtyard, but instead of going back out on to Palace Square, I looked for one of the more humble exits on the western side. I found one. The sentry was a cadet of about fifteen. The door was open and he was happily chatting to the group of Red Guards who stood outside. They could have got past him at any moment, but the order had not come yet. I stepped out into the street.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ It was one of the men outside who asked. His accent wasn’t local.

  ‘I’m leaving.’ I hadn’t meant to inject quite such a sense of cowardice into my words, but my response got a huge laugh from all of them. I began to push my way through and was offered no resistance. I felt the pat of several hands on my back, congratulating me for my apparent desertion.

  I glanced over at the Palace Bridge. It was lowered again now and that could only mean the Red Guards had taken it – it was to their advantage to allow more troops to come in from the north of the city. I decided it was best to get to Senate Square by skirting around the Admiralty to the south rather than going along the embankment. Suddenly from behind me I heard shouts and laughter. I looked. One of the Red Guards had been hoisted on to the shoulders of another so that he could paint a message on the palace wall. He’d just finished. It was large enough for me to read.

  Down with the Jew Kerensky! Long live Trotsky!

  I could only smile to myself, but not, I supposed, for the same reasons that they laughed. What did they think Trotsky was? A Buddhist?

  I made it to Senate Square unmolested – nobody gave a damn about someone walking away from the palace. The square and the embankment were busy with workers, some loitering with no real sense of what to do, others – Red Guards – clearly better organized. Dmitry was already there, accompanied by the same two voordalaki that had been with him the previous night. I looked at them more carefully than before, but neither had been among those who had followed me.