Blackstone and the Endgame

by Sally Spencer

  And so it was that, after dinner, he set off on a walk along the promenade in search of new friends – who he hoped would be both younger and more amusing than the one who had let him down.

  He decided to avoid the Royal Pavilion – he had learned recently that it had been turned into a hospital for limbless soldiers, and that somewhat diminished its charm – and instead headed in the opposite direction, towards a rather amusing cocktail bar, where he was very much in demand.

  There was a cold wind that night, and the only people who appeared to be on the promenade were two drunks, who were advancing slowly towards him in an erratic zigzag.

  For a moment, Max contemplated crossing the street to avoid them. Then, noticing that the drunks were very well dressed – and probably had fat wallets which could be easily lifted – he changed his mind.

  He stopped walking, took out his packet of cigarettes and patted his pockets as if he was searching for his matches.

  ‘Excuse me, do you have a light?’ he asked the first drunk.

  At first, the man did not seem to understand what he was talking about, but then he said, ‘Light … wanna light a shigarette?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Max agreed.

  The drunk turned to his companion. ‘Man here wants to light a shigarette,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you give him a light, then?’ the second drunk asked.

  ‘Good idea,’ the first drunk agreed.

  He reached into his overcoat pocket, clumsily pulled out its contents and immediately dropped them.

  ‘Fallen on the ground,’ he said, bemused.

  ‘I’ll pick them up for you,’ Max said, bending down.

  He quickly surveyed his potential haul. There was a handkerchief, a pocket watch, a penknife, a bunch of keys and – yes – a nice fat wallet.

  It would be a mistake to pocket the wallet just then, Max told himself, because the drunk might miss it and demand to search him. A better plan would be to move just a little distance away and collect it later.

  He coughed loudly and gave the wallet a good kick. It flew through the air and landed ten feet behind them. Then he swept up the rest of the possessions and handed them to the drunk.

  ‘You don’t seem to have a box of matches,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t seem to have a box of matches,’ the drunk told his companion, as he crammed all the objects back into his pocket.

  ‘I’ve just remembered – you gave up smoking last week,’ the second drunk said.

  ‘So I did,’ the first drunk agreed. ‘Don’t have any matches because I gave up smoking last week,’ he told Max. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Max said. ‘If I can’t smoke, I think I’ll take in some sea air, instead.’

  He walked over to the cast-iron railings and looked out to sea, thus putting himself in the clear if the drunk now realized he was missing his wallet and started looking for it.

  But the drunk didn’t seem to realize it. Instead, he and his companion walked on a few yards, before stopping again.

  It might be wise to let them get further away before picking up his prize, Max considered.

  On the other hand, the more time that elapsed, the more chances the drunk had to remember the wallet.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The two men were standing still, but they were looking in the opposite direction. If he swept the wallet up and walked quickly away, he should be perfectly safe.

  It did not occur to him, until he was actually bending down to pick up the wallet, to wonder why the drunk had kept it in his overcoat pocket, rather than the inside pocket of his jacket.

  But before he could develop that thought further, he felt a couple of strong arms clamping his own arms to his sides and experienced the unpleasant sensation of having a bag pulled over his head.

  NINETEEN

  Vladimir looked out of his study window on to the dark street below.

  ‘The car has arrived, so it is time for us to go,’ he said.

  Blackstone, who had been expecting to leave much earlier, glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘The middle of the night is a bloody funny time for history to be made,’ he said.

  ‘History happens when it can happen,’ Vladimir replied. ‘And tonight, it cannot happen before midnight.’

  ‘Thank you for explaining that,’ Blackstone said. ‘As with all your explanations, everything is now perfectly clear.’

  ‘Sarcasm does not become you, Sam,’ Vladimir said.

  ‘Neither does going out at ten o’clock at night in the middle of a Russian winter,’ Blackstone countered.

  ‘You should put on a warm coat,’ Vladimir said, ignoring the comment. ‘We may be sitting in the car for quite some time.’

  When they reached the street, Vladimir dismissed the driver and climbed behind the wheel himself.

  ‘This car is a Renault Frères,’ he said, as they pulled away. ‘I am not a great admirer of the French as a nation, but they certainly do know how to make automobiles.’

  The streets of Petersburg were all but empty, and Vladimir handled the car with the calm assurance of a man used to driving on snow. They had been going for ten minutes when he pulled up next to a canal. and pointed to the impressive three-storey building on the other side of the road which was bathed in floodlights.

  ‘That is the Moika Palace, so called because it looks out on to the Moika Canal,’ he announced. ‘It belongs to the Yusupov family.’

  Out of a policeman’s habit, Blackstone found himself counting the number of windows at the front of the palace, and found that there were seventy-eight with a view over the canal.

  ‘The Yusupov family must be very rich,’ he said.

  ‘What makes you reach that conclusion?’ Vladimir wondered.

  Blackstone grinned. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said, ‘though perhaps it might possibly have something to do with the size of their home.’

  ‘You’re easily impressed,’ Vladimir said dismissively. ‘This shack is nothing when compared to their palace on the Fontanka Canal, which has a theatre, three ballrooms and an art gallery. And let us not forget their palace in Moscow.’

  ‘No,’ Blackstone agreed, ‘let’s not forget that.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Why are we watching this palace, Vladimir?’ he asked.

  ‘Because this is where the history I spoke of earlier is about to be made,’ Vladimir replied.

  ‘That seems rather vague,’ Blackstone pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps it does,’ Vladimir agreed. ‘But now our young friend is here, I am sure everything will become much clearer.’

  He was pointing to a tall, handsome young man who had appeared at the palace gate and now began to cross the road with the obvious intention of talking to them.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Ah, of course, you have never seen him without a dress, have you? That, Sam, is Prince Felix Yusupov.’

  The prince drew level with the car, and Vladimir opened the door to speak to him.

  ‘I really have been most awfully clever, Count,’ Yusupov said enthusiastically. ‘You must come and see my preparations.’

  ‘I appreciate your kind offer, but I would prefer to observe matters from a distance,’ Vladimir said.

  Felix Yusupov’s mouth twisted into an expression of disappointment and petulance.

  ‘Well, if you won’t take an interest in it, I don’t see why I should bother myself,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ll just call the whole thing off.’

  Vladimir sighed. ‘Very well, if that is your wish, I suppose I could take a quick look,’ he said.

  The petulance was gone, and now Yusupov was beaming with pleasure.

  ‘I really have been very clever,’ he repeated.

  ‘Rasputin thinks he is coming to the palace to meet my wife, Princess Irina,’ Yusupov said, as the three of them crossed the snow-covered courtyard, ‘but, in fact, she is staying at our palace in the Crimea.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Vladimir sa
id to Blackstone, ‘when we were talking earlier, I forgot to mention their palace in the Crimea.’

  ‘What was that you said?’ Yusupov asked.

  ‘I was just briefing my colleague,’ Vladimir said. ‘Where are your servants tonight?’

  ‘I’ve given them strict instructions that they are to remain in their quarters at the back of the palace,’ Yusupov said. ‘The fewer people who have suspicions there might be a conspiracy afoot, the better.’

  Blackstone and Vladimir followed Yusupov down into a two-roomed basement.

  ‘This is where Rasputin will spend his final moments,’ the prince said, with some relish.

  So that was what it was all about, Blackstone thought. He should have guessed, but coming from a country where people did not talk casually about assassinations, it was not entirely surprising that he hadn’t.

  He looked around. The place was certainly opulently furnished. There were porcelain vases, inlaid chests, tables and carved wooden chairs. Persian carpets had been laid on the floors, and in front of a bronze and crystal crucifix was a magnificent bearskin rug.

  ‘This morning, the place was nothing but a gloomy basement – and look at it now,’ Yusupov said, obviously proud of himself. ‘I selected all this personally from our furniture store at the back of the palace.’

  ‘And did you bring it here yourself?’ Vladimir wondered.

  Yusupov laughed. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then how did it get here?’

  The question seemed to puzzle the prince.

  ‘It was brought here by the servants,’ he said – as if it was obvious that when anything was moved, it was moved by servants.

  ‘And how many of them were involved in the operation?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. My major-domo supervised the whole thing.’ He looked around. ‘I shouldn’t imagine it was less than ten of them.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Vladimir said softly, ‘the fewer people who have suspicions there might be a conspiracy afoot, the better.’

  ‘There will be four of us involved in this exercise in vermin control,’ Yusupov continued, missing the point completely, ‘though, of course, I will take the leading role.’

  ‘Of course,’ Vladimir agreed. ‘Might I be so bold as to inquire who the other three will be?’

  ‘Can I rely on your discretion?’ Yusupov asked.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘In addition to Grand Duke Dimitri, there will be Purishkevich, who is a deputy in the Duma, and a Dr Lazovert. The plan is that when Rasputin arrives, I will bring him down here straight away. I will tell him that my wife is entertaining some other guests upstairs – there will be a gramophone at the head of the stairs, so it will certainly sound as if she is having a party – but that they will soon be leaving, and when they do, she will come and join us.’

  ‘And have you remembered to supply some records for the gramophone?’ Vladimir asked.

  ‘Naturally!’ Yusupov snorted. ‘I am not an amateur, you know. But to continue: I will offer Rasputin some refreshment – wine and cakes – which Dr Lazovert will previously have poisoned. He will eat the cakes, and he will drink the wine, and then he will die. We will take his body and drop it into the Neva – we have already bought the chains to weigh it down – and the affair will be all over. Is that not a brilliant plan?’

  ‘Breathtaking,’ Vladimir said. ‘With so much clever thinking behind it, I cannot see how it can possibly fail.’

  Once they were back in the car, Vladimir said, ‘There is a complication that has only just occurred to me – though I should have thought of it long ago.’

  ‘And what complication might that be?’

  ‘In all that has gone on, I had quite forgotten that you are still a policeman. And you are still a policeman, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not according to Scotland Yard,’ Blackstone replied. ‘According to them, I’m nothing but an escaped criminal.’

  ‘Yet you are still a policeman in your head.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll always be a policeman in my head.’

  ‘And as a policeman, when you hear that a crime is about to be committed, it is your instinct to try to prevent it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You cannot try to prevent this murder, Sam. I will not allow it. I will do whatever is necessary to stop you.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ Blackstone agreed.

  And he found his thoughts returning to the first – and only – murder he had ever witnessed.

  Blackstone is still a young man – he has been told that he is, in fact, the youngest sergeant in the British army. He has not been in India long, and on this particular day – the day of the murder – he is out on a routine patrol with a corporal, an Anglo-Indian who has seen twenty years’ service on the North-West Frontier.

  They sense the tension in the air the moment they enter the small village. It is a strange mixture of anger, fear and excitement, and they know that something significant is about to happen.

  A large crowd has gathered at the centre of the village and formed itself into a circle around two men. The larger of the two has a sabre in his hand and is swaggering around the edge of the circle, cheered on by the other villagers. The other man – who is smaller and skinnier – is kneeling in the centre of the circle. He is sobbing, and every time one of the tribal elders offers him a weapon, he shakes his head.

  ‘We have to put a stop to this,’ Blackstone says.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ his corporal asks.

  ‘The man kneeling down doesn’t want to fight.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t, because he knows he wouldn’t have a chance,’ the corporal agrees. ‘But whether he chooses to fight or not, he’s already as good as dead.’

  ‘And that’s why we have to stop it,’ Blackstone says.

  ‘I’ll give you three reasons why we shouldn’t,’ the corporal tells him. He starts to count them off on his fingers. ‘The first is that even though this particular tribe considers itself a friend of the British, we probably wouldn’t get out of here alive if we tried to stop it.’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason at all,’ says the idealistic young Blackstone hotly. ‘Your first concern must always be to do the decent and proper thing, even if that puts your own personal safety at risk.’

  ‘The second reason is that the man on his knees has raped and murdered three little girls,’ the corporal says.

  ‘How can you possibly know he did that?’ Blackstone asks. ‘We’ve only just ridden into this village.’

  ‘And how can you know he didn’t do it – or something equally terrible?’ the corporal counters.

  Blackstone finds he has no answer to that.

  ‘What’s your third reason?’ he asks.

  ‘You don’t have the right to interfere,’ the corporal says. ‘Imagine you see a fox stalking a rabbit. You know the fox has to eat to live, so do you have the right to warn the rabbit?’

  ‘I do if it’s my rabbit,’ Blackstone says.

  ‘Exactly,’ the corporal agrees. ‘But the man on his knees over there isn’t your rabbit, is he?’

  ‘I shall want an assurance from you that you will not try to interfere, Sam,’ Vladimir said, calling Blackstone’s mind back from its time-journey to India.

  ‘Your hand is in your pocket,’ Blackstone said. ‘Is it wrapped around your pistol, and is your finger even now on the trigger?’

  ‘It might be,’ Vladimir said.

  ‘You can relax,’ Blackstone told him. ‘I won’t interfere. Rasputin’s not my rabbit.’

  It was near to midnight when a large car, with Yusupov sitting in the back, left the palace and disappeared up the street.

  ‘Felix has gone to fetch Rasputin from his apartment,’ Vladimir said. ‘If he and his little friends can refrain from making a complete pig’s ear of things, the whole business should be over in an hour or so.’

  ‘Something’s been puzzling me,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘Indeed? And wh
at might that be?’

  ‘You asked Yusupov if he would tell you who the other conspirators were. You were very humble about it. But I could see, just from looking at you, that you already knew their names.’

  ‘Of course I already knew their names, but by asking for them as a favour, I made him feel as if he was in charge, and someone as unstable as Yusupov needs constant reassurance of that. There’s a danger that he’ll fall to pieces before he has killed Rasputin, and so I’m doing everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘What about after he’s killed Rasputin?’

  Vladimir shrugged. ‘After he’s killed Rasputin, he can sit huddled in a corner and eat his own shit for all I’ll care.’

  ‘How many people do know about the plot?’ Blackstone asked.

  Vladimir shrugged again. ‘It’s impossible to say. I have taken the precaution of reading some of the letters Yusupov has written to his wife and parents, and while he does not actually say what he’s about to do, they would have to be idiots not to read between the lines. And Purishkevich is even worse. He’s openly boasted in the Duma press room that Rasputin will be killed in the palace and that Grand Duke Dimitri will be one of the assassins – none of which is at all surprising from a man who sometimes wears a red rose in his fly to show his contempt for the socialists.’

  ‘And you don’t think that the tsarina has heard any of the rumours?’

  ‘The tsarina lives in a crystal bubble. She does not even know that the people beyond her palace walls are starving, so she obviously has no idea at all of just how much Rasputin is hated.’

  ‘But when she learns of his death – as she must – she will want revenge,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Most certainly,’ Vladimir agreed, ‘and there is at least one person who will be willing to exact that revenge for her.’

  ‘General Kornilov,’ Blackstone said, remembering Vladimir’s story of the young military attaché who had prepared Princess Alexandra for her future life as the tsarina.

  ‘General Kornilov,’ Vladimir agreed.

  The car returned at twelve fifteen, and now the conspirators had a new figure with them – a man in a fur coat and a beaver-skin hat.