The White Russian

by Tom Bradby

  “City police,” Ruzsky said. He wasn’t in the mood to offer felicitations for the dawning of a new year.

  “You should have come to the other side.”

  “There have been two murders, out here, on the ice.”

  The sergeant walked forward, followed by his companions. They stood in a small group looking out toward the torches in the middle of the frozen river. “Yesterday it was a drunk,” he said, pointing at the deserted road in front of him. “Froze to death just here.”

  “I fear this is a little different. The victims were stabbed-”

  “A week ago, someone was stabbed out in front of the Admiralty.”

  “A domestic dispute,” Pavel corrected him. “Two brothers. Both still alive.”

  “Have you been on duty all night?” Ruzsky asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’re on detachment?”

  The Yellow Cuirassiers-officially His Majesty’s Life Guard Cuirassier Regiment-were based out at Tsarskoe Selo, in the small town that surrounded the royal palaces there. It was about an hour’s train ride from the capital.

  The sergeant did not answer.

  “There are other guards?” Ruzsky went on.

  The man shrugged. “On Palace Square. They don’t move unless we call for them.”

  Ruzsky looked down the embankment toward the Hermitage. “There is no one out here?”

  “A sentry either end until midnight. After that, it is not necessary. The shutters on the ground and first floors are closed. We would hear any commotion.” He was defensive.

  “There are no patrols?”

  His cheeks flushed slightly. Ruzsky didn’t wish to press the point; it had been New Year’s Eve, after all. “What time did you and your men come on duty?”

  “If you wish to ask questions, you will have to apply to the head of the guard detachment or the office of the palace police.”

  “Come on,” Pavel said softly, before Ruzsky could get annoyed. “A couple of lovers have been sliced up out there. We just want to check to make sure no one saw anything, then be on our way.”

  The man’s face softened. He breathed out. “Cigarette?” Pavel asked, taking out a tiny tin case from the pocket of his coat and offering it around the group.

  The men hesitated-smoking on duty was strictly forbidden-before each taking one in turn. They lit up and smoked in silence, suddenly conspiratorial.

  The sergeant looked out at the constables still guarding the bodies on the ice. It was marginally less cold here, in the shelter of the giant porch.

  “We came on duty at midnight. I did my last rounds about an hour later. I walked along the embankment to check for drunks. Then I locked the door.”

  “You stand here, inside the hallway?”

  “We check the rooms periodically, but, as I said, all the shutters are locked, except those by the door.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything?”

  The sergeant shook his head and so did his young companions. Ruzsky could see they were telling the truth. He suspected they’d probably been playing cards as the New Year dawned.

  That, and the fact they had accepted a cigarette while on duty, was, he thought, a sign of the times. He wondered if the men had seen action at the front. The sergeant, certainly. The others looked too young.

  “When you came out at one o’clock, you didn’t see anyone at all?”

  “There was a group farther down, by the Admiralty. I think they’d just crossed the river, but they were going home. It was quiet after that. If we’d heard anyone else, we’d have moved them on. We don’t allow people to linger.”

  “Could anyone have seen something from one of the upstairs windows? A servant?”

  He shook his head. “These are all state rooms at the front. There are family bedrooms on the top floor, but none are occupied.” The sergeant gestured toward the group on the ice again. “It’s quite far out.”

  “But extremely visible on a clear night.”

  “Yes.” He shook his head and looked genuinely apologetic. “You can talk to the head of the household later on. He could tell you whether there might have been anyone in the front rooms, but I’m afraid I cannot help you.”

  The sergeant turned and retreated, taking the younger men with him. The door shut with a loud bang and the silence descended once more, save for the iron chain above them creaking in the icy wind. An ambulance had parked on the Strelka and two men were carrying a stretcher out to retrieve the bodies.

  “It’s a strange place for a murder,” Pavel said. “At this time.”

  Ruzsky didn’t answer. He glanced over his shoulder. They were only a few minutes from his parents’ home here, and he thought of his son Michael sleeping, curled up with his teddy bear pressed to his nose.

  “We’d better start looking for the knife,” he said.

  Ruzsky returned to the edge of the ice. As he reached the bottom of the steps, he heard the sound of a car door being shut and turned to see two men in fedoras getting out of a large black automobile farther down the embankment.

  The men leaned over the wall and surveyed the scene on the ice.

  “The Okhrana?” Ruzsky asked quietly.

  It was only half a question. They both knew perfectly well that these were Vasilyev’s men. The change in Pavel’s demeanor was palpable.

  “What are they doing here?” Ruzsky asked.

  Pavel did not answer. He was staring at them, trying to conceal his unease.

  The two secret policemen sauntered back to their automobile and got in. The car swung around and returned the way it had come.

  Ruzsky and Pavel watched as it disappeared down the embankment before turning left over the bridge in the direction of the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress.

  3

  R uzsky didn’t want to go back onto the ice, so he got Pavel to instruct the constables and then stood on the embankment and watched as they searched across the river. It was a huge area and they moved quickly, reminding him of a pack of hunting dogs eager to pick up a trail. Maybe they just wanted to get home.

  The wind had dropped a little, but it was still bitterly cold. The dim light gave the appearance of fog and Ruzsky could now only just make out the spire of the cathedral on the other side of the river. It wasn’t going to make their search any easier.

  It was still early, but they were not alone on the ice; two constables from the marine police had begun working the section of the river around the Strelka. As Ruzsky watched, one leaned forward and probed gently with his foot, before reaching back, taking a pole with a red flag from his colleague, and sticking it into the ice.

  The pair appeared oblivious to the fact that a murder investigation was going on around them. They were looking for hazards, patches of black water, where a thin covering of ice concealed a pocket of five or six feet of water and a thicker layer of ice underneath.

  Pavel was marching back toward him. Ruzsky wondered why none of the constables had bothered to go and tell the marine policemen to be on the lookout for a murder weapon.

  “Not helping with the search, Deputy Chief Investigator?” Ruzsky asked Pavel as he climbed the steps toward him.

  “They’ll never find anything.” Pavel glanced at him. “You look terrible, by the way.”

  Ruzsky did not respond. Pavel had picked him up from the station upon his return from Siberia the previous night, and they had demolished a bottle of bootlegged vodka in the dingy room Pavel had rented for him.

  They stood together in silence, their breath billowing out into the morning air. Pavel coughed.

  The bodies had already been removed by the ambulance, but watching the constables scanning the ice, Ruzsky had a clear vision of the dead girl’s face. He could picture her laughing, her head resting on her companion’s shoulder as they stared up at the stars and the cold beauty of the city around them. The dawn of another year. Had they been wondering what it would bring? How could you not?

  Ruzsky heard the sound of movement an
d turned to see a servant brushing snow from the porch of the Winter Palace behind them. The man was a tall Tartar in the distinctive cinnamon-colored coat of rough cloth and cap trimmed in silver braid worn by these most menial of palace staff. He, too, stopped what he was doing to watch the dark figures moving about on the ice.

  “You must be excited about seeing your boy,” Pavel said.

  Ruzsky frowned. His wife, Irina, had left him in Tobolsk six months earlier and returned to the capital, taking their son with her. Pavel knew the bare facts, but, so far, Ruzsky had managed to avoid all but the most cursory discussion of the subject. “She won’t allow me to see him,” he responded.

  “She won’t allow it?”

  Ruzsky could see that Pavel also blamed himself for the state of his marriage, but the surprise was not that Irina had left him, but that she had ever agreed to go to Siberia with him in the first place, as was the fact that she had stuck it out for two and a half years. It had been a last attempt to make the marriage work, and for a few months it had even looked as if it might succeed.

  “Irina has gone to stay with my father,” Ruzsky explained. “She’s sheltering behind them.”

  With a talent for deliberate provocation that he now recognized as one of her most striking attributes, Irina had, upon her return to Petersburg-or Petrograd, as it had been renamed at the start of the war-gone straight to live with his father rather than her own parents. The old man doted on his grandson and would deny him nothing.

  Pavel shook his head. “He’s your son, Sandro. Just demand it.”

  Pavel seemed about to go on, so Ruzsky forestalled him, wishing to change the subject. “When you think about it-”

  “I’m not paid to think anymore,” Pavel responded.

  Ruzsky gave him a stern look and continued. “I can’t understand those last three paces. The killer doesn’t come back and make any attempt to conceal them, and they’re clearly visible to even the most ignorant detective.”

  “It shows you what people expect.”

  Ruzsky stared at the steps in front of him. He wondered what the man had done to encourage such brutality in his assailant. “Who found the bodies?” he asked.

  “An old woman walking home.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “Of course. She didn’t see anything.”

  “What time did the constables call you out?” Ruzsky asked.

  “I don’t know how you stand it, Sandro,” Pavel went on. “I wouldn’t manage a month without seeing my boy. Why did she leave?”

  Ruzsky watched one of the constables talking to a marine policeman, thinking of how his wife had detested their stifling provincial life in Tobolsk, from the exaggerated respect afforded the governor, a petty tyrant from Petersburg, to the crumbling homes and small-town mind-set of the local gentry. He didn’t blame her. Not for that.

  “A disintegrating marriage is not an attractive thing,” he said, quietly, reflecting upon the arguments that had raged in that tiny house at the end of a dusty street.

  Ruzsky took a pace forward. He surveyed the river once more. “Is there anywhere else from where someone might have witnessed the murder?” he asked. But the wide expanse of ice answered the question for him.

  The constables were working their way back toward the embankment.

  “Well, we survived another night without a revolution,” Ruzsky said, turning toward his deputy. It was a teasing reference to Pavel’s vodka-induced doom and gloom the night before.

  “I told you what is said in the khvost.”

  The khvost was a phenomenon talked about even in faraway Tobolsk, but you had to see the lines of people snaking around windy street corners to believe them. The poor had to queue for anything and everything these days: food, oil for their lamps, clothes. They joined lines even when no one seemed aware of what lay at the front; it was bound to be something in short supply.

  “What you don’t understand,” Pavel went on, “because you have not been here, is that people don’t read newspapers anymore. No one believes what little slips past the censors and so they treat what is said in the khvost as news, not rumor. They believe it.”

  “Maybe the war will be over soon.”

  “Maybe I’ll become the tsar.” Pavel leaned forward earnestly. “The word in the khvost-and it has been so for months-is treason.”

  “That’s not exactly new.”

  “One of our neighbors was in a line last night for bread. She told Tonya it was a four-hour wait. One woman said she’d heard from a cousin in the Life Guards that the imperial family had already left for England. Another said China had invaded. The day before, the khvost talk was that the Empress had agreed to be paid by the Germans to starve the peasants to death. Last week, it was said she had promised to sell the western half of Russia to Berlin. And the things that have been said about the Empress and Rasputin…”

  “Perhaps things will improve now that the priest’s no longer with us,” Ruzsky said. They’d talked about Rasputin’s murder last night. The case had been taken over by the Okhrana, as had all recent cases that were deemed to have political significance.

  “No. And it was too late, anyway. Do you know where the biggest khvost is? There’s a new railway ticket bureau since you left, in Michael Street. Now that so few trains run, the line there is five-deep. Thousands are leaving-to the Crimea or the Caucasus, or Haparanda.”

  Haparanda was just over the border, in Sweden. “And here’s another thing,” Pavel went on, getting into his stride, “who would defend them? Tell me that. If it blows, who would fight to save the Romanovs?”

  They’d had this discussion last night too. “The same people who always have.”

  Pavel shook his head violently. “The blue bloods are not here. They’re at the front. Dead. You have seen it yourself; the capital is full of reservists, the wounded, deserters.”

  “There’s one lot who would defend him,” Ruzsky said, pointing at a group of dark figures who had left the Strelka and were walking toward the Winter Palace. They were dressed in black and the man at the center carried a picture of the Tsar mounted on a wooden pole. They were singing the national anthem, “Bozhe, Tzaria Khrani”-“God Save the Tsar”-in loud, tuneless voices.

  “Another night of Jew bashing,” Ruzsky muttered as he and Pavel watched their approach. The Black Bands were gangs of street thugs funded by the secret police to attack opponents of the Tsar. Mostly, they spent their time organizing pogroms against the Jews.

  The men mounted the steps, still singing. The figure carrying the portrait was a young man with a fleshy face flushed red from alcohol and exertion, and a thin, pencil mustache. In his left hand, Ruzsky could see a knuckle duster. He stopped. “New Year, New Happiness,” he said.

  Neither Ruzsky nor Pavel answered.

  “God save the Tsar!”

  This was what all of these gangs did, demanding a show of loyalty as an excuse to beat anyone who wouldn’t offer it. “Fuck off,” Ruzsky said.

  The man took a pace forward, his face livid.

  “We’re police officers,” Pavel added. “There’s been a murder. Move on, please.”

  Pavel’s tone had been more conciliatory, but the leader of the group brushed him aside. “If you’re police officers, you should want to show your loyalty to the Tsar.”

  “Go away, before I arrest you,” Ruzsky went on.

  “You? Arrest us?” The man did not move, and, for a moment, he looked as if he would strike them. Ruzsky felt the weight of the Sauvage revolver in his pocket. As it had been often before his exile, the temptation to bring these kind of scum down to size was overwhelming.

  There was a shout from the river. Close to the embankment-about fifty feet away-one of the constables was holding something above his head.

  Ruzsky and Pavel pushed past the thugs and strode out onto the ice. Behind them, the men of the Black Bands began to sing “God Save the Tsar” again.

  “I’ve found it, sir!” the constable shouted as t
hey approached him. He offered Ruzsky the knife.

  “Christ,” Pavel whispered.

  It was an old, crude black dagger. Ruzsky held it up so that he could see the twisted iron handle more clearly. There was some inscription by the base of the blade, partly obscured by dried blood. It looked like Sanskrit, or Arabic. He turned it over in his hand and then passed it to Pavel.

  Ruzsky faced the embankment. The gang of thugs had disappeared from view, the sound of their singing now just a faint echo across the river. “Why would he do that?” Ruzsky asked.

  “Do what?”

  “He follows them so carefully out here, then throws away the murder weapon.”

  “He must have been wearing gloves. There won’t be any fingerprints.”

  “It’s still careless. Why throw it away?”

  “Panic.”

  “He wasn’t panicking when he retraced his steps, going backward.”

  Pavel returned the knife to the constable. “Take it straight to the office and give it to Veresov. If he’s not in his room, telephone him at home and say the chief investigator would like his help and he is to come in immediately.”

  The constable ran off in the direction of the palace. They watched him go. “In its way, it’s all a bit theatrical, isn’t it?” Pavel said, gesturing toward the patch of blood in the center of the ice. “Following in the footsteps and so on.”

  “If you call being stabbed a dozen times theatrical.” Ruzsky turned to his partner. “It’s certainly not straightforward, I’ll grant you that.”

  4

  P avel was hungry, so Ruzsky agreed to go briefly to a café for breakfast. The route to their favorite haunt took them around the front of the Winter Palace, past the Hermitage, and into Millionnaya Street, where the wind funneled down from Palace Square had swept deep drifts up against the walls of the houses. Outside the barracks of the first battalion of the Preobrazhensky Guards-his father’s regiment-a sentry stamped his feet hard.