by Don Winslow
Well, workers in theory, anyway — the lack of fuel and materials and the hyperinflation brought on by Western financial assaults on the ruble had closed many of Petrograd’s factories. The workers were freezing and starving.
It was on a February afternoon that Yuri Voroshenin, then the head of the Petrograd Cheka, climbed the steps to the huge wooden doors and kicked the snow off his shoes. He entered without knocking.
The enormous foyer was full of people, shuddering in coats and blankets, and yet she had prevented them from chopping up the expensive wooden furniture that filled the house. Voroshenin walked past them onto the sweeping curved staircase and went up to the rooms where she retained her “apartment.”
She was thin, her cheeks a little sunken, her skin pale with hunger. Even the upper classes were hard-pressed to find or pay for food. Nevertheless she regarded him with the haughty look of the ruling class, as if to ask what he was doing disturbing her at such an early hour of the afternoon.
Clearly he was not used to insolence. He wanted her to be afraid, as well she might have been, for this creature was responsible for countless executions and hideous tortures and she was at his mercy. But she showed no fear.
“Good day, Comrade Ivanovna.”
“I am not, nor never will be, your ‘comrade.’ ”
“You know that such an attitude could get you shot.”
She closed the book. “Now? Shall we go? Should I bring a wrap or are you going to shoot me here?”
“I am not amused.”
“Nor amusing.”
She reached to her bed table for a square of colored paper and unwrapped it to reveal a piece of chocolate and then noticed the Bolshevik’s hungry stare. Despite the fact that she had saved this little bit for weeks, she said, “How rude of me. Would you care for a bite?” Snapping the chocolate in half, she held it out to him.
He accepted it. “I haven’t seen chocolate since …”
“I believe ‘since before the Revolution’ is the phrase you’re searching for,” Alexandra said pleasantly. “Yes, St. Petersburg was a city of large and small pleasures then.”
“It’s Petrograd now.”
“As you wish,” she said.
She watched him savor the chocolate, and then he said, “You will be required to move out.”
What was she to do? she asked Nicholai as she told him the story. Her family had all been killed in the war or executed by the Reds. More than death, she was terrified by the thought of being out in the street, without her attachments, her belongings, her things. There were few places to live in Petrograd, fewer still where a notorious “White” would find a welcome. She had seen her peers on the streets carting human waste, selling apples, renting their bodies.
“And where will I go?” she asked.
“That is not my concern.”
Alone and helpless, the only power she retained was the only power a woman had in those days. She looked at him for several moments and then said, “It could be. Your concern, that is.”
“Whatever would make you think that?”
“The way you look at me,” she answered. “But am I wrong? Perhaps I am mistaken.”
“No, you are not wrong.”
Releasing her hand from his grip, she walked over to the huge bed.
She kept her apartments.
He joined her there many afternoons and most nights, his position in the Cheka protecting him, at least for the time being, against the “social contamination” of an affair with a member of the “possessing classes.”
One night he told her that he loved her. She laughed. “Certainly a good Bolshevik such as yourself doesn’t believe in romantic love.”
“Perhaps I do.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” she said. “Romance is dead in this world, my dear. You should know, you helped to kill it. We have an arrangement, Voroshenin, nothing more.”
An arrangement indeed, he thought. She gave him herself, he protected her from himself. The symmetry was mind-boggling.
The next afternoon he walked into her apartment, his face white with concern. “Alexandra, you have to go. Now.”
She looked startled. “I thought that —”
“The Cheka knows about Rizhsky Prospect.”
Since the Revolution she had carefully, secretly, bit by bit hidden the Ivanov family fortune — millions of rubles — away in the safekeeping of an old accounting firm on Rizhsky Prospect. For a fee, the men there were slowly smuggling it out of the country, little by little, into banks in France and Switzerland. It was an act of incredible daring — Whites had been tortured to death for hoarding a watch, a ring, some loaves of bread, and she conspired to hide millions. And the discipline — feigning poverty, going hungry, starving herself, allowing herself only the odd little square of chocolate.
“It’s only a matter of time before they come for you,” he said. “Me too. You have to go. Get out. Leave the country.”
“But my things, my furniture —”
“A train east out of Finland Station tomorrow morning at seven,” Voroshenin said. “I’ve arranged space for you and all your things. A heavy bribe, but apparently you have money, no? I’ve drawn up travel papers that will take you safely to Vladivostok. After that …”
Thousands of Whites had taken this route — to Vladivostok, then across the porous border into China, where most had sought the relatively cosmopolitan refuge of Shanghai. It was not a pleasant choice, but the only choice she had.
“Where is your money?” he asked. “I’ll need some of it for bribes. The rest, carry with you in cash.”
“I’ll go get it.”
He shook his head. “Too dangerous. You would be arrested and then … I could no longer protect you. And you would tell them everything, Alexandra. Trust me on this, you would tell them everything they want to know and more.”
She told him where the money was. “But most of it is still there?” he asked.
She nodded.
They made plans.
Cheka agents would storm her house that night, “confiscate” and cart off all her furniture and belongings, and take them to a waiting rail agent at the station, where they would be loaded onto a special Cheka car.
“No one will have the nerve to inspect it,” Voroshenin assured her.
She would be “arrested” before dawn and taken to the station for removal to some hellhole in Siberia. Instead, she would ride in relative comfort to Vladivostok with the papers asserting her new identity.
“And my money?” she asked.
“I will deliver it to the train myself,” he said.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Aren’t you in danger?”
“I will be on the next train,” he said, “with my new papers. In Vladivostok, we can decide what to do next about our arrangement. But we have to act quickly,” he urged. “There is much to do and little time to do it, and the Cheka is on the hunt.”
Ivanovna gave him the address of the accountants in Rizhsky and then started to gather her personal belongings — jewelry, china, crystal, treasured family heirlooms, all the things she had protected against the mob for the past five long years.
Voroshenin went to Rizhsky Prospect.
His Chekan subordinates, suitably bribed and cowed, arrested her in the morning and took her to the train.
Voroshenin, of course, never turned up.
She knew that she had been outsmarted and was lucky he had let her take her belongings into exile.
This was the story that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna told her son.
How Yuri Voroshenin had taken her honor and his inheritance.
42
VOROSHENIN SET DOWN the file.
Staring out the window, he forced himself to focus on the current applications and not drift into the realm of memory.
The reports, many of them copies of old and handwritten documents, were unanimous in the opinion that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna had fled Russia in 1922, but that much Voroshenin already knew.
Apparently she took the quite common eastern route, through Manchuria and into then wide-open China, where she was reputed to have settled in Shanghai. Although she had all her household possessions, she was otherwise penniless — but, again, Voroshenin knew that — and survived by using her wit, beauty, and seductive skills to charm a series of wealthy expatriates and adventurers.
Voroshenin had no doubt about her seductive powers, having experienced them himself. The memory of her lush body, satin skin, and …
According to the reports, Ivanovna had seduced a German nobleman, become pregnant by him, and then refused the pro forma offer of marriage from the young Keitel zum Hel. Sometime around 1925 or ‘26, she gave birth to a son, whom, unreconstructed aristocrat that she was, she christened Nicholai.
Nicholai Hel, Voroshenin noted, was almost precisely the same age as Michel Guibert. It was a coincidence, but the men Voroshenin knew who believed in coincidence were all dead men.
Such as zum Hel, who had died at Stalingrad.
Ivanovna disappeared from intelligence reports until 1937, when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and her house was commandeered, literally, by the Japanese general, Kishikawa. The cited informants salaciously repeated gossip that the relationship became something a bit more than hostess and hosted, and Voroshenin felt an unexpected twinge of jealousy, remembering afternoons in …
The countess might very well have made herself vulnerable to charges of collaboration had she survived the war, but she died of natural causes.
But what of the son? Voroshenin wondered.
On the subject of Nicholai Hel, the files had nothing more to offer. The boy simply disappeared from the record, which was not unusual, Voroshenin reassured himself. In the chaos that was wartime Asia, hundreds of thousands of people simply disappeared.
Now, as Voroshenin sat in his office at the Russian Legation, he wished that he had ordered Ivanovna to be executed — or done it himself — before the bitch could spawn.
But is it possible?
Is it possible that this Guibert is Hel, come for his vengeance?
Just when I am on the verge of making my escape?
43
THEY TOURED ALL the major sights.
Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Bell and Drum Towers, and Beihai Park.
“Which you’ve already seen,” Chen remarked.
He was relieved when Nicholai suggested that they go to Xidan Market to sample the street vendors’ wares. It was bitterly cold now, in the gloaming dark of late afternoon, and they paused by the open braziers and trash-can fires to warm their feet and hands as they wandered through the hutongs of Xidan. During one such hiatus Nicholai finally learned that the driver’s name was Liang Qishao and that he was a Beijing native, as he treated both men to fried dough cakes, mugs of hot green tea, scorched sausages, roasted chestnuts, and bowls of sweet porridge.
Nicholai enjoyed the outing, a colder and somewhat tamer version of his youthful forays into the seedier parts of Shanghai, and the common food was as delicious as anything served in the finer restaurants.
Sated, he said to Chen, “Now I would like to go to church.”
“To church?”
“A Catholic church,” Nicholai clarified. “I am French, after all. Do any survive in Beijing?”
Liang nodded. “Dongjiaomin. ‘St. Michael’s.’ In the Legation Quarter.”
“Could you take me there?” Nicholai asked.
Liang looked to his boss.
Chen hesitated, then nodded.
“All right.”
The church was lovely.
Nicholai was not a devotee of religious architecture, but St. Michael’s had an undeniable charm, its twin Gothic spires rising above the otherwise low skyline. A statue of the Archangel Michael stood above the two arched doorways.
Chen had him dropped off on the east side of the building, off the main street, and neither he nor Liang accompanied him through the iron gate into the courtyard. Nicholai enjoyed the rare moment of privacy before going inside.
The interior was relatively dark, lit only by candlelight and the dim glow of a few low-wattage wall lamps behind sconces. But the fading afternoon sun lit the stained-glass windows with a subtle grace, and the atmosphere was quiet and peaceful.
As Solange had tutored him, Nicholai dipped his fingers in the small well of holy water and touched his forehead and shoulders, making the sign of the cross. He walked down to the altar, knelt in front of the votive candles, and said a prayer. Then he retreated to the pews and waited for someone to come out of the confessional booth.
She was a Chinese woman, her head covered in a black scarf, and she looked at Nicholai and hurried out, frightened. He waited for a moment, remembering the words Solange taught him, and then went in and knelt in the confessional and said in French, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
He could barely make out the priest’s face through the screen in the darkened booth, but it looked Asian.
“What is your name, son?”
“Michel.”
“How long has it been since your last confession?”
Nicholai recalled the number called for. “Forty-eight days.”
“Go on.”
Nicholai confessed a precise list of “sins,” in precise order — lust, gluttony, dishonesty, and lust again — Haverford’s small joke. When he had finished, there was a short silence and the priest’s face was replaced with a piece of paper.
“Can you see?” the priest asked. He turned up the lamp a bit.
“Yes,” Nicholai said, studying the floor plan of the Zhengyici Opera House. A certain box was circled in red.
He memorized the plan — the doorways, stairs, the halls — then said, “I have it.”
The priest’s face came back into view. “Your sins are forgiven you. Ten Hail Marys, five Apostles’ Creeds, and an Act of Contrition. Try to curb your lust. God be with you, son.”
Nicholai left the confessional, returned to the altar, knelt, and said his prayers.
44
VOROSHENIN SAT and thought.
There was something about the name Kishikawa.
A few minutes later, he thought he recalled something and got on the phone. Half an hour later, he was on the line to Moscow, in touch with an old colleague, Colonel — now General — Gorbatov.
“Yuri, how are you?”
“In Beijing, if that answers the question.”
“Ah. To what do I owe —”
“Does the name Kishikawa mean anything to you?”
“I was the Soviet part of the joint Allied prosecution of Japanese war criminals outside of Tokyo back in ‘48,” Gorbatov answered. “Kishikawa was my biggest fish. Why do you ask?”
“Did you execute him?”
“We were going to,” Gorbatov said. “Didn’t get the chance.”
“Why not?”
“It was extraordinary, actually,” Gorbatov said. “Quite the story. There was this young man who worked as a translator for the Americans and was somehow a friend to Kishikawa. Actually he was the son of a Russian aristocrat … hold on … it’s coming to me … Ivanovna. A countess, no less.”
“Do you remember his name? The young man’s?”
“He was quite a memorable chap. Very self-possessed —”
“His name, Piotr?”
“Hel. Nicholai Hel.”
Voroshenin actually felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “What happened to the general?”
“That’s the extraordinary part,” Gorbatov answered. “Young Hel killed him. In his cell. Right in front of the guards, some sort of Japanese strike to the throat. Apparently he wanted to save him the shame of hanging.”
Voroshenin felt his own throat tighten. “Is this Hel in our custody?”
“No, the Americans took him. We were happy to see him go, believe me.”
“Do we know what happened to him?”
“I don’t,” Gorbatov said. “Glad to wash my hands o
f it. Very spooky, the whole thing, if you ask me. On which subject, why are you asking, Yuri?”
“A favor, Piotr?” Voroshenin asked. “Forget I called?”
He hung up the phone.
45
NICHOLAI PUSHED A CHAIR against the wall to create some space in his room, then he stripped down to his shorts and did twenty repetitions of the demanding hoda korosu “Caged Leopard” kata.
He selected this particular form because it stressed close-in fighting — precise strikes that demanded the buildup of force at short range. Starting with the entire room, he performed the kata in increasingly smaller circles, until by the end he barely moved his feet as he fought in the tightening bamboo cage of his imagination.
Although the form included brutal elbow and knee strikes, its principal feature was its unique “leopard paw” hand posture, the fingers bent at the second knuckle but not closed to make a complete fist. The striking surface was therefore thin, just the second knuckles, intended to penetrate a narrow space.
Precision was key.
That, and the concentration of force, and Nicholai practiced until he could generate explosive power in a strike that traveled just two inches before striking its target. He thought he might have as much as six inches to two feet in the actual situation, but didn’t want to allow himself the mental leisure of that luxury.
Physically exhausted but mentally invigorated when he finished, Nicholai sat on the floor, pulled himself into a rigid meditation posture, and envisioned the plan of the Zhengyici Opera House.
He had the floor plan perfectly in mind, and now he worked from the box Voroshenin had reserved, out the hallway, and down a set of stairs. A left turn would take him into the main part of the theater, then into the lobby and out the main doors. But a right turn at the bottom of the stairs led to another short corridor and a door that would lead to the backstage area.
At that point, he could turn right to go backstage or left into the alley behind the theater.
So there it was, and he mentally walked through the escape route. Out of the box, left down the hallway, down the stairs, right down the hallway, left out of the building. He “walked” it twenty times in his mind before adding the next mental level.