by Kim Wright
“So have we come to an impasse?” Trevor said, after a moment of silence. “Yet once again?”
“Not at all,” Tom said. “I find your mention of the Scottish case most apt. It reminds us to question every assumption. There may be two killers afoot, and not one, and they may be connected to a joint cause or acting on completely different motivations. The murders may be less connected that they appear. Yulian may not have been the only member of the Volya to have infiltrated the palace.”
“I find that last thought the most chilling,” Emma said. “For you’re quite right. If Yulian Krupin managed to dance his way through these iron gates and into close congress with the imperial family, there could be others.”
“One other point,” Rayley mused. “Yulian had been part of the imperial ballet corps for nearly a year. Why was he killed now?”
“Rayley is returning to his training,” Trevor said, nodding toward Tom and Emma. “When the Yard cannot discover why something has happened, we busy ourselves with the timeline, the ‘when’ of the crimes. For the ‘when’ often leads us to the ‘why.’”
“Perhaps Yulian’s killer only recently discovered his identity,” Tom said.
“I think it’s more likely there’s some sort of ticking clock we aren’t aware of,” Rayley said. “Some upcoming event which is forcing the killer’s hand.”
“Quite a few events are converging,” Emma said, her voice also slow and speculative. She seemed to be talking as much as ever and sifting through the discussion perfectly well, at least to Trevor’s point of view, and he wondered about this misty, distracted manner that both Tom and Rayley had commented upon. She certainly wasn’t showing it to him.
“There is of course the great ball,” Emma was continuing. “And the customary closing of the Winter Palace just afterwards, so that the imperial court can retire to the coast. You might also argue that our own arrival is a significant event, even though no one appears to be treating it that way. A visit by the Queen of England is inherently significant, is it not? And of course, except for Ella, no one seems to want Alix to marry Nicky.”
“Another thing - Yulian was shortly to be leaving for Paris,” Rayley said. “He and Katya had been granted an exalted and apparently rather rare opportunity to dance there. Filip put this out as part of the motive during our afternoon in the saunas, when he suggested that Antonovich killed Yulian out of professional jealousy.”
“Then perhaps young Yulian’s loyalty to the Volya was not truly so unswerving,” Tom said. The energy of the room was picking up again and they had all leaned a bit closer into the center of the circle. “The chance to dance in Paris with Katya may have tempted him away from his duties to the cause.”
“Now we’re onto something,” Trevor said with enthusiasm. “I’m not sure which, if any, of these notions is the closest to correct, but I feel in my bones that this is a fruitful line of questioning. For the one assumption we cannot be foolish enough to make is that Yulian was the only member of the Volya within the Winter Palace. We cannot assume that all threats to the imperial family died with him.”
“The Tchaikovsky ball is in two days,” Emma said. “Everyone will be there. Not just the imperial family and Ella, but Alix and the Queen as well. If I were a revolutionary I would consider it …the last day of hunting season.”
“Quite right,” Rayley said. “Even with the loss of a man on the inside, the Volya may be prepared to continue whatever scheme they’d conceived. We can’t say for sure it would be the ball, but the timing is suspicious, is it not?”
“Damn suspicious,” Tom said, slapping his thighs. “Especially in light of the fact that, just as Emma says, all the birds will scatter the day after the ball. Once the imperials and their consorts are at the seashore for the season, they’re beyond the reach of anyone, the Volya included.”
“Just how desperate would you guess these revolutionaries to be?” Rayley asked. “Enough so that they’d be willing to alter a plan at the last minute, even if they have lost a key player?”
Trevor winced. “If anyone should have a word to say on the subject, it’s Davy. But where could he be? I expected him some time ago.”
The Streets of St. Petersburg
6:48 PM
Davy had been wandering the streets of St. Petersburg ever since leaving Vlad. Not only was it a beautiful city, but now that his nose had finally grown accustomed to the smell of the marsh, he found that the most enchanting vistas were those from the bridges. Heaven knows there were plenty to explore. The city was a compilation of nineteen separate islands, all connected by a series of arching bridges, spanning the ever-present Neva at regular intervals.
The city is a silent place, he thought suddenly, as he stood at the arc of one of the bridges, staring down into the steel-grey water below. At first the streets had seemed noisy, noxious, and fulsome – just like the streets of London. But here, just the middle of the bridge, high over the Neva, he realized a different aspect to St. Petersburg. A silence so profound that for a moment it unsettled him.
The heat had grown with the day and at some point in his walk he had removed his cap and stuffed it in his jacket. At another corner of another street he had rolled up his shirt sleeves and finally now, here on the bridge, he unclasped his collar. Such dishevelment would never be allowed on the streets of London where at any moment he might have crossed paths with someone else from the Yard or perhaps, even worse, some public citizen who knew his function there and considered him a representative of all that was proper with Queen and country. Representing the crown could be burdensome at times, especially for a man who had not yet left his twenty-first year, and Davy now rubbed his throat and neck, seeking the promise of a breeze and enjoying the freedom that came from being anonymous, just another faceless man in the streets.
This is why people travel, he thought. So they can loosen their collar and roll their sleeves in every known sense of the words.
A church bell rang. Even this sound was muted by the water and his elevation on the bridge but his mind automatically counted the faint bells. Seven. Dear God, he thought, jerking to attention, pulling his elbows away from the railing. He had walked for hours, he had missed teatime, and thus the chance to confer with Trevor and the others. Returned to himself immediately, he loped down the slope of the bridge and onto the sidewalk, trying to calculate the fastest route back to the Winter Palace. He suspected the path he had taken with Vlad – the Nevsky Prospect which ran beside the Café of the Revolutionaries and required transit over the bridge where Alexander II had met his famous end – was not the most direct option but that was the street he knew best. It would perhaps be faster to follow along the Neva itself, which would eventually lead to the palace. But rivers could undulate and waver, thus limiting their usefulness for a man navigating on foot and who knows how many of the steep bridges he would be required to cross between this spot and the palace?
Striding briskly, Davy decided to take the Nevsky Prospect. If nothing else, traveling a well-known street would allow his mind the time to work on excuses for Trevor and to practice his report, late though it would be, in his head.
He was halfway there, merely a block or two shy of the Café of the Revolutionaries – he really needed to stop thinking of it that way lest he make a slip in the presence of the Volya – when he saw Vlad himself. He was coming up the sidewalk from the opposite direction as Davy and walking with another man. A large and hulking beast whose brown jacket was buttoned to his throat despite the heat and whose facial features seemed ludicrously lost in the vastness of his flesh. Small eyes, small nose, small mouth. He looked like a snowman who was melting, Davy thought, whose coal eyes and stony mouth were being slowly engulfed in his collapsing face.
Vlad had seen Davy too and, judging by his guilty, exasperated expression, some sort of battle was going on in his mind. He is leaving the meeting, Davy thought, in the presence of a fellow Volya member. And here, as luck would have it, he encounters me. He would prefer n
ot to introduce me to this man, but what choice does he have? We are walking right toward each other and it is too late for either of us to pretend we have not noticed the other or to change direction. He must either introduce me to his companion or, by neglecting to do so, know that he has incited my curiosity about the man even more.
“Hello there,” Vlad said as they all three came to stop on the street. “Where have you been since we parted?”
“Walking,” Davy replied, reflecting upon how sometimes the most honest of answers could also sound the most evasive. “Admiring your beautiful city.”
“Ah,” said Vlad, looking around with some surprise, as if it had been years since he had closely observed the streets he walked every day. “We have been in our meeting, as you know.”
“Yes,” Davy said, glancing at the man beside him. Almost all the Russians he had met spoke some degree of English but perhaps this fellow did not. His face was convincingly blank, as if even this banal discussion was beneath his understanding.
But evidently not. With a slight grimace, Vlad accepted the social realities of the situation. “This is Davy Mabrey,” he said to the snowman. “He is a British revolutionary in service to the Queen but in sympathy to our cause.” The man’s small eyes darted to Davy with sudden interest and Davy flushed.
“And this is one of the senior members of the Volya,” Vlad continued. “May I present my comrade, Filip Orlov.”
Chapter Eighteen
Here was the secret that very few men knew: The attempt on the life of the tsar two years earlier had been a fake.
Well, that is, at least somewhat of a fake.
The events of a political revolution may seem to move like lightning to those watching from outside, but the planning of them requires patience. Placing Filip Orlov within the tsar’s guard had been a necessary first step, but the guard employed so many men that the guard was a virtual army. The Volya knew that in order to utilize Filip’s unique talents to their fullest potential, they would have to find some way to differentiate him from the dozens of others serving a similar role.
It had been decided that the simplest way to do this would be to have Filip throw himself between the tsar and a would-be assassin. The tsar, like many gruff men, had a profoundly sentimental aspect to his nature; he might reward a detective who had thwarted a murder through clever investigation with some jewel-encrusted trinket, or decorate a guard who had acted quickly to subdue a threat by pinning any number of festoons upon his chest. But his most profound gratitude would be reserved for a man who had suffered in his stead, the one whose body absorbed the bullet which had been intended for him.
And thus the Volya had launched a two-tiered initiative. Most of the lads believed that the mission was to shoot the tsar. And so it was, although the senior and more experienced members of the group knew that this plan, without irony, was a bit of a long shot. The marksman understood that if his first bullet went astray, he was to cut his losses and fire the second one into Filip; that way, if the Volya couldn’t manage to assassinate Alexander III on the anniversary of his father’s murder, then the entire mission should not fall to ruins. It would at least buy them a comrade placed high within in the tsar’s private circle.
The assassination attempt may have been a fake but the bullet, unfortunately for Filip, was real. As it ripped into his well-cushioned side, expertly placed there by the Volya’s best marksman, he had been surprised not only by the pain – somewhat different in actuality than it had been in theory – but also by the sense of violation. As he had wailed and stumbled and collapsed in the middle of the street, his grief had been unfeigned.
From there, events had happened exactly as planned. The stretcher, the doctors, the recovery in an elevated suite of rooms within the Winter Palace. The news that several of his comrades had been arrested – that some of them had talked and others had been hanged. Fortunately none of the ones who broke under pressure had known that the shooting of Filip had been part of the overall plan, but still…one never could never predict what details might emerge under questioning, especially the sort of highly persuasive interrogation the private guard was known to employ. Each day in his starched white hospital bed Filip had lain with both physical pain and a far more tormenting sense of anxiety. Any hour could bring the sound of advancing steps, the guard coming to tell him that he had been revealed and was thus to hang with his comrades.
The days turned into a week, then two, as contagion swept the infirmary and his recovery was delayed. But still no such steps rang down the hall and eventually Filip relaxed.
When he eventually expressed a desire to return to his ancestral home for the remainder his rehabilitation, this small request had been graciously granted – so graciously, in fact, that Filip had traveled in one of the tsar’s own carriages. His mother had wept at the sight of him, although he had never been entirely sure if it was the size of the wound or the size of the carriage that had brought about such an uncharacteristic reaction. He announced his promotion to the elite guard casually, while smoking in the garden with his brothers, but word spread fast, just as he knew it would. Before he left to assume his new post, his village had bestowed upon their favored son the greatest gift such a humble town had to offer: Tatiana.
She did not love him. He knew this, but was not offended by the fact. One might argue that, other than the enchantment of her beauty, he did not particularly love her either, at least not at the time of their wedding. But despite the surface differences between them, he knew that they were similar in the core. They were pragmatists, cursed to spend their lives among people who did not think clearly, who likely would never be able to do so. They had both noticed, at some point in their miserable youths, that the only road out of town led to St. Petersburg, and they also shared a certain cold ambition – he for his politics and she for a better life. Tatiana did not know about her husband’s involvement with the Volya, nor the fact that his marriage to her was a way to accelerate his plans. Being shot in lieu of the tsar might have moved him into the inner circle, but Filip knew that to stay there, it would take more. A beautiful wife who proved a quick study in the ways of the court was an asset. Yes, he was rescuing her, but she brought advantages for him as well.
That was the part that happened quickly. The rest of the plan had taken more time. For the Volya was also, in its way, a slow moving force for change, their plans hampered by the comings and goings of the members. A university was by design a transient place. Young men were trained at great effort and great expense, sometimes of funds and sometimes of life. In most cases, the investment did not pay off. The young men married or took up professions and became caught within the maw of personal ambition. They moved on, their revolutionary days a mere memory, something they would brag about behind closed doors and after much drink. Only a small percentage of the boys recruited remained long enough to progress within the group and even they could not always be trusted.
Yulian was the perfect example. At Gregor’s insistence they had gotten him inside the palace and through the boy’s own gift for dance he had thrived there. But then came the girl, the damn girl who wanted nothing more than to dance in that whore of a city called Paris, and Yulian’s head had been turned. We will kill the tsar after the tour, he told them. Katya and I must go to Paris first. It means so much to her. Yes, this was the impudence of the boy. He looked into the face of a man who had offered his body up to a bullet and said that yes, he would help them, but that he wanted to go to Paris first.
Paris first.
That is what the boy said.
The revolution could wait until his holiday was complete.
And then he had added casually, almost as an aside, the remark which sealed his fate. “Katya understands I must someday return and do my duty. I tell her everything, you see.”
Here was the secret that only one man kept: the death of Yulian Krupin came at the hands of the cause he served.
The day he decided he must eliminate one of his own was
a dark day indeed, but Filip had long ago accepted the need to make difficult decisions. You could hardly take the boy without the girl; the two had argued quite convincingly to everyone within earshot that their fates were linked. Yulian had died as he lived – blindly - and Katya had followed with remarkable ease, almost cooperatively, almost as if she understood that for Russian women, romantic love was generally a death sentence.
Even when one is a member of a collective there are times when one must act alone. Filip understood that no one in the Volya could ever know of his decision, and nor could anyone within the palace. Keeping his secret had already proven difficult, for Gregor had many unanswered questions about his brother’s death. At the memorial service he had approached Filip and held out a handkerchief saying “So that you might weep for my brother, comrade.”
The statement was probably nothing more than a rebuke over the fact that Filip had remained dry-eyed among the wailing of the others, but for a moment Filip’s blood had run cold. He had taken the handkerchief and nodded briskly, a gesture which seemed to satisfy Gregor, but then Filip’s gaze had fallen on the equally dry-eyed Vlad who was leaning against the plaster wall. Watching and listening, just as he always did. A pesky mosquito, that one.
Within the palace, the death of the dancers had attracted little interest from his fellow officers, who had either been fooled by the flourishes of his staging or too unimpressed by the stature of the victims to care. Just the damn British woman, another of those watch and listen types, another mosquito begging for the palm of a hand. Her interference had been unfortunate and her death, he feared, might still arise to haunt him, especially in light of the nearly simultaneous arrival of a contingent of her countrymen. If the British should decide to investigate…