The Sword of Justice

by Leif G. W. Persson

  Your average Polish pedlar would look autistic in comparison with this bugger, Bäckström thought. He had picked up that difficult word at one of the many police conferences he usually attended as soon as the weekend was in sight. He occasionally used it himself when he was questioning crims who just sat there and said nothing the whole time. A couple of times it had actually worked, because the crims wanted to know what sort of verbal insult their questioner was throwing at them and opened their mouths for that very reason. But GeGurra evidently suffered from the exact opposite, and there was no point even trying to say anything because it would be like pissing in the wind.

  So for the past quarter of an hour he had contented himself with listening with half an ear while he nursed his cognac and tried to focus on the brown envelope that he had more or less been promised. Even though he really ought to have said thank you for the meal, then stood up and walked out. Instead, he was sitting there on the back of the lame snail that was slowly carrying him towards the goal of this particular journey, a victim of his excessive tolerance and good-natured willingness to do whatever people asked of him. By now he was starting to feel slightly aggrieved at the way GeGurra was exploiting him.

  ‘Is there anything you’re wondering about so far, Bäckström?’ GeGurra asked, giving him a look that was a little too perceptive for Bäckström’s taste.

  ‘Only when you were likely to get to the point,’ Bäckström replied. ‘I may not have made any firm plans for the rest of the night, but—’

  ‘I’m getting to that, my dear friend,’ GeGurra interrupted, patting him cheerily on the hand. ‘I shall soon be getting to the point, which is why it’s important that you pay attention now that the story is starting to come together.’

  82

  Anna Maria and her grandmother have been installed in Prince Sergei’s palace on the banks of the River Neva in St Petersburg. A five-minute ride by horse and carriage from the Alexander Palace where the tsar and his family spend most of their time at this part of the year. In short, and in summary, it can be said that they are unlikely to suffer any hardships during the ten months they will be living there. Two hundred rooms and around a hundred servants, and the suite which Anna Maria has at her disposal for herself and her maid consists of six rooms and lies directly next to Prince Sergei’s own apartment. Big enough, perhaps even one room larger than she really needs, as for some time she has been spending her nights in Sergei’s bedchamber.

  Anna Maria’s grandmother, on the other hand, lives at the other end of the house together with her staff, and if her father, the marquis, had known about these arrangements he would surely have been both surprised and concerned. But how could he have any idea about them, seeing as he was at the other end of Europe, and the letters which arrived several times a week from his daughter and her elderly grandmother had nothing to say about such trivialities?

  They are instead concerned with matters raised high above the mundane. Not least with how well they are being cared for, the generous hospitality they are enjoying, and how Anna Maria has been presented at the tsar’s court after only a couple of weeks. Most of the letters are full of stories from the imperial court. Of how Anna Maria is soon spending several days each week at the Alexander Palace, as a companion to the tsar’s four daughters.

  Not merely as a companion, for that matter. She is also their music teacher, language tutor and storyteller from the distant land of Italy, which, especially during the autumn months, when darkness and cold close in on St Petersburg, arouses their fantasies about another life. Happier, warmer and brighter than the one that awaits them at home during the long Russian winter.

  And of course she is beautiful, their very own Anna Maria Francesca, with her dark, gently curled hair, her sparkling eyes and her wide smile. She takes the lead in all their games and activities, and the fans, silk shawls and Venetian masks that she brought with her are all put to good use. They all love Anna Maria Francesca, from twelve-year-old Olga to little Anastasia, who has just turned six, and, after just one week, they receive an unexpected visit.

  Their little brother, Alexei, is standing in the doorway in the company of two large, silent men in cossacks’ uniforms. A little boy of three, dressed in a blue sailor-suit with long trousers. One of the cossacks is holding a small balalaika in his huge hand, while their little brother gives his sisters an imperious look. With one hand he gestures for them to leave the room, so that he can be alone with their Italian companion.

  How fat he looks, even though his face is so thin, Anna Maria Francesca thinks in surprise as she stands up from the grand piano, bows her head and curtsies deeply to the tsarevich.

  It is late that evening that she learns of the secret which is never mentioned outside the family.

  ‘He suffers from haemophilia,’ Sergei explains. ‘He inherited it from his mother. But he isn’t fat. It’s his clothes, he walks around covered with padding.’

  To protect him, heavy padding has been sewn into all his clothes. The slightest little scratch could kill him, because it is practically impossible to stop him bleeding.

  ‘One fall, one bump, one blow, even as little as a scuffed knee, could kill him. The previous winter he had caught himself on a table and spent the whole spring in bed suffering from severe internal bleeding,’ Sergei explains.

  ‘Cara mia, mia cara, it’s a very tragic business,’ Sergei sighs as he strokes her cheeks and forehead with his fingertips. Now that he’s lying beside her, he’d prefer to talk of other things. As full of life as he is, he doesn’t want to think about death for a moment.

  Alexei is three years old the first time he meets Anna Maria Francesca di Biondi. Fifty years younger than his relative, Sergei. Despite the difference in age, and the human activities that are contingent on such things, his heart is full of the same feelings as Sergei’s, and just one week after their first meeting he is sitting in Anna Maria’s lap with his head resting against her large breasts as she reads out loud to him about a little boy whose nose grew whenever he told a lie.

  Anna Maria translates the story into Russian as she reads, leaving some Italian words in and explaining what they mean, pointing and showing him all the pictures. When the story is finished, she carefully runs her forefinger down Alexei’s own nose, while Alexei smiles and nestles closer to her warm body. The warm, soft body that smells so good.

  Alexei is transformed. He stops sliding along the polished floors, stops running through the corridors and rooms without the slightest thought of what might happen if he were to fall, stops climbing the trees out in the park. All those trees, where the slenderest birch could kill both him and his guards if he were to fall.

  Instead, he sits quietly in Anna Maria’s lap while she reads to him, sits solemnly at her side in front of the grand piano while she helps him to find the right notes, collapsing into fits of laughter when he gets it so wrong that he himself notices. Little Alexei is transformed, and his father, Tsar Nicholas II, notes what he sees with approval. From a distance, naturally, three rooms away in the long suite facing the river. So that he can see them without them seeing him.

  Each new day is not merely a gift from life but also brings with it the hope that his son might survive the childhood which constantly threatens to snatch his life away from him. One day, one moment at a time, until he is finally old enough to understand the circumstances governing his existence. Old enough to be able to take control of the Russia he will one day inherit from his father.

  Is it perhaps that music, those songs and those stories that will save his beloved Russia? Nicholas thinks. That would certainly be remarkable, considering everything that has saved the Russian people over the past five hundred years. All those warriors, not least the general who was the great-grandfather of the Italian woman who is now sitting on the velvet bench in front of the grand piano in the large music room of the Alexander Palace, where she is trying to teach his young son to play the balalaika.

  It is natural that he should think of h
er great-grandfather. The old general who served under his grandfather, Alexander I. The hero of Berezina, who rode in the vanguard of the imperial dragoon regiment on a black charger, sabre at the ready. Exactly as he does on the large painting of the battle that hangs in the gallery on the second floor.

  He may well also have reflected upon the moment when he arrived home one afternoon several months before, after a ride in the park. When he entered the great marble hall on the ground floor of the palace, he immediately saw his cousin Maria Pavlovna sitting on a silver tray on the top step of the steep staircase. In her lap sat his only son, Tsarevich Alexei. And Maria pulled at the edge of the top step and sent them flying down the staircase. He can still see it, and hear it too. The sound as the tray hit each new step as it flew down, louder and louder, coming faster and faster. With Maria Pavlovna and Alexei shrieking with delight the whole way down.

  That time everything had been all right. Even though Alexei’s guards had stood there paralysed, hapless bystanders. Even though he himself had stood there rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to utter a word to stop what was happening right in front of his eyes. That time everything had gone all right, even though he evidently couldn’t even trust a close relative who was a grown woman, almost eighteen years old, and on the point of marrying a Swedish prince.

  Only later had things changed. When music, songs and stories became part of his child’s life. Inextricably linked to their Italian companion and tutor, Anna Maria. And this is when he gets an idea of what to give Alexei as an Easter present. A logical and perfectly obvious idea, considering what is going on around him, and inside his own head. The present may well cost as much as the diamond-encrusted golden eggs he has traditionally given his wife and mother on the occasion of the greatest holiday of the year. A present which on closer reflection could be permitted to cost any amount at all, if it could secure the imperial succession and save his Russia.

  ‘No doubt you’re wondering what it was?’ GeGurra asked, looking at his guest inquisitively. ‘The present, I mean, the one the tsar was going to give to his haemophiliac son.’

  ‘Yes, I can hardly contain myself,’ Bäckström sighed, glancing at his watch. This will have to be my last cognac, because I’m fucked off with this now, he thought.

  ‘A musical box,’ GeGurra said. ‘Not just any musical box, but the most remarkable musical box ever created in all of human history.’

  A musical box. Now where have I heard that before?

  83

  A musical box, but not just any musical box. The most remarkable musical box ever created in all of human history. GeGurra also seemed to know everything that was worth saying about it. It had taken him quite a while, and required numerous digressions along the way before he got to the musical box itself.

  Bäckström had more or less given up. He had ordered another cognac, and was now leaning back and trying not to listen. What choice did he have? Sticking his hand into GeGurra’s briefcase, grabbing the brown envelope and running off was clearly no longer an option.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said.

  Carl Fabergé was a jeweller in St Petersburg, by appointment to the imperial court, and there was no doubt that his most significant customers were the tsar and his family. His company created pretty much anything that could be made with precious metals and precious stones and, as the company’s customers wanted the best, most of the artefacts were made of gold and diamonds.

  ‘All manner of jewellery, of course, but also clocks, snuff-boxes, cutlery, dinner services, photograph frames, ornaments and miniatures. Anything you can imagine made out of gold, silver and precious stones. Of course, Fabergé is now most famous for his Easter eggs. Fifty-seven of them in total, given by the tsar as Easter presents to the tsarina and, later on, to his mother as well. Those eggs, made out of gold, jewels and enamel, are what has given Carl Fabergé a place in art history comparable to that of a latter-day Cellini,’ GeGurra summarized.

  ‘You don’t say. This Cellini,’ Bäckström said, having a vague notion that he had heard the name in some sort of work-related context at some point. ‘What does he have to do with the story?’ Must be a dago, with a name like that. Dagos are never good, he thought.

  ‘What does Cellini have to do with this story?’ GeGurra said, looking at his guest in surprise. ‘Nothing at all, if you really want to know.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’ Bäckström countered.

  ‘Benvenuto Cellini died in 1571. He’s regarded as the greatest jeweller in the history of art. He came from Florence as well. The reason I mentioned him was to help you appreciate how great Fabergé is.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘How about trying to stick to that musical box? Like I said, I haven’t got anything planned for tonight, and of course the night is still young, but—’

  ‘My dear friend,’ GeGurra interrupted, patting him on the arm again. ‘I’m getting to that.’

  ‘The musical box,’ Bäckström said. ‘I want to hear about the musical box.’

  ‘It’s a remarkable story,’ GeGurra said. ‘Not least considering what Fabergé had produced up until then. Even though they had made all manner of objects, including clocks, both larger pieces and pocket watches, they had never made a musical box.’

  ‘But now they did,’ Bäckström said. At last, he thought.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ GeGurra confirmed. ‘Even though they later denied having done so. Which perhaps seems a little strange, given that the musical box is unequalled in the history of Western art.’

  ‘So what was so remarkable about it, then?’ Bäckström asked. Sounds pricey, he thought. Still, we seem to be getting somewhere at last.

  Fabergé’s musical box was unique. Unlike most conventional musical boxes, where the notes are produced with the help of combs, bells, discs, needles, strings and metal cylinders, set in motion by a spring mechanism, this one was constructed like a flute, and the man who came up with the idea was also the composer of the twenty-second-long tune of Fabergé’s musical box.

  ‘Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov,’ GeGurra said with a contented sigh. ‘You’ll have heard the name, no doubt. World-famous composer, conductor and professor at the St Petersburg conservatory. He was given the task by the tsar, and he knew exactly what was required. A tune played on a flute, starting and ending in a minor key. This struck him as utterly obvious, given the context that the music was supposed to illustrate.’

  ‘A flute,’ Bäckström said. ‘So what was the problem?’ Surely it could hardly have been much simpler? Except perhaps that triangle he was given to bash away at in primary school when all the other kids in the class were playing recorders, he thought.

  The technical difficulties were enormous, according to GeGurra, but considering who the client was and the fact that it was the first musical box they had produced, Carl Fabergé hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance.

  ‘For the purely mechanical part of the commission he had employed the finest clockmaker of the time, Anton Hügel, who did most of his work for Patek Philippe in Geneva, and, in close collaboration with Rimsky-Korsakov, he had eventually solved the practical problems.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Bäckström persisted. ‘A flute? Surely that couldn’t have been that difficult?’

  ‘It was,’ GeGurra said. ‘When you play a flute, you blow air through a tube into which the air passes over a sharp edge and through holes of different sizes and at different distances. And you produce the notes and tune by the positioning of your fingers. You open and close the holes using your fingers. But, in this instance, it was Pinocchio’s nose that was going to function as a flute, and the idea that he was going to hold and keep fiddling with his nose the whole time was obviously out of the question, even if that would have been simpler to solve from a purely technical point of view. People have managed to make musical boxes with plenty of moving parts since they were first produced at the end of the eighteenth century.’

  ‘W
hy?’ Bäckström said. Why couldn’t he just have fiddled with his nose the whole time? People do that the whole time when they’re lying, he thought.

  ‘When the tune plays, it’s because Pinocchio is telling lies,’ GeGurra said. ‘That was the idea. And so his nose starts to grow. It gets longer and longer until he falls silent. And then it stops growing. So the nose has to function as a flute without being touched by any fingers, because that would ruin the whole conceit. That’s the whole point of the story of Pinocchio. That he doesn’t know that his nose grows when he tells lies.’

  ‘So how did they solve it?’ Bäckström said. A flute in the shape of a nose, he thought. Must be pretty hard to beat, for an old faggot like GeGurra.

  In a number of different ways, according to GeGurra. The musical box itself, in the shape of Pinocchio, was thirty-one and a half centimetres tall. It was made of gold, but enamelled in different colours. The mechanism inside the box was driven by a powerful spring that was tightened by a key that was inserted into the base of the box, and as the spring was tightened, it sucked air into a small bladder inside the box. When the spring was tight and the bladder full of air, the box could be switched on.

  The air was forced out across a metal tongue in a hole at the top, and through the holes in the underside of the growing nose, where the holes were opened and closed by a rod being moved back and forth inside the nose. That was how the tune was produced. When the tune was over and the nose had stopped growing, the last tension in the spring was used to withdraw the nose again after a four-second pause.

  ‘Abracadabra,’ GeGurra said, sounding almost as proud as Rimsky-Korsakov and Anton Hügel must have been when they completed their assignment some hundred years before.

  ‘But when it was finished, presumably you had to wind it up again?’ Bäckström asked.