Mikhail told Powerscourt afterwards that he thought the inspector was going to have a heart attack. The veins in his neck stood out. His face grew redder and redder. His breathing became very heavy.
‘Just get this into your heads,’ he shouted. ‘There is no policeman here of that name. There is no policeman in St Petersburg of that name. There was no body of an Englishman found on the Nevskii Prospekt. I do not know who has been feeding you with forgeries. I suggest you take them home. And now, get out of my police station before I lock you in the cells and throw away the key.’ With that he left his desk and began advancing towards them with his great fist raised.
‘It’s all right, Inspector, we were just leaving.’ Mikhail was translating as fast as he was walking backwards. ‘Don’t trouble yourself with us any more. Perhaps you need to sit down. Have a little rest. A glass of water might be helpful. Maybe you ought to see your doctor. You know you mustn’t overdo it.’
Mikhail shouted his version of the last two sentences through the door as they hurried into the street. ‘Well, Lord Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘here’s a pretty pickle and me on my first morning in the job. Before we had the details of a dead man but no body. Now we don’t even have the details of the corpse if we believe the red-faced policeman. What do you think we should do?’
‘I know precisely what we should do, ‘ said Powerscourt, patting the young man affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Take me to your morgues.’
The road was narrow, skirting a canal. On the far side a factory was pouring great streams of smoke into the air. Young men hurried past them carrying great bundles of wood in their arms. There was a faint smell of bread baking far away.
‘Do you have a lot of money on you, Lord Powerscourt?’ Mikhail Shaporov sounded faintly embarrassed at having to mention money.
‘I do, Mikhail,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Rupert de Chassiron gave me a great deal at the Embassy. I assume you are going to pay out one or two bribes.’
‘I am,’ the young man laughed. ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, you are an experienced investigator and I am a mere novice translator, do you think we will find Mr Martin’s body?’
‘I would be very surprised if we do,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘We have to check these morgues, of course we do, but I should be amazed if we find him there. It’s interesting that we don’t know how he died. Shot? Stabbed? Strangled? Maybe the truth would be too compromising, so they conceal it from us. If Martin has been murdered his killers could cut a hole in the ice and drop him down it. He might never turn up anywhere at all, just be lost at sea. If the corpse did appear on the coast of Finland or down near Riga it would be unrecognizable by then. I think he, or somebody described as him, was brought into the police station and our form filled in. That was just to tell us he was dead. Now we are meant to have got the message and keep quiet. We can’t make much of a fuss after all if we don’t have a body.’
Mikhail Shaporov was bringing them through a side gate into the gardens of a large, rather ugly building with lines of people waiting outside. ‘This is the hospital, St Simon’s. The morgue is down there at the bottom of the garden. I’m going to bribe one of the porters to get the key. Do you want to come with me or will you wait here?’
‘I think I’ll wait here,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘A stranger from Europe might put the prices up.’ As he idled along the path another thought struck him about Martin, the note and the police station. Martin might never have been to the police station at all. Maybe the police inspector really didn’t exist. Maybe the note handed in to the Embassy actually was a forgery, the stamp stolen from the police station, or even put on the paper by one of the police who had been ordered to kill him. So the red-headed policeman could have been right after all.
Mikhail Shaporov was waving cheerfully at him with a large rusty key in his hand. ‘God knows what this is going to be like,’ he said. ‘My education up till now hasn’t run to morgues or mortuaries. I told the porters that an old college friend had gone missing after a drinking session and might have got killed or frozen to death.’
There was a harsh squeak as the key turned in the lock. Shaporov put his hand on the right-hand wall and turned on a feeble light. ‘They don’t bother with refrigeration in the winter,’ he whispered, ‘they let nature work for them.’
The dead of St Petersburg were piled up in rows and rows that looked like bookcases with very wide shelves, seven or eight storeys high. Some had been placed in crude hospital shrouds by the nurses. Some, dead on arrival, Powerscourt presumed, had been left in the rags they had on as they passed away. One or two had obviously been wounded, strangely coloured gashes running down their faces. They were a terrifying collection, Powerscourt thought. If they were among the first to rise from the dead on the last day the rest of the citizens would quake in terror as these zombies from the morgue marched out from their wooden resting place. There was an unpleasant smell, of things or people going bad. Mikhail Shaporov was working his way methodically round the room, sometimes checking on the labels attached to each person. He ignored the women and the old and the very young altogether. Powerscourt heard him muttering to himself as he carried out this last inspection of these dead souls.
‘No joy here,’ he said finally. ‘It’s possible they brought him here to die but they certainly didn’t leave him in the bloody morgue.’
The second morgue could not have been more different. It was attached to a modern hospital near St Petersburg University on Vasilevsky Island opposite Senate Square and the Admiralty.
‘The only reason we’re here is that it is further away than the other place from where we think he was found, but anybody who knew the city and its facilities would see to it that he ended up here rather than that other hell-hole. This whole hospital was designed by Germans so it’s going to be very efficient. It’s funny, Lord Powerscourt, one minute we like foreigners to come in and design things for us – the whole of early St Petersburg was designed by foreigners after all – and then another decade on they’re not to be allowed in because they’re decadent, or don’t understand Russia or haven’t got any soul.’
There was no need to bribe anyone here. A grave young man took them down and waited while Mikhail Shaporov carried out his melancholy duties once more. Here the dead were not piled so high and they had their own private space, locked away inside large green compartments that looked like a giant’s filing cabinet. Name tags were pinned neatly to the handles as if they were the title of a file or a folder. Powerscourt wondered if these dead were happier here or if they might prefer the more tempestuous atmosphere of St Simon’s. The young man engaged Powerscourt in conversation in halting French. Powerscourt thought he told him that if the bodies were not claimed for burial inside a couple of months, the hospital buried them in a cemetery inland. Another terrible thought struck Powerscourt, so upsetting that he had to interrupt Mikhail and bring him over to act as translator.
‘What would happen to the dead body of a foreigner that was brought in here? Would he be kept long?’
‘Possibly, if nobody came to claim him, he could be here for a while,’ the young man said.
‘And what criteria do the doctors use in picking out the corpses they are going to use for dissecting, for teaching the medical students?’
Mikhail looked perturbed as he translated this.
‘You need not fear,’ said the young man. ‘They only use the people from the poorhouses for this. Foreigners, I think not. The students and the doctors might not trust foreign bodies.’
Even so Powerscourt could not get the thought out of his mind. Bits of Roderick Martin being cut up and examined by a crowd of students. His inner organs, his heart and his liver and his spleen, all taken out like a sixteenth-century disembowelment and prodded and poked by a lot of twenty-year-old Russians. It was a relief when Mikhail came over and shook his head.
‘He is not here.’ They thanked the grave young man and Mikhail suddenly seized Powerscourt by the arm. ‘Do you have an
y plans for lunch, Lord Powerscourt? You do not? Let me take you to a little place not far from here called Onegin’s. It doesn’t look very exciting but they serve the best cabbage soup in the city. Onegin’s is famous for it.’
Ten minutes later they were seated at a trestle table in what looked like an army refectory. Powerscourt half expected some Russian sergeant major to emerge from the door at the top and issue his orders to the diners. Warriors of every description lined the walls, portraits of fierce-looking little Cossacks next to imperial admirals who stared out at their fleets with haughty disdain. There were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars here, Kutuzov the seasoned general who had fought Napoleon at Borodino the only one Powerscourt recognized. On the wall above the doorway was hung a collection of ancient musketry, some of which looked older than the city itself.
‘They say, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail Shaporov looked very much at home here, ordering their cabbage soup and black bread with great anticipation, ‘that when the next European war comes the army will be so short of weapons that they will impound all that old stuff above the door and cart it off to the battlefields.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is there a military academy round here? Does that account for all the portraits and things?’
‘Oddly enough,’ said Mikhail as two enormous bowls of cabbage soup were put in front of them, ‘it’s the university students who frequent this place. The prices are low, the food is plentiful – if it’s enough for a peasant’s main meal of the day it’s enough for a philosophy student’s lunch. I should leave that soup to cool down for a moment, if I were you. They send it out hot enough to burn your tongue off.’
‘You were not tempted, Mikhail, to be a student here, in your own native city?’ said Powerscourt blowing desultorily at his bowl.
‘My father was very keen that I should go to Oxford, I don’t know why,’ the young man replied, ‘but my elder brother was here. I can’t tell you how different it is being a student in England and Oxford, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, trying the first exploratory mouthful of his soup.
‘It’s much more serious here,’ Mikhail Shaporov replied, stirring his soup slowly with his spoon. ‘It’s nearly an occupation in itself. In Oxford the height of fame and fashion is probably to climb to the top of Magdalen Tower or the Sheldonian or drink your college cellars dry. Here the height of fame and fashion would be to blow up a government minister or start a revolution. I don’t think undergraduates in England ever take philosophy seriously. Here you find people whose student lives are consumed by it. Some of them become so wrapped up in it that they turn into perpetual students, staying on at the university in their quest for the answer to everything until they are in their thirties.’
Powerscourt was now seriously engrossed in his soup. It was thick, far thicker than any vegetable soup he had ever eaten in London. He thought he detected carrot and potato and garlic and maybe tomato and maybe lemon juice and possibly sour cream, as well as the eponymous cabbage. It was remarkably filling, giving the impression that the consumer was not in a barrack-style restaurant near the university but out in the great expanse of the Russian countryside, flat fields reaching to the distant horizon, an occasional tree providing a modicum of shade, a lone peasant pulling a handcart along a dusty road, a sense of space stretching out till eternity, cabbage soup that tasted of the earth of Mother Russia herself.
‘People always think,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, ‘that they must have a battalion of grannies in the kitchen here, imported from the nearby countryside perhaps, who have inherited this recipe from their grannies and so on, a direct line of grannyhood going back to the foundation of the city itself, hunched over their ancient saucepans, chopping and tasting and stirring and checking their soup all day long.’
‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt.
‘There’s only two of them who make it, Lord Powerscourt. They’re in their early twenties and learnt the recipe from their mother. They’re the proprietor’s daughters.’
‘A man could do worse than marry a woman for her soup, perhaps. What do you say, Mikhail?’
‘Indeed. And there are rumours that these two have been working on a surprise for Easter time. People say they’ve developed an entirely new borscht.’
‘Cabbage soup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, borscht on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You would live like a king.’
‘What I am about to ask you has nothing to do with soup or marriage, Lord Powerscourt, but with our plans today after the interview in the Interior Ministry this afternoon. Do you think you will need my services after that, after I have taken you back to the Embassy, of course? It’s just that I have made a provisional arrangement to meet somebody for an hour or so at six o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, please. If you need me I’ll translate for you all day and all night.’
Powerscourt wondered at the mental process by which his young friend had gone from soup and marriage to discussion of his plans for an evening rendezvous.
‘Forgive me for asking you, Mikhail, but would I be right in thinking you are going to meet a young lady?’
‘You are quite right, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mikhail went slightly pink as he replied. ‘It is a young lady and could I make a further suggestion? This has only just come to me, and you may think it absurd.’
‘I’m sure I won’t think it is absurd, once I know what it is,’ said Powerscourt.
‘My friend is called Natasha. She comes from a very grand family here in Petersburg. Just now she is working as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and her daughters at the Tsar’s country palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Do you think it might help if I told her about your mission and our work in pursuit of the vanished Martin? I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I went to London. Her letters to me were very stilted and stiff as if she felt somebody was reading them, I think. But it has always been said that the best-informed people in St Petersburg are the servants who wait at the Tsar’s table and his coachmen and suchlike people. She might hear something to our advantage.’
Powerscourt scraped the bottom of his bowl to extract the very last drop of cabbage soup. ‘Let me put it like this, Mikhail. Do you think it would be dangerous for her if she were known to be close to the British Embassy?’
‘Dangerous, possibly. I don’t think she’d end up dead on the Nevskii Prospekt but I think she’d be out of a job pretty quickly.’
‘I think you must decide, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, looking serious all of a sudden. ‘I think it would be unwise to involve Natasha in the decision, however level-headed she is. There’s nothing more attractive to some women than a whiff of danger. I think I would insist that she only listens. She never asks any questions. She doesn’t poke her nose into areas that don’t concern her. Some women, mind you, would find even that limited prospectus hard to stick to.’
‘I will think about it before our meeting,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, trotting off to pay the bill. ‘I insist on paying for lunch, Lord Powerscourt. When we Russians introduce distinguished visitors to our national cuisine, it is only fitting that we should pay. I insist, I really do.’
As they made their way across the river to their next meeting Shaporov told Powerscourt some of what he knew of the Interior Ministry. Most of his information, he said generously, came once again from his father, some of it from his friends who had had dealings with it, some of it simply absorbed from the air and the streets of his city. Mikhail gave his English visitor the Russian bureaucracy in numbers. Eight hundred and sixty-nine, the number of paragraphs in Volume One of the Code of Laws that defined the rules and conduct of the Imperial Civil Service. Fourteen, the number of different Civil Service ranks, each with its own uniform and title. The top two ranks of civil servants were to be addressed as Your High Excellency. Those in ranks three and four to be addressed as Your Excellency. The less fortunate in ranks nine to fourteen had to make do with Your Honour. White trousers changing to black, red ribbons changing to blue, even adding a stripe he
re and there could mark momentous turning points in the orderly progression of the bureaucrat’s life. He could be promoted by one rank every three years from ranks fourteen to eight and one every four years in ranks eight to five. Promotion – and Mikhail emphasized how typical it was, this interface between the autocracy and the bureaucracy that would only make it less likely that either could function effectively – promotion to the last four ranks was at the discretion of the Tsar and carried a hereditary title. With great care not to displease, taking as few decisions as possible in case they gave offence, a man might reach the top of the tree by the age of sixty. This carefully modulated bureaucracy, Mikhail said, was strangling Russia, strangling it in a slow bureaucratic bear hug.
They could see several of these bureaucrats now, coming down the steps of the Interior Ministry building, some of them carrying briefcases.
‘They’re not going home already, Mikhail, are they? It’s just before three o’clock, for God’s sake.’
‘You don’t want to overdo it, if you’re a bureaucrat, Lord Powerscourt. It’s a very hard life in the Interior Ministry. Some of these fellows may have had to attend a couple of meetings in the morning. Think how exhausting that must have been for them.’
Powerscourt had been inside a number of ministries in London where the splendour was reserved for the quarters of the minister and his most senior officials. The rest had been furnished with due regard to the exigencies of the public purse and the dangers of newspapers launching crusades about governments wasting taxpayers’ money on luxurious surroundings for civil servants. But nothing, he thought, could prepare you for the drabness of the interior of the Russian Interior Ministry. The floors were covered in something grey that might once have been the Russian equivalent of linoleum. The walls were painted with a dark colour that looked as if it might have been originally intended for a battleship. A long hopeless corridor stretched out for a couple of hundred yards behind the reception desk, manned by a small man with only one arm.
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