‘Sometimes, General, the most unlikely explanation turns out to be the truth.’
‘Let me take him downstairs, General.’ Colonel Kolchak broke his silence. ‘I’ll soon get some sense out of him.’ The English came very slowly. Powerscourt was astonished by the voice. A man like Kolchak should come with a deep powerful bass. Instead his voice was very high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. It made him, Powerscourt felt, more frightening, the thought of those tones shrieking at you for your confession.
‘Lord Powerscourt is a most distinguished man, Colonel Kolchak. It is not for us to treat him at this time as if he were a common revolutionary, distributing pamphlets in the university perhaps, or learning to make bombs in some slum on the Petrograd side.’
Powerscourt smiled nervously as the words ‘at this time’ sank in.
‘Let me put a hypothesis before you, Lord Powerscourt, if I may.’ The General completed one of his doodles with a great flourish. ‘Mr Martin is sent on a mission here. Let us pretend it is a secret mission, as you say.’ Powerscourt realized suddenly that the Okhrana might not know any more about Martin’s death than he did. In this scenario, he was there to enlighten them. If true, that might work to his advantage. But then, champion chess players are moving pieces in their brains ten or fifteen moves ahead. Maybe he should ask the General how good he was with the rooks and the knights and the bishops.
‘Unfortunately for all of us,’ Derzhenov shook his head slightly at this point, ‘Mr Martin dies. Alas! Poor Mr Martin! Let us not speculate at this moment on how he died or who might have killed him. Let us concentrate on his replacement. Step forward, Lord Francis Powerscourt of Markham Square in Chelsea, sent by the British Foreign Office to fulfil the mission of Mr Martin. Consider, if you would, the visitors attendant on the Lord Powerscourt before he left.’
The General picked a piece of paper out of his desk drawer. ‘The Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, calls. A junior minister from the same ministry calls two days later. A former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, the famous Lord Rosebery himself, also pays a visit from his great mansion in Berkeley Square. And then, orchestrated and organized by Sir Jeremiah himself, the widow Martin in her widow’s weeds comes to meet Lady Powerscourt at Markham Square. The purpose of all those visits and all those visitors? Surely, Lord Powerscourt, there can be only one explanation. The Lord Powerscourt is being briefed to carry on the work of the dead man, to take the place of Mr Martin and do whatever he came to St Petersburg to do. So all that remains for you, Lord Powerscourt, is to let us know the outline of what your colleagues told you in Markham Square. The fiction that you do not know what Mr Martin was here for cannot possibly be true.’
It all sounded very definite but Powerscourt thought it might be a fishing expedition, no more. He was astonished that the Okhrana had been watching his house in Markham Square. He remembered de Chassiron telling him, in one of his great tours de force of contemporary Russia, that the Okhrana were the best organized and most sinister secret police in the world. Other states might catch up, he had said, but the Okhrana had a great start. Before Powerscourt could reply there was a knock at the door. A thick-set man wearing a deep blue butcher’s apron with dark stains on it spoke briefly in Russian to General Derzhenov. He barked a few words and waved the minion away.
‘Fool in the last cell on the right has died on us. Natural causes, the usual thing. Gives us room to welcome another guest.’ He looked meaningfully at Powerscourt.
‘General Derzhenov.’ Powerscourt was aware that there was now less than an hour before his appointment at the Interior Ministry, and that his position might truly be described as precarious. ‘You are obviously very well informed about what goes on in London. Now I am going to tell you a story. You are a man accustomed to listening to stories. I leave it up to you to judge whether this one is true or not.
‘I have been working as a full-time investigator for over fifteen years. I was involved with Lord Rosebery in one very difficult case concerning the royal family some years back in 1892. We have been very close ever since. Three years ago in 1902 I was asked to investigate some deaths at a London Inn of Court, a legal establishment where barristers have their offices and train up newcomers to their profession. It was a difficult case. At the end I was shot and severely wounded. I very nearly died. I was saved, I believe, by the expertise of the doctors and the love of my family. After that my wife Lucy and I went on holiday to Italy. She made me promise to give up investigating as I had been nearly killed too many times. I agreed, but with some reluctance, I must say. As you gentlemen will know, it is no light matter to abandon one’s profession. The procession of visitors your people observed going into Markham Square were not coming to brief me on the nature of Martin’s mission to St Petersburg. They were coming to try to persuade me to come out of retirement to investigate his death. Finally, they succeeded. That is why I am here today. But I do not know anything about Martin’s mission, any more,’ he drew a bow at a venture here, ‘than you do. Look.’ Powerscourt brought his notebook out of his pocket and began writing names and addresses at great speed. ‘Here is Lord Rosebery’s address in Berkeley Square, and the barrister Maxwell Kirk’s chambers in Queen’s Inn. Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, as you know, is at the Foreign Office in King Charles Street. If your agents speak to these people, you will discover very quickly that I am telling the truth.’ He handed over the piece of paper.
General Derzhenov looked at him very slowly. He began serious work on another doodle. Peering at the page upside down Powerscourt thought he was drawing people who had lost a limb, in war, or perhaps in his basement. There were spidery figures with only one arm or one leg, or with hands that had disappeared. Two had no heads, perhaps pulled off by Colonel Kolchak in person.
‘That is very interesting, Lord Powerscourt. I do believe your story.’ The General smiled his wolflike smile once more. ‘But I will have our people check it out all the same. I would make just one comment. There is no reason why events could not have taken place as you describe, but with the following exception. That you were also briefed on Mr Martin’s visit to Russia.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘You don’t give up,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you ask Lord Rosebery about Martin? He doesn’t know what the mission was either.’
‘But if you were Lord Rosebery, Lord Powerscourt, and a curious Russian person asked you about it, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’
‘The trouble with you, General, is that you have a very suspicious mind. You see plots and conspiracies where they don’t exist.’
Derzhenov laughed bitterly. ‘If I did not have a suspicious mind, where do you think Russia would be now? If I did not suspect plots and conspiracies, this Emperor would have gone the way of his grandfather and his Interior Minister and his Education Minister and his Governor of Finland, blown into smithereens by the bombs of the revolutionaries. This is necessary in our country, the whips downstairs, the iron bars to break a man’s arms, the water torture, the racks, the burnings, all of it. This is not a safe country for its rulers, Lord Powerscourt. All we can do is try to make it a little safer for them. Russia today is a place where the students learn to make bombs in their science classes, not one where they drift up and down the Backs in punts in your Cambridge drinking champagne and reciting the doubtful verses of A.E. Housman.’
The General shrugged his shoulders. ‘You make me grow philosophical, Lord Powerscourt. I need some exercise in the basement to bring me back to reality. Off you go to your meeting. Your young man should be waiting outside. I shall be in touch after I have heard about our discoveries in London. Good day to you.’
The General picked up another of those dark blue aprons from a peg on the back of his door and hurried down his stairs. As Powerscourt left Number 16 Fontanka Quai, he noticed again the disagreeable smell coming from the basement. Very faintly he could hear the swish of the whips and a noise that sounded like a human head being smashed against a wall. H
e wondered if the General had rejoined his fellow torturers in his own private underworld of pain and suffering.
Shortly before four o’clock that afternoon Powerscourt and Mikhail were back in the Shaporov Palace. Mikhail had brought his friend to the Great Drawing Room on the second floor, a vast chamber with a sprung floor and spectacular candelabra that had originally been intended to serve as a ballroom for the Shaporovs and their guests. Their meeting at the Interior Ministry had been cancelled. The man at the decrepit reception desk had told them in his surliest tones that Mr Bazhenov was not at home. Only when pressed hard by Mikhail had he divulged that there was a message for them. Only when Powerscourt produced a wide variety of papers testifying to his name and existence did the wretch with one arm hand over the envelope. They waited till they were outside the building before they opened it. Mikhail translated fast:
‘Interior Ministry, January , et cetera et cetera . . . Dear Lord Powerscourt, Please forgive me for not attending our meeting as we arranged. I apologize most sincerely. Something else of great importance to my Ministry has taken me to very urgent meetings elsewhere. More apology, Lord Powerscourt, a paragraph and a half of it. Can you survive without it?’
‘Certainly,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think I could manage very well.’
‘We talked,’ Mikhail peered down at some indecipherable piece of Bazhenov handwriting, ‘about Mr Martin’s visits. I promised to give you some dates of the earlier occasions when he was a visitor to our city. Here they are. 1904, January 5th to 11th, March 21st to 29th, October 15th to 22nd. 1903, January 4th to 12th, March 23rd to 30th, October 1st to 9th. 1902, January 6th to 14th, October 5th to 12th. We have been unable to find information on previous years. I hope this is useful.
‘There’s another paragraph of apology, Lord Powerscourt. Translate or not translate?’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Powerscourt, who had filled one sheet of his notebook with the dates in English. ‘I think I can manage with what we’ve got, thanks.’
Now Powerscourt was perched on a sixteenth-century French chair in the Great Drawing Room, thinking his hair should be powdered and his shoes buckled and his legs in tights with a ceremonial sword, perhaps, hanging by his side. Mikhail was opposite him, frowning at the dates.
‘Can you attach any significance to the timings of these earlier visits, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘Easter perhaps, with your different calendar, Mikhail? Would the man come for Easter?’
‘God knows. I think it is more important here than in England. It is the most important religious festival in the Orthodox calendar. Somewhere there’s going to be some prayer book or other in this place which will tell us.’
‘I think,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that I should fill you in on what happened in my happy visit to the Okhrana. Then, perhaps, it would be time to review what little we know, Mikhail, and see if we can deduce anything useful for our investigation of the late Mr Martin.’ With that, Lord Francis Powerscourt, in behaviour that would have been instantly recognizable to his wife and children, began walking up and down the room. Except that in London his drawing room was the length of his house in Markham Square, while here in St Petersburg the Great Drawing Room was nearly as long as Markham Square itself. Powerscourt spared Mikhail none of the horrors of the basement, the whips, the screams, the General interfering in fury himself.
At a quarter past four a young visitor swept into the main entrance of the Shaporov Palace. Mikhail had sent her a note that morning, saying that if she were able to get away, he hoped to be at home by four in the Great Drawing Room. Natasha Bobrinsky had walked all the way from the railway station to the palace, hoping to see some remains of the massacre on the way. She was disappointed, but her cheeks were bright from the walk, her black boots clattered happily over the Shaporov marble and her long fashionable coat kept out the January cold. A dark blue fur hat protected her curls from the freezing air. She resisted all attempts to detain her. The doorman assured her that she could not just march in like this and assume young Mr Shaporov would be able to see her. They had no idea, the servants, what he was doing at this moment. They all had fearful memories of Mikhail’s father swearing viciously at them when he did not want to be disturbed, in one case throwing a junior footman right out of the room until he crashed into the opposite wall. Natasha swept past them, ignoring all their pleas to wait.
The geography of the vast Shaporov Palace meant she had to walk halfway along the front of the building before turning right. Then she had to progress down a very long corridor, the Mirror Corridor, created by some late eighteenth-century Shaporov, which connected with the Italian Corridor at the back of the palace, lined with Italian paintings, and led directly to the entrance to the Great Drawing Room, halfway along another corridor.
After her initial escape towards the Mirror Corridor, the butler despatched three groups of footmen to head her off. One was to pursue Natasha up the corridor, trying to persuade her to pause in one of the libraries or sitting rooms off the main route.
‘Please, Miss Bobrinsky, please step in here, it’ll only take a second . . .’
‘I’m sure Mr Shaporov will be only too happy to see you, but we must preserve appearances . . .’
‘We could all lose our jobs here, Miss Bobrinsky, I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen.’
Natasha swept majestically on. The footmen watched helplessly as she turned into the Mirror Corridor. Her back began to multiply as she progressed up the great passage. Soon there were ten, fifteen Natashas reflected in the huge mirrors sent centuries before from the island of Murano near Venice and the St Gobain glass factories in France. Occasional glimpses of black boot, multiplied ten or twenty fold, reduced the footmen to a moonstruck combination of admiration and lust. At the top of the corridor the underbutler watched the marching army approaching his position at the turn of the two corridors. All the Natashas he could see wore expressions of great determination. Every now and then there was a defiant toss of twenty beautiful heads as she approached the corner. The underbutler withdrew his two colleagues and himself to the opening of the rear corridor just before she reached it. He formed his little band up, arms linked, across the corridor, stretching almost to the opposite wall. Behind them a dazzling array of Raphaels and Botticellis and Andrea del Sartos guarded the entrance into the Great Drawing Room. But not a single Natasha arrived. She dived through a side door, hurried down three flights of stairs, found the lift that connected with the side door into the room three floors up and presented herself in the Great Drawing Room where her young man was deep in conversation with the man from London they called Lord Francis Powerscourt.
‘Natasha! How nice to see you!’ Mikhail Shaporov seemed to cover the hundred yards or so between his chair and the lift in a couple of seconds, switching effortlessly into their common language of French. ‘Have you just arrived in St Petersburg? How are they all out there in Tsarskoe Selo?’
Natasha strode imperiously across the drawing room and sat down on a French chaise longue next to Powerscourt while Mikhail made the introductions. Powerscourt and Natasha had not met before. ‘Never mind all of them out at Tsarskoe Selo,’ she said briskly, beginning to peel off her black leather gloves, ‘what has been happening here in St Petersburg? My family are away in the south of France, as you know, so I rely on you to keep me informed, Mikhail. What took place here on Sunday? We heard rumours of marches and hundreds of protesters shot dead by the Tsar’s troops. That can’t be true, can it?’
Mikhail Shaporov sat down beside her. The pair of them, Powerscourt thought, looked absurdly young, absurdly innocent, absurdly ill equipped maybe to cope with what was happening in their country.
‘We watched it all from the roof of the Stroganov Palace,’ he began, ‘Lord Powerscourt and I and a colleague of his from the British Embassy.’ He told her of the marching columns, of the singing of the National Anthem, of the hymns rising up into the sunshine, of the children on their parents’ shoulders, of the po
rtraits of the Tsar and the icons of the Virgin. He told her how all the different columns began to concentrate on Palace Square where they hoped to hand in their petition with its absurdly optimistic demands for the vote, for free elections, for a constituent assembly, for laws to regulate the wretched lives of the wretched workers in their wretched factories. He told her of the charges of the cavalry, sabres slashing into innocent faces, lances cutting into innocent backs. He told her of the round after round of infantry fire, smashing into the bodies of the marchers, reducing them to random chunks of flesh bleeding to death on the streets. He told her of the red blood staining the ice and the shattered remains of one hundred and fifty thousand protesters whose journey had started with hope and ended in total despair. He told her of the pathetic attempts the three of them had made to help the wounded as they lay dying on the Nevskii Prospekt. He told her of the aftermath, the corpses waiting for the carts to take them away, the pathetic children’s toys broken on the ground from the gunfire, the waves of hatred that had flown across the city.
‘How many?’ said Natasha at the end, her face the colour of ivory.
‘Nobody knows,’ said Mikhail gravely. ‘The foreign newspapers have talked of thousands and thousands of martyrs. The authorities here, the police and so on, talk of a couple of dozen terrorists accidentally killed in a revolutionary incident. Lord Powerscourt, who has seen a number of battles in his time, thinks we shall never know the true figure, but it is probably a thousand or so. And, of course, hundreds and hundreds more wounded. Russia will never forget Bloody Sunday.’
They all fell silent. The only sound in the room was the ticking of a Sevres clock at the far end of the room. Mikhail took the girl’s hands and held them in his own. Powerscourt wondered what the Russian for ‘no longer wanted’ might be.
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