Death on the Nevskii Prospekt lfp-6

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt wondered what kind of world left you permanently speculating about the physical attributes of your informers or the people they informed against.

  ‘Oh, yes, M. Brouzet,’ he replied, ‘she is very beautiful. Quite headstrong, I should say. Might be rather a handful.’

  ‘Some day,’ said the Frenchman darkly, ‘they will release me from this office and let me out into the real world. Even Mrs Kerenkova must be worth a look, I would have thought. Now then, enough of this, sorry, Lord Powerscourt. Let me come back to your colleague Mr Martin. I knew he had been killed. I presumed somebody had killed him, whether for what he knew or what he refused to tell, I do not know. And I know he had been to see the Tsar. That, my friend, must be the key to the whole affair, that meeting.’

  ‘Did you know, M. Brouzet, that not even the Foreign Office or the British Ambassador in St Petersburg knew why he was there, that his mission was a complete secret, known only to the Prime Minister?’ Powerscourt could hear Sir Jeremiah Reddaway fussing with fury at this piece of intelligence being given away. Powerscourt hoped that if he gave up an ace he might at least be offered a king.

  ‘I did not know that, Lord Powerscourt, how very helpful of you. Did you know, incidentally,’ – something was coming his way, Powerscourt thought. Was it a knave or a valet as the French call the jack, or a queen or a king? An ace even, perhaps? – ‘that Kerenkov was seen at the station late on the night Martin was probably killed? I mean the St Petersburg station where the Tsarskoe Selo trains come in. You can guess the rest, I am sure.’

  Queen, Powerscourt said to himself, maybe king. ‘I just have this problem, M. Brouzet, about Kerenkov killing Martin. Why do it now? Why not before? He’d been home lots of times in the past after Martin had left his visiting cards with the fair Tamara, after all.’

  The Frenchman shrugged. ‘The affairs of the heart, love, revenge, jealousy, Lord Powerscourt, are not susceptible to the rational analysis you and I carry round in our heads. Let me return to the meeting between Martin and the Tsar with this new piece of knowledge you have given me.’

  He paused briefly and stared out into the square. A number of people were now making their way across it, one or two of them tourists, earnestly consulting their guidebooks.

  ‘I always say in my mind to these damned tourists, Lord Powerscourt, forgive me if many of them are your fellow countrymen, that they should read their wretched Baedekers in their hotel rooms or in the cafes or even when they go home. In this square, of all squares, they should look at the buildings and soak in all the beauty. Maybe then they can carry some of it home to Boston or Birmingham or wherever they come from. Forgive me, I digress again.’

  Powerscourt smiled. He thought that if he had to choose a man to work for, His Nibs, say, or Reddaway or even de Chassiron, he would prefer this slim Frenchman.

  ‘Let us put our brains together, Lord Powerscourt,’ Olivier Brouzet continued, ‘and think about this meeting. Consider first of all the subject matter. Of what do emissaries from Prime Ministers speak to autocrats like Nicholas the Second? Of money? Unlikely, it seems to me. The Tsar doesn’t understand his own domestic finances, let alone those of his empire. Mind you, I’m sure we could find bankers in this city who would argue that understanding your own finances would be a crippling handicap in coping with your government’s. However, with the greatest respect, my lord, it is France, the old ally, that provides most of the Russian loans, not the English. So I think we can rule out money as a topic for the meeting.’

  Powerscourt had two cards he had not put in play. He thought of them as the eight and nine of trumps, no more. But because he was not sure if they were real information, or just a guess, he did not introduce them. Over the next two days as he travelled across eastern France and most of the German plain he was to wonder if he had been right not to do so.

  ‘A new treaty, do you think that possible, my lord?’ Olivier Brouzet smiled quizzically at his guest.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but in that case why are there no Foreign Office ministers present?’

  The Frenchman laughed. ‘Think of the psychology of the Tsar, my lord. He has to appoint all these damned ministers, Finance, Interior, Education and so on. If they are any good, they make the Tsar look a fool for being so bad at the rest of his job. If they are bad, he reassures himself that as the autocrat of Russia he must have been better than they were in the first place. There’s nothing he would like more than to conclude secret treaties behind the back of his Foreign Ministry. He’d be boasting about it to that old cow Alexandra for weeks afterwards. After all, he concluded some bloody treaty with the Kaiser without telling any of his ministers. They had to spend years wriggling out of it.’

  ‘That’s all very well for the Tsar,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but I find it hard to see a British Prime Minister carrying on like that.’

  ‘More difficult for the British, but not impossible,’ said Brouzet cheerfully. ‘I’m sure Lord Salisbury wouldn’t have turned a hair. Well, that’s treaties as one possible subject of the meeting. Do you have any other thoughts as to what they might have talked about?’

  ‘Just one,’ said Powerscourt, hanging on grimly to his eight and nine of trumps. ‘What about the little boy? What about the Tsarevich and his terrible illnesses? We, the British, or it might equally well be the French, will send you three, let us say, or four of our finest children’s doctors, to see if they can find out what is wrong with Alexis. That’s certainly the kind of thing you’d want to keep very quiet.’

  ‘All arriving with false beards and fake moustaches, mind you, Lord Powerscourt, dressed as if they were going to an undertakers’ convention. Think of the outrage in London if the boot was on the other foot, and three Russian doctors were coming to sort out the health of the Prince of Wales. The rumpus in St Petersburg would be enormous, especially since they hate that bloody woman so much. But it is quite likely, certainly. Do you know what the illness is, Powerscourt?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Powerscourt,

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Brouzet smoothly, and Powerscourt wondered if that was the French secret service’s eight and nine of trumps. ‘But I hope to know fairly soon. Let us consider, finally, the dynamics of the meeting, if we may.’

  ‘The dynamics?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering if he was wandering into some French metaphysical territory.

  ‘Let me explain,’ said the head of the French secret service. ‘Suppose the original idea comes from the British. They send Martin to St Petersburg. He sees the Tsar. For someone to kill Martin it seems likely to me that the Tsar said Yes, rather than No, to whatever proposal it was Martin brought. If he said No, it was merely reverting to the status quo, after all. Martin could be left alive as nothing had changed. That says Treaty talk to me, I think. Or it’s the other way round. The Tsar has the original idea. He sends for a British agent. Somebody doesn’t like what the Tsar is offering to the British and kills Martin before he can take the message home.’

  ‘But the message could have been sent by cable before Martin was killed,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Pedant,’ said the Frenchman.

  ‘Or,’ said Powerscourt, ‘think of it like this. Suppose we’ve got the order all wrong. The original idea comes from the Tsar. He sends a message to London. Martin comes, not as a man with a message, but as a man with an answer, the answer to the original idea or question from the Tsar. That’s what he conveys to the Tsar out there in the Alexander Palace. That’s what somebody overhears, or maybe the Tsar is indiscreet. That is what kills Martin. As a matter of fact, I have requested an audience with the Tsar on business related to Martin but I doubt if he will see me.’

  ‘But the message, Lord Powerscourt, what did it concern, this message from London?’

  ‘I wish I knew, M. Brouzet.’

  ‘I do like that last theory, Lord Powerscourt. But look, you must be on your way, or you will miss your train.’

  As they shook hands at the front en
trance and Powerscourt looked out once more at the glories of the Place des Vosges, the Frenchman put his hand on his arm. ‘Will you promise me, one thing, Lord Powerscourt? Tell me the true story if you can, when you have found it. I am sure you will find it, you see. God speed and good luck!’ As he went back into Number 32, Place des Vosges, with his escritoire and his Watteau and his tapestries, Olivier Brouzet resolved to help his English colleague in one important respect. He would ask the French Ambassador to St Petersburg, the most respected man in the St Petersburg diplomatic community, to use his good offices at court to obtain for Lord Francis Powerscourt an interview with Nicholas the Second, Tsar of All the Russias. On his own. Just like Mr Martin.

  Even at the entrance gates, some hundreds of yards from the dockyards themselves, the noise was deafening. It was, Powerscourt felt, as he waited with Mikhail Shaporov for a guard to take them inside, a harsh, clanging, brutal sort of noise. In times gone by the wooden ships would have been built to gentler tunes in wooden dockyards without this harsh screeching of modernity. But Krondstadt was where some Russian ships were built, Krondstadt was where the battleship Tsarevich was being repaired, Krondstadt was where Lieutenant Anatoli Kerenkov would be found. The earlier unease about Natasha Bobrinsky had gone, to be replaced with concern for her health after such a long sojourn looking after the Tsar’s daughters and helping out with the sick little boy. She had written a very short note the day after the cable was sent to Powerscourt, explaining why she had not been able to leave the Alexander Palace. A further message said she would be with them at lunchtime the following day.

  A very dirty sailor came at last to escort them to the Lieutenant. His face and hair were filthy and it took some time to work out that his straggling coat must once have been green. A foul-smelling cigarette hung from his lips. Powerscourt decided he must work in the engine room. He led them on to a sort of viewing platform high above a vast open hangar of a dock. Lying on a huge metal cradle was a ship, shrouded in scaffolding. Men the size of tiny dots scurried along the planks, some making minor repairs to the sides or the hull, others, higher up, beginning to apply fresh coats of paint. At the further end of the vessel, the prow, a huge crane was hovering some twenty-five feet above the deck. It was holding a vast grey gun, destined to be lowered into place to serve as a warning and a siren of destruction for Russia’s enemies. A man in a red hat was directing the operations with a series of enormous bellows, punctuated, Mikhail whispered to Powerscourt, with terrifying threats about the fate of anybody who caused the gun to miss its appointed place. Beyond the prow, just visible through the smoke of the various smithies, were the pale blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. And on the southern side, eight or ten miles to the south-east, was a group of buildings as different in spirit as it was possible to be from this industrial furnace and floating factory of death, the graceful eighteenth-century palace of Peterhof, built as a summer residence for earlier Tsars, famed for the glory of its fountains and cascades that bounced the water down the hill towards the sea, a place where water nymphs danced in marble glory and the gods who had presided over past Russian victories stared out into eternity.

  ‘You are Powerscourt?’ a short bearded man in blue uniform greeted them. ‘Kerenkov.’ He was powerfully built with very dark eyes and a permanent scowl playing about his features. He looked like a close associate of Blackbeard or one of the fabled pirates of the Caribbean, equally adept at storming treasure ships by day and their owners’ wives and daughters by night.

  ‘How kind of you to spare us the time, Lieutenant,’ said Powerscourt, eyeing the gun handle that protruded from the man’s trouser pocket. ‘You must be very busy.’

  Mikhail was translating very fast this morning, as if he was on especially good form, or frightened.

  ‘Derzhenov told me about you,’ said Kerenkov.

  Powerscourt wondered what the sadist had said about him.

  ‘Do you work for Derzhenov?’ Powerscourt asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Kerenkov replied with a scowl. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I do not. At present I am working for the British Government trying to find out who killed Mr Martin, as you almost certainly know, Lieutenant Kerenkov.’

  Kerenkov spat viciously into the sawdust at their feet. ‘I did not kill the man, Powerscourt. He is not important. There are other people we Russians have to kill. Japanese for a start. If we do not kill them they will kill us. It is now eleven months since my ship was damaged, barely able to limp home with its survivors. We threw fifty-seven Russians into the sea on our way home, dead from the wounds they received, gone to enrich the ocean rather than the peasant earth of their motherland.’

  Kerenkov paused and pointed at the hanging gun, now a mere fifteen feet from the deck. He planted a rough hand on Powerscourt’s shoulder. ‘Do you see that gun, man? It looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it, you’d think it’s going to be a real help in the battles with the Japanese. Stuff and nonsense!’ He launched a vicious kick at the planks on the side of their platform.

  ‘It’s virtually a waste of time sending it over to Japan,’ he went on, ‘bloody thing is obsolete even before it’s fitted. One of my jobs out there in Port Arthur was to make a report on the Japanese navy. I tell you, those little yellow fellows have speedier ships, quicker guns that fire further and faster than ours, nastier torpedoes, more efficient shells, the conflict should be banned under the rules of war as a totally uneven contest. Everybody back in St Petersburg thinks we must win, we’ll win when our Baltic Fleet finally sails halfway round the world for a lasting victory, we’ll win because we’re European, or our elites are European, we’ll win because we’re a superior race. That’s all nonsense.’ He paused, Mikhail’s young voice stopped a couple of phrases later, and Powerscourt felt for the man, a patriot without the means to defend his country.

  ‘Now I think about it, there’s a bloody ship of yours, Powerscourt, a British frigate, wandering about the Gulf of Finland. It’s been going up and down for weeks as if it’s taking a holiday cruise. Do you know what the damned thing is doing here?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Do you know any history, man?’ Kerenkov seemed to be changing tack.

  ‘A bit,’ said Powerscourt, anxious not to give offence.

  ‘Do you remember that damned Crimean War?’ Powerscourt nodded.

  ‘I’ve been reading lots of history books lately, from then on,’ said the unlikely scholar. ‘We lost that war because we were so backward. So from then on Russia must be able to defend itself. Russia must be able to produce the latest weapons, Russia must become modern, Russia must have huge capitalist factories to produce the guns and the bullets and the giant pieces of artillery that could fire a shell across the Gulf of Finland. But that’s not Russia, Powerscourt, capitalists and middle class and workers replacing tsar and aristocrats and peasants. Our poor country is being torn apart by the battle between conservatism and modernity, between change and not change, between the old and the new. I don’t like the new very much, Lord Powerscourt, the only thing is that it’s not as bad as the old.’

  An enormous crash heralded the arrival of the gun on to the deck. Sparks and dust temporarily hid it from view. The man in the red hat surpassed himself in the volume of his shouts. Various dots at the front of the vessel seemed to be waving their hands in the air. Kerenkov peered forward to check it was success rather than a catastrophe. ‘Thank God that’s landed safely,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray we meet some wooden Japanese ship from the middle of the last century in the next battle.’ Maybe the safe arrival of the gun mellowed him slightly. ‘Sorry for boring you with my views,’ he said. ‘I just care about what’s going on.’

  Powerscourt thought now was the time to ask his questions.

  ‘Forgive me for asking you, Lieutenant, about your relations with the late Mr Martin. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘I did not, sir. I could see little point in shaking the hand of a man who has had intimate relations with
my wife.’

  ‘Quite so, Lieutenant, quite so. I think on this last occasion you had advance warning of his coming to St Petersburg, is that not so?’

  ‘I did,’ said Kerenkov, ‘lots of people knew he was coming.’

  Powerscourt suspected this was not true, but felt there was little he could do about it. ‘And why do you think, Lieutenent,’ he went on, ‘that Mr Martin kept away from your wife on this occasion? He never had before, after all. Did you warn him off?’

  Kerenkov looked at him blankly. He did not reply. ‘You were seen, you know,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘at the station, on the evening Martin was killed. Were you waiting for him to come back from Tsarskoe Selo? Were you waiting to take him off to the Nevskii Prospekt? And then to kill him?’

  Kerenkov turned red suddenly. Veins began throbbing in his temple. His hand moved ominously towards his pocket. ‘Look here, Powerscourt, I know I’m a rough sort of a fellow,’ he began, restraining himself with difficulty. ‘My profession is killing people, rather as yours is finding out who killed them. But the people I want to kill are Japanese. My country is at war with them. We are not at war with England. Some people think I had every reason to kill Martin but in today’s St Petersburg that sort of morality has long gone. It’s melted away like the snows in spring. I didn’t kill him, please believe me, and I have no idea who did.’