Field of Mars (49 page)

‘I ought to kill you like you people killed Gulka. That's what you deserve, an anonymous death, a simple
disappearance
, yes?' Evdaev said bitterly and took a step closer. ‘I knew it, too. I knew it in my heart. I knew a bunch of merchants couldn't pull something like this off. You think, you really think that money and a few killers is all it takes to overthrow the greatest nation on earth?' For a moment Ryzhkov thought he was going to club him with the pistol. Then he stopped; there was a script somewhere he was following, a plan for the hunt, for sharing out the spoils and mounting the trophy. Probably there was no struggle written into it. Evdaev stood staring at him for a moment and then laughed. ‘I told Alexandr Ivanovich that Sergei was soft, a fucking mama's boy, scared to go all the way. Now it's gone all wrong, and I knew it . . .
I knew it
.'

Evdaev's face contorted and then he did hit him, a sharp little slap with the side of the pistol that came so quickly that Ryzhkov didn't even see it. Everything went black for a moment and he fell back into the chair. There was a ringing in his ears that wouldn't go away; it sounded like a long continuous siren, or the howling of a dog that never ran out of breath, someone screeching on a flute . . . It didn't really hurt, but the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes were little dark circles of his own blood dripping on to his trousers.

Evdaev was still muttering. He had put the rifle down across the chart table. It was only a few feet away. A leap across the desk, a desperate lunge—across the carpet Evdaev had the pistol in his hands and was checking its action. ‘Think I'm a
fool
. . . telephoning me, oh, yes . . . not to worry. We take care of our own. I'm sending someone over, Nestor. Not to
worry
. I
love
you. I'm sending money, the Andrianov companies will provide whatever is needed. After all, I'm your
friend
. I'm your
brother
,' Evdaev recited, his voice growing more constricted. Was he crying? In the gloom Ryzhkov couldn't see.

‘So . . . three little letters, then. One from you, one from me, one from him out there. Everything nice and set out in good order, written clearly with signatures, and then Nicholas will know that I have not died with this stain on my honour. That I lived to serve Russia . . . and my Tsar.'

Evdaev was standing there with an ethereal smile on his face. He looked so peaceful that it happened automatically; an instinct to ingratiate, to grant him some kind of forgiveness, to speak a friendly word in his last moments, just like the executioner on the train had said. Or maybe it was just to keep him talking. To stall for time. ‘Who was he?' Ryzhkov asked. ‘Him? The one out there?' He inclined his head in the direction of the balcony.

Evdaev flinched. Shook himself like a dog. ‘Shut up!' he suddenly screamed, and then whirled away from the view. ‘Hurry up, damn it! Read it back to me—hurry up! I know there's more of your confederates watching! I know someone's out there waiting for you to finish the job. I'm not stupid!' Evdaev bellowed and then abruptly crossed behind the desk to check out the window to the gardens. ‘It's a confession. Make your confession. “. . . and I freely admit that I, conspiring with others, did engage in acts of treason against his Most Holy Majesty”—Put that in.' Evdaev said and then turned and came back to the desk, looking at the papers, the eyes asking,
pleading
for something, whatever it was he thought would save . . . his honour. For an exit he could die with, for salvation.

‘Go ahead . . . The ending—' Evdaev pushed the barrel of the gun against his neck.

‘Yes, fine. I'll write it. What do you want me to say?' Ryzhkov said, a little peevishly. Maybe a little too peevishly.

‘“. . . and I name . . .”'

‘Fine, fine,' he said, writing it.

‘“Sergei Danilovich Andrianov as my associate and fellow conspirator . . .”' Watching as Ryzhkov made the name, the gun in the side of his head pushing him into illegibility.

‘Good, good. Sign it.' And when his hand shook Evdaev pushed the muzzle against his neck, harder so that he was leaning over in the chair. ‘Sign-the-fucking-letter!' he shouted.

Time stopped finally. Ryzhkov could see it stop. See the moment when there was
no moment
. The space between heartbeats, as he reached out with his pen to sign his name on the paper—the space between Evdaev's wheezing breath—a bird flicking from its resting place on the stonework of the balcony—his own eyes following the loops of his signature, the last act in the script.

‘Here,' he said, signing the letter and gathering the papers up with one hand, as if to hand them to Evdaev and then—Ryzhkov was up now, launching himself out of the chair, his hand slapping the gun away from his own neck, pushing himself up into Evdaev who pulled the trigger an instant before they collided so that it felt like an explosion between the two of them, something bursting behind his head. The bullet slammed into the window, and then they were falling back against the doors, and the finely crafted mullions that could not hold their weight, and Ryzhkov was clawing to bend the gun back out of the bigger man's hand as they tumbled out on to the tiles of the balcony. As they landed he had turned the pistol away from himself and there was a second gunshot, Evdaev screamed and jerked away, a fountain of blood gushed on to the tiles and Ryzhkov saw that he had shot himself in the hand, losing his grip, the gun sliding away across the tiles, and . . .

And now . . .

Now, he was moving faster than light, moving faster than time. Faster than the sound of the shots.

Someone was shouting inside the house. Evdaev was shrieking for help, someone was pounding on the door. Maybe it was the confederate he didn't know about, maybe it was the servants, the gendarme, or some other friend of . . . Sergei's coming to take revenge. He stood and staggered back to the doorway. He had the gun now, the sheaf of papers was on the floor and he scooped them up. Evdaev was getting to his knees when he rushed him and jammed his knee into the man's face. It was like hitting brick, the sound was a hard crack and it echoed through the garden. His leg was suddenly numb. Behind him the door was breaking and there was no time, no more sand in the hourglass.

He stepped out on to the balcony, looked over the rail and immediately jumped into the softest place he could find, a trellis of roses that flanked a patio directly below him. The fall shook him for a moment but he recovered and began to run for the stables, only realizing when he was nearly all the way across the lawn that he must have smashed his ankle, that he was running with his legs askew, that something was wrong.

He reached the stables, there was no one waiting inside, and he staggered out into the sloping lane, and began to limp down it, trying desperately not to run.

The river was ahead of him. Across its breadth he could see the spire of the Admiralty, a golden needle pointed towards the heavens, gleaming in the bright sun; behind it the green copper roof of St Isaac's. He hobbled down the hill, gingerly testing his weight on the ankle, shaking it every step or two, as if he could mend it that way, by jiggling it back into place. Feeling like a fool, a marionette covered in blood.

He plunged his bleeding head into a trough of water at the end of the lane, threw the bloody jacket into the dark recess of a chicken coop, jammed the pistol down into the waistband of his trousers and covered it with his shirt. As he came out on to the next lowest cross street he saw a St Petersburg police motorcar whizzing past, changing gears and climbing the hill loudly, loaded down with gendarmes, one man furiously cranking the siren.

Along the street everyone had stopped, looking up the hill towards Evdaev's mansion. Ryzhkov walked into the crowd, skipped across the street and continued on, meandering towards the river, his ankle thickening up. He looked at his reflection in a shop window and then turned off the street, down the next lane.

He untied his cravat and wrapped it around his head like a sweatband, hiding the cut. Opened the neck of his shirt and rolled his sleeves up. There was a manure rake leaning against a stack of firewood and he reached out and stole it, swung it over his shoulder and walked along trying to look like a labourer. He felt weak, as if he were going to faint. Sirens came and went on Kamenoovstrovsky, two streets away now.

He continued on, his foot really hurting him now, crossed over the bridge to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul. There was a little beach there down below the thick walls and he threw the rake aside and took his time, slowly climbed down the stairs one at a time, took off his clothes and went out into the river in his underwear and then came back and collapsed on the hot sand.

His heart was still pounding. Crazy designs floated behind his eyelids; darkness that grew red as blood, overprinted with whirling, spiralling, flickering, tessellated patterns, all of it going down the drain.

FORTY-FIVE

He bathed his ankle in the cold Neva, testing his weight until he could hobble along in the sand. Washed the blood off his face and rested on the beach until his underclothes dried, then dressed. The ankle had swollen and he had to open his shoe to its widest and leave the laces loose. He strolled away from the fortress slowly, trying to limp as little as possible, casually, like a man taking his ease on a hot afternoon.

He caught a tram back across the river and then another down the Nevsky, getting out and dodging behind a gendarme who was handing out leaflets bearing a series of photographs of himself, Dima and Hokhodiev. There was a fourth man's likeness printed on the paper and it took him a moment to recognize the portrait of a very young Zezulin. Somehow he too must have been swept up in everything, and somehow he must also be on the run. So, the sleepy old man had had enough wits to make a break for it. The thought of it made him happy.

To avoid the policeman he ducked into the Imperial Public Library. He waited there, finding himself a corner in the gigantic reading room, and, as the afternoon wore on, amassed a pile of books, notes, pamphlets, the better to understand the life of one Sergei Danilovich Andrianov.

Evdaev's confession was detailed enough to tell him most of what he needed to know and over a few hours he collected addresses, the names of the clubs to which Andrianov belonged, a list of his properties, anything that he thought would help to track him down, anything that would help him decide on the exact spot where he could wait in the shadows.

He grew colder and colder as he did it, watching the conspirators' privileged lives play out in front of him; watching them as boys, growing, acquiring knowledge, virtues, credentials, awards, titles. The inevitable accretion of greed, of vanity, the emergence of the Pan-Slavic ideology that came to dominate their class.

So Evdaev had come to his Slavist ideology honestly. After all he had been born into that world, lost relatives in the war against the Turks, nearly lost his own life fighting against the Japanese because of Russia's weakness; in reaction he had dedicated himself to the re-establishment of the Evdaev family in its position of primacy.

But to actually turn the clock back in an empire like Russia's you would need to have power, real power. And blocking him from that power was the anaemic House of Romanov. At this point his desires coincided with Andrianov's and Nestor had decided that he could get what he wanted, for himself, for his own family, for his rejuvenated Russia, and for Slavs all over the world, by taking a shortcut.

On the table in front of Ryzhkov was the class annual for the Corps des Pages of the year of 1896. In each volume were representatives of all of the ruling families of the empire. He was riffling through the book when the name Andrianov leapt out at him and he suddenly found himself staring at a young version of Sergei. Then, after a moment, he checked himself, realizing his mistake; he was looking at a portrait of Andrianov's younger brother, who had graduated from the school and promptly been assigned to the Black Sea Fleet.

There were photographs of the faculty and he saw that
Major
A.I. Gulka had been a professor of history at the academy. Ryzhkov stared at the severe face that glowered directly at the camera; hearing in his memory the dreamy voice singing to his lovely Sara-jev-ooo.

In the photograph Andrianov's mentor was stronger, leaner. The hair much darker and the moustache very dark indeed. He must have been a fearsome instructor. It was a very contained world at the top, he thought. A world where personal relationships were the basis for everything. Where family was at least as important as riches, a world where codes of behaviour meant more than codes of law. A world gushed over by society columnists, a world served by tailors, equerries, jewellers and clerics. That was the real Petersburg. The filthy streets in spring, the frozen bodies of the peasants in winter, the suicides floating downstream to the Gulf—all of it might as well be on another planet.

For a moment Ryzhkov's old bitterness surfaced and he shook his head at the injustice, wondering how different his own life would have been if he had been allowed to attend the academy of the Corps des Pages. Maybe Gulka would have been his teacher, too. Perhaps he would have learned that Slavic purity was the greatest philosophy ever invented. Maybe he could have been Evdaev's friend, something like a brother, living in the big house with the stables at the back, the mistress on the Moika. Everything would have been different; there would have been no Filippa, no rainy nights waiting in the darkness for an informer to show up. Life wouldn't have included a stint as a
gorokhovnik
on the run, that much was sure.

Paging through the year books, the faces gliding by, he suddenly had a vision of his father. It came as something only half-remembered, a flash of the old man bent over his drawing table. The characteristic way he would look up, seemingly perplexed at the slightest interruption. His calculations, his intricate designs inked out in front of him, his barrier and refuge from reality. His father looking up, startled—as if he didn't even recognise the face of his own son, as if he didn't even know where he was, once he had been awakened from his paper labyrinth.