Field of Mars (6 page)

There was only one more address on their side of the Nevsky, a café, supposedly a centre of well-heeled, intellectual, hot-blooded anarchism. When they got there the owners had already closed. Ryzhkov stepped down into the street so that he could see the topmost windows. Everything appeared to be shuttered.

‘Knock anyway,' he told Dudenko. ‘Go around the back, Konstantin,' he said to Hokhodiev. ‘See if they left anyone up there.' He had started to fantasize that some assassin was waiting in an upstairs room for the Tsar's carriage, a marksman with a hunting rifle and a lot of tangled ideas about starting a Slavic version of the French Revolution. He waited while they went about their tasks. Stood there and had a cigarette and watched the street.

The Nevsky: one of the great thoroughfares of Europe. Nearly two miles long, running arrow-straight from the golden spire of the Admiralty to Moscow Station where it turned, angling south towards the domes of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.

Ryzhkov loved the street at the sudden start of spring, when the pedestrians came out to promenade; all of them drawn to the bustle, the elegance, and the energy of the great boulevard. Along the sides of the street the cobbles had been replaced by hexagonal wooden blocks in an effort to dampen the noise of the carriages. Still, on a busy day it was the sheer cacophony that defined the prospekt—the shouts, the whistles, the clattering of the horses' hooves, the carriages flying past, the splutterings of the motorcars, the yelping blasts of their horns, the ringing of the bells on the trams. The murmur of thousands of conversations, the buzzing of the throng as they moved from shop to shop; laughing, arguing, complaining, lecturing. Shop assistants mingled with soldiers, who mingled with priests, who mingled with tea-sellers and princesses. Some walked briskly, desperately about on some pressing business, faces grim. Others simply idled along, content to be part of the great stream of humanity with no place better to go, admiring their reflections in the shop windows. An endless promenade; a blend of the ultra-rich in silks and feathers, with newly-arrived peasants clutching their hats in their grimy hands, staring up at the fantastic buildings. That was life on the Nevsky; it was the spine, the vibrant centre of modern Russia.

But this morning all that vigour was restrained, forced off the balconies, and out of the windows, everything cordoned off to allow the Tsar free passage.

‘I got in up there. Nothing,' said Hokhodiev from behind him. Dudenko was talking to a man on the corner. They were pointing to the café. The man was smoking, trying not to show his nervousness at being grilled by one of the Okhrana. Dudenko nodded and the man smiled with relief and ran back across the street. Coming back to them Dudenko looked happy, almost blushing, Ryzhkov thought. Like a spring bride. Young, alive, and maybe even delighted to be pushing people around who were too scared to fight back. ‘Everything's fine,' he reported.

Hokhodiev looked over at Ryzhkov again. ‘Are you sure you're feeling up to all this?'

‘I'm fine,' he said. ‘Fine for now anyway.'

FIVE

The upper tier of the Marinsky was more sauna than theatre; a miasma of stale perfume, cigar smoke, and sweat. After the procession, Ryzhkov and his team had been able to return to the dank dormitory that Internal kept in the basement of their headquarters building on the Fontanka. He was able to wolf down some soup, took just enough time to file a request for a St Petersburg Criminal Investigation report on the Peplovskaya Street murder, and then they were rushing across the city to the theatre.

The toothache had diminished in the late afternoon, but now he was in real pain, the throbbing in his jaw keeping pace with the tempo of Glinka's score for
A Life for the Tsar
. All he could do was lean against the carved walls of the opulent blue-and-gold dress circle corridor of the Marinsky and feel the sweat trickle down his spine into his underpants.

Hokhodiev and Dudenko were pacing up and down the corridor, locked into one of their sporadic arguments. On this occasion it was over the ruthlessness of the fighting in the Balkans, the various armies like a pack of crows picking over the carcass of the Ottoman Empire and the waning hopes for peace. Dima was doing most of the talking, since he fancied himself a great critic of kings and politicians.

The bad tooth was his own fault, Ryzhkov decided. He had made more than one appointment to have it fixed, but had been scared of what his dentist would find. The molar had been cracked for years, the result of a violent confrontation with a group of metalworkers who had surprised him as they'd poured out of a clandestine meeting where they had been preparing strike plans. He had been caught right in their path, incriminated by the revolver he was loading. He hadn't even got it closed before one of the metalworkers hit him with something hard, like a brick. He didn't remember anything after that.

They had taken his gun, of course, and left him with a cracked jaw, swelled to the size of a coconut for nearly three weeks. Drinking through a straw. Listening to Filippa berate him a dozen times a day about his choice of occupation before she left for her uncle's, tired of playing the role of nurse.

And so, yes, in typical Russian fashion, he
deserved
to carry a little bit of hell around with him. He had made mistakes, he had committed crimes. He had sinned, he had sinned repeatedly. He had never, never been good, never lived up to expectations, not really. So, then. All the pain was justified. Perhaps his father had been right all along. He should have tried to accomplish more, to have made more of himself. But he hadn't. He'd either been too distracted or too lazy, and when he'd finally picked a vocation it had been for all the wrong reasons.

He'd ended up being the one who cleaned up the trash, swept the mess of the empire into a corner, and then saluted his betters as if nothing had ever been there. He could have been someone of worth, someone of substance. Instead he had become a kind of necessary rat, a creature devoid of status, respect, or glamour. Something vile, ruthless, and efficient.

Not just a policeman, but
more
than a policeman.

Pyotr Mikhalovich Ryzhkov was an Okhrana investigator, a member of the dreaded Third Branch of the Imperial Chancellery. He had advanced in his career to the point where he led a section of investigators, all of whom were supposedly elite policemen. They were charged with the task of suppressing all forms of dissent against the Tsar, the Imperial family, its property, or its policies.

Okhrana was divided into three branches. The Foreign Agency, sometimes called ‘The White Branch', held the portfolio of international espionage. Its work was conducted by men and women whose annual budget for clothing exceeded Ryzhkov's income by thousands of roubles. Their battles were conducted in the glittering salons of embassies spread around the globe.

Closer to home was the External Agency, responsible for the active policing of threats to the state. External rigorously monitored the activities of any organisation that might have reasons to bring down the empire. They studied reports of terrorists' comings and goings, read their letters, deciphered their codes, sifted through their rubbish, and analysed their publications. No cell was too small to avoid scrutiny. Thousands of External clerks maintained a vast system of files containing information and photographs of anyone charged with a crime; dossiers on all labour leaders, prominent members of the liberal and radical political parties, exiled or expatriate politicians, editors and journalists of magazines, books, or seditious literature of all kinds.

But Ryzhkov and his men were gorokhovniks— members of the Internal Agency. The nickname was a slur derived from the slang term for their long raincoats named after Petersburg's famously drab Gorokhovaya Prospekt.

Internal investigators were considered little more than thugs and informants by the more genteel External agents. They operated out of safe-houses and flats, often used multiple identities and routinely dealt in conspiracies, blackmail, bribery, and assassination. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, filled in when the External needed them, snatched sleep and meals when and where they could.

There was no such thing as a normal day for an Internal investigator. Within the branch, marriages were doomed to failure; Ryzhkov's was on its last legs. Children were neglected. He thought himself lucky that he had none. To relieve the futility, Internal investigators often fell prey to drink or the kind of low level corruption that came with nearly unlimited police power. It was more than a job, it was a way of life, a way of behaving. A way of thinking and existing to which Ryzhkov had grown accustomed. And gradually he'd come to accept that the purgatory of being in the despised Internal branch, like the pain in his tooth, was something for which he was uniquely suited. Something he deserved.

A man content to give his life for the Tsar.

‘. . . and the next thing is that the Hapsburgs are going to use the excuse and step in to protect their empire, and then it's everyone rushing to be manly, eh? To protect the home and the hearth, eh?' Dudenko was lecturing as the two of them paced by Ryzhkov, who had been propping up the wall.

‘Be quiet. Be quiet, for Godsakes,' Ryzhkov said weakly. Neither of them could hear him. ‘Just, please . . . be quiet,' he mumbled. Even moving his tongue hurt. Inside the theatre he could hear an alto singing desperately:

 

Oh, I wish I were a knight!

Oh, I wish I were a hero!

I would break down the gates be they of cast iron!

I would rush to the chamber where our Tsar reposes, I would call ‘Servants of the Tsar!

Wake up!'

There was a commotion down the hallway and reflexively all three Internal inspectors straightened as the Chevalier Guards Officer-in-Charge came striding along the carpet. He was resplendent in his shining silver breastplate, skin-tight breeches and gleaming helmet. Beside him Hokhodiev looked like a small-town magistrate in a borrowed tailcoat.

The guardsman's eye settled on Ryzhkov and he frowned. ‘Has this one been drinking?' he asked.

‘Toothache,' Ryzhkov muttered. The officer nodded sympathetically. Everyone had been pressed into service today. Normally a section of Internal men would be nowhere near the Marinsky, but extreme times called for extreme measures.

‘Bloody hell,' the officer said. Ultimately he was in charge of the security precautions at the theatre. ‘Well, stay here. I'll get you something.' He headed back down the carpet toward the Imperial boxes.

Ryzhkov relaxed, took up his place against the wall and let his eyes shut. His dentist had a surgery on Vasilevsky Island, but after-hours he had no idea how to find the man. And now he'd lose the tooth. Yes, it was his fault for ignoring it, but before the pain had never really been unbearable. A little twitch every now and then, but nothing like this.

‘Why don't you sit down? If you hear me whistle, they're coming,' said Hokhodiev.

He began to pull Ryzhkov across the carpet to one of the satin covered benches that ringed the corridor. No one sat on the benches. They were strictly ordered never to sit on the benches while on duty. ‘Sit, for Christ's sake Pyotr Mikhalovich,' Dudenko had slipped an arm around him, and he suddenly felt his knees collapse as they heaved him on to the settee.

Immediately he heard the guards officer's voice. ‘Has he collapsed? Here, make him take this.' He pressed a round silver container into Ryzhkov's palm.

‘Put it right on the tooth.' The man grimaced. Beneath the moustache Ryzhkov could see that the officer had very few teeth beyond his incisors. Evidently he knew what he was talking about.

The officer stood back and appraised the three of them for a moment, then went back to his station. Ryzhkov screwed open the salter and found it full to the brim with cocaine.

‘Well, well, well,' Dudenko sighed.

‘I expect that should do you for a bit, eh?' said Hokhodiev with satisfaction, and he and Dudenko moved along the corridor so they could cover for him.

When he began dabbing cocaine on his tooth the relief was instantaneous, a wave of cool water that spread through his swollen gums. He made a mental note to repay the officer for his courtesy, and sat there sighing with gratitude. Maybe the cocaine would provide him with enough relief to get up and do his job before the end of the act. It wouldn't do to get a citation on the Chevalier Guard nightly report, no matter what branch he was in. Ryzhkov's career as an Internal agent might not be glamorous but it was, nevertheless, all the career he had.

A smart young man with no connections or noble blood, Ryzhkov had come into the Police Department in 1897, at what seemed to him to be the absurdly distant age of twenty-one. His first job had been to shadow the great Tolstoy while he visited St Petersburg. It was a bizarre introduction to policing, following an ageing writer as he browsed through the bookshops and markets of the city. But Ryzhkov conscientiously recorded Tolstoy's every movement, the time and content of his meals, his conversations, and the numbers of the cabs he took across the city.

Now Ryzhkov caught sight of himself in a mirror. For a split second he thought it was someone else. One side of his face was swollen. He looked like a hamster or a man with a wad of tobacco in his cheek. His hair had come awry, his eyes were droopy and dull as if he had not slept in several days; perspiration had soaked his shirt front and the collar was stained and limp. Still, he had managed to restrain himself from pulling loose his cravat, and his suit was reasonably immaculate.

With a graceful flick of his fingertips he straightened up and shook his arms so the suit would settle across his shoulders. He tried to smile, tried to be debonair for a moment. The effort sent little spikes of pain across his jaw. He shook his head waggishly, as if he had just heard a naughty joke, made a smooth pivot, and with astounding grace began ambling down the corridor toward his men.