The Third Section (12 page)

Suddenly, Tamara was four years old again. She knew the age precisely because it was the time they had heard of the old tsar’s death – Aleksandr I. News travelled more slowly back then, but it had reached them within days. She had been like Vadim was now,
too
young to understand the grief of others, but she remembered Yelena and Valentin being very much the same as they were now.

For perhaps the first time she appreciated the magnificence of their old age and understood why they were so affected. They were not just grieving for Nikolai, but for their memories of the death of Aleksandr, and of his father Pavel before him – perhaps even the death of Yekaterina. They would have been as young then as she was at Aleksandr’s death. Perhaps they realized too that they would not live to see the end of this new tsar’s reign – or at least hoped it.

And from the distant reaches of that four-year-old mind came another thought – the memory of a hope, but not of its fulfilment. What had affected her most as a child on hearing of the death of the tsar had not been a sense of sorrow, but a realization that the news also meant that her father – her real father – would be coming home.

THE IMPERIAL ARMY
was taking the news surprisingly well. The death of the tsar made no difference to daily life in the besieged city of Sevastopol. The enemy guns had not fallen silent in deference to the departed emperor, nor had they fired a salute in honour of the succession of the new one. Many were pleased that Tsar Aleksandr had at last relieved the woeful commander-in-chief, Prince Menshikov, and replaced him with Prince Gorchakov, but those who bothered to read the dates on the dispatches soon realized that this had not been the first act of the new tsar, but the last of the old one. Some of the men had shed a tear for their departed emperor, but among the officers it was only those who knew him personally who showed any real emotion at his passing.

Dmitry had never met the late Tsar Nikolai, but had seen him on several occasions, the first being in December 1825 as he sat astride a horse just to the south of Senate Square and ordered his cannon to open fire on the thousands of good men who had dared raise objections to his absolute power. Nikolai’s power had won out – and Dmitry had never forgiven him.

But neither had Dmitry ever done anything about it. He’d fantasized over the idea of himself as a lone assassin, liberating Russia by annihilating her dictator, but he had never acted, or even begun to formulate a plan. He guessed that there were others like him – in the army and elsewhere – but it would need them to work together for anything to come of it. And since the fall of the Decembrists, there were few who dared talk like that. The Third Section was everywhere, or at least that was what people – what
Dmitry
– believed, and that was enough. No one had acted. In the end Nikolai had died of a winter chill. General
Février
had turned traitor.

‘You’re the last man I expected to see moping over the death of Impernikel.’

Dmitry looked up. It was Tyeplov. In each hand he held a glass of brandy. He offered one to Dmitry.

‘You shouldn’t call him that,’ said Dmitry, his voice kept low. The name, a simple contraction of ‘
Empereur Nikolai
’, was not particularly insulting in itself, but it was the favourite epithet of the tsar’s long-time critic, the exile Aleksandr Herzen.

‘Nobody here cares any more than you or I do,’ said Tyeplov, sitting down beside him. Dmitry looked around. It was probably true. If anyone here held the same strength of opinion as Dmitry, they kept it to themselves, but few would object to so trifling an insult.

Two weeks ago, Dmitry would have suspected that Tyeplov was trying to lure him into saying something even more treasonous, which he could report back to his masters in the Third Section, but now he had come to doubt it. Tyeplov was too obvious for a government spy – and far too engaging. They had already dined together several times. Anatoliy Vladimirovich Tyeplov – Tolya, as Dmitry now addressed him – was wonderful company. In many ways, Dmitry found him like a child, his mind an empty vessel into which Dmitry could pour so much of his knowledge and fascination and taste. Tyeplov was in no way stupid, but there were some huge gaps in his education. On the other hand, there were areas in which he had ideas of which Dmitry had never dreamed. Talking to him was like talking to an open-minded father – someone from whom he could learn but who did not object to learning from him. Dmitry had lost his own father, Aleksei, at an age when such communication could only really be one way. Even with Yudin there was a sense that there was little Dmitry could tell him that he did not already know.

But there were other ways in which Tyeplov was nothing like a father. For a start, he must have been a good fifteen years younger than Dmitry. And neither Aleksei nor Yudin had ever occupied Dmitry’s mind quite so exclusively as Tyeplov did.

‘Anyway,’ said Dmitry, sipping his brandy, ‘I wasn’t moping. I was remembering.’

‘14 December 1825,’ said Tyeplov, simply.

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s what everyone’s thinking. At the end, we think of the beginning.’

‘I was there,’ said Dmitry. It was a foolish admission, but for some reason he blurted it out.

‘With your father?’

Dmitry nodded. ‘And a friend – someone who was almost like a father to me.’

‘What happened?’

Dmitry looked over to him. It wasn’t something he had spoken of to anyone before, apart from Yudin, but the concern that displayed itself in Tyeplov’s eyes made Dmitry’s urge to unburden himself irresistible.

‘My father and I were both there, in Senate Square, with the others – prepared to die for what we believed in. And then Vasiliy Denisovich – this friend – came and joined us.’

‘He was a revolutionary too?’

Dmitry smiled at the thought. ‘Oh no. Vasiliy had no interest in that sort of thing.’

‘Had?’

‘He died – on that day.’ It was odious for Dmitry to lie to Tyeplov, but it was a promise he had made to Yudin on discovering that he was alive and that he had changed his name.

‘Go on.’

‘Both Papa and Vasiliy begged me to leave – Vasiliy even brought Mama into it – and so I did. I walked away and left them to it.’

‘It must have been a great relief to them.’

‘You think so?’ asked Dmitry eagerly. Yudin had always said as much to him, but he knew nothing of Aleksei’s thoughts. Even a hint of where Dmitry had been that day would be pounced upon by the censors.

Tyeplov nodded firmly. ‘So what did you do?’

‘I went home – by a roundabout route. There were troops everywhere, some loyal to Nikolai, others on our side, but I didn’t want to run into either. I went out across the Neva, over
to
Vasilevskiy Island, then on to Petrogradskaya and finally back across the ice to the mainland. The shooting was over by then. Vasiliy was dead and Papa had been arrested.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He was shot. I heard about it long after. My father tried to help him. But then when the ice broke up, his body was lost in the water.’ That much was true. Dmitry had managed to piece it together from various witnesses and in the end from Yudin himself. His father had never written of it.

‘Did they find the body?’

Dmitry shook his head, staring down into his drink. He could not look Tyeplov in the eye and lie so blatantly. Though it was in a sense true. They didn’t find a body because Yudin had survived. The bullet wound had been superficial and he had been pulled from the water moments after falling in. He had managed to escape the city and flee. He told it all to Dmitry when he returned, years later.

‘And your father?’

‘Arrested. Tried. Exiled. I never saw him again.’

‘Not even when he was in prison?’

‘No.’ Everyone, Aleksei included, had said it was for the best, to avoid any suspicion of where Dmitry’s sympathies lay.

‘So what did you do?’

Nothing, thought Dmitry, before churning out the usual list. ‘I stayed with the army. Became a loyal subject of Impernikel. Suppressed those who rose up against him. Looked after my mother. Got married.’ Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

‘Children?’

Dmitry shook his head. ‘What about you?’

‘Never even married.’

‘No, I meant the whole life story thing.’

‘Ah!’ said Tyeplov. ‘Now there’s a tale.’

Dmitry was not to hear it, not then. The shout of ‘Anatoliy’ flew across the room. Tyeplov looked, and Dmitry thought that he saw a momentary scowl cross his friend’s face. It was a reflection of Dmitry’s own annoyance, of his jealousy of Tyeplov’s company.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tyeplov said, standing. ‘Come. Join us.’

Dmitry considered, but the thoughts of Aleksei and Yudin and the events of thirty years before had thrown him into a dark humour. Instead he went over to the piano and began to play Beethoven – it suited his mood and he knew Tyeplov enjoyed it. He watched as Tyeplov chatted with the two officers who had hailed him; a
Shtabs
-Captain and a
poruchik
. He had no need to look at the keyboard and kept his eyes fixed on his friend, playing with just a fragment more passion whenever Tyeplov’s eyes flicked towards him.

Yudin had chosen to savour the moment. He’d been busy in the days since the news had arrived, but not so busy that he couldn’t have spared the hour or so that it would have taken to set up his microscope and finally gaze upon the exquisite detail of what Raisa had provided for him. But so august an observation merited better than time that was spared; it required time that was dedicated. There was no rush. If Yudin could have observed Aleksandr’s blood at the very moment of his father’s death, then he might have seen something uniquely wonderful, but in the time it had taken the news to reach Moscow – even via the magnetic telegraph – that moment had passed, and a delay of days was no worse than a delay of minutes.

Yudin checked himself. That was an assumption. For him to believe that it took but an instant for the knowledge of Aleksandr’s new-found status to be transferred from his body in Petersburg to the sample of his blood in Moscow was as foolish as the belief that light travelled at an infinite speed – which was to say that it did not travel at all. A new experiment was needed to establish the speed of that transfer, but now was not the time. Yudin had better things to interest him: the blood of a Romanov – the blood of a new tsar.

What secrets might it reveal? Might he find a way to hurry the process of transformation, to make Aleksandr into a
voordalak
with none of the machinations that their failed attempt on the first Aleksandr had involved? If he could present such a mechanism to Zmyeevich then all would be forgiven. Or perhaps what he discovered might lie in a different direction. Perhaps he could even find out that it was possible to completely reverse the process and
thereby
cure the Romanovs of their affliction for ever. He had no affection for the rulers of Russia, but they would pay mightily for such a cure – and would protect him from Zmyeevich. On the other hand, Zmyeevich would pay for it too, if only to keep it from them. Yudin saw the auction price rising and rising before his eyes.

He allowed himself one more moment to savour the idea, then got to work. He cleared his desk and took the microscope out of its case. The brasswork was a little tarnished, but he would see to that later. Next, he gathered together every lamp and candle he had – even going up to Gribov’s room to fetch more – and lit them, assembling them as close together as he could at the opposite end of the desk from the instrument. Then, from a small drawer in the bottom of the microscope case, he produced a lens. It was an ordinary magnifying glass, quite a large one, mounted on a stand. He placed it between the lamps and the microscope and began adjusting its position.

It had been one of the most horrible realizations after he had become a vampire. For a moment he had feared he might never be able to look into a microscope again. A microscope required light – an abundant commodity for most in the form of sunlight, but unusable for a vampire. Any microscope – Yudin’s included – was fitted with a small mirror beneath the viewing platform. The mirror could be adjusted to any angle and was meant to be positioned so that sunlight reflected from it up through the specimen, through the combination of lenses that did the work of magnification and into the observer’s eye.

Yudin had tried it once. It had been the most delectable agony he ever experienced. He only opened the curtain a fraction, so that sunlight fell upon the mirror, not on him, but the light that came from the microscope and entered his eye had been as intense – more intense – than any example he had seen of light falling directly upon a vampire’s body. In the caves beneath Chufut Kalye, when he had been merely human, he had carried out many experiments to discover the effect of light on vampires. But times had changed, and this one he had been forced to perform upon himself.

He had gone completely blind in that eye. Raising his hand to it
he
could find only a bloody gap, which he knew was already healing. He could not look in a mirror to see the effect. He had put his hand to the back of his head and felt a gap there too. The light had burned all the way through his skull. And yet, within less than a minute, he was as normal. The wound was healed and his sight restored, with no scar to hint at the horrible disfigurement he had so briefly endured. It was the knowledge that there would be no permanent damage that made the pain bearable.