The Third Section (63 page)

Then, suddenly, nausea hit him. He thrust himself away from the woman’s body, for fear that what he was consuming had poisoned him, but he felt no lessening of the pain. Her blood had not grown stale, as it would have done if she had died, though death was not far from her now. This was something far more horrible, more fundamental, more all-consuming than mere tainted blood. It was as though he had received the most terrible news and awoken the following morning to have forgotten the details of it, yet still to remember the horror.

He searched his mind, and it took only moments to understand what had happened: Raisa was dead. Her presence, sometimes close, sometimes distant, had been there since the moment he had first awoken as a
voordalak
. Tonight it had been hard to discern, obscured by confusion, but it had existed; even when she slept.
Now
it was gone, and although as a vampire Dmitry was young and naive, somehow he knew that she was dead. There was much he had hoped to learn from her, but the opportunity was lost. There was only one that he could learn from now, with whom there was no such bond as there had been with Raisa, but whose understanding of Dmitry’s new condition would be far greater.

He glanced at the clock. It was too late for it tonight – soon Dmitry would have to head back to his adopted tomb, but he knew he could no longer put it off. When night fell again, Dmitry would not waste time on feeding. He would visit Yudin.

It had taken Tamara all night and most of the morning to get home. She had carried her mother’s body north-west along the railway track. It hadn’t taken long for them to reach the bridge and beneath it the ravine stretching down to the river Skhodnya below; a little longer before Tamara had been able to find a path down to the water’s edge. If anyone had seen her she would have cut a strange image, carefully clambering down through the clumps of grass, tenderly clutching the frail corpse as though it were the most precious thing in the whole world.

Then she had stood there, gazing at the flowing water, wondering exactly what she should do. She could think of no other way to lay her mother to rest. She would happily have carried the body barefoot across a thousand versts, but to what end? Tamara had no room in her life for further complications; not now. She scoured the riverbank until she found some wood – a couple of planks that she guessed were left over from the construction of the bridge that towered above her. Then she cut strips of material from the hem of her skirt and used them to bind the planks together. She laid her mother on the makeshift funeral raft. Finally she gathered leaves and foliage and covered the body. Before covering her face, Tamara had given her mother one final kiss on the lips, and then gazed at her, trying to remember any detail that she could of their life together when she was a child. The memories of the last few hours proved too strong, overpowering, for now, those that were more distant and more subtle. But even they were enough.

She pushed the boat out into the water and let the current take
it
, murmuring a prayer that she remembered from her husband’s funeral. She did not know how long she stood there by the river’s edge before turning away – it was more than an hour. Domnikiia’s body had long since vanished into the distance.

After that she had walked back to Khimki. Day had broken by the time she arrived, but she still had a long wait. A freight train came through, but with no passenger cars. At last the daily express train came in, two hours later than it should have done, but once she was on board, the journey back to Moscow was rapid and direct. She couldn’t have looked at her best, sitting there in the second-class carriage, after the night’s exertions, but after twenty hours on the train neither did many of the passengers.

Moscow seemed unquantifiably different. Tamara knew that it was she, not the city, who had changed, but still she felt that everyone she passed was examining her. It was only later, when she saw herself in the mirror, that she understood the grotesque nature of the wound to her left cheek. At the time she had felt that every uneasy gaze was asking her why she had let Domnikiia Semyonovna die like that, why she had disposed of her body with so little propriety. They could all go hang, and yet Tamara knew that there was one man who could fairly ask those questions of her: her father. He, who had survived so much, who had covered the thousands of versts from Siberia back to the west in just a few months, would not expect that the woman who had stood by his side throughout his exile would be dead within hours of their arriving home. He would not expect that, on hugging his beloved son after three decades apart, he would find that Dmitry had been transformed into the creature that Aleksei had spent his whole life learning to despise.

But first she must find him. She could not begin to guess where he would go. It surprised her that he had come to Moscow, not Petersburg, but then she remembered what Domnikiia had said. Aleksei had been eager to see Dmitry, and evidently they believed Dmitry to be in Moscow. They had not heard the news of his death, and before that, Moscow had been his last address. She would go and find out if Aleksei had called at his lodgings – sooner or later he would. But first she needed to clean herself up and, above all, to rest.

The door was bolted from the inside when she arrived at Degtyarny Lane, just as it should be. It took two or three minutes before Isaak opened it, but when she entered, what shocked her most was the ordinariness of everything. Nadia was crossing the salon, carrying jugs of hot water to take upstairs to the girls’ rooms. Few of the girls themselves were out of bed yet. Sofia was coming downstairs and wished Tamara a bleary ‘Good morning.’

None of them seemed concerned that Tamara had been away all night; none had noticed that Raisa was not there at all; no one had even discovered the broken-down wall in the gap between Raisa and Sofia’s rooms, nor the grim item that lay at the foot of the steps beyond it. They’d certainly never suppose what had become of Raisa – that her head had been severed from her body by the wheels of the Moscow train, and that her remains had in an instant wasted to nothing. It was hard for Tamara to believe it herself.

It was only as Tamara turned towards her rooms that she heard a gasp and the crash of china breaking on the floor.

‘What happened to you?’

Tamara turned and looked at Nadia, and realized that she was reacting to the scratch marks that Raisa had left on her cheek. She hadn’t even seen them herself yet, but judging from Nadia’s reaction it was none too pretty a sight.

‘You’d never believe me,’ she said.

Then she went over to her rooms, through her study and into her bedroom, and collapsed on her bed, asleep.

It was dark when she awoke. There was a light, urgent tapping on her door. She was amazed that she had been able to sleep, with so many thoughts bouncing off the walls of her mind, but it had been over a day since she had last rested.

‘Come in!’ she shouted.

Nadia popped her head round the door. ‘A gentleman asking for you,’ she said.

‘Tell him to pick someone else,’ she snapped, then added, ‘Tell him I’ve retired.’ It was entirely an afterthought, but the very idea of it filled her with excitement.

‘I don’t think he’s interested in that. He’s not that sort of gentleman. He asked specifically to speak to you.’

Tamara leapt to her feet, all sleepiness banished in an instant. Could it be, at last? Had her father come to find her? She sped across her bedroom, into the study and through the salon to the front door.

Her face fell. She had no idea what Aleksei looked like, but this wasn’t him. It was Gribov. She had never seen him at Degtyarny Lane before. She wasn’t even sure if he knew the nature of the business that Yudin operated from there, but the very presence of the small, mild, bookish man seemed incongruous.

‘I hope I haven’t overstepped myself, Tamara Valentinovna,’ he said, ‘but given your researches, I felt sure you’d like to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘Aleksei Ivanovich. He has returned. He’s in Moscow.’

That much was old news to Tamara, but she could only guess that Gribov had more to tell. ‘Where is he?’ she asked urgently.

‘Actual State Councillor Yudin has shown an equal interest in speaking to him. That’s why he’s had him arrested.’

‘Arrested? What for? He’s been pardoned.’

‘I fear Actual State Councillor Yudin regards that sort of thing as a detail. It was only luck that I was there when the gendarmes delivered him.’

‘Delivered him? Where?’

Gribov swallowed visibly before answering. ‘To Yudin’s office. I saw them dragging him down the stairs, but they didn’t stay there for long.’

‘Where did they take him?’ It was a stupid question, as Gribov made clear.

‘I think, Tamara Valentinovna,’ he said, scarcely raising his voice above a murmur, ‘that you know that as well as I do.’

‘Why?’

The word surprised Yudin, not in its meaning but in the fact that anyone had spoken at all. He had been expecting, on his return from the cells beneath, that his office would be empty. But then he had also been expecting, for some weeks now, that Dmitry would seek him out. It was an appointment that neither
of
them could shirk. And of all the ways that it might begin, Dmitry’s ‘Why?’ had always been the most likely.

‘You object?’ Yudin countered.

‘How could I? But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have objected if I’d known.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

Dmitry paused. ‘It’s hard to tell. It’s as if I was another person.’

‘Really?’ Yudin was, as ever, curious.

Dmitry did not choose to elucidate. ‘How long has it been for you?’ he asked instead.

‘Barely thirty years. You remember when you left me and your father in Senate Square to face Nikolai’s guns? It was within an hour of that.’

‘Who was it that created you?’

‘I’m unusual,’ explained Yudin. ‘I created myself.’

‘From nothing? Like God?’

‘Not quite. I needed a vampire’s blood, but he was already dead.’

‘So you are an orphan?’ asked Dmitry.

‘If you want to put it like that.’

‘As am I.’

‘Raisa’s dead?’ asked Yudin.

Dmitry nodded. ‘I don’t know what happened. Her mind was confused, and then was no more.’

Yudin sighed. It was a shame, but it had been a risk worth taking. Perhaps a stronger mind – or one less vain – would have dealt better with what it had witnessed in the looking glass, but Yudin still wasn’t going to risk experimenting on himself, or even on Dmitry; not for now. He wished he were back in Chufut Kalye, where he’d had the facilities, and the guinea pigs, to conduct such elegant experiments.

Dmitry turned away and walked over to the map drawers. He reached out and pulled away the blanket, revealing the dressing-table mirror that had always stood there.

‘Raisa told you that was there?’ asked Yudin.

‘I learned it from her. She was obsessed by it – by mirrors. She thought you would be able to let her see her face.’

Yudin felt his muscles stiffen slightly, ready for action.
Voordalaki
were emotionless creatures, but he had learned over the years that the regard held by one of them for the vampire that created it could be strong; enough to lead to the desire for revenge over whoever had killed the vampire parent. Yudin did not feel the emotion himself – how could he as a parricide? – but in Dmitry it could prove dangerous. Neither of them knew how Raisa had died, but her reaction to the mirror must have been at least in part responsible. And Yudin had shown her the mirror.

‘I tried,’ he said. ‘But I could never find a way.’

Dmitry nodded. ‘She thought you were stringing her along.’

For a moment, Yudin considered objecting to this untruth, but he realized it was wiser to let it lie. Dmitry seemed to bear no grudge over such minor trickery of Raisa and so it was best to have him go on believing it rather than hint that Yudin might ever have had the power to reveal to her her true likeness.

‘We both benefited from our association,’ he said.

‘You still haven’t explained why,’ said Dmitry.

So many reasons. Some Dmitry would understand; most he would be indifferent to. One, however, was fundamental. ‘I’d always planned it.’

‘Always?’

‘Since I first met you, a little boy of five, in Petersburg, in 1812.’

‘That’s a long time to nurture a plan.’

Yudin smiled, taking Dmitry’s words as a compliment. ‘Perhaps an option then, rather than a plan, but it was there from the beginning.’

‘So why now?’

‘Because you were on the point of working it out for yourself, and that would have made it far more difficult to persuade you. Then of course there was the fact that, with the amnesty, your father would be returning home soon.’

‘And he would have stopped you?’

Was that a hint of pride that Yudin noted in Dmitry’s voice? It was unlikely – impossible, even. The intonation merely reflected years of habitually speaking of Aleksei in that way.

‘Hardly,’ Yudin countered. ‘He’s an old man now, and it’s been a long time since he had more influence over you than I did.’

‘So what’s he got to do with it?’