To Kill a Tsar (22 page)

‘You can cool down for an hour.’ He grabbed her arm and dragged her roughly to her feet. ‘Here, you, Rostislov,’ he said, addressing a constable bent in conversation with the chief clerk. ‘Take this one to Room 6.’ And turning to Anna again, he said, ‘An hour. If you don’t give me your address and answer for yourself after that I can promise you now, you’ll be spending the night in the Peter and Paul Fortress.’

It was a box room with a tiny barred window, furnished with only a wooden bench and a bucket. Anna pressed herself into a corner, her knees up to her chest, exhausted by the nervous tension of the last two hours. She knew she should rehearse her story, but she had neither the will nor the energy. Mikhailov had assured her she was clean but it was only a matter of time before they found a witness – perhaps the servant girl – who could tie her to Goldenberg or Soloviev or one of the others. She closed her eyes and groaned quietly into the crook of her arm: that it had come to this already. Her head was still buried there a few minutes later when she heard the rattle of the key in the lock. It was Constable Rostislov.

‘It seems you don’t have to remember where you live after all,’ he said dryly. ‘Follow me.’

He led her down a windowless corridor and into what looked like a secretariat, with clerks sitting at a block of desks in the centre of the room. At the opposite end, the sergeant was standing beside the only polished doors in the station.

‘Still limping, then?’

Before she could reply, the door was opened by the superintendent’s gatekeeper who announced His Honour Ivan Andreievich Kuznetzov was now ready to see the prisoner.

The superintendent’s office was like those occupied by middle-ranking policemen all over the empire, with its oppressively dark wallpaper, cheap burgundy drapes, filing cabinet, desk and undistinguished print of His Imperial Majesty. Kuznetzov was sitting beneath it, his grey head bent over his papers. Almost lost in a high-backed chair in front of his desk sat a woman, her dark hair drawn tightly into a bun. Anna could see no more than the top of her head but there was something in the shape of it and the way she held it that was familiar. The woman raised a hand to sweep a loose strand of hair behind her ear and Anna let out an involuntary gasp of pain.

‘Go on – what’s the matter with you?’ It was Sergeant Korovin at her shoulder.

‘Ah, it’s you!’ Olga Liubatovich twisted in the chair to look at her. Her eyes were almost lost beneath a heavy frown, her voice full of resentment. ‘Did you deliver the note? What am I going to tell my husband, you foolish girl? Look at the trouble you’ve got us into.’

Clever, clever Olga. Burying her face in her hands, Anna began to sob pathetically, her small frame shaking with the effort.

‘All right, all right,’ said the superintendent irritably. ‘Sit down.’ He waved his hand to Korovin to indicate he should guide her to a chair.

‘Now, can you tell me who this woman is?’ he asked when she had settled in front of his desk.

‘My mistress, Elizaveta Dmitrievna.’

‘Look at me.’

Anna raised her eyes for just a second then looked away. He had a thin face and severe mouth, as if years in the police had ground him to a sharp point.

‘Now tell me what business you had at a terrorist’s apartment?’

‘A message to the seamstress,’ she snivelled.

‘For goodness sake, stop behaving like a child!’ the superintendant roared and he thumped his fist on the desk so hard some of his papers floated to the floor. ‘Do you know who lives in that flat?’

‘No.’

‘And you,’ he said turning to Olga, ‘where do you live?’

Olga ignored him and turned to Anna again. ‘My husband will be so cross! This is your fault,’ she said. ‘I’ve a mind to turn you out!’

Anna resumed her noisy sobbing. It was a more than respectable performance, but the superintendent had been in the service many years and was a difficult man to deflect. For an hour, he kept returning to the same questions: why had she visited the apartment? What was the message for the dressmaker? Where did she come from? He worried away at both of them, coaxing and bullying in turn.

‘All right, we’ll see,’ he said at last, getting to his feet stiffly. ‘Take them home, Sergeant. Examine their papers. Search the apartment from top to bottom and speak to the husband.’

As the two of them were bundled into a police barouche, Anna managed to lean across and whisper ‘Thank you’. It was below freezing, the light was fading and the sky threatened more snow, but her spirits were lifting in the cold air after the stuffiness and anxiety of the station. A policeman sat on the box beside the driver, another two travelled on the footboard at the back, and behind them a dozen more in cabs. But once they were beneath the canopy, Olga reached across to give her hand a little squeeze: ‘We have a chance.’

It was only a short drive to the building on Nevsky. Glancing up furtively, Anna could see the parasol was no longer posted
in the window: the flat must have been cleared of incriminating papers and Morozov would have left too. A posse of policemen huffed and puffed up the stairs after them and gathered on the narrow landing at the top. For appearance’s sake, Olga rang the bell, confident no one would answer. After a few seconds, she began rummaging in her bag for the keys, but before she could find them they heard footsteps in the hall and the sound of a heavy bolt drawn back. To Anna’s dismay, the door opened to reveal a very startled-looking Nikolai Morozov: ‘What on earth—’

Olga threw herself upon him, clutching him tightly. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry. Please don’t be angry. The police have arrested Anna. I had to go to the station, and now they won’t let us go. Please don’t be angry.’

‘What?’ Morozov had regained his composure at once. ‘What’s happened to you?’

Sergeant Korovin was ready with his own explanation: ‘Your maid was arrested at the apartment of two people we suspect of blowing up the tsar’s train in Moscow. We’re going to have to search your flat.’

‘Please do,’ said Morozov, stepping back from the door.

‘No. No. You first and your wife – and you,’ Korovin said, pulling Anna roughly by the arm.

They sat on the edge of the bed in silence as the police turned the place upside down, ferreting through cupboards and drawers, moving the few small pieces of furniture, lifting rugs and loose boards, examining their clothes, stirring the ashes in the stove. After an hour they had turned up nothing in the least incriminating and Korovin had no choice but to call a halt to the search. Until their personal papers had been checked against police records they were under house arrest, he told them, and to be sure this order was obeyed he left two constables at the door.

‘It will take them a while to check our identities,’ said Morozov
when it was safe to talk. ‘But my papers were stolen from a merchant in Tula. He’s bound to have reported the theft to the local police.’

‘Why did you stay, Nikolai?’ Olga asked him, leaning forward to stroke his hair. ‘You should have gone.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ He reached up to grab and hold her hand. ‘Sophia helped me clear the flat. She’s gone to warn the others. What’s important now is getting out of here.’

There was a shimmering halo around the street lamps in the prospekt. Snow was falling again. It was after seven o’clock and a steady stream of workers was trudging home along the slush-covered pavements. To Anna’s exhausted mind, they appeared blurred and dark at the edges like a badly taken daguerreotype. Gazing from the sitting-room window, she felt unaccountably empty, as if the stuffing had been ripped from her by one of the constables. Her companions were still at the table, whispering to each other, holding hands, drawing strength from their intimacy.

‘All right, I think it’s time.’

The two young policemen looked thoroughly miserable. It was only a few degrees above freezing on the stairs and for an hour they had been shifting stiffly from foot to foot, stamping and slapping their sides like awkward marionettes.

‘My husband wants me to order some tea,’ Olga said, as they turned to look at the two women. ‘Maria Alexandrovna,’ she shouted in a stentorian voice. ‘Maria Alexandrovna!’

The landlady’s name echoed down the stairs and a few seconds later a door opened on the landing below. A large woman in her fifties in a black scarf and ankle-length coat peered up at them. ‘What’s this racket?’

‘Maria Alexandrovna, we would like some tea.’

Tea, she huffed. Tea – when the police had taken over her house! She kept a respectable house . . . Olga cut her short:
‘Maria Alexandrovna – the samovar. Some tea, as soon as possible, please.’

A few minutes later Anna was allowed to visit the landlady’s kitchen with one of the constables and returned with a large pot and glasses. They tidied the sitting room, clearing the floor, replacing the drawers, making it as homely as possible, and Morozov fed the little stove and placed some chairs before it.

‘All right,’ he whispered to the two women. ‘This is our chance. Quick – in the kitchen and remember to take your boots off.’

A moment later, they heard the front door open and Morozov’s silvery voice inviting the policemen to step inside for a glass of hot tea. ‘It’s so cold out here. Please join us. My wife is preparing a little food.’

The seconds ticked by, Anna’s ear pressed to the kitchen door. Surely they were not going to refuse. She felt dizzy with the strain, bent double, and both of them in their heavy winter coats.

‘Talk, we must talk normally,’ Olga whispered at her shoulder.

But before Anna could think of something to say there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

‘Sit by the stove,’ they heard Morozov say. The sitting-room door clicked shut.

‘Now!’ Olga hissed.

‘No. Wait until they’ve settled.’

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds, then Anna began to gently lift the latch on the door. One of the policemen was talking, there were footsteps – Morozov would be serving the tea – and now some laughter. Slowly, lightly, they shuffled along the corridor in their stockinged feet. Morozov had left the apartment door ajar. On the landing, they put on their boots then stood anxiously by, Olga gripping Anna’s arm, the keys ready in her hand: she would have to be quick. After a tense few minutes they heard Morozov’s voice. ‘They’re in the kitchen. I’ll fetch them.’ Perhaps
one of the policemen said something or he heard them get to their feet, for a second later Morozov was thumping down the short corridor towards them. He almost fell through the door, grabbing the handle as he did so. It slammed shut behind him, but not before Anna heard the policemen cursing and stumbling after him. Olga was fumbling with the lock.

‘For God’s sake . . .’ Morozov shouted. ‘Have you done it?’

‘Yes, yes! It’s locked.’

Bang. A shoulder hit the door: ‘Open it now! Open it!’ Then another crash as the heel of a heavy boot struck the frame. ‘Open it!’

Morozov gave Anna a shove: ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ The shouting and the banging chased up and down the stairs, and on the landing below the landlady was at her door. ‘What are you doing, you can’t leave them . . .’

‘In the name of the executive committee of The People’s Will,’ said Morozov, cutting across her, ‘I warn you, Maria Alexandrovna, if you value your life you will leave them there. Do you understand me?’

He did not wait for an answer.

They thundered down the stairs and burst through the door at the back of the building into the snowy yard. Olga took Anna by the arm and they walked beneath the carriage arch and on to Nevsky.

‘We’ll go to the flat in the Izmailovsky district,’ said Morozov. He stepped off the pavement to hail a passing cab. Seconds later its sleigh blades slithered to a stop. ‘We’ll all squeeze in somehow,’ and he reached for Anna’s hand to help her to a seat.

‘No. I’ll join you later,’ she said.

Olga grabbed Anna by the shoulders and turned her quickly to look her in the eye. ‘You must come with us!’

‘There’s something I have – I want to do,’ she said, correcting herself.

‘What?’

‘It’s my concern.’

‘Everything we do is the party’s concern.’

‘You don’t believe that, Olga. You and Nikolai . . .’

‘I do,’ she said, sharply.

‘There isn’t time to argue now. The police could be here any moment. You go. Go now. I’ll see you later.’

‘We must go,’ said Morozov, pulling at Olga’s elbow. ‘Be careful, Anna. You’re an “illegal” now.’

She did not wait to see the cab pull away but walked on quickly, turning off the prospekt into a side street. No money, no clothes but the ones she was wearing, no home, no papers and wanted by the police, and yet she still felt the exhilaration of freedom won at great risk. And a thought, a hope had planted itself almost unnoticed in the tense hours of that day. It had flashed through her mind at the police station and again when she was cowering in the kitchen, and as the cab pulled alongside them on the prospekt it had been quite impossible to ignore.

T
he front rolled westwards after midnight, leaving Peter still and fresh for a few precious hours beneath a blanket of virgin snow. It was as if the wind had swept the filth and stench of a million people from the city, plastering the fissures in its buildings white and filling its rutted streets, bathing all in the fairy tale light of the late November moon. Gazing back across the frozen Neva, Hadfield was struck again by its beauty and his great good fortune. What was life in London to this? He had spent the happiest of evenings with his cousin, Alexandra, and their friends from the embassy, careering at breakneck speed down the great ice slide that had been erected in the Field of Mars. Not content to leave it there, they had dined well then set out on an exhilarating troika ride, wrapped together in bearskin rugs, silver harness bells tinkling, the driver whooping wildly and cracking the whip to warn the careless that they stepped from the pavement at their peril. His head a little fusty with vodka, happy and excited still, Hadfield had delivered his cousin to the English Embankment in a cab, then set off for home on foot. By the time he reached the end of Line 7, he was beginning to regret his own impetuosity, conscious of the hour and his list at the surgery later that day. The snow had drifted a little against the wall of the House of Academics, forcing him from the pavement into the street. It was only two minutes’ walk to his apartment, but for those minutes he was always on his guard, watchful, alive to the crunch of boots in the snow, careful to give doorways and courtyards a wide berth. Line 7 was quiet and badly lit and footpads had been known to make use of the
winter darkness to set upon rich students reeling home along it after a good night out. His uncle had insisted he take a stout stick, and Hadfield made a point of changing his grip on its handle in case he had to wield it as a club. But the street was empty and he did not see or hear anything at all out of the ordinary. Disgusted with himself for his timidity, he stood on the step of Number 7 stamping and scraping the snow from his boots. It was after one o’clock and the dvornik would be sleeping or in a drunken stupor. Reaching into his coat pocket for his keys, he was turning towards the door when he caught a movement at the corner of his eye.