To Kill a Tsar (28 page)

Zhelyabov struck a match and put it to the punch and a flame began to dance about the bowl. The earnest fellow who had called the room to order pulled out his dagger and laid it across the bowl. Zhelyabov did the same, and then another man and another, as if enacting a pagan blood ritual, gold and red
shimmering on their blades. Then one of the men began to hum a lively folk tune.

‘It’s a song from the Ukraine,’ Anna whispered, her eyes shining with pleasure.

The candles were lit again and the strong rum punch served to all.

‘Here.’ A petite young woman soberly dressed in black offered him a glass. ‘Dr Hadfield, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ He seemed to tower over her.

‘My name is Sophia Perovskaya. I’m glad to make your acquaintance.’

So, this was the daughter of the former governor general of the city. She was rather plain, with an oval face and high forehead. There was a girlish innocence in her expression that was difficult to reconcile with her reputation. He had heard her name spoken at the best parties, invariably with a disapproving and incredulous shake of the head.

‘Anna says you love our country and that you’re a socialist,’ Sophia said, her blue eyes wide, her gaze uncomfortably intense.

‘Yes, yes, I am.’

‘Let us hope Russia changes for the better in the year to come.’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you will play a part in that transformation.’

He gave a slight nod, hoping this would satisfy her. One of the comrades called for music to general approval, and for a while Hadfield was spared awkward questions by some hearty folk-singing. At midnight there were kisses and they drank to freedom for the homeland. The earnest young man who had been the first to place his dagger over the punch – his name was Nikolai Morozov – predicted the new year would bring an end to ‘slavery’. Then, from the edge of the circle, the man Hadfield knew as ‘Alexander’ spoke. He must have slipped into
the apartment just before midnight because he was wearing his heavy black overcoat, wet with melting snowflakes.

‘To Alexander Soloviev. To our comrades in prison, to “The People’s Will” and to our revolution.’

As Hadfield raised his glass with the rest, he could sense Alexander’s sharp little eyes upon him, and he made a point of holding his gaze. He was heavier than Hadfield remembered him, his fine frock coat stretched tightly across his chest, that rarest of men, a plump revolutionary. He saluted Hadfield very deliberately with his glass before someone plucked at his sleeve and he was obliged to look away.

The new year ticked on into the early hours. Anna showed no inclination to leave. ‘No doubt you believe it your duty to be with your comrades even to the end of a party?’ Hadfield risked teasing her. Anna gave a little frown, but the corners of her mouth twitched as she struggled to suppress a smile. A woman called Olga suggested a séance and a large sheet of paper was conjured up from somewhere, the letters of the alphabet written around its edge.

‘No one believes in this superstitious nonsense, do they?’ he whispered to Anna.

‘I do,’ she said crossly.

‘But I thought you were an atheist.’

‘I am.’

‘But you believe in this?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, a little.’

They took their places at the table, a saucer upside down on the paper, and by the light of a flickering candle they tried to summon the spirit of Tsar Nicholas.

‘We must ask him how his grandson will die,’ Olga whispered.

‘Why do we want to spoil our new year by inviting an old tyrant to join us?’ asked Zhelyabov.

Olga hissed at him to be quiet. ‘How will Alexander meet his death? How will the tsar meet his death?’ she intoned.

The saucer began to move, dragging Hadfield’s forefinger across the table. The whole thing seemed not only ridiculous but in very poor taste, and he was grateful for the anonymity of darkness. For ten minutes the saucer glided meaninglessly about the table as if struggling to find a common will and then it moved to ‘P’ and ‘O’ and the letter ‘I’ in front of Hadfield, then to ‘S’ and to ‘O’ again, and finally ‘N’. POISON.

‘But that’s impossible!’ said Olga.

Hadfield could not help smiling: how very ‘old Russia’.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ said someone else. No one at the table believed the tsar would die from poisoning because it was not a weapon the executive committee of The People’s Will would ever approve.

Zhelyabov tried to laugh it off: ‘What can we expect from such nonsense?’ But it seemed to Hadfield that instead of raising spirits the séance had only succeeded in dampening them.

‘It’s almost three o’clock. We must leave,’ Alexander said from the darkness beyond the table. ‘But first – the
Marseillaise
.’

‘Do you know the words, Doctor?’ asked Sophia Perovskaya.

Yes, Hadfield knew the words well and he joined with the singing, softly and cautiously, lest the neighbours heard their call to arms. But he was conscious of Anna silent beside him, shifting uncomfortably, the revolutionary from the village who did not know the words to a socialist anthem but believed spirits could be summoned to a drunken table. And he felt a warm surge of love for her difference and reached for her hand.

They left the party in pairs and threes to avoid the unwelcome attention of the street superintendent, and at last he was alone with her. As soon as he could he pulled her into the shadow of a yard and bent to kiss her tenderly. ‘Happy New Year, my darling’.

‘Am I your darling?’

‘How can you doubt it?’

They spent the rest of the night wrapped in each other’s
arms on the mattress in the old Ukrainian woman’s cell. There had been other women in Switzerland and London but none that had touched him like Anna. She was always with him, every minute, every second, at the core of his being. It troubled him that he could not understand why it was so. There was a darkness in her, fragility, confusion, a stubbornness beyond reason. What was it she felt for him? She did not say, and he wondered if she knew. She was capable of slipping from submissiveness to defiance and intemperate anger in little more than the blink of an eye. And yet there was a femininity and subtle intelligence there, too, that was deeply attractive. Lying beside her, the early sun dropping down the wall opposite, Hadfield knew that for better or worse their fates were bound together – and that this new year marked a new phase in his life.

Yes, it’s a sin for revolutionaries to start a family. Men and women both must stand alone, like soldiers under a hail of bullets. But in your youth, you somehow forget that revolutionaries’ lives are measured not in years, but in days and hours.

Olga Liubatovich,
Member of The People’s Will

You can call [terror] the heroic method but it is also the most practical . . . if you keep on with it unceasingly. Occasional individual attacks may alarm the public, but they do not effectively demoralise an administration. You must make attack after attack uninterruptedly and relentlessly against one fixed and prearranged target.

Andrei Zhelyabov,
Member of the executive committee of
The People’s Will

‘. . . The Minister of Justice has agreed to an amnesty for your comrades.’

The little man with the wispy red hair and goatee beard nodded his head calmly, but beneath the table his hands were wrestling anxiously with a pencil. He was dressed in prison greys several sizes too large, his head and shoulders hunched forward as if cowering from an invisible presence. Perhaps it was the ghost of his irascible father – he had spoken of him often to Dobrshinsky in the course of their conversations – or the rough Jew-hating neighbours of his childhood in Kiev. Perhaps he was bent by guilt and the long shadow of Alexander Mikhailov, or by exhaustion, his senses blunted after days in the interrogation room, coaxed and cajoled, his illusions stripped from him one by one.

‘And I have your word,’ Goldenberg said at last. ‘I have your word they will be safe? If even one hair on the head of a comrade is hurt, I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘You know I respect your cause. I admire your courage. We trust each other. Here . . .’ The chief investigator picked up the vodka bottle on the table between them and poured a little into two small glasses. ‘To reconciliation. To reform. To a new year for Russia and an end to confusion,’ he said, raising his own in salute. Then, turning to the clerk at the table in the corner of the interrogation room, ‘The last few sentences.’

The young clerk ran his forefinger along the page of his open log book: ‘. . .
discussed my idea for the assassination of the emperor with Alexander Mikhailov and others
. . .’

‘A group of us met and we—’

‘Who?’

‘Mikhailov, a Pole called Kobilianski, Kviatkovsky, Zunderlich, Soloviev . . .’

‘Anna Kovalenko?’

‘Yes. I wanted to do it and the Pole volunteered too, but Mikhailov said the tsar should be killed by a Russian – not a Pole or a Jew. So Alexander Soloviev agreed to do it and I helped him prepare.’

Dobrshinsky gave a little nod.

‘But I wouldn’t have missed,’ said Goldenberg with sudden passion.

‘And Anna Kovalenko – she was there with Soloviev in the square?’

Goldenberg licked his lips, then, lifting his right hand to them, began biting at his thumb nail. So vain, so weak, so anxious for praise and attention, Dobrshinsky wondered how a clever man like Mikhailov had made such a mistake.

‘I must know the truth to bring this to an end as we agreed,’ he said quietly, leaning forward at the table in an effort to hold eye contact with the prisoner.

‘Anna was there to report on what happened, that’s all,’ said Goldenberg reluctantly.

‘And Bronstein, how did you discover . . . ?’

‘The informer? I don’t know. That was Mikhailov. Mikhailov knows everything. He has his own sources. A man he calls the Director who he says guides him.’

‘And this man works for the police?’

Goldenberg shrugged: ‘I don’t know, but Mikhailov seems to know a lot about the police and the Third Section.’

Before Dobrshinsky could shape the next question there was
an insistent knock at the door and a prison clerk entered unbidden bearing a note from the chief prosecutor.

Count Vyacheslav von Plehve had squeezed his ample frame behind the untidy desk in the assistant governor’s office. ‘This is in strict confidence, but I wanted you to know at once,’ he said, indicating with a wave of his plump hand that Dobrshinsky should take the chair opposite. ‘There are to be sweeping changes, a new Supreme Security Commission, and heads are to roll. I think it is certain General Drenteln will be replaced at the Third Section.’ The chief prosecutor placed his elbows on the desk, his fingers at his lips, a courtroom silence.

His news did not elicit a flicker of a response. Dobrshinsky resented being summoned from an interrogation to hear rumours of a new council, gossip about who was rising up the empire’s greasy pole and who was falling. His orders were to keep His Majesty alive. Service politics was a distraction.

The count may have had a sense of what he was thinking because he began to wriggle uncomfortably behind the desk.

‘The investigation,’ he said at last. ‘Are you any closer to arresting the leaders of this nihilist party?’

‘We have Kviatkovsky.’

‘Kviatkovsky?’

‘We took the plans for the Winter Palace from his flat,’ said Dobrshinsky.

‘The police have found nothing. They’ve searched the palace from top to bottom a dozen times, and all the neighbouring buildings,’ said von Plehve brusquely. ‘Every morning they check to see if any of the stones in the square have been lifted and they search the servants. If you’ve fresh evidence they will be overjoyed to hear it.’

‘The People’s Will may have called off the attack when they discovered we had Kviatkovsky in custody.’

Pushing his chair back sharply, the chief prosecutor rose and
walked over to the tiled stove in the corner of the room and bent to the heat. ‘Anton Frankzevich, we need to demonstrate we are making progress to the chairman of the new Supreme Security Commission when he is appointed.’ He paused again, then said with quiet emphasis, ‘It’s important we make a good impression. Your future will depend upon it. Ah, you smile, but it’s true.’

‘I can say with confidence we are making progress,’ said Dobrshinsky.

‘What sort of progress? The Jew?’

‘I have persuaded him terror is slowing the pace of reform. That the emperor wants to introduce a democratic assembly and freedom of the press but he can’t be seen to bow to terror.’

‘And you think he believes you?’ asked the count.

‘Yes.’

‘Is he mad or simple?’

‘He thinks I’m a liberal and I can be trusted to tell the truth.’ Dobrshinsky paused, a thoughtful frown on his face. ‘He wants to believe he can play a role in shaping Russia. I’m trying to convince him that his part is in persuading his comrades to stop, that this is the only way to bring about reform. Oh, and I have assured him none of them will be harmed.’

‘So he’s a simpleton.’

‘Lonely, naive, weak, vain . . .’

‘So when can we look forward to . . .’

‘Arrests? I have names, descriptions, and we can tease more from him – more names and, I hope, some addresses. But these things take time,’ said Dobrshinsky. ‘We have a little way to go.’

‘Good, good, but not too much time,’ said the count with a resigned nod of the head. ‘Keep me informed. Now, if you will excuse me, I am expected at the ministry.’

The chief prosecutor had grasped the door handle and
was on the point of stepping out when Dobrshinsky spoke again.

‘There is one thing more. Your friend, the English doctor, Dr Hadfield . . .’

The count interrupted him crossly. ‘He’s no more than an acquaintance. I met him at the British embassy. He made a very poor impression on me.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Dobrshinsky. ‘Goldenberg remembers him well. He was at the woman Volkonsky’s.’

‘I see. So do you think he’s a spy?’ Von Plehve seemed excited by the possibility.