To Kill a Tsar (38 page)

T
hey were the wrong couple to run the cheese shop. Bogdanovich looked the part all right, with his broad face and spade-shaped beard, the colour of a burnished samovar, but he knew nothing of commerce. The executive committee had chosen Yakimova for the role of shopkeeper’s wife because of her ‘democratic’ manner. She had the face of a badly nourished factory girl and an accent that marked her as someone from the Vyatka province. But ‘Bashka’ – as she was known to all – knew even less about running a business.

It had been open a week when Anna Kovalenko visited it for the first time, and they had already begun work on the tunnel. The Malaya Sadovaya was a busy little thoroughfare with civil servants passing to the justice building at the end of the street, shoppers and crowded taverns. The men working on the tunnel began long after closing and they left before dawn to avoid arousing the suspicion of the neighbouring tradespeople. But Anna went during business hours, her basket of tools covered by a neat little cloth. The shop was empty but for Bashka, who was arranging her cheeses on the counter.

‘And how is your husband, Madame Kobozev?’ Anna asked, placing the basket on the floor and sliding it beneath the counter with her foot.

‘Not as attentive as I would like,’ said Bashka, and she burst into an infectiously earthy laugh.

‘That’s because he’s a gentleman – far too good for you.’

‘And don’t you think women like us have something to teach a gentleman,’ said Bashka with a wink and a mischievous chuckle.

‘You mean about the rights of working women?’

Bashka chuckled again: ‘My rights are very important to me.’

‘And your business too, I hope?’

Bashka’s face crumpled in a troubled frown: ‘Not so good. Spirits are low. I’ve told them it must spur us on.’

The party was still reeling from the news that Kviatokovsky and Presnyakov would be hanged, and the rest had been sentenced to a lifetime of labour in the east.

Bashka bent low to pick up the basket: ‘Can you mind the shop? I’ll be back in a minute.’

‘Is that wise?’ asked Anna. ‘I might run off with your cheese.’ She was only half in jest. It was not businesslike behaviour: ‘What if a customer comes into the shop?’

‘Shout. But no one will come in. The only visitors we get are the other merchants.’

She slipped through the door at the back to the cellar, where Bogdanovich was clearing earth from the new tunnel. Anna used the time to examine the shop front, checking the stock, lifting the lids of the barrels. Some of the cheese was hard and barely edible, and a merchant with so little stock would surely go out of business in weeks. If they did not run the place properly and turn in a profit, the other tradesmen would begin to talk.

‘Here we are, miss,’ Bashka said as she swung her broad hips through the door and up to the counter. ‘Some smelly Roquefort for you. It’s French.’ And she handed the basket to Anna.

‘And how much is your French cheese?’ Anna asked.

‘Whatever you want to give,’ she replied with a smile.

Anna shook her head with disapproval: ‘Is that what you say to all your customers? Not much of a capitalist,
are you? Have you visited the other cheese merchants?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Bashka.

‘Well, you must.’ And Anna tried to explain why it was important to behave like proper bourgeois shopkeepers fretting over every kopek, but there was a distant look in Bashka’s eyes.

‘Vera Figner was here,’ she said at last, ‘pretending to sell me some Gorgonzola. She wanted to know about you and the Englishman.’

‘What business is it of Vera’s?’ Anna snapped, her blue eyes dancing like sun on hard-packed ice. ‘And what do you know of him anyway?’

Bashka hesitated, startled and a little frightened by the vehemence of her challenge: ‘There was talk. Your comrades were concerned . . . no one blames you.’

‘Blames me for what?’

‘How were you to know he was an informer?’ Bashka rocked defensively behind her counter.

‘Informer? Don’t be stupid, he’s—’ But Anna could not finish. A cold sickness gripped her. ‘What has he done to him?’

‘Are you all right? Look, sit here . . .’ Bashka lifted the counter, dragging a stool to the front of the shop.

‘What has he done?’ Anna repeated.

‘Who?’ Bashka was standing in front of her with the stool, pink with embarrassment.

‘Mikhailov. What has he done?’ Anna reached for her, digging her nails into Bashka’s shoulder. ‘What? Tell me.’

‘You’re hurting me.’

But Anna was possessed by fear and a determination to know the truth and she began to shake her, pushing her hard against the counter.

‘Please, Anna.’ Bashka sank trembling to her knees. ‘Please.’

Anna did not reply. Her shoes clicked sharply on the
stone-flagged floor, and a moment later the doorbell tinkled and the shop filled with the bustle of the street.

Alexander Mikhailov was not in the best of humours. He had finished his piece on the execution after midnight and delivered it to the press at a respectable hour of the morning. The police screw was tightening and, but for the urgency, he would not have risked visiting the apartment on Podolskaya Street by day. And so it was galling to find that Anna was not at home. The rest of the printing family were busy with the new edition of
The People’s Will
but none of them could be trusted with what would be a most sensitive task. Anna would have been the ideal person to slip in and out of the photographer’s shop. He waited at the apartment for a while, drinking too many glasses of cheap black tea, while he considered what to do. All the photographers had been warned by the gendarmes to be on the watch for anything that might be of use for illegal propaganda. A police spy had followed him to the little shop on the Zagorodny and would know he had asked for copies of portraits of Kviatkovsky and Presnyakov. But someone had to pick up the photographs. Copies to Hartmann in Paris, copies to their friends in Berlin and London – a copy to Karl Marx – and copies to all the newspapers in St Petersburg; they needed the pictures by this evening.

The sky was a dingy winter grey, and lazy wet snowflakes that melted as they fell were sweeping along the street. Mikhailov turned up his collar in the doorway then set off at a brisk place. It was lunch time and most of the people he passed were hurrying home in the opposite direction, their heads bent into the wind. At the junction with Malodestskoselsky Prospekt, the stallholders were gathered round a crackling yellow fire with no thought to business. A scantily clad girl, her thin face thick with cheap make-up, stepped on
to the street from a doorway and gave him a cold and hungry look. He walked on, avoiding her eye. He would take a cab from the Zagorodny to Madame Dubrovina’s comfortable home. Perhaps she could be of assistance. But as he was approaching the end of the street, he saw Anna’s neat figure hurrying towards him, the plain burgundy scarf he had given her when they were still friends pulled tightly about her face. She appeared distracted, and had almost rushed past him when he spoke her name.

She stopped, startled, then her expression hardened with contempt. ‘You. You – what have you done to him? Tell me.’ She spat it at him with a fury he had not known in her before.

‘What on earth . . .’ For once he was lost for words.

‘What have you done?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he hissed at her. What was she doing berating him in the street? They would be arrested.

‘Don’t tell me to shut up. What did you do?’ She pulled her scarf away from her face. ‘Have you hurt him?’ There was a wildness in her eyes.

‘No.’

‘Liar! What have you done?’ She gave him a shove.

‘For God’s sake, Anna!’

Passers-by were looking at them. He would have to send her away again. She was a danger to the party. Reaching out for her arm, he said: ‘Anna, please. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but he’s alive. Now can we go somewhere else? This is not the place.’

‘Tell me, liar. Tell me now.’

‘He was an informer. The executive committee needed to deal with him.’ His voice was harsh, matter-of-fact.

‘You murdered him.’ She tried to slap his face but he caught her wrist and twisted her arm down and she let out a little gasp of pain.

‘He’s alive, didn’t I say so?’ he hissed at her. ‘Control yourself. Remember the party. Remember your duty.’

‘Let go of me, you bastard!’ She began to scream: ‘Help! Someone please help!’

He let her go: ‘Please. He’s alive . . . I did what I thought best for the party.’

This time she did manage to slap him with ringing force across the face. ‘You did what was best for you.’

‘You were blind to the risk you were taking,’ he said, touching his cheek. ‘The Director was sure he was—’

‘Liar,’ she said again. ‘I will speak to the executive committee. I will tell them the truth. You are a liar.’

She stared at him for a few seconds with an expression of contempt, even hatred, on her face, then walked away in the opposite direction, looking neither left nor right, proudly upright. And Mikhailov walked on too, ignoring the dvornik who had been watching them from a doorway on the other side of the street and the old lady at the curtains of her apartment. He could feel the imprint of Anna’s hand on his cheek and he was shaking with quiet rage.

He turned on to the Zagorodny Prospekt and began walking east towards the cab stand in front of the station. But when he reached it he decided to go a little further. His encounter with Anna had disturbed him more than he cared to admit, even to himself. Perhaps the exercise and the cool air would restore his equanimity. A regiment of horse was being put through its paces, kicking up the dirt of the parade ground where Alexander Soloviev had met his end on the scaffold. What had become of the Anna who had hurried from the square with news of their first attempt to execute the tsar? How could she think it was something personal? He was still pondering what he should do with her twenty minutes later, after walking almost the entire length of Zagorodny. Before him was the extravagant yellow and white bell tower of the
Church of Our Lady of Vladimir, and in its shadow the russet-coloured block where the photographer lived and rented his premises. Next to it a busy market was spilling on to the pavement, street traders in traditional belted coats with baskets from the country at their feet, a beardless youth in a tall hat pushing a handcart of rags, a vodka seller offering cheap spirit to a passing work gang. Mikhailov stepped off the pavement into a doorway, where he could observe the entrance to the photographer’s studio. Zhelyabov and the others had urged him not to go near the place, but now he was here he could not pass it by. He lit a cigarette and leant against the wall to scrutinise with an expert eye the stallholders and their customers, searching for a furtive conversation, a tell-tale exchange of glances. He was surprised to find that his hand was still shaking. Surely he had always acted in the best interests of the party, even if it meant making difficult choices? He forced himself to put the matter out of his mind.

‘Hey, you, want to earn some money?’

The street urchin looked at him suspiciously. He was about ten years old, thin, dressed in a ragged grey coat and battered calf-length boots, his head and hands bare.

‘I saw you looking into the window of that pastry shop. This would be enough for something special with cream.’ Reaching inside his coat, Mikhailov took twenty kopeks from his waistcoat pocket.

All the boy needed to do was to stand in front of the entrance opposite and look inside the photographer’s shop. To collect the money he would have to describe anyone he could see and anything out of the ordinary. ‘Make a good job of it and there might even be a little more.’

The boy was back ten minutes later with his grubby palm out. ‘Just the old photographer. A woman went in and he took out a big book. He wrote in it and then she left. That’s all,’ he said with a shrug.

‘How do you know he was the photographer?’

‘Because I see him every day,’ the boy said with a cheeky smile.

Mikhailov paid him the twenty, and ten kopeks more.

The old man was still at his ledger when Mikhailov stepped through the door, and did not look up until he dropped his kidskin gloves on the counter. He lifted his grey head and his expression changed in an instant from an easy trade smile to shock, then something close to abject terror. Before he was able to open his mouth, Mikhailov had turned on his heels and was making for the door. What a reckless fool he had been. He knew he had only seconds. Seconds. Walk out. Keep walking. Someone was moving at the window. He heard the clattering of boots behind him as men crowded into the front of the shop. As he reached for the handle and pulled the door, the bell tinkled cruelly.

‘Haven’t you forgotten these?’

It was not the photographer’s crackly old voice but a policeman’s. And there was another on the pavement outside. Mikhailov closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, his shoulders sagging a little.

‘You’re quite right. I did forget to collect my pictures,’ he said, turning back to the shop. ‘Fyodor Ivanovich Korvin at your service.’

A burly plain-clothes officer stepped from behind the counter with a gun in one hand and the photographs in the other.

‘Major Vladimir Alexandrovich Barclay at yours.’

The doorbell tinkled again and Mikhailov was aware of gendarmes at his back. The plain-clothes agent gave a nod and someone seized him roughly from behind.

‘Can I ask what grounds you have for this behaviour?’ he asked indignantly.

A gendarme was unbuttoning his coat, checking his jacket pocket for a weapon and his papers.

‘What grounds?’ Barclay asked, taking a step towards him. ‘What grounds? You are Mikhailov. I think that’s enough, don’t you?’

3 NOVEMBER 1880

F
rederick. It’s me.’

She was standing beneath the little silver birch at the entrance to the hospital, her mouth and nose hidden by a burgundy scarf. It was dark – eight o’clock – the ground white with frost, and she was shivering.