Twelve (23 page)

Dmitry and I headed off in the other direction and soon caught sight of Ioann once again. He had turned west along the embankment between the Kremlin and the Moskva.

Ioann's travels of that night were not much different from those of Matfei the previous night, or of Foma the night before that. His chosen prey – like Foma's – was from a concentrated group of soldiers. During the night he found three separate barracks, two of which I'd mentioned when I'd briefed him and Foma a couple of days earlier. He slipped quietly into each one, making no sound as he entered or as he killed. We made no investigation ourselves of what he had done or whom he had killed. We both knew full well what had taken place – unlike Vadim, we required no further physical evidence.

Waiting and watching as Ioann went about his activities summarized for me the ambivalence of my attitude to the Oprichniki. My intent was to kill Ioann as soon as the opportunity arose and I should have been mortified at each killing that my delay allowed him to perpetrate. In reality, I could only be happy at those deaths. They were the deaths of French invaders. Their deaths were the very purpose for which we had summoned the Oprichniki to Moscow. My desire to kill Ioann was based solely on what he was, not on what he did. I supported him in his actions and condemned him for his nature. It was the exact opposite of why I had allowed Maks to die.

After his three repasts, Ioann's movement had become less stealthy. As I had observed in Matfei the previous night, once their hunger had been sated, then the Oprichniki became a little less feral in their movements. His walk was more upright – more proud – and, were it not for the circumstances in which the city found itself, he might have been mistaken for a Moscow socialite returning from a night of gaming or dancing.

With Dmitry's assistance, following was far easier than it had been alone. In a city, there is an established way for two men to follow another. The pursuers never need get near their quarry; they never even have to take a single step along the path that he has trod. While one remains stationary to watch where the target is going, the other runs down a sidestreet to get ahead of him. Once he has made it to a new viewpoint, the roles are switched. The man who is being followed never sees movement and never knows that he is being pursued.

This approach was complicated by the fact that I was urgently trying to evade Dmitry whilst still keeping track of Ioann, because I knew that Dmitry would try to thwart me in my goal of destroying at least one more of the repulsive creatures that night. Dmitry seemed to guess that I was planning something and so he spent as much of his time pursuing me as he did helping me to pursue Ioann.

Despite these intricacies, and the steady rain that began to fall during the night, we did not lose sight of Ioann. His resting place turned out to be not far from where we had first met him and Iuda earlier that night; close to Kutznetsky Bridge, the French quarter that had still managed to escape the flames. It was an address in a tightly built area, where the boundaries between separate properties within a block were so indistinct that one front door could have led to any one of three or more homes. Remarkably, these buildings too were as yet untouched by the fires which had already consumed many of their neighbours. Ioann crept up the steps to a door and slipped inside.

'Any more you want to see?' asked Dmitry, unenthusiastically.

'Yes,' I replied. 'I want to see where he goes.'

'He went in there. He's not going anywhere else tonight. It'll be dawn in an hour.'

But I was already setting off to see precisely where in the building Ioann lay. The fact that I had not been able to shake Dmitry off my back was not going to be a permanent impediment to my goal. If I could see where he slept, then I would have the benefit of a full day of sunlight to come back and slaughter Ioann in a manner of my choosing.

I reached the doorway, still ajar as Ioann had left it, and peeped inside. Within, I could see nothing but an empty hallway. I heard footsteps behind me. It was Dmitry, clearly (and wisely) unwilling to leave me alone with Ioann for even a few minutes.

'You see anything?' he asked. I shook my head and pushed open the door. There were three doors off the hallway, plus a flight of stairs. Beneath the stairs, open, was a fourth doorway which, undoubtedly, led down to the cellar. That surely was where Ioann would have gone.

More prepared than the previous night, I had brought with me a candle, which I lit. I held it ahead of me as we descended the stairs. Dmitry was close behind me, his hand against my back. A sudden fear possessed me. If we were to encounter Ioann – and maybe other Oprichniki as well – on whose side would Dmitry place himself? Was that hand on my back there to steady and reassure me, or would it be the case that if I turned to flee the
voordalaki
we encountered, Dmitry's hand would thrust me pitilessly into their midst? Dmitry had saved my life seven years before. We had been the closest of friends before that and ever since. I had named my son after him. It was a shocking reflection on one or both of us that at this moment I could doubt him.

At the bottom of the stairs, my candle illuminated on one side an archway into a small cellar and on the other a closed double door. A brief glance through the archway proved that there was nothing there. The ceiling was partially collapsed and no one had bothered to repair it in years. It was a miracle that no dinner party from the room above – tables, chairs, tureens, plates, servants, guests and all – had ever fallen through and landed in there. None had, nor had Ioann made his bed there.

Dmitry remained on the stairs, again almost deliberately blocking my exit. I pulled open the left-hand door and peered into the darkness beyond. This cellar was larger than the other; less dilapidated but still unused by the occupants of the house. No windows shone any light into it, and there were no other exits but the one at which I stood. Much as I had seen twenty-four hours previously, in the centre of the floor lay two coffins. This time they were not the makeshift crates of the night before. Whoever slept here slept in luxury. The coffins were solid oak, with brass handles. Where the vampires had obtained them, I could not guess.

I walked over towards them. Halfway across the room I heard a sound at my back. I had just walked into a cellar with only one exit. Anyone who had been expecting me could easily have hidden beside the doorway and stepped out only now to seal the trap. I turned. It was Dmitry, peeping through the doorway. For a man so familiar with the ways of the Oprichniki, he was remarkably timid about encountering them in their own environment. I beckoned to him to follow me, but he stayed where he was.

I took a step towards the first coffin. It was empty. Stepping over that, I looked into the second. There lay Ioann, his face the same rosy flush of repletion that I had seen in Matfei. Ioann had not even bothered to pull the coffin lid across him. In that windowless cellar, there was little chance of any sunlight disrupting his sleep.

'What's in them?' hissed Dmitry from the door.

I dared not make even that little noise. I simply mouthed to him. 'Ioann's in this one. The other's empty.'

'Then let's get the hell out of here before the other one comes back.' Dmitry spoke louder this time, and once he had spoken, he was gone. I could only defer to his experience and assume that these creatures did not like their slumbers to be disturbed.

I went back up the stairs to the hallway and then out of the front door, looking around to see where Dmitry was. I heard a hiss and looked to its source. It was Dmitry, settled atop the low roof of a building on the other side of the street where he could observe this building unnoticed. I ran across and climbed on to the roof to lie beside him.

'Not a moment too soon,' he said, pointing towards the far end of the street. The unmistakable form of Iuda had appeared. Unlike Ioann, he had retained his stealthy creeping posture. Perhaps he had not eaten. Perhaps he was wise enough to understand the continued need for caution once he had. Whatever the reason, he kept to the walls and to the shadows throughout as he progressed down the street.

'No sign of Vadim, though,' whispered Dmitry smugly. 'Evidently he lost track of him.'

'Either that or he's so good at avoiding detection that he's keeping hidden from us as well as Iuda,' I replied. For my part, I wasn't sure which was more likely. Vadim was a little older than the rest of us, and his skills in this sort of work had never been quite up to the abilities of me, Dmitry or Maks. Maks had always excelled at it – both in hunting and in avoiding being hunted. No one could get close to Maks unless he wanted them to – unless he trusted them. I pulled myself up. It was another train of thought that I did not wish to follow.

Iuda had reached the steps of the house. With a swift glance around, he went inside.

'I trust you don't want to follow him too, and check where he's going, Aleksei?' said Dmitry.

I smiled. 'No, I think we can make a guess on that one.'

We climbed down from the roof and headed back up the street.

'Well,' said Dmitry, 'if Vadim's out there, he's bound to see us now.'

But of Vadim there was no sign. 'Iuda must have given him the slip,' I said.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon as we turned the corner into the next road. Iuda had left his homecoming to the latest possible moment.

'Shall we go and steal some breakfast then?' asked Dmitry, in a manner so casual one might have thought that the mysteries of the past few days had never occurred.

'No,' I said. 'I'm tired. I'll see you tonight.' With that I parted company from him, heading in whichever direction he wasn't.

I meandered through the city streets for about an hour. I had all day to return and destroy the creatures that slept in that cellar, but it would feel better to get it over with sooner. Turning back to the blocks of houses to the east of Red Square, I saw the now all too familiar glow of flames. The fires, thanks to the rain of the previous night, were generally dying down. But the rain had now stopped and there were still areas of Moscow that remained untouched by the flames and so were still ripe for the burning.

I began to run back to where Ioann and Iuda lay. Although I had slightly less stomach for killing Iuda than for the others, I still knew that it had to be done. The fire in this area, however, would make my job much easier. Even so, I had to make sure the vampires found no route of escape.

When I got there, half of the block beneath which the two Oprichniki lay was already ablaze. Within five minutes their cellar too would be a furnace. I couldn't remember the folklore in detail, but I did remember the slight fear that Foma had shown when I mentioned the fires to him. I felt quite confident that fire was one of the ways by which vampires might be destroyed. Even if they tried to escape the fire, they would have to leave the safety of the cellar to do so. If the flames did not destroy them, then when they came out into the street, the light of the sun would.

It was still not certain enough, however. Their cellar lay beneath a massive sprawl of buildings. It was conceivable that, with a degree of luck, they might find their way to safety without ever having to expose themselves to daylight. It was a risk I did not want to take.

I raced into the house and down the cellar steps with none of the trepidation that I had shown during the night. The doors behind which the two coffins lay remained closed. Already I could smell smoke creeping in from the neighbouring houses. I looked around me. In the collapsed cellar opposite I saw a short beam of wood. It was perfect. The cellar doors had on them two large handles through which the beam would fit, barring the door securely.

I turned and lifted the wooden beam. When I turned back, I saw that the doors had begun to move. Somebody was beginning to push them from the inside. The vampires were awake and were about to make their bid for freedom. I flung myself against the door, the beam stretched out in front of me with my full weight behind it. Whoever was pushing the doors open was taken completely off guard and they slammed shut. I had only moments before he recovered. I could not both lean against the door and use the beam to bar it permanently. I took my weight away and slipped the beam behind the two iron handles, fearing at every moment that the doors would spew open before I had made them safe. They did not, and now that the beam was in place, they would not. I breathed again.

I knew that I should leave, that I had as much to fear from fire as the vampires did, but I felt the urge to wait, to make certain that they perished. I sat down on the steps. Almost immediately, I heard someone banging against the doors. At first it was the rapid beating of someone demanding attention, then it was the slower, heavier thud of a shoulder trying to break down a barrier. The door held. Soon there was coughing. I could see smoke beginning to seep under the door. I remembered one of my grandmother's stories, wherein a
voordalak
could transform itself into mist or smoke at will. Could that be true? If it was, then I might have expected to see evidence of them doing it already. And still the coughing and the banging continued, so I felt I was safe.

With the fire so close upon me, I decided it was time to leave. As I began climbing the stairs, the beating on the doors returned to the rapid pounding that cried attention. Now, between coughs, it was accompanied by an excruciated scream.

'Help! Help!'

I could not resist smiling at the thought of Iuda or Ioann, whichever it was, dying in such pain after what they had inflicted on others. At a conscious level, it never even occurred to me that the cry was in Russian. Soon the voice lost the strength even to scream. I heard the sound of a body slumping to the ground and the voice relaxed from a scream to a prayer.

'My God, have mercy upon me.'

It was only then that I recognized the voice as Dmitry's.

I
THREW MYSELF BACK DOWN THE STAIRS AND LIFTED THE BAR FROM
the doors. Immediately they swung open and Dmitry's semiconscious body spilled out on to the floor. At the same time, I was hit by a wall of smoke and heat which combined to make breathing an impossibility.

The cellar beyond was in flames. Fire licked across the wooden ceiling and the supporting beams were almost charcoal. Within moments the roof would collapse. One of the coffins was completely ablaze, the other, in which I could just make out Ioann's still-dormant body, was already beginning to blacken in the flames. It had been dragged from its original position towards the door, so that Dmitry's feet almost rested against it.

I bent down over Dmitry. He was breathing shallowly. The backs of his hands and his forearms were burnt. On the right side of his face, his beard had withered away to reveal his scar, surviving intact as the rest of his cheek had blistered under the intense heat. I would have slapped his face to try to bring him round, but given his injuries, I chose to shake him by the shoulders.

He soon began to cough and open his eyes.

'Can you walk?' I asked.

'Yes, yes!' he insisted, pushing himself up to a sitting position.

'We have to get out, and fast.' I went back to the doorway. The stairway down which I had descended was beginning to smoulder. In places its ceiling was already alight. It was still passable and, anyway, it was the only exit we had.

'Come on,' I said, turning back to Dmitry.

'Give me a hand!' Dmitry was further into the cellar than where I had left him. His hands were clasped around a handle on Ioann's coffin and he was straining every sinew to pull it to the door. In his weakness, Dmitry was unable to move it even an inch. 'We have to get them out of here.'

Even if I had wanted to save the Oprichniki – rather than leave them there to be reduced to nothingness by the all-consuming flames – it would have been impossible. Ioann showed no sign of regaining consciousness and there was little hope for even the two of us to manhandle his coffin up the blazing stairway.

'Leave him, Dmitry! You've got to come now!' Dmitry ignored me and continued to haul pathetically at the coffin. I dashed back over to him and pulled him away. He could offer little resistance.

I pushed him towards the door, and he seemed then either to bow to my stronger will or realize that his rescue attempt was hopeless. I herded him in front of me up the stairs. When he was almost at the top, and I was about halfway up, the step beneath my foot gave way. The fire below the wooden stairs was intense – enough to eat away at them without actually sending them up in flames. As my leg fell through the gap, up to my thigh, I felt immediately the heat of the cavity below. My leg began to roast with a pain such as I had never before experienced.

My body twisted and I found myself looking back down the stairs into the cellar. Through the smoke and flame I saw Ioann, awake now and fighting his way towards us. His eyes fell upon me and, with a leap that was unmistakably similar to the movement with which Varfolomei had launched himself on me the previous night, he attacked. He seemed not so much concerned with saving his life as with avenging his and Iuda's deaths, or at least with having one final meal.

As he leapt, the ceiling above him gave way. Burning beams crashed to the ground and took Ioann with them. They would have fallen on me too, pinning me to the steps and trapping me in this inferno, had I not felt Dmitry's strong arms at that moment lift me from where I lay and out into the hallway above. Even there, we were not safe. The whole house was ablaze and on the verge of collapse. We made a dash for the door, one of us supporting the other, though which was which I could not say, and made it outside to the cool, life-giving Moscow air.

The fire had now attracted some attention. A French captain was attempting to organize a human chain of both French soldiers and Russian civilians to get water to the fire. The task was hopeless, but they were intent on it and paid little attention to the two figures that had just bolted out of the house and lay gasping for breath in the street outside.

At length I heard a voice ask, in genuine Muscovite Russian, 'What were you doing in there?'

I raised my head. It was a girl of about fifteen, scruffy, with a dirty face and tightly curled black hair. She was leaning over Dmitry to see if he was unconscious or dead, but speaking to me.

'We were sleeping in there. Our house has already been burnt down. This time it almost got us.' I rolled on to my side towards Dmitry. 'Is he all right?' I asked.

'He's badly burned, but he may live,' she replied, and then went over to the captain who, I presumed, had sent her to find out what we were about. She spoke to him briefly and then returned to us.

'Come with me,' she said, trying to lift Dmitry. I put my shoulder beneath Dmitry's arm and together we managed to raise him to his feet. With whatever slight consciousness he had about him, he managed to take some of his own weight on his legs and so we slowly made progress away from the burning buildings. My own leg continued to feel as though it was roasting within my breeches, but the pain remained constant whether or not I put any weight on it, so it was little hindrance to our progress.

'What's your name?' I asked the girl as we walked.

'Natalia,' she replied.

'I'm Aleksei. This is Dmitry.'

'Why have you stayed in Moscow?' she said.

'Our household packed up and left us behind. He's a chef.' I nodded towards Dmitry. 'I'm a butler.'

'No you're not,' she laughed. I don't know what gave it away, but it was evidently easier to fool dozens of French officers than a single Russian child. 'I reckon you're soldiers.' I made no reply.

'Are you going to kill all the French for us and make the city ours again?'

I smiled to myself. 'That's the plan.'

'Did you start the fires?'

'No,' I replied. 'The fires don't do Moscow any good.'

'They don't do the French any good – that's what matters.'

'You were talking happily enough to that captain.'

'I'd have pushed him into the flames if I could. Not too far in.

I'd rather he burned slowly. I'd hold him down and let my own hand burn if I needed to.'

'So for you it's any price to defeat Bonaparte?'

'They killed my brother. He was a soldier, just like you. Well, not like you. He was just a
ryadovoy
, not an officer.' How she knew we were officers, I could not tell.

'Where did he die?' I asked.

'At Smolensk.'

'What was his name?'

'Fedya. He said the tsar would never let them take Moscow.'

She paused for a moment before adding, 'He was wrong about that.'

'No, I think you just misheard. The tsar will never let them keep Moscow. That's why he sent me and Dmitry here.'

'Just you?' she asked derisively.

'And others.'

'I hear they've let loose a plague that only affects Frenchmen.

Is that true?'

'Would you be happy if it was?'

'I'd be happy to pay any price to get rid of them. I was happy to lose Fedya.' She became suddenly silent. I sensed a tear rising inside her as she comprehended what she had said about her brother. 'Not happy,' she managed to force out with a choked voice, desperate for me to understand what I found so obvious.

'I know what you mean,' I said.

'So remember me when you kill them. And Fedya too. Think of us and don't show any mercy.'

I had no time to reply. We had arrived at her 'home'. It was a shantytown, founded in a churchyard a few blocks to the north of where Natalia had found us. Rough tents and awnings had been set up to accommodate perhaps fifty or sixty people. Around the periphery, a sort of market had formed, selling basic foodstuffs and clothing along with more prestigious items that had no doubt been pilfered from nearby houses. While I could not begrudge them the sale of the valuables left behind by evacuees who had no further use for them, I had seen in Natalia and saw now in the others an emaciation which told me they should not be storing up gold in exchange for food, but quite the reverse. Clothing too, though now it seemed like a source of income, would be sadly missed in the winter months in a town two-thirds consumed by fire, even if the French did leave.

She led us through the marketplace to a central area divided up into small cells by rough curtains of thin linen. She took us into one of them, where a man, aged around fifty, sat cross-legged on the muddy floor, tapping nails into a pair of boots. Around him were scattered a few rudimentary possessions, and on the other side of the cubicle a sheepskin marked the position of their bed; a roughly tied bundle of cloth serving as a pillow. On this, we laid Dmitry.

'This is my father,' said Natalia. 'He's a cobbler,' she added unnecessarily.

I held out my hand. 'Aleksei Ivanovich.'

He held out his in return. 'Boris,' he said. 'Boris Mihailovich.'

'Aleksei is an officer,' said Natalia proudly.

'Then I'm sure he would prefer it if you did not announce the fact too loudly, my dear,' replied Boris Mihailovich. He held out the boots to her. 'Now take these back to Lieutenant . . . whoever it was, and make sure you get from him what he promised.'

Natalia took the boots and scurried off. Throughout my life I had, I hoped, served my country and served my superior officers, but I had never had to work in the way that a valet serves his master or a cobbler serves his customer. The contrast between Natalia's desire for the death of every Frenchman in Moscow and her willingness to take money off them was one that I had not experienced; at least not from that side of the deal. Did Domnikiia, I wondered, harbour the same ambiguous feelings towards her clients? I hoped that, with one exception, she did and I believed truly in that one exception and in its being me, but I would have given much to be with her then and to hear her reassurance that it was so. I would have given much to be with her, whatever she chose to say.

'How's your friend?' asked Boris, inclining his head towards Dmitry. His face was filled with warm curiosity. The whites of his eyes were a jaded yellow and he had to squint to focus on me, but I have rarely looked into a face in which I felt such an immediate trust. The question was not conversational, but asked out of genuine concern for a man to whom he had never spoken. He had picked up a new pair of boots to work on and sat hunched over them, his eyes close to his work with the short-sightedness that is the mark of expertise in a true craftsman. When he spoke to me, he glanced upwards, the wrinkles gathering across his forehead like waves in the sea, stopping at an abrupt line to leave the bald dome of his head smooth and unperturbed.

'He's badly burnt, but I think he'll be all right.' I leaned over to Dmitry. He was breathing more normally now. The burns to his face, hands and forearms were painful, but not deep enough to kill. 'We will leave you before nightfall.'

'No, no, no. Leave us when you will, but there is no rush. I love my Natalia as much as I did her mother, but a daughter can never be a son. My son, Fyodor Borisovich, was a soldier too. He died at Smolensk. He was eighteen.' He paused, lost in the memories of his son, then he reached over to a pile of rags beside him, slipping his hand underneath.

'Here,' he said, pulling out his hand and bringing with it a bottle of vodka, half full. 'I cannot drink with Natalia like I could with Fedya.' He opened the bottle and put it to his lips, drinking no more than a gulp. He wiped the top. 'I'm sorry I have no glasses,' he said as he handed the bottle to me.

I sat down on the ground, stretching my burnt leg out in front of me in hope of easing the continuous, dull pain. I deliberately drank as much from the bottle as he had; no more and no less. I offered the bottle back to him with a smile and an utterly heartfelt 'thank you'.

'No, you drink as much as you please,' he told me. 'I'm sure my daughter has been too polite to tell you, but you look appalling; worse than your friend over there.' I recalled how Dmitry had been shocked at my appearance the previous evening. The night's activities could have done me no favours. But at his mention of Dmitry I remembered that my friend was in greater need of a drink than either myself or the old cobbler. I held the bottle to his lips and he swallowed the few drops that fell into his mouth. He coughed a little and muttered something under his breath. I tried to force some more of the spirit between his lips, but he held them shut and turned his head away.

Once more, I offered the bottle back to Boris Mihailovich. He took another small swig, before handing it back to me. 'You drink it, Aleksei. Fedya can drink no more, so you should have it.'

I took a gulp, taking more pleasure in it than I had the first, feeling the fire trickle down my throat and through my chest before spreading like a fountain around the walls of my stomach. I took a second gulp and felt the same feeling of refreshment. I knew that the man was giving me the last of his supply, that I should be grateful and abstemious, but I could not. I took gulp after delicious gulp until the bottle was dry.

If he was upset to see the last of his vodka drunk, he did not show it. He merely smiled the smile of an old man who enjoys seeing in others the enjoyment of pleasures that he can no longer appreciate for himself.

'Were you at Smolensk?' he asked. I nodded. 'Tell me about it.'

And so began a long day of me recounting every war story that I knew. I told him of distant campaigns, like Austerlitz, and of the more recent battles at Smolensk and Borodino. I always spoke as if I had been just a regular soldier. He needed no stories of espionage and the Oprichniki, simply good honest tales of soldiery of the sort that he knew his son had been involved in.

As I spoke, he continued to mend boots, able to listen and to work without one activity in any way interfering with the other. Sadly, he had only three pairs in his pile and, once they were mended, there was no more work for him to do. During our conversation Natalia returned. She had the money she had received for the one pair of boots that he had given her, plus two more for him to deal with. He made quick work of them, listening throughout to my stories, and as I spoke, Natalia also sat beside us on the floor, enraptured by my words, basking in the illusion that her brother was once again with them.