by Ian Hocking
The poker passed through empty air.
Draganov felt that the garrotte was loose. He whipped it from his throat using the gun. Ignoring the pain of his burnt neck, he coughed and staggered to his feet. He forced air into his lungs but his vision darkened abruptly and he slumped against the upturned chair. He raised his gun into this gloom and prepared to fire.
Draganov could see his assailant. It was an ostler. No, a woman dressed as an ostler—her long, untied hair betrayed her—and she was running for the window. He would have to shoot her in the back. He decided this was justice. It was her own fault for attacking one of the Protection. But he could not bring himself to fire, and in three bounds she was through the window. He expected to see her fall to the ground. This room was on the first floor. Instead, she tumbled onto something that rang wooden and hollow. There had to be a carriage beneath the window.
The Countess was retrieving her belongings from the collection of evidence. She turned to Draganov and looked coldly at the gun as he brought it to bear. She did not hesitate. The last item she took was the black band. She passed this over the stump of her left wrist and secured it at the elbow.
‘It is you,’ said Draganov. His voice had a drunken slur. He felt crushed with sleepiness. ‘You are … Brandt.’
A man’s face appeared in the window. Draganov recognised him as the Georgian poet who had led the pirates. The man hissed, ‘Lynx! Come!’
Instead, the woman walked towards Draganov. He held the weapon but her green eyes scared him. She used her teeth to pull off her glove.
‘We have a custom here,’ she said, talking from the side of her mouth, ‘which a stranger will practise on a child when leaving a house. It helps learn names, and a little respect.’
She slapped him hard.
‘I am Lynx.’
Draganov coughed, then smiled. The Countess moved out of focus.
‘I know you as Saskia Brandt, late of the Federal Investigation Bureau. You remember it as a dream, don’t you?’
Though he could no longer see her face in detail, Draganov perceived her bewilderment. The glove still hung from her teeth. She was staring at him. The moment ended when the man at the window shouted, ‘Now or never again, Lynx. We have it all. Come.’
Slowly, and still covered by Draganov’s gun, the Countess walked away. Draganov fell to his knees. He could hear the shouts of alarm from the floor below. Someone was knocking at the door. Even as he pitched onto his face and his sense of himself evaporated, enough wit remained to appreciate the sophistication of his entrapment. Saskia Brandt, alias the Countess, had been reunited with her most precious possession. Did she even know why it was so important? Did she justify her yearning for the band as a sentimental attachment, origins forgotten? In passing, she had also discovered the identity of the man, Paruyr, who had betrayed their latest expropriation, as well as the death of the woman she called Alenya.
Yes, it was the neatest thing.
Draganov watched the blur of this woman slip through the window. He had been outplayed. But he was determined to meet her again. It would take more than a garrotte to separate him from a vow.
Chapter One
Approaching St Petersburg: Early September, 1907
A late evening train moved north through the empty miles towards the City Upon Bones. The electric lights of the train reflected in the water dripping from the trees and the animal eyes only one passenger, Saskia Brandt, could see. She sat in the dining carriage. Her right hand held The Travels of Marco Polo open at an illustration of Kublai Khan, but Saskia was not reading the book. Her eyes searched for the occluded horizon. She had been thinking of that first meeting with Draganov in Sukham, when he had used her real name and unlocked the puzzle box of her memory.
Pink spray carnations leaned in pity over her uneaten lemon sorbet. Saskia had no appetite. She was more scared than she could remember, and she could remember everything. Fear was her partner and had been since April of 1904. Some days she led; some days the fear took her through every step and turn.
She looked once more to the horizon. The Tsar’s Village was close. She needed to reach it within twenty-four hours or her hope would be lost. She could, if necessary, leave the train before St Petersburg and head to the Tsar’s Village directly, but there was little chance of entering the Summer Palace undetected. She would need the help of revolutionaries, and they were to be found in St Petersburg.
Her right hand closed The Travels of Marco Polo and joined her left wrist within a bearskin warmer that she wore around her waist.
She thought of one hour before, when her travelling companion, who happened to be a psychotic and a murderer, had fallen from the train. Fear rocked the balance of her mind and she imagined this man having clung to the carriage.
Was that Kamo’s bloodied face in the window of the connecting door? No. It was the guard of the dining carriage. She had exchanged pleasantries with him earlier in the journey. His long coat was silvered with rain. He ignored Saskia and moved past her to the curving partition behind which the maître d’ was making preparations for the second service.
Saskia inventoried the occupants of the carriage once more. She worried that her daydreaming had distracted her from the entrance of a passenger she could not trust. Since its inception, the Moscow-St Petersburg railway had unsettled those authorities who did not wish to see the Russian people move quickly between the two cities. The train was intended for passengers above a certain class threshold. Passport control was strict. The train would carry any number of Tsarist agents. Saskia wondered whether a third person had been assigned to watch both her and Kamo and, perhaps, assume responsibility for the completion of their task should they fail.
There were three other people in the carriage. Each was travelling alone. The first was an elderly Hussar who was occupied with the anatomy of his strudel. The second, shaking straight his newspaper at irregular intervals to the annoyance of the first, appeared to be a civil servant. The third was a minor royal of some description, and he was sleeping with an open mouth. Next to him, a stove flickered redly. Saskia looked at the upright carriage clock near the door to the first class sleeping carriage. She alone heard it tick.
Yes, Kamo had failed. He was lying somewhere along a cold curve of rail, miles to the rear, maybe near a rural train station, maybe not.
Two minutes passed. Each second was crowded with ideas, notion upon notion. She thought about the item in the luggage carriage addressed to the Twelve Collegia. At the close of that second minute, Saskia resolved that she would complete her business on the train and jump clear before its arrival in St Petersburg.
The wheels struck an irregularity in the rail. Saskia rocked. The minor royal snorted awake. The civil servant looked at Saskia and smiled in the manner that said: he was a man, she was a lady, and in his opinion everything would be quite all right.
Saskia inclined her head towards him and left the carriage by its rear door. Outside, on the open platform, the wind pressed against her hat, which was securely pinned to her hair. She could see the connective tissue of the train beneath her feet; sleepers flickering by; the knots of time passing. The fear was there, too, leading her.
She tried to relish the air from the Gulf of Finland but her nerves hummed like ramshackle electrics. It was likely her mascara still carried the dust of the Caucasus. She thought about Kamo as the sky in the west lost its blueness for black.
When the train guard came, Saskia was ready. She smiled and touched her hand to his sleeve. He was buttoning his double-breasted coat. Its thick collar reached his ears. His hat was wide and heavy.
‘Madam,’ he said, pinching some soup from his moustache, ‘you would be more comfortable in your compartment. You are not dressed for these conditions. May I lead you there?’
Saskia was wearing the clothes that had been given to her: a vermillion dress with a fishtail skirt, a short pearl-white jacket, and a pillbox hat. It would not have been her first choice, but the revolutionary
who had expropriated it from a public bath in Baku had, at least, selected a costume of the correct size.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘But you are very good.’
She looked at the pinned flap of coat that neatly dressed his arm, which had been amputated at the elbow. The guard noticed her attention.
‘An old injury,’ he said.
Saskia shook her head. ‘I did not mean to offend you.’
‘You could not offend me.’
The guard had not finished his sentence with “madam”. Saskia took it as a sign that he was willing to forego the strict propriety that would typically characterise a conversation between a noblewoman and a train guard. His age helps, she thought. He must be fifty or sixty. He wants to daughter me.
Saskia removed her left wrist from the hand warmer. The guard looked at the scarf that covered her stump. His expression had not changed. The thick skin of his eyelids did not move.
‘There was an accident. It happened in the Ukraine, during the summer when I went down to the peasants.’
The guard put his hand in one of the deep pockets of his coat. For a moment, Saskia feared that he would draw a gun and denounce her as an anarchist. But then she remembered him taking his official timepiece from that pocket in response to the minor royal’s query about the accuracy of the clock in the dining carriage, not two hours before.
‘I have no weapon,’ she said.
‘Then you have placed yourself in some danger.’
Saskia wanted to ask his name, but she thought that his hesitation might set her back. There was no question that she needed his help. There was a piece of furniture in the luggage compartment that Saskia and her fallen companion had been instructed to escort, regardless of cost to life, to sympathisers in St Petersburg.
Saskia would not let that happen. She needed to press the guard.
‘Are you a friend?’ she asked. ‘Tell me now or go about your business.’
His beard twitched. ‘Are you an agent of the Third Section?’
Saskia smiled. The Tsar’s Third Section had not existed officially for years, but its name still held a chill.
‘My friend,’ she said, touching the arm that had held the timepiece, ‘there is a crated item in the luggage compartment addressed to the University’s Twelve Collegia.’
‘Do you want me to change the address?’
‘You’re a good man, comrade. Here it is.’ She passed him an envelope. ‘Inside are new luggage labels. It will be safer if you do not read them.’
The guarded nodded and put the envelope in an outer pocket.
‘Take these, too,’ she said, pulling a clip of roubles from her sleeve.
‘I will not.’
Saskia sighed. ‘I need the train to be slowed. Can you do that?’
‘You need to be careful.’
The guard had used the informal “you”.
‘Comrade, will you let the train be slowed?’
The guard sighed and took his hand from his pocket. Where Saskia expected the pocket watch, she saw a revolver.
With an apologetic shrug, the guard said, ‘We’re given these.’
Saskia felt a wave of relaxation down the muscles on her right side. She was ready to slap the gun aside and overpower him.
The train whistled.
The guard said, ‘You should have it. What am I meant to do with it? I’m an old man.’
‘Thank you, but keep it.’
‘I will slow the train for you and redirect the crate. Should I tell you my name?’
Saskia put her hand to his cheek. She did not want to give him her assumed name, which would be to meet honesty with deceit.
‘There is a tunnel,’ the guard said, ‘and at its entrance, if you go north, there is a track. That will take you quietly into the city.’
When he left, Saskia slowed her vision to watch the sleepers drift by. She thought about the revolver, how the cylinder would turn with quiet clicks.
I will lead my fear, she thought.
Chapter Two
In the first sleeping carriage, the steward was sitting in his chair. He rose as Saskia passed. She smiled, expressed her desire to remain undisturbed in her compartment, and continued along the narrow, carpeted passage until she reached the last door.
She knocked once and went inside. There was nobody hiding beneath the fold-out seats or in the en suite bathroom. She locked the door. The steward had left her smoked salmon and vodka in an ice bucket. On one seat was a printed note from the train manager. It described the weather and the wildlife one might see coming into St Petersburg. The note from the previous day, which had appeared following their departure from Moscow, had said much the same.
Saskia popped some salmon into her mouth and withdrew a small travelling bag from the cupboard beneath the sink in the bathroom. It had a tumbler lock. She turned the dials, opened the bag, and withdrew her papers. There were several. Each testified to the state’s anxiety. Saskia set them alight using the oil lamp and brushed the debris into the sink. She turned the tap and watched the blackened flakes swill away. Then she opened the window and threw out Kamo’s second hat, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and his wash bag.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
Home, she thought. We’re going home.
There was no time to consider what she meant by ‘we’. Did she feel some responsibility for Ute Schlesinger, the woman who had been born in this body? Saskia knew her own mind to be a digital ghost. Indeed, perhaps her thoughts were only a crude facsimile, a simulation.
Mirror, mirror.
As always, the imperfections stood out. Her eyes were wrinkling at the edges. The dimples either side of her mouth were deeper now. This is age. This is time. The days were long passed since she had shaved her legs or shaped the edges of her eyebrows. Saskia had been told that she gave the impression of a sadly lost beauty, a woman whose twin turned beneath chandeliers. The compliment did not please her. The physical attractiveness distinguished her as surely as her missing left hand. Both were attributes she wanted to hide.
So neat: those petals of skin that a butcher had gathered, folded and stitched during the winter of 1905. It was a curious thing that the absence of her hand should embarrass her when she was alone. Curious too that the hand had been lost in the crash of a heavier-than-air flying machine. What secrets she carried.
It is time for us to go home, she thought.
Am I thinking in Russian?
‘It is time,’ she said in German, watching her mouth in the mirror, ‘to go home.’
The face—Ute’s face, Saskia’s face—smiled.
She took her long coat from the hook on the bathroom door and swung it around her shoulders. She fastened the buckles with a practised movement and folded back the material on her left sleeve. Pinned it. As she held the bearskin warmer between her teeth, she changed her hat for a thick cap, and undid the laces on her boots. They had high heels and would not do.
In Kamo’s trunk beneath the window, she found the expensive fur boots that he had bought in Baku, on the Caspian. She stuffed the toes with newspaper and put them on.
Before she could pack her satchel, there was a knock at the door. It was sturdy but the upper panel, hidden by a green blind, was glass. A strong man would be able to break it open. She watched the brass handle turn. Its lock held.
She remembered that her revolver had fallen from the train along with Kamo, and regretted her refusal to accept the replacement offered by the guard.
Am I thinking in Russian?
The handle turned again.
Fear, she thought. Lead me.
Had there been a day without fear since her unhappy arrival in Russia? Not truly. Days of camaraderie, yes. Mountain work. Milk bar stories in the hard lands around Tiflis. Her friends there had risked death for a future they could not imagine. It had been imagined for them by the orators and downright mountebanks of the revolutionary movements.
A voice outside said, quietly, ‘Open in th
e name of the Tsar.’
Saskia smiled with one side of her mouth. She entered the bathroom. It had a door, identical to the one leading to the corridor, which connected to the bathroom of the neighbouring compartment. She could break through it but the sound would carry and she would only gain the advantage of another compartment, which could be occupied.
She crossed to the window, opened it, and looked forward along the train. Through habit, Kamo had chosen a compartment next to the maintenance foot-hoops, and they were within reach. She saw the dining carriage, the luggage carriage beyond that, the tender, and the locomotive. The darkness of the sky was complete. The train was passing through a wood whose trees rose to twice the height of a carriage.
She remembered a dervish in Yerevan Square. And the bloody, gut-blown horses. When the horses had screamed, she had not heard them over the echo of grenades. Those grenades had been called “apples” in the parlance of the Outfit. She remembered everything.
Saskia closed Kamo’s trunk and stepped onto it. She swung her leg out into the night air. She had climbed from a moving train window twice before, but she had never ascended to the roof. The bunched newspaper in the toes of her boots made the job difficult. She reached one of the maintenance hoops with her heel and swung out to snag the topmost rung with her hand. She caught it, held on, exhaled. For the moment, she was secure against the side of the train with the window below and to her left.
As she looked, a head emerged from it.
Saskia tried to make herself small against the train. She felt the vibration of the carriage through her cheekbone. She could see that the man was holding onto his hat and looking towards the rear of the train. He did not, however, lift his eyes. She hoped he could not hear the flapping of her skirt.
The train blew its whistle. Saskia squinted against the sooty air and saw the locomotive enter the tunnel that the guard had described. If their speed did not change, she had between six and seven seconds before her own carriage passed through.
