PENGUIN CANADA
FIELD OF MARS
A native of North Carolina, STEPHEN MILLER graduated from Virginia Military Institute and obtained a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia. He is a screen and television actor. Miller’s debut mystery, The Woman in the Yard, was published in the United States and Canada. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and son.
STEPHEN MILLER
Field of Mars
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005.
Simultaneously published in the U.K. by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Published in this edition, 2008.
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Copyright © Stephen Miller, 2005
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Miller, Stephen E., 1947–
Field of Mars / Stephen Miller.
ISBN 978-0-14-301772-1
I. Title.
PS8576.I556F53 2008 C813’.54 2008-900675-5
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ISBN-13: 978-0-14-301772-1
ISBN-10: 0-14-301772-1
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For Wendell
And down the embankment of history
Came not the calendar
But the real Twentieth Century
Akhmatova
The decadent Ottoman Empire is in retreat.
Poised on her northern borders, the Austrian and Russian Empires intrigue ceaselessly to further their own ambitions. For Russia it is the dream to possess Constantinople and guarantee herself an outlet to the Mediterranean. For Austria, it is hegemony over the Balkan nations, and naval domination of the Adriatic. Unable to restrain herself, in 1908 she annexes the province of Bosnia—a stroke that inflames Serb patriots.
By 1913 the Great Powers are locked into a frenzied arms race, spending themselves into debt producing dreadnoughts, howitzers, repeating rifles, experimental aeroplanes, and undersea boats. At the same time humans are connected as never before—by motorized vehicles on improved roads; by faster vessels, telephone exchanges, and telegraphic cables that girdle the Earth.
As the Ottoman tide ebbs, all the Balkan nations begin vying for supremacy over their neighbours. In a mad dance of betrayal and avarice, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia fight a bloody war. Momentarily separated by an armistice in April, they are joined by Rumania to clash again barely two months later.
Although the wars in the Balkans are remarkable for their cruelty and casualties, the Serbs are doing well. Their star is on the ascendant, but they are anxious that in a future war against Austria-Hungary they can not win alone. As fellow Slavs they look toward Russia for protection.
Everyone is afraid to provoke mighty Russia. Her multi-million peasant armies are thought capable of annihilating any opposition. But Russia’s Tsar is more remarkable for his faults than his virtues. St Petersburg might be one of the great cities of Europe, but the court is in the grip of sycophantic corruption. Nicholas is an indecisive man who likes domestic life, who enjoys noting down the changes in the weather. The Tsarina Alexandra has given him four daughters and an heir— Alexei, afflicted with the barely-understood disease of haemophilia. Deeply religious, and despairing, the Romanovs are easy dupes for a series of faith healers and charlatans who promise a cure for the Tsarevich.
None of this is a secret. Indeed all of these topics are endlessly discussed in newspapers, cafés, and bars; in the streets and on trams, over expensive dinners in the finest restaurants, and over cigars and brandy in diplomatic salons, in bedrooms and bordellos. A whirlwind of gossip, speculations, and nightmares. Amateur strategies, and apocalyptic theories. All is known. All is pondered, all is anticipated.
Yet still there are secrets.
ST PETERSBURG
1913
ONE
St Petersburg shimmered like a vast hallucination. It was three in the morning, but on this white June night the sun flared like a beacon over the deserted boulevards.
Lost in their dreams, the innocents slept. It was the hour of the prostitute and her final client, the hour when the drunk had collapsed into his nightmare, the hour when the suicide ceased his pacing. It was the hour of the thief and the hour of the investigator, the hour when tears had dried and laughter was just a memory. The hour of the predator and the hour of the victim.
Petersburg was a premeditated city. A metropolis with artificial neighbourhoods and preposterously wide boulevards that ran arrow-straight to the horizon. It was a place even a peasant could understand, its avenues designed for military parades, bisected by canals whose bridges could easily be blocked by cossacks.
Three centuries of Romanov rule had not mellowed the city’s master plan; there were the parks with their silent green foliage, cathedrals looming over statues of long-dead Tsars, garish sentinels protecting the most important circles and plazas.
An artist’s eye might linger on the barges moored against the embankments, the golden flash of the Admiralty’s spire, the leaden green light across the broad waters of the Neva, the row of red-painted government buildings interrupted by the gigantic yellow General Staff building. But no colours could enliven Russia’s purpose-built gateway to the world—a city built upon the corpses of serfs enslaved to the horrific aspirations of Peter the Great. A capital born with its cord anchored to a swamp—beautiful, on the surface.
On this garish morning two carriages were drawn through the heart
of the empty city. Leading was an opulent troika pulled by white horses. Beneath its luminous black lacquer one could still detect the ornamental crest of the House of Romanov. At a discreet distance a threadbare izvolchik followed, with three members of the Okhrana secret police crammed inside. Beyond boredom, they had nothing to look forward to and no plans, for anything might happen at such an hour. They had raised the top of the cab to protect themselves from the glare and two were sleeping while their superior leaned his head against the window post and fought to stay awake.
Pyotr Ryzhkov watched the city glide by—a long blur of apartment blocks, office buildings and markets, most of them built in identical style, from identical materials to an identical height. The slow pace of the carriage gave him the illusion that he was falling—sinking into an eternal void.
Ryzhkov was the most ordinary looking of the three. With unruly dark hair and strong brows, he looked like his father without the moustache. Eyes that were blue, but with dark pupils, as if always starved for light. He seemed a little older than his years, the hard life had done that. Here and there he had a scar; wrinkles of concern, and a slight frown that had etched itself into the mask he had worn as a face for too many years. He needed a shave and a few regular meals. He needed a vacation, some new clothes. To sleep. A new life.
Ahead of them the elegant troika slowed, turned off the embankment on to a narrow side street. Muta flicked his whip, and in a few seconds they reached the intersection in time to see the troika stopping at the entrance to an ornate office building.
‘All right. He’s decided to stop …’ Ryzhkov nudged Konstantin Hokhodiev awake. Kostya was a big man. He yawned and stretched and tried to straighten his legs in the small carriage. ‘Whose place is it this time?’ he groaned without opening his eyes.
‘I don’t know. Someone with money to spend, just looking at it,’ Ryzhkov said. Down the street a queue of expensive carriages and motorcars rested at the curb, their drivers sleeping or standing about smoking. The windows of the mansion were open and there was a wash of sound: music, laughter, groans.
Dima Dudenko, the youngest member of their team, yawned and also tried to stretch his legs in the carriage. His feet got tangled in Ryzhkov’s and he woke with an irritated jerk, then realized where he was. ‘Good Christ, this is insane. Doesn’t Blue Shirt ever sleep?’
‘Here he comes …’ Ryzhkov muttered as the door of the troika opened and the mad monk—Grigori Efrimovich Rasputin, stepped down on to the pavement. The prostitutes were tipsy. They laughed and stumbled into the street behind him. Hokhodiev managed to blink himself awake just as Rasputin and his friends climbed the front steps. A sign hanging above the portico read Apollo Fine Papers & Binding. The front doors opened and Rasputin threw his arms wide as a blast of applause engulfed him. A clutch of men in formal dress stepped out to kiss his hand. Laughing, he was dragged inside.
They were in a fading neighbourhood, a little too far away from the canal, not close enough to the theatre, and much too close to the stench of the market on a warm day. Ryzhkov cleared his throat and spat out on to the cobbles. ‘This is … Peplovskaya Street, yeah, Muta?’ he asked the driver.
‘Peplovskaya, yes, excellency. Only a small street,’ Muta said in his thick Georgian accent. Ryzhkov had been along the little street dozens of times; still, he had never really noticed it. An uninteresting street, the kind that could only take you somewhere else.
‘Well, he’ll be in there for hours,’ Dudenko muttered. ‘Does anybody want something to eat? There’s a place down the corner, they might have something?’
‘Not me,’ Hokhodiev said, got out and walked a few paces out into the street and began to urinate.
‘Go ahead. I suppose he’s probably safe enough in there.’ Ryzhkov climbed out of the carriage to shake the stiffness out of his legs, took a moment to roll his head around on his shoulders.
Ostensibly the Okhrana were charged with watching over Rasputin to ensure that he did not come under the influence of foreign agents or revolutionary elements that might use him to gain access to the Imperial family, but really they were guarding ‘Blue Shirt’—as the Internal branch knew him, from embarrassment in the newspapers. There was no detective work involved. Everyone knew the secret police were trailing the staretz, not because he was a threat to the Imperial family, but because he was their pet.
In less than a decade Rasputin had become a legend. He was thought to be a holy wanderer who could speak directly with God, a creature with unlimited sexual appetites who could cure illnesses with a simple caress. Everyone in the capital knew that if you wanted something—a posting to a particular ministry, special attention paid to your proposals, consideration when it was time to hand out military decorations—anything at all, you would need Rasputin as an ally. His favour was a necessity in order to ensure a successful career, his wrath could obliterate a cabinet minister in a single morning.
Thus, when their rotation came around Pyotr Ryzhkov and his men dutifully trailed Rasputin back and forth across the city. It amounted to a series of sleepless nights that only ended when Blue Shirt fell into his bed in the company of a final prostitute he would select from the group waiting at the entrance to his building. It was boring unless you enjoyed watching the upper crust humiliate themselves at the feet of a con artist, an exercise which Ryzhkov had long since ceased to find amusing.
His memory of the street gradually came back— apartments over shops down at the corner of Sadovaya, a couple of shabby wooden houses and a little warehouse up on the market end of the street— Peplovskaya. The only thing disturbing the peace of the street was the noise coming out of the Apollo Bindery.
‘Look at this,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Oh, yes, all you need is the money and you can buy a little taste of heaven …’ Hokhodiev joined him as he walked along beside the carriages. Painted on their sides were the crests of some of Russia’s most powerful families. At the head of the queue, the black troika of Prince Yusupov, behind it a carriage inscribed with the gold filigreed crest of the House of Orlovsky. A flaming fortress indicated the Evdaev family, next was the gleaming Renault of Prince Cantacuzène.
‘Well, they must be sewing together some extremely rare books. A very literate clientele, by the looks of it …’
‘High flying, even for our friend,’ Hokhodiev said. ‘You want me to get the numbers?’
‘Oh, yes, whatever the circumstances we must complete our paperwork. Do you have enough space in your book?’ The carriages and motorcars continued for the length of the street past the bordello, vehicles belonging to an assortment of devotees, perverts, aristocrats, power-mad debauchees of every stripe.
‘If I run out of pages, maybe I’ll go up and buy a new one from the management, eh?’ Hokhodiev laughed and walked away down to the start of the queue.
Ryzhkov stood in the centre of the street, fiddled for his watch and checked the time. Nearly four in the morning. The sky above him was a pearly white tinged with streaks of yellow. From above one of the prostitutes was crying out in pretend-orgasm. The chauffeurs looked over and he shook his head and they laughed. Down at the end of the street he watched Kostya gathering the meaningless licence numbers.
‘No point,’ he said. He sighed and headed back to their carriage, the most unkempt vehicle on the street. ‘No point whatsoever …’
Dima came back with rolls and a pot of tea. When Ryzhkov took a drink he flinched. ‘Are you all right?’ Dudenko asked, his narrow face frowning.
‘Oh, it’s just this tooth, it’s started up again. I’m fine.’ He took a sip from the glass of tea that Dudenko gave him. The heat brought another jolt of pain to his jaw.
‘You should do something about that, an infection can lead to serious illness, eh?’
‘Yes, yes, yes …’ He held the hot liquid on his jaw and waited for the pain to go away.
They sat in their shabby little carriage and shared out the food among themselves. Muta took the opportunit
y to fall asleep with the reins in his hand. After a few minutes Hokhodiev returned, opened the door of the carriage, sat on the step and smoked. They talked about the schedule for the next day. It should have been the end of a hellish week of Blue Shirt surveillance, but the Tsar was in the capital and the three of them were to augment the Imperial Guard at the Marinsky Theatre. What that meant was—less sleep all around.
Dudenko gathered their glasses and had taken only a few steps down the pavement when they heard the screams.
There was a sudden crashing that came from the end of the street. All the drivers and chauffeurs looked up. It sounded like one or two women—angry. A man’s voice, lower. Something crashed into splinters and shards.
‘What … what is this? Tell me he hasn’t gone and got into something stupid …’ Ryzhkov stood up in the carriage. Muta woke up and his pony took a nervous step forward. There was another long scream from the upstairs of the building.
‘It’s down there—’ Dudenko stooped and placed the glasses on the pavement, stood and peered down the street. Ryzhkov could see the drivers at the end of the queue looking at something masked by the edge of the building.
‘Something going on in the lane down there,’ Hokhodiev said.
Ryzhkov jumped out of the carriage, ran across the cobbles and down to the corner of the bindery. There at the beginning of the lane a group of drivers were standing still, serious expressions on their faces. In the distance sounded the shrill blast of a police whistle. He rounded the corner and saw what he first took for a bundle of clothes tossed on to the pavement.
And then—
One of the drivers had covered her with a jacket, but it was too small and Ryzhkov could see the fan of her blonde hair across the stones. Reflexively he moved closer and one of the drivers reached out to stop him. He shook the man off and held his Okhrana disc up for them to see. From the back of the building the cooks and servants had come running out. An old man was standing over the girl, rubbing his hands on his apron.
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