Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  ‘Sir,’ he said in a stage whisper, pointing one finger toward the ceiling. ‘It appears that Christ has risen, and would like to confer with you.’

  He nodded, took a moment to realize where exactly in the universe he was—this is my office, this is my window, those are the leaves falling from my linden … ‘Yes, thank you,’ he said softly to no one—Izachik had already left the doorway. He stood up, stretched the soreness from his joints, washed his mouth out with tea, straightened his clothing, rubbed his eyes, and headed upstairs.

  ‘Ah, Pyotr Mikhalovich!’ As Ryzhkov knocked on the door of his office, Zezulin was just coming out of the toilet, doing up the buttons on his trousers as he paced across the room in his socks. Ryzhkov was trying to think of an excuse to open a window.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure you will be as thankful as the rest of us that this terrorist activity is about to be tidied up, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I will.’

  ‘Then we can get back to something resembling normality. Not that pursuing these misguided radicals isn’t of value. Yes.’ Zezulin smiled, patted his pockets trying to find something he’d lost, padded around behind his desk and started opening the drawers one at a time. He seemed comparatively alert and Ryzhkov decided that he might as well take the opportunity.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you about the Lvova case, if there’s a chance. I’m convinced that there is something more to it all, sir.’

  ‘Lvova, Lvova …’ Like Hokhodiev, Zezulin was a big man. Strong, with bushy dark hair and almost blond moustaches. He looked like a sleepy wolverine with a pair of spectacles. ‘What’s that again? Perk me up.’

  ‘The girl that was … defenestrated in June. When I spoke to the police I got nothing—’

  ‘Well, those cretins couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag if it had two holes.’

  ‘And as well, the mortuary report raised some questions. I thought that perhaps further investigation was needed. Blue Shirt was there, that night, after all. And someone is attempting to call it a suicide when it wasn’t—’

  ‘Certainly, Pyotr Mikhalovich. Absolutely. You have my complete trust. Circumspect. Diligent …’ Zezulin had forgotten about the desk drawers and their contents. He was staring out through one of the little attic windows that overlooked the canal.

  ‘Thank you then, sir. I’ll start on the paperwork.’ Zezulin continued his vigil. Ryzhkov might as well have been invisible. ‘Well, then. Will there be anything, else, sir?’

  ‘Well, there’s always something else, isn’t there!’ Zezulin laughed at his own joke. ‘So! Well, good to have you back, Inspector. And keep me up to date on that … on your … project. Sounds suspicious, to me. Don’t like it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Nor do I.’

  ‘Good, good … whatever you need.’ Zezulin gave him a kind of salute, a spinning motion with his hand, a cross between a wave goodbye and a Moorish salaam.

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  At the end of that same night Ryzhkov, Dudenko and Hokhodiev treated themselves to a visit to the Egorov baths. At five in the morning they almost had the place to themselves. They passed a bottle of vodka back and forth and talked. Ryzhkov told Hokhodiev about what he had been doing: the Lvova reports, what Bondarenko had said and the odd way he had said it. Hokhodiev just listened and nodded. When it was all over he spat into the drain and sat there for a long moment. ‘Big people,’ he said and shook his head. ‘Real aristocrats.’

  ‘It’s an expensive place, that whorehouse,’ Ryzhkov said.

  ‘So, you don’t know what to do now? That’s not like you. What do you care anyway?’

  Ryzhkov looked at his friend for a moment, shrugged. It was a good question. ‘I don’t know. Someone killed her, Kostya. Someone is lying about it, now someone is going to get away with it … with doing something like that.’ He shrugged again. What did he care? It was hard to put into words.

  ‘Fine, fine. You have a sense of justice, I know, even if she was a whore. It’s touching and it’s why you have so many friends in the police force, but do you really think there’s the slightest chance of getting to the bottom of it? These big shots, they have resources, brother …’ Hokhodiev wagged a finger and even tried to laugh, but it didn’t sound happy.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll try to see if there are any witnesses, talk to the madam—but I thought I should tell you about it at least.’

  ‘Look, I don’t give a damn if you have to slip it through the cracks, I’ll help you, brother, and he will too, won’t you—’ Kostya turned to elbow Dudenko, but stopped. ‘Look at that,’ he said. Dudenko lay sleeping on the narrow bench across from them, wrapped up in a sheet, his hands pressed down between his knees, snoring. ‘A babe in the woods, a sheep waiting for the wolves …’

  ‘… teacup in an earthquake …’

  ‘… virgin in the barracks … God have mercy.’ The big man turned and laughed quietly. ‘And, of course, Dima’s the only one who’ll get out of this, you know that, don’t you? He’s young, intelligent, he has savoir faire … he has a future,’ Hokhodiev said and raised the bottle to his lips. The vodka was warm and almost gone.

  ‘Oh, yes … Smart, educated.’

  ‘Oh, the boy’s a genius. A fucking genius, with his little earphones and things that he can screw into your telephone set. Without ones like him they’d be shitting Bolshevik bombs in Peterhof, but does he get any credit, will it do him any good?’ He looked up at Ryzhkov and winked.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Nothing. There’s no loyalty any more. The three of us here in this room are loyal, the only loyal ones left. Protect the Tsar, protect the Tsarina, protect the grand dukes, the grand duchesses … on and on …’ Hokhodiev closed his eyes for a few moments as if he were falling asleep, then his lids flickered. ‘No one ever asks the question, if these people are so fucking holy why do they need so much protection in the first place, eh?’

  ‘There’s always someone trying to get to the top,’ Ryzhkov muttered.

  ‘Blue Shirt …’ Hokhodiev said, coming out of his dream, then looked over at Ryzhkov as if he were surprised to be awake.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know,’ Ryzhkov said. ‘We have to protect him, too.’

  ‘And all of it is just to keep the rich ones getting richer and the powerful ones getting more powerful. But Russia … poor Russia, she’s just a fucking house of cards and she’s just going to cave in on herself. It’s all sick, a goddamned pestilence.’

  ‘It’s Rasputin.’

  ‘All of them, they’re all sick. Rotten. Like a fish rots, from the head down. Dima …’ Hokhodiev looked over at Dudenko and started laughing quietly. ‘Poor fellow, to be coming along in a world like this.’

  ‘He should do well, he seems to know a lot about the telephone system—’ Ryzhkov had started laughing, too.

  They talked about women. Ryzhkov’s bad luck, about Filippa and her mother, how the disease of irrational femininity seemed to somehow get passed along from mother to daughter.

  After a few moments of silence Hokhodiev leaned forward, elbows propped on thick knees, one hand stroking the wispy hair on the crown of his head, and told Ryzhkov that his wife was dying. His voice sounded thick. They had drunk too much. Far, far too much. ‘… and you know, Pyotr, it’s not a moment too soon, if you ask me.’

  ‘Is she in pain?’ Ryzhkov finally said, his words coming slowly, one at a time; is—she—in—pain.

  ‘Pain …’ Hokhodiev said, thinking it over. ‘Well, who isn’t?’

  ‘I mean …’

  ‘In the mornings, yes. Pain.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Ryzhkov closed his eyes.

  ‘Listen, Pyotr. You’re not like me. You’re different, you’re smart. You still have, you still have …’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘You look around us? You see these bastards, these fucking cabinet ministers and their grandiose … fiefdoms? It doesn’t matter about the Tsar. We have no Tsar. It’s not Nicho
las, it’s fucking Alexandra that’s running everything.’

  ‘Kostya, Kostya—’

  ‘And you see that poor little boy in his uniform … and they get Blue Shirt to pray for him and think that’s going to make the difference? Where are the damn patriots, that’s what I mean.’

  ‘They’re all patriots, just ask them.’

  ‘Oh, I know … patriots are the worst, it’s so cheap. The patriots and the fucking Church. You poke around the Narva district for awhile. Are there any blessings, any blessings at all?’ He trailed off for a moment. ‘That’s what’s killing Lena. It’s all this shit around us, the impossibility of ever, of ever … getting out, or growing, or anything.’ They had no children, Ryzhkov remembered. No, that was wrong. They had had one child. Died from typhoid fever before Ryzhkov had met him. ‘And when they do finally look up, when they see how these fools, fucking Blue Shirt, and the fucking Tsarina who will give him any damn thing if he just lets her suck his cock—’

  ‘Hey, hey …’ Ryzhkov said gently to quieten him down. They had their own room, but the walls were thin.

  ‘… And then there’s your day of reckoning, right there, your Armageddon, and your fucking Sodom and Gomorrah turning into salt. You free all the damn serfs and they don’t know any better. They pile into the city, heading for the bright lights, work themselves to death in some factory and they think that’s heaven on earth. They just want money like anyone else. And when they wake up, you know who they’ll blame? Who they’ll be stoning to death in the damn square, when the whole pile of shit goes down the shitter? It won’t be the damn Tsar, he’ll be on his yacht, safe and sound, heading for some spa—’

  ‘Hey, Kostya—’

  ‘No, brother, it’ll be us that’ll be dragged through the streets. Us, that’s who.’

  Ryzhkov reached out and poured out the last inch of vodka on to the floor.

  ‘You think I’m drunk,’ Hokhodiev said, an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace.

  ‘Well … maybe just a little—’ The bottle suddenly slipped from his fingers and he reflexively swiped at it and, only by chance, managed to knock it up on to the bench where it spun around harmlessly. Dudenko woke up with a jerk and looked around with a horrified expression. They both found the spasm funny, laughed and leaned back against the wall.

  ‘You two are drunk,’ Dudenko said dully.

  ‘I am drunk,’ Hokhodiev said quietly. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t know whereof I speak, eh? Remember the words of your friend, the prophet.’

  ‘All right, I will.’

  ‘They’re coming to get … us …’

  ‘If we don’t get them first,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. That’s right. So, yes, brother. Them first. I will help you,’ Kostya said and put a hand on his shoulder. The weight of his arm felt like a log. ‘I’ll help you right now. And you will too, won’t you Dima?’

  Dudenko looked up from the floor and blinked his eyes. Without his glasses he was blind. ‘What?’ he asked, not having been listening. ‘What? Whatever it is, yes,’ he said. And then he laughed.

  Exhausted, drained, and dizzy from the heat of the baths, they dressed, paid their bill, and climbed out into the yellow dawn. Stood like dimwitted beasts on the embankment, blinking and looking around for a cab. ‘I think it’s time to go home,’ Hokhodiev said.

  ‘Yes …’ Ryzhkov muttered, suddenly bone-tired, staggering out on to the cobbles in the direction of the Obvodni.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said to his friends, to the shining waters in the canal, to the impassive façades with their metalled roofs. Goodnight to the gleaming spire of the Admiralty, goodnight to the morning sun.

  Only a few groggy hours later, supposedly the start of a new week, Izachik slipped another thin envelope across his desk. ‘Here are more of the papers you requested, sir …’

  Inside Ryzhkov found a one-page carbon-copied list of the owners of the Apollo Bindery at 34 Peplovskaya. According to the police, the Apollo Bindery had long since gone out of business; the building itself was owned by a private property trust, and on the date of the girl’s defenestration the lessee had been a Monsieur T.N. Hynninen, a Finnish speculator who lived in Helsingfors. Nothing new.

  Ryzhkov turned over the single page but there was nothing else. He looked more closely at the list— investors in the numbered property consortium, twenty-four partners, all of them anonymous, sheltered behind numbered titles.

  He slipped the thin sheet of nearly transparent onion-skin paper back into the envelope and filed it together with the police statement and Bondarenko’s cause-of-death report. Tried not to look at the little human diagram with the wounds inked on it as he put all of it in his bottom drawer. Now, he thought, all that was left of Lvova, Ekatarina was resting undisturbed inside a green Okhrana folder, like everything else that was wrong with the world.

  Another little tail-twister vanished? What did it matter? Some marks, some bloodstains that had spread in strange patterns, some loose ends, some details that didn’t fit … What did he think he could do about it? Dig her up? Call in a few dozen of Petersburg’s richest and most prominent men for some discussions about exactly what they had been doing and to whom?

  He rubbed his hand across his forehead. He was tired, trying to do too much, too fast. He was hot, feverish perhaps. Coming down with something.

  The girl was dead and someone in the Okhrana was protecting the killer, or had at least taken steps to ensure that Bondarenko would sanitize his statement. Things like that didn’t just happen by coincidence, there had to be a reason for it. Rasputin?

  What if he had done it? The girl had been thrown out of an upstairs window at the corner of the lane. It could have only been reached by a hallway, via a staircase. Did the building have a lift? And if Rasputin had done it, how would he have made it back downstairs to the table so quickly? Perhaps he should get inside the building … run up and down the stairs with a stopwatch in hand. Certainly he should pursue the case—what if Rasputin had done it and someone was attempting to blackmail him?

  Was such a thing plausible? Rasputin was untouchable, wasn’t he? And the girl wasn’t going to come back just because he got soft and went on some idiot’s crusade. Never trust someone with an axe to grind, never trust a priest. Never trust anyone with ideals … with illusions, he told himself over and over again. Actually chanting the words under his breath ‘… Realism … realism … realism …’

  But maybe Rasputin had done it after all …

  Murder, he heard a woman scream.

  NINE

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Larissa had said. ‘It was just an accident, Vera … go to sleep now,’ she’d said.

  And she had. Even though it was a lie; it hadn’t been an accident. No. Not an accident at all.

  ‘Go to sleep, Vera … it wasn’t your fault, it’s over now.’

  Vera, Larissa, and another girl had slept on the stage in the back room that first night after the … accident. Passing out from too much konyak and exhausted from fending everyone off. When they woke up the other girl was gone.

  The owner was called Izov. He had got angry when he realized they were too distraught to provide him with any fun. Well, they certainly didn’t have to give anything away, but he had made his understanding clear. There was going to have to be some kind of payment. He left them with a last warning that it was a cabaret, not a flophouse, no matter how many people were sleeping on the floor. Not long after that he came back and fed them, grousing about the expense. Vera drank her kvass and decided that probably it was only Larissa’s smile and her smoky laugh that got them breakfast.

  The club was really two shops joined into one. At one point it had been a dressmaker’s, and after that, judging from the long glass counter and the greasy floors in the back room, it had served as a butcher’s shop. Izov had broken through the walls and converted the bottom floor into a bistro which he named Komet after the famous shooting star. The ‘restaurant’ was outfitted with tables
and chairs, the other had a stage at one end enabling Izov to extract a little more money from his customers by providing ‘entertainment’ to go along with the ‘food’.

  Izov went out for a while and the piano-player, the one they called the Professor, came over and served the customers. He talked continuously while he ladled out the soup and took their kopeks, asking her all sorts of questions about her background. Later that evening they tried to rope her into a rehearsal. Mostly it was loud argument, shouting, and strange musical clashings. She’d fallen asleep when the ‘director’, Khulchaev, a tall boy with a sharp dark beard and a smirk, woke her up to make them all tea. As if she were his servant.

  She hadn’t even got on her feet and he started straight in, ‘Hey, these are the whores, right?’ loudly enough for the whole room to hear him. He liked to do things loudly, she saw.

  She turned away, but he reached out and pulled her around. ‘Hey, don’t run off, I’m going to use you,’ he said to her quietly.

  ‘Anyway,’ Larissa piped, ‘We’re not, we’re dancers.’ All the men laughed. Vera tried to scratch him in the face and he let her go quickly.

  ‘No …’ Vera heard the Professor say behind them. ‘No, Dmitri, I think they have the correct temperament for dancers.’ All of them laughing.

  And hiding in the lavatory and breaking down into long silent sobs, that she hid even from Larissa. ‘Don’t worry,’ Larissa saying as she paced outside the stall. ‘Don’t worry, he just wants to fuck you and can’t get it up. Don’t worry …’

  When she finally came out of there, with no alternative to having to walk all the way around the stage to get out, Khulchaev started in on her again.

  ‘Here!’ he whistled at her, ‘Here, we really do need a dancer. Hey, Dancer, come on here—’ She just kept going. They could all go fuck themselves. ‘Well, I guess she’s a whore after all then,’ he said as she was halfway through the door.

  And even when she whirled and walked back into the room and slapped him, they all laughed.

  But by the end of the week she was on stage.