Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  Ryzhkov shook his head, turned away from the coloured map of Europe, tried to get a glimpse of the street outside. The grey snow had begun again. Somewhere out there was a wonderful land where children should be safe in their beds, being given warm milk and being sung lullabies. But where was that place, he wondered?

  ‘Yugo-Slavia, they call it. That’s their great dream and the cross that they bear, their blood lust and their obsession. Smyrba is draining our strength to fuel

  Serbian militarism, to push us into joining in a third Balkan war, and make himself rich into the bargain. Imagine their joy should they succeed! With Russia standing behind Serbia, they’re invulnerable. They can get away with anything.’

  ‘Anything,’ Fauré said again, just to make sure they’d got it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the dark of morning the monks had come.

  To level the pavilion atop the ice, to ensure the carpeting was dry, brushed, and comfortable to walk upon. They had seen to the incense, to sweeping the ice around the pavilion, removing any waste paper or cigar stubs forgotten by the carpenters, twigs blown in by the wind, droppings left by animals or men. So careful had they been, that an immaculate arc had grown around the pavilion, dozens of metres out on to the river. Their brethren bent themselves to the cutting of a circular hole in the ice, its dimensions scribed with geometrical precision, sawn out and extracted with surgical care. The ice a little thinner this year, some said, quietly under their breath as they worked to ring the hole with a wreath of velvet. All to prepare for the Tsar’s blessing of the Neva’s waters.

  Awnings had been secured, the stairs sanded and everything swept yet again. All over the city important personages were getting dressed, having breakfast, emptying themselves in preparation. Stablemen were grooming their best animals, boys were polishing the carriages. Workers were spreading sawdust on the streets.

  In the barracks the soldiers were bathing, shaving, polishing, receiving their orders, checking their route through the chaos to come. Theirs was a grim celebration, the best and the worst of duties—stand there and glisten. Woe to the poor soldier who slipped in an icy puddle, whose breastplate had acquired a scuff. Appearance was truly everything today.

  In the Winter Palace, now humming with activity, the Tsar and Tsarina were awake, had been fed, and were beginning to dress. A little later than everyone else, since they had the least distance to travel. From their windows, low on the west side of the building, they could nearly see the pavilion down on the quay below, curtained by the priests to waist height in an effort to mitigate the wind should gusts arise.

  Ryzhkov was at his post. Hunched beneath the perfectly designed arch at the mouth of the short Winter Canal, sheltering himself from the unpredictable wind, with one eye cocked for the approach of the carriage of the Dowager Empress. At the other end of the arch three St Petersburg policemen stood shifting from foot to foot, trying to keep the circulation going inside their boots.

  Hokhodiev walked in, past the flics, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette cupped behind his fingers.

  ‘All right, then. I’m ready. Let’s get it over with,’ Hokhodiev said dryly.

  ‘I’ll let them know you’re in place, I’m sure the Tsar will hurry right out.’

  ‘Oh, please, don’t bother the poor man. I know he has to wait for his mother to pick her teeth, breeze through the ballroom, greet a few hundred people, and to tell the truth, I’m—ahh!—’ A particularly violent blast of frigid air whipped around the corner and interrupted him. ‘—I’m really in no hurry.’

  Ryzhkov pulled his chin out of his collar, smiled across at Hokhodiev’s dark expression. ‘Someone will probably come around to check on us, you know,’ he said, looking out to the embankment. Out there the wind was sweeping little bursts of freezing snow over the railing; it was a hellish place to be posted for the next couple of hours.

  ‘I just looked, Pyotr. There’s nothing out there but ice.’ The embankment was closed to traffic for the ceremonies. Only after the strictly limited audience of clergy and nobility had retreated from the embankment would ordinary vehicles be allowed to use the stretch of roadway between the palace and the Neva.

  ‘But, perhaps a submarine boat could have come up during the night, either be waiting now or have planted a mine, someone could have tunnelled over from the fortress. I’ll go check again, just so we can say we’re making the rounds.’ Ryzhkov stepped out of the protection of the arch and walked out on to the embankment. For a moment he thought it was better once out from under the arch, but as soon as he reached the railing the wind whipped up into his face. A street away the Preobrazhensky Guards were forming.

  In the other direction, the street in front of the Admiralty was completely closed by other regiments. He went out to the wall and looked down on to the granite bank to see if there was any visible disturbance; of course there was nothing. Walked for thirty metres in one direction, and then back along the other way to a set of steps leading down to a little quay. Looked around on the edge of the ice below the quay. Nothing.

  Bells had begun to ring, starting with St Isaac’s, spreading across the city, the echoes rolling over the river to his ears as he returned to the shelter of the arch.

  He and Konstantin watched the nobility assemble themselves, their places in the throng on the embankment determined by rules of protocol more ancient than the dynasty itself. Protecting them was a ring of generals and admirals resplendent in their uniforms, and surrounding them the elite Corps des Pages—to Ryzhkov’s eye, rank upon rank of pathetically young boys. The youngest didn’t even come up to his belt. To be accepted as a page, particularly a page assigned to duty with the Imperial family was tacit assurance of a life-long military career that could easily reach stellar proportions. If one’s family was not distinguished enough to obtain their son an appointment to the corps, the most a young man could hope for was a place in the civil service.

  ‘Look sharp, it’s fucking Tuitchevsky,’ Hokhodiev hissed, snapping him out of his daydreams about military careerism. The local commander’s open motorcar was approaching, veering past a knot of gendarmes at the other end of the arch.

  ‘Nod, salute, and smile …’ Kostya whispered as they stepped out to greet the spluttering contraption.

  ‘What do you think you are doing inside here?’ A shivering Colonel Tuitchevsky screamed at them. He obviously had a cold, his nose was wet and his words came in great spitting clouds. He looked more frightened than anything else. It took Ryzhkov a moment to recognize the man seated beside him as General Gulka, head of the entire Third Branch. His face was as immobile as a wax statue.

  Tuitchevsky was dressed in his full military uniform, only the plain black car gave him away as Okhrana. The effect made him look like a children’s puppet, a jack-in-the-cabriolet. Beside him Gulka looked like a different toy, a garishly painted wooden egg that might suddenly open to reveal other terrible figures growing within.

  ‘Well, excellency …’ Hokhodiev started.

  ‘I checked not more than five minutes ago, sir. Nothing’s been disturbed,’ Ryzhkov said. He realized he was still saluting the men in the car.

  ‘Get back out there! You won’t be able to move during the prayers—go on! And no smoking, understand?’ Tuitchevsky brayed.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ came Konstantin’s soft acknowledgement of the order and they moved out to the railing. Behind them Tuitchevsky stood in the car, making a show for his boss, as if to follow them all the way out on to the embankment.

  ‘It’s a dog’s life,’ Ryzhkov said, bracing himself against the wind. ‘And we are the fleas.’

  ‘Well, at least we’ll have a better view.’ They took up equally spaced positions on the embankment beside each other.

  ‘How’s Lena?’ he asked Hokhodiev after a while. Konstantin made a tight little smile, moved his head back and forth.

  ‘Well, you see, they told her it would require surgery and she’s set her mind against all that.’

&n
bsp; ‘It’s become that bad?’

  Hokhodiev shook his head. ‘They don’t know really. These fucking doctors; one says one thing, another says something else. Every time you have to pay …’ He spat onto the cobbles. ‘She might go in for the operation if there were any guarantees, but for now she takes chamomile with her draught at night, says her prayers. She has a teacher who comes around. She claims it’s working, so …’

  ‘A teacher?’

  ‘A man who is showing her the Eastern way of breathing.’ Hokhodiev shrugged and stared out on to the ice. ‘At least it doesn’t hurt, so …’

  ‘Please tell her I asked after her, eh?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Certainly, of course. Thank you, Pyotr.’ Hokhodiev stood leaning against the wall, legs tight together, hands jammed down into the pockets of his overcoat.

  A blast of trumpets heralded the arrival of the Metropolitan. Ryzhkov could just pick him out in the centre of a cascade of holy men weighed down by their gold-encrusted vestments as they escorted the ikons down to the pavilion. Behind them, slowly walking in time to the music, came Nicholas II, the Tsar of all the Russias, dressed in his ceremonial uniform as an officer of the Preobrazhensky regiment. There were many stops along the way; the stairs had to be purified, the little pavilion itself had to be blessed. All of it took time.

  Ryzhkov’s occupational paranoia reasserted itself; a glance to the roof searching for a hidden anarchist marksman, an eye to the uniforms of the nearest men around them, searching for the detail that would reveal a terrorist in disguise. But what if the threat came from within …

  There was the sound of a single silver bell and all the men removed their hats. Hokhodiev, nearly bald after all, groaned as he took off his fedora. The life of a policeman.

  In response to a sharp command, the pages uncovered, tucking their helmets in the crook of their arms. Their colonel, satisfied, stiffly turned about and did the same. The life of a soldier.

  Now the Tsar was receiving God’s blessing via Metropolitan Cervenka. The Tsar knelt and Cervenka placed the cross on the Tsar’s shoulder—one, two, three times. There was a pause where presumably a short, inaudible prayer was said. Ryzhkov, like everyone else, tried to avoid shuffling his numbed feet. There was the slightest glimpse of movement as the prayer ended and the Tsar stood. Then, the cry of Cervenka’s voice pleading with God to accept the Tsar’s blessing of the Neva. The golden cross was plunged three times into the velvet-ringed hole, a few more holy words and Cervenka stepped back, waiting for the annual miracle to occur. The life of a priest.

  A bejewelled golden ladle was filled with a generous amount of river water, and poured into an equally ornate golden cup held by another ancient. Cervenka once again called upon God for reassurance, and then presented the Tsar with the goblet. Seemingly without hesitation, Nicholas drank off a portion of the contents and pronounced it good.

  Ryzhkov could not help flinching at the absurdity of the moment. Why would an assassin bother trying to attack the Tsar, since drinking from the Neva might just as easily kill him. Everyone, except the most ignorant peasants, knew better. There must be doctors waiting in the palace, ready to purge Nicholas the moment the ceremony concluded. Or maybe the Tsar had just been pretending to drink; and who would have challenged him? Maybe he did drink and his personality killed the germs, or perhaps Nicholas was truly divine after all and all the double-headed eagles were watching over him. Ryzhkov wondered if Nicholas ever worried about getting sick; no Tsar had ever been ill as a result of the blessing, at least as far as the public knew. So, God must have killed all the germs, was the obvious conclusion.

  Ryzhkov looked up to the façade of the palace where diplomats, invited commoners and their families clustered at the tall windows. Here, safe and warm, was everyone else, the lesser nobles, the very rich. The mayor of the city, the members of the Duma, visiting dignitaries, the children and the elderly who could not stand the cold. He wondered where Fauré was standing, what thoughts were going through his head. Would the empire hold together long enough for any of them to witness next year’s Blessing of the Waters?

  Now from the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul came a rippling series of flashes, and a moment later the roar of the cannons’ salute. As a reiteration, music began, cathedral bells pealing across the entire city.

  Thus was the Neva purified for another year.

  Ryzhkov watched as Nicholas ascended the walkway, the atmosphere slightly more informal now, the generals, the admirals, the grand dukes, the princes, the counts and the barons all permitted to put on their hats. Everyone eager to get inside where the food was waiting, everyone glad the ceremonies were over. The life of a Tsar.

  The pages assembled under a new command and Ryzhkov and Hokhodiev trotted across the cobbles to get out of their way as they wheeled through the arch on their way back to the palace. Ryzhkov suddenly felt old beyond his years, a man grown beyond the possibility of a future. In front of him passed the regiment, bound by oaths of loyalty to the Tsar, to the True Church, to the Corps des Pages itself. At the moment they were just boys with beardless faces and a growing awareness of their own privileged position, but in the decades ahead they would be the chosen ones—the cabinet ministers, the generals, the leaders of industry, the commanders-in-chief of Russia’s forces, the generation that held the keys to a golden Russian century. And at their head, the boy who could not kneel—Alexei.

  The rhythm of their marching was hypnotic, so much so that he didn’t hear Hokhodiev the first time, and Kostya had to reach out and give him a little punch on his cold shoulder.

  ‘… had better come along, Pyotr. That is, unless you want to die out here …’

  And when they turned to leave they saw that the Okhrana car had gone, leaving only the oily smell of its vanishing.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Izachik thought that he was about to lose his job.

  He had come off duty that Saturday morning, awakened to find that there was an additional ‘auditor’ come to sift through their case books. The first ‘auditor’ who had been with them for two weeks, turned and looked at him as he came down the stairs from the duty officer’s room and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘He’s with me …’ and Izachik caught a flash of an Okhrana disc before they turned back to one of the binders.

  It had started with Zezulin behaving suspiciously, he was forced to admit. He should have seen it earlier. The entire station was under some great … threat. Threat, that was the only way he knew to perceive it.

  Zezulin was awake all the time now. Suddenly grown alert. Serious. He’d never been like that before. He’d had a boy come and throw all the bottles in the garbage, then he’d ordered two caretakers to come around and clean his office thoroughly. He requested and returned boxes of files, folders of correspondence. He had started his own special log, Izachik knew, perhaps two special logs, or more … and he came down from his rooms and hovered over receipt books that had long ago been properly filled out for everything that came into their office.

  Then a week later he had backslid. After having denied himself a drink for days, Beilund found him asleep on the couch with a bottle clasped between his hands and another on the floor. In the morning he had reformed and was back at work when Izachik arrived; had his food brought up to him and left outside the door.

  Whatever was happening, it must be important. He knew it was important.

  Zezulin could be in some sort of trouble; perhaps he had been approached, offered a bribe, exposed somehow and was now on the brink of being arrested. These things happened, everyone knew it. Was he trying to cover his tracks? As far as Izachik could determine, by leafing through all the indices, there was no logic to Zezulin’s requests. Perhaps he was trying to find something that he should have seen earlier? It was impossible to guess. Maddening.

  And then had come the auditors. Zezulin hadn’t liked it, followed the man around, made some telephone calls immediately upon his arrival. Had the young man up for a meeting, before letting
him see the books.

  And now another.

  They had started with the accounts, the budget expenditures for 17 Pushkinskaya. These were all simple arithemetic. Nothing to worry about, everything was in order simply because he, Izachik, had played a good part in keeping the accounts accurately. Everything up to snuff, he reminded himself; so, the financial books had taken but a day to check and there was nothing to worry about there. No, whatever they were after, it wasn’t the money.

  Perhaps Tuitchevsky, the local commander, was looking for an excuse to replace Zezulin; if so, why go to all the pretence, why spend the effort when anything would do. It didn’t fully explain Zezulin’s sudden efficiency, but then … what man isn’t afraid to lose his job?

  The next thing to happen would be something official, an evaluation they would call it, someone would come around, someone with more authority than the auditors, or—it would be short and sweet—a simple announcement, a pathetic goodbye party for Zezulin and a rallying speech by the new man, whoever had been selected.

  Or perhaps there would be interviews beforehand, he would find himself under the spotlight, all of his actions questioned. He felt the panic rise in his throat.

  It was then that he started going through the files himself. If there was any irrgularity he wanted to be the first to discover it, and, filled with guilt and anxiety, he spent the rest of the night stacking and rearranging ledgers, file reports, dossiers, and procedural requests into their correct pigeon-holes and cabinets, trying to divine a greater logic hidden within the official logic of his office.

  By dawn he was exhausted and panicky. So distraught that when Dima Dudenko came in and saw him there—rumpled, with his hair (what little there was left) hanging in greying strings from his pate—and asked if anything was wrong, he dragged him around behind the bookcases and blurted it all out to him in a stage whisper that tore at his throat, and brought tears.

  Overnight he had discovered that yes … in horrible truth, files were missing or had been altered. Multiple pages had been removed, razored out of older bound volumes. It was impossible to say how long any of it had been going on, and doubtless there were official secrets that had to sometimes be … rewritten or various forms of evidence that, given the importance of protecting the empire, had to be fabricated. Still! There were safeguards, precautions designed for exactly this circumstance, but inevitably they had been circumvented. Case files. Different reference numbers. There’s no way to trace it, of course. It could be the accountants. It could be Velimir Antonovich Zezulin.