by Jasper Kent
Something caught Dmitry’s eye, just where the side and bottom panels joined, about halfway down: a small metal ring attached to a wire, which disappeared into a gap in the wood, no bigger than a wormhole. On the other side was a similar arrangement, except that a longer stretch of wire was visible. The mechanism for some secret door? Dmitry doubted it. More likely it was the switch to activate whatever traps Iuda had to protect him while he slept; one wire to switch them on, when he lay down, the other to disable them before he rose. Dmitry would leave things be, for now.
He returned upstairs and considered. Why would Iuda have bothered telling them, if there was nothing here to be found? For a momentary respite from his suffering? To allow him the chance to overpower Zmyeevich and escape? It was possible, but it would not get him very far – Zmyeevich could deal with him perfectly well. Merely for the amusement of wasting their time? That seemed feasible, but Dmitry was still doubtful.
In his mind he retraced his steps around the house – upstairs, downstairs and in the cellar. And then he saw it: a gap in the layout of the rooms, on the ground floor, between the stairwell, the kitchen and the large room that looked out on to the street. He walked around it, trailing his fingers across the wall, feeling for any secret latch. The space was definitely there, large enough for a sizeable room, and with no windows – no outside walls – ideal for a vampire.
And that meant the entrance would not be through any of the main rooms of the house. Iuda would want to be able to rise from his coffin in the cellar and go straight to whatever was hidden in there, without passing by any windows and the inconvenience of daylight. Dmitry returned to the cellar steps. He did not go down, but closed the door at the top and examined the wall that had been hidden when it was open.
The switch was easy enough to find. With a click Dmitry felt the panel in the wall loosen. He pushed and it swung back. He stepped through.
It was a study. The walls were lined with shelves and in the centre stood a desk and chair, facing the door. A great mirror with a gilt frame hung quite unnecessarily on one wall, to the side of the desk. Dmitry stood and gazed into it, but saw no reflection of himself, just as Iuda would not have seen himself when he stood there. The small room behind was visible in every detail, but of Dmitry – of any vampire – there could never be any sign. Why would Iuda have put it there? It could be that it dated back to a time when Iuda was human, but it seemed improbable. More likely it was there only to serve Iuda as a reminder of what he was – a memento mori, but of what had passed, not what was to come.
It was a reminder for Dmitry too, but as ever when he looked unseeing into a mirror it was not his own death that came to his mind, but that of Raisa Styepanovna, the creature who had taken him from humanity – his vampire mother. He did not know quite how she had died – and thus could not decide how she was to be avenged – but whenever he saw a mirror he felt a sense of horror and revulsion that he knew came from her in the hours leading up to her death. She had gone mad, but the last lucid thought he had shared with her was her anticipation that soon she would once again be able to see her face.
He turned back to the room and began to search. The shelves were empty. He inspected them all and saw faint markings in the dust that suggested they had once been filled with papers, but either Iuda had taken them away himself, or someone else had got here before Dmitry. He turned his attention to the desk. There were a few items on its top – a dried-up inkwell, a paperweight, a candle – nothing of any interest. There were nine drawers, four on either side and one in the middle.
Dmitry pulled at the central one. It wasn’t locked, but stuck after he had opened it only an inch. He tugged, and it gave with a click. At the same moment, Dmitry heard a scraping sound behind him, and realized what a fool he had been.
He flung himself to one side, half rolling, half sliding across the desktop before landing heavily on the dusty carpeted floor. He stared back at where he had been standing. In the shelves behind the desk, right behind his back, a panel had dropped open, revealing behind it some contraption whose nature he could easily guess at. There was a grinding, squealing sound and something began to move in the darkness. Then the movement stopped with a clunk and a long, thin cylinder rolled sideways and fell to the ground. All was still.
Dmitry got to his feet. He bent forward and picked up the cylinder. It was essentially an arrow, though slightly thicker, made of wood except for the feather fletches at the rear end. The front had been sharpened to a point. The mechanism from which it had fallen was a crossbow, aiming the wooden bolt at the heart of whoever had so incautiously stood and opened that drawer. But such a complicated mechanism needed care and maintenance, and this had received none for many years. Some of the metalwork was rusted, and Dmitry could see the marks where rats’ teeth had gnawed into the wood. A few pieces of string hung loose where once they would have been taut, presumably thanks to the same cause.
Dmitry laughed, both at his luck and his stupidity. He could easily have been the victim of Iuda’s little trap, and it was down not to him but to fate that he had survived. Why was that a matter for laughter? He closed his mouth and the room was silent again, but still in his head he could hear someone laughing – laughing at him. There was no voice to it, no timbre or pitch that he could recognize, but the sentiment behind it was clear. It had the same mocking tone he had heard from Raisa, even as she took his mortal life. But it could not be her – she had shared a part of his mind, but no longer. Who then could it be?
He pushed the thoughts away and examined further the trap that had failed to catch him. When Iuda had last been here, he would have ensured that everything was in order. The metalwork would have been well oiled; the rats would have been poisoned. But when Iuda last departed, he would not have been expecting such a long period of absence. What was he thinking now, Dmitry wondered, as he sat beneath the Kremlin with Zmyeevich, awaiting Dmitry’s arrival? Had he realized how decayed his machine had become? Dmitry would be pleased to see the look on his face when he returned.
In the meantime, he had work to do. The open drawer was brimming with documents. Dmitry began leafing through them.
Iuda followed Dmitry’s progress in his mind. It was pure guesswork; there was no mental connection between them as there would have been if one of them had inducted the other into the voordalak race. Iuda simply employed the power of reason. He knew how Dmitry behaved; he knew what Dmitry would find. There would be details over which he was mistaken, of course, but for the most part everything would go according to Iuda’s plan.
Once Dmitry departed, Zmyeevich had begun to remove the twigs and splinters of wood and cloves of garlic that perforated Iuda’s body, and he had begun to heal. Even so, it was a slower process than normal. In some wounds, depending on the type of wood, sap had oozed into his flesh and inhibited regrowth. The same was true with the juice from the garlic. Iuda had to acknowledge some admiration for Zmyeevich. In all of his experiments on the functioning of a voordalak’s body he had never thought of trying anything like this. Zmyeevich, with his great age and experience, knew much that Iuda was yet to discover.
They did not speak. Zmyeevich walked out of the cell and Iuda heard him heading up the stairs. Iuda was glad of the solitude and of the chance to consolidate his plan for escape. It began with Dmitry’s trip to Zamoskvorechye. Iuda had acquired the property not so very long after becoming a vampire; he’d had plenty of time to prepare.
Dmitry would go down to the cellar first, Iuda imagined. He’d be wary of traps – he knew Iuda well enough for that. Would he touch either of those two cables hidden on each side of the coffin? One side might not make him taller, but the other would most certainly make him shorter. Iuda had come up with the idea long before his gaolers at Geok Tepe.
Would Dmitry perceive the missing space in the middle of the house? Would he find his way in there? If not, he would return empty-handed and Iuda would have to let slip another clue. It wouldn’t come too easily, not without a little
more persuasion, but Iuda could cope with the pain of the wooden shards and the garlic. He could even cope with a little more of Zmyeevich’s blood; that was a slow, cumulative poison.
But Dmitry was no fool – not in that way. He’d find that secret room, Iuda would give odds on it. Would he avoid the crossbow? Would it even work after all this time? It would be a shame if that got him, or the guillotine in the cellar. Iuda remembered explaining once to Dmitry’s father how disappointing it could be in a game of chess when an opponent fell into one of the inconsequential traps that were set not to catch him, but to guide him towards the true finale. The dénouement would not take place in Moscow at all, but in Petersburg. But first they had to get there.
He heard footsteps approaching and the sound of voices speaking softly. Zmyeevich entered, followed by Dmitry. Iuda tried to let his face show a little disappointment, as if he’d not been expecting Dmitry to return, but instead thought he’d be reduced to a cloud of dust by the wooden bolt that pierced his heart. It was by such little things that Iuda had managed so often to deceive, ever since he was a boy.
Dmitry was carrying a bundle of papers. That was good. He laid them out on the wooden table, next to the tools of Zmyeevich’s trade, and began to pore over them. Dmitry explained what he made of them. Iuda could not see exactly what they were looking at, but he could listen.
‘These all relate back to his time in the Third Section. They’re mostly just authorizations for interrogation.’
He was right, that’s all they were.
‘Any names you recognize?’ asked Zmyeevich.
Dmitry shook his head, but with none of the dismissiveness the papers deserved. There was nothing important in any of them, they were just dross, padding so that the real item of substance would not be too obvious.
‘These are letters from his bank, but they’re ancient.’
‘And all sent to the house in Zamoskvorechye, so even the bank would be able to tell us nothing new.’
Shame. Keep trying.
‘What about this?’ asked Zmyeevich. ‘It looks like a rental agreement. Is there an address?’
Dmitry spoke after a pause, with a slight laugh. ‘It’s just Papa’s old apartment on Konyushennaya Street. We’ve already looked there.’
Was that a hint of nostalgia in Dmitry’s voice? It was where he had grown up.
‘This one I can’t make out at all though,’ said Dmitry.
Aha!
‘It looks like a builder’s plan …’ Indeed it was.
‘But I can’t tell what for.’
Iuda sighed inwardly. He hoped he wouldn’t have to help them further. He began to think of how he could let the information slip without making it too obvious, hoping it wouldn’t come to that. They should both have been familiar with what they were looking at.
‘It looks big,’ Dmitry concluded, unhelpfully.
Zmyeevich considered, his fingers stroking his moustache. He began to nod, slowly at first, but speeding up. He turned to look at Iuda, smiling broadly, then back to Dmitry.
‘Oh, I know where this is,’ he announced.
‘Where?’ asked Dmitry.
‘Get him back in the crate,’ said Zmyeevich, nodding in Iuda’s direction. ‘We’ll have to take the railway.’
‘But where are we going?’
‘We’re going,’ said Zmyeevich, ‘to Saint Petersburg.’
CHAPTER VII
PETERSBURG WAS IN uproar. Mihail’s train had arrived the previous day and even then the news was beginning to circulate. That was Wednesday 28 January 1881, a day that would go down as one of the saddest in Russia’s history. Now on Thursday everybody knew. Everyone in Petersburg would have awoken, like Mihail, some of them happy, some of them sad, some indifferent, but after a few moments they would have remembered the news, and wished it had been a dream.
Dostoyevsky was dead.
Mihail had read everything that Fyodor Mihailovich had ever published – as should every Russian of his generation, even those who despised him for his conservatism. Mihail had seen him in the flesh and heard him speak only the previous year, in Moscow at the unveiling of the statue of Pushkin. Mihail had elbowed his way into the rear of the auditorium to listen.
Looking back, he found he couldn’t agree entirely with the great man’s message. It had been a call for national unity – a fine sentiment, but one which in Russia would require such compromise by the different factions that it would never be achieved. But the way Dostoyevsky had spoken and the words he had used had been mesmerizing. The small figure had taken to the stage quite unassumingly, so distant that Mihail could not make out his features and had to strain to hear his voice. But by the end, his presence filled the entire hall.
When he had finished there had been a brief moment of silence, and then the audience erupted. There was clapping, cheering, the banging of chairs on the floor; handkerchiefs were waved, hats thrown into the air. Ivan Sergeivich Aksakov was supposed to speak next but refused, knowing he could say nothing that would compare to what had just been heard. If anything could achieve national unity, then it was this speech and the almost Christ-like reputation of Dostoyevsky himself. Here was a man who had been a radical, who had faced a firing squad and been pardoned just seconds from death. And yet still he could see the good in Russia – the good in humanity.
The mood had faded quickly, but not completely. After Dostoyevsky’s speech there had been no further assassination attempts on His Majesty. After Dostoyevsky’s speech the Third Section had been abolished. After Dostoyevsky’s speech, so rumours had it, Aleksandr and Loris-Melikov, his Minister of the Interior, had begun plans for a constitution. No one could swear that these events were the result of his speech, but to some degree he seemed to have captured the nation’s zeitgeist.
Mihail was surprised how deeply the death of a writer – a stranger he had never met – affected him. When he read the morning paper he found something that made it all the more personal. He saw Dostoyevsky’s date of birth: 30 October 1821. He had been born just six months after Mihail’s mother, Tamara. He had outlived her by less than six weeks. They had each packed more than a single lifetime into their fifty-nine years.
But there was no time to dwell upon it. It was Mihail’s first visit to Saint Petersburg, though his mother had described it to him in such detail that it seemed strangely familiar. There were two reasons to be here; two relatives: a father and a half-brother. In each case he had to presume his mother was to be believed. He had more confidence with regard to the latter than the former. It was illogical to doubt her. Every other thing she had told him had proved true, yet all of it was immeasurably more preposterous than the idea that a grand duke should take a lover, and that the lover should conceive a child.
Tamara had even told him where it had happened. As he’d taken the final leg of his journey – the train from Moscow to Petersburg – he’d looked out for the stations; somewhere between Bologoye and Okulovka. It gave a certain verisimilitude to the story, that degree of detail. With the help of an old railway timetable, he might have been able to determine the exact time of his conception too, but he didn’t bother.
By then he had been travelling alone. Dusya had not been true to her word. She’d claimed to be going all the way to Moscow, the end of the line, but had in fact alighted at Ryazan, the previous station. The tall man with the beard had got off there too, though still there was no direct communication between them. Dusya and Mihail had spoken a little more on the long journey, but he had never mentioned his suspicions over her. They had talked mostly about his part in the campaign against the Turcomans, and so he had been forced to lie to her. But he spoke in great detail about his work with explosives, and tried to gauge her reaction. At every opportunity he exaggerated his own radicalism. Like all Russians he had heard of these terrorists, but until now he had never met one. She was not as he had imagined and he was intrigued to find out more.
At Moscow he’d had only a few hours to change trains and o
nce in Petersburg, having taken in the news of Dostoyevsky, he had checked into a hotel and taken his first real bath since Rostov and then spent his first night in a real bed for many months. By morning he had decided which of his relatives he was going to visit. He would need proof, of course, with a story like his, and Tamara had provided it for him in two ways. One was a simple letter. It conveyed the information, but was unlikely to convince; it could have been written by anyone. The second was far more substantial.
He sat on his bed and looked at it, cupping it in his hands; a large pink gemstone, with a hint of blue, the last of five that made up a necklace that Konstantin had given to Tamara as a birthday present. Again it could all be part of a fantasy world in which she lived, but the gems were real. Pink sapphires, so she told him, and jewellers confirmed it – how else could they have lived so long on the money made from selling them, along with the smaller diamonds, and the silver setting?
But she had insisted they never sell this last one, not until Mihail had presented it to Konstantin and said to him the words ‘I am your son.’
He slipped it into his pocket and set off. It was wonderfully cold. Saratov, his home town, had cold winters. In Moscow, where he’d studied, it was colder still. But in the south, around the Caspian, where his quest for Iuda had taken him, there was no real winter. Here in Petersburg, it felt Russian. Mihail set out north from his hotel and crossed the Moika, heading towards the English Quay. The surface of the Great Neva was frozen solid, though he knew that the cold waters still ran beneath. It was a beautiful city, and he was sorry that it had taken almost twenty-four years of his life for him to visit it. His mother, having lived in both, preferred Moscow, but then she had the most horrific memories of Petersburg and of the cholera epidemic that had claimed her family. Now people understood cholera. It persisted, but only thanks to the government’s inaction.
