Death in St. Petersburg

by Tasha Alexander

  “You should be delighted with this development, non?” she asked. “This is hardly the first time you have exposed a murderer whom you had grown to like.” She was quite right on this point. In one case, I discovered that a woman I had considered a close friend was guilty of the crime, and the knowledge had struck a terrible blow. “Although I never felt that you liked Katenka.”

  “I don’t know her well enough to form an opinion,” I said. “I certainly don’t trust her, but something about this feels all wrong.”

  “If you are going to start talking like that, it is a good thing Monsieur Hargreaves is not here,” she said. “The crime is solved. There is no further need for instinct.”

  “Consider the last conversation I had with Katenka. My focus was on her brother, and she might have concluded that Lev was in danger of being arrested for murder. I’m convinced she didn’t tell us about his relationship with Nemetseva to protect him.”

  “He is not Nemetseva’s only former lover,” Cécile said. “Their romance ended years ago. Why would he have waited so long to exact his revenge?”

  “I have not figured out the details,” I said, “but I have no doubt she knows more than she’s told us and that she is willing to do anything for her brother.”

  “Confessing to murder is going a bit far, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps not when you consider their history. They’ve always been extremely close, and since her mother and grandfather died, he’s her only family. And the murder weapon, Cécile—do not forget that. A naval dirk just like the one her father had. It is hardly a reach to think his son would have received it upon his death.”

  “C’est vrai.” Cécile stood and got her coat.

  “You’re leaving me?” I asked.

  “No, I’m going to the prison with you to speak with Katenka. That was your plan, non?”

  Ekaterina Petrovna

  December 1898

  The morning after she had seen Lev in Irusya’s apartment, Katenka was desperate to talk to her friend, but by the time Irusya arrived for company class, the pianist had already started to play; she would have to wait. Irusya was perfect in class: her pliés, her tendus, her ronds de jambe, but most of all her work in the center, culminating with one of the most gorgeous adagios Katenka had ever seen. Irusya was glowing.

  “You had an excellent class,” Katenka said when Petipa had dismissed them.

  “On some days, everything works, doesn’t it?” Irusya said. “This is a good day and will be a better night. Are you ready for Esmeralda?”

  Rife with love, jealousy, betrayal, honor, and loyalty, the ballet told the story of Esmeralda, the gypsy girl who enters into a marriage of convenience to save a man from execution. She finds true love in the end, but only after first experiencing profound feelings of heartbreak. “It is so full of emotion,” Katenka said. “There is nothing I would rather dance. But what about you? I haven’t seen you so happy in ages. Has something happened?”

  “I’m just excited that you are performing in a role that could very well lead to a promotion,” Irusya said. She was right. Petipa had cast her as one of Esmeralda’s friends in the pas de six in the third act.

  “Surely that alone does not account for your improved mood?”

  “I’ve heard rumors Petipa plans to revise the choreography next season for Mathilde. She told me she plans to train Esmeralda’s goat herself.” The company always used a real goat to play Esmeralda’s pet, something that never failed to delight the younger students in the Imperial Theatre School.

  Katenka could not understand why Irusya wasn’t telling her about Lev. Perhaps the reunited couple wanted to share the news together. Satisfied by this explanation, Katenka asked no more questions.

  Katenka’s performance that night was a spectacular success. All of her additional practice and the hours of lessons with Cecchetti had paid off; she outdid herself in the pas de six. Petipa announced her promotion to coryphée after the performance. Their Esmeralda, the sublime Olga Preobrajenska, was flawless. Irusya missed the landing on one of her jumps but recovered seamlessly and did a credible job as Fleur de Lys, the young maiden unlucky in love.

  As soon as the final curtain fell, Mitya rushed backstage, clutching a book to his chest and grinning when he found Katenka. He picked her up and spun her around with such vigor he nearly sent his spectacles flying.

  “I am so proud of you,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks and handing her the book. “Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, the inspiration for this ballet.”

  “Thank you, Mityusha,” Katenka said, beaming. She looked around for Lev but did not see him. “Where is my brother?”

  “He could not come but sends his congratulations with me. He knew you would shine,” Mitya said. “Now, we must celebrate. You go change and I will wait for you by the stage door, with the rest of your admirers.”

  “You’re my only admirer.”

  “Not after tonight, Katyushenka.”

  Flushed with excitement and exertion, Katenka headed for the dressing room she shared with the rest of the corps, passing Irusya’s on the way. She stopped to speak to her friend but then realized Petipa was there, giving Irusya a lengthy set of corrections. Her performance had disappointed him. Katenka’s elation faded a bit, and she waited in the corridor until the ballet master had finished. He congratulated Katenka again as he walked out of the room.

  “You have impressed me so much tonight, Ekaterina Petrovna,” he said. “Now, at last, you are becoming the dancer we all knew you could be.”

  Katenka thanked him and went to Irusya.

  “He ought not to have been so severe with you,” she said.

  “He said nothing that wasn’t true,” Irusya said. Her demeanor, so perfectly calm and measured, would have led someone who knew her less well to believe that his criticism had taken no emotional toll on her. “It is of no consequence. Not every performance can be perfect, and I will do better tomorrow. Let’s talk about you instead. I am so happy for you! No one deserves promotion more.” She kissed Katenka on both cheeks and embraced her.

  “Mitya is waiting for me outside. Will you come celebrate with us?”

  “I want to more than anything, but I’m afraid I have a previous commitment that cannot be broken.” Irusya blushed as she spoke, and looked at the floor.

  “Ah,” Katenka said, smiling. “I believe I understand.”

  Irusya squeezed her hand. “I knew you would. I have been waiting for this for so long. Tomorrow, after Sleeping Beauty, we will celebrate together. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  January 1900

  22

  Before we left the suite, I rang the judicial investigator, who told me where Katenka had been confined. Cécile had Masha’s carriage outside waiting to take us across the Neva to the St. Petersburg Prison for Solitary Confinement. Although not so infamous as the jail in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the conditions inside the large red brick building appalled me. This was a place where tuberculosis thrived and suicide seemed preferable to life.

  The warden agreed to let us see Katenka and had two guards bring her to a small room not far from his office. Wretched did not begin to describe the ballerina. Her eyes were red and swollen, a dark bruise blooming beneath one of them. Her golden hair had escaped its pins and hung around her face like straw. She was no longer wearing her own clothes, and the woolen dress and felt boots of her prison uniform were coarse and ill-fitting.

  She sat across a roughly hewn table from us and stared at the floor.

  “Why have you done this?” I asked.

  “The truth always finds its way out,” she said. “I should have thought you’d be glad. I could tell you suspected me from the beginning.”

  I chose not to correct her. “Describe for me exactly what happened.”

  “I came here and asked to see the warden—”

  “No, not in the prison,” I said. “With Nemetseva.”

  Katenka drew a deep breath. “I ha
d been jealous of her for years and could stand it no longer. I arranged to have her killed. I am ashamed of myself, but I acted out of a desperate passion to succeed in my chosen profession, something not possible so long as I had to compete with Irusya.” She spoke as if reciting lines written for someone else. They did not fit her.

  “Whom did you hire?”

  “A wretched man who skulks about my neighborhood. Don’t bother to look for him. He’s long gone by now, and I don’t even know his real name. We agreed on a price and I told him where he could find Irusya. I knew she always waved to Agrippina Alexandrovna during the interval. I chose the date I did because I was the understudy for Swan Lake,” she said. “I knew I would triumph when I took on the role for the remainder of the ballet at the last minute in difficult circumstances. As you see, it all went just as I planned.”

  “And what about your brother?” I asked.

  “My brother has nothing to do with this.” She spat the words. “Why do you mention him?”

  “Partly because you’ve consistently tried to mislead me about him and partly because of how you reacted when I told you about the knife wielded by the murderer. If the crime were committed as you claim, you would not have permitted your neighborhood brute to use a weapon that could be tied to your family.”

  “I did not tell him what knife to use. He probably stole it from someone. You’ve got what you want now, so can’t you just leave me be? Your case is solved. There’s no need for you to torment me any longer, and you certainly have no right to try to bring my brother into any of this. I’m no fool—I realized that you had begun to suspect him. It’s what spurred me to confess. I had made an uneasy peace with my conscience over my crime, but it had never occurred to me that I might be putting Lev in danger. Once I realized that you were rushing to the wrong conclusion, I had to come forward. He would never have received a fair trial.”

  I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow, but Cécile spoke before I could. “Porquoi pas?”

  “His politics would preclude it.” Her voice was barely audible. “Can you be so ignorant about my country? We are not allowed to think what we want. The fact that he had nothing to do with the murder would be irrelevant. They’d send him to Siberia regardless to punish him for his ideas.”

  “They could do that without accusing him of murder,” I said. “What is he involved in, exactly? You must tell me. I can help you, but only if—”

  The warden threw open the door and told us our time was up. The guards pulled Katenka roughly from her chair, knocking it over and nearly sending her flying with it. Cécile admonished them to be more gentle, but they ignored her. My stomach churned as I watched them take their prisoner away.

  Neither of us said another word until we were back in the carriage and out of sight of the prison.

  “What a horrible place.” Cécile looked as disturbed as I have ever seen her. “It is as bad as the Bastille. Something must be done.”

  “Do you believe she is telling the truth?” I asked.

  “She is lying, bien sûr, but whether to protect her brother or because she is innocent, I cannot say.”

  “I have been suspicious of her, but her confession does not ring true. If anything, it argues for her innocence. What if she’s wrong about Lev needing protection? At least wrong about who is threatening him.” I thought about Mr. Tabokov, Colin’s colleague. If Lev were his agent, he wouldn’t be worried about the government objecting to his politics, and surely he would have found some way to reassure his sister. Unless … but I could not worry about that right now. “If that’s the case, the murderer may still be wandering free. I know where we need to go next.”

  This was not precisely accurate. I knew, in theory, where I wanted to go, but had no idea as to the actual location. I ordered the carriage to Katenka’s building, but rather than going to her rooms, I knocked on the doors of the other apartments in the building, inquiring in Russia if the occupants were acquainted with Katenka and her friend Mitya. Most of her neighbors knew and liked her, and a few recognized my description of Mitya, but it took nearly an hour to find anyone who could claim an acquaintance with him.

  “Yes, of course, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Ivchenko,” said the young man who lived on the second floor. “I was in school with him, and we often speak when he comes to see Ekaterina Petrovna. He has a room not far from here in the building above a butcher’s shop. I will write down the address and directions.”

  We thanked him and set off. Finding the building was simple enough, but reaching the apartment was another matter. Mitya lived on the top floor, up a seemingly endless succession of stairs. When at last we reached his door, I knocked repeatedly while Cécile caught her breath. No one answered. A woman poked her head out from across the narrow corridor.

  “He’s not there,” she said. Her dress was filthy and torn and she was missing most of her teeth. “So you can stop making such a racket.”

  “Do you know when he will return?” I asked. She replied, but I could not understand her well enough to grasp her meaning. I tried to clarify, but she only laughed at my failure to speak Russian fluently.

  “I don’t like her, Kallista,” Cécile said. “Did you see the way she looked at us? Sizing us up? It is not safe for us to stay here.”

  “We need to get inside,” I said, once again turning to my lock picks. I worked quickly, not wanting to be seen by anyone, and soon we were inside. Mitya had only a single room, with a narrow couch and a small table with three mismatched chairs. There was no electricity, and only one window. I pushed aside the curtains to let in some light, and we began to systematically comb through his belongings.

  “I think we may be getting ourselves into more trouble than we realize,” I said, holding up a stack of leaflets.

  “What do they say?”

  “My Russian is only so good, but as far as I can tell they first document the plight of the workers and then urge them to rise up against their employers. Along the bottom, here”—I pointed—“it says League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.”

  “This name is familiar to me,” Cécile said.

  “Remember the maid murdered at the Yusupov Palace? The man who confessed to killing her is a member of this very organization. If Lev is not loyal to the cause, as Mr. Tabokov tells us, and his friends have realized he’s a fraud, they would want to punish him.”

  “Wouldn’t they simply kill him? Is that not how thugs deal with each other in these situations?”

  “Not if they were concerned that eliminating him might alarm their enemies, who, in this case, are the government. Better to have him lawfully arrested for a crime, don’t you think? That would remove him from their organization without the police or anyone knowing that his cover was blown. It’s a much subtler approach, and a more useful one.”

  “Except that he has not been arrested.”

  “Only because his sister has intervened,” I said. “Think about it. How did we get the murder weapon? It was left at my hotel. They knew we would identify its origins, and they knew that we would see the connection to Katenka’s family. Her confession will have thrown off their plans. We must be very careful as to how we proceed.”

  “I cannot imagine Monsieur Hargreaves or anyone else is going to want us—or rather, you—to proceed. You won’t be able to prove your theories, and he will want proof. Evidence, hard evidence, as he always says.”

  “Colin knows the league is planning something. He will listen to me.”

  We continued our search of Mitya’s pitiful lodgings, hardly expecting to find something more explosive than what we already had. But there, inside a narrow cupboard next to the window, hung a white tulle ballet costume, perfect for Swan Lake; below it, a pile of neatly folded crimson scarves.

  When we left, closing the door behind us, the neighbor woman was waiting in the corridor. She did not speak, but followed us to the stairs and watched as we descended. I have never been better pleased to leave a building, nor more grateful
to have a carriage waiting outside. We returned directly to the hotel, where I nearly yelped with joy when I saw Colin was already in our rooms.

  “I hardly dared hoped I would find you here,” I said, embracing him before even removing my coat. “What a brilliant surprise!”

  He returned my embrace and kissed me quickly, but looked over my shoulder to Cécile and then whispered to me. “Much though I am enjoying your enthusiasm, I fear it is not a precursor to any sort of pleasant activity. What have you two learned? I can’t remember when I’ve seen you so agitated.”

  He pulled away, greeted Cécile, and took our coats. Cécile lowered herself next to him on the couch, but I found myself too on edge to sit and stood in front of them to recount the events of the day. He already knew about Katenka’s confession and assured us that she was being well treated in prison, a statement I could not reconcile with the bruise I had seen on her face.

  “There is more, however,” I said, and handed him one of the pamphlets I had taken from Mitya’s room.

  “Where did you get this?”

  I explained, and as I spoke his countenance grew dark. He rose to his feet and started to pace.

  “I am relieved you got out unharmed, Emily,” he said. “I do not admonish you, because you had no way of knowing. This group is radical and may be dangerous—you remember Anna?”

  “I do,” I said. “It is the league’s connection to her murder and information I overheard from your colleague Mr. Tabokov that prompted me to come up with a new theory. Katenka did not hire someone to kill Nemetseva. The league eliminated her themselves.” Still pacing, Colin listened as I explained how I had reached my conclusion.

  “I agree that your idea has merits. If Lev’s colleagues realized he is a spy, they would want to deal with him, but framing him for murder seems a clumsy and unreliable way to do it. Nonetheless, it is worth considering the possibility. I agree that Katenka’s confession leaves something to be desired, but if she stands by her words, there is not much we can do.” I told him about the ballet costume. “So the revolutionaries are behind our ghostly ballerina.”