Blackstone and the Endgame

by Sally Spencer

  ‘And where will this navigation take place?’

  ‘It will take place in a famous Petersburg nightclub called the Aquarium,’ Vladimir said.

  ‘It’s a strange name for a nightclub,’ Blackstone commented.

  ‘On the contrary, it is a very sensible name, as you will see when we get there,’ Vladimir said.

  It was becoming almost impossible to get good French champagne at any price, Max Schneider thought, but then, he supposed, since the whole of Europe was engaged in a life-and-death struggle in which millions had already perished, it was only right that even he should have to sacrifice something.

  Leaving a generous tip on the table – and his last glass of champagne barely touched – Max stood up and walked across the dining room.

  He was aware of the eyes that were following his progress, but it did not displease him. In fact, he fairly revelled in it.

  After all, why wouldn’t they look at him? He was a handsome man by any standards, and if watching him brought a little light into their humdrum lives, then he was pleased for them.

  He crossed the foyer and stepped out of the front door straight on to the promenade.

  He loved Brighton, he thought, as he strolled towards the Royal Pavilion, though he would have loved it even more during the Regency period, when the Prince Regent had made it the place to be seen.

  Somewhere in the distance, two seagulls squawked in angry dispute, and he felt a shiver run down his spine.

  He hated the birds with a passion because they reminded him of Hamburg, where he had been brought up – and Hamburg reminded him of his stern, unyielding father who had been responsible for that upbringing.

  ‘When you were born, I had hopes that you would grow into a real man, Max,’ he said, in a voice much deeper than his natural one. ‘And look at you now – you disgust me!’

  ‘Why don’t you die, Father?’ he asked in his normal voice. ‘Why didn’t you die long ago?’

  It was dangerous to be a German in Britain – even one posing as a Norwegian – but he would never go back to the country of his birth, he promised himself. He had known from almost the moment he had landed in England that it was his spiritual home, and even when the money ran out – and it would run out eventually – he would stay and get by as best he could.

  The seagulls squawked again, and he found himself wondering how difficult it would be to poison every gull in Brighton.

  The walls of the Aquarium nightclub were made of thick glass, and, behind that glass, brightly coloured fish swam endlessly up and down.

  The centre of the club, in contrast, had much more muted lighting, though it was still possible to see beyond your own table to the three or four that surrounded it.

  There were two other people at Blackstone and Vladimir’s table – a young officer in a Guards’ uniform and a strikingly attractive woman in a long flowing dress that was covered with jewels.

  They both seemed to know Vladimir – they gave every indication of having been waiting impatiently for his arrival – but Vladimir did not introduce Blackstone to them, and they seemed totally indifferent to him.

  The lights dimmed in the room, and a spotlight appeared on the stage. A woman walked to the centre of it, and there was thunderous applause.

  She was very dark-skinned for a Russian, and her hair was jet black. She was wearing a dress with a long gathered skirt and had a shawl over her shoulders. Four more women, dressed in a similar manner, came on to the stage and stood behind her, and then two men, wearing wide-brimmed black hats, followed.

  The guitarists began to play a simple tune, the woman began to sing, and even after a few notes, Blackstone felt a catch in his heart and knew that hers was a voice that could weave magic.

  She sang five songs, full of melancholy and passion, despair and euphoria, and when she walked off the stage, Blackstone was exhausted.

  ‘She’s one of the most famous gypsy singers in the whole of Petersburg,’ Vladimir told him.

  The striking woman at their table had been watching the door for the whole of the gypsy woman’s performance, and now she turned to Vladimir and said, in an anxious voice, ‘He hasn’t come.’

  ‘You assured me, Count, that he would be here,’ she said.

  Vladimir looked down at the hand with some distaste and then removed it – none too graciously – with his own.

  ‘I am not accustomed to having my word doubted,’ he growled. ‘I told you he will be here, and so he will. His policemen – to whom I have paid out a small fortune – will make sure of that.’ And then, as if he could bear the sight of the woman no longer, he turned back to Blackstone and said, ‘What were we talking about, Sam?’

  ‘You were telling me that the gypsy singer is famous,’ Blackstone reminded him.

  ‘Ah, yes. I believe that, in some countries, gypsies are despised, but in that – as in so many other things – Russia is different. The cabarets and theatres are prepared to pay a great deal to engage the services of a gypsy singer.’

  ‘I imagine they are,’ Blackstone agreed, his nerves still tingling from the performance.

  ‘And while most actresses – even quite famous ones – accept it as part of their job to sleep with some of their admirers, a gypsy singer will do no such thing. If you wish to bed her, you must first marry her, and you cannot marry her without the consent of her family, which you can only obtain by giving them a small fortune as a gift.’ Vladimir took a sip of his wine. ‘Do the members of your English aristocracy ever marry gypsies, Sam?’

  ‘Only in romantic fiction,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Here, it is quite common,’ Vladimir said. ‘Half of the noblest families in Russia have some gypsy blood in them.’

  ‘He’s coming,’ the striking woman hissed excitedly, though she did not attempt to grab Vladimir’s arm again. ‘He’s coming.’

  Blackstone turned towards the door and saw a man weaving his way uncertainly between the tables. The man had a scraggy beard and was dressed simply in a peasant blouse and baggy trousers – though, as he got closer, it was obvious that the blouse was made of shot silk, and the trousers of the finest cloth.

  He had not come alone. Following in his wake were six women, three dressed like prostitutes and three wearing gowns that would not have disgraced a society ball.

  ‘Do you recognize him from the cartoon you saw?’ Vladimir asked Blackstone.

  ‘Is he Rasputin?’ Blackstone said.

  ‘The very same,’ Vladimir confirmed.

  Rasputin reached the table that had been reserved for him and sat down. His women – the rasputinki – stood hovering uncertainly as he first studied them and then glanced at the seats around the table.

  A full minute passed before he pointed first to one of the gowned women and then at a chair on the far side of the table. The woman’s shoulders slumped, and as she walked slowly to the seat he had assigned her, it seemed as if her whole world had come to an end.

  ‘They worship him,’ Vladimir said to Blackstone. ‘When he eats hard-boiled eggs, they beg him to let them take the shells away with them, and if he gives his permission – and he doesn’t always – they preserve those shells as if they were precious relics.’

  Rasputin had decided that another of the women should sit next to him, and her delight was as obvious as the despair of the other woman had been.

  ‘I’m told that one of his favourite tricks is to stick his fingers deep in a dish of jam and then have his disciplines lick them clean,’ Vladimir said. ‘I’m not sure who I despise more – him or his women.’

  When the whole party was finally seated, Vladimir stood up and walked over to Rasputin’s table. Once there, he bent down and whispered something in the starets’ ear. Rasputin replied, and Vladimir took a step backwards and made a great show of shaking his head in a disbelieving manner.

  Rasputin spoke again, waving his hand agitatedly through the air, and Vladimir laughed.

  Rasputin attempted to rise from his chair – pe
rhaps to take a swing at the other man – but Vladimir placed a powerful hand on his shoulder and forced him down again.

  One of the gowned women at the table started to speak to Vladimir. Her face was full of rage, and it was obvious – even from a distance – that she was telling him to leave Rasputin alone. Then Vladimir raised his hand in a commanding gesture, and she fell silent.

  Blackstone shook his head in silent admiration. It was unlikely that any of the people at Rasputin’s table knew who Vladimir was – the very nature of his business dictated that he be unknown – yet, just by his presence alone, he was dominating them all.

  Rasputin said something else to him, and Vladimir nodded.

  This time, when the starets started to stand up, Vladimir did nothing to prevent him.

  Rasputin lifted his peasant blouse and held the edge of it in his teeth, so that his chest was bare. Then he took the waistband of his baggy trousers in both hands and pulled them down to his knees.

  He was wearing no underwear, and his penis was immediately exposed to anyone who happened to be looking in that direction.

  Rasputin took the penis in his right hand and held it up for Vladimir to inspect.

  Two waiters suddenly appeared, one of them holding a tablecloth. They wrapped the cloth around him, then began to hustle him across the room, a manoeuvre not made any easier by the fact that his trousers were still at knee level and he could move at no more than a shuffle.

  Vladimir returned to his own table.

  ‘Well, that was most satisfactory,’ he said to Blackstone.

  ‘What was it you said to Rasputin?’ Blackstone asked Vladimir, in the cab back to the apartment.

  ‘I asked him if he was the starets, and when he agreed he was, I told him, in a very contemptuous manner, that I needed proof before I would believe him. Of course, he had the proof right there at the table – he was surrounded by people who could vouch for his identity – but he was drunk, and so, instead of appealing to them, he asked me just what sort of proof I would require.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said that I had heard that the real Rasputin had a wart on the end of his prick, which he uses to drive women into ecstasies. I asked him to show it to me – which, of course, he did.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known he’d do it,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘True,’ Vladimir agreed, ‘but he has certainly exposed himself in nightclubs before, and I had no doubt that, in order to make me look small, he would expose himself again.’

  ‘But I still don’t see why you would have wanted him to expose himself,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Ah, that was for the benefit of Grand Duke Dimitri and Prince Felix Yusupov,’ Vladimir said. ‘I thought it might encourage them towards an action that they were already seriously considering taking.’

  Vladimir was playing one of his games, Blackstone recognized – dangling tantalizing bits of information before his eyes, and making him jump through hoops before supplying the context that would make sense of them.

  Well, he supposed it helped to pass the time.

  ‘Who are Grand Duke Dimitri and Prince Felix Yusupov?’ Blackstone asked dutifully.

  ‘Grand Duke Dimitri is the tsar’s younger cousin,’ Vladimir said. ‘The tsar and tsarina are very fond of him, and though the wider imperial family is really quite large, he is the only member of it who is ever invited to spend much time with them. He serves as the tsar’s aide-de-camp and is, in some ways, almost a second son to the tsar and tsarina. It is even rumoured that they are considering marrying him to their eldest daughter.’

  ‘And since you put the show on for him, I am assuming that he was at the Aquarium tonight.’

  Vladimir laughed. ‘Of course he was. He was the young officer who was sitting at our table.’

  ‘And was this Prince Yusupov there, also?’

  ‘Oh yes. Though they have had their occasional disagreements – and even quite long periods of separation – he is still Grand Duke Dimitri’s closest friend and constant companion.’

  Even by his own standards, Vladimir was making heavy work of this, Blackstone thought.

  ‘Might I have seen him?’ he asked.

  ‘You could not have avoided it,’ Vladimir said, with a grin, ‘because he was sitting at our table, too.’

  ‘The woman!’ Blackstone exclaimed in disbelief.

  ‘Felix has enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes since he was twelve or thirteen years old. His parents were naturally concerned about it, and, in an attempt to cure him of the habit, they sent him to Oxford University, which they believed to be both staid and respectable. Unfortunately for them, however, he joined something called the Bullingdon Club while he was there, and that only seems to have made him worse.’

  ‘A woman!’ Blackstone repeated, still not quite able to believe that the strikingly attractive figure who had sat opposite him could have been a man.

  ‘You’re not the first one to fail to see through Felix’s disguise – not by a long way,’ Vladimir assured him. ‘Once, he appeared on the stage of the Aquarium dressed as a woman, and everyone was taken in. He sang six songs before he was recognized by some of his mother’s friends – even then, they didn’t really see that it was actually him until they’d recognized his mother’s jewellery, with which he’d lavishly draped himself.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Blackstone said.

  ‘And it’s not just on the stage or in dim lighting that he can get away with it,’ Vladimir continued. ‘There was another occasion, after a ball at the opera, when he allowed himself to be picked up by four Guards officers, who took him to the Bear nightclub. He told his friends, later, that in order to escape their amorous intentions, he was forced to throw a bottle of champagne into the nearest mirror, switch off all the lights and make a dash for the street. And perhaps he did do that – or perhaps he made no attempt to escape at all and stayed to service all four of them.’

  ‘You have nothing but contempt for him, do you?’ Blackstone asked, remembering the way Vladimir had roughly removed Felix Yusupov’s hand from his arm.

  ‘The man is scum,’ Vladimir declared with a passion. ‘While all the other young men of his class are serving in the army – and some are actually dying for their country – he has found a way to gain an exemption. While the poor starve, Felix spends money like a drunken sailor – a very rich drunken sailor. He has no redeeming features, and the world would be better off without him.’

  ‘And yet, knowing all you do about him, it was still important to you that this man – above all others – should see Rasputin behaving disgracefully?’ Blackstone asked incredulously.

  ‘Not above all others,’ Vladimir said. ‘It was important that Grand Duke Dimitri saw it, too, although it is undoubtedly the case that Yusupov is the leader and Dimitri the follower.’

  ‘I still don’t see why you went through the whole charade,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘I did it because I need him,’ Vladimir said. ‘And while it is true that I find him so disgusting I would rather dive into a bath of shit than shake his hand, it is also true that he is about to help me to navigate events around my deeply held beliefs.’

  SIXTEEN

  13th December 1916 – Julian calendar; 26th December 1916 – Gregorian calendar

  It was snowing when they arrived at the mill, and half the square was covered with a blanket of unbroken whiteness. The other half – the section closest to the Narva cotton mill gates – was a different matter. There – partly to keep warm, partly because they were too nervous to stand still – the workers had been wandering up and down for over an hour, and as quickly as the snow fell, they were turning it to slush.

  ‘None of the children are here today,’ Blackstone said, glancing quickly around him.

  ‘No,’ Tanya agreed, ‘they are not. It was agreed it would be safer for them to remain in the dormitories.’

  ‘It was agreed?’ Blackstone repeated quizzically.

  ‘Yes,’ Ta
nya said.

  ‘And Josef went along with it?’

  ‘Of course he went along with it. He is our leader – our vanguard. No such decision would have been made without his consent.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like him at all,’ Blackstone mused.

  ‘How can you say that about him, when you have only met him once?’ Tanya asked, sounding slightly uncomfortable.

  Yes, he had only met him once, but once was more than enough, Blackstone thought.

  He had seen the ruthlessness in the other man’s eyes – the determination to do anything to advance the cause of the revolution. A man like that would not baulk at the slaughter of the innocents – he would relish the prospect.

  So if Josef had changed his mind, it must have been under powerful persuasion.

  And who could have provided that persuasion?

  Certainly not the mill workers, who looked up to him with the same sort of naive trust that the peasants had once bestowed on the tsar, whom they had called their ‘Little Father’.

  No, it wasn’t them – there was only one person who could have made him change his mind.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘To whom?’ Tanya replied evasively.

  ‘To Josef.’

  ‘I said nothing.’

  That was a lie, Blackstone thought. Somehow, Tanya had found a weakness in Josef that she could exploit – a point at which pressure could be applied.

  And, with a sudden flash of insight, he understood exactly what that weakness – that pressure point – was.

  ‘You offered to sleep with him, didn’t you?’ he asked, surprised by how angry he sounded.

  Tanya shrugged. ‘What if I did? Do you think that my virginity is as precious as the lives of little children? I certainly do not.’

  ‘You can’t sleep with him!’ Blackstone said.

  ‘A girl must lose her cherry at some time, and I might as well lose mine to Josef,’ Tanya said.

  ‘So you find him attractive, do you?’