by Boris Akunin
Egorsha the carpenter, an unruly and dissolute man, worked furiously with his elbows as he squeezed his way through the crowd. He had spent the whole previous day lying in a drunken stupor and had not gone to beat the Yids, so now he was burning up with impatience.
'Come on, come on,' said Egorsha, laughing and pushing up the sleeve of his tattered coat. 'Don't you worry; he won't fire; he won't dare.'
The revolver immediately replied to Egorsha's words with a loud crack and blue smoke.
The carpenter gasped, clutching at his wounded shoulder and squatting down on his haunches, and the black barrel barked another four times at regular intervals.
Now there were no more bullets in the cylinder, and Green took a home-made bomb out of his left pocket. But he did not need to throw it because Mitrii Kuzmich, wounded in the knee, began howling so terribly - 'Oh, oh, they've killed me, they've killed me, good Orthodox believers!' - that the crowd shuddered and pressed back and then set off at a run, with men trampling each other, back across the bridge into the Orthodox quarter.
As he watched the backs of the fleeing men, Green felt for the first time that there was very little sky-blue left in him. His dominant colour was steel-grey now.
At twilight the district police officer arrived with a platoon of mounted police and was surprised to see that all was quiet in the little town. He spoke with the Jews first and then took the pharmacist's son away to jail.
Grigory Grinberg became Green at the age of twenty, after one of his repeated escapes. He had walked one and a half thousand versts and then, just outside Tobolsk, been caught in a stupid police raid on tramps. He had had to give some kind of name, and that was what he called himself - not in memory of his old surname, but in honour of Ignatii Grinevitsky, who had killed the Tsar.
At the one thousand eight hundredth heartbeat he felt that his strength was fully restored and got lightly to his feet, without touching the floor with his hands. He had a lot of time. It was evening now; there was the whole night ahead.
He did not know how long he would have to spend in Moscow.
Probably about two weeks at least. Until they took the plainclothes police agents off the turnpikes and the railway stations. Green was not concerned for himself; he had plenty of patience. Eight months of solitary confinement was good training for that. But the lads in the group were young and hot-headed; it would be hard for them.
He walked out of the bedroom into the drawing room, where the other three were sitting.
'Why aren't you sleeping?' asked Bullfinch, the very youngest of all, flustered. 'It's my fault, isn't it? I was talking too loud.'
All the members of the group were on familiar terms, regardless of their age or services to the revolution. What point was there in formality if tomorrow, or next week, or next month you might all go to your death together? Of all the people in the world Green only spoke like that to these three: Bullfinch, Emelya and Rahmet. There had been others before, but they were all dead.
Bullfinch was looking fresh, which was natural enough - they hadn't taken the boy on the operation, although he had begged them to, even weeping in his rage. The other two looked cheerful but tired, which was also only natural.
The operation had gone off more easily than expected. The blizzard had helped, but the greatest help of all had been the snowdrift on this side of Klin, a genuine gift of fate. Rahmet and Emelya had been waiting with a sleigh three versts from the station. According to the plan Green had been supposed to throw himself out of a window while the train was moving, and he could have been hurt. Then they would have picked him up. Or the guards could have spotted him as he jumped and opened fire. The sleigh would have come in handy in that case too.
Things had turned out better than that. Green had simply run along the track, entirely unharmed. He hadn't even got cold -running the three versts had warmed him up.
They had driven round the water meadows of the Sestra river, where workmen were clearing the line. At the next station they had stolen an old abandoned handcar and ridden it all the way to Sortirovochnaya Station in Moscow. Of course, pumping the rusty lever for fifty-something versts in the wind and driving snow had not been easy. It was hardly surprising that the lads had exhausted themselves: they weren't made of steel. First Rahmet had weakened, and then the doughty Emelya. Green had had to work the handle on his own for the entire second half of the journey.
'You're like the dragon Gorynich, you're Greenich!' Emelya said, shaking his flaxen-haired head in admiration. 'You crawled into your cave for half an hour, cast off your old scales, grew back the heads that had been cut off and now you're as good as new. Look at me, a big strapping hulk, but I haven't got my breath back yet, my tongue's still hanging out.'
Emelya was a good soldier. Strong, without any prissy intelligentsia pretensions. A wonderful, calming dark-brown colour. He had chosen his own alias, in honour of Emelya Pugachev; before that he had been known as Nikifor Tyunin. He was an armoury artisan, a genuine proletarian. Broad-shouldered and pie-faced, with a childish little nose and genial round eyes. It wasn't often that the oppressed class threw up steadfast, class-conscious warriors, but when one of these strapping heroes did appear, you could put your life in his hands with complete confidence. Green had personally selected Emelya from five candidates sent by the party. That was after Sable had failed when he flung his bomb at Khrapov, and a vacancy had appeared in the Combat Group. Green had tested the novice's strength of nerve and quickness of wit and been satisfied.
Emelya had really shown what he was worth during the operation in Ekaterinburg. When the Governor's droshky had driven up to the undistinguished townhouse on Mikhelson Street at the time indicated in the letter (and even, as promised, with no escort), Green had walked up to the fat man who was laboriously climbing out of the carriage and shot him twice at point-blank range. But when he ran through a passage to the next street, where Emelya was waiting disguised as a cab driver, they'd had a stroke of bad luck: at that very moment a police officer and two constables just happened to be walking past the false cabby. The policemen had heard the shots in the distance, and now here was a man running out of the yard - straight into their arms. Green had already thrown his revolver away. He felled one of them with a blow to the chin, but the other two clung to his arms and the one on the ground started blowing his whisde. Things were looking really bad, but the novice Emelya hadn't lost his head. He climbed down from his coachbox without hurrying and hit one constable on the back of the head with his massive fist so hard that he instantly went limp, and Green dealt with the other one himself. They had driven off like the wind, to the trilling of the police whistle.
It warmed his heart to look at Emelya. The people won't carry on just lounging their lives away for ever, he thought. The ones with keen wits and active consciences have already started waking up. And that means the sacrifices are not in vain and the blood - ours and theirs - is not spilt for nothing.
'So that's what sleeping on the floor and absorbing the juices of the earth does for you,' Rahmet said with a smile, tossing a picturesque lock of hair back off his forehead.
'I'd just started composing a poem about you, Green.'
And he declaimed:
Once there was a Green of iron
With a talent to rely on,
Scorning sheets and feather bed,
On bare boards he laid his head.
'There's another version too.' Rahmet raised his hand to stop Bullfinch laughing and continued:
Once there was a poor knight errant,
Green the Fearless was his name,
With a very useful talent
-He slept on floors to earn his fame.
His comrades laughed in unison and Green thought to himself: That's a verse from Pushkin he rewrote; I suppose it's funny. He knew that he didn't understand when something was funny, but that didn't matter, it wasn't important. And he mentally corrected the verse: I'm not iron, I'm steel.
He couldn't help himself - this t
hrill-seeking adventurer Rahmet simply wasn't to his liking, although he had to admit that he did a lot of good for the cause. Green had chosen him the previous autumn, when he needed a partner for a foreign operation - he couldn't take Emelya to Paris.
He had arranged for Rahmet to escape from the prison carriage as he was being driven away from the courthouse after sentencing. At the time all the newspapers were full of the story: the Uhlan cornet Seleznyov had interceded with his commanding officer for one of his men and in response to the colonel's crude insults had challenged him to a duel. And when his affronter had refused to accept the challenge, he had shot him dead in front of the entire regiment.
What Green had especially liked about this gallant story was the fact that a junior officer had not been afraid to ruin his entire life for the sake of a simple man. There was a promising recklessness in that, and Green had even imagined a certain kinship of souls - a familiar fury in response to base stupidity.
However, Nikolai Seleznyov's motivation had turned out to be something quite different. On close acquaintance, his colour proved to be an alarming cornflower-blue. 'I'm terribly inquisitive; I like new experiences,' Rahmet used to repeat frequently. What drove the fugitive cornet on through life was curiosity, a pointless and useless feeling that forced him to try first one dish and then another - the spicier and hotter the better. Green realised that he had not shot the colonel out of a sense of justice, but because the entire regiment was watching with bated breath, waiting to see what would happen. And he had joined the revolutionaries out of a craving for adventures. He had enjoyed the shooting during his escape, and he had enjoyed the trip to Paris even more.
Green had no illusions left about Rahmet's motives. He had chosen his alias in honour of the hero of Chernyshevsky's 'What is to be Done?', but he was a different sort of creature altogether. As long as he still found terrorist operations interesting, he would stay. Once his curiosity was satisfied, he'd be off, and never be seen again.
Green's secret concern in dealing with Rahmet was to extract the maximum benefit for the cause from this vacuous individual. The idea he had in mind was to send him on one of those important missions from which no one returns. Let him throw himself, a living bomb, under the hooves of the team pulling the carriage of a minister or a provincial governor. Rahmet wouldn't be afraid of certain death - that was one trick life hadn't shown him yet. If the operation at Klin had been a failure, Rahmet's mission would have been to blow up Khrapov this evening at the Yaroslavl Station, just before he left for Siberia. Well, Khrapov was dead already, but there would be others; autocracy kept plenty of other vicious guard dogs. The important thing was not to miss the moment when boredom appeared in Rahmet's eyes.
This was the only reason why Green had kept him in the group after what had happened with Shverubovich in December.
The order had come from the party to execute the traitor who had betrayed the comrades in Riga and sent them to the gallows. Green didn't like that kind of work, so he had not objected when Rahmet volunteered to do it.
Instead of simply shooting Shverubovich, Rahmet had chosen to be more inventive and splash sulphuric acid into his face. He had said it was to put a fright into any other stoolpigeons, but in reality he had simply wanted to see what it looked like when a living man's eyes poured out of their sockets and his lips and nose fell off. Ever since then Green had been unable to look at Rahmet without a feeling of revulsion, but he put up with him for the good of the cause.
'You should go to bed,* he said in a quiet voice. 'I know it's only ten. But you should sleep. It's an early start tomorrow. We're changing apartments.'
He glanced round at the white door of the study where the owner of this apartment, Semyon Lvovich Aronson, a private lecturer at the Higher Technical College, was sitting. They had planned to stay at a different address in Moscow, but there had been a surprise waiting for them. The female courier who met the group at the agreed spot had warned them that they couldn't go to the meeting place - it had just been discovered that the engineer Larionov, who owned the apartment, was an agent of the Okhranka.
The courier had a strange alias: Needle. Green, still reeling after pumping the handcar, had told her: 'You Muscovites do poor work. An agent at a meeting place could destroy the entire Combat Group.'
He had said it without malice, simply stating a fact, but Needle had taken offence.
Green didn't know much about her. He thought she came from a rich family. A dry, gangling, ageing young lady. Bloodless, pursed lips; dull, colourless hair arranged in a tight bun at the back of her head - there were plenty like that in the revolution.
'If we did poor work, we wouldn't have exposed Larionov,' Needle had retorted. 'Tell me, Green, do you absolutely need an apartment with a telephone? It's not that easy.'
'I know, but there must be a telephone - for emergency contact, an alarm signal, warning,' he explained, promising himself to make do in future with only his own resources, without help from the party.
'Then we'll have to assign you to one of the reserve addresses, with one of the sympathisers. Moscow's not St Petersburg; not many people have their own telephones here.'
That was how the group had come to be billeted at the private lecturer's place. Needle had said he was more of a liberal than a revolutionary, and he didn't approve of terrorist methods. That was all right: he was an honest man with progressive views and he wouldn't refuse to help; but there was no point in telling him any details.
Having taken Green and his people to a fine apartment house on Ostozhenka Street (a spacious apartment on the very top floor, and that was valuable, because there was access to the roof), before she left the courier had briskly and succinctly explained the elementary rules of the clandestine operation to their jittery host.
'Your building is the tallest in this part of the city, and that is convenient. From my mezzanine floor I can see your windows through binoculars. If everything is calm, do not close the curtains in the drawing room. Two closed curtains mean disaster. One closed curtain is the alarm signal. I'll telephone you and ask for Professor Brandt. You will reply: "You are mistaken, this is a different number" - and in that case I shall come immediately; or if you say: "You are mistaken, this is private lecturer Aronson's number" - I shall send a combat squad to assist you. Will you remember that?'
Aronson nodded, pale-faced, and when Needle left he muttered that the 'comrades' could use the apartment as they saw fit, that he had given the servants time off, and if he was needed, he would be in his study. And in half a day he hadn't peeped out of there even once. He was a real 'sympathiser' all right. No, we can't stay here for two weeks, Green had decided immediately. Tomorrow we have to find a new place.
'What's the point in sleeping?' Rahmet asked with a shrug. 'Of course, you gentlemen do as you wish, but I'd rather pay a visit to that Judas Larionov - before he realises he's been discovered. Twenty-eight Povarskaya Street, isn't it? Not so far away'
'That's right!' Bullfinch agreed enthusiastically. 'I'd like to go along. It would be even better if I went on my own, because you've already done your job for the day. I can manage, honest I can! He'll open the door, and I'll ask: "Are you engineer Larionov?" That's so as not to kill an innocent man by mistake. And then I'll say: "Take this, you traitor." I'll shoot him in the heart - three times to make sure - and run for it. A piece of cake.'
Rahmet threw his head back and laughed loudly. 'A piece of cake, of course it is! You shoot him - go on, just try. When I let von Bock have it point-blank on the parade ground, his eyes leapt out of their sockets, I swear to God! Two little red balls. I dreamed about it for ages. Used to wake up at night in a cold sweat. A piece of cake .. .’
And what about Shverubovich with his face melting, Green thought, do you dream about him?
'It's all right; if it's for the cause, I can do it,' Bullfinch declared manfully, turning pale and then immediately flushing bright red. He had got his nickname from the constant high colour of his cheeks an
d the light-coloured fluff that covered them. 'The bastard betrayed his own, didn't he?'
Green had known Bullfinch for a long time, a lot longer than the others. He was a special boy, bred from precious stock - the son of a hanged regicide and a female member of the People's Will party, who had died in a prison cell while on hunger strike; the child of unmarried parents, not christened in church, raised by comrades of his mother and father; the first free citizen of the future free Russia; with no garbage in his head, no filth polluting his soul. Some day boys like that would be quite ordinary, but for now he was one of a kind, the invaluable product of a painful process of evolution, and so Green had really not wanted to take Bullfinch into the group.
But how could he not have taken him? Three years earlier, when Green had escaped from the state prison and was making his way home the long way round the world - through China, Japan and America - he had been detained for a while in Switzerland. Just hanging about with nothing to do, waiting for the escort to guide him across the border. Bullfinch had only just been sent there from Russia, where his guardians had been arrested yet again, and there was no one in Zurich to take care of the little lad. They had asked Green, and he had agreed because at that time there was nothing else he could do to help the party. The escort was delayed and then disappeared completely. Before they managed to arrange a new one, a whole year had gone by.
For some reason Green didn't find the boy a burden - quite the opposite, in fact; perhaps because for the first time in a long time he was obliged to concern himself not with the whole of mankind but with one single individual. And not even an adult, but a raw young boy.
