Death on the Nevskii Pros

by David Dickinson

  De Chassiron had a look of anticipation on his face as if he expected some dramatic development at any moment. He was not disappointed.

  ‘Are you telling us, Powerscourt, that you discussed these possibilities with young Shaporov, including the disgraceful accusation that Martin might have been a Russian agent?’ Martin might have been rather a lot of trouble to the Ambassador during his life, but he was not going to have the man’s service traduced once he was dead. ‘I think that was unwise of you, most unwise.’

  Powerscourt wondered whether to hit back or not. Probably better not. ‘I am sorry if you felt I was out of order, Sir Jasper. I cannot believe there is anything untoward about a young man recommended by the Foreign Office itself. I should say he is very discreet.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Powerscourt, I urge discretion on you. At all times. Nobody working in the purlieus of diplomacy and foreign affairs should forget that. I expect you to keep me informed of your activities, and your . . .’ The Ambassador paused for a second or two here as if unsure of the right word. ‘. . . your speculations every evening from now on about this time.’ The Ambassador rose from his seat and headed for the door. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, and a very good evening to you both.’

  A battalion of cleaners took up their positions on the ground floor of the Winter Palace at five o’clock on the morning of Thursday January the 6th, Epiphany Day. They brought tall ladders with them as well as the usual complement of mops, pails, dusters, soft cloths, feather dusters on long poles. Today was one of the most important days in the calendar of the great palace. Today the Tsar, members of the court and his family and senior members of the Church in St Petersburg processed down from the first floor of the Winter Palace to a special ceremony by the banks of the Neva called the Blessing of the Waters. And the route down from the first floor came down one of the most spectacular sections of this most spectacular of buildings, the Jordan Staircase.

  The twin flights of the marble staircase were overlooked by a selection of caryatids, trompe l’oeil atlantes and a fresco of the gods on Mount Olympus. Ten solid granite columns supported the vaults of the staircase. The walls and balustrade dripped with decoration, with gilding, with mirrors. The ceiling, way above the staircase, showed the gods of Olympus besporting themselves in a heaven scarcely less spectacular than the Winter Palace itself. The route upwards was decorated with monumental statues brought from Europe by Peter the Great: Diana, Power and Might. In the great days of the St Petersburg season, before the Japanese War and the threat of terror put an end to the festivities, the rich and the fashionable of St Petersburg would progress up the Jordan Staircase to dance until dawn in the great state rooms on the first floor.

  Today it was the route by which the Emperor led his procession to attend the annual service of the Blessing of the Waters at Epiphany in commemoration of Christ’s Baptism in the river Jordan. It was an uneasy time in the capital. Workers were on strike against their conditions of employment and their numbers increased every day. Police reported the working class districts as being restive and liable to erupt in violence. For the Blessing a temporary pavilion was set up on the ice of the Neva at a point opposite the northern entrance to the palace. The Metropolitan of St Petersburg dipped a cross in a hole made in the ice and referred to it as ‘Jordan’. A small cup was then lowered into the hole and presented to the Emperor who took a sip of the water and handed the cup back to the churchman. Prayers were said for the health of the Tsar and his family, wisely, the more cynical observers thought, in view of the impurities of the river water.

  Out on the Neva a detachment of marine police inspected the ice for any signs of suspect activity. The secret police had warned the imperial family that there was a high risk of terrorist activity at this time. The Tsarina and her daughters stayed behind the tall windows of the Winter Palace, staring out at the scene on the blue-green ice. When the proceedings were over there came the sound of a great salute from the guns of the Fortress of Peter and Paul across the river. The more historically minded of the citizens referred to the fortress as the Russian Bastille. Its reputation as a place of incarceration was fearful. Prisoners were said to have died of cold, of hunger, of the terrible beatings they received from the guards. In fact, there were never more than a hundred prisoners in the fortress at any one time and some of them even spent their time reading revolutionary literature without any interference from their jailers.

  The fortress was also the necropolis of the Romanovs. Almost all the Tsars were buried inside. And on this Epiphany Day it seemed as if some malignant spirits were intending to increase their number. For these were not blanks being fired from the great guns. This was live ammunition. A policeman standing beside the Tsar fell wounded to the ground, his blood spreading out in strange red patterns against the snow. Shots were fired into the Winter Palace itself, the glass in the windows shattering and flying inside, threatening the flesh of any who got in its way. Other shots ricocheted off the Admiralty Building back into Palace Square. On the first floor in the Field Marshal’s Hall shards of glass lay at the feet of the Tsar’s mother and sister, but they were unhurt. Out in the snow the Tsar crossed himself and began saying his prayers. Not far from there his grandfather had been driving in his carriage twenty-four years before when a bomb shattered his vehicle, wounded his horses and his companions but left the Tsar himself unhurt. Stepping down from the wreck of his carriage he went to inquire after the wounded. Another assassin ran up and threw a bomb directly between the Tsar’s feet. In a huge sheet of flame and metal his legs were torn away, his stomach ripped wide open and his face badly mutilated. Still breathing he asked for what remained of him to be carried into the Winter Palace to die. He left a trail of black blood on the marble stairs while they carried him to a couch for his last moments in this world. Before he passed away, his grandson Nicholas, dressed in his blue sailor suit, came and watched in horror from the end of the bed. Now that grandson, currently Nicholas the Second, Tsar of All the Russias, was hurried, unhurt, into the same palace where his grandfather had died in agony. The word flashed round the great mansions of the capital with astonishing speed. In the bar of the Imperial Yacht Club, the fons et origo of St Petersburg chic, the aristocrats and the generals crossed themselves and prayed for their future. The French Ambassador, holding court by the window, told whoever would listen that the most significant thing in the assassination attempt was the fact that the guns were manned by sailors. These are not the fanatic students who blew up the Interior Minister last year, he said. These men swear a powerful oath to be loyal to their rulers. If they desert the Tsar, what future for the Romanovs? The foreign correspondents rushed from their bar at the fashionable Evropeiskaya Hotel to interview or invent eyewitnesses to the event and telegraph the news, suitably embellished and dramatized, to their employers.

  Watching alone by one of the intact windows of the Field Marshal’s Hall the Empress Alexandra shivered slightly as she looked out at the snow. She was remembering a prophecy attributed to St Serafim. ‘They will wait for a time of great hardship to afflict the Russian land,’ it read, ‘and on an agreed day at the agreed hour they will raise up a great rebellion all over the Russian land.’

  4

  Lord Francis Powerscourt decided he had spent too much of his time in Russia listening to people. Listening to the Ambassador and the cynical Secretary at the Embassy, listening to the translations of his young interpreter from policemen and bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry. Now, the day after Epiphany, they were in a rather different waiting room of a very different section of the Russian bureaucracy, waiting for another interview, this time with a senior official of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

  The Interior Ministry, Powerscourt had decided, looked rather like one of those vast mental hospitals the authorities built round the fringes of London towards the end of the previous century, enormous complexes where the mad could get lost finding their way back to their own ward, and where a man could forget what few wits he might
have left trying to work out how to find the front door. The Foreign Ministry, however, looked like a French Second Empire hotel that had once known better times, a resort that had lost its raison d’être perhaps, Vichy without the water, Bath without the spa. The place had certainly once had considerable stylistic ambitions, but now the gilt was falling off the mirrors and the imitation Watteaus on the walls had lost whatever lustre they once possessed, the dancers and the musicians exhausted. Mikhail had told him on the way that while the people in the Interior Ministry saw it as their mission to pacify the interior of Russia, the mission of the people in the Foreign Service was to join the foreigners, preferably somewhere rather warmer than St Petersburg, as quickly as possible. Some of the diplomats, Powerscourt was told, spent almost their entire lives abroad, only returning at the end of their careers to advise on the foreign policy of a country they no longer knew and whose nature they were not now equipped to understand. Combined with the abilities of the Tsar, Mikhail had said savagely, this was a system guaranteed to produce one of the most incompetent foreign policies in the world. Hence, Mikhail shrugged an enormous shrug, the unbelievably stupid decision to go to war with Japan.

  A flunkey in a stained frock coat told them in bad French that they were expected inside. The Under Secretary, a man who had risen effortlessly through the hurdles of Deputy and Assistant, greeted them warmly.

  ‘Ivan Tropinin at your service, gentlemen. Please sit down.’

  Mikhail had said the man would probably speak French. France after all was the favourite posting of most of these would-be foreigners. It was astonishing, he said, how many little Russian diplomatic missions were peppered along the south coast from Biarritz to the Riviera to Nice and the Italian border. But Tropinin was speaking in his native tongue. Powerscourt wondered if it was to throw him off the scent, whatever the scent might be.

  ‘Please, Lord Powerscourt, your reputation precedes you, we are delighted to see you here.’ Tropinin ushered them on to two very decorative French chairs, as uncomfortable as only the French knew how to make them. ‘I know you are in St Petersburg about the affair of Mr Martin.’ Tropinin was a small thin man with a tiny beard and very delicate hands which he inspected from time to time in case they were going coarse.

  Powerscourt nodded. Mikhail was looking intently at the fading portrait of a semi-naked lady on the opposite wall. Perhaps these badges of status came to those who reached the rank of Under Secretary. He wondered what happened when you were promoted above the level of Under Secretary. Maybe there were no clothes at all then.

  ‘I am most grateful,’ Powerscourt began, ‘for your time. I know how busy you all must be here in the ministry.’

  Tropinin laughed. He leaned forward and looked Powerscourt firmly in the eye. ‘You will have to talk to many people in this city, my English friend. More than you would like, I suspect. Most of them will be lying to you. I am not going to tell you lies.’ Powerscourt had a sudden vision of men from Crete and people telling lies and long undergraduate arguments in his rooms in Cambridge. ‘I am going to tell you the truth. Why? Because I like England and I like Englishmen. I have spent some time in your country, Lord Powerscourt. They took me to some of the great houses like your Blenheim Palace. To a Russian, of course, it is scarcely bigger than a hunting lodge, but it is very fine. The park is beautiful. And I know the father and the family of your young translator here. I have known them for years.’ The Under Secretary nodded vigorously. Powerscourt wondered if there was some secret code at work, some private language of bribery or obligation he did not understand.

  ‘I am most grateful for your assistance,’ Powerscourt put in with a smile, keen to get back to business.

  ‘Of course,’ the diplomat said, checking his hands once more. ‘Let me come to the point.’ Tropinin paused and looked at his two visitors.

  ‘It is a very little thing I can tell you, but believe me when I tell you it is true. Many people will try to tell you that your Mr Martin was not here a couple of weeks ago, that his body was not found by the Nevskii Prospekt, that as there is no body there can be no crime and as there was no Mr Martin, Lord Powerscourt, there is nothing for you to investigate, and as there is nothing for you to investigate you may as well go home and leave St Petersburg to its fate. This is what some people want you to believe.’

  ‘Are you saying that that is not the truth?’

  ‘I tell you, Lord Powerscourt, he was here, he was killed here. That is all I can say.’

  ‘Did you see him, Mr Tropinin? Did you have a meeting with him as you are now having one with us?’

  The little man held his hand up. ‘I told you I had one thing to say. That was it, I cannot tell you anything else.’

  ‘Do you know why Mr Martin came to St Petersburg? Can you tell us that much?’

  ‘I have nothing further to say.’

  ‘Do you know if he succeeded in his mission, whatever that was, Mr Tropinin?’ This was Powerscourt’s last throw.

  ‘I cannot help you. I have nothing more to say.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was standing on the roof of the Stroganov Palace at twelve o’clock on Sunday morning, wearing an enormous borrowed coat in dark grey that brushed the ground as he walked. He liked to think it had belonged to some military man in the distant past, a campaigning Shaporov perhaps, commanding the artillery in battles long ago and far away. On his head he wore a thick Shaporov Russian hat. Beside him, Mikhail was wearing a similar coat and had two very expensive pairs of binoculars wrapped round his neck. By his side, wearing the warmest coat and gloves that London’s Jermyn Street could provide, stood Rupert de Chassiron, Secretary to the British Embassy, who had been invited to share the view and the spectacle from the top of the palace. The three men had come to watch the great march of workers that was going to set out from different points of the city and converge on Palace Square, site of the Tsar’s residence, the Winter Palace, where their leader, Father Georgy Gapon, was to hand in a proclamation to the Tsar. While they waited for the marchers to appear, Mikhail told Powerscourt about his recruitment of Natasha and her news from the palace about the boredom and the rituals and the vanishing eggs and the sick little boy.

  Below them, diminutive people strolled along the Nevskii Prospekt in their Sunday best. Late worshippers were going in to a service at the Kazan Cathedral to their right, a favourite place for prayer and meditation of the Empress Alexandra. The trams rolled on their tracks towards the Alexander Nevskii Monastery. On their immediate left was the Moyka river and beyond that the great expanse of Palace Square flanked by the General Staff Building, the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, the winter sun glistening off its golden domes. Across the frozen Neva, slightly to the north, the forbidding Fortress of Peter and Paul, burial ground of the Romanovs and prison fortress for their enemies. Further round to the north-west, Vasilevsky Island, home to the university and cabbage soup. To the north-east behind the Finland station, the Vyborg side, home to many factories and unimaginable squalor. To the south-west, beyond the Yussupov Palace and the Mariinsky Theatre, lay the Narva Gates, built to commemorate victory over Napoleon, and behind them the Putilov factories where the current wave of strikes began. From all these different districts the great columns of marching people would be snaking their way towards the heart of St Petersburg.

  Today, both Mikhail and de Chassiron had told Powerscourt, might be a key date in Russian history.

  ‘Today could change everything,’ de Chassiron said, waving a hand expansively across the city spread out in front of them, glad to be able to embrace historical change in person. ‘Autocracy could be banished. The will of the people could bring about a constitution. Of course it depends whether the Tsar pays any attention to them. He’s perfectly capable of ignoring the whole thing.’ And with that he screwed his monocle back into his left eye and continued his close inspection of the fashionable ladies down below.

  ‘I believe that the Tsar is not even in St Petersburg at the moment,’ said Mikh
ail Shaporov, whose connections with the imperial household were better than most, ‘and I don’t believe he is intending to come here at all today. Quite what the marchers will do when they hand their petition in to the Chief of Protocol rather than the Tsar of All the Russias, I cannot tell you. I dread to think how cross it could make them, unless, of course,’ Mikhail peered over towards the Winter Palace as if the Chief of Protocol might be rehearsing his welcome even now, ‘he manages to convince them that the Tsar is inside and will consider their point of view.’

  ‘How do you know that, about the Tsar not being here today?’ De Chassiron was on the scent of the source like a bloodhound.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid,’ said Mikhail cheerfully, ‘but believe me when I say it is totally accurate.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘This palace here, the one we’re standing on, it belongs to one of your cousins, you say?’

  ‘It does,’ said Mikhail. ‘My mother came from a very large family so I think we are related to half the aristocracy in the city. My father complains that you cannot drink tea in the Yacht Club without falling over three or four relations, all of them asking you for money.’

  Powerscourt saw, to his enormous delight, that the mother Shaporov would have to make the acquaintance of Lady Lucy as quickly as possible. They could start comparing notes on numbers of second cousins and impoverished younger sons.

  ‘And was the Beef Stroganov invented here? That dish with beef and onions and mushrooms and sour cream and so on? Was it so called because the original chef was employed in this palace?’

  ‘It was named after a General Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov, of the family of this palace,’ said Mikhail. ‘That must have been about twenty-five years ago. It has made my father very sad.’

  ‘Why is that?’