The other man, who was driving, was not distracted. He took the hearse at a sedate speed through the street, and people on the pavements, seeing it, looked in respect at it. Men lifted their hats as it passed.
‘You may scream if you wish,’ said Bukov, ‘but no one will hear very much. Anyone who does will think you are in hysterical distress. That is all. But I’m aware you’re determined to make a nuisance of yourself, to do what you can to escape us. I thought you would give trouble. I have prepared myself to deal with that. I am not going to risk what might happen at the frontier post. The years I have spent looking for you are not going to be wasted now. I am committed to taking you back and delivering you.’
‘Taking me back?’ Natasha shuddered.
The hearse was in steady, ponderous movement through the outskirts of Berlin now, and Bukov waited until the way ahead was very quiet before he enlightened her.
‘To the Ekaterinburg Soviet,’ he said.
Natasha screamed. Bukov pulled her down and smothered her face on the seat. The hearse began to accelerate. It sped fast out of Berlin.
In a very quiet place, well off the main road, Natasha fought like a wildcat. It was the pale-eyed man who subdued her, Commissar Bukov who injected her with the contents of a hypodermic syringe. Natasha collapsed into unconsciousness. They bound her ankles, and they bound her wrists, and they put a thick strip of wool between her teeth and tied it behind her head. Then they placed her in the coffin. Small holes drilled in the side allowed her to breathe, but that was their only gift to her, fresh air. When she came to, she knew herself entombed. For a moment, the nightmare aspect threatened to destroy her mind, but she fought it as she had fought so much else over the years. She had always clung to life and hope, even when her existence was at its most desperate. So, they had put her in the coffin, and there was a tight, wet rag between her teeth, but they had not killed her. Nor were they going to. They were taking her to Ekaterinburg.
Her appointment was with the Ekaterinburg Soviet, the workers’ council.
But despite that, and despite the terrifying nature of her confinement, in the darkness of the coffin a little light still burned in the mind of Natasha Petrovna.
Chapter Fifteen
Over the telephone, a woman’s voice said, ‘Frankfurt Electrics’.
In carefully spoken German, Mr Gibson said, ‘I would like to speak to your director, Herr Gebert.’
‘Who is calling him, please?’
‘My name is Gibson. Gibson.’
‘What is your business with Herr Director, please?’
‘Personal and urgent. I think he will talk to me if he is still there.’
‘Excuse me?’
Mr Gibson repeated his words, slowly.
‘Yes, he is still here. He arrived back from England a short while ago.’ The telephonist seemed disposed to make a conversation of the courtesies. ‘I am not sure how busy he is. Will you hold the line, please?’ Mr Gibson held the line, nerves and impatience sorely trying his normally calm disposition. The telephonist’s voice returned. ‘I am connecting you with Herr Director.’
‘Thank you.’
Herr Gebert made himself heard. ‘Hello? That is my friend Mr Gibson?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry to bother you, Herr Gebert, but in concern over what happened to you and your wife – and your car – it occurred to me, when I caught the hearse up—’
‘You have caught it up?’
‘It made a stop. I spotted it outside an inn. While it was not my personal business to make an issue of it with the driver, I thought I might as well speak to him and make it clear he had caused an accident almost fatal. However, after I had exchanged only a few words with him, he became abusive and drove off.’
‘Ah, so?’ said Herr Gebert.
‘I noticed the other man with him. I also noticed the name of the undertaker. Thomas Schmidt of Berlin.’
‘That is good, very good, Herr Gibson. Thank you, and thank you also for telephoning me. I shall look up the address and get in touch with the firm.’
‘I thought you might wish to take immediate steps. That is what I’d do myself. Why don’t you telephone the police at Swiebodzin and ask them to keep an eye open for him?’
‘Swiebodzin? Is it assumed he is going to Swiebodzin?’
‘He informed me he had no time to talk to interfering idiots, he was in a hurry to deliver a coffin in Warsaw. And off he went. A madman like that is a menace to everyone else on the road. It’s against the law, surely, to force a car off a highway, to endanger lives and not to stop. But he will have to stop at Swiebodzin, at customs control. The police could pick him up there.’
‘Yes, I must think about that.’
‘I’d do it at once, if I were you. The driver may be drunk. It would be a kindness to others on the road.’
‘I did intend to leave for my home in a few minutes—A moment, Mr Gibson, my wife wishes to say something.’ Mr Gibson hung on again, fretting. He heard a murmur of voices. ‘Mr Gibson? My wife says how kind you are to have telephoned, and while I am attending to some papers here before we leave, she will telephone the police at Swiebodzin. It is very good of you, very good. Please accept our best wishes.’
‘Thank you. Goodbye, Herr Gebert. Good luck.’
Mr Gibson was motoring towards Swiebodzin a few minutes later, eating rich brown German bread and spicy sausage while he drove. He had been on the road three hours, and had covered some eighty miles. He was averaging less than thirty miles an hour, mainly because of the traffic in Berlin and Frankfurt, and the telephone call, but he did not think the hearse would be achieving a better average. It was half past three, and November would bring its darkness in another hour and a half. Swiebodzin was now about ten or eleven miles ahead. There, if Frau Gebert had made her telephone call, the police might have apprehended the hearse and its driver. That, he hoped, would give him the chance to catch up with it before it crossed the border into Poland. It depended on the amiable Frau Gebert and what kind of a case she put to the police. In any event, he did not imagine they would lock the driver up. They would want his version of the incident, and then decide whether or not to charge him with dangerous driving.
Wait. The Soviet Embassy in Berlin had been mentioned. Supposing both men had diplomatic immunity?
Damn all the ifs and buts, said Mr Gibson to himself.
He drove on, and the afternoon became overcast with damp and grey gloom. He reached Swiebodzin with his sense of worry and urgency far in excess of any feeling of hope. There was not a great deal of traffic. The people on the streets looked strong and sturdy, and were well wrapped up in coats and hats and thick scarves. He headed towards the frontier post, following the signs. There were a few vehicles waiting at customs. He pulled up behind them, and got out. He experienced a let-down feeling. He had half expected to see the hearse at some point between the entrance to the town and the customs building. He approached a uniformed official who was in conversation with an armed frontier guard. As calmly as he could, he asked if a funeral hearse had passed through recently.
The frontier guard shook his head.
The customs officer said, ‘No, mein Herr, and please get back into your car.’
Mr Gibson returned to the Riley, an acquisition of a temporary kind that was proving invaluable. He focused his thoughts on what was to be done if the hearse had taken another route. Hurriedly, he consulted the map. No, not from Frankfurt. Never. From Frankfurt, it had to be Swiebodzin. He looked back. A van was approaching. He made a three-point turn before he became hemmed in, facing the Riley the way he had come. He got out again, walked swiftly up to the customs man and asked the way to the police station. Receiving directions, he drove there, losing himself once and having to be redirected by a helpful citizen. There was just a chance, he thought.
The moment the police station came in sight, he drew a quick breath. There it was, the hearse, standing outside the station. It was empty, except for the coffin, and unattended. Fra
u Gebert had made her complaint to the police, it seemed. The police had apprehended the hearse and insisted on it being driven to the station. The two men had to be in the station, making statements. German police were very thorough. Where was Natasha? In the station with them? Or dead? Or still in Berlin? The coffin forced itself into his consciousness, and his mouth tightened. Natasha was a girl of courage and endurance, and deserved far better of life than she had received. Frederic Schmidt had said the coffin was for a certain Vasily Borovitch Bukov.
Parking his car close to the hearse, Mr Gibson quietly alighted. The lights inside the police station were on, the afternoon gloom deepening. People passed by. A policeman emerged from the station, with a colleague following on. Mr Gibson unhooked the retaining clips of the Riley’s bonnet strap. He raised the bonnet and peered at the engine. The two policemen disappeared. He lowered the bonnet, secured it, and turned to the hearse. In the grey twilight, the coffin lay a dark bulk, wreaths on top of it. He tried the polished handle that held the glassed rear doors shut. The handle was not locked. It turned. He swung the doors open. He felt a strange sense of wonder, an incredible feeling that the coffin was not inert, but animate. He leaned in. He rapped with his knuckles on the side of the coffin. Immediately, there was the slightest of responsive sounds made by a body jerking and heaving. Swiftly, he cast the wreaths aside. Someone passed by, glancing at him. Mr Gibson lifted his head and nodded solemnly. The passer-by, a woman, smiled sympathetically and went on.
Nerves at a high pitch, and expecting the emergence of the two men at any moment, Mr Gibson loosened the stays and pulled the coffin towards him. Quickly, he unscrewed the lid, and as noiselessly as he could he lifted the end of it and shifted it to one side. Natasha lay inside the silk-lined tomb, gagged and bound. Her eyes filled with the light of wonder and joy as she saw Mr Gibson. He released the bonds and removed the gag.
‘Be quick, be silent, dear girl,’ he whispered. ‘Out, Natasha, out.’
Pain tortured her unbound wrists, but she scrambled out, her breathing a series of erratic little indrawn gasps. But her blood was in a wild frenzy of rapture and gladness. Mr Gibson replaced the lid, turned the screws, pushed the coffin back into place and secured the stays. He returned the wreaths to their original positions and closed the doors. He pushed Natasha towards the Riley. Trembling and overjoyed, she rushed. She slid into the car. Mr Gibson joined her.
Inside the police station, Commissar Vasily Bukov and his colleague were in a long, protracted argument with the law. Bukov’s eyes were livid, fixed in rage on his companion, who had forced a car off the road and was now being brought to book for it. And the questioning police officer kept saying, in response to Bukov’s interruptions, that papers emanating from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin did not effect consideration of the matter concerning the other gentleman, one Herr Vorstadt, who had been driving at the time of the reported incident.
The Riley had been driven out of Swiebodzin in a tearing hurry. Now, its headlamps on, it was powering steadily over the road on its way back to Frankfurt-on-Oder. Natasha was still finding it difficult to get her breath. And it was even more difficult to contain her emotions. The intensity of her love and gratitude was both a pain and a joy.
‘Are you hungry?’ asked Mr Gibson.
‘Hungry? Hungry?’ The words burst from her. ‘No – no! How can you ask a question like that? A question so ordinary.’
‘Well, I’m hungry myself. I’ve eaten only a little bread and some sausage since breakfast.’
‘Oh, I cannot believe such words, not when a miracle has taken place!’ She spoke with all the fervour and passion of a Russian. ‘A miracle of deliverance. To have found me, to have saved me from the Bolsheviks – how can you speak of food at such a moment as this? What would it matter if we were even starving – and even dressed in rags? It is only the miracle that is important.’
‘It wasn’t quite a miracle,’ said Mr Gibson, the lights of the car guiding them through the dark evening. In a measured, matter-of-fact way, he told her of all that had taken place. Natasha listened enraptured. His matter-of-factness could not affect her conviction that he was describing a miracle. At the end, he said, ‘I assume you let those men into the apartment. What made you—’
‘I did not! How could you think so?’ Her emotions were at a peak. ‘They had a key. That commissar – yes, it was him – he said he had many keys. I thought it was you letting yourself in. Oh, Your Serene Excellency—’
‘Serene? Now you really are going over the top.’
‘One speaks as one feels,’ said Natasha. ‘I was going to say you have never really believed the Bolsheviks were after me.’
‘You’ve never told me why.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I am forgiving you. How could I not? Oh, that awful, miserable coffin – when I heard someone knock on it and when, moments later, I saw you – I was God’s happiest and most grateful servant.’
‘I should still like to know why that commissar still wants you. Do you know his name?’
‘Bukov,’ said Natasha, and thought of how the red blood would leap into the commissar’s eyes when he discovered she had escaped him yet again.
‘Bukov? Bukov?’ Mr Gibson stared at the moving beams of his headlamps. ‘Good God.’
‘You have heard of him?’ said Natasha, feeling warm and glowing and melting because she was here beside Mr Gibson, and close to him.
‘I’ve heard his name. It was mentioned to me by the undertaker. He said the coffin was for a certain Vasily Borovitch Bukov.’
‘But that is ridiculous,’ said Natasha. ‘In the end, it was going to be for me, yes, I know it was. I would not have gone with him, no, never, but he said he was going to wait for you and kill you unless I did.’
‘In your time, Natasha, you haven’t met the nicest kind of gentlemen,’ said Mr Gibson.
‘Oh, but I have met you, and I shall light many candles to your goodness,’ said Natasha earnestly. ‘I could not let that man kill you, so I went with him. It was terrifying. They used a needle to make me unconscious. Before they did so, he said they were going to take me back to—’ She stopped. It was still so instinctive, the necessity to keep silent because of the Bolsheviks and the monarchists. The monarchists would not spare her if she talked. Worse, they would not spare Mr Gibson. Ekaterinburg. The murder of the Tsar and his family. The murder of her parents. The commissar would have murdered her too, once she had told him what he wanted to know.
‘I know where he was going to take you, Natasha,’ said Mr Gibson, driving steadily and with care through the black countryside of Brandenburg.
‘No, you cannot know.’
‘The destination of the coffin was Ekaterinburg. The undertaker told me so.’
‘Oh, it is no good for you to know things. The monarchists would kill you, so would the Bolsheviks.’
‘What happened in Ekaterinburg, Natasha, beside the massacre of the Imperial family?’
Natasha was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I think I am hungry, after all.’
‘We’ll stop in Frankfurt and find a suitable restaurant there. You can think then about telling me what it is that gives you so much pain and worry, and makes certain people consider you dangerous.’
‘Dangerous? I am dangerous?’ Natasha ridiculed the possibility with a gesture and a laugh. Anything was better, anything, than sharing her secrets with Mr Gibson. To confide in him would be fatal. He was not a man who would allow other men to keep him quiet. He had come to Berlin to collect information and facts, and to draw conclusions, and if he was given information that could affect his conclusions dramatically, he would hold that information up to the light. And that might have the effect of sending him to Austria, to look for a man called Kleibenzetl. Perhaps Kleibenzetl was still alive, perhaps he was not. No one had ever heard from him. No one among the monarchists, that is, or among the supporters of that tragic lady in the clinic. If Mr Gibson went in search of him, then someone would go after Mr Gibs
on. ‘Mr Gibson, how could I be dangerous?’
‘I don’t know. You haven’t told me. All you’ve said is that it’s better for me not to know.’
‘Yes. I am glad you agree. We need not talk about it any more. Oh, I still cannot believe I am free of those men. God has been very good to me.’
‘Some people might question that, after all you’ve suffered,’ said Mr Gibson.
‘But I’m alive, we are both alive, and are going to Switzerland,’ said Natasha. ‘My life is full of light. You are the best man in the world. Thank you, thank you.’
‘You could not have been left in the hands of the Bolsheviks, and I was only too relieved I caught up in time. A generous amount of thanks is due to young Hans, and also to Herr Gebert and his wife. Now we’ll find a restaurant in Frankfurt where we can both freshen up before we eat.’
‘Yes, Mr Gibson. Thank you.’
The German police at Swiebodzin would not allow the man Vorstadt to leave the country until a decision had been made about whether or not he should be prosecuted for dangerous driving. His passport, a Russian one, was confiscated. Commissar Bukov had no option but to take the hearse to Warsaw himself. He drove through the evening and all through the night, with not a single compassionate thought for the young woman he had interred in the coffin. She was, after all, a woman who, as a girl, had so frustrated him that, in an excess of hatred for her family, he had had them shot. That had led to him being condemned by the workers’ council as a man of intemperate judgement and, accordingly, of suspect value to the Revolution. That had been a bitter pill to swallow. She was to blame, the girl who was now a woman.
He knew, of course, that the workers’ council of Ekaterinburg, the Soviet, was no longer made up of Lenin’s adherents or Trotsky’s followers. They were Stalin’s men now. Those who had wavered had been liquidated. That made no difference to Bukov. His soul belonged to the Revolution. He had promised to bring back the girl who had refused to divulge what she knew about a sequel to the execution of the Romanovs. She had denied knowing anything. But she knew, yes, she knew. It was not something Lenin or Trotsky wished to become common knowledge, not at that particular time. Well, at least he had her, and together they would keep the belated appointment with the Ekaterinburg Soviet. They would both die. She because she had refused to help the Revolution, and he because Stalin’s men had taken over. He knew he had been away from Russia too long.
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