The White Russian

by Tom Bradby

  Godorkin sighed. His expression told Ruzsky that the exact same things had been explained to Pavel. “White’s name was on our wanted list. The details that I gave you are all that we have. The case notes from the file itself are missing.”

  “So what was stolen?”

  “A sum of money, I believe. Several thousand rubles. The case has been inactive for some time. I only took over in September last year, so it was well before my tenure. I went in search of the file when I received your telegram.”

  “Vasilyev was the chief of police at the time of the robbery?”

  Godorkin’s gaze was steady, but wary. He appeared to be assessing whether he was being led into a trap, but whatever it was he saw in Ruzsky’s eyes, it appeared to win his approval. He relaxed. “That is correct,” Godorkin said.

  “His investigation?”

  Godorkin shrugged.

  “His file.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Ruzsky turned to face the window. He watched a sail being hoisted on a white racing yacht. “Strange,” he said. “Vasilyev has a reputation for efficiency.” He turned back to face Godorkin. “You said that you knew both of them. White and the girl, Ella?”

  “She was a sweet little thing. I knew her father.”

  “Were you aware that Ella began an affair with this American, White, in the summer of 1910?”

  “I was with the military liaison department at the embassy in France at that time. I hadn’t seen Kovyil for some years when he died.”

  “He wouldn’t have approved. Or so his wife said.”

  “Of an American criminal? Hardly.”

  Ruzsky stood and watched the yacht tack across the center of the bay. The wind seemed to have slackened and the craft brought itself around slowly. “What brings a man like that halfway across the world?”

  “ Yalta is famous, Chief Investigator. Perhaps you shouldn’t underestimate our appeal.”

  “Perhaps not.” Ruzsky sat on the sill. The cigarette had gone out in his hand-he’d barely smoked it-and he threw it out of the window.

  “What is the connection between this office and Livadia?”

  “That I can’t discuss.”

  “You vet staff?”

  “We have, in the past. If they’re local. Sometimes they come from farther afield.”

  “Who do you deal with there?”

  Godorkin smiled. “Your friend has beaten you to it. He left here yesterday to go straight up to the palace.”

  “You must have a list of political suspects. The Okhrana supplies you with information?”

  “A certain amount is disclosed to enable us to ascertain that any local individual has no inappropriate political involvement, but normally we know them well enough to be sure.”

  Ruzsky faced him. “Would you mind if I spent some time in your file room?”

  Godorkin looked astonished, but not insulted. An honest man, Ruzsky thought.

  If Godorkin’s intention was to regularize the station’s affairs, he hadn’t begun with the filing system.

  Indeed, there was no system to speak of. The filing cases were kept in a gloomy, dust-laden room in the basement. There wasn’t even an electric light. Ruzsky shuddered. This place reminded him uncomfortably of the station in Tobolsk.

  “Help yourself,” Godorkin said, with heavy humor, lighting a candle and thrusting it into his hand. “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know precisely. Other cases around that time. Names that are familiar to me from somewhere else.”

  Ruzsky hoped he would not be offered any assistance. He wanted to be alone. “Broadly,” Godorkin said, “cases are filed by order of year, starting at the beginning of the century on the left here. Any personal files are at the far end of the room, in alphabetical order. I’ve achieved that much. Shout if I can be of any assistance.”

  Godorkin coughed once and then slowly climbed the stairs. Ruzsky walked down toward the far end of the room. There was a small grille here for ventilation that let in a thin stream of light. Beneath it stood a desk. Ruzsky brushed the dust from its surface. He retraced his steps and found a ledge upon which to place the candle so that he could use both hands to work through the files.

  Godorkin was right. The files had been sorted through recently, because the layer of dust upon some of the cases was thinner than around the rest of the room. Ruzsky found 1910 and took all the files for that year down to the desk under the grille. There were about five large piles. Quite a lot, he thought, for a small provincial town, however important.

  All of the files had the nature of the crime to which they related inscribed on the front, along with the date upon which it had been said to have taken place. The date the crime had been reported was also recorded. Most, though not all, files were annotated in the same flowing hand. Ruzsky had seen only one detective upstairs in the main room on the ground floor, but he looked about seventeen-much too young to have been working here seven years ago.

  The crimes were mostly incidental. Petty theft, vandalism, the odd affray, some domestic violence. It took Ruzsky about an hour to work through all the files and he reached the end with a sense of disappointment. He supposed that he’d hoped White’s name, or Markov’s-or even Ella’s-might have cropped up in some other context.

  He began on the files relating to political suspects or criminals.

  They were not strictly in alphabetical order, so he ended up going through the whole shelf. There was no reference to any of them.

  Ruzsky sat back down at the desk. He watched the dust dancing in the shaft of light still angling through the grille. He checked his watch. He had arrived at Sevastopol shortly after breakfast and it was now almost three o’clock in the afternoon. He was hungry.

  He began to sift through the files for 1909. The task was beginning to seem pointless, but instinct told him that these people could not have passed through Yalta without coming to the attention of the authorities.

  And if White had robbed a train, he had certainly not acted alone.

  There were fewer files for 1909, but they were no more illuminating. Ruzsky was close to giving up when he saw a small, discarded pile on the top shelf. He brought the chair from the other end of the room.

  There were ten files, covered in dust. He carried them back to the desk. The top file had the words Black Terror written in the same flowing hand on the front. He opened the buff cover and sifted through the loosely bound, yellowing pages within.

  A feeling of unease crept slowly through him.

  One name appeared three times. The last entry was for August 11, 1910.

  The Black Terror was one of many revolutionary groups that had sprung up at the end of the last century to concentrate on assassinating luminaries of the regime. This small and, by the look of the notes, loosely affiliated cell had been formed on January 12 of that same year by a Michael Borodin, according to the statement of a well-known Bolshevik from St. Petersburg. The police had had an informant on the inside of the group, because the date and venue of each meeting was recorded alongside a paragraph or two describing what had transpired.

  Ruzsky ran his eye over one of the entries again. The reports must have been written by the informant’s police contact.

  July 12. Dumskaya Hotel. Present: Borodin, the American White, Ella Kovyil, Constantine Markov, Olga Legarina, Maria Popova.

  Ruzsky stared at her name, struggling to take it in. Maria Popova.

  Meeting called to order by Borodin. Further discussion of possible assassination of Governor of Odessa. Markov agreed to travel to Odessa, to research Governor’s movements. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target. White spoke of the need for money to carry out revolutionary tasks. Raised possibility of robbing a bank in Odessa, Sevastopol, or Simferopol in order to raise funds. All agreed on necessity of this type of action.

  Ruzsky’s mind swam. He stood, transfixed. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target.

>   He sat and stared at the grille, his vision blurred.

  There was bile in the back of his throat. A revolutionary? A murderer? He thought of the softness of her skin and the gentle sadness in her eyes. It wasn’t possible.

  But who were the men she had left the station with this morning?

  Had she been watching him? Is that why she had come to Yalta?

  No, it had been her suggestion. She had told him she was returning before they’d discovered Markov’s body on the Lion Bridge.

  Ruzsky read through the entries again. Half of him still did not believe the evidence before his own eyes.

  He tapped his fingers against the pages. Why did the reports come to a halt on August 11?

  Ruzsky toyed with the idea of keeping what he’d found to himself, but he decided that it could do no harm to discuss it with Godorkin. The chief of police sat at his desk, a cigarette burning in the solid silver ashtray, a blind flapping idly against the window.

  Ruzsky placed the file in front of him. “Have you got the folder for the train robbery, even if it is empty?”

  Godorkin was already reading. He opened the cupboard beneath him, took out an empty folder, and handed it to Ruzsky. Simferopol-Odessa train robbery, it read. August 31, 1910.

  Godorkin looked up.

  “The entries cease,” Ruzsky said, “roughly two weeks before the train robbery, of which they make no mention.”

  “Yes.”

  “I assume it takes longer than two weeks to plan a crime of that kind.”

  Godorkin nodded. “I should imagine so.”

  They were silent. Both men stared out of the window. There were two yachts in the bay now, and they crossed each other, their sails a startling white against the sea.

  “Ella Kovyil got a job in the royal household up at Livadia,” Ruzsky said. “How did she manage that, if the department here was doing the vetting?”

  Godorkin did not reply. The answer was obvious to both of them. “Someone must have called a halt to the surveillance,” Ruzsky said, forcing home the point. “After the robbery, Vasilyev makes sure the case is handled here, but goes nowhere. Eventually, the notes are removed and disposed of. If there was an investigation, that is.”

  Godorkin still did not reply.

  “Did you know the Popova family?” Ruzsky asked. “Wasn’t her father the governor?” He tried to keep his tone and expression neutral.

  Godorkin shrugged.

  “I think the girl must have been the agent. Nothing else would make sense. Her father died some years before?”

  The policeman didn’t respond.

  “You didn’t know him?”

  “No.”

  Ruzsky stood. He felt suddenly profoundly uneasy.

  35

  R uzsky strolled back down the winding alley to the promenade. He had established from Godorkin that the Tatyana Committee Convalescent Home was on the other side of the hill, overlooking the next bay, but even if Maria had gone there to see her sister, neither the prevailing atmosphere nor Ruzsky’s state of mind encouraged haste.

  He needed time to think.

  He stopped and leaned against the wrought iron railings. A group of small boys was throwing stones on the shingle beach below, trying to land them in a small pool of water they’d dug in the sand. Farther down, a man was selling cold drinks from a cheerful red and white stall.

  Ruzsky straightened. He crossed the road and walked into the hotel lobby. He climbed the stairs to the first floor and knocked on Pavel’s door. There was no answer. He cursed under his breath. It was unlike Pavel not to have left a note. Beside him, in the corridor, a palm tree fluttered in the breeze from an open window.

  Perhaps his departure from the train had upset his old friend more than he’d imagined. Ruzsky rubbed his hand hard across his face and groaned inwardly. He supposed it had been a typically selfish gesture. He walked toward the stairs again. He needed that cheery, gregarious face now.

  The Moorish palace at Livadia was cut from almost translucent white stone. Ruzsky was admitted to the grounds by the security guards at the gate and told to wait in the sunshine beside the front steps. He squinted heavily, shading his eyes as he watched one gardener clipping a hedge while another scrubbed the stonework around the fountain. The garden, like so much of Yalta, was green even at this time of year, packed full of the distinctive narrow firs and tall palm trees.

  The man who came to meet him was exceptionally tall and lugubrious, but without the military bearing Ruzsky had grown to expect in palace officials. He stooped slightly, as if weighed down by his long, drooping nose. He was thin almost to the point of emaciation, and superior to the point of being immediately irritating. A much lesser individual, Ruzsky judged, than Shulgin at Tsarskoe Selo. “You are the investigator?” the man said, his voice so soft that it was hard to hear.

  Ruzsky nodded expectantly as he listened to the clip-clip-clip of the shears behind him.

  “How can I help you?” He had not bothered to introduce himself.

  “And you are?” Ruzsky asked.

  “I am the chief officer of the household.”

  “You have, I’m sure, already spoken to my colleague.”

  The man inclined his head. “I do not believe so.”

  Ruzsky frowned. “He came here yesterday, direct from the police station. A big man, with a generous beard. Investigator Miliutin. Pavel Miliutin.”

  The man shook his head, his confusion genuine.

  “Perhaps he spoke to someone else?” Ruzsky asked.

  “That’s not possible. I was here all day. If he had called, the guards would have sent for me.”

  Ruzsky was silent. He turned to face the sea and watched the gardeners at work again. He wanted to leave now, but suddenly had no idea where to go. Pavel must have been onto something. He must have followed a lead.

  “How can I help you?” the man asked, and now his supercilious manner annoyed Ruzsky.

  “Ella Kovyil.”

  The official frowned again.

  “She used to work here. Her father was a noncommissioned officer in the Preobrazhenskys. She was taken on as a nanny to the Tsarevich in the summer of 1910.”

  “It may be.”

  “It may be, or it was?”

  Perhaps the man sensed Ruzsky’s unease. His patronizing manner melted away and his face grew more serious. “It was.”

  “You were here?”

  “I recall the girl, if that is what you mean.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  The man tilted his head a fraction and appraised his interlocutor properly for the first time. “You have come a long way, Chief Investigator. What is the nature of your inquiry?”

  “Ella was found with a knife in her chest in front of the Winter Palace on New Year’s morning. Her companion was cut to bits.”

  The man did not react. His expression was sober, but neutral.

  “Did you know when you employed her that she was a member of a revolutionary organization?”

  Now the lugubrious bureaucrat looked as if he had seen a ghost.

  “She was part of a cell of the Black Terror that met regularly through the spring and summer of 1910, at different venues in Yalta.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true.” Ruzsky was enjoying his power to shock, even if he wasn’t enjoying much else. “The question that I have is a simple one. Who was responsible for vetting her before she took up her post in the nursery here?”

  The man shook his head. “She was only here a short time. I could never have-”

  “Who was responsible for ensuring she had the correct security clearance to take a job working in close, daily contact with the heir to the throne? The chief of police in the town, isn’t that so?”

  “She was from Yalta,” the man answered defensively. “She’d lived here all her life. We naturally assumed that if there was anything amiss, then it would have come to the attention of the chief of police. And of course, Mr. Vasilyev i
s now…” He trailed off, not wishing to offer a criticism.

  “The information that I have just given you,” Ruzsky said, “was gleaned from Mr. Vasilyev’s files here in Yalta.”

  The official stared out to sea. He pressed his finger against the skin above his lip, as if smoothing an imaginary mustache.

  Ruzsky left him. He wanted to find Pavel. He wanted to find Pavel now.

  On the journey down the hill, Ruzsky rested his head on the back of the horse-drawn cab and gazed up at the unblemished sky.

  The path was dusty and the cab threw up a cloud behind it which was blown gently across the rocky scrubland.

  He considered the possibility that Ella had once been a police agent, but could not see it. The girl of his imagination, and of her own mother’s description, was too timid for such a thing. And yet, she’d continued in her doomed love affair against the wishes of her family, and had stolen something intensely personal from the most powerful woman in Russia -or had tried to.

  The cab stopped in front of the hotel and Ruzsky climbed down into the street. He paid the driver and noticed as he did so that a different man sat behind the red and white stall on the promenade. He seemed to be consciously avoiding his eye, even though the street was almost deserted.

  Ruzsky put the change in his pocket. He watched the group of boys he’d seen earlier climb the steps from the beach and walk off in the direction he’d just come from.

  Ruzsky patted the cabbie’s horse. The man at the stall still didn’t look at him.

  He turned around and moved slowly into the lobby of the hotel.

  He knew people were watching. Everyone seemed suddenly too busy. The air of indolence had been replaced by one of unnatural industry. Only the palm trees still swaying in the gentle breeze bore witness to the hotel’s normal, relaxed atmosphere.

  Ruzsky approached the desk. The clerk gave him a frozen smile.

  Ruzsky heard himself ask if his colleague had returned, but now, when the man shook his head, Ruzsky could see that he was lying.

  The world seemed to turn more slowly. Ruzsky felt the screeching in his ears that he remembered from the day of Ilusha’s death-and the sense of everything around him disintegrating.