by Jasper Kent
‘My God!’ muttered Raisa.
‘There are thousands suffered the same – or worse,’ said Tamara.
‘Peasants,’ said Raisa.
It was true; the serfs were always hit harder – by disease, by famine. Freedom wouldn’t change that. Freedom was the freedom to die. Raisa expressed the common view that they were inured to it. If they were, so was Tamara.
They turned off Tverskaya Street into Degtyarny Lane. The wind had eased and a little late snow had begun to fall gently, illuminated by the lamps at the windows. It wouldn’t settle.
‘Home at last,’ muttered Tamara, and then paused to think about what she had said. She’d had many places to call home, all of which she’d had to leave, either through circumstance or of her own volition. She’d not been here ten weeks, and it surprised her that already she could think of it as such. She looked at Raisa and smiled. Raisa’s face was quizzical, but she said nothing.
It was only as she approached the front door and noticed that it was wide open, with no one in attendance, that Tamara began to feel anything might be wrong.
Nadia Vitalyevna was on the verge of tears when they entered. She was at the top of the stairs, on the landing that accessed most of the girls’ rooms. Within moments Tamara and Raisa had joined her, and the girl threw herself into Tamara’s arms.
‘It’s Irina Karlovna,’ she said, her voice fractured.
‘What about her?’ asked Tamara.
‘Her door’s locked. She won’t answer.’
‘You mean she’s not there,’ suggested Raisa.
‘No,’ said Nadia. ‘I saw her go in.’
‘Why didn’t you use the spare keys?’ asked Tamara.
Nadia sniffled, and glanced from Tamara to Raisa and back.
‘We can get to her through mine,’ said Raisa, exasperated at the girl’s silence. Tamara had already considered using the connecting door between the two rooms, but even as she spoke, Raisa tried her own door handle and found it too did not yield.
Tamara turned back to Nadia. ‘Where are the keys?’ she insisted.
‘Irina asked me for them,’ sobbed Nadia. ‘I knew I shouldn’t. I’ve been running between her door and the front for the past half-hour, seeing if she’ll answer and looking out for you.’
Tamara raced down the stairs to her own rooms. Inside, she retrieved her master set of keys and then hurried back up. Nadia and Raisa stood waiting.
‘Did she have any customers?’ Tamara asked.
‘A captain came and asked to see her,’ said Nadia. ‘That’s when she didn’t answer the door.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t stay.’
‘I bet,’ muttered Raisa.
They had come to the door. Tamara inserted her key. Nadia was still right beside her, ready to go in, but Raisa, guessing wisely what they might find within, held back. Tamara glanced from her to Nadia and back, and Raisa took the girl’s hand and led her a little way away. Tamara turned the key in the lock and opened the door.
The mirrors didn’t help. Tamara could not immediately see the bed because of the door, and even when she stepped into the room it was visible only out of the corner of her eye. But reflected in Irina’s many beloved mirrors, just as Irina had intended, she saw the image of what lay on the bed again and again and again.
It was as though an artist had made a series of preparatory sketches of his model, each from a different angle, unable to decide which point of view would show off her beauty at its fullest. But the mirrors had the advantage of showing the scene in its full, vivid colour.
From some angles, Irina appeared demure, her head tilted away in shyness. From others she was licentious, her legs lying open to reveal that part of her which had been her livelihood and, most likely, the reason for her death. But what predominated were those reflections which showed her face, still and pale with eyes that gazed into Tamara’s and showed no recognition – and beneath that young, childlike face, visible wherever Tamara looked, was the wide, red gash between her chin and her collarbone where some monster in human form had torn away the flesh of her once elegant neck. There was no aspect to the bloody, mangled mess of tissue that, by looking somewhere in the room, Tamara could not see.
From outside she heard Raisa’s voice shout, ‘No!’ and then felt Nadia at her side. The girl didn’t even glance at the mirrors, but turned straight to the bed.
Her shrill, regular screams, filling the room, reminded Tamara of a locomotive’s whistle.
CHAPTER VII
‘AND SO TO our toast,’ said Valentin Valentinovich, ‘in an order which is intended to imply no preference. To our beloved daughter and to our city’s beloved saint. To a slayer of dragons and a slayer of men’s hearts.’ He was a little drunk, even on a little wine, but Tamara did not mind. She had drunk more, but to no beneficial effect. ‘To Tamara and to Saint George!’
‘Tamara and Saint George.’ Two voices echoed the sentiment – Yelena and young Vadim. Tamara was happy to be with just those three.
It was Saint George’s day. He was the patron saint of Moscow, and revered throughout the country. On the table in front of them stood the remains of the traditional meal of roast lamb, enjoyed by all. But if it was Saint George’s day then that meant, inescapably, that it was Tamara’s birthday. It was also five days since Irina Karlovna had been murdered. Tamara was now thirty-four. Irina had been twenty-one.
There was no question of her telling them. They did not know where she worked or what she did. They might have heard something of the murder through gossip – from their servants if not from their friends – but Yudin had taken charge of affairs within hours of the discovery of Irina’s body; and Yudin’s instinct was for secrecy. It was simple for him to ensure that the regular police did not investigate the crime – they were answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. Instead he had called in the Corps of Gendarmes. Their ultimate commander was Count Orlov, who was also head of the Third Section. It was no coincidence. Although the two were officially separate institutions, the fact that they were led by the same man revealed the truth. The Corps of Gendarmes was the uniformed branch of the Third Section.
When Yudin had spoken to the gendarmes who came to Degtyarny Lane, it was clear who was in charge, regardless of the blue uniform and plumed helmet of their captain. Yudin’s suggestion had been that Irina had killed herself. Tamara questioned her motive and her method, but Yudin had countered that those were vague doubts set in the face of a body found alone in a locked room, a room to which Irina herself had insisted on taking the keys. But then Tamara had pointed out that the keys were nowhere in the room – neither was anything that could be thought of as a weapon. Yudin conceded it was a puzzle, but asked why, if Irina had been with a man, no one had seen him leave.
In the end Tamara accepted that Yudin had his own reasons for letting the murder lie uninvestigated. It would be bad for business. A murder like this would discourage the clientele of any brothel. For one whose customers were of such high status – and thus had so much to lose – it could mean the flow of information dried up completely. Even if Yudin knew beyond peradventure who had killed Irina, he might keep it quiet just so as not to rock the boat. If that were so, Tamara doubted whether she would catch any hint of it.
She looked up at Valentin Valentinovich, and tried to conjure the image of her real father toasting her, standing at the end of the table, instead of him. Valentin so failed to come up to the mark. The dining room where they sat held no strong associations with her true father and only slight ones with her mother – it was the same in all the rooms downstairs. And yet the calm familiarity of the place was an incalculable blessing. She didn’t partake much in the conversation, merely sat back and enjoyed it. Somewhere at the back of her mind she felt the urge to smoke, but she knew she could not here. It didn’t bother her very much. Talk had turned to the war. Valentin was telling his grandson of affairs in the north – and therefore of the boy’s fathe
r.
‘The British, of course, have sent a second expeditionary force into the Baltic.’
‘But Papa will stop them.’
‘Absolutely. Before they can take Petersburg, they have to take Helsingfors. And to take Helsingfors they’ll have to destroy Sveaborg – and that’s where Rodion comes in.’
‘You sound like my papa,’ said Yelena, with an affectionate laugh. ‘“Before Bonaparte can take Moscow, he’ll have to capture Smolensk. Before Smolensk, he’ll have to take Vitebsk. Before Vitebsk, Vilna.”’
A frown appeared on Valentin’s face. His grandson had already spotted the flaw. ‘But Bonaparte did capture Vilna,’ he said earnestly, ‘and Vitebsk and Smolensk and then Moscow.’
‘And then Vadim Fyodorovich sent him packing,’ said Tamara, grinning at her nephew, ‘just like Rodion Valentinovich will.’ Perhaps the tales of Vadim Fyodorovich, great-grandfather to Vadim Rodionovich, were where Tamara got her image of the gallant male that somehow transformed into her imagined father. He was the true hero of the family, naturally to Yelena, his daughter, but also to Valentin.
‘Not just Vadim,’ added Vadim Rodionovich. ‘There were four of them: Vadim, Maks, Dmitry and Aleksei. They all did it together.’ Clearly he knew the stories as well as Tamara did – perhaps better. She knew enough about the exploits of Vadim Fyodorovich, but the lives of Maks, Dmitry and Aleksei were less easy to remember. It was just Vadim and his comrades – the exploits and characters of the other three merging in her mind into one.
There was an awkward silence. Valentin glanced at Yelena, while the young Vadim remained happily unaware of it. The cause was obvious – the older Vadim might have got rid of Bonaparte, but he had died in the process. Rodion had been born within days of his grandfather’s death – Tamara nine years later. But from what she had heard of him, it was Vadim more than anyone who made her wish she was truly part of this family.
‘And now this second Napoleon is coming back for more,’ exploded Valentin, breaking the uneasiness.
‘Third,’ said Vadim.
‘He calls himself “the third”,’ said Valentin, with more than a hint of bile, ‘but he’s only the second one to claim to be emperor of France.’
‘And the last,’ added Tamara.
‘Ha!’ said Valentin, impressed by Tamara’s unexpected patriotism. ‘Yes.’ He stood and raised his glass. ‘A new toast. To Toma, to Saint George, and to Napoleon the Last.’
The other voices chimed in unison. ‘Napoleon the Last!’
Saint George’s day had not been widely noticed in Sevastopol. Those officers who came from Moscow joined together to celebrate as best they could, but any chance of an evening of enjoyment was marred by the fact that outside the city thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen were planning to destroy them. True, the English revered George in much the same way Muscovites did, but it had caused no let-up in their determination. And as Dmitry more than once pointed out to his fellow officers, that was in no small part because the English had celebrated the feast of Saint George twelve days earlier, thanks to the absurdities of their calendar.
That evening Dmitry was blessed with Tyeplov’s company, though the circumstances were hardly convivial. Again, Dmitry had been tasked with inspecting the state of Totleben’s defences – and of the men’s morale – this time in the fourth bastion, regarded as the foulest posting of the lot. When they’d spoken at the barracks, Tyeplov had seemed almost casual in suggesting he come along. The company of any man that night would have cheered Dmitry – that it was Tyeplov meant something more.
Winter had vanished completely and where once the streets had been hardened by frost, now they were a sea of mud. Embedded sporadically in the ground were cannonballs. It was unusual but not unheard of for them to reach into the heart of the city, though most arrived here accidentally. The Allies knew that it was Totleben’s ramparts that stopped them from taking Sevastopol, not the buildings and people within, and so that was where they concentrated their fire. As Dmitry and Tyeplov walked along the bank of the Military Harbour and got closer to the bastion, the concentration of the discarded iron balls became more dense. Eventually they would be gathered up and reused by the Russians, only to be replenished in another bombardment. No guns were firing today – not yet, at least.
As they came out of the city, the road descended into a narrow trench, with wooden planks placed intermittently along the sides to prevent the earth from cascading back into what it regarded as its rightful territory. In construction, it was much like the tunnel beneath the Star Fort where Dmitry and Shulgin had made their gruesome discovery – with the exception that it had no roof. As long as Dmitry was free to stand upright, he felt none of the terror of entombment that would otherwise have descended upon him.
As they came closer to the bastion, the dug-out walls of the trench became augmented by gabions. They could absorb some of the blast from a shell and sometimes a direct hit from a cannonball. There had been times where they had proved dangerous in themselves, toppling over and crushing the soldiers they had been constructed to defend, but in most cases they were strapped securely in place.
The trench began to ascend and ended at the inner wall of the fourth bastion itself. There was little to distinguish it from any of the others. A few of the braver men peered out over the top towards the enemy lines. Most sat and hugged themselves to keep out the cold. At least there was no rain tonight, and the wind was not too severe. Dmitry spoke to the first soldier he saw.
‘Where’s your commanding officer?’
The man – a boy really – glanced up, but seemed unimpressed by Dmitry’s seniority. ‘In the naval casemate.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing down another trench that ran parallel with the bastion wall. Dmitry felt no desire to reprimand him; instead he and Tyeplov followed the trench. At the end of it, a wooden door was visible, beside which sat a sailor smoking a pipe.
‘Is it all right to go in?’ asked Dmitry.
‘Just a moment, sir.’ The sailor, showing a better sense of rank than had his army comrade moments before, was on his feet in an instant. ‘I’ll tell them you’re here.’ He opened the door and stuck his head through it. Moments later he stood upright and pushed the door wide open, indicating that the two officers should enter.
Dmitry had never been inside this casemate before. All the bastions had them – some several. From outside there was no hint, apart from the door, that this part of the earthworks was not as solidly built as the rest of it, but inside was an entire room, a large one at that, acting as a shelter from the weather and a haven of relative safety. Compared with the others he had visited, Dmitry was struck by the degree of decoration inside. The floor was parqueted, no less; a little bumpy in places, but a leap forward compared with the raw earth or duckboards that he had seen elsewhere. Against the wall at either end stood two beds, with curtains that could provide a modicum of privacy. In the corner near one of them hung an icon of the Virgin, with a pink vigil lamp burning in front of it, resting on a stool. On one of the beds lay a naval officer, fully clothed in the uniform of a michman – apparently asleep. At a table in the middle of the casemate, one seated, the other standing, were two infantry officers, each at least ten years Dmitry’s junior.
‘Anatoliy!’ exclaimed the standing officer, embracing Tyeplov as an old friend. Then he turned to Dmitry, offering his hand. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’
They had met, in the mess weeks before when Dmitry’s conversation with Tyeplov had been interrupted. He chose not to mention it. Instead he dumped his knapsack beside the door before walking over to shake the officer’s hand.
‘I’m Shtabs-Captain Mihailov,’ said the man, ‘and this is Lieutenant Wieczorek.’ Dmitry always found it difficult to trust Poles who fought for Russia. More than one senior Polish officer had switched sides to the Turks, taking on a Turkish name to hide his treachery. Dmitry knew for a fact the so-called Sadyk Pasha, a leading light of the ‘Sultan’s Cossacks’, was n
one other than Micha Czaykowski, a Polish turncoat. But it was unfair to judge Wieczorek by the standards of his countrymen; he was, after all, still here. ‘And that reprobate,’ continued Mihailov, picking up a bread roll from the table and hurling it at the sailor on the bed, ‘is Michman Ignatyev.’ Ignatyev showed no reaction as the projectile bounced off his chest. ‘Care for a glass of Bordeaux?’ asked Mihailov, lifting a bottle from the table and jiggling it in their direction.
For a brief moment Dmitry hoped against hope that Mihailov had genuinely meant Bordeaux, but he only needed to glance at the bottle to realize that it contained just the local Crimean brew. It was a joke he’d heard often enough now to forget its original humour. He accepted a glass anyway, as did Tyeplov.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this on the front before,’ said Dmitry, glancing around him and taking in the room once more.
‘One has to maintain one’s standards,’ replied Mihailov.
‘It’s like a country gentleman chose to transfer his home into a cave. Don’t you think, Tolya?’
‘Quite unique,’ said Tyeplov, after a momentary pause and with an enigmatic smile.
‘Much action out here?’ asked Dmitry.
Mihailov glanced at Wieczorek, who answered, ‘Nothing for two days.’ Dmitry could detect no hint of a Polish accent in his speech.
‘A blessing, I suppose,’ said Tyeplov.
‘Means it’s due,’ came Ignatyev’s voice from the bed.
‘It’s been quiet over the winter,’ said Dmitry.
‘It’s spring now,’ said Ignatyev, using his fingers to tidy his moustache as he sat upright. ‘They won’t give up.’
Mihailov reached forward and refilled Dmitry’s glass. Dmitry hadn’t realized how quickly he had emptied it. If it was Bordeaux, then it hadn’t travelled well. Even its short journey from the vineyards between here and Bakhchisaray had done it little good. Despite that, Dmitry enjoyed the sensation of it on his throat, if not the taste.
