Death on the Nevskii Prospekt lfp-6

by David Dickinson

  ‘Leave your bags here, the porter will take them up.’ The voice was languid but powerful, its owner a beautifully dressed diplomat of some thirty-five years called Rupert de Chassiron, Chief Secretary to the Embassy. He radiated an effortless charm. From time to time a hand would be despatched on an upward mission to check the status of his hair, which was beginning to let him down by going thin on top. De Chassiron sported a very expensive-looking monocle which gave him, as intended, an air of great distinction. ‘His Nibs, that’s the Ambassador to you and me, is off at some charity function with that frightful wife of his. I’m to take you to the feeding station.’

  Powerscourt resisted the temptation to ask for further details of the frightful wife. He remembered from his time in South Africa that embassies could become very claustrophobic, always prone to feud and faction. They were walking past the Alexander Monument, surrounded by the great buildings of the Admiralty and the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, powerful and menacing in the dark.

  ‘Been here before, Powerscourt? Seen all the stuff?’

  ‘I came here some years ago with my wife. We saw quite a lot of stuff then.’ So much stuff, he remembered suddenly, that after four days Lucy could hardly walk and had to spend the next day being ferried round the city in a water taxi.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the diplomat, ‘they know me here. Booked a private room. Don’t have to eat the Russian food if you don’t want to. Place is called Nadezhda. Means hope. Always needed in these parts, hope, in as large a helping as you can lay your hands on.’

  A nervous young Tatar waiter showed them to their room. There were no windows and the most remarkable feature was the wallpaper. It was dark red with patterns that Powerscourt could only refer to mentally as vigorous. If you were feeling kind you would have said there were loops and twirls and hoops and arches and circles of every size imaginable. If you were feeling unkind you would have said the designer was a madman. If you were visually sensitive you might well have felt sick. Powerscourt felt he knew now why this was one of the private rooms.

  ‘Tatar pattern, Powerscourt,’ said de Chassiron cheerfully. ‘Local traditions not confused down there with six hundred years of design history from Renaissance buildings to Aubusson tapestries. You want a twirl, you give it a twirl. Not exactly restful, would you say?’ he remarked as a waiter brought him some wine to taste.

  ‘Excellent, he said, ‘the local rich are very partial to French wine, thank God. This Chablis is first rate.’

  As they started on their first course, blinis, Russian pancakes, with caviar, de Chassiron began to talk about Martin.

  ‘Let me tell you, Powerscourt,’ the diplomat paused briefly to swallow a particularly large mouthful, ‘all I know about Martin. Won’t take long.’ He took a copious draught of his wine. ‘Came here on a Tuesday. Wouldn’t tell a soul what he was here for, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve. Wouldn’t tell the Ambassador anything, much to His Nibs’ fury. Went off somewhere, God knows where, didn’t tell a soul where he was going, on Wednesday morning. Next seen dead early on Thursday morning as you know. Not clear if he died Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Not clear if he died where he was found or somewhere else. That’s it. The last unknown hours of Roderick Martin.’

  Powerscourt helped himself to a few more blinis. ‘They’re really very good, these blinis,’ he said. ‘I can tell you one thing, you know one more fact than I do. Apart from the bit with the Ambassador, that’s all I know too. I don’t know any more than you do. All attempts to get the Prime Minister to talk have failed.’

  De Chassiron wiped his mouth carefully. Powerscourt thought he might be rather vain about his appearance. As his wild boar and the diplomat’s fish arrived, Powerscourt asked for a diplomatic overview of where Russia now stood, its main political and foreign attitudes that might, somewhere, contain a clue to the life and death of senior British diplomat Roderick Martin.

  De Chassiron smiled. ‘Be happy to oblige, Powerscourt, nothing diplomats like doing better than spinning their private theories about history and current trends. But where to start? I tell you where I’ll start. St Petersburg is a very deceitful place. You look at these incredible buildings all about the centre of the city designed by Quarenghi and Rastrelli and these European architects in their sort of heavy international baroque, and you think you’re in Europe, in another Milan or Rome or Munich. It’s deceptive in exactly the same way that America is deceptive, except that in New York or Washington it’s the common language that makes you think you share a common culture and common values. You don’t. Here it’s the architecture that makes you think you’re just in another part of Europe. For the Doge’s Palace in Venice read the Winter Palace. For the Uffizi in Florence read the Hermitage. It’s not true. Even here, in a city designed to turn his fellow countrymen into good Europeans, Peter the Great never quite succeeded. And if they’re not truly European in this place, think of the rest of the Russians, most of whom are peasants who have never even seen a city and wouldn’t know a baroque one from a city built, or more likely destroyed, by Genghis Khan.’

  Powerscourt’s mind wandered off briefly to contemplate a city built or razed to the ground by Genghis Khan. Birmingham, he decided, maybe Wolverhampton.

  ‘There’s another thing about these buildings, Powerscourt.’ De Chassiron paused to spear a large mouthful of his fish. ‘I don’t know what a democratic building would look like, maybe it would have to look classical like that damned Congress in Washington, but these buildings here, they’re autocratic, they’re to be lived in by one lot of autocrats and handed over to another lot of autocrats. Those great palaces outside the city, Peterhof and Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo, they’ve all got a shadow over them and the shadow is that of Versailles and the Sun King. These Romanovs are the last serious autocrats in Europe, if not the world. Our King has the powers of a lowly parish clerk, heavily watched by a suspicious parish council, compared to them. And consider this.’ He held up the passage of a particularly large slice of his fish and waved his fork at Powerscourt. ‘What sort of representative bodies, councils, assemblies, parliaments do you think the Tsar has to help him in his work of administering this vast empire? Two? Three? House of Commons? House of Lords? Not one, not even a House of Lords. I’ve always suspected that Kings of England were very happy to have all their aristocrats penned up in a House of Lords. They could plot against each other rather than plot against the King. Very satisfactory all round. But here, these aristocrats may not be fully European but they know the political power exercised by their counterparts elsewhere. If you were an English lord or a duke, your power might not be as ostentatious as it once was but it’s still pretty real and there’s probably more of it than people imagine. If you’re a Prussian Junker you have enormous power. Here you have nothing, whether you’re a peasant, a worker or an aristocrat.’

  ‘So what do the people who would be in the Lords or Commons, or the Congress in Washington, do here? Where do their political energies go?’

  ‘That’s a very good question, Powerscourt. I wish I knew the answer.’ De Chassiron screwed his monocle in for another brief inspection of the wine list. ‘Some of them campaign for reform and so on. Some may even join one or two of the more extreme left wing sects that spring up all the time. They gamble. Quite often they gamble huge fortunes away. They fornicate with other people’s wives. Then they fornicate with yet other people’s wives. There’s a great deal of that going on. The wives must get worn out. The cynics say that Tolstoy wasn’t writing fiction when he described the affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. Some of them drink. That’s usually in addition to, rather than a replacement for, the fornication with the wives of others and the reckless gambling. Sometimes they retire to their estates in the country. Lots of these people own properties the size of a small English county, for Christ’s sake. Not many last out though in the rural idyll. Prolonged exposure to the theft and violence of the peasantry sends them back to the cities. There’s a st
ory, probably apocryphal, about one aristocrat who retired to the country to read all of Dostoevsky and improve his soul. After three novels he blew his brains out. People said it was Petersburg’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment who pushed him over the edge.’

  Powerscourt found it hard to see how any of these varied activities could lead to the death of an English diplomat. ‘What about the violence?’ he said. ‘What about all these assassination attempts? Could they have anything to do with Martin’s death?’

  ‘The French Ambassador, Powerscourt, the wisest foreigner in the city, says this is a society at war with itself. There could easily, in his view, be a civil war or a revolution here. Nothing is stable. The Tsar is both symbol and cause of so many problems. Symbol because he stands for nearly three hundred years of autocratic rule, and the autocratic principle will not permit him to share power with any council or elected assembly. He is a terrible administrator but if any minister he appoints manages to do the job properly he is fired because he puts the Tsar in a bad light. Then you get more toadies and the trouble starts all over again. He and his family are more or less prisoners in that palace of theirs out in the country. The security people won’t let them go anywhere else in case they’re blown up. In Tsarskoe Selo, at least, they’re safe because they’re guarded by thousands of soldiers and police twenty-four hours a day. It’s gilded, their cage, it’s very gilded, but it’s still a cage.’

  A surly-looking waiter had removed their plates. De Chassiron had ordered another bottle of Chablis and was contemplating the menu. ‘I can recommend the cranberry mousse, Powerscourt,’ he said finally, placing the order before his guest had a chance to reply.

  ‘Then there’s this bloody war,’ he continued, staring intently at the demented wallpaper. ‘They’re going to lose it and there’ll be the most enormous fuss. Imagine Mother Russia being defeated by the Japanese, little better than savages in the view of most of Russian society, small inferior yellow savages at that. It’ll be a terrible blow to the imperial prestige when they lose to the little yellow chaps with their ridiculous moustaches. They say the Tsar was one of the most eager campaigners for war.’

  ‘Do you think that could have had anything to do with Martin’s mission?’ asked Powerscourt, rather enjoying his crash course in Russian politics. ‘Could they have been asking for help with the war? A naval alliance or something like that?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said de Chassiron, ‘but why all the bloody secrecy? It’s not as if His Nibs is going to take a sled down the Nevskii Prospekt and shout the news aloud to all comers. I wonder, I haven’t told anybody else this, and it’s only a theory, but I wonder if it didn’t have to do with security. Once the Okhrana are involved everything gets much more complicated and much more secretive than it need be.’

  ‘The Okhrana are the secret police?’ Powerscourt was hesitant.

  ‘Indeed,’ said de Chassiron, settling the bill. ‘They’ve almost certainly noted your arrival and will check your movements all the time you are here. They are the most suspicious, the most paranoid organization in the world. And they will, almost certainly, follow us all the way back to the Embassy.’

  Next day Mikhail Shaporov presented himself at a quarter to nine in the morning at the British Embassy. He was wearing a grey suit with a pale blue shirt and looked as though he might have been a young lawyer dressing in a conservative fashion to avoid prejudicing the judge by his tender years.

  Powerscourt waved a piece of paper at him. ‘I’m told this is a report from the Nevskii police station informing the Ambassador that they have found a British national in their possession. I should say a dead British national.’

  Mikhail read it quickly. ‘That is correct, Lord Powerscourt. And we have an appointment to see the policeman who wrote it at nine fifteen? Come, it is not far. I presume that nobody has succeeded in extracting the body from this police station? Indeed, it is probably no longer there. It may be in one of the morgues. I have the addresses of the two most likely in these parts.’

  ‘That was very intelligent of you, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I am impressed.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not me you have to thank for it, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Mikhail with a smile, ‘it’s my father. He’s lived here almost all of his life. He may have bribed many policemen in his time, I do not know.’

  The police station was a nondescript three-storey building behind the Fontanka Canal. A collection of drunks, sleeping, comatose or dead, were sprawled across the hallway inside the front door. Their beards were long and unkempt, their hair was matted, their clothes were filthy. A powerful smell of dirt and damp and human waste rose strongly from them. Powerscourt noticed that the young man paid them absolutely no attention. This was the background of his life, a sight he had seen so often he hardly noticed it. Perhaps it was the background to the lives of all the citizens of this city, lost souls given up to vodka to escape the pain of their daily lives, drink-sodden refugees from the tensions of everyday existence in St Petersburg who sprawled across the floors of its police stations until they were granted the temporary consolation of a cell.

  Powerscourt saw that Mikhail had opened a conversation with the fat policeman behind the desk.

  ‘He’s new here,’ he said to Powerscourt, ‘he’s gone to make inquiries. That could mean a couple of minutes or a couple of days. They don’t care how they treat people at all, the local police. Not like in London.’

  Just then a door at the far end of the hall opened and two burly policemen emerged. They began dragging the drunks through the doorway into some unknown territory behind.

  ‘Cells?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mikhail, ‘maybe they’re just throwing them back on to the streets now it’s daylight. This lot may have been brought in during the night to stop them freezing to death. Even here they don’t like corpses lying about in the streets first thing in the morning. Doesn’t look too good in the shadow of the Winter Palace if winter’s victims are stretched out in front of it, dead from the winter cold. Bad for business. Might upset a passing Grand Duchess.’

  The fat policeman had returned. Once more Mikhail engaged him in conversation. After a couple of minutes he gestured to Powerscourt. ‘I’m getting nowhere, Lord Powerscourt. I think you need to let him have it. Sent by Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, all that sort of stuff, big guns, heavy artillery.’

  ‘I am afraid, Constable,’ Powerscourt began, ‘that I find your position very unsatisfactory.’ He heard Mikhail’s translation coming out just behind his own. ‘I am here as a representative of the British Foreign Office and the British Prime Minister. I wish to speak to the police inspector named here,’ Mikhail waved the document at the policeman as he spoke, ‘who reported the death of a British diplomat to the British Ambassador some days ago. It is imperative that I speak to him.’

  Mikhail translated, his emphases more vigorous in Russian than Powerscourt’s had been in English. Powerscourt wondered if the man knew where Great Britain was. Did he know where Kazakhstan was? Or Georgia?

  There was another burst of Russian. ‘We have no knowledge of this inspector here,’ said Mikhail. ‘My superiors instruct me to tell you that this must be a mistake.’

  ‘No,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it is you who are mistaken. This inspector made a report to the British Embassy itself. We are not mistaken. I demand to see the senior policeman here.’

  Powerscourt noticed that the gap between his words in English and Mikhail’s in Russian was getting shorter. Maybe when he’s back in practice he really will be simultaneous, he thought. Powerscourt regarded this as a truly wondrous feat, akin to those of people who could unlock the hidden theorems of mathematics.

  Very reluctantly the fat policeman retired to the inner quarters in search of a senior officer. Mikhail was looking at the paper once more. ‘It couldn’t be clearer, Lord Powerscourt. The inspector is reporting the police discovery of the dead Martin at one thirty in the morning of Thursday Decemb
er the 23rd. It’s as clear as a bell.’

  Suddenly Powerscourt had a terrible thought. They hadn’t dumped Martin in the hall along with the drunks, had they? Left him there for hours until rigor mortis had set in? That was not a comforting thought to take back to London and the home of the widow Martin and the parents Martin. They might never sleep again.

  There was a shout from the desk. The fat policeman had been replaced by an even fatter one with a red beard and a disagreeable air of menace about him.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Mikhail began translating. ‘How dare you come in here and waste police time. There is no officer here of that name. There never has been. Forging official documents is a serious offence in our country. The penalties can be up to ten years’ imprisonment. Now, I suggest you get out of here and don’t come back.’

  With that he banged his fist on the table and pointed to the door. Powerscourt was not very impressed.

  ‘Thank you for your suggestions, Inspector. We have an appointment with the Interior Ministry. We shall certainly raise with them our treatment at your hands. We also have an appointment at the Foreign Ministry where the displeasure and dismay of my government will be conveyed in the strongest possible terms. All we wish at this juncture is the chance to speak with your inspector who wrote this report, complete with your very own stamp on it.’ With that, in a sudden burst of inspiration, Powerscourt picked up the stamp on the desk, moistened it in the pad beside it and made another mark on the other side of their document. It was identical to the mark already there.

  ‘See?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘This stamp is the same as the one already on the report. Surely even you can see that proves it is genuine.’

  The signs were pretty bad. ‘May have to beat the retreat rather sharpish, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail was whispering, pulling Powerscourt back from the desk. ‘This character is going to lose his temper, he’s going to go up like Krakatoa.’