Field of Mars (37 page)

‘What time is it?' Fauré said over his shoulder as he turned from side to side, checking the drape of his jacket.

‘It's time,' said Tomlinovich. ‘Well, Ryzhkov . . .' They shook hands and Tomlinovich clapped him on the shoulder. Fauré turned from the mirror and did the same.

‘I know that this has been very difficult, a very arduous process, Inspector.' Fauré's expression was as serious as Ryzhkov had ever seen him before. ‘I'm very proud to have known you, Ryzhkov. If Russia had more like you, then we might have a golden age yet again.'

‘We're all very proud, proud as mother hens. Get out of here, I never want to see you or hear your name, understand?' Tomlinovich put in quietly. Then Fauré gave him an awkward embrace, stepped back, and then smiled his famous smile—the charming, confident smile that had won so much for him over his young life.

And then the two of them were gone.

He followed them out. The carriage was dark and gleaming. Jekes had dusted off his boots and was wearing a clean greatcoat for the occasion.

Just as they pulled away from the kerb, Fauré raised one finger as if pointing towards heaven, and then winked. Ryzhkov waved and watched as the carriage moved off.

A curious emptiness had come over him. He found himself staring at the street, the patterns in the cobbles, the fluttering of the awnings above the open windows, a fine view to the east and the ornate cupolas atop the Church of the Resurrection, a touch of pure Russian architecture amidst the rectilinear apartment buildings that stretched towards the river. Beyond, the Vyborg side of the city faded away to the misty horizon. For one long moment he drank in the beauty of a summer morning in St Petersburg; the warmth of the air, the clattering of carriages, the chuffing of the steamers plying the river, the factory whistles from far away, the piping of the newsboys hawking their sheets . . . all of it blending and harmonizing as the city growled and bustled into life.

So, finally it was over, and suddenly his hatreds, his horror over the girl, the visions that refused to die when he closed his eyes—suddenly it all began to float slowly away, like clouds dissolving in a clear blue sky.

He took a step, his throat suddenly constricted and he laughed. It came out sounding like a cough, and tears sprang to his eyes. He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose loudly, and looked back up the stairs where the new kid was laughing at him.

He stood there wondering which way to go. Spinning on the pavement like a weather vane. Back to 17 Pushkinskaya? Undoubtedly a service as big as the

Internal branch would be able to find something for him to do.

He began heading down Kryukov Street thinking that he would find Vera, try to tell her . . . Try to tell her what? That he loved her, that he wanted to marry her, to at least try. That he didn't care about her past and that he hated his own, that none of it mattered. That they could both just stop. He could resign, they could leave Russia. He could end the marriage with Filippa and the money from his share of the apartment would get them somewhere . . . somewhere else. Anywhere else. They could go to London, learn English. Settle down there. He could always translate. He was still relatively young. Young enough to start all over again, he thought.

He would find her.

And that was when he heard the explosion.

THIRTY-FOUR

He ran.

Even as the moment of shocked silence fell away. Ahead of him he could hear the screaming. The shriek of a horse in its death throes, a ripple of police whistles echoing through the streets. Around him everyone in the neighbourhood was running towards the intersection of Kryukov Street where it joined Demidov Avenue.

He rounded the corner and saw the crater where Fauré's carriage had exploded into matchsticks. Clumps of the seat stuffing had caught fire and were burning with a rancid stench. A gendarme knelt beside the dying horse. A sudden pistol shot as he put the poor animal out of its misery.

He pushed his way to the front of the crowd in time to see shopkeeper using a rag carpet to hastily enshroud a body, a large body with one leg twisted around so that it looked like a burned man trying to run in two different directions at once. A large pool of dark blood zigzagging through the channels between the paving stones and pooling in the bottom of a crater. Tomlinovich.

He let his eyes look around at the crowd, everyone riveted to the carnage. Women stricken with shrieks half-formed in their mouths. The shattered windows that had rained glass down over everything.

They had pulled a cart up there, then left it to block the narrow neck of Kryukov Street, forcing Jekes to guide his pony directly over the bomb. He remembered that there had been barricades there earlier in the week, men working on the street. It had taken some planning and they'd made a good job of it, he saw. He suddenly felt nauseous and clamped his jaws together.

They were probably watching, they would have had to be in order to accurately detonate the device. He kept his eyes down and fell back into the mob, then entered the side-door of a confectioner's shop. The place was in chaos, a woman standing in the window had been killed outright and a dozen more people were wounded by the flying glass.

Above the street a yellow cloud of smoke hung in the air; a warm, chemical smell of the bomb mixed with the sweeter smell of burned hair. He looked up at the windows and saw nothing but jagged holes and collapsed shutters. Papers were spread everywhere, some burning in the splinters—the remains of Fauré's great hope, the precious Red Book. He could not see Fauré, only portions of his clothing.

All around him there was activity. They might as well stop, it was all meaningless, he wanted to scream. He saw the scene in the street as if everything had been jerked into a double-speed parody, some kind of frenetic modern dance. There was a sudden clanging as an ambulance rushed past into the intersection. But no . . . there was no need to rush now.

Across the street he saw the local commander, Chief Tuitchevsky making his way through the cordon of police, moving to inspect another body that Ryzhkov hadn't seen at first. Tuitchevsky stepped in something and stopped for a moment to wipe his shoe off against the base of a streetlamp.

Ryzhkov spun away from the street and started walking, head down, trying to join a larger knot of pedestrians, all the time looking around for a tram. He managed to resist breaking into a run, thinking frantically about where he might go. He changed his mind and turned around on the pavement and started back the way he came, then stopped and rushed across the street and began heading down a lane that went south towards the canal.

He couldn't go back to Kryukov. He tried to remember his first moments out in the street before the explosion, tried to remember if he'd seen anyone watching. There was a sudden catch in his throat as he remembered the boy that had been minding things at the top of the stairs, wondered if he was still alive.

No one was following him, at least no one he could see.

Terrorists, they were saying. They'd be looking around the neighbourhood right now. He suddenly felt terribly vulnerable in the lane, someone threw open a shutter above him and he jumped and whirled and then did everything in his power not to run.

The busy intersection at the Yekaterininsky embankment felt like paradise, with smiling shoppers, children wailing, men smoking cigars, the braying of the cab drivers in front of the Apraxin market stalls. He moved right into the market and then cut through to Theatre Street and then around to the Nevsky, ran out into the prospekt and jumped on to a passing Number 34 that that would take him all the way down to Znamenskaya Square where he caught an
izvolchik
and drove past 17 Pushkinskaya and then back again. Then he got the
izvolchik
to drop him at the corner where he walked back up the street, watching all the time, then caught another cab to the long blocks of terraced houses in the Bozhdestvenskaya neighbourhood where Hokhodiev kept house with Lena.

He got out at the corner and looked around the street. Nothing stuck out as odd and so he kept going, walking directly to the Hokhodievs' entrance, hesitating at the door, pretending to check for an address, one last look around. Still nothing, so he went upstairs and continued past their floor, all the way up to the roof. Nothing.

He went back down to their apartment, at the rear facing the lane and a garden which everyone in the building shared.

Seeing Lena shocked him, made him go through in his mind how long it had been since he had seen her. At least a year, he supposed. Her red hair had gone a yellow-grey, and she had shrunk by a third. Her skin was waxy but when she saw him she smiled for a moment.

‘Petrushka . . .' she breathed and tried to pull him inside. They embraced and he could feel the bones.

‘Lena, is he around?'

‘No . . . no, he's off somewhere. He's not with you?' ‘No. Look, there's not perhaps much time, Lena . . .' He faltered. Staring at her, not wanting to make anything worse than it already was. ‘Tell him

‘
Abuschkaya
,' he'll know what I mean, and tell him to find Dima.'

‘Yes, of course, of course . . .' She knew immediately what was up, Kostya had told her everything.

‘Do you have a place you can go?'

‘My sister, I'll go to her house, you go now—' she shooed him out and shuffled off to get dressed.

‘I'm sorry, Lena—' He went to hug her once more. ‘Go, Petrushka. Go—' She pushed him off and he was back out into the hall and heading for the back stairs.

He walked all the way to the river and then went into a hotel florist's and selected two dozen roses to be delivered to Mademoiselle Vera Aliyeva at the Komet Theatre as soon as possible. In the note he told Vera to stay away from his apartment, and that by looking at the morning newspapers she would know why.

Love
, he wrote. Stared at the word for a long moment, and then scrawled a hasty
P
beneath it.

The vault belonged to the Abusch family, after whom Abuschskaya Street had been named.

He paced up and down through the cool long room, reading the epitaphs, noting the carved Neptunes and sinking ships that had been chiselled into the malachite plaques. A whole family of German mariners were recorded here: shipwrights, exporters, and finally accountants and canny investors; immigrants who'd prospered, owing their success to Teutonic connections and an accident of geography that had led the original Abusch to settle at the confluence of the Neva and the Gulf of Finland and begin building ships for Catherine the Great. That same original Abusch rested inside a catafalque which now supported a large canvas bag of groceries Ryzhkov had brought for the wait.

Where had all the Abuschs gone? Probably abroad, probably somewhere more fashionable, the shares in the business long since sold or placed in trusts, profits gambled away by dissolute offspring—artists without skill, wanderers without a destination.

For Ryzhkov it was a safe place, a safe place filled with death. There were no longer any Abuschs to notice that the dried flowers had been disturbed, the cobwebs had been mysteriously cleared away, that suddenly there were cigarette butts and muddy footprints across the floor. No one to complain that the family vault had been desecrated.

Hokhodiev whistled and then Ryzhkov heard him scrape his shoes on the gravel. Ryzhkov moved to the iron gates and swung them open as quietly as he could. He could tell that Hokhodiev had been walking quickly. ‘Dima's coming,' he said. He had a cheese inside his jacket and a short revolver that he'd tucked in his belt. They went back and sat down in the back room.

‘He's only about fifteen minutes behind me. Lena caught me on the stairs, she's gone off to Masha's place. Jesus . . .' he said, staring down at the stones. ‘This is what I think it is, right? This is as bad as I think?' Hokhodiev pulled off his fedora and fanned himself.

‘Fauré asked his minister, Tomlinovich asked Gulka.' ‘This is, this is just what I thought. Gulka. Oh . . .' Hokhodiev said and shook his head.

‘We'll get out and we'll get her out, get word to Masha.'

‘I found Dima at the office.'

‘I only drove past.'

‘They hadn't got there yet. And . . . you know, I didn't wait to see.'

‘We might be out of it. I don't know if they know us,' Ryzhkov said. ‘I'd been removed from their case, that was their way of ending the deal. It might be nothing,' he said. He'd stood up now and was pacing back and forth. It was too desperate. Hokhodiev raised his finger to his lips to quieten him. For a long moment he just stood there, staring at the carvings.

‘No . . . No, brother,' Hokhodiev said. ‘We're not out of it. We might be a little ahead, but nobody but Gulka could get a job done like that . . . those Justice boys . . . it's a mine, they have to put it in the street like that? They'd been watching. It's probably the Parrot,' he said, meaning one of the other Internal investigators they knew who'd long made explosives his speciality.

‘If they are on to us . . .' Ryzhkov had been trying to minimize it in his imagination. Now just thinking about it put a catch in his throat.

‘When were you at Kryukov last?' Hokhodiev asked him.

‘Before this, not for . . . three, three or four days.'

‘Dima and I have been gone from there for at least a week now. When did they go upstairs to get their permissions?'

‘Who knows? But probably right after the whale meeting. Three weeks.'

‘Shit,' Hokhodiev said. They heard a man coughing out on the gravel and Ryzhkov moved to the gate. Across the pathway he saw Dima stop and take his hat off and shuffle about in front of a huge granite tombstone. He dropped to one knee and looked over and saw Ryzhkov nod. Dima stood up and walked away down the path for a dozen metres, then stopped and backtracked directly to the Abusch gate.

‘We're all right, I think,' Dima said. ‘I ran back in and pulled this before I left.' He held up an envelope that bulged with fifty-rouble notes. Part of the ‘petty cash' that Volga Metals Assurance kept inside a windowsill at 17 Pushkinskaya.