Field of Mars (46 page)

Yes there were rumours, even in such a clandestine organization as the Okhrana. Nikolsky had been recently elevated, tipped as the broom that was going to sweep the Okhrana clean, but no one knew who the Tsar would pick to replace General Gulka on a permanent basis. Changes were in the wind, but knowing it all in advance still hadn't prepared the custodian for the shock. He raised his pince-nez to his eyes, tried to find the location of the room Nikolsky was looking for.

‘I know where it is, excellency,' the boy piped up. Nikolsky looked over at him. ‘All right then, you show me. Give him the keys. How do you know it?'

‘I was often on duty in the early hours, and General Gulka frequently used the room at those times.'

‘Do you know what he was doing there?'

‘No, excellency. He would arrive, sometimes stay for an hour or two—'

‘It's all in the books,' the senior man snapped. Nikolsky looked over at him, thinking that he was already on his way to an assignment on the border, he just didn't know it yet.

‘Yes, it would be in the sign-in book,' the boy said, and bowed reflexively and shut up. The older man handed him the keys and they went off down the long hallway.

‘Anything else?'

‘Often he would ask for tea. I would bring him tea, take away the cart afterwards.'

‘He came alone?'

‘Yes. It would be in the book as well, excellency,' he said quietly and then fell silent until they arrived at the door. ‘It is a special electrical lock, excellency. It requires a code before the key can be inserted.'

Nikolsky sighed. ‘Of course. Very well, go back and call the men upstairs.' He had brought two locksmiths, and when they were stymied by the lock and mistakenly fired it, so that it fused the metal together and they had to drill out the cylinders, he sent the custodian upstairs to keep everyone out of the halls and let the boy keep an eye on the men while they did their work. The door was sheathed in steel and to force it required a great deal of hammering. Nikolsky tried to doze in the chair at the end of the hall. Admittedly it was a superb chair; a warm, well-padded leather chair meant for passing long hours in the service of the Tsar, and sitting in it, Nikolsky could not honestly begrudge the custodian his lassitude. But they would all be much more fatigued yet, before it was over.

Finally the boy came back. ‘They've opened both doors, excellency. I made sure they touched nothing.'

‘What's in there?' said Nikolsky, getting up and hurrying down the hall.

‘I saw nothing, excellency,' the boy said, which Nikolsky thought was probably not the whole truth.

The locksmiths were waiting halfway along, and Nikolsky had the boy make them wait; if there was a vault inside he would need them again. He went into the first room, really nothing more than an ante-chamber. There was a desk there, just as there would be if a clerk or receptionist were on duty, but it had been pushed back against the wall with no chair. Fixed into the corridor wall was a drop-box and Nikolsky went over and looked inside. There was a series of daily reports and he opened the one on the bottom, the earliest that Gulka hadn't picked up; it bore the date of his disappearance.

The second room was larger. Fitted out with a padded chair, even more comfortable than the custodian's, and a settee with a pillow and blankets. A lamp for reading, a long table that held piles of paperwork, various files and dossiers. A glance at their spines told Nikolsky the level of secrecy. A thorough, ongoing investigation of . . . and then he turned and saw how Gulka had arranged the walls of the room, and the faces of the men he had been investigating.

He recognized Andrianov immediately and had already started across to the bulletin board which held his own photographs and documents, when the other faces stopped him. Evdaev, whom he had not seen since the wedding reception at the Gorchakovs, looking as noble as a Lippizaner, a second man he vaguely remembered, a foreigner, an embassy official . . . Yes, the Bulgarian attaché, Smyrba, who had lately been recalled to receive instructions from his government. There were two more men he did not know. An older one, perhaps someone's father, with white whiskers and a bare pate, and then a panel pinned with photographs of an ordinary man of the streets. His attention was drawn to it, purely because of its poverty and he moved across the room and looked more closely at the panel, then reached up and unpinned the man's Okhrana identity photograph and put it in his jacket pocket.

He had the men install new locks while he searched through the papers, bagged what he needed, lit a fire in the furnace in the corner and burned his own dossier that Gulka had begun to assemble. When they were done he snapped off the lights and closed the doors behind him, using his own code for the buttons. The custodian had come back and stood there with his clipboard. He was wide awake now, trying to smile and look competent. He ticked the rooms off the list.

‘I'll hold on to these,' Nikolsky said as he pocketed the keys and started down the hall.

‘Yes, excellency.'

‘My level, restricted just as before. If there's an expanded list of recipients I'll give it to you in due course.'

‘Yes excellency.'

‘It's pathetic, you know that?' Nikolsky said.

‘Yes, excellency?'

‘We recruit the best men in the service, everything is fine and then, suddenly . . .' he shrugged. The custodian nodded in sympathy, as if he understood the great tragedy of human frailty within the secret services.

‘It just goes to prove that even good men, even the very best men can go bad,' Nikolsky said. ‘Temptation,' he intoned ‘say nothing about this, eh? You see . . . we may have a matter that goes before the special courts,' he whispered, tapping the man on the chest and inclining his head down in the direction of Gulka's secret rooms. ‘There are the requirements of evidence, you see?'

‘Ahh. Quite right, then entry is restricted to only you, excellency.'

‘Correct. I may have to seal the rooms, who knows?' Nikolsky gave the man a smile, a reassuring pat on the back, then headed up the stairs. He would deconstruct Gulka's labyrinthine investigation and, if what he learned caused a scandal that brought down a few nobles, or shook up a few ministries, so be it. The boy was waiting at the top. He bowed and made way for Nikolsky's exit.

‘You're working for me, now. You're my assistant, understand?' Nikolsky said, and took him by the arm.

‘Yes, of course, excellency. Thank you—'

‘Have this man brought to my office immediately.' He fished in his jacket and handed Zezulin's photograph to the boy. ‘He's been reassigned somewhere I think, look it up, find him, have him arrested if you have to. Under my authority.' He stopped at the desk and signed himself out, tossed his disc down at the barrier. The boy watched him for a moment and then did the same, smiling. Nikolsky handed the boy his card, wrote Zezulin's name across the back, signed it and gave it to the boy. ‘Under my authority,' he said and started towards the doors, the new keys making a disturbing weight in his trouser pocket.

FORTY-THREE

In Pyotr's dream the world was burning.

Above the ashes of the cities he could see the dismembered bodies of the citizenry. He could see children running, miraculously spared the fires, but terrorized by fear and abandonment; running like chickens caught in a yard with a weasel, chaotically, looking over their shoulders. Above them great winged vultures were soaring. Waiting, preparing to strike.

Ryzhkov was with them, like all the rest, running away. Like all the rest, trying to escape the claws on the cobbles behind him, the hot breath of the advancing predator. Crying out, he spun away from his pursuers, and spun away into a different world, spun away into wakefulness.

And that, he thought, in some ways was worse.

The landscape was tedious, unending rolling fields of the Ukraine. The carriage was sweltering and he was dehydrated from all the drinking the night before. Pravdin, he remembered. Pavel Pravdin.

In the dining-car he met an old woman with her blind granddaughter. The girl was fourteen, straight and serious. Her eyes seemed to look in different directions at once. Her hearing was very acute the old woman said, as she told their story. The girl found her food on the plate by touch, her manners were impeccable. They were on their way to Moscow to consult a famous medium. The girl could see ghosts, the old woman said.

‘Truly?' Ryzhkov asked her.

‘Yes,' the girl said. ‘There are many riding with us in this carriage at this very moment.'

He returned to his seat and fell asleep against the hot window. All the windows were open, and each time he awoke he felt like a dried prune. He ran into the old woman and her clairvoyant granddaughter in the station, and seized with a sudden wave of paranoia he sold the balance of his ticket in Kharkov and changed to a direct train for Petersburg.

They had only just pulled away from the Kharkov Station when the executioner asked if he could share the compartment with him.

The man wasn't the least bit reluctant to talk about his profession. He told Ryzhkov about the mechanics of hanging, how they took the one who was about to die up on to the gallows, the physics of the noose and the drop. The condemneds' attitudes towards the priests' blessings, the last words. At Schlusselburg they used a gallows installed at one end of an old stable, the man said. It was always cold in that region and it was better to perform the executions indoors. Warmer, out of the rain. There was no danger the mechanism would freeze. It made it easier on everyone.

Without his black mask the executioner was a smooth-faced man of middle age, a man who looked, Ryzhkov thought, like anyone else one might meet, a shopkeeper, or a minor bureaucrat. He had inherited the job from an uncle nearly twenty years earlier, he said, and during his career he had been called upon to hang exactly seventy-three persons, sixteen of whom were women.

He said the number with a little smile, as if it was something that he was proud of, but didn't want to boast about. The answer came easily, practised, one of the things everyone wanted to know about the job.

He was a religious man, he said. With a family. Newly become a grandfather, the result of his long marriage and six children, all of whom were doing well. The youngest girl was the wild one of the lot, his favourite, an artist who had moved to Copenhagen to study. Being an executioner did not pay all that well. The fees had gone up over the years, but he supplemented his income by taking a second job.

‘Why don't you stop? All the—'

‘Yes. My wife wants me to stop, she can't imagine that it does me any good. She makes me wash after,' he said with a shrug. ‘I suppose she's right, but . . .' For the first time the executioner had the beginnings of a frown across his brow. ‘You see . . . I can do this, it's not something that I enjoy, but it's necessary, and I can do it. Can you imagine someone doing it who loved it? Or who brought an attitude of . . . vengeance? I meet them the night before when I weigh them, I ask their forgiveness, and describe what I can do for them. I try to put them at ease.' The executioner paused, looked at the open fields that stretched to the horizon.

‘I see,' said Ryzhkov.

For a long time they said nothing.

The executioner slept, snoring lightly on the seat across from him. Later in the day they ate together and the executioner excused himself. He had to get off at Kursk. Only family business, he said with a little smile.

‘You said you asked for their forgiveness,' Ryzhkov said. ‘Do they give it to you?'

‘Oh, yes. Nearly always.'

At Kursk he helped the man with his rather heavy suitcases. ‘It's been a pleasure meeting you, sir,' the executioner said, a little out of breath, after they had trudged the length of the platform. A gendarme stepped out from a barrier and blocked their way, roping off that portion of the platform. Another train had come into the station and was being given priority.

‘Oh, my . . .' said the executioner. They put the bags down and waited with the other passengers while a crowd of young peasant boys, still in their rough clothes, lined up in long ranks. Perhaps a hundred of them. Looking around with their open faces, shaking off their sleep. Now Ryzhkov saw that all around them, on the lampposts, on the railings of the station, around each of the windows were garlands of bunting with little shields representing the hereditary arms of Russia.

‘What's all this?' he asked a gendarme.

‘Haven't you heard the news sir? The red cards are going up soon. On Tuesday they put out the call for the technical battalions. It's the start of mobilization,' the man said with a smile. Russia's peasant armies were beginning to form. ‘The President of France, Monsieur Poincaré, is visiting the capital, too, eh? You know, discussing strategy with the Tsar so we can get together and crush those filthy Huns, eh?' And now the policeman laughed and walked a few paces away to patrol the other end of his rope.

Over by the platform someone screamed a command and the lines of boys straightened up and tried to look serious.

He watched a sergeant and his officer inspect the boys. It seemed to go on for quite some time, and the scene was novel enough that gradually a small crowd gathered to watch. The boys were growing up before his eyes. Now the sly looks were gone. Now their baby faces were hardened, scowling. Their shoulders thrown back, chests open to whatever challenge was coming their way.

He and the executioner stood patiently and watched the whole thing, the sergeant and his officer walking the ranks, stopping at each boy, grilling them, encouraging them, correcting them. Soon their clothes would be shucked off and replaced with khaki. Soon, instead of carrying the pathetic parcels their mothers had pressed on them the day before, they would be shouldering their long bayoneted rifles. Soon you wouldn't be able to tell them apart.