Sashenka (19 page)

There was just the crispness of blades slicing frozen snow, and Sashenka could almost feel Sagan weighing up the price of a man’s life versus the value of an agent.

“Verezin,” he said at last.

“The concierge of the Horse Guards barracks?”

“Surprised?”

“Nothing surprises me,” Sashenka said, exultantly.

The sky was furrowed with scarlet, as if ploughed with blood. Rabbits jumped out ahead of the horses and crisscrossed one another, making jubilant leaps. What joy! Sagan gave orders to the coachman, who whipped the horses.

Sashenka sat back and closed her eyes. She had the name. Her mission was successful. The Party would be pleased. She had got what Mendel wanted—not bad, she decided, for a Smolny girl! Somehow, together, she and Sagan had delivered. They had shared the adrenaline that all operatives feel after a successful mission. She had tricked him and, for whatever reason, he had given her his nugget of gold.

A cottage appeared in the distance, probably on the edge of some estate. The temperature was falling, and the ice was stiffening again. A clump of pines looked as if they were made of tarnished silver.

“See, there!” said Sagan, taking her gloved hand in his own. “Isn’t it beautiful? Far away from the struggle in the city. I wanted to show you an exquisite little place that I love.”

“There you are,
barin
,” said the coachman, raising his eyebrows and spitting. “Just as you ordered.”

“I could live here forever,” said Sagan passionately, pulling off his
shapka
, his flaxen locks flopping over his eyes. “I might escape out here. I could be happy here, don’t you think?”

A little curl of smoke puffed out of the distant tin chimney. Sagan took her hand and slipped her glove off. Their hands, dry and warm, cleaved together, breathing each other’s skin. Then he took her left hand and slipped it inside his own glove, where her fingers rested closely against his, buried in kid leather and the softest rabbit fur. It seemed impertinent, yes, and horribly intimate, but she found it delicious too. She gasped. The tender skin of her palm seemed to become unbearably sensitive, glowing and prickling against his rough skin. She felt a flush rising up her neck and withdrew her hand from his glove abruptly.

She could feel his eyes on her, but she looked away. That, she decided, had been a step too far.

“Faster!
Bistro!
” Sagan barked at the driver. The three horses jumped forward and suddenly the driver lost control. The sleigh bounced left and right, the driver shouting, but the snow was uneven, tipping them one way, then the other and finally flipping the sleigh in a powdery tornado of whirling snow until Sashenka found herself flying through the air.

She landed in a soft drift, facedown, and was still for a moment. Sagan was close to her but not moving. Was he alive? What if he was dead? She sat up. The horses were still galloping away, the driver chasing after them and the sleigh upside down. Sagan was still, his face covered in snow.

“Petro!” she called out, crawling over to him. She touched the dimple in his chin.

Sagan sat up laughing, wiping the snow off his long narrow face.

“You gave me a shock,” she said.

“I thought we were
both
dead,” he replied, and she laughed too.

“Look at us!” she said, “we’re soaked…”

“…and cold,” he said, looking for the sleigh. “And I fear quite alone!”

She saw that his dark pupils were dilated with the excitement of the crash. She put his hat back on his head and they could not stop laughing, like children. Sitting there in the midst of the snowfields, the cottage still far away, the sleigh invisible, he moved his head to rest on her shoulder just as she did the same and they bumped heads, then looked at each other.

Without missing a beat, he kissed her on the lips. No one had ever kissed her before.

Thinking of the Party, relishing her success, and remembering that perhaps Mendel was right after all, perhaps Sagan did like her, she allowed him to press his lips on hers. His tongue opened her mouth and licked her lips, teeth, tongue. Her lips tingled and she became drowsy and dreamy. For a moment, just a moment, she closed her eyes and let her head rest against his, and her hand did what it had always wanted to do: stroke the pale hair that reminded her of cotton candy. They had shared personal confidences—the poetry, his marriage and headaches, her family—but nothing so allembracing as the Superlative Game of conspiracy. The deadly exchange of information formed the climax of a slow, voluptuous polka on the thinnest ice. Sashenka was dizzy and shaky, yet sparks of nervous excitement and a flick of sensuous heat flashed through her.

“Here we are,
barin
!” cried the sleigh driver, whose entire beard was frosted like a fungus.

He had righted his sledge and driven his troika of lathered horses in a big circle to pick them up again. “Apologies for the bump but, well, no broken bones, I see. A picture of health!” and he cackled coarsely. Sagan’s skin was warm, prickly, rough on her cheeks and chin. It burned her—and she broke away. “Whoa!” cried the driver. The sleigh came to a halt beside them with a slushy crunching that sprinkled a shower of frozen stars onto their faces.

Sagan helped her up and brushed the snow off her and then handed her back onto the sleigh. Her hands and knees were quivering. She wiped her lips with her sleeve. She was unsure of herself, unsettled.

Moments later, they arrived at the cottage. Spears of ice with fine points hung down from the eaves, and intricate blossoms of frost made opulent patterns on the windows. The nailed wooden door opened and a smiling pinkcheeked peasant girl in a sheepskin caftan came out, bearing a tray with two glasses of
gogolmogol
. The glowering sky spread its soft blanket over the snow, turning it a deep purplish blue.

Afterward, Sagan and Sashenka parted at the station.

She had a rash on her chin. She touched it with her fingertips and, remembering his lips against hers, she shivered.

29

Captain Sagan watched Sashenka’s little train pull away and gather speed, its steam billowing like the sultanspike of a gendarme’s helmet.

He showed his pass to the stationmaster, who was almost overcome with excitement as Sagan commandeered the fool’s cozy office. Warming himself by the Dutch stove and helping himself to a shot of cognac, he wrote a report to his boss, General Globachev.

Sagan’s temples were tightening, always the start of a reverberating headache. He quickly rubbed some of the medicinal powder onto his gums then sniffed two tokes. Things were not going well. He and the general were more worried about St. Petersburg than he had let onto Sashenka. But both men agreed that a crackdown and a dismissal of the Duma were necessary: it was time, he considered, for the Cossack to wield his
nagaika
whip. The coca tonic replaced his anxiety with a feeling of allconquering satisfaction that drummed in his temples.

Ever since his days in the Corps de Pages, Sagan had been one of the top students, winner of the highest prize during the two years of courses at the School for Detectives. He had learned the anthropometric tables of the Bertillon system for describing the features of those under surveillance, won the bull’seye prize in Captain Glasfedt’s practical course on firearms and mastered the “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents,”

which he had applied punctiliously to Sashenka. He had memorized the urbane orders of Colonel Zubatov, the genius of the Okhrana, who had written:
You should look on your informer as a mistress with whom you are involved in an adulterous affair
. It was indeed impossible to turn female revolutionaries into double agents without exploiting chivalry in some form, even if that meant what he called “antichivalry”—allowing silly teenagers to believe they were serious intellectuals who would never contemplate the slightest flirtation, yet alone sexual approaches. Sagan had followed Zubatov’s recommendations with one of his female double agents in the SRs and another in the Bolsheviks. Neither was a beauty but, in bed, the drama of espionage more than compensated for the often dull athletics.

Sagan always prepared himself meticulously for his meetings with Sashenka, listening to the latest tango, learning reams of that doggerel by Mayakovsky that had turned her head.

Her devotion to Bolshevism made it child’s play: the humorless ones were always the easiest to crack, he told himself. Like so many of the revolutionaries, she was a
zhyd
, a kike, one of that race of turncoats who supported either god less Marxism or the German Kaiser. He smiled at his own liberal posturing, he who believed so passionately in Tsar, Orthodoxy and Motherland, the old order.

Now, using the stationmaster’s pen and ink, he started to write his report to the General:
Your Excellency, I am most satisfied with the case of Agent 23X (‘Snowfox’) who has finally
started to prove useful. As Your Excellency knows, I have now met clandestinely with this member
of the RSWP (Russian Socialist Workers’ Party: Bolshevik faction) eleven times, counting the first
interrogation. The hours of work have paid off and will yield considerable gains later. Using our
surveillance teams of external agents, Snowfox’s movements have enabled us to arrest three nihilists of middling rank and to track the new printing press.

The price for the recruitment of this agent has been 1. philosophical—her conviction of my sympathy for her cause and her person (the rescuing of her mother from the Dark One’s apartment was
particularly successful in gaining trust); and 2. tactical—the handover of the name of the doorman
(new Party member code named Horseguards), which has cost our service nothing since we earlier
failed to recruit him as an internal agent, despite the offer of the usual financial inducements (100

rubles/ month) as per P. Stolypin’s “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents.”

At today’s meeting, the agent surrendered the name of two revolutionists, a Menshevik factionist
and a Bolshevik terrorist, who had long been sought by the Security Sections of Baku, Moscow and
Petrograd. I will organize surveillance according to General Trusevich’s “Instructions for External
Surveillance” and arrest forthwith. I request your permission to continue to handle Agent “Snowfox” in the future as I believe that her usefulness for the service depends on my management. It is
possible that her Bolshevik handlers have ordered her to hand over these names but I believe that the
threat of exposure to her own comrades will now make her submission easy to accomplish.

Our primary mission remains the arrest of Mendel Barmakid, her uncle (codename Clubfoot; alias
Comrade Baramian, Comrade Furnace, etc.) and the Bolshevik faction’s Petrograd Committee, but I
have absolute confidence that this organization is now hopelessly broken and incapable of any threat
in the short to medium term…

Poor little Sashenka, he thought smugly—yet in his heart he knew she was the brightest star in his firmament.

He did not look forward to seeing his wife or General Globachev. If he had had his way, he would have met Sashenka at the safe house every night.

Her diffidence, those teenage doubts, her awkward stance, the prim way she dressed in grey serge, dreary wool stockings and buttoned blouses with her thick hair in a virginal Bolshevik bun, the absence of any makeup or even perfume—all this had wearied him initially. But in recent weeks she had began to grow on him and now he looked forward to the smell of her fresh skin and her sumptuous hair when she was near him, the way her columbine eyes bored into him so intensely, her fingers touching her short upper lip when she talked about her mother, the way her slim body was shaping into a woman’s curves that she was determined to conceal and scorn. And nothing was so adorable as the way she suppressed her humor and joie de vivre, knitting her brows to play the dour revolutionary. He laughed at the tricks of the Almighty, for, however matronly she wanted to be, God had given her features—those lips that never closed, those scathing grey eyes, that lush bosom—that undermined her wishes at every turn and made her even more delicious.

And when he had tasted her lips, his hands had actually started to shake. Her reluctance to return his kiss made her obvious enjoyment of it even more poignant and delightful. Or did I imagine that? he asked himself. Any man of almost forty would lose judgment when faced with that skin, those lips, and the husky bumblebee voice he had come to know so well. He raised his hands and thought he could divine the scent of her skin, her neck…

Yet she was his agent. The cause, Tsar and Motherland, always came first. It was a desperate struggle for survival between good and evil and she was on the wrong side. If he had to…Well, he hoped it would never come to that. The Okhrana was special. The battle to defend the Empire was a war that had to be fought with merciless conspiracy—as his colleague General Batiushin had told him: “All honor to him who dishonors his name and ends the case with silence as his only reward.” He wet his finger and dipped it into Dr.

Gemp’s powder and applied cocaine to nose and gums. He chuckled to himself.

The door opened. A livid snout and ginger whiskers appeared, followed by a uniformed paunch and the rest of the stationmaster.

“Did you say something, Your Excellency?” he said. “Anything I can do? A note to my superiors would be a help. I’d be so grateful…”

“Why not?”

“We hope you’re destroying our enemies, German agents and
zhyd
nihilists!” The stationmaster rubbed his hands.

“Absolutely! When’s the next train to the Finland Station? I have a report to file.”

“Five minutes, Your Excellency. God Save the Tsar!”

30

The Grand Duke’s crested Benz was already parked among the carriages outside the Radziwill Palace on Fontanka when Pantameilion’s Delaunay swung into the forecourt, the chains wrapped around the wheels just gripping the ice. Samuil and Ariadna Zeitlin waited their turn while the French Embassy Renault dropped Ambassador Paleologue and his wife.