Thirteen Years Later (29 page)

Aleksei remained calm. Valentin was speaking with complete accuracy. Tamara was a bastard – the most adorable bastard in the whole wide world. Domnikiia was, or at least had been, a whore – though Aleksei guessed that Valentin was unaware of the literal truth of his words. It was his attitude to espionage that really riled Aleksei. The man thought himself a gentleman, and thought no spy ever could be. It was an insult to so many of Aleksei’s friends.

‘Shall we go and ask Yelena Vadimovna what she thinks of my profession?’ said Aleksei, with a certain sense of pride. It was an obvious enough question for a blackmailer to ask his mark, but in reality it was a three-pronged attack in which blackmail was far from Aleksei’s intent; far, but not completely absent.

It was almost possible to see Valentin wilt step by step as each aspect washed over him. The use of Yelena’s patronymic, and with it the reminder of her father Vadim, hit him first. Vadim
Fyodorovich had practised that same underhand profession. Yelena loved her father without question. To insult Aleksei for that would be to insult her father, and that would be unwise.

The second problem for Valentin was what Aleksei knew about him. It wasn’t much, but for a man as honourable as Valentin, it was monumental. It had been a minor embezzlement, and Valentin had been unaware of it, but he had trusted flattering colleagues who had promised him the rank of Actual State Counsellor in exchange for help in what they assured him was an entirely legal set of transactions. One of them had been siphoning funds to Polish activists, and that’s how Aleksei had come across the fraud. He’d looked at the books and found that Valentin was guilty of nothing more than allowing others to use his bank account. He made sure Valentin’s name was kept out of the ensuing trial, and even found a way to let him keep half the money. When he revealed what he had done, Valentin had misread him. He’d seen it as an attempt at blackmail and had capitulated in an instant, even though at the time (back in 1818), there was nothing Aleksei had wanted from him. It was that which had precipitated Valentin’s move from government into commerce, and from Petersburg to Moscow. Aleksei had stored the incident away, until Domnikiia had fallen pregnant, and then called in the marker. Valentin saw it as coercion, Aleksei as one good deed being repaid with another. It made no practical difference to the outcome.

Of course, it had not been Valentin Valentinovich’s decision alone that they should take in Domnikiia and, when she entered the world, Tamara. Yelena Vadimovna had also to be persuaded. On the one hand she would do almost anything for Aleksei, who had been her father’s most trusted comrade but, as was the nature of women, she had become somewhat close to Marfa in Petersburg, even though they only knew one another through Aleksei. Thus to support one friend in his hour of need would be to betray another. In the end, Aleksei liked to think that it was Yelena’s love for her father that had won the day, but there were other factors. Yelena herself had had a lover when she lived in Petersburg. This
had been some while after Rodion’s birth, so there was no doubt as to his paternity, and Aleksei could easily understand why an intelligent and vibrant woman like Yelena might seek attention from a man other than Valentin Valentinovich.

But Aleksei had not used his knowledge to blackmail Yelena; he doubted she was even aware he knew. Even so, her guilt made her less willing to judge others. She was unprepared to go to Marfa and reveal Aleksei as unfaithful, not because she feared he would do the same for her, but because she feared God would.

And from that came the third reason why Valentin would do what Aleksei asked, and retreat from the very idea of discussing it with Yelena. Valentin suspected that Aleksei and his wife had at one time been lovers. Thus he both believed she would side with him now and feared that any disagreement between them would result in him being publicly branded a cuckold. It was all fantasy. There had never been any physical relationship between Yelena and Aleksei, just an intense friendship born out of their mutual love for Vadim. But for a man of Valentin’s limited imagination, such closeness could have only one explanation. A younger Aleksei would have despised him for ever allowing his wife’s lover into the house, but as he had grown to know him, Aleksei had seen something more and more noble in every one of Valentin’s actions. It was a desire to do the right thing which Aleksei knew he could never achieve and so did not even attempt. Nor did he attempt to avoid exploiting Valentin’s fears when it served his purpose.

It took only moments for all these concepts, or at least his perceptions of them, to mollify Valentin’s position. ‘I’m sorry, Aleksei,’ he said quietly, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t help you. As I say, I don’t speak English.’

‘Do you have a dictionary?’

‘I’m sure I could find you a copy of Johnson somewhere in the city, or even Webster, but I don’t see how that would help you.’

‘I meant a bilingual dictionary,’ said Aleksei.

‘Between English and Russian?’ There was greater passion in Valentin’s voice at this ridiculous suggestion than there had been
in any other part of their conversation. ‘I don’t think anyone’s attempted such a thing.’ He paused for a moment in thought, tapping his lips with his pen. ‘Wait a minute though . . .’ He turned to the bookshelf behind him and brought down a sheaf of papers, clearly not a published work but some notes of his own. ‘Yes. Louis Chambaud produced a lexicon of English and French in 1805. That would do you.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Aleksei. ‘Do you have a copy?’

‘No, no, no. But I know a man who does.’

‘Excellent. Tell me his name and I’ll go see him.’

Valentin looked at him coldly. ‘I think not. There’s no need for you even to know the name of the gentleman. I shall ask him for it when I next see him.’ He sat down at the desk and resumed his work. Aleksei remained seated. Valentin pretended to ignore him and, much as Aleksei enjoyed the tension that his presence created, he was eager to make use of the dictionary.

‘It is rather urgent,’ he said unassumingly.

Valentin stood up swiftly and flung his pen down on his desk, or at least began to fling it, but he regained his self-control and by the time the object made contact with the desktop, its movement could be described as no more than a gentle placement.

‘Very well, I’ll go and see if I can borrow it,’ huffed Valentin. ‘Wait here.’

The wait was less than half an hour. That would have been time for Valentin to make it some way across the city and back, but Aleksei knew he would not have been able to make a brief call. He would have spent at least ten minutes in polite conversation before putting so direct a question. That put the library from where the dictionary had come very close. Aleksei could easily formulate a list of five likely candidates, with five more who were reasonable possibilities.

In the end, such calculations were unnecessary. A glance inside the front cover as soon as he had returned to the privacy of his rooms revealed an ornate
Ex Libris
, bearing the name of
a celebrated prince and government minister whose library (so the best inside information that Aleksei could obtain had it) was more notable for its erotica than for its lexicography.

With so simple an identification of the book’s owner in mind, Aleksei turned to the mysterious volume Kyesha had given him the previous night. Had he missed something so utterly obvious? He opened it and looked at the inside. There it was – no decorative bookplate, but the simple, functional name of the author:

Richard L. Cain F.R.S.

It certainly sounded like an English name. The ‘F.R.S.’, Aleksei presumed, did not signify further initials, but some kind of qualification or decoration. He had no idea of its precise nature.

He set about translating the text. Whilst the dictionary could give him the meaning of words, their formation into sentences was a more difficult issue. He learned as he went. He was immediately reminded of what he had already heard about English – the fact that it was almost totally lacking in inflection. Aleksei knew that in such languages word order took on greater significance. By following roughly the same rules as French, he generally came up with a sensible translation. Even so, the first few sentences took him over an hour. Many others had words that were not listed in the dictionary at all, presumably scientific terms which had not been deemed necessary for general conversation – or perhaps even terms coined since the dictionary had been published. Who could tell? If Richard Cain really was at the cutting edge of science, he might be inventing new words as he went along.

‘What’s that, Papa?’

He looked up. Tamara had come in. She and Domnikiia had been out most of the day. He could hear Domnikiia’s movements in the next room.

‘It’s a book,’ he said, hoisting his daughter up on to his knee.

‘Can I read it?’

‘You can try.’ She was a keen reader already, in French more so
than in Russian, though she spoke Russian better. She looked at the book lying open on the desk in front of Aleksei for some time and then frowned.

‘It’s silly,’ she said confidently.

‘It’s English,’ said Aleksei.

She gave a look of concentration and then spoke. ‘The king of England is King George IV.’

‘Very good.’

‘The king of France is King Charles X.’

‘Excellent,’ he smiled. ‘Any more?’

‘America does not have a king. It is a republic.’ It seemed her long-dead Uncle Maks was having an influence on her. ‘A republic is an affront against God,’ Tamara added. That sounded less like Maks – or perhaps not; Maks was quite fond of affronting God.

‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

‘Uncle Valentin.’

‘And do you believe everything Uncle Valentin tells you?’

Before she could answer, Domnikiia shouted from the other room. ‘Toma!’ The little girl ran out, leaving Aleksei with a sudden understanding of the Latin phrase on the front of the book.
Nullius in Verba.
On the words of no one. Take nobody’s word for it. Certainly not Uncle Valentin’s, nor that of any adult. The phrase should be written above the gates of every school in the country.

‘Let your father work,’ said Domnikiia from outside. A moment later, Aleksei felt her arms around his neck and her chin on his shoulder.

‘So this is what it was all for?’ she asked. He had told her about the book that morning.

‘Seems so. A step along the way, at least.’

‘Why couldn’t he have just given it to you the first time you met?’

‘Or just delivered it to my house in Petersburg,’ suggested Aleksei. ‘Perhaps he’s in league with someone who wants to bring me to Moscow and keep me here. Now who could that be?’

He felt a tight little punch to his shoulderblade. ‘Can you decipher it?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t yet. If only Toma would stop pestering me.’

‘But she’s . . . Oh, I see.’ She kissed him on the cheek and he felt her arms uncoil from around him. He heard the door close.

In truth he had made some headway, but he had found nothing that could explain why Kyesha should have wanted him to read the document. It was, as he had suspected, some sort of scientific journal, listing a series of ongoing experiments, many of which were related, to use a term repeated frequently in the text, to ‘biology’. It was not a word listed in the dictionary, but Aleksei knew enough Greek to guess its meaning. Many of the experiments were conducted on animals, of a species that was not made clear. Individuals were referred to simply by a number. The image that formed in Aleksei’s mind was of rats, but there was nothing concrete to suggest that. Other experiments were of a more chemical nature, many referring to a substance called
lapis lunaris
, which Aleksei this time had to resort to Latin to translate, unenlighteningly, as ‘moonstone’.

It was clear that this was simply the latest volume in an ongoing work. The text began abruptly on 9 December the previous year, with a reference to work from the day before. It would be a slow process to translate page by page, though ultimately necessary, but for now it seemed there was a better chance of gaining some clue as to what was really going on by flicking through the book and diving in at random. In doing so, Aleksei stumbled on one further fact. One entry referred to the day of the week. The section was pondering, as well as Aleksei could make out, whether any of the animals changed their behaviour on a weekly cycle. Seemingly they did not, but the text made the comment ‘today being Sunday’ and therefore placed that entry’s date, 8 March 1825, as a Sunday.

Aleksei searched his desk and found an almanac. 8 March was the feast day of Saint Theophylaktos, but more importantly, it was indeed a Sunday. That meant that the book’s author was
definitely using the Old Style calendar, and probably working in Russia, or at least in the east of Europe.

Aleksei raised his head and rubbed his face with his hands, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead. It was dark outside. He glanced at the clock. It was half past eight. He’d been sitting there for hours, and he was in danger of missing his appointment – if indeed he had one.

As he passed Tamara’s room, he glanced inside. She was in bed. Her mother was singing gently to her. Aleksei could not make out the words. He paused to watch and to listen. It was another twenty minutes before he left the house.

Aleksei had run across the city. As he went, he questioned what he was doing. Kyesha had killed a man the previous night, and had to be well aware that Aleksei had planned the action against him. And yet Aleksei felt no fear. Kyesha had made no move to attack him all week. His ultimate goal had been to deliver the book, and now that was achieved, it seemed even more pointless to do anything to harm Aleksei until he had actually managed to read it.