The Jewel of St Petersburg (54 page)

“That Stolypin is dead?”

“No.” She shook her head, her shoulder tucked hard against his. “That the revolutionaries are attacking every theater. Surely it can’t be true.”

“It’s most likely a rumor to create chaos and fear. But we can’t take any chances, so stay close.”

“Why?” She dug her heels in, so that Jens was forced to halt in the surging crowd and look down at her. “Why? What would they gain by causing such chaos?”

“Let’s just find your carriage.”

“No.” She shook his arm. “Tell me, what is it you fear?”

He looked at her intently. “I fear that someone has organized this and is doing something under the cover of this panic.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. Come, don’t stop now.”

He pulled her forward, and she pointed ahead toward the jumble of carriages blocking the road. “There. It’s Papa’s.”

Jens shouldered his way through, until they found her father and mother standing beside their carriage in the rain. The wheelchair waited empty and forlorn in front of them.

“Where’s Katya?” Valentina asked quickly.

“She’s gone.”

W
HO WOULD TAKE HER?”

Jens had to ask the question twice. Elizaveta Ivanova was holding herself rigid, her eyes unfocused and her movements jerky as her fingers touched her mouth but her lips remained silent and uncooperative. Her husband was the reverse. Streams of anger poured from him; his feet stamped the ground and he jabbed a finger at one of the group of policemen who had gathered around them. “Get out there, you fool, and find my daughter,” he shouted. “She’s been kidnapped.”

They were all back at the theater standing in the rain outside a side door. It was the one from which the Ivanovs had first emerged, carried along by the rush for the exits, with Katya safe in her wheelchair.

“Madam Ivanova,” Jens asked, “tell me again what happened.”

She didn’t look at him. Her mouth quivered but no sound emerged.

“Elizaveta!” her husband urged.

Jens placed himself directly in front of her, took both her elbows firmly in his grip, and drew her closer, so that she had to focus on him. “Was Katya hurt in the crush?”

She shook her head, blinked hard, and murmured, “Nyet. She didn’t panic. Just held tight to her chair.” She drew her fair eyebrows together, frowning at the images ransacking her brain. “She ...” The words stopped.

Jens lowered his face to hers. “What happened?”

“My husband went off to find our carriage.”

“Think, madam. Think. The minister left you and Katya here ... and then?”

“Princess Maria and her husband came out behind me.”

“You spoke to them?”

He was losing her. Her gaze grew glassy as she nodded. “She was screaming.”

“Katya was screaming?”

“No.” It was a whisper.

“Princess Maria was screaming?”

No answer. He shook her gently and saw her eyes roll.

“Yes. She’d fallen. Her cheek was ...”

“You spoke to them?”

“Yes.” She shuddered. “There was panic everywhere. When I turned back to the wheelchair, it was empty.”

“Mama.” It was the first time Valentina had spoken. Her voice was calm but sounded hollow, as if it came from far away. “Was Katya frightened? By the panic and the shouting.”

“No. No, she was excited.”

Valentina nodded. She seized Jens’s hand and started to pull him away. “Quickly. Come with me.”

“Where are you going?” her father demanded. “What about your sister?”

“Papa. I’m going to find her.”

Rain was sliding down Valentina’s cheeks, and the light of streetlamps and carriages skidded off her bone-white face, changing its shape. Her eyes were the harsh color of coal.

S
HE RODE ON HIS HORSE WITH HIM. IT WAS QUICKER BY horse than in a
drozhky
cab. The roads were crammed with traffic, lights streaked through the darkness, and the rain grew heavier, drumming on carriage hoods with impatient fingers. Tempers flared and accidents occurred, causing more confusion.

Jens’s horse, Hero, sidestepped it all neatly, with Jens guiding him up onto the sidewalks when necessary, until they were free from the blockages and could canter unhindered through the center of the city. They rode fast. Jens felt the heat from her. Could smell her wet hair. She was tucked inside his riding cape in front of him, her body like a furnace against his chest and her grip on the horse’s mane so fierce it almost tore the hairs from the animal’s neck. She sat stiff-backed and tense. They had argued fiercely.

“Jens, it’s the revolutionaries who have taken her.”

“No, Valentina, think carefully. It could be just greedy kidnappers, holding her to extort money from your father.”
Dear God, don’t let it be the revolutionaries
. Their knives would slit an upper-class throat, male or female, as readily as they would slice open a chicken.

“No,” she’d insisted. “No. It’s them, I know it’s them. They torment my family and won’t be satisfied until we are dead.”

The air between them stretched thin, damp against their faces. He had come with her because he could not bear to let her go alone to the back alleys of Petersburg. But it was madness.

T
HE FOUNDRY WORKER AND HIS WIFE——THE ONE WHO slept with dead children—were both at home. Jens looked around as he stepped into the room. At least it was cleaner than last time. They regarded him with narrow eyes, as though they would like to stamp on him the way he stamped on cockroaches. Both had their arms folded across their chests, the table between them, and he saw two mugs of beer on its surface. Drinking a toast? Drinking to success?

“He’s dead,” Ivan announced smugly. “Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin is dead.”

“Not yet,” Jens corrected. “Wounded, I heard.”

The woman was staring at Valentina. “What’s wrong with her?”

“My sister,” Valentina said. “Where is she?”

“The one in the wheelchair?”

“Yes. She’s been kidnapped.” Her voice was without emotion. “I believe your revolutionaries have taken her captive. I want you to go to your friends and ask where she is being held.”

The couple shook their heads. Jens stepped forward and banged a fist on the table so hard that beer slopped onto it. “I will give you each six months’ pay.”

Their eyes brightened with hungry interest.

“Only if,” Jens continued, “you find out where her sister is being held.”

“Why would revolutionaries want to take her?” Ivan spat on the floor at his feet.

“To exert political pressure on her father, Minister Ivanov.”

The man flexed his shoulders like a fighting dog. “And if we refuse?”

“Then I shall be obliged to insist.”

J
ENS WAITED WITH LESS PATIENCE THAN VALENTINA. THE room with its damp walls and cracked ceiling felt small and suffocating to his restless mind. Each time the woman threw a log on the fire, smoke billowed out, settling on the furniture and in their lungs. The truth was as hazy and insubstantial as the smoke, it seemed to him.

The truth of what a person believed and the truth of what they said were two different things. There was no hard-and-fast line to draw under it because it shifted between shadows and sunlight. A changing shape. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were forever tearing strips off their so-called truth as they jostled for power, worse than jackals on a carcass, crying out for justice and equality. Kidnapping a young girl. What kind of justice was that? What kind of equality, the weak devoured by the strong?

They sat at the table, Valentina’s hand in his. The woman watched them, tightening her headscarf every now and again, as she crouched by the fire drinking her beer. For two hours they remained like that. He could see the thin shreds of tension in Valentina’s eyes, could almost see her brain turning, hear the cogs and chains whirring, and he feared for her safety. At one point she squeezed his hand and stared at him, unblinking. His watch over her was vigilant, but not vigilant enough.

When four men in ragged jackets and sodden caps barged into the room behind Ivan, bringing the chill night air with them, Jens rose to his feet. Valentina didn’t look at the men, as if she already knew what they would say. Ivan strode over to the fire for warmth.

“Well?” she asked mildly. Her eyes were on Jens.

“You,” Ivan pointed at her, “come with us. You,” he pointed at Jens, “stay here.”

“No!” Jens moved purposefully toward her, but she jumped in front of him and seized his face between her strong hands.

“I’m sorry, my love,” she whispered as her lips touched his.

That was when the floor leapt up at him and a noise like a fire-cracker exploded inside his skull. He could feel his brain fracture into a thousand glass pieces. When the pain of the blow reached him at last, it tipped him into an empty black pit.

Thirty-three

R
AIN DRIPPED INCESSANTLY. COLD RIVULETS OF IT BURST through the roof of the
izba
cottage and fell like gunshots into the zinc buckets. Viktor Arkin hardly noticed the sound. His feet paced the rotting floorboards and his mind chased a thousand answers to the questions that pounded through his head.

Were they coming?

How much did she know?

What had she seen?

Was the girl a pigeon laid out by the Okhrana to ensnare him?

Who could he trust?

It was always the same, this looking over his shoulder. It was the price he paid.

He had prepared the room. But she would not be like her sister. She would be a constant danger; he had to tread warily. He had perceived the strength behind the wide dark eyes and despite her young age he knew she would tear him limb from limb if he gave her the chance. Yes, he was prepared.

He ceased pacing and stared out of the small grubby window. Three o’clock in the morning, what did he expect? The blackness outside was impenetrable, drowning any other sounds under the relentless onslaught of wind and rain. The peasant’s cottage was flimsy, its rooms small, but it did the job well enough. Far from anywhere, it sat in the middle of a flat ocean of marshy land through which ran one single dirt road that was raised above the level of the fields to avoid flooding.

For an hour he stood at the window, ears alert for the rumble of a cart, but all the time he could not keep their mother from his mind. She slid in uninvited. The secret pale hollows of her skin, the mound of glorious curls at the base of her stomach like a vivid splash of butter. The taste of it in his mouth. And now the memory of her blue eyes would not let him rest. Wide with glazed shock. Her voice calling his name as he ran from the theater through the rain with her daughter in his arms. He had to make her hate him, so that he could be free of her.