The Jewel of St Petersburg (57 page)

“Nyet.”

“My father didn’t pay?” Katya asked from the bed.

“No.”

Katya shut her eyes, draped an arm across her face, and took no further part in the conversation.

“Nothing for her?” Valentina asked.

“No.”

Her fingers itched to tear his eyes out.

T
HE POOR ARE EASY TO BRIBE. JENS COULD BUY THEIR words but he didn’t expect to buy their loyalty. The night had proved futile. He cursed again and again.

Valentina.
As he stalked the smoky rooms of the city’s backstreets he kept catching a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, in her blue dress with that graceful swing of her hips and the way she tilted her head in greeting. Her dark eyes teasing him. But each time he turned around, she had vanished.
Valentina. Don’t vanish, don’t give up. Stay here. Stay. With me.

He had spoken with her father, and it had been a heated exchange. Minister Ivanov was a man who did not take kindly to being told what to do, but it was obvious he cared for his daughters and for them had suffered the humiliation of begging on his knees. But banks, wealthy friends, fellow government ministers, and even the Jewish moneylenders had all said no. Half a million roubles. It was too much when he was already in debt. But Viktor Arkin would not accept less, that was what he had demanded for his revolution. Jens sought to raise the money himself from the land he owned with Davidov, but it didn’t come close. Elizaveta Ivanova had sat rigid and silent, her face the color of ash.

It was only halfway through that terrible day that it occurred to Jens that maybe Arkin didn’t want the money after all, and that was why he had set it so high. What he wanted was to hurt the Ivanov family. To make the sisters suffer, he had plunged his revolution right into their lives. That was when Jens ceased talking to banks and started haunting the back rooms and smoky cellars where men with red pamphlets in their pockets gathered and talked of rage and destruction and a new order.

T
HERE’S A PLACE.” “Where?”

“Somewhere”—the man with the freckled face waved a hand toward the window of the gloomy bar they were in—“out on the marshland.”

Jens placed a fifty-rouble note on the table between them. “Where on the marshland?”

“I don’t know. Honest, I’ve just heard about it. A long way out.”

Jens gave an exaggerated sigh and put the note back in his pocket, but poured the man another shot of vodka. “Where?” he asked again.

“Look”—the man’s eyes were indistinct behind pale ginger lashes, his hand not quite steady on the glass—“they’d kill me if I shot my mouth off.”

Greed did strange things to people. Jens laid two fifty-rouble notes on the table.

K
ATYA’S BREATHING SETTLED INTO A RHYTHM. WAS SHE asleep? Or pretending? Valentina decided she had to risk it and slipped off the bed without disturbing her. In the dark she found her way to the door and scratched it softly with her fingernails. She paused, listened, and scratched again. She heard nothing, no footsteps, but before she could do it once more a whisper came from the other side.

“What is it?”

She put her lips to the crack of the door. “I need to talk to you.”

No sound. Maybe a sigh. She waited, bare feet curling on the boards, her heart slamming against her ribs. There was the familiar noise of the lock. She watched for movement in the soft mound that was Katya but saw none, and a strip of amber light sneaked in through the small gap at the door, making Valentina blink.

“May I come out?”

“What for?”

“Please?”

Arkin’s voice sounded different, as though he’d been drinking. She thrust her wrists out through the narrow space between door and frame and felt a leather thong tighten around them. She stepped out with her wrists bound in front of her, and he locked the door behind her.

“Now what?”

It must have been the early hours of morning, but he had obviously been sitting at the table under the kerosene lamp studying a set of maps, beside which stood a bottle of vodka and a glass. The glass was half full. She walked over and drank it. He folded the maps before she could look at them and regarded her with appraisal. She was wearing her silk evening gown, which had dried out during the day, brushed free of dirt as best she could, and her hair swung in tangled waves on her bare shoulders.

“You look”—he sought for a word—“delicate.”

It wasn’t exactly a compliment but it would do. There was a bruise on his jaw, and his eyes were heavy as though ready for sleep.
Not yet, Viktor Arkin, don’t you fall asleep yet
. She sat down at the table and refilled the glass but didn’t pick it up. Every movement was awkward with her hands tied.

“So?” he asked roughly.

“Sit down, please. I want to talk.” She smiled at him to show she meant no harm.
Use your weapons,
Davidov had said.

He took the other chair, and she pushed the glass nearer him. The room was small and mean, uncared for, and she wondered to whom it belonged. Not to him. It was far too untidy to be his. It had a low smoke-stained ceiling and timbered walls with shelves and an icon in one corner. The place smelled of rotting wood, but there were no drips into the buckets tonight.

“My father said no?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Did he offer you anything at all for us?”

“No.”

“Did you speak to him face to face?”

He looked at her with a stare that made her feel foolish. “Of course not. Written messages were passed back and forth. I was very careful.” He gave a slight snort. “No one followed me back here, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No,” she said, “I wasn’t thinking that. I don’t doubt your skill at avoiding capture. So what now? Will you release us?”

“No.”

One word. Yet so much rage in it.

“So what will happen to us?”

He reached for the glass and drank it down in one swallow. His eyes were bloodshot. “You really want to know?” he asked tiredly.

“Of course.” She licked her dry lips.

“Your father must be forced to open up his purse, so ...” He stopped. Refilled the glass. A sinew was jumping in his neck. “So one of you will be killed tomorrow to demonstrate that we mean business, and then he will pay for the other’s safety. It doesn’t matter which one of you it is.”

Something broke inside her. “I told you, my father doesn’t have money. He is in debt to the banks, so it’s no use expecting him to—”

“Shut up. No lies.”

He placed the glass of vodka in front of her and she drank it down, but neither spoke for a long time; just the wind rattling the shutters kept them aware of a world outside the close confines of their own.

“Arkin,” Valentina said, “I’m not lying. It needn’t be like this. Have you no conscience?”

He didn’t bother to respond but lit himself a cigarette. Even that task he did with precision despite the alcohol in his blood. When he rested his hand on the table she removed the cigarette from his grasp, inhaled on it, and blew out smoke in a thin line that stretched across the table to him.

“I promise you,” she said softly, “you will get no money for your Bolshevik cause from my father because he is bankrupt. You will have to kill us both, Katya and me.”

He took back the cigarette. “I have killed before.”

That shook her. “It would be pointless. What would you gain except more police attention?”

He leaned his elbows heavily on the table. “What are you suggesting?”

She didn’t let herself hesitate. “This.” She reached forward with her bound hands and took his face between them, aware of the stiffening of his jaw as she touched him. She drew him toward her and kissed his mouth. It tasted of vodka and tiredness, lips hard and tight.

He seized her wrists and jerked her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“You will receive no payment, not for my sister and not for me. So let Katya go.” She paused and angled a teasing smile at him. “I am offering you a different kind of payment ... if you will agree to release her tomorrow.”

His eyes widened, and she couldn’t tell whether it was astonishment or disgust. “You will sell yourself? Like a common street whore?”

“Yes.” She flushed.

He stared at her so long she almost lost her nerve. It wasn’t too late; she could snatch back the words, she and Katya could ... could what?

Arkin stood up suddenly, swaying on his feet. “I agree. Both of you can go.”

A tight sharp pain kicked inside her heart. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

S
HE THOUGHT SHE WOULD THINK OF JENS. BUT SHE DIDN’T, and that made her want to weep.

She thought she would imagine that they were his lips nuzzling her thighs, his hungry fingers caressing her cold skin and delving into the dense mound of dark curls between her legs. She wanted to believe it was the weight of Jens’s naked body pressing down on her, trapping her on the filthy mattress. But she didn’t. Not even for one second. She could not bring Jens into this bed of betrayal. She banished him from her head so that his eyes could not watch what her legs were doing, how they entwined with those of this hated stranger, or see how her treacherous lips kissed the bare flesh of his shoulder.

Arkin didn’t speak. He couldn’t remove her dress completely because of the bonds on her wrists, but he undid what he could, stripped off his own clothes and lay down beside her at first. Touching her. Stroking her. Cradling her breasts but never looking at her face. Once he was on her and in her with her arms looped around his neck, he closed his eyes firmly and with each thrust released a mumbled jumble of words. But they were not meant for her. It was as if he were making love to someone else.

Thirty-five

V
ALENTINA WOKE LATE. AN AX WAS CHOPPING SPLINTERS from her brain and her mouth tasted sour. Before she even opened her eyes she remembered the vodka, the full glass of it afterward.
Afterward
. The word lingered like oil on her tongue, and she longed to burn it off. A dull ache inside her reminded her of her body’s resistance, but it was nothing to the other pain. The one that clawed at her heart.