To Kill a Tsar (35 page)

‘Don’t pretend this has nothing to do with Frederick.’

‘Alexander has explained. He thinks it will be easier—’

‘For whom?’

‘For you. Someone must go with Khalturin,’ said Sophia firmly. ‘It is the decision of the executive committee.’

‘I give him up and now the party wants to punish me,’ Anna replied, her voice strained and unhappy. And this time she did not resist when Sophia picked up her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

‘You’re a true comrade, Annushka. There is no one I trust more. It will only be for a few weeks.’ And, rising from her chair, she came to stand beside Anna, an arm around her shoulders.

‘He loves me, you know.’ Anna began to cry, her tears pattering on to the rough table.

‘Shshhhh, Annushka.’

But Anna could not control herself any longer. Her small frame shaking, she leant forward to place her head on the table and wept.

I
t was an excellent disguise. He looked every inch the gauche impoverished student of the sort to be seen on the streets of the island every day. A good student, but a very poor police informer. Hadfield had spotted him lurking in the yard opposite when he left his apartment in the morning, and he was conscious of being followed to his surgery and then to the Nikolaevsky later that day. And the poor fellow was standing opposite the hospital entrance in the evening, ludicrously conspicuous beneath a street lamp, stamping his feet, slapping his sides, frozen to the marrow. His dogged persistence deserved recognition. Taking a professional card from his medical bag, Hadfield scribbled the name of a restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt on the back and tipped a hospital porter to present it to him with his compliments.

George Dobson was in the best of humours, delicately executing a conversational
pas de deux
over dinner that led them from the politics of terror to the theatre – ‘quite as senseless and brutal’ – and to a paeon of praise for ‘his lovely’ dancer, Natalya. He had arranged to meet her after the performance at the Mariinsky and was anxious not to keep her waiting, unapologetically glancing at his pocket watch every few minutes. ‘She is so upset if I’m late. Hope you don’t mind, old fellow.’

For once the correspondent’s acute powers of observation deserted him and he did not register that Hadfield was out of sorts and drinking heavily. By the time they rose from the table, he was the worse for wear for wine and Dobson was obliged
to take his arm and lead him from the restaurant. Hadfield was too befuddled to notice if his police shadow was waiting on Nevsky and quite past caring. He took a cab as far as the English Embankment, then crossed the river by a well worn path over the ice. The freezing air helped clear the claret fumes but not the thoughts of her that filled every idle minute of his day.

It was a little after eleven o’clock when he reached the pier below Line 7 and climbed unsteadily to the embankment. At the top of the steps, he slipped and almost fell back, grasping the wall, his heart racing. Bloody fool. A broken neck wouldn’t help. He took a deep breath and walked on, anxious to reach home and bring the day to a close, head bent, concentrating hard on an imaginary line. For once he did not take the precaution of walking in the middle of the street, and after a few paces he was startled by a man who stepped sharply from the darkness of a doorway into his path. Sober in an instant, his body tensed in readiness to fight. Then he recognised the slight figure of his police shadow and he laughed with relief.

‘You!’ How absurd. ‘Dobrshinsky won’t thank you for frightening me to death, my friend.’

The informer took a step closer. He had a thin face, serious, clean-shaven, with large brown eyes, his long hair swept back from his forehead. He was dressed in what may once have been a student uniform.

In the seconds it took to look him up and down Hadfield recognised he had made a foolish mistake.

‘In the name of the executive committee of The People’s Will, you are . . . you—’ The student’s voice shook uncontrollably with fear. He was fumbling in his coat pocket. A knife? A gun? Hadfield threw himself forward, driving the student to the ground, punching his face with his right hand, pinning his arm to his side with his left. The young revolutionary cried out in pain as his head struck the icy pavement. And Hadfield grabbed at his hair, swinging his head and banging it down hard again.

‘You hopeless bastard!’ he snarled through gritted teeth, enjoying the power, the excuse to punch, hurt, make the man cry out in pain. ‘You hopeless, feeble little bastard.’ And he struck him in the face again and felt his nose fracture.

‘Does she know?’ he shouted, his voice husky with rage. The student began to whimper. ‘Shut up, you coward. Does she know?’

But his words were lost as a wave of incandescent pain broke behind his eyes and washed through his body. He must have crashed sideways on to the pavement because, as the pain began to recede, he saw the student lying curled in a ball at his side. Then someone kicked him in the chest and for a second his heart skipped a beat. Voices – two, three men, working men.

‘Go on. Finish it.’

Rolling away, Hadfield tried to rise but was thrown back by a crushing blow, a fist like a hammer. One of them aimed another kick at him and in desperation he grabbed the man’s boot, trying to drag him down.

Fight. Fight. Don’t die. But one of the others kicked him in the back and he let go, gasping for air. Don’t die. Don’t. It beat in his mind through the pain. And with the strength of fear he began to rise again, clutching at someone’s legs, head bent against their fists. They want to crush me. Blow after blow, his head, his sides. They are going to murder me. I’m going to die on the pavement outside the House of Academics. The will of the people. No fear, no pain now, only the jarring of his body and a struggle for breath at the edge of consciousness. And he began to float with Anna, with her playful smile and blue, so blue eyes. But a moment later she was lost to a dazzling light. And then the light was lost to darkness.

‘Is he dead?’

‘As dead as it is possible to be, Your Honour.’

‘Let me see.’

The heavy iron door opened with a squeak and the warder stepped inside with his lamp, the circle of light creeping up the back wall of the cell. Grigory Goldenberg was hanging from the bars of the little window, his head twisted to one side, his tongue lolling thick and blue from his mouth, wispy red hair plastered across his forehead. His eyes had rolled upwards in his last moments, as if he was beseeching his god. He looked like a badly made marionette.

The party’s little puppet, Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky thought with distaste, a dangerous enthusiast with a craving for active service and an inflated sense of his importance. It had taken time, but he had been able to turn him to good effect. A list of over a hundred names, descriptions, addresses and pages and pages of evidence. Yes, the little fanatic had done him a very good turn. Drenteln had gone but Dobrshinsky stayed, and the new man in charge of the Third Section had given his investigation fresh impetus.

‘When?’ he asked, turning to the warder.

‘No more than two hours ago, Your Honour.’

‘Does anyone know why?’

‘He heard of the arrests from one of the other prisoners. He said he’d been tricked. Guilt, Your Honour. Guilt.’

Dobrshinsky took a step closer. Goldenberg’s life had been choked from him. Only great despair and a supreme act of courage could have driven him to it. A prison towel torn into strips to make a rope, dangling from the bars, his hands loose at his side, his feet only inches from the floor.

‘Cut him down and clean up the cell,’ Dobrshinsky said, turning his back on the corpse. ‘It could have waited until the morning.’

But it was not the end of the collegiate councillor’s day. Just as his carriage was drawing to a halt in front of his home,
the porter came scuttling down the steps to greet him with a note.

‘I was to deliver it as soon as you returned, Your Honour,’ he wheezed asthmatically. ‘I’ve been waiting these last two hours.’

‘Before I’ve had a chance to step from my carriage and take off my hat and coat?’

Dobrshinsky pulled off his gloves and, with a hand that seemed to tremble a little, he took the letter and broke the seal. He read it, then sat back in the carriage for a moment, his eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said at last, and he took a few kopeks from his pocket and dropped them into the porter’s hand: ‘For your trouble.’

Major Vladimir Barclay was waiting for him in the office of the assistant superintendent of the Nikolaevsky, dozing at the stove, an empty glass of tea balanced precariously on the arm of his chair. Dobrshinsky took the precaution of removing it before he shook him gently by the shoulder.

‘Anton Frankzevich, Your Honour,’ he said, rising blearily to his feet.

‘Where is our doctor?’

‘His Excellency General Glen was here, and the first secretary from the British embassy,’ said Barclay, doing up the buttons of his jacket.

The assistant superintendent had informed him Hadfield was suffering from a severe head injury, broken ribs, bruising to the chest and back and broken fingers. The head injury was causing particular concern.

‘And where is the general?’ asked Dobrshinsky.

‘He’s gone home, spitting fire, and says he’ll be back in the morning.’ Barclay grimaced at the thought. ‘He’s going to speak to His Excellency, Count Loris-Melikov, and to His
Majesty too. He’s convinced the terrorists want to murder him and his family. He’s insisting on a police guard. He seems to blame us.’

The special investigator smiled at the aggrieved note in his voice. ‘My dear Barclay, surely you didn’t expect anything else?’

‘Some gratitude, Your Honour. They would have stuck his nephew like a pig if our fellow hadn’t stepped in to save him. I tried to tell His Excellency—’

‘Tell me.’

Agent Sudeikin of the Third Section had been following the doctor since the explosion at the palace but had lost him that night on the Nevsky Prospekt.

‘Not for the first time,’ Dobrshinsky observed dryly.

Sudeikin had noticed that a student was following the doctor too but he had not had the wit to associate him with The People’s Will.

‘And to be fair to Sudeikin, he doesn’t look the sort of fellow they would trust with this sort of task,’ said Barclay. But the student had three burly factory workers with him who were more than capable of kicking a man to death. Agent Sudeikin had come upon them as they were preparing for the
coup de grâce
, and had fired his revolver, wounding one in the arm and driving all but the student away.

‘The doctor gave the fellow such a beating he was not in a fit state to run. He’s in a cell at the Preliminary. He hasn’t said more than that he’s an agent of The People’s Will.’ Barclay chuckled: ‘Looks as if he’s been kicked by a horse.’

Dobrshinsky frowned thoughtfully, his head bent a little, staring at nothing in particular.

‘It’s puzzling,’ Barclay offered. ‘I was sure he was one of them.’

‘Yes,’ said Dobrshinsky, turning his sharp little eyes upon his colleague again. ‘He was one of them and he was one of us. He’s a lucky man.’

‘Lucky indeed – they almost finished him off.’

‘No, no, Barclay, I don’t mean that,’ the investigator replied with a sardonic smile. ‘My dear fellow, he’s lucky because who would dare to arrest him now?’

30 MARCH 1880
78 MOIKA EMBANKMENT

T
he pianoforte was in a drawing room on the floor above but the door was ajar and the deliberate melody of the prelude was ringing on the marble stairs and in the hall. Anton Dobrshinsky stood and listened with pleasure and surprise, for a highly accomplished performance of Chopin was not what he expected to hear in the count’s house.

‘The fellow from the Conservatory. My wife’s invited some guests for a musical soirée.’ Von Plehve had come to stand beside him at the foot of the stairs. ‘Do you think he’s good?’

‘He plays beautifully.’

‘I’m glad you think so. Her Highness Princess Dolgorukaya will be here, and the British ambassador and his wife.’ Von Plehve touched Dobrshinsky’s elbow and led him across the hall into his study.

Yellow evening light was pouring through the windows overlooking the Moika, shifting in the swirling smoke from the fire and softening the cold gilt edges of the room. It was expensively but unimaginatively decorated with delicate but uncomfortable furniture and dark Flemish pictures with Old Testament themes.

‘I want you to see this before my man delivers it,’ said von Plehve, picking up a letter. ‘Please,’ and he indicated with a casual wave that Dobrshinsky should take the library chair in front of his desk. The letter was marked ‘Strictly Confidential’ and carried that day’s date.

To the Chairman of the Supreme Security Commission, His Excellency, General Count Loris-Melikov

Your Excellency,

I have the honour to report that I visited this morning The Earl of Dufferin, the British Ambassador, and spoke with him for nearly an hour. In the course of our meeting, the ambassador asked his military attaché, Colonel Gonne, to join us. I inquired after the health of the English doctor, Frederick Hadfield, and was assured he was making good progress. As Your Excellency will no doubt be aware, Dr Hadfield is recuperating from his injuries at the home of his uncle, General Glen.

Turning to the matter of Hadfield’s contacts with the terrorists, in particular the woman, Romanko, Lord Dufferin wished to repeat his confidence in the doctor’s innocence. He also asked me to reassure Your Excellency that the British government was not involved in a conspiracy to undermine His Majesty or the Russian government, and would do all it could to prevent and condemn terrorist violence. The military attaché, Colonel Gonne, has spoken to the correspondent of
The Times
newspaper in the city. It is the opinion of Mr George Dobson that the doctor is nothing worse than a liberal. He described the doctor as a little naïve, and raised the possibility that he had become infatuated with the Romanko woman while he was working beside her at a clinic for the poor.