EF06 - The State Counsellor (4 page)

'What?' asked Fandorin, looking him straight in the eye. 'Is there some other possible explanation that I have overlooked? Tell me, Stanislav Filippovich, tell me. We are speaking frankly here.'

'Well, there are also the secret agents, whom we refer to in our department as "collaborators" - that is, the members of revolutionary groups who collaborate with the police.'

'Agents provocateurs?' the State Counsellor enquired with a frown.

'No, not necessarily provocateurs. Sometimes simply informants. Our work would be quite impossible without them.'

'How could your spies know the detailed arrangements for the reception of a secret visitor, right down to the description of my appearance?' asked Erast Petrovich, knitting the black arrowheads of his eyebrows in a frown. 'I can't see why they should.'

The Colonel was clearly in some difficulty. He blushed slightly, twisted one side of his moustache into an even tighter curl and lowered his voice confidentially.

'There are different kinds of agents. And the way the authorised officers handle them varies too. Sometimes it's a matter of entirely private ... mmm... I would even say, intimate, contact. Well, you understand.'

'No,' said Fandorin with a shudder, looking at the other man in some fright. 'I do not understand and I do not wish to. Do you mean to tell me that for the good of the cause employees of the Office of Gendarmes and the Department of Security enter into sodomitical relations with their agents?'

Ah, why necessarily sodomitical!' Sverchinsky exclaimed, throwing his hands up. 'The collaborators include quite a large number of women, as a general rule quite young and good-looking. And you know what a free attitude our modern revolutionary youth and their associates have towards matters of sex.'

'Yes, yes,’ said the State Counsellor in a rather embarrassed tone. 'I have heard about it. I really do not have a very clear idea of the activities of the secret police. And I have not previously had any dealings with revolutionaries - mostly murderers, swindlers and foreign spies. However, Stanislav Filippovich, you are clearly pointing me in the direction of one of the Department's officers. Who is it? Which of them, in your view, has suspicious connections?'

The Colonel maintained his expression of moral torment for about half a minute and then, as if he had come to a difficult decision, he whispered: 'Erast Petrovich, my dear fellow, to some extent, of course, this is private business, but knowing you as I do to be a highly scrupulous and broadminded individual, I feel that I have no right to conceal the facts, especially since this is a matter of exceptional importance, in the face of which all personal considerations pale into insignificance, no matter—' At this point, having lost the thread of his tangled grammar, Sverchinsky broke off and began speaking more simply. 'I am in possession of information indicating that Lieutenant Colonel Burlyaev maintains an acquaintance with a certain Diana - of course, that is her agent's alias - a very mysterious individual who collaborates with the authorities without reward, out of ideological considerations, and therefore sets her own terms. For instance, we do not know her real name or where she lives -only the address of the secret apartment that the Department rents for her. From what we know, she is a young woman, or married lady, from a very good family. She has extremely wide and extremely useful contacts among the revolutionary circles of Moscow and St Petersburg, and she renders the police truly invaluable service ...'

'Is she Burlyaev's mistress, and could he have revealed secrets to her?' the State Counsellor asked impatiendy, interrupting Sverchinksy. 'Is that what you are hinting at?'

Stanislav Filippovich unbuttoned his stiff collar and moved . closer. 'I... I am not certain that she is his mistress, but I think it possible. Very possible, in fact. And if she is, Burlyaev could easily have told her things that he shouldn't have. You understand, double agents, especially of this complexion, are not very predictable. Today they collaborate with us, tomorrow they reverse direction and..."

'Very well, I'll bear it in mind.'

Erast Petrovich began thinking about something and suddenly changed the subject: 'I assume Frol Grigorievich has telephoned and asked you to offer me every possible assistance.'

Sverchinsky pressed his hands to his chest, as if to say:
Everything that I can possibly do.

'Then I tell you what. For this investigation I shall require a smart assistant who can also act as my liaison officer. Will you lend me your Smolyaninov?'

The State Counsellor had not spent very long in the yellowish-white building, probably no more than half an hour; but when he came back out into the street, the city was unrecognisable. The wind had wearied of driving white dust through the crooked streets and the snow had settled in loose heaps on the roofs and roadways. In some magical manner, the sky, so recently completely obscured, had now cleared, and the low, grainy ceiling was gone, replaced by a joyous, soaring vault of blue, crowned, just as it should be, by a small circle of gold that glittered like a shiny new imperial. Church domes looking like New Year's tree toys had sprung up out of nowhere above the roofs of the buildings, the freshly fallen snow sparkled with all the colours of the rainbow, and Moscow had performed her favourite trick of changing from a frog into a princess so lovely that the sight of her took your very breath away.

Erast Petrovich looked around and even came to a halt, almost blinded by the bright radiance.

'How beautiful!' exclaimed Lieutenant Smolyaninov and then, suddenly ashamed of his excessive enthusiasm, felt it necessary to add: 'Really, what remarkable metamorphoses... Where are we going now, Mr State Counsellor?'

'To the Department of Security. This weather really is glorious. L-Let's walk there.'

Fandorin sent the carriage back to the Governor General's stables, and five minutes later the deputy for special assignments and his ruddy-cheeked companion were striding down Tver-skaya Street, which was already full of people strolling along, half-crazed by this sudden amnesty that nature had granted them, although the yard-keepers had barely even begun clearing the alleyways of snow.

Every now and then Erast Petrovich caught people glancing at him - sometimes in fright, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes with simple curiosity - and it was a while before he realised the reason. Ah yes, it was the fine young fellow in the blue gendarme's greatcoat, with a gun-holster and a sword, walking to one side and slightly behind him. A stranger could easily assume that the respectable-looking gentleman in the fur cloak and suede top hat was under armed escort. Two engineering students whom Fandorin did not know at all nodded as they walked towards him and gave his 'escort' a look of hatred and contempt. Erast Petrovich glanced round at the Lieutenant, but he was smiling as serenely as ever and seemed not to have noticed the young men's hostility.

'Smolyaninov, you are obviously going to spend several days with me. Don't wear your uniform; it may interfere with our work. Wear civilian clothes. And by the way, I've been wanting to ask you for a long time ... How did you come
to be in the gendarmes corps? Your father's a privy counsellor, is he not? You could have served in the g-guards.'

Lieutenant Smolyaninov took the question as an invitation to reduce the respectful distance that he had been maintaining. In a single bound he overtook the State Counsellor and walked on shoulder to shoulder with him. 'What's so good about being in the guards?' he responded readily. 'Nothing but parades and drunken revels: it's boring. But serving in the gendarmes is pure pleasure. Secret missions, tailing dangerous criminals, sometimes even gunfights. Last year an anarchist holed up in a dacha at Novogireevo, do you remember? He held us off for three whole hours, wounded two of our men. He almost winged me too; the bullet whizzed by just past my cheek. Another half-inch, and it would have left a scar.'

The final words were spoken with obvious regret for an opportunity lost.

'But are you not distressed by the... the hostile attitude taken by society towards blue uniforms, especially among your own contemporaries?' Erast Petrovich looked at his companion with keen curiosity, but Smolyaninov's expression remained as untroubled as ever.

'I take no notice of it, because I serve Russia and my conscience is clear. And the prejudice against members of the gendarmes corps will evaporate when everyone realises how much we do to protect the state and victims of violence. I'm sure you know that the emblem assigned to the corps by the Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich is a white handkerchief for wiping away the tears of the unfortunate and the suffering.'

Such simple-hearted fervour made the State Counsellor look again at the Lieutenant, who began speaking with even greater passion: 'People think our branch of service is scandalous because they know so little about it. But in actual fact, it is far from easy to become a gendarme officer. Firsdy, they only take hereditary nobles, because we are the principal defenders of the throne. Secondly, they select the most deserving and well educated of the army officers, only those who have graduated from college with at least a first-class diploma. There mustn't be a single blot on your service record, and God forbid that you should have any debts. A gendarme's hands must be clean. Do you know what difficult exams I had to take? It was terrible. I got top marks for my essay on the subject "Russia in the twentieth century", but I still had to wait almost a year for a place on the training course, and after the course I waited another four months for a vacancy. Although it's true, Papa did get me a place in the Moscow office...' Smolyaninov need not have added that, and Erast Petrovich appreciated the young man's candour.

'Well, and what future awaits Russia in the twentieth century?' Fandorin asked, glancing sideways at this defender of the throne with obvious fellow-feeling.

'A very great one! We only need to reorientate the mood of the educated section of society, redirect their energies from destruction to creation, and we must also educate the unenlightened section of society and gradually nurture its self-respect and dignity. That's the most important thing! If we don't do that, then the trials in store for Russia are truly appalling

However, Erast Petrovich never discovered exactly what trials were in store for Russia, since they had already turned on to Bolshoi Gnezdikovsky Lane, and ahead of them they could see the unremarkable, two-storey green building that housed the Moscow Department of Security, or 'Okhranka'.

Anyone unfamiliar with the tangled branches of the tree of Russian statehood would have found it hard to understand what the difference was between the Department of Security and the Provincial Office of Gendarmes. Strictly speaking, the former was supposedly responsible for the detection of political criminals and the latter for their investigation and interrogation, but since in secret police work detection and investigation are often inseparable, both agencies performed the same job - they strove to eradicate the revolutionary plague by any and every means possible, regardless of the provisions of the law. Both the gendarmes and the
okhranniks
were serious people, tried and tested many times over, privy to the deepest of secrets, although the Office of Gendarmes was subordinated to the senior command of the Special Corps of Gendarmes, and the Department of Security, or Okhranka, was subordinated to the Police Department. The confusion was further exacerbated by the fact that senior officers of the Okhranka were often officially listed as serving in the Gendarmes Corps, and the provincial offices of gendarmes often included in their staff civilian officials from the Police Department. Evidently at some time in the past someone wise and experienced, with a none-too-flattering opinion of human nature, had decided that a single eye was insufficient for observing and overseeing the restive Empire. After all, the Lord himself had decreed that man should have not one eye but two. Two eyes were more practical for spotting sedition, and they reduced the risk of a single eye developing too high an opinion of itself. Therefore, by ancient tradition the relations between the two branches of the secret police were founded on jealousy and hostility, which were not only tolerated from on high but actually encouraged.

In Moscow the eternal enmity between gendarmes and
okhranniks
was mitigated to a certain extent by unified management - both sides were subordinated to the head police-master of the city - but under this arrangement the inhabitants of the green house were at a certain advantage: since they possessed a larger network of agents, they were better informed than their blue-uniformed colleagues about the life and moods of the great city, and for the top brass, better informed meant more valuable. The relative superiority of the Okhranka was evident even in the Department's location: in the immediate vicinity of the residence of the head police-master, with only a short walk across a closed yard from one back entrance to the other, whereas from Malaya Nikitskaya Street to the police-master's home was a brisk walk of at least a quarter of an hour.

However, the prolonged absence of a supreme police commander in Moscow had disrupted the fragile equilibrium between Malaya Nikitskaya Street and Gnezdikovsky Lane, a fact of which Erast Petrovich was well aware. Therefore Sverchinsky's insinuations concerning Lieutenant Colonel Burlyaev and his subordinates had to be regarded with a certain degree of circumspection.

Fandorin pushed open the plain door and found himself in a dark entrance hall with a low, cracked ceiling. Without slowing his stride, the State Counsellor nodded to an individual in civilian clothes (who bowed respectfully in reply, without speaking) and set off up the old winding stairs to the first floor. Smolyaninov clattered after him, holding his sword still.