Midnight in St. Petersburg (26 page)

Gorgeous, unashamed excess: it was why he loved Russia.

Felix Youssoupoff lived on the second floor; his mother on the first. But it had been his father's floor, the ground floor, which Horace had been shown. The apartments were ugly, but crammed with valuable curios: old masters, miniatures, porcelains, snuff boxes. In one showcase alone Horace had examined a Buddha cut from ruby matrix, a Venus carved from a huge sapphire and a bronze Negro holding a basket filled with precious stones.

One of the cigarette boxes making up Horace's commission from Felix was a present for his father. Horace thought, turning over the Venus, that he'd have his work cut out to impress a man who lived with this. He'd better make it good.

Next to the father's study was a Moorish room. When they'd gone in, Horace had seen mosaics, a fountain, marble columns, divans voluptuously draped in Persian fabrics.

‘Copied from the Alhambra,' Felix said languidly. He watched Horace shiver. ‘Though with rather different weather conditions,' he added drily. ‘When I was a boy I was very taken with this room. The perfect place to play sultan, don't you agree? I only stopped after the day my father caught me, wearing all my mother's jewels, lying on the divan, with one of our Arabs at my feet, raising a dagger as if to stab him…' He shook his head. ‘Oh, how angry he was. Wouldn't let me back in for years.'

It wasn't Felix's father who'd collected these treasures, as it turned out. It was his grandfather, the late Prince Nikolai. Felix's father was a simple army man who liked shooting and drinking. Horace had been relieved. It wouldn't be so difficult to impress a man of that kind with the quality of his dreaming-spire scene.

It had been Felix's grandfather who'd bought the violins stored in a third room in the suite, too. ‘They're sleeping in deep peace, as no one ever practises or plays there,' Felix had cheerfully remarked. ‘Would you like to see them?'

Horace had declined – he wouldn't have understood what he was looking at – but not without wondering whether, one day, if he continued to be on such familiar terms with Felix, he might bring Leman, or even Inna, to see them.

Felix hadn't been offended. ‘A pity,' he'd said lightly. ‘My mother took it for granted that I'd inherited my grandfather's talent. She insisted on my taking violin lessons with a professor of the Academy of Music. Even the Stradivarius was brought out to encourage me, but all in vain. My career as a violinist soon came to an end. The instruments are quite forgotten, now.'

He'd laughed, and Horace had laughed with him. People were always saying young Youssoupoff was a spoiled playboy, too busy with dubious pleasures to settle down. But Horace couldn't help enjoying him. And now they'd also started saying, about town, that he was going to get married. Marriage would change everything for Felix, Horace thought optimistically. It would give him that centre of gravity so lacking at present.

Yes, Wera would be pleased if she could see him today, Horace thought, with the box in his pocket, and, inside, the ring. With Wera, he'd never got that far. Just dithered, and put off the moment of decision – should they study first, should they live in London, should they…? Until, suddenly, it was too late.

He'd learned his lesson. He had the ring. Was this the moment?

His heart beat faster. But then he hesitated, as he always did. As if he lacked Inna's energy, and the will to act that had made her cut a new lifeline through her flesh. As if he didn't know the road home.

Stop dithering, he chided himself.

The doors opened and half a dozen people came in. Men. He could hear more footsteps on the stairs behind. The after-theatre crowd; too late, then. He looked down. His heart was still racing.

He was ashamed to think it might be from relief.

‘But … that's the police!'

Horace heard the panic in Inna's hissed whisper. ‘Surely not,' he said, calmly, before looking up and realizing she was right.

The men were in uniform, and they were shutting the club doors behind Inna.

*   *   *

The policemen took the passports of Inna, Horace and the other half-dozen early birds. Then the Stray Dog clients were shepherded upstairs to wait in the courtyard for the theatre-goers who'd come any minute to swell the numbers, while the police turned up the lights in the cellar, moved tables back and arranged themselves to question the club members in due course.

Everyone who came into the courtyard – and a couple of dozen newcomers did, within minutes – had their passports taken, too.

Panicky knots of artists hung around the courtyard, whispering. Soon, everyone knew what the police were here for. Some boy who'd taken to coming here recently – one of that silly dancer girl Sudeikina's lovelorn moon-calves – had blown his brains out, far away, in his regimental barracks in Riga. The mother was claiming it was because he'd seen Sudeikina with another man, here at the club.

‘How very sad, but nothing for us to worry about,' Horace said to Inna, who'd gone absolutely quiet. He could see she was clenching her hands into white-knuckled fists at her sides. ‘A few routine questions, and they'll be off.'

Inna nodded, but she didn't relax.

What drama addicts Russians were, Horace thought as he watched the histrionics on all sides: doomily lowered heads, trembling hands.

It wasn't the first time he'd thought this. It was one of the things the Western Europeans at Fabergé's laughed about among themselves. Ask a Russian with a cold how he felt and you could be sure he'd never answer, ‘Oh, not too bad,' or ‘Can't complain.' Oh no. What you always got here was lugubrious eye-rolling, followed by a mournfully exaggerated wail of something more like, ‘I'm dying!' That was Russians for you. No balance. No restraint.

You'll never be bored here, Horace repeated to himself, not without irony. Though, if you're English, you might sometimes feel a little exasperated.

Young Osya Mandelstam was being especially melodramatic. He paced up to Inna and Horace, radiating despair. ‘We're all so selfish, so self-absorbed. We play our selfish little games with love, tormenting the innocents who don't know how to play, like that poor boy. This is
our
punishment – our richly deserved punishment.'

How he's hamming it up, Horace thought, almost laughing. It was a suicide the police were looking into, after all, not a murder. There'd be no punishment for anyone.

‘Why, they don't want
you
,' he said, trying to keep the English pull-yourself-together briskness out of his voice. ‘They'll want a quick word with Sudeikina, that's all.'

But when a policeman emerged from the cellar, with a pile of open passports in his hand, it was Inna he called for.

Horace squeezed her arm. Inna squared her shoulders and stepped forward matter-of-factly enough. He was proud of her composure.

At least, he was until he saw her look over the policeman's shoulder down the stairs. And then he saw how white her face had turned; how dread was written all over it.

He stepped forward, suddenly anxious.

But she'd started downstairs already, slow and straight-backed.

*   *   *

She'd been down these stairs before.

But this time, with the policeman giving her that hateful smile, Inna felt dizzier with every step. As if she was going back into an earlier time; as if she was sleepwalking into danger.

She was in the dark, with her nostrils full of smoke, struggling to breathe. She knew what the people reaching for her would say. Words and leers filled her head. She could almost see the other great wet red smile, the one she couldn't bear to recall; if she only turned her eyes, it would be there again, and then she'd scream, which she mustn't do, because if they remembered her they'd turn on her.
Hey, Abramovna, see this?
She could almost hear the tearing of clothes, the desperate, silent scuffling in the corner, and the glint of firelight on silver uniform buttons. The guffaws as they all closed in on that corner, while she crept backwards towards the door and the safety of the stairs.

Stairs …

She stopped at the bottom step, overwhelmed.

She said to herself, You're just remembering a nightmare. An old nightmare. You can't panic now.

She knew how important composure was. Look them in the eye; keep your chin up. Be proud.

She pulled at her collar, gulped in air, and entered.

Nothing the two men inside actually said, once they'd got started, was half as frightening as the dream-image. But the look in their eyes was the one she'd almost forgotten since she'd been here, the one she'd grown up with in Kiev. They meant trouble.

‘
Venyaminovna
, eh?'

‘
Feldman
, eh?'

‘Jewish by nationality, then?'

‘It's in my papers,' Inna said through tight lips.

‘Just want to know where we stand, don't we, when there's funny business going on,' the fatter policeman said. ‘Because you so often get Jews mixed up in funny business. So you were born, where, now … Ah, I see, Zhitomir. Down south. An incomer.'

The thinner one began picking at her passport with a cracked thumbnail; testing stitches and glue. He held it under the light. He stared suspiciously at the flowing copperplate writing and the red stamp-marks, and the dates.

‘Forged?' he asked, before eventually putting it down and shaking his head. He looked disappointed.

‘Now then.' The fatter one moved on to a new tack. ‘Were you…' he paused for emphasis, and bared his teeth, in a way that looked to her more snarl than smile, ‘…
intimate
with the deceased?'

‘
Me?
'

Inna asked, in a stupidly small voice, cursing her breathlessness. Surely they knew which woman that poor boy had been in love with; surely they knew who Sudeikina was?

At least, that was what she thought she'd been thinking.

So she had no idea, looking back, why the next thing she remembered was rushing up the stairs, sobbing, and colliding with Horace, who was coming down four steps at a time.

But she remembered him catching her, all right. She remembered him murmuring ‘there, there' and ‘calm down' and rocking her until she could breathe again.

And she remembered the two police – who now looked less like tormentors than naughty boys caught red-handed in some small misdemeanour – watching nervously from the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.

They flinched when Horace brought Inna back down, for what Russian policeman would want to be questioned by a tall, elegant person of visibly high status; someone wearing a well-brushed coat and starched collar; someone with a gleam of watch chain at his front and a flash of gold at the wrists; someone from the unbullyable classes?

And they cringed at the command in his voice when he snarled, with fury on his face, ‘What the Hell's going on?' and, ‘This is a disgrace!'

Inna leaned into Horace's side, trying to slow her tearful gulping as he berated the policemen.

‘No wonder Russia has the barbaric reputation that it does!' he barked. ‘Have you people absolutely no idea how to conduct an inquiry? I will personally ensure that your behaviour is reported to the very highest authorities and that you are punished!'

A calm part of her couldn't help admiring Horace's upright bearing and confident turn of phrase. He knew exactly what threats and tone to use to terrify these bullies who'd so terrified her. His English accent was no problem in this kind of rant; it was his menacing connectedness to power that counted. Half the aristocracy spoke Russian no less imperfectly than him, with some kind of French or English twang.

It was only during his final growl of – ‘BECAUSE I KNOW MY RIGHTS!' – that he slipped on a case ending. Which exposed him, she suddenly saw, as the kind of real foreigner whom every thieving bureaucrat in Russia would love to fleece.

He stopped, looking shocked, and she felt his arm tighten protectively around her.

It was the first time Inna had seen Horace at a loss.

I should be really frightened, now, she told herself. But what she actually felt, stealing a glance sideways and seeing that unexpected vulnerability on his face, was something quite different. A soft, magical tenderness was stealing gently through her, like warmth; and, close behind it, a dizzying first inkling of the possibility that the answer to all the questions she'd been asking, all these months, might have been here, right under her nose all along.

Trying to lend him strength, she leaned closer into his side.

The fat policeman was staring meekly at his toes, still overawed, but the one with a face as long and bony as a sturgeon's snout raised his nose.

Sniffing weakness.

‘What's it got to do with you, anyway, Mr Englishman?' he said after a long moment's silence. ‘What do you even know about the troubles we Russians have with our Jews and revolutionaries?'

His tone was pugnacious. Hearing it, his colleague raised a hopeful head.

‘This has nothing to do with Jews and revolutionaries, for God's sake!' Horace snapped, but if Inna could sense he was rattled now, then so, surely, could the policemen. ‘You're investigating a suicide in Riga, and you're in an artists' club in St. Petersburg. There are no revolutionaries here.'

Inna held her breath.

‘Ah, but that's never quite true, is it?' the thin policeman said. ‘Whenever there's trouble, it always comes down to just two things, as we all know. Jews and revolutionaries.'

Horace's eyes opened wide at this idiocy.

Don't give up! Inna implored him, in her head. Taking hold of his hand at her waist, she squeezed it encouragingly.

For a moment, he looked down at her. His gaze expressed no clear, single emotion. But his hand squeezed hers back, very hard.