The Third Section (5 page)

‘Thank you, Your Excellency,’ she replied. Given the role Dubyelt had recommended her for, it was difficult to know whether to take what Yudin had said as a compliment.

Yudin raised his hand with an air of humility. ‘We are not in Petersburg now, Tamara Valentinovna. I think we can be a little less formal.’

He was a younger man than she had been expecting. She guessed he was in his late forties, but as she looked at him she realized he might be ten years older than that, or more. It was his hair that confused her. It was of such a deep and uniform shade of black that it was quite obviously dyed, in a way that suggested a much older man. But the tone of his skin was not that of a man with greying hair. He was clean-shaven – as the law dictated for a civilian – and had gone to the trouble of dyeing his eyebrows the same dark hue. Only his eyelashes were pale, glittering as they caught the lamplight.

He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and glanced at it. ‘Some very impressive names,’ he said. ‘And some impressive information that you’ve wheedled out of them.’

‘Men think power makes them attractive, and powerful men have secrets.’

‘And how can they demonstrate that they have secrets without whispering a few of them to you?’

‘That’s how it works,’ she said blankly, trying to avoid any possibility of him thinking she might enjoy her work.

‘Do you find it attractive?’ Yudin asked, as if making small talk. ‘Power?’

She had heard it all before. All her superiors – all of them men – had a fascination for what drove her, unable to believe that her work was to her as monotonous as theirs was to them; a necessity in order to live. Even so, she thought about his question for a
moment
. The image of her husband, Vitya, came to her mind and she felt her face redden. It would not be noticed in the darkness. ‘Not that kind of power,’ she replied.

Still he persisted. ‘You were certainly in a position to choose to sleep with these men. You must have found them in some way attractive.’

He understood nothing; nor should she have expected him to. ‘General Dubyelt led me to believe that my role here would be somewhat different,’ she said.

‘He did?’

Yudin knew it perfectly well. Tamara had seen the letter that Dubyelt had sent him, but clearly he wanted to hear how Tamara would describe her work.

‘I’m not young any more, Vasiliy Innokyentievich.’

‘You’re still very attractive.’ He said it as though he had read the information in her file.

‘He told me I’d be in charge,’ she said firmly. There had always been the possibility that the nature of her work might change by the time she got to Moscow. If it had, there was not much she could do about it, but now was her best chance to try.

‘An officer, rather than a foot soldier?’ suggested Yudin.

‘If you like. He said it was a new venture in Moscow; that a woman would be able to manage things less conspicuously.’

Yudin nodded slowly. ‘We’ve acquired a house in the north of the city. It’s an established bordello – been going since before the war.’ He stopped for a moment. ‘The Patriotic War, I mean.’ While the distinction between the current war and that of 1812 might have been necessary, Tamara couldn’t help but note the implication that the current war was in some way less than patriotic. ‘The former owner got into some legal trouble,’ continued Yudin, ‘and we took the establishment off his hands. It has a very respectable clientele.’ He picked up another list of names and handed it to her. ‘Just the sort of men you like to … rub shoulders with.’

‘So the girls there know what they’re doing?’

‘Most of them were there when we took over. They know one side of the job – how to get their man to bed – but they’re less acquainted with the other – how to get him to talk once he’s there.’

‘So I’m to teach them everything I know?’

Yudin shrugged. ‘You’re in complete control – at least on a day-to-day basis. You’ll have your own rooms there and you’ll run the place as you see fit. All I want from you is regular information.’

Information was all that interested Tamara – though not of the kind that Yudin sought to learn from sweaty generals and libidinous privy councillors. But it was too soon to mention her interest in the archives. She felt a sense of relief washing over her at the fact that Yudin’s view of her job matched Dubyelt’s, and she wasn’t going to push her luck.

‘About anything in particular?’ she asked.

‘Broadly, there are three categories. Foreigners, for a start. They may well be wary, and of course there are not many English or French around just now, but it would be useful to know which way Austria is going to jump. Among our own people there are two sorts. Some you’ve been dealing with already: soldiers and ministers who just talk too much. We need to know which of them are loose-lipped and put a stop to it.’ He paused. ‘And finally there are those who tell us things that we don’t know.’

‘Such as?’ Tamara could already guess what he was talking about.

‘It’s been almost thirty years since the Decembrists were rounded up. That’s long enough for people to start to forget. You remember ’48?’

Tamara’s eyes flashed at him. She wondered how he could know, how he could be so cruel, but then realized that the year 1848 meant to him, to most of the world, something very different from what it did to her. She nodded.

‘Half of Europe went mad with revolution,’ he continued. ‘It didn’t happen here, but it might have. That’s our biggest fear. That’s what I want you to listen out for. Even within our own government there may be revolutionary voices. Perhaps even in this department.’

‘So I report only to you?’

‘Has Leontiy Vasilievich told you otherwise?’

Tamara shrugged. Dubyelt had said nothing on the subject, but she knew well enough the internal politics of the Section to understand that it was best to keep everybody guessing.

‘Then I won’t contradict him,’ said Yudin. He pushed an envelope towards her. ‘Here are details of the place and its employees. The only other one of our people in there is Raisa Styepanovna Tokoryeva. You can speak freely to her, but she’s under your command.’

He said nothing more and Tamara took it that the interview was at an end. She stood up to leave. ‘Thank you, Vasiliy Innokyentievich,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

She was almost at the door when he spoke again. ‘Oh, and you’ll need this.’

She turned. His arm was held out across the desk, proffering a sheet of paper – a yellow sheet of paper. She took it from him, but did not need to look closely to see what it was: the yellow ticket that identified a woman formally as a prostitute. She guessed that one of the girls had not yet been issued with it; perhaps Raisa Styepanovna.

‘Who’s it for?’ she asked.

Yudin said nothing, but nodded his head towards the ticket. Tamara looked. The name on it was her own: Tamara Valentinovna Komarova. She had never needed such a thing before, despite meriting it, but this made things seem official. Yudin had been toying with her earlier. She looked questioningly at him.

‘Even senior officers have to pitch in with the troops sometimes,’ he said, ‘particularly in time of war.’

She cursed herself for thinking things might be any different, then turned and left.

DMITRY FELT ENTOMBED
. The snow surrounded him, filling his nostrils, lashing against his eyes and inveigling its way between his lips. It was as if he had been buried in it, but he had not. It was merely a flurry within a storm that would soon die down again and then he would be able to see. Somewhere out there in front of him, across the river, stood the enemy. It might be the French, or the British, or the Turks. It could even be the damned Sardinians, now that they’d chosen to join in, sucking up to the French in the hope of support in their own war. Dmitry could not see to tell. He couldn’t even see the river, but he knew it was there.

‘Major Danilov!’

Dmitry turned. A young
poruchik
was standing beside him, a dispatch clutched in his gloved hand. Dmitry could only guess how the youth had managed to find him in the blizzard. He took the paper from him and tried to read it, holding it away from him so that he could focus. The driving snow flickered between his eyes and the scrawled writing, but it was not difficult to make out. There were only two words.

Save ammunition
.

Dmitry screwed the paper into a ball and was about to throw it to the ground when he thought better of it. He slipped it into his pocket. What would the French make of it if they found orders like that?

‘Any reply, sir?’

Dmitry smiled to himself. Had he been both wittier and more reckless he might have sent a response that expressed his true
feelings
. ‘No reply,’ he said. The
poruchik
saluted and dashed away, disappearing in an instant behind sheets of falling snow.

It was the enemy’s first assault of the year, and a foolish one. The allied lines were to the south of Sevastopol, stretching inland from the coast. The city was their target, but it was well if hastily defended. Dividing it like a jagged wound was the harbour, wherein were anchored the remains of the Black Sea fleet – the whole reason that the British and French were here. The harbour was fed by the Chernaya river, continuing the natural line of defence out to the east. To cross it was the enemy’s best hope of encircling the city. But they had chosen the wrong day to attempt it.

Dmitry mounted his horse and trotted down the Russian lines. The wind had dropped, and although the snow was still falling, it was now possible to see a little further, almost to the far side of the river. The enemy weren’t making much progress. Their attack had begun with a bombardment. The intent had been to drive the Russians back from the north bank of the river, but while it had achieved that goal, it had also warned them of the impending advance. Some might question why Dmitry was even here. He was a staff officer, deemed too senior in more senses than one for service in the field; it was an assessment that sickened him, and when the attack had come he’d been among the first into action. He had the desire neither to die nor to kill – but either was better than remaining at headquarters, reading reports of both.

He didn’t bother to forward the orders he had been given. The men knew that ammunition was short as well as he did, and knew that it was down to the rotten supply lines from Moscow. Even the enemy, sailing through the Mediterranean, could get supplies quicker than the Russians. And now the English had built a railway up from the docks at Balaklava. There were no locomotives for it yet – the wagons were pulled by horses – but it meant that food, ammunition and even artillery could come all the way from the factories of England to the red-coated British infantrymen on the front line without ever travelling along anything so primitive as a road. If Tsar Nikolai had chosen to build a railway from Moscow to Sevastopol, or Simferopol or even Odessa, then the enemy wouldn’t have got a toehold on the peninsula. But the line
from
Moscow to Petersburg had more prestige – and that’s what mattered to a tsar.

On the far riverbank Dmitry could just see French sappers trying to control the segmented pontoon bridges that they hoped would allow their fellow troops to march straight across. They made easy targets, but the weather was as effective a hindrance to them as any bullet. Even as he watched, one of the ropes that they were heaving on broke loose, whipping across the pontoon and knocking a man into the river. His comrades reached down for him, but then the blizzard blew up again and Dmitry could see no more. He remembered his father’s stories of the Battle of the Berezina, when Napoleon had desperately organized the bridging of the river so that he could lead his remaining troops out of Russia. His father had not attempted to hide his admiration for the sappers then, who stood chest deep in the freezing water, constantly shoring up the construction they had built from scavenged wood. But Dmitry could not feel a similar sympathy for his enemy. They at least came here by choice, whereas the Russian soldiers – the men, if not the officers – were serfs; owned either by the tsar or by other rich nobles and obliged to do their masters’ bidding, be it to die of exhaustion toiling in the cornfield or to die from a bullet in the field of battle.

‘Boat coming!’

Dmitry could not tell which eagle-eyed spotter had made the call, but as he looked out over the river, the prow of a landing craft began to emerge from the cascading snow. Dmitry was about to shout an instruction, but the captain of the company beat him to it.

‘Muskets only!’ he shouted. ‘Fire at will!’

‘Hold fire!’ Dmitry countermanded instantly, raising his hand in the air. ‘Let them get close.’

The captain corrected his instructions without the slightest complaint, just as Dmitry would have – each of them was merely a link in the chain of command. The corrected order was passed down the line. The men on the boat began to fire, and a number of the Russian infantrymen fell. Dmitry felt a bullet whistle past close to his ear and was surprised that he did not flinch. At least half the British and almost as many of the French had
shtutser
s,
which
reloaded faster and were more accurate than muskets. In the Russian army, they were almost non-existent. Dmitry remembered the discussions about introducing them, decades before, and recalled one senior officer’s opinion that faster-loading guns would only encourage the men to use up more ammunition instead of relying on their bayonets. That point of view had won out. It was the same attitude that encouraged men to deliberately loosen the ramrod and the keeper-rings on their muskets so that they rattled during drill. It was a fine thing for five hundred guns to sound together in perfect time on the parade ground, another to see that not one of them could hit a man in the field.