The Third Section (52 page)

He stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Vasya, but I have to sort this one out for myself.’

‘You always have done, Mitka. And you’ve always come to the right decision.’

‘And forget what I said earlier. I
do
ask you to do nothing with regard to Raisa. I’ll deal with the problem, one way or another. Whatever happens, she’ll be out of your way.’

He turned and headed for the stairs that would lead him up to the fresh air.

‘Mitka!’ Yudin called from behind him. Dmitry turned. ‘Always act in accordance with your conscience. No man can ask you to do any more.’

Dmitry stared at him. It was as if he understood. Perhaps he had read the letters already – that would be like him. He would lie if it were necessary, but only to do good. Dmitry paced across the room and leaned across the desk to kiss Yudin on each cheek. Then he turned and left, knowing that he might never see his old friend again.

This was the fastest Tamara had ever travelled. The freight trains went at about sixteen versts every hour; the passenger trains at forty. The imperial train was unlimited by anything but the power of the locomotive pulling it, and the impetuosity of His Majesty. A conductor had told her that they would reach speeds in excess of fifty-five, but moments later a colleague had added that that was only because Aleksandr was more in favour of a smooth ride than a speedy one. Under Nikolai, he told her, they had sometimes got up to seventy. But even at today’s speed, the journey from Petersburg to Moscow would be completed in under fifteen hours. It was a quirk of tradition that even when Pyotr the Great moved his capital from Moscow to Petersburg, it had been decided that coronations would still take place within the Kremlin. Now that the railway had come, the decision seemed modern and far-sighted.

She had only had a few hours’ stop in Petersburg. The scheduled train had got her in at the usual time of nine in the morning, and the imperial train had departed that same afternoon. There were more dignitaries on board than had ever been gathered together on a Russian train, more even than when the line was opened. The imperial ultramarine coaches – there were only two in existence – had been hooked together, but that was only sufficient for His Majesty, the tsaritsa, the tsarevich and the other children, the dowager empress and perhaps a few others. Tamara did not even know if Konstantin was included in that august group. The rest of the train, apart from the two kitchen cars, was made up of compartmentalized first-class carriages, specially cleaned and repainted for the occasion, though some of them seemed to be running without occupants.

At the very end of the train there was one coach – open rather than divided into compartments, but still first class – where the likes of Tamara had their seats. There were agents of the Third Section and the Gendarmerie, officers of the regular police and middle-ranking employees of the railway. None of them was worthy of sitting among the nobility in the other coaches, but the imperial train would not pull any carriage that was not at the very least first class.

For now, Tamara chose not to sit. She stood outside, on the iron
platform
at the back of the train, watching the track vanish into the distance. She exhaled and watched as the smoke that she had drawn in from her cigarette was caught in the wind and dragged away from her. It was dark, almost midnight, but the train would carry on through the night and arrive in Moscow in the morning, leaving the imperial family a few days to prepare themselves for the great, once-in-a-generation spectacle that was the coronation of the Tsar of All the Russias.

The locomotive whistle blew and the conductor, who had been standing a little way away, moved to apply the brake. Even an imperial train needed to stop for fuel. The station they rolled into was Okulovka. Tamara threw her cigarette down on to the track and stepped on to the station platform before they had quite stopped. There were only railway staff on it – no passengers. It wasn’t a scheduled train, and even if members of the public turned up, they wouldn’t be allowed on to the station. They were free to stand beside the track and cheer, which during the day they had, but not to get too close when the train stopped.

Tamara was not the only person to alight quickly. From every carriage at least one figure got off and looked warily up and down the platform just as she had. She was not even the only woman. Moments later, as if responding to the command of some unseen choreographer, a number of the passengers disembarked as a single mass. Tamara focused on the imperial carriages, but there was no sign of His Majesty or any of his immediate family. Okulovka was only a second-category station, and so they would not be staying long. She looked too for Konstantin, but did not see him. That did not mean he was not there. While the tsar, a typical Romanov, would have stood above the crowd, his brother could more easily get lost among it.

Everything seemed quite relaxed. She had spoken to a few of the Third Section’s men who were based in Petersburg, and their opinion was that this was more for show than out of fear of any serious threat. The importance of a leader was reflected in how well he was guarded, and so a leader of Russia required the most guards of all. In her bag she carried the Colt pistol that Yudin had given her – for quite a different purpose – but she doubted she would have call to use it.

She walked up the platform, glancing at the faces she passed, and occasionally into the train. In the rear of the two imperial coaches she thought she caught sight of His Majesty, though she really only recognized his distinctive moustache. He looked pensive; for a man only three years older than herself, it was a great weight that had been thrust on his shoulders – but one he had been born to.

Then, on the platform, at the end of the very same carriage, she saw Konstantin. He was looking back up at the train, speaking to a woman Tamara could only guess was his wife, Aleksandra Iosifovna, who was looking down the platform, straight towards Tamara. Tamara was struck by how beautiful the grand duchess was. She had a reputation for it, but Konstantin had never described her. But then he wouldn’t, not to his mistress. Tamara could almost see something of herself in the woman. Their faces were quite different, but her hair had a hint of red to it, though darker than Tamara’s. Their builds were similar too – neither of them skinny, nor by any means fat; both with a full bosom and a body and limbs that curved gracefully. She was nine years Tamara’s junior.

Aleksandra turned to face her husband and, seeing her in profile for the first time, Tamara could only be surprised at the size of her nose. It wasn’t bulbous or even unattractive, just rather long. It was the only advantage that Tamara could see she had, at least in terms of appearance, but it was enough to cause her to smirk a little. At the same moment Konstantin turned and his eyes fell on Tamara. It was bad enough that he should see her at all, but that when he looked at her it was to see her sniggering at his wife’s nose was appalling. Tamara felt her face redden and hoped he had not guessed her thoughts.

Konstantin was a model of calm. He had seen Tamara, she was certain, but he did not bat an eyelid or waver for a moment in his conversation with Aleksandra. Tamara walked past, perhaps a little closer to him than she should have, but neither he nor his wife seemed to notice. She walked all the way down to the north-western end of the platform, where the imperial waiting rooms were situated, but none of the royal family had chosen to make use of them at this stop. She looked inside the Kartsov Restaurant,
which
was reasonably full – the kitchen cars on the train served only the imperial coaches, and so by now many
chinovniki
and other attendants were feeling hungry and thirsty. She paid her ten copecks for a cup of coffee.

After about a quarter of an hour, the restaurant began to clear as passengers reboarded and the train prepared to leave. Tamara remained until almost everyone had gone, then walked down the platform towards her coach at the back. She passed the imperial carriages, and then the compartmentalized first-class carriages where, on a scheduled service, families and individuals could enjoy privacy for an extra charge. She had just passed an open window when she heard a familiar voice.

‘Excuse me, mademoiselle.’

She took a step back and looked in through the train window.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Would you, by any chance, be interested in becoming a member of a very exclusive group of people?’

She raised an eyebrow and smiled, but said nothing. The door opened and she stepped inside.

The locomotive blew its whistle and the train rolled slowly out of the station and onward towards Moscow.

It was an honour, but Titular Councillor Myshkin could see it only as a curse. He was certain that of all the people on the imperial train, he was of the lowliest rank – and that probably included the driver and the stoker. He had only been invited on board because His High Excellency, Actual Privy Councillor Laptyev, still had preparations to make for the coronation and needed a secretary to write down his thoughts.

It was Laptyev who had called it an honour, but now he had fallen asleep further up the train with a bottle of vodka in his hand and left Myshkin to write up letters to three dozen dignitaries explaining precisely what the limits of their duties would be on the day. And a moving train was not an easy place to write a letter, particularly when accompanied by the loud snoring of an Actual Privy Councillor, and the raucous shouts of others who had not yet succumbed to the drowsy numbness to which so much celebration must eventually lead.

Fortunately, Myshkin had noticed a few empty compartments and so, while the train was halted, he walked down the platform and got into one, and now he sat there alone, trying to write. The problem was the shaking of the train. If Myshkin had not been so busy with his work, he would have been interested to make notes on how the amount of vibration did not simply increase with the speed of the train. When they had been going slowly, it had been quite violent, and then they had reached a velocity at which the train itself had seemed suddenly comfortable, calm even. If only the driver could have kept them at that rate of progress. Now they had speeded up further, and the movement was worse than ever.

Suddenly there was a loud bang, and the whole carriage shook. For a moment Myshkin feared that a bomb had been laid on the track, but he soon realized that the train was continuing its swift, rocky motion. It had just been some kink or perturbation in the rails. The only thing that had been disturbed was the door that led through to the next compartment in the carriage. The noise he had heard had been its banging against the wooden partition.

He looked through, and his pen fell from his hand and on to the floor.

The scene was framed perfectly by the doorway. Its main element was a woman’s naked back. Not quite naked; her underskirts were still on, but were dragged up and bunched around her waist, held there by the hands of a man whose face was obscured by the woman’s body. Her own hands were raised and clasped behind her head, holding up a mass of curled red hair that would otherwise have hidden the beautiful – Myshkin could not deny it – curve of her back.

Her knees were up on the train seat, on either side of the man who sat there. His trousers were down around his ankles. While the rocking of the train might have been a hindrance to Myshkin’s chosen occupation for the evening, it seemed to provide a convenient metronome for these two. Each time the wheels beneath the carriage crossed the join between two lengths of rail, which would have knocked Myshkin’s pen across the page, the woman’s body crashed down on to the man’s, and even on flat sections of track they performed the same movement, maybe with a little less vigour.

Myshkin recovered his pen from the floor and put it on the table beside him. He was no stranger to the sexual act, as his wife would attest and his nine children demonstrated, but in the thirty-seven years of his life it had never occurred to him that anyone could – or should want to – perform it in so uncomfortable and precarious a position. A bed would prove far more suited to the activity, though it had to be admitted that there was no bed available in the carriage.

It suddenly seemed to Myshkin that the train was beginning to travel faster, though a glance out of the window showed the landscape outside rushing past at the same speed as before. He quickly realized that it was not the train that had increased its tempo, but the couple in the compartment opposite. Like an unruly violin section, they had broken free of the rhythm dictated by their conductor, and were racing ahead to the conclusion of their performance. The train could no longer keep up with them, and Myshkin might have been convinced that it was their intention to arrive in Moscow ahead of it.

Then the woman stopped moving. She tried to rise, but the man’s hands, still at her waist, held her down on him. She leaned forward and slightly to one side, putting her arms around his neck, and in so doing allowed her red tresses to fall down and cascade across her back. The man’s face peeked from behind her shoulder.

It was the Grand Duke Konstantin. Though his eyes were shut tight, his spectacles were still perched unmistakably on his nose. Titular Councillor Myshkin could not see the woman’s face, but he felt certain that she was not the grand duchess. She certainly didn’t behave as though she was.

Myshkin stood up and walked across the compartment to the door. He closed it quietly but firmly, and returned to writing his letters.

THERE WAS NO
chance that tamara would have been granted a place within the Cathedral of the Assumption, nor would she have wanted it. It was a beautiful, warm day in late August, perhaps one of the last good days they would get before the autumn. Inside the cathedral it would be close and stuffy, and all there was to see would be stilted and formal. From here she could see Russia – not the entire land but, it seemed to her, the entire people, or a fair sample of them. Without even turning her head she could look out on what felt like half the population of Moscow.