The White Russian (35 page)

July 12. Dumskaya Hotel. Present: Borodin, the American White, Ella Kovyil, Constantine Markov, Olga Legarina, Maria Popova.

Ruzsky stared at her name, struggling to take it in. Maria Popova.

Meeting called to order by Borodin. Further discussion of possible assassination of Governor of Odessa. Markov agreed to travel to Odessa, to research Governor’s movements. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target. White spoke of the need for money to carry out revolutionary tasks. Raised possibility of robbing a bank in Odessa, Sevastopol, or Simferopol in order to raise funds. All agreed on necessity of this type of action.

Ruzsky’s mind swam. He stood, transfixed. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target.

He sat and stared at the grille, his vision blurred.

There was bile in the back of his throat. A revolutionary? A murderer? He thought of the softness of her skin and the gentle sadness in her eyes. It wasn’t possible.

But who were the men she had left the station with this morning?

Had she been watching him? Is that why she had come to Yalta?

No, it had been her suggestion. She had told him she was returning before they’d discovered Markov’s body on the Lion Bridge.

Ruzsky read through the entries again. Half of him still did not believe the evidence before his own eyes.

He tapped his fingers against the pages. Why did the reports come to a halt on August 11?

Ruzsky toyed with the idea of keeping what he’d found to himself, but he decided that it could do no harm to discuss it with Godorkin. The chief of police sat at his desk, a cigarette burning in the solid silver ashtray, a blind flapping idly against the window.

Ruzsky placed the file in front of him. “Have you got the folder for the train robbery, even if it is empty?”

Godorkin was already reading. He opened the cupboard beneath him, took out an empty folder, and handed it to Ruzsky. Simferopol-Odessa train robbery, it read. August 31, 1910.

Godorkin looked up.

“The entries cease,” Ruzsky said, “roughly two weeks before the train robbery, of which they make no mention.”

“Yes.”

“I assume it takes longer than two weeks to plan a crime of that kind.”

Godorkin nodded. “I should imagine so.”

They were silent. Both men stared out of the window. There were two yachts in the bay now, and they crossed each other, their sails a startling white against the sea.

“Ella Kovyil got a job in the royal household up at Livadia,” Ruzsky said. “How did she manage that, if the department here was doing the vetting?”

Godorkin did not reply. The answer was obvious to both of them. “Someone must have called a halt to the surveillance,” Ruzsky said, forcing home the point. “After the robbery, Vasilyev makes sure the case is handled here, but goes nowhere. Eventually, the notes are removed and disposed of. If there was an investigation, that is.”

Godorkin still did not reply.

“Did you know the Popova family?” Ruzsky asked. “Wasn’t her father the governor?” He tried to keep his tone and expression neutral.

Godorkin shrugged.

“I think the girl must have been the agent. Nothing else would make sense. Her father died some years before?”

The policeman didn’t respond.

“You didn’t know him?”

“No.”

Ruzsky stood. He felt suddenly profoundly uneasy.

R uzsky strolled back down the winding alley to the promenade. He had established from Godorkin that the Tatyana Committee Convalescent Home was on the other side of the hill, overlooking the next bay, but even if Maria had gone there to see her sister, neither the prevailing atmosphere nor Ruzsky’s state of mind encouraged haste.

He needed time to think.

He stopped and leaned against the wrought iron railings. A group of small boys was throwing stones on the shingle beach below, trying to land them in a small pool of water they’d dug in the sand. Farther down, a man was selling cold drinks from a cheerful red and white stall.

Ruzsky straightened. He crossed the road and walked into the hotel lobby. He climbed the stairs to the first floor and knocked on Pavel’s door. There was no answer. He cursed under his breath. It was unlike Pavel not to have left a note. Beside him, in the corridor, a palm tree fluttered in the breeze from an open window.

Perhaps his departure from the train had upset his old friend more than he’d imagined. Ruzsky rubbed his hand hard across his face and groaned inwardly. He supposed it had been a typically selfish gesture. He walked toward the stairs again. He needed that cheery, gregarious face now.

The Moorish palace at Livadia was cut from almost translucent white stone. Ruzsky was admitted to the grounds by the security guards at the gate and told to wait in the sunshine beside the front steps. He squinted heavily, shading his eyes as he watched one gardener clipping a hedge while another scrubbed the stonework around the fountain. The garden, like so much of Yalta, was green even at this time of year, packed full of the distinctive narrow firs and tall palm trees.

The man who came to meet him was exceptionally tall and lugubrious, but without the military bearing Ruzsky had grown to expect in palace officials. He stooped slightly, as if weighed down by his long, drooping nose. He was thin almost to the point of emaciation, and superior to the point of being immediately irritating. A much lesser individual, Ruzsky judged, than Shulgin at Tsarskoe Selo. “You are the investigator?” the man said, his voice so soft that it was hard to hear.

Ruzsky nodded expectantly as he listened to the clip-clip-clip of the shears behind him.

“How can I help you?” He had not bothered to introduce himself.

“And you are?” Ruzsky asked.

“I am the chief officer of the household.”

“You have, I’m sure, already spoken to my colleague.”

The man inclined his head. “I do not believe so.”

Ruzsky frowned. “He came here yesterday, direct from the police station. A big man, with a generous beard. Investigator Miliutin. Pavel Miliutin.”

The man shook his head, his confusion genuine.

“Perhaps he spoke to someone else?” Ruzsky asked.

“That’s not possible. I was here all day. If he had called, the guards would have sent for me.”

Ruzsky was silent. He turned to face the sea and watched the gardeners at work again. He wanted to leave now, but suddenly had no idea where to go. Pavel must have been onto something. He must have followed a lead.

“How can I help you?” the man asked, and now his supercilious manner annoyed Ruzsky.

“Ella Kovyil.”

The official frowned again.

“She used to work here. Her father was a noncommissioned officer in the Preobrazhenskys. She was taken on as a nanny to the Tsarevich in the summer of 1910.”

“It may be.”

“It may be, or it was?”

Perhaps the man sensed Ruzsky’s unease. His patronizing manner melted away and his face grew more serious. “It was.”

“You were here?”

“I recall the girl, if that is what you mean.”

“Tell me about her.”

The man tilted his head a fraction and appraised his interlocutor properly for the first time. “You have come a long way, Chief Investigator. What is the nature of your inquiry?”

“Ella was found with a knife in her chest in front of the Winter Palace on New Year’s morning. Her companion was cut to bits.”

The man did not react. His expression was sober, but neutral.

“Did you know when you employed her that she was a member of a revolutionary organization?”

Now the lugubrious bureaucrat looked as if he had seen a ghost.

“She was part of a cell of the Black Terror that met regularly through the spring and summer of 1910, at different venues in Yalta.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“But it’s true.” Ruzsky was enjoying his power to shock, even if he wasn’t enjoying much else. “The question that I have is a simple one. Who was responsible for vetting her before she took up her post in the nursery here?”

The man shook his head. “She was only here a short time. I could never have-”

“Who was responsible for ensuring she had the correct security clearance to take a job working in close, daily contact with the heir to the throne? The chief of police in the town, isn’t that so?”

“She was from Yalta,” the man answered defensively. “She’d lived here all her life. We naturally assumed that if there was anything amiss, then it would have come to the attention of the chief of police. And of course, Mr. Vasilyev is now…” He trailed off, not wishing to offer a criticism.

“The information that I have just given you,” Ruzsky said, “was gleaned from Mr. Vasilyev’s files here in Yalta.”

The official stared out to sea. He pressed his finger against the skin above his lip, as if smoothing an imaginary mustache.

Ruzsky left him. He wanted to find Pavel. He wanted to find Pavel now.

On the journey down the hill, Ruzsky rested his head on the back of the horse-drawn cab and gazed up at the unblemished sky.

The path was dusty and the cab threw up a cloud behind it which was blown gently across the rocky scrubland.

He considered the possibility that Ella had once been a police agent, but could not see it. The girl of his imagination, and of her own mother’s description, was too timid for such a thing. And yet, she’d continued in her doomed love affair against the wishes of her family, and had stolen something intensely personal from the most powerful woman in Russia -or had tried to.

The cab stopped in front of the hotel and Ruzsky climbed down into the street. He paid the driver and noticed as he did so that a different man sat behind the red and white stall on the promenade. He seemed to be consciously avoiding his eye, even though the street was almost deserted.

Ruzsky put the change in his pocket. He watched the group of boys he’d seen earlier climb the steps from the beach and walk off in the direction he’d just come from.

Ruzsky patted the cabbie’s horse. The man at the stall still didn’t look at him.

He turned around and moved slowly into the lobby of the hotel.

He knew people were watching. Everyone seemed suddenly too busy. The air of indolence had been replaced by one of unnatural industry. Only the palm trees still swaying in the gentle breeze bore witness to the hotel’s normal, relaxed atmosphere.

Ruzsky approached the desk. The clerk gave him a frozen smile.

Ruzsky heard himself ask if his colleague had returned, but now, when the man shook his head, Ruzsky could see that he was lying.

The world seemed to turn more slowly. Ruzsky felt the screeching in his ears that he remembered from the day of Ilusha’s death-and the sense of everything around him disintegrating.

He watched his boots as he climbed the stone steps.

The first-floor landing was deserted, the window still open, another palm swaying in the breeze. A fan turned on the ceiling above him.

Ruzsky crossed the wooden floor toward Pavel’s room. He saw the gold number eleven on the big green door and heard his own knock, though he could barely feel the impact on his knuckles.

There was no reply.

He knocked again.

Ruzsky hammered harder. “Pavel.”

He waited.

“Pavel!” he shouted.

He reached inside his jacket for his revolver. “Pavel!” he bellowed again.

The corridor and the room within remained silent. No one had come to investigate the source of the shouting.

Ruzsky put his shoulder to the door and shoved. He stepped back and kicked it. He tried again with his shoulder and it suddenly gave.

The room was dark, thick, embroidered curtains tightly drawn.

Pavel Miliutin lay facedown on the bed, a naked arm trailing along the floor.

Ruzsky did not move. The silent breeze cooled his face. His head spun and he pushed himself forward. He opened his mouth to shout, but no sound came out.

He reached his friend and heaved him roughly over, pitching him onto the floor.

The sunlight spilled onto his face. Pavel opened his eyes. “Sandro?” His breath reeked of vodka.

Ruzsky stood up, gave him a firm kick, and then slumped down on the bed. He saw the bottle of vodka on the floor beside him. “You idiot,” he said.

Pavel heaved himself up, frowning heavily. He rubbed his eyes. “Why didn’t you answer the door?” Ruzsky asked.

“What time is it?”

“Time I got a new deputy.”

“Be my guest.” Pavel frowned again. “What happened to the door?”

“You didn’t answer when I knocked. Everyone in the lobby was behaving as if they knew something that I didn’t.”

“They’ve been like that for days.” Pavel yawned and rubbed his forehead again. “They know we’re being watched.”

Ruzsky strode forward, tore the curtain back from the window, picked up his revolver from where he had dropped it, and stepped out onto the balcony. The red and white stall on the promenade had disappeared.

The street was deserted, the light rapidly fading.

Ruzsky waited, but there was no sign of life. Even the waves seemed quieter.

He came back into the room. The last of the sunlight illuminated Pavel’s creased face.

They both heard the quick footsteps of someone running in the street and Ruzsky looked down to see a man in a dark suit-young, with long hair-sprinting with his arm stretched back behind his shoulder.

For a moment, he was paralyzed, his eyes on the black cylinder as it left the man’s hand.

Ruzsky took two quick paces and hit Pavel, knocking him to the floor as the bomb thumped against the wooden frame of the balcony door and then fell to the ground.

There was a moment’s silence.