Inside was a musty collection of desks, writing lamps, battered typewriting machines, and cluttered bookshelves. There were piles of paper on every surface. In one corner was a small hand press, something you could use to whip off a few hundred radical leaflets in half an hour and then wipe clean.
‘We ought to seal this place, eh?’ said Hokhodiev, but Ryzhkov shrugged. If the editors of the collection of newspapers had managed to pass the censors, who was he to shut them down? Maybe they were paying someone off. Whatever it was he didn’t want to fool with it.
There was only one more address on their side of the Nevsky, a café, supposedly a centre of wellheeled, intellectual, hot-blooded anarchism. When they got there the owners had already closed. Ryzhkov stepped down into the street so that he could see the topmost windows. Everything appeared to be shuttered.
‘Knock anyway,’ he told Dudenko. ‘Go around the back, Konstantin,’ he said to Hokhodiev. ‘See if they left anyone up there.’ He had started to fantasize that some assassin was waiting in an upstairs room for the Tsar’s carriage, a marksman with a hunting rifle and a lot of tangled ideas about starting a Slavic version of the French Revolution. He waited while they went about their tasks. Stood there and had a cigarette and watched the street.
The Nevsky: one of the great thoroughfares of Europe. Nearly two miles long, running arrow-straight from the golden spire of the Admiralty to Moscow Station where it turned, angling south towards the domes of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.
Ryzhkov loved the street at the sudden start of spring, when the pedestrians came out to promenade; all of them drawn to the bustle, the elegance, and the energy of the great boulevard. Along the sides of the street the cobbles had been replaced by hexagonal wooden blocks in an effort to dampen the noise of the carriages. Still, on a busy day it was the sheer cacophony that defined the prospekt – the shouts, the whistles, the clattering of the horses’ hooves, the carriages flying past, the splutterings of the motorcars, the yelping blasts of their horns, the ringing of the bells on the trams. The murmur of thousands of conversations, the buzzing of the throng as they moved from shop to shop; laughing, arguing, complaining, lecturing. Shop assistants mingled with soldiers, who mingled with priests, who mingled with tea-sellers and princesses. Some walked briskly, desperately about on some pressing business, faces grim. Others simply idled along, content to be part of the great stream of humanity with no place better to go, admiring their reflections in the shop windows. An endless promenade; a blend of the ultra-rich in silks and feathers, with newly-arrived peasants clutching their hats in their grimy hands, staring up at the fantastic buildings. That was life on the Nevsky; it was the spine, the vibrant centre of modern Russia.
But this morning all that vigour was restrained, forced off the balconies, and out of the windows, everything cordoned off to allow the Tsar free passage.
‘I got in up there. Nothing,’ said Hokhodiev from behind him. Dudenko was talking to a man on the corner. They were pointing to the café. The man was smoking, trying not to show his nervousness at being grilled by one of the Okhrana. Dudenko nodded and the man smiled with relief and ran back across the street. Coming back to them, Dudenko looked happy, almost blushing, Ryzhkov thought. Like a spring bride. Young, alive, and maybe even delighted to be pushing people around who were too scared to fight back. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he reported.
Hokhodiev looked over at Ryzhkov again. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling up to all this?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Fine for now anyway.’
The upper tier of the Marinsky was more sauna than theatre; a miasma of stale perfume, cigar smoke, and sweat. After the procession, Ryzhkov and his team had been able to return to the dank dormitory that Internal kept in the basement of their headquarters building on the Fontanka. He was able to wolf down some soup, took just enough time to file a request for a St Petersburg Criminal Investigation report on the Peplovskaya Street murder, and then they were rushing across the city to the theatre.
The toothache had diminished in the late afternoon, but now he was in real pain, the throbbing in his jaw keeping pace with the tempo of Glinka’s score for A Life for the Tsar. All he could do was lean against the carved walls of the opulent blue-and-gold dress circle corridor of the Marinsky and feel the sweat trickle down his spine into his underpants.
Hokhodiev and Dudenko were pacing up and down the corridor, locked into one of their sporadic arguments. On this occasion it was over the ruthlessness of the fighting in the Balkans, the various armies like a pack of crows picking over the carcass of the Ottoman Empire and the waning hopes for peace. Dima was doing most of the talking, since he fancied himself a great critic of kings and politicians.
The bad tooth was his own fault, Ryzhkov decided. He had made more than one appointment to have it fixed, but had been scared of what his dentist would find. The molar had been cracked for years, the result of a violent confrontation with a group of metalworkers who had surprised him as they’d poured out of a clandestine meeting where they had been preparing strike plans. He had been caught right in their path, incriminated by the revolver he was loading. He hadn’t even got it closed before one of the metalworkers hit him with something hard, like a brick. He didn’t remember anything after that.
They had taken his gun, of course, and left him with a cracked jaw, swelled to the size of a coconut for nearly three weeks. Drinking through a straw. Listening to Filippa berate him a dozen times a day about his choice of occupation before she left for her uncle’s, tired of playing the role of nurse.
And so, yes, in typical Russian fashion, he deserved to carry a little bit of hell around with him. He had made mistakes, he had committed crimes. He had sinned, he had sinned repeatedly. He had never, never been good, never lived up to expectations, not really. So, then. All the pain was justified. Perhaps his father had been right all along. He should have tried to accomplish more, to have made more of himself. But he hadn’t. He’d either been too distracted or too lazy, and when he’d finally picked a vocation it had been for all the wrong reasons.
He’d ended up being the one who cleaned up the trash, swept the mess of the empire into a corner, and then saluted his betters as if nothing had ever been there. He could have been someone of worth, someone of substance. Instead he had become a kind of necessary rat, a creature devoid of status, respect, or glamour. Something vile, ruthless, and efficient.
Not just a policeman, but more than a policeman.
Pyotr Mikhalovich Ryzhkov was an Okhrana investigator, a member of the dreaded Third Branch of the Imperial Chancellery. He had advanced in his career to the point where he led a section of investigators, all of whom were supposedly elite policemen. They were charged with the task of suppressing all forms of dissent against the Tsar, the Imperial family, its property, or its policies.
Okhrana was divided into three branches. The Foreign Agency, sometimes called ‘The White Branch’, held the portfolio of international espionage. Its work was conducted by men and women whose annual budget for clothing exceeded Ryzhkov’s income by thousands of roubles. Their battles were conducted in the glittering salons of embassies spread around the globe.
Closer to home was the External Agency, responsible for the active policing of threats to the state. External rigorously monitored the activities of any organization that might have reasons to bring down the empire. They studied reports of terrorists’ comings and goings, read their letters, deciphered their codes, sifted through their rubbish, and analysed their publications. No cell was too small to avoid scrutiny. Thousands of External clerks maintained a vast system of files containing information and photographs of anyone charged with a crime; dossiers on all labour leaders, prominent members of the liberal and radical political parties, exiled or expatriate politicians, editors and journalists of magazines, books,