Empress Alexandra’s features were frozen, her expression was a metallic mask – as dead as an ikon, her skin nearly as pale as the white lace she wore. Only the impatience of her step betrayed her emotions. Her eyes were dark and glazed, focused on nothingness, blankly staring ahead. Immediately behind her came a Cossack bodyguard carrying the young Grand Duke Alexei, heir to the House of Romanov. A few steps behind them, the Tsar strode out, deep in conversation with the Minister of War. All sound ceased except for the Tsar’s voice softly fading as the Imperial entourage moved down the carpeted corridor between the ranks of gleaming soldiers, ranks so solemn that they could have been on parade for the dead.
Then, as abruptly as they had come, the Romanovs were gone, through the great doors and down the golden staircase, heading for their carriages at the front of the Marinsky. The tension instantly evaporated.
‘Finally.’ The officer turned on the Okhrana men, pushing them back against the wall so they would be clear of the swarm of Russia’s elite rushing towards the staircase. The corridor was suddenly full of gowns and jewels and bright uniforms. ‘What’s your name?’ the officer hissed. His face was red, angry.
‘Deputy Inspector Hokhodiev, sir.’
‘Get this one out of here. And you!’ Now the guardsman whirled on Dudenko. ‘You make sure he does it! Now go!’
‘Take us to Glasovskaya Street then,’ Dudenko called out to Muta.
‘Not all that far, eh, Dima?’ Hokhodiev said sarcastically. ‘Only a few hundred miles across the Fontanka, way down there by the gasworks, tucked in beside the race track.’
‘God,’ Dudenko sighed.
‘It’s a nice new place, though, right? A little noisy, but still a nice place, eh, Pyotr?’
‘Yes. Nice,’ Ryzhkov said underneath the rushing trees. Filippa had picked it out, the family had bought it for them. The best apartment in the best building on a second-rate street. Being from Moscow they’d known nothing about the neighbourhood.
‘You can keep this until the morning then, I suppose,’ said Hokhodiev as he shifted the salter full of cocaine back into his pocket. Ryzhkov sat up a little, unscrewed the lid and stuck his finger in for another dab of painkiller. They were manoeuvring around a park and for a few moments he tried to decipher their location by the undersides of the trees as they clattered along.
Ryzhkov succumbed to a reverie that kept pace with the rhythm of their horse’s hooves, only surfacing when he heard Hokhodiev tell Dudenko that the gendarmes’ official explanation was that the girl at the bindery had been drunk and imagined she could fly. She had jumped out of the window in a fit of hysteria.
‘But she had marks,’ Ryzhkov said. ‘Right around…’ He tried to make a little circling gesture around his neck. ‘Marks,’ he said again and closed his eyes, musing on the nature of suicide. She might have been sick. Lonely. She might have been tired, tired of the bad life. Tired of being a toy for any man with twenty roubles. There were plenty of reasons for the girl to want to die, but she hadn’t strangled herself first, he knew that.
And now officially they were saying he should forget all about it. Forget the smeared lipstick, the transparent dress. Forget.
At Glasovskaya Street they helped him up the stairs, helped him fish for his key, helped him open his great creaking door. ‘It’s almost time to wake up and go to the dentist…’ he mumbled.
‘All right, have a good night then,’ Hokhodiev said, Dudenko’s hand halfway rising in salute as he closed the door behind them.
Ryzhkov started undressing but he ended up just taking off his shoes and socks, walking out to the front room, covering himself with a dressing-gown and collapsing on the chaise. After only a few minutes he got up and moved to the writing desk. Under the blotter was the running letter he had started a week earlier. He pressed the nib of his pen into the blotter and made a series of dashes over the paper until the ink began to run, then he began to finish the letter.
…only just returned now from the theatre. Unfortunately I have come down with a severe toothache…
His pen hung paralysed at the end of the sentence. The clicking in his jaw was the only sound he could hear. He let his eyes travel up an empty frame on the top of the desk. He had removed her portrait months earlier, unable to live with Filippa’s relentless staring. What to say? What to say to a wife who was gone, gone away for good, gone away to Lisbon for how long?
Too long. For longer than necessary. Yes. Unavoidable. Gone for all the right reasons: to help her sister and her children cope while their mother recuperated. Oh, yes. She’d had to go.
It had turned out to be an extraordinarily long illness. Filippa’s mother was unexpectedly delicate. She had suffered from misdiagnosis, and quarrelled with her doctors. Filippa reported on her medical progress in letters that arrived every two weeks or so. He’d found that if he jotted something each day he ended up with enough for a return letter over the same time period.
…as regards the Tsarevich, now the rumours are confirmed and something is obviously wrong with the poor boy’s health…
She had been gone for…how long now? Nearly a year. One of the neighbours was probably keeping count of the months. Ryzhkov sat there and drew little crosshatchings on the blotter while he did the mathematics of her leaving.
The calculations got too complicated and he closed the curtain against the constant light. Of course the marriage had been a mistake. It was obvious, should have been obvious on the wedding day itself. They had ‘grown apart’ as one of their friends had said. I grow, you grow, we grow. Oh, yes, that’s understandable. To grow apart, yes.
…there is an entire schedule of celebrations, so many that they will continue through the year…
He saw now that she’d always thought of him as a sort of project. Something that with a lot of work might one day be finished to satisfaction and mounted on the shelf. But after a dozen tearful attempts to push him into a series of more acceptable, more fashionable situations, she had abandoned him to the sordid world of policemen and criminals. ‘You’re like them, you’re just like them. You admire them! You want to be like them!’ she’d screamed at him when she’d finally had enough.
Now it was her idea that all should be forgiven. No one should be blamed, no one should even get angry. It was a modern world now. A woman leaving her husband, what was new about that? They would continue on as before, only on paper.
In one of her most recent letters she had mentioned a possible return to Petersburg at Christmas, but naturally this would be prevented if her mother’s illness continued. Someone, then, would have to stay in Lisbon to manage things. If so, did he have plans to join her?
No.
So, gone for a year in March, then. And gone for a lot longer than that, to be truthful.
…with my greatest consideration and respect, I remain…
Gone.
It was a grey Bulgarian dawn and Sergei Andrianov woke from his sleep in the back of the Rolls touring car the railway had lent him. It came with a chauffeur, a quiet Italian named Mattei, who had gone inside the shed to talk with the signalman. He checked his pocket watch and there was a simultaneous hoot of an engine’s whistle. Right on time, he smiled.
He straightened in his seat, found his case and extracted a cigarillo. He had been travelling throughout Europe for nearly two weeks through