St Petersburg shimmered like a vast hallucination. It was three in the morning, but on this white June night the sun flared like a beacon over the deserted boulevards.
Lost in their dreams, the innocents slept. It was the hour of the prostitute and her final client, the hour when the drunk had collapsed into his nightmare, the hour when the suicide ceased his pacing. It was the hour of the thief and the hour of the investigator, the hour when tears had dried and laughter was just a memory. The hour of the predator and the hour of the victim.
Petersburg was a premeditated city. A metropolis with artificial neighbourhoods and preposterously wide boulevards that ran arrow-straight to the horizon. It was a place even a peasant could understand, its avenues designed for military parades, bisected by canals whose bridges could easily be blocked by cossacks.
Three centuries of Romanov rule had not mellowed the city’s master plan; there were the parks with their silent green foliage, cathedrals looming over statues of long-dead Tsars, garish sentinels protecting the most important circles and plazas.
An artist’s eye might linger on the barges moored against the embankments, the golden flash of the Admiralty’s spire, the leaden green light across the broad waters of the Neva, the row of red-painted government buildings interrupted by the gigantic yellow General Staff building. But no colours could enliven Russia’s purpose-built gateway to the world – a city built upon the corpses of serfs enslaved to the horrific aspirations of Peter the Great. A capital born with its cord anchored to a swamp – beautiful, on the surface.
On this garish morning two carriages were drawn through the heart of the empty city. Leading was an opulent troika pulled by white horses. Beneath its luminous black lacquer one could still detect the ornamental crest of the House of Romanov. At a discreet distance a threadbare izvolchik followed, with three members of the Okhrana secret police crammed inside. Beyond boredom, they had nothing to look forward to and no plans, for anything might happen at such an hour. They had raised the top of the cab to protect themselves from the glare and two were sleeping while their superior leaned his head against the window post and fought to stay awake.
Pyotr Ryzhkov watched the city glide by – a long blur of apartment blocks, office buildings and markets, most of them built in identical style, from identical materials to an identical height. The slow pace of the carriage gave him the illusion that he was falling – sinking into an eternal void.
Ryzhkov was the most ordinary-looking of the three. With unruly dark hair and strong brows, he looked like his father without the moustache. Eyes that were blue, but with dark pupils, as if always starved for light. He seemed a little older than his years, the hard life had done that. Here and there he had a scar; wrinkles of concern, and a slight frown that had etched itself into the mask he had worn as a face for too many years. He needed a shave and a few regular meals. He needed a vacation, some new clothes. To sleep. A new life.
Ahead of them the elegant troika slowed, turned off the embankment on to a narrow side street. Muta flicked his whip, and in a few seconds they reached the intersection in time to see the troika stopping at the entrance to an ornate office building.
‘All right. He’s decided to stop…’ Ryzhkov nudged Konstantin Hokhodiev awake. Kostya was a big man. He yawned and stretched and tried to straighten his legs in the small carriage. ‘Whose place is it this time?’ he groaned without opening his eyes.
‘I don’t know. Someone with money to spend, just looking at it,’ Ryzhkov said. Down the street a queue of expensive carriages and motorcars rested at the kerb, their drivers sleeping or standing about smoking. The windows of the mansion were open and there was a wash of sound: music, laughter, groans.
Dima Dudenko, the youngest member of their team, yawned and also tried to stretch his legs in the carriage. His feet got tangled in Ryzhkov’s and he woke with an irritated jerk, then realized where he was. ‘Good Christ, this is insane. Doesn’t Blue Shirt ever sleep?’
‘Here he comes…’ Ryzhkov muttered as the door of the troika opened and the mad monk – Grigori Efrimovich Rasputin – stepped down on to the pavement. The prostitutes were tipsy. They laughed and stumbled into the street behind him. Hokhodiev managed to blink himself awake just as Rasputin and his friends climbed the front steps. A sign hanging above the portico read Apollo Fine Papers & Binding. The front doors opened and Rasputin threw his arms wide as a blast of applause engulfed him. A clutch of men in formal dress stepped out to kiss his hand. Laughing, he was dragged inside.
They were in a fading neighbourhood, a little too far away from the canal, not close enough to the theatre, and much too close to the stench of the market on a warm day. Ryzhkov cleared his throat and spat out on to the cobbles. ‘This is…Peplovskaya Street, yeah, Muta?’ he asked the driver.
‘Peplovskaya, yes, excellency. Only a small street,’ Muta said in his thick Georgian accent. Ryzhkov had been along the little street dozens of times; still, he had never really noticed it. An uninteresting street, the kind that could only take you somewhere else.
‘Well, he’ll be in there for hours,’ Dudenko muttered. ‘Does anybody want something to eat? There’s a place down the corner, they might have something?’
‘Not me,’ Hokhodiev said, got out and walked a few paces out into the street and began to urinate.
‘Go ahead. I suppose he’s probably safe enough in there.’ Ryzhkov climbed out of the carriage to shake the stiffness out of his legs, took a moment to roll his head around on his shoulders.
Ostensibly the Okhrana were charged with watching over Rasputin to ensure that he did not come under the influence of foreign agents or