To Kill A Tsar Part 28

'Are you quite well, Doctor?' Dobrshinsky did not attempt to disguise his irritation. Hadfield stared intently at him for a few seconds more, lifting his fingers to his lips as if wrestling with a particularly vexing problem. Then he turned abruptly to Dobson: 'George, you must excuse us. There is something I have to discuss with the collegiate councillor in confidence.'

The correspondent was quite taken aback, but after a moment's hesitation he nodded and took a few steps towards the door. The courtroom was empty but for the clerks gliding across the polished floor, tidying testimony and evidence from the tables.

'Well, Doctor?' Dobrshinsky asked when they were out of earshot. 'How can I help you?'

'Collegiate Councillor, it is a question of what I can do for you.'

'Oh?' Dobrshinsky raised his eyebrows quizzically. 'Do you have information that might be of use to our investigation?'

'No, no,' Hadfield said with a brusque shake of the head. 'In a professional capacity as a doctor. You see, I have some experience of treating men with your problem insomnia, stomach pain, a certain weakness of the body, loss of breath it is a most pernicious habit.'

Dobrshinsky's face tightened in an angry frown, the colour rising for once to his sallow cheeks. After a few cold seconds, he said: 'I can't imagine what you're referring to, Doctor.' He leant a little closer and Hadfield could smell the sickly sweetness of his breath and feel it against his cheek. 'Are you trying to blackmail me?'

'To treat you.'

There was an intensely hostile gleam in the special investigator's eye. 'Be careful, Doctor. The days are shorter. You may not be fortunate enough to escape a second time.' He brushed past Hadfield and ignoring Dobson stalked out of the courtroom.

Society had twittered with the story of the handsome young English doctor beaten to within an inch of his life by terrorists. So fearless, so determined to bring His Majesty's enemies to justice, an innocent victim who had treated the wounded after the explosion at the palace. General Glen had given a party to celebrate his recovery, anointing him beneath the martial portrait of his great-grandfather, reading a message of sympathy and grat.i.tude from the emperor. His aunt had tried to persuade him to move from the island to a larger apartment 'You can afford it. Everyone wants to claim you as their physician.' And yes, he had found himself in the enviable position of having to turn patients away. But he refused to consider a change of address. If anything, he spent more evenings at home, and he had invested a little money in pictures and some furniture to stamp something of himself on the apartment. There were still society engagements on the embankment and at the emba.s.sy, evenings with Dobson and at the houses of rich patients, but more often than not he preferred his own company.

It was late one evening and he was sitting in his shirt sleeves before the fire with a book as usual when there was a knock at the door. The dvornik always thumped with the fleshy part of his fist and this was a lighter hand. To be sure, he picked up the small revolver his uncle had given him after the attack and held it to his side.

'Who is it?'

'An old friend from Zurich,' came the m.u.f.fled reply.

'Come in then, old friend.' He opened the door and kissed Vera Figner warmly on both cheeks.

'Who else were you expecting?' she asked, pointedly looking down at the gun.

'I thought you would know.'

Vera frowned and reached out to rest her small hand lightly on his sleeve: 'What are you talking about, Frederick?'

They were still standing in his hall, Vera in her hat and dark grey cloak. 'I'm sorry. Come and sit beside the fire,' he said, and he led her into the drawing room and helped her from her things.

'Did Sergei the dvornik see you? It's not safe for you here.'

But Vera had been watching the house for some time and had waited until Sergei had stumbled off in the direction of the tavern on Bolshoy Prospekt.

'You look thinner, Frederick,' she said, examining him with a clinical eye. 'How long has it been? More than a year, and so much has happened in that time.'

So she knew nothing of the attempt on his life. He was relieved. 'What has happened, Vera? We are still waiting for your revolution.'

She gave him a disdainful pitying look of the kind that only one full of perfect certainty is capable of giving. 'I don't want to argue with you, Frederick,' she said, 'especially when you've been so kind. Was it difficult to get tickets for the trial? I knew you would manage it.'

'A little. Your note was a surprise after such a long time,' he said with a wry smile.

'I want you to tell me what you saw, what you heard: Evgenia how is she?' Vera's tone was clipped and matter-of-fact, as if the fate of her sister was no more important than the day's grocery order.

Hadfield studied her for a moment then rose without speaking and stepped over to the drinks tray. 'Can I pour you something?'

She nodded.

He poured a little brandy into two gla.s.ses, placed one on the table at her side and returned to his chair with his own.

'Well?' she asked impatiently.

'Evgenia looked a little grey but defiant, of course.'

'And the others?'

For half an hour he answered her questions, describing the proceedings and the evidence in the smallest detail. And he told her of Alexander Kviatkovsky's pa.s.sionate words denouncing tsarist tyranny and his determined justification of terror as the only course open to the people. As he spoke her expression began to soften, a small affectionate smile, a twinkle of pride, and soon all the questions were of Kviatkovsky. And when he had told her all he could, she sat back in her chair with a heartfelt sigh.

'He means a lot to you?'

'Yes.'

They sat in silence for a while, Vera avoiding his gaze, turning her gla.s.s on the arm of the chair. She looked lovely in the firelight, calm, even a little severe, and his heart went out to her because he could sense her quiet pain.

'Is Anna safe?' He had to ask the question.

She looked up in surprise. 'Anna Kovalenko?'

'Didn't you know we were close?'

'No. I didn't. How peculiar.'

'How so, peculiar?'

She hesitated, searching carefully for her words. 'You're very different. Anna is so committed to our cause and you're from such different families . . .'

He smiled sardonically. 'The provincial aristocrat speaks, and I thought you were of the people now.'

Vera flushed angrily. 'She is a good comrade. You're very different, that's all I was trying to say.'

'And you have no idea if she knew of the attempt to murder me?'

Vera frowned and leant forward, her small hands clasped tightly together. 'You should explain now, Frederick. Who tried to kill you?'

'The People's Will.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' she said with a cross shake of her head. 'This is some sort of delusion.'

'Oh, Vera,' said Hadfield with a mirthless laugh. 'I've suffered from delusions, but sadly this is not one of them.' And he explained to her what had happened. 'The student was taken. He told his interrogator I was to be executed as an informer.'

Vera listened with a pensive frown, perched at the edge of her chair, her gaze bent to the floor. Suddenly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her skirt, she rose abruptly from the chair. 'I must go. Where's my coat?'

He stared at her, confused by the cold determination in her face, then he stood up slowly and took a step towards her.

'I shouldn't have come here.' Her face and neck were pink, her shoulders twitching a little with barely repressed anger: 'The party will have had its reasons.'

'No, Vera. Weren't you listening?' He was struggling to control his temper. 'Your comrades tried to murder me.'

'There is always a reason,' she said. 'You were an enemy of the people and that is enough.'

'Weren't you listening to me? Where is the woman who used to make up her own mind?' He was trembling with fury now.

'If you don't give me my coat, I'll leave without it,' she said with icy resolution. He stared at her for a few seconds she would not look him in the eye then he said, 'I must check the stairs and the street first.'

They did not speak again until he had shown her safely from the house. But at the bottom of the street, close to where he had been set upon, she turned to him with a softer expression and, after a little hesitation, she said: 'I don't think she would have known, Frederick. Really, I don't think Anna would have known.'

35.

They were the wrong couple to run the cheese shop. Bogdanovich looked the part all right, with his broad face and spade-shaped beard, the colour of a burnished samovar, but he knew nothing of commerce. The executive committee had chosen Yakimova for the role of shopkeeper's wife because of her 'democratic' manner. She had the face of a badly nourished factory girl and an accent that marked her as someone from the Vyatka province. But 'Bashka' as she was known to all knew even less about running a business.

It had been open a week when Anna Kovalenko visited it for the first time, and they had already begun work on the tunnel. The Malaya Sadovaya was a busy little thoroughfare with civil servants pa.s.sing to the justice building at the end of the street, shoppers and crowded taverns. The men working on the tunnel began long after closing and they left before dawn to avoid arousing the suspicion of the neighbouring tradespeople. But Anna went during business hours, her basket of tools covered by a neat little cloth. The shop was empty but for Bashka, who was arranging her cheeses on the counter.

'And how is your husband, Madame Kobozev?' Anna asked, placing the basket on the floor and sliding it beneath the counter with her foot.

'Not as attentive as I would like,' said Bashka, and she burst into an infectiously earthy laugh.

'That's because he's a gentleman far too good for you.'

'And don't you think women like us have something to teach a gentleman,' said Bashka with a wink and a mischievous chuckle.

'You mean about the rights of working women?'

Bashka chuckled again: 'My rights are very important to me.'

'And your business too, I hope?'

Bashka's face crumpled in a troubled frown: 'Not so good. Spirits are low. I've told them it must spur us on.'

The party was still reeling from the news that Kviatokovsky and Presnyakov would be hanged, and the rest had been sentenced to a lifetime of labour in the east.

Bashka bent low to pick up the basket: 'Can you mind the shop? I'll be back in a minute.'

'Is that wise?' asked Anna. 'I might run off with your cheese.' She was only half in jest. It was not businesslike behaviour: 'What if a customer comes into the shop?'

'Shout. But no one will come in. The only visitors we get are the other merchants.'

She slipped through the door at the back to the cellar, where Bogdanovich was clearing earth from the new tunnel. Anna used the time to examine the shop front, checking the stock, lifting the lids of the barrels. Some of the cheese was hard and barely edible, and a merchant with so little stock would surely go out of business in weeks. If they did not run the place properly and turn in a profit, the other tradesmen would begin to talk.

'Here we are, miss,' Bashka said as she swung her broad hips through the door and up to the counter. 'Some smelly Roquefort for you. It's French.' And she handed the basket to Anna.

'And how much is your French cheese?' Anna asked.

'Whatever you want to give,' she replied with a smile.

Anna shook her head with disapproval: 'Is that what you say to all your customers? Not much of a capitalist, are you? Have you visited the other cheese merchants?'

'No, of course not,' said Bashka.

'Well, you must.' And Anna tried to explain why it was important to behave like proper bourgeois shopkeepers fretting over every kopek, but there was a distant look in Bashka's eyes.

'Vera Figner was here,' she said at last, 'pretending to sell me some Gorgonzola. She wanted to know about you and the Englishman.'

'What business is it of Vera's?' Anna snapped, her blue eyes dancing like sun on hard-packed ice. 'And what do you know of him anyway?'

Bashka hesitated, startled and a little frightened by the vehemence of her challenge: 'There was talk. Your comrades were concerned . . . no one blames you.'

'Blames me for what?'

'How were you to know he was an informer?' Bashka rocked defensively behind her counter.

'Informer? Don't be stupid, he's-' But Anna could not finish. A cold sickness gripped her. 'What has he done to him?'

'Are you all right? Look, sit here . . .' Bashka lifted the counter, dragging a stool to the front of the shop.

'What has he done?' Anna repeated.

'Who?' Bashka was standing in front of her with the stool, pink with embarra.s.sment.

'Mikhailov. What has he done?' Anna reached for her, digging her nails into Bashka's shoulder. 'What? Tell me.'

'You're hurting me.'

But Anna was possessed by fear and a determination to know the truth and she began to shake her, pushing her hard against the counter.

'Please, Anna.' Bashka sank trembling to her knees. 'Please.'

Anna did not reply. Her shoes clicked sharply on the stone-flagged floor, and a moment later the doorbell tinkled and the shop filled with the bustle of the street.

Alexander Mikhailov was not in the best of humours. He had finished his piece on the execution after midnight and delivered it to the press at a respectable hour of the morning. The police screw was tightening and, but for the urgency, he would not have risked visiting the apartment on Podolskaya Street by day. And so it was galling to find that Anna was not at home. The rest of the printing family were busy with the new edition of The People's Will but none of them could be trusted with what would be a most sensitive task. Anna would have been the ideal person to slip in and out of the photographer's shop. He waited at the apartment for a while, drinking too many gla.s.ses of cheap black tea, while he considered what to do. All the photographers had been warned by the gendarmes to be on the watch for anything that might be of use for illegal propaganda. A police spy had followed him to the little shop on the Zagorodny and would know he had asked for copies of portraits of Kviatkovsky and Presnyakov. But someone had to pick up the photographs. Copies to Hartmann in Paris, copies to their friends in Berlin and London a copy to Karl Marx and copies to all the newspapers in St Petersburg; they needed the pictures by this evening.

The sky was a dingy winter grey, and lazy wet snowflakes that melted as they fell were sweeping along the street. Mikhailov turned up his collar in the doorway then set off at a brisk place. It was lunch time and most of the people he pa.s.sed were hurrying home in the opposite direction, their heads bent into the wind. At the junction with Malodestskoselsky Prospekt, the stallholders were gathered round a crackling yellow fire with no thought to business. A scantily clad girl, her thin face thick with cheap make-up, stepped on to the street from a doorway and gave him a cold and hungry look. He walked on, avoiding her eye. He would take a cab from the Zagorodny to Madame Dubrovina's comfortable home. Perhaps she could be of a.s.sistance. But as he was approaching the end of the street, he saw Anna's neat figure hurrying towards him, the plain burgundy scarf he had given her when they were still friends pulled tightly about her face. She appeared distracted, and had almost rushed past him when he spoke her name.

She stopped, startled, then her expression hardened with contempt. 'You. You what have you done to him? Tell me.' She spat it at him with a fury he had not known in her before.

'What on earth . . .' For once he was lost for words.