The cause of such confusion and not a little heartache was lurking in a doorway a short distance from the Church of the Assumption. Alexander Mikhailov’s gaze was fixed on the shadows beneath the splintered awning of a modest two-storey building. A low drinking den, like so many others in the Haymarket district, it was doing steady trade even on the Lord’s Day. Patrons were obliged to step over the prostrate form of an elderly peasant who had staggered no further than the door before collapsing in a stupor. No one seemed in the least concerned and Mikhailov wondered if the landlord was leaving the drunk on the step as barely living proof of the purity of his vodka. A couple of young women in gaudy rags were accosting all who came and went. That the broad fellow in workman’s clothes who had been following him for almost an hour should try to conceal himself close to frumps plying their trade was nothing short of pitiful. Still, it was a simple enough task to lose one police spy, the sort of challenge he enjoyed, but perhaps there were others.
Without looking left or right Mikhailov began picking his way round the empty market stalls and piles of rubbish, putrid and thick with flies, to the opposite side of the square. On most days of the week the market was bustling with peasants and merchants; this was the ‘belly’ of St Petersburg, with every manner of object and animal for sale, women and children too. Respectable folk only chose to visit the district on business, although Mikhailov had heard stories of literary pilgrims in search of Raskolnikov’s attic. And only the day before he had seen Dostoevsky in the street with a posse of admirers.
From the square, he walked at a steady pace to the Ekaterininsky Canal then along its embankment into the city. A little beyond Gorokhovaya Street he turned right into a gloomy courtyard and strolled nonchalantly across it to a door on the opposite side. It was open as he knew it would be. Up the bare wooden stair, across the landing and down again to the main entrance, where he paused for a moment to listen for his pursuer. Thump, thump on the bare boards behind him, and for the first time Mikhailov’s heart beat a little faster. Not one but two men. Too bold to be just informers. Slipping out of the front, he crossed quickly to a decaying four-storey apartment block a little way up the street and turned without hesitating through a wicket gate hanging loosely from its hinges. An old lady was sitting on a stool in the yard behind, two small children playing in the dust at her feet. He nodded politely to her as he made his way towards a door at the corner of the building opposite. Behind him, the creak of the gate and the scuffing of courtyard stones as his pursuers hurried towards him. No time to look. He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door. A shout and the clatter of boots as they broke into a run. Glancing back he could see they were close: two plain-clothes policemen. Time only to turn the key in the lock before the sound of a shoulder crashing against the door.
‘Open up!’ The beating of fists. He waited a moment, collecting his thoughts, his right hand on his pounding chest. It would be only minutes before the banging and shouting on the other side of the door roused the dvornik or one of the tenants. He must move quickly.
Mikhailov was a thorough man and he had gone to great lengths over many months to ensure his comrades would continue to benefit from his very particular skills. He found the servant’s corridor without difficulty and began weaving his way along it to the front of the building. An old lady in a black dress and goatskin slippers was struggling up the steps of the entrance hall with a bag of laundry. Mikhailov brushed past her and on into the street. Turning right, he walked as quickly as he could along the pavement without drawing attention to himself, crossing to the other side just beyond the railings of the Assignation Bank. A few yards further on he stopped outside a handsome yellow and white classical mansion, glanced left and right then retreated a step into the road to examine the windows on the first floor. At the bottom of the one on the extreme right there was a small blue diagonal strip of paper: it was safe to call.
Tarakanov was waiting for him on the first floor landing, an anxious expression on his chubby face.
‘I saw you in the street,’ he said. ‘Come in, come in quickly.’
Councillor Tarakanov was as timid as a hare. The small circle who knew of his role in the movement had given him the code name ‘Bucephalus’, after Alexander the Great’s highly strung horse. Time in his company passed slowly, but in extremis there was no safer place in Petersburg. He was the most trusted of the movement’s ‘Ukrivateli’ — concealers — for he was the last person the authorities would suspect of revolutionary sympathies. Short, fat, fastidious, he was also a councillor at the Ministry of Interior and a social snob.
‘Did anyone see you at the door?’ he asked, stepping over to the window.
‘Of course not,’ replied Mikhailov.
‘You know the lodger downstairs, a nosy old crone with great staring eyes, she’s a milliner, I think, she always looks at me strangely when I meet her. She’s a spy, I am sure of it.’
Mikhailov rolled his eyes by way of a reply.
‘You don’t know the risk I am taking,’ said Tarakanov petulantly.
‘I do, I do, believe me. You’re a good chap. And I won’t be here long, now come away from the window before someone sees you.’
But Mikhailov’s pursuers had given up the chase. Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky was listening to their report in the investigation office at Fontanka 16, a map of the city open in front of him. The other agents were bent low over their desks in an effort to avoid catching his eye.
‘He knew his way through the building, Your Honour.’ Agent Myshkin shifted his weight to the other foot, his hands clasped awkwardly in front of him. His companion — Zadytsev — looked just as uncomfortable.
‘He must have known he could lock the door and slip out to the lane at the front.’
‘Show me.’
Dobrshinsky followed the agent’s finger as he traced the route they had taken from the Haymarket. When he had finished the collegiate councillor sat back and stared at them coldly.
‘You made yourselves conspicuous,’ he said at last. ‘What use are you to the investigation if you can’t follow a suspect without giving yourselves away?’
‘He kept stopping, Your Honour… He knew what he was doing.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Dobrshinsky. ‘I don’t want excuses. Redeem yourselves. I want you to question every porter and yard keeper in the area.’ He tapped the map with his fingers. ‘Take the local gendarmes with you. And begin with the house where he gave you the slip. I want to know who is helping Mikhailov.’
‘Now, Your Honour?’ asked Myshkin tentatively.
‘Yes. Now. At once,’ said Dobrshinsky, rising abruptly from the desk. ‘What are you waiting for?’
He watched them scuttle out of the office, then turned to one of the clerks. ‘Do we have the report on the dead informer?’
The clerk opened a file on his desk, took out a single sheet of paper and handed it to him.
‘It took only a few seconds for Dobrshinsky to glance through the report. Just the bare bones. Body in a Peski street. Stab wound to the chest. A vagrant by the name of Viktor who used to keep his eyes and ears open for kopeks. He had given them the student Popov. The dvornik at a local school had found the vagrant’s body on the doorstep. Murdered before he had a chance to give them anything more.
‘Why are we always left with a corpse?’ he muttered under his breath.
Alexander Mikhailov knew it was wise not to presume too often or for too long on Bucephalus’s hospitality. Besides, there was an appointment he had to keep. And so, after an hour spent sipping tea in the comfort and security of the councillor’s drawing room, he made his way by a back stair to a door that opened on to the courtyard behind the mansion. It was nearly eight o’clock, and to avoid being recognised in the empty Sunday streets he hailed a cab with a canopy and directed its driver to take him across the Fontanka. The short journey took Mikhailov along the embankment past the Third Section’s headquarters and he could not resist leaning forward to glance at it as the cab swept past. He was the sort of revolutionary popular writers like Dostoevsky branded a ‘fanatic’ because he dedicated his life to the cause but he was not anxious to be hauled down the steps into the basement cells at Number 16. Stay one step ahead of your enemies, he told his comrades — and with the help of the man he called ‘the Director’ he would do.
The cab driver turned right off Fontanka into one of the handsome little streets opposite the Summer Garden. Mikhailov paid without a word and with just enough of a tip to be unmemorable. He appeared for all the world, if the world was watching, an unassuming young gentleman, modestly dressed in a light brown summer suit, perhaps a civil servant returning home after a day in the country. He walked at an unhurried pace, saluting a young couple who made way for him to pass on the pavement. At the bottom he stopped and, pretending to check the time, cast a look back down the street. Satisfied, he turned right on to Solianoy Lane and strolled down to the handsome little red and white church on the corner.
The last public service of the day had ended some time ago but the air was heavy with the sweet smell of incense. The church was empty but for an old lady nodding and clicking her rosary beads before the icon of St Panteleimon. Mikhailov paid for a votive candle, lit it and pressed it into one of the iron banks before the iconstasis, then, hands clasped, he muttered a meaningless prayer to a god he did not believe in any more. The flickering light of the candles seemed to breathe life into the grim painted faces of the patriarchs gazing down on him from the pillars and walls. Revolutionaries too, he thought with a smile, recalling the English doctor’s description of Christ as a ‘socialist’. Memories of childhood, his mother holding his hand, the rumble of the cantor, the silver framed icon held aloft by the priest, shimmering in the candlelight — he could feel the pull of that old religious order still. What was it Karl Marx had called it? — das Opium des Volkes — but not in a disparaging way. Ordinary people were not going to give up their belief in God and heaven until the world changed for the better and it was no longer necessary to turn to faith for the comfort of hope and forgetting.
‘Please God, where is the Director?’ he whispered under his breath. For how long was he going to have to keep up this pretence of piety? His sacrilegious prayer was answered, for he heard a footstep and was conscious of someone at his shoulder.
The ‘Director’ stepped forward and pressed his own candle into the stand then crossed himself several times.
‘You’re late, Alexander,’ he said at last. ‘I was worried.’
‘A little trouble,’ Mikhailov replied. ‘Nothing that need concern you.’
He led the way to a bench half hidden behind a curtain and in deep shadow at the back of the church. The man who slumped round-shouldered beside him was in his late twenties, thin and rather pasty. He had a long solemn face and a badly trimmed beard, a beetle brow and large brown intelligent eyes, enormous when glimpsed through the lenses of his spectacles. His clothes and general demeanour suggested an industrious but downtrodden junior clerk. ‘The body of the spy was found in the street outside the school in Peski,’ he said. ‘A report has been made by the local station.’
‘Do you know how he found Popov?’
The Director shrugged: ‘A chance to make a little money for vodka. He’d worked for the police for a while. Saw Popov at the Baird Works and followed him. But there’s something else…’ He edged a little closer. ‘Dobrshinsky’s going to bring in a woman called Volkonsky for questioning. ’
Mikhailov frowned thoughtfully: ‘She doesn’t know a great deal. Some names…’
‘You, Goldenberg, Morozov, Kviatkovsky… here are the people they are most interested in…’ The man reached into his pocket and handed him a small square of paper.
Mikhailov glanced down the list of names: ‘Who is this Madame Romanko?’
‘Kharkov has sent her records through — early twenties, brown hair, blue eyes, attractive — meets the description of the woman seen leaving the Volkonsky mansion in your company. Don’t you know her? They suspect she may have been in the square with Soloviev when he missed.’
For a moment Mikhailov stared at the paper, then turned to his companion with a small smile: ‘Thank you, Nikolai. Thank you again.’
They spoke for a few minutes more only, the Director casting anxious glances around the church. Mikhailov told him of the conference that was to be held at Voronezh and of the new alliance he hoped to forge there: ‘But you, my friend, must stay here in Petersburg. It’s most important.’
The Director nodded.
‘And Dobrshinsky?’
‘He’s not popular. But he’s clever. He’s brought in new people — the major from the Gendarme Corps who was there when Popov shot himself.’
‘And your position — is it secure?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Director with a little laugh. ‘Quite secure. I’m a good conservative. And the bits you feed me go down well.’
‘Good,’ said Mikhailov, getting to his feet. ‘And now I must go. Next time we must meet somewhere different. I’ll send word the usual way.’ Turning his back on his companion, he walked over to the bank of flickering candles and stood with his hands together waiting for the clunk of the closing door.
The city’s clocks were striking nine when Mikhailov stepped into the street once more. It was a ‘white’ Petersburg night when the sun hovers low on the horizon but does not set and the delicate pink and blue of early evening meets the dawn. A fresh breeze was blowing off the river and the city breathed easy again after the heat of the day. The streets about Nevsky were alive still with prosperous couples promenading in their summer finery, groups of inebriated students weaving noisily up and down the pavements, streetwalkers with an eye to Sunday business and the constant rattle and squeak of the horse-drawn trams and carriages. Mikhailov slipped in and out of the crowd unnoticed until he reached the cab rank in front of the Imperial Public Library. No matter the lateness of the hour, there was a task he wished to perform. It was going to put him to no small amount of trouble but it was quite impossible to ignore.
It was half past ten by the time he stepped on to the narrow wooden platform at the village of Alexandrovskaya. The schoolroom and adjoining house were set back a little from the main street, just five minutes from the station. Mikhailov walked slowly down the dusty lane, glancing left and right as if searching for a house. A sick-looking dog trotted hopefully towards him but there was no sign of its master or any other living soul, only the flicker of candlelight in windows and the distant rattle of a nightjar. The modest three-room schoolhouse was built of wood in the traditional manner and looked very like the rest of the village, if better cared for, with a coat of fresh green paint and a neat little garden, a honeysuckle twisting up the wall. From the lane he could see the smoky yellow glow of an oil lamp in the window. Anna was awake.
‘Who is it?’ she asked at the door.
‘It’s me. Alexander.’
‘Why are you here?’ But before he could answer, the door opened abruptly and she stood away from it to let him pass quickly inside: ‘Are they chasing you?’
‘I have important news.’
‘What’s happened?’ Her voice was taut with anxiety.
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry.’ He settled himself on her couch. ‘First, is there any tea?’
She stood staring at him. She must have been preparing to go to bed because the top of her white cotton blouse was hanging open, her hair loose about her shoulders, her feet bare.
‘The water’s still hot,’ she said reluctantly.
Mikhailov watched as she busied herself with the tea, admiring the curve of her bottom and thighs as she bent to light the samovar flame. Yes, other men would find Anna attractive, not a fashionable beauty, her nose a little broad, her brow a little dark and heavy, but handsome nonetheless, with a neat figure and striking blue eyes. Above all, there was lively but graceful purpose in her every gesture and movement that even a man who did not share her view of the world might recognise and admire.
‘You’ve put the picture on the wall, I see,’ he said.
‘Yes, do you like it there?’ she asked, without turning to face him. Her voice was calmer. It was a little watercolour of folk dancing he had given her, young Ukrainian men in traditional Cossack dress, twisting wildly to fiddle and flute. It was hanging close to the stove along with a cheap icon of the Virgin that the priest had left for her when she took the position. It was a simply furnished room with a few functional sticks of furniture, an old wooden table and four kitchen chairs, a basic range for cooking and heat, and drawn across the windows, smoke stained cotton curtains. The only piece that would be at home in a bourgeois drawing room was the couch Anna had bought for herself.
‘Well?’ she asked, a little coolly.
He held his breath for a moment as she leant forward to give him the glass of tea. Her eyes were darker blue in the dim lamplight. He watched her over the top of his glass as she turned to sit at the table.
‘I’ve been to see a friend I call “the Director”. It’s a joke we share. A code name, I suppose. His job is to guide the movement. I found him a year or so ago and helped him to his…’ he paused for a moment, searching for a discreet euphemism, ‘a special position.’
He sipped at his tea before continuing: ‘The Director says Madame Volkonsky will be arrested and questioned. She will give them some names, of course… no, sit down, please.’
Anna was half out of her chair: ‘Have you spoken to Vera and Evgenia?’
‘They’ve left for Voronezh. They’re safe for now. And you must go too. First thing tomorrow.’
‘But I don’t think Madame Volkonsky knows my name.’
‘My dear Anna,’ he said. He placed the glass on the floor at his feet then leant back with his arms folded across his chest and stared at her.
‘Well?’ She lifted her right hand to her lips nervously. ‘Why have you come?’
‘The most extraordinary coincidence. The police are looking for a mysterious woman with brilliant blue eyes, a fine figure, brown hair. Someone who seems to know me, someone very like you, but who goes by the name of Madame Romanko.’
‘Oh?’ said Anna, rising quickly to her feet. She turned her back on him and went over to the samovar, but not before he had noticed with amusement the colour rising in her neck and cheeks. After a few seconds’ silence she turned back to the table, careful to avoid his eye.
‘You know, I like you, Anna.’
She looked up at him and gave him an uncertain smile, her shoulders narrowing insecurely.
‘You and I are dedicated to the revolution, to sacrifice…’ Mikhailov eased himself on to the edge of the couch. ‘And we share that burden…’
‘Yes.’
He slowly got to his feet and walked over to the window, lifting the smoky curtain to one side to stare into the blue summer night. Then turning abruptly to face her again: ‘Are you married?’
‘That’s my concern.’ Her voice rang with cool defiance, but her face was pink with indignation and embarrassment.
‘Have you left him?’
She paused to consider whether she should answer, then reluctantly: ‘He left me two years ago.’
‘Anna,’ he said breathily, taking a step towards her.
‘Please,’ she said, her hand hovering above her lap as if hoping to push what she knew to be coming away. ‘Please.’
‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’ He edged closer to the table: ‘No, sit please, don’t move.’ He held his hand close as if to restrain her.
‘Please, Alexander, we’re comrades…’
‘Marriage is nothing. A prison. But love — we can help each other. Comrades, yes, and lovers,’ and he bent down a little and touched her arm.
She shrank from him. ‘I don’t love you… this, this is damaging the revolution. There is no place for…’
Mikhailov bent swiftly, reaching for her cheek with trembling fingers, so close, the smell of her, her breasts beneath the cotton blouse: ‘I love you…’ His voice was barely more than a whisper. And he touched her hair, the back of her head, trying to draw her closer, but she pulled herself free.
‘No!’ She jumped to her feet, her chair crashing to the floor. ‘We’re comrades!’ she said angrily from the other side of the table. ‘Comrades, that’s all. I think you should go.’
Mikhailov’s face felt hot. He was struggling to hold his temper. He never lost his temper. Who did she think he was? He turned away from her and threw himself down on to the couch. ‘Is it the Englishman?’
‘No!’ she said indignantly. ‘No. It’s you.’ She was still standing at the table, arms wrapped anxiously around herself. ‘Go, please.’
‘This English doctor can’t be trusted. He isn’t one of us, you know that?’ Mikhailov said coldly.
‘It’s nothing to do with him. Now go. Please.’
‘Tell him not to come to the clinic. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, I’ve hurt you, but…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! You haven’t hurt me. I only care about what is best for our cause, best for the people. And you should think of that too.’
‘I do,’ she said quietly.
Silent seconds ticked by as they stared at each other. The walls of the room seemed to press upon them in the flickering light of the lamp like the sides of a box. In the end, it was Anna who looked away and down at the table.
‘Before you go,’ she said coolly, ‘I want to remind you that we agreed the doctor could be of use to us. He has connections. We agreed that. And he has already proved his worth. There was a body in the street today…’
‘I know,’ said Mikhailov. ‘The Director told me.’
‘The Director? But why did he think the death of a beggar in Peski worth mentioning?’ There was an intense frown on her face.
‘Because he was a police informer.’
‘Dr Hadfield was sure he was murdered by someone who knew what they were doing. Did you kill him?’
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said coldly. ‘The security of the movement is my concern.’ Getting quickly to his feet, he stepped up to the table and, placing his chubby hands upon it, he leant across until he was only an arm’s length from her: ‘Leave first thing tomorrow. I will see you in Voronezh. And think about what I’ve said. In the next few weeks we will make brave decisions that will change this country for ever. You will play your part, I know.’ He stared at her for a silent few seconds, his face hard with certainty. Anna did not flinch. Turning at last, he snatched his hat from the table and walked to the door, only glancing back as he opened it to where she stood in the shadow. It closed with a quiet click and she was alone.