The first time Barclay’s agents noticed the man glancing up at the apartment they dismissed it as of no importance. Tavricheskaya was a busy thoroughfare in the evening, with many well-to-do merchants and professional people living in the new mansion blocks that were springing up in the district. The drawing-room lights were burning invitingly, a parasol in the window, and anyone wishing to visit Alexander Mikhailov would assume it was safe to do so. But the man in the official-looking coat sipped at the apartment like a secret drinker, careful not to break his stride for even a second.
Ten agents from Moscow had moved into Mikhailov’s apartment, and another on the floor above, two days after his arrest. Their presence was known only to a few, their orders simple: watch, wait, listen and arrest anyone — Major Barclay had placed particular emphasis on that — anyone who called at Number 15/8. Only Mikhailov knew the informer’s identity for sure, and he was keeping his mouth firmly shut.
‘He won’t be coaxed or bullied into an indiscretion — he’s too clever,’ Collegiate Councillor Dobrshinsky had observed after the first interrogation, ‘he’s no Goldenberg.’ They had no choice but to wait for the Director to break cover.
The dvornik knew to keep his mouth shut and stay away, and in the week they had been there only a maid and a shoeshine had knocked at the door. So there was a flurry of excitement in the two apartments when the man in the service coat returned the following evening and lingered against the railings of the gardens opposite. Tall but stooped, slightly built, he was wearing a fur hat and most of his face was covered by a black scarf.
He bent to fiddle with his laces, glancing up at the apartment as he did so. After a minute he rose, stepped off the pavement into the road, hesitated, then walked quickly away.
‘He’ll be back,’ Agent Marusin observed when Barclay visited him later in the evening. ‘I’d wager he’s your man.’
‘But you couldn’t see his face?’
‘He was careful about that. The only thing…’ Marusin paused, ‘now that I think of it, he was wearing spectacles.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
Yes. Marusin was quite sure. And on reflection he thought the fellow may have needed thicker lenses because he had peered at the apartment then bent very low over his boots, craning forward as some very short-sighted people do.
Barclay stiffened, his mouth set firm and the hard little lines about his eyes narrowed, but he refused to been drawn into speaking his mind.
He returned in the middle of the following day, slipping into the yard through a building in the parallel street and making his way into the mansion block by the tradesman’s entrance. He had disguised himself as a labourer with a peaked cap pulled low over his face.
The apartment had been turned upside down by the Moscow agents, and the drawing-room floor was littered with broken furniture, books and propaganda leaflets. Sweeping more from a chaise longue, Barclay lay back with his eyes closed to wait for dusk, and was asleep in minutes. It was almost nine o’clock when he was woken by angry voices. Marusin and his colleagues were playing Skat for kopeks. One of them had accumulated a tidy sum and to the annoyance of the rest was preparing to leave the game.
‘I didn’t bring you here for this,’ Barclay barked at them, cross with himself too. ‘Shut up and put the cards away.’
The apartment was cold, the agents hungry, and it was plain the spirits of all but the lucky card sharp were low. Marusin reported no sign of their man.
‘All right then, ask the landlady for food and send the dvornik up to light the fire.’ Barclay picked up his coat in readiness to leave. ‘I don’t think you’ll see our man now, but keep the noise down. Clear?’
The wind buffeted him as he stepped into the dark yard, drops of ice pricking his face, and in the lee of the buildings opposite he paused to adjust his scarf. His modest apartment was only a few streets away in the Smolny district. Mikhailov had been a neighbour. Hands wedged in the pockets of his short coat, he walked on with eyes bent to the icy pavement, his thoughts of home and the sharp words his wife would have for him when she saw him dressed as a common labourer. But he had gone only a few hundred yards when he heard someone shout and, looking back, he saw one of the Moscow agents running down the lane towards him. The wind whipped his words away but the urgency in his voice was clear enough. Barclay stood and waited, his fingers round the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket.
‘We’ve got him, sir,’ the man panted, his head bent over his knees. ‘He arrived as soon as you’d left. Tried to get his gun out but Agent Marusin caught him a good blow.’
Barclay hurried back along the lane and into the mansion block, taking the stairs two at a time. An agent was at the apartment door and he brushed past two more in the corridor.
‘He’s in the bedroom, sir.’ It was Marusin.
‘Has he said anything?’ Barclay asked, struggling to catch his breath.
‘Only that he’s one of ours and we should let him go. He refuses to give us a name.’
Barclay stood in the hall for a minute, breathing deeply, his hand on the door knob. Then, with his face set hard, he turned it and stepped inside.
Agent Nikolai Kletochnikov was sitting on the bed with his back to the wall, a bloody handkerchief clasped to his nose, his broken spectacles on the bedspread beside him. He lifted anxious eyes to Barclay’s face for a second then looked away.
‘I thought it might be you,’ said Barclay, and to his intense annoyance there was a tremor in his voice. ‘You left me for dead in the student Popov’s apartment. I knew you were a coward, now I know you’re worse.’
Kletochnikov looked up at him again, and this time Barclay read defiance and something close to hatred in his face.
‘A traitor? My loyalty is to the people and to my real comrades,’ he said quietly.
Only the collegiate councillor’s strictures to avoid unnecessary violence held Barclay’s hand. Oh, how dearly I want to see this creature brought down, he thought. I want to grind my boot in his face. ‘Get him out of here,’ he barked.
‘Where to?’ Agent Marusin inquired.
‘Fontanka 16, of course.’ Barclay’s eyes were fixed on Kletochnikov’s long white face. ‘Everyone is anxious to meet the Director. But keep your hands off him — for now.’
Dobrshinsky tired of asking questions and receiving no answer and moved Mikhailov to the Peter and Paul. It was the nineteenth of November. Mikhailov did not know the date until he arrived beneath its white arch: a year to the day since the attack on the tsar’s train. Inside the curtain wall the low scaffold where Kviatkovsky was executed for his part in the plot was thick with snow, ropes still hanging from the beam. Beyond Peter’s cathedral, the grim face of the fortress proper and the gate to the prison. They led him in chains between a row of soldiers into a guardhouse, and from there across a small courtyard to the ravelin in the outer wall.
Rags for binding his legs, a filthy grey and brown smock, peasant shoes and an unlined sheepskin coat saturated with the stale sweat of many.
The penance cell was lit by a shaft of light from a small barred window high in the wall, the stone floor covered in rubbish and fetid straw, the only furniture a narrow plank bed with a wafer thin mattress and a toilet bucket.
An old soldier from the time of Tsar Nicholas was posted at his door, pledged to guard him at all hours. The gendarmes called him ‘Uncle Vishka’, a filthy white-haired rat of a man who, after two decades within the ravelin’s walls, was sick and bitter and malignant. His bloodshot eye hovered at the spy hole in the door for hours and he spoke only abuse to the prisoners. He would thrust his grubby hands through a window like a wicket in the iron door twice a day with a glass of tea, dry bread or a little weak soup that tasted of nothing and was often tainted by the guards.
The stench in the cell was overpowering, and Mikhailov’s hair and beard were soon crawling with lice. But it was the oppressive silence that troubled him most. Once he heard screaming from the corridor and hammered on the door until Uncle Vishka spoke to him: ‘They’re thrashing some money out of a newcomer.’
‘What?’
‘Everyone has to pay,’ the old soldier said carelessly. ‘You gentlemen politicals get off lightly.’
His escape was to the past, conversations, people, whirling Anna about the dancefloor — he thought of her often — and summers on his father’s estate. He took an unholy delight too in imagining the death of the tyrant, the revolution, a popular uprising that would set the prisoners free. But hope was inseparable from fear. There were times in the winter chill at night when he knew despair and he would pray to the Russian god he did not believe in for a quick release.
At first, he had been flattered by the attention of the authorities, the procession of visitors to his cell at the Preliminary — senior policemen and soldiers, government ministers — who had learned of his importance to the party from the testimony of Goldenberg. Collegiate Counsellor Dobrshinsky had spent many hours trying to break him with threats and promises and even the offer of a pardon if he turned state evidence. He had expected and enjoyed resisting these blandishments. But he had been surprised and irritated by the particular interest the special investigator had shown in the English doctor. Why had the party tried to kill him? Was he a member of The People’s Will? What help were they receiving from the British? Money? Explosives? Mikhailov had refused to answer all but the last of these, for he was a socialist patriot and would never have accepted assistance from a foreign power. What a trouble the Englishman had been to him. Would he have stepped inside the photographer’s shop if Anna had not charged him so vehemently with acting only in his own interests?
By a wicked irony it was the doctor who brought him some relief from the cell and the ravelin at Christmas. It was late afternoon, to judge from the grey rectangle of sky, and in the corridor the confused echo of boots and a jangle of keys. The iron door opened and the warder stepped inside, his nose pinched between thumb and forefinger: ‘You stink like a Tatar. What’s your visitor going to think?’
For the five minutes it took to walk under escort to the Commandant’s House he felt drunk with the hope his mother or sister was waiting to see him, or a comrade in disguise. The crunch of boots in the snow, the tolling of a barracks bell, a troika sliding towards the Peter Gate, clean air sharp in his chest, the sights, sounds, taste of the life he used to live.
But it was Major Vladimir Barclay who was warming his hands at the stove. With a weak smile and a casual wave, he indicated that Mikhailov should take a chair. For once, the major was in the blue and red of the corps, campaign medals on his broad chest and the Order of St Vladimir at his throat. To Mikhailov’s mind he did not cut an impressive figure, rather foreign with his round beardless face, crafty eyes and thin brown hair.
‘You look awful,’ the policeman observed coolly. ‘I’ll speak to the warder. A bath and a shave. After all, you are a gentleman, aren’t you? Tea?’
Mikhailov nodded.
‘But you’ve lost a little weight; that’s a good thing.’
The tea tasted as it should taste and Mikhailov sat at the table with a glass cupped in his hands, grateful for that small kindness. It was a warm panelled room with an eighteenth-century chandelier, fine walnut chairs and a stove of pretty blue and white Dutch tiles. It made Mikhailov feel dirtier and even a little ashamed, and that made him irritable.
‘Well, what do you want?’
‘Collegiate Counsellor Dobrshinsky has asked me to speak to you again,’ said Barclay. ‘The ravelin is no place for a gentleman. He said to me: “See if Alexander Dmitrievich is ready to help us a little, now he’s had time to reflect upon his future”.’
Mikhailov watched impassively as the policeman leant across the table and poured more tea into his glass.
‘We know your little comrades are plotting another attempt on the emperor’s life.’
‘Oh?’
‘You people can’t take a shit without us knowing about it.’
Mikhailov looked at him disdainfully. ‘Then I can’t possibly be of service to you.’
‘But you can.’ The policeman leant forward again, his big hands clasped together, warm smile, eyebrows arched. ‘How? When? Where?’
‘I really have nothing to say.’ Mikhailov wondered that the special investigator had trusted this task to a man with the intellect of a common soldier.
‘A porter has reported seeing your comrade Anna Kovalenko again.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, she was visiting the Englishman at the Nikolaevsky,’ said Barclay, with a knowing voice.
Mikhailov felt the colour rising in his face. The policeman had swung wildly and caught him a glancing blow. He was not going to show it. Placing his palms flat on the table, he almost shut his eyes, as inscrutable as a plaster saint.
‘If your comrades kill the emperor another will take his place, but if you don’t help us you will die in a damp hole forgotten by everyone.’
‘Right-minded people must give themselves to this struggle.’
‘The gentleman peasant,’ said Barclay with a cynical smile. ‘Collegiate Counsellor Dobrshinsky was sure you wouldn’t listen to reason. That’s why he sent me, of course.’ He sat up slowly, dragging his fists back across the table then rising to his feet.
‘Do you recognise this one?’ he asked, pointing to the red enamel decoration at his throat.
‘The Order of St Vladimir.’
‘I call it my Mikhailov medal,’ Barclay said with a broad grin. ‘I have you to thank for it.’ Then, turning to the door, he shouted: ‘Sergeant, I’ve finished with him.’
And again to Mikhailov: ‘Oh, I forget to mention. A comrade of yours is here too. Nikolai Kletochnikov.’
‘I’ve never heard of the fellow.’
‘What was it you called him, “your Director”? He hadn’t heard from you for a while so he paid you a visit. He was at a loss without you. Resentful that you’d kept him from the rest of the party. Of course, he didn’t know we’d picked you up already. A couple of his Moscow comrades were waiting for him — they were a little rough. He’s been very helpful.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No? Well, if you change your mind — and you might — speak to your guards.’
Mikhailov could hear their heavy tread on the polished boards behind him, and a moment later the warder of the ravelin was at his side with handcuffs.
‘Is the prisoner moving, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes. To the Secret House. A chance for a little more reflection,’ replied Barclay.
It was the final test for enemies of the state, a damp unheated solitary block below the level of the river, where prisoners were left to rot in medieval darkness.
Mikhailov gazed at him with unflinching contempt. ‘You must know the tsar will die.’ His voice was cool, matter-of-fact, full of certainty. ‘It must be. It is the will of the people.’