The People's Will (36 page)

Not long ago, that officer had been Dmitry, in the guise of Colonel Otrepyev. Why, Mihail wondered, had not Dmitry in the guise of Chairman Shklovskiy exerted the same pressure upon Kibalchich? He began to piece together an answer.

Once they had decided upon a course of action, then digging began again. Almost everyone pitched in – the women as well as the men – though as far as Mihail could tell, Dmitry never came down. Zhelyabov never dug, though he did help out. Like Dmitry, he was too big to be able to employ his great strength in the enclosed space.

Over the following days Mihail began to get to know his comrades, to admire some and despise others. Sofia Lvovna he liked least of all. He wondered even if she might be mad, her dedication to the cause so eclipsed every other consideration. It was a madness he knew well, though his cause was different and he was forced to keep it hidden, but it helped him to fit in well with them. Where they said ‘Aleksandr’ he had merely to think ‘Iuda’ and he became indistinguishable in his hatred from those
around him. And even as he pretended to be one of them, their attitudes began to rub off on him. Each night he would lie awake thinking about it; it worried him to admit it, but more and more he could imagine himself remaining quiet – not warning the tsar, his uncle, of the plans against him.

Dusya did not often come to the cheese shop, and when she did her slight build made her little use for digging. Even when she was there she and Mihail spoke little. They exchanged occasional glances and smiles, but had few opportunities for private conversation. Their nights together were quite different. Since the first time they had lain together in each other’s arms there had been only two occasions when he had heard her tapping at his door and let her into his room and his bed. In the darkness it could almost have been anybody, but he quickly grew to know every detail of her using only the four senses that remained. As planned, he had rented another room in another hotel, but never stayed there – it served purely to store his precious booty. Neither Dusya nor any of them knew of its existence, as far as he could tell.

He never asked her again whether the Executive Committee was aware of their relationship; he had no desire to offend her, or more importantly to lose her. He would assume that they were and hope that they were not. It was hard to imagine her speaking of it to anyone. In the presence of the others she seemed very different from the brave girl who had couriered dynamite halfway across the country, or the passionate one whose nails and teeth left their marks on his back and chest, or the thoughtful one he spoke to in the darkness afterwards. When with them she willingly placed herself in their shadows, particularly when it came to Sofia. She wanted to be like her but, Mihail was happy to observe, she could not achieve it.

It was with Kibalchich that he formed the strongest bond. It was unsurprising; they both understood engineering and they found themselves working side by side every day. The chances were that they would either despise one another or become friends. If Kibalchich had possessed any true dedication to his cause, it might well have proved to be the former, but he was one of the type that Mihail had spoken to Dusya about. His
dedication today was just an echo of the radicalism of his youth, but he dared not admit it – not to himself and certainly not to his comrades. But it was obvious to anyone that Kibalchich now had a new passion towards which to dedicate his great intellect, and that passion was science.

They had been speaking, as all the group often did, of the world to come – a world in which Russians were freed from the Romanov tyranny. But Kibalchich’s view of the future had little to do with politics.

‘In our lifetimes,’ he said earnestly, ‘men will walk on the moon.’

‘You think so?’ Mihail replied.

‘Why not? And they wouldn’t just walk. They would run faster and leap higher than any man has dreamed – Olympian gods compared to those left on Earth.’

‘How come?’

‘You’d weigh less. About a seventh of what you do here. Look.’

Kibalchich had shown him the calculations. There was no principle that he invoked of which Mihail was unaware, but Mihail had never in his whole career thought of applying his knowledge to so impractical a question as what a man would weigh on the moon. But Kibalchich was not a practical man.

‘And how would you get there?’ Mihail asked.

‘Aha! You’d need a rocket.’

‘You mean like a firework, or a Congreve Rocket?’

‘Exactly, but bigger of course, with some kind of vessel for the explorers.’

‘It would be impossible.’

Kibalchich had proved him wrong, with a few lines on a scrap of paper. It was a tricky formula; the more fuel you carried, the more fuel you needed to lift its own weight, along with that of the men and equipment on board. But it was calculable and finite. The amount required was enormous, Kibalchich was happy to concede it, but it wasn’t so large as to be unattainable within a few decades.

‘I’ve already started work on a design,’ Kibalchich explained.

‘To go to the moon?’

Kibalchich’s face fell. ‘Small steps, Mihail. We’ll start by
travelling between cities first, then continents. These things take time.’

‘You have your plans here?’ Mihail asked.

Kibalchich glanced around furtively and lowered his voice. ‘No. I’m not sure I’d trust everyone here. They wouldn’t understand. But I have them at home. I’ll show you some time and see what you think – get a practical viewpoint on them.’

Mihail never saw Kibalchich’s rocket designs, and doubted he would have understood them if he had, but he secretly imagined the two of them as old men, themselves too decrepit to take that fateful flight, but able to stand and watch others depart for the moon in Kibalchich’s machine.

In the evenings he would read through Iuda’s papers, sitting on the scruffy, uneven chair that along with the bed made up the sole furnishings of his second hotel room. He would not sleep here – if he did, how would Dusya know where to find him? – but he had brought his more unusual possessions here. He placed the hazelnut that Kibalchich had given him on the window ledge and would glance up at it as he turned each page. It was a reminder of just how dedicated these people were, and reaffirmed how dedicated he would have to be to defeat Iuda. He imagined his teeth pressing down on the shell and feeling the liquid inside spill on to his tongue and roll down his throat, wondering just how much pressure his jaw would have to exert to break it. He thought about slipping it into his mouth and resting his teeth lightly against it, allowing fate to decide if it would shatter or not. But he never did.

From Iuda’s books on vampires he learned of new weaknesses and new dangers of which he and Tamara had never been aware. Even in these later volumes where Iuda had begun to summarize his years of work there was too much for Mihail to remember every detail, and he could not know now what might one day be of use to him. The other correspondence, he hoped, would be of more help in locating Iuda, but there was nothing. The most obscure collection of letters dated back to the 1830s and were signed Auguste de Montferrand, a name with which Mihail was unfamiliar. The letters discussed issues of architecture, sometimes in general, sometimes very specifically, particularly
with regard to the positioning of windows – an issue over which any
voordalak
would be concerned. It would seem that de Montferrand was taking advice from Iuda – whom he addressed as Vasiliy Innokyentievich Yudin, an alias which Mihail knew – on the design of some building, but there was no clue to its location, save for the fact that the documents were in the folder marked Petersburg. In all of it there was thankfully no indication that Iuda knew where Tamara had fled to in 1856, nor that he had any inkling she had borne a son.

The strangest thing he found was a single sheet of paper, not part of any of the notebooks, but placed between the pages of one of them. It could have been put there as a bookmark or for safe keeping. In any event it was a peculiar thing for a creature like Iuda to have in his possession: a charcoal drawing of a woman’s breast. The artist had talent and Mihail mused as to why it had been drawn. It was more than an anatomical diagram; it seemed to have been crafted with love, though not with lust. It lacked the exaggerated perfection that might come from a lascivious imagination. And yet it was not so mundane that it did not raise desire within him. It was initialled and dated:

S.M.F. 22.iv.1794

It could be another of Iuda’s aliases, though he would have been young judging by the date. It was hard to conceive that such a thing could have been created by Iuda’s hand. Mihail lingered over it for a while, then continued on through the journals.

The other possible trail that might eventually lead Mihail to Iuda had gone cold. Dmitry never came down to the cellar of the cheese shop, and Mihail found no opportunity to make contact with him. The name of Shklovskiy came up occasionally in conversation, and Mihail did his best to uncover more about him, but he dared not appear too inquisitive. It seemed that at first, before he had gone to Geok Tepe, Dmitry had been most concerned with what lay beneath the cheese shop. But once the digging had begun, once those older cellars had been unearthed and explored, he had lost interest.

The location of the cheese shop had one further advantage as
far as Mihail was concerned: it was close to the Hôtel d’Europe. On travelling to and from his subterranean work there was ample opportunity for Mihail to keep an eye out for Iuda, either entering or leaving. He even managed to exchange the odd word with the concierge, who, in return for a few roubles, would tell him what he had seen.

But whether it came from the concierge’s mouth or from Mihail’s own eyes, the conclusion was the same. Iuda had not returned to the hotel.

Iuda looked out across the frozen river. The icy surface hid the turbid currents beneath. More than once those currents had clutched at him and carried him where they would. But they were all duplicates of the Berezina, where Lyosha had held his hair and thrust him beneath the surface. He didn’t remember how he’d escaped – he’d been unconscious and so whatever it was that had allowed him to live on, it was not his own wits. He had washed up and marched west with the pathetic vestiges of the Grande Armée. It was only in Warsaw that he had managed to get away from them. He was desperate and alone and with only one thought in his mind: to go home. It was another four months before he found himself in England and once there he realized that Esher meant nothing to him. There was only Oxford, where at least a few people remembered him.

And there his life had met a turning point. The letter had been waiting for him for almost a decade. His father’s brother, his uncle Edmund, had died and named Cain as the sole beneficiary of his will. The estate at Purfleet was worth thousands, and there were other assets to boot. It all belonged to Cain. He let the property to tenants to get an income, and bought himself a house in London, on Piccadilly, but still he spent much of his time in Oxford, writing a thesis based on what he had learned on his travels. He soon understood he could do little without his original notes, and so he had to return to where he had hidden them, in Petersburg. There he had reacquainted himself with Lyosha’s wife, Marfa, and with his son Dmitry. It was then he had realized how much he loved Russia – loved the naivety of its people and their potential for exploitation – and had known he would return there.

But there were other matters to attend to. On returning to England his thesis on the fauna of the Crimea gained him a doctorate and, with the addition of later work, a Fellowship of the Royal Society. But it all meant so little; the property, the wealth, the accolades. Still he craved only knowledge, a knowledge for which he would be laughed out of the Royal Society even for mentioning. He wanted to know of the
voordalak
. One day perhaps London would accept such a paper for the work of genius that it was, but that was not where he would do his research. From his uncle he had money, from Oxford he had an education. Both would help further his studies, but they would take place in Russia, in the Crimea, in the caves he had seen beneath Chufut Kalye. It was more than most scientists could dream of.

Was this, then, the fate for which he had been destined? Was this the proper life of an FRS – to lie on his stomach on the bank of the Neva, spying upon his enemies? But he knew he must watch them, even though the more he watched, the more he despised them. They were like gypsies, occupying property that did not belong to them and then treating it as their home. In Zmyeevich it was understandable; he hailed from the same part of the world as they did – it was in his blood. For Dmitry there was no excuse. Iuda had watched them for several nights, ever since he had discovered the invasion of his rooms at the hotel. He could no longer sleep there, and couldn’t return to the cavern beneath Senate Square – Zmyeevich and Dmitry already knew of it. But he’d little thought that they would choose to make their own nest there. Iuda himself continued to rest in the same tomb in the Smolenskoye Cemetery that had had been his home since his first night of freedom. From there it was only a short walk, at dusk, down to the northern bank of the Great Neva, from where he could look out over the river, across Senate Square and to the entrance of Saint Isaac’s. By the second night he’d acquired – unpaid-for – a pair of binoculars from a shop on Nevsky Prospekt, and could clearly identify the two figures that slipped from the cathedral as night fell, and returned before dawn. He had little doubt as to where they went once inside the building.

Some of the time he kept watch on the Hôtel d’Europe. He had removed his remaining journals from there on his first visit, so there
was nothing more to be taken, but there was always the chance that Lukin might go back there, or even Dmitry or Zmyeevich, but there was no sign of any of them. Whatever his suspicions, Iuda was well aware that he had no clear evidence linking Lukin to the two vampires, but what other reason the lieutenant might have for searching his rooms he could not imagine. He could still only deduce that the connection was through Luka – the one person who knew about the Hôtel d’Europe – so there remained other avenues to explore.