The Third Section (16 page)

‘I went down with it too,’ she told Raisa, glad again that she could not see her friend’s eyes. ‘I don’t remember much for two days except for the pain, and the smell. And the shame – that’s the worst of it – lying in your own filth like an old woman. When they could see I’d recover, they told me how lucky I’d been.’

‘You were,’ said Raisa.

‘Then they told me Milenochka had died. She’d been taken ill the same time as me, and I never even noticed. I wanted Vitya to come out for the funeral, but they said it had to be done quickly. They’d already buried Stasik – I never found out where. I searched and searched. At least I know where Milenochka is.’ She knew, but she also knew that Milena was not alone. It had been a mass
grave
. Not a pauper’s grave – it wasn’t a question of money. She was always keen to point that out when she spoke of it, as though boasting of which school her children went to. It was simply that with such great numbers of dead, things had to be done quickly. Perhaps Stasik’s body was at the bottom of that same grave pit – it was a strange thing to hope for.

‘So it was just you and Luka?’

‘For a while. In the autumn, Vitya wrote to say it was safe now. He tried to hide it, but even in his writing I could tell that he’d changed. It wasn’t just Milenochka and Stasik – he must have seen so much death in the city.’

‘So you went back to Petersburg?’

Tamara nodded. ‘As fast as we could.’

‘And how was Vitya?’

‘He was dead.’ For the first time in the conversation, Tamara allowed emotion to seep into her voice and her words sounded to her like a lament. She breathed deeply to regain control of herself. ‘Not the cholera – not directly. Murder plain and simple. One of his patients – a peasant he was treating free of charge – thought Vitya must have money. Stabbed him a few days before we got back.’ Freedom was the freedom to kill.

‘Did they catch him?’

‘God did. He was a genuine patient – died to prove it. Vitya might have saved him.’

‘You had Luka,’ said Raisa. There was nothing consoling in her voice.

‘No, Luka died too.’ It was a lie, pure and simple, but nobody ever questioned it. Sometimes Tamara almost believed it herself, or wished she could.

‘My God!’ muttered Raisa.

‘There are thousands suffered the same – or worse,’ said Tamara.

‘Peasants,’ said Raisa.

It was true; the serfs were always hit harder – by disease, by famine. Freedom wouldn’t change that. Freedom was the freedom to die. Raisa expressed the common view that they were inured to it. If they were, so was Tamara.

They turned off Tverskaya Street into Degtyarny Lane. The
wind
had eased and a little late snow had begun to fall gently, illuminated by the lamps at the windows. It wouldn’t settle.

‘Home at last,’ muttered Tamara, and then paused to think about what she had said. She’d had many places to call home, all of which she’d had to leave, either through circumstance or of her own volition. She’d not been here ten weeks, and it surprised her that already she could think of it as such. She looked at Raisa and smiled. Raisa’s face was quizzical, but she said nothing.

It was only as she approached the front door and noticed that it was wide open, with no one in attendance, that Tamara began to feel anything might be wrong.

Nadia Vitalyevna was on the verge of tears when they entered. She was at the top of the stairs, on the landing that accessed most of the girls’ rooms. Within moments Tamara and Raisa had joined her, and the girl threw herself into Tamara’s arms.

‘It’s Irina Karlovna,’ she said, her voice fractured.

‘What about her?’ asked Tamara.

‘Her door’s locked. She won’t answer.’

‘You mean she’s not there,’ suggested Raisa.

‘No,’ said Nadia. ‘I saw her go in.’

‘Why didn’t you use the spare keys?’ asked Tamara.

Nadia sniffled, and glanced from Tamara to Raisa and back.

‘We can get to her through mine,’ said Raisa, exasperated at the girl’s silence. Tamara had already considered using the connecting door between the two rooms, but even as she spoke, Raisa tried her own door handle and found it too did not yield.

Tamara turned back to Nadia. ‘Where are the keys?’ she insisted.

‘Irina asked me for them,’ sobbed Nadia. ‘I knew I shouldn’t. I’ve been running between her door and the front for the past half-hour, seeing if she’ll answer and looking out for you.’

Tamara raced down the stairs to her own rooms. Inside, she retrieved her master set of keys and then hurried back up. Nadia and Raisa stood waiting.

‘Did she have any customers?’ Tamara asked.

‘A captain came and asked to see her,’ said Nadia. ‘That’s when she didn’t answer the door.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t stay.’

‘I bet,’ muttered Raisa.

They had come to the door. Tamara inserted her key. Nadia was still right beside her, ready to go in, but Raisa, guessing wisely what they might find within, held back. Tamara glanced from her to Nadia and back, and Raisa took the girl’s hand and led her a little way away. Tamara turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

The mirrors didn’t help. Tamara could not immediately see the bed because of the door, and even when she stepped into the room it was visible only out of the corner of her eye. But reflected in Irina’s many beloved mirrors, just as Irina had intended, she saw the image of what lay on the bed again and again and again.

It was as though an artist had made a series of preparatory sketches of his model, each from a different angle, unable to decide which point of view would show off her beauty at its fullest. But the mirrors had the advantage of showing the scene in its full, vivid colour.

From some angles, Irina appeared demure, her head tilted away in shyness. From others she was licentious, her legs lying open to reveal that part of her which had been her livelihood and, most likely, the reason for her death. But what predominated were those reflections which showed her face, still and pale with eyes that gazed into Tamara’s and showed no recognition – and beneath that young, childlike face, visible wherever Tamara looked, was the wide, red gash between her chin and her collarbone where some monster in human form had torn away the flesh of her once elegant neck. There was no aspect to the bloody, mangled mess of tissue that, by looking somewhere in the room, Tamara could not see.

From outside she heard Raisa’s voice shout, ‘No!’ and then felt Nadia at her side. The girl didn’t even glance at the mirrors, but turned straight to the bed.

Her shrill, regular screams, filling the room, reminded Tamara of a locomotive’s whistle.

‘
AND SO TO
our toast,’ said Valentin Valentinovich, ‘in an order which is intended to imply no preference. To our beloved daughter and to our city’s beloved saint. To a slayer of dragons and a slayer of men’s hearts.’ He was a little drunk, even on a little wine, but Tamara did not mind. She had drunk more, but to no beneficial effect. ‘To Tamara and to Saint George!’

‘Tamara and Saint George.’ Two voices echoed the sentiment – Yelena and young Vadim. Tamara was happy to be with just those three.

It was Saint George’s day. He was the patron saint of Moscow, and revered throughout the country. On the table in front of them stood the remains of the traditional meal of roast lamb, enjoyed by all. But if it was Saint George’s day then that meant, inescapably, that it was Tamara’s birthday. It was also five days since Irina Karlovna had been murdered. Tamara was now thirty-four. Irina had been twenty-one.

There was no question of her telling them. They did not know where she worked or what she did. They might have heard something of the murder through gossip – from their servants if not from their friends – but Yudin had taken charge of affairs within hours of the discovery of Irina’s body; and Yudin’s instinct was for secrecy. It was simple for him to ensure that the regular police did not investigate the crime – they were answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. Instead he had called in the Corps of Gendarmes. Their ultimate commander was Count Orlov, who was also head of the Third Section. It was no coincidence. Although the two
were
officially separate institutions, the fact that they were led by the same man revealed the truth. The Corps of Gendarmes was the uniformed branch of the Third Section.

When Yudin had spoken to the gendarmes who came to Degtyarny Lane, it was clear who was in charge, regardless of the blue uniform and plumed helmet of their captain. Yudin’s suggestion had been that Irina had killed herself. Tamara questioned her motive and her method, but Yudin had countered that those were vague doubts set in the face of a body found alone in a locked room, a room to which Irina herself had insisted on taking the keys. But then Tamara had pointed out that the keys were nowhere in the room – neither was anything that could be thought of as a weapon. Yudin conceded it was a puzzle, but asked why, if Irina had been with a man, no one had seen him leave.

In the end Tamara accepted that Yudin had his own reasons for letting the murder lie uninvestigated. It would be bad for business. A murder like this would discourage the clientele of any brothel. For one whose customers were of such high status – and thus had so much to lose – it could mean the flow of information dried up completely. Even if Yudin knew beyond peradventure who had killed Irina, he might keep it quiet just so as not to rock the boat. If that were so, Tamara doubted whether she would catch any hint of it.

She looked up at Valentin Valentinovich, and tried to conjure the image of her real father toasting her, standing at the end of the table, instead of him. Valentin so failed to come up to the mark. The dining room where they sat held no strong associations with her true father and only slight ones with her mother – it was the same in all the rooms downstairs. And yet the calm familiarity of the place was an incalculable blessing. She didn’t partake much in the conversation, merely sat back and enjoyed it. Somewhere at the back of her mind she felt the urge to smoke, but she knew she could not here. It didn’t bother her very much. Talk had turned to the war. Valentin was telling his grandson of affairs in the north – and therefore of the boy’s father.

‘The British, of course, have sent a second expeditionary force into the Baltic.’

‘But Papa will stop them.’

‘Absolutely. Before they can take Petersburg, they have to take Helsingfors. And to take Helsingfors they’ll have to destroy Sveaborg – and that’s where Rodion comes in.’

‘You sound like
my
papa,’ said Yelena, with an affectionate laugh. ‘“Before Bonaparte can take Moscow, he’ll have to capture Smolensk. Before Smolensk, he’ll have to take Vitebsk. Before Vitebsk, Vilna.”’

A frown appeared on Valentin’s face. His grandson had already spotted the flaw. ‘But Bonaparte did capture Vilna,’ he said earnestly, ‘and Vitebsk and Smolensk and then Moscow.’

‘And then Vadim Fyodorovich sent him packing,’ said Tamara, grinning at her nephew, ‘just like Rodion Valentinovich will.’ Perhaps the tales of Vadim Fyodorovich, great-grandfather to Vadim Rodionovich, were where Tamara got her image of the gallant male that somehow transformed into her imagined father. He was the true hero of the family, naturally to Yelena, his daughter, but also to Valentin.

‘Not just Vadim,’ added Vadim Rodionovich. ‘There were four of them: Vadim, Maks, Dmitry and Aleksei. They all did it together.’ Clearly he knew the stories as well as Tamara did – perhaps better. She knew enough about the exploits of Vadim Fyodorovich, but the lives of Maks, Dmitry and Aleksei were less easy to remember. It was just Vadim and his comrades – the exploits and characters of the other three merging in her mind into one.

There was an awkward silence. Valentin glanced at Yelena, while the young Vadim remained happily unaware of it. The cause was obvious – the older Vadim might have got rid of Bonaparte, but he had died in the process. Rodion had been born within days of his grandfather’s death – Tamara nine years later. But from what she had heard of him, it was Vadim more than anyone who made her wish she was truly part of this family.

‘And now this second Napoleon is coming back for more,’ exploded Valentin, breaking the uneasiness.

‘Third,’ said Vadim.

‘He calls himself “the third”,’ said Valentin, with more than a hint of bile, ‘but he’s only the second one to claim to be emperor of France.’

‘And the last,’ added Tamara.

‘Ha!’ said Valentin, impressed by Tamara’s unexpected patriotism. ‘Yes.’ He stood and raised his glass. ‘A new toast. To Toma, to Saint George, and to Napoleon the Last.’

The other voices chimed in unison. ‘Napoleon the Last!’

Saint George’s day had not been widely noticed in Sevastopol. Those officers who came from Moscow joined together to celebrate as best they could, but any chance of an evening of enjoyment was marred by the fact that outside the city thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen were planning to destroy them. True, the English revered George in much the same way Muscovites did, but it had caused no let-up in their determination. And as Dmitry more than once pointed out to his fellow officers, that was in no small part because the English had celebrated the feast of Saint George twelve days earlier, thanks to the absurdities of their calendar.