Death on the Nevskii Prospekt Read online

  The remnant of the marchers, those not yet bloodied by the Tsar, and the stragglers of the other columns met up on Nevskii Prospekt, and made a last doomed effort to reach Palace Square. A huge body of cavalry and several cannons had been drawn up at the edge to blast or slash any marchers impertinent enough to reach it into eternity. But the crowd, swollen now by students and onlookers, began to push forward once again. Soldiers were ordered to disperse the marchers using whips and the flats of their sabres. When that proved unsuccessful, they began firing once more. Powerscourt watched in horror as a young girl who had climbed on to an iron fence was crucified to it by a hail of bullets. The screams of the wounded and the dying carried up to the roof of the Stroganov Palace. A small boy who had mounted an equestrian statue was hurled into the air by a volley of artillery. Other children were hit and fell from the trees where they had been perching to get a better view. It was twenty to two, just a few short minutes before their intended rendezvous with the Tsar. The great crowds, sullen now and silent, their anger growing, began to trudge home, many of them helping wounded comrades on their way. Only when the dead lay thick on the ground and the shattered stragglers turned to retreat back up the Nevskii Prospekt did the firing cease. The lancers harried them on their way, slashing the faces of any brave or foolhardy enough to press onwards towards the Winter Palace. Powerscourt watched one cavalryman collect a great mass of papers at the end of his lance. Powerscourt had no idea what he was doing until two of his colleagues dragged a dying man towards the paper. The lancers smeared it with his blood. Then they made a hole in the ice of the Neva and thrust the remains of the proclamations down into the swirling waters beneath. The demands for the vote, for freedom of speech, for a constituent assembly, for equality before the law, all the dreams of Father Gapon and his hundred and fifty thousand supporters ended up stuffed down a hole in the river. The ink would have gone long before the proclamations made landfall, if they ever did.

  ‘They’ll never forgive him for this,’ Mikhail said. ‘Never. As long as this city survives, as long as the last of the marchers survive, as long as their children and grandchildren survive, the people of St Petersburg will remember this day and hate the man who caused all the suffering.’ He was still holding on to Powerscourt. His face was wet with tears.

  ‘Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, ‘perhaps we could provide some help for the wounded down below. The palace here must have some bandages, we could bring water, vodka perhaps as a disinfectant, whatever the women in the palace think would be best. But I think we should do it quickly.’

  And so, as the afternoon wore on, a small party tried to bring what help they could to the dying and the wounded, an Irish peer, a Russian aristocrat and a fastidious diplomat who cared nothing for his appearance as he tried to bring some comfort to the dying. Powerscourt made himself one promise that afternoon: that, whatever it took, he would get to the bottom of the strange death of Roderick Martin.

  That evening, out at the Alexander Palace in his village called Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar did not disturb his routine for the unfortunate events in his capital. He had his afternoon walk, and tea as usual with his family. Then they all spent a busy half-hour sticking their latest photographs into their albums. That evening after supper he read aloud to them from a book his librarian had ordered specially from London. Every evening when he could, the Tsar read aloud to his wife and children. He had not bothered to tell his family about the terrible events in St Petersburg. Much better, he thought, to take their imaginations to a different country altogether, to the West Country of England, to the strange case involving an enormous dog and Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson and a treacherous bog.

  Later that evening there were sporadic disturbances in St Petersburg. Barricades were set up, slogans shouted at the soldiers who continued patrolling the streets. When the workers reached their homes, many of them bleeding to death from their wounds, or carried to their pathetic hovels on makeshift stretchers, they realized the full horror of what had happened. Fathers, husbands, sons, wives, daughters, so many were lost in the massacre. Hope, the hope that had led them on to the streets, the hope that tomorrow might be better than today or yesterday, that hope had died with the blood on the ice. The more perceptive understood that night what else they had lost. Faith in the Tsar, the father of his people, the protector of his flock, the true shepherd of his subjects, all that had gone with the sabres and the bullets and the corpses littering the streets that led to the Winter Palace. A new watchword went out, travelling round the streets behind the Narva Gates where Father Gapon had marched from, to the Vyborg side with its factories and its squalor, to Petrograd and to Vasilevsky Island. Men spoke the slogan only to those they knew they could trust. ‘Death to the Tsar!’ The marchers had already decided what to call this day. They christened it Bloody Sunday. The blood was the blood of their comrades who lost their lives to death on the Nevskii Prospekt.

  That evening the writer Maxim Gorky sent a message to the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in New York. ‘St Petersburg, Bloody Sunday, 9th January 1905,’ the message read. ‘The Russian Revolution has begun.’

  PART TWO

  THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY EGG

  This time has come, a great mass is moving towards all of us, a mighty healthy storm is rising, it’s coming, it’s already near, and soon it will blow sloth, indifference, contempt for work, this festering boredom right out of our society. I will work and in some twenty-five or thirty years’ time everyone will work. Everyone!

  Tuzenbakh, Act One,

  The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov

  5

  Natasha Bobrinsky sat as quietly as she could at the back of the room while the Tsar read The Hound of the Baskervilles to his family. Surely, she thought to herself, the Tsar must know what had happened in his city earlier that day. Tsars are meant to know everything. Surely he must have told his wife. Why didn’t they tell the children some version of events, however sanitized? The girls would hear about it from the servants soon enough. Word had reached the Tsar’s village by about four o’clock in the afternoon. The driver of one of the afternoon trains to Tsarskoe Selo had seen the final massacre on the Nevskii Prospekt and had brought the news with him. Natasha felt tenser than she had ever felt in her life. She knew her face was very pale. This day, she thought, must be a turning point. Nothing in Russia would ever be the same after the day when the Tsar’s soldiers mowed down their fellow citizens on the streets of the capital as if they were barbarian invaders from afar. As she listened to that soft voice reading on, about the Stapletons, about the escaped prisoner on the moor and the terrible dangers of the Grimpen Mire, Natasha fell into a reverie where most of the Russian land mass toppled slowly into the Gulf of Finland and St Petersburg, her elegant, sparkling, beloved St Petersburg, began to sink slowly beneath the waters of the Neva, the great spires of the churches and the Admiralty the last to disappear. Maybe the great Hound is the symbol of Revolution, Natasha said to herself as she came round, come to devour the people who look after him and crush their bones in his fearful embrace.

  The Tsar read well. His voice was quiet but he knew when to raise it for effect. Natasha wondered if it was true what they said in the servants’ quarters, that he was a bad ruler, that his indecision and his incompetence would ruin Russia. As the children filed out and began to make their way upstairs for bed, she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Natasha, my child,’ said the Empress Alexandra, ‘you know something, don’t you? Something about what happened in the city today?’

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ said the girl. ‘I do know something, but whether it is true or not, I do not know.’

  ‘What do you know, child?’ said the Empress, drawing Natasha over to sit on the edge of a sofa.

  ‘All I have heard, Your Majesty,’ said Natasha, remembering her father shouting at her brothers not to believe every bloody rumour they heard in this rumour-sodden city, ‘is that there was a lot of sho
oting in St Petersburg, and many people were killed by the soldiers.’

  Suddenly she wanted to cry for her unknown dead, mown down on a January Sunday.

  ‘They were bad people, very bad people.’ The Empress had raised her voice. For one glorious moment Natasha thought Alexandra was talking about the soldiers who had killed the marchers. ‘They’re all the same,’ she went on, and Natasha knew her hopes were false, ‘assassins, revolutionaries, bomb throwers, constitutionalists, liberals, seekers after the false gods of freedom and democracy. These are the people who murdered the Tsar’s grandfather, and God knows, they have tried to blow us all up enough times since. Why do you think we have to hide away out here, child? I will tell you. It is because the authorities tell us it is too dangerous for the moment to live in Petersburg. Until these people realize who rules Russia, we shall have more crackpot episodes like today. Do you know what they wanted to do, these scum? They wanted to hand over a petition to the Tsar! As if they had any right to tell him what to do! Let us hope that the rabble have learned their lesson today. If not we will just have to shoot more of them next time.’

  Natasha bent her head so the Empress might not see her horror.

  ‘On Tuesday, Your Majesty, it is my afternoon off. Could I have permission to go to the city in the afternoon to see my family?’

  ‘Of course you can, my child,’ said the Empress. ‘I have no doubt you will find opinion in the city even firmer against the rabble than my own.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was confident enough now of his knowledge of the geography of central St Petersburg to make his own way to the Shaporov Palace to collect Mikhail for their second meeting at the Interior Ministry. Snow had fallen during the night, obliterating the last stains of Bloody Sunday. Bits of clothing flapped about the streets, fragments of hats and caps were stuck on the railings, the front of a shirt, the sleeve of a jacket now shrouded in white. Dogs patrolled the area, still seeking, and occasionally finding, pieces of human flesh. Small scraps of proclamation still fluttered around the Neva. There was a bitter wind and the sun was in hiding. Powerscourt was just turning into Millionaires’ Row when two men in dark greatcoats stopped him.

  ‘You are to come with us,’ the taller one said in broken English.

  ‘Please,’ said the smaller one, though he didn’t sound as if politeness was his normal stock in trade.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Powerscourt, trying to walk on, but finding his way barred, ‘I’m going to meet a friend just up the road here.’ If he shouted, he thought, they might just hear him in the palace.

  ‘Later you meet friend,’ said the taller one, who seemed to be the chief spokesman. ‘Now you come with us.’

  ‘Please,’ said the smaller one again, ‘no trouble. We no want trouble.’ Powerscourt felt something hard and round pressing into his side from the pocket of the smaller one’s coat. This was trouble.

  ‘Do you mind telling me who you are?’ said Powerscourt angrily, as he was frogmarched back the way he had come. ‘The British Embassy will hear about this.’

  ‘British Embassy!’ The taller one laughed. ‘This is St Petersburg, not London. British Embassy go to hell!’

  They left him at a tall building on the Fontanka Quai by the Fontanka river that flows through the centre of the city and whose banks are graced by many fine buildings. A bald man shook him warmly by the hand and brought him indoors. ‘I think you will find it is warmer inside today,’ he said, in flawless English. ‘I hope my men did not inconvenience you too much.’

  ‘I have been inconvenienced quite enough,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and I demand to be released. It is barbaric to go around threatening people like this. And who the devil are you?’

  ‘I thought you might have worked that out for yourself by now, Lord Powerscourt, a man with your reputation as an investigator. My name is Derzhenov, Anton Pavlovich Derzhenov. I am a general in the army of the Tsar, and Chief of the Okhrana, the secret police charged with the responsibility of defending the person of His Majesty and the integrity of his state. At your service.’ He bowed deeply to his visitor.

  De Chassiron had told Powerscourt about the many different secret organizations charged with extirpating terrorism, special sections of the police, of the military, of the troops guarding the imperial family, even of the customs. None, in his view, could compare with the Okhrana in the cruelty of their interrogations or their determination to achieve their goals. Not that General Derzhenov looked like a secret policeman. People seldom did. His most distinguishing characteristic was that he was completely bald. Powerscourt didn’t think he had ever seen a man so bald. He looked as though he had never had any hair at all. Perhaps, Powerscourt thought, he had been born bald and nothing had ever grown on the top of his head. He was of average height with a small goatee beard and he was conservatively dressed as if he was going to a board meeting. Powerscourt felt he would not have looked out of place in an Inn of Court, relentlessly harrying opposition witnesses and flattering the jury.

  ‘Let me give you a very brief tour, Lord Powerscourt. Our visitors are always curious about what goes on in the Okhrana.’ Derzhenov laughed an ominous laugh.

  With that he led the way down a flight of stairs to a very long corridor in the basement. Powerscourt saw that the building went back a very long way. There was a series of doors in antiseptic green on either side of the passageway, some with small glass peepholes near the top. There was a very bad smell that might have been rotting flesh. Powerscourt thought he could see a trail of blood oozing out of one of the doors at the far end.

  ‘It’s a lot quieter since we taped up all their mouths, Lord Powerscourt.’ Derzhenov spoke as if he was showing a potential purchaser round a desirable residence in Mayfair. ‘The neighbours used to complain about the screams. One or two of the guests manage to free themselves of the tapes but not for long.’

  He talked, Powerscourt thought, as if he were discussing a new method of producing pig iron or some other industrial process rather than the torture techniques of the Russian secret service. He shivered slightly.

  ‘We’ve been trying out some new methods,’ General Derzhenov went on, peering in through one of the grilles and making approving noises. ‘We’ve recruited a number of former peasants recently. They have a remarkable aptitude for the work.’

  The General tapped lightly on the glass and made winding movements with his hand as if he thought the rack or the press holding the victim should be made even tighter. Then he waved happily as if his suggestion had worked.

  ‘Do you know what goes on in the peasant villages, Lord Powerscourt? No? Fascinating, quite fascinating. Some of the miscreants in these places,’ Derzhenov went on, walking slowly along his corridor, ‘were known to have had their eyes pulled out, their nails hammered into their body, legs and arms cut off, and stakes driven down their throats. We find most terrorists are only too happy to talk before they get to the end of that.’ This time Derzhenov beamed happily at his visitor.

  Powerscourt saw to his horror that the man was worse than a sadist. He was a connoisseur of torture, discussing its refinement as Johnny Fitzgerald might compare the more expensive brands of Bordeaux.

  ‘Another favourite punishment in the peasant village,’ Derzhenov went on, smiling slightly at the cruelty, ‘was to raise the victim on a pulley with his feet and hands tied together and to drop him so that the vertebrae in his back were broken; this was repeated several times until the victim was reduced to a spineless sack.’

  They were halfway up the corridor now. Powerscourt was feeling sick. Through the door to his left he could hear the swish of a whip. It sounded as if two were being applied at the same time.

  ‘One last example, Lord Powerscourt, one of our most successful imports from the peasant village.’ Derzhenov was smiling broadly now, rather like a wolf, Powerscourt thought, as he looked at the dirty teeth of the secret policeman. ‘The naked victim is wrapped in a wet sack, a pillow is tied around his torso, and his stoma
ch is beaten with hammers or iron bars, so that his internal organs are crushed without leaving any external marks on his body. Not a single one! Neat, don’t you think?’

  A single piercing scream came suddenly from the last cell on the right. It was followed by a second, even more agonized than the first. Then Powerscourt heard a terrible thump as if somebody had hit the victim in the stomach with tremendous force. Then the General disappeared into the cell himself. Again Powerscourt heard the sound of whips applied in a frenzy. Derzhenov was sweating slightly as he came out, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Sorry about that, Lord Powerscourt. Fellow was quite out of order. Now then, pity we’ve got to leave here but you mustn’t be late for your appointment with the Interior Ministry. Come, we’ll talk in my office upstairs.’

  How, Powerscourt wondered, did the man know about the time of his interview at the ministry? He hoped the General didn’t have a torture collection in his room, glass bookshelves perhaps, filled with whips and clamps and racks. He wasn’t very far wrong.

  ‘I think I’m going to open a torture museum when I retire, Lord Powerscourt,’ General Derzhenov said, taking the stairs two at a time. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to send me some contributions from England. I particularly like the sound of the Scavenger’s Daughter from the time of the Tudors. Very labour-saving, that one, I’ve always thought. You just fit the hoops on the criminal, making sure he or she is properly bent over, and you can leave them, for days or weeks if necessary. You don’t have to go on pulling the bloody levers as they do with the rack.’

  The General seated himself behind an enormous desk. There was not a note or a file to be seen. It was as if the General or his staff tidied up every scrap of paper after his day’s work each evening. He waved Powerscourt towards a small uncomfortable chair to the side. A great brute of a man with thick black hair and a black beard that almost covered his face slipped into a seat opposite Powerscourt. He was enormous. His hands looked as though they could pull a normal person’s arms or legs off with a couple of tugs.