Death on the Nevskii Prospekt Page 20

  ‘Powerful? Poppycock!’ Derzhenov tossed off the remainder of his vodka. ‘Do I need to remind you what was wrong with the first one? Inaccurate archery fire again. Nowhere near the heart, for God’s sake. Arrows not drawing blood. Pathetic. Sebastian should have been dead long before if they could have fired straight, those Mauretanian archers. Know what I think, Powerscourt? It’s a serious failure of duty by the counter-terrorist forces in Rome. Couldn’t be tolerated here in Russia. Third century AD, all this stuff with arrows and loincloths and so on, I think. Roman history not my strong point, but this Sebastian had been clearly discovered by the authorities giving comfort and sympathy to Christian revolutionary elements. Enemy of the state. Should have been disposed of quietly in some Roman basement like our own. No bugger would ever have heard of him then. No bloody paintings either. Instead the archers are so bad the man survives! He was rescued, for God’s sake, by some other terrorist sympathizer called Irene and nursed back to health. Fellow only dies when he shows himself to the Emperor who has him stoned or cudgelled to death, can’t remember which. Terrible failure by the security services, that’s how I portray it to our students.’

  Powerscourt was saved from the need for speech by the reappearance of the waiter with the vodka tray who glided in almost invisibly from a door hidden by a tapestry.

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ said Derzhenov, downing one glass and taking another. ‘Let me lead you to our next pair of pictures, Lord Powerscourt. These I always take care to show our new recruits. Can I interest you in a couple of Flagellations on the way?’ Derzhenov had moved away to the window and was looking at the snow falling fast on the courtyard outside. ‘Both remarkable examples of how not to whip a man? No? A couple of heads of John the Baptist, perhaps? One a Caravaggio where the mouth of the beheaded prophet seems to carry on speaking after death? My own favourite depiction of violence, the blinding of Samson, a quite remarkable early work by Rubens? No? Well, before we step along to the last two, perhaps we could speak of Mr Martin.’

  Powerscourt had known this must be coming. He wondered if the violent paintings had been meant to soften him up. Well, he thought to himself, he had seen far worse things in battle. Then, he told himself, so too had Derzhenov.

  ‘My assumption, Lord Powerscourt,’ the Okhrana man continued to stare out at the snow, deliberately avoiding eye contact in the manner of an Old Bailey barrister, ‘is that you have not found the answer to the death of Mr Martin. If you had, you would have gone home by now. Is that right?’

  ‘You will understand, General, that I am not at liberty to discuss the case with you, however much I might want to.’

  ‘Nonsense, Lord Powerscourt, don’t give me that rubbish. If you thought I could help, you would have been begging for my assistance.’

  ‘And you must understand, General, my belief that if you had the information you seek, you would not be questioning me at all.’

  Not so much chess as fencing, Powerscourt felt, unsure of his ground. He wondered if the Okhrana man had read Lord Rosebery’s cable by now.

  ‘You have been to speak to that mistress of Martin’s, I believe, Lord Powerscourt. Did she have anything to say for herself, apart from the names of all the waltzes they ever danced together?’

  ‘I’m sure you have spoken to Mrs Kerenkova in your time, General. You would have been remiss if you had not. She told me what I am sure you already know, that her husband is here in St Petersburg, supervising the repairs on his ship.’

  ‘I did know that, but thank you for being prepared to tell me. Anything else?’

  Powerscourt thought it might help his cause if he flung unimportant titbits in front of the Russian. ‘Only that he knew Mr Martin was coming, sometime round about the middle of December,’ he said. ‘Do you find that odd?’

  The Russian shrugged his shoulders. ‘The military, be they army or navy, are always close to the intelligence services, I think. They talk, they gossip. So you are staying for a while longer, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘I hope so,’ was the reply, ‘unless something terrible happens, or you decide to throw me out.’

  ‘Thank you for being so co-operative, Lord Powerscourt. Let me just show you my last two treasures.’

  They passed beyond a couple of severed heads, sitting incongruously on silver salvers, and a couple of flagellation scenes where the action was too dark to see properly. Then Derzhenov stopped. ‘My second favourite,’ he said solemnly. ‘The Flaying of Marsyas, by Titian,’ he went on reverentially. ‘For anyone who needs to extract information from the unwilling, it is an inspiration.’

  Powerscourt looked at the painting. It told the story of the flaying of the satyr, half man, half goat, called Marsyas who challenged Apollo to a musical contest, Marsyas on his pipe, Apollo on the lyre. When Apollo won, some said by challenging his opponent to play his instrument upside down as Apollo could his lyre, his reward was to have Marsyas flayed alive for his insolence in challenging a god. The action took place in a wood or a forest towards the end of the day and the colours were a study in flesh tones up through various shades of brown to a pale pink. There was no blue or green or red to be seen. Marsyas had been tied upside down to a tree. Bits of an improbable pink ribbon could be seen fastening the ends of his legs to the branches. His hands at the bottom of the painting were tied together. The dark brown and occasional white of the fur on his satyr’s legs contrasted with the hairless trunk and chest beneath. His arms formed a circle round his head. To the left of the painting a young woman was playing the violin, another stringed instrument that would mock the satyr in his agony. To the right were some spectators, a naked man carrying what looked like a bucket of coal, possibly for a fire to heat up the flaying devices, an old woman sitting with her hand on her chin, a child and a couple of dogs. A naked man with a black woollen hat was working on the goat part of Marsyas with a silvery instrument. A section of goat fur had already been removed from around the knee. A young woman, scarcely more than a girl, was attacking the skin on his upper chest with a silver knife. Marsyas himself seemed to have passed out. All the participants looked as though this was a perfectly normal routine that happened every day in the forest, hanging a satyr upside down and cutting the skin off his body.

  ‘Just suppose, Powerscourt,’ Derzhenov had that cruel smile again, ‘that this Marsyas was a terrorist, a revolutionary, a maker or a planter of bombs rather than a stupid satyr with a pipe. How long do you think he would last out before he talked under this treatment? Ten minutes? Half an hour? You would have to be very tough indeed to last much longer than that. They say the French used this technique on Spanish guerillas in the Napoleonic Wars. The painter has failed once again, of course. How they shied away from the sight of blood, these sensitive Venetians!’ Derzhenov waved his right hand expansively at the upside-down figure of the satyr. ‘The whole area round the body of Marsyas here would be drenched with blood. This section of the forest would be like a small abattoir, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt nodded feebly. By his calculations there was only one more painting to go. He remembered suddenly seeing the Rubens called The Blinding of Samson some years before in Amsterdam. It was one of the most terrible paintings he had ever seen, Samson held down inside a cave while a group of soldiers in armour assault him. A big soldier on the left of the strongman has a great rapier, pointing directly towards Samson’s face. The viewer thinks at first that this sword is going to do the terrible deed. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that another, less obtrusive, soldier, crouching by Samson’s side, has this very second driven a dagger into Samson’s right eye and the first spurts of blood are beginning to shoot outwards and upwards. What on earth was this last one going to be like? What horrors had been committed to paint by some unfortunate artist working to fulfil a sadistic patron’s fancy?

  ‘Here we are,’ said Derzhenov, rubbing his hands. ‘What a pity we are about to run out of time. I am going to be late for my appointment with th
e Foreign Minister. Never mind. It’s another martyr. I do like martyrs.’ He giggled slightly as he said the words. ‘St Lawrence this time, not, I’m told, one of the crème de la crème of Christian martyr-hood, but a significant figure all the same.’

  At first sight the painting, by a French artist called Jean Valentin of the early seventeenth century, looked innocuous enough compared to Derzhenov’s previous compositions. St Lawrence, Powerscourt recalled, was an early Christian martyr of the third century AD, sentenced to death shortly after his Pope. On the far left of the painting a Roman soldier was holding back a crowd. On the far right were a couple of young men carrying buckets with what looked like fish in them. A Roman captain on a horse looked preoccupied. Seated on a table were two or three figures who seemed to be supporters of St Lawrence. The light was dark everywhere except for the bottom half on the left-hand side. There, St Lawrence, clad only in a loincloth, was being fastened on to a gridiron. Another man, naked to the waist, seemed to be supervising the fire underneath it. The flames were clearly taking hold below. It was obvious that in a few minutes St Lawrence would be totally bound to his gridiron and that his fate was to be burnt, grilled or roasted to death. The saint himself was calm, if a little apprehensive as his fate drew near.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering what the appeal of this one is, aren’t you, Lord Powerscourt? All looks a bit tame, bit peaceful?’

  ‘Oh, I think the appeal is perfectly obvious, General,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s the waiting, the suspense, not knowing how long your death is going to take that appeals to you, I think.’

  ‘Well done, Lord Powerscourt, well done indeed. Suppose you were our friend the bomb maker or some other form of revolutionary vermin. The arrows could despatch you in a couple of minutes if they were properly controlled. The flaying would probably despatch you pretty quickly, unless,’ he giggled suddenly as if the thought had only just occurred to him, ‘unless, of course, you took things really slowly, one cut every half an hour maybe. But the gridiron! The gridiron! You could turn the temperature up and down just as you could on a domestic oven at home. Very slow roasting could take hours and hours before the victim is killed. Very fast and he’d exchange one form of hell for another in a couple of minutes. The interrogator has total control, you see. Wouldn’t you talk and confess all after a couple of hours of the leisurely cooking, the slow roast, Powerscourt? I know I would. That’s why I think this is one of the finest, it’s most likely to get a confession. Heaven knows why the wretched French got so excited about the guillotine. Nobody had time to tell the authorities anything at all when the blade was shooting down towards their necks.’

  Derzhenov collected his vodka tumblers and checked that all the paintings were hanging properly. ‘I forgot to tell you, Powerscourt,’ he said as he led the way out of their long corridor, ‘that someone in the Catholic hierarchy must have had a warped sense of humour. Do you know what he’s patron saint of, among other things, our mutual friend St Lawrence here? Guess.’ Powerscourt had no idea. ‘Prepare yourself, my friend,’ said Derzhenov, smiling broadly. ‘After all he went through on his gridiron, St Lawrence is the patron saint of cooks!’

  Two days later Natasha Bobrinsky was off duty at the Alexander Palace. She kept telling herself to be calm. I may have this very important piece of news which is a very great secret, she said to herself as the train carried her the fifteen miles or so from Tsarskoe Selo to St Petersburg. In her fashionable bag she held the note from Mikhail inviting her to tea in the Shaporov Palace. Some older people might say I am only eighteen years old, she thought, but I am a woman of the world, a friend and colleague of a great investigator sent from London to look into a mystery, and the lover of one of the most eligible young men in St Petersburg. Natasha was wearing a dark red coat of her mother’s today with a black fur hat. Her friends said it set off her dark hair and her green eyes. It was two years since she had borrowed the coat, and she was not sure she had actually told her mother about the loan, but it served very well.

  As she set out from the station to walk to the Shaporov Palace, she was so lost in her own thoughts that she had not time to notice a soldier, who had been sitting in the next carriage staring blankly out of the window. The soldier, wearing the normal uniform and greatcoat, seemed to look into the distance on the steps of the railway station as if he expected a sign or a signal. Then he followed Natasha, about fifty yards behind. She was not to know that all sections of the Russian security services, police, Okhrana, maritime and customs, imperial protection units, all favoured military personnel for the work of following and trailing persons of interest. It was the uniform, they would have said, if pressed. Uniforms are so much more anonymous. So when Natasha went into the main entrance of the Shaporov Palace, the soldier backed away into a doorway some seventy yards distant. He lit a cigarette and checked in his pocket for the half bottle of vodka. He settled down to wait. Most of the people he was asked to follow were middle-aged men. A pretty girl made a delightful exception. The man in the doorway wasn’t a soldier at all. He had been recruited into the ranks of the watchers and proved reliable. Out on the Vyborg side his wife and family were grateful that he was in work and much better paid than he would be in one of those terrible factories.

  Natasha tried to look unconcerned as she walked into the little Dutch sitting room. It was called the Dutch sitting room because it had a multitude of Dutch and Flemish paintings crammed on to its walls, Rembrandt portraits, Rubens landscapes, seascapes by Van de Velde. Powerscourt didn’t think General Derzhenov would care much for any of them. Natasha was wearing a long black skirt with an elaborate shirt of white lace fastened to the neck on top. Mikhail was translating for Powerscourt from a navy newspaper that carried details of ship repairs, including Tamara Kerenkova’s husband’s ship, the Tsarevich. Powerscourt rose to shake Natasha by the hand. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ he said with a smile, ‘you have something important to tell us.’

  ‘How did you know?’ said Natasha, slightly cross. ‘I thought I was being frightfully grown up and reserved about it.’

  ‘You were, my dear Natasha,’ said Powerscourt, feeling rather like her great-grandfather, ‘but sometimes people have a sort of glow about them if they’re excited. Why don’t you tell us all about it.’

  Natasha folded her hands together in her lap as her governesses had taught her. Although she had rehearsed this little speech about fifty times by now, she suddenly felt it slipping from her memory once the moment of revelation had come.

  ‘It was the beginning of this week,’ she began, looking alternately at Mikhail and Powerscourt. Mikhail was wondering if they would have a chance to be alone together on this day. Powerscourt was wondering just how much danger the girl was in. ‘All the girls, the Tsar’s daughters, I mean, were out in the park with their sledges by Toboggan Hill. Toboggan Hill was built years ago to provide a good slope to run down in the snow. The girls all love it. The little boy was sick, he was in bed at the house with his mother and three doctors from St Petersburg fussing over him.’

  Powerscourt thought it might be advantageous at some point to find out exactly what was wrong with Alexei, the Tsarevich.

  ‘They’re all very good with their toboggans,’ Natasha went on, ‘though the two elder ones are quite cautious. The third child, Marie, is easily the most gifted at it, but she is also the most reckless. This is what happened.’

  Natasha paused briefly to concentrate on her memories. Already the afternoon seemed like a dream from long ago. ‘It was growing dark,’ she began.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but were there just you and the girls there at this point, no security police, no soldiers?’

  ‘There had been a soldier,’ Natasha said, ‘but he seemed to have disappeared. I think he may have gone to relieve himself in the bushes. They’re always doing that. Anyway, it was very nearly dark and I thought there was only enough light for two more descents of Toboggan Hill. Marie got one of her big sist
ers to push her across the top so she had a good head of speed when she began her descent. Then it all went wrong. Her toboggan hit a stone or something and she was thrown out, hitting her head on a tree trunk hidden in the snow. She was flung off through the air. All the other girls started screaming and wailing. I was just going to try to calm them down when this soldier appeared from a sort of shed by the Krasnoselskie Gates not far away. He seemed to know what he was doing. He told me he knew about first aid and things, and that he would carry Marie back to the Alexander Palace. He picked her up and collected the other girls as well. One thing he did say, was that I had to mind his shed until he came back. I’ve thought since that he must have assumed, as a soldier or guard or whatever he was, that he would get a reward for bringing the girls back.’

  Natasha paused and took a drink of tea. Mikhail looked at her admiringly.

  ‘The shed was very crude, Lord Powerscourt. There was a sort of writing ledge with a big book on it. The Captain of the Guard from the far side of the gates told me I had to write down the name and purpose of visit of anybody coming in. The only person who came in my time was the piano tuner. But here comes the bit that will interest you, Lord Powerscourt. I turned the pages back to the days when Mr Martin was in St Petersburg. On the evening of December the 22nd last year, Mr Martin came to see the Tsar alone. If people are coming in a body, all their names are entered together. Mr Martin was there on his own. He probably saw the Tsar when the rest of the household had retired for the night.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Well done, Natasha!’ said Mikhail.

  ‘Indeed,’ Powerscourt chimed in, ‘extremely well done. Natasha, are you sure nobody saw you looking at the back entries?’

  ‘Well, I can’t be certain. But the captain and his men were all on the other side of the gates. He’s not even meant to come inside the park at all. And the soldier who carried Marie to the palace didn’t come back for a good ten minutes or so.’