House of the Hanged. Mark Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ but with a lot of life still left in them.

      Run, he told himself. Settle your breathing and stretch out your stride. He would take the next street on the left, head south, lose himself in the back streets around the Mariinsky Theatre.

      Tom glimpsed the revolver in the other man’s hand a split-second before they collided. Both had been slowing to make the turn, but the head-on impact still sent them sprawling in a tangle of limbs.

      The gun. Where was it? No longer in the man’s hand, but within reach. Tom lashed out with his foot, slamming the heel of his boot into the man’s head, catching him in the temple. This bought him a precious second, enough to give him a fighting chance. The two of them scrabbled and clawed for possession of the weapon, the lancing pain in Tom’s damaged wrist numbed by the panic.

      The moment he realized he’d been beaten to the prize, the Cheka man froze. Keeping the revolver trained on him, Tom scrabbled to his feet.

      ‘Please . . .’ said the man, raising a futile hand to stave off the bullet.

      Tom glanced down Admiralty Quay: vague smudges of movement in the distance, drawing closer, but too far off yet to pose a threat.

      Tom looked back at the man. He was young, Tom’s age, his lean, handsome face contorted with fear, and in those pitiful eyes Tom saw everyone who had ever been cruel to him, everyone who had ever hurt him, deceived him, betrayed him.

      ‘Vade in pacem,’ he said quietly.

      Go in peace – the same parting words of Latin which the priest had offered to him in the chapel at St Isaac’s just minutes before. He didn’t know why they sprang from his mouth; he didn’t care.

      He was gone, disappearing down the darkened street, flying now on adrenaline wings.

      The apartment building was a drab five-floored affair on Liteiny Prospekt, near the junction with the Nevsky. The grey morning light didn’t do it any favours.

      Tom watched and waited from across the street, one eye out for Cheka patrols, or anyone else showing undue interest in the apartment building. He had got rid of the bag, abandoning it in the coal cellar where he’d passed a sleepless night, swaddled in the clothing intended for Irina. The bullet that had knocked him flat in the park was now in his hip pocket. He had tried to think of it as his lucky charm, but how could it be? If Irina wasn’t dead by now, she would be soon. He was too much of a realist to believe otherwise.

      He knew how the Cheka operated; months of tracking their working methods from the safety of Finland had introduced him to the brutal truth. In Kharkov they went in for scalping and hand flaying; in Voronezh they favoured rolling you around in a barrel hammered through with nails. Crucifixion, stoning and impalement were commonplace, and in Orel they liked to pour water over their victims, leaving them to freeze outside overnight into crystal statues.

      This is what the Revolution had brought out in men: not the best, but the very worst, the stuff of bygone eras, when Genghis Kahn and his blood-thirsty hordes had run merry riot through the Steppes.

      In no way could Tom be held accountable for the dark state of nature that lurked in men, but he was to blame for choosing to gamble with it, and losing. How would things have turned out for Irina if he hadn’t tried to intervene? She might have weathered the incarceration, the torture, and been released. What if he had underestimated her? Should he not have had more faith in her resilience?

      These were the questions that had kept him awake in the coal cellar, and he couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t plague his thoughts. If he had come here to this grim apartment building on Liteiny Prospekt, it was only with a view to dragging some small consolation from the disaster.

      He had a street number and an apartment number, but no name. Markku had told him that the name was of no importance; the one he knew her by was probably false anyway.

      ‘It’s a woman?’ Tom had enquired.

      ‘It’s something close,’ had been Markku’s enigmatic reply.

      The problem lay in slipping past the concierge un noticed. It was well known that the building caretakers of Petrograd were rapidly becoming the unofficial eyes and ears of the Cheka. It was even rumoured that some made false denunciations of their residents, leaving them free to pillage the apartments once the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ had been carted off.

      Seeing an elderly woman rummaging for her key at the entrance door, Tom hurried across the street, arriving as the door was swinging shut behind the woman. He stopped it with his hand, waited a few moments, then slipped inside.

      The cavernous entrance hall was dark and deserted. He heard the woman puffing her way up the stone staircase, and through the glazed doors directly ahead of him he could see a man shovelling snow in the courtyard.

      The apartment was on the third floor, towards the back of the building. He knocked, and was about to knock again when he heard a female voice.

      ‘Who is it?’

      ‘Markku sent me,’ he replied, in Russian.

      ‘I don’t know anyone called Markku.’

      ‘He told me to say that you make the best pelmeni in all Russia . . . after his mother’s.’

      Three locks were undone before the door was opened as far as the guard chain would permit. A small woman, a shade over five feet, peered up at him defiantly. Her black hair was threaded with silver strands and pulled back tightly off her lined face. Her dark eyes were clear and hard, like polished onyx. They roamed over him from head to toe, then past him, searching the corridor behind. Only then did she release the chain.

      Tom followed her along a corridor into a large and extravagantly furnished living room. The rococo divans, Persian rugs and gilt-framed portraits – one of a booted general, another of some high-bosomed ancestress – had obviously been intended for a far nobler space than this; here, they looked awkward and overblown, eager to be elsewhere.

      Tom turned and found himself staring into the barrel of a handgun.

      ‘Take off your coat,’ said the woman. ‘Take it off and throw it on that chair there.’

      There was nothing strained or hysterical in her voice. She might just as well have been a doctor inviting him to remove his clothes in a consulting room.

      Tom did as she requested, unquestioningly, watching while she searched the coat, knowing what she would find. Her eyes only left his momentarily, to glance down at the revolver as she pulled it from one of the pockets.

      ‘This is a Cheka weapon,’ she said, levelling her own gun at his head.

      Tom cowered. ‘It was. Until last night.’

      ‘You’re not Russian.’

      ‘I’m English.’

      She switched effortlessly to English, with just the barest hint of an accent. ‘And where were you born?’

      ‘Norwich.’

      ‘A flat and dull county, Norfolk.’

      ‘You obviously don’t know it well.’

      ‘Sit СКАЧАТЬ