The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ whereabouts of the Romanovs was on everyone’s tongue. The consensus agreed with the announcement he had witnessed – that the Tsar was dead and the family removed to a ‘safe place’. The announcement had also been published on a broadsheet that had been pasted up around the city and recovered by the Czechs. Still, there were no bodies, and no eye witnesses to the Tsar’s execution, since the executioners had fled the city, presumably with the Romanov women and servants in tow.

      ‘But the worst sin is that there is no champagne, none whatsoever. The Bolsheviks drank it all!’ a man was screaming at him. He was flanked by two red-headed women who hung on his arms and offered their cheeks to Ryzhkov. One woman had torn her dress and her heavy breasts were exposed. She made fluttering attempts to cover herself, and then gave up.

      ‘What is this, then?’ Ryzhkov said. They had forced a bottle on him.

      ‘Vodka! Made locally. You mix it with lime juice and fizzy water from the springs! Goes down good, eh?’ the man shouted. A band had begun playing but they were as drunk as everyone else and the music wheezed and swerved through the tonal spectrum. Ryzhkov put his mouth to the bottle and drank the faux champagne. At least it was cold, with an antiseptic taste that seemed somehow more healthy than the punch that had been served but had now run out.

      ‘Come on now,’ the second of the redheads said to him. ‘You’re good for it, eh?’

      Ryzhkov didn’t know what she was talking about for a moment. The other two were dancing. The music was just an unstructured wailing, all out of beat and synchronization. The woman was kissing him now, and pulling him into the shadows. The room was emptying out, and filling up again. They had taken over the whole hotel. He found himself in a corridor with a group of other officers, the uniforms too confusing to place. The doors were open and the true orgy had begun in the opened-up suites.

      ‘We may die,’ the redhead said into his ear. ‘We may die at any moment.’ She pulled him into a room. There was another couple on the floor, but it didn’t matter. Her hands were on his fly and he had thrown his coat on the floor. They wrestled on the bed with the other couple groaning beside them. He hadn’t had anyone in a long time, and now she swam before him, her breasts wobbling as he tried to thrust himself into her, her face looking up at him, imploring him, gripping him by his buttocks, lunging up to snatch a kiss. The other couple had finished and were standing there laughing. He saw that she was talking with them, having a conversation in the middle of his efforts. ‘…not much…not much at all,’ she was saying. After a moment she pushed him away.

      ‘Too drunk,’ he muttered, and the woman slapped him. For a moment he saw white, reeled backwards and made a fist, flung it at the woman, but she had already got up. Then he was on the bed, his face pressed into the hot blankets, while the other man hurled abuse at him. The other woman was laughing as the redhead complained to her about his quality.

      He staggered to the door but didn’t make it. Vomited across an armchair, stood there clinging to it and coughing and wiping his mouth off on the antimacassar. There was a bottle and he took a drink to wash his mouth and spat it out on the floor. From the doorway he could see that more people had arrived. The fun was continuing. A girl was slumped against the panelling and crying. He stood there, supporting himself in the doorway and watching her. She was thin, blonde, and her hair had been cut short and frizzy. Her eyes were puffy and streaked where the kohl had run. She looked terribly alone in the middle of it all, absently beating the wall with her silk scarf in one hand, and holding the other to her mouth to stop the sobbing. She looked up at him and then started crying all over again.

      They met in the centre of the corridor. Others were walking around them. It was like being an island in a river of drunks. She pressed her face into his jacket, sobbing, then looked up at him. The only beautiful woman he had seen all night long, he thought. The only honest thing in the city. She pressed her lips to his mouth and pulled him to her, strong for such a thin girl. He felt himself growing hard and she reached for him and they had each other there on the edge of the sofa, against the wall, everything happening at once, a quick little hurricane of lust and hands slipping over fabric and flesh, the bones of her back, her legs trying to reach around him, her face pressed into his neck, and his into the spikes of her hair. The smell of flowers.

      It was over as quickly as it had started and they clung to each other while everything was ebbing away. She said something that he couldn’t hear because of the noise of the lift just down the hall opening and closing spasmodically as each new drunken troupe tried to line it up with the floor.

      Then suddenly she pulled away and was gone, not even a look back, and he was there, still in the river, fumbling with his clothing and not feeling better, not feeling any better at all.

      He would leave, he thought. He would just walk to Vladivostok if that’s what it took. No one would miss him in this chaos. Zezulin would assume he’d been killed, probably wouldn’t waste the effort to take revenge on Vera. The world had already gone to hell. All that remained was the burning.

      He staggered towards the stairs, and met the man who’d been in the room with him. There were words, Ryzhkov couldn’t hear them or understand. It might have been a different language. He punched the man hard in the chest and he stepped back and slid down the wall, groaning. Everyone around them laughed. At the landing he saw Giustiniani coming up.

      ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. ‘This is Judge Nametkin, he’s in charge of our investigation.’ Beside Giustiniani was a portly man, deep into his forties, a bald head that someone had written upon with lipstick.

      ‘Hello,’ the man said. Large grey eyes looked up and smiled at him lazily.

      ‘This is Ryzhkov, our new detective,’ Giustiniani prompted and Nametkin extended his hand. ‘We’re going over there right away. Might as well get started, eh?’

      ‘Where?’ said Ryzhkov, and realized that he’d only made a noise, not a word, so he repeated again, ‘Where-are-we-going?’

      ‘Don’t worry, you’ll find out,’ Nametkin said, forming his words with equal precision. ‘Should we walk? What do you think?’ he asked Giustiniani, bracing himself against the wall.

      ‘Mmm…a cab, I think. The government is paying after all,’ and they both laughed. As they went down the stairs, a man approached Nametkin and blocked their descent. His face was dirty, rat-like.

      ‘You want to see Anastasia, comrade? I’ll take you to her, but there are necessary fees –’ Giustiniani batted him away and he collapsed on the stairs and began to cry. ‘I have them, I have them all! On good authority!’ he shrieked behind them as they escaped to the foyer.

      ‘Loyalty,’ Nametkin was saying to Giustiniani as they got into the cab. ‘Loyalty is a porous, negotiable thing. This is the White world. You can believe in the virtues all you want, but where are you going to put your money?’

      ‘Exactly. Money,’ said Giustiniani. Ryzhkov took the seat in the back, feeling sick all over again.

      ‘It’s the worst of the worst. Who do you think is going to win? That’s the basis, the entire basis…’

      ‘Exactly. Basis.’ As they rolled through the city Nametkin began to snore. Giustiniani leaned forward, said something to the driver, and they turned back.

      ‘It’s no use. We’re all in. We’ll do it tomorrow,’ he explained to Ryzhkov, who had no idea, no idea at all what they were doing, where they were going, or why.

      As the cab drew closer to the barracks he saw the girl he’d СКАЧАТЬ