A Game of Soldiers. Stephen Miller

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       FIVE

      The upper tier of the Marinsky was more sauna than theatre; a miasma of stale perfume, cigar smoke, and sweat. After the procession, Ryzhkov and his team had been able to return to the dank dormitory that Internal kept in the basement of their headquarters building on the Fontanka. He was able to wolf down some soup, took just enough time to file a request for a St Petersburg Criminal Investigation report on the Peplovskaya Street murder, and then they were rushing across the city to the theatre.

      The toothache had diminished in the late afternoon, but now he was in real pain, the throbbing in his jaw keeping pace with the tempo of Glinka’s score for A Life for the Tsar. All he could do was lean against the carved walls of the opulent blue-and-gold dress circle corridor of the Marinsky and feel the sweat trickle down his spine into his underpants.

      Hokhodiev and Dudenko were pacing up and down the corridor, locked into one of their sporadic arguments. On this occasion it was over the ruthlessness of the fighting in the Balkans, the various armies like a pack of crows picking over the carcass of the Ottoman Empire and the waning hopes for peace. Dima was doing most of the talking, since he fancied himself a great critic of kings and politicians.

      The bad tooth was his own fault, Ryzhkov decided. He had made more than one appointment to have it fixed, but had been scared of what his dentist would find. The molar had been cracked for years, the result of a violent confrontation with a group of metalworkers who had surprised him as they’d poured out of a clandestine meeting where they had been preparing strike plans. He had been caught right in their path, incriminated by the revolver he was loading. He hadn’t even got it closed before one of the metalworkers hit him with something hard, like a brick. He didn’t remember anything after that.

      They had taken his gun, of course, and left him with a cracked jaw, swelled to the size of a coconut for nearly three weeks. Drinking through a straw. Listening to Filippa berate him a dozen times a day about his choice of occupation before she left for her uncle’s, tired of playing the role of nurse.

      And so, yes, in typical Russian fashion, he deserved to carry a little bit of hell around with him. He had made mistakes, he had committed crimes. He had sinned, he had sinned repeatedly. He had never, never been good, never lived up to expectations, not really. So, then. All the pain was justified. Perhaps his father had been right all along. He should have tried to accomplish more, to have made more of himself. But he hadn’t. He’d either been too distracted or too lazy, and when he’d finally picked a vocation it had been for all the wrong reasons.

      He’d ended up being the one who cleaned up the trash, swept the mess of the empire into a corner, and then saluted his betters as if nothing had ever been there. He could have been someone of worth, someone of substance. Instead he had become a kind of necessary rat, a creature devoid of status, respect, or glamour. Something vile, ruthless, and efficient.

      Not just a policeman, but more than a policeman.

      Pyotr Mikhalovich Ryzhkov was an Okhrana investigator, a member of the dreaded Third Branch of the Imperial Chancellery. He had advanced in his career to the point where he led a section of investigators, all of whom were supposedly elite policemen. They were charged with the task of suppressing all forms of dissent against the Tsar, the Imperial family, its property, or its policies.

      Okhrana was divided into three branches. The Foreign Agency, sometimes called ‘The White Branch’, held the portfolio of international espionage. Its work was conducted by men and women whose annual budget for clothing exceeded Ryzhkov’s income by thousands of roubles. Their battles were conducted in the glittering salons of embassies spread around the globe.

      Closer to home was the External Agency, responsible for the active policing of threats to the state. External rigorously monitored the activities of any organization that might have reasons to bring down the empire. They studied reports of terrorists’ comings and goings, read their letters, deciphered their codes, sifted through their rubbish, and analysed their publications. No cell was too small to avoid scrutiny. Thousands of External clerks maintained a vast system of files containing information and photographs of anyone charged with a crime; dossiers on all labour leaders, prominent members of the liberal and radical political parties, exiled or expatriate politicians, editors and journalists of magazines, books, or seditious literature of all kinds.

      But Ryzhkov and his men were gorokhovniks – members of the Internal Agency. The nickname was a slur derived from the slang term for their long raincoats named after Petersburg’s famously drab Gorokhovaya Prospekt.

      Internal investigators were considered little more than thugs and informants by the more genteel External agents. They operated out of safe-houses and flats, often used multiple identities and routinely dealt in conspiracies, blackmail, bribery, and assassination. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, filled in when the External needed them, snatched sleep and meals when and where they could.

      There was no such thing as a normal day for an Internal investigator. Within the branch, marriages were doomed to failure; Ryzhkov’s was on its last legs. Children were neglected. He thought himself lucky that he had none. To relieve the futility, Internal investigators often fell prey to drink or the kind of low level corruption that came with nearly unlimited police power. It was more than a job, it was a way of life, a way СКАЧАТЬ