A Game of Soldiers. Stephen Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ was wrong. They had had one child. Died from typhoid fever before Ryzhkov had met Hokhodiev. ‘And when they do finally look up, when they see how these fools, fucking Blue Shirt, and the fucking Tsarina who will give him any damn thing if he just lets her suck his cock –’

      ‘Hey, hey…’ Ryzhkov said gently to quieten him down. They had their own room, but the walls were thin.

      ‘…And then there’s your day of reckoning, right there, your Armageddon, and your fucking Sodom and Gomorrah turning into salt. You free all the damn serfs and they don’t know any better. They pile into the city, heading for the bright lights, work themselves to death in some factory and they think that’s heaven on earth. They just want money like anyone else. And when they wake up, you know who they’ll blame? Who they’ll be stoning to death in the damn square, when the whole pile of shit goes down the shitter? It won’t be the damn Tsar, he’ll be on his yacht, safe and sound, heading for some spa –’

      ‘Hey, Kostya –’

      ‘No, brother, it’ll be us that’ll be dragged through the streets. Us, that’s who.’

      Ryzhkov reached out and poured out the last inch of vodka on to the floor.

      ‘You think I’m drunk,’ Hokhodiev said, an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace.

      ‘Well…maybe just a little –’ The bottle suddenly slipped from his fingers and he reflexively swiped at it and, only by chance, managed to knock it up on to the bench where it spun around harmlessly. Dudenko woke up with a jerk and looked around with a horrified expression. They both found the spasm funny, laughed and leaned back against the wall.

      ‘You two are drunk,’ Dudenko said dully.

      ‘I am drunk,’ Hokhodiev said quietly. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t know whereof I speak, eh? Remember the words of your friend, the prophet.’

      ‘All right, I will.’

      ‘They’re coming to get…us…’

      ‘If we don’t get them first,’ Ryzhkov said.

      ‘Yes. That’s right. So, yes, brother. Them first. I will help you,’ Kostya said and put a hand on his shoulder. The weight of his arm felt like a log. ‘I’ll help you right now. And you will too, won’t you, Dima?’

      Dudenko looked up from the floor and blinked his eyes. Without his glasses he was blind. ‘What?’ he asked, not having been listening. ‘What? Whatever it is, yes,’ he said. And then he laughed.

      Exhausted, drained, and dizzy from the heat of the baths, they dressed, paid their bill, and climbed out into the yellow dawn. Stood like dimwitted beasts on the embankment, blinking and looking around for a cab. ‘I think it’s time to go home,’ Hokhodiev said.

      ‘Yes…’ Ryzhkov muttered, suddenly bone-tired, staggering out on to the cobbles in the direction of the Obvodni.

      ‘Goodnight,’ he said to his friends, to the shining waters in the canal, to the impassive façades with their metalled roofs. Goodnight to the gleaming spire of the Admiralty, goodnight to the morning sun.

      

      Only a few groggy hours later, supposedly the start of a new week, Izachik slipped another thin envelope across his desk. ‘Here are more of the papers you requested, sir…’

      Inside Ryzhkov found a one-page carbon-copied list of the owners of the Apollo Bindery at 34 Peplovskaya. According to the police, the Apollo Bindery had long since gone out of business; the building itself was owned by a private property trust, and on the date of the girl’s defenestration the lessee had been a Monsieur T.N. Hynninen, a Finnish speculator who lived in Helsingfors. Nothing new.

      Ryzhkov turned over the single page but there was nothing else. He looked more closely at the list – investors in the numbered property consortium, twenty-four partners, all of them anonymous, sheltered behind numbered titles.

      He slipped the thin sheet of nearly transparent onion-skin paper back into the envelope and filed it together with the police statement and Bondarenko’s cause-of-death report. Tried not to look at the little human diagram with the wounds inked on it as he put all of it in his bottom drawer. Now, he thought, all that was left of Lvova, Ekatarina, was resting undisturbed inside a green Okhrana folder, like everything else that was wrong with the world.

      Another little tail-twister vanished? What did it matter? Some marks, some bloodstains that had spread in strange patterns, some loose ends, some details that didn’t fit…What did he think he could do about it? Dig her up? Call in a few dozen of Petersburg’s richest and most prominent men for some discussions about exactly what they had been doing and to whom?

      He rubbed his hand across his forehead. He was tired, trying to do too much, too fast. He was hot, feverish perhaps. Coming down with something.

      The girl was dead and someone in the Okhrana was protecting the killer, or had at least taken steps to ensure that Bondarenko would sanitize his statement. Things like that didn’t just happen by coincidence, there had to be a reason for it. Rasputin?

      What if he had done it? The girl had been thrown out of an upstairs window at the corner of the lane. It could have only been reached by a hallway, via a staircase. Did the building have a lift? And if Rasputin had done it, how would he have made it back downstairs to the table so quickly? Perhaps he should get inside the building…run up and down the stairs with a stopwatch in hand. Certainly he should pursue the case – what if Rasputin had done it and someone was attempting to blackmail him?

      Was such a thing plausible? Rasputin was untouchable, wasn’t he? And the girl wasn’t going to come back just because he got soft and went on some idiot’s crusade. Never trust someone with an axe to grind, never trust a priest. Never trust anyone with ideals…with illusions, he told himself over and over again. Actually chanting the words under his breath ‘…Realism…realism…realism…’

      But maybe Rasputin had done it after all…

      Murder, he heard a woman scream.

       NINE

      ‘Go to sleep,’ Larissa had said. ‘It was just an accident, Vera…go to sleep now,’ she’d said.

      And she had. Even though it was a lie; it hadn’t been an accident. No. Not an accident at all.

      ‘Go to sleep, Vera…it wasn’t your fault, it’s over now.’

      Vera, Larissa, and another girl had slept on the stage in the back room that first night after the…accident. Passing out from too much konyak and exhausted from fending everyone off. When they woke up the other girl was gone.

      The owner was called Izov. He had got angry when he realized they were too distraught to provide him with any fun. Well, they certainly didn’t have to give anything away, but he had made his understanding clear. There was going to have to be some kind of payment. He left them with a last warning that it was a cabaret, not a flophouse, no matter how many people were sleeping on the floor. Not long after that he came back and fed them, grousing about the expense. Vera drank her kvass and decided that probably it was only СКАЧАТЬ