The Last Train to Kazan

And then he saw the bullet holes.

Obviously the shots had come from where they were now standing, their impacts clustered in the wall directly opposite the doorway. There were single holes and then a flurry of others. A lot into the floor as well – too many to count. There should have been blood but there wasn’t, so Ryzhkov walked over to the corner and got down on his knees.

‘It’s been cleaned, I think, yes?’ Strilchuk asked, sniffing.

‘It’s all very tidy,’ Nametkin said. Ryzhkov patted his pockets, and then asked if either of them had a knife. Strilchuk reached into his pocket and came out with a blade.

Ryzhkov used it to winkle a strip of moulding off the floor, a long piece that had come awry, shattered at one end by a bullet. It broke away and he picked it up and carried it to the sunlit doorway.

‘Yes, all cleaned up,’ he said, showing the dark band of blood to Nametkin.

‘I suppose we don’t want to take it apart just yet, eh?’ Strilchuk said, looking around at the room.

‘No, we can wait, but it should be sealed, eh?’ Ryzhkov said.

‘I wouldn’t trust these people to seal a stamp,’ Giustiniani said.

‘How much blood is it, do you think?’ Nametkin asked him.

‘It’s impossible to say. It’s been well cleaned. When you get in the corner you can really smell it. Vinegar too, but there’s the other smell. In this weather you can’t get rid of that. And from the number of bullet holes, it’s more than one person for sure,’ Ryzhkov said.

‘He says eleven,’ Nametkin said, waving the paper at him. ‘He says everybody.’

‘Good God.’ Ryzhkov turned and looked at the room, trying to imagine the press of eleven people gathered in there to be killed – the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the boy, the four girls. Eleven?

‘Who were the others?’ Strilchuk asked.

‘Their servants. Loyal retainers,’ Giustiniani said in a voice that dripped cynicism.

Ryzhkov tried to imagine the scene. Eleven people, then. Plus, jammed in at the doorway there would have had to be the firing squad. A tightly packed little room. Maybe they’d been done in smaller groups. It would have been easier that way. He started to ask Nametkin about the other victims, but the prosecutor had turned and gone back outside.

Ryzhkov stood there for a few more moments, looking around the storeroom, the crazy splattering of bullet holes, the faint swirls where they’d mopped the floor with vinegar and sand, a sliver of broken threshold – the wood clean and yellow-brown. All of it lit by single barred, dirty window, and the flare of sunshine from the open door.

A collection of rosy shadows across the cheap wallpaper, the faint whiff of cleaning fluid and death.

The end of an empire.

The rest of the day was taken up with a parade of witnesses, a whirl of testimony and common police work. From birth it seemed to be a stuttering, confused murder investigation, pulled administratively between the Czech military under General Golitsyn, and Nametkin’s bosses, the civilian ‘government’ – Kolchak’s dictatorship with its green and white flag. Giustiniani added to the confusion by ratifying everything with a wave of his hand, keeping absolutely no paper record, and referring to Ryzhkov variously as ‘investigator’, ’secretary’ and ‘aide’. In practice Ryzhkov did whatever was required and additionally tried to provide anything Nametkin needed.

Besides Strilchuk, the ‘investigators’ were combined from what was left of the Yekaterinburg police, a sub-standard force of malcontents and traitors who’d found protection by banding together, and augmented by a detachment of soldiers.

Ryzhkov kept his eye on Strilchuk, who went about his work with a set jaw and a stare that never wavered. Giustiniani had also noticed his hard edge. By the afternoon Strilchuk had been moved to the front desk in the office and been given responsibility for coordinating the day-to-day logistics of the investigation.

In the afternoon Ryzhkov took a breather, walked out onto the steps, fished around in his pockets for a smoke, realized he had none, and cadged one off an officer who was standing there. Only a moment later Volkov, the young corporal who was filling in as their secretary, brought him back to the office to hear what a courier from the hospital had to say.

Apparently a Russian officer had turned up at the hospital and demanded to see the commander immediately. His story was that he’d been hiding in the woods, dressed as a peasant, near Koptiaki, a little town only four miles north of Yekaterinburg on the edge of the lake. Early on the morning of 17 July the villagers had been rousted out by Bolshevik guards from the hovels where they had been camped. They’d been told differing stories: the Czechs were coming, there was a dangerous demolition exercise planned for the area, all sorts of things. When morning came and the Bolsheviks had left, they all went back to the site.

When they got there they saw that there had been a fire, and when they poked about in the ashes they discovered charred clothing and several pieces of jewellery.

‘Where is this place?’ Ryzhkov asked.

‘It’s the Ganin pit. That’s the name he told us, Excellency,’ the courier said.

‘Near Koptiaki,’ Strilchuk said. ‘Not far.’

‘Do you know it?’ Giustiniani demanded.

‘Yes. It’s a mine. They are all through the woods, here. An open mine where the coal is close to the top layer of the soil. The peasants dig them. You have to be careful in the woods. You can easily fall in,’ Strilchuk said.

‘Can you take us there?’ Giustiniani pressed Strilchuk.

‘Sure,’ he said, not really deferring to Giustiniani in the way he said it. ‘It’s between here and Koptiaki. You cross the tracks –’

Giustiniani had turned on the courier. ‘Where is this officer now?’

‘Lt Sheremetevsky,’ the courier said, reading from a piece of card, ‘is on the way here, sir. The doctors could not keep him.’

‘And the jewels, the various items, what was it exactly?’

‘A jewelled cross and a brooch,’ the boy read out loudly. ‘They are now downstairs. We thought they should be put in the vault.’

Ryzhkov and Giustiniani went down to the vault to see the jewels. It was just as the boy had said: a cross and what looked like a jewelled pin, something a woman would use to fasten a scarf to her dress. Both had been wrapped and tied in butcher’s paper.

Ryzhkov straightened, his entire body exhausted. His mind was dazzled with the details that were piling up in the case. After breaking down all the stories and trying to tease the truth from the rumours, it was obvious that Yurovsky was now the most wanted fugitive from White justice. Whatever had happened to the Tsar, Yurovsky had been in charge. He had last been seen leaving the city by motor car, about the same time Ryzhkov’s train was dropping off its reinforcements for the Fifth Army.

They must have crossed, Ryzhkov realized suddenly. They might have actually stared at each other on opposite tracks, as Yurovsky escaped the White dragnet and Ryzhkov rushed towards it.

If he could get word back to Zezulin, Yurovsky could be picked up in Moscow. Zezulin could interview him to his heart’s content in the bowels of the Lubyanka, and Ryzhkov’s mission would be over. Maybe everything could be settled in one easy stroke. It was simple, probably too simple, but it was a chance. And if Yurovsky had managed to escape back to Moscow, perhaps he could too.

They went upstairs, sat in the shade on the balcony above the portico and waited for the lieutenant to arrive. Giustiniani was staring out at the filthy expanse of the square and humming.

Ryzhkov thought about the spray of bullet holes in the floor of the Special House’s storeroom. A lot of lead for one emperor. The box of hair that existed for no apparent reason, that stuck out too. ‘We’ll go to the pit tomorrow, yes?’ he said to the Italian.

‘Oh, yes…We’ll go there with shovels.’

They had been waiting for longer than an hour, and the squad of soldiers that Giustiniani had sent to find out why Sheremetevsky was late on his walk from the hospital (only two blocks) had still not returned. Giustiniani spat his cigar stub out into the street. From the corner a peasant stepped out and recovered it, bowing and smiling back at them, then rolled off down the street – bandy legs, filthy clothes and a knotted beard down to his belly.

‘This so-called officer isn’t coming,’ Ryzhkov said to him, and Giustiniani looked around.

‘Yes, I was thinking the same thing. He might not be real.’

They fell silent. Some men came by in a cart that contained a spindly cow, laid out and bawling, obviously ill from the way it was twitching. They got across the square just fine, but then two of the men had to move to the rear and push as the cart climbed the long rise up Voznesensky Prospekt.

It might not be real.

10

He was Wilton, he said. From The Times.

Not only the attention of The Times, but indeed the attention of the whole world was on Yekaterinburg. Yes, it was regrettable, like looking at an atrocity, eh? Looking at something that made you vomit. You got too close to horror and you recoiled. Sometimes the temptation to look away was strong, didn’t they agree? The scene of the murders, the House of Special Purpose, he called it. The bedrooms were awash in blood, Wilton said. The horror was unimaginable. Of course the women, the young grand duchesses in particular, had suffered the most.

‘Raped?’ one of the men asked.

‘Repeatedly. By the entire drunken hoard, then shot.’

‘My God!’

‘Perhaps they are better off…’

‘Do you want another?’ the waiter who’d been tending their portion of the bar asked Ryzhkov. By his accent he was Russian, but he’d picked up an odd ring to his voice. It wasn’t French. Something else.

‘Yes, thank you, comrade.’

‘Comrade!’ The man exploded in laughter. ‘Hah! Yes, here’s to you – comrade! Comrades!’ They all lifted their glasses.

The war was going well, Wilton said. He read every dispatch that came over the wire. White armies were attacking the Bolsheviks from all sides; Denikin and the Cossacks from the south, and now Kolchak and the Czechs from the East. Moreover the British had landed in Archangel and were pushing down the Dvina river from the north. Everyone would converge on the Volga. The Volga was the central highway of Russia. If only the Czechs could keep rushing forward, take Kazan and link up with the British, the Allies and the Whites would be able to advance and capture the ancient city of Nizhni Novgorod.

And from there they would have an open plain to Moscow.

‘Say fini to your red fucking revolution, gentlemen. It’s already as good as lost.’ Wilton smiled and bounced on the balls of his feet. He was dressed in thick woollens even though the weather was still hot, a felt fedora on his head, face shiny with passion and sweat, and a smile like a gash in his skull. He insisted they all have a new drink he’d discovered in Paris.

‘Ivanis!’ he called across the room. He had to shout twice more before the bartender caught their eye and waved to him. ‘He’s the expert in these, boys. Ivanis! Make us one of those ones you did the other night.’

Ivanis came over to him smiling, a dark shock of hair falling into his eyes. Thin like a knife. ‘How can I help you, sir?’ he said.

‘The bloody drink, that Sambo thing you did.’

‘Yes, sir, right away.’

‘Five of them, right? Give us the group rate, eh?’ Wilton said, winking at them. Ivanis went to make the order. ‘You can learn a lot from these fellows, eh? They see everything, hear everything. Somebody wants some information. Who do you ask, eh?’ he said to Ryzhkov.

‘How can I get in touch with the Ural Soviet,’ Ryzhkov said. He’d gone by the house on Kushok Lane at the meal hour, but no one was there. He’d had enough to drink that he figured he might as well ask an expert like Wilton.

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Wilton said. ‘The American here is the only place you can get these things,’ Wilton said, looking past them at one of the tables.

From there the evening went downhill.

The saloon in the Hotel American was subject to strange and hectic energies. Contingents of soldiers, adventurers, journalists, consular officers and employees would whirl through, collapse a while, then whirl out again. Among the saloons and salons of the city an ever-widening cruise had begun to develop. The streets in the still-warm nights were clotted with merry-makers and desperadoes. They clung to one another, floating from one watering-hole to the next in search of greater thrills, someone else to swindle, or just simple unconsciousness.

Ryzhkov had opted for the unconsciousness.

The Sambos finally came. They’d grabbed a table by this point and Ryzhkov was seated in his chair, leaning comfortably against the wall, sipping the concoction – a mixture of vodka, coffee and pepper, it took him back to Paris, where he had his first one, the drink having become the rage of the crowd at Café Cine where he pretended to work when Qirenque required. The drink itself was nothing special, only you couldn’t sleep after, and Ryzhkov needed more than anything, he suddenly realized, to sleep.

‘A member of the Ural Soviet,’ Wilton was saying. ‘Well, of course you’d love to put your mitts on one of them. If you get a lead, you call me first, eh?’ he said, lifting his glass. ‘God bless the Alsatians,’ he sipped and murmured.

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