But it would have been in Kell’s file, of course. And, now that he thought about it, he did recall the name Kolchak. She had mentioned him in one of the letters he had received while at the front. It was just before he had been wounded. His post had been erratic just then, particularly letters from his mother. He had received a bundle before going up the line, shortly before the push on Passchendaele, and had had to read them quickly.
Paul generally made a point of taking little notice of the Russian strays his mother mentioned, but he remembered Kolchak’s name because of a connection to his father. Kolchak had served under him on a destroyer during the Russo-Japanese war, his mother had written. According to her, the admiral had been passing through London on his way to America — part of some mission or other — and she had given him dinner. She said she had thought him particularly young to have achieved the rank of admiral and that he’d been commander of the Black Sea Fleet. During the Revolution when his men had mutinied and threatened his life, Kolchak — as his mother had described it — had lined them up on his ship, thrown his sword over the side and told them they could do with him as they wished. He won them over although it had sounded to Paul like a particularly Russian piece of melodrama. His mother, of course, would have lapped that sort of thing up. And no doubt she saw entertaining an admiral, as a feather in her cap. She had always tried to keep abreast of events, maintaining a foot in both political camps although, with the Revolution an established fact, the Russian émigrés she encountered were changing character. Fewer left wing agitators could be found hanging around her apartment, and more exiles from the propertied classes. Or un-propertied classes now, he supposed, as they too always seemed to be looking for hand-outs.
‘I never met him,’ he was able to tell Cumming truthfully. ‘I was at the front at the time. I recall my mother mentioning the admiral in one of her letters because he’d apparently served under my father.’
‘During the Russo-Japanese war?’
‘At Tsushima.’
‘When the Japanese sunk the Imperial Fleet.’
‘¬¬Thought they might have done better than that,’ Browning interposed abstractedly, as if ¬the complete humiliation of the Russian navy had been no more than a poor showing at a rugger match.
‘Well, that’s old history now,’ Cumming maintained, a little heartlessly it seemed to Paul. ‘We have to look to the future. The point is, what are we going to do about your ignorance of the Legion?’
‘Does it matter?’ Browning asked. ‘After all, he knows Mikhail Rostov and all we need is a go-between, someone Rostov will trust.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Paul said. ‘Mikhail never liked me, actually. He was an arrogant little—’
‘We can’t trouble ourselves over family likes and dislikes,’ Cumming interrupted. ‘When the chips are down blood will out. My enemy’s enemy… eh? He will see that, I’m sure.’
Paul wasn’t sure he had caught Cumming’s meaning.
‘But he’s not, is he,’ he said. ‘I mean — tell me if I’m wrong — but our enemy is Germany, right? And Russia isn’t their enemy any more. After signing that treaty…’
‘Brest Litovsk,’ Browning said.
‘Yes, Brest whatever. That means the Bolsheviks aren’t Germany’s enemy any more, doesn’t it? Or friend, come to that.’
‘Your point?’ asked Cumming.
‘That they’re no longer in the war…?’ Paul hazarded.
‘But that’s the whole point!’ Cumming roared back with sudden exasperation. His face became flushed and his monocle fell from his eye, swinging by its cord against his chest. ‘That they’re no longer in the war, that they’re not our friend. That they’re our enemy! They’re a bunch of damned…’
‘Revolutionaries,’ Browning supplied.
‘Exactly!’
‘Then who are our friends?’ Paul asked, now thoroughly confused.
‘The Legion,’ Cumming bellowed, reaching for the paperknife again before stopping himself.
‘Oh, well,’ Paul replied with a shrug, ‘as I said, I don’t know anything about them. That would have been—’
‘The other Ross,’ Browning finished for him, sounding sick of the whole business.
‘And he’s dead,’ Cumming added. He gave Paul a look that suggested he might be wondering if the game were worth the candle. ‘Sit down Rostov,’ he sighed, ‘and I’ll try to explain it to you. In words of one syllable if that’s what it’ll take…’
6
It had taken a great deal more than words of one syllable.
The Nazdar companies were made up of exiles, POWs taken from the Austro-Hungarian armies, and deserters who had gone over to the Allies. Czechs and Slovaks from Moravia and Bohemia, they supported Tomáš Masaryk and the Czech National Council who wanted to create an independent nation — Czechoslovakia — from their Austrian-dominated homeland. The other Paul Ross, a speaker of Czech, had been seconded into a liaising role with the companies formed in France under French leadership.
Paul had never suspected this linguistic facility in a man he had never regarded as anything more than a nuisance. As far as Paul was concerned, the other one was just the man who always got Paul’s correspondence, who, irritatingly, would cancel appointments he had made, who one evening had even managed to take his girl out to dinner at a restaurant he had booked. This sort of thing had seemed never to happen in reverse; all Paul had ever got from his namesake were bills from creditors, useless items delivered to him that he had not ordered; messages of congratulation over mentions in dispatches that Paul had not earned. He didn’t suppose for a minute that the other Ross had ever been dunned by the Club Secretary for his bills…
But the man was dead now and Paul supposed he ought to show a little compassion. At least he had had the decency to keep the stomach wound that had killed him to himself. But then, he couldn’t help thinking, it was the other Ross’s fault that he was having to sit there listening to Cumming outline the sort of dubious operation that might just get him killed in the end anyway…
And Cumming was still chuntering on across the desk. Paul supposed he ought to make a conscious effort to pay attention. He understood that the Nazdar companies consisted mainly of Czechs, which was where the other Paul Ross had been of use, but apparently there were also Slovaks and Poles in it, too, which made him wonder if Ross hadn’t been some multi-lingual prodigy… That would leave Paul’s meagre facility with only Russian looking a poor effort.
‘The Russians,’ Cumming ventured…
‘The Russians…’ Paul echoed absently.
‘Are you listening, Rostov?’
‘Yes, sir. Of course.’
Cumming’s snout twitched. ‘The Russians,’ he said again, ‘took thousands of prisoners on the eastern front. And that’s not counting those who considered themselves to be Czech or Slovak already living inside Russian borders when the war started. It was the Czech National Council and the French who suggested the Russians recruit a corps of their own. The tsar wouldn’t have a bar of it to begin with. Chary of opening a Pandora’s Box — encourage his subservient nationalities into expecting some sort of self-determination, I daresay.’
That didn’t surprise Paul at all. He had spent too many interminable evenings before the war playing the young host to his mother’s eclectic gatherings, listening to their diatribes against the oppression under which the Poles and the Letts, the Ukrainians and the God knows who were suffering under the tsar to be unaware of how the Russians treated their subject nationalities. Neither had it gone unnoticed even to someone as bored by the whole business as he was, that the Russian prejudice against ethnic minorities extended even to Russian exiles, whatever their political leanings. No matter how radical or left-wing the Russians were, they never seemed willing to concede an inch of what they regarded as Russian soil.