‘Best keep your head down for the first day or two and let Hart sniff him out,’ he suggested, immediately inhaling deeply himself as if there were a chance he too might pick up the scent. ‘And this is Masaryk’s letter.’ He handed an envelope to Paul. ‘Whatever you do you mustn’t let it fall into the wrong hands. As a last resort you destroy it. If the Bolsheviks get hold of it, the letter will not only compromise Masaryk but the Legion as well.’
It occurred to Paul that firing on Trotsky had pretty well compromised the Legion already. But then the Bolsheviks might have been in power long enough by now to become as adept at diplomacy as everyone else, and had learned to ignore the glaringly obvious when in their interest to do so.
Cumming gestured to Browning who placed several sheets of typed paper in front of Paul.
‘This states the terms of your recruitment,’ Browning intoned. It covers secondment from your regiment, rates of pay and an oath of secrecy.’
‘Secrecy?’
‘Naturally,’ Cumming said. ‘Since you will be privy to secret information, we need your assurance that you will not disclose it to anyone outside this organisation.’
Paul would have thought that his word as a gentleman might have sufficed, but Browning was tapping impatiently on the paper.
‘Sign here,’ he said.
Paul took the pen. He had always been told never to sign any document before reading the small print closely. Yet, whenever he came to it, it had always seemed rude to keep people waiting while one trawled through each sub-clause and codicil. He glanced hesitantly at Browning then signed his name.
‘Excellent,’ Cumming beamed. Browning folded the paper and handed it to him. Cumming leaned forward. ‘Now, two more considerations.’
Paul looked at Cumming stony-faced, the fact not lost upon him that Cumming had waited until Paul had signed before breaching news of more considerations.
‘Gold,’ Cumming said.
‘What gold?
‘The Imperial reserves. Someone had the bright idea last year to move it out of Petrograd in case it fell into German hands.’
‘Where to?’
‘Kazan.’
‘How much is there?’
Cumming blew out his cheeks. ‘Between seventy-five and a hundred million.’
‘Roubles?’
‘Pounds.’
Browning, standing next to the desk, swallowed hard as if the amount had given him a sudden case of indigestion.
‘Access to that amount of money,’ Cumming said, ‘could make all the difference in any military campaign, of course.’
‘Who holds Kazan?’ Paul asked.
‘The Bolsheviks.’
‘Well, if the Bolsheviks have it there’s not a lot can be done, is there?’ Meaning there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. ‘It’s not as though one could carry that amount around in one’s luggage.’
‘Indeed not,’ agreed Cumming. ‘In fact the only way of transporting the bullion is by rail or river barge. It’s too heavy to be shipped by other means. The Legion controls the railway and any advance westward would mean they could control the Volga river as well. We need to ensure that securing the bullion becomes the Legion’s prime objective. Once that has been achieved, it has to be delivered safely into the keeping of Admiral Kolchak.’
‘Do you expect me—’
‘You’ll leave that to Hart,’ Cumming said abruptly.
It seemed to Paul that the need for his presence was becoming ever more superfluous, Hart expected to take charge of everything as he obviously was.
‘You said there were two considerations, sir. What is the other?’
Cumming sat up a little straighter as if protocol demanded it.
‘The Imperial family.’
8
The train clattered on, the countryside beyond the window baked ochre by summer. Fields of wheat and barley moved sluggishly under a torpid breeze, stoically awaiting — like the rest of the country — the reaper’s blade.
Paul had avoided it, if narrowly. But the thought, instead of bringing a sense of relief, paradoxically filled him with foreboding. He was being saved for something worse.
Cumming’s talk of the Imperial family had recalled the photographs of tsar and his family that had adorned the Rostov house in Petersburg when he was boy. His Uncle Ivan had been nothing if not a toady.
But it wasn’t only photos of the Romanovs that he remembered. The Rostov house on Tavricheskaya, where it met the Neva River, was no more that a short walk along the embankment to the Winter Palace itself. He recalled being taken there as a child to see the tsar and his family wave regally to their subjects from the balcony that overlooked Palace Square.
His most vivid memory of them, though, was oddly of a time when the royal family were not even in Petersburg.
It had been a cold day in January, a Sunday, a bleak morning with the still air frozen under a sky the colour of a shroud. There had been snow overnight and where it had fallen it lay smooth on the frozen river, its pristine whiteness like the pelt of an enormous arctic fox. A celebration had been planned for that afternoon, nothing to do with the tsar but for Paul himself. It was the ninth of the month and Paul’s tenth birthday. His father had already sailed with the Baltic Fleet for the east but his mother made a fuss of him and there was to be a party. All morning the servants had been preparing, although the talk had not been about the party but about a march of the people to the Winter Palace led by a priest. Gunfire had already been heard to the north over the Vyborg district.
Thinking back, he always imagined that he had heard it, too. But he could never really be sure. He had heard it later, watching from their balcony as the soldiers and the cavalry massed in the icy streets below before moving towards Palace Square. The ragged volleys that had followed a few minutes later had seemed to crack the brittle morning air. Then he’d seen the crowds running past, scattering and sliding on the ice. What had stayed most clearly in his memory afterwards, however, was the blood in the snow after the crowd and the soldiers and the horses had passed. And the small, still, trampled bundle of rags in the gutter that, not long before, had been a child.
‘The latest report maintains they are being held in Ekaterinburg. Ostensibly under the orders of the local Soviet but it’s Lenin who calls the tune.’
Cumming shuffled a few papers on the desktop as if adjusting Europe’s monarchical hegemony.
‘Apart from the tsarist faction there are precious few who’d actually like to see the Romanovs returned to power. Nevertheless all sides regard him as a figurehead. There was talk of the family coming here but, given the situation…’
‘What situation?’
‘That we’ve quite enough agitators of our own who sympathise with the Bolsheviks without giving them any more grounds for provocation,’ Browning said.
‘And then there’s the German connection, of course.’ Cumming adopted his pained expression again. ‘The Empress Alexandria… Well, the fact is our royal family doesn’t need the country being reminded of its German origins.’
‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I can see that.’
‘The British Government has advised against offering them refuge. Fortunately, it looks as if the Bolsheviks won’t allow them to leave anyway. So, in the event of an unforeseen outcome, they’ll be the ones to attract the odium.’
‘What odium? What unforeseen outcome?’
‘We are terming it unforeseen, Rostov, but there remains the possibility that the tsar will be executed.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul.
‘Merely a possibility. Another is that if we’re successful in turning the Legion west, the Imperial family might fall into Czech hands. Then, of course, it will be a matter for Kolchak and the Russians to decide what to do with them.’