‘Party business in Moscow concerning the Putilov factory,’ Valentine announced importantly, his accent adopting a rough, working-class edge Paul had not heard before.
The Chekist, small and slight and wearing rimless glasses examined Valentine’s papers. He turned his lifeless eyes on Sofya and Paul.
‘Who are they?’
‘The girl’s my secretary.’
‘And this one?’
‘One of the clerks. An accountant.’
‘What sort of business?’
‘Finance,’ said Valentine. ‘Dirty business, comrade, but it has to be done.’ He laughed. The Chekist didn’t join in.
‘You have tickets?’
Valentine passed him their tickets. The Chekist looked them over and nodded to the militiaman behind him who was barring the gate. Valentine pocketed his party card and papers and passed through. Paul and Sofya scurried after him.
The Moscow train was already waiting on the platform, snorting and hissing like a recumbent animal. The carriages, Paul noted, still sported their pre-Revolutionary colours and classes. Valentine led them along the platform to the front of the train and a first class sleeper. He gave their tickets to the provodnik waiting at the carriage door who indicated their berths.
A bearded balding man in a creased suit was already in the compartment and he stood as they entered, bowed slightly and bid them good evening.
‘Pyotr Slepynin,’ he said, introducing himself and eyeing Sofya in a manner Paul didn’t care much for.
Sofya seemed not to notice and for the next minute they begged each other’s pardon as they attempted to arrange themselves without treading on one another’s toes.
Once the luggage was stowed they sat facing each other. Slepynin leaned towards Sofya.
‘Forgive me, Miss…’
‘Korovina, comrade,’ Sofya said.
‘… Miss Korovina. Have I had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before?’ He took a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles from his top pocket and polished the lenses on a dirty handkerchief before putting the glasses on as if, either seeing Sofya more clearly would jog his memory, or the change to his appearance might jog hers.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Korovina is my secretary,’ Valentine told him. He produced his Party card.
Slepynin smiled at them both and took out his own Party card, handing it to Valentine for examination.
‘A Party meeting, perhaps?’ Slepynin hazarded, turning to Sofya once more.
‘Possibly,’ said Sofya, deliberately looking away out of the window at the activity on the platform.
The train jogged forward, the carriage couplings rattling noisily. A whistle blew and the engine responded with a blast of its own. The commotion on the platform intensified and some of the desperate travellers broke into a run. Carriage doors slammed and the train lurched another few feet.
‘A meeting I expect,’ Slepynin continued, smiling at Sofya over the top of his spectacles.
‘Have you heard any further news of Comrade Lenin?’ Valentine asked.
‘Only that his condition is thought to be stable,’ Slepynin replied. His face assumed a funereal aspect. ‘An outrage. A tragedy for the country. And comrade Uritsky, too. Such counter-revolutionary action must be liquidated. The Social-Revolutionaries are to be held to account. You agree, comrade, of course?’
‘Of course,’ said Valentine. They exchanged views on the measures needed to counter opposition to Bolshevik power, Slepynin expressing the need for terror. Paul stopped listening.
The train left Nikolaevsky through a desert of hatched tracks and marshalling yards. They passed the Alexander Nevski Quarter, a warren of narrow streets and squalid housing where the workers from the harbour and the factories near the Baltic and Warsaw Stations in the eastern Narva Quarter lived. The Putilov metalworks where Valentine had worked lay in that direction, beyond the Narva Triumphal Arch.
Paul glanced across to where he was sitting, deep in conversation with Slepynin, and wondered how Valentine did it; how he was able to assume a character that must be completely alien to him. To look at him, one would have taken Valentine for a born in the bone Russian, the sort of man Paul himself ought to be, having been born there. And yet he was the alien, as out of step and out of sympathy with those around him as it seemed possible to be. Even Sofya didn’t appear out of place in her cheap dress and scuffed shoes. She had retrieved Valentine’s attaché case from the luggage rack and was presently pretending to study a sheaf of papers she had found inside. She held a pen which she periodically touched to the sheets although, as far as Paul could see, it was dry of ink.
Through the window he caught a glimpse of the Volkovskoye Cemetery in the twilight, where their governess had been buried that morning; interred at dawn only to be resurrected at midnight as Sofya assumed her identity. She had given it to avoid Slepynin’s curiosity, Paul supposed, and was impressed at how quick-witted she had been. No doubt he would have blithered and blathered, forgetting his own alias the moment he needed to remember it. What on earth had possessed Cumming to thinking he was fitted for this kind of work?
On the opposite side of the tracks were working-class districts, hovels mostly, and Paul wondered if it was chance or design that had engineered the passage of Petersburg’s masses through a cemetery each day as they passed to and from work. Was it a deliberate lesson on the temporary nature of life, and the need for the poor to keep their eyes focussed upon salvation? If so it was a lesson being ignored. The Bolsheviks had made their intent plain in weaning the people off their religious opiate — as Marx had had it — and to that end had begun sacking the churches. Like Henry VIII, he couldn’t help thinking, unable to keep avaricious hands off all those valuables. Paul didn’t doubt they’d strip the lead off the roofs, too, so that in a hundred years or so Petersburg and other Russian cities would be dotted with crumbling cathedrals like the English monasteries.
A vendor appeared at the door with glasses and a jug of kavass. From a tray he offered blinis, pirogis and purées. Valentine and Slepynin dug into their pockets and pancakes and pastries were handed round for a few kopecs. Lenin’s recovery was toasted with glasses of kavass, the fermented fruit juice.
‘Did you by chance work at the Ministry of the Interior, Miss Korovina?’ Slepynin persisted as Paul watched him spoon the last of an unappetising-looking kisél gorókhovi — a pea purée — into his mouth. ‘I was a mere factotum there before the Revolution, you understand. At everyone’s beck and call. But learning valuable lessons nonetheless on the workings of the bureaucratic autocracy. On occasions, I even found myself in the august presence of his excellency, Minister Kurlov himself, rot his soul.’ Slepynin’s face twisted unpleasantly as if his pea purée was giving him indigestion. He turned to Valentine. ‘Was Kurlov tried for his crimes, do you recall?’
‘Pavel Grigoriyevitch Kurlov?’ Sofya said, as if unable to help herself. ‘No, he escaped abroad. Others died, though,’ she added flatly.
‘So I believe,’ Slepynin said, his head suddenly cocking to one side like an attentive spaniel’s. ‘Indeed, was not the under-minister, Rostov, one of those killed in the disturbances?’
Sofya’s eyes dropped to the papers again. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said.
Slepynin looked as if about to say something else but the provodnik knocked on the door at that moment, carrying their bedding. It was dark beyond the window now and Paul pulled the curtains together before they shuffled into the corridor while the provodnik made up their bunks. The men stayed outside the compartment for a minute or two to allow Sofya time to undress and get into bed then, when she called, followed her in. She had taken an upper bunk and Valentine took the other, leaving Slepynin opposite Paul on the lower. The light was extinguished and after a muttered exchange of ‘sleep well,’ Paul lay back fully clothed. He closed his eyes, rocking in the bunk to the steady movement and listening to the rattle of the train.