‘I thought I was coming with you.’
‘It’s too dangerous now, being with me.’
‘We ought to stay together,’ Sofya said, turning and looking into his face.
‘They know who we are, Sofya.’
‘It’s not the Bolsheviks you’re worried about, is it,’ she said. ‘It’s him. Valentine. He doesn’t want me with you, does he?’
‘It’s best if you stay out of his way,’ Paul suggested.
‘Because he killed Slepynin and that woman in Copenhagen?’
‘That’s part of it,’ Paul admitted.
‘But I can’t take all your money.’
‘I’ve got enough.’
The train slowed; the provodnik walked along the corridor, announcing their approach to Moscow.
‘Leave us as soon as we arrive,’ Paul said. ‘And be careful,’ and before he knew what he was doing he pulled her towards him and kissed her on the mouth.
Sofya stepped back in surprise, flushing.
Valentine slipped into the compartment. ‘We’re almost there,’ he said, looking from one to the other curiously. His gaze settled on Sofya. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said to her. ‘We’ll meet up outside the station. Are you ready?’
32
Crammed against the carriage door, Paul dwelled upon the suspicion that Valentine had had no intention from the beginning of taking Sofya with them. He supposed he had known as much since the moment they had walked into the house in the Nevskaya although he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. Would Valentine have done something there and then if Paul had left him alone with her? Paul’s being there had left Valentine with little option but to let her accompany them to the Nikolaevsky Station. Perhaps if he had been able to work out a safe way of letting Slepynin take her without involving Paul and himself, Valentine would have done that in preference to killing the Cheka agent. For Paul didn’t doubt that that was what Slepynin was, a Cheka agent.
Of course, it might be that he was doing Valentine an injustice. But how could Paul know? He still hadn’t managed to fathom the workings of Valentine’s mind. He wasn’t capable of seeing things through Valentine’s eyes. And he was glad he couldn’t. Killing people wasn’t an entirely reasonable way of solving problems (although he had to allow the High Command back on the western front might give him an argument about that). It wasn’t that he thought Valentine was mad — not in the homicidal maniac sense, anyway — it was more a case of the man’s response to any particular situation seemed not entirely sane.
Paul’s train of thought was derailed at that moment as a peasant who had had a run-in with Valentine on the platform while boarding the train suddenly pushed up against him. Given the unpredictability of Valentine’s reactions, the man had no idea of how lucky he was. Even so, he was a malevolent-looking individual. Heavily bearded with a pair of deep-set eyes and long straggling rat-tails of hair, his whole appearance put Paul in mind of evil peering from a haystack. Having squashed up against Paul the man’s lips curled in the semblance of a smile, revealing an irregular row of rotten teeth. A wave of stale breath washed out. Paul turned his head away.
The train was packed and there were no seats. The crowd that had been waiting on the platform at the Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station while the train got up steam had made a sudden surge towards the carriages, fighting to get aboard as if someone had dropped a starting flag. Lines of troops heading for the Kazan front had commandeered several carriages for themselves, and the rest of the passengers had been left to elbow each other aside as best they could. Luggage and parcels had bounced off bodies as everyone scrambled for the open doors. Small livestock, chickens and geese mostly but also the odd piglet which a moment before been tucked contentedly under their owners’ arms, began squawking as if the life was being crushed out of them.
Valentine had tried pushing his way through the scrum with the liberal use of his elbows and holding aloft the proletarian icon of his Party card as if its manifestation might part the crowd like a human Red Sea. And, in fact, had just managed to reach a carriage door when the peasant with his face presently stuck into Paul’s had pushed in front of him.
Valentine complained and pushed his card into the man’s face, but this particular peasant seemed signally unimpressed, by both Valentine’s Party card and by his threats.
‘Fuck off,’ he said and climbed in front of them into the carriage, giving Valentine a lesson in village etiquette as well as language. Not to mention a face full of spittle as he did so.
Paul, jammed up against Valentine as he was, felt him stiffen, halting so abruptly that Paul stepped on the toes of some innocent baboushka behind him. She squealed and Valentine shouted something at the peasant who was now on the step above him. It was a colloquial mixture of dialect and muzhik execration, as far as Paul could make out, and Valentine rounded it off by threatening to have the man arrested. The peasant merely repeated the direction in which he thought Valentine should go and how he should get there.
Where Valentine had learned his Russian, Paul didn’t know; the factories he’d worked in judging by his vocabulary. Paul’s Russian had been learned in the schoolroom of a noble’s house under the vigilant eyes and ears of private tutors. In those surroundings coarse words earned a clout around the head — peasant violence for peasant manners, as one tutor was fond of saying.
Now, squashed against the carriage door, the brute was blocking Paul’s way again, fumes from his patched smock competing with his foetid breath in the nauseation stakes, fouling the whole atmosphere between them.
Paul squeezed around so that he had his back to the man and pulled down the window to let a little fresh air into the carriage.
They had arrived at Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station. It was the terminus for most of the Petersburg trains, although some coming from the former capital also stopped at the Nikolaevsky. Stepping onto the platform, Paul thought how much more convenient that would have been. The Nikolaevsky was no more than a couple of hundred yards from the Kazan Station from where they would be catching the train for Kazan. The Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station, to the south and on the eastern side of the city, may not have been much more than a mile from the Kazan Station but it still meant having to find their way through the Moscow streets.
He had felt a hand squeeze his arm as he stepped off the train behind Valentine and had turned in time to see Sofya disappear into the crowd. Watching her go, wishing he was going with her, he had bumped up against Valentine.
‘Where is she?’ he asked.
‘She’s gone,’ Paul said.
‘Gone?’
‘I told her to make her own way.’
‘Make her own way where?
‘South,’ Paul said, ‘anywhere.’ Anywhere away from you, was what he meant. ‘To look for her brother.’
A detachment of soldiers with slung rifles moved along the platform. Roughly dressed in an assortment of ill-matching uniforms, Paul assumed they were bound south themselves to face Deniken.
Valentine pushed something into Paul’s hand. ‘Here. Show it at the gate. It’s all they need to see.’
Paul looked down and saw he was holding Slepynin’s Party card. At the barrier two expressionless men were watching the crowd. One caught Paul’s eye as they approached. Paul forced himself to make straight for the man, barely breaking his stride and raising the Party card as he reached the barrier. The man’s icy gaze swept over it and then up at Paul. He nodded and Paul walked past though the barrier.