‘We can take a tram to Kazan Station,’ Valentine said, gesturing across the road to where a line of them were parked. He dropped his hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘We should have kept her with us, you know. Your cousin. She knows too much. About us, I mean.’
Paul paused at the kerb. ‘She said you killed Slepynin.’
For a second he thought Valentine was going to deny it and he held out Slepynin’s Party card like a trump he was prepared to play. Valentine’s face assumed his habitual open expression.
‘No choice I’m afraid, old man. He started asking too many awkward questions.’ He gave a shrug as if it wasn’t really of much consequence. ‘He was Cheka,’ he said. ‘Hardly a loss.’
Paul looked at the Communist Party of Bolsheviks card in his hand and thought about Slepynin and the man he had left in the alley; about Pinker on the boat, Tamara Oblenskaya and Olga Volokoskaya. He wondered if any of them had been a loss to somebody.
Valentine started across the road and Paul hurried to keep up.
‘Suppose they’d found his body before we got off the train? Did you think about that?’
Valentine boarded the tram through the rear door and bought the tickets. Paul slumped into a seat and leaned against the window. Red flags decorated the exterior of the station. Slogans had been strung across on banners exhorting the people to support the workers and peasants, to defend the Revolution, to stand in solidarity behind the Party… The tram started, rattling along Zemlyanói.
‘They wouldn’t find him before we reached Moscow,’ Valentine said quietly. ‘I put him out the lavatory window. And a devil of a job I had getting him through, too. He hadn’t gone hungry in Petersburg, that’s certain.’
Paul stared at the passing street.
‘Well, if she’s gone she’s gone,’ Valentine said philosophically. ‘With luck we’ll be out of the city before they pick her up.’ Then, no doubt remembering it was Paul’s cousin he was talking about, he added in palliation, ‘I know she was family of sorts, but after all old man, you hadn’t seen her for a long time and they’d hardly treated you like the prodigal son, had they?’
Paul was thinking Valentine had confused his biblical analogies but said nothing.
‘So I’d put her out of your mind if I were you,’ Valentine went on. ‘One thing, she doesn’t know where we’re heading so if they do happen to pick her up at least she won’t be able to tell them much. Anyway, all to the good if they assume we’re headed south as well. As it is I think we can now dispense with Mikhail Rostov. Komuch has raised their own army. We’ve got Masaryk’s letter of introduction to the Legion and that’s all we’ll need.’
Paul said nothing at all.
He watched the Moscow street pass on the other side of the window. He had been to the city often as a boy with the family, usually on the way to or from the family estate near Rostov. The trains south left from the Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod, and they would invariably arrive there and generally break their journey in the city. They had a family house in Moscow in the Byeli Gorod, the most elegant quarter of the city near the palaces and shops on the wide streets north of the Kremlin. His mother had been fond of the opera and the ballet. She often attended performances at the Great Imperial Theatre in Theatre Square, or plays at the smaller Imperial opposite. As children they had never been allowed to accompany the adults and would have to stay home under the supervision of Korovina or someone like her. Unless it happened to be summer when the theatres were closed, in which case they would be taken to the circus, the Truzzi or the Nikitin in the Triumfálnaya Sadóvaya.
He had always thought of Moscow since as being the heart of Russia. Or perhaps more accurately, he supposed, his memory of Moscow filtered through his mother’s recollections. But he did have memories of Mátyuska Moskvá — ‘Little Mother Moscow’ — of his own. Mostly they were sights and scenes glimpsed from carriage windows as the family moved between railway stations and the house. Or while out shopping, or on the way to the circus. As he recalled now, Moscow had always appeared more colourful to him than home — Petersburg — and while he recalled that many people in Moscow dressed in the bourgeois style — what had then been termed German dress — as they had in Petersburg, it was here in Moscow that one was able to see the full diversity of the Russian Empire. There were the Tartars and the Circassians to be seen; Greeks in their red fezes and Persians wearing their tall conical sheepskin caps; there would be Cossacks from the Don and Bokhariots… and everywhere the bearded muzhíks, the peasants in their bast slippers and caftans and their armyáks. Looking out the tram window now, the colours were drab, like home — his real home — England. Army tunics and greatcoats could still be seen, despite the war with Germany being over. But they had a new war now, one with each other. And, like Europe, that required soldiers, dull men in grey unenlivened by any colour to denote rank or staff. Any colour other than red, that was. There was plenty of that: Bolshevik red.
When the tram reached Kazan Station he followed Valentine out of the front door. Threading their way through the crowd outside the station he became aware of the sense of menace in the air. He could almost taste it, as if he inhaled it with the oxygen. It had an electrical, almost metallic, taste, a taste redolent of blood in the back of the throat. Was it premonition? Or was the sense of menace simply a memory of blood mixed with fear, the anti-coagulant that kept it flowing? Imagination again. But it was exactly how he had felt in London, at Liverpool Street Station, when he had had the assassin’s blood over his clothes and was expecting to be challenged any minute.
What had his name been… Yashin? Yankov? No, they were Russian names and Valentine had said the man had been Lithuanian. Yurkas, that was it. For some reason the Bolsheviks preferred Lithuanians and Letts to staff their political police. Why was that? Did they believe Russians had an inborn disinclination against using force against their fellow nationals? He had never noticed the fact. Certainly not when the tsar had needed a demonstration broken up, a few heads cracked or a few men shot or sabred down. But then the tsar had favoured Cossacks for that sort of job and the Cossack was a breed apart…
‘Hungry?’ Valentine asked unexpectedly.
Paul realised he was. He had eaten nothing since the bread and cucumber he had shared with Sofya apart from a blini on the train.
‘There’s a traktir by the station,’ Valentine said. ‘We can eat there. We can’t count on getting much on the train and it’s nine hundred versts to Kazan.’
‘Six hundred miles? How long will that take?’
‘Thirty hours at least. The express is quicker but I don’t know if we can get on that. Best take the first offered.’
‘No chance of a sleeper, then?’
Valentine chuckled. ‘You’re a worker now, old man, and don’t you forget it.’
‘Sofya said you needed food cards to eat in traktirs.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Valentine assured him. ‘As Communist Party members we’re top of the heap now.’
Traktirs were cellars usually, the long dark rooms that served cheap black bread and salted cucumber, tea and vodka. Only there hadn’t been much vodka since the outbreak of the war when the tsar put an embargo on its manufacture — another thing the working classes had had against him, Paul supposed. Traktirs were where the poor and the peasants ate; where the workers who had no more than a few kopeks in their pockets could rely on vodka to make them forget the fact. They had traktirs in Petersburg, of course, but Paul had never been inside one. Valentine, though, pushing through the door and down the steps looked quite at home in the gloom of the long room.