It was no more than half full but the stench of the place hit Paul’s nostrils as if it had been packed to the gunnels. The air was thick with an odour of sweat and stewed tea, heavy with coarse Russian tobacco and rank clothes and unwashed bodies. He had grown used to the close proximity of men in the trenches, of living cheek by jowl with filthy bodies in uniforms that hadn’t been taken off for days at a time, used even to the constant aroma of putrefaction. But this was different. The trenches were at least in the open air. Here the ceilings and walls somehow compressed the smell so that walking into the room felt like immersing oneself in redolent fluid.
‘Over there,’ Valentine said, gesturing at one end of a long table by the door. ‘They might ask for a ration card but just show them your Party card. No one will argue.’ Then he wandered off across the room and left Paul to it.
Paul sat down, showed them Slepynin’s card and began chewing unenthusiastically at the bread served him. He asked if there was vodka and was brought a cloudy spirit that tasted as if it had been distilled from army boots. He knocked it back anyway and lit a cigarette. Russian tobacco had a taste all its own, at once sugary yet somehow oriental; heavy with a musty odour. He breathed it in deeply to rid himself of the stench around him.
Valentine came back, broke some bread and began sucking tea through a sugar lump.
‘There’s a train in an hour. There’ll be troops on it moving to join Trotsky at the Kazan front.’
‘Trotsky’s there?’
‘Lenin told him to retake the city whatever the cost. They’re saying Trotsky’s already shot every tenth man in the units that ran when the last attack failed.’
‘Lenin’s still alive then.’
‘Yes. If I can get to a telephone I’ll try ringing Ransome, see if I can find out what the situation is. Eat up and we’ll go and get our tickets.’
Paul pushed the bread away. ‘I’ve had enough.’
At the station, while Valentine bought their tickets and went to find a telephone, Paul looked for a lavatory. He found a malodorous one by the waiting room, a cubicle so filthy it suggested that whoever’s job it was to clean it had decided the chore beneath him now the Revolution had arrived.
Paul needed a wash. The spirit he had drunk, whatever it was, had been a bad idea. Already dehydrated from the overnight journey, it had only made him feel worse. He wasn’t quite desperate enough to drink the rust-coloured trickle emanating from the faucet, nor would have been even if there wasn’t a cholera scare in Moscow. Instead he took off his cap and dampened his hands then ran them over his face and around his collar. Needless to say there was nothing on which to dry himself, so he wiped his hands on his jacket. Putting the cap back on he went outside and waited by the gate until Valentine showed up.
‘Ransome’s in Stockholm with his mistress, Evgenia Shelepina,’ he said when he returned. ‘She’s purportedly there to assist the Bolshevik Ambassador to Sweden, Vovovsky. I didn’t know who I was speaking to so I kept it short rather than tell them anything.’
Paul thought that was probably just as well. He hadn’t forgotten that someone had tipped off the Bolsheviks that Cumming was sending him to Russia. It could only have been one of the myriad agents or diplomats already in the country. Logic would have dictated that whoever it was also knew of Valentine’s presence, but somehow he seemed able to come and go with impunity. Paul supposed the chances of ever finding out who the traitor was were slim and, as long as long as he wasn’t arrested, he didn’t much care. Finding traitors was Cumming’s job — or Kell’s. All Paul wanted was to get to some place where he might have a decent stab at trying to do the job he was there to do. Kazan seemed to offer the best opportunity for that and the fewer people who knew they were going there the better. Of course he still needed to contact the Legion, and to do that it would have helped if he had Masaryk’s letter. But that was in the money belt with Sofya.
All things considered, that was where he would have preferred to be as well.
33
He had lost sight of Valentine. Paul wasn’t even sure in which carriage he was. Shortly after they had left Kazan Station Valentine had squeezed his way to the other end of their carriage waving his Party card looking for a seat. Paul had tried following him using Slepynin’s card but seemed to lack the requisite air of authority and got stuck behind people while Valentine disappeared into the next carriage.
Throwing one’s weight around had been easy enough in the trenches with men accustomed to doing what an officer told them. Yet it was quite another in the teeth of a civilian rabble who probably didn’t think much of the Bolsheviks in the first place. Out of uniform Paul didn’t seem to possess the conviction that others would do what he told them to do and, of course, they always recognised the fact. So he had stayed where he was, putting up with the discomfort and the evil-looking muzhik for the few miles it took to reach Veshnyakí where the peasant and many of the other passengers got off the train.
When it started again he went looking for Valentine. He passed through two crowded carriages without luck and had just entered a third when he was stopped in his tracks. Two seats down, sitting pushed against the window by a round little woman in a headscarf, he saw Sofya gazing out at the passing countryside. A chicken was nestled contentedly in her lap and she was idly stroking the animal’s feathers with her fingers.
Perhaps she sensed he was there for she looked up, saw him and suddenly smiled. She had barely smiled at him at all since he had found her and, touched, he walked along the aisle towards her and leaned across the stocky peasant woman and said, somewhat redundantly:
‘You’re here!’
The chicken in her lap squawked and fluttered its wings. Sofya ran a soothing finger over its bobbing head.
‘Where was I to go?’ she asked. Then, lowering her voice, ‘Anyway, I’ve still got your… you know… the belt?’
‘I told you to keep it.’
Her thin shoulders rose in a shrug. ‘And what will you do for money? Besides, I have no idea where Mikhail went. And there’s nothing in Rostov for me since they burned our estate.’
The peasant woman turned to her, listening.
‘I thought of going back to Petersburg,’ Sofya said, unconcerned at being overheard.
‘It’s not safe,’ Paul told her, thinking they ought to be more careful what they said.
‘What was I supposed to do then? You said you were going to Kazan so I thought I’d better come with you. Would you rather I didn’t?’
‘Of course not. But how did you know what train we were on?’
‘I saw Valentine buying tickets at the Kazan Station. I told the man at the window I wanted a ticket for the same train.’
Paul glanced at the rotund peasant and found she was looking up at him. Her eyes seemed to hold nothing beyond the odd muzhik impenetrability he remembered as a child. It was a strange amalgam of animal cunning and vacuous innocence, an admixture that, like oil and water, one might suppose could not coexist. But it was always there nonetheless.
‘It would be better,’ he said to Sofya, making a point of avoiding using Valentine’s name, ‘If you didn’t mention to our friend that I told you we were going to Kazan.’