Two miles further on, as they approached the railway bridge, Paul saw a line of boats blockading the river.
36
‘He was here!’ Sofya’s eyes were wide, her face flushed.
‘Who was here?’
‘My brother! Mikhail! He came with Colonel Kappel.’
‘Mikhail is in the army?’ That possibility was almost as big a surprise for Paul as the fact that they had reached Kazan.
‘No, not in the army,’ Sofya said breathlessly. ‘He came to take charge of the gold reserves.’
The guns opened up again. The Red Army was shelling the city from their positions on the Uslan Hill on the west bank of the Volga. They all ducked automatically. The shell whined overhead, exploding somewhere in the vicinity of the railway station and shaking the room.
‘It’s true, old man,’ Valentine said slipping into English while keeping his eyes on the ceiling as plaster began showering down like confetti. ‘I should imagine Kappel wants to make sure the reserves stay in Russian hands. He’s a monarchist, but since Komuch are the only Russians in this area fighting the Bolsheviks he’s thrown his hand in with them. Your cousin was attached to the Ministry of Finance so he’s the man Kappel’s brought to do the job.’
Paul thought Mikhail had been with the Ministry of the Interior, not Finance. He looked at Sofya but she seemed far too excited at having found her brother to be concerned about where he worked. As for Kappel… Paul could see what the general had to gain but wondered why the rump of the Constituent Assembly would do business with a monarchist officer and a reactionary representative of a tsarist ministry like Mikhail Rostov. But he had learned a lot in the past couple of days about the opposition to the Red Army and how the seemingly united anti-Bolshevik front cloaked a myriad of dissenting factions, all squabbling all over their own self-interest.
‘You’ve seen him?’ he asked Sofya.
‘No, he’s already left.’
‘They shipped the gold back to Samara,’ Valentine said. ‘Your cousin went with it.’
Another rat leaving the ship, Paul thought.
The city was in chaos. The situation had deteriorated since they had arrived four days earlier. He had been up the Syuyumbéka tower at first light that morning. The old Tartar construction was around two hundred and fifty feet high and dominated the Admiralteiskaya quarter. From the top one had a good view of Kazan and, more importantly, of the Volga and of Uslan Hill on the west bank. The Red Army had moved it’s artillery up under cover of darkness and now occupied the Uslan. On the east bank, what Malinovsky had called the Left Bank Group of the Fifth Army had advanced towards the mouth of the Kazanka. Although Paul couldn’t see them, he supposed Azin’s Arsk army had sealed the river and rail routes to the east.
The bombardment felt indiscriminate, although he didn’t doubt the Red Army had a purpose in the haphazard way they peppered various parts of the city with their shells. Terror. The poor citizen beneath the barrage had no idea where he might be safe. Initially it had seemed that their target was the Syuyumbéka tower. But no sooner had one scrambled down from the observation point into the streets of the Admiralteiskaya, or took shelter under the walls of the Zilantovski Monastery, than the shells appeared to follow one with a disconcerting vindictiveness. They shelled the railway line and the station then, to show their lack of discrimination and favour, ranged east and gave the old Tartar quarter a pasting. What little that remained of Komuch’s army in the city had been almost encircled along with the few Czech detachments left. The only route out of Kazan now was by barge down the Volga, and there was no telling how long that would remain open given the approach of Raskolnikov’s flotilla. In the panic that had followed the start of the bombardment, anyone who could had already got out, including many of the White Russian officers who’d wasted no time decamping with what they could carry. Any equipment that couldn’t be loaded onto the barges had already been abandoned. As had many of the civilians who looked to the army for protection. News of the widespread arrests and executions by the Cheka in Petersburg and Moscow following the attempt on Lenin’s life had already reached the city. No one in Kazan was under the illusion that distance and lack of complicity would save them.
It was astonishing to Paul how quickly the fear he had felt four days earlier as they had steamed up the Kazanka — fear that had vanished on realising that the blockade ahead of the Lyena was manned by Czech troops — had returned. His short-lived sense of triumph at having reached his objective had barely survived the first day. Once the reality of the situation had dawned upon him, the fear was back, gnawing at his stomach like hunger pangs. But pangs that couldn’t be placated by a couple of pounds of black bread.
As soon as the Lyena had been boarded, Paul had given Masaryk’s letter to the officer in charge of the party. Initially truculent, the man’s attitude underwent a miraculous transformation. He immediately despatched a messenger and then hurriedly arranged an escort for the Lyena and, half an hour later, Paul was standing in a railway carriage in front of the commander of the Legion’s forces in Kazan, Colonel Čeček.
There was something almost oriental about Čeček, with his thin moustache and round face, bundled as he was in his rumpled grey uniform. But then Paul was willing to conceded that his euphoria at reaching Kazan, the city’s history and Tartar heritage, his exhaustion through lack of sleep and hunger, may all have combined to induce a confusion that bordered upon hallucination.
He gave the colonel a smart salute — his due, Paul had thought despite his own civilian dress — and had recited his rank and regiment, before attempting to explain his mission. This he did without direct reference to Cumming and the Foreign Service and made, he couldn’t help thinking, something of a hash of it. Čeček listened attentively, gripping Masaryk’s letter in his fist as if it were a tangible link to his Czech homeland.
‘You have come from General Poole? How close to Petersburg are they?’
Paul had to explain that he had not actually come through Archangel and had no current news of Poole’s whereabouts but believed him still to be in the northern port. Čeček looked crestfallen. ‘I’m here to liaise with Admiral Kolchak,’ Paul said. ‘Where can I find him?’
‘In Japan,’ said Čeček.
‘Still?’ It had been weeks since Cumming had said Kolchak would be arriving.
‘Of course,’ Čeček added, his voice heavy with irony, ‘the Russians might know more, if you can find any officers still left in Kazan to ask, that is.’
Čeček then questioned Paul as to how they had managed to get through the Red Army lines, and had an aide take notes on the Red Army positions. Then he had excused himself, delegating the aide to see to the needs of Paul and his companions.
They were found rooms close to the railway station. The evacuation of Kazan following the failure of Komuch to take Sviyázhsk and the reinforcement of the Red Army had left no shortage of accommodation in the city.
Valentine immediately hurried away to find out what he could about the gold reserves. Sofya went with him. She needed clothes, she said, to replace her sarafan, now stained with Malinovsky’s blood in addition to the rest of the dirt it had picked up on the journey. Paul, left alone, returned to Čeček’s headquarters. He managed to persuade the Czech adjutant to put him on temporary attachment to Čeček’s command with the rank of podkapitan — the equivalent of staff captain — and, to his relief, was at last able to swap his proletarian disguise for a Czech uniform.