‘You understand that I am not interested in my immediate death,’ said Saskia. ‘So I will not tell you where it is. I want to live long enough to show you.’
Kamo sighed. ‘You are creating difficulties.’
‘Let us say that it is safe; it is undiscovered; and it is perfectly preserved.’
Kamo looked through the window. The movement of the train made his head rock perceptibly. It reminded Saskia of the nose of the drunk alpinist in Monte Carlo.
‘Vailevna, I trust you,’ he said. ‘I believe that’s why you’re coming back to Russia, is it not? Do not confirm my faith; it would undo it. I understand that this is an attempt to pay off your debts. You want to be a good person for us and for the Party.’
‘A good person like you.’
‘Do you remember when I found you?’
‘I’ve never forgotten it.’
‘Then you will tell me why it has taken one winter for you reach this decision to reunite the Party with its rightful property.’
‘In St Petersburg, I was poisoned. I needed to recuperate.’
‘So I heard. Are you fully recovered?’
‘No. My liver and kidneys are permanently damaged.’
Kamo pursed his lips. It was either sympathy or mirth.
‘And now, my dear, you have decided to return to the bosom.’
‘Events have forced my hand, but I had planned to return in the spring. I have gained the confidence of a Jewish lawyer called Ioffe. He has a house on Lake Geneva, from which he conducts business with the Russian émigré community. His daughter, in St Petersburg, needs a governess. For this, he was prepared to obtain a passport on my behalf and pay for passage. I intend to locate the container and give it to our mutual friend in Finland.’
Kamo yawned. He did not cover his mouth, which was a rare slip of character.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will give it to me.’
‘We will give it to him together, as we had planned.’
Saskia wiped her mouth with a napkin. At once, Kamo gripped her gloved wrist. His grin was broad in deference to the onlookers but, up close, it trembled with the effort of clamping Saskia’s bones.
‘I wonder,’ said Kamo.
‘What?’ she replied, playing indifferent.
‘Did that agent, Draganov, turn you after all? Have you been telling lies to your old friend, Kamo?’
‘What do you think?’
Kamo held her stare for a long moment. Then he released her hand and turned to the menu. ‘To whom does one give one’s trust? That is the question of today, and every day.’
To whom.
That word, Кому, was the pronoun he could not correctly modify as a child. Kamo. Like camouflage, she thought, drinking him in. With it, an identity. Brigandage, murder and high talk. Those skirted coats. Laughter and piracy. Princes without money. Dust. Milk.
‘But, of course,’ said Kamo, ‘I believe you. That is faith, after all, and faith cannot be the preserve of the zealot.’
Saskia touched the band at her left elbow, one constant companion among so many. The train passed into a tunnel and a red gloom came to the carriage. The imperfect light of dusty bulbs could not match the sun.
Russia was there. It waited to open up and to drink her in.
Kamo leaned forward in the murk. His good eye wavered as though it had lost track of her. Criminal; master of disguise; bore. Par for the revolutionary course.
She raised her eyebrows and drank more of the wine.
Chapter Nine
After many countries and many trains, Saskia and Kamo were passing through the last of the taiga south of St Petersburg. Low sunlight flashed. Late Russian spring: water everywhere, the chill at ebb. Saskia stood at the window of her compartment and leaned against the slowing of the carriage. The hood of the station roof was grey-black through the dripping window. Saskia was in no hurry. She watched the platform fill with people. She noted that the speed of an individual was correlated to his or her class. The moneyed were slow; the poor like oil, greasing them.
Kamo looked at her from his bed. He was awake. A clicking in his throat suggested that he was choking, so Saskia rolled him onto his front and tipped his head. He coughed. One eye turned to her. Its pupil was a bloodspot in an egg.
‘I once knew another Simon,’ she said. She paused. There was a sense of repetition. Had she said this before, in a dream? ‘He was not real. Are you real?’
Moving with the air of an artist adjusting her work, she unbuttoned his jacket and shirt. She took some port from a cabinet and wetted his beard and throat. Then she poured his half-drunk, poisoned wine onto the centre of the floor, in case a servant was tempted by it. She put the bottle on the floor.
Let ten seconds pass. Do not appear to flee.
‘Bitter, is it not? The fungus is called the Destroying Angel.’
He could not speak, or would not.
‘You thought I needed you. I don’t.’
A train whistle, short, echoed through the station and spoke of other journeys. Saskia left the compartment. But at the steps, she paused, then returned to Kamo.
‘You saved my life,’ she whispered. ‘So the poison is not mortal. You will recover with no ill effects. I said it was the Destroying Angel, but that was a lie to finesse the trick.’
Kamo growled.
‘My dear?’ she asked.
He was unconscious. Resting at last.
Travellers came to Nicholaevsky Station from Central and South Russia, from Siberia, Eastern Ukraine, and the Crimea. Chains hung from its high arches like funeral crepe. There was something opera about this place. A dwarf approached Saskia with a tray of tea and chocolate. She shook her head. Corinthian, too: the columns. The dwarf raised his hat and continued along the platform. Behind her, a train whistle blew a minor chord. Old women bent like ships under full sail. Gents placed the points of their umbrellas as they walked. Others wore scuffed, tilted hats in great variety. A man must have a hat. A child dashed a zigzag, powered by flippers of torn newspaper. The wealthier children wore knickerbockers and cloth caps: English, but the cuts suggested Russian interpretation. Waxed whiskers. Gypsies selling honey and flowers. An old man, holding his bleeding nose, looking for a culprit. A younger man, offering the flat of his hand to the air, frowning at the ceiling.
Saskia was a quiet island. She sighed. The expansion strained at her corset.
A woman screamed. Saskia turned. The woman was spinning a boy in her arms, delighting in his weight, while an embarrassed father looked at both of them with a pleasure that made Saskia hurt. Her pain disappeared when she heard something almost below the threshold of her hearing.
Is.
It.
Her.
The head of the platform was intermittently obscured by steam. Something inside Saskia isolated a frequency band near the microwave spectrum and showed her what was beyond the steam: two men. One appeared to be looking at her, when he could only be looking at the steam. His expression was anxious. He was either a secret policeman, which made her a suspect for the attack on Draganov, or from the Party, which made her a traitor. Either way, she had to lose him directly.
Saskia beckoned to an attendant. He was an old fellow, stooped and with bad hips. She asked him to send her two hand-cases ahead to a hotel on the English Quay, which was some miles east. The man had a capable air. Saskia was glad of it. With luck, resources from her surveillance team would be diverted to the luggage. As for that, she did not expect to see it again, and did not care.