‘I know I’m on Nevsky Avenue,’ Kamo said. ‘I heard the bell of the Armenian church.’
Saskia put the towel around his neck. Then she shook the badger-hair brush, wet it in the hot water, and worked the small cake in the shaving mug.
‘Do I get breakfast?’ he asked. ‘I want an omelette with chopped tomato, plenty of salt and pepper, and fresh bread.’
Saskia tipped his head back. Their faces were close. His breath stank. She lathered his chin.
Kamo said, ‘You think I’m afraid of him?’
She took the razor and thumbed it open using the tang. Then, holding the blade at a reflex angle between her fingers, she placed the razor across the point of his trachea.
‘I am,’ said Kamo, his voice hoarse. ‘And you should be, too.’
Saskia moved the razor. There was something like analogue static in the sound of the blade as it cut the bristles. Kamo’s breath quickened but he did not swallow. She could see that he had picked out a chandelier on which to concentrate his attention.
‘I’m sorry about the boy,’ said Kamo.
Saskia paused.
‘Really,’ he continued. ‘I just wanted to get him out of the way.’
She swept the razor upward. It scraped a note off the edge of his chin.
‘We are both agreed, my dear, that the money must be liberated?’
Saskia paddled the blade in the hot water. Bristles and lather and the smallest hint of blood spiralled out.
‘Are we agreed?’ he pressed.
She turned his head a second to the right and drew the blade over his left cheek. She saw the blemish in his rolling eye. The bomb fragment was still embedded, turning in the humours.
‘I can protect you,’ said Kamo. ‘And I won’t mention the boy.’
A clump of his beard had gathered on the blade. She rinsed it once more.
‘Let me go alone,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where it is hidden. Is it the Amber Room? The Chinese Room? A couch, a settee? A painting?’
The blade cut his cheek. He tutted.
‘Then come with me, witch. Bring your pleasure-boat friends. We can travel in convoy to Finland. Lenin will hear of our shared triumph. I will construct a story to explain your winter obrok. Why would I do this? Take it as a measure of my thanks for the rescue.’
Saskia emptied his right cheek of hair.
‘Saskia?’
Then his chin. Finally, his upper lip.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I will steal us both into the Summer Palace. Our disguises will render us invisible.’ He stopped as she towelled his face. ‘You need me, Saskia.’ With the shaving complete, a withheld anger began to harden his shoulders and twist his mouth. Saskia felt him coil. ‘If you didn’t need me, why are you still in this city? Why did you pull me from that carriage?’
‘What made you into this, Simon?’
‘Whore.’
‘I have your word?’
Kamo shrugged. ‘Yes. How about some breakfast for your prisoner?’
Using her foot, Saskia steadied the bar that held the two manacles. She unlocked both. Kamo groaned with relief and studied his hands. He turned to her. His eyes were half-closed, as though Saskia was an illusion whose defect he might discover by study. Then his hands—they were small, not thickened by work—drifted towards her throat. She let him encircle her neck and press. Throughout, Kamo’s eyes bulged as though it was him, not her, whose blood was gathering in the head, unable to drop. She maintained her look of scorn. After fifteen seconds, Kamo dropped his hands to her living, right hand and gathered it to his lips, lowering his head. He could not say sorry. Contrition was not a mode he had mastered, even as an actor.
Saskia took a long breath. She looked into the darkness of the flue.
‘See? You need me, Kamo. You always did.’
‘I want to trust you.’
‘You told me that you were suspicious of Draganov, the agent on the train. You thought we were in league.’
‘Well, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Because I’m going to kill him.’
He raised his head. The grin had returned. He squeezed her left breast and pushed his clammy, rancid mouth onto hers, but there was sufficient elbow room in the fireplace for Saskia to punch him sharply behind the ear. She laid his unconscious body on the floor of the library and went to wake Robespierre.
Chapter Eighteen
The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, or Protection Department, is seen as the immovable object of the Tsarist government by the irresistible forces of discontent. It is from the words Okhrannoye otdelenie, Protection Department, that the contemptuous diminutive Okhranka is formed. Protection Department affairs are supervised, along with all police matters throughout the Empire, at the headquarters of the Department of Police on the Fontanka canal. The majority of Protection Department officials are not involved in secret police work; they work in non-political, non-secret Secretariats. Those charged with clandestine matters comprise a group known as the Special Section, which is so covert that one enters it by passing through a padded door in the fourth-floor office of the Police Chief. One must bow beneath its lintel because the door is stunted by an attic beam. The office is busiest at night, which is the preferred time for arrest, and thus work. The moustachioed case officers seldom attend the arrests because they cherish anonymity. They further protect themselves with assumed names. They rarely wear uniforms.
Two Special Section Officer, Mr Alexei Draganov and Dr Naum Kaplan, are not at their desks because they are talking under circumstances of absolute insulation. They are seated in the tiled chamber of a nearby bathhouse, at 27 West 24th Street, an establishment owned by the Imperial Russian Bath Company.
While ladies enter directly at the stoop of the bath house, gentlemen use another entrance: steps that take them below the level of the street. Inside are twenty-six dressing rooms. Each is furnished with carpet, stools, couches and is valet served for assistance in disrobement.
The baths are moderately busy this morning. In the vapour-bath room, which is spacious, tube-ventilated and fitted out with Italian marble, men recline, laugh, or slip into the central plunge pool. This is fed by a constant stream of filtered water through the heads of nickel-plated lions.
In one private room can be found our secret policemen, Naum Kaplan and Alexei Draganov. Kaplan is from the Ukraine, though he has forgotten which village. He is handsome, five years from retirement, quite secular, and unpleasant to those he deems less capable than himself. Into this category he places the majority of the tobacco-addicted high-flyers at the Special Section, but not Alexei Draganov, who meets the monolithic arguments of Kaplan with the patience of a mountain climber considering an ascent. Draganov is around forty-five years old, taller than Peter the Great and equally broad-shouldered, and wears his red beard in the manner of the Tsar. He maintains his fitness through cricket, which he plays along with British expatriates in the Petersburg XI during the green winter.
The two men are continuing a conversation that has occupied them since their cab ride from the Fontanka. It was sparked by a comment from Kaplan, who, as mentor to Draganov, wishes to instil in him the peculiar difficulties facing a secret police service in modern times. Given the traffic of valets, the conversation is conducted in Latin as an imperfect but basic obfuscator. It continues along the worn lines of an argument that Kaplan enjoyed with Draganov’s predecessor, Grossman, who was thrown from Trinity Bridge by politicals not two years before. Still, the valets come and go, carrying towels and shampoo in carafes and vodka at ten degrees centigrade. Draganov interrupts one of the men and asks him to collect some theatre tickets for this evening’s performance of Boris Godunov at the Mariinksy. Unnoticed, another valet collects an empty glass and carries it, alone on a tray, to the back rooms of the bath house.