‘The taxi with the white sash.’
‘I was beginning to get worried.’
Saskia felt her scalp sweat beneath the wig.
The coach’s interior was luxurious, which satisfied Saskia because the coach and its driver had cost the remainder of her money. Kamo sat on the rear-facing seat. He did not help her lower the blinds or, in shadow, pull the cases from the small rack. He watched her.
‘When we’ve merged into traffic,’ she said, ‘open the rear window and pull the sash inside.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Are you going to change?’
‘Directly,’ he said, tasting the arm of his glasses. ‘Directly.’
With her legs braced on the rocking floor, Saskia opened her case and examined the costume. It might have been a huge, red parachute. The metaphor suited her vertigo. She stripped to her corset while Kamo rubbed his left eye, the one that had been damaged by the bomb.
‘Does something worry you?’
‘Silence, woman.’
‘Very well.’
The new costume had a fitted corset. Saskia removed her own. At this, Kamo said, ‘You’re not like the others.’
‘Who?’
‘If you were lost, a hundred ships would be launched to your rescue.’
She smiled crookedly. ‘Don’t you mean a thousand?’
Kamo stood. He could not reach his full height, and he bent over her. His humour had gone. ‘I have never forced myself upon you.’
‘Should I thank you?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Some men have laughed at me because I would not.’
‘If laughter is so important to you, perhaps you should.’
Kamo put his hand to his wounded eye once more. As he kneaded the lid, Saskia felt an absurd pity. Once, he had been a spoiled boy in a seminary, bewitched by the older student assigned to help him pass some exams. And now this: brigandage, escapology, and casual talk of hurt.
Softly, he said, ‘How are we meant to get the money out of there?’
‘You’re standing in it. Now get dressed. I don’t want these blinds to be down for much longer. It will draw attention.’
As Saskia completed her transformation and sat down, she discovered a note in her hand warmer. She could read it in the gloom, but she lifted the window blind and turned the paper against the light. Its words had been written in a trivial substitution cipher.
The boy passed his viva voce, and will become a student at the Lyceum. His examiners were particularly impressed by his discussion of the St Petersburg Paradox. His father thanks his tutor. I remain,
Your good man.
Saskia did not weep. It would have revealed too much to Kamo.
‘Give me that,’ he said, taking it. But his eyes moved haphazardly over the text. ‘What language is this?’
She looked through the window at the people. In one hundred years they would be dead, but she would be alive, if being alive meant anything.
Chapter Twenty
As a woman who had overheard a thousand conversations about St Petersburg throughout the Russias, she knew that no commentator passed through St Petersburg without remarking, with the pomp of private insight, that the city was an attempt to impersonate the face—and, by association, the bone structure—of its European cousins: the polyglot, intellectual Vienna; the lynchpin Berlin; Peter’s favourite, Amsterdam; and Paris, which could never be bettered for taste. Last of all, Saskia thought, there is Venice, as she passed her invitation to a footman who was dressed in white, clownish pyjamas, a stove-pipe hat, and black mask. Her invitation read, Carnevale Veneziano a San Pietroburgo, 1908. Tonight the cliché would be celebrated.
‘Goda del nostro carnevale, signora,’ said the footman, opening an arm towards the façade of the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars. It was lit with theatrical lime-jets and oil fires and the last of the spring sunshine. Its northern square, through which Saskia had galloped not four days before, throbbed with activity.
Saskia took a breath to correct his Italian, but held it. Instead, she looked upon the crowd and let Kamo take her arm and move her into its swirl. Most guests were costumed in the Venetian style. Others were dressed as courtiers from the reign of Catherine the Great. One short man was dressed as a Roman centurion, though his cloak was golden. Another as a pirate. There was a highwayman. And the clowns. Clown after clown.
‘We will go immediately to the Amber Room,’ said Kamo, pulling her.
‘We will not.’ She scanned the crowd. ‘Midnight is our time, not before.’
‘Is it clockwork? Do we meet someone there, is that it?’
Kamo’s face was obscured by his mask: a skull missing its jaw. She could, however, see him biting the inside of his cheek.
‘You could say that,’ she replied. ‘We will wait until dinner is called, eat, and recover the money. Smile.’
Kamo squeezed her arm. ‘How will we move it? Money is heavy, worse than books.’
‘It has been arranged. Relax. Enjoy yourself.’
‘What is my role in this, Lynx?’ he asked.
Saskia turned to him. His tone was so soft, the question placed so wearily, that she wondered whether he had guessed her true plan.
‘You are the finest infiltrator in St Petersburg,’ she said. ‘How else would we have made it to this ball?’
‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my presence is a bulwark against further interference as you proceed to betray the Party.’
Saskia looked at him.
‘You overestimate my cunning.’
‘I remember a comment the Pockmarked One made after I told him the story of our first meeting on Turtle Lake. “Perhaps,” he said, “she is a witch who seeks the wisdom of the dead.” He found that funny.’
To this, Saskia did not reply.
Polished, black masks complemented the bone white. The latter were commonly gilded, their beauty spots gold in the touches of sunlight. The black masks were seldom without precious stones. Below those masks that covered only half the face, lips were licked. Many half-masks sported probosces that recalled that perfect English expression—Nosey Parker. The full masks were still as skulls and their fixed smiles defiant: lips red and full. The men liked to wear these masks with a headband below their three-pointed Venetian hats. The women tended to carry them on stalks. Their skirts were shorter than usual and their necklines lower. Many wore long, thin gloves with a hook at the elbow in which to hang the hem of the skirt, and they expanded as they spun.
All about fluttered the whispers of fans, laughter, and conversation. Only the palace servants, who wore no masks, were silent as they carried trays and lit cigarettes and delivered small notes, precise as jewels in clockwork. The occasional flutter of a juggled torch led to an appreciative gasp. Young ladies giggled. It was no difficult task to locate the courtesans. They were slower and employed the conspicuous posture of the huntress, not the prey.
The evening already smelled of sweat, perfume, cooking meat, and fireworks. The air itself might have been a cocktail mixed to the perfection of collective anticipation: that this night to come, this Petersburg cliché turned authentic, would be somehow unforgettable and unique. This evening might represent the apogee of the season. The Tsar, sadly, was not present. But in his absence there was release. These aristocrats were set for an occasion during which their good names, hidden by a temporary Venetian pall, could not be impaired by mistakes romantic or otherwise. It limited the damage to a level below that of disaster. There might be mishaps and distant shakes of the head. That was the attraction of the masked ball.