Saskia thumped the roof of the carriage and asked to be dropped near a streetlamp on the next corner. When she had paid the driver, she doubled back. She kept her boater tilted forward and strained to overhear voices. Midway down the road a piebald ginger-white cat moved towards her. Saskia heard its footfalls. Then she heard the scrape of a chair and the dry clap of book being closed and, far away, the laughing of a child. A voice (female, Russian, upper class accent, probably from St Petersburg) admonished the child.
Saskia did not stop, but she turned her head. Here, then, was the house that held Lenin, perhaps the money from the Tiflis robbery, and Soso. It was a three-storey building with a hipped roof, blue walls and white beamwork. The surrounding garden was hedged and expansive. The iron gate was ajar.
She walked on to the next villa. It was unlit and shuttered. She entered the gate with deliberate confidence and walked into its rear garden. She climbed the rear hedge and landed on gravel at the rear of Lenin’s house. The shadows were deep. She waited, crouching, for sounds of alarm, or the inquisitive patter of an approaching guard dog. She heard none. It was as she expected. Grisha, the Finn and Kamo were likely to have formed Lenin’s complete bodyguard. He did not like a retinue.
Saskia looked around the garden. On the brick support of the iron gate, the ginger-white cat was sitting. Its eyes looked past her. Slowly, Saskia followed its stare.
There was nothing but wind mussing the branches of the high trees separating this property from the one behind.
Saskia moved beneath an unlit window near the back door. She removed her rucksack and withdrew Kamo’s guns. Their barrels were pitted and scratched. There had been a time when Saskia thought she could change his direction with the application of a little loving force. She remained troubled by the smile he had worn when she shot him.
Still meditating on the revolvers, she heard footfalls within the house. She put her ear to the bricks. There was a commotion. The front door swung open. There was no mistaking its sound. Meanwhile, boots made soft crunches in the grass. Saskia closed her eyes and let the sounds mix and merge; let the meaning come to her. In a moment, she understood that the Finn she had left on the mountainside had returned. Saskia was not surprised that he had failed to bury Kamo—who had often boasted that the birds and were welcome to pick at his meat—but she was surprised by the speed of his arrival, considering the blow she had dealt him.
Breathlessly, the Finn said, ‘Kamo is lost. I’m sorry, truly.’
The next voice made Saskia’s eyes open.
‘I fucked your mother,’ said Soso. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘She overpowered me.’
‘Catch your breath. Did she follow you?’
‘I ran as fast as I could.’
A third man, quieter than the other two, said, ‘Never mind your belated efforts. Does she know this address?’
‘Not,’ said the Finn, ‘not exactly.’
The quiet man: ‘Yes or no, idiot.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry?’ said Soso. ‘When I shit in your mouth, you’ll be sorry. Make up for your mistake by securing a carriage this instant.’
‘No,’ said the quiet man. ‘You go, comrade. I will not put the safety of myself and the solvency of the Party in the hands of this idiot. Take him with you and pay him off.’
There was a pause. Saskia imagined the strained faces. The Finn anguished, Soso anxious, and the quiet man—who was surely Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—unreadable. Then the silence ended in a series of footfalls that signalled the departure of Soso and the Finn as they hurried to make arrangements.
She crouched in the darkness with her head cocked, trying to picture Lenin. Was he scanning the street for shadows shaped like her? There would be a ruthless cast to his face. Saskia was in no doubt what the instruction ‘pay him off’ meant for a man like Soso, who was renowned for carrying little money about his person.
But Saskia had noted another phrase of Lenin.
‘I will not put the safety of myself and the solvency of the Party in the hands of this idiot.’
The proceeds of the Tiflis bank heist were in the house.
Saskia put the rucksack on and tightened its straps until they cut into her shoulders. Then she pushed the guns under the straps barrel-first. This made the handles high but reachable. She cocked both the revolvers and moved towards an open window on the corner of the house. The room beyond was gaslit but unoccupied. She jumped onto the sill and braced herself with a foot against the frame. The room was full of toys. A doll’s house had been left open; it was filled with marbles, a paper windmill, and a drum. In a heap by the door lay costumes—a sailor, a Red Indian—and tiaras and sparkling slippers. A chest, with its drawers pulled into steps, sat beneath a hanging mobile on which wooden children rode moonbeams.
The plucked notes of a music box filled the room.
All around the mulberry bush.
Saskia looked at the floorboards to better identify where to step. Then she lowered herself gently into the room. She crouched. She marked off thirty seconds. At the twenty-fifth, the pile of costumes moved.
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock.
Saskia approached the costumes and pulled them away.
Pop! goes the weasel.
There was a girl, perhaps nine years old, in a blue dress. She was turning the handle of a small jack-in-the-box. There was a resemblance between this girl and the girl Ute who had played on the sand in Saskia’s dream.
Saskia smiled. She whispered in French, ‘Hello, little weasel. Are you playing hide and seek?’
The girl said nothing. Her expression was petulant.
‘It takes a special girl to fool my special ears. I’m Penelope. How do you do?’
Still the girl said nothing.
Saskia feigned seriousness, and in Russian, whispered, ‘Have you been told not to speak to strangers?’
The girl nodded.
‘I see you have found an accomplice, young lady,’ said Vladimir Ulyanov. He was standing in the black doorway. He looked at Saskia. ‘I was speaking to my student. We were practising our German verbs when I was called to the door.’
With all the grace she could gather, she rose from the child.
Lenin was shorter than Saskia. His premature baldness emphasised his forehead and his steady eyes, which took in the pair of revolvers. The sharpness of his eyebrows and his neat Van Dyke beard made him rather more caricature than real, and his short neck seemed to lift his shoulders, but there was nobility about him. A nobility not like that of the Count, who was gentle and intelligent. Lenin’s airs were colder. He counted himself among the superior examples of humanity.
‘You must be Comrade Penelope,’ he continued, ‘which makes you an extremely resourceful individual. May I treat you as an intelligent woman and not introduce myself as a Finnish chef?’
‘What’s in a name?’ Saskia said. Her voice was measured. ‘In Tiflis, they call you the Mountain Eagle.’
Lenin smiled. It was the smile of a lawyer about to cross-examine a witness. ‘The money is here, of course. We packed it inside encyclopaedias. I can show you. There would be no dishonour in leaving this house with some volumes. Shall we say A to D?’