“Where are these boys?”
“In Ta Khure. They’re being kept in a compound two streets away from the Tokchin temple. There’s a large yurt what I believe the Mongols call a “twelve-Mana”. And a summer-house behind it.”
Ungern looked past Winterpole.
“Do you know it, Sepailov?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve been keeping an eye on it for a little while now.
It sounds very likely to me.”
“Good. Send a detachment of men round there straight away.
They’re to take everyone alive if possible, except for the two boys.
Have them shot on the spot, I don’t want anyone having second thoughts.
You’d best send Russians for this job.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll see to it at once.” He saluted and turned to the Colonel.
Sepailov turned back again.
“Before you leave, have this man taken out and shot. Do it yourself if you have time.”
Winterpole spluttered, then drew himself erect.
“May I ask what is the meaning of this? I’m a representative of His Majesty’s government. I have diplomatic immunity. Your behaviour is most improper, General.”
Ungern stood up and leaned across the desk. Winterpole blustered to a halt. He had joined his army of glass, and found-Tiimself as brittle and vulgar at heart as any of them. When glass breaks, it shatters, it does not splinter like wood.
“You are not a diplomat, Major. You are, by your own admission, an intelligence agent. Whether you are a spy or an administrator of spies, it is not for me to judge. My task here is to eliminate three groups: Bolsheviks, Jews, and foreign agents.”
“For God’s sake, General. We’re on the same side!”
“Not any longer,” Ungern told him.
“What do you mean “not any longer”?”
“Just that. Your government has just entered into a trade agreement with the Soviets’ it was signed in March. Surely you cannot pretend you did not know.”
“I assure you, I .. .”
“Your Mr. Lloyd George signed it alongside Krasin, the Soviet representative, on the sixteenth of March. The Russian Trade Delegation has already been granted permanent status in London.
The next step will be diplomatic recognition. Do you tell me you were ignorant of this?”
“I left London long before that. No-one thought to tell me. There must be some mistake.”
“There is no mistake. You are, are you not, one of the two men responsible for the deaths of General Rezukhin and seven of his unit at a camp five days south of here? Wrere you not originally arrested by the General for spying on the execution of a party of Bolshevik infiltrators?”
Winterpole tried to stand, but his legs had lost their strength.
He felt Sepailov’s powerful hands on his shoulders, pinning him down.
He was beginning to break. In a moment he would shatter and be gone.
Ungern stepped out from behind the desk.
“Please don’t take too long, Colonel I want that boy dead by midnight.”
He went to the door and stepped outside. Sepailov put one hand on Winterpole’s windpipe.
“Relax, Major,” he said in a whisper.
“It won’t hurt if you don’t fight against it.”
Sometimes the ticking of the clocks soothed him. At others, it depressed him, and he sought out the silent chambers of his palace, where time seemed to stand still. Tonight, it brought him neither pain nor pleasure, and he realized that he was growing old. He was fifty-one, but he felt older and sadder than that.
Tomorrow, he would have to play the god again for the multitudes already assembling outside in the darkness to receive his festal benediction. A long cord of red silk stretched from his throne through the length of the palace, across the perimeter wall, and into the wide street outside. For the entire morning, he would have to sit holding the cord in one hand while pilgrims gathered in the mud and refuse to touch its other end. They believed that a blessing would pass down the cord from him to them, wiping away their sins, cancelling all the bad karma they had accumulated. It was a farce; but it was the only farce he knew.
He had been blind for seven years now. The doctors said it was because he drank so much, but he set little store by their dictums and went on drinking regardless. At least it consoled him in his blindness. He loved maygolo, a sweet aniseed brandy that the Chinese traders had sold in small round bottles; and French cognac, whenever Ungern could get a shipment through, which wasn’t often; and above all the boro-darasu wine that they used to send him from Peking. They gave him a kind of sight, or at least a shimmering in the blackness.
For all that, he resented his blindness. It meant he could no longer enjoy all the beautiful things he had gathered about him over the years. The world was such a place, he thought, such a place; and he had seen so little of it. Locked up in monasteries and palaces all his life, he could not go to the world; but he had brought the world to himself.
His secretaries were in bed. His wife was amusing herself with a new lover, in her own palace outside the walls of Ta Khure: he would cover her breasts with oil and her thighs with essence of sandalwood. His monk-attendants were busy praying in readiness for the Festival tomorrow. Alone, he walked through the silent rooms and corridors of his private residence, touching his past with regretful fingers.
It was all here: plate after plate of Sevres porcelain, from which he had never eaten, silvered with a fine patina of dust; pianos that he had never learnt to play, cracked and out of tune now; clocks of every description, their hands set at every conceivable hour;
albums of ivory and malachite, of mother-of-pearl and silver, of onyx, agate, jade, and ornately tooled Russian leather, of blue and red and purple velvet, crammed with fading photographs of the dead and the living; liqueur stands, champagne tweezers, gold and silver and glass candlesticks for which there had been no candles in years; cigar-cases, card-cases, spectacle-cases of tortoise-shell and gold and silver filigree; telescopes through which he had once gazed at the stars, abandoned and dust-covered now. Dreams and fancies to keep a god happy and a man possessed. He ran a stubby ringer over a set of Japanese wind-chimes. They tinkled in the still air like flakes of falling ice.
As the sound faded, it was replaced by another. Footsteps, heavy footsteps. He had expected no-one at this hour. Least of all here, in his private quarters, which no-one entered without his permission. The footsteps grew in volume, muffled by the thick kin cob carpet that covered every inch of floor. His visitors were not pilgrims seeking a private audience: pilgrims would have come on silent feet or on their hands and knees. The footsteps halted, still several feet away from him. He turned to face them.
“Your holiness,” a voice said, “I beg your pardon for this intrusion, but I have brought someone to speak to you. Please listen to what he has to say.”
He recognized the voice. It was Bodo, a high-ranking lama who had once served briefly as one of his secretaries. What on earth could he be doing here? Before he had time to respond, someone else spoke. He could not be certain, but he thought he had heard this voice before as well.
“You are the khubilgan of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, the Bogdo Khan, known by the reign-title “Exalted by AH”?”
He nodded. He was sure the voice was familiar.
“Who else did you think I would be?” he asked.
“Then I am authorized to tell you, on behalf of the Provisional Government of the Mongolian People and the Central Committee of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, that you are hereby placed under house arrest and will be confined to these quarters until such time as it has been decided what is to become of you. Do you understand?”