“…mmm… A less than model prisoner… numerous escape attempts. Tsk… scorning our lavish welcome. Captured, July fifteenth, 1916, near the village of Trysten… Battle of the Stokhid… acting commander of a Guards battalion as a senior captain… hmmm…. Guards captain and lieutenant colonel are the same… both K7, if I recall correctly… before that… company command, Second Company, Kexholm Guards regiment… machine gun detachment commander before that… wounded at Tannenburg… joined Guards 1910… 1906 graduate of Pavlov Military Academy… First Cadet Corps before that… Order of Saint Anne, 4th Class… Stalislaw, Third Class… Saint Vladimir… Saint George…”
Two or three times—Kostyshakov lost count—the German stopped reading and looked at the curved ceiling contemplatively. Finally, reaching the end of the file, he closed it and turned his attention back to the Russian.
That study went on a long, intense, and uncomfortable time, before Kostyshakov lost his patience and asked, “Is there something I can do for you, General? And how do you—how does that file—know these things?”
Good, thought Hoffmann, he is patient but not too patient. Also not dull-witted.
“Ah, my apologies, Captain,” said the German in flawless Russian. “I’m Major General Max Hoffmann. You have, perhaps, heard of me.”
“Chief of Staff, Ober Ost?” Kostyshakov asked, a little incredulously. He knew the German staff system reasonably well.
“That would be me, yes. As to your file; I suspect it was captured in the same battle you were in, or shortly thereafter, and made part of your file for our purposes. It’s in Russian, which I doubt anyone—well, anyone German—before me has thought to read. If they had, you would have been in this place a lot sooner, long before so many escape attempts.”
“Well now I really am intrigued,” Kostyshakov said. “This is a signal honor, sir. But, more to the point, to what do I owe this signal honor?”
Again, Hoffmann reverted to quiet study, not answering the question.
For his part, sensing a sort of mental game in progress, Daniil simply folded his arms and proceeded to stare back.
And very quick on the uptake, too. I think I can make use of this young man.
“Tell me, Captain,” Hoffmann said, “you have shown yourself resourceful at breaking out of places; six distinct escapes that got you outside the walls of whatever camp you were in, if I didn’t lose count.”
“Six? I think that’s probably right, sir.”
“So you can break out… how do you think you would be at breaking in?”
Kostyshakov unfolded his arms in a painful attempt to sit more upright. “Sir, I…”
“I have a proposition for you, young man. But first, tell me what you know of circumstances in Russia.”
“Not that much, sir. I know the tsar abdicated, and that Kerensky has formed a government.”
Something about the tone in Daniil’s voice when he said, “Kerensky,” prompted Hoffmann to ask if he knew him.
“We’ve never met, sir, no, but I know of him. I’ve read some of his work, notably his exposure and treatment of the Lena Massacre was important. But… although Russia needs to modernize and even liberalize, I don’t think Kerensky is the man to do it.”
“Why not?”
“His heart’s in the right place, but he’s far too left wing, and even too innocent, for the job.”
“I see,” said Hoffmann. “Well, you will be pleased to note that Kerensky is no longer in charge of the Provisional Government. His place has been taken by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin…”
“The Bolshevik?” Daniil asked, distress in his voice. “The Bolsheviks are in charge of Russia?” He let his compact torso fall back upon his medical cot, then covered his face in the crook of one arm. “I should have known, except that here part of my sentence was to be deprived of Red Cross parcels and newspapers.”
“It gets worse,” Hoffmann said.
“How can it be worse? How can it possibly be worse than that godless Bolshevik, Lenin, ruling Russia?”
“Russia’s dropped out of the war.”
“Still not as bad as Tsar Lenin,” Daniil said. “For he’ll be the tsar, even if he scorns the title.”
Hoffmann continued, trying to shake the Russian, “The imperial army has mostly disintegrated.”
“Of course, it did,” Kostyshakov agreed. “How could it not with the Bolsheviks at the helm?”
“Germany is stripping away, which is to say guaranteeing the independence of, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. That’s about one third of the Empire’s population, just under ninety percent of its coal, perhaps half of Russia’s industrial base, and about a quarter of the rail system.
“It didn’t have to be,” Hoffmann continued, not necessarily with perfect honesty. “With the tsar or even with Kerensky we could have made a far more generous peace. But with the Bolsheviks in charge? Germany has to secure itself against them.”
“No doubt,” Daniil replied. And I even do understand it, at least to some degree.
“So how do you feel about your royal family,” Hoffmann asked, “or, rather, your former royal family?”
“While I breathe,” Daniil replied, “and they do, they remain my royal family and…”
“Yes?” Max prodded.
“Nothing, sir. Nothing important.”
Hoffmann stood, again causing the chair to groan in relief, and took the two steps to the night table next to Kostyshakov’s bed. He picked up the postcard, saying, “Beautiful girls. German girls, really, for the most part, which is a good deal of why I’m here to see you. I’ve never met either one, though I saw them from a distance once when they were little above babies.”
Kostyshakov’s eyes took on a sort of dreamy look, as if they were piercing the veil of time to look back. “I was wounded again,” he said, distantly, “in nineteen fifteen. It was a fairly heavy dose of shrapnel. It looked touch and go for a while. I was evacuated to a hospital at Tsarskoe Selo to recover. My nurse was… the one on the right, Tatiana Romanova. Wonderful, wonderful girl. The other, Olga, is sweet but not strong. Tatiana is strong.
“Beyond my station, of course; even leaving aside that I am a probably a little too old for her; my family wasn’t ennobled until my grandfather was awarded the Order of Saint George, Fourth Class, for fighting on the frontier.”
“Yes, and I’m not even a ‘von,’” Max said. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, you feel you do have obligations both to the tsar and the royal family, professionally and morally, and to this girl, personally?”
“Yes. And as for the girl, still, a man can dream.”
“That may prove unfortunate and your dream a nightmare,” Hoffmann said. “The Bolsheviks cannot possibly let the tsar and his family live. At some point in time, the decision will be made—it is part of the inescapable logic of revolution—that they must die before they can become so much as figureheads for the enemies of the revolution.”
“I don’t believe it,” Kostyshakov replied. “Even the Bolsheviks—”
“Are you at all familiar with the French Revolution?” Hoffmann interrupted. “Does the name Marie Antoinette not ring a bell? The Princess de Lamballe? How many hundreds, how many thousands, of others?
“Don’t delude yourself, Captain Kostyshakov; the tsar and his family are as good as dead.”
Daniil grew very silent then, staying that way for what seemed a long time. When he finally spoke, it was to say, “You didn’t come here to tell me all this just to torture me, General Hoffmann. What is it that you want?”