Aleksei nodded. ‘I can’t really say any more,’ he said.
‘But whose side is he on? Is he one of us, or one of them?’
It was very, very simple for Dmitry – ‘us’ and ‘them’; radicals and conservatives. But every ‘us’ and ‘them’ could eagerly form into a combined ‘us’ when faced by a new, dangerous, external ‘them’. Thus the whole of Russia had become a united ‘us’ when faced with the invading French. And if only the French and Russians had known, they could have joined together to see off the threat of the voordalak ‘them’ for good.
‘It’s not as straightforward as that, Mitka,’ he said. He realized he sounded condescending, particularly by using the diminutive, but it was how he felt. ‘The man’s an enemy of Russia – the whole of Russia, regardless of our petty squabbles.’ The whole of Russia and beyond.
‘So you’re still working for the tsar?’
‘For Russia,’ said Aleksei. ‘There’ll still be a government after the tsar is gone. There’ll still be criminals and spies, and they’ll still have to be dealt with.’
‘So you plan to keep your job?’ There was bitterness in Dmitry’s voice. Aleksei was tempted to ask whether he thought the overthrow of Aleksandr would leave him free to pursue his career as a musician, but he refrained. Instead he simply nodded.
‘You sound like Talleyrand,’ said Dmitry. ‘Friend of Napoleon, friend of Louis, friend of Charles. Friend of anyone who’s in power.’
‘Talleyrand is a friend of France. I’m a friend of Russia.’ He realized it was an odd way to put it. ‘I’m Russian,’ he added. ‘And any man who can say that should mean by it the same as I do.’
Dmitry looked expressionlessly at his father for a few moments, then changed the subject. ‘So, how are we going to catch him?’
‘You’re going to have nothing to do with it.’
‘But I can help you.’
‘Like you helped me tonight?’ asked Aleksei.
‘He’s a dangerous man. You can’t do this alone.’
‘That may well be the case, Mitka, but – and I don’t mean this to sound cruel – if I did want help, would you really be the best man for me to turn to? I’ve been in this business twenty years. If I need the help of someone to track down a man, there are hundreds of professionals I know to call on. If I need to kill a man, I know dozens who would help me.’
‘But Papa…’
‘It’s not about me being your papa or you being my son. Would you ask me to play a piano duet with you?’
‘I’d love you to, if that’s what you wanted.’
‘If our lives depended on my ability? If that piano had killed three, maybe four people in Moscow over the past week?’
Aleksei’s lip quivered at the absurdity of his own analogy. He could not hide it from Dmitry, and both broke into laughter.
‘My point is,’ said Aleksei after a few moments, ‘that certain tasks require expertise. Passion and loyalty aren’t always enough.’
‘After a few years in the army then?’
‘If that’s the path you want to go down. Is it?’
Dmitry considered for a few seconds. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.
His father hoped to God it wasn’t.
Aleksei climbed the steps to the door of the Lavrovs’ house and raised his hand to knock, but he tensed the muscles of his forearm, and his knuckles never reached the door. He had been kicking so many ideas around in his mind as he walked home – concerning Dmitry, Kyesha, the Northern Society and more – that it was only now that his most immediate problem came to his attention.
Dmitry had been following him.
From that simple fact followed two vital questions. When had he started his pursuit, and when had he stopped? The second question could be posed more bluntly: had he stopped?
Aleksei glanced up and down the street, but saw no one. Dmitry had played a clumsy shadow earlier that evening, but that did not mean he could manage nothing better. Aleksei turned away from the door and carried on down the street, then to the right. He knew the layout of the area, had known it for over four years, though he could not specifically recall committing it to memory. Around the corner, there was only one house before a metal railing ran alongside the pavement, separating it from a private garden. Aleksei leapt over silently.
Of course, he had been visiting the area for several years. Yelena and Valentin had moved down from Petersburg in 1817. After Vadim’s death – and the general chaos the French invasion had provoked, even as far away as in the new capital – Yelena had become particularly close to her widowed mother. But she had died, brokenhearted, less than four years after her husband. Others of her children had remained in their home town, but Yelena and Valentin had moved away almost as soon as Yelena’s inheritance had made it possible. Valentin had, some thought recklessly, left his government post to set up as an importer of textiles. Aleksei was one of the few who knew the full story behind it. Yelena had been happy to follow her husband, even though it was her money that paid for their new life.
Aleksei crept through the garden that surrounded the detached house – a rarity in that neighbourhood – and headed back towards the street in which the Lavrovs resided. It had been here he had come in 1820 on discovering the news that Domnikiia was pregnant. There was no way she could continue running the milliner’s shop, following in the footsteps of a father she had seen only once in the last sixteen years. To raise an illegitimate child would not have been, even for a man like Aleksei and certainly for a woman like Domnikiia, an insurmountable stigma in Russia. It was to the north-west of Europe and beyond that such details of people’s private lives were the concerns of others, and becoming ever more so. But Aleksei had always felt a visceral urge, with which his cautious mind on this occasion agreed, to keep all matters concerning his relationship with Domnikiia as secret as possible: secret from his wife, out of affection for her; from Dmitry, in consideration of his pride; from whoever or whatever lurked out there. Even though Iuda was dead, Aleksei still had enemies. The greatest safety for Tamara lay in no one ever knowing that she was his offspring. Even though Iuda was dead.
And so it had taken only a little persuasion for the Lavrovs to take her in. Whatever her acquaintance had been with Marfa in Petersburg, Yelena’s primary loyalty had always been to her father, and Aleksei was Vadim’s closest comrade. As for Valentin – he was hardly in a position to deny Aleksei anything. And the extra money was a boon; the textile trade was not going well, at least under his helmsmanship.
Once this street had become the home of Domnikiia and, arriving soon after, Tamara, Aleksei had instinctively acquired an understanding of the lie of its land, as the leader of a wolf pack does of its territory. He had long known this garden to be an easy way to double back, unseen, into the street. He looked both ways, but saw no one. Here there were no shops or taverns, and the only people he would expect to see would be those who lived here, or were calling on friends who did. Perhaps in the old days, before the war, that would have still meant a street that was, if not crowded, something more than deserted, but tonight it did not.
He waited another quarter of an hour before emerging. It would seem that Dmitry had not followed him from Lubyanka Square – or if he had, he had very rapidly learned a whole new set of skills in the field of stealth and concealment. Aleksei went back to the door and knocked. The maid who opened it scarcely disguised her displeasure at being dragged from the warmth of her fireplace at this hour. No one else in the house kept the same hours as Aleksei, nor would anyone, except perhaps Domnikiia, have tolerated the servant’s look with the same good humour.
‘Well?’ Domnikiia was standing in her nightgown when Aleksei entered. He had no doubt as to the meaning of her question.
‘He got away,’ he said.
‘He saw you?’ Her voice showed a concern that was little different from terror.