Even so, my face must have become indistinguishable from those around it when I first laid eyes on the horror that had befallen the Kremlin. It had been spared the fires of the first days of Bonaparte's occupation, thanks largely to the efforts of the French themselves to protect it as the richest jewel in the crown that they had captured. But on his departure, Bonaparte had instructed that the citadel should be mined and destroyed so that we could not reclaim that which he could not keep. There could be no military justification for it, as there might possibly have been for the fires that dogged the French when they first took the city; it was mere petulance.
Luck, however, having chosen that autumn of 1812 to desert Bonaparte, had deserted him completely. The Kremlin was not destroyed. Perhaps his subordinates had been half-hearted in executing so churlish an order. Perhaps the rain had dampened the fuses. Whatever the cause, few of the charges had ignited. But whatever relief Muscovites might have felt that the Kremlin was saved, it was still a misery to see the damage that had been done. Facing Red Square, everything between the Arsenal and the Saint Nicholas Tower was gone, along with several other towers stretching down towards the river. Venturing within, I saw that the Palace of the Facets had collapsed. Worst of all, the great golden cross that had once topped the Ivan the Great Bell Tower was gone. It had not been destroyed in any explosion, but dragged to the ground and carted off as part of Bonaparte's plunder.
Sad though it was to witness the mutilation caused by the departure of the French, I counted myself as fortunate to have missed the brief trough of anarchy into which the remaining population of Moscow had descended in the twenty-four hours after the French had left. What I heard of it was disheartening enough. A crowd had marched on the Foundlings' Home, where there were no longer to be found orphans, but hundreds of French wounded who were too weak to be moved. Few survived the wrath of the mob, though their deaths were quicker than those of many of their comrades who had been able to walk out into the slow, freezing mortality of the Russian winter. Had the mob's only actions been those of vengeance, then they might have been attributed to some misplaced sense of patriotism, but, so I was told, looting had become more rife than ever. Those supplies that should have been eked out between all Muscovites were grabbed by the strongest and most selfish. Fortunately, there were Russian troops under Prince Khonvansky near to the city, waiting for the French to leave, and so the period when no law – neither French nor Russian – reigned was mercifully brief. By the time I returned, civilization – if not civility – had long been restored.
The inn in Tverskaya where I usually stayed (when I wasn't frequenting stables and crypts) had at least in part survived the fires. Flames had consumed much of the block, and as many as half of the rooms had been destroyed, but its proprietors had already returned and were attempting to resurrect their business using those few rooms that remained habitable. I chatted to the innkeeper as he led me up to a dispiritingly humble room. (The set which I used to occupy was no more – the stairs that had once led up to it now led only to a precipice overlooking a wasteland of detritus and rubble.) He asked after Vadim, Dmitry and Maks. I told him they were all well, finding it easier simply to lie about Maks, but I gathered that he had not seen Vadim any more recently than I had.
There was little I could do to track down Vadim. When the French arrived he, like me, had gone underground. His skills at hiding himself from view might not have been the greatest in the world, but in a city the size of Moscow, there was nowhere I could even begin to search for him. All I could do was attend the same daily meeting points that we had arranged weeks before. It was a dim hope, but that was the last plan of action we had. However slim the chance, it was the best I had of finding him. On top of that, there was also the possibility that one or more of the Oprichniki might show up – a prospect that I viewed with some ambivalence.
Sunday's meeting place was the Church of Fyodor Stratilit, beside Menshikov's Tower, east of the Kremlin. I took a slight detour to revisit the place where I had spent my last night in the city, in Boris and Natalia's tiny dwelling within the shantytown. When I got there, nothing remained of it – a few possessions of little value were strewn about, and I could see the remains of the homemade tents that the people had built. I even managed to find the precise spot where, I estimated, Boris and Natalia's particular compartment had been. They had left nothing of value. A broken bottle stuck half out of the mud. Whether it had been the one I had drunk from, or one of those I had given them, or some other stray, discarded bottle, I could not tell.
Asking around, I heard that the encampment had been broken up by the French only a few days after we left. There had been no bloodshed – the people there had simply dispersed to other locations in the city. There was little hope that anyone would know where a specific cobbler and his daughter had gone. I carried on to the meeting which I hoped Vadim would attend.
He was not there when I arrived, a little before nine. It took me but a moment to find the message I had left for him, scratched against the soft stone on a low part of the wall. My heart beat faster in the anticipation that he might have followed it up with a subsequent message in response, but there was none. I waited for an hour, but Vadim did not come. I headed back to my bed.
The following morning, I made a tour of the six remaining meeting points, much as I had done on my last day before leaving Moscow. My purpose was, as it had in part been at the church the previous night, to check whether Vadim had left any responses to my messages. Most of my messages remained intact. One of the chalk ones had vanished completely, presumably washed away by rain, and another had been half rubbed off, but was still essentially legible. However, at none of them did I find any corresponding reply from Vadim. I even checked the burnt-out tavern, where I had not left anything at all, in case Vadim had written a message there, but there was nothing.
If he had read any of the messages, he would surely have replied. Even if he had decided instantly on joining us in Yuryev-Polsky, he would have at least indicated that he had been at the rendezvous. It was, of course, possible that he had been at the place but not seen the message but, on the other hand, I had put them in conventional places – places where Vadim, with his years of experience, would certainly have looked. I could only conclude that he had not attended any meeting since we had last seen him, under the archway at Saint Vasily's. Like us, he must have left the city soon after. But even then, wouldn't he have left messages for us as I did? The other possibility was that he had never left the city and never would.
It seemed increasingly likely. If Iuda had realized that Vadim was following him, he would have had no qualms about ridding himself of his pursuer and indulging in a good meal at a single stroke. Vadim would have put up a good fight, but his scepticism was obvious even at the mention of the word 'voordalak', and so he might not have been as wary as he should. Moreover, it was Iuda, not Vadim, that I had seen more recently. And who was to know that they hadn't run into one of the other Oprichniki, and then Vadim would have been beyond hope. It was an irony and a very small comfort that, if this was the case, Iuda himself had perished only hours later in the inferno of the cellar.
But though I feared, I did not know. It was just as likely that Vadim had fled Moscow. If that was the case then, with the city coming back to life, now was the time when he would be most likely to return, just as I had. All I could do was turn up at the appropriate place at nine o'clock each evening and hope.
That afternoon, I paid a visit to Degtyarny Lane. I hadn't completely abandoned hope on Domnikiia, but if she was lost to me, then I at least wanted it to end on an amicable footing. I also wanted to throw myself at her feet and tell her I loved her, but she was well aware of that – saying it wouldn't change anything.