Eventually, Matfei must have come to this conclusion as well, for he was distracted by the sound of a pleasant French baritone emanating from one of the grander houses that we passed. There was a light at the window, but I could not see who was inside. Matfei crept up and peered closely through the glass. Suddenly, he started. Once again, as I had been with Foma, I was reminded of a cat, tensing as it catches sight of its prey. Either the door was unlocked, or he had some way of opening it, for he was soon inside the house, leaving me to watch and wait in the shadows outside. And to listen.
The Frenchman's pleasant voice continued to serenade the night. On our arrival, he had been singing an aria that I recognized to be from Beethoven's Fidelio. At Austerlitz, tunes from this then-new opera had been on the lips of French and Austrian soldiers alike, and on those of some of the more cosmopolitan Russians. Now the unseen singer had switched to that old favourite (in certain quarters) ' La Marseillaise'. I smiled to myself; I could well imagine Vadim incensed by the singing of that song in a house in Moscow, though I think it would have been bluster. In his heart, I'm not sure Vadim loved his country any more than I did, or than Dmitry or… Well, no more than Dmitry or I anyway, but Vadim did like to make his patriotism clear for everyone else to see. He loved the emblems of Russia and hated the emblems of the invader. How I would have loved to have him beside me then, huffing and puffing at the outrage of hearing the air of Moscow polluted by such a tune. In truth, Bonaparte himself would have been little happier. He found ' La Marseillaise' a little too redolent of revolution for his new imperial dynasty, but it remained popular amongst the men.
For my part, I loved the tune. I lay my head against the wall behind me and enjoyed the rendition. The Frenchman inside the house sang in a fruity tone and had just got to the bit about the bellowing soldiers coming to cut the throats of his sons and his consorts when he too was cut short. The song ended in a curt, startled yelp, with which I was becoming all too familiar. I continued the song under my breath, choking back a tear whose cause I could not quite determine:
'Aux armes citoyens.
Formez vos bataillons.
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.'
It was inexplicable to be so overcome with emotion at a foreign anthem – far from the finest music, or verse, ever written – but for the man inside the house, whose death at Matfei's hand I had just listened to, it had meant everything. I had witnessed many deaths over the past decade, and if he had been stood on the battlefield, supporting to the last a tricolour, then his death would have been… respectable – both to me and, I believe, to him. But ever since we had begun to work with the Oprichniki, there had not been one single honourable death amongst the whole lot of them. Maks' death, the deaths of the uncounted French, even the deaths of the Oprichniki – Simon, Iakov Alfeyinich and Faddei – betrayed by Maks to the French; none of these fitted into the mould of the regular deaths of war. Perhaps in years to come, such ways of dying would become commonplace and acceptable, as the Frenchman – Louis, I think it was – had suggested back at that encampment we had infiltrated, but just then I yearned to witness a straightforward death by cannonball or sword. When I had chosen my path, away from the regular army, I had thought espionage was about information; about discovering what lay in the enemy's mind. I soon learned that it was simply about terminating those minds – about finding new and more unusual ways to carry death to our foes.
The door of the house opened and Matfei emerged once again. Glancing from side to side, he headed back up the street the way we had come. A coldness gripped me as, for the first time, I noticed something tangibly vile in one of the Oprichniki. Up until then, their methods and their manner were distasteful – distasteful to me and hence the problem was as much mine as theirs; no more than a clash of cultures. But what I now saw took a step beyond distaste, into abhorrence. I noticed – and at that distance I could hardly see, yet I was nonetheless certain – that he had blood on his lips.
Still, there might be nothing untoward in that. The Frenchman might have put up a fight before his death, laying a punch on Matfei's face, and so the blood might simply be Matfei's own. After a few steps, the Oprichnik stopped and raised his hand to his mouth, wiping the stain away. He looked at his fingers, considering the blood that he found there. I couldn't help but remember the blood on my own fingers, as those fingers were one after the other removed from my hand. Perhaps Matfei had not realized that he had been injured, and now, on seeing his own blood as confirmation of the wound, he would merely wipe his fingers clean on his coat. He did not. He raised his fingers back to his mouth and licked them delectably until the blood was gone. Then he set off once again on his way. Memories of long-forgotten stories forced their way into my mind, but I repressed them. I continued my pursuit.
As we travelled back north-eastwards, Matfei's stride was now less surreptitious – more the step of a contented gentleman returning to his home after an evening's revelry. Indeed, the directness of his motion suggested that he was no longer meandering through the city in search of targets, but was heading for some specific objective, which could only be his lodgings.
The fact that he had done his work for the evening and was heading for home, however, did not deter him from keeping an eye out for any other opportunities to kill that might arise. We had been travelling for about half an hour, always in a roughly north-easterly direction, when Matfei suddenly pressed himself against a wall and vanished, much as I had seen Foma do. His hearing was clearly sharper than mine; it wasn't for several seconds that I heard the regular footfall of a patrol.
I ducked into an alleyway, watching the point at which Matfei had disappeared, hoping, if not to see him as he hid, at least to have my eyes focused on the right place when he eventually moved. The patrol marched past him, close enough to feel his breath on their cheeks, if he was in fact breathing at all, such was his stillness. And even now, just two days into their occupation of Moscow, I think 'marched' was too flattering a word for the French troops. Over the weeks that the French remained in Moscow, the behaviour of the average soldier was to deteriorate beyond all military decorum, but already their marching was slack and ragged. They chatted and laughed as they went by, and the last of them paused to light a cigar that he had, no doubt, stolen from some empty Muscovite home, part of the pillage that the French termed the 'Foire de Moscou' – the Moscow Fair.
I held my breath, though in anticipation of what, I could not tell. Did I fear that the French would see Matfei, that the French would see me or that Matfei would see me? The actual outcome was, I think, the one that I had really been afraid of. The hindmost, straggling man, lighting his cigar, stood unwittingly at the very point in the street where Matfei had thrust himself, camouflaged against the wall. He had fallen ten, perhaps fifteen paces behind his companions.
Matfei pounced. In a single motion he stepped to the soldier's side and flung his tightly clenched fist back against the man's larynx. The blow itself could have caused fatal damage to the soldier – though not immediately fatal – but additionally, it bashed his head back against the wall behind him with a damp cracking sound. Matfei's action had exhibited enormous strength, but also an indolent casualness, like a child cuffing aside a ball as he runs in for his dinner. The soldier crumpled unconscious to his knees, dragging in scraping breaths through his shattered windpipe.