Читать книгу The Last Train to Kazan - Stephen Miller - Страница 13

The first train arrived just after four carrying the headquarters of White General Golitsyn, his deputy, Major de Heuzy, and several cars of hangers-on and support staff, a melange of diplomats, spies, adventurers, journalists, disgruntled fugitives and commercial opportunists – a population made up of the lowest forms of life, all of them hungry and in search of food and lodging.

By afternoon the citizenry had reclaimed the streets and the city was suddenly busy, swarming with all varieties of blue-uniformed Czechs, the officers striding possessively through the shopping district, all of them demanding service and willing to pay, although it was in paper roubles that had been over-stamped by the White Kolchak-led government, or in letters of credit that no one could understand. There wasn’t really any choice: if you had something they wanted you could either sell it for the pretend money or they’d just requisition it.

Over dinner the details came out. Ryzhkov was fed lavishly at the Fez, a restaurant across the square that had immediately been taken over as the officer’s club. The room was not crowded, they were eating between hours. A troika of Czechs held serious talk over cigars in the corner. The waiters came in and out, resetting the tables, tidying up for the dinner hour. Giustiniani had taken one bite when he began laughing at the quality of the cooking.

‘You know,’ Giustiniani said haltingly so that he wouldn’t choke, ‘I have been all over the world, based in some lovely cities. Everywhere, in every port there is at least one reasonably decent restaurant.’ His fork stirred the concoction on his plate. It looked like a small steak of some kind smothered in a brown camouflaging sauce, and potatoes that had been mashed and blended with cabbage beside it. Ryzhkov couldn’t decipher it either although it hadn’t stopped him from wolfing it down. ‘Every port brings people in, you know, from elsewhere. New blood, strangers with new ideas – fertilization,’ Giustiniani continued wistfully, took a sip of wine and winced, shook his head and pushed the hateful dish away.

With nothing to fill his mouth, Giustiniani was free to tell his life story while Ryzhkov ate, and so began a poetic and amusing saga of olive groves and grapevines and cypress trees.

Tommaso di Giustiniani was a submariner in the Italian navy who had surfaced just in time to be sent to Russia to help the Allies quell the worldwide revolution. He had ceased to refer to himself as nobility, dropping the ‘Conte’ and shortening his name. ‘The family is…well, it is not what it was,’ he said by way of explanation.

Giustiniani liked to entertain and he liked to talk, and he had, apparently, all the time in the world to do it. But Ryzhkov saw him for a man who preferred being underestimated, preferred to conceal his true strength inside. You didn’t go down in those tin cans if you didn’t have the black space inside you somewhere, and you didn’t last if you didn’t know how to handle men. For Giustiniani, dropping his noble connections was an obvious first step; a title and estates were worthless when pressure was cracking the hull, or when the destroyers were trying to find you, and all the crew knew it. Ryzhkov wasn’t an expert on the Italian underwater boat service, but he knew that all such machines were fantastic creations that used the most expensive materials in their defiance of the seas. Thus, despite his old-world charm, the lazy smile, the unmuscled gestures, Giustiniani was a modern man.

The brandy came, and by that time Ryzhkov had grown sleepy and drunk. Giustiniani signed the chit and they moved into a large room that had been converted into a lounge and attempted to play billiards on a threadbare table. ‘There is no felt, eh? No felt in Yekaterinburg at all. There is a felt shortage,’ Giustiniani said, missing a shot.

At one point Ryzhkov found himself gazing at two billiard tables, the visions overlaying each other at angles, identical balls swimming in the sea, and knew that he was very, very drunk. He tried to snap back to sobriety because Giustiniani was talking about the Romanovs.

‘Everyone says they are dead,’ Ryzhkov said.

‘Everyone says a lot of things. Everyone says that Nicholas and Alexandra were seen in Perm yesterday morning. Everyone says that our advance party stole them away just before we took the town on Tuesday accomplishing this with such stealth that no one actually saw them. Those kinds of witnesses we have plenty of. All we can be certain of is that the Imperial Family has vanished since last weekend. And their property also,’ he added with a smile.

‘What do you want me to do then?’ Ryzhkov said. They were both standing there looking at the billiard ball. Giustiniani stared at him for a second, then reached out and swept it into a side pocket.

‘I want you to go and get cleaned up. We’re expected at an orgy.’

Cleaning up meant splashing cold water on himself in the shower at the military quarters that Giustiniani took him through, a quick shave which was frightening because of his inability to see his own face clearly, then more frightening when he finally came into focus. A rinsing of his mouth with mint water, and then Giustiniani was there at the door, looking as fresh as a spring day. They journeyed through the streets by hired cab, the driver being all too happy for the fare.

By the end of the night Yekaterinburg had been transformed into a town gripped by a fever as powerful as a gold rush. The people were manic, like inhabitants of a desperate new boom town – everyone simultaneously trying to ingratiate themselves with the winners and queuing up for transit passes to Vladivostok.

Outside the Hotel Palais Royal there was a fist-fight in progress, and soldiers stood about listlessly leaning on their rifles, smoking cheroots and waiting for the combatants to tire. The foyer was crowded with women negotiating terms and conditions with various suitors, and the stairs were threadbare and treacherous, owing to the increasing lack of illumination the higher one climbed.

It didn’t seem much like an orgy to Ryzhkov, at least not in the imagined Roman sense. It was held in the ballroom of the hotel, supposedly one of the city’s finest, and was crowded with sweating matrons and men holding their hats in their hands, everyone seeking approval, affection, a little cash, a passage east – easily the most prised item – or a position in the new government of Admiral Kolchak.

The ballroom itself was an elongated chamber with high windows at one end that looked over the city, giving a view of the stream that ran down to the lower Iset pond and the fishing docks at the head of the lake. There was a balcony there and the doors were thrown open, but this did nothing to dispel the cloud of tobacco smoke and the ladies’ heavy perfume.

It was a curious mixture, a large number of Czech officers of various ages and a few other uniforms, most of which Ryzhkov could not place. Giustiniani was well known, it seemed. He kept Ryzhkov with him, introduced him to all as his ‘aide’, and otherwise ignored him. Ryzhkov excused himself and took air on the balcony. Refused all drinks and tried to sober up.

It was not to be, however. Giustiniani would find him on his next orbit and take him across the room to meet some other governmental dignitary or eminent military figure. The Czechs had acquired the Russian habit of commemorating everything with a vodka toast. And so it went, Ryzhkov losing count of how many times this occurred.

The whereabouts of the Romanovs was on everyone’s tongue. The consensus agreed with the announcement he had witnessed – that the Tsar was dead and the family removed to a ‘safe place’. The announcement had also been published on a broadsheet that had been pasted up around the city and recovered by the Czechs. Still, there were no bodies, and no eye witnesses to the Tsar’s execution, since the executioners had fled the city, presumably with the Romanov women and servants in tow.

‘But the worst sin is that there is no champagne, none whatsoever. The Bolsheviks drank it all!’ a man was screaming at him. He was flanked by two red-headed women who hung on his arms and offered their cheeks to Ryzhkov. One woman had torn her dress and her heavy breasts were exposed. She made fluttering attempts to cover herself, and then gave up.

‘What is this, then?’ Ryzhkov said. They had forced a bottle on him.

‘Vodka! Made locally. You mix it with lime juice and fizzy water from the springs! Goes down good, eh?’ the man shouted. A band had begun playing but they were as drunk as everyone else and the music wheezed and swerved through the tonal spectrum. Ryzhkov put his mouth to the bottle and drank the faux champagne. At least it was cold, with an antiseptic taste that seemed somehow more healthy than the punch that had been served but had now run out.

‘Come on now,’ the second of the redheads said to him. ‘You’re good for it, eh?’

Ryzhkov didn’t know what she was talking about for a moment. The other two were dancing. The music was just an unstructured wailing, all out of beat and synchronization. The woman was kissing him now, and pulling him into the shadows. The room was emptying out, and filling up again. They had taken over the whole hotel. He found himself in a corridor with a group of other officers, the uniforms too confusing to place. The doors were open and the true orgy had begun in the opened-up suites.

‘We may die,’ the redhead said into his ear. ‘We may die at any moment.’ She pulled him into a room. There was another couple on the floor, but it didn’t matter. Her hands were on his fly and he had thrown his coat on the floor. They wrestled on the bed with the other couple groaning beside them. He hadn’t had anyone in a long time, and now she swam before him, her breasts wobbling as he tried to thrust himself into her, her face looking up at him, imploring him, gripping him by his buttocks, lunging up to snatch a kiss. The other couple had finished and were standing there laughing. He saw that she was talking with them, having a conversation in the middle of his efforts. ‘…not much…not much at all,’ she was saying. After a moment she pushed him away.

‘Too drunk,’ he muttered, and the woman slapped him. For a moment he saw white, reeled backwards and made a fist, flung it at the woman, but she had already got up. Then he was on the bed, his face pressed into the hot blankets, while the other man hurled abuse at him. The other woman was laughing as the redhead complained to her about his quality.

He staggered to the door but didn’t make it. Vomited across an armchair, stood there clinging to it and coughing and wiping his mouth off on the antimacassar. There was a bottle and he took a drink to wash his mouth and spat it out on the floor. From the doorway he could see that more people had arrived. The fun was continuing. A girl was slumped against the panelling and crying. He stood there, supporting himself in the doorway and watching her. She was thin, blonde, and her hair had been cut short and frizzy. Her eyes were puffy and streaked where the kohl had run. She looked terribly alone in the middle of it all, absently beating the wall with her silk scarf in one hand, and holding the other to her mouth to stop the sobbing. She looked up at him and then started crying all over again.

They met in the centre of the corridor. Others were walking around them. It was like being an island in a river of drunks. She pressed her face into his jacket, sobbing, then looked up at him. The only beautiful woman he had seen all night long, he thought. The only honest thing in the city. She pressed her lips to his mouth and pulled him to her, strong for such a thin girl. He felt himself growing hard and she reached for him and they had each other there on the edge of the sofa, against the wall, everything happening at once, a quick little hurricane of lust and hands slipping over fabric and flesh, the bones of her back, her legs trying to reach around him, her face pressed into his neck, and his into the spikes of her hair. The smell of flowers.

It was over as quickly as it had started and they clung to each other while everything was ebbing away. She said something that he couldn’t hear because of the noise of the lift just down the hall opening and closing spasmodically as each new drunken troupe tried to line it up with the floor.

Then suddenly she pulled away and was gone, not even a look back, and he was there, still in the river, fumbling with his clothing and not feeling better, not feeling any better at all.

He would leave, he thought. He would just walk to Vladivostok if that’s what it took. No one would miss him in this chaos. Zezulin would assume he’d been killed, probably wouldn’t waste the effort to take revenge on Vera. The world had already gone to hell. All that remained was the burning.

He staggered towards the stairs, and met the man who’d been in the room with him. There were words, Ryzhkov couldn’t hear them or understand. It might have been a different language. He punched the man hard in the chest and he stepped back and slid down the wall, groaning. Everyone around them laughed. At the landing he saw Giustiniani coming up.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. ‘This is Judge Nametkin, he’s in charge of our investigation.’ Beside Giustiniani was a portly man, deep into his forties, a bald head that someone had written upon with lipstick.

‘Hello,’ the man said. Large grey eyes looked up and smiled at him lazily.

‘This is Ryzhkov, our new detective,’ Giustiniani prompted and Nametkin extended his hand. ‘We’re going over there right away. Might as well get started, eh?’

‘Where?’ said Ryzhkov, and realized that he’d only made a noise, not a word, so he repeated again, ‘Where-are-we-going?’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll find out,’ Nametkin said, forming his words with equal precision. ‘Should we walk? What do you think?’ he asked Giustiniani, bracing himself against the wall.

‘Mmm…a cab, I think. The government is paying after all,’ and they both laughed. As they went down the stairs, a man approached Nametkin and blocked their descent. His face was dirty, rat-like.

‘You want to see Anastasia, comrade? I’ll take you to her, but there are necessary fees –’ Giustiniani batted him away and he collapsed on the stairs and began to cry. ‘I have them, I have them all! On good authority!’ he shrieked behind them as they escaped to the foyer.

‘Loyalty,’ Nametkin was saying to Giustiniani as they got into the cab. ‘Loyalty is a porous, negotiable thing. This is the White world. You can believe in the virtues all you want, but where are you going to put your money?’

‘Exactly. Money,’ said Giustiniani. Ryzhkov took the seat in the back, feeling sick all over again.

‘It’s the worst of the worst. Who do you think is going to win? That’s the basis, the entire basis…’

‘Exactly. Basis.’ As they rolled through the city Nametkin began to snore. Giustiniani leaned forward, said something to the driver, and they turned back.

‘It’s no use. We’re all in. We’ll do it tomorrow,’ he explained to Ryzhkov, who had no idea, no idea at all what they were doing, where they were going, or why.

As the cab drew closer to the barracks he saw the girl he’d had in the hallway. She was walking along in the same direction, still trailing her scarf in her hand. When they passed her he looked back and saw that her face was washed clean, her chin high, and that she looked over to them for a moment, then looked away.

Straight ahead up the street, not caring about the men in the carriage, what they thought about the world situation, or anything they might claim to understand.