Читать книгу The Last Train to Kazan - Stephen Miller - Страница 14

Propas, the chauffeur, roused him out of bed. It took some work. Ryzhkov was hung over, sick, and his head was pounding so that he could hear it. Another man was waiting while Ryzhkov, making certain of his hand-holds, climbed into the back seat. The man watched with a disgusted expression, waited for him to swing his legs inside, slammed the door and got in the front. The car was huge and painted field grey and, in places, a paler colour that might have been brown; brushstrokes done quickly, and the doors labelled in odd stencilled writing that Ryzhkov thought looked Chinese.

The man in the front seat turned out to be Ilya Strilchuk, the only remaining detective inspector who had been a veteran of the Tsarist Yekaterinburg police. When the Bolsheviks took over Strilchuk had escaped execution by hiding in the woods, but his wife and children had been murdered instead. He didn’t turn around to look at Ryzhkov when he made his introduction, and he didn’t elaborate on any of the details.

After Strilchuk’s sad story, they fell silent. They were driving up a gentle slope, climbing away from the embankment and the historic centre of the city, the road curving to where it opened out upon a church and a wide square, which abruptly ended in a tall wooden palisade. The fence had been built of rough wood and newly cut logs, and a quartet of guardhouses were spaced along the opposite side of the street. Peeking out above the tall fence he recognized it as the house he’d been shown on the way into town.

‘This is the place,’ Strilchuk said, and the chauffeur set the brake. Strilchuk got out to help him, but Ryzhkov was conscious of his own dignity to the point where he made the effort to get out unaided. Giustiniani was at the front of the building, evidently waiting for them. The magistrate Nametkin was with him. They both looked just fine. The gate was opened by a boy in a cut-down artilleryman’s uniform. He snapped to present-arms as they went through. Nametkin thought the boy was funny and kept nudging Giustiniani.

‘Do you let just anybody in here?’ Giustiniani said to the boy. ‘There may have been murder done in this house, you know that, don’t you?’

The boy shrugged spasmodically.

‘This house is the subject of a military investigation. Everyone that comes is required to sign a register. Where is it?’

‘A book, do you mean, Excellency?’

‘Yes, yes, of course. A book. Can you produce it?’ The boy turned and headed for the front door to search for it.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Nametkin said. ‘We need you to translate for our witness. How are you today, Ryzhkov? Hale and hearty?’

‘I’ll last the morning at least,’ he said. ‘What’s this about a witness?’

‘Just inside,’ Nametkin said. They stepped into the foyer. The place was a mess. In the front room there was live ammunition piled on top of the piano. The floor was littered with leaves that had either been blown in or tramped in on the soldiers’ boots and not swept away. Nametkin headed for the staircase. ‘This first floor was the billet of the inner guard,’ he said over his shoulder.

The house had been not so much destroyed as worn down. The upholstery on the furniture had been punctured and spilled out, the legs on some of the chairs had broken and the pieces thrown into the corners. Smells of food gone rancid, the filthy toilets, stale tobacco and sweat lingered in the rooms. ‘The Imperial Family were confined to the five rooms above,’ Nametkin said as they made their way up the central staircase, rounded the banister and walked into the hallway. Even with the windows open the house was stuffy.

‘Up here the guards occupied the area beside the stairs, and the family lived behind these doors,’ Nametkin said and waited for them to catch up. Giustiniani came up last, looking over his shoulders.

Nametkin threw open the double doors and Ryzhkov walked into the Romanovs’ apartments.

He could see the rooms had been taken apart. Every piece of furniture had been moved about and repositioned, the cupboards opened, drawers tipped out and anything of value taken away. It looked like a building that had been repossessed by a series of particularly angry landlords and then abandoned. Underneath it all there was an elusive perfume that still lingered in the dust, in the fabric of the chairs and the bedding. It might be soap or something rotting just from being closed up in the summer.

Nametkin waved his finger at the mess. ‘You and Strilchuk should get a list of all these possessions.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Strilchuk said. Whatever he said it always had that edge in his voice.

‘It’s part of the estate, I suppose,’ Giustiniani murmured. He was standing at the windows. Ryzhkov saw they had been painted over with whitewash from the outside and then the sash had been nailed closed.

‘Well…’ Nametkin made a face. ‘The Romanov estate? Until we have some evidence, I guess it must be assumed…’

Under a chair Ryzhkov saw a book. He stooped and picked it up: Les Bienfaits de la Vièrge. Inside was an inscription to Tatiana –

For my darling…

He slid it back onto the floor.

Around the room, nothing broken, no shards of glass. No blood. Just disarray and petty theft as the Bolsheviks had retreated.

‘Ah, here’s our friend,’ said Nametkin. A guard walked out with a man whose hands were cuffed in front of him. They put him in a chair and Ryzhkov told him to tell his story while Strilchuk wrote it all down.

The witness was one Petr Matok, and he claimed to have been one the guards at the Ipatiev house. In Matok’s version the Imperial Family had been brought to Yekaterinburg in two contingents: the Tsar, Alexandra and their daughter Maria came in April, then about a month later the remaining grand duchesses and the heir Alexei arrived and were taken to the Special House.

In the first week of July the Ural Soviet replaced the commandant of the guard with a Cheka officer named Yakov Yurovsky.

‘Why did they do that?’ Giustiniani asked them man.

‘He was the man from Moscow,’ Matok said, as if that explained everything.

‘So it was orders from the very top, then, eh?’ Nametkin said. Matok only shrugged.

‘Go on,’ Ryzhkov told him.

According to Matok, Yurovsky had grown up in Yekaterinburg and was an experienced revolutionary. He’d been educated, been a photographer, and had acquired sufficient medical experience to act as a doctor for Alexei on one occasion. Things changed with Yurovsky’s arrival: ‘Tthe broom sweeps clean,’ Matok said. He was smiling a little now. No one was beating him up and he wanted to say the right things and keep it that way.

Yurovsky replaced almost all of the guards, dividing them into two groups with no connection to each other: an outer guard of local volunteers to police the approaches to the Ipatiev house where Matok worked, and a strictly isolated inner guard made up of imported Latvian riflemen whom he’d brought with him. The Latvians came with a reputation as reliable enforcers: only a year earlier they’d been the guns that secured the infant Bolshevik revolution.

With the changes the Romanovs gained some privileges while others were taken away. Father Storozhev and his nuns were forbidden from bringing their extra daily rations of eggs and milk. This lasted until one of the doctors protested that the heir suffered from malnutrition, and Yurovsky relented.

‘But then it all changed, you see?’ Matok said, his voice taking on tones of helplessness.

‘Changed? How so?’ Giustiniani prodded.

‘With the Czechs, Excellency,’ Matok said, reflexively bowing to the men standing there over him. Starting in the middle of July there was a sudden clampdown on anyone approaching the Special House. The Czechs were pressing their encirclement of Yekaterinburg, and when Yurovsky wasn’t supervising the additional fortifications to the Special House he spent his time in the telegrapher’s kiosk at the American Hotel asking Moscow for orders, Matok claimed.

‘He was worried about being overun?’

‘Yes, Excellency. We all were worried,’ Matok said, giving a little laugh and another bow.

Then, he said, only a few days later he’d heard the Romanovs had been executed in the night.

‘Heard? Heard from whom? Were you here?’

‘No, Excellency. I had been given leave. I would have been here, because when you were here you got extra food, and you know…I am always hungry,’ he said. Matok looked up at them with big eyes. He didn’t know if he’d told them enough to save his life, and from Giustiniani’s expression the odds weren’t good.

‘So it was all Yurovsky’s doing?’

‘Yes, Excellency. All because of Comrade Yurovsky.’

Nametkin looked to Giustiniani, who sniffed. ‘Take him back,’ he said, and the guard pulled him up out of his chair and took him down the staircase. ‘Well, to me it sounds like a fifth-hand story. “He wasn’t here, he heard from someone else,” you know…all these people come out of the wood-work,’ Giustiniani said with a laugh. ‘For instance, the Tsar is in Harbin – that’s what it says in this morning’s newspaper,’ Giustiniani said, unscrewing a flask and holding it out to Ryzhkov.

‘You want some other wild tales? There was a mysterious telegram received, there was a special armoured train provided by the British that arrived in the middle of the night, there is a secret tunnel connecting with the British consulate, there are mysterious strangers, black aeroplanes that land on the main street and then take off again a few moments later…and so on and so forth.’

Ryzhkov took a short sharp swig of what turned out to be brandy. Excellent brandy, he thought. He offered the flask to Strilchuk, who just looked at him blankly and didn’t even move, then passed it to Nametkin.

Nametkin was searching his pockets. He came out with two pages and unfolded them. ‘This is what we know…’ Nametkin cleared his throat.

‘This is from Gorskov, another of these guards,’ Giustiniani said to Ryzhkov and Strilchuk.

‘We will go by his notes,’ Nametkin said, adjusting his spectacles. ‘“On the night of the 16th last, Yurovsky came up here with several members of the guard, and the Imperial Family were summoned to the dining area…There were trucks placed outside…”’ Nametkin recited.

‘Trucks so they could move them?’ Ryzhkov said. Strilchuk looked over at him. Nametkin shrugged and waved the papers. ‘…“the Romanov women took a certain amount of time, but when they were dressed…” and so on. Some time later –’

‘Didn’t he say “forty-five minutes”?’ Giustiniani’s voice was one note above boredom.

‘Yes, forty-five minutes later they were ready and then they were told that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute them. “They were immediately fired upon…“’ Nametkin read, backing away, and turning to the dining room as if it were going to respond. For a moment they all looked around at the open cupboards and tins spilled out onto the floor.

‘This is a box of hair,’ Strilchuk said. He had found a cigar box and was hefting it as if to determine the weight. The box was stuffed with long curls of at least three different colours of women’s hair. They all gathered around it. Giustiniani stuck his finger in the box and felt beneath the curls. ‘Just hair,’ he said.

‘Hmmph,’ Nametkin said, and returned to his papers. Strilchuk closed the lid on the box and placed it on an end table.

‘”…the Latvians opened fire…”’ Nametkin read. ‘It says that the Latvians immediately opened fire on the family, and at the end of it when they checked the pulses Anastasia was still alive –’

‘In here?’ Ryzhkov said. Nothing of the kind had ever happened in that dining room, he could see. He looked over at Strilchuk who shook his head.

‘– so they beat her with their rifles –’

‘No, they didn’t. Not in here,’ Ryzhkov said.

‘– “stabbed her thirty-two times”.’

‘Not in here,’ Ryzhkov repeated.

‘What, did he stand there and count?’ Strilchuk said.

‘The other story is that this Yurovsky took them down the back staircase –’ Giustiniani put in.

‘And took them into the basement room,’ Nametkin said. Strilchuk walked out into the corridor, already looking for the exit from the dining area.

‘Into a side basement room,’ Nametkin said. ‘Let’s go and find that. The house slopes…’

‘It’s down here, I think.’ Strilchuk led them down the narrow back staircase. At the foot of the stairs there was a portico and a set of four stairs down to wide doors, locked with a hasp and padlock.

‘Christ,’ Giustiniani said. He and Strilchuk went around to the guardhouse to see if anyone had the keys to the room.

Ryzhkov and Nametkin looked around the back of the house. There was a woodshed and a sauna bath, built downhill in the dried-out gardens. There was a smaller area to which the Imperial Family must have been recently confined, the grass worn away to dust, a series of chairs and a table made from a tree stump which still held a soggy newspaper and an oyster-shell ash tray.

‘You know Conte Giustiniani was appointed to make sure we come up with the right answers to this whole enterprise.’ Nametkin said to him.

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. General Golitsyn has his deputy, Major de Heuzy, watch Giustiniani, who watches me, and in turn I watch him. It’s all politics, eh?’ Nametkin said. He stood at the end of a little porch that had been built at the end of the bathhouse and looked around at the property. ‘Old Ipatiev. It looks like he put together a pretty nice place for himself.’

‘Yes, it looks like it would have been very peaceful at one time,’ Ryzhkov said, imagining a garden full of grand duchesses running about. At the corner of the stockade was a large gate topped with new barbed wire. ‘The trucks would have been brought in through there,’ he said. The two of them headed up the hill; indeed, the entrance was chewed up, muddy from motor traffic in and out.

Giustiniani walked up with a ring of keys in his hand. ‘He’s just a boy, he can’t read, he can’t find the register, he just gives me the keys because I yell at him a little.’ He fumbled through the keys.

‘Look at this,’ Nametkin said, pointing to the sheen of a cartridge case in the mud outside. Ryzhkov bent to pick it up; much stepped on, clotted with mud and sand. The brass case from a pistol cartridge; he put it in his pocket and stepped back to better appreciate the side wall of the house. There was a short stairway down to the basement doors, a single window looking out from what was supposed to be a storeroom, or perhaps it had once been a bedroom for a servant that had been added on.

Giustiniani had trouble with the lock and Ryzhkov stepped in to help; the old key to the door turned the opposite way. The door creaked open and they hung there on the threshold of the dark room, blinded a little because of the sunshine outside. They pushed the doors open wider to reveal a completely bare space.

And then he saw the bullet holes.

Obviously the shots had come from where they were now standing, their impacts clustered in the wall directly opposite the doorway. There were single holes and then a flurry of others. A lot into the floor as well – too many to count. There should have been blood but there wasn’t, so Ryzhkov walked over to the corner and got down on his knees.

‘It’s been cleaned, I think, yes?’ Strilchuk asked, sniffing.

‘It’s all very tidy,’ Nametkin said. Ryzhkov patted his pockets, and then asked if either of them had a knife. Strilchuk reached into his pocket and came out with a blade.

Ryzhkov used it to winkle a strip of moulding off the floor, a long piece that had come awry, shattered at one end by a bullet. It broke away and he picked it up and carried it to the sunlit doorway.

‘Yes, all cleaned up,’ he said, showing the dark band of blood to Nametkin.

‘I suppose we don’t want to take it apart just yet, eh?’ Strilchuk said, looking around at the room.

‘No, we can wait, but it should be sealed, eh?’ Ryzhkov said.

‘I wouldn’t trust these people to seal a stamp,’ Giustiniani said.

‘How much blood is it, do you think?’ Nametkin asked him.

‘It’s impossible to say. It’s been well cleaned. When you get in the corner you can really smell it. Vinegar too, but there’s the other smell. In this weather you can’t get rid of that. And from the number of bullet holes, it’s more than one person for sure,’ Ryzhkov said.

‘He says eleven,’ Nametkin said, waving the paper at him. ‘He says everybody.’

‘Good God.’ Ryzhkov turned and looked at the room, trying to imagine the press of eleven people gathered in there to be killed – the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the boy, the four girls. Eleven?

‘Who were the others?’ Strilchuk asked.

‘Their servants. Loyal retainers,’ Giustiniani said in a voice that dripped cynicism.

Ryzhkov tried to imagine the scene. Eleven people, then. Plus, jammed in at the doorway there would have had to be the firing squad. A tightly packed little room. Maybe they’d been done in smaller groups. It would have been easier that way. He started to ask Nametkin about the other victims, but the prosecutor had turned and gone back outside.

Ryzhkov stood there for a few more moments, looking around the storeroom, the crazy splattering of bullet holes, the faint swirls where they’d mopped the floor with vinegar and sand, a sliver of broken threshold – the wood clean and yellow-brown. All of it lit by single barred, dirty window, and the flare of sunshine from the open door.

A collection of rosy shadows across the cheap wallpaper, the faint whiff of cleaning fluid and death.

The end of an empire.

The rest of the day was taken up with a parade of witnesses, a whirl of testimony and common police work. From birth it seemed to be a stuttering, confused murder investigation, pulled administratively between the Czech military under General Golitsyn, and Nametkin’s bosses, the civilian ‘government’ – Kolchak’s dictatorship with its green and white flag. Giustiniani added to the confusion by ratifying everything with a wave of his hand, keeping absolutely no paper record, and referring to Ryzhkov variously as ‘investigator’, ’secretary’ and ‘aide’. In practice Ryzhkov did whatever was required and additionally tried to provide anything Nametkin needed.

Besides Strilchuk, the ‘investigators’ were combined from what was left of the Yekaterinburg police, a sub-standard force of malcontents and traitors who’d found protection by banding together, and augmented by a detachment of soldiers.

Ryzhkov kept his eye on Strilchuk, who went about his work with a set jaw and a stare that never wavered. Giustiniani had also noticed his hard edge. By the afternoon Strilchuk had been moved to the front desk in the office and been given responsibility for coordinating the day-to-day logistics of the investigation.

In the afternoon Ryzhkov took a breather, walked out onto the steps, fished around in his pockets for a smoke, realized he had none, and cadged one off an officer who was standing there. Only a moment later Volkov, the young corporal who was filling in as their secretary, brought him back to the office to hear what a courier from the hospital had to say.

Apparently a Russian officer had turned up at the hospital and demanded to see the commander immediately. His story was that he’d been hiding in the woods, dressed as a peasant, near Koptiaki, a little town only four miles north of Yekaterinburg on the edge of the lake. Early on the morning of 17 July the villagers had been rousted out by Bolshevik guards from the hovels where they had been camped. They’d been told differing stories: the Czechs were coming, there was a dangerous demolition exercise planned for the area, all sorts of things. When morning came and the Bolsheviks had left, they all went back to the site.

When they got there they saw that there had been a fire, and when they poked about in the ashes they discovered charred clothing and several pieces of jewellery.

‘Where is this place?’ Ryzhkov asked.

‘It’s the Ganin pit. That’s the name he told us, Excellency,’ the courier said.

‘Near Koptiaki,’ Strilchuk said. ‘Not far.’

‘Do you know it?’ Giustiniani demanded.

‘Yes. It’s a mine. They are all through the woods, here. An open mine where the coal is close to the top layer of the soil. The peasants dig them. You have to be careful in the woods. You can easily fall in,’ Strilchuk said.

‘Can you take us there?’ Giustiniani pressed Strilchuk.

‘Sure,’ he said, not really deferring to Giustiniani in the way he said it. ‘It’s between here and Koptiaki. You cross the tracks –’

Giustiniani had turned on the courier. ‘Where is this officer now?’

‘Lt Sheremetevsky,’ the courier said, reading from a piece of card, ‘is on the way here, sir. The doctors could not keep him.’

‘And the jewels, the various items, what was it exactly?’

‘A jewelled cross and a brooch,’ the boy read out loudly. ‘They are now downstairs. We thought they should be put in the vault.’

Ryzhkov and Giustiniani went down to the vault to see the jewels. It was just as the boy had said: a cross and what looked like a jewelled pin, something a woman would use to fasten a scarf to her dress. Both had been wrapped and tied in butcher’s paper.

Ryzhkov straightened, his entire body exhausted. His mind was dazzled with the details that were piling up in the case. After breaking down all the stories and trying to tease the truth from the rumours, it was obvious that Yurovsky was now the most wanted fugitive from White justice. Whatever had happened to the Tsar, Yurovsky had been in charge. He had last been seen leaving the city by motor car, about the same time Ryzhkov’s train was dropping off its reinforcements for the Fifth Army.

They must have crossed, Ryzhkov realized suddenly. They might have actually stared at each other on opposite tracks, as Yurovsky escaped the White dragnet and Ryzhkov rushed towards it.

If he could get word back to Zezulin, Yurovsky could be picked up in Moscow. Zezulin could interview him to his heart’s content in the bowels of the Lubyanka, and Ryzhkov’s mission would be over. Maybe everything could be settled in one easy stroke. It was simple, probably too simple, but it was a chance. And if Yurovsky had managed to escape back to Moscow, perhaps he could too.

They went upstairs, sat in the shade on the balcony above the portico and waited for the lieutenant to arrive. Giustiniani was staring out at the filthy expanse of the square and humming.

Ryzhkov thought about the spray of bullet holes in the floor of the Special House’s storeroom. A lot of lead for one emperor. The box of hair that existed for no apparent reason, that stuck out too. ‘We’ll go to the pit tomorrow, yes?’ he said to the Italian.

‘Oh, yes…We’ll go there with shovels.’

They had been waiting for longer than an hour, and the squad of soldiers that Giustiniani had sent to find out why Sheremetevsky was late on his walk from the hospital (only two blocks) had still not returned. Giustiniani spat his cigar stub out into the street. From the corner a peasant stepped out and recovered it, bowing and smiling back at them, then rolled off down the street – bandy legs, filthy clothes and a knotted beard down to his belly.

‘This so-called officer isn’t coming,’ Ryzhkov said to him, and Giustiniani looked around.

‘Yes, I was thinking the same thing. He might not be real.’

They fell silent. Some men came by in a cart that contained a spindly cow, laid out and bawling, obviously ill from the way it was twitching. They got across the square just fine, but then two of the men had to move to the rear and push as the cart climbed the long rise up Voznesensky Prospekt.

It might not be real.