The Last Train to Kazan
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.
9
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.