The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller
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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.
He was Wilton, he said. From The Times.
Not only the attention of The Times, but indeed the attention of the whole world was on Yekaterinburg. Yes, it was regrettable, like looking at an atrocity, eh? Looking at something that made you vomit. You got too close to horror and you recoiled. Sometimes the temptation to look away was strong, didn’t they agree? The scene of the murders, the House of Special Purpose, he called it. The bedrooms were awash in blood, Wilton said. The horror was unimaginable. Of course the women, the young grand duchesses in particular, had suffered the most.
‘Raped?’ one of the men asked.
‘Repeatedly. By the entire drunken hoard, then shot.’
‘My God!’
‘Perhaps they are better off…’
‘Do you want another?’ the waiter who’d been tending their portion of the bar asked Ryzhkov. By his accent he was Russian, but he’d picked up an odd ring to his voice. It wasn’t French. Something else.
‘Yes, thank you, comrade.’
‘Comrade!’ The man exploded in laughter. ‘Hah! Yes, here’s to you – comrade! Comrades!’ They all lifted their glasses.
The war was going well, Wilton said. He read every dispatch that came over the wire. White armies were attacking the Bolsheviks from all sides; Denikin and the Cossacks from the south, and now Kolchak and the Czechs from the East. Moreover the British had landed in Archangel and were pushing down the Dvina river from the north. Everyone would converge on the Volga. The Volga was the central highway of Russia. If only the Czechs could keep rushing forward, take Kazan and link up with the British, the Allies and the Whites would be able to advance and capture the ancient city of Nizhni Novgorod.
And from there they would have an open plain to Moscow.
‘Say fini to your red fucking revolution, gentlemen. It’s already as good as lost.’ Wilton smiled and bounced on the balls of his feet. He was dressed in thick woollens even though the weather was still hot, a felt fedora on his head, face shiny with passion and sweat, and a smile like a gash in his skull. He insisted they all have a new drink he’d discovered in Paris.
‘Ivanis!’ he called across the room. He had to shout twice more before the bartender caught their eye and waved to him. ‘He’s the expert in these, boys. Ivanis! Make us one of those ones you did the other night.’
Ivanis came over to him smiling, a dark shock of hair falling into his eyes. Thin like a knife. ‘How can I help you, sir?’ he said.
‘The bloody drink, that Sambo thing you did.’
‘Yes, sir, right away.’
‘Five of them, right? Give