The Amber Rooms

Chapter Sixteen

Kamo had been installed in the public viewing room of the Police Department on the Fontanka. It was a plain wooden hall with leather-backed doors at both ends. Kamo was standing on a chair in the centre. His feet were chained and his hands cuffed behind his back. Around him, a line of building superintendents, and their assistants, and the otherwise curious, passed by in a spiralling queue. Their expressions were by turns curious or indifferent. He might have been the Tsar in state. As one of them lingered, Kamo stamped his foot, and hissed, ‘There you are! Did you get the consignment of illegal pamphlets I sent? Come, don’t be shy!’

That gawker hurried on.

Outside, the sound of church bells carried through the traffic.

This abstract present carried wearisome generalities. Even the pain was boring. Kamo longed for the particular feel of forest earth beneath his felt boots.

In his memory, it is October, 1905. The weather is unseasonably cold. Tiflis could be warm in autumn, even sultry. The cold snap is a topic of conversation second only to the revolution.

Kamo is walking past the railway station in Tiflis. A crowd of workers stand near a derailed locomotive. The huge, metal eyelid of its smokebox is open. The workers look sorry.

Kamo, not stopping, glances into the smokebox. His thoughts have turned to his greater challenge. It has been decided by Lenin, Leonid Krassin, and Soso that Kamo should form a band of expropriators to secure funds for weaponry. Many agents in this fighting unit, or Outfit, will comprise individuals selected for their revolutionary attributes, which Kamo has interpreted as “attractiveness”. They will use their feminine characteristics to infiltrate those circles in which the transfer of State monies is discussed. They will romance State Bank and Treasury employees. Kamo will gather information about the movement of these funds and then take steps to expropriate them. Thus the money for the greater revolution will be deducted from the Tsar’s ration. Nobody in the Party believes the current troubles trigger the inevitable, beautiful revolution. That must wait. These ructions are the clearing of a throat. The money must see the Bolsheviks through coming days when the State will reassert itself.

Kamo smiles. He takes a pistol from his belt and fires it into the smokebox. The sound is futuristic and dreadful. It might be the cry of a mechanical man. One of the workers makes the sign of the cross. Kamo laughs and hurries on to the north-east of the city, where he is due to interrogate the traitor Saakashvili.

A boy runs up to Kamo. He is berry-brown, almost feral, and has a purposeful look in his eye. It is not unusual for Soso to use such boys as messengers. Kamo crouches. His skirted chokha fans out on the packed earth. In the distance, glass breaks.

‘What is your name, brother?’ he asks the boy.

‘You must help her.’

Kamo cocks his head. The boy has not given him a code phrase. ‘Who?’

‘The lady from the forest. She gave me food.’

Kamo stands and walks on.

‘Dmitri!’ calls the boy, jogging alongside him. ‘I am Dmitri!’

‘How old are you, Dmitri?’ asks Kamo. The question is automatic. Kamo has no interest.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go home to your mother.’

‘The Tsar has her! Twenty men came out of the trees.’

Kamo turns his head to the boy, but does not stop. They pass a burning police wagon.

‘Who? Your mother?’

Dmitri, who is perhaps ten years old, but looks eight, reaches for the nearest of the two pistols that Kamo wears in his belt. Kamo claps his hand over the boy’s. They stop in the street.

The two stare at one another. Kamo is impressed by the fierceness he sees.

‘And how do we know she is not yet dead?’

‘She killed four of them. I saw it. She learned boxing from a Chinaman. It’s all true.’

The boy squints towards the smoke that covers the sun. It is cold. The great snows have not yet come, but they will come soon, and they will fill the cracks in the earth, bury the broken wood, and slow the quickening of the revolution.

While he was being presented to the building superintendents, Kamo occupied himself with thoughts of Saskia. He wanted to kill her. It had been a mistake to attack the boy. Her maternal instincts had been piqued by the gesture, and doubled her strength.

He smiled at an unpleasant-looking man, and screamed, ‘Watch the birdie!’

An urchin followed the man. Kamo felt his fear as though it were an aroma. ‘Down with the Tsar!’ Kamo shouted. If his arms had not been tied, he would have twiddled his moustache. ‘Come on, boys, be wolves, not sheep. Let us murder these cowardly instruments of oppression and take flight. Let the revolution be bloody!’

There was a Security Section case officer in the corner. He was overweight. Kamo had remarked upon this. The officer was sitting at a temporary desk that reminded Kamo of those used in school. The officer had been reading a novel. At Kamo’s outburst, he closed it.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘let’s take a rest from the identification.’

One gendarme ushered away the superintendents who had viewed Kamo. Another halted the line of newcomers at the door. Soon, Kamo was alone with the officer and four gendarmes. This was a different audience entirely. Kamo was still calculating how best to annoy them when two of the gendarmes helped him down from his chair and invited him to sit. As he did so, they pulled off his socks.

The case officer looked at him. ‘Why the performance? It will come to nothing when you are recognised.’

‘My own mother wouldn’t recognise me. At least, not as well as yours would. What a night that was!’

One gendarme offered his truncheon to Kamo’s mouth. Kamo grinned and bit. Then his legs were raised and a second truncheon was whipped across the soles of his feet. His neck twisted and his head snapped back and he gasped. The image of the unlit ceiling lamp fluttered with his eyelids. His tears mixed with his snot, and he wondered if there was some poetry in the strange contrast between this quiet office and the chatter, the telephone buzzers and the tapped typewriters that carried through the cracks in the old walls of this old police station. He fainted.

The Turtle Lake wet a thin slice of the northern slope of Mtatsminda. It was shallow enough to have frozen already. The surrounding woods were colourless with snow. Kamo and the boy found the woman hanging in a tree close to the shore. The boy cried out at the sight. Kamo assessed her death: arms tied back; hatless; unusually good boots. He removed his rifle, which hung across his back, and cocked it. He looked into the trees for the telltale clouds of exhalation.

The boy should not have cried out.

But there was no sign of movement in the trees. They were alone.

He looked at the snow beneath the hanged woman, and saw the traces of her executioners: cigarettes; matches; piss. The tracks led south.

He watched the boy tug at the rope where it had been made fast to an exposed root. Kamo saw something to admire in the ferocity and the desperation. Though the woman was dead, Kamo took a dagger from his belt and passed it to the boy, blade first.

The boy sawed at the rope. He used both hands and all his strength. The rope thrummed.

Kamo turned in a slow circle. He held his rifle in a casual grip. He took a bullet from the lapel of his chokha and pushed it into the corner of his mouth like a cigar.

He did not see the woman fall. The sound was muffled by the deeper snow close to the trunk of the tree. He turned to see her roll lifelessly through the powder until she was face down.

‘Does her heart beat?’ he asked. ‘Quickly, now.’

The boy pushed onto her back. He put his cheek to her chest for a few seconds. When he looked at Kamo, there were no tears. He shook his head.

Brave lad, Kamo thought. Maybe I can use him.

‘Say a prayer for her, if you wish. We will bury her. Then, Dmitri, I will take you to my sisters. They will help you.’

‘I want her to take care of me,’ said Dmitri. His tears were coming now. ‘Not your poxy sisters.’

Kamo sighed. ‘A poet wrote, “Know for certain that once / struck down to the ground, an oppressed man strives again to reach the pure mountain when exalted by hope”. If you don’t understand now, you will soon enough.’

The boy said nothing. They both looked at the woman. Her face was fat and red with death. The rope around her neck was thick, like a fur collar. Her death would have been prolonged. There had been no first drop to her execution. They had hauled her up like a black flag.

The gendarmes inserted a needle beneath the nail of his big toe. That woke him. They were experts, after all. These gendarmes, careful as nurses, put his socks back on and helped him stand on the chair. The case officer asked for the door to be opened once more. The superintendents filed in. Kamo watched them sleepily.

‘Remember,’ called the officer, ‘if you recognise him, there is no need to tell us this instant. Have no fear. Begin.’

Kamo barked. ‘I will dance for a penny, gentleman. Only a penny!’

He danced, though the flesh of his feet was crushed and lumpy. The gendarmes steadied him and the case officer, shaking his head, returned to his book.

Kamo turned towards the south, where the trees were thickest. He saw a sleek movement flicker between two trunks. It appeared again further up the slope. Kamo did not need another glance to tell him that this was a lynx. Unusual to see one so close to the city. Unusual to see one break cover.

Slowly, Kamo worked the bullet from one side of his mouth to another.

‘Dmitri, do you remember the boat shed to the east of the lake?’

‘Why?’

Kamo gave him a serious look. To his credit, the boy straightened his back. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘The bicycle is there.’

‘It’s yours.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘When I tell you, run as fast as you can across the lake. Keep to the edges. Don’t cross the middle. Run to the shed, get on the bicycle and ride back to the city. Go to the church of the Metekh near the old Royal Palace and ask for Papa Chiladze.’

‘But the bicycle is too big for me.’

Kamo smiled. His heart slowed as it always did on the cusp of a fight. The worst angels of his nature quietened and the dragging, sapping burden of his anxiety lightened. He looked at the sunlight on the mountain behind them and understood the privilege of the moment.

He tried to think through the nature of this trap. If a Tsarist group had hanged the woman and let the boy escape to return with help, how could they be sure that their net would snare revolutionaries? And why rig the trap so clumsily that their haul was so meagre? Kamo was, perhaps, a prize, but the Tsarists had no way of knowing that.

How important was this woman, whom he had never seen before? Why did the Tsarists believe her peril would draw out revolutionaries, and in number?

He put a second bullet in his mouth.

‘Dmitri, you run now.’

They called from the trees, a dozen men or more, ‘In the name of the Tsar!’ and fell upon them both.

Kamo counted six hours before they let him step down from the chair. By that time, his legs were bloated. He could not unlock his knees. His bladder was a tight, painful ball. The gendarmes helped him down through the building in a reinforced lift that—Kamo noted, one eye open—was unlocked by a key carried by each of them.

His cell was a concrete cubicle no wider than a horse trough. Its floor sloped towards a drain with a fist-sized hole that had no echo and stank of the worst human smells. Eight feet above him, an electric light flickered. Its mesh was bunged with dead flies. Kamo smiled. He’d seen worse.

They had taken his clothes. He moved to the rear of the cell and lay on his back. His feet, which he did not bother to inspect, throbbed somewhat less now, but the pain was growing. Even his cheeks ached where he had lost some of his beard to the thorough inspection of the sergeant, looking for razors or files or keys. He raised his legs so that they rested against the wall.

Kamo, inverted, sang a Siberian fishing shanty in a strong Armenian accent. That would confuse them. And, at last, he held his penis and let the urine out, steering it towards the drain. It was the colour of rosé. This did not worry him. The police in Georgia had played the same trick on his feet years before, and the blood was a temporary symptom. He sung the chorus of the shanty even more lustily.

Having relieved himself, he paused his singing for the answer of fellow revolutionaries. None came. Perhaps he had the wing to himself.

He acquiesced to sleep and the last of the shanty became a quiet slur. He did not relive the story of his defeat in his dreams, but parts of the episode flickered through him, as though on the pages of that book the case officer had been reading: Saskia, that spider, wearing that battle frown of hers; the boy with his fists raised like a proper gentleman; the smartly-dressed old man who had died with such surprise. Such surprise! Asleep, Kamo licked his lips. His hands twitched. Another image: the door to the Amber Room, opening.

The Amber Room.

An uncle in Alexandrapol had once shown him an amber pendant. When rubbed with a cloth, the amber could lift chicken feathers.

His hands twitched again, as though scratching.

Kamo had targeted one man and shot him. He picked his next man, who was loping through the high snow. Before Kamo could shoot, hot sparks struck his face. He growled and dropped to his knees. He loosed his next bullet blind. Seconds; seconds, he knew, until the group could close the distance and shoot him point-blank.

He needed to find cover. Still blinded, he scrambled towards the hanging tree but pellets struck him in the thigh and buttock. He tumbled forward, rolled twice, and lay in the snow with a foamy blood on his lips.

Distantly, a man shouted, ‘For the Tsar!’

Kamo brought his hand to his face. It had been pierced by wood splinters from a ricochet. He scraped them out, rubbed the blood from his eyes, and blinked at the empty sky and the branches that veined through it. He focused first on the birds that had taken flight from the gunfire. Then he saw something he could not understand.

It was a figure leaping with the ease of an acrobat through the trees. The figure crouched and launched upward again and again, using the bounce of the living wood, keeping to the hardier branches near the trunk, passing needle-like through the fir much as the lynx had passed through the forest less than five minutes before.

Kamo blinked away the blood.

He turned to his left, where the body of the woman should have been.

There was nothing but a pit of snow.

Kamo was awoken by a long, icy train of water that choked him and dragged his eyelids open. Hands hooked his armpits and lifted him to his feet. Now, with his weight and the pressure of blood, his soles burned again. He grinned through his pain at the men who held his shoulders. From their countenance, he could tell that they were prepared for the bureaucracy of a prisoner who has died under interrogation.

After blindfolding him, they took him to a chamber whose earthen floor had been sprinkled with sawdust. He was dropped into a wooden chair and tied with leather straps. The seat had been polished by the cold arses of a thousand subversives, criminals, and innocents. It stank worse than the open drain in his cell.

Somebody removed the blindfold.

Dull daytime glowed on a high, dirty window. The case officer was leaning against the far wall. His head almost touched the window, and the effect was to silhouette his face. Kamo shivered on the chair. His feet were tilted to their outer edges.

The case officer pulled back his overcoat and checked his pocket watch. ‘You are being held by the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order. You were found, disrobed and unconscious, in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars having gained unlawful entry. You also impersonated a member of the Imperial horse guards. Would you like to tell me why?’

‘No.’

‘Mr Mirsky—’

Kamo strained at his leather straps. ‘Who told you my name?’

The case officer cocked his head, as though listening. ‘So. You wish me to think that we have guessed your name correctly. That only tells me that we haven’t. What is your name, my friend, if not Mirsky?’

‘I am the Tsar, you fool! But you may call me Nicholas—Nicholas the Last!’ Kamo laughed. ‘I demand to be returned to my estate in Poland.’ He assumed a serious expression. ‘There, I will apply myself carnally to the Tsarina.’

The case officer stared at him. He nodded to somebody behind Kamo, who walked around the chair: a short man in overalls. He did not look Kamo in the eye as he pushed Kamo’s legs apart, then tightened the straps so that they could not move.

‘The assistant will now remove your cock. It is a simple procedure, and you need not fear for your life. You just have to keep your legs crossed once the operation is complete. Is that not so, Jablonski?’

The man in overalls said nothing. But he took the bulb of Kamo’s penis between the index finger and thumb of his glove hand, nonchalant as a barber turning a chin for a close shave, and held a knife to its root.

The case officer held up his hand.

‘Only your cock will go, my friend. The rest of your equipment will function normally. Can you imagine a lifetime tormented by a growing desire but no outlet to satisfy it?’

‘No,’ said Kamo, ‘but if you are set on finding out, let us telephone your wife and ask her to describe the sensation.’

The case officer began to roll a cigarette. Midway through the procedure, he flicked his hand at the overalled man, who sheathed his knife and undid the straps around Kamo’s legs. Each leg was held until the straps were tightened once more, in case Kamo wished to kick the man in the face, which indeed he did.

‘So,’ said the case officer. ‘We have each spent many hours in such airless rooms. Let us dispense with the gambits and proceed directly to the endgame. You want, no doubt, to know whether I have the power to save you from Stolypin’s necktie. I do. I have assurance that your sentence will be considered for commutation if you supply suitable answers. You know what this means. We say to the magistrate, well, our friend is no criminal; he is a political. He wanted to avenge, say, the unlawful hanging of a dissident. Let him spend some years in Siberia, thinking hard.’

‘What kind of suitable information?’

‘I don’t care how you gained access to the Summer Palace. I don’t care where you obtained your handsome uniform. I want your identity. I want the identity of the woman who escaped, and the boy she was carrying. I want to know why you risked entry to the Summer Palace in the first place.’

Ah, Saskia, he thought. If only you had let slip the secret of that room. I would love to toss you as a scrap to these jaws.

‘You ask the earth, and I am a humble man with nothing but my beautiful smile.’

The case officer lit his cigarette, drew upon it, and expelled the smoke towards the sunlight. ‘There is such a small chance of your survival. Take it.’

Kamo said, ‘I am resigned to death, my friend. I am absolutely calm in the face of it. Already, there should be grass growing six feet high on my grave. One can’t escape death forever. One must die. But I will try my luck once more and, perhaps, one day, I’ll laugh at my enemies again.’

‘Is that your final word?’

‘You have it,’ said Kamo.

‘Then I must send you to a brutal individual. His name is Draganov and he has never failed to break a man.’

Kamo laughed. ‘Draganov!’ He strained at his straps. ‘Draganov!’ The laughter grew. Spit erupted and his throat convulsed. His snorts came high and low. Kamo howled at the high window and they struck the vault of his skull and his lights were out before the sensation reached that part of him that laughed, that bubbled with delight.

The Cossacks stood in a semicircle with their backs to the forest. They wore skirted coats and fur hats. Each was armed with a rifle, sword, daggers, and pistols. Kamo had dragged himself upright against the hanging tree and was resting his head against his shoulder, as though his injuries were severe. He hoped that his bloody face would aid in the illusion. His right hand was thrust beneath his jacket.

‘Who are you?’ asked Kamo, though he knew well. They were Cossacks of the Kuban Host.

The men said nothing.

‘Come,’ said Kamo. ‘Are you soldiers?’

He could not judge their mood. Were they disappointed that their trap had sprung on only one poor Bolshevik?

A man from the centre of the group said, ‘Your papers.’

Kamo smiled. There was blood on his chin. He could feel it cooling. His papers, such as they were, had been loaned by a school friend. Perhaps his confidence betrayed him; the officer did not repeat his request. In the silence, a little snow fell from the tree.

‘Who will search me?’ asked Kamo. ‘Will it be you, officer?’ He moved his eyes around the group. ‘You? Or you?’ He waggled the hand behind his jacket. ‘Maybe I have something for you.’

The faces of the men remained blank.

‘If it is a bomb,’ said the officer, ‘show us.’

Kamo spat, ‘If I were a revolutionary, would I give you your evidence so easily? No, friend.’

‘Choose your words carefully,’ said the officer. ‘I have the moral advantage.’

‘What moral advantage can you have when your trap is honeyed by a boy?’

The man raised his rifle to hip height and shot at the snow between Kamo’s knees.

‘That’s for your insolence,’ said the officer. ‘Look behind you.’

Frowning, Kamo turned. Dmitri had made it one third of the way across the lake before the ice had broken. He was floating, quite dead, supported by the air trapped beneath his jacket.

‘That is truly sad,’ said Kamo. ‘We should be ashamed of our times, and what our State has brought us to.’

‘Thank you,’ said the officer. He seemed relieved that their conversation was over. ‘We will hang you for that. Now, give us a statement and my friend Oleg will write it down.’

‘All this for me?’ asked Kamo. ‘You must be disappointed.’

For the first time, the Cossacks looked unsure. There is something in this, thought Kamo. If I were Soso, I could smoke this out.

‘Listen, fine and brave Cossacks of the Kuban Host,’ said Kamo. An unease was growing among them. ‘“Thrust out your chests to the moon / With outstretched arms, and revere / The spreader of light upon the earth!”’

‘That’s it,’ said the officer. ‘String him up for a fucking poet.’

A black shape fell upon the Cossack at the edge of the semicircle and the man collapsed in an explosion of snow. There was an instant of silence. Then, before could Kamo work out what had happened, the Cossacks were turning as one and the black shape, a hard contrast to the snow, seemed to spiral up from the ground like a dervish.

Kamo did not understand how a woman, or even a circus strongman, could survive such a fall without injury. Neither did he understand how she had returned to such conspicuous life after a hanging. But he did understand that death had moved one step away from him. Indeed, death had now taken the form of this creature. She knocked aside the rifle of the next Cossack in the line, struck his ribs with two hard elbow strikes, caught his rifle, and discharged it into his chest. The man was dead before he fell. Likewise the Cossack behind him, whose throat was burst by the same projectile.

The third Cossack swung his rifle towards the woman. It struck her shoulder and she dropped onto her side. The Cossack aimed at her face and tensed to shoot, but now Kamo had picked up his own instrument and played it with the satisfaction of a maestro. The Cossacks had, to a man, turned towards this black apparition, and Kamo would not waste his gift. He shot the next in the head, thumbed the bolt, the next in the chest, thumbed the bolt, missed the third, heard a hasty shot pass over his head, thumbed the bolt, dropped the officer with a gutshot, tossed away his rifle, and emptied his pistols into the final two.

He kept his arms outstretched.

It was over.

The woman stood up. She had the posture of a noblewoman. It made Kamo want to laugh. What was noble in this warm work? But she was beautiful. Her hair had fallen from its pins. Her face had lost its death bloat. Yes, there was beauty. Clear eyes green as the grass. The noose still looked like a fur collar, the rope a bloody pigtail. Kamo thought of Dmitri and the coldness of his death. He wanted to laugh again.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, gesturing to her left hand, which was concealed under her right elbow.

The woman walked over to Kamo, crouched by him, and touched his face.

‘You are hurt,’ she said, in Georgian. Her voice had the ring of a poem by Soso. She might have been a native of Gori, the town where Kamo had grown up. ‘You should see a doctor.’

He laughed.

‘I should see a doctor, says the woman who was hanged!’

He took a knife to the rope cuffs that dangled from her right wrist, and then parted the knot that held her noose. The striations on her neck were bloody, but she could breathe well. This done, he stood. The pellets in his leg stung.

He said, ‘I am at your service.’

‘No. I am at yours.’

Her eyes were empty. Kamo told himself that, given her thin frame, the thickness of the rope, and the absence of a drop, it was not impossible that she could survive the hanging. Not impossible.

He thought about this as he hobbled around the Cossacks, finishing them with his dagger.

‘Are you hungry?’

The woman was standing on the edge of the lake with her back to him. She was looking at the boy. The way she concealed her left hand gave her a forlorn quality that Kamo judged would endear her handsomely to the employees of the State Bank.

‘Call me Kamo,’ he said, moving in front of her to occlude the boy’s death. ‘What shall I call you?’

The empty eyes looked at him. In a man, this would have angered Kamo. In her, it made him curious.

‘I don’t have a name.’

‘Where do you come from?’

When she spoke, she used the words that Kamo would hear again and again, as though her short history was a litany.

‘I became conscious for the first time when I walked west from Lake Baikal. Before that, there is nothing. Sometimes I dream about the time before. The dreams make no sense. If they are true, they are not my truth.’

‘You drop on your prey like a lynx,’ he said. ‘How is that for a name, Lynx?’

‘Lynx.’

‘Will you listen as I tell you how the people will rise up?’

‘You saved my life. I will listen.’

The prison wagon rattled through the streets. It was night. Now he was bound by chain instead of leather. Kamo could feel the spirit of a dead lawyer in the stinking suit they had given him. The lawyer: that beloved tool of the bourgeoisie. The suit reeked of mothballs and shit and the acid tang of fear, an aroma Kamo had smelled on men before, but never himself. He never would.

His eyes dawdled over the wet canvas roof, down to the gendarme opposite. Their heads rocked in synchrony. The gendarme faced the direction of travel while Kamo faced backward. The gendarme smiled as though he knew Kamo’s secret. Because he did not, Kamo smiled too. His eyes continued to drift. He looked at the iron rods that covered the small, high windows. Counted them. He noticed the tough, canvas layer that protected the floor. His bench was wooden. In it, two circular holes admitted his hands, and these found heavy manacles whose weight threatened to pop his shoulders and collapse his knuckles with every pothole and bump.

Kamo had long ceased his routine of playful comment. His mind had moved to the next challenge. How would he get word to Soso of this incarceration? Doubtless there would be comrades in the remand prison, but many would be stool pigeons. Time would pass before he met someone he recognised. Then, he would make his connection to the informal postal system that webbed the incarcerated political underground, on the condition that he was fortunate enough to be placed among the politicals.

Into his mind’s eye came the cold, narrow stare of Soso, for whom the money was everything. It meant retaining his head. Expropriations had been voted down by the Party and it was a great difficulty for Lenin that Soso had continued his banditry. But there were other problems. Marked notes had been uncovered in Paris and Berlin, cities that suffered under active and enthusiastic foreign bureaus of the Protection. These sums were paltry, yes. They represented slivers of the cuts of middle men. But their leakage put Soso under pressure. Times were already difficult thanks to the stalled revolution three years earlier. For the gradualists, the new parliament was a path to power, and such criminal activities as those advocated by Soso had to be minimised. For the high-blooded revolutionaries, the failure to locate the bulk of the cash spoke to incompetence. The Party was suffocating without the sweet trade. It had to stage its grand meetings, like the one in London the previous year that so titillated the international Press, and maintain the irrigating work of propaganda. It had its underworld of couriers and agitators, none of whom could be expected to earn an honest living when Party business took them all over the Empire, made it impossible to acquire the legal paperwork for paid employment, and, most often, sent them on a slow train to Siberia and their ruin.

These thoughts settled on Kamo with a true weight.

The wagon turned a corner and halted. A rotten egg struck the window bars and a whoop of joy rose up from a gang of urchins. The sound made Kamo nostalgic for Tiflis. His mood was buoyed even more by the manner in which the gendarme picked eggshell from a magnificent side-whisker.

But before the wagon could set off, something heavy landed on the roof. Kamo watched it warp.

It was not likely to be a bomb. One threw a bomb beneath a carriage, not onto it, and such a bomb would come second to the first bomb, which should rip the life from the horses to prevent their flight. The weight of the object was spreading. Could it be person on all fours?

‘A wolf!’ said Kamo. ‘There’s nature for you, comrade. Red in tooth and claw.’

‘No, it’s the chicken who laid the eggs,’ said the gendarme nervously, referring to an old Caucasian nursery rhyme. But two more, softer sounds came from the roof. The gendarme moved from window to window. Red blotches stood out on his cheeks.

Kamo was certain that the two sounds were footfalls of a person moving forward

The gendarme fell into Kamo’s lap as the wagon juddered forward. Kamo watched him scramble back to a window once more. Above the street sounds, Kamo heard someone shout, ‘Yah! Yah!’ The carriage accelerated.

‘What do you suppose can be happening?’ he asked the gendarme. ‘A rescue? That must make me rather important. Do you regret being left with me in this carriage?’

The gendarme said, ‘Be quiet. Let’s see what happens.’

‘Do you wonder why a good fellow such as yourself should be killed so a person like me can go free? After all, you’re a good citizen. But there can be no good citizens in a corrupt society, comrade.’

‘I told you to shut up.’

‘I’ll ask my friends for leniency, assuming you’ll cooperate. What will you say if you are later presented with my face? Let’s practise.’

With a sudden jerk, the wagon’s speed increased. The gendarme collapsed into his seat and let his head fall into his grey-gloved hands. Whether this was a childish mime in answer to Kamo’s question, or simple despair, Kamo could not be sure.

Kamo strained to look through the window but the angle was too oblique. Street lamps passed in haste. He pictured the horses. He had a bad feeling. All of St Petersburg was being treated to a display of his botched escape. But, before that, the carriage would strike an errant bump, or attempt a corner, and a spill would be the result.

Then, in the next moment, the wagon flipped forward.

Kamo wondered if he were already dead. Perhaps the carriage had crashed minutes (centuries?) before and this experience was only an echo of his last moment, sounding again and again. But the gendarme was gripping his seat and asking for his mother to save him, and it became known to Kamo with a troubling certainty that the wagon had been ridden into the River Neva. Kamo had an image of the horses going over the bank; their drop would explain the sharp leverage needed to make the wagon flip.

The carriage struck the water with a tremendous crash. Kamo, facing backwards, was in a good position to meet the impact, but the gendarme was thrown forward. He managed to twist before striking the partition behind Kamo, however, and this saved his neck. As the carriage righted, he fell into the well between the seats, dazed.

Kamo felt water close on his hands. It was rising fast through the suspension holes. Soon it rushed across the floor, biting his wounded feet with cold. Then silver dribbles came through the cracks in the doorframe. The carriage tipped sideways and Kamo roared as his wrists accepted the weight of his body. Barrels of white, icy water burst upwards through the window. Kamo watched it swallow the gendarme. Then the water passed his head, blocking his eyes and pressing the air from his lungs as the carriage drifted down.

A hand gripped his ankle. The gendarme, then, was thrashing his last. Kamo kicked him. But a unexpected sensation spread from his wrists: release. The gendarme had freed him.

With a thump, the carriage settled on the river bed.

Kamo floated upwards. His face emerged into a pocket of air that shrank to nothing as he took a breath. He twisted left and right. He felt certain that his rescue had failed, that he would die here with the gendarme. However, he would not panic at the foot of the tower of Death. He would kick open the door of the carriage. Make the lazy tyrant come down to Kamo.

An elbow hooked his neck and he was drawn away from the bench. There was a perceptible change in the water around him. He was, now, outside the shell of the coach. He was in the river proper. The arm released him and Kamo kicked. He kicked at the darkness and rose through the black skins of filth until he roared onto the surface. Out of the silence, sounds returned: moving water, distant shouts, cheers, and clip-clop of traffic. The wild eye of a horse bore down, and Kamo had time to cover his head as its flank spun him aside. Only when the thrashing animal had passed did he think of riding it from the river.

The horse had deadened his shoulder. He moaned, went under, and when he emerged a second time, he saw a lantern blinking in the darkness as its cowl was raised and lowered. Kamo swallowed water. His shoes gave little to his flailing legs and his arms were loaded with iron manacles. Yet he thrashed towards the blinking lodestone and swore at the river and damned his burning muscles.

The lantern was extinguished moments before Kamo could reach for it. Arms took him from the darkness and hauled him across the stern of a small launch. Kamo collapsed with his head against the gunwale. Next him was a figure so wrapped in a blanket that only his red nose was visible. It was the gendarme. A second, red-haired man unshipped the oars of the launch and dug them into the black river. A third figure put a blanket around Kamo’s shoulders, who was too exhausted to raise his head. Instead, he lay looking at his manacles. How had he swum with these things? The calls and heckles of the shore grew dim as the launch pushed into the open estuary. The oarsman’s breaths grew fuller.

Kamo turned to the person at the tiller. He noted the small rubberised slippers, the canvas trousers tied with thong at the ankle and the knee—a familiar style—and the boat cloak. He looked closely at the eye slits in the tiller’s mask, which was better suited to the masked ball than a rescue. The hair that rolled like a black flag in the wind, abeam the boat, off the Gulf of Finland.

His eyes shrank.

‘Ahoy, comrade,’ Lynx said.

‘Why?’ he spat.

‘I need you to make me—us—invisible.’

His head thickened with icy thoughts of her demise, until the cold reached his centre, and he slowed, asleep.