The State Counsellor

CHAPTER 2 The man of steel rests

Seven hundred and eighty-two, seven hundred and eighty-three, seven hundred and eighty-four ...

The lean, muscular man with the stony face, calm grey eyes and resolute vertical crease in the centre of his forehead lay on the parquet floor, counting the beats of his own heart. The count proceeded automatically, without involving his thoughts or hindering them in any way. When the man was lying down, each heartbeat was precisely one second - that had been verified many times. The old habit, acquired during imprisonment at hard labour, of listening to the workings of his internal motor while he rested had become such an integral part of the man's very existence that sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night with a four-figure number in his mind and realise that he hadn't stopped counting even in his sleep.

There was a point to this arithmetic: it trained and disciplined his heart, heightened his endurance, strengthened his will and -most importantly - allowed him to relax his muscles and restore his strength in the space of only fifteen minutes (nine hundred heartbeats) just as well as he could have done in three hours of sound sleep. Once the man had had to go without sleep for a long time, when the common convicts in the Akatuisk penal prison had decided to kill him. Too afraid to come near him during the day, they had waited for darkness to come, and the same scene had been played out over and over again for many nights in a row.

The practice of lying on a hard surface had remained with him since the days of his early youth, when Green (that was what his comrades called him - no one knew his real name) had worked hard to develop his self-discipline and wean himself of everything that he regarded as 'luxury', including in this category any habits that were harmful or simply unnecessary for survival.

He could hear muted voices behind the closed door: the members of the Combat Group were excitedly discussing the details of the successful operation. Sometimes Bullfinch got carried away and raised his voice, and then the other two hissed at him. They thought Green was asleep. But he wasn't sleeping. He was resting, counting the beats of his heart and thinking about the old man who had grabbed hold of his wrist just before he died. He could still feel the touch of those dry, hot fingers on his skin. It prevented him from feeling any satisfaction in the neat execution of the operation - and the grey-eyed man had no other pleasures apart from the feeling of duty fulfilled.

Green knew the English meaning of his alias, but he experienced his own colour differently. Everything in the world had a colour, every object and concept, every person - that was something Green had felt since he was a little child; it was one of the special things about him. For instance, the word 'earth' was a clay-brown colour, the word 'apple' was bright pink even for a green winter apple, 'empire' was maroon, 'father' was a dense purple and 'mother' was crimson. Even the letters of the alphabet had their own coloration: 'A' was scarlet, 'B' was bright lemon-yellow, 'C was pale yellow. Green made no attempt to analyse why for him the sound and meaning of a thing, a phenomenon or a person had these particular colours and no others - he simply took note of this information, and the information rarely misled him. The fact was that every colour also had its own secret meaning on a scale that was an integral, fundamental element of Green's soul. Blue was doubt and unreliability, white was joy, red was sadness, and that made the Russian flag a strange combination: it had joy and sadness, both of them strangely equivocal. If the glow given off by a new acquaintance was blue, Green didn't exacdy regard him with overt mistrust, but he watched a person like that closely and assessed him with particular caution. And there was another thing: people were the only items in the whole of existence capable of changing their colour over time - as a result of their own actions, the company they kept and their age.

Green himself had once been sky-blue: soft, warm, amorphous. Later, when he decided to change himself, the sky-blue had faded and been gradually supplanted by an austere, limpid ash-grey. In time the once dominant light-blue tones had receded somewhere deep inside, reduced to secondary tints, and Green had become bright grey, like Damask steel - just as hard, supple, cold and resistant to rust.

The transformation had begun at the age of sixteen. Before that Green had been an ordinary grammar-school pupil - he used to paint landscapes in watercolour, recite poetry by Nekrasov and Lermontov, fall in love. But, of course, even then he had been different from his classmates - if only because they were all Russian and he was not. They didn't persecute him in the classroom, or bait him with being a 'Yid', because they could sense the future man of steel's intensity of feeling and calm, imperturbable strength; but he had no friends and he could not have had. The other pupils skipped lessons, talked back to the teachers and copied from cribs, but Green was obliged to earn top marks in every subject and conduct himself in the most exemplary fashion, because otherwise he would have been expelled, and that would have been too much for his father to bear.

The sky-blue youth would have gone on to graduate from the grammar school, then become a university student and after that a doctor, or perhaps - who could tell? - an artist, if the Governor General Chirkov had not suddenly taken it into his head that there were too many Jews in the city and given instructions for all the pharmacists, dentists and tradesmen who did not possess a permit to reside outside the pale to be sent back to their home towns. Green's father was a pharmacist, and so the family found itself back in the small southern town that Grinberg senior had left many years before in order to acquire a clean, respectable profession.

Green's natural response to such malicious, stupid injustice was one of genuine bewilderment, which passed through the stages of acute physical suffering and seething fury before it culminated in a craving for retaliation.

There was a lot of malicious, stupid injustice around. The juvenile Green had agonised over it earlier, but so far he had managed to pretend that he had more important things to do: justify his father's hopes, learn a useful trade, search within himself and grasp the reason why he had appeared in the world. But now that the inexorable locomotive of malicious stupidity had come hurtling down the rails straight at Green, puffing out menacing steam and tossing him aside down the embankment, it was impossible to resist the inner voice that demanded action.

All that year Green was left to his own devices. He was supposedly preparing to sit the final grammar-school examinations as an external student. And he did read a great deal: Gibbon, Locke, Mill, Guizot. He wanted to understand why people tormented each other, where injustice came from and what was the best way of putting it right. There was no direct answer to be found in the books, but with a little bit of serious thought, it could be read between the lines.

If society was not to become overgrown with scum like a stagnant pond, it needed the periodical shaking-up known as revolution. The advanced nations were those that had passed through this painful but necessary process - and the earlier the better. A class that had been on top for too long became necrotic, like callused skin, the pores of the country became blocked and, as society gradually smothered, life lost its meaning and rule became arbitrary. The state fell into dilapidation, like a house that has not been repaired for a long time, and once the process of disintegration had gone too far, there was no longer any point in propping and patching up the rotten structure. It had to be burned down, and a sturdy new house with bright windows built on the site of the fire.

But conflagrations did not simply happen of their own accord. There had to be people willing to take on the role of the match that would be consumed in starting the great fire. The mere thought of such a fate took Green's breath away. He was willing to be a match and to be consumed, but he realised that his assent alone was not enough. Also required were a will of steel, Herculean strength and irreproachable moral purity.

He had been born with a strong will; all he needed to do was develop it. So he devised an entire course of exercises for overcoming his own weaknesses - his main enemies. To conquer his fear of heights he spent hours at night walking backwards and forwards along the parapet of the railway bridge, forcing himself to keep his eyes fixed on the black, oily water below. To conquer his squeamishness he caught vipers in the forest and stared intently into their repulsive, hissing mouths while their spotted, springy whiplash bodies coiled furiously round his naked arm. To conquer his shyness he travelled to the fair at the district town and sang to the accompaniment of a barrel organ, and his listeners rolled around in laughter, because the sullen little Jewish half-wit had no voice and no ear.

Herculean strength was harder to obtain. Nature had given Green robust health, but made him ungainly and narrow-boned. For week after week, month after month, he spent ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day developing his physical strength. He followed his own method, dividing the muscles into those that were necessary and those that were not, and wasting no time on the unnecessary ones. He began by training his fingers and continued until he could bend a five-kopeck piece or even a three-kopeck piece between his thumb and forefinger. Then he turned his attention to his fists, pounding an inch-thick plank until his knuckles were broken and bloody, smearing the abrasions with iodine and then pounding again, until his fists were covered with calluses and the wood broke at his very first blow. In order to develop his shoulders, he took a job at a flour mill, carrying sacks that weighed four poods. He developed his stomach and waist with French gymnastics and his legs by riding a bicycle up hills and carrying it down them.

It was moral purity that gave him the greatest difficulty. Green quickly succeeded in renouncing intemperate eating habits and excessive domestic comfort, even though his mother cried when he toughened his will by fasting or went off to sleep on the sheet-metal roof on a rainy October night. But he was simply unable to deny his physiological needs. Fasting didn't help, nor did a hundred pull-ups on his patented English exercise bar. One day he decided to fight fire with fire and induce in himself an aversion to sexual activity. He went to the district town and hired the most repulsive slut at the station. It didn't work - in fact it only made things worse; and he was left with nothing but his willpower to rely on.

Green spent a year and four months whittling himself into a match. He still hadn't decided where he would find the box against which he was destined to be struck before being consumed in flame, but he already knew that blood would have to be spilled and he prepared himself thoroughly. He practised shooting at a target until he never missed. He learned to grab a knife out of his belt with lightning speed and throw it to hit a small melon at twelve paces. He pored over chemistry textbooks and manufactured an explosive mixture to his own formula.

He followed the activities of the resolute members of the People's Will party with trepidation as they pursued their unprecedented hunt of the Tsar himself. But somehow the Tsar evaded them: the autocrat was protected by a mysterious power that miraculously saved his life over and over again.

Green waited. He had begun to suspect what this mysterious power might be, but was still afraid to believe in such incredible good fortune. Could history really have chosen him, Grigory Grinberg, as its instrument? After all, he was still no more than a boy, only one of hundreds or even thousands of youngsters who dreamed, just as he did, of a brief life as a blazing match.

His wait came to an end one day in March when the surface of the long-frozen river waters cracked and buckled and the ice began to move.

Green had been mistaken. History had not chosen him, but another boy a few years older. He threw a bomb that shattered the Emperor's legs and his own chest. When he came to for a moment just before dying and was asked his name, he replied, 'I don't know,' then he was gone. His contemporaries showered curses on him, but he had earned the eternal gratitude of posterity.

Fate had enticed Green and duped him, but she did not abandon him. She did not release him from her iron embrace, but picked him up and dragged him, confused and numb with disappointment, along a circuitous route towards his goal.

The pogrom began when the pharmacist's son was away from the little town. Consumed by an insatiable, jealous curiosity, he had gone to Kiev to find out the details of the regicide - the newspaper reports had been vague, for the most part emphasising the effusive outpourings of loyal subjects.

On Sunday morning the alarm bell sounded in the Orthodox quarter on the other side of the river, where the goys lived. The community had sent their tavern-keeper, Mitrii Kuzmich, to Belotserkovsk on a special errand and he had returned, bringing confirmation that the rumours were true: the Emperor-Tsar had been killed by Yids - which meant you could give the sheenies a good beating with no fear of the consequences.

The crowd set off across the railway bridge that divided the little town into two parts, Orthodox and Jewish. They walked in a calm, orderly fashion, carrying church banners and singing. When they were met by representatives of the other community - the rabbi, the director of the Jewish college and the market warden - they did nothing to them, but they did not listen to them either. They simply pushed them aside and spread out through the quiet, narrow streets where the closed shutters stared at them blindly. They spent a long time wondering where to start, waiting for the impulse they needed to unlock the doors of their souls.

The tavern-keeper himself set things moving: he stove in the door of a tavern that had opened the previous year and ruined his trade. The crashing and clattering dispelled the people's lethargy, and put them in the right mood.

Everything happened just the way it was supposed to: they fired the synagogue, rummaged through the little houses, broke a few men's ribs, dragged a few around by their sidelocks and in the evening, when the barrels of wine hidden in the tavern's cellar were discovered, some of the lads even got their hands on the Yids' young wenches.

It was still light as they made their way back, bearing off their bales of plunder and drunks. Before they dispersed, the whole community decided not to work the next day, because it was a sin to work when the people were grieving so badly, but to go across the river again.

When Green came back that evening the little town was unrecognisable: broken doors, feathers and fluff drifting in the air, a smell of smoke and from the windows the sound of women wailing and children crying.

His parents had survived by sitting it out in the stone cellar, but the house was in an appalling state: the anti-Semites had smashed more than they had taken, and they had dealt most viciously of all with the books - in their furious zeal they had torn the pages out of all five hundred volumes.

Green found the sight of his father's white face and trembling lips unbearable. His father told him that the pharmacy had been ransacked in the morning, because there was medical alcohol there. But that was not the most terrible thing. They had smashed in the old tsaddik Belkin's head, and he had died, and because the cobbler's wife Gesa refused to give them her daughter, they had chopped away half of her face with an axe. The next day the mob would come again. The people had collected together nine hundred and fifty roubles and taken the money to the district police officer and the police officer had taken it, saying he would go to fetch a troop of armed men, and left, but he would not be back before the following morning, so they would have to endure yet more suffering.

As Green listened, he blanched in his terrible mortification. Was this what fate had been preparing him for? - not a blinding flash erupting from beneath the wheels of a gilded carriage with a thunderclap that would echo round the world, but a senseless death under the cudgels of a drunken rabble? - In a remote backwater, for the sake of wretched people in whom he felt no interest, with whom he had nothing in common? He couldn't even understand their hideous dialect properly, because he had always spoken Russian at home. Their customs seemed savage and absurd to him, and he himself was a stranger to them, the half-crazy son of a Jew who hadn't wanted to live like a Jew (and what, I ask you, had come of that?).

But the stupidity and malice of the world demanded retaliation, and Green knew that he had no choice.

In the morning the bell sounded again in the goys' quarter and a dense crowd, more numerous than the previous day's, set off from the marketplace towards the bridge. They weren't singing today. After the wine from the tavern and the neat alcohol from the pharmacy, they were bleary-eyed, but still brisk and determined. Many of them were dragging along trolleys and wheelbarrows. Walking at the front with an icon in his hands was the man of the moment, Mitrii Kuzmich, wearing a red shirt and a new knee-length coat of good-quality cloth.

Stepping on to the bridge, the crowd stretched out into a grey ribbon. On the river below porous ice floes drifted downstream, another unstoppable mass of grey.

Standing in the middle of the rails at the far end of the bridge was a tall young Yid with the collar of his coat turned up. He had his hands in his pockets and the sullen wind was tousling the black hair on his hatless head.

The men at the front drew closer and the young Yid took his right hand out of his pocket without saying a word. The hand was holding a heavy, black revolver.

The men at the front stopped, but those at the back could not see the revolver; they pressed forward, and the crowd kept moving at the same speed.

Then the dark-haired man fired over their heads. The report boomed hollowly in the clear morning air and the river took it up eagerly, echoing it over and over again: Cra-ack! Cra-ack! Cra-ack!

The crowd stopped.

The dark-haired man still did not speak - his face was serious and still. The black circle of the revolver's muzzle moved lower, staring straight into the eyes of those standing at the front.

Egorsha the carpenter, an unruly and dissolute man, worked furiously with his elbows as he squeezed his way through the crowd. He had spent the whole previous day lying in a drunken stupor and had not gone to beat the Yids, so now he was burning up with impatience.

'Come on, come on,' said Egorsha, laughing and pushing up the sleeve of his tattered coat. 'Don't you worry; he won't fire; he won't dare.'

The revolver immediately replied to Egorsha's words with a loud crack and blue smoke.

The carpenter gasped, clutching at his wounded shoulder and squatting down on his haunches, and the black barrel barked another four times at regular intervals.

Now there were no more bullets in the cylinder, and Green took a home-made bomb out of his left pocket. But he did not need to throw it because Mitrii Kuzmich, wounded in the knee, began howling so terribly - 'Oh, oh, they've killed me, they've killed me, good Orthodox believers!' - that the crowd shuddered and pressed back and then set off at a run, with men trampling each other, back across the bridge into the Orthodox quarter.

As he watched the backs of the fleeing men, Green felt for the first time that there was very little sky-blue left in him. His dominant colour was steel-grey now.

At twilight the district police officer arrived with a platoon of mounted police and was surprised to see that all was quiet in the little town. He spoke with the Jews first and then took the pharmacist's son away to jail.

Grigory Grinberg became Green at the age of twenty, after one of his repeated escapes. He had walked one and a half thousand versts and then, just outside Tobolsk, been caught in a stupid police raid on tramps. He had had to give some kind of name, and that was what he called himself - not in memory of his old surname, but in honour of Ignatii Grinevitsky, who had killed the Tsar.

At the one thousand eight hundredth heartbeat he felt that his strength was fully restored and got lightly to his feet, without touching the floor with his hands. He had a lot of time. It was evening now; there was the whole night ahead.

He did not know how long he would have to spend in Moscow.

Probably about two weeks at least. Until they took the plainclothes police agents off the turnpikes and the railway stations. Green was not concerned for himself; he had plenty of patience. Eight months of solitary confinement was good training for that. But the lads in the group were young and hot-headed; it would be hard for them.

He walked out of the bedroom into the drawing room, where the other three were sitting.

'Why aren't you sleeping?' asked Bullfinch, the very youngest of all, flustered. 'It's my fault, isn't it? I was talking too loud.'

All the members of the group were on familiar terms, regardless of their age or services to the revolution. What point was there in formality if tomorrow, or next week, or next month you might all go to your death together? Of all the people in the world Green only spoke like that to these three: Bullfinch, Emelya and Rahmet. There had been others before, but they were all dead.

Bullfinch was looking fresh, which was natural enough - they hadn't taken the boy on the operation, although he had begged them to, even weeping in his rage. The other two looked cheerful but tired, which was also only natural.

The operation had gone off more easily than expected. The blizzard had helped, but the greatest help of all had been the snowdrift on this side of Klin, a genuine gift of fate. Rahmet and Emelya had been waiting with a sleigh three versts from the station. According to the plan Green had been supposed to throw himself out of a window while the train was moving, and he could have been hurt. Then they would have picked him up. Or the guards could have spotted him as he jumped and opened fire. The sleigh would have come in handy in that case too.

Things had turned out better than that. Green had simply run along the track, entirely unharmed. He hadn't even got cold -running the three versts had warmed him up.

They had driven round the water meadows of the Sestra river, where workmen were clearing the line. At the next station they had stolen an old abandoned handcar and ridden it all the way to Sortirovochnaya Station in Moscow. Of course, pumping the rusty lever for fifty-something versts in the wind and driving snow had not been easy. It was hardly surprising that the lads had exhausted themselves: they weren't made of steel. First Rahmet had weakened, and then the doughty Emelya. Green had had to work the handle on his own for the entire second half of the journey.

'You're like the dragon Gorynich, you're Greenich!' Emelya said, shaking his flaxen-haired head in admiration. 'You crawled into your cave for half an hour, cast off your old scales, grew back the heads that had been cut off and now you're as good as new. Look at me, a big strapping hulk, but I haven't got my breath back yet, my tongue's still hanging out.'

Emelya was a good soldier. Strong, without any prissy intelligentsia pretensions. A wonderful, calming dark-brown colour. He had chosen his own alias, in honour of Emelya Pugachev; before that he had been known as Nikifor Tyunin. He was an armoury artisan, a genuine proletarian. Broad-shouldered and pie-faced, with a childish little nose and genial round eyes. It wasn't often that the oppressed class threw up steadfast, class-conscious warriors, but when one of these strapping heroes did appear, you could put your life in his hands with complete confidence. Green had personally selected Emelya from five candidates sent by the party. That was after Sable had failed when he flung his bomb at Khrapov, and a vacancy had appeared in the Combat Group. Green had tested the novice's strength of nerve and quickness of wit and been satisfied.

Emelya had really shown what he was worth during the operation in Ekaterinburg. When the Governor's droshky had driven up to the undistinguished townhouse on Mikhelson Street at the time indicated in the letter (and even, as promised, with no escort), Green had walked up to the fat man who was laboriously climbing out of the carriage and shot him twice at point-blank range. But when he ran through a passage to the next street, where Emelya was waiting disguised as a cab driver, they'd had a stroke of bad luck: at that very moment a police officer and two constables just happened to be walking past the false cabby. The policemen had heard the shots in the distance, and now here was a man running out of the yard - straight into their arms. Green had already thrown his revolver away. He felled one of them with a blow to the chin, but the other two clung to his arms and the one on the ground started blowing his whisde. Things were looking really bad, but the novice Emelya hadn't lost his head. He climbed down from his coachbox without hurrying and hit one constable on the back of the head with his massive fist so hard that he instantly went limp, and Green dealt with the other one himself. They had driven off like the wind, to the trilling of the police whistle.

It warmed his heart to look at Emelya. The people won't carry on just lounging their lives away for ever, he thought. The ones with keen wits and active consciences have already started waking up. And that means the sacrifices are not in vain and the blood - ours and theirs - is not spilt for nothing.

'So that's what sleeping on the floor and absorbing the juices of the earth does for you,' Rahmet said with a smile, tossing a picturesque lock of hair back off his forehead.

'I'd just started composing a poem about you, Green.'

And he declaimed:

'There's another version too.' Rahmet raised his hand to stop Bullfinch laughing and continued:

His comrades laughed in unison and Green thought to himself: That's a verse from Pushkin he rewrote; I suppose it's funny. He knew that he didn't understand when something was funny, but that didn't matter, it wasn't important. And he mentally corrected the verse: I'm not iron, I'm steel.

He couldn't help himself - this thrill-seeking adventurer Rahmet simply wasn't to his liking, although he had to admit that he did a lot of good for the cause. Green had chosen him the previous autumn, when he needed a partner for a foreign operation - he couldn't take Emelya to Paris.

He had arranged for Rahmet to escape from the prison carriage as he was being driven away from the courthouse after sentencing. At the time all the newspapers were full of the story: the Uhlan cornet Seleznyov had interceded with his commanding officer for one of his men and in response to the colonel's crude insults had challenged him to a duel. And when his affronter had refused to accept the challenge, he had shot him dead in front of the entire regiment.

What Green had especially liked about this gallant story was the fact that a junior officer had not been afraid to ruin his entire life for the sake of a simple man. There was a promising recklessness in that, and Green had even imagined a certain kinship of souls - a familiar fury in response to base stupidity.

However, Nikolai Seleznyov's motivation had turned out to be something quite different. On close acquaintance, his colour proved to be an alarming cornflower-blue. 'I'm terribly inquisitive; I like new experiences,' Rahmet used to repeat frequently. What drove the fugitive cornet on through life was curiosity, a pointless and useless feeling that forced him to try first one dish and then another - the spicier and hotter the better. Green realised that he had not shot the colonel out of a sense of justice, but because the entire regiment was watching with bated breath, waiting to see what would happen. And he had joined the revolutionaries out of a craving for adventures. He had enjoyed the shooting during his escape, and he had enjoyed the trip to Paris even more.

Green had no illusions left about Rahmet's motives. He had chosen his alias in honour of the hero of Chernyshevsky's 'What is to be Done?', but he was a different sort of creature altogether. As long as he still found terrorist operations interesting, he would stay. Once his curiosity was satisfied, he'd be off, and never be seen again.

Green's secret concern in dealing with Rahmet was to extract the maximum benefit for the cause from this vacuous individual. The idea he had in mind was to send him on one of those important missions from which no one returns. Let him throw himself, a living bomb, under the hooves of the team pulling the carriage of a minister or a provincial governor. Rahmet wouldn't be afraid of certain death - that was one trick life hadn't shown him yet. If the operation at Klin had been a failure, Rahmet's mission would have been to blow up Khrapov this evening at the Yaroslavl Station, just before he left for Siberia. Well, Khrapov was dead already, but there would be others; autocracy kept plenty of other vicious guard dogs. The important thing was not to miss the moment when boredom appeared in Rahmet's eyes.

This was the only reason why Green had kept him in the group after what had happened with Shverubovich in December.

The order had come from the party to execute the traitor who had betrayed the comrades in Riga and sent them to the gallows. Green didn't like that kind of work, so he had not objected when Rahmet volunteered to do it.

Instead of simply shooting Shverubovich, Rahmet had chosen to be more inventive and splash sulphuric acid into his face. He had said it was to put a fright into any other stoolpigeons, but in reality he had simply wanted to see what it looked like when a living man's eyes poured out of their sockets and his lips and nose fell off. Ever since then Green had been unable to look at Rahmet without a feeling of revulsion, but he put up with him for the good of the cause.

'You should go to bed,* he said in a quiet voice. 'I know it's only ten. But you should sleep. It's an early start tomorrow. We're changing apartments.'

He glanced round at the white door of the study where the owner of this apartment, Semyon Lvovich Aronson, a private lecturer at the Higher Technical College, was sitting. They had planned to stay at a different address in Moscow, but there had been a surprise waiting for them. The female courier who met the group at the agreed spot had warned them that they couldn't go to the meeting place - it had just been discovered that the engineer Larionov, who owned the apartment, was an agent of the Okhranka.

The courier had a strange alias: Needle. Green, still reeling after pumping the handcar, had told her: 'You Muscovites do poor work. An agent at a meeting place could destroy the entire Combat Group.'

He had said it without malice, simply stating a fact, but Needle had taken offence.

Green didn't know much about her. He thought she came from a rich family. A dry, gangling, ageing young lady. Bloodless, pursed lips; dull, colourless hair arranged in a tight bun at the back of her head - there were plenty like that in the revolution.

'If we did poor work, we wouldn't have exposed Larionov,' Needle had retorted. 'Tell me, Green, do you absolutely need an apartment with a telephone? It's not that easy.'

'I know, but there must be a telephone - for emergency contact, an alarm signal, warning,' he explained, promising himself to make do in future with only his own resources, without help from the party.

'Then we'll have to assign you to one of the reserve addresses, with one of the sympathisers. Moscow's not St Petersburg; not many people have their own telephones here.'

That was how the group had come to be billeted at the private lecturer's place. Needle had said he was more of a liberal than a revolutionary, and he didn't approve of terrorist methods. That was all right: he was an honest man with progressive views and he wouldn't refuse to help; but there was no point in telling him any details.

Having taken Green and his people to a fine apartment house on Ostozhenka Street (a spacious apartment on the very top floor, and that was valuable, because there was access to the roof), before she left the courier had briskly and succinctly explained the elementary rules of the clandestine operation to their jittery host.

'Your building is the tallest in this part of the city, and that is convenient. From my mezzanine floor I can see your windows through binoculars. If everything is calm, do not close the curtains in the drawing room. Two closed curtains mean disaster. One closed curtain is the alarm signal. I'll telephone you and ask for Professor Brandt. You will reply: "You are mistaken, this is a different number" - and in that case I shall come immediately; or if you say: "You are mistaken, this is private lecturer Aronson's number" - I shall send a combat squad to assist you. Will you remember that?'

Aronson nodded, pale-faced, and when Needle left he muttered that the 'comrades' could use the apartment as they saw fit, that he had given the servants time off, and if he was needed, he would be in his study. And in half a day he hadn't peeped out of there even once. He was a real 'sympathiser' all right. No, we can't stay here for two weeks, Green had decided immediately. Tomorrow we have to find a new place.

'What's the point in sleeping?' Rahmet asked with a shrug. 'Of course, you gentlemen do as you wish, but I'd rather pay a visit to that Judas Larionov - before he realises he's been discovered. Twenty-eight Povarskaya Street, isn't it? Not so far away'

'That's right!' Bullfinch agreed enthusiastically. 'I'd like to go along. It would be even better if I went on my own, because you've already done your job for the day. I can manage, honest I can! He'll open the door, and I'll ask: "Are you engineer Larionov?" That's so as not to kill an innocent man by mistake. And then I'll say: "Take this, you traitor." I'll shoot him in the heart - three times to make sure - and run for it. A piece of cake.'

Rahmet threw his head back and laughed loudly. 'A piece of cake, of course it is! You shoot him - go on, just try. When I let von Bock have it point-blank on the parade ground, his eyes leapt out of their sockets, I swear to God! Two little red balls. I dreamed about it for ages. Used to wake up at night in a cold sweat. A piece of cake .. .’

And what about Shverubovich with his face melting, Green thought, do you dream about him?

'It's all right; if it's for the cause, I can do it,' Bullfinch declared manfully, turning pale and then immediately flushing bright red. He had got his nickname from the constant high colour of his cheeks and the light-coloured fluff that covered them. 'The bastard betrayed his own, didn't he?'

Green had known Bullfinch for a long time, a lot longer than the others. He was a special boy, bred from precious stock - the son of a hanged regicide and a female member of the People's Will party, who had died in a prison cell while on hunger strike; the child of unmarried parents, not christened in church, raised by comrades of his mother and father; the first free citizen of the future free Russia; with no garbage in his head, no filth polluting his soul. Some day boys like that would be quite ordinary, but for now he was one of a kind, the invaluable product of a painful process of evolution, and so Green had really not wanted to take Bullfinch into the group.

But how could he not have taken him? Three years earlier, when Green had escaped from the state prison and was making his way home the long way round the world - through China, Japan and America - he had been detained for a while in Switzerland. Just hanging about with nothing to do, waiting for the escort to guide him across the border. Bullfinch had only just been sent there from Russia, where his guardians had been arrested yet again, and there was no one in Zurich to take care of the little lad. They had asked Green, and he had agreed because at that time there was nothing else he could do to help the party. The escort was delayed and then disappeared completely. Before they managed to arrange a new one, a whole year had gone by.

For some reason Green didn't find the boy a burden - quite the opposite, in fact; perhaps because for the first time in a long time he was obliged to concern himself not with the whole of mankind but with one single individual. And not even an adult, but a raw young boy.

One day, after a long, serious conversation, Green made his young ward a promise: when Bullfinch grew up, Green would let him work with him, no matter what he might happen to be doing at the time. The Combat Group had not even been thought of then, or Green would never have promised such a thing.

Then he had come back home to Russia and set to work. He often remembered the boy, but of course he completely forgot about his promise. And then, just two months ago, in Peter, they had brought Bullfinch to him in a clandestine apartment. Here, comrade Green, meet our young reinforcements from the emigration. Bullfinch had gazed at him with adoration in his eyes and started talking about the promise almost from the very first moment. There was nothing Green could do about it - he didn't know how to go back on his word.

He had taken care of the boy and kept him away from the action, but things couldn't go on like that for ever. And after all, Bullfinch was grown up now - eighteen years old. The same age Green had been on that railway bridge.

Not just yet, he had told himself the previous night, as he prepared for the operation. Next time. And he had ordered Bullfinch to leave for Moscow - supposedly to check on their contacts.

Bullfinch was a delicate peach colour. What kind of warrior would he make? Though it did sometimes happen that people like that turned out to be genuine heroes. He ought to arrange a baptism of fire for the boy, but the execution of a traitor was not the right place to start.

'Nobody's going anywhere,' Green said with authority. 'Everybody sleep. I'll take first watch. Rahmet's on in two hours. I'll wake him.'

'E-eh,' said the former cornet with a smile. 'You're a fine man in every way, Green, only boring. Terror's not the right business for you. You ought to be a bookkeeper in a bank.' But he didn't argue, he knew there was no point.

They drew lots. Rahmet got the bed to sleep on, Emelya got the divan and Bullfinch got the folded blanket.

For fifteen minutes he heard talking and laughter from behind the door, and then everything was quiet. After that their host looked out of the study, his gold pince-nez glinting in the semi-darkness, and muttered uncertainly: 'Good evening.'

Green nodded, but the private lecturer didn't go away.

Green felt that he had to show some consideration. After all, this was inconvenient for the man, and risky. They gave you penal servitude for harbouring terrorists. He said politely: 'I know we've incommoded you, Semyon Lvovich. Be patient -we'll leave tomorrow.'

Aronson hesitated, as if there were something he was afraid to ask, and Green guessed that he wanted to talk. After all, he was a cultured man, a member of the intelligentsia. Once he got started, he wouldn't stop until morning.

Oh no. Firstly, it was not a good idea to strike up a speculative conversation with an unproven individual, and secondly, he had something serious to think over.

'I'm in your way here,' he said, getting up decisively. 'I'll sit in the kitchen for a while.'

He sat down on a hard chair beside a curtained entrance (he had already checked it: it was the servant girl's box room). He started thinking about 'TG'. For perhaps the thousandth time in the last few months.

It had all started in September, a few days after Sable blew himself up - he had thrown a bomb at Khrapov as the General was coming out of a church, but the device had struck the kerb of the pavement and all the shrapnel had been thrown back at the bomber.

That was when the first letter had come.

No, it hadn't come; it had been found - on the dining table in the apartment where the Combat Group was quartered at the time, a place to which only very few people had access.

It wasn't really a group - that was just a name, because after Sable's death Green was the only active warrior left. The helpers and the couriers didn't count.

The Combat Group had been formed after Green returned to Russia illegally. He had spent a long time assessing where he could be most useful, where he should apply the match so that the blaze would flare up as fiercely as possible. He had transported leaflets, helped to set up an underground printing works, guarded the party congress. All this was necessary, but he had not forged himself into a man of steel in order to do work that anyone could manage.

His goal had gradually taken clear shape. It was the same as before: terror. After the destruction of the People's Will party the level of militant revolutionary activity had dwindled away to almost nothing. The police was no longer what it had been in the seventies. There were spies and agent provocateurs everywhere. In the whole of the last decade there had only been a couple of successful terrorist operations and a dozen failures. What good was that?

If there was no struggle against tyranny, revolutions did not happen - that was axiomatic. Tsarism would not be overthrown by leaflets and educational groups. Terror was as necessary as air, as a mouthful of water in the desert.

After carefully thinking everything through, Green had begun to act. He had a word with Melnikov, a member of the Central Committee whom he trusted completely, and was granted qualified approval. He would cany out the first operation entirely at his own risk. If it was successful, the party would announce the establishment of a Combat Group and provide financial and organisational support. If it failed, he had been acting alone.

That was logical. In any case acting alone was safer - you certainly wouldn't betray yourself to the Okhranka. Green also set one condition: Melnikov was to be the only member of the Central Committee who knew about him; all contacts had to go through him. If Green required helpers, he would choose them himself.

The first mission he was given was to carry out the sentence that had been pronounced a long time ago on Privy Counsellor Yakimovich. Yakimovich was a murderer and a villain. Three years earlier he had sent five students to the scaffold for planning to kill the Tsar. It had been a dirty case, based from the beginning on entrapment by the police and Yakimovich himself, who was not yet a privy counsellor, but only a modest assistant public prosecutor.

Green had killed him during his Sunday walk in the park -simply, without any fancy business: just walked up and stabbed him through the heart with a dagger, with the letters 'CG' carved into its handle. Before the people around him realised what had happened, he had already left the park - at a quick walk, not a run - and driven away in an ordinary cab.

This terrorist act, the first to be carried out after a long hiatus, had really shaken up public opinion. Everyone had started talking about the mysterious organisation with the mysterious name, and when the party announced what the letters meant and declared that revolutionary war had been renewed, a half-forgotten nervous tremor had run through the country - the tremor without which any social upheavals were unthinkable.

Now Green had everything necessary for serious work: equipment, money, people. He found the people himself or selected them from candidates proposed by the party. He made it a rule that there should be no more than three or four people in the group. For terror that was quite enough.

Big operations were planned, but the next assassination attempt - on the butcher Khrapov - had ended in failure. Not total failure, because a revolver bearing the letters 'CG' had been found on the dead bomber, and that had produced an impression. But even so, the group's reputation had been damaged. There could not be any more flops.

And that had been the situation when Green discovered the sheet of paper with the neatly typed lines of words, lying folded in two on the table. He had burned the paper, but he remembered what was written on it word for word.

Better not touch Khrapov for the time being; he is too well guarded now. When there is a chance to reach him, I shall inform you. Meanwhile, I can tell you that Bogdanov, the Governor of Ekaterinburg, visits house number ten on Mikhelson Street in secret at eight o'clock in the evening on Thursdays. Alone, with no guards. Next Thursday he is certain to be there. Burn this letter and those that follow as soon as you have read them.

TG

The first thought that had occurred to him was that the party was overdoing its conspiratorial methods. Why the melodramatic touch of leaving the letter like that? And what did 'TG' mean?

He asked Melnikov. No, the party Central Committee had not sent the note.

Was it a gendarme trap? It didn't look like one. Why beat about the bush like that? Why lure him to Ekaterinburg? If the police knew his clandestine apartment, they would have arrested him right there.

It had to be a third option. Someone wanted to help the Combat Group while remaining in the shadows.

After some hesitation, Green had decided to risk it. Of course, Governor Bogdanov was no major VIP, but the year before he had been condemned to death by the party for his vicious suppression of peasant riots in the Streletsk district. It wasn't a top priority mission, but why not? Green needed a success.

And he had got one. The operation went off wonderfully well, if you disregarded the scuffle with the police. Green left a sheet of paper at the scene - the party's death sentence, signed with the initials 'CG'.

Then, at the very beginning of winter, a second letter had appeared: he found it in the pocket of his own coat. He was at a wedding - not a genuine wedding, of course, but a fictitious one. Two party members had wed for the sake of the cause, and at the same time an opportunity had been provided to meet legally and discuss a few urgent matters. There had not been any letter in his coat when he took it off. But when he put his hand in the pocket as he was leaving, there was the sheet of paper.

The lieutenant general of gendarmes, Selivanov, who is well known to you, is inspecting the foreign agents of the Department of Security incognito. At half past two in the afternoon on 13 December he will go to a clandestine apartment at 24 rue Annamite in Paris.

TG

And once again everything had happened exacdy as the unknown TG had promised: taking the cunning fox Selivanov had been almost child's play, in fact - something they could never have dreamed of in St Petersburg. They waited for the gendarme in the entrance, Green grabbed him by the elbows, and Rahmet stuck the dagger into him. The Combat Group became the sensation of Europe.

Green had found the third letter on the floor in the entrance hall earlier this year, when the four of them were living on Vasilievsky Island in St Petersburg. This time the writer had directed his attention to Colonel Pozharsky, an artful rogue who was one of the new crop of gendarmes. The previous autumn Pozharsky had destroyed the Warsaw branch of the party, and he had just arrested an anarchist sailors' organisation in Kronstadt that had been planning to blow up the royal yacht. As a reward he had received a high post in the Police Department and an aide-de-camp's monogram for saving the imperial family.

The note had read as follows:

The search for the CG has been entrusted to the new deputy director for political affairs at the Police Department, Count Pozharsky. He is a dangerous opponent who will cause you a lot of trouble. On Wednesday evening between nine and ten he has a meeting with an important agent on Aptekarsky Island near the Kerbel company dacha. A convenient moment: do not let it slip.

TG

They had let the moment slip, even though it really was convenient. Pozharsky had demonstrated quite supernatural agility, returning fire as he melted away into the darkness. His companion had proved less nimble and Rahmet had caught him with a bullet in the back as he was running off.

Even so, the operation had proved useful and caused a sensation, because Green had recognised the man who was killed as Stasov, a member of the party's Central Committee and an old veteran of the Schlisselburg Fortress who had only just returned illegally to Russia from Switzerland. Who could have imagined that the police had people like that among their informers?

The latest message from TG, the fourth and most valuable, had appeared yesterday morning. It was hot in the house, and they had left the small upper window open for the night. In the morning Emelya had found the letter wrapped round a stone on the floor beside the window. He had read it and gone running to wake Green.

And now it is Khrapov's turn. He is leaving for Siberia today by the eleven o'clock express, in a ministerial carriage. I have managed to discover the following: Khrapov will make a stop in Moscow. The person responsible for his security while in Moscow is State Counsellor Fandorin, Prince Dolgorukoi's Deputy for Special Assignments. Description: 35 years old, slim build, tall, black hair, narrow moustache, grey temples, stammers in conversation. Extreme security measures have been planned in St Petersburg and Moscow. It is only possible to get close to Khrapov between these points. Think of something. There will be four agents in the carriage, and a duty guard of gendarmes in both lobbies (the front lobby is blind, with no access to the saloon). The head of Khrapov's guard is Staff Captain von Seidlitz: 32years of age, very light hair, tall, solidly built. Khrapov's adjutant is Lieutenant Colonel Modzalevsky: 39years of age, stout, medium height, dark-brown hair, small sideburns.

TG

Green had put together a daring but perfecdy feasible plan and made all the necessary preparations. The group had left for Klin on the three o'clock passenger train.

Once again TG's information had proved to be impeccable. Everything went without a hitch. It was the Combat Group's greatest triumph so far. It might have seemed that now he could afford to relax and congratulate himself on a job well done. The match had not been extinguished, it was still burning, and meanwhile the fire it had kindled was blazing ever more furiously.

But his enjoyment was marred by the mystery. Green could not abide mystery. Where there was mystery, there was unpredictability, and that was dangerous.

He had to work out who TG was - understand what kind of man he was and what he was after.

He had only one possible explanation.

One of his helpers, or even a member of the actual Combat Group, had someone in the secret police from whom he received confidential information that he passed on anonymously to Green. It was clear why he did not make himself known. That was to maintain secrecy; he did not wish to increase the number of people who knew his secret (Green himself always behaved in the same way). Or he was shielding his informant, bound by his word of honour - that sort of thing happened.

But what if it was entrapment?

No, that was out of the question. The blows that the group had struck against the machinery of state with the assistance of TG were too substantial. No tactical expediency could possibly justify an entrapment operation on that level. And most importantly of all: not once in all these past months had they been under surveillance. Green had an especially keen nose for that.

Two abbreviations: CG and TG. The first stood for an organisation. Did the second stand for a name? Why had there been any need for a signature at all?

That was what he must do when he got back to Peter: draw up a list of everyone who had had access to the places where the notes had been left. If he included only those who could have reached all four places, the list was a short one. Only a few people in addition to the members of the group. He had to identify who it was and engage them in candid conversation. One to one, with proper guarantees of confidentiality.

But it was a quarter past twelve already. His two hours were up. It was time to wake Rahmet.

Green walked through the drawing room into the dark bedroom. He heard Bullfinch's regular snuffling, Emelya's gentle snoring.

'Rahmet, get up,' Green whispered, leaning down over the bed and reaching out his hand.

There was nothing there. He squatted down and felt around on the floor: there were no boots.

Rahmet, the cornflower-blue man, was gone. He had either set out in search of adventures or simply run off.