The White Russian

34

T he chief of police in Yalta ’s tiny station was a more important post than this leafy, sun-kissed town might otherwise have merited, on account of the proximity of the Tsar’s summer palace at Livadia, a car or troika journey up the hill.

Godorkin was still older than Ruzsky had expected. He was tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and a clean-shaven, narrow, but pleasant face. He had steady eyes and a relaxed air and held himself like the former military officer that Ruzsky soon learned he was. He’d come here for the weather, he said. His family was from outside Odessa. There were sketches on the wall depicting officers of the Ataman Cossacks regiment on horseback, and photographs of five children on his desk. Godorkin was not, Ruzsky was relieved to conclude, Vasilyev’s man.

He sat, legs crossed, behind a wide teak desk. He lit a cigarette and offered Ruzsky one.

As he sucked in the smoke, Ruzsky tried to imagine Vasilyev sitting in that chair and wondered what kind of ambition could drive a man from such serene and peaceful surroundings to the frozen back alleys of the nation’s capital.

“Did you know Vasilyev?” Ruzsky asked.

“Met him once. Years ago. There have been two other chiefs between us. And three governors.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled, blowing a plume of smoke up toward the roof. “The weather didn’t agree with them.” There was a quiet knock and Godorkin’s plump secretary bustled in with a tray and two cups of tea. She smiled shyly and withdrew.

Ruzsky considered asking about Maria’s father, but thought better of it. Perhaps later.

Godorkin leaned forward and pushed a sheet of paper across the desk toward him. “Your colleague left this list with us, just in case we could come up with something else, but I’m afraid we haven’t.”

It was a note of the victims in Petersburg in Pavel’s handwriting: Ella Kovyil. Robert White/Whitewater. Boris Markov.

“As I told your colleague,” Godorkin said, “Whitewater is on our wanted list. That’s why I responded to your telegram.”

“Wanted for what?”

“Armed robbery. He is suspected of having held up the train from Simferopol to Kharkov.”

“Recently?”

“In 1910.”

Ruzsky frowned. “Not on his own?”

Godorkin shrugged. “He had accomplices, of course.”

Perhaps it was his imagination, but Ruzsky sensed that the genial detective was embarrassed. “It was before your time?”

“Yes, I’m glad to say.” Godorkin leaned forward on his desk, suddenly every inch the army officer. “There’s no excuse for it. Just because a case is old, it doesn’t mean that it should be forgotten.” He leaned back again, waving his arm. This was clearly not the first time he had been exercised by this subject. “It’s damned difficult getting to grips with old cases when there are no files.”

“Why are there no files?”

“Lost. Missing. No paperwork written up. Who knows?”

“So there is no file on this armed robbery?”

“A file exists, but the paperwork within it has been lost.”

Ruzsky shook his head. “Shouldn’t the case have been handled in either Simferopol or Kharkov?”

“They say it was dealt with here.”

“Why?”

Godorkin shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m confused,” Ruzsky said. He sat up straight. “How did you know about Robert White’s involvement if there is nothing in the file?”

Godorkin sighed. His expression told Ruzsky that the exact same things had been explained to Pavel. “White’s name was on our wanted list. The details that I gave you are all that we have. The case notes from the file itself are missing.”

“So what was stolen?”

“A sum of money, I believe. Several thousand rubles. The case has been inactive for some time. I only took over in September last year, so it was well before my tenure. I went in search of the file when I received your telegram.”

“Vasilyev was the chief of police at the time of the robbery?”

Godorkin’s gaze was steady, but wary. He appeared to be assessing whether he was being led into a trap, but whatever it was he saw in Ruzsky’s eyes, it appeared to win his approval. He relaxed. “That is correct,” Godorkin said.

“His investigation?”

Godorkin shrugged.

“His file.”

“I’ve no idea.”

Ruzsky turned to face the window. He watched a sail being hoisted on a white racing yacht. “Strange,” he said. “Vasilyev has a reputation for efficiency.” He turned back to face Godorkin. “You said that you knew both of them. White and the girl, Ella?”

“She was a sweet little thing. I knew her father.”

“Were you aware that Ella began an affair with this American, White, in the summer of 1910?”

“I was with the military liaison department at the embassy in France at that time. I hadn’t seen Kovyil for some years when he died.”

“He wouldn’t have approved. Or so his wife said.”

“Of an American criminal? Hardly.”

Ruzsky stood and watched the yacht tack across the center of the bay. The wind seemed to have slackened and the craft brought itself around slowly. “What brings a man like that halfway across the world?”

“ Yalta is famous, Chief Investigator. Perhaps you shouldn’t underestimate our appeal.”

“Perhaps not.” Ruzsky sat on the sill. The cigarette had gone out in his hand-he’d barely smoked it-and he threw it out of the window.

“What is the connection between this office and Livadia?”

“That I can’t discuss.”

“You vet staff?”

“We have, in the past. If they’re local. Sometimes they come from farther afield.”

“Who do you deal with there?”

Godorkin smiled. “Your friend has beaten you to it. He left here yesterday to go straight up to the palace.”

“You must have a list of political suspects. The Okhrana supplies you with information?”

“A certain amount is disclosed to enable us to ascertain that any local individual has no inappropriate political involvement, but normally we know them well enough to be sure.”

Ruzsky faced him. “Would you mind if I spent some time in your file room?”

Godorkin looked astonished, but not insulted. An honest man, Ruzsky thought.

If Godorkin’s intention was to regularize the station’s affairs, he hadn’t begun with the filing system.

Indeed, there was no system to speak of. The filing cases were kept in a gloomy, dust-laden room in the basement. There wasn’t even an electric light. Ruzsky shuddered. This place reminded him uncomfortably of the station in Tobolsk.

“Help yourself,” Godorkin said, with heavy humor, lighting a candle and thrusting it into his hand. “What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know precisely. Other cases around that time. Names that are familiar to me from somewhere else.”

Ruzsky hoped he would not be offered any assistance. He wanted to be alone. “Broadly,” Godorkin said, “cases are filed by order of year, starting at the beginning of the century on the left here. Any personal files are at the far end of the room, in alphabetical order. I’ve achieved that much. Shout if I can be of any assistance.”

Godorkin coughed once and then slowly climbed the stairs. Ruzsky walked down toward the far end of the room. There was a small grille here for ventilation that let in a thin stream of light. Beneath it stood a desk. Ruzsky brushed the dust from its surface. He retraced his steps and found a ledge upon which to place the candle so that he could use both hands to work through the files.

Godorkin was right. The files had been sorted through recently, because the layer of dust upon some of the cases was thinner than around the rest of the room. Ruzsky found 1910 and took all the files for that year down to the desk under the grille. There were about five large piles. Quite a lot, he thought, for a small provincial town, however important.

All of the files had the nature of the crime to which they related inscribed on the front, along with the date upon which it had been said to have taken place. The date the crime had been reported was also recorded. Most, though not all, files were annotated in the same flowing hand. Ruzsky had seen only one detective upstairs in the main room on the ground floor, but he looked about seventeen-much too young to have been working here seven years ago.

The crimes were mostly incidental. Petty theft, vandalism, the odd affray, some domestic violence. It took Ruzsky about an hour to work through all the files and he reached the end with a sense of disappointment. He supposed that he’d hoped White’s name, or Markov’s-or even Ella’s-might have cropped up in some other context.

He began on the files relating to political suspects or criminals.

They were not strictly in alphabetical order, so he ended up going through the whole shelf. There was no reference to any of them.

Ruzsky sat back down at the desk. He watched the dust dancing in the shaft of light still angling through the grille. He checked his watch. He had arrived at Sevastopol shortly after breakfast and it was now almost three o’clock in the afternoon. He was hungry.

He began to sift through the files for 1909. The task was beginning to seem pointless, but instinct told him that these people could not have passed through Yalta without coming to the attention of the authorities.

And if White had robbed a train, he had certainly not acted alone.

There were fewer files for 1909, but they were no more illuminating. Ruzsky was close to giving up when he saw a small, discarded pile on the top shelf. He brought the chair from the other end of the room.

There were ten files, covered in dust. He carried them back to the desk. The top file had the words Black Terror written in the same flowing hand on the front. He opened the buff cover and sifted through the loosely bound, yellowing pages within.

A feeling of unease crept slowly through him.

One name appeared three times. The last entry was for August 11, 1910.

The Black Terror was one of many revolutionary groups that had sprung up at the end of the last century to concentrate on assassinating luminaries of the regime. This small and, by the look of the notes, loosely affiliated cell had been formed on January 12 of that same year by a Michael Borodin, according to the statement of a well-known Bolshevik from St. Petersburg. The police had had an informant on the inside of the group, because the date and venue of each meeting was recorded alongside a paragraph or two describing what had transpired.

Ruzsky ran his eye over one of the entries again. The reports must have been written by the informant’s police contact.

July 12. Dumskaya Hotel. Present: Borodin, the American White, Ella Kovyil, Constantine Markov, Olga Legarina, Maria Popova.

Ruzsky stared at her name, struggling to take it in. Maria Popova.

Meeting called to order by Borodin. Further discussion of possible assassination of Governor of Odessa. Markov agreed to travel to Odessa, to research Governor’s movements. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target. White spoke of the need for money to carry out revolutionary tasks. Raised possibility of robbing a bank in Odessa, Sevastopol, or Simferopol in order to raise funds. All agreed on necessity of this type of action.

Ruzsky’s mind swam. He stood, transfixed. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa perhaps better target.

He sat and stared at the grille, his vision blurred.

There was bile in the back of his throat. A revolutionary? A murderer? He thought of the softness of her skin and the gentle sadness in her eyes. It wasn’t possible.

But who were the men she had left the station with this morning?

Had she been watching him? Is that why she had come to Yalta?

No, it had been her suggestion. She had told him she was returning before they’d discovered Markov’s body on the Lion Bridge.

Ruzsky read through the entries again. Half of him still did not believe the evidence before his own eyes.

He tapped his fingers against the pages. Why did the reports come to a halt on August 11?

Ruzsky toyed with the idea of keeping what he’d found to himself, but he decided that it could do no harm to discuss it with Godorkin. The chief of police sat at his desk, a cigarette burning in the solid silver ashtray, a blind flapping idly against the window.

Ruzsky placed the file in front of him. “Have you got the folder for the train robbery, even if it is empty?”

Godorkin was already reading. He opened the cupboard beneath him, took out an empty folder, and handed it to Ruzsky. Simferopol-Odessa train robbery, it read. August 31, 1910.

Godorkin looked up.

“The entries cease,” Ruzsky said, “roughly two weeks before the train robbery, of which they make no mention.”

“Yes.”

“I assume it takes longer than two weeks to plan a crime of that kind.”

Godorkin nodded. “I should imagine so.”

They were silent. Both men stared out of the window. There were two yachts in the bay now, and they crossed each other, their sails a startling white against the sea.

“Ella Kovyil got a job in the royal household up at Livadia,” Ruzsky said. “How did she manage that, if the department here was doing the vetting?”

Godorkin did not reply. The answer was obvious to both of them. “Someone must have called a halt to the surveillance,” Ruzsky said, forcing home the point. “After the robbery, Vasilyev makes sure the case is handled here, but goes nowhere. Eventually, the notes are removed and disposed of. If there was an investigation, that is.”

Godorkin still did not reply.

“Did you know the Popova family?” Ruzsky asked. “Wasn’t her father the governor?” He tried to keep his tone and expression neutral.

Godorkin shrugged.

“I think the girl must have been the agent. Nothing else would make sense. Her father died some years before?”

The policeman didn’t respond.

“You didn’t know him?”

“No.”

Ruzsky stood. He felt suddenly profoundly uneasy.