The White Russian

49

R uzsky flew down the stairs, the constable alongside him. “A woman?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Young?”

“I-”

“Twenty? Thirty? Older?”

“Something like that, sir, yes.”

Ruzsky ran out into the street toward the droshky waiting opposite. They had lost Pavel, but he did not wait. “Where?” he demanded of the constable as the young man got in beside him.

“Vyborg side,” the man shouted at the driver. “By the Finland Station.”

The driver cracked his whip and the sled began to move. “Go via the quay,” Ruzsky instructed him.

The man did not look around, nor did he query the instruction. Only likhachy drivers were usually allowed to take their charges along the Palace Embankment. Ruzsky glanced back over his shoulder and saw Pavel running out of the building. The big detective hailed another sled. He had two more constables with him.

Ruzsky swung back to his companion. “She was dark?” he demanded. “Dark hair? Long, dark hair?”

“Yes, sir. I believe so.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes… yes.” He did not seem at all certain. “She had a knife, through her…” He pointed at his eye.

Ruzsky faced the front.

It could not be her. But his heart threatened to break out of his chest and his forehead prickled with sweat.

The sled hurtled past the Admiralty and the facade of the Winter Palace. They swung onto the Alexandrovsky Bridge.

“Whereabouts?” Ruzsky heard himself shout. “Tell me where exactly.”

“I’ll show you, sir,” the constable responded, equally agitated. “I’ll show you.”

They were over the bridge now and hurtling down the broad, tree-lined avenue, toward the spire of the Finland Station.

“Here,” the constable shouted at the driver, pointing toward a narrow side street between the tenements. “Here.”

The man slowed the horses and then wheeled them into the alley and down toward a tall, dark building surrounded by armed men.

Ruzsky leapt from the sled before it had ground to a halt.

Ten or more Okhrana agents, armed with rifles, stood in a semicircle around the entrance. The queue outside the bakery opposite stared at the scene in awed silence.

Ruzsky strode toward the officer in charge. “Chief Investigator Ruzsky,” he said, “city police.”

The man’s broad, bearded face was unyielding. “We’ve instructions to let no one through.”

“A murder has been reported by my constables,” Ruzsky said.

The other sled drew up and Pavel strode over. He produced his identification papers. “Deputy Chief Investigator Miliutin,” he said. The man remained unmoved.

The two groups faced each other. Ruzsky slipped his hand into his jacket, grasping the handle of his revolver. The silence was broken by the screech of an engine and then a loud clank as a train shunted inside the Finland Station.

Ruzsky seized his moment.

“You… stop,” the officer shouted, but Ruzsky had already broken into a run, darting through the entrance, past a mound of garbage.

“Wait,” he heard Pavel shout. He half expected a shot.

Ruzsky pounded up the stairs. The stench of urine and decay brought tears to his eyes. The walls glistened with water. He tried to focus only the steps ahead of him. He turned the last corner.

There was a man ahead, bent over the body.

Ruzsky saw one slim leg twisted at an impossible angle, a long leather boot.

Prokopiev straightened and turned to face him. A knife protruded from the dead woman’s cheek.

“Sandro, I-”

It was not her.

It was Olga.

Christ, it was not her.

Ruzsky leaned against the wall as he tried to recover his breath. Inside his overcoat, he was soaked in sweat, his throat dry and palms clammy. The Okhrana officer caught up with him and bellowed in his ear, but Ruzsky was oblivious.

“All right, all right,” Prokopiev shouted. He waved the man away, and Pavel, who stood behind. “I’ll deal with him.”

Prokopiev faced Ruzsky, his hands thrust into his pockets, waiting for the others to withdraw.

Ruzsky tried to control his breathing. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Prokopiev examined him as a gamekeeper might a cornered animal, but, as Ruzsky came to his senses, he realized that something had changed in the man.

Ivan Prokopiev appeared tired, and in those dark, intense eyes, there was a hint, if not of humanity, then at least of irony, or weary disillusion. “Are you all right, Chief Investigator?” he asked. “You do not look well.”

When the others had retreated out of earshot, Prokopiev took out a silver cigarette case and offered it to Ruzsky. “Did you think it was someone else?” Prokopiev asked as his match flared.

They smoked in silence. Prokopiev glanced at his boots. They had been newly polished. “I heard about your father,” he said. “I’m sorry for that.”

Ruzsky did not respond. He took a pace toward the body, but Prokopiev raised his hand. “Don’t go any closer,” he said, smoke bleeding through his mouth and nostrils.

Ruzsky examined the dead woman. The hilt of the knife bore a striking resemblance to the one they had discovered on the Neva.

“You know who she is?” Ruzsky asked.

Prokopiev shrugged.

“Might I take a look?”

Ruzsky inched forward and this time Prokopiev made no move to stop him.

Olga had fallen awkwardly, her body twisted. Her assailant had been waiting in the shadows of the doorway and her face, never beautiful, was savagely distorted.

Ruzsky squatted, an arm resting upon his knee. He reached forward to touch the skin of what remained of her cheek. She had been dead some time.

He examined the knife. It was an ancient, simple weapon with an iron handle, but no inscription that Ruzsky could see.

There were three stab wounds: one in the left cheek, another in the mouth, and a third directly through the center of the eye. He didn’t need Sarlov to tell him that the killer had been tall. The wounds were deep. A pool of congealed blood had frozen on the stone floor around her head. Her remaining eye was fixed upon him. It appeared to be as filled with hatred for Ruzsky and his kind as it had been when she was alive.

Prokopiev leaned on the iron balcony. “So, who did you think it was, Chief Investigator?”

“There are no witnesses?” Ruzsky asked, ignoring Prokopiev’s knowing look. He had seen no onlookers or curious glances through half-open doors. Such was the fear of the Okhrana.

Prokopiev did not respond.

Ruzsky reached a hand toward the pocket of Olga’s overcoat.

“There’s nothing in there.”

Olga’s clothes were ill-fitting and loose, so he started to ease her overcoat away from her right shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

Ruzsky did not respond.

“Step back, Sandro. Please.”

But Ruzsky had already pulled back Olga’s overcoat and was now shifting the thick shirt beneath far enough to allow him a glimpse of her shoulder.

She had the mark, a dark star branded upon white skin.

“Move back,” Prokopiev said.

“You see this? This brand? The American had one; so did the man we found at the Lion Bridge.”

Prokopiev bent down to take a closer look. Ruzsky could see that he knew exactly what it meant.

“The mark of the assassin,” Prokopiev sighed, almost inaudibly. He straightened, his eyes boring into Ruzsky’s own. “Do not mourn for them, Sandro.”

“You know the woman?”

“Few will regret her passing.”

“You know her from Yalta?”

“An anarchist.”

“How did she come to be here?”

“No tears will be shed for her. But, for your girl…” He paused. “Now she is a very different matter.”

Ruzsky stared at him, searching for some sign that this was another threat, but Prokopiev’s expression was concerned-almost imploring. “Did you know her in Yalta?”

“No.”

“You were on the train with us?”

“When you disappeared? Yes.”

Ruzsky gestured at the bodies. “Vasilyev has been behind these killings, hasn’t he? He wishes to remove all traces of the connections that date from Yalta?”

“You’re smarter than that. No general kills his own soldiers before the battle begins.”

“What battle?”

“Your time is short.”

They heard labored footsteps on the stairs below. “Back,” Prokopiev instructed. He fixed Ruzsky with an intense stare. Your time is short, his eyes blazed.

Vasilyev turned the corner, a dark cape around his shoulders, fastened at the throat by a gold chain. He mounted the steps with his head thrust forward, his face glacial. He ignored Ruzsky and examined the body, betraying no reaction.

“Thank you, Chief Investigator. That will be all.”

As Prokopiev led him away, Ruzsky dropped the remains of his cigarette and looked back at the dark figure stooped over the body. At the bottom of the stairs, he noticed a small pool of blood and stopped to examine it.

Prokopiev lifted him up gently and propelled him onward. Ruzsky tried to turn back, but the door of the apartment building was slammed in his face.

Pavel was waiting on the far side of the road, to one side of the queue. “Who was it?” His eyes told Ruzsky he knew who it was not.

“Olga Legarina.”

“She’s also from Yalta?”

“She’s one of the group, yes.”

“Did you get a look at the body?”

“It’s the same killer, with a similar knife. She had an identical mark on her right shoulder.”

“The same as the American?”

“Yes. Prokopiev called it the mark of the assassin.”

Pavel said, “If we don’t reach her, she’s going to die, isn’t she?” He did so without emotion, as if considering the possibility for the first time. “We had better find her.”

But Ruzsky was deep in thought. “We’ve been foolish,” he said. “Or I have. I should have spent more time looking for the families of the victims.”

“I thought they were robbers.” Pavel shook his head. “Armed robbery, you said.”

Ruzsky was staring at the doorway opposite. He thought of the passage in the records he had uncovered in Yalta. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa better target.

He turned and walked rapidly back toward the sled. “Hurry up,” he said.