The White Russian

2

T hey climbed onto the embankment and approached the riverside entrance of the Tsar’s Winter Palace.

Ruzsky stepped forward to knock on the giant green door. There was no answer, so he tried to look through the misted glass of the window to his right. He climbed up on a stone ledge to give himself a better view.

“Be careful or they’ll shoot you,” Pavel said.

A light was dimly visible in the hallway. There was little obvious security, but then it was well known that the Tsar and his family preferred their country palace outside the city at Tsarskoe Selo.

Ruzsky stepped forward and knocked once again. He glanced up at the light suspended on a long iron chain above him. As it swung slowly in the icy wind, its metal links creaked.

“This cannot be right,” Pavel said.

“If anyone saw it, it will have been the guard here.”

Pavel hesitated. “Let’s go around to the office of the palace police at the front.”

“Then we’ll never find out who was on duty back here.”

They waited, listening to the wind. Pavel forced his hat down upon his head. “Maybe it’s colder than Tobolsk.”

Ruzsky saw the guilt behind Pavel’s uncertain smile. “It’s the damp here,” Ruzsky said. “You know how it is. In Siberia, it’s a dry cold.” Ruzsky wanted to assuage his friend’s guilt, but did not know what else he could say. Pavel had been responsible for his exile, but Ruzsky did not hold it against him. In fact, far from it. The thought still filled Ruzsky with bitterness, as though it had happened yesterday.

Three years before, in the darkened, piss-strewn stairwell of a tenement building in Sennaya Ploschad, Ruzsky and Pavel had arrested a small-time landlord who’d assaulted and strangled the ten-year-old daughter of one of his poorer tenants. The man had not imagined the terrified mother would dare complain, but his insouciance as they led him down to the cells in the city police headquarters ought to have set their alarm bells ringing. Throughout that night, both Ruzsky and Pavel had struggled to retain their tempers as the fat, sweaty toad had drummed his pudgy fingers upon the table and answered their questions with a contemptuous insolence.

Pavel had a distinct intolerance for these crimes, and while Ruzsky was upstairs dealing with the paperwork, Pavel had decided to put the man into a cell with a group of armed robbers. He’d informed the men of the nature of their new companion’s crime.

Ruzsky had no moral objection to this solution, but it had resulted in the world falling in upon their heads. The man turned out to have been the foreman of an arms factory over in Vyborg and, more damaging, an agent of the Okhrana-the Tsar’s vicious secret police. Within a few hours of his lifeless body being dragged from the cell, the city police headquarters had been swarming with hard-faced Okhrana men in long black overcoats.

Pavel tried to take responsibility, but Ruzsky had overruled him. It had been his own idea, he told the secret police chief, Igor Vasilyev, and his thugs.

Ruzsky’s punishment had been effective banishment to Siberia as the chief investigator of the Tobolsk Police Department.

Ruzsky tried to return his friend’s smile. They both knew that Pavel’s punishment would have been much worse. Ruzsky might have been the black sheep of his distinguished, aristocratic family, but the Ruzsky name itself and the fact that his father was a government minister still carried weight. It had limited the scale of punishment-back then, at least.

Ruzsky finally heard a bolt being pulled back and the palace door swung open. Three men in the distinctive uniforms of the Yellow Cuirassiers emerged from the darkness. The elder of the men-a sergeant-had white hair and a mustache like Pavel’s. His two young companions were nervous and held their rifles firmly in both hands. In the grand hallway behind them, Ruzsky could just make out the tip of a chandelier.

“City police,” Ruzsky said. He wasn’t in the mood to offer felicitations for the dawning of a new year.

“You should have come to the other side.”

“There have been two murders, out here, on the ice.”

The sergeant walked forward, followed by his companions. They stood in a small group looking out toward the torches in the middle of the frozen river. “Yesterday it was a drunk,” he said, pointing at the deserted road in front of him. “Froze to death just here.”

“I fear this is a little different. The victims were stabbed-”

“A week ago, someone was stabbed out in front of the Admiralty.”

“A domestic dispute,” Pavel corrected him. “Two brothers. Both still alive.”

“Have you been on duty all night?” Ruzsky asked.

“Of course.”

“You’re on detachment?”

The Yellow Cuirassiers-officially His Majesty’s Life Guard Cuirassier Regiment-were based out at Tsarskoe Selo, in the small town that surrounded the royal palaces there. It was about an hour’s train ride from the capital.

The sergeant did not answer.

“There are other guards?” Ruzsky went on.

The man shrugged. “On Palace Square. They don’t move unless we call for them.”

Ruzsky looked down the embankment toward the Hermitage. “There is no one out here?”

“A sentry either end until midnight. After that, it is not necessary. The shutters on the ground and first floors are closed. We would hear any commotion.” He was defensive.

“There are no patrols?”

His cheeks flushed slightly. Ruzsky didn’t wish to press the point; it had been New Year’s Eve, after all. “What time did you and your men come on duty?”

“If you wish to ask questions, you will have to apply to the head of the guard detachment or the office of the palace police.”

“Come on,” Pavel said softly, before Ruzsky could get annoyed. “A couple of lovers have been sliced up out there. We just want to check to make sure no one saw anything, then be on our way.”

The man’s face softened. He breathed out. “Cigarette?” Pavel asked, taking out a tiny tin case from the pocket of his coat and offering it around the group.

The men hesitated-smoking on duty was strictly forbidden-before each taking one in turn. They lit up and smoked in silence, suddenly conspiratorial.

The sergeant looked out at the constables still guarding the bodies on the ice. It was marginally less cold here, in the shelter of the giant porch.

“We came on duty at midnight. I did my last rounds about an hour later. I walked along the embankment to check for drunks. Then I locked the door.”

“You stand here, inside the hallway?”

“We check the rooms periodically, but, as I said, all the shutters are locked, except those by the door.”

“You didn’t see or hear anything?”

The sergeant shook his head and so did his young companions. Ruzsky could see they were telling the truth. He suspected they’d probably been playing cards as the New Year dawned.

That, and the fact they had accepted a cigarette while on duty, was, he thought, a sign of the times. He wondered if the men had seen action at the front. The sergeant, certainly. The others looked too young.

“When you came out at one o’clock, you didn’t see anyone at all?”

“There was a group farther down, by the Admiralty. I think they’d just crossed the river, but they were going home. It was quiet after that. If we’d heard anyone else, we’d have moved them on. We don’t allow people to linger.”

“Could anyone have seen something from one of the upstairs windows? A servant?”

He shook his head. “These are all state rooms at the front. There are family bedrooms on the top floor, but none are occupied.” The sergeant gestured toward the group on the ice again. “It’s quite far out.”

“But extremely visible on a clear night.”

“Yes.” He shook his head and looked genuinely apologetic. “You can talk to the head of the household later on. He could tell you whether there might have been anyone in the front rooms, but I’m afraid I cannot help you.”

The sergeant turned and retreated, taking the younger men with him. The door shut with a loud bang and the silence descended once more, save for the iron chain above them creaking in the icy wind. An ambulance had parked on the Strelka and two men were carrying a stretcher out to retrieve the bodies.

“It’s a strange place for a murder,” Pavel said. “At this time.”

Ruzsky didn’t answer. He glanced over his shoulder. They were only a few minutes from his parents’ home here, and he thought of his son Michael sleeping, curled up with his teddy bear pressed to his nose.

“We’d better start looking for the knife,” he said.

Ruzsky returned to the edge of the ice. As he reached the bottom of the steps, he heard the sound of a car door being shut and turned to see two men in fedoras getting out of a large black automobile farther down the embankment.

The men leaned over the wall and surveyed the scene on the ice.

“The Okhrana?” Ruzsky asked quietly.

It was only half a question. They both knew perfectly well that these were Vasilyev’s men. The change in Pavel’s demeanor was palpable.

“What are they doing here?” Ruzsky asked.

Pavel did not answer. He was staring at them, trying to conceal his unease.

The two secret policemen sauntered back to their automobile and got in. The car swung around and returned the way it had come.

Ruzsky and Pavel watched as it disappeared down the embankment before turning left over the bridge in the direction of the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress.