She had arranged to meet Sagan at Beloostrov, the small town nearest the Finnish border. When she arrived – the only passenger to leave the carriage – Sagan was waiting in a troika, a sleigh with three horses, smoking a cigar, shrouded in furs. She climbed in and he covered their laps with the fur blanket. The coachman spat out a spinning green gobbet of phlegm, cracked his whip and they were off. Sashenka remembered such trips with Lala in the family sleigh with its ivory fittings, the family crest on the doors, the sable rug. Now this flimsy sleigh, creaking and clattering, flew over the fields, the coachman in his sheepskin and fur hood leaning to one side, drunkenly flicking his whip over the mangy rumps of the skinny piebalds. Every now and then he talked to the horses or his passengers but it was hard to hear him over the swish of the sleigh and the thud of the hooves.
‘Giddy-up … Oats … prices rising … Oats …’
‘Shouldn’t you be in Piter fighting the wicked pharaohs?’ Sagan asked her.
‘The workers are just hungry, not rebels at all. Aren’t you worried though?’
He shook his head. ‘There’ll be riots but nothing more.’
‘The Party agrees with you.’ She peered up into Sagan’s face. He looked exhausted and anxious – the strain of his double life and miserable marriage, the headaches and insomnia, the rising turbulence in the city, all seemed to be catching up with him. She shook her head at Mendel’s accusations. How could he know what Sagan felt when he had never met him and certainly never seen them together? No, Sagan had become a sort of friend – he alone understood the pain of having a mother like Ariadna. She felt that he liked her too, for her own sake, but not like that! Not at all! Sagan was not even suited to police work. He was much more like a vague poet than a frightening policeman with his feathery blond hair that he wore much too long – and yet it suited him. They were enemies in many ways, she knew that, but their understanding was based on mutual respect and shared ideas and tastes. She had a serious mission and when it was over they might never see each other again. But she was glad Mendel had ordered her to see Sagan again. Very glad. She had family news to tell him and who else could she confide in?
‘Something has happened at home,’ she began. There was no harm in recounting harmless gossip. ‘Mrs Lewis! My Lala! Mendel has a spy in the Donan. That’s how I discovered. When I confronted Papa, he blushed and denied it and looked away and then finally admitted that he had considered marrying her for me, to make me a happier home. As if that would make the slightest difference to my life! But now he says he’s not going to divorce Mama. She’s too fragile. I asked Lala and she hugged me and told me she refused him on the spot. They’re all such children, Comrade Petro. Their world’s about to end, the inevitable dialectic’s about to crush them and they’re still playing like that orchestra on the Titanic.’
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, leaning towards her. She noticed his blond moustache was cut just like her father’s.
‘Of course not,’ she answered huskily, ‘but I never thought of Lala like that!’
‘Governesses are prone to it. I had my first love affair with my sister’s governess,’ said Sagan.
‘Did you?’ She was suddenly disappointed in him. ‘And how’s your wife?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m spiritually absent from my home. I come and go like a ghost. I find myself doubting everything I once believed in.’
‘Lala was my confidante. Who do you talk to?’
‘No one. Not my wife. Sometimes I think, well, maybe you’re the only person I can be myself with because we’re half-strangers, half-friends, don’t you see?’
Sashenka smiled. ‘What a pair we are!’ She closed her eyes and let the wind with its refreshing droplets of snow sprinkle her face.
‘There!’ shouted Sagan. He pointed at an inn just ahead.
‘Right, master,’ cried the sleigh-driver and whipped the horses.
‘We’re almost there,’ Sagan said, touching her arm.
A tiny wooden cottage, with colourful wooden carvings hanging from its roof, stood all alone in the middle of the snowfields with only a few birches on either side like bodyguards. Sashenka thought the place belonged in a Snow Queen fairy tale.
The sleigh swished to a stop, the horses’ nostrils flared and steaming in the cold. The wooden door opened, and a fat peasant with a jet-black beard came out in a bearskin kaftan and soft boots to hand her down from the sleigh.
Inside, the ‘inn’ was more like a peasant izba. The ‘restaurant’ was a single room with a traditional Russian stove, on top of which a very old man with a shaggy white beard lay full-length, snoring noisily in his socks. Inside the half-open stove, Sashenka saw game sizzling on a spit. The black-bearded peasant showed them to a rough wooden table and thrust a generous shot of cha-cha into their hands.
‘To a strange pair!’ said Sagan and they drank. She had never been out for a meal with a man before. The cha-cha burned in Sashenka’s belly like a red-hot bullet, and this unlikely idyll – the open fire, the sleeping old man and the aromatic game in the stove – softened her concentration. She imagined that they were the only people alive in the whole of the frozen north. Then she mentally shook herself, to keep her wits about her. Joking with Sagan, whom he seemed to know, the peasant served them roast goose in a piping-hot casserole, so well done that the fat and flesh almost dripped off the bones to flavour a mouth-watering beetroot, garlic and potato broth. They so enjoyed the food that they almost forgot the Revolution, and just made small talk. There was no dessert, and the old man never awoke. Eventually they left, very satisfied, after another cha-cha.
‘Your tip checked out, Petro,’ said Sashenka as the sleigh sped over the featureless snowfields.
‘It was hard to give you that.’
‘But it wasn’t enough. We want the name of the man who betrayed us.’
‘I might get it for you. But if we’re going to keep meeting, I need to show my superiors something …’
She let the silence develop as she prepared herself, excited by the danger of their game. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘There is something. Gurstein escaped from exile.’
‘We know that.’
‘He’s in Piter.’
‘That we guessed.’
‘Well, do you want to find him?’
He nodded.
‘Try the Kiev boarding house, Room 12.’ This was the response she’d rehearsed with Mendel, who had warned her that she would have to trade some information of her own. Gurstein was apparently expendable.
Sagan did not seem impressed. ‘He’s a Menshevik, Sashenka. I want a Bolshevik.’
‘Gurstein escaped with Senka Shashian from Baku.’
‘The insane brigand who robbed banks for Stalin?’
‘He’s in Room 13. You owe me, Comrade Petro. If this was known, the Party’d kill me by morning. Now give me the name of the traitor who betrayed the printing press.’
There was just the crispness of blades slicing frozen snow, and Sashenka could almost feel Sagan weighing up the price of a man’s life versus the value of an agent.
‘Verezin,’ he said at last.
‘The concierge of the Horse Guards barracks?’
‘Surprised?’
‘Nothing surprises me,’ Sashenka said, exultantly.
The sky was furrowed with scarlet, as if ploughed with blood. Rabbits jumped out ahead of the horses and crisscrossed each other, making jubilant leaps. What joy! Sagan gave orders to the coachman, who whipped the horses.
Sashenka sat back and closed her eyes. She had the name. Her mission was successful. The Party would be pleased. She had got what Mendel wanted – not bad, she decided, for a Smolny girl! Somehow, together, she and Sagan had delivered. They had shared the adrenalin that all operatives feel after a successful mission. She had tricked him and, for whatever reason, he had given her his nugget of gold.
A cottage appeared in the distance, probably on the edge of some estate. The temperature was falling, and the ice was stiffen
ing again. A clump of pines looked as if they were made of tarnished silver.
‘See, there!’ said Sagan, taking her gloved hand in his own. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Far away from the struggle in the city. I wanted to show you an exquisite little place that I love.’
‘There you are, barin,’ said the coachman, raising his eyebrows and spitting. ‘Just as you ordered.’
‘I could live here for ever,’ said Sagan passionately, pulling off his shapka, his flaxen locks flopping over his eyes. ‘I might escape out here. I could be happy here, don’t you think?’
A little curl of smoke puffed out of the distant tin chimney. Sagan took her hand and slipped her glove off. Their hands, dry and warm, cleaved together, breathing each other’s skin. Then he took her left hand and slipped it inside his own glove, where her fingers rested closely against his, buried in kid leather and the softest rabbit fur. It seemed impertinent, yes, and horribly intimate, but she found it delicious too. She gasped. The tender skin of her palm seemed to become unbearably sensitive, glowing and prickling against his rough skin. She felt a flush rising up her neck, and withdrew her hand from his glove abruptly.
She could feel his eyes on her, but she looked away. That, she decided, had been a step too far.
‘Faster! Bistro!’ Sagan barked at the driver. The three horses jumped forward and suddenly the driver lost control. The sleigh bounced left and right, the driver shouting, but the snow was uneven, tipping them one way, then the other and finally flipping the sleigh in a powdery tornado of whirling snow until Sashenka found herself flying through the air.
She landed in a soft drift, face down, and was still for a moment. Sagan was close to her but not moving. Was he alive? What if he was dead? She sat up. The horses were still galloping away, the driver chasing after them and the sleigh upside down. Sagan was still, his face covered in snow.
‘Petro!’ she called out, crawling over to him. She touched the dimple in his chin.
Sagan sat up laughing, wiping the snow off his long narrow face.
‘You gave me a shock,’ she said.
‘I thought we were both dead,’ he replied, and she laughed too.
‘Look at us!’ she said, ‘we’re soaked …’
‘… and cold,’ he said, looking for the sleigh. ‘And I fear quite alone!’
She saw that his dark pupils were dilated with the excitement of the crash. She put his hat back on his head and they could not stop laughing, like children. Sitting there in the midst of the snowfields, the cottage still far away, the sleigh invisible, he moved his head to rest on her shoulder just as she did the same and they bumped heads, then looked at one another.
Without missing a beat, he kissed her on the lips. No one had ever kissed her before. Thinking of the Party, relishing her success, and remembering that perhaps Mendel was right after all, perhaps Sagan did like her, she allowed him to press his lips on hers. His tongue opened her mouth and licked her lips, teeth, tongue. Her lips tingled and she became drowsy and dreamy. For a moment, just a moment, she closed her eyes and let her head rest against his, and her hand did what it had always wanted to do: stroke the pale hair that reminded her of candyfloss. They had shared personal confidences – the poetry, his marriage and headaches, her family – but nothing so all-embracing as the Superlative Game of conspiracy. The deadly exchange of information formed the climax of a slow, voluptuous polka on the thinnest ice. Sashenka was dizzy and shaky, yet sparks of nervous excitement and a flick of sensuous heat flashed through her.
‘Here we are, barin!’ cried the sleigh-driver, whose entire beard was frosted like a fungus. He had righted his sledge and driven his troika of lathered horses in a big circle to pick them up again. ‘Apologies for the bump but, well, no broken bones, I see. A picture of health!’ and he cackled coarsely. Sagan’s skin was warm, prickly, rough on her cheeks and chin. It burned her – and she broke away. ‘Whoa!’ cried the driver. The sleigh came to a halt beside them with a slushy crunching that sprinkled a shower of frozen stars on to their faces.
Sagan helped her up and brushed the snow off her and then handed her back on to the sleigh. Her hands and knees were quivering. She wiped her lips with her sleeve. She was unsure of herself, unsettled.
Moments later, they arrived at the cottage. Spears of ice with fine points hung down from the eaves, and intricate blossoms of frost made opulent patterns on the windows. The nailed wooden door opened and a smiling pink-cheeked peasant girl in a sheepskin kaftan came out, bearing a tray with two glasses of gogol-mogol. The glowering sky spread its soft blanket over the snow, turning it a deep purplish blue.
Afterwards, Sagan and Sashenka parted at the station.
She had a rash on her chin. She touched it with her fingertips and, remembering his lips against hers, she shivered.
29
Captain Sagan watched Sashenka’s little train pull away and gather speed, its steam billowing like the sultan-spike of a gendarme’s helmet.
He showed his pass to the stationmaster, who was almost overcome with excitement as Sagan commandeered the fool’s cosy office. Warming himself by the Dutch stove and helping himself to a shot of cognac, he wrote a report to his boss, General Globachev.
Sagan’s temples were tightening, always the start of a reverberating headache. He quickly rubbed some of the medicinal powder on to his gums then sniffed two tokes. Things were not going well. He and the general were more worried about St Petersburg than he had let on to Sashenka. But both men agreed that a crackdown and a dismissal of the Duma were necessary: it was time, he considered, for the Cossack to wield his nagaika whip. The coca tonic replaced his anxiety with a feeling of all-conquering satisfaction that drummed in his temples.
Ever since his days in the Corps de Pages, Sagan had been in the top stream, winner of the highest prize during the two years of courses at the School for Detectives. He had learned the anthropometric tables of the Bertillon system for describing the features of those under surveillance, won the bullseye prize in Captain Glasfedt’s practical course on firearms and mastered the ‘Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents’, which he had applied punctiliously to Sashenka. He had memorized the urbane orders of Colonel Zubatov, the genius of the Okhrana, who had written: You should look on your informer as a mistress with whom you are involved in an adulterous affair. It was indeed impossible to turn female revolutionaries into double agents without exploiting chivalry in some form, even if that meant what he called ‘anti-chivalry’ – allowing silly teenagers to believe they were serious intellectuals who would never contemplate the slightest flirtation, let alone sexual approaches. Sagan had followed Zubatov’s recommendations with one of his female double agents in the SRs and another in the Bolsheviks. Neither was a beauty but, in bed, the drama of espionage more than compensated for the often dull athletics.
Sagan always prepared himself meticulously for his meetings with Sashenka, listening to the latest tango, learning reams of that doggerel by Mayakovsky which had turned her head. Her devotion to Bolshevism made it child’s play: the humourless ones were always the easiest to crack, he told himself. Like so many of the revolutionaries, she was a zhyd, a kike, one of that race of turncoats who supported either godless Marxism or the German Kaiser. He smiled at his own liberal posturing, he who believed so passionately in Tsar, Orthodoxy and Motherland, the old order.
Now, using the stationmaster’s pen and ink, he started to write his report to the general:
Your Excellency, I am most satisfied with the case of Agent 23X (‘Snowfox’) who has finally started to prove useful. As Your Excellency knows, I have now met clandestinely with this member of the RSWP (Russian Socialist Workers’ Party: Bolshevik faction) eleven times, counting the first interrogation. The hours of work have paid off and will yield considerable gains later. Using our surveillance teams of external agents, Snowfox’s movements have enabled us to arrest three nihilists of middling rank and to track the new printing press.
The price f
or the recruitment of this agent has been 1. philosophical – her conviction of my sympathy for her cause and her person (the rescuing of her mother from the Dark One’s apartment was particularly successful in gaining trust); and 2. tactical – the handover of the name of the doorman (new Party member codenamed Horseguards) which has cost our service nothing since we earlier failed to recruit him as an internal agent, despite the offer of the usual financial inducements (100 roubles/month) as per P. Stolypin’s ‘Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents’.
At today’s meeting, the agent surrendered the name of two revolutionists, a Menshevik factionist and a Bolshevik terrorist, who had long been sought by the Security Sections of Baku, Moscow and Petrograd. I will organize surveillance according to General Trusevich’s ‘Instructions for External Surveillance’ and arrest forthwith. I request your permission to continue to handle Agent ‘Snowfox’ in the future as I believe that her usefulness for the service depends on my management. It is possible that her Bolshevik handlers have ordered her to hand over these names but I believe that the threat of exposure to her own comrades will now make her submission easy to accomplish.
Our primary mission remains the arrest of Mendel Barmakid, her uncle (codename Clubfoot; alias Comrade Baramian, Comrade Furnace, etc.) and the Bolshevik faction’s Petrograd Committee, but I have absolute confidence that this organization is now hopelessly broken and incapable of any threat in the short to medium term …
Poor little Sashenka, he thought smugly – yet in his heart he knew she was the brightest star in his firmament.
He did not look forward to seeing his wife or General Globachev. If he had had his way, he would have met Sashenka at the safehouse every night.
Her diffidence, those teenage doubts, her awkward stance, the prim way she dressed in grey serge, dreary wool stockings and buttoned blouses with her thick hair in a virginal Bolshevik bun, the absence of any make-up or even scent – all this had wearied him initially. But in recent weeks she had began to grow on him and now he looked forward to the smell of her fresh skin and her sumptuous hair when she was near him, the way her columbine eyes bored into him so intensely, her fingers touching her short upper lip when she talked about her mother, the way her slim body was shaping into a woman’s curves that she was determined to conceal and scorn. And nothing was so adorable as the way she suppressed her humour and joie de vivre, knitting her brows to play the dour revolutionary. He laughed at the tricks of the Almighty, for, however matronly she wanted to be, God had given her features – those lips that never closed, those scathing grey eyes, that lush bosom – that undermined her wishes at every turn and made her even more delicious.