The Jewel of St. Petersburg

  “Those clothes look better on you than they ever did on me.”

  She clamped her tongue between her teeth and managed not to spit.

  Thirty-four

  THE WIND WAS CHILL WITH THE STREETS DARK AS THE devil without lamps or sidewalks as Jens moved silently through a maze of backstreets. He kept alert as they twisted and turned, splitting into dingy alleyways and courtyards that spilled into one another with no warning. The main thoroughfares were designed by Peter the Great to be the showpiece of the Western world, but behind the palaces and the magnificent façades, these overcrowded hives of the underclasses had spread like sores. Bitterness and resentment festered.

  In front of one of the shabby houses, Jens walked down a flight of stone steps to a basement, wet and slippery underfoot. This was no place to live. Down below the water level. The swampland on which St. Petersburg was constructed liked to reclaim its own when the rain was heavy or the tides high. Basements flooded throughout the city, yet here people still lived in them. It was either that or sleep on the street. He banged at a door. It opened warily, and a woman in a flannel nightdress stared up at him.

  “I’m looking for Larisa Sergeyeva,” he announced. “Is she here?”

  The woman blinked rapidly and backed away into the room behind her, allowing Jens to enter. My God, bozhe moi, Jens put a hand over his nose. In the unsteady light of two candles, he could make out that the room was large and stretched away into darkness but was packed right up to the low ceiling with bunk beds and bodies huddled together for warmth. There must have been thirty to forty people. Scraps of sheet were draped over a few of the beds in an attempt at privacy, and children lay on grubby mattresses on the floor.

  “Larisa!” the woman in the nightdress shouted. “A gentleman visitor for you!”

  Voices jeered good-naturedly and a thin young woman stepped forward from the shadows, a baby asleep in her arms.

  “Larisa Sergeyeva?” Jens asked.

  “Da.”

  “I’d like a word with you.”

  “What about?”

  “It’s a private matter.” He flicked a glance at the rows of eyes trained on them. “Outside, I think.”

  She didn’t argue. She handed the baby to the woman who had opened the door and followed Jens up into the street. He saw her shiver. Good. He wanted her to be nervous. He led her into the slice of murky light that fell onto the road from a nearby window and inspected her. Her face was gentle, with shy uncertain eyes and light brown hair cut in a line at jaw level. One of her feet was kicking at the dirt road with quick jabs.

  “You are the widow of Mikhail Sergeyev?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was soft. Pleasant on the ear.

  “I believe he was a friend of Viktor Arkin.”

  Abruptly her foot stopped kicking. Her eyes lowered. “I don’t know.”

  He could shake her. Till her teeth rattled and her soft lying tongue fell out. Instead he dropped his voice. “I think you do.”

  She shook her head and fingered her lips in silence.

  “He brings food to you,” Jens stated.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I want to speak with him. Tonight.”

  Her eyes lifted nervously to his. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jens Friis.”

  “Direktor Friis?”

  “Yes. Your husband worked for me.”

  “You helped us when he broke his arm.” She touched his hand. “Thank you. Spasibo. We would have starved.”

  “The baby?”

  “She’s well.”

  “I wish I could say the same of Valentina Ivanova.”

  “What? I don’t understand. Who is she?”

  Jens lowered his face to hers and said fiercely, “Tell Arkin I want to see him. Now.”

  She shook her head and scurried back down the steps.

  SHE WASN’T CAREFUL ENOUGH, NOWHERE NEAR CAREFUL enough. Larisa Sergeyeva kept looking back over her shoulder as she ran down the alleyways, but at the wrong times and in the wrong places. Ten minutes after he left her, she set off from the house with a scarf over her head and something bulky in her pocket. He could see the way it dragged at her coat. She was too easy to follow.

  He tracked her to a narrow passage with high brick walls on either side from which footfalls echoed, but she was running and would only hear the beating of her own heart. He moved in the shadows and merged with the wall when she stopped at the end of the passage, scanning its length. When she suddenly turned into the rear entrance of a noisy bar, he hung back under an archway. Almost immediately she emerged again, and behind her loped a dark figure who was careful to avoid the lamplight from the bar. They drew into a doorway and spoke in whispers. This was the man, the one who had left his fingerprints all over Petersburg. Jens drew a gun from his waistband and checked the pool of darkness behind him in the passageway. Never before had he killed a man, but this one would rot in hell before the night was over. He moved forward to the doorway.

  “Arkin! Where is she?”

  Arkin made no sound, but Larisa Sergeyeva released a sharp gasp. “I didn’t bring him here, Viktor, I swear.”

  Jens ignored her. “Where is she?” The gun was aimed at the bastard’s head.

  Arkin stepped away from the woman. He came into the open and regarded Jens with a watchful stare. “The engineer,” he said softly. “If you kill me, she will also die.”

  Jens lowered the gun till it was pointing at Arkin’s right knee. “Listen carefully. If you ever want to walk straight again, talk now. Where are they?”

  Arkin looked down at the gun and for a moment said nothing. “How did you know about Larisa?”

  “You are not the only one with eyes and spies in this city.”

  “What do you—”

  His voice was cut off as a massive arm came from behind and encircled his neck. The woman screamed.

  “Remember our friend, Liev Popkov?” Jens slammed the gun into Arkin’s jaw and heard him grunt. “He was tortured by the Okhrana police because of you. And let’s not forget the hole in my chest because of you. It would give us both a great deal of pleasure to put a bullet in you in return.”

  “Let me rip his head off first,” Popkov growled.

  Larisa whimpered.

  “No,” Jens said. “A bullet in the right knee first, then in the left.”

  Arkin struggled in Popkov’s grip, but it was like trying to escape from a bear and when his arm was twisted almost out of its socket, he stopped. Jens stepped closer, his voice harsh. “One last time, Arkin. Where is she?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “It’s your choice.” He aimed the gun.

  “Let him go.” It was the woman.

  She was pointing a revolver of her own at Jens. Her hand was shaking and she was shifting nervously from foot to foot, but at this range she couldn’t miss.

  “Larisa,” Jens said quietly, “don’t do this. You will ruin your life and your child’s. Whatever you decide, I am going to blow this murdering bastard’s leg off right now if he doesn’t tell me where he’s hiding the Ivanova daughters.”

  “If you do, I swear I’ll kill you,” she said. “I need his help, if I am to keep my baby alive.”

  “That’s a risk I’ll take.”

  She tightened the grip on her gun. He looked away from her.

  “Arkin, where is Valentina?”

  Arkin stared at the woman and kept his mouth shut. Jens drew a breath but before he could pull the trigger Popkov suddenly released his stranglehold on his prisoner and moved back from him. Before they could blink, Arkin was gone.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jens shouted at the big man.

  “The little mouse would have killed you. What good are you dead to Valentina?”

  HOW MUCH DO YOU GIVE? THE QUESTION HUNG IN VALENTINA’S mind. What is the price? What is the price one person should pay and where do you draw the line? When do you say no, enough is enough?

  Who says where guilt starts and wher
e guilt ends?

  Valentina stood with her face pressed against the window grille, breathing in the scents of the wetlands and listening to the birds as if this would be the last time she would hear their songs. She squinted through the mesh toward the open-sided hut outside, where logs were stacked in untidy rows. A rat with half an ear ripped off stared back at her suspiciously from the woodpile.

  “Valentina, do you think we’ll go home tomorrow?”

  She turned and faced her sister on the bed. Gray lines like the footprints of tears ran from her nose to the corners of her mouth. Valentina smiled. “Of course we will.”

  IT WAS LATE WHEN ARKIN ARRIVED BACK AT THE IZBA THAT night and pushed open the door. Valentina heard it slam on its hinges and caught the drag of his footsteps across the boards. Not a good day then. The rumble of male voices lasted no more than a couple of minutes before the outer door slammed again and she heard Mazhik swear thunderously as he stomped off across the yard. Arkin didn’t knock, just unlocked the door to their room and walked in. He didn’t offer even that courtesy.

  “Dobriy vecher, good evening,” Valentina greeted him.

  “Here is bread and water for tonight.”

  “Morphine?”

  “Nyet.”

  “My father didn’t pay?” Katya asked from the bed.

  “No.”

  Katya shut her eyes, draped an arm across her face, and took no further part in the conversation.

  “Nothing for her?” Valentina asked.

  “No.”

  Her fingers itched to tear his eyes out.

  THE POOR ARE EASY TO BRIBE. JENS COULD BUY THEIR words but he didn’t expect to buy their loyalty. The night had proved futile. He cursed again and again.

  Valentina. As he stalked the smoky rooms of the city’s backstreets he kept catching a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, in her blue dress with that graceful swing of her hips and the way she tilted her head in greeting. Her dark eyes teasing him. But each time he turned around, she had vanished. Valentina. Don’t vanish, don’t give up. Stay here. Stay. With me.

  He had spoken with her father, and it had been a heated exchange. Minister Ivanov was a man who did not take kindly to being told what to do, but it was obvious he cared for his daughters and for them had suffered the humiliation of begging on his knees. But banks, wealthy friends, fellow government ministers, and even the Jewish moneylenders had all said no. Half a million roubles. It was too much when he was already in debt. But Viktor Arkin would not accept less, that was what he had demanded for his revolution. Jens sought to raise the money himself from the land he owned with Davidov, but it didn’t come close. Elizaveta Ivanova had sat rigid and silent, her face the color of ash.

  It was only halfway through that terrible day that it occurred to Jens that maybe Arkin didn’t want the money after all, and that was why he had set it so high. What he wanted was to hurt the Ivanov family. To make the sisters suffer, he had plunged his revolution right into their lives. That was when Jens ceased talking to banks and started haunting the back rooms and smoky cellars where men with red pamphlets in their pockets gathered and talked of rage and destruction and a new order.

  THERE’S A PLACE.” “Where?”

  “Somewhere”—the man with the freckled face waved a hand toward the window of the gloomy bar they were in—“out on the marshland.”

  Jens placed a fifty-rouble note on the table between them. “Where on the marshland?”

  “I don’t know. Honest, I’ve just heard about it. A long way out.”

  Jens gave an exaggerated sigh and put the note back in his pocket, but poured the man another shot of vodka. “Where?” he asked again.

  “Look”—the man’s eyes were indistinct behind pale ginger lashes, his hand not quite steady on the glass—“they’d kill me if I shot my mouth off.”

  Greed did strange things to people. Jens laid two fifty-rouble notes on the table.

  KATYA’S BREATHING SETTLED INTO A RHYTHM. WAS SHE asleep? Or pretending? Valentina decided she had to risk it and slipped off the bed without disturbing her. In the dark she found her way to the door and scratched it softly with her fingernails. She paused, listened, and scratched again. She heard nothing, no footsteps, but before she could do it once more a whisper came from the other side.

  “What is it?”

  She put her lips to the crack of the door. “I need to talk to you.”

  No sound. Maybe a sigh. She waited, bare feet curling on the boards, her heart slamming against her ribs. There was the familiar noise of the lock. She watched for movement in the soft mound that was Katya but saw none, and a strip of amber light sneaked in through the small gap at the door, making Valentina blink.

  “May I come out?”

  “What for?”

  “Please?”

  Arkin’s voice sounded different, as though he’d been drinking. She thrust her wrists out through the narrow space between door and frame and felt a leather thong tighten around them. She stepped out with her wrists bound in front of her, and he locked the door behind her.

  “Now what?”

  It must have been the early hours of morning, but he had obviously been sitting at the table under the kerosene lamp studying a set of maps, beside which stood a bottle of vodka and a glass. The glass was half full. She walked over and drank it. He folded the maps before she could look at them and regarded her with appraisal. She was wearing her silk evening gown, which had dried out during the day, brushed free of dirt as best she could, and her hair swung in tangled waves on her bare shoulders.

  “You look”—he sought for a word—“delicate.”

  It wasn’t exactly a compliment but it would do. There was a bruise on his jaw, and his eyes were heavy as though ready for sleep. Not yet, Viktor Arkin, don’t you fall asleep yet. She sat down at the table and refilled the glass but didn’t pick it up. Every movement was awkward with her hands tied.

  “So?” he asked roughly.

  “Sit down, please. I want to talk.” She smiled at him to show she meant no harm. Use your weapons, Davidov had said.

  He took the other chair, and she pushed the glass nearer him. The room was small and mean, uncared for, and she wondered to whom it belonged. Not to him. It was far too untidy to be his. It had a low smoke-stained ceiling and timbered walls with shelves and an icon in one corner. The place smelled of rotting wood, but there were no drips into the buckets tonight.

  “My father said no?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Did he offer you anything at all for us?”

  “No.”

  “Did you speak to him face to face?”

  He looked at her with a stare that made her feel foolish. “Of course not. Written messages were passed back and forth. I was very careful.” He gave a slight snort. “No one followed me back here, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No,” she said, “I wasn’t thinking that. I don’t doubt your skill at avoiding capture. So what now? Will you release us?”

  “No.”

  One word. Yet so much rage in it.

  “So what will happen to us?”

  He reached for the glass and drank it down in one swallow. His eyes were bloodshot. “You really want to know?” he asked tiredly.

  “Of course.” She licked her dry lips.

  “Your father must be forced to open up his purse, so ...” He stopped. Refilled the glass. A sinew was jumping in his neck. “So one of you will be killed tomorrow to demonstrate that we mean business, and then he will pay for the other’s safety. It doesn’t matter which one of you it is.”

  Something broke inside her. “I told you, my father doesn’t have money. He is in debt to the banks, so it’s no use expecting him to—”

  “Shut up. No lies.”

  He placed the glass of vodka in front of her and she drank it down, but neither spoke for a long time; just the wind rattling the shutters kept them aware of a world outside the close confines of their own.

&nb
sp; “Arkin,” Valentina said, “I’m not lying. It needn’t be like this. Have you no conscience?”

  He didn’t bother to respond but lit himself a cigarette. Even that task he did with precision despite the alcohol in his blood. When he rested his hand on the table she removed the cigarette from his grasp, inhaled on it, and blew out smoke in a thin line that stretched across the table to him.

  “I promise you,” she said softly, “you will get no money for your Bolshevik cause from my father because he is bankrupt. You will have to kill us both, Katya and me.”

  He took back the cigarette. “I have killed before.”

  That shook her. “It would be pointless. What would you gain except more police attention?”

  He leaned his elbows heavily on the table. “What are you suggesting?”

  She didn’t let herself hesitate. “This.” She reached forward with her bound hands and took his face between them, aware of the stiffening of his jaw as she touched him. She drew him toward her and kissed his mouth. It tasted of vodka and tiredness, lips hard and tight.

  He seized her wrists and jerked her hands away. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You will receive no payment, not for my sister and not for me. So let Katya go.” She paused and angled a teasing smile at him. “I am offering you a different kind of payment ... if you will agree to release her tomorrow.”

  His eyes widened, and she couldn’t tell whether it was astonishment or disgust. “You will sell yourself? Like a common street whore?”

  “Yes.” She flushed.

  He stared at her so long she almost lost her nerve. It wasn’t too late; she could snatch back the words, she and Katya could ... could what?