They could see several of these bureaucrats now, coming down the steps of the Interior Ministry building, some of them carrying briefcases.
‘They’re not going home already, Mikhail, are they? It’s just before three o’clock, for God’s sake.’
‘You don’t want to overdo it, if you’re a bureaucrat, Lord Powerscourt. It’s a very hard life in the Interior Ministry. Some of these fellows may have had to attend a couple of meetings in the morning. Think how exhausting that must have been for them.’
Powerscourt had been inside a number of ministries in London where the splendour was reserved for the quarters of the minister and his most senior officials. The rest had been furnished with due regard to the exigencies of the public purse and the dangers of newspapers launching crusades about governments wasting taxpayers’ money on luxurious surroundings for civil servants. But nothing, he thought, could prepare you for the drabness of the interior of the Russian Interior Ministry. The floors were covered in something grey that might once have been the Russian equivalent of linoleum. The walls were painted with a dark colour that looked as if it might have been originally intended for a battleship. A long hopeless corridor stretched out for a couple of hundred yards behind the reception desk, manned by a small man with only one arm.
‘Mr Bazhenov, Room 467, fourth floor. Lift over there. Enter your names in this book before you go up.’
Every public building you went into in St Petersburg, Powerscourt was to discover, took down your name and address as if they proposed to establish a regular correspondence. He wondered briefly about instituting a similar system in Markham Square.
The lift was gloomy and stank of sweat and urine. Mikhail Shaporov pressed the bell for the fourth floor.
‘Do you think the more important chaps live higher up, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Only ranks eight and above allowed on floor three?’
‘God knows,’ said Mikhail, sounding more cheerful than the surroundings warranted. ‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I have lived in this city most of my life and this is the first time I have ever been inside a government building. It’s a revelation.’
It seemed that Room 467 must be at the outermost limit of the fourth-floor corridor where the room numbers started illogically at 379 opposite the lift. Clerks carrying files sauntered past them on their way to unknown bureaucratic destinations. Their feet sounded loud on the grey floor covering that might once have been linoleum. One or two doors were open and Powerscourt and Mikhail had brief visions of rooms filled with desks like classrooms for the grown-up and sad-faced men seated at them reading files or making entries in great ledgers. Through the dirty windows on their right they could see a small courtyard below where figures seemed to march round and round as if on some everlasting ministerial treadmill. They passed a conference room with a fine table and velvet-covered chairs round it, waiting for another meeting. Powerscourt thought he saw a thick layer of dust on the mahogany surface as if the last meeting had taken place some time ago, the committee dissolved perhaps, the junior minister moved on. Maybe only ghosts had their being in there now, coming out only at night – God, what must this building be like in the dark – taking ghostly notes of ghostly meetings and recording them in ghostly files.
Now they had reached Room 467. The name plate announced the presence of Vasily Bazhenov, Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary, Administrative Division, Ministry of the Interior. Powerscourt wondered what pain and humiliation had to be gone through to win these undistinguished spurs. He noted that the name plate looked very old as if Bazhenov had been in post for many years. Perhaps promotion had passed him by. Perhaps the jump from Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary to Second Assistant Deputy Under Secretary was too much for him. Perhaps Vasily Bazhenov would be old and crabbed and waiting for retirement.
But the voice that answered Shaporov’s knock and bade them enter was cheerful. So was the bureaucrat. He spoke quite slowly as if to give Mikhail plenty of time to translate. Powerscourt and his friend were seated on one side of a circular table in chairs that did not have velvet upholstery but were perfectly respectable nonetheless. Bazhenov had a number of files in front of him. He was about forty years of age with a wild shock of black hair that looked as if it repelled all attempts to control it. His eyes were grey, his nose small and his long black beard seemed to be acting in sympathy with his hair. Powerscourt wondered if he had a wife who wrestled with his appearance before she despatched him every morning on his bureaucratic Via Dolorosa. The man could have been taken for some wild Siberian preacher rather than a Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary in the Administrative Division.
‘You are interested in a Roderick Martin, I believe,’ he said to Powerscourt.
‘That is correct, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt, remembering Rosebery’s advice to promote all army officers, civil servants and policemen. ‘We were given to understand that you might have some details about him here.’
Bazhenov sighed deeply. ‘In one sense, I have to disappoint you, Lord Powerscourt. I – we – cannot help you with this Martin. Under normal circumstances, there would be all kinds of information about such a man. The time and date of his arrival and departure. The record of where he was staying. If he was an important person holding important meetings with important government officials, there would be a record, as there will be of this meeting.’
The Third Assistant Deputy Under Secretary smiled. There had been almost a note of irony, Powerscourt thought, of mocking as the bureaucrat detailed his lists of information, though it was hard to tell in another language. Information, after all, was the currency he dealt in, wrested from the reluctant population to be stored in the unforgiving files of the Interior Ministry.
Bazhenov opened his hands wide. ‘But we have no records for the year 1905. No place of entry. No place of residence. I wish I could help you, gentlemen, but I cannot.’
The man’s lying, Powerscourt thought to himself. Surely he knows Martin came here and was killed here last December. He remembered the fat inspector with the red beard shouting at them in the police station where his investigations in St Petersburg had begun. Perhaps they’re all liars. But he could see little point in an argument. Better to hear what the man might have to say.
‘You are being as helpful as anybody could be, Mr Under Secretary,’ said Powerscourt at his most emollient, ‘but I would ask you to consider things from my government’s perspective. Mr Martin, a distinguished member of his ministry in London as you are of yours here in St Petersburg,’ Bazhenov half rose to his feet and bowed to Powerscourt at this point, ‘comes here last December and holds, we believe, a series of meetings, possibly with the Foreign Ministry, we are not sure. On the evening of the same day he is murdered. The death is reported by a policeman in the police station nearest to the British Embassy. It is even committed to paper.’ That, Powerscourt felt, should have maximum appeal to the bureaucrat. The spoken word, it was nothing, worthless as air. Pieces of paper, records, minutes, memoranda, these were his life’s blood. ‘Now the police deny all knowledge. They say the piece of paper must be a forgery.’ Truly, Powerscourt said to himself, forgery would be the sin against the Holy Ghost of bureaucratic machines everywhere. It could cast doubt on everything it touched. It, or the suspicion of it, could spread through the files like the Black Death. ‘They say Mr Martin cannot have come to St Petersburg. But he left London on a special mission to the Russian capital. He has not returned. We have no reason to believe he is alive. We believe he is dead. You gentlemen say he never came here at all. Who or what are we to believe?’