The fortress was also the necropolis of the Romanovs. Almost all the Tsars were buried inside. And on this Epiphany Day it seemed as if some malignant spirits were intending to increase their number. For these were not blanks being fired from the great guns. This was live ammunition. A policeman standing beside the Tsar fell wounded to the ground, his blood spreading out in strange red patterns against the snow. Shots were fired into the Winter Palace itself, the glass in the windows shattering and flying inside, threatening the flesh of any who got in its way. Other shots ricocheted off the Admiralty Building back into Palace Square. On the first floor in the Field Marshal’s Hall shards of glass lay at the feet of the Tsar’s mother and sister, but they were unhurt. Out in the snow the Tsar crossed himself and began saying his prayers. Not far from there his grandfather had been driving in his carriage twenty-four years before when a bomb shattered his vehicle, wounded his horses and his companions but left the Tsar himself unhurt. Stepping down from the wreck of his carriage he went to inquire after the wounded. Another assassin ran up and threw a bomb directly between the Tsar’s feet. In a huge sheet of flame and metal his legs were torn away, his stomach ripped wide open and his face badly mutilated. Still breathing he asked for what remained of him to be carried into the Winter Palace to die. He left a trail of black blood on the marble stairs while they carried him to a couch for his last moments in this world. Before he passed away, his grandson Nicholas, dressed in his blue sailor suit, came and watched in horror from the end of the bed. Now that grandson, currently Nicholas the Second, Tsar of All the Russias, was hurried, unhurt, into the same palace where his grandfather had died in agony. The word flashed round the great mansions of the capital with astonishing speed. In the bar of the Imperial Yacht Club, the fons et origo of St Petersburg chic, the aristocrats and the generals crossed themselves and prayed for their future. The French Ambassador, holding court by the window, told whoever would listen that the most significant thing in the assassination attempt was the fact that the guns were manned by sailors. These are not the fanatic students who blew up the Interior Minister last year, he said. These men swear a powerful oath to be loyal to their rulers. If they desert the Tsar, what future for the Romanovs? The foreign correspondents rushed from their bar at the fashionable Evropeiskaya Hotel to interview or invent eyewitnesses to the event and telegraph the news, suitably embellished and dramatized, to their employers.
Watching alone by one of the intact windows of the Field Marshal’s Hall the Empress Alexandra shivered slightly as she looked out at the snow. She was remembering a prophecy attributed to St Serafim. ‘They will wait for a time of great hardship to afflict the Russian land,’ it read, ‘and on an agreed day at the agreed hour they will raise up a great rebellion all over the Russian land.’
4
Lord Francis Powerscourt decided he had spent too much of his time in Russia listening to people. Listening to the Ambassador and the cynical Secretary at the Embassy, listening to the translations of his young interpreter from policemen and bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry. Now, the day after Epiphany, they were in a rather different waiting room of a very different section of the Russian bureaucracy, waiting for another interview, this time with a senior official of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The Interior Ministry, Powerscourt had decided, looked rather like one of those vast mental hospitals the authorities built round the fringes of London towards the end of the previous century, enormous complexes where the mad could get lost finding their way back to their own ward, and where a man could forget what few wits he might have left trying to work out how to find the front door. The Foreign Ministry, however, looked like a French Second Empire hotel that had once known better times, a resort that had lost its raison d’etre perhaps, Vichy without the water, Bath without the spa. The place had certainly once had considerable stylistic ambitions, but now the gilt was falling off the mirrors and the imitation Watteaus on the walls had lost whatever lustre they once possessed, the dancers and the musicians exhausted. Mikhail had told him on the way that while the people in the Interior Ministry saw it as their mission to pacify the interior of Russia, the mission of the people in the Foreign Service was to join the foreigners, preferably somewhere rather warmer than St Petersburg, as quickly as possible. Some of the diplomats, Powerscourt was told, spent almost their entire lives abroad, only returning at the end of their careers to advise on the foreign policy of a country they no longer knew and whose nature they were not now equipped to understand. Combined with the abilities of the Tsar, Mikhail had said savagely, this was a system guaranteed to produce one of the most incompetent foreign policies in the world. Hence, Mikhail shrugged an enormous shrug, the unbelievably stupid decision to go to war with Japan.
A flunkey in a stained frock coat told them in bad French that they were expected inside. The Under Secretary, a man who had risen effortlessly through the hurdles of Deputy and Assistant, greeted them warmly.
‘Ivan Tropinin at your service, gentlemen. Please sit down.’
Mikhail had said the man would probably speak French. France after all was the favourite posting of most of these would-be foreigners. It was astonishing, he said, how many little Russian diplomatic missions were peppered along the south coast from Biarritz to the Riviera to Nice and the Italian border. But Tropinin was speaking in his native tongue. Powerscourt wondered if it was to throw him off the scent, whatever the scent might be.
‘Please, Lord Powerscourt, your reputation precedes you, we are delighted to see you here.’ Tropinin ushered them on to two very decorative French chairs, as uncomfortable as only the French knew how to make them. ‘I know you are in St Petersburg about the affair of Mr Martin.’ Tropinin was a small thin man with a tiny beard and very delicate hands which he inspected from time to time in case they were going coarse.
Powerscourt nodded. Mikhail was looking intently at the fading portrait of a semi-naked lady on the opposite wall. Perhaps these badges of status came to those who reached the rank of Under Secretary. He wondered what happened when you were promoted above the level of Under Secretary. Maybe there were no clothes at all then.
‘I am most grateful,’ Powerscourt began, ‘for your time. I know how busy you all must be here in the ministry.’
Tropinin laughed. He leaned forward and looked Powerscourt firmly in the eye. ‘You will have to talk to many people in this city, my English friend. More than you would like, I suspect. Most of them will be lying to you. I am not going to tell you lies.’ Powerscourt had a sudden vision of men from Crete and people telling lies and long undergraduate arguments in his rooms in Cambridge. ‘I am going to tell you the truth. Why? Because I like England and I like Englishmen. I have spent some time in your country, Lord Powerscourt. They took me to some of the great houses like your Blenheim Palace. To a Russian, of course, it is scarcely bigger than a hunting lodge, but it is very fine. The park is beautiful. And I know the father and the family of your young translator here. I have known them for years.’ The Under Secretary nodded vigorously. Powerscourt wondered if there was some secret code at work, some private language of bribery or obligation he did not understand.
‘I am most grateful for your assistance,’ Powerscourt put in with a smile, keen to get back to business.
‘Of course,’ the diplomat said, checking his hands once more. ‘Let me come to the point.’ Tropinin paused and looked at his two visitors.