‘But the message, Lord Powerscourt, what did it concern, this message from London?’
‘I wish I knew, M. Brouzet.’
‘I do like that last theory, Lord Powerscourt. But look, you must be on your way, or you will miss your train.’
As they shook hands at the front entrance and Powerscourt looked out once more at the glories of the Place des Vosges, the Frenchman put his hand on his arm. ‘Will you promise me, one thing, Lord Powerscourt? Tell me the true story if you can, when you have found it. I am sure you will find it, you see. God speed and good luck!’ As he went back into Number 32, Place des Vosges, with his escritoire and his Watteau and his tapestries, Olivier Brouzet resolved to help his English colleague in one important respect. He would ask the French Ambassador to St Petersburg, the most respected man in the St Petersburg diplomatic community, to use his good offices at court to obtain for Lord Francis Powerscourt an interview with Nicholas the Second, Tsar of All the Russias. On his own. Just like Mr Martin.
Even at the entrance gates, some hundreds of yards from the dockyards themselves, the noise was deafening. It was, Powerscourt felt, as he waited with Mikhail Shaporov for a guard to take them inside, a harsh, clanging, brutal sort of noise. In times gone by the wooden ships would have been built to gentler tunes in wooden dockyards without this harsh screeching of modernity. But Krondstadt was where some Russian ships were built, Krondstadt was where the battleship Tsarevich was being repaired, Krondstadt was where Lieutenant Anatoli Kerenkov would be found. The earlier unease about Natasha Bobrinsky had gone, to be replaced with concern for her health after such a long sojourn looking after the Tsar’s daughters and helping out with the sick little boy. She had written a very short note the day after the cable was sent to Powerscourt, explaining why she had not been able to leave the Alexander Palace. A further message said she would be with them at lunchtime the following day.
A very dirty sailor came at last to escort them to the Lieutenant. His face and hair were filthy and it took some time to work out that his straggling coat must once have been green. A foul-smelling cigarette hung from his lips. Powerscourt decided he must work in the engine room. He led them on to a sort of viewing platform high above a vast open hangar of a dock. Lying on a huge metal cradle was a ship, shrouded in scaffolding. Men the size of tiny dots scurried along the planks, some making minor repairs to the sides or the hull, others, higher up, beginning to apply fresh coats of paint. At the further end of the vessel, the prow, a huge crane was hovering some twenty-five feet above the deck. It was holding a vast grey gun, destined to be lowered into place to serve as a warning and a siren of destruction for Russia’s enemies. A man in a red hat was directing the operations with a series of enormous bellows, punctuated, Mikhail whispered to Powerscourt, with terrifying threats about the fate of anybody who caused the gun to miss its appointed place. Beyond the prow, just visible through the smoke of the various smithies, were the pale blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. And on the southern side, eight or ten miles to the south-east, was a group of buildings as different in spirit as it was possible to be from this industrial furnace and floating factory of death, the graceful eighteenth-century palace of Peterhof, built as a summer residence for earlier Tsars, famed for the glory of its fountains and cascades that bounced the water down the hill towards the sea, a place where water nymphs danced in marble glory and the gods who had presided over past Russian victories stared out into eternity.
‘You are Powerscourt?’ a short bearded man in blue uniform greeted them. ‘Kerenkov.’ He was powerfully built with very dark eyes and a permanent scowl playing about his features. He looked like a close associate of Blackbeard or one of the fabled pirates of the Caribbean, equally adept at storming treasure ships by day and their owners’ wives and daughters by night.
‘How kind of you to spare us the time, Lieutenant,’ said Powerscourt, eyeing the gun handle that protruded from the man’s trouser pocket. ‘You must be very busy.’
Mikhail was translating very fast this morning, as if he was on especially good form, or frightened.
‘Derzhenov told me about you,’ said Kerenkov.
Powerscourt wondered what the sadist had said about him.
‘Do you work for Derzhenov?’ Powerscourt asked.
‘Sometimes,’ Kerenkov replied with a scowl. ‘Do you?’
‘I do not. At present I am working for the British Government trying to find out who killed Mr Martin, as you almost certainly know, Lieutenant Kerenkov.’
Kerenkov spat viciously into the sawdust at their feet. ‘I did not kill the man, Powerscourt. He is not important. There are other people we Russians have to kill. Japanese for a start. If we do not kill them they will kill us. It is now eleven months since my ship was damaged, barely able to limp home with its survivors. We threw fifty-seven Russians into the sea on our way home, dead from the wounds they received, gone to enrich the ocean rather than the peasant earth of their motherland.’
Kerenkov paused and pointed at the hanging gun, now a mere fifteen feet from the deck. He planted a rough hand on Powerscourt’s shoulder. ‘Do you see that gun, man? It looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it, you’d think it’s going to be a real help in the battles with the Japanese. Stuff and nonsense!’ He launched a vicious kick at the planks on the side of their platform.
‘It’s virtually a waste of time sending it over to Japan,’ he went on, ‘bloody thing is obsolete even before it’s fitted. One of my jobs out there in Port Arthur was to make a report on the Japanese navy. I tell you, those little yellow fellows have speedier ships, quicker guns that fire further and faster than ours, nastier torpedoes, more efficient shells, the conflict should be banned under the rules of war as a totally uneven contest. Everybody back in St Petersburg thinks we must win, we’ll win when our Baltic Fleet finally sails halfway round the world for a lasting victory, we’ll win because we’re European, or our elites are European, we’ll win because we’re a superior race. That’s all nonsense.’ He paused, Mikhail’s young voice stopped a couple of phrases later, and Powerscourt felt for the man, a patriot without the means to defend his country.
‘Now I think about it, there’s a bloody ship of yours, Powerscourt, a British frigate, wandering about the Gulf of Finland. It’s been going up and down for weeks as if it’s taking a holiday cruise. Do you know what the damned thing is doing here?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Do you know any history, man?’ Kerenkov seemed to be changing tack.
‘A bit,’ said Powerscourt, anxious not to give offence.
‘Do you remember that damned Crimean War?’ Powerscourt nodded.
‘I’ve been reading lots of history books lately, from then on,’ said the unlikely scholar. ‘We lost that war because we were so backward. So from then on Russia must be able to defend itself. Russia must be able to produce the latest weapons, Russia must become modern, Russia must have huge capitalist factories to produce the guns and the bullets and the giant pieces of artillery that could fire a shell across the Gulf of Finland. But that’s not Russia, Powerscourt, capitalists and middle class and workers replacing tsar and aristocrats and peasants. Our poor country is being torn apart by the battle between conservatism and modernity, between change and not change, between the old and the new. I don’t like the new very much, Lord Powerscourt, the only thing is that it’s not as bad as the old.’
An enormous crash heralded the arrival of the gun on to the deck. Sparks and dust temporarily hid it from view. The man in the red hat surpassed himself in the volume of his shouts. Various dots at the front of the vessel seemed to be waving their hands in the air. Kerenkov peered forward to check it was success rather than a catastrophe. ‘Thank God that’s landed safely,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray we meet some wooden Japanese ship from the middle of the last century in the next battle.’ Maybe the safe arrival of the gun mellowed him slightly. ‘Sorry for boring you with my views,’ he said. ‘I just care about what’s going on.’