She flopped into the chair. Sagan noted her exhaustion with satisfaction—and calibrated pity. She was really no more than a confused child. Still, it opened up interesting possibilities.
“You look hungry, mademoiselle. Fancy ordering some breakfast? Ivanov?” A gendarme NCO appeared in the doorway.
She nodded, avoiding his eyes.
“What can I get you, maga-mozelle?” Ivanov flourished an imaginary pen and paper, playing the French waiter.
“Let’s see!” Captain Sagan answered for her, remembering the reports in the surveillance files. “I’ll bet you have hot cocoa, white bread lightly toasted, saltless butter and caviar for breakfast?” Sashenka nodded mutely. “Well, we can’t do the caviar but we have cocoa, bread and I did find a little Cooper’s Fine Cut Marmalade from Yeliseyev’s on Nevsky Prospect. Any good to you?”
“Yes, please.”
“You’ve been bleeding.”
“Yes.”
“Someone attacked you?”
“Last night, it was nothing.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“I was read the charges. I’m innocent.”
He smiled at her but she still did not look at him. Her arms remained crossed and she was shivering.
“You’re guilty of course, the question is how guilty.”
She shook her head. Sagan decided this was going to be a very dull interrogation. Ivanov, wearing an apron stretched lumpily over his blue uniform, wheeled in the breakfast and offered bread, marmalade and some cocoa in a mug.
“Just as you ordered, maga-mozelle,” he said.
“Very good, Ivanov. Your French is exquisite.” Sagan turned to his prisoner. “Does Ivanov remind you of the waiters at the Donan, your papa’s favorite, or the Grand Hotel Pupp at Carlsbad?”
“I’ve never stayed there,” Sashenka whispered, running her fingertips over her wide lips, a gesture she made, he noticed, when she was thoughtful. “My mother stays there: she puts me and my governess in a dingy boardinghouse. But you knew that.” She was silent again.
They’re always the same. Unhappy at home, they get mixed up in bad company, he thought. She must be starving, but he would wait for her to ask him whether she could eat.
Instead she suddenly looked straight up at him as if the sight of the food had already restored her. Grey eyes, cool as slate, examined him. The speckled lightness of the irises—grains of gold amid the grey—under the hooded eyebrows, projecting a mocking curiosity, took him aback.
“Are you going to sit there and watch me eat?” she asked, taking a piece of bread.
First point to her, thought Sagan. The gentleman in him, the descendant of generations of Baltic barons and Russian generals, wanted to applaud her. Instead he just grinned.
She picked up a knife, spread the bread with butter and marmalade and ate every piece, quickly and neatly. He noticed there were delicate freckles on either side of her nose, and now her arms were no longer crossed he could see that she had a most abundant bosom. The more she tried to hide her breasts, the more conspicuous they became. We interrogators, concluded Sagan, must understand such things.
Ivanov removed the plates. Sagan held out a packet of cigarettes emblazoned with a crocodile.
“Egyptian gold-tipped Crocodiles?” she said.
“Aren’t they your only luxury?” he replied. “I know that Smolny girls don’t smoke, but in prison, who’s watching?” She took one and he lit it for her. Then he took one himself and threw it spinning into the air, catching it in his mouth.
“A performing monkey as well as a torturer,” she said in her soft voice with its bumble-bee huskiness, and blew out smoke in blue rings. “Thanks for breakfast. Am I going home now?”
Ah, decided Sagan, she does have some spirit after all. The light caught a rich tinge of auburn in her dark hair.
Sagan reached for a pile of handwritten reports.
“Are you reading someone’s diary?” she asked, cheekily.
He looked up at her witheringly. “Mademoiselle, your life as you knew it is over. You will probably be sentenced by the Commission to the maximum five years of exile in Yeniseisk, close to the Arctic Circle. Yes, five years. You may never come back. The harsh sentence reflects your treason during wartime and, as you are a Jew, next time it will be harsher still.”
“Five years!” Her breaths grew quick and shallow. “It’s your war, Captain Sagan, a slaughter of working men on the orders of emperors and kings, not our war.”
“OK, here’s the game. These are the surveillance reports of my agents. Let me read what my files say about a certain person I will call Madame X. You have to guess her real name.” He took a breath, his eyes twinkling, then lowered his voice theatrically. “After following the erotic religion of Arzabyshev’s novel Sanin and taking part in sexual debauchery, she embraced the ‘Eastern’ teachings of the so-called healer Madame Aspasia del Balzo, who revealed through a process called spiritual retrogression that in a former life Mrs. X had been the handmaiden of Mary Magdalene and then the bodice-designer of Joan of Arc.”
“That’s too easy! Madame X is my mother,” said Sashenka. Her nostrils flared and Sagan noticed her lips never quite seemed to close. He turned back to his file.
“In a table-turning session, Madame Aspasia introduced Baroness Zeitlin to Julius Caesar, who told her not to allow her daughter Sashenka to mock their psychic sessions.”
“You’re making it up, Captain,” said Sashenka drily.
“In the lunatic asylum of Piter, we don’t need to make anything up. You appear quite often in this file, mademoiselle, or should I say Comrade Zeitlin. Here we are again. Baroness Zeitlin continues to pursue any road to happiness offered to her. Our investigations reveal that Madame del Balzo was formerly Beryl Crump, illegitimate daughter of Fineas O’Hara Crump, an Irish undertaker from Baltimore, whereabouts unknown. After embracing the teachings of the French hierophant doctor Monsieur Philippe and then the Tibetan healer Dr. Badmaev, Baroness Zeitlin is now a follower of the peasant known to his adepts as ‘Elder,’ whom she asked to exorcize the evil spirits of her daughter Sashenka who she says despises her and has destroyed her spiritual well-being.”
“You’ve made me laugh under interrogation,” Sashenka said, looking solemn. “But don’t think that you’ve got me that easily.”
Sagan spun the file onto his desk, sat back and held up his hands. “Apologies. I wouldn’t for a second underestimate you. I admired your article in the illegal Rabochnii Put—Workers’ Path—newspaper.” He drew out a grubby tabloid journal headed with a red star. “Title: ‘The Science of Dialectical Materialism, the Cannibalistic Imperialist Civil War, and Menshevik Betrayal of the Proletarian Vanguard.’”
“I never wrote that,” she protested.
“Of course not. But it’s very thorough and I understand from one of our agents in Zurich that your Lenin was quite impressed. I don’t imagine any other girls at the Smolny Institute could write such an essay, quoting from Plekhanov, Engels, Bebel, Jack London and Lenin—and that’s just the first page. I don’t mean to patronize.”
“I said I didn’t write it.”
“It’s signed ‘Tovarish Pesets.’ Comrade Snowfox. Your shadows tell me you always wear an Arctic fox fur, a gift from an indulgent father perhaps?”
“A frivolous nom de révolution. Not mine.”