Trying to blend in, Tom shuffled forward with the rest, ready to follow Turnbull's cue if anyone spoke to them in Russian. For her part, Viktor had conjured up blue overalls and freshly laminated badges that identified them as working for the company employed to mop the marbled halls and dust the gilded galleries of the Hermitage each night.
The atmosphere was jovial as the guards ushered everyone inside. Somebody made a comment and the line collapsed into fits of giggles, as did the guards. Tom joined in, wondering whether the red-faced youth manning the metal detector had been the butt of their humor.
The first guard gave Tom's badge a cursory glance and waved him in. Turnbull followed. Then Tom walked through the metal detector. It remained silent. Turnbull stepped through after him, the alarm triggering noisily.
"Must be all the iron I've been pumping," Turnbull joked in Russian to the guard who beckoned him over.
"From the size of you, I'd say it's more like all the iron you've been eating," quipped a voice from the crowd. Again, the other cleaners and guards broke into laughter.
"Raise your arms," ordered the guard, a handheld metal detector at his side, the green LED display flickering. He was young, with blond hair shaved close to his head, and a nose that seemed slightly off center, as if it had been broken several times. Turnbull complied, and as the guard moved in with the detector, Tom noticed his thumb slide almost imperceptibly over the On/Off switch. The green LED faded.
"You're clear," said the guard, the LED flashing back on as soon as he had finished.
"Well, that wasn't too bad," Turnbull whispered as they followed the other cleaners along a narrow corridor and down a flight of stairs into the basement.
"Viktor said she could get us in," Tom reminded him, "but from here it's down to us."
The staircase gave onto a large room filled with mismatched chairs and crumbling sofas, the cushions riddled with cigarette burns. Tom and Turnbull took off their coats and hung them on one of the few coat hooks that hadn't snapped off, pictures of topless women smiling down at them from where they'd been ripped out of old calendars and pinned to the walls. A few people had gathered around thermos flasks and were sharing out cups of coffee; others were changing their footwear from heavy boots to more comfortable shoes.
A man entered and, from the way he began calling out names, Tom guessed he was the shift manager. People came up to him in twos, took a piece of paper, disappeared into a small side room, and then reemerged wheeling a small cart bristling with brooms, mops, buckets, bin liners, and bottles of detergent and polish. Thus equipped, they made their way back upstairs via the elevator to wherever their piece of paper had directed them.
Eventually, Turnbull nudged Tom to indicate that their names, or at least the names that corresponded to their badges, had been called.
"You guys new?" the shift manager asked. His name badge identified him as Grigory Mironov.
"That's right," Turnbull replied in perfect Russian.
"No one told me," complained Mironov.
"No one told us until a few hours ago."
He looked at their badges, then at their faces. "You're not on my list."
"That's not our fault."
Mironov sighed. "Don't you talk?" he asked Tom.
"Never shuts up," Turnbull answered for him.
Mironov looked suspiciously at Tom, who returned his stare unblinkingly. Mironov's face broke into a grin. "I can see that," he chuckled. Tom smiled too, still unaware of what was being said.
"Here you go." He handed Turnbull a piece of paper. "You'll find the gear in there. Head for the second floor. You get lost, just ask one of the guards."
They gathered their equipment from the storeroom and rolled the cart to the lift.
"We drew the second floor of the Western Wing," Turn-bull said as soon as the door shut. Tom pulled out the floor plan he had brought with him and ran his finger across the page.
"That puts us on the right floor but the wrong side of the building. We need to get to the northeast corner, where the restoration rooms are."
The door rolled open and an armed guard greeted them with an upturned hand.
"What?" Turnbull asked in Russian.
"The work schedule." The guard clicked his fingers impatiently. "What room are you in?"
"Oh" — Turnbull lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper—"no schedule tonight." The guard frowned. "The director's expecting an important guest tomorrow, but his office isn't due for a clean until the day after. Well, you know what the Committee are like when it comes to bending the rules, even for him. So he's paid us cash to do it for him tonight. I gave a third to Mironov and here's a third for you. We don't want any schedules screwing things up for us, do we?"
The guard winked and closed his hand around the crisp fold of notes that Turnbull had just slipped him. "Understood." He stepped back from the lift. "Do you know your way?"
"Just down there, isn't it?"
"That's it. Last door on the right before you turn the corner. Anyone wants to know what you're doing over there, just tell them to speak to Sasha. I'll smooth things over."
They headed off in the direction of the administrative offices and workshops. Even though this area was closed to the public, the corridors were no less richly decorated, with their intricate parquet floors and ornate plasterwork, chandeliers drooping to the floor under their own weight like branches loaded with ripe fruit.
Suddenly Tom felt a tug on his sleeve. Turnbull indicated the door beside them and translated the inscription: "Department of the History and Restoration of the Architectural Objects — looks like this is the one."
It was locked.
Turnbull gave a glance over his shoulder to check that there were no guards in sight, then unzipped the front of his overalls and detached the small pouch that had been strapped to his belt. The same pouch that had set off the metal detectors on the way in. Tom was not surprised to see that its removal had not visibly reduced Turnbull's girth.
Tom pulled on his gloves and took his pick and tension wrench from the pouch. Most thieves use the pick to locate the locking pins and, one by one, push them out of the way; the tension wrench is then inserted underneath the pick and turned, like a key, to open the lock. This was too time-consuming for Tom's liking. His preference instead was for a technique known as scrubbing, which requires split-second timing and a level of dexterity that makes it the preserve of only a select few. By moving the pick rapidly back and forth over the pins once, and applying pressure on the tension wrench between each pass to knock the pins off center, Tom had the door open in seconds. To Turnbull, looking on, it seemed as simple as using a key.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Boris Kristenko was sitting in the dark in his office. Having long since exhausted the meager respite that chewing his fingernails could offer, he was now gnawing anxiously on a ballpoint pen. Every so often he would swap it to the other side of his mouth, his saliva filling the pen's clear plastic case with a cloudy liquid.
A pipe gurgled somewhere and he jumped, convinced for a moment that it heralded the arrival of an angry horde of police officers. He fixed the door with a fearful stare, but it remained shut, his heart hammering inside his chest.
Closing his eyes, he leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking under the strain as he balanced on the rear legs. Try as he might, he simply could not make sense of what had just happened on Decembrist's Square.