“Hold him,” Dr. Fedorin urged.
With one final wrench, which brought forth another gut-churning groan, Fedorin straightened up. His hands were scarlet. Sweat had painted a sheen on his skin and there was a slash of blood across his brow where he’d brushed his hand.
“It’s the best I can do, Sergeyev.”
Through glazed eyes the man stared down at his shattered right forearm and uttered a moan. The bones were still visible through the mat of blood, but there were no longer jagged edges spiking in all directions. Jens felt Sergeyev’s chest start to shake. He released his grip on it.
He rested a hand on the tunnel digger’s trembling shoulder. “The doctor has done a fine job.”
A fine job? How dare he call such a mangled mess a fine job? He knew Fedorin had done all he could, but what in God’s name would this man live off now?
“Give him more morphine,” Jens said.
“What good is morphine to me?” Sergeyev groaned. “I can’t work.” Nevertheless he accepted several drops on a spoon when it was offered.
“It’ll mend,” Dr. Fedorin assured him. “It may not be as straight or strong as it was before, but it’ll mend. You’re young enough for it to heal fast.”
He bathed the damaged limb with boiled water and iodine, then proceeded to stitch the wounds while Jens kept up pressure just inside the man’s elbow to reduce the blood loss. When fresh lint, bandages, and splints were all in place and Sergeyev’s arm fixed in a sling, Jens drew a bottle of brandy from the drawer of the table that made do as his makeshift desk. He poured three slugs into tin mugs.
“Here. Get this down you.”
He thrust one into the good hand of Sergeyev and gave one to the doctor. Dr. Fedorin knocked back half the drink in one swallow and began to scrub his hands in the rest of it over a bowl, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. They were in the wooden hut that served as Jens’s office at the entrance to one of the tunnels, but he knew these accidents shouldn’t be happening. Somewhere somebody was cutting corners. He poured the digger another brandy and, now that the worst was over, the man’s gray pallor started to fade.
“Spasibo, Direktor Friis.” He raised his mug to Jens and Fedorin. “Spasibo.”
“Sergeyev, here is money for a drozhky ride home.” Jens handed over a fistful of notes from a drawer. “Take it and feed your family.”
The man set down the mug and took the money. His fingers gripped it hard, smearing blood on the notes, but it was an uneasy moment. Jens laid his hand again on the man’s shoulder. “You are a good worker, Sergeyev. I’ll need you back here when your arm is mended.”
The digger studied the roubles in his hand. “You’ll keep my job open for me?”
“Yes, I will.”
“The foreman won’t like that.”
“The foreman will do as I say.”
The man gave a half-smile. “Da. Of course he will.”
Jens again felt that uneasiness seep into the hut. “Go home,” he said. “Go home and get better.”
“It will need a clean dressing,” Dr. Fedorin pointed out.
Sergeyev still stared at the money. “I can’t pay you, Doktor.”
Fedorin glanced at Jens. “Your Direktor is good enough to cover the costs.”
At last the man looked up at Jens. “Direktor, tell me, do you intend to pay personally for every man who needs a doctor here in the tunnel? To hold the job open for every digger who is injured? Every factory worker in Petersburg? Even for men like me who will now have a crippled arm?”
Jens took a grip on the man’s good arm and hoisted him up out of the chair. “Get out of here, Sergeyev. Go home to your wife.”
Clutching his right arm with his left, Sergeyev headed for the door.
“What I do in these tunnels,” Jens said sharply, “is my business.”
Sergeyev turned abruptly and his eyes fixed first on Jens, then on Fedorin. “Not for much longer,” he said softly.
HE COULD HAVE BEEN MORE GRATEFUL, THE BASTARD,” the doctor said.
“He was humiliated. He wanted to throw the money back in my teeth. It’s work in decent conditions that he wants, not charity.”
“Jens, my good friend, sometimes I think you do not even now understand the Russian soul. Your Danish mind is too rational. The Russian soul is not.”
Jens smiled at him and raised his glass. “Za zdorovye! Good health! To the Russian soul and the Russian mind. May they triumph over the enemies of progress.”
“Which are?”
“Complacency and corruption. Stupidity and greed.”
“Hah!” Fedorin slapped Jens on the back. “I like that.”
“The trouble is that no one is warmer hearted than a Russian, yet no one is crueler. There is no middle path in Russia; it is all or nothing. Look at Tsar Nicholas. He believes he was put on this earth by God himself to rule Russia and is even convinced that God sends him omens to guide him. He has spoken of them to me.”
“Don’t depress me, my friend.”
“He chases after spiritual guides such as Monsieur Philippe of Lyons and St. Serafim of Sarov. And that foul monk, Grigori Rasputin. The tsarina is besotted by him.”
“I’m told she believes the illness of her son, Tsarevitch Alexei, is a curse from God and they try to keep it secret.”
“How bad is it, this illness?” Jens asked.
Fedorin poured himself another shot of brandy. “The tsar’s son is a bleeder. That’s why they hide him away at Tsarskoe Selo.”
Jens did not let the shock show on his face. “A hemophiliac?”
“Da.”
“They don’t live long, do they?”
“Not usually, no.”
“God help Russia.”
Fedorin knocked back his brandy. “God help all of us, my friend.”
He shook hands and left Jens’s office. Jens poured his own brandy over his desk and scrubbed the blood off the wood with it. Whatever Dr. Fedorin said, Jens felt a kinship with the Russian soul, with its black aching moods of despair. He’d come here when only eighteen years old to escape servitude in his father’s printing business and had studied engineering in St. Petersburg instead. During the nine years he’d been here, he’d learned to love Russia with a passion. He wasn’t ready to see it brought to its knees by greed.
EXPLAIN IT TO ME, WILL YOU, FRIIS?” MINISTER DAVIDOV instructed.
The map of the city was spread out before the group of six men. Jens lit a cigarette and narrowed his eyes through the smoke, taking in the tension in the faces around the table. Andrei Davidov was a man whose voice rarely rose above a murmur. At times people forgot to silence their own tongues and listen to his, but Jens knew such people were fools.
“Minister.” Jens leaned forward and picked up a tapered ivory pointer from the table. “Let me show you.” He traced the tip of it along one of the lines that zigzagged across the map. “See this blue line; this depicts the sewer tunnels completed. Notice how they cluster around the central area and the palaces.”
Davidov nodded. His eyes were hooded but watched the pointer intently.
“This one”-Jens indicated a series of green lines-“represents those under construction.”
The minister drew his craggy eyebrows together and flicked the cover of his watch open and shut with a sharp little snip. “Do we need so many?”
“Indeed we do, Minister. Petersburg is expanding every year; the population is increasing as more peasants pour in from the fields to work in our new factories. That is why this one”-he drew the pointer along a thick red line-“shows the planned tunnels that have not yet been started.”