Anton straightened. He had his glasses in his hand and spun them slowly.
“You’re in early,” Ruzsky said.
Anton looked at him for a moment more and then came toward him. “My boy,” he said, gripping his shoulders and looking into his eyes. “How wonderful to have you back. Come, let’s celebrate.”
Anton reached down to the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of vodka. As he filled two glasses, a large mop of dark hair hung over his forehead, the gray now visible at his temples. His face exuded the warmth of a loving father, his manner the absentmindedness and eccentricity of the college professor he had once been.
Anton pushed one glass across the desk and raised the other. He looked carefully at his protégé. “Fantastic to have you back.”
They drank. Ruzsky almost choked. “Christ.”
“I know, it is dreadful.”
“It’s worse than dreadful.”
“The city is an island, cut off from decent vodka.”
“I should have brought you some from Tobolsk.”
Anton raised his eyebrows. “Better keep your voice down. It’s still illegal, you know.”
Ruzsky smiled. “I’m sure prohibition has been observed to the letter, especially inside this building.”
Anton took another slug. “It’s been an excellent idea which, as the chief of the city police, I have, of course, fully supported. It has made a huge contribution to improving the general level of sobriety.” Anton refilled his glass.
Ruzsky took a pace closer to look at the photograph on Anton’s desk. It was of the five of them-Ruzsky, Pavel, Anton, Vladimir, and Maretsky. “Good God,” Anton said. “A proper reunion is in order. Where is Pavel?” He picked up the telephone earpiece. “Professor Maretsky,” he told the operator, then: “Maretsky. Anton. Come around, will you, I’ve got a surprise. And bring Vladimir.” Anton listened. “What about Sarlov?” He shook his head. “All right, just get over here.”
Anton put down the receiver and refilled both glasses.
“Pavel will be back in a minute.” Ruzsky threw the vodka to the back of his throat, shook his head once, and put the glass down. He picked up the photograph and looked at the faces that stared back at him, one a much younger version of his own.
“You were a baby then,” Anton said.
“So were you.”
Ruzsky stared at the photograph. The words Criminal Investigation Division, St. Petersburg City Police Department and the year-1900-had been written by hand across the bottom of it. Ruzsky took out his cigarette case and pushed it toward Anton, who removed one and shunted it back.
“Have you seen her?” Anton asked. Ruzsky saw the warmth and affection that shone in his friend’s eyes.
“Irina? No.”
“I wasn’t talking of Irina.” Anton was smiling. “I saw you together, don’t forget. That night at the Mariinskiy.”
Ruzsky did not answer. He wondered how his feelings could have been so transparent.
“One of the dancers told me she kept a photograph of you on her dressing table after you went.”
Ruzsky felt his face flush with embarrassment and pleasure as he thought of Maria.
Anton stretched his legs. “So?”
Ruzsky shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“I know that you will say that I should not, but I cannot help feeling in some way responsible for this mess.”
Ruzsky sucked heavily on his cigarette. Irina had been one of Anton’s students.
“Pavel has been filling me with the usual gloom,” Ruzsky said, anxious to change the subject.
Anton leaned forward again. “This time he’s right. I never imagined that the Tsar’s absence would be a handicap, but since he ran off to the front to try and win the war single-handedly, it has gotten worse. It is like being on a ship headed for an iceberg with a madman at the controls.”
“I got the article.”
“Yes, but the worst of it is that the woman is at the steering wheel. That’s what’s frightening.”
“Do you still attend the weekly meetings at the Interior Ministry?”
“Yes.”
“What do the Okhrana say?”
“We don’t need them to tell us what is going on. Stand in a line for bread. You’ll get the idea.”
Anton came around the desk and leaned against it. “I took a look at the bodies,” he said.
“And?”
“People are desperate, but this kind of savagery… Have you identified the victims?”
“No. Their bodies have been systematically stripped.”
Anton looked up. His eyes were washed out and bloodshot. There was deep concern there. “It troubles me. At this time, right out there on the ice, in front of the palace, in the very heart of the city.”
Ruzsky wondered what lay beneath Anton’s concern. “I don’t think the location was chosen for its symbolic value, if that is what you mean.”
Anton toyed with his eyeglasses.
“I don’t understand what you’re driving at,” Ruzsky said.
“These are complicated times, Sandro.”
“What has that to do with us?”
Anton sighed. “It’s a time for caution. The Progressives and even some members of the government have been writing to senior generals at headquarters to demand the Empress be arrested on her next visit to the front line, and sent to the Crimea. I’ve heard that some of your contemporaries at the yacht club discuss in hushed tones whether it would be justifiable to assassinate the Tsar.”
“And what has that to do with us?”
“Nothing, I just want you to be aware.”
“Of what?”
“No one operates in a vacuum, that’s all.”
Ruzsky did not see what Anton was driving at. “And our friend Vasilyev?”
“The chief of the Okhrana sits in his office playing the loyal police chief. The plotters’ letters are opened, their contents divulged to the Empress. She in turn writes to her husband and demands another round of ministers be sacked and sent into exile. We call it ministerial leapfrog. At a meeting yesterday, the latest bulletin to be sent up to Tsarskoe Selo was pushed around the table. It contained extracts from a letter written by the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna to a leading member of the Duma, demanding that the Empress be… annihilated.”
Ruzsky did not answer. Maria Pavlovna was one of the most senior members of the Romanov family and what Anton was telling him was not khvost gossip. “Pavel tells me Vasilyev tolerates no opposition,” he said, memories of his confrontation with the city’s secret police chief three years ago still fresh.
“You have to question the currency of a regime that relies for its survival on such a man.”
“You exaggerate.”
“No.”
“And he is rewarded for his loyalty?”
“Yes, but you’re missing the point. Vasilyev is not stupid. Think about it for a minute. Some of these strikes… what lies behind them? Are the Okhrana up to their old tricks? We know they have provocateurs in these factories and strike committees. Is Vasilyev deliberately stirring up trouble so that whichever group of revolutionaries he favors can seize power under the guise of saving the Empire?”
“The incorruptible Vasilyev? Devoted servant to the Tsar?”
Pavel appeared in the doorway. “What’s this, a wedding reception?”
Maretsky was half a step behind him. “Professor,” Ruzsky said, unable to conceal his pleasure. Maretsky stepped forward and offered himself for a bear hug, and Ruzsky ducked into it as he would have done to his son. Maretsky gripped him tight, then took a pace back, unsteady and misty-eyed for a moment, before he sat down next to Anton. His legs didn’t quite reach the floor and he looked like a child in an adult’s chair. His face was round, a few wispy strands of gray hair protruding from the top of his shirt belying an otherwise almost feminine appearance. He wore a gray jacket and shorter boots than was the fashion.