Andrei fell, but Borodin was onto him even before he hit the ground, his arm rising and falling. They listened to the sound of the wrench pulverizing flesh and bone.
At last, Borodin straightened. The boy’s head was half lit, but unrecognizable, almost indistinguishable from the pool of blood and pulp that lay beneath it.
Borodin breathed heavily. He began wiping the blood from his face with the back of his hand, but it only smeared it further. He bent to pick up the torch.
“Get me a cloth, some water,” Borodin snapped.
Nobody moved.
“Get it,” he snarled.
Maria moved first and broke the spell. Olga followed quickly after her.
Ruzsky stood opposite Borodin, whose breath still rasped from the exertion. He took out a white handkerchief and began to clean his face.
He tried to wipe small particles of Andrei’s skull from his shirt and coat.
Maria returned with a bowl of water and a cloth. She put the bowl down on the shelf and began to attend to Borodin like a maidservant, washing his face and hands, before trying to remove the stains from his clothes.
Ruzsky felt the blood pounding through his brain.
“You still want to be part of this, Khabarin?”
For a moment, Ruzsky did not respond to his assumed name, but he recovered. “Now more than ever,” he said.
“You can report the death to the police, if you wish.”
Ruzsky stared at the revolutionary. He thought that only a man with an intimate relationship with the police would dare to behave like this in front of a stranger, but he held his tongue. “Change has casualties. It could not be otherwise.”
Maria bent over and wiped the blood from the silver chain of Borodin’s pocket watch. Ruzsky felt the muscles twitching in his jaw as he tried to hide his revulsion at the way in which she was attending to him. He tightened his overcoat, the tip of his revolver pressing into his chest.
Could he have stopped the boy’s murder?
Was this the man who had repeatedly stabbed the American and almost severed Markov’s head at the Lion Bridge?
Borodin turned toward him. “You don’t flinch from the sight of blood?”
Ruzsky stared at Andrei’s corpse. Olga and the other man took an arm each and dragged it away to the far corner of the room. Ruzsky heard a thump as they rolled Andrei up against the wall.
“Why aren’t you at the front?” Borodin asked. Maria was concentrating again on his collar.
“I work in the War Ministry.”
“Don’t you want to do your patriotic duty?”
“I’d rather not die for the Tsar, if it is all the same to you.”
Borodin smiled. He took hold of Maria’s hand.
They followed Borodin out onto the steps, Olga holding the torch aloft beside him so that the crowd could see his face. For a moment, Ruzsky stood behind him, but he saw Maria slipping away and he followed her to a corner where they would be less conspicuous.
As she turned, Ruzsky expected to see some kind of recognition or warmth in her face, but all he received was a blank stare. The woman who had saved his life only moments before was again a stranger.
“Good evening, comrades,” Borodin’s voice boomed. His face shone. Ruzsky realized that Andrei’s death had not just been a performance for Alexander Khabarin’s benefit. Borodin had enjoyed every minute of it. He couldn’t dispel the image of Maria kneeling before the revolutionary, wiping the blood from his cloak.
“Which of us here is not hungry?” Borodin demanded of the now silent onlookers. Ruzsky noticed a soldier ahead of him on the far side of the steps, leaning against the wall of the factory.
“Which of us here hungers for enough bread to eat, to feed their families, enough fuel to warm their home, enough…” He was drowned out by the roar of the crowd.
“Bread,” he went on, when the crowd had quieted. “That’s what I promise you, comrades. Bread, and peace.”
There was another roar.
“How many have you lost in our great patriotic war? Papa’s war. Mama’s war, though who knows which enemy Mama is fighting…” The crowd began to shout its approval again, but he quieted them with a sharp cut of his hand. “We have all lost. Fathers, brothers, husbands. Each and every family has lost a soul, and for what have we been forced to make these terrible sacrifices? So that Papa and Mama could sit at the knee of their unmentionable priest?”
He scanned faces in the crowd, his head twisting one way and then the other.
“It is not men and women who go to the front, but a silent army of the damned, forced to their deaths like cattle. Without rifles, without purpose, without hope, while Mama is paid by the enemy to starve our families to death.
“We see train after train of the wounded arriving at the Warsaw Station day after day after day. We see the hungry eyes in the slums, we see the corrupt officials in their carriages and the parasitic merchants and aristocrats who wanted this war for the greater glory of the Empire, well I say enough. Enough!”
Borodin was silent.
“This is our country too. We want our land back. We want our people back. We want bread, we want peace!”
The crowd began to shout its approval, but Borodin once again demanded silence with a wave of the hand.
“Now, we can wait no longer. We the people, the workers, demand change. We demand a government that can deliver peace, that can give us bread so that our children do not starve while we slave to provide the armaments to protect their empire. Tonight we demand a new beginning. This is not simply a strike. This is a message we wish to send to the heart of the government of this country. To Papa, to Mama.”
Borodin smiled as he once again used these as terms of abuse.
He waited.
“Tonight we march to the palace. Like our brothers and sisters did before us. And we will send a message to the government and the world that we will take no more.” He paused once more and then leaned forward. “Do the police and soldiers dare stop us from passing, comrades?”
“No,” chanted hundreds of voices in unison.
“Comrades, it is better for us to die for our freedom than live as we have lived until now.”
“We will die!”
Ruzsky looked at Maria, but her face was stony, her lips tight, her eyes fixed on the man at the top of the steps.
Ruzsky glanced about him and took in for the first time the composition of the crowd. He saw railwaymen in uniform and workers from the tramcar depot in knee boots and leather jerkins, better-dressed civilians from white-collar jobs in long overcoats and groups of what he would have said were no more than children, pockets of schoolboys and girls. “Do you swear to die?” Borodin demanded.
“We swear!”
“Let the ones who swear raise their hands…”
Borodin swept down the steps and through the crowd, pushing forward toward the gates. Maria followed, Ruzsky half a step behind her.
He turned to see Pavel making his way toward him, his eyes wide with alarm. “Slowly,” he seemed to be saying, but as Ruzsky forged ahead through the factory gates, the big detective was swallowed by the crowd.
The moon was bright. Around him, in every face, Ruzsky saw determination and anger as the protesters cascaded out into streets. He walked by Maria’s side.
She still would not meet his eye.
Ruzsky brushed past a group of schoolchildren; would they not be siphoned off from the march?
And then Borodin was once again alongside them. He had put on a fur hat. He leaned toward Ruzsky. “Do you fear the police, Khabarin?” he asked quietly.
Ruzsky shook his head.
“Do you fear the Cossacks?”
He did not answer.
“If blood is shed, then it will be to the greater glory of our revolution, isn’t that so?”
Ruzsky still did not respond.
“People do not care anymore, do they? Desperation is the force we need.” Borodin touched his shoulder. “Can you fire a rifle?”