Ruzsky rubbed the condensation from the window. The morning sun disappeared behind a bank of heavy cloud.
Dmitri left the room for a few moments and returned with a yellow carnation. He placed it in the buttonhole of their father’s jacket.
Ever since the death of their mother, the old man had ordered fresh flowers for her bedside table every week, just as she had done when she was alive.
“Do you think they will be happy together?” Dmitri asked. “Wherever they are.”
“Content, perhaps.”
“Is that the best we can hope for? To be content?”
“We were born to a different age.”
Ruzsky bent down and tugged the wing of his father’s collar back inside his morning coat.
There was a soft knock at the door. Pavel and Sarlov slipped in and Ruzsky saw from the expression on their faces that it was time for them to take the body away. Ruzsky straightened his father’s coat once more and then stepped back.
Pavel and Sarlov bent to pick up the body.
Ruzsky and his brother watched their father being carried out.
As the door was pulled shut, Dmitri moved to the old man’s desk and picked up the paperweight he had always used-a rock Ruzsky had given him during a family holiday at their aunt’s estate in the Crimea. He pushed it to and fro on the desktop.
Despite the sight and smell of blood, the removal of the body made the old man’s death seem almost an illusion. The voices outside died away as the servants drifted back to their tasks. Pavel and Sarlov left with the ambulance.
The telephone in the hall was silent. Even the wind had faded to a whisper.
Ruzsky thought of the loneliness that must precede suicide; could he not have saved him that? Was it simply for want of another’s support that his father had reached such an impasse? He’d assumed the old man would have been too proud to want to share a dilemma with his eldest son, and yet hadn’t he tried?
As Ruzsky looked out of the window at the lifeless skies, he grew more certain. A liar or cheat could always dream of escape, because he did not fear his conscience, but for an honorable man, sometimes there was only one way out. The old man’s responsibility was to protect the assets of the state-what mistake or threat could have demanded such a sacrifice?
“Did you know he was going to meet Vasilyev this morning?” Ruzsky asked. He was surprised by the strength in his own voice.
“No.”
“Do you have any idea what they could have talked about?”
Dmitri looked at him. “No.”
Ruzsky turned to face his brother.
“I sometimes think,” Dmitri said, “that you believe Father talked to me in a way he never did to you, but it wasn’t so. He would never have confided in me.”
Ruzsky shook his head, but even as he did so he knew that Dmitri was right. “You were an officer in his regiment…”
“But not like he was. Not like you would have been.”
Ruzsky saw the distress in his brother’s eyes. As it had once before, grief diminished him and it broke his heart to see it. “Let us not quarrel,” he said.
The tension on Dmitri’s face eased. “Yes. Let us not quarrel.”
Ruzsky found Michael playing with Ingrid in the attic. The pair sat side by side on the floor, putting together the train track. The boy looked up with a naive but brittle optimism in his eyes. “Is Grandfather awake now?”
Ruzsky sat down. He put the station at Mtsensk by the edge of the track and then assembled the house and village at Petrovo a short distance away from it. “I think Grandfather has gone to be with Uncle Ilusha.” Ruzsky glanced at Ingrid.
“Does that mean we won’t see him again?” Michael asked as he fitted the first locomotive onto the track and then began to hitch carriages behind it.
“Not in the way we are used to.”
Michael concentrated intently on putting together his train.
“I’m sorry, my boy.”
“Will you come and live here, now, Father?”
Ruzsky hesitated. “Yes.”
“With Mama?”
“I will talk to her.”
“I will miss Grandfather.”
Ruzsky did not answer.
“Will you miss him also?”
“Very much.”
“Some of the servants said you didn’t like each other, but you did, didn’t you?”
Ruzsky swallowed hard. “I loved him. And I think, in his way, he loved me.” He pieced together two stretches of track. “He was my father, just as I am yours. It is an unbreakable bond.”
Ingrid reached forward to squeeze Michael’s shoulder.
There was a long silence.
“How did he have an accident?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Was he sad?”
Ruzsky shook his head. “No.”
“Then why did he have an accident?”
Ruzsky did not offer an answer, since he had none to give.
Michael put the last carriage on his train and pushed it around to the station at Mtsensk. He unloaded the small wooden passengers and assembled them on the platform with their luggage. One family had been modeled on Ruzsky’s own: two parents with three boys and a small group of servants. There was even a troika waiting for them. “Can we speak to Grandfather?” Michael asked.
“In our dreams,” Ingrid said. “In our dreams, we can talk to him.”
Michael seemed encouraged. His frown eased. He loaded the passengers back onto the train, sorting each group into its regular compartment before storing their luggage.
45
I n the hallway of the Okhrana’s gloomy headquarters, they had clearly been expecting him. Ruzsky neither had to explain who he was nor offer any form of identification. He was led down the corridor to the elevator, almost colliding with a man bringing a box full of papers out of the printing room.
As the elevator began its ascent, Ruzsky reflected upon the bomb that had been thrown at him in Yalta. Had not the intention been to kill the pair of them then-and if so, why had the Okhrana’s many trained assassins not been instructed to try again?
Were they waiting for the right moment? Had it arrived?
Vasilyev was standing by the door to his dark, wood-paneled office, and he offered his hand as Ruzsky entered. “I’m sorry, Sandro,” he said, in his low, smoke-roughened voice, his eyes searching Ruzsky’s own. His handshake was firm. “Please have a seat.” He pointed to the table around which their last meeting had been conducted. “Please.”
Vasilyev retreated behind his desk, silhouetted against the light. Ruzsky noticed for the first time an oil of the bay at Yalta above the mantelpiece. It looked like it had been painted from the window of Godorkin’s office.
“You have been told of my father’s death?”
“Your office informed the government and Colonel Shulgin telephoned me directly. It must have been a very great shock.”
Vasilyev’s insincerity brought a flush of anger to Ruzsky’s cheeks. Beneath the table, he carefully clenched and unclenched one of his fists. He had promised himself he would not allow himself to be provoked.
“Some tea?” Vasilyev leaned forward to tap a service bell upon his desk.
A young boy in a starched linen jacket appeared through a side door. “Tea,” Vasilyev instructed him. “Would you like something stronger?”
“No.”
Vasilyev slipped his hands into his pockets, waiting for the servant to withdraw.
Ruzsky looked out of the window at the fading light that shrouded the city’s rooftops. For the first time, he felt a stranger in the land of his birth.
Vasilyev smiled. It was as if he was able to read Ruzsky’s mind. He picked up a silver case from his desk. “Cigarette?”
Ruzsky shook his head. Vasilyev lit one for himself.
“You came to a meeting at Millionnaya Street,” Ruzsky said.
“Yes. Tragically, it appears that I was the last-”
“What was it about?”
Vasilyev gave another tight smile. Only good manners, his expression suggested, required him to continue the conversation. “I’m afraid, Sandro, that I am not at liberty to-”