Twelve

'It's a two-edged sword,' I said. 'He may have established a dynasty, but what's good for the dynasty isn't the same as what's good for the dynast. France's future is now assured even if Bonaparte dies, so France has less need to protect Bonaparte. Look what happened to our own tsar's father.'

'But he was mad,' put in Vadim.

'When the English have a mad king,' said Maks, 'they appoint a regent. When we have a mad king, we throttle him in his own bedroom.'

'Maks!' cautioned Vadim with a growl. No one knew quite what had happened to Tsar Pavel, but it was still best not to repeat even the most widespread of rumours.

'It just shows how useless the king of England is,' said Dmitry.

'But that's their strength,' continued Maks. 'Who have been the great Englishmen that have stood against Napoleon? Pitt?

Nelson? Both dead. And yet England marches on. But if Napoleon died, would France march on? That's why Napoleon has to found a dynasty, until France is strong enough for the emperor to be as insignificant as an English king.'

'Or a Russian tsar?' I asked, before anyone else could. From Vadim it would have sounded like an accusation of treason; from Dmitry, an incitement to it.

'By the by, have you heard about these deaths in the south?' asked Maks, changing the subject abruptly. 'All along the Don, as far north as Voronezh. They thought it was plague, but now the stories are changing.'

There was little in Maks' account that I hadn't heard before, but I wondered where he might have picked up the rumours. It didn't take me long to find out.

Later that same day, I went to visit Domnikiia. As I was entering the establishment, I bumped into Maks, just leaving. He was embarrassed.

'Maksim Sergeivich!' I said. 'I am surprised. I thought this sort of thing didn't interest you.'

'It doesn't,' he replied discreetly, 'any more than eating or breathing interests me. But these things still have to be done.'

He smiled as we both realized that I, as a married man, should be more embarrassed than he. There wasn't any mockery in his expression, just an understanding of the irony. 'I can see why you like Dominique so much. Please don't tell Vadim and Dmitry.'

He walked away. If anyone else had said that about Dominique, their words would have been full of double meaning – of challenge and rivalry – but from Maks, they had only their face value. He said them just as he might have said, 'I can see why you like vodka so much.' There's enough vodka to go round, so who could be jealous about having to share? But for me, the words were devastating. My only consolation, and it was a desperate one, was that he called her Dominique, not Domnikiia.

I had to wait for Domnikiia, arriving as I did so soon after her previous client. I could have gone with one of the other girls, to show how little I cared. The problem was that I did care.

I must have been very cold. We lay side by side, not in the usual quiet embrace that followed our love-making.

'Are you all right, Lyosha?' she asked.

'Please don't sleep with Maks.'

It was a simple enough request, but her reaction was livid. She leapt out of bed and stormed across the room. Her anger was incomprehensible to me. 'Who the hell are you to ask me that, Aleksei? I'm not a serf. You don't own me – you rent me. You pay me for an hour, you get me for an hour. I'm yours. Whatever you want – I do it. You pay me for twenty-three hours, I do it for twenty-three – but that one hour a day is still mine and I'll sleep with Bonaparte himself, if he pays.'

She paused for a moment, lost in her anger. 'I don't say to you it's OK to kill Frenchmen, but please, Aleksei, don't kill this particular Frenchman or that particular Frenchman, or kill the French, but leave the Turks alone. It's a job. If you choose to do the job then you don't get to pick out the bits you like most.' She sat down and became a little calmer. 'You'd better go now; I've got clients to see.'

'Can I see you tomorrow?'

'It's my job; I can't stop you,' she said curtly. Then she smiled at the irony. 'Weren't you listening just now?'

I left the building elated. I'd made her angry. In every conversation we'd ever had, she had kept her composure – what she said could be genuine, or it could be merely what I wanted to hear.

We'd both known it, and that was part of the fun. But now, somehow, I'd got to her. She'd revealed some small, real part of herself, and what a powerful, eloquent self she had revealed.

Having said that, there was still one small matter to attend to.

'Please don't sleep with Dominique,' I asked that evening when Maks and I were walking alone. 'There are plenty of other girls there to choose from.'

Maks seemed briefly surprised, but didn't take issue with me. 'OK.' He thought for a moment, feeling that more needed to be said. 'She's very nice, but then I'm sure they all are.'

We walked a little further until Maks filled the silence with, 'We talk about you, you know.'

'We?'

'Dominique and I,' he replied.

He told me, I think, to be kind – to flatter me – but all it did was bring to my mind the most bizarre and unpleasant images, along with, by some unfathomable route, recollections of the story of Oedipus. 'Jesus, Maks, no! Just leave it. Just don't talk about it. You've said you won't see her. That's fine. There are some things that just don't need discussing.'

I marched off and went back to my room, sat down, and wrote a letter to Marfa. Almost everything I wrote was untrue, so I tore it up.

The next day, things seemed back to normal between me and Domnikiia; better than normal even. I presumed the whole thing was forgotten.

'Maks came in today, but he went with Margarita.'

'OK,' I replied cautiously, wondering where the conversation was going.

'He's a good friend to you. He respects you.'

'You're happy with that?'

'That your friend does you a favour when you ask him? Why shouldn't I be?'

'So does that mean you're not my friend?'

'Do you want me to be?' she asked, looking directly at me. I thought for a moment about my answer, but before I could speak, she continued. 'It's either/or.'

I gave an exaggerated frown, and then smiled. 'Fair enough.' Then I changed the subject. 'Maks said there were more stories of the plague along the Don.'

'There are. Only it's not a plague and it's not just on the Don.'

'How do you know it's not a plague?' I asked.

'The way they die. It's all rumour. Some people are saying their throats are cut, others that they've been strangled, others that they've been attacked by animals. One story is that the French have sent saboteurs to attack us from the south.'

It sounded unlikely, but then it also sounded somewhat like what Vadim, Dmitry, Maks and I had been commissioned to do against the French. 'How do you know all this?'

'Lots of traders come to Moscow from Tula, leaving their wives safely at home. Or not so safely, now there've been deaths in Tula itself.'

'In Tula?'

'Yes. I looked at the places on a map. They follow the river Don. Rostov, Pavlovsk, Voronezh.' She turned to me and smiled. 'I looked at Petersburg, too. Is it nice there?'

'Not as nice as here,' I said, somewhat dismissively, but I was too concerned by what she was saying. 'And you say it's reached Tula?'

'Today someone mentioned Serpukhov; I haven't looked that up yet.'

'Serpukhov?' I was shocked. 'That's only about eighty versts away.'

'Really? Are you worried?'

I tried to be reassuring. 'No, not really. They're just rumours. You know what these peasants are like. Someone catches cold and it's a new outbreak of plague.'

But as I left her, I still felt in need of some convincing myself. Any concerns were, however, soon pushed to the back of my mind. That evening, the Oprichniki arrived.