The Last Rite (Danilov Quintet 5) Read online

  Here stands a chest of drawers,

  On the chest a hippopotamus,

  And on the hippopotamus sits an idiot.

  The absurdity was obvious to anyone who looked at it, and yet Nikolai, Aleksandr’s son, had been happy to have it put on display a decade and a half after his father’s death. The idea of the statue was to remind the Russian people that the tsar was immovable, that the tsar’s power was unchanging. But the people didn’t need reminding of that. They knew it. They experienced it every day of their lives. Even those of us whose existence was tolerable knew that nothing would change. With each new tsar we hoped, but it always came to nothing. No one would ever have portrayed Tsar Nikolai II as having the brutish strength of his father. If Aleksandr believed himself immovable he might have been right. Nikolai most certainly believed it, and was quite mistaken.

  I let out a brief snort. The factory worker, still close to me, would have taken it for a response to the graffito, but it wasn’t that. I was laughing at myself and the fact that in my own mind I referred to them as Tsar Aleksandr and Tsar Nikolai. Was I trying to hide, even from myself, the simple fact that I was one of the family – that Aleksandr III was my cousin?

  ‘This is your final warning. Hand it over.’

  It was the sound of the police captain’s voice. The ‘it’ in question was a red flag being held up in the crowd. Earlier it had been right at the front, but as the gendarmes had tried to get hold of it, it had made its way to the centre of our group. I couldn’t see whether the people carrying it had moved or whether it had just been passed along from hand to hand, but now it was defended on all sides by a shield of human bodies. I doubted they would protect it for long against bullets and sabres. It wasn’t even as if there was anything written on the banner, but the colour alone was enough. It went back to 1848, the Year of Revolutions, and perhaps longer. Both sides understood what it meant. Russia hadn’t had a revolution in 1848, and now we were making up for lost time.

  ‘Come and take it!’ rang a shout from somewhere in the crowd. The captain hesitated. There was no doubt that that was precisely what he had been planning to do, but now it would seem as if he was taking his orders from the mob. The dilemma didn’t trouble him for long. He turned his horse and trotted away from us, back towards his men who stood in mounted ranks in front of the railway terminus. I didn’t hear him issue any instructions, or even make a gesture, but a moment later he turned again and as one they charged forwards, their right arms extended and their sabres horizontal. It would have better suited the battlefields of the Crimea than a square in Petersburg. But this wasn’t Saint Petersburg. This was Petrograd and had been for the last three years. And Petrograd was turning out to be a very different place.

  I was close to the back of the crowd and therefore safe for the time being. None of us around the statue moved. Some at the front – maybe half of them – tried to turn and run, but the ranks of protestors behind them remained still and there was nowhere for them to go. A few tried to escape by going forwards, slipping between the charging horses. I saw at least one – a woman – trampled. Perhaps others made it through.

  Now the horses were among us. As the front line of protestors finally gave way, a wave of motion – like the blast running through an explosive – raced through the crowd and almost seemed to hit me. I stepped back from it, bumping into those behind me and perpetuating the wave through the mass of bodies. I could hear screams from the front and saw the police sabres rise and fall. I could not make out where the blows landed, but each time the blades were lifted high to strike again there was more blood on them. I’d heard that this was how the police were dealing with protests, but I’d not seen it for myself; not truly believed it. If I had done I doubted I would have come here. The same was true for most of those around me; we’d been brave enough to face the police if all they did was stand and watch, but now it was time to flee.

  I turned and ran, but those around me were faster. An elbow barged me to the left. I turned, instinctively wanting to apologize, but I’d been pushed into someone else’s path – a sailor, head and shoulders taller than me. He didn’t even notice that he’d knocked me to the ground. I tried to get up, but a knee hit me in the back of my head, and then I felt a foot between my shoulder blades. I tried to crawl towards the statue, hoping it would give me some kind of shelter. I kept low, like I’d been taught in the army, as though to avoid enemy fire, trying to use my forearms to gain some purchase on the paving slabs.

  It seemed an eternity, but it can only have been a matter of seconds before a pair of hands gripped me and lifted me up, leaning me against the plinth on which the hippopotamus stood. I was protected from the stampeding crowd, forced to pass it on one side or the other. I never saw who had saved me, and they didn’t stay to receive my thanks.

  I clutched at the leg of the bronze horse, desperate to stay on my feet. It was pointless for me to run. I could feel the air rasping in my chest as I breathed. My arms were weak. When the charging gendarmes got to me I’d no reason to suppose they’d see me any differently from how the crowd running past did, how I saw myself: a weak, pathetic old man, clinging to a statue because his own legs weren’t strong enough to hold him up. They wouldn’t regard me as a threat.

  I looked back towards the railway terminus to take in the slaughter. I knew the sight would not sicken me as perhaps it should – I’d seen worse in battle. I didn’t relish it either, but someone had to bear witness to it, to report it. The more brutally they treated us, the sooner it would end – as long as people heard what was happening.

  But I didn’t see what I’d expected. The mounted gendarmes were not amongst the crowd, hacking away at them. Most of the people in the square had managed to get away and some had even stopped and turned to look, like me, at what was happening. There was still a battle taking place, but it was not between police and protestors.

  The Cossack troop which had been stationed to one side of the square, as if in reserve, had entered the fray. But they had not gone to the support of the police. Instead they had moved to protect the crowd. They outnumbered the gendarmes, and knew better how to use a sabre from the back of a horse, though some of them were more practical than that. I heard pistols firing. The police thought too late to use their own guns – a sword is a fine weapon for scattering a group of protestors, but it’s not so much use against a Cossack.

  Shouts and cheers began to rise up from the crowd, which was now reassembling. They were fickle, but in times like these it was madness to be anything else. A few minutes before they had been jeering at those same Cossacks they now hailed as their saviours. And why not? We were no longer in a world of certainties, of officer and ryadovoy, of noble and peasant. What mattered now was not what you were, but which side you were on. The Cossacks – this troop of them – had chosen. It was a choice I’d made only months before.

  The battle was quickly over. The police weren’t prepared for any kind of resistance. There were no orders given, but they soon disengaged – those that could. They headed north at the gallop, up Ligovskaya Street. The crowd had once more become emboldened, and a hail of stones and other projectiles followed the retreat, though to little effect. The damage had already been done. I could see four gendarmes lying there in the middle of Znamenskaya Square, alongside the bodies of those they’d cut down. Two riderless horses stood close, calmly awaiting some form of instruction. The others must have followed the herd. One of the gendarmes managed to get to his feet. He eyed the Cossacks fearfully, but they’d now lost interest, or been gripped by the realization of what they’d done. The policeman roused one of his comrades, then another. I heard one of them shout ‘Sir!’ and shake the fourth prone body and it was then I realized it was their commanding officer, and that he was dead. The Cossacks were experienced enough in battle to know that the best strategy was decapitation – take out the opposing leader and those who remained would be powerless. The other gendarmes were lucky that the operation had been so clinical.r />
  I turned and walked away. The crowd was thinning now and I had my breath back. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so old – quite so self-pitying. I’d be sixty in a few months. That wasn’t so ancient. There were plenty of officers still active at the Front who were older than me. And I’d managed to achieve a riper age than that police captain, or those he’d killed in the crowd. There’d been a time, years before, when I’d thought the whole purpose of my existence on Earth had been fulfilled. And so it had been, with the death of a single man – a single vampire. Since then I’d found new reasons to live.

  ‘Mihail!’

  I turned at the shout of my name, but there were still crowds around, and I couldn’t make out who had uttered it.

  ‘Mihail Konstantinovich!’

  Someone was walking towards me. It took me a moment to recognize her: Yelena Dmitrievna Stasova. I wouldn’t have called her a friend, but our paths had crossed more than once. She was an extremist – a Bolshevik who’d only recently returned from exile in Siberia – but now wasn’t the time to worry about our petty differences. For the moment we were all on the same side.

  We shook hands. ‘Were you in that?’ she asked, jerking her head towards Znamenskaya Square.

  I nodded and we began walking side by side up Nevsky Prospekt.

  ‘I thought it was going to be like ’05 all over again,’ she said.

  I shuddered at the thought. ‘Bloody Sunday’ they’d called it, though you only had to say ‘The Ninth of January’ and people knew what you meant. I’d been seven thousand versts away, fighting the Japanese, but the news had still reached us. The official figure was around a hundred dead, shot and trampled, but I’d heard as many as four thousand. All they’d wanted to do was deliver a petition to the tsar asking for decent working conditions. Nikolai hadn’t even been in the city, but the Imperial Guard had fired on them anyway. Half of the crowd had been singing ‘God Save the Tsar’. They didn’t want to get rid of him, they just wanted him to rule for his people. Times had changed.

  ‘Back then it was the army against the people,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t even a contest.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘You saw whose side the Cossacks were on.’

  ‘One platoon? What difference is that going to make?’

  I smiled to myself. ‘You weren’t expecting it to be Cossacks, were you?’

  ‘Their loyalty’s to themselves,’ she explained, ‘but they’re human – some of them.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve never bothered putting your agents provocateurs in amongst them?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, tovarishch.’

  I didn’t press the point, and the Bolsheviks weren’t the only ones trying to infiltrate the army. It wasn’t that the men needed pushing into revolution – three years of war had done enough of that – but we all knew that the real battle would be for what came after the revolution, about who took the reins of power. It would be in that struggle that troops – certainly those stationed in Petrograd – could be decisive. The navy was completely infiltrated, but wasn’t such a presence in the city, not with the waterways frozen all the way out to the Baltic. Only the Imperial Air Force – the service that in recent years I’d come to know best – was free of the infiltration, but I couldn’t see how it would have much part to play in the events to come.

  ‘Did you think it would happen so quickly?’ I asked her.

  She considered for a moment before answering. ‘We all knew it would be this year. Like you, we had a timetable, but revolution has a life of its own.’

  ‘Like us?’

  ‘I was told it was planned for next month. Nikolai would be deposed. The tsarevich would succeed, with his uncle as regent, and a few senior nobles would hold the real power.’

  She was right. I wasn’t a part of the plot, but I knew all about it. It would have been a very Russian way for power to change hands, like when Yekaterina had her husband, Pyotr III, imprisoned, or when a handful of senior officers murdered Pavel I and set his son on the throne as Aleksandr I. But I wasn’t going to admit anything to her.

  ‘I’m hardly a noble,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, come now, Colonel Danilov.’ She’d switched to addressing me more formally simply to tease me. ‘You’re a member of the nobility by dint of your rank alone. And your family’s reputation goes back to the Patriotic War. You should relish your status. In a few days it will mean nothing.’

  I laughed briefly. She had no idea just how high-born I was – the bastard son of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, Tsar Aleksandr II’s brother. It was a quarter of a century since my father’s death. I never saw him in his last years. He had a stroke and his wife took control of his affairs. She made sure his mistresses and his illegitimate children never got to visit him, though I don’t think she ever knew about me, or my mother, Tamara Alekseevna. And Mama was already long dead by then.

  ‘So a plot set for March would have beaten you then,’ I said. ‘I take it you were planning something for May Day.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she replied, noncommittally. ‘But then fate trumped us both – the hint of an early spring, and the streets are filled.’

  I looked around. Only a Russian would see any signs of spring here, but the winter had been particularly harsh and so any slight thaw was a respite. We were just crossing the Fontanka. The ice on its surface was still thick. The streets were covered with snow and it was mostly sleds, not wheeled carriages, that travelled up and down Nevsky Prospekt. The automobiles couldn’t replace their wheels with runners, but their tyres were wrapped in chains for grip. It was still below freezing, even in the middle of the day, but only by a few degrees. That meant people weren’t afraid to come out on the streets. Nevsky Prospekt was crowded, even for a Saturday. Mind you, with so many strikes the factories were mostly empty, and where else were people to go? The warmer weather had started two days earlier on International Women’s Day. Everyone knew there’d be demonstrations and the people had taken to the streets. They’d begun to sing the Marsiliuza – the Marseillaise, if they’d known how to pronounce it – recalling another revolution of over a century before. Nikolai had banned the song, just as Bonaparte did in his day. But it was a signal to all that Nikolai could no longer expect such pronouncements to be obeyed. If it hadn’t happened now, it would have been on May Day, or some day before very long.

  ‘I’ll take my leave of you here,’ she said.

  We both stopped. She glanced ahead, meaningfully, and I looked to see another confrontation about to take place. Further up Nevsky a crowd of workers stood tightly together, their backs towards us. Beyond them I could just see the upper bodies of mounted troops, blocking their way. Yelena offered me her hand and I shook it.

  ‘Keep in touch,’ she said as her fingers squeezed mine, making sure I understood it was no simple platitude.

  She turned and made her way along the embankment of the Yekaterininsky Canal. Ahead of her I could see the coloured onion domes of the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, better known as the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. The spilled blood in question had been that of Tsar Aleksandr II and the church had been built to mark the spot of his assassination, on 1 March 1881. It had been carried out by an organization known as Narodnaya Volya – the People’s Will. I had been a reluctant member, though I’d not been there to witness my uncle’s murder. I’d been close though; just a few blocks away in a tunnel beneath the street.

  However tragic 1 March had been for Russia, for me it was a day of celebration. It was then that I’d finally destroyed the monster who had plagued my family for three generations, a vampire who called himself Iuda, or sometimes Cain, or a dozen other names. In 1812 he’d murdered three of my grandfather’s closest friends. In 1825 he’d forced my grandfather, Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, into exile for thirty years. In 1856 he’d finally killed Aleksei, and tricked my uncle, Dmitry, into becoming a vampire himself. But in 1881 I’d had revenge for all of them, and for my mother too, and killed Iuda. I
’d lured him down into that cellar just a few blocks east of here and exposed him to a new form of electric light, one which had the quality, if not the intensity, of the sun itself. It was enough to incinerate the flesh of any vampire, and so he had died in deserved agony. I’d never encountered a voordalak since. But that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there, somewhere. I was always on my guard.

  I carried on over the canal towards the crowd, as did almost everyone else on the street. A few, like Yelena, decided to turn away, but for the majority it was confrontations such as this that were the purpose of the day. We were just outside the Kazan Cathedral. The mounted troops were Cossacks again, but not the same ones I’d seen earlier. They were stretched across the street, three ranks deep, stopping anyone from going further. The Winter Palace, just a little way beyond, was the focus of attention for most of the protestors, even though its significance was purely symbolic – the tsar was seldom in residence, and certainly not today.

  The crowd was pushing left, towards the Kazan, in some sort of outflanking manoeuvre that was never going to work. The cathedral’s two curved wings attempted to embrace them like welcoming arms and I wondered if they might not do better to seek sanctuary within rather than face the soldiers in front of them. The Cossacks were tight up against the far wing, and there was no room to slip past. I looked at the faces of the men on horseback. They were hard to read. Cossacks had their own customs and their own culture, and even in wartime they didn’t mix much with the regular army. They looked anxious, almost afraid, and that wasn’t a good thing. A nervous finger could pull a trigger more easily than a steady one.