It was intended to flatter, and it succeeded. Aleksei was certainly more highly regarded in the Society than someone like Obukhov, but over the years he had managed to give the impression of being even closer to the heart of the plotting than he really was, not just to Obukhov, but to several junior officers. The more they thought he already knew, the more they might tell him. And in return he was prepared to tell them plenty. If he had his way, the whole of the Northern Society would turn into a sieve; information would leak out at every point and its leaders would abandon their plans before the government ever bothered to move against them and prove how hopeless their ambitions were.

  ‘We’re ready to serve,’ said Obukhov, ‘whenever the call comes.’

  ‘It will be next year – the summer, I would guess; once Aleksandr returns to Petersburg. His death will be the signal.’

  ‘His death?’ For a moment, Aleksei wondered whether the idea was too much for the young officer to stomach. ‘But how can we predict that?’ Aleksei gave him a stony look. It didn’t take long for realization to dawn. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘It’s for the good of the country, I suppose.’

  It was a debate Aleksei had had with Maks, long ago. He could not remember precisely when. Maks had spoken of the benefit to the country (for Maks, the country would as likely have been France as Russia), but he had seemed to forget that a country is only a grouping of citizens within a geographical boundary. The tsar was a citizen of Russia, but his death would not do him any good.

  ‘Would you kill a serf, if it was for the good of the country?’ Aleksei knew he shouldn’t get into such discussions, not here, but it was likely that Obukhov would assume that he was simply playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘We’re doing this for the serfs,’ said Obukhov earnestly. Maks would have come up with a better answer. Would Obukhov, he wondered, kill ten million serfs to liberate ten million and one? Aleksei suddenly remembered where he had had that conversation with Maks. It was in that hut near Desna, moments before Maks had died. He gulped down his vodka and raised his hand to order another. He wondered whether he should press the point with Obukhov, but before he could, they were interrupted by a sound from the next room.

  A piano had started playing, and after a few bars, voices joined it. The song was ‘Where Are Those Islands?’ Aleksei, like many of those present, was personally acquainted with the lyricist. He had spoken to him only days before. It was Kondraty Fyodorovich Ryleev, leader of the Northern Society, in whose house Aleksei had but recently discussed the very assassination of which he had just informed Obukhov. Ryleev was a poet of some standing, and works such as ‘Where Are Those Islands?’ were sung in the most conservative of establishments. Other pieces, which revealed more of his politics, were not. Sometimes he was mentioned in the same breath as Pushkin – in terms of politics as well as talent – but Pushkin was more idealistic, which not only benefited his poetry, but kept him away from serious revolutionary groups such as this one; that and exile to the south, though as far as Aleksei knew, he had not become involved with the Southern Society.

  Along with most of the other officers in the room, Aleksei and Obukhov made their way through to join in with the singing. The adjoining room was much larger, with space in the middle of the floor large enough to dance, as two or three men were attempting to do, little though the tempo of the song suggested it. Most were thronged around the piano, obscuring it from view. They were drunk enough to sing and, for the most part, not so drunk as to sing badly.

  Aleksei felt his lips moving in time with the words, and a few quiet notes formed in his voicebox. The idea of singing out loud did not appeal to him – certainly not the idea of others hearing him – but he enjoyed joining in, being part of the spontaneous choir. He had lost sight of Obukhov, but he gradually pressed his way through the crowd towards the piano. The pianist was doing a marvellous job, not simply accompanying, but introducing decorations and countermelodies, and yet never outshining the singers themselves.

  At last, Aleksei got within sight of the man at the piano. As their eyes met, Aleksei felt the words of the song freeze in his throat. It would have been an acute ear that noticed the briefest of caesurae in Dmitry’s playing, but after he saw his father, his accompaniment reduced in complexity to being simply that. The virtuoso flourishes that had previously adorned his playing vanished.

  Aleksei had never suspected that his son might have anything to do with the Northern Society. For one thing, he was far too young. For another, he had never been out of Russia – excepting one brief visit to Warsaw – never to the West. The two reasons were really the same reason. It was in Paris that the soldiers who had fought Napoleon, routed him from their own land and pursued him across a continent, discovered the true nature of what they had been fighting. For many, particularly the young, it was paradise. For Aleksei it came close, but he had been old enough to understand that it was a paradise that could never be achieved in Russia. The idea of Heaven on earth brings with it, inescapably, the concept of the final destruction of earth. And Russia was the most earthly nation imaginable. More than that, Aleksei knew that even France was no utopia, for how could a utopia have produced the monster Bonaparte? He had dragged half a million men across Europe into Russia and returned with less than a hundred thousand. That didn’t even take into account the Russians who had died. Whatever blessings the French Revolution had brought, it had not brought peace, and Aleksei had fought in enough battles to love peace above all things; even above freedom.

  Thus, although there were a few in the Northern Society of Aleksei’s age, and older, he was too old to be a typical member. Similarly, Dmitry was too young; too young and too Russian. But if Dmitry had somehow acquired revolutionary ideas during his short life, they could only have come from one source – Aleksei himself. It would be appropriate. Aleksei’s own father had had little education, and yet his love of the idea of learning had been passed down to Aleksei to become in him a reality. Had Aleksei’s talk of liberty similarly become in his son a concrete desire to bring that liberty about, no matter what the cost?

  Aleksei’s eyes locked with his son’s for less than a second. He could see questions in Dmitry’s face that were no less confused than those in his own mind. For Dmitry to learn that his father mixed with those who openly plotted to overthrow the tsar would be more shocking than anything Aleksei could feel at the reverse discovery. He did not wait for his son to ask those questions. He turned and fled – walking calmly and unhurriedly, yet still his action could only be described as flight – walking out of the room, out of the building and into the cool, darkening evening of Lubyanka Square.

  * * *

  Aleksei had not had far to walk to reach that evening’s rendezvous. Red Square was a very different place from what it had been when he first met the Oprichniki there in 1812. Before that – only days before – it had been different again, filled with shops and stalls that obscured the huge majesty of the open space that lay to the east of the Kremlin. By the time Aleksei had had his meetings there, during the French occupation, most of those primitive wooden buildings had been burnt to nothing, and the stone ones had suffered almost as badly. The rebuilt square was less cluttered. There were still shops on the east side, but nothing taller than a single storey. Nothing had been built that would hide Saint Vasiliy’s or the Kremlin itself. Beyond the cathedral, on the hill down to the river, there was a mess of new buildings, but they were scarcely visible from the square. Even viewed from the south, Saint Vasiliy’s managed to dwarf them.

  It was a little after eight when Aleksei arrived. He preferred the square as it was now, though he would have liked it even more if it had been completely clear – of shops, at least. He would have broken down and cried if Saint Vasiliy’s had become a victim of the fires. He stood briefly to look up at the statue of Minin and Pozharskiy taking pride of place in the centre of the square. This was the kind of clutter he appreciated, even though it was less than a decade old. The heroic events it commemorated were over two centuries old, back in the ‘Time of Troubles’. Boris Godunov – one of the original Oprichniki after whom the monsters Aleksei had encountered had been given the epithet – had declared himself emperor, but the entire nation had come under threat from a Polish invasion, which had besieged the Kremlin. It was only when a prince, Dmitry Mihailovich Pozharskiy, and a butcher, Kuzma Minich Minin, had raised an army of Muscovites that the Poles were driven out. The year was 1612. It was always the twelves. 1612: liberation from the Poles, which led almost immediately to the foundation of the Romanov dynasty. 1712: the year Saint Petersburg became the capital – Aleksei might not have liked it, but he couldn’t deny its place in history. 1812: the defeat of Bonaparte – an event that had not merely changed Russia, but the entire world. What, Aleksei wondered, would happen in 1912 that would be so globally significant that it could compare with the happenings of a century, two centuries, three centuries before? Aleksei would not be around see it. Neither would his children – but his children’s children? Perhaps.

  There was still no sign of Kyesha, but the clock on the Saviour’s Tower said that it was barely half past eight. Aleksei walked on towards Saint Vasiliy’s, revelling in the new openness of the square. He had entered from the north, and the moment he had done so, the cathedral had called to him across the vast empty space, in a way it never could have when the area was built up. The Kremlin itself was ubiquitous, looming over the entire length of Red Square, but Saint Vasiliy’s was like a beacon, small in the distance, but never insignificant, and ever growing as it was approached. Aleksei had seen Notre Dame in Paris. He had been inside and had climbed its towers. It was massive and beautiful, but it could never be as compelling as this ornate, garish symbol of all that it meant to be Russian.

  ‘I never could work out quite where in Red Square you planned to meet.’ Aleksei could not see where Kyesha had come from. It did not matter.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have caused you any trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Are you ready to play?’

  ‘Of course. Where shall we go?’

  Kyesha looked around, then nodded towards the only object that interrupted the surface of the square between the cathedral and the statue of Minin and Pozharskiy – the Lobnoye Mesto. It was a round stone dais from which, traditionally, the ukases issued by the tsar had been announced. They climbed the steps up to it. The platform itself was more than a man’s height above the square, and surrounded by a stone wall that came up almost to Aleksei’s shoulders. It would not have been easy to attract attention when making a proclamation, but at the very centre of the large circular platform was another, smaller podium. Aleksei presumed it would have been on this that the herald actually stood.

  But it was not Aleksei and Kyesha’s intention to be seen by the people in the square, few of them though there were that evening. Once they had sat down, their backs against the outer wall, they were invisible to anyone who did not actually climb the steps and look inside. Even if someone had done, they would have had to look closely to see the two men through the darkness of the moonless night. But the dark would be an equal problem for them if they intended to play knucklebones. Kyesha had come prepared. He lit a candle. Its dim light didn’t even reach the far wall, but it was sufficient. He took the bones from his pocket again and placed five of them on the stone floor between them.

  ‘How shall we do this?’ asked Aleksei. He was sure Kyesha would have worked out the details.

  ‘The question is the bet,’ he replied. ‘You announce the question and the number of bones, and if you succeed, you’re given an answer. We’ll forget about doubling.’

  ‘And if you don’t succeed?’

  ‘Then you lose control of the bones. We keep playing till we fail – then the other one gets a go.’ He pushed the bones towards Aleksei. ‘You start.’

  Aleksei threw the five bones on to the ground. He didn’t need to worry about catches on the back of the hand, and again he chose the largest to throw into the air. Then he had to think of a question.

  ‘When was your brother’s birthday?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d know that already,’ said Kyesha, ‘but I’ll accept.’

  Aleksei did know it already. It wasn’t that sort of question. He threw the bone in the air and picked up two easily.

  ‘13 April 1788,’ said Kyesha. Aleksei still found it very doubtful that this was indeed Maks’ brother, but he had done his homework. He threw the stones down again, perhaps a little too hard. They bounced wildly and spread further apart than usual.

  ‘What’s your mother’s patronymic? For two.’

  Kyesha accepted. It was a harder pick-up, but Aleksei managed it.

  ‘Malinovna,’ said Kyesha. ‘But that was too easy, Aleksei; it was in the letter I gave you.’

  Aleksei had realized that almost as soon as he’d asked the question. He threw the bones again. ‘Your father’s?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

  ‘I don’t accept,’ said Kyesha. Aleksei smiled. It seemed that his opponent’s research had not gone very deep after all.

  ‘For three?’

  ‘OK.’

  The way the bones had fallen made three tricky. Aleksei threw the one in his hand higher than he had before. He picked up three from the ground easily enough, but had to reach out to catch the one in the air. He smiled as he felt his fingers grip it, and then looked Kyesha in the face, waiting for an answer.

  ‘Our father’s name was Sergei.’ He paused, as if unsure, but Aleksei guessed now that he was merely teasing. ‘Sergei Ilyich Lukin.’

  He was right. It meant nothing except that he had come well prepared. Aleksei tried a change of tack. He threw the bones down again.

  ‘Have we met before? For two.’

  ‘No,’ said Kyesha.

  ‘We haven’t?’ asked Aleksei.

  ‘I mean, no, I don’t accept the bet.’

  ‘For three?’

  Kyesha shook his head.

  ‘For four?’

  Kyesha considered for a moment, then nodded. It did not really matter. Aleksei knew Kyesha would not have tried to avoid the question if the answer had been ‘no’. His very resistance implied – though he might well have been bluffing – that they had met. Aleksei had thought his face familiar that first evening in the theatre, but he still could not place it.

  The large bone hit the stone platform with a gentle click just as Aleksei’s fingers reached for the third one to pick up. He did not mind about not having his question answered, but it did mean that he lost control. He handed the bones over to Kyesha.

  ‘I have no personal questions for you, Aleksei,’ he said, throwing the bones down. ‘I trust that you are who you say you are.’ Aleksei noted, not for the first time, how Kyesha’s calm and confidence appeared out of keeping with his youth.

  ‘When did my brother die?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

  Aleksei accepted. It was an easy bet, but Aleksei had no objections to answering the question. In fact, he realized, he would probably learn more from hearing what Kyesha had to ask than from any answers he might give to Aleksei’s questions. Kyesha had no trouble picking up the knucklebones.

  ‘28 August 1812,’ said Aleksei. It was a date he would never forget.

  ‘Was he a traitor? For two.’

  Aleksei nodded his acceptance of the bet even as he considered what his answer would be. Again, Kyesha had no trouble snatching up the two bones, but Aleksei did not answer his question.

  ‘Well? Was Maksim a traitor?’

  ‘He was a French spy,’ said Aleksei. ‘He confessed that much to me himself.’ The words were carefully chosen, and Kyesha did not press for a more direct answer. Instead, he cast down the bones again.

  ‘Did you kill him? For one.’

  Aleksei would have answered that question for none, as Kyesha had clearly guessed with the simplicity of the challenge, but they followed the routine.

  ‘No, I did not,’ he answered when the time came. The direct answer disguised more than it revealed.

  ‘Did Dmitry? For two.’

  For a brief moment, Aleksei felt a horrible pang of concern at the sound of his son’s name on Kyesha’s lips, but he quickly realized that the object of the question was not Dmitry Alekseevich, but the long dead Dmitry Fetyukovich. Aleksei pictured the abandoned farmyard where he had last seen Dmitry – not the last time he had seen him alive, nor indeed the first time he had seen him dead. It had been the spring of 1813. At the first sign of a thaw, Aleksei had headed back to the burnt-out farmhouse north of Yurtsevo where he had left Dmitry’s frozen corpse. Even then, the ground had been hard to dig – but easier than it would have been in the winter, when Aleksei had first found the body. It did not matter how hard it was; Aleksei had made a promise to himself. Dmitry was the third and last of the three comrades he had lost during Bonaparte’s invasion. He had witnessed none of their deaths, but had buried them all.

  ‘For three then?’ asked Kyesha, misinterpreting Aleksei’s silence. Aleksei nodded, and Kyesha collected the bones without trouble.

  ‘No,’ said Aleksei. ‘Dmitry didn’t kill Maks either.’ It was as accurate as the answer he had just given concerning himself.

  ‘There was a famous Dmitry died at this very spot, wasn’t there?’ said Kyesha. Aleksei said nothing, surprised by the change of subject. He glanced down at the knucklebones. Kyesha misread the gesture. ‘You’re not going to make me play for an answer to a question like that, are you?’

  Aleksei smiled. ‘I suppose not. You’re right. That was 1606. The first “False Dmitry”.’

  ‘There was more than one?’

  ‘There were three – each claiming, falsely, to be the missing heir to the late tsar, Ivan IV. All in the Time of Troubles. He didn’t last long. When the mob had finished with him, they left his body here.’ Aleksei was a little surprised that Kyesha didn’t know all this, but Maks too had had surprising gaps in his knowledge of Russian history. On the other hand, Kyesha might just have been playing dumb. ‘You know why they call this thing Lobnoye Mesto?’ he asked.