Despite having seen it before, Aleksei found the ballet just about incomprehensible. He had, he believed, worked out who was playing Zephyr, the west wind, and who was Flora, the goddess of flowers and spring. Even before he’d entered the theatre he’d questioned why a Greek god should be attempting to seduce a Roman goddess when her Greek equivalent, Chloris, would at least be more likely to speak his language. But looking at the woman who was dancing the part of Flora, he couldn’t help but wonder why any god or mortal, Greek or Roman, would want to seduce her, even if she offered him every one of the flowers that she caused to bloom in the spring. It was surprise enough that the rope by which she was all too frequently suspended – an innovation by Didelot in his original production – could hold her in the air long enough for her to fly across the stage and join her lover. Aleksei could only imagine the two, perhaps three, stagehands off in the wings, valiantly straining to keep the nymph aloft.

  But he remembered that, just as he was not here to enjoy the ballet, he was equally not here to despise it. He glanced around the auditorium again and then down at the empty seat beside him. It was too late. The seat was no longer empty. On it lay a package, wrapped in paper, with three letters scrawled on its front:

  Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov. Kyesha had slipped in to deliver it without Aleksei even noticing. Perhaps Kyesha himself had not come at all – he could have asked anyone to place the parcel on the seat. And it could have happened at any time within the last ten minutes. But there was no benefit in speculating. Aleksei grabbed the package and rushed out of the auditorium. The tunnel took him quickly out to the foyer and then he headed straight on, out of the theatre and into the square.

  At first, he saw nothing. The square was not bustling, but as busy as one would expect on a Saturday evening. It was only after a few moments that he perceived a consensus of motion amongst a significant fraction of the people. Most walked in their own direction, or stood still, but all around, a number of individuals and often pairs were cutting through the crowd at a run, converging on a point just out of Aleksei’s view – around the corner of the Maly Theatre. They were like ants, rushing home and converging on a single entrance to their nest. All were men he had deployed to track Kyesha. He felt a presence at his shoulder and turned. It was one of them – Lieutenant Batenkov, if he remembered correctly.

  ‘We saw him speaking to Lieutenant Danilov, sir,’ he said. ‘The lieutenant gave the signal.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They headed east, over there.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And where’s Lieutenant Danilov now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Aleksei raced down the theatre steps and diagonally across the square. Batenkov ran to keep up with him.

  ‘Did you see what happened next?’ asked Aleksei as they hurtled through the crowds.

  ‘No. One of the men must have; he gave a shout. Then everyone started running.’

  They crossed the street, dodging the slow-moving carriages, and turned past the Maly Theatre. Quite a crowd had gathered – passers-by as well as the soldiers – but it opened up as Aleksei approached, walking now. Aleksei saw the soles of a pair of boots first, then the body, laid flat on its back, and finally the face, covered in blood. There was only a small wound to the neck, but it had been instantly fatal. More blood oozed around the head in a slowly growing halo, which caused the circling crowd likewise to expand as people stepped back to avoid sullying their boots.

  It must have been a wrench for Kyesha to leave so much blood unconsumed, but his motivation that night had not been hunger, but flight. And in that he had succeeded.

  CHAPTER XI

  ‘IT’S NOT LIEUTENANT DANILOV, COLONEL.’ BATENKOV HAD KNELT down to examine the body.

  ‘I know that,’ snapped Aleksei. ‘Don’t you think I’d recognize my own son?’ He stepped forward and looked more closely at the bloody face. It was Obukhov. Aleksei knew he should have sent him home earlier when he had seemed so keen for a fight. He should have sent them all home.

  He heard the sound of footsteps trotting down the street and looked up to see Dmitry. Aleksei walked quietly away from the crowd, and Dmitry changed his course to join him. They spoke in low voices.

  ‘I saw him coming out of the theatre,’ said Dmitry.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘I thought so, but he didn’t come over to me. Had you already spoken to him inside?’

  ‘Later,’ said Aleksei. ‘Tell me your story first.’

  ‘Well, I went after him, and once I was close, just about where we are now, it was impossible for him to avoid me. I told him where you were.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said he knew. He seemed in a hurry to leave, so I gave the signal.’ Dmitry repeated the sign. It seemed undetectable to anyone unprepared for it. It wasn’t even right to call it a kiss; Dmitry merely touched his curled index finger to his lips, as if in thought. ‘He can’t have known what it meant, but perhaps he saw one of them react to it. He just turned and ran. Obukhov was further down the street. He threw himself at Kyesha; I didn’t quite see what happened, but Kyesha hardly seemed to pause before running on. I tried to follow, but I lost him.’

  Aleksei said nothing. The whole plan had been foolhardy. A good, if disobedient soldier was dead and Kyesha was no longer going to trust either him or Dmitry. The worst part was how little concern Aleksei really felt for Obukhov.

  ‘What did he say to you in there?’ asked Dmitry.

  Aleksei briefly looked up at his son, not understanding the question for a moment. ‘Oh, I never spoke to him,’ he replied.

  ‘So why did he come here at all?’

  Aleksei held up the package he had discovered on the theatre seat. ‘To give me this.’

  Aleksei’s credentials had proved to be almost too impressive when he showed them to the police. His intention had merely been to get them off his back, but the officer had been all too keen to leave Aleksei in charge of the whole investigation. Whether this was the result of deference or indolence, Aleksei could not tell, but it had taken some persuasion before he had finally been able to leave, with the promise that he would make himself available for any further enquiries. Only himself and Batenkov had been there when the gendarmerie arrived. The others – including Dmitry – had followed orders and dispersed. There would be many unanswered questions for the police, but with luck they would remain unanswered.

  As he walked back home, Aleksei wondered how long the Moscow police kept records for, and how thorough they were in referring to them. Would they go back all the way to 1812? There would be nothing for them to find during the French occupation itself, but there had been deaths after the city had returned to Russian control, one of which – that of Margarita Kirillovna, Domnikiia’s colleague – Aleksei had reported himself. To anyone who cared to look, the similarities between that crime and this would become immediately apparent.

  ‘He got away, didn’t he?’ Domnikiia spoke within seconds of Aleksei’s coming through the door. Even though there was barely enough light to see even his outline, she knew him well enough to perceive his mood. He sat on the bed beside her.

  ‘Yes, he got away.’ He didn’t mention the death of Obukhov. He hoped her intuition might detect that too, but if it did, she said nothing. She stroked his back.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve at least scared him away.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Aleksei. But he had little doubt that Kyesha had been planning to leave Moscow anyway.

  ‘Come to bed,’ she said, moving her hand on to his thigh. He looked towards her, just able to make out the glint of her eyes.

  ‘No, there’s something I’ve got to do.’ He leaned forward and kissed her, but in the darkness missed her mouth, his lips falling somewhere close to the side of her nose.

  ‘Do me,’ she whispered, but he stood up and walked to the door.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

  In the adjoining room he lit the lamp and sat down at the desk. He laid the parcel down in front of him and slipped on his spectacles. There was no string or other fastening – the crumpled paper had simply been wrapped around the contents. The three letters were the only noticeable marks.

  He turned the parcel over and pulled the paper gently aside, drawing the lamp closer to see what it was that he had revealed.

  It was a book.

  A large book, almost the size of a church Bible, but not nearly so thick. It was bound in a pale-brown leather. Aleksei put his fingers out to touch it. It felt extraordinarily delicate, like chamois, but also highly ridged, as though it had not been properly stretched. The leather could be easily deformed and would return to its original shape. It seemed like the work of an amateur. There was nothing written on it. He turned the book over. He had evidently been looking at the back. On the cover were three words:

  Nullius in Verba

  The ink was a greenish-blue and the style ornate. Both the script and the language were Latin. ‘On the words of no one,’ was a rough translation. It meant little to Aleksei. He opened the book.

  The handwritten text inside also used the Latin alphabet, but not the Latin language. Aleksei was fluent enough in French and Italian to have no trouble reading the script, despite the tight cursive handwriting, but the language itself was neither of those. Nor was it German, of which he had some knowledge. The use of words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘is’, repeated beyond any necessity, gave it away as English. It was easier to come up with corresponding words in either French or Italian than it was in Russian itself.

  Aleksei’s understanding of English was woefully poor. He glanced through the book, flicking page after page, but could understand little beyond the structural essentials of the language and the occasional word or phrase that had been lifted wholesale from French or Latin, of which English had so many.

  His understanding of the text might have been helped by the fact that much of it was accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, but with so little knowledge of the language, it was impossible to understand their context. Many of them appeared to be studies of human anatomy, whilst others were less clear, perhaps relating to optics. There were also several tables of numbers, but again, without understanding the text at the top of each column, they offered little enlightenment.

  There was one deduction Aleksei felt he could confidently draw. The six characters heading each new section of the book were dates. The formation of two digits, followed by one, two, three or four letters and then another two digits had confused him for a moment, until he had noticed that the letters were limited to a very small set: ‘x’, ‘v’ and ‘i’. The author was expressing the month in roman numerals. The first entry was dated 9.xii.24 and the last 24.viii.25. Given that the text was English, it was a reasonable assumption that these dates were in the New Style calendar, not the Old. On the other hand, wouldn’t even an Englishman, if he was located in Russia, use the local calendar? The difference was only twelve days anyway. After the final date and its corresponding entry, there were several blank pages. This was a work in progress.

  The only other thing that could be deduced from the dates was that Kyesha was most likely not the author. If he had been, then why had he kept it in his possession for almost six weeks without writing anything new in it? The final entry was dated a little while before that scrawled message had been left in Aleksei’s study in Petersburg. The implication was that Kyesha had acquired the book from its author soon before. It was speculation of course, but it seemed reasonable.

  The English text began to dance before his eyes in the dim lamplight. There was nothing more he would be able to discern that night. He wrapped the book back up in the paper and placed it in a drawer of the desk. He took off his spectacles and rubbed the sides of his head above his ears where they had dug in. Maks might have had a greater intellect than Aleksei, but he most certainly had a smaller skull.

  Aleksei extinguished the lamp and went back into the bedroom. He undressed quickly and slipped into bed beside Domnikiia, wondering if she was still awake. He ran his fingers down her side, lightly brushing her smooth, cool skin and pushing from his mind the strange texture of the book’s covering. When his hand was as far down her leg as he could reach, he ran it back up her body, this time along the inside of her thigh.

  She was awake, but she spoke only briefly before rolling over and turning her back on him. ‘Some hope,’ she said.

  * * *

  The Kerch Strait was not wide; less than five versts across at its narrowest, to use the local measurement. That was a huge gap compared with the Bosphorus, but narrow enough to see the coast on either side from the deck of Rzbunarea. The hills sloped steeply upwards on the Crimean shore, the buildings of the town of Kerch itself clinging to them.

  Ahead lay the Sea of Azov. This was still the familiar route of thirteen years before, but it would be over much sooner – perhaps in less than a day, according to the captain. Already, they were sailing against the outflow from the river Don, at the other end of the small, isolated stretch of water, but on this occasion, he would not be making the tiresome journey upriver into the heart of Russia. On his next visit, he would make that journey and be hailed as a king, but for now, this outpost of the great empire would suffice. Once they had dropped anchor, then all he needed to do was wait. Others would do the work for him.

  A journey taking in all the bookshops of Moscow would be unlikely to yield what Aleksei was looking for. He had never heard of such a thing as a dictionary to assist with translations between English and Russian, and doubted whether anyone else had. Fortunately, he happened to be living under the same roof as one of the greatest bibliophiles in the city, the master of the house himself, Valentin Valentinovich. Not only did he possess an impressive library of his own, but his knowledge of what was in the city’s other libraries was unsurpassed.

  Aleksei knocked on the door of Valentin Valentinovich’s study, and entered when called. He sat down in the chair opposite the desk. After a few cool pleasantries, he asked the most obvious question:

  ‘How’s your English, Valentin?’ He was ambivalent about the response. If Valentin was able to translate the text directly for him, then it might save hours, or even days, of work. But it would be a bold move to ask anyone for a translation of a text whose contents could reveal anything. On the other hand, perhaps just a summary of the first page might send Aleksei on the right track. He could always claim it was a work of fiction – apparently the principal use for the English language.

  ‘Not a word, I’m afraid,’ replied Valentin. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have a letter I need to translate.’

  ‘A letter? Why on earth would anyone write to you in English?’ He wasn’t stupid, and was able to answer his own question almost immediately. ‘It’s not your letter, is it?’

  He stood up from his desk and slammed his hand against the bookshelves. ‘This is really too much, Aleksei.’ Other men would have shouted, but Valentin Valentinovich spoke as if he had never known true anger. He persisted in using French, even though its popularity had been in decline – certainly amongst men of his class – for a decade. ‘I look after your whore, I pretend your bastard is my own, I let you treat my home as though it were a hotel, and now you want to involve me in your . . . your . . . underhand profession.’ He spat the word ‘underhand’ as though it were the foulest profanity he could think of.

  Aleksei remained calm. Valentin was speaking with complete accuracy. Tamara was a bastard – the most adorable bastard in the whole wide world. Domnikiia was, or at least had been, a whore – though Aleksei guessed that Valentin was unaware of the literal truth of his words. It was his attitude to espionage that really riled Aleksei. The man thought himself a gentleman, and thought no spy ever could be. It was an insult to so many of Aleksei’s friends.

  ‘Shall we go and ask Yelena Vadimovna what she thinks of my profession?’ said Aleksei, with a certain sense of pride. It was an obvious enough question for a blackmailer to ask his mark, but in reality it was a three-pronged attack in which blackmail was far from Aleksei’s intent; far, but not completely absent.

  It was almost possible to see Valentin wilt step by step as each aspect washed over him. The use of Yelena’s patronymic, and with it the reminder of her father Vadim, hit him first. Vadim Fyodorovich had practised that same underhand profession. Yelena loved her father without question. To insult Aleksei for that would be to insult her father, and that would be unwise.

  The second problem for Valentin was what Aleksei knew about him. It wasn’t much, but for a man as honourable as Valentin, it was monumental. It had been a minor embezzlement, and Valentin had been unaware of it, but he had trusted flattering colleagues who had promised him the rank of Actual State Counsellor in exchange for help in what they assured him was an entirely legal set of transactions. One of them had been siphoning funds to Polish activists, and that’s how Aleksei had come across the fraud. He’d looked at the books and found that Valentin was guilty of nothing more than allowing others to use his bank account. He made sure Valentin’s name was kept out of the ensuing trial, and even found a way to let him keep half the money. When he revealed what he had done, Valentin had misread him. He’d seen it as an attempt at blackmail and had capitulated in an instant, even though at the time (back in 1818), there was nothing Aleksei had wanted from him. It was that which had precipitated Valentin’s move from government into commerce, and from Petersburg to Moscow. Aleksei had stored the incident away, until Domnikiia had fallen pregnant, and then called in the marker. Valentin saw it as coercion, Aleksei as one good deed being repaid with another. It made no practical difference to the outcome.

  Of course, it had not been Valentin Valentinovich’s decision alone that they should take in Domnikiia and, when she entered the world, Tamara. Yelena Vadimovna had also to be persuaded. On the one hand she would do almost anything for Aleksei, who had been her father’s most trusted comrade but, as was the nature of women, she had become somewhat close to Marfa in Petersburg, even though they only knew one another through Aleksei. Thus to support one friend in his hour of need would be to betray another. In the end, Aleksei liked to think that it was Yelena’s love for her father that had won the day, but there were other factors. Yelena herself had had a lover when she lived in Petersburg. This had been some while after Rodion’s birth, so there was no doubt as to his paternity, and Aleksei could easily understand why an intelligent and vibrant woman like Yelena might seek attention from a man other than Valentin Valentinovich.