‘So, they’re all lying when they say there’s no democracy under the communists?’

  ‘Was there democracy under the Tsar?’

  ‘But the Bolsheviks didn’t replace the Tsar, they replaced Alexander Kerenskii’s government, who would have held the first elections in the history of Russia, if the communists hadn’t used force of arms to shut the Constitutional Assembly down and send everybody home.’

  ‘Was there democracy under the Tsar?’ Margarita repeated.

  ‘Perhaps not. But Lenin and his gang made big promises that the new regime would be better than the old one.’

  ‘And so it is, much, much better than the old one.’

  ‘Is it democratic? Can you honestly tell me there is a democracy like the one Russia would have had if the Constitutional Assembly had been elected?’

  ‘It depends how you define democracy.’ Margarita lit another cigarette.

  ‘Is it democratic?’ Alyosha persisted.

  ‘You’re shutting your mind again. Try and be more receptive to other ways of living. Why is it only your way that’s valid? If I explain to you the true nature of communism, will you promise to put your prejudices to one side and listen?’

  Without even waiting for his reply, Margarita launched forth.

  ‘There is a very great difference between bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy. The first is based on the idea of the will of the nation, which unites the will of every class within the state. The truth of it is that, within a bourgeois state, there are several classes with different interests… I speak from experience. When I first came to Berlin, I found work – I don’t know if you remember this – in a cake factory. There, on the assembly line, I saw for the first time in my life how the capitalist system operated. Why kill yourself working long hours only to put more profit in the bosses’ pockets? Working more than ten hours a day certainly didn’t benefit the workers.’

  ‘Margarita, I’ve worked in awful jobs myself, I’m not denying there are bad bosses out there.’

  ‘The raison d’être of all bosses is to squeeze as much work out of us as they can, for as little money as they can get away with, in order to maximise their own profit.

  ‘I’m just not so sure it’s that simple,’ he said.

  ‘But it is that simple. Talking about the common will is sheer folly. Essentially, the will of one class or another has to triumph. There is no middle way. Between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, where is the common will? Either the bourgeoisie will prevail or the proletariat will prevail, and whoever wins will impose their will on the state. The victorious proletariat wills a communist republic, a society which operates for the benefit of the many, and not for the few rich and privileged.’

  He remained silent, reluctant to capitulate so easily, and besides, he wasn’t sure yet what he thought. Margarita let him be for a while before saying, ‘I can see from your face that what I said is beginning to make sense to you. There’s nothing mysterious or complicated about communism. Anybody can understand it. Marxism is the answer to the age-old problems of the human condition and the tangle of history. Keep thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Which class offers hope and deliverance from oppression, and transforms the world for the better? And which class wants to reinforce the old slavery?’

  13.

  Alyosha was lying on his bed when he heard the front door open and voices cross the hall. He sat up to listen, then went to the top of the stairs, but there was nothing more to be heard. As he padded downstairs, he noticed the thick protruding vein on his left foot, like a snail under his skin. That was the price for tramping the streets of Paris.

  He went over to the parlour door and opened it, then froze, as the couple quickly drew away from each other. His cousin blushed deeply, and half turned her shoulder, her pregnant stomach very obvious. The young man jumped to his feet, but then just stood there awkwardly, and Alyosha felt that he should say something, but no words came. Larissa started fussing with the sofa cushions, and eventually said, ‘I thought you were thinking of going out for the afternoon.’

  ‘I had thought of going for a walk,’ Alyosha answered, ‘but I went to rest instead.’

  Nobody knew quite what to say next. In the end, Alyosha managed to say, ‘You’ve no need to worry… I won’t say anything.’

  ‘Not even to Margarita?’ asked Larissa, a little too hurriedly.

  ‘Not even to her…’

  ‘Thank you. Alyosha, this is Simon – Simon, Alyosha, my cousin…’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ said her lover, shaking his hand.

  It was the maid’s half-day, so Larissa made the three of them tea in the kitchen, as they tried to keep up the rather stilted conversation. Alyosha learned that Simon Schlünz was a junior doctor at the Charité Hospital, and had recently saved Larissa from being attacked – or worse.

  ‘No, I’m not a Berliner, I come from a place called Schwalmstadt in Hessen… There’s a castle’

  ‘And a Spring Fair,’ prompted Larissa.

  ‘Yes, quite a famous one. Sells all sorts of things…’

  Alyosha watched his cousin hanging on his every word.

  ‘…pots and pans, crockery, fruit and nuts and foods of every description…’

  There was admiration and love in her expression. After her initial embarrassment, she seemed pleased to be able to share him with someone else.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Simon presently. ‘You were badly beaten, Larissa tells me?’

  ‘These things happen.’

  They smiled at each other, and then Larissa put her hand to her stomach as she felt the baby kick.

  Bruno’s baby, or Simon’s? Alyosha wondered.

  He felt he was trespassing on their time together, so he told them he would take that walk after all.

  14.

  It was almost three in the morning and Artyom was drunk. There’d been a great deal of flirting and kissing of wrists and arms at the bar, and then he’d tried for a proper kiss from the prettiest of the lot. She was staggeringly beautiful, but a nervy little thing, terrified of her husband’s anger, though longing at the same time for some sexual adventure.

  Artyom felt sure – on the basis of past experiences – that her lovemaking would be wild and uninhibited, however coy she seemed. He’d had enough women like her over the years, women who were sexually starved. But then, her husband appeared with a glass of Tzuica in his hand, stout and red-cheeked. He was an idiot, of course, his conversation dull and pompous, reminding Artyom of a saying of his grandfather’s that men with small minds were very similar to bottles with narrow necks: the less substance they contained, the more noise they made in the pouring.

  The man summoned his wife over to the roulette table, where Artyom had the pleasure of watching him lose. His own luck wasn’t much better; he wasn’t concentrating, as his eye still roved the room for a woman, though he was, by now, too drunk to do anything about it.

  Leaving the Haussmann Club on his own, he felt thwarted and irritable, and he lost his temper with the chauffeur when he tried to warn him against bumping his head as he bent clumsily to get in to the back of the Rolls-Royce. He wasn’t aware of the hot lump on his forehead until he had crossed the threshold of the villa.

  He stumbled up the stairs and crashed around the bedroom in the gloom, dropping his clothes on the floor as he undressed.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Sssshhh.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  His throat was hoarse with smoking, talking and laughing. He collapsed naked onto the bed, flung an arm around Zepherine, and immediately sank into a drunken sleep. Zepherine, furious that he hadn’t even bothered to answer her, tried to wake him, shaking his shoulder and then, her temper mounting, kicked his leg.

  ‘Don’t…’ he mumbled.

  ‘Where have you been until now?’

  ‘Need to sleep…’

  ‘Artyom? You stink of cheap perfume. You’ve been carrying on with someone, haven’t you?’

  He rolled onto his side, turning his back to her.

  ‘Well?’ she asked, and continued to punch him. ‘Who was she? Where did you go? I can smell her on you, you bastard.’

  There was a knock on the door, and a sleepy maid poked her head into the room, saying there was somebody on the telephone asking for Monsieur Artyom.

  ‘At this time of the night? Is it her?’ asked Zepherine.

  The fog of drunkenness cleared amazingly quickly when the maid gave Artyom the name. He wrapped himself in the coverlet from the bed and stepped past the plump maid, who was trying to stifle her yawns. Zepherine had hired her because she was the plainest of the six who had been interviewed – almost ugly in fact – and so was highly unlikely to be a threat to the lady of the house.

  In the dark study, he gave himself a moment to clear his head before he picked up the receiver. It could only be bad news. What else had a call in the middle of the night ever been?

  A lonely little voice reached him from the other end of the line.

  There was a problem.

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  In the background, he could hear the voices of some stragglers wandering out into the night. In his mind’s eye, Artyom could see Pierre standing at the booth in the corner of the Café de la Terrasse, and he could practically smell Marseille in his nostrils.

  Pierre was gabbling away. There was something rash and reckless in his make-up which Artyom was already aware of, and he would often overreact and panic when the slightest little thing occurred – a dangerous cocktail.

  Artyom tried to slow him down. ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me…’

  Pierre gradually became more coherent. L’Oreille had been due to meet him that night at the Stockholm, but hadn’t appeared.

  ‘Why? Where was he?’

  Somebody had lobbed a bottle of petrol through a window of the cottage on the outskirts of Bandol where the heroin was prepared, and set light to it, burning the place to a cinder, with Louis Albertini, the chemist, and L’Oreille inside.

  ‘Are they alive?’

  That was why he was calling. L’Oreille had finally made contact with Pierre. Apart from some minor burns on their hands, he and Albertini were safe, but the main worry was that the entire latest load had been destroyed in the fire. All their equipment had gone as well, and the flics had been there already, searching through the smouldering remains of the cottage for evidence.

  Artyom’s mind was darting all over the place, but he suddenly heard his father’s voice warning him that people who played with fire usually ended up being burned. He hadn’t heard that voice for a very long time, but it seemed rather apt given the circumstances.

  ‘Did you settle with them?’ asked Pierre quietly.

  ‘What do you take me for? I’ve settled with them every time.’

  ‘Them’ were François Spirito and Paul Carbone, who ruled the docks of Marseille. When they were younger, they had smuggled opium themselves, but these days, they simply claimed a hefty commission for every load of opium smuggled through the docks from Beirut, making a handsome amount of money without having to dirty their own hands.

  If there was nothing owing to them, then they weren’t responsible for the fire. But L’Oreille and Pierre had both warned Artyom that, for some months now, a rival gang had been trying to encroach on Spirito and Carbone’s patch, and that Lolole and Meme Corse were becoming a force to be reckoned with. Several men had already lost their lives. Pierre had told him that in the little Vatican, a part of the Old Port which was like a city within a city, and which had been ruled by Spirito and Carbone for years – the atmosphere was tense.

  Barely a month before, one of François Spirito’s nephews had been stabbed in his eye outside the Nautique Club. Reprisal had been swift and savage. Tempers were running high, and it was only a matter of time until there was an all-out war, from which only one gang could emerge victorious, after which everything would settle down again. In the meantime, this fire was most likely a message to Artyom that he had picked the wrong side. Artyom knew that without the protection of one or other of the gangs, his business was totally impossible. It was a dangerous place to be.

  Zepherine had come in to the study, but he half turned his back to her.

  ‘I’ll come down the day after tomorrow.’

  Pierre asked why he couldn’t come sooner.

  ‘I can’t. I have things to attend to here in Paris. But I’ll be there the day after tomorrow. I promise.’

  Zepherine watched him as he hung up.

  ‘What?’ he asked, his mind racing.

  ‘Are you really going to try and claim that there’s nothing going on?’

  When she didn’t receive an answer, Zepherine flounced out. Artyom sat down quietly, to try and clear his thoughts. He was still sitting there when morning broke, the image of the cottage going up in flames before his eyes, and all his dreams with it.

  15.

  To Bruno’s great disappointment, the new baby was a girl, whom they named Clara. He and Alyosha went to a bar called Bauer, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse, to celebrate, along with four or five of Bruno’s colleagues from the hospital. From there, they then went on to watch the bicycle racing at Plötzensee, where Bruno became very sentimental, and told Alyosha how much his little girls meant to him. He spoke of his love for ‘my Larissa’, and how he would be lost if something happened to her. He had slung his arm around Alyosha’s shoulder, and it remained there, like a dead weight.

  ‘There’s nothing I ought to know, is there?’ he whispered in his ear.

  ‘Know about what?’

  ‘You’re in the house for most of the day. Don’t look so clueless…’

  Bruno squeezed his shoulder.

  ‘You’d tell me? Hmmm? Man to man?’

  ‘Why? What do you think is going on…?

  ‘I don’t think anything is going on, I’m only asking…’

  ‘Well, no, of course…’

  ‘So, there’s nothing going on? You’re sure?’

  Alyosha was feeling increasingly uncomfortable, and was glad when Bruno let the subject drop. That night, he came to the conclusion that he had probably overstayed his welcome. It was time he stopped imposing on his cousin. He was used to living his own life, and he was starting to miss his freedom.

  16.

  Artyom instructed the chauffeur to park in the shade of one of the warehouses, and to wait for him. He walked past the seamen’s hostels and the offices for sailors looking for a passage, and made his way to the Stockholm. From the babel at the bar, he was greeted by Doña Rosa, the strapping Spanish woman who ran the place with her son, Camilo José. He was not quite sixteen ounces to the pound, but was perfectly pleasant until his temper was up. Then, he became a murderous lunatic, and would snort like a pig as he stamped a man’s head to porridge.

  The beauty of the Stockholm as a meeting-place was that it was completely safe. Doña Rosa was discretion itself, wise as the three wise monkeys. As for the clientele, even if they overheard something incriminatory, by the time the job was done, the potential witness would be safely back on his ship on the other side of the world. How were the flics to find witnesses, when there were no witnesses to be had?

  The little man arrived. He pulled up a chair and Artyom lit his cigarette. L’Oreille didn’t have much good news. Spirito and Carbone had decided to teach a lesson to the leader of the dockers’ trade union, Jean Carré, in order to keep him in line. A man was sent round to his house and gave his wife and children a good scare, but this proved a miscalculation. Carré, far from being cowed, saw red, and vowed that Spirito and Carbone would pay dearly for threatening his family. Jean Carré ruled over four thousand men, so it was really not a good idea to cross him. The word was that he was going to throw in his lot with Lolole and Meme Corse. There was another rumour, as yet unconfirmed, that two of Spirito and Carbone’s inner circle, seeing the way the wind was blowing, had already sailed on a whaler bound for Newfoundland.

  ‘You can be away for eighteen months to two years at a time on those whalers,’ said L’Oreille in his light cynical way. ‘By the time you’re back home, things will have calmed down, and everybody will have forgotten the reason you went away in the first place. Mind you, it’s a rubbish job. You’ll only get desperate men on a boat like that. You’re almost bound to lose a couple of toes, or fingers – or your mind – because it’s so fucking cold.’

  ‘What do you think the outcome will be?’ Artyom inquired.

  ‘Spirito and Carbone are on borrowed time. Everybody knows that. If you want to carry on, and I know you do, you don’t have much choice but to go the other lot and hear their terms.’

  Artyom left the bar feeling unsettled. Quite aside from his business troubles, he was still feeling peevish about Zepherine, who was being ridiculously quarrelsome, reproachful and jealous. If he so much as looked at another woman, she’d accuse him of wanting to get into her underclothes. More often than not, of course, he did. But what business was that to her, he fumed, as long as he kept her in luxury, fed her, clothed her, and made sure not to humiliate her by being relatively discreet? That was how practically every other man of Artyom’s acquaintance arranged things, and their wives didn’t complain one bit.

  He had promised her he would be back home by the weekend, but he was already dreading it, as he knew it would drag interminably; two long days of Zepherine being sulky, picking fights, hurling accusations, then long hours of moody silence. It would be unbearable. And what in God’s name had he done to deserve such treatment? He couldn’t win. The more attention and presents he gave, the kinder he was to her, the more suspicious she became. Now that she had made her mind up he had somebody else, whatever he did, he couldn’t win.