‘How?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter how.’

  ‘But it does matter how. Wait…’

  Leonid was already pocketing the bracelet. Alyosha grabbed his arm.

  ‘Oy! Let go! …’

  ‘You’re going to sell that to somebody…’

  ‘Let go of me I said!’

  ‘…who probably knows you. So if the flics shake them down they can pin it on you. It’s too risky’

  They both froze as they heard a noise from downstairs; the unmistakeable sound of the front door opening.

  ‘Out. Now.’

  21.

  ‘I’m bad at remembering names…’ his new neighbour, Yury, had mumbled the first time they met, as he stood at the head of the stairs, dressed only in his vest and underpants. He had been to piss in the zinc bucket in the dark little cupboard that passed for a W.C. ‘Were you in the civil war in Russia?’

  Alyosha said he’d been too young to fight.

  ‘Nobody was too young to wage war on the Antichrist.’ The man scratched his underarm with his dirty fingernails and Alyosha backed away slightly from the stink of him, but there was no escape to be had. ‘Come into my room, why don’t you…’

  Reluctantly, Alyosha followed him in and sat on the unmade bed. He would discover that his neighbour spoke about Russia obsessively, and was always going back to the turmoil of the Civil War. He loathed his life as an exile in Paris.

  Yury pulled a lice comb through his greasy hair and then examined it.

  ‘When I first arrived, the only place I could find to sleep was in a stable with some poor nag of a horse, clapped out after a lifetime of pulling people in a cart around Paris.’

  He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Russia,’ he sighed.

  It was the Russian landscape he missed more than anything. That and the weather. And the people. He described seeing the sun set above Sukhinichi, a blood-red streak across the vast sky, as the clouds froze above the tiny village of Pruzhana on the fringes of the vast Belovezhsk forest, where open fields stretched across the country, fields of oats, fields of barley, and wide meadows of wild mustard. They’d sat there as the rain soaked the soldiers to their skin.

  ‘There’s nothing worse than rain to make a soldier’s uniform stink…’

  And then it would rot on your back and fall to pieces leaving you half naked. The worst time was when you saw miles of marshland lying ahead of you, and you had to slog through it in the rain, your feet so heavy you could barely lift them, through thickets of grey poplars, dense vegetation, clumps of weeds, under a cold green sky, and no shelter to be found for the horses or the soldiers; the merciless wind pursued them with as much savagery as the Red Army.

  Onwards, onwards.

  And the communists never far from their tail.

  Onwards, onwards.

  Until, late one afternoon, a girl in a glade, her big white eyes, her lips open like a scream; nearby, a dog and a small boy, her brother. ‘Go and fetch water from the stream,’ he orders the boy. He tears his shirt, tears it in two, in three. A young girl in her terror – What’s happening to me? You’re having a baby. He rolls up his sleeves. What’s happening to me? A scream swallows her words, deafens them as the pains rips through her. The night in flames; sparks in the forest, and her low whimpering mingling with the rustle of the leaves; dry, white lips, the smell of her sweat among the birds, the moles and the sharp scent of a zig-zaggy fox, until something pink spills onto the straw like a piglet.

  Yury’s stories were nearly all of the same ilk.

  ‘How were we so stupid as to lose Russia?’ he’d ask, again and again. On one evening, the man demanded, ‘When do you think we’ll all be able to go home?’ while on another, as Alyosha was combing the lice out of his hair above a basin of boiling water, Yuri begged, ‘Alexei Fyodorovich? When do you think the hour will come?’

  ‘Some day.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  He wasn’t sure at all.

  ‘This is the age of Caesar,’ his neighbour raged, ‘an age of blood and iron, and we just kick at the wind.’

  Yury often felt he was going crazy, as well as bewilderingly powerless and listless; that he was nothing more than his current situation, and that his future was a bleak affair.

  Russia, Russia…

  His friends in Paris were ex-soldiers from the White Army almost to a man. One of his closest friends was a one-armed twenty-eight-year-old called Fedot. Every time they met, they got roaring drunk together, and reminisced as the big red trumpet of the gramophone sang arias from Rigoletto.

  22.

  Alyosha lifted his head. For a split second in the dense blackness, he had absolutely no idea where he was. But a stranger’s fist was knocking furiously on his door. He pulled back a curtain to let the moonlight flood the floor of his room, and stumbled to the door.

  Two devils stood there.

  He groped for his visa, his permis de sejour and his Nansen passport, and stood there, bleary-eyed, as they rifled through them. Neither of them looked as though they were in any hurry to leave, or gave any apology for turfing him out of his bed at six in the morning. Outside his window, a glimmer of light was just inching its way into the sky.

  Before he’d left Berlin, Alyosha had spent days running from one counter to another, from office to office on Alexanderplatz, begging for the passport created especially for stateless Russians. Then more endless queues and interviews, before he’d obtained his visa in the office of the French Counsel. A permis de sejour could only be obtained on the Paris black market, and had cost him dearly. But his papers were all in order.

  The visit had the stamp of a warning about it. They’d been investigating a spate of burglaries, and his name had been passed on to them. They didn’t want to accuse him or arrest him (‘Not at present anyway’), but they wanted him to know that they would be keeping an eye on him from now on.

  ‘So if you have any common sense…’

  ‘Can I have my visa back?’

  ‘If you want it back, you’ll need to go and see this man.’

  The name on the card he’d been given was Superintendent Chenot.

  Alyosha didn’t have much choice. Without a visa he could easily be arrested on the street in broad delight, and transported over the border in chains between two policemen. When he showed up at the Préfecture de Police on Boulevard de Paris the next morning and announced himself, he was ushered up to an office on the second floor, where a man in his fifties, dressed in a dark suit and a shirt with an ill-fitting collar, sat behind the desk.

  Alyosha took a cigarette from the proffered silver case. Superintendent Chenot was clean-shaven, and his fleshy cheeks testified to a life of good eating and drinking. There was some slight defect in his left eye which meant it was always half shut, and he wore a pair of spectacles, with black bone frames. He was friendly enough, made small talk about this and that, although Alyosha hardly said a word.

  ‘Do you know what the secret of policing Paris is?’ the Superintendent asked eventually. ‘I’d be happy to let you in on it.’

  Through a gap in the clouds, a shaft of light fell on the old grey mansard roofs of the tall buildings of the Quai Saint-Michel. Alyosha watched the tourists strolling past the stalls lining the walls of the riverbank. He could also hear the faint hum from the steady trickle of traffic: trucks, motor cars and omnibuses.

  ‘…are you listening to me?’ Superintendent Chenot clicked his fingers. ‘Small accidents and small men can cook up big events.’

  He insisted that Alyosha shut his eyes and try to imagine a gang of men sitting in a room in a building somewhere in Paris at that very minute, plotting some villainy. A burglary. Something even worse, an atrocity. A bomb in a café, perhaps. What did anybody know about these men? How would it be possible to prevent them? Through what method?

  ‘The most important commodity for a policeman,’ Superintendent Chenot told him, ‘is knowledge. When a man knows all there is to know about his fellow man, he’s in a very privileged position. It makes it possible to re-arrange the pattern of events, so the consequences are diverted – but without anybody being any the wiser about the unseen hand quietly steering it all.’ Suddenly he laughed – a big heartfelt sound. ‘The expression on your face, Alexei Fyodorovich!’

  As he lit another cigarette, Alyosha noticed that the policeman’s nails were bitten down to the quick.

  ‘What would you like to be?’ Chenot asked him calmly from behind his black spectacles.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Apart from a thief.’

  Alyosha denied that he was one.

  ‘Seen your friend Leonid Kolosov recently? You needn’t answer, because you haven’t. Do you know why? Because he’s with us – well he’s not with us exactly, but in a cell over in Santé. Mind you, I’m not sure how much of a friend he is to you, really. We brought him in for a little chat after he’d been trying to flog a bracelet over in the Bois de Verrière market, only the stall holder happens to be one of our songbirds. Now… we don’t have the evidence against you that we have against your friend. But then again… how will you survive in Paris without your visa? Or your permis de séjour?’

  Knuckles rapped against the frosted glass of the door and a curly-headed man with a ginger beard came in, shirt-sleeves rolled up and his trousers hoicked up over his stomach with braces. He placed a file on Superintendent Chenot’s desk and said he couldn’t go any further with it until his boss looked at it.

  ‘I’ll telephone you once I’ve finished, Eric,’ Superintendent Chenot looked directly at Alyosha and added, ‘I shouldn’t be too much longer.’

  The curly haired man nodded and left the office.

  ‘Do you know this man?’ asked the policeman holding up a photograph in front of him.

  Alyosha nodded, ‘Baron Wrangel. He led the White Army.’

  ‘And what about this one?’

  Yury Safronovich.

  ‘You needn’t say a word. I know that you do. You both live at the Hôtel de Nantes.’

  He picked up two or three other photographs. ‘We have all sorts of people singing to us in all sorts of places – you’d be surprised.’

  Yury Safronovich was a member of the Soiuz Russkikh Ofitservo Uchastnikov Voiny – the Union of White Army Officers in Paris, which held regular meetings. It was the duty of the Paris police to keep an eye on all foreign groups, never mind who they were. The Reds. The Whites. Mussolini-hating Italians. Arabs. Armenians. Yellow students from Cochinchina, hell-bent on toppling the regime in Saigon. In short, the riff-raff from all continents, who had found refuge here in France, the shit from the gutters of every country in the world. Nobody was going to turn the Republic into an arena for political intrigue, with so much potential for violence. Not on his watch. And now that the Soviet Union and France had restored diplomatic relations, any plotting from the White émigrés was at best a nuisance, and at worse, harmful to French interests.

  ‘So… you do us the odd favour, and you can be sure we’ll look after you.’

  Alyosha asked what kind of favours he had in mind.

  ‘You just tell us what your friends are talking about. What’s on their mind.’

  ‘You want me to be a Judas?’

  ‘You could argue that Judas helped Jesus Christ to bring about God’s eternal purpose in the world. So, you wouldn’t be a traitor, you’d be a facilitator.’

  23.

  Zepherine was at home with the baby, but his uncle’s wife gave Alyosha a distinctly lukewarm welcome, especially once she understood that he’d come to ask Artyom a favour. He needed to be put in touch with Milko Steiner as quickly as possible, so that he could buy a new visa on the black market.

  He offered her a cigarette, but Zepherine made a point of taking one from the wooden box at her elbow, and said curtly, ‘I though you weren’t on speaking terms with your uncle? But then, you only call by when you want something.’

  It was the truth and he didn’t have a ready answer. He snuffed his match out between his thumb and forefinger and slipped it into his pocket.

  ‘Is he here?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, he’s not. He’s away on business, and before you ask, I’ve no idea where.’

  ‘When are you expecting him back?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘He didn’t say?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  Alyosha suspected that she knew, but chose not to share the information with him.

  ‘Would it be possible for a message to reach him?’

  ‘Would it be possible for you to stop interrogating me?’

  ‘I want to put our quarrel behind us.’

  ‘Do you now? Well, well.’ She swept a wisp of hair back from her face.

  ‘I was at fault to doubt him. It was my mother who got rid of Grete, I realise that now.’

  ‘You took your time to come to that conclusion.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hope you’re not just saying this to me because you need his help again.’

  ‘Like I said, I was at fault.’

  ‘So what are you living on? Your mother’s money? Have you patched things up with her too?’

  He had no intention of telling Zepherine how precariously he was living, and the conversation limped on until Alyosha could bear it no more and made an excuse to leave. At the door Zepherine asked him to wait a moment and came back with a letter in her hand.

  ‘This belongs to you.’

  Alyosha recognised the writing at once and noticed the Biarritz postmark.

  ‘It arrived… let’s see… a while back now. I don’t remember exactly when. Better late than never I suppose.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  They said their farewells and he left his uncle’s house.

  He read through his mother’s scrawl on a bench in the Luxembourg gardens. The Hôtel Biarritz in Biarritz. What was she doing there? Was she on holiday, or had she taken up residence?

  The contents were direct and to the point. Alexei Alexeivich Dashkov had left her for another woman. He had taken advantage of her and stolen her money. He had been opportunistic and selfish from start to finish. She begged Alyosha to forgive her for not listening to him when he warned her; she longed to see him once more, she thought about him constantly, was worried about him and realised how badly she had treated him.

  Alyosha was about to throw the letter away, but changed his mind. He decided he was going to reply to his mother.

  24.

  At the best of times, Yury was a sad and self-pitying creature, which explained why there was always a sour, bitter air about him. He hardly ever laughed. Perhaps he had lost the capacity, as his only reaction to a witty comment was to say ‘ha ha’, which made him sound even sourer. One of his favourite phrases was, ‘Every exile is a chronicler of suffering’.

  There was something sickly about him, his shoulders always hunched and his hands usually stuffed up the sleeves of his shirt as if he was trying to keep warm, even on a sunny day. Not only had he been uprooted and thrown to the four winds, many years previously, Yury had been disappointed in love. He had never come to terms with his loss and still lived with his pain, in summer as in winter, day and night, frozen in his misery as the city streamed past him.

  ‘You have no idea how much I loved her.’ Like picking at a scab, he insisted on revisiting his memories over and over. ‘We were engaged. I remember putting the ring on her finger as though it were yesterday.’

  This was in Kiev during the Civil War.

  ‘Look…’

  He took a photograph out of his pocket.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ he asked, smiling gently. ‘Tell me honestly.’

  ‘Very beautiful.’

  ‘Wasn’t she?’ Yury kissed her image. ‘Nobody could hold a candle to her. Then that fucking stinking fucker of a Jew stole her from under my nose.’

  His grief for her loss was stronger than anything else. At the time, he’d been running a puppet theatre in Kiev with Tamara Bobrikova, this girl who left him for another man – some journalist by the name of Stanislav Markovich Feldman. Destroyed, Yury decided to join the White Army and go off to fight the Reds, just as the first chill winds of winter were blowing in. It was his attempt at burying his pain, though he nursed a hope that Tamara Bobrikova would see through the Jew, and come back to him one day.

  ‘That hope was the only thing that kept me alive through that winter of mud and blood.’

  He wasn’t only fighting for Russia, he was fighting to win Tamara back, and he clung to his dream of returning victorious to Kiev to fill his lungs with a pure spring breeze. But Tamara Bobrikova was lost to him forever, and all down the years he still loved her, still desired her, though he hadn’t heard a word of what had become of her. The worst of it, what gave him more pain than anything, was that he had lost her to one of Jesus Christ the Saviour’s murderers, one of the race who had nailed the Son of God to the cross.

  ‘I used to know him,’ Alyosha finally had to admit.

  ‘The Jew Feldman? You?’

  He nodded.

  ‘How? When?’

  Alyosha told him of his own troubles in Kiev. Then he said, ‘He used to see my cousin, Margarita Kozmyevna, in Berlin for a while.’

  ‘Did you ever hear him mention Tamara?’

  ‘No, never.’

  Ever since he’d lost her, Yury’s heart had darkened, his reason was disturbed and his judgment impaired. No wonder he used to shout at himself so much. Behind the door of his room, he kept a puppet of the devil – one he’d bought in an open-air market in Moscow – and often the two of them would scream at each other for hours, which always terrified any new tenant.