Blackstone and the Endgame (20 page)

Rasputin had decided that another of the women should sit next to him, and her delight was as obvious as the despair of the other woman had been.

‘I'm told that one of his favourite tricks is to stick his fingers deep in a dish of jam and then have his disciplines lick them clean,' Vladimir said. ‘I'm not sure who I despise more – him or his women.'

When the whole party was finally seated, Vladimir stood up and walked over to Rasputin's table. Once there, he bent down and whispered something in the
starets
' ear. Rasputin replied, and Vladimir took a step backwards and made a great show of shaking his head in a disbelieving manner.

Rasputin spoke again, waving his hand agitatedly through the air, and Vladimir laughed.

Rasputin attempted to rise from his chair – perhaps to take a swing at the other man – but Vladimir placed a powerful hand on his shoulder and forced him down again.

One of the gowned women at the table started to speak to Vladimir. Her face was full of rage, and it was obvious – even from a distance – that she was telling him to leave Rasputin alone. Then Vladimir raised his hand in a commanding gesture, and she fell silent.

Blackstone shook his head in silent admiration. It was unlikely that any of the people at Rasputin's table knew who Vladimir was – the very nature of his business dictated that he be unknown – yet, just by his presence alone, he was dominating them all.

Rasputin said something else to him, and Vladimir nodded.

This time, when the
starets
started to stand up, Vladimir did nothing to prevent him.

Rasputin lifted his peasant blouse and held the edge of it in his teeth, so that his chest was bare. Then he took the waistband of his baggy trousers in both hands and pulled them down to his knees.

He was wearing no underwear, and his penis was immediately exposed to anyone who happened to be looking in that direction.

Rasputin took the penis in his right hand and held it up for Vladimir to inspect.

Two waiters suddenly appeared, one of them holding a tablecloth. They wrapped the cloth around him, then began to hustle him across the room, a manoeuvre not made any easier by the fact that his trousers were still at knee level and he could move at no more than a shuffle.

Vladimir returned to his own table.

‘Well, that was most satisfactory,' he said to Blackstone.

‘What was it you said to Rasputin?' Blackstone asked Vladimir, in the cab back to the apartment.

‘I asked him if he was the
starets
, and when he agreed he was, I told him, in a very contemptuous manner, that I needed proof before I would believe him. Of course, he had the proof right there at the table – he was surrounded by people who could vouch for his identity – but he was drunk, and so, instead of appealing to them, he asked me just what sort of proof I would require.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I said that I had heard that the real Rasputin had a wart on the end of his prick, which he uses to drive women into ecstasies. I asked him to show it to me – which, of course, he did.'

‘You couldn't have
known
he'd do it,' Blackstone said.

‘True,' Vladimir agreed, ‘but he has certainly exposed himself in nightclubs before, and I had no doubt that, in order to make me look small, he would expose himself again.'

‘But I still don't see why you would have
wanted
him to expose himself,' Blackstone said.

‘Ah, that was for the benefit of Grand Duke Dimitri and Prince Felix Yusupov,' Vladimir said. ‘I thought it might encourage them towards an action that they were already seriously considering taking.'

Vladimir was playing one of his games, Blackstone recognized – dangling tantalizing bits of information before his eyes, and making him jump through hoops before supplying the context that would make sense of them.

Well, he supposed it helped to pass the time.

‘Who are Grand Duke Dimitri and Prince Felix Yusupov?' Blackstone asked dutifully.

‘Grand Duke Dimitri is the tsar's younger cousin,' Vladimir said. ‘The tsar and tsarina are very fond of him, and though the wider imperial family is really quite large, he is the only member of it who is ever invited to spend much time with them. He serves as the tsar's aide-de-camp and is, in some ways, almost a second son to the tsar and tsarina. It is even rumoured that they are considering marrying him to their eldest daughter.'

‘And since you put the show on for him, I am assuming that he was at the Aquarium tonight.'

Vladimir laughed. ‘Of course he was. He was the young officer who was sitting at our table.'

‘And was this Prince Yusupov there, also?'

‘Oh yes. Though they have had their occasional disagreements – and even quite long periods of separation – he is still Grand Duke Dimitri's closest friend and constant companion.'

Even by his own standards, Vladimir was making heavy work of this, Blackstone thought.

‘Might I have seen him?' he asked.

‘You could not have avoided it,' Vladimir said, with a grin, ‘because he was sitting at our table, too.'

‘The woman!' Blackstone exclaimed in disbelief.

‘Felix has enjoyed dressing up in women's clothes since he was twelve or thirteen years old. His parents were naturally concerned about it, and, in an attempt to cure him of the habit, they sent him to Oxford University, which they believed to be both staid and respectable. Unfortunately for them, however, he joined something called the Bullingdon Club while he was there, and that only seems to have made him worse.'

‘A woman!' Blackstone repeated, still not quite able to believe that the strikingly attractive figure who had sat opposite him could have been a man.

‘You're not the first one to fail to see through Felix's disguise – not by a long way,' Vladimir assured him. ‘Once, he appeared on the stage of the Aquarium dressed as a woman, and everyone was taken in. He sang six songs before he was recognized by some of his mother's friends – even then, they didn't really see that it was actually him until they'd recognized his mother's jewellery, with which he'd lavishly draped himself.'

‘Jesus!' Blackstone said.

‘And it's not just on the stage or in dim lighting that he can get away with it,' Vladimir continued. ‘There was another occasion, after a ball at the opera, when he allowed himself to be picked up by four Guards officers, who took him to the Bear nightclub. He told his friends, later, that in order to escape their amorous intentions, he was forced to throw a bottle of champagne into the nearest mirror, switch off all the lights and make a dash for the street. And perhaps he did do that – or perhaps he made no attempt to escape at all and stayed to service all four of them.'

‘You have nothing but contempt for him, do you?' Blackstone asked, remembering the way Vladimir had roughly removed Felix Yusupov's hand from his arm.

‘The man is scum,' Vladimir declared with a passion. ‘While all the other young men of his class are serving in the army – and some are actually dying for their country – he has found a way to gain an exemption. While the poor starve, Felix spends money like a drunken sailor – a very
rich
drunken sailor. He has no redeeming features, and the world would be better off without him.'

‘And yet, knowing all you do about him, it was still important to you that this man – above all others – should see Rasputin behaving disgracefully?' Blackstone asked incredulously.

‘Not above all others,' Vladimir said. ‘It was important that Grand Duke Dimitri saw it, too, although it is undoubtedly the case that Yusupov is the leader and Dimitri the follower.'

‘I still don't see why you went through the whole charade,' Blackstone admitted.

‘I did it because I need him,' Vladimir said. ‘And while it is true that I find him so disgusting I would rather dive into a bath of shit than shake his hand, it is also true that he is about to help me to navigate events around my deeply held beliefs.'

I
t was snowing when they arrived at the mill, and half the square was covered with a blanket of unbroken whiteness. The other half – the section closest to the Narva cotton mill gates – was a different matter. There – partly to keep warm, partly because they were too nervous to stand still – the workers had been wandering up and down for over an hour, and as quickly as the snow fell, they were turning it to slush.

‘None of the children are here today,' Blackstone said, glancing quickly around him.

‘No,' Tanya agreed, ‘they are not. It was agreed it would be safer for them to remain in the dormitories.'

‘It was
agreed
?' Blackstone repeated quizzically.

‘Yes,' Tanya said.

‘And Josef went along with it?'

‘Of course he went along with it. He is our leader – our vanguard. No such decision would have been made without his consent.'

‘That doesn't sound like him at all,' Blackstone mused.

‘How can you say that about him, when you have only met him once?' Tanya asked, sounding slightly uncomfortable.

Yes, he had only met him once, but once was more than enough, Blackstone thought.

He had seen the ruthlessness in the other man's eyes – the determination to do anything to advance the cause of the revolution. A man like that would not baulk at the slaughter of the innocents – he would relish the prospect.

So if Josef had changed his mind, it must have been under powerful persuasion.

And who could have provided that persuasion?

Certainly not the mill workers, who looked up to him with the same sort of naive trust that the peasants had once bestowed on the tsar, whom they had called their ‘Little Father'.

No, it wasn't them – there was only one person who could have made him change his mind.

‘What did you say to him?' Blackstone asked.

‘To whom?' Tanya replied evasively.

‘To Josef.'

‘I said nothing.'

That was a lie, Blackstone thought. Somehow, Tanya had found a weakness in Josef that she could exploit – a point at which pressure could be applied.

And, with a sudden flash of insight, he understood exactly what that weakness – that pressure point – was.

‘You offered to sleep with him, didn't you?' he asked, surprised by how angry he sounded.

Tanya shrugged. ‘What if I did? Do you think that my virginity is as precious as the lives of little children? I certainly do not.'

‘You
can't
sleep with him!' Blackstone said.

‘A girl must lose her cherry at some time, and I might as well lose mine to Josef,' Tanya said.

‘So you find him attractive, do you?'

Tanya shuddered slightly. ‘He is Natasha's comrade, and comrades share with each other,' she said.

‘And where will Tanya be while Natasha is offering him her body?' Blackstone asked.

Another shudder. ‘Tanya will be elsewhere,' the girl said.

Well, if he couldn't change Tanya's – or Natasha's – mind about sleeping with Josef, he could certainly make sure that Josef was incapable of sleeping with her, Blackstone decided, settling on a broken leg as the best way to curb the revolutionary's amorous intentions.

A boy – he could not have been more than ten – came running through the snow and spoke to a woman who might well have been his mother. Almost immediately, an excited murmur ran through the crowd.

‘The Cossacks are coming, the Cossacks are coming.'

The cry galvanized the strikers, and they quickly formed lines, with Tanya and Blackstone part of the front one.

As if nature had decided to add drama to the Cossacks' arrival, the snow had begun to fall more heavily, and at first they were nothing more than dark shapes in the distance. Then, as they drew closer, it became possible to pick out the individual features – their fur hats, the whips they held in their hands, the rifles in their holsters at the side of the saddles.

They were riding in single file, as they had the day before, and once again they executed a series of faultless manoeuvres which ended when they lined up side by side, facing the strikers.

But it was not an exact replication of the day before, Blackstone thought. Then, they had formed their line no more than ten metres from the strikers. Now, they were at least thirty metres away – and that was not good.

What am I doing here?
he asked himself.

But he already knew the answer to that question – he was there to protect Tanya.

He knew why she was there, too – so that she could gain credibility with the revolutionaries, who would give her valuable information about their plans, which she could then pass on to Vladimir.

And he knew why the strikers were there.

But did
they
know?

They probably thought they were there to win concessions from their heartless managers, but that was not the case at all. The Party had put them there to be hurt, to be an example to other workers who would rise up in their anger and be hurt, too – and on and on, until there was so much anger that even pain could not make them retreat, and the regime would crumble.

There was still a chance the day would not turn out too badly, he thought. There was still a possibility that when the workers realized how serious the Cossacks were, they would run – and the horsemen would let them. And then he read the sheer determination in the Cossack captain's bearing, and he knew that was not about to happen.

The Cossacks were vastly outnumbered, but they had two things in their favour, both related to their ponies. The first was the elevated position that their mounts gave them. The second was the speed at which they could move.

But if they allowed themselves to be hemmed in, neither of those things would count for anything. So when it started, they would come in hard, doing all they could to cut swathes through the mob – giving themselves room to manoeuvre – and that was why they had formed their line so much further away that morning.