The Third Section (4 page)

There was a brief moment when she thought she had identified her true father: Prince Pyetr Mihailovich Volkonsky. It might be the whim of many a little girl to believe that her father was a prince, but the idea had not come to Tamara until she was seventeen, and was no whim. She had been idly rummaging – as she presumed all girls of that age did – through her official father’s desk when she had discovered a note from Volkonsky confirming the delivery, that year as every year, of the sum of three thousand roubles for her upkeep. Specifically for her. She couldn’t think of anything other than it must have something to do with her parentage.

But if Volkonsky was her father, who was her mother? It was
possible
that it might still be the woman who had raised her – Yelena Vadimovna Lavrova. Could she and Volkonsky have had an affair? But if that were so, then the annual payments to Valentin Valentinovich would imply that he knew about it, and Tamara could hardly imagine him being happy to raise so obvious a reminder of his own cuckolding. Perhaps she was the daughter of some unknown paramour of Volkonsky’s – given to the Lavrovs to raise as their own. That seemed more feasible – and a little more romantic.

But now she knew better. Prince Volkonsky had died two years ago and Tamara had felt no qualms about using her official position to gain access to at least some of his private papers, as kept in the archives in Petersburg. It had taken her six months, and in the end she had found only one letter that made any mention of her – not even by name, simply a reference to ‘a girl in Moscow in the care of V. V. Lavrov’. It made clear that Tamara was not his daughter, but that he was providing money for her care on behalf of her father, whom Volkonsky regarded as ‘a brother and an unhailed hero of the nation’.

For a little while Tamara had felt quite proud, but her thoughts soon turned to a darker possibility. As far as she could tell – this time from studying Valentin Valentinovich’s papers – Volkonsky had first taken an interest in her upbringing when she was five, in 1826. That was just after the Decembrist Uprising, when three thousand soldiers – officers and men – had taken it upon themselves to decide who should be tsar. Thankfully they had failed, but among them had been another Volkonsky – Sergei Grigorovich, related to Pyetr Mihailovich as a cousin and a brother-in-law – who had been a leader of the uprising and had as punishment been sent to Siberia as an exile. Could Pyetr Mihailovich be paying to support his cousin’s child? Could Tamara be the offspring of a Decembrist? It was an odious thought, but she had never been able to dismiss it.

But whatever she might think, she evidently did not believe in her heart that either of the Volkonskys was her father, or that Valentin Valentinovich was her father or Yelena Vadimovna her mother. Otherwise, why did she not see their faces in her dreams?

The train had slowed, as it always did, to climb the Valdai Hills. It was the steepest incline on the route from Petersburg to Moscow. The line had only been open for five years, but already there were plans to reroute it – to follow a longer, shallower path around the hills. And already there were plans to use that for propaganda against Tsar Nikolai. The story would be that Nikolai had drawn the route between Saint Petersburg and Moscow himself, using a ruler on the map to find the shortest distance. But his thumb had lain over the edge of the ruler and caused a bump in the line, just at the point of the Valdai Hills. And none of the tsar’s cronies had dared make a correction.

She had never met the tsar, but knew people who had, and though he might be resolute in his judgements, he was not a fool. Anyone who had seen the surveyors out, in all weathers, trying to determine the most practical route for the line, would know that Nikolai was in no position to make such detailed decisions. But she also knew that there were many in the government and beyond who would like to make him out to be a despot, even those close to him – perhaps even his own sons.

The train was late already. She smiled to herself. Five years ago she would have had to take a coach on the paved chaussée that ran between the old and the new capitals, and it would have taken days. Now, the journey was less than twenty-four hours, and still everyone complained over a couple of hours’ delay – including Tamara.

The train reached the top of the hill and began to speed up again. This wasn’t the first time she had taken this journey, nor was it likely to be the last, but today it did have a sense of permanence to it. Today, she was leaving Petersburg and going to live once again in Moscow. Moscow was the town where she had been born – if any of the details of her early life could be believed – and where she had grown up. The Lavrovs still lived there. Petersburg was the town where she had married and where she had borne three children. But it was not a city that could tell her what she needed to know.

Only Moscow – the city of those dim remembrances – could do that. It was where she was most likely to find any records relating to her lineage. She had exhausted the archives of Petersburg and
her
contacts there, and now she must move on. There was no certainty that she would discover anything, but she had to try – otherwise, what was she for?

She had been fortunate to get work in Moscow that would give her the possibility of access to the great library of letters and documents that lay hidden within the Kremlin. Only a government official would have a chance of gaining entry and for a woman that kind of work was rare. But she had carried out such work – however distasteful – in Petersburg and she doubted whether she would find its nature very much different in the old capital. Besides, she needed the money. After she had married, her father had always forwarded her the payments from Volkonsky – ‘a little gift from Papa’, as he had called them, as if forgetting that he had admitted where they truly came from – but with Volkonsky’s death that had stopped. Tamara wasn’t destitute, but a regular income was a blessing.

She stood up. It would be an hour until the next stop, and she desperately needed a cigarette. Even if smoking were allowed on the train, there would be frowns to see a woman partaking of that pleasure in public. She walked down the carriage, opened the door at the end and stepped into the cold night air. A railing surrounded the narrow platform at the end of the wagon, with gates that would allow her to the next one or on to the station when they stopped.

She reached into her reticule and took out a cigarette, lighting it with a match. The junior conductor, standing at his post by the brake, glanced at her, but raised no objection to her breaking the rules. He had probably witnessed it a hundred times. And even if he had thought of calling a gendarme at the next station, he had seen her authority to travel when he looked at her ticket, and would guess that the police would not interfere.

Tamara drew deeply on the cigarette, enjoying the sensation of the smoke clutching at her lungs, and glanced up at the starry sky, then gazed out across the flat, snow-covered countryside as it raced past her. She exhaled. The train – this miracle of Russian modernity, built by American engineers and running on English rails – pressed on into the night, carrying her, for all its faults, at
a
speed of almost forty versts every hour, towards the truth that she had forever yearned to know.

Tverskaya Street was much as Tamara remembered it, its neat columns of trees naked of leaves and with the February snow clinging to their branches. It was less than a year since she had last visited Moscow, but even in the twelve years since she had made the move to Petersburg, there had not been much that had changed. She crossed Strastnaya Square with its cluster of churches and headed north-west, away from the Kremlin – her first port of call on arriving in the city. The gate and bell tower of the Convent of the Passion, which gave the square its name, were new, though she had seen them slowly rise up over the past few years. Now they were complete, she couldn’t say that she admired the rose-pink walls. But Moscow had to be renewed. Her parents – the Lavrovs – often spoke of how things had been before the war, before the fires that had destroyed two-thirds of the city, but back then they too had lived in Petersburg, and knew the old capital only as tourists.

It was dark now, even though it was still early. The snow here in the city had melted under the persistent tread of feet and wheels of traffic, but it would come again soon; the worst of winter was not over. She crossed a side street on the right and knew that the next would be her destination – her new home as well as her new job.

She turned off the main street and into Degtyarny Lane. The building was easy to spot, on the north side, its plaster walls painted a pale lilac, as garish as those of the convent, but in this case seeming entirely appropriate. This part of town had avoided the fires of 1812. Opposite the building stood a little bench, but the street was empty of people. Although it was dark, it was still too early for there to be much likelihood of business. That would change over the next few hours.

Tamara lifted the heavy iron knocker and rapped on the door. Moments later a little wooden flap at eye level, covered with a grille, was opened from the inside and Tamara was faced with a pair of the most scintillating blue eyes. The hatch closed and Tamara heard the sound of bolts being drawn back, then the door
opened
to reveal a young woman. She was somewhere in her early twenties, the blonde of her hair as perfect as the blue of her eyes. She was a little shorter than Tamara and dressed as though for a party. At her throat was a simple black-velvet choker.

She looked Tamara up and down. ‘You must be Tamara Valentinovna,’ she said.

‘That’s right. And you?’

‘Raisa Styepanovna,’ replied the girl with a smile.

She led Tamara inside.

Tamara had been told, not an hour earlier, that Raisa Styepanovna was the only one of the girls she could fully trust. Her first appointment of the day, direct from stepping off the train, had been inside the Kremlin. In Petersburg, the location of the offices of the Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery was well known; the ‘building beside the chain bridge’ as it was usually called, the bridge being the one that crossed the Fontanka at the southern end of the Summer Garden. But in Petersburg, the leaders of the Third Section – Count Orlov and General Dubyelt – believed that a secret police force was most effective when it was least secret; that fear was a more effective weapon than surprise. In Moscow the organization was run by Actual State Councillor Yudin and though technically he was subservient to both the count and the general, Moscow was far enough from Petersburg for them to let him do things his way.

And his way, it seemed, involved the utmost secrecy.

Tamara had known only to report to the gate in the Nikolai Tower at the northern end of Red Square. From there the guard had led her into the Kremlin and its chaotic clutter of buildings erected by tsars and tsaritsas through the ages, each determined to make their own mark, none daring to expand beyond the walls established centuries ago. They walked between the Arsenal and the Senate, both relative newcomers to the citadel, and then turned, as if intending to leave via the Trinity Gate. At the last moment, the guard turned again and took them along the inside of the thick defensive outer wall, to a small wooden door, just beside the corner of the newly built Armoury. There a small, precise, balding man named Gribov had met her and escorted her
down
a short flight of stairs that led into the foundations of the wall itself.

At its bottom, sitting quietly in his subterranean office, she had met Vasiliy Innokyentievich Yudin. He deliberately ignored her arrival – a common enough trick to ensure that a subordinate did not feel at ease. Instead he continued to read the magazine that he clutched close to him, hiding his face from her. Tamara looked at the cover, but could not make sense of the writing. Then she realized it was in the Latin alphabet. The title was
Punch
, though she couldn’t guess what language the word came from.

Yudin turned a page and laughed loudly; in doing so, he pretended to notice for the first time that Tamara was there. Without asking who she was, he handed the magazine across to her, pointing to a cartoon at the bottom of the page. It portrayed a man playing a church organ. It took a second look before she realized that the figure portrayed was intended to be Tsar Nikolai. The oddity of it – the point, she presumed, of the joke – was that he was sporting a large pair of bat’s wings and, when she looked closely, had pointed ears, again seemingly meant to be suggestive of the animal.

It was clearly some kind of test. She returned the magazine to Yudin, considering her response. ‘Why would they portray His Majesty as a bat?’ she asked.

‘Why indeed?’ Yudin was still smirking from whatever humour he had seen in there. ‘Makes you wonder if they know something we don’t.’

She considered for a moment whether it was appropriate for him to be reading the enemy’s propaganda in the middle of a war, but she could easily see that it fell within the purview of the Section.

Yudin indicated that she should sit down. As she complied, he slipped the magazine into a drawer of his desk. ‘You come on the highest recommendation of Leontiy Vasilievich,’ he said, referring to the man that she had only ever spoken of as General Dubyelt.

The office was dark, dank and old – certainly no recent addition to the complex. Here beneath the surface, windows were meaningless. Yudin’s desk was lit by a single oil lamp, and a similar one stood on one of the crowded bookshelves behind him.
Anyone
who lived in a city where in the winter there were almost sixteen hours of darkness became accustomed to operating in such gloomy conditions, but few would welcome it as Yudin seemed to have done in his choice of rooms. A strange smell hung in the air that Tamara put down to damp. They must be close to the level of the Moskva here, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if the room had been flooded more than once.