Boris Akunin - The State Counsellor

Green's secret concern in dealing with Rahmet was to extract the maximum benefit for the cause from this vacuous individual. The idea he had in mind was to send him on one of those important missions from which no one returns. Let him throw himself, a living bomb, under the hooves of the team pulling the carriage of a minister or a provincial governor. Rahmet wouldn't be afraid of certain death - that was one trick life hadn't shown him yet. If the operation at Klin had been a failure, Rahmet's mission would have been to blow up Khrapov this evening at the Yaroslavl Station, just before he left for Siberia. Well, Khrapov was dead already, but there would be others; autocracy kept plenty of other vicious guard dogs. The important thing was not to miss the moment when boredom appeared in Rahmet's eyes.

This was the only reason why Green had kept him in the group after what had happened with Shverubovich in December.

The order had come from the party to execute the traitor who had betrayed the comrades in Riga and sent them to the gallows. Green didn't like that kind of work, so he had not objected when Rahmet volunteered to do it.

Instead of simply shooting Shverubovich, Rahmet had chosen to be more inventive and splash sulphuric acid into his face. He had said it was to put a fright into any other stoolpigeons, but in reality he had simply wanted to see what it looked like when a living man's eyes poured out of their sockets and his lips and nose fell off. Ever since then Green had been unable to look at Rahmet without a feeling of revulsion, but he put up with him for the good of the cause.

'You should go to bed,* he said in a quiet voice. 'I know it's only ten. But you should sleep. It's an early start tomorrow. We're changing apartments.'

He glanced round at the white door of the study where the owner of this apartment, Semyon Lvovich Aronson, a private lecturer at the Higher Technical College, was sitting. They had planned to stay at a different address in Moscow, but there had been a surprise waiting for them. The female courier who met the group at the agreed spot had warned them that they couldn't go to the meeting place - it had just been discovered that the engineer Larionov, who owned the apartment, was an agent of the Okhranka.

The courier had a strange alias: Needle. Green, still reeling after pumping the handcar, had told her: 'You Muscovites do poor work. An agent at a meeting place could destroy the entire Combat Group.'

He had said it without malice, simply stating a fact, but Needle had taken offence.

Green didn't know much about her. He thought she came from a rich family. A dry, gangling, ageing young lady. Bloodless, pursed lips; dull, colourless hair arranged in a tight bun at the back of her head - there were plenty like that in the revolution.

'If we did poor work, we wouldn't have exposed Larionov,' Needle had retorted. 'Tell me, Green, do you absolutely need an apartment with a telephone? It's not that easy.'

'I know, but there must be a telephone - for emergency contact, an alarm signal, warning,' he explained, promising himself to make do in future with only his own resources, without help from the party.

'Then we'll have to assign you to one of the reserve addresses, with one of the sympathisers. Moscow's not St Petersburg; not many people have their own telephones here.'

That was how the group had come to be billeted at the private lecturer's place. Needle had said he was more of a liberal than a revolutionary, and he didn't approve of terrorist methods. That was all right: he was an honest man with progressive views and he wouldn't refuse to help; but there was no point in telling him any details.

Having taken Green and his people to a fine apartment house on Ostozhenka Street (a spacious apartment on the very top floor, and that was valuable, because there was access to the roof), before she left the courier had briskly and succinctly explained the elementary rules of the clandestine operation to their jittery host.

'Your building is the tallest in this part of the city, and that is convenient. From my mezzanine floor I can see your windows through binoculars. If everything is calm, do not close the curtains in the drawing room. Two closed curtains mean disaster. One closed curtain is the alarm signal. I'll telephone you and ask for Professor Brandt. You will reply: "You are mistaken, this is a different number" - and in that case I shall come immediately; or if you say: "You are mistaken, this is private lecturer Aronson's number" - I shall send a combat squad to assist you. Will you remember that?'

Aronson nodded, pale-faced, and when Needle left he muttered that the 'comrades' could use the apartment as they saw fit, that he had given the servants time off, and if he was needed, he would be in his study. And in half a day he hadn't peeped out of there even once. He was a real 'sympathiser' all right. No, we can't stay here for two weeks, Green had decided immediately. Tomorrow we have to find a new place.

'What's the point in sleeping?' Rahmet asked with a shrug. 'Of course, you gentlemen do as you wish, but I'd rather pay a visit to that Judas Larionov - before he realises he's been discovered. Twenty-eight Povarskaya Street, isn't it? Not so far away'

'That's right!' Bullfinch agreed enthusiastically. 'I'd like to go along. It would be even better if I went on my own, because you've already done your job for the day. I can manage, honest I can! He'll open the door, and I'll ask: "Are you engineer Larionov?" That's so as not to kill an innocent man by mistake. And then I'll say: "Take this, you traitor." I'll shoot him in the heart - three times to make sure - and run for it. A piece of cake.'

Rahmet threw his head back and laughed loudly. 'A piece of cake, of course it is! You shoot him - go on, just try. When I let von Bock have it point-blank on the parade ground, his eyes leapt out of their sockets, I swear to God! Two little red balls. I dreamed about it for ages. Used to wake up at night in a cold sweat. A piece of cake .. .’

And what about Shverubovich with his face melting, Green thought, do you dream about him?

'It's all right; if it's for the cause, I can do it,' Bullfinch declared manfully, turning pale and then immediately flushing bright red. He had got his nickname from the constant high colour of his cheeks and the light-coloured fluff that covered them. 'The bastard betrayed his own, didn't he?'

Green had known Bullfinch for a long time, a lot longer than the others. He was a special boy, bred from precious stock - the son of a hanged regicide and a female member of the People's Will party, who had died in a prison cell while on hunger strike; the child of unmarried parents, not christened in church, raised by comrades of his mother and father; the first free citizen of the future free Russia; with no garbage in his head, no filth polluting his soul. Some day boys like that would be quite ordinary, but for now he was one of a kind, the invaluable product of a painful process of evolution, and so Green had really not wanted to take Bullfinch into the group.

But how could he not have taken him? Three years earlier, when Green had escaped from the state prison and was making his way home the long way round the world - through China, Japan and America - he had been detained for a while in Switzerland. Just hanging about with nothing to do, waiting for the escort to guide him across the border. Bullfinch had only just been sent there from Russia, where his guardians had been arrested yet again, and there was no one in Zurich to take care of the little lad. They had asked Green, and he had agreed because at that time there was nothing else he could do to help the party. The escort was delayed and then disappeared completely. Before they managed to arrange a new one, a whole year had gone by.