Andrew Williams - To Kill a Tsar

Every muscle in Anna’s body was taut, her heart pounding, but she sought and held eye contact with the policeman, smiling sweetly.

‘It’s a mess in here,’ he said, as she slipped past into the hall. The drawing-room door was ajar. It looked as if a bomb had gone off inside. The upholstery had been ripped out of the soft sofa and armchairs, the contents of the sideboard drawers were strewn all over the floor along with copies of a statement on the attack printed on the party’s new press. They were to have been secretly posted around the city that night. Worse still, she could see copper drums, a roll of wire and a secure box that was identical to the one they had used to store dynamite at the cottage in Preobrazhenskoe.

‘Hey you, back in the kitchen!’ the sergeant bellowed behind her, and turning, Anna saw the little face of the maid peeking round the door. The poor girl was petrified and bobbed back inside at once.

‘In here, miss,’ said the sergeant, pointing to Evgenia’s room. Anna cleared more copies of the party’s statement from the bed then perched at its edge, her hands held demurely in her lap.

‘Sergeant — I really can’t stay. I must go,’ she said in a plaintive voice.

Korovin ignored her, turning his head to shout to one of his men: ‘Haven’t you finished in there?’

‘My mistress is expecting me,’ she whined. ‘Please let me go. I promised I would only be an hour.’

But the policeman just looked at her coldly.

‘Please. I don’t want to be in trouble.’ Taking out her handkerchief she began to snivel noisily into it.

‘What a performance. Bravo,’ said Korovin, clapping. ‘You’re wasting your breath, miss.’

Although Anna tried her best with desperate looks and tears, he was not to be moved. As soon as the constables had finished searching Kviatkovsky’s bedroom, she was escorted from the apartment, the crunch of police boots at her back, echoing up and down the stairwell. She was afraid but calm and clear-sighted, absorbed in rehearsing the story she would spin at the station. Time. She needed to buy as much of it as she was able. Olga was waiting a short distance away, but would she notice?

The sergeant stepped forward at the bottom of the stairs to hold the front door open. ‘After you, miss.’

The self-satisfied sneering in his voice made Anna furious. As he led her on to the pavement, she pretended to stumble and cried out in pain. Lifting her dress a little, she reached down to her ankle. ‘I’ve twisted it.’

‘Oh?’ said Korovin, quite unconcerned. ‘It’s fortunate your carriage awaits you.’ And he waved to the police driver parked a little way along the lane.

‘Aren’t you going to help me?’ Anna burst into noisy tears.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. But by now she had worked herself into a pitiful frenzy, her body heaving with sobs, and it was all the embarrassed sergeant could do to prevent her collapsing to the snowy pavement.

Her little pantomime was beginning to attract the attention of the street.

‘What are you doing to her?’ a young man in an expensive coat called from the pavement opposite.

‘Shame!’ shouted a woman from a window above.

‘Come on with that carriage,’ bellowed Korovin. A moment later it drew up in front of the mansion. ‘All right, all right, let me help you,’ he said impatiently.

Anna limped forward, pausing at the step to glance furtively down the lane. Yes, Olga was watching. There was no mistaking that blue scarf and enormous old fur coat.

The district police station was on the second floor of a run-down building on Zagarodny. It was oppressively hot, the waiting room crowded, and Korovin was obliged to shout and shoulder his way through to the administration office. He left Anna on a chair in front of the chief clerk’s desk and went in search of the station superintendent. A few minutes later, he was back and the scowl on his heavy face suggested he was very out of sorts: ‘Name and address?’

‘I’m going to be in so much trouble. Please let me go.’ She buried her head in her hands.

‘You’re in trouble now,’ the policeman barked. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Anna Petrovna Kovalenko,’ she muttered between her hands.

‘And where are your papers?’

But Anna refused to say more. Threats, imprecations, promises, even a reassuring arm, nothing he tried would elicit another word from her. And the more he tried the more hysterical she seemed to become until he began to wonder at her sanity.

‘You can cool down for an hour.’ He grabbed her arm and dragged her roughly to her feet. ‘Here, you, Rostislov,’ he said, addressing a constable bent in conversation with the chief clerk. ‘Take this one to Room 6.’ And turning to Anna again, he said, ‘An hour. If you don’t give me your address and answer for yourself after that I can promise you now, you’ll be spending the night in the Peter and Paul Fortress.’

It was a box room with a tiny barred window, furnished with only a wooden bench and a bucket. Anna pressed herself into a corner, her knees up to her chest, exhausted by the nervous tension of the last two hours. She knew she should rehearse her story, but she had neither the will nor the energy. Mikhailov had assured her she was clean but it was only a matter of time before they found a witness — perhaps the servant girl — who could tie her to Goldenberg or Soloviev or one of the others. She closed her eyes and groaned quietly into the crook of her arm: that it had come to this already. Her head was still buried there a few minutes later when she heard the rattle of the key in the lock. It was Constable Rostislov.

‘It seems you don’t have to remember where you live after all,’ he said dryly. ‘Follow me.’

He led her down a windowless corridor and into what looked like a secretariat, with clerks sitting at a block of desks in the centre of the room. At the opposite end, the sergeant was standing beside the only polished doors in the station.

‘Still limping, then?’

Before she could reply, the door was opened by the superintendent’s gatekeeper who announced His Honour Ivan Andreievich Kuznetzov was now ready to see the prisoner.

The superintendent’s office was like those occupied by middle-ranking policemen all over the empire, with its oppressively dark wallpaper, cheap burgundy drapes, filing cabinet, desk and undistinguished print of His Imperial Majesty. Kuznetzov was sitting beneath it, his grey head bent over his papers. Almost lost in a high-backed chair in front of his desk sat a woman, her dark hair drawn tightly into a bun. Anna could see no more than the top of her head but there was something in the shape of it and the way she held it that was familiar. The woman raised a hand to sweep a loose strand of hair behind her ear and Anna let out an involuntary gasp of pain.

‘Go on — what’s the matter with you?’ It was Sergeant Korovin at her shoulder.

‘Ah, it’s you!’ Olga Liubatovich twisted in the chair to look at her. Her eyes were almost lost beneath a heavy frown, her voice full of resentment. ‘Did you deliver the note? What am I going to tell my husband, you foolish girl? Look at the trouble you’ve got us into.’

Clever, clever Olga. Burying her face in her hands, Anna began to sob pathetically, her small frame shaking with the effort.

‘All right, all right,’ said the superintendent irritably. ‘Sit down.’ He waved his hand to Korovin to indicate he should guide her to a chair.

‘Now, can you tell me who this woman is?’ he asked when she had settled in front of his desk.

‘My mistress, Elizaveta Dmitrievna.’

‘Look at me.’

Anna raised her eyes for just a second then looked away. He had a thin face and severe mouth, as if years in the police had ground him to a sharp point.