David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

Mikhail Shaporov slept all the way across the Channel. He slept through France. Powerscourt began to wonder if he was going to sleep all the way to Russia when he finally appeared just outside Cologne. They had crossed the Rhine, the first of Europe’s great rivers the train would traverse on its long trek across a continent. It began snowing just before Hamburg. The fields and the farmhouses disappeared in a soft carpet, the sharp edges of the buildings in the cities disappeared in a white blanket. Mikhail dragged Powerscourt to an open window, admitting freezing wind and torrents of snow, to see the spray shooting up and curving gracefully backwards as the great dark engine pounded forward through the white snow. They were shedding passengers now faster than the replacements were coming on board. Considerable numbers got off at Hannover. More got off for the architectural glories of Potsdam, more still for the pomp and swagger of Berlin. There were only a few hardy souls left for the long haul to Warsaw and the final route through to the Baltic glories of Riga and Tallinn. At last, after three days’ travelling, at half past six in the evening, they arrived in St Petersburg. Mikhail had arranged transport for himself to his palace and for Powerscourt to the British Embassy. They arranged to meet at the Embassy at nine o’clock the following morning. Powerscourt had made a number of appointments by telegraph before leaving London.

‘Leave your bags here, the porter will take them up.’ The voice was languid but powerful, its owner a beautifully dressed diplomat of some thirty-five years called Rupert de Chassiron, Chief Secretary to the Embassy. He radiated an effortless charm. From time to time a hand would be despatched on an upward mission to check the status of his hair, which was beginning to let him down by going thin on top. De Chassiron sported a very expensive-looking monocle which gave him, as intended, an air of great distinction. ‘His Nibs, that’s the Ambassador to you and me, is off at some charity function with that frightful wife of his. I’m to take you to the feeding station.’

Powerscourt resisted the temptation to ask for further details of the frightful wife. He remembered from his time in South Africa that embassies could become very claustrophobic, always prone to feud and faction. They were walking past the Alexander Monument, surrounded by the great buildings of the Admiralty and the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, powerful and menacing in the dark.

‘Been here before, Powerscourt? Seen all the stuff?’

‘I came here some years ago with my wife. We saw quite a lot of stuff then.’ So much stuff, he remembered suddenly, that after four days Lucy could hardly walk and had to spend the next day being ferried round the city in a water taxi.

‘Here we are,’ said the diplomat, ‘they know me here. Booked a private room. Don’t have to eat the Russian food if you don’t want to. Place is called Nadezhda. Means hope. Always needed in these parts, hope, in as large a helping as you can lay your hands on.’

A nervous young Tatar waiter showed them to their room. There were no windows and the most remarkable feature was the wallpaper. It was dark red with patterns that Powerscourt could only refer to mentally as vigorous. If you were feeling kind you would have said there were loops and twirls and hoops and arches and circles of every size imaginable. If you were feeling unkind you would have said the designer was a madman. If you were visually sensitive you might well have felt sick. Powerscourt felt he knew now why this was one of the private rooms.

‘Tatar pattern, Powerscourt,’ said de Chassiron cheerfully. ‘Local traditions not confused down there with six hundred years of design history from Renaissance buildings to Aubusson tapestries. You want a twirl, you give it a twirl. Not exactly restful, would you say?’ he remarked as a waiter brought him some wine to taste.

‘Excellent, he said, ‘the local rich are very partial to French wine, thank God. This Chablis is first rate.’

As they started on their first course, blinis, Russian pancakes, with caviar, de Chassiron began to talk about Martin.

‘Let me tell you, Powerscourt,’ the diplomat paused briefly to swallow a particularly large mouthful, ‘all I know about Martin. Won’t take long.’ He took a copious draught of his wine. ‘Came here on a Tuesday. Wouldn’t tell a soul what he was here for, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve. Wouldn’t tell the Ambassador anything, much to His Nibs’ fury. Went off somewhere, God knows where, didn’t tell a soul where he was going, on Wednesday morning. Next seen dead early on Thursday morning as you know. Not clear if he died Wednesday night or Thursday morning. Not clear if he died where he was found or somewhere else. That’s it. The last unknown hours of Roderick Martin.’

Powerscourt helped himself to a few more blinis. ‘They’re really very good, these blinis,’ he said. ‘I can tell you one thing, you know one more fact than I do. Apart from the bit with the Ambassador, that’s all I know too. I don’t know any more than you do. All attempts to get the Prime Minister to talk have failed.’

De Chassiron wiped his mouth carefully. Powerscourt thought he might be rather vain about his appearance. As his wild boar and the diplomat’s fish arrived, Powerscourt asked for a diplomatic overview of where Russia now stood, its main political and foreign attitudes that might, somewhere, contain a clue to the life and death of senior British diplomat Roderick Martin.

De Chassiron smiled. ‘Be happy to oblige, Powerscourt, nothing diplomats like doing better than spinning their private theories about history and current trends. But where to start? I tell you where I’ll start. St Petersburg is a very deceitful place. You look at these incredible buildings all about the centre of the city designed by Quarenghi and Rastrelli and these European architects in their sort of heavy international baroque, and you think you’re in Europe, in another Milan or Rome or Munich. It’s deceptive in exactly the same way that America is deceptive, except that in New York or Washington it’s the common language that makes you think you share a common culture and common values. You don’t. Here it’s the architecture that makes you think you’re just in another part of Europe. For the Doge’s Palace in Venice read the Winter Palace. For the Uffizi in Florence read the Hermitage. It’s not true. Even here, in a city designed to turn his fellow countrymen into good Europeans, Peter the Great never quite succeeded. And if they’re not truly European in this place, think of the rest of the Russians, most of whom are peasants who have never even seen a city and wouldn’t know a baroque one from a city built, or more likely destroyed, by Genghis Khan.’

Powerscourt’s mind wandered off briefly to contemplate a city built or razed to the ground by Genghis Khan. Birmingham, he decided, maybe Wolverhampton.

‘There’s another thing about these buildings, Powerscourt.’ De Chassiron paused to spear a large mouthful of his fish. ‘I don’t know what a democratic building would look like, maybe it would have to look classical like that damned Congress in Washington, but these buildings here, they’re autocratic, they’re to be lived in by one lot of autocrats and handed over to another lot of autocrats. Those great palaces outside the city, Peterhof and Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo, they’ve all got a shadow over them and the shadow is that of Versailles and the Sun King. These Romanovs are the last serious autocrats in Europe, if not the world. Our King has the powers of a lowly parish clerk, heavily watched by a suspicious parish council, compared to them. And consider this.’ He held up the passage of a particularly large slice of his fish and waved his fork at Powerscourt. ‘What sort of representative bodies, councils, assemblies, parliaments do you think the Tsar has to help him in his work of administering this vast empire? Two? Three? House of Commons? House of Lords? Not one, not even a House of Lords. I’ve always suspected that Kings of England were very happy to have all their aristocrats penned up in a House of Lords. They could plot against each other rather than plot against the King. Very satisfactory all round. But here, these aristocrats may not be fully European but they know the political power exercised by their counterparts elsewhere. If you were an English lord or a duke, your power might not be as ostentatious as it once was but it’s still pretty real and there’s probably more of it than people imagine. If you’re a Prussian Junker you have enormous power. Here you have nothing, whether you’re a peasant, a worker or an aristocrat.’