David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt.

‘There’s only two of them who make it, Lord Powerscourt. They’re in their early twenties and learnt the recipe from their mother. They’re the proprietor’s daughters.’

‘A man could do worse than marry a woman for her soup, perhaps. What do you say, Mikhail?’

‘Indeed. And there are rumours that these two have been working on a surprise for Easter time. People say they’ve developed an entirely new borscht.’

‘Cabbage soup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, borscht on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You would live like a king.’

‘What I am about to ask you has nothing to do with soup or marriage, Lord Powerscourt, but with our plans today after the interview in the Interior Ministry this afternoon. Do you think you will need my services after that, after I have taken you back to the Embassy, of course? It’s just that I have made a provisional arrangement to meet somebody for an hour or so at six o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, please. If you need me I’ll translate for you all day and all night.’

Powerscourt wondered at the mental process by which his young friend had gone from soup and marriage to discussion of his plans for an evening rendezvous.

‘Forgive me for asking you, Mikhail, but would I be right in thinking you are going to meet a young lady?’

‘You are quite right, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mikhail went slightly pink as he replied. ‘It is a young lady and could I make a further suggestion? This has only just come to me, and you may think it absurd.’

‘I’m sure I won’t think it is absurd, once I know what it is,’ said Powerscourt.

‘My friend is called Natasha. She comes from a very grand family here in Petersburg. Just now she is working as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and her daughters at the Tsar’s country palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Do you think it might help if I told her about your mission and our work in pursuit of the vanished Martin? I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I went to London. Her letters to me were very stilted and stiff as if she felt somebody was reading them, I think. But it has always been said that the best-informed people in St Petersburg are the servants who wait at the Tsar’s table and his coachmen and suchlike people. She might hear something to our advantage.’

Powerscourt scraped the bottom of his bowl to extract the very last drop of cabbage soup. ‘Let me put it like this, Mikhail. Do you think it would be dangerous for her if she were known to be close to the British Embassy?’

‘Dangerous, possibly. I don’t think she’d end up dead on the Nevskii Prospekt but I think she’d be out of a job pretty quickly.’

‘I think you must decide, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, looking serious all of a sudden. ‘I think it would be unwise to involve Natasha in the decision, however level-headed she is. There’s nothing more attractive to some women than a whiff of danger. I think I would insist that she only listens. She never asks any questions. She doesn’t poke her nose into areas that don’t concern her. Some women, mind you, would find even that limited prospectus hard to stick to.’

‘I will think about it before our meeting,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, trotting off to pay the bill. ‘I insist on paying for lunch, Lord Powerscourt. When we Russians introduce distinguished visitors to our national cuisine, it is only fitting that we should pay. I insist, I really do.’

As they made their way across the river to their next meeting Shaporov told Powerscourt some of what he knew of the Interior Ministry. Most of his information, he said generously, came once again from his father, some of it from his friends who had had dealings with it, some of it simply absorbed from the air and the streets of his city. Mikhail gave his English visitor the Russian bureaucracy in numbers. Eight hundred and sixty-nine, the number of paragraphs in Volume One of the Code of Laws that defined the rules and conduct of the Imperial Civil Service. Fourteen, the number of different Civil Service ranks, each with its own uniform and title. The top two ranks of civil servants were to be addressed as Your High Excellency. Those in ranks three and four to be addressed as Your Excellency. The less fortunate in ranks nine to fourteen had to make do with Your Honour. White trousers changing to black, red ribbons changing to blue, even adding a stripe here and there could mark momentous turning points in the orderly progression of the bureaucrat’s life. He could be promoted by one rank every three years from ranks fourteen to eight and one every four years in ranks eight to five. Promotion – and Mikhail emphasized how typical it was, this interface between the autocracy and the bureaucracy that would only make it less likely that either could function effectively – promotion to the last four ranks was at the discretion of the Tsar and carried a hereditary title. With great care not to displease, taking as few decisions as possible in case they gave offence, a man might reach the top of the tree by the age of sixty. This carefully modulated bureaucracy, Mikhail said, was strangling Russia, strangling it in a slow bureaucratic bear hug.

They could see several of these bureaucrats now, coming down the steps of the Interior Ministry building, some of them carrying briefcases.

‘They’re not going home already, Mikhail, are they? It’s just before three o’clock, for God’s sake.’

‘You don’t want to overdo it, if you’re a bureaucrat, Lord Powerscourt. It’s a very hard life in the Interior Ministry. Some of these fellows may have had to attend a couple of meetings in the morning. Think how exhausting that must have been for them.’

Powerscourt had been inside a number of ministries in London where the splendour was reserved for the quarters of the minister and his most senior officials. The rest had been furnished with due regard to the exigencies of the public purse and the dangers of newspapers launching crusades about governments wasting taxpayers’ money on luxurious surroundings for civil servants. But nothing, he thought, could prepare you for the drabness of the interior of the Russian Interior Ministry. The floors were covered in something grey that might once have been the Russian equivalent of linoleum. The walls were painted with a dark colour that looked as if it might have been originally intended for a battleship. A long hopeless corridor stretched out for a couple of hundred yards behind the reception desk, manned by a small man with only one arm.

‘Mr Bazhenov, Room 467, fourth floor. Lift over there. Enter your names in this book before you go up.’

Every public building you went into in St Petersburg, Powerscourt was to discover, took down your name and address as if they proposed to establish a regular correspondence. He wondered briefly about instituting a similar system in Markham Square.

The lift was gloomy and stank of sweat and urine. Mikhail Shaporov pressed the bell for the fourth floor.

‘Do you think the more important chaps live higher up, Mikhail?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Only ranks eight and above allowed on floor three?’

‘God knows,’ said Mikhail, sounding more cheerful than the surroundings warranted. ‘Do you know, Lord Powerscourt, I have lived in this city most of my life and this is the first time I have ever been inside a government building. It’s a revelation.’

It seemed that Room 467 must be at the outermost limit of the fourth-floor corridor where the room numbers started illogically at 379 opposite the lift. Clerks carrying files sauntered past them on their way to unknown bureaucratic destinations. Their feet sounded loud on the grey floor covering that might once have been linoleum. One or two doors were open and Powerscourt and Mikhail had brief visions of rooms filled with desks like classrooms for the grown-up and sad-faced men seated at them reading files or making entries in great ledgers. Through the dirty windows on their right they could see a small courtyard below where figures seemed to march round and round as if on some everlasting ministerial treadmill. They passed a conference room with a fine table and velvet-covered chairs round it, waiting for another meeting. Powerscourt thought he saw a thick layer of dust on the mahogany surface as if the last meeting had taken place some time ago, the committee dissolved perhaps, the junior minister moved on. Maybe only ghosts had their being in there now, coming out only at night – God, what must this building be like in the dark – taking ghostly notes of ghostly meetings and recording them in ghostly files.