David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

‘Why is that?’ asked Natasha at her most demure.

‘Most of the space is occupied by something other than a chair or a sofa.’

‘I’ve no idea what you mean, Mikhail Shaporov,’ she said, laughing at him with her eyes and taking him by the hand. ‘Perhaps you’d better show me.’

Powerscourt was just a few hundred yards from the British Embassy when he felt a touch on his arm. There was that bald head again, complete with the ingratiating smile beneath it. Powerscourt thought he would rather have walked all the way to Siberia than have another meeting with this face.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ said Derzhenov, the Okhrana chief, ‘how delightful to meet you again. Perhaps you would do me the honour of accompanying me to my humble abode? I have something to tell you and something to show you. Both will be of interest, my dear friend.’

Powerscourt felt himself being steered away from the sanctuary of the Embassy and de Chassiron’s Earl Grey in the direction of the Fontanka Quai and its revolting basement. He wondered if Derzhenov had any more torments to show him down there. He rather suspected he had.

‘Have you been seeing much of that charming Natasha Bobrinsky lately, Lord Powerscourt? Such a beautiful girl.’

‘I have seen her recently, as a matter of fact, Mr Derzhenov. She was in good spirits.’

Derzhenov looked shiftily around him, as if he were under surveillance from some of his own operatives. ‘I should tell her to take care, Lord Powerscourt, if I were you, to be very discreet. Some of the other organs of state security have been keeping an eye on the fair Natasha and they might not like what they see.’

Powerscourt felt lost in the thickets of the Russian intelligence chess game, a pawn surrounded by marauding knights and bellicose bishops. Why on earth, he said to himself, is Derzhenov telling me this? Surely he is on the same side as this other organ of state security, whatever that might be, wherever it might be found. Relief came from the unexpected quarter of the basement of the Okhrana headquarters and a couple of guards saluting their master and his foreign visitor. On the way down the steps Powerscourt was assailed once again by the smell, a putrid compound of sweat, dried blood and human waste that rose to greet the visitors. The noises too were the same as before, the groans and smothered grunts of men whose lips are sealed and have no way to express their agony. Further up the corridor there was the familiar sound of whips meeting human flesh. But Derzhenov was drawing Powerscourt towards a door that led into a small courtyard outside. What he saw there took his breath away.

On the left-hand side, nearest to the wall, a soldier was holding back a couple of people whose filthy faces and bloodstained clothes showed they must be prisoners pressed into service as extras. On the far right were a couple of young men carrying buckets with coiled whips in them. Seated on a table were two or three more prisoners, spectators of the scene beneath them. A young woman was trying to hide behind them. The light was dark everywhere. On the right-hand side of the scene a prisoner, clad only in a loincloth, was being fastened on to a gridiron. Another man, naked to the waist, seemed to be supervising the fire underneath it. Powerscourt could see the flames taking hold below. He could hear the hiss as they leapt from coal to coal. Powerscourt thought it was probably the most obscene sight he had ever witnessed.

‘Do you not like my artistry, Lord Powerscourt? Do you not admire the echoes of the martyrdom of St Lawrence I showed you in the Hermitage? The prisoner in the loincloth, he even looks a bit like the dead saint. My two boys with the whips in the buckets – so much more appropriate than the fish in the original, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt? – are under orders to set to work if they think the man may talk.’ Derzhenov paused briefly and shouted something in Russian. The man supervising the fire bent to his task with greater vigour than before. The two guards fastening the man on to the gridiron strapped him down.

‘We think this fellow on the gridiron has links with the people who blew up Grand Duke Serge in Moscow,’ Derzhenov went on. ‘We’ve got a couple of the gang here. They’re a bit squeamish down there in the Kremlin. The unfortunate Grand Duke was shattered into hundreds of pieces by the bomb. Our friend here’ – Derzhenov pointed to the prostrate figure, his mouth gagged, his face already contorted into a rictus of pain – ‘is only being burnt a little. All he has to do is to tell us all he knows and he will be released.’

Derzhenov inspected his little tableau. ‘Oh, Lord Powerscourt, I almost forgot. You see the girl at the back there, hiding behind the men? That is his sister. We thought she might enjoy the show.’ Derzhenov laughed a bloodcurdling laugh. ‘If he does not talk, Lord Powerscourt, maybe we will swap them over. The young man can watch his sister take on the role of St Lawrence, that should loosen his tongue.’

Derzhenov steered Powerscourt back towards the corridor. ‘Would you like to join us in a bet, Lord Powerscourt? We take bets, you see, on the time the prisoner will talk or the time he will die. You can take your pick.’

Powerscourt shook his head and wondered how much more he could take. There was always a double-edged quality to Derzhenov’s displays of torture. One side of it showed how ruthless he and his colleagues could be. The other was a warning to Powerscourt. If you don’t cooperate, then you’ll be next on the skewer or underneath the whips or fastened to the gridiron.

‘We must take one very quick look at one of the cells near the end here,’ Derzhenov said, almost licking his lips in anticipation. ‘It is, dare I say it, another of my combinations of art and interrogation!’

Powerscourt had visions of rows and rows of real crucifixions mounted in the style of Rubens and Caravaggio and Tintoretto and the etiolated saviours of El Greco. What confronted him in Cell 24 of the Okhrana basement was worse.

On the back wall of the cell somebody had painted a forest scene in the evening. There were occasional shafts of light visible in the gloom. In front of this sylvan idyll a great tree trunk had been fixed with chains. And hanging upside down was a prisoner, his legs secured to the upper branches. His hands at the bottom of the tree were bound with rope. His arms were locked in a circle round his head. Standing by the prisoner’s left side was a young woman, almost naked, her bare right breast not far from the victim’s chin. In her right hand she carried a knife and she was peeling the skin from the prisoner’s chest in slow deliberate movements. Kneeling on the floor a male guard, also equipped with a deadly knife, was peeling the skin from his lower legs. The prisoner’s body was totally covered in blood.

‘The flaying of Marsyas, Powerscourt, do you not think it fine? And the girl at work on his chest, maybe arousing the final pangs of desire from the victim in her deshabille? My own special touch, I must confess. Really, I am not sure which I am fonder of, this Marsyas in here, or the Martyrdom of St Lawrence without. It is so hard to tell.’

The prisoner uttered what must have been a scream. The gags on his mouth made it sound like a small groan. ‘We thought this one was going to talk about half an hour ago,’ Derzhenov went on, ‘but when we took the gag out he just spat in the eyes of his captors. But come, upstairs, I have news for you.’

This time the Okhrana chief took him, not to his office, but to a small sparsely furnished sitting room on the third floor. The only decorations on the walls were a painting of a monastery and a silver crucifix. Any notion Powerscourt might have had about a religious side to the Russian secret service was swiftly dispelled.