Katherine Woodfine - Spies in St. Petersburg

He wasn’t the kind of person anyone else would have paid any attention to. He looked like an ordinary old man, with an unkempt beard. He wore a shabby overcoat with the collar turned up, and his hat pulled low. He wasn’t like the other gentlemen who came to Rivière’s: the haughty young aristocrats; the Tsar’s officers with their gleaming gold braid; the wealthy merchants in fur-lined coats. And yet he visited the shop almost every day. Once there, he would shuffle his way slowly around, before coming to rest, in silent contemplation, before a cabinet of enamelled opera glasses and jewelled lorgnettes. It was always the same display that held him transfixed – and as he looked at it, Sophie looked at him.

The beard, the hat and the collar did not fool her in the least. She knew that this was no ordinary, shabby, harmless old man. In fact, the man who was gazing at the opera glasses was the reason she was here in St Petersburg – and he was someone very dangerous indeed.

Rivière’s, The Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg

‘I don’t understand why you waste time on him,’ Irina muttered, as she and Sophie stood together behind the counter, some distance away from where the old man was peering at a gilded magnifying glass. ‘He’s never going to buy anything! He’s obviously got no money – just look at the state of his overcoat!’

‘I know,’ said Sophie, with a shrug. ‘I suppose I feel sorry for him.’

Irina tutted disapprovingly. ‘ Alice! I know you haven’t been here very long, but you have to understand! If you want to earn a commission, you can’t start feeling sorry for people. You have to choose your customers with care.’ She cast her eye around the shop. ‘Look – see him, for example? That young fellow, with the gold trim on his coat. He’s got money burning a hole in his pocket, I can tell. See how he wants to impress his lady friend? I recognise her – she’s a dancer from the Mariinsky. He’s the one you want to go for.’

She raised her eyes at Sophie, encouraging her, but Sophie just smiled. ‘He’s all yours,’ she said sweetly.

Irina shrugged. ‘Your loss. I bet you fifty kopeks I can get him to buy that gold bonbonnière .’

She strolled off in the direction of the young man, and Sophie grinned after her. She was fond of Irina, whose easy confidence sometimes reminded her a little of Lil. But the truth was, she wasn’t concerned with earning a commission. The small attaché case, carefully hidden under her bed in her room at Vera’s, contained more money than Irina would earn in a year, courtesy of the Secret Service Bureau.

Sophie wasn’t here to earn money. She was here for the old man in the shabby overcoat.

‘May I help you? Would you like to take a closer look at the opera glasses?’

He looked up and smiled at her, a little embarrassed. ‘You must think I am mad,’ he said, in fluent French – though Sophie could detect the traces of a German accent. ‘Almost every day I come here, and every time you are kind enough to show these to me.’

‘Not at all. It’s my job,’ said Sophie pleasantly, as she unlocked the cabinet with one of the small keys that hung on her belt. ‘We have many customers who come back to look at their favourite items. There is one lady who likes to try on a particular diamond tiara every week!’ she added, with a smile.

The old man smiled back, but his eyes were already fixed on the pearl and ruby opera glasses she was showing him. ‘Fascinating,’ he murmured, extending a careful fingertip to touch the gold filigree. ‘Such perfect craftsmanship!’

‘Is there anything else you would care to look at today, Herr Schmidt?’

Sophie knew that the man’s name wasn’t ‘Herr Schmidt’, any more than her own was ‘Mademoiselle Alice Grayson’. She’d decided to use her mother’s name as her alias – her false name – while she was travelling undercover. It seemed rather appropriate, as she knew her mother had visited St Petersburg as a young girl: she’d read all about it in the old diaries that she had inherited.

For a brief moment, she wondered why the man standing before her had chosen ‘Herr Schmidt’ as his own alias. Perhaps he simply thought that with such an ordinary German name, no one could possibly guess that he was no harmless old man, but in fact the Count Rudolf von Wilderstein – disgraced cousin of the King of Arnovia, and husband of the notorious Countess von Wilderstein, hiding under a false identity in St Petersburg.

When Sophie had left Paris in Captain Nakamura’s aeroplane, she’d never expected she’d end up following the Count all the way to Russia. She’d hoped she would be able to catch up with him at the next stage of the air race, and seize back the stolen notebook he was carrying: the notebook containing the all-important information about the secret weapon. But catching up with the Count had not been as easy as she’d hoped. After the dramatic arrest of the Countess in Paris, he and his plane had disappeared from the race, as though they had vanished into thin air.

It had been Nakamura who had explained that it would not be possible for the Count to disappear altogether – not if he continued to travel by plane, at any rate. After all, there were not very many airfields where a pilot could stop to refuel, or to fix the endless problems which Sophie had learned affected aeroplanes at every stage of a journey. And so, at each stage of the air race, while Nakamura had traded stories with the other pilots, or made essential repairs to his plane, Sophie had talked to the mechanics to learn what she could of the Count’s whereabouts. As the weeks passed and they made their way across Europe, telegrams had zigzagged back and forth to the Bureau in London, and with their help, she’d pieced together the Count’s route. At first he’d roughly followed the path of the air race, taking advantage of the free passage across borders offered to the pilots. He’d travelled out of France to Belgium, and then to the Netherlands, where they’d almost caught up with him, missing him at the airfield by barely an hour. After that they’d lost him for a while, before getting a tip-off that he had landed at an airfield in Sweden.

‘He must be in a great hurry,’ Nakamura had said, as they studied the route that Sophie had pencilled on the map. ‘He’s barely stopped to rest for more than an hour at a time – and flying is tiring. I would think it dangerous to fly so long without a proper break.’

‘I think he’s trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Arnovia,’ Sophie had observed. ‘He must know he’s wanted by the authorities, for plotting against the King.’

‘So what will we do now?’ Nakamura had asked. ‘There are only two more stops: Milan, and then Zurich. The air race will be finished in a few days. After that, would you like to go in pursuit of the Count and the notebook?’

Sophie had looked up at him, pleased and surprised. She’d assumed that Nakamura would go back to Japan as soon as the air race was over – but now here he was, proposing that they keep following the Count.

‘I’d like that very much, if you really would be willing. But I just wish I knew for sure that he still has the notebook.’ It was far too precious to be sent by post, but there was always the risk that the Count had handed it to some fellow on an airfield somewhere, who’d been entrusted with seeing it safely into the hands of the Fraternitas . ‘If he hasn’t, then all I’ve done will be for nothing.’