Mark Mills - House of the Hanged

‘He didn’t send me,’ Tom replied. ‘I’m sailing under my own colours.’

Dukes snapped the barrel shut and looked up, intrigued. ‘Go on.’

Tom told him everything: of his relationship with Irina, his forced flight from Russia, and his work for the Secret Intelligence Service in Helsinki, which had involved deciphering many of Dukes’s own intelligence reports. Helsinki was a mess, a sinkhole of desperation and duplicity, swarming with émigrés and spies. Information and disinformation were the twin orders of the day in the Finnish capital, and Tom’s other duties had entailed trawling the city’s restaurants, hotel bars and drawing rooms, keeping an ear out for anything of value.

This wasn’t how he had got wind of Irina’s arrest, though; that news had come to him via Markku, who had heard it from one of the other couriers, along with the small but devastating detail that Irina was pregnant. Tom didn’t reveal this to Dukes, if only because the notion that he’d fathered a child was still too big to grapple with on his own, let alone share with a stranger. Besides, at the time it hadn’t coloured the decision he’d arrived at with Markku’s encouragement and assistance.

Both men knew that Bayliss, the SIS station chief in Helsinki, would never have sanctioned a rescue attempt, so the plan had been hatched in secret, with Markku providing false documents, detailed instructions on a number of routes in and out of the country, as well as the names of a few reliable contacts in Petrograd. The sixty thousand roubles which Markku estimated would be required for bribes had proved much harder to come by. In the end Tom had been left with no other choice but to ‘borrow’ it from the SIS slush fund.

Dukes had been listening attentively throughout, but now broke his silence with the bleak observation, ‘That’s going to cost you your job, and probably a lot more.’

‘I don’t care. It all went wrong last night.’

He described how the band of Chekists had shown up at St Isaac’s Cathedral in place of Irina, and how he had only just managed to slip through their fingers.

Dukes got to his feet and wandered to the fireplace. He poked at a burning log with the toe of his boot. There was something ominous in his studied silence.

‘I’m going to tell you this now,’ he said eventually, turning to face Tom. ‘Because if you don’t hear it from me, you may never hear it at all.’ He paused. ‘She was executed last night.’

Tom felt a cold hand settle on his heart. His words, when they came, sounded distant, hollow.

‘How do you know?’

‘Console yourself with the fact that they would have killed her anyway. You see, I never met her myself, but I know of people she helped. We were aware of her . . . predicament.’

Her predicament? He made her sound like a debutante torn between two evening gowns in Harrods.

‘How do you know?’ demanded Tom, more forcefully this time.

‘I had it on good authority early this morning.’

‘Good authority?’

‘A very reliable source, I’m afraid.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘I have a right to know.’

‘And I have a duty to protect his identity. If you’re captured by the Cheka they will make you talk. Don’t look so affronted – everyone talks. Do you want him to lose his life too?’

At that moment Katya returned bearing a tray, which she placed on a low side table. She must have been eavesdropping from the kitchen. It wasn’t just the misting of pity in her hard eyes; before pouring the tea she handed Tom two tablets and a glass of water.

‘Aspirin. For your wrist.’

The tea cups matched the antique porcelain pot, and Dukes savoured a first, warming sip before continuing.

‘Look, believe me, I’m sorry. We’ve all lost friends, good friends, and I daresay we stand to lose many more. But you shouldn’t have come here. Markku should not have given you this address. There’s nothing we can do for you.’

‘I didn’t come here for me, I came here for you – to warn you.’

He explained that Markku had put him in contact with a man named Dimitri Zakharov. It was Zakharov who had organized the escape, Zakharov who had betrayed him to the Cheka.

Dukes and Katya exchanged a brief look. ‘I doubt that very much,’ said Dukes. ‘Zakharov gave them a description of me. I overheard them say it.’

Dukes hesitated. ‘If he did, then it was tortured out of him.’

‘He didn’t look too distressed when I saw him leave his apartment an hour ago.’

Dukes was clearly taken aback by this news. ‘Maybe we’re talking about another Zakharov.’

‘How many Zakharovs does Markku know who live on Kazanskaya?’

‘Katya . . .?’

For once she looked shaken. ‘Anything is possible. We both know that.’

Dukes turned his attention back to Tom. ‘I was wrong. You were right to come here.’ He handed the revolver back. ‘I’m surprised there are still six bullets left in the cylinder.’

Tom had indeed trailed Zakharov for a good few streets, imagining the moment – the muzzle of the gun planted at the base of the traitor’s neck, or maybe a swift tap on the shoulder first with the barrel so that Tom could carry with him the flash of recognition, of terror, in the other man’s eyes as a future balm for his soul. In the end, though, he had allowed Zakharov to slip away from him.

Maybe it had been cowardice, the knowledge that retribution would surely come at the cost of his own life, or maybe the calculating pragmatist in him had prevailed over base emotion. Either way, he was alive, and the information he had just handed on might even save lives. It clearly had value; he could see its worth reflected back at him in Dukes’s eyes.

‘This changes everything,’ said Dukes. ‘We can’t stay here. Katya, you also have to leave.’

‘No.’

‘You must.’

‘Not if I don’t know where you’re going.’

‘Katya –’

‘Do I know?’ she insisted.

Dukes shook his head solemnly.

‘Then go,’ she said. ‘Both of you. What are they going to do with an old woman like me?’

Her life had been reduced quite enough already to this: this queer museum of displaced artefacts. The barbarians might be hammering at the gates of the city, but the curator had no intention of abandoning her post.

It took Dukes a few minutes to gather his belongings together, and all the while he was issuing instructions to Tom. Katya accompanied them downstairs as far as the first-floor landing. Pressing something into Dukes’s hand, she said, ‘It was my mother’s.’

Tom also received a parting gift – a jewelled gold locket on a chain.

‘You are a brave boy,’ said Katya, ‘and you deserve to live. But remember . . . keep back one bullet for yourself.’

She shooed them off down the stairs like a mother sending her two sons out to play.

Tom left the building first, turning up his collar and heading south on Liteiny Prospekt. Dukes went north. Ten nerve-racking minutes later they reconvened, as arranged, in front of a haberdashery on Nevsky Prospekt. There was no acknowledgement; it was an opportunity for each of them to determine if the other was being followed. Dukes had said he would stamp the snow from his boots if he felt they were safe to proceed. This he now did, before setting off once more at a brisk pace. Tom tailed him at a distance, his fingers closed around the revolver in his pocket, unsure of their destination.

He tried to remain alert, but his grief came at him in waves. He had walked this same route with Irina, idly strolling in the summer heat, stopping every so often to peer into a shop window, the scarlet trams rattling back and forth nearby.

He choked back a sob and felt the heat of anger rising in his belly. He didn’t fight to suppress it; he let it spread through him, into his chest, along his limbs, warming him.