Stephen Miller - A Game of Soldiers

Dima Dudenko, the youngest member of their team, yawned and also tried to stretch his legs in the carriage. His feet got tangled in Ryzhkov’s and he woke with an irritated jerk, then realized where he was. ‘Good Christ, this is insane. Doesn’t Blue Shirt ever sleep?’

‘Here he comes…’ Ryzhkov muttered as the door of the troika opened and the mad monk – Grigori Efrimovich Rasputin – stepped down on to the pavement. The prostitutes were tipsy. They laughed and stumbled into the street behind him. Hokhodiev managed to blink himself awake just as Rasputin and his friends climbed the front steps. A sign hanging above the portico read Apollo Fine Papers & Binding. The front doors opened and Rasputin threw his arms wide as a blast of applause engulfed him. A clutch of men in formal dress stepped out to kiss his hand. Laughing, he was dragged inside.

They were in a fading neighbourhood, a little too far away from the canal, not close enough to the theatre, and much too close to the stench of the market on a warm day. Ryzhkov cleared his throat and spat out on to the cobbles. ‘This is…Peplovskaya Street, yeah, Muta?’ he asked the driver.

‘Peplovskaya, yes, excellency. Only a small street,’ Muta said in his thick Georgian accent. Ryzhkov had been along the little street dozens of times; still, he had never really noticed it. An uninteresting street, the kind that could only take you somewhere else.

‘Well, he’ll be in there for hours,’ Dudenko muttered. ‘Does anybody want something to eat? There’s a place down the corner, they might have something?’

‘Not me,’ Hokhodiev said, got out and walked a few paces out into the street and began to urinate.

‘Go ahead. I suppose he’s probably safe enough in there.’ Ryzhkov climbed out of the carriage to shake the stiffness out of his legs, took a moment to roll his head around on his shoulders.

Ostensibly the Okhrana were charged with watching over Rasputin to ensure that he did not come under the influence of foreign agents or revolutionary elements that might use him to gain access to the Imperial family, but really they were guarding ‘Blue Shirt’ – as the Internal branch knew him – from embarrassment in the newspapers. There was no detective work involved. Everyone knew the secret police were trailing the staretz , not because he was a threat to the Imperial family, but because he was their pet.

In less than a decade Rasputin had become a legend. He was thought to be a holy wanderer who could speak directly with God, a creature with unlimited sexual appetites who could cure illnesses with a simple caress. Everyone in the capital knew that if you wanted something – a posting to a particular ministry, special attention paid to your proposals, consideration when it was time to hand out military decorations – anything at all, you would need Rasputin as an ally. His favour was a necessity in order to ensure a successful career, his wrath could obliterate a cabinet minister in a single morning.

Thus, when their rotation came around Pyotr Ryzhkov and his men dutifully trailed Rasputin back and forth across the city. It amounted to a series of sleepless nights that only ended when Blue Shirt fell into his bed in the company of a final prostitute he would select from the group waiting at the entrance to his building. It was boring unless you enjoyed watching the upper crust humiliate themselves at the feet of a con artist, an exercise which Ryzhkov had long since ceased to find amusing.

His memory of the street gradually came back – apartments over shops down at the corner of Sadovaya, a couple of shabby wooden houses and a little warehouse up on the market end of the street – Peplovskaya. The only thing disturbing the peace of the street was the noise coming out of the Apollo Bindery.

‘Look at this,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Oh, yes, all you need is the money and you can buy a little taste of heaven…’ Hokhodiev joined him as he walked along beside the carriages. Painted on their sides were the crests of some of Russia’s most powerful families. At the head of the queue, the black troika of Prince Yusupov, behind it a carriage inscribed with the gold filigreed crest of the House of Orlovsky. A flaming fortress indicated the Evdaev family, next was the gleaming Renault of Prince Cantacuzène.

‘Well, they must be sewing together some extremely rare books. A very literate clientele, by the looks of it…’

‘High flying, even for our friend,’ Hokhodiev said. ‘You want me to get the numbers?’

‘Oh, yes, whatever the circumstances we must complete our paperwork. Do you have enough space in your book?’ The carriages and motorcars continued for the length of the street past the bordello, vehicles belonging to an assortment of devotees, perverts, aristocrats, power-mad debauchees of every stripe.

‘If I run out of pages, maybe I’ll go up and buy a new one from the management, eh?’ Hokhodiev laughed and walked away down to the start of the queue.

Ryzhkov stood in the centre of the street, fiddled for his watch and checked the time. Nearly four in the morning. The sky above him was a pearly white tinged with streaks of yellow. From above one of the prostitutes was crying out in pretend-orgasm. The chauffeurs looked over and he shook his head and they laughed. Down at the end of the street he watched Kostya gathering the meaningless licence numbers.

‘No point,’ he said. He sighed and headed back to their carriage, the most unkempt vehicle on the street. ‘No point whatsoever…’

Dima came back with rolls and a pot of tea. When Ryzhkov took a drink he flinched. ‘Are you all right?’ Dudenko asked, his narrow face frowning.

‘Oh, it’s just this tooth, it’s started up again. I’m fine.’ He took a sip from the glass of tea that Dudenko gave him. The heat brought another jolt of pain to his jaw.

‘You should do something about that, an infection can lead to serious illness, eh?’

‘Yes, yes, yes…’ He held the hot liquid on his jaw and waited for the pain to go away.

They sat in their shabby little carriage and shared out the food among themselves. Muta took the opportunity to fall asleep with the reins in his hand. After a few minutes Hokhodiev returned, opened the door of the carriage, sat on the step and smoked. They talked about the schedule for the next day. It should have been the end of a hellish week of Blue Shirt surveillance, but the Tsar was in the capital and the three of them were to augment the Imperial Guard at the Marinsky Theatre. What that meant was – less sleep all around.

Dudenko gathered their glasses and had taken only a few steps down the pavement when they heard the screams.

There was a sudden crashing that came from the end of the street. All the drivers and chauffeurs looked up. It sounded like one or two women – angry. A man’s voice, lower. Something crashed into splinters and shards.

‘What…what is this? Tell me he hasn’t gone and got into something stupid…’ Ryzhkov stood up in the carriage. Muta woke up and his pony took a nervous step forward. There was another long scream from the upstairs of the building.

‘It’s down there –’ Dudenko stooped and placed the glasses on the pavement, stood and peered down the street. Ryzhkov could see the drivers at the end of the queue looking at something masked by the edge of the building.

‘Something going on in the lane down there,’ Hokhodiev said.

Ryzhkov jumped out of the carriage, ran across the cobbles and down to the corner of the bindery. There at the beginning of the lane a group of drivers were standing still, serious expressions on their faces. In the distance sounded the shrill blast of a police whistle. He rounded the corner and saw what he first took for a bundle of clothes tossed on to the pavement.