Stephen Miller - The Last Train to Kazan

And this is what he does, finding one of the wretches that wait just outside the station so that they will not be run off by the one of the Red Guards assigned to patrol the entrance.

‘I need a courier. Who’s the best?’ Making it like a challenge, the kind of thing boys of a certain age prefer over all others. Putting on a smile to dazzle them. One tough on top of a luggage cart doesn’t flinch. ‘It might be difficult,’ he says to them, still smiling, ‘but I’m in a hurry and don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Two kopeks,’ they are all shouting. The little ones cluster around his knees.

‘I am having dinner with a special person. She needs consoling.’

‘If you want the receipt, it’s extra,’ says the tough.

‘No, I don’t know where I’m going to be. You keep the receipt and I’ll come back for it.’

‘It’s still extra,’ says the boy, and the little ones look around, willing to do whatever he tells them for less.

He looks at the boy’s eyes. Not unattractive. Good enough. Big enough to know what getting hurt means. Now all the little ones have shut up.

‘Fine, then,’ he says. ‘You.’

They move into the corridor and he finds a counter and the forms. He writes the message, changes his mind in midsentence and tears up the form and starts again.

The boy reaches into his pocket and takes out a tin box, something once used for pills. He has a cigarette stub in there, and begins to dig for a match.

‘Here,’ he says, and gives the boy his cigarette case. Turns back to the writing.

‘Sometimes the best-laid plans go all wrong, you understand?’ he says to the boy.

‘All the time,’ the boy says, carefully closing the case, turning it over in his hands, feeling the warmth of the silver. Expensive, the boy will be thinking. Nice, but something that’s been around, a dent here, a place where the silver has rubbed off at one corner, as if it had been dragged along the ground. He holds out his hand and the boy gives the case back. The touch of a smile.

They are equals now.

‘The important thing is not to panic. Not to lose your head, eh?’ Looks over at the boy and smiles. He straightens up from the counter top and gazes down through the doors out to the open square.

Tonight, he thinks. Certainly, it will be tonight, he is thinking. The Bolsheviks are packing up and leaving town, the better to make their stand on the Volga. Everyone is trying to get out of the city on the last train. Those who’ve kept back a little are even trying to bribe their way out of town.

If you are going to run away, he is thinking, you should resemble as much as possible someone who is running away. Someone with something to save, something to protect. It’s victims who run away.

He tears up the form again. Starts over.

SPECIAL SALES #R4-0B3

READY TO PURCHASE SEVEN. ADVISE REGARDS DELVERY

SOONEST.

TODMANN

He signs, and folds the form in half. ‘I’m going to give you a rouble extra, eh?’

The boy frowns, looking at him, surprised that this supposed sophisticate has revealed himself to be a far bigger fool than he has suspected.

‘But it’s not for you, it’s for one of the operators in there, eh? Go in through the door and give him the note. For that much it goes to the top of the queue, yes?’

‘Yes, of course.’ The boy actually smiles.

‘Thank you, and here, soldier. Take another.’ He opens the silver case and gives the boy another cigarette, wondering if he’s the kind to rush through things or make them last. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he says.

‘Fine,’ says the boy after a moment. A good boy. Good eyes. Strong and hungry.

‘I’ll be back for the receipt. I need it for business, so make sure you keep it. Keep it safe in your little box, eh? If they reply, I might hire you a second time, eh? So, go on, then,’ he says, and watches him walk down the corridor, jump the line, take his cap off as he pushes into the telegraphers’ cage and, good boy that he is, do exactly as he’s been told.

Everything changed in Perm. Ryzhkov watched the soldiers as they suddenly emptied out, and there was the first delay; a full half-hour while they watered and fitted an extra tender. The wires were down and no one knew if they could re-coal at Yekaterinburg yard.

He walked around the city, stood there watching the Kama running low between its embankments, used his Cheka credentials whenever he needed, and poked his nose into everything. Dropped in on the commissar and let him know that he might have important communications from time to time, looked the man straight in the eye. Watched the wheels go around even as he agreed. Special handling, then. Absolutely.

They got going again at dusk. He managed to requisition a loaf of bread at Cheka mess, which was a long room in the basement of a therapeutic school with kitchens at the end and steaming soup pots. Then in the night the train had slowed, and stopped intermittently – the entire journey elongating from a normal eight hours to two days and counting.

The weather had changed, becoming wetter. It began to rain in the night, and it was in some grey late July hour when they finally arrived, passing through a hurried line of barricades the Bolsheviks were throwing up at the village of Kungur, where the road to Moscow intersected with the railroad – an important little place, for if the Czechs overran it they’d be one step closer to controlling the railroad all the way to Viatka, and that much closer to joining with British and American forces advancing south from the port of Archangel.

And if that happened the people’s revolution would be surrounded.

They were losing, Ryzhkov saw. The train was completely empty in the last stretches, not a good sign. It appeared that there were no reinforcements rushing to help the Ural Soviet and the people of Yekaterinburg. And, even with the fresh troops he had been travelling with, it was obvious that there would be no strong Red defence of Perm. It was just the mathematics – there weren’t enough trained Red fighters to stop the Czechs. No horses to speak of, no artillery.

No hope.

‘Where’s this?’

‘Yekaterinburg – but there’s two stations. They are trying to decide. They might not be able to get into the city,’ one of the conductors told him.

The train, which had been creeping along, slowed to a halt some distance outside the first stop, a rural station on the way into the city. Manning the watchtowers beside the road were factory workers, with red rags tied round their sleeves, while below them a mass of wounded Bolshevik infantrymen waited for evacuation. The only station was hardly more than a tiny loading dock, and a telegraph shed at the crossing of the Moscow road.

The conductor came back and said they wouldn’t be going into the city to the central station. Too dangerous. In the distance there was a sudden crash of an artillery explosion, and Ryzhkov shouldered his bag, stepped down out from his carriage and started walking down the tracks to the crossing.

There was another ripple of artillery rising up through the hills, a long distance away, but still his shoulders hunched and his stomach went light. The little station had been blacked out except for a single shielded light. The artillery had given him the shakes, and all he’d wanted to do from the moment he’d got out of the train was run away as fast and as far as he could.

Find the Romanovs and then get out, he told himself.

Places are either good, or they are bad. Yekaterinburg was bad, a city in chaos, stupefied, not knowing to whom it should pay allegiance. Ryzhkov’s first view of the city was from the back of a automobile-tyre-shod cart that was being used as an ambulance back and forth to the crossroads. There was plenty of room going back. The driver was careful to explain that he’d been recruited by the local soviet when Ryzhkov flashed his Cheka book at him. ‘It’s fine. I don’t care which side you’re on,’ Ryzhkov told him.