David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Next to the stairs he had used to reach the first floor, a separate flight led down again. The floor below did not look as comfortable as the one above, some of the rooms being almost empty of furniture. These, he supposed, had been vacated by the Ipatiev family and that they had taken what they had needed with him.

Here was the door to the cellar. He knew it without being told. Some rough timber — used to board up the basement rooms — lay beside it on the floor. Prised off by the curious Gajda, no doubt. Paul took hold of the handle and pushed the door open.

A small vestibule led to a second door and to the room in which the Imperial Family had been murdered. The air was musty although he detected no smell beyond that of damp. Nothing, other than a few broken chairs and some pieces of rag left lying on the floor remained, and the only evidence of what had happened was a large area of brown staining in the dirt and dust that could only have been blood. It was the place where the family had died, along with their doctor and a couple of their servants, but no pockmarks from bullet holes showed on the wall above the bloodstained floor. The tattered wallpaper had been hacked through to the plaster and the laths beneath where Colonel Sokolov had dug out the bullets during his investigation.

Paul felt a mixture of morbid curiosity and grim prurience. Some of the men he had served with since leaving Kazan had claimed to have been among the first to enter Ekaterinburg after the Bolsheviks had evacuated the city. He had heard stories from them of what the tsar’s four daughters had suffered at the hands of their killers. How they had known, Paul couldn’t say. After the murder, the bodies had apparently been hurriedly thrown on a cart, driven out into the forest, burned, and then dumped down a well. Looking around the cellar, there was little evidence of anything except the fact of their deaths and he didn’t suppose there was much of anything left of the girls in the forest, either, to reveal what they had endured. It was left to the imagination to supply the evidence, and imagination was probably the genesis of most of the stories he had heard.

Even so, the images persisted in his head and he turned and hurriedly left. Outside he breathed deeply of the freezing air for a minute or two then quickly walked away.

He knew Russia was a country well-used to violence and assassination. He had been old enough before he left to remember reading the newspaper headlines and listening to the talk whenever yet another of the tsar’s ministers had been shot, or bombed, or whatever method of liquidation had been employed. Over the years people had become inured to it. They took it in their stride. It was the way politics in Russia worked — the tsar would hang a few of the guilty and in return the Social-Revolutionaries would assassinate a few more. It was expected. And later, after the February Revolution, it was not a fact that got in the way of negotiations. What remained of the tsar’s ministries had been quite prepared to sit down with the Provisional Government, even men like Kerensky’s deputy minister of war, Boris Savinkov, who had personally planned assassinations. But what the Bolsheviks had done in Ipatiev’s house seemed to go beyond the pale. Given the violence of the time perhaps the tsar might have expected to die. But in a cellar, shot like a rat? And the rest of the family — the four girls and the boy — what had they been guilty of except being Romanovs? It was an act designed to polarise opinion. Paul supposed moderation to be anathema to tyrants, whatever their ideological stamp; a movement like Bolshevism could only exist in opposition to something equally extreme. Even in the short time since it had happened the manner of the deaths of the Imperial Family had begun to relieve the tsar, and even his German tsarina, of some measure of the odium in which they had been held. Along with all the other politically motivated killings the Bolsheviks were guilty of, before and since, their deaths had begun to cleave Russia in two.

There were sides to be taken and Paul had come to the conclusion that it was no country for moderating liberals.

Ward’s train stood at the platform. It was getting up steam, leaving that night for a tour of the Kungur and Lisvin fronts. The carriage Paul stood in was warm and furnished with comfortably upholstered seats. He had taken off his Kirgis coat and it now hung limply on a peg by the carriage door like a skinned bear.

The admiral was seated. Ward stood to his left. Both had changed out of dress uniform, Ward back into his khakis while Kolchak wore civilian clothes. In his cutaway jacket and pinstriped tailored trousers, Paul thought he looked more like a banker than an admiral. But then, he was now the minister for war.

Ward effected the introduction, keeping it simple. ‘Captain Ross,’ he announced.

Paul saluted, then unaccountably found himself clicking his heels and executing an awkward bow. Neither action proved successful, the dull leather of his Czech-issue army boots suppressing any trace of military snappiness while his bow, he suspected, had appeared more reminiscent of a wine-waiter’s.

Kolchak stood and extended his hand.

‘Of the family name, Rostov,’ Paul added, muddying the waters, and he immediately noticed Ward cocking his eye in the manner of a man detecting something unexpectedly devious.

‘Rostov?’ Admiral Kolchak’s pallid forehead creased with a quizzical frown.

‘The Admiral served with my father at Tsushima, I believe. And did my mother the honour of calling upon her in London last year?’

‘Rostov.’ Kolchak said again, sitting down. ‘There was an officer in the Baltic Fleet by that name.’

‘My father, sir.’

Paul was aware that convention generally dictated that Kolchak be obliged to say something complimentary about his father at this point, yet an uncomfortable silence ensued. A steward served drinks on a silver tray. Paul filled the awkward conversational gap with an enquiry as to how the admiral had found his mother.

‘Your mother?’ Kolchak repeated once again, glancing at Ward as if the colonel might have been familiar with his London itinerary. ‘London, you say…? Oh, in good health, I am sure.’

Ward cleared his throat. ‘ Ross here,’ he said, making a point of emphasising the name he’d been given, ‘has come out to liaise. Isn’t that the fact, Ross?’

‘Indeed?’ asked Kolchak. ‘In what capacity?’

‘In the first instance’ Paul said, ‘to contact my cousin, Mikhail Ivanovich Rostov,’ adding rather stiffly, ‘formerly of the late tsar’s Interior Ministry. Through him I was to liaise between the anti-Bolshevik factions and General Poole in Archangel. Once having achieved this, I was expected to present myself to the Admiral upon your arrival and to offer my services. I also carry a letter of introduction from Professor Masaryk to the Czech Legion.’

Aware that he had said little of this to the Ward, he was not surprised to see the colonel looking somewhat non-plussed.

‘By whom?’ asked the Admiral.

‘Sir?’

‘On whose orders were you told to present yourself to me?’

‘By the British War Office, sir.’

‘General Knox has not advised me of this.’

‘I don’t believe the general has actually been acquainted with my mission, Admiral.’

‘Oh?’ Kolchak glanced from Paul to Ward and back again. ‘How so? Is General Knox not the senior British military advisor in Siberia?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Paul agreed, glancing himself at Ward but seeing from the colonel’s bluff exterior that he could expect little in the way of assistance from that quarter. ‘But I was sent by the Foreign Service, sir. Under the auspices of the War Office.’