Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

Afterward, Sagan and Sashenka parted at the station.

She had a rash on her chin. She touched it with her fingertips and, remembering his lips against hers, she shivered.

Captain Sagan watched Sashenka’s little train pull away and gather speed, its steam billowing like the sultan-spike of a gendarme’s helmet.

He showed his pass to the stationmaster, who was almost overcome with excitement as Sagan commandeered the fool’s cozy office. Warming himself by the Dutch stove and helping himself to a shot of cognac, he wrote a report to his boss, General Globachev.

Sagan’s temples were tightening, always the start of a reverberating headache. He quickly rubbed some of the medicinal powder onto his gums then sniffed two tokes. Things were not going well. He and the general were more worried about St. Petersburg than he had let onto Sashenka. But both men agreed that a crackdown and a dismissal of the Duma were necessary: it was time, he considered, for the Cossack to wield his nagaika whip. The coca tonic replaced his anxiety with a feeling of all-conquering satisfaction that drummed in his temples.

Ever since his days in the Corps de Pages, Sagan had been one of the top students, winner of the highest prize during the two years of courses at the School for Detectives. He had learned the anthropometric tables of the Bertillon system for describing the features of those under surveillance, won the bull’s-eye prize in Captain Glasfedt’s practical course on firearms and mastered the “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents,” which he had applied punctiliously to Sashenka. He had memorized the urbane orders of Colonel Zubatov, the genius of the Okhrana, who had written: You should look on your informer as a mistress with whom you are involved in an adulterous affair . It was indeed impossible to turn female revolutionaries into double agents without exploiting chivalry in some form, even if that meant what he called “antichivalry”—allowing silly teenagers to believe they were serious intellectuals who would never contemplate the slightest flirtation, yet alone sexual approaches. Sagan had followed Zubatov’s recommendations with one of his female double agents in the SRs and another in the Bolsheviks. Neither was a beauty but, in bed, the drama of espionage more than compensated for the often dull athletics.

Sagan always prepared himself meticulously for his meetings with Sashenka, listening to the latest tango, learning reams of that doggerel by Mayakovsky that had turned her head. Her devotion to Bolshevism made it child’s play: the humorless ones were always the easiest to crack, he told himself. Like so many of the revolutionaries, she was a zhyd , a kike, one of that race of turncoats who supported either godless Marxism or the German Kaiser. He smiled at his own liberal posturing, he who believed so passionately in Tsar, Orthodoxy and Motherland, the old order.

Now, using the stationmaster’s pen and ink, he started to write his report to the General:

Your Excellency, I am most satisfied with the case of Agent 23X (‘Snowfox’) who has finally started to prove useful. As Your Excellency knows, I have now met clandestinely with this member of the RSWP (Russian Socialist Workers’ Party: Bolshevik faction) eleven times, counting the first interrogation. The hours of work have paid off and will yield considerable gains later. Using our surveillance teams of external agents, Snowfox’s movements have enabled us to arrest three nihilists of middling rank and to track the new printing press.

The price for the recruitment of this agent has been 1. philosophical—her conviction of my sympathy for her cause and her person (the rescuing of her mother from the Dark One’s apartment was particularly successful in gaining trust); and 2. tactical—the handover of the name of the doorman (new Party member code named Horseguards), which has cost our service nothing since we earlier failed to recruit him as an internal agent, despite the offer of the usual financial inducements (100 rubles/ month) as per P. Stolypin’s “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents.”

At today’s meeting, the agent surrendered the name of two revolutionists, a Menshevik factionist and a Bolshevik terrorist, who had long been sought by the Security Sections of Baku, Moscow and Petrograd. I will organize surveillance according to General Trusevich’s “Instructions for External Surveillance” and arrest forthwith. I request your permission to continue to handle Agent “Snowfox” in the future as I believe that her usefulness for the service depends on my management. It is possible that her Bolshevik handlers have ordered her to hand over these names but I believe that the threat of exposure to her own comrades will now make her submission easy to accomplish.

Our primary mission remains the arrest of Mendel Barmakid, her uncle (codename Clubfoot; alias Comrade Baramian, Comrade Furnace, etc.) and the Bolshevik faction’s Petrograd Committee, but I have absolute confidence that this organization is now hopelessly broken and incapable of any threat in the short to medium term…

Poor little Sashenka, he thought smugly—yet in his heart he knew she was the brightest star in his firmament.

He did not look forward to seeing his wife or General Globachev. If he had had his way, he would have met Sashenka at the safe house every night.

Her diffidence, those teenage doubts, her awkward stance, the prim way she dressed in grey serge, dreary wool stockings and buttoned blouses with her thick hair in a virginal Bolshevik bun, the absence of any makeup or even perfume—all this had wearied him initially. But in recent weeks she had began to grow on him and now he looked forward to the smell of her fresh skin and her sumptuous hair when she was near him, the way her columbine eyes bored into him so intensely, her fingers touching her short upper lip when she talked about her mother, the way her slim body was shaping into a woman’s curves that she was determined to conceal and scorn. And nothing was so adorable as the way she suppressed her humor and joie de vivre, knitting her brows to play the dour revolutionary. He laughed at the tricks of the Almighty, for, however matronly she wanted to be, God had given her features—those lips that never closed, those scathing grey eyes, that lush bosom—that undermined her wishes at every turn and made her even more delicious.

And when he had tasted her lips, his hands had actually started to shake. Her reluctance to return his kiss made her obvious enjoyment of it even more poignant and delightful. Or did I imagine that? he asked himself. Any man of almost forty would lose judgment when faced with that skin, those lips, and the husky bumble-bee voice he had come to know so well. He raised his hands and thought he could divine the scent of her skin, her neck…

Yet she was his agent. The cause, Tsar and Motherland, always came first. It was a desperate struggle for survival between good and evil and she was on the wrong side. If he had to…Well, he hoped it would never come to that. The Okhrana was special. The battle to defend the Empire was a war that had to be fought with merciless conspiracy—as his colleague General Batiushin had told him: “All honor to him who dishonors his name and ends the case with silence as his only reward.” He wet his finger and dipped it into Dr. Gemp’s powder and applied cocaine to nose and gums. He chuckled to himself.

The door opened. A livid snout and ginger whiskers appeared, followed by a uniformed paunch and the rest of the stationmaster.

“Did you say something, Your Excellency?” he said. “Anything I can do? A note to my superiors would be a help. I’d be so grateful…”