The White Russian

When the others had retreated out of earshot, Prokopiev took out a silver cigarette case and offered it to Ruzsky. “Did you think it was someone else?” Prokopiev asked as his match flared.

They smoked in silence. Prokopiev glanced at his boots. They had been newly polished. “I heard about your father,” he said. “I’m sorry for that.”

Ruzsky did not respond. He took a pace toward the body, but Prokopiev raised his hand. “Don’t go any closer,” he said, smoke bleeding through his mouth and nostrils.

Ruzsky examined the dead woman. The hilt of the knife bore a striking resemblance to the one they had discovered on the Neva.

“You know who she is?” Ruzsky asked.

Prokopiev shrugged.

“Might I take a look?”

Ruzsky inched forward and this time Prokopiev made no move to stop him.

Olga had fallen awkwardly, her body twisted. Her assailant had been waiting in the shadows of the doorway and her face, never beautiful, was savagely distorted.

Ruzsky squatted, an arm resting upon his knee. He reached forward to touch the skin of what remained of her cheek. She had been dead some time.

He examined the knife. It was an ancient, simple weapon with an iron handle, but no inscription that Ruzsky could see.

There were three stab wounds: one in the left cheek, another in the mouth, and a third directly through the center of the eye. He didn’t need Sarlov to tell him that the killer had been tall. The wounds were deep. A pool of congealed blood had frozen on the stone floor around her head. Her remaining eye was fixed upon him. It appeared to be as filled with hatred for Ruzsky and his kind as it had been when she was alive.

Prokopiev leaned on the iron balcony. “So, who did you think it was, Chief Investigator?”

“There are no witnesses?” Ruzsky asked, ignoring Prokopiev’s knowing look. He had seen no onlookers or curious glances through half-open doors. Such was the fear of the Okhrana.

Prokopiev did not respond.

Ruzsky reached a hand toward the pocket of Olga’s overcoat.

“There’s nothing in there.”

Olga’s clothes were ill-fitting and loose, so he started to ease her overcoat away from her right shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

Ruzsky did not respond.

“Step back, Sandro. Please.”

But Ruzsky had already pulled back Olga’s overcoat and was now shifting the thick shirt beneath far enough to allow him a glimpse of her shoulder.

She had the mark, a dark star branded upon white skin.

“Move back,” Prokopiev said.

“You see this? This brand? The American had one; so did the man we found at the Lion Bridge.”

Prokopiev bent down to take a closer look. Ruzsky could see that he knew exactly what it meant.

“The mark of the assassin,” Prokopiev sighed, almost inaudibly. He straightened, his eyes boring into Ruzsky’s own. “Do not mourn for them, Sandro.”

“You know the woman?”

“Few will regret her passing.”

“You know her from Yalta?”

“An anarchist.”

“How did she come to be here?”

“No tears will be shed for her. But, for your girl…” He paused. “Now she is a very different matter.”

Ruzsky stared at him, searching for some sign that this was another threat, but Prokopiev’s expression was concerned-almost imploring. “Did you know her in Yalta?”

“No.”

“You were on the train with us?”

“When you disappeared? Yes.”

Ruzsky gestured at the bodies. “Vasilyev has been behind these killings, hasn’t he? He wishes to remove all traces of the co

“You’re smarter than that. No general kills his own soldiers before the battle begins.”

“What battle?”

“Your time is short.”

They heard labored footsteps on the stairs below. “Back,” Prokopiev instructed. He fixed Ruzsky with an intense stare. Your time is short, his eyes blazed.

Vasilyev turned the corner, a dark cape around his shoulders, fastened at the throat by a gold chain. He mounted the steps with his head thrust forward, his face glacial. He ignored Ruzsky and examined the body, betraying no reaction.

“Thank you, Chief Investigator. That will be all.”

As Prokopiev led him away, Ruzsky dropped the remains of his cigarette and looked back at the dark figure stooped over the body. At the bottom of the stairs, he noticed a small pool of blood and stopped to examine it.

Prokopiev lifted him up gently and propelled him onward. Ruzsky tried to turn back, but the door of the apartment building was slammed in his face.

Pavel was waiting on the far side of the road, to one side of the queue. “Who was it?” His eyes told Ruzsky he knew who it was not.

“Olga Legarina.”

“She’s also from Yalta?”

“She’s one of the group, yes.”

“Did you get a look at the body?”

“It’s the same killer, with a similar knife. She had an identical mark on her right shoulder.”

“The same as the American?”

“Yes. Prokopiev called it the mark of the assassin.”

Pavel said, “If we don’t reach her, she’s going to die, isn’t she?” He did so without emotion, as if considering the possibility for the first time. “We had better find her.”

But Ruzsky was deep in thought. “We’ve been foolish,” he said. “Or I have. I should have spent more time looking for the families of the victims.”

“I thought they were robbers.” Pavel shook his head. “Armed robbery, you said.”

Ruzsky was staring at the doorway opposite. He thought of the passage in the records he had uncovered in Yalta. Popova expressed view that Chief of Police in Odessa better target.

He turned and walked rapidly back toward the sled. “Hurry up,” he said.

50

T he records division of the Petrograd City Police Department was housed in the vast cellar that ran all the way under Ofitserskaya Ulitsa. It was cold, the documents it contained damp and frayed at the edges.

The duty clerk led them to the far wall and pointed at a section of buff-colored files which stretched for thirty yards or more. No one had ever counted exactly how many servants of the regime had been murdered in the past twenty years, but it clearly ran into the thousands. For each assassination, the local police office telegraphed notification and a request for information to every major city department in the country. Every crime against the regime was recorded here.

The only desk in the cellar belonged to the clerk, so Pavel and Ruzsky sat on the floor. Pavel began on the shelf for 1910, Ruzsky for the year before. Each folder contained the telegraph traffic for one week.

“What are we looking for, precisely?” Pavel began to turn over the tattered sheets of the first file. “An assassination in the Crimea?”

“And the surrounding area, unless something else leaps out at you.”

Ruzsky looked up at the narrow slit in the far wall. The ceiling shook as an automobile passed on the street above. He thought again of the brief description of the group’s activities in the records in Yalta and its reference to both the chief of police and governor of Odessa. “I think they concentrated on the peninsula, and possibly Odessa.”

Pavel did not look convinced.

Ruzsky began to sift through the telegraphs in his hand. They provided a window on an empire in which it was all too easy for criminals to evade capture.

After half an hour, Ruzsky found a string of correspondence relating to the murder of an imperial official-the principal private secretary to the governor-in Kazan. No group was mentioned and the two suspects were “believed to have traveled to Moscow.”

He replaced the file and began to work through the next, but he was finding it hard to concentrate. “It’s age that divides them,” he said.

“Divides who?” Pavel asked, without looking up.

“The victims. Olga, the American, and Markov from the Lion Bridge are all considerably older than Ella. And it is they who have the mark.”