CHAPTER VIII

THEY CLUNG TO each other. Dmitry was shivering and the warmth of Tyeplov’s body did nothing to alleviate it.

‘Mitka. What have you done?’ Tyeplov hissed.

‘What did you see, Tolya?’ asked Dmitry. It was an important question. The more that Tyeplov had observed for which there could be no sane explanation, the easier Dmitry would find it when unfolding his own, insane account of what had taken place.

‘I saw you shoot Mihailov,’ he stammered. ‘I saw you stab Wieczorek. I saw … Where is Wieczorek?’

Dmitry stood and offered his hand to Tyeplov. He felt suddenly aware of their nakedness. Tyeplov rose to his feet and Dmitry led him to where Wieczorek’s clothes lay. Dmitry saw his own trousers where he had discarded them earlier, protruding from beneath the pile of garments. He grabbed them, shaking them to get rid of as much of the dust as he could.

‘That’s Wieczorek?’ asked Tyeplov, a look of wild horror crossing his face.

‘You saw what happened, Tolya. Only one of them made it out the door.’

Tyeplov nodded, and considered for a few moments. Then he turned to Dmitry, calmer. ‘How though?’

‘Voordalaki,’ said Dmitry, simply. He waited for the word to sink in, for all of those stories that Tyeplov must have heard as a child to come to the forefront of his mind, so that Dmitry could pounce on them and convince him that they were no more stories than were the tales of the horrors perpetrated by the French at Borodino. It was a conversation Dmitry had had before, with his father, but on that occasion it was Dmitry who had been the doubting ingénu, his father the proficient and experienced slayer of monsters. It was again a reversal of roles, though no longer Chopin with which he would delight and intrigue his companion. It wasn’t a position he relished, not least because, unlike his father, Dmitry was not an experienced slayer of monsters. In his whole life he had disposed of just one voordalak – the creature over whose remains they now stood.

‘You’re mad,’ Tyeplov gasped.

Dmitry began to dress, scouting around the casemate for his various items of clothing. It had occurred to him that if the two vampires had made their way through the trench then before long so might mortal men. They would not be so much of a threat to Tyeplov and Dmitry’s lives, but they would still react to finding the two men together like this. Tyeplov followed Dmitry’s lead.

‘So what’s your explanation?’ asked Dmitry, pulling on his shirt.

‘I … I don’t have one.’

‘But mine is mad?’

‘It must be,’ Tyeplov shouted, more to convince himself than to persuade Dmitry.

‘Why do you think they came here?’

‘They’re in command here. This is their casemate.’

‘They came,’ said Dmitry, ‘to feed.’

‘To feed?’

‘Tolya, listen to me.’ Dmitry squatted down to be on a level with Tyeplov, who was pulling on his socks. ‘At the beginning of this month, in the Severnaya, I was shown two bodies. Their throats had been ripped out. It was those two that must have done it. That’s what they had in store for us.’

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘You think I should have waited?’

‘No, but …’

‘You saw how Wieczorek died. You saw how Mihailov failed to die, for God’s sake. What do you need them to do?’

Tyeplov seemed to accept Dmitry’s argument. His next question was on a different tack. ‘How do you know? I mean, I’m not questioning it, but how do you know so much?’

‘I’ve met them before,’ said Dmitry. ‘Thirty years ago. And my father fought them a decade before that.’ Dmitry felt a sudden new pride as he spoke the phrase ‘my father’.

‘Those creatures?’

‘Not Wieczorek and Mihailov, but creatures like them.’ Just one creature like them in Dmitry’s case, but it would do no good to admit it.

‘So what do we do?’ asked Tyeplov.

‘We find Mihailov and we kill him.’ Again, Dmitry reminded himself of his father. Yudin would never have seen things in such simple black and white. In many situations it made him the better man, but not here.

‘But he’s mortally wounded. He’ll be dead soon anyway.’

‘He’ll recover,’ said Dmitry.

‘And so you’ll kill him, just like you killed Wieczorek?’ Tyeplov’s voice wavered with rising panic.

‘There are other ways.’ Tyeplov gave a look of naive enquiry which left Dmitry uncomfortable about being specific. ‘Remember your folk tales,’ he said. He watched Tyeplov’s face as his mind wandered through each myth and legend that he had ever heard about the voordalak. Fear turned to horror when, as far as Dmitry could guess, he came to the various ways that the creatures could be dispatched: a wooden blade through the heart, decapitation, fire, exposure to sunlight.

‘No!’ shouted Tyeplov, with sudden vehemence.

For a moment, Dmitry despised him, but it was in Tyeplov’s nature – in anyone’s – to feel sympathy. Only someone like Dmitry – or his father – knew enough to be able to expunge such doubts. But it would do no good to attempt to persuade Tyeplov, not at that moment. Dmitry turned on his heel and marched out of the casemate, hoping that Mihailov hadn’t gained too much of a head start.

It was nearly dawn. The sky was a deep, heavy blue in the east, but still black away from the sun. But there was enough light to see by. The bastion was half gone. The fortification bore a huge breach down the middle through which Dmitry glimpsed the enemy guns. An infantry captain stood alone among the scattered gabions, bewildered. Around him men worked haphazardly on rebuilding the defences, stepping through the bodies of dead and wounded comrades.

However much Dmitry might have wanted to pursue Mihailov, needs here were more pressing. He felt suddenly invigorated by the prospect of dealing with a human battle.

‘Captain!’ he barked. The officer snapped to attention. ‘What’s the situation?’

‘God knows how many dead, sir. The wall’s breached in three places. This one’s the worst. I’ve sent for engineers.’

‘Any sign of them advancing?’

‘No, sir.’

Dmitry moved on down the line, scrambling over the tattered remains of the bastion, making sure that sharpshooters were in their places in case the French did attack, organizing the repair of the earthworks and seeing that injured men were carried to the field hospital, back in the city. As for the dead, there was nowhere for them to be buried. He didn’t have to order it, but the men knew the procedure; most of the bodies were hauled over the side of the defences, for the French to crawl through when they eventually decided to advance.

It was several hours before Dmitry returned to the casemate. By then, Tyeplov was gone.

The old woman must have been mad. Tamara had told herself that again and again. It was over a week since they had spoken, but still Tamara could not dismiss the conversation from her mind. It was a bright, sunny day now – not yet summer, but definitely spring – and it seemed a shame to be hiding from it among the gloomy records of the Kremlin’s secret library, deep beneath the ground, but it was her first opportunity for several weeks to do any research.

Gribov still appeared to revel in the futility of her task. The only reason that he was prepared, grudgingly, to bring her down here was to crow over her failure.

‘Any progress with Prince Volkonsky?’ he asked.

‘Not a lot.’

‘Do you even know what it is you’re looking for?’

Until recently, Tamara’s answer would have been simple, if unspoken – her parents – but for the moment at least she had been distracted by a new quest.

‘Do you keep police records down here?’ she asked.

‘We have records for the Third Section and the Gendarmerie, of course. As for the Ministry of the Interior … you might be lucky. As with everything else, it is sorted by the order in which it arrived.’

‘Whereabouts are the records for 1812?’ she asked, knowing full well the stupidity of her quest.

‘1812?’ There was an edge of sarcasm to his voice. ‘You might find something.’ He glanced at one of the shelves and then turned abruptly left. Tamara followed. They came to a table piled high with papers, some tied with ribbon, some with string; others were loose. He picked up one at random and looked at it. ‘That’s 1811,’ he said. He went over to a shelf and pulled down a bound volume, examining its spine. ‘And that’s 1814. So it’s all somewhere around here.’

‘Thank you,’ she said curtly. She pulled up a chair and sat at the table, clearing a space in front of her.

‘Of course, you’ll find nothing on the Volkonskys – neither of them. They were both fighting in the war.’

‘I know,’ said Tamara.

Gribov placed the lamp on the table beside her and walked away into the darkness. She began looking at the documents, quickly rejecting each one as she saw its date or got some idea of its contents. In the distance, she heard a pause in Gribov’s footsteps. She looked and saw his silhouette in the doorway, before it disappeared. The sound of the door slamming shut reached her a fraction of a second later. She returned to her work.

Natalia had said it had happened just after the French had gone, and the victim’s name had been Margarita. She searched her memory for more detail. Margarita Kirillovna – that had been it – a patronymic, but no surname. The date was helpful though. The French had left Moscow in October 1812. It was an unimaginable time. The idea of French soldiers – of any foreign power – marching through the streets of the city seemed like something from a fairy tale. Today Russia was again at war with France, but there was no sense of any risk to the homeland. That was why it was so easy to send the country’s young men out to fight. War was an unreal thing – foreign. Those diminishing few who remembered 1812 would see things differently.

She leaned back in her chair and asked herself why she was doing this. Natalia was an old woman; she could have dreamed the whole thing up, or at the very least been confused over the dates. And even if she was right, what possible connection could the two murders have? Tamara was wasting her time. She should be down here looking for her parents, not chasing murderers, especially when Yudin seemed pretty keen that the murderer remained undiscovered.

Then she thought of Irina’s face, and her stillness and her horrible wounds. That deserved some investigation, surely. And if neither Yudin nor the gendarmes were prepared to do it, then it was left to her. And Yudin could hardly object; he might want to play down the murder of Irina Karlovna, but Tamara was not investigating that. He could not censure her for looking into the death of Margarita Kirillovna.

She grabbed the paper nearest to her, a letter, and began to read.

‘Why did you kill Irina Karlovna?’

Raisa stiffened as Yudin spoke the words. She continued to gaze into her unreflected face in the mirror against the wall of his office, but she was not stupid. She would know he had observed her reaction, would know that he had chosen the precise moment of his question so that he was best placed to evaluate her response.

‘How did you know?’ she asked. She did not attempt a denial.

He continued to watch her, and she continued to avoid looking back at him. ‘I believe in simplicity,’ he explained. ‘A woman is killed, quite obviously by a vampire. A vampire is the occupant of the adjacent room, with a connecting door. One hardly has to be Dupin.’

‘We’re not the only ones.’ She turned to him at last. ‘Perhaps not the only ones in Moscow.’

‘Have you heard something?’ He tried, successfully, to sound uninterested.

‘No. And even if I had, you’re right. The simple explanation fits.’

‘You still haven’t explained why.’

‘She found out – heard me going down to the cellar. She didn’t know what, but she suspected something. Then she got me into her room. The mirrors told her everything.’

‘You should have been more careful,’ said Yudin.

‘Where would be the fun in that?’

He could hardly fault her. They had survived together, on and off, for three decades. She knew how to be circumspect. ‘You should have told me,’ he muttered, grudgingly.

‘I knew you’d work it out.’

‘Is your grave there still safe?’

Raisa nodded. ‘She didn’t have time to tell anyone.’

Yudin looked at her. Her face had a yellow tinge to it and the skin around her eyes was lined. ‘Are you hungry now?’ he asked.

‘Just tired.’

Picking up a lamp, he went to the door opposite the mirror and unlocked it. The stairs went down a little way and then split into two flights. ‘To the left if you are hungry; to the right if you want to sleep,’ he said. She hesitated, then turned right. Further down was another door. He unlocked it and they went through.

They were directly underneath his office now. The room was almost bare – too deeply buried to be lit by windows. On the far side there was another door, much like the one they had come in through. The smell of the river was stronger here, but it was of no concern to either of them. In the middle lay two coffins, expensive ones – ageing now. Quite unaccountably they had been built to last.

Raisa went over and climbed into the smaller of them, on the left. Even to one of Yudin’s vast experience, it was a strange sight – perhaps even a little unnerving. No human would comfortably lie down inside a construction whose design so obviously indicated that they would never rise from it again. But it did not concern Raisa for a moment. She lay back and closed her eyes, not bothering to make use of the heavy lid that lay beside her. Yudin walked over and looked down at her. She was unconscious, not even breathing. He knew that if he were to place his hand to her chest he would feel no heartbeat.

He turned and left, locking the door behind him. It was a clever mechanism, of his own devising, which would allow her to leave when she awoke, but would prevent anyone else from entering. It meant that they could sleep in safety, but need never fear being entombed.

He glanced through the letters on his desk – all of them from the diminishing band of exiles who scratched a living out in Siberia. There was nothing ostensibly from Aleksei – he seemed to write to his son less and less these days, no doubt because his son never replied. Or at least, when he did, those letters were intercepted and destroyed by Yudin. But Aleksei was not stupid. He might easily have persuaded a fellow exile to slip something into one of his letters. They’d all need checking anyway, but not just yet. There was no hurry for them to be delivered.

Thoughts of Aleksei, along with those of the murder on Degtyarny Lane, began to intertwine in his mind. It was in that same house that Aleksei’s mistress, the lovely – although nowadays probably not so lovely – Dominique, had lived and plied her trade. Yudin smiled at the memories of a time when he had so thoroughly duped Aleksei. It had been so simple; Yudin had enacted a little charade involving himself and a woman, knowing that Aleksei was watching. But what Aleksei had never been able to determine was whether that woman had been his lover, Dominique, or some other. It had been enough to convince him that Dominique had become a vampire, enough to persuade him to offer himself up to her as a willing victim. Yudin chuckled, imagining the scene in which Aleksei had awoken to discover that neither he nor his mistress had joined the undead. Yudin had not witnessed it, or heard tell of it in any detail. He knew simply that it must have taken place, because he had planned that it would. He had played Aleksei for such a prostak that even now Yudin could look back on it as his finest hour.

But the thought itself brought up another memory, a memory of thirteen years later – Yudin lying on the frozen Neva, cradled in Aleksei’s arms, a bullet from Aleksei’s gun nestling in his heart. Aleksei had used that same word – almost that same phrase.

‘Oh, this is no simple checkmate, Iuda,’ Aleksei had said. ‘You’ve been fooled – played for a prostak – and now I’m going to tell you all about it.’

Aleksei had little known that, even in death, Yudin had chosen life, of a sort. He had grabbed the vial that hung around his neck and drunk it – a vial of vampire’s blood that would ensure that, though he might die, yet would he live again as a voordalak. Even so he had been genuinely fascinated to learn how Aleksei might have tricked him.

‘Do go on, Lyosha,’ he had said, and then, after drinking the blood, ‘Go on, Lyosha.’ Suddenly, for the first time, he remembered every word.

‘Iuda,’ Aleksei had said, patting him on his chest so as to amplify the pain of the bullet that lay there, ‘I have beaten you.’ Even then, it had been obvious he meant a greater victory than merely to have killed him.

‘Carry on, Lyosha,’ he had persisted. ‘Tell me what you were going to say.’ And then, ‘Please, Lyosha, grant a dying man his wish.’

And then Yudin had noticed a change in Aleksei, a stiffening of his body that he had always suspected, but never been sure, indicated that Aleksei had guessed what Yudin had done, guessed that though he would die there on the cold, flat, frozen river, he would be reborn. Still Yudin had persisted.

‘Please, tell me. How did you fool me?’

And at that point, Aleksei had relented – changed his story. Yudin remembered his smile. ‘I didn’t, Iuda. I was pretending, but I won’t lie to you. I could never devise a trick clever enough to fool you.’

In the past, Yudin’s memories of the moment had been vague – it had been so close to his death. But now it all came back to him with utter clarity. And in that same moment Aleksei’s words made sense of another conundrum that had been puzzling Yudin much more recently: that of the inert nature of Tsar Aleksandr’s blood. How could Aleksei’s pretended or perhaps real trickery be related to that? The answer lay in the date. That scene on the frozen Neva had been played out in December 1825, just a month after the death of Tsar Aleksandr I.

And that was what lay at the heart of it: the reason that Aleksandr II’s blood was immune to Zmyeevich’s; the deception that Aleksei had wanted to reveal, but had hidden on realizing that Yudin would not die; the deception that was to be maintained for almost thirty years.

But now that deception was over. Yudin understood all. It was a simple enough concept, but it explained everything. Tsar Nikolai I might have died in Petersburg in February 1855, but in terms of the Romanov blood, that meant nothing.

The truth was that his predecessor, Tsar Aleksandr I, supposed to have died in Taganrog in 1825, had not died then and indeed had not died at all. It was the only explanation – and it made perfect sense.

Aleksandr Pavlovich, Tsar of All the Russias, vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte, still lived.

‘Madame Komarova.’

Tamara’s body jerked upright, instantly awake, but her mind was still blurred by sleep. She looked around and saw the man who had spoken. She recognized him, but could not place him. He was small, almost as short as she was. His hair was grey and there wasn’t much of it. His eyes had a yellow tint as they peered at her through his spectacles.

‘Gribov,’ she mumbled, not even realizing where in her memory the name had come from. She looked around her again. The room she was in was vast. Even in the dim light she could see it was full of books and documents. One of them, she knew without understanding why, was of inestimable importance to her.

‘You fell asleep,’ said Gribov. ‘You must have been here all night.’ He began to tidy up the books and papers on the desk where she had been sitting, straightening out the ones that had been crumpled by her lying on them.

‘No!’ she shouted, memory pouring back into her consciousness as though through a broken dam. ‘I found something.’

‘Concerning Prince Volkonsky?’

That much she still couldn’t remember, but she suspected not. She had been looking through the documents for 1812 for almost a month; there were far more than Gribov had suggested, despite the French occupation. Last night, late last night, she had found something. She began searching, not knowing what she was looking for but recognizing those papers that she had already rejected and throwing them to the floor. Gribov diligently followed her around the table, picking them up.

‘Got it!’ she shouted at last.

She handed it to Gribov, who soon returned it to her, though she noted that he had allowed his eyes to scan twice across its contents.

‘And how is this helpful?’ he asked.

Tamara could not remember. She looked at the paper again, refreshing her knowledge of what she knew had been so exciting a discovery the previous night. ‘You remember the murder last month, at Degtyarny Lane?’ she asked.

‘Sadly,’ nodded Gribov.

‘Well, this is the police report of another murder. It’s dated 11 November 1812.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s the same; exactly the same,’ said Tamara, her eyes continuing to scan the document.

In truth, the similarity was not exact. The victim, Margarita Kirillovna, was found in an upstairs room at a bordello on Degtyarny Lane. It could only be the same building – it was impossible to tell which room. She had suffered severe lacerations to the neck – just like Irina Karlovna – which were believed to be the cause of death. But then came the difference. Margarita Kirillovna had suffered an additional wound to the chest – she had been stabbed in the heart. There had been no sign of that with Irina. The report also stated that this last wound was believed, due to the lack of bleeding from it, to have been inflicted some time after death. But only a fool would ignore the similarities on account of that one discrepancy.

‘You suspect there might be a connection?’ Many might have uttered the question with an air of disbelief, but from Gribov it came merely as an enquiry.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, still reading. ‘I don’t know.’

But she knew how she was going to find out. At the bottom of the page was a list of witnesses – three of them. She opened her own notebook, ready to write the names down, but discovered that she had already done so, the previous night. She checked with the document, but she had made no mistakes. She had three witnesses to a crime of four decades earlier:

Pyetr Pyetrovich Polyakov.

Domnikiia Semyonovna Beketova.

Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov.