Sashenka

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…”

“Why not?”

“We hope you’re destroying our enemies, German agents and zhyd nihilists!” The stationmaster rubbed his hands.

“Absolutely! When’s the next train to the Finland Station? I have a report to file.”

“Five minutes, Your Excellency. God Save the Tsar!”

30

The Grand Duke’s crested Benz was already parked among the carriages outside the Radziwill Palace on Fontanka when Pantameilion’s Delaunay swung into the forecourt, the chains wrapped around the wheels just gripping the ice. Samuil and Ariadna Zeitlin waited their turn while the French Embassy Renault dropped Ambassador Paleologue and his wife.

The Izmailovsky Guards in green tunics, the gendarmes with their sultan-spikes and the Cossacks in leather trousers and high furs, flicking their thick whips, bivouacked around bonfires in the squares and guarded the street corners. The air steamed with horse sweat and manure and sweet woodsmoke; the cobbles clattered with the clipclop of a thousand hooves, the rumble of howitzer carriages, the metallic rattle of rifles, horse tackle and scabbards.

The melody of waltzes and laughter wafted down the marble stairs of the palace. The Zeitlins greeted the French ambassador and his wife at the top of the steps. The foursome were just agreeing how quiet the city was when a gunshot echoed over the rooftops. Dogs howled, sirens wailed and somewhere out toward the Vyborg Side the city herself seemed to growl.

“How are you, dear Baron? Are you better, Baroness?” The French ambassador bowed, speaking fluent Russian.

“Much better, thank you. Did you hear that?” asked Ariadna, her eyes iridescent as whirlpools. “A firework!”

“That was gunfire, Baroness, I fear,” replied the ambassador, immaculate in black coat, top hat and white tie. “There it is again. The metal factory workers are marching in their hundreds of thousands from Petrograd, Vyborg and Narva.”

“I’m freezing,” shivered Ariadna.

“Let’s go in,” said the Frenchwoman, taking her hand.

The ambassador’s wife and Ariadna, both in floor-length furs, one in ermine, the other in seal, walked inside, handing their coats to the staff. Ariadna, like an angel stepping out of a fountain, emerged glistening and pale in a