Almost imperceptibly, Pekkala nodded.
“He was shot,” replied the major.
The muscles twitched along Maximov’s jaw. “This is my fault,” he muttered.
“Why do you say that?” asked Pekkala.
“Yelena—Mrs. Nagorski—she was right. It was my job to protect him.”
“If I understand things correctly,” replied Pekkala, “he sent you away just before he was killed.”
“That’s true, but still, it was my job.”
“You can’t protect a man who refuses to be protected,” said Pekkala.
If Maximov took comfort in Pekkala’s words, he gave no sign of it. “What will happen to them now? To Yelena? To the boy?”
“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala.
“They won’t be looked after,” insisted Maximov. “Not now that he is gone.”
“And what about you?” asked Pekkala. “What will you do now?”
Maximov shook his head, as if the thought had not occurred to him. “Just make sure they are looked after,” he said.
A cold wind blew through the wet trees, with a sound like the slithering of snakes.
“We’ll do what we can, Maximov,” Pekkala told the big man. “Now go home. Get some rest.”
“That man makes me nervous,” remarked Kirov after the bodyguard had vanished back into the dark.
“That’s part of his job,” replied Pekkala. “When we get back to the office, I want you to find out everything you can about him. I asked him some questions and he avoided every one of them.”
“We could bring him in for questioning at Lubyanka.”
Pekkala shook his head. “We won’t get much out of him that way. The only time a man like that will talk is if he wants to. Just find out what you can from the police files.”
“Very well, Inspector. Shall we head back to Moscow?”
“We can’t leave yet. Now that we know a gun was used, we have to search the pit where Nagorski’s body was found.”
“Can’t this wait until morning?” moaned Kirov, clutching his collar to his throat.
Pekkala’s silence was the answer.
“I didn’t think so,” mumbled Kirov.
Pekkala woke to the sound of someone banging on the door.
At first, he thought it was one of the shutters, dislodged by the wind. There was a snowstorm blowing. Pekkala knew that in the morning he would have to dig his way out of the house.
The banging came again, and this time Pekkala realized someone was outside and asking to come in.
He lit a match and set the oil lamp burning by his bed.
Once more he heard the pounding on the door.
“All right!” shouted Pekkala. He fetched his pocket watch from the bedside table and squinted at the hands. It was two in the morning. Beside him he heard a sigh. Ilya’s long hair covered her face and she brushed it aside with a half-conscious sweep of her hand.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Someone’s at the door,” Pekkala replied in a whisper as he pulled on his clothes, working the suspenders over his shoulders.
Ilya propped herself up on one elbow. “It’s the middle of the night!”
Pekkala did not reply. After doing up the buttons of his shirt, he walked into the front room, carrying the lamp. Reaching out to the brass doorknob, he suddenly paused, remembering that he had left his revolver on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. Now he thought about going to fetch it. No good news ever came knocking at two in the morning.
The heavy fist smashed against the wood. “Please!” said a voice.
Pekkala opened the door. A gust of freezing air blew in, along with a cloud of snow which glittered like fish scales in the lamplight.
Before him stood a man wearing a heavy sable coat. He had long, greasy hair, a scruffy beard and piercing eyes. In spite of the cold, he was sweating. “Pekkala!” wailed the man.
“Rasputin,” growled Pekkala.
The man stepped forward and fell into Pekkala’s arms.
Pekkala caught the stench of onions and salmon caviar on Rasputin’s breath. A few of the tiny fish eggs, like beads of amber, were lodged in the man’s frozen beard. The sour reek of alcohol oozed from his pores. “You must save me!” moaned Rasputin.
“Save you from what?”
Rasputin mumbled incoherently, his nose buried in Pekkala’s shirt.
“From what?” repeated Pekkala.
Rasputin stood back and spread his arms, “From myself!”
“Tell me what you are doing out here,” Pekkala demanded.
“I was at the church of Kazan,” said Rasputin, unbuttoning his coat to reveal a blood-red tunic and baggy black breeches tucked into a pair of knee-length boots. “At least I was until they threw me out.”
“What did you do this time?” asked Pekkala.
“Nothing!” shouted Rasputin. “For once, all I did was sit there. And then that damned politician Rodzianko told me to leave. He called me a vile heathen!” He clenched his fist and waved it in the air. “I’ll have his job for that!” Then he slumped into Pekkala’s chair.
“What did you do after they threw you out?”
“I went straight to the Villa Rode!”
“Oh, no,” muttered Pekkala. “Not that place.”
The Villa Rode was a drinking club in Petrograd. Rasputin went there almost every night, because he did not have to pay his bills there. They were covered by an anonymous numbered account which, Pekkala knew, had actually been set up by the Tsarina. In addition, the owner of the Villa Rode had been paid to build an addition onto the back of the club, a room which was available only to Rasputin. It was, in effect, his own private club. The Tsarina had been persuaded to arrange this by members of the Secret Service, who were tasked with following Rasputin wherever he went and making sure he stayed out of trouble. This had proved to be impossible, so a safe house, in which he could drink as much as he wanted for free, meant that at least the Secret Service could protect him from those who had sworn to kill him if they could. There had already been two attempts on his life: in Pokrovsky in 1914 and again in Tsaritsyn the following year. Instead of frightening him into seclusion, these events had only served to convince Rasputin that he was indestructible. Even if the Secret Service could protect him from these would-be killers, the one person they could not protect him from was himself.
“When I was at the Villa,” continued Rasputin, “I decided I should file a complaint about Rodzianko. And then I thought—no! I’ll go straight to the Tsarina and tell her about it myself.”
“The Villa Rode is in Petrograd,” said Pekkala. “That’s nowhere near this place.”
“I drove here in my car.”
Pekkala remembered now that the Tsarina had given Rasputin a car, a beautiful Hispano-Suiza, although she had forgotten to give him any lessons on how to drive it.
“And you think she would allow you in at this time of night?”
“Of course,” replied Rasputin. “Why not?”
“Well, what happened? Did you speak to her?”
“I never got the chance. That damned automobile went wrong.”
“Went wrong?”
“It drove into a wall.” He gestured vaguely at the world outside. “Somewhere out there.”
