The Third Section Part 6

Trampled beneath the hooves of Pyotr's horse lay a serpent, defeated by him as though he were Saint George and it was a dragon. In truth, the serpent represented Zmyeevich his name literally meaning 'son of the serpent'. It was on this very spot, in 1712, that Pyotr had tricked the vampire and stolen his knowledge, but in doing so had condemned his own descendants to be victims of a blood curse.

It was here too that the Decembrists had stood against Tsar Nikolai. Yudin had been among them, along with his old adversary, Aleksei. They had been near the statue when the guns opened fire. Yudin traced their steps from there. He'd been ahead, suspecting that Aleksei had something planned for him, though nothing so lacking in subtlety as a mere pistol. He'd thought to run down Galernaya Street, but one glance at it told him that if the imperial guards caught up, it would be a shooting gallery. Instead, he had turned to the river, where many were already fleeing across the thick, steady ice.

This evening there was no one around. Beneath him, in the river, ice clung to the embankment, but where he had jumped down all those years before there was a gap through which he could see the cold dark water. He stepped forward, feeling the sensation of falling for only a fraction of a second before the icy water engulfed him. If anyone had seen, they would have taken it for a suicide, but his body would not be found, just as it had not been found thirty years before. Neither had Zmyeevich's, 113 years before that.

Yudin swam forward, under the water, barely able to see, remembering that Zmyeevich too, after his confrontation with Pyotr, had thrown himself into the river somewhere hereabouts, in fear for his life. There were myths that vampires hated the water, but in reality they had many of the attributes required to be good swimmers. They had no trouble with the cold until it was enough for the fluids in their bodies to actually freeze solid and they had little need for air. To be sure they needed to breathe, but they could survive without it, just as they could survive without consuming the blood and flesh of humans. Eventually lack of any of those things would cause them to slip into unconsciousness, but it would not kill them. If Yudin remained beneath the water too long he would lose strength and sink to the river bed, there to remain undisturbed. Perhaps centuries from now some fisherman would dredge him up, and on the first gulps of cool, fresh air he would come spluttering and coughing back to this world, hungry and grateful to find in that fisherman both his saviour and his first repast.

But Yudin would not be so foolish. He knew he could make his planned journey by surfacing a mere two or three times for breath. It would mean that his approach was un.o.bserved. It was a hard swim though, upstream against a strong current. He had no idea which direction Zmyeevich had headed on entering the water, but he would guess it was out to sea. His aim had been to depart Russia by the quickest conceivable route. As for Yudin, in 1825, there had been no aim no intent. He remembered that Aleksei had shot him as he fled across the ice, mortally wounding him, but not killing him outright. Then Aleksei had begun his play-acting for the crowd, pretending to comfort his fallen friend, victim of one of the soldiers' muskets. They had talked and Aleksei had teased him over some trick that he had pulled, but the details were hazy. Yudin had drunk the blood that he had taken from the voordalak Kyesha, who had previously drunk his blood. It was Yudin's only hope of survival to become such a creature himself. Then, with death, memory stopped.

He surfaced and took a gulp of air, glad of the opportunity to check his bearings. He was between the Winter Place and the lighthouses, just at the point where the Greater and Lesser Nevas split. He could just see his destination in the distance. He submerged again, and remembered his soggy restoration to life.

The persistence of memory had been his greatest fear. All the voordalaki he had ever spoken to claimed that they were the same being the same person that they had been before being transformed into that new state. It was easy enough for them to say, but Yudin had always wondered if the vampire might not be some other creature that took over the physical body of its victim, discarding its previous owner and taking from him only sufficient memories to pa.s.s itself off as a continuation of the original. He could think of no experiment that could prove things one way or another, except one that he would have to perform on himself, and that he delayed until the only other possibility was his own death.

He had returned to consciousness somewhere to the east of Helsingfors on one of the many islands that were scattered along that stretch of coast. It had been a little over a month since his death. That was a not untypical period for the transformation. Ideally a vampire would awake in its human grave, safe from the light of day and able to dig itself out when night fell, but Yudin's body had simply lain on a beach, exposed to the rays of the sun. Thankfully, nature guarded against such risks. The final stages of the transformation, when the vampire's flesh changed its nature so as to become susceptible to even the dimmest sunlight, always occurred at night. Yudin had known it by experimentation, and had learned it for himself. He had scuttled into a cave long before the dawning of his first day as a voordalak.

He popped his head above the water again. He was very close now. The Peter and Paul Fortress stood ahead of him. He was directly in front of the jetty from which the Decembrists, Aleksei among them, had begun their journey to the east. He could see two guards, some distance apart. Neither of them seemed particularly alert. There would be more of them on the far side, where an attack from the land could take them by surprise, but from the river an enemy could only approach by boat and would be easily spotted before reaching the fortress walls; or so they thought.

When he next surfaced he was under an arch of the jetty itself the one closest to land. He could hear the footsteps of one of the guards above him. The water was shallow enough here that he had no need to swim.

'Help!' he shouted weakly. He heard the guard's feet move, but nothing more. 'Help me!' A little louder this time.

'Who's there?' shouted the guard.

'Please!' cried Yudin plaintively, then squatted down so that he was entirely submerged, with his face just inches below the surface.

He saw the blurry silhouette of the guard, peering out from the edge of the jetty and into the cold water, searching for the source of the sound. Yudin launched himself upwards, pus.h.i.+ng against the firm river bed beneath his feet. He reached out with both hands and grabbed at the man's head. One hand caught his collar, the other an ear. In a moment, Yudin was falling back into the water and the soldier, off balance from leaning over, came with him. There would have hardly been a splash. Once beneath the river surface, the man attempted to struggle for a few seconds, but Yudin's teeth soon found their mark and he felt the delicious warmth of fresh blood filling his mouth, diluted but unmistakable, mixed with the river water.

He didn't wallow in the indulgence. He floated the body under the jetty, hoping that the current would not spit it out again too soon. A dark trail meandered through the water, staining the blocks of floating ice where it touched them, but it would take a keen eye for the other guard to notice it and a good deal more time than he had available to him.

Yudin peered out of the water. On the other side of the jetty, the second guard was just disappearing around the corner of the Naryshkin Bastion. Yudin pulled himself up on to the pathway and ran lightly along it, hoping the splat, splat, splat of his wet feet would not attract attention. He stood with his back pressed against the ravelin, listening for the man's return, estimating his height.

He heard steps approaching and then glimpsed the soldier's leading foot emerging from behind the stonework. Yudin threw out his fist with a single, determined backhand blow. He heard a crunch as the man's nose collapsed. Yudin had been aiming for the throat, but it did not matter. The guard crumpled and Yudin caught him before he hit the ground any observer might have thought it an act of concern. Out of the water, and with less prospect of being disturbed, Yudin took the opportunity to feed. He bent over the unconscious guard, listening to uneven breaths that were sucked into the mouth and then spluttered out through the broken nose.

Yudin's teeth easily penetrated the man's throat and from then on it was a simple matter. The human heart, desperate to cling on to life, continued to pump, forcing the blood out of the newly created wound. Yudin merely had to swallow occasionally and he became nourished.

Sated, he left the body half empty, rolling it into the river with an indifferent shove towards the jetty where it might be hidden beside its former comrade. He was glad the man had been unconscious, or he would have been tempted to linger too long in enjoying his pain. To drink as he had done was merely the scratching of an itch the yielding to an obvious temptation from which no pleasure but the visceral could be taken. And while the blood that he had consumed would, over the next few days and even weeks, make him feel stronger and appear younger, its immediate effect was to render him tired and slothful; satisfied it was an odious sensation.

But it could be overcome. Yudin looked at the stone wall. It was perhaps six times his height, with an overhanging ledge at the top. Arched openings allowed cannon to aim out into the river, but gave no access to the interior of the fortress. Occasionally, deliberate gaps in the stonework allowed a view through the entire thickness of the wall, but were too narrow for anything larger than a rat to make use of.

He began to climb. It was a fascinating skill that he had discovered and needed within hours of awakening as a vampire, as he climbed his way up the cliffs that surrounded the beach where he had found himself. He clung close to the wall, allowing his fingers to take his entire weight as they insinuated themselves into even the tiniest crevice between the straight-cut stones. He moved quickly, despite his wet clothes, leaving behind him a damp trail soaking into the granite. He pictured himself as a slug.

Once on the top of the fortifications, he glanced around. His final destination was the Pyetropavlovskiy Cathedral dedicated to the same two saints who gave the fortress itself their names. Its spire soared into the air, disproportionate for the whole island, not merely the church beneath it. He could see no one, but knew there would be guards patrolling the interior. He could deal with them, but he did not want to be again distracted by his baser needs.

He dropped to the ground and crept through the shadows between the mint and the commandant's house, smiling at the thought that it was in there that Aleksei, along with the other Decembrists, had been interrogated and, hopefully, tortured to reveal the names of all the other conspirators he knew. Aleksei would have held out, to protect one name at least: that of his son. Even then, he would have had some idea that Dmitry was lost to him, taken in hand by Yudin himself when Aleksei was away with his mistress, just as Aleksei's wife, Marfa, had been. Aleksei knew that too. It was a delightful torture for Aleksei now, far away, cut off from any communication, to wonder how the relations.h.i.+p between his son and his most bitter enemy had developed. One day, Dmitry would face the final humiliation and Yudin would ensure that Aleksei learned of it; better still, witnessed it. But that day would have to be soon like Yudin, Aleksei was an old man now. Yudin wore it better.

He dodged a couple of guards easily and was soon in front of the cathedral's yellow walls, at the foot of the bell tower. Pyotr had founded it in 1712. Some in the Romanov family, who pretended they knew, said he did so specifically to give thanks to G.o.d for his defeat of Zmyeevich, but as with so much of that story, it was a mixture of myth and propaganda. It was a quite un-Russian church, better suited to Rome than Petersburg, wherein one might expect to hear ancient superst.i.tions intoned in Latin by an old man who knew nothing of the world. In reality the language would be Church Slavonic rather than Latin, but the inanity of the content would be the same. The cathedral was not built for defence the walls of the fortress saw to that but it might still be guarded; to walk in through the door would be unwise.

Yudin scaled the wall of the bell tower with much the same ease as he had that of the fortress. Soon he was higher than the roof of the main building. The gilded spire stretched skyward above him, topped by an angel clutching a cross and pointing towards heaven. Yudin had no need to go that far. He smashed a window and was soon inside the bell tower. From there, he found a stone stairway spiralling downwards to the body of the church.

For any Russian who loved his tsar, it would have been a magnificent sight. The illumination of a thousand candles shone on the marble columns and brightly decorated walls and ceiling. The iconostasis not simply a flat wall but an entire structure in itself towered over the sanctuary. But it was all mere decoration. In the middle of the nave, in front of the iconostasis, surrounded by candles, on a pedestal, in a coffin, lay the centrepiece a cold, still, silent corpse. This was what Yudin had come to see.

He heard the murmur of a voice. Over by the main door stood two soldiers, chatting softly. Yudin again felt on his lips the taste for blood, even though he had already consumed more than enough for his needs. He resisted. If they noticed him, he would deal with them, but it would be wiser to let them live. Tomorrow the church would be filled with almost every living member of the Romanov family come to pay homage to one of their own. At least one of them would know of the ancient pact with Zmyeevich Yudin was not sure who, but they would not be so stupid as to let the story be lost and so leave their children ignorant of what might befall them. To find bodies that so obviously bore the mark of the voordalak would raise their suspicions, and their defences, unnecessarily.

He skirted around the nave, along the northern aisle, until he was as close as possible to the late Tsar Nikolai. At least, that was whose body officially lay there. Yudin had his suspicions. Why, though, should Nikolai fake his own death? Did it have something to do with the Romanov bloodline, or was it unrelated? Was he even a willing partic.i.p.ant, or had the new tsar, Aleksandr, taken power from his father by force and imprisoned him somewhere, lacking the stomach for parricide? If it were true then Aleksandr II was breaking with centuries of familial tradition.

But it all hinged on the fact or otherwise of Nikolai's death. Yudin stole a glance at the two guards, still deep in conversation, and crept out towards the centre of the nave, ducking down so that the coffin itself obscured any view they might have of him. Soon he was beside it. He stood up, and gazed in.

It certainly looked like Nikolai. He was older than when Yudin had last seen him, and a little fatter, but that could be put down to the process of embalming. His moustache was neatly waxed and his hair brushed forward, as it usually had been in life, to hide the great expanse of his balding head. Yudin placed his hand on the body's forehead, enjoying its coldness, and confirming beyond doubt that it was dead.

It could, of course, be a doppelganger. Any man of approximately the correct height and appearance could have easily been persuaded to perform this duty of ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his tsar, and probably wouldn't have been given the option. The blood would tell, but Yudin understood enough of the mechanisms of preservation to know that the first step would have been to drain the blood from the body. The ruddy hue of the cheek was purely the effect of external make-up, to hide the work of entirely legitimate, if wasteful, vampirism. But a sample of flesh would be just as informative.

Yudin reached into his pocket, stiff and unyielding from its earlier soaking, and withdrew a small leather case. Inside was a scalpel. It was a delicate instrument; ideal for the task. The fragment of tissue need not be large, but still had to be taken from somewhere that would not be noticed. But why be so subtle? Yudin felt the sudden urge to desecrate the body in a way that would be unmistakable to all the Romanovs when they came to bury their beloved to carve into his forehead a single word: Zmyeevich. That would scare them, the thought that the arch-voordalak could get in here, so close to the heart of their power.

Yudin chuckled quietly, but resisted. He lifted the corpse's left arm and turned it so that the hand was palm up, pulling back the sleeve to reveal the pale skin between it and the glove. They had not thought to apply make-up here, where no one would look. He cut away a sliver of skin and a little of the fat below, and slipped it into a gla.s.s tube, which he returned to the leather case.

He turned away. Tomorrow, before a vast crowd, Nikolai would be interred beneath the cathedral, beside his father Pavel and his grandmother Yekaterina and countless other tsars and tsaritsas, most but not all of whom shared that same Romanov blood and its curse. Pyotr III had been willing to join with Zmyeevich, but Yekaterina, his wife, had prevented it and herself become empress. Her blood was not Romanov, though her spirit was. With Aleksandr I they had come closest. He had even drunk Zmyeevich's blood, but had lived long enough to be free of it. His body was down there too, having taken the long slow journey across Russia from Taganrog, where death had found him.

One day, if Zmyeevich got his way, there would be a tsar who, although buried, would awaken in the crypt of the cathedral and would ascend to take his place beside his master to rule Russia for eternity. Would that tsar be Aleksandr II? Yudin did not know. He did not understand what he had seen in his microscope, but that fragment of tissue in his pocket would explain things. He was eager to examine it.

He left the way he had come.

CHAPTER VI.

'WHY DON'T YOU have a mirror?'

Tamara had been into Raisa's room as she had all the girls' rooms more than once over the weeks since she'd arrived, but the absence of that otherwise universal item of furnis.h.i.+ng had not previously occurred to her. She was seated on the bed, watching Raisa from behind as she brushed her long, blonde tresses. In front of her was a dressing table, much the same as in any of the other rooms except that it had no mirror.

'Vanity,' said Raisa simply.

'Vanity?' Tamara would not deny that Raisa was vain any woman who was so consistently well turned out would always be suspected of that but it didn't explain the lack of a mirror. 'If you were vain, surely you'd have more mirrors.'

'Like Irina Karlovna?' Raisa briefly nodded towards the door that connected her room with that of her colleague, though Tamara doubted either of them had ever used it Raisa and Irina were not friends.

Tamara laughed. 'Exactly!' The walls of Irina's room were covered with mirrors. She'd even asked to have one fixed to the ceiling, but Tamara had still to find an opportunity to discover whether Yudin would stump up the money.

'And whose benefit do you think those mirrors are really there for? Irina's?'

'For her clients', obviously.' Otherwise Tamara wouldn't have agreed to paying for any of them.

'And what do you suppose those gentlemen are looking at in the mirrors?'

'Irina?' suggested Tamara, though she knew already where Raisa was leading.

'They don't need a mirror for that. What those men are gazing at, through the entire process, is themselves. They find it so hard to believe that Irina has coaxed them into achieving something that they haven't managed with their wives for years, that they need to keep looking over her shoulder and checking.'

Tamara laughed.

'I'd rather have them looking at me,' continued Raisa. 'Hence no mirrors. Pure vanity.'

It was a good story, if not a good explanation. 'But what about doing your make-up?' asked Tamara.

Raisa swivelled round on her stool. In her hand she had a dainty pot of rouge Rallye and Company's finest. She picked up a brush and dabbed it in the pot, then began to apply it to her lips. Her hand never wavered, and within seconds her lips were a perfect cherry red, the line between pale, powdered skin and rouged lip as precise as the boundary between two nations, drawn on a field marshal's map. She picked up another pot and with another brush applied pale blue shading to her eyelids, enhancing the natural sapphire of her eyes. Again she made not one slip.

'Practice,' she said when she had finished.

'I'd like to see you do that on the train,' said Tamara.

Before Raisa could reply there was a knock at the door. It was Nadia Vitalyevna. She was a curious thing. She had no qualms about the nature of the work that most of the girls in the brothel were called upon to perform, and yet despite her youthful charm, there was some quality about her that made her quite unappealing to the majority of the clientele. Those men who did show an interest, Tamara distrusted profoundly, and so Nadia had fallen into the necessary role of a simple housemaid. Perhaps she would grow into a more suitable creature for the work to which she aspired.

'Lieutenant General Yelagin here for you,' she said.

Raisa rolled her eyes, but Tamara knew that Yelagin was no ordinary customer. 'He's on Yudin's list,' she said. There were certain officers that Yudin insisted should be allowed every indulgence. It wasn't because he liked them. She stood and walked over to the door as Nadia departed to fetch Raisa's guest.

'Anything for the motherland,' said Raisa, giving a mock salute.

Tamara glanced at her and grinned, then left her to her work.

It was Nikolai's body.

At least, it was the body of a Romanov and of Nikolai's generation and that left little room for other possibilities. Back in Moscow, in his office beneath the Kremlin, Yudin had examined the small fragment of fatty skin that he had taken from the body in the cathedral. The body had been buried now, and the remainder of the family had bid their tearful farewells, and Yudin was as sure as they that it was truly Nikolai.

He had ground the sample to a pulp with a pestle and mortar, then mixed it with oil to form a liquid from which he could make a slide for his microscope. Then he'd added a few drops of Zmyeevich's blood and watched. Each time now that he used any part, however small, of that precious blood supply, he became nervous. It would not last for ever. He had eked it out over thirty years, expecting that it would be ultimately useful at the time of Nikolai's death; and useful it was proving, but not in any ultimate sense. Each discovery that Yudin made only led him on to further questions.

The current observation was a dull one but informative. Nothing happened. With normal human flesh, as with normal human blood, the blood of a vampire should wreak immediate destruction, causing the human cells to wither and die. Here, there was no reaction. Vampire and human cells coexisted. They did not merge, as he had previously observed with Aleksandr's cells, because they were not blood, but the lack of immediate decay was enough.

He went over to his notebooks and checked again. He had brought them all here from his house in Zamoskvorechye now all the secrets he had discovered from years of experimenting on the creatures. Some of the books were in a sorry state, battered and dog-eared not only from his regular use of them, but from being stored underground, hidden away at times when mobility had been his only means of survival. There were benefits to the settled life he had here in Moscow.

Two of the books though including the one he was now consulting had withstood the years remarkably well. They were covered in a light, flexible and phenomenally durable material. All the books had been bound in such a way to begin with bound in the skin of a living vampire. He'd begun it more for amus.e.m.e.nt than because he thought it particularly practical, but it had turned out that there were only two ways that the skin could be damaged: it could be exposed to sunlight which Yudin was incapable of causing without risk to himself or the vampire from which the skin had originally come could perish. There had been three that he had used for the purpose. Two of them were dead one killed by Yudin's own hand, and to save the life of Aleksei, of all people.

The third creature, whose skin still covered those last two volumes, remained where Yudin had left him entombed beneath the cave city of Chufut Kalye, which Yudin had been precipitately forced to leave. He had used explosives to seal all the tunnels that led down there, and the voordalaki on whom he had been experimenting were thereby entombed. They would starve, but they would not die. Instead they would simply become dormant, unconscious of the world around them until such time as they could once again taste human blood on their lips and be given strength enough to revive. It was an unlikely scenario, despite the war so nearby. Far more probable was that some explorer would one day dig his way back into those caves and, in doing so, expose those emaciated bodies he found to the light of the sun, destroying them for ever. But Yudin's notebooks were still neatly bound, and so he knew that deep within those caves his former captive was still, in some sense, alive.

He checked the entry he was looking for. It was dated April 1824. It described exactly what he had just observed. The human flesh had not been Romanov and the vampire blood had not been Zmyeevich's, but that did not matter. Neither that family nor its nemesis was in any way special in terms of their biology only in their status. He read through the details and could find no difference between what he had done then and what he was doing now. He tried to think back, but could find no memory whatsoever of actually carrying out the experiment he could now see described in his own handwriting one of dozens he had conducted at the time. He silently complimented himself on his own a.s.siduity in taking notes, not then knowing for sure how long he would live, or how poor his memory would become.

But there was always the possibility that he had made an error back then. He couldn't see how, but he was not fool enough to think himself infallible. It would be easy enough to reproduce, to confirm that his notes were correct. For vampire blood he could use his own, or that of Raisa or one of the several other samples he had collected over the years. As for human blood, he had an ample supply of it how else did he live?

He collected a few items from his desk and then took out a key and went across the room to the heavy wooden door that stood opposite the covered mirror. He unlocked it, revealing the stone steps that descended to that deeper, older level of the building. He carried out one last check on the equipment he had picked up: a porcelain bowl, a scalpel and a thin gla.s.s rod, hollow on the inside, like a reed. It was all that he needed.

He descended the steps.

It was April now two months since the late tsar's death and spring was clearly on its way. There were only a few mounds of snow left waiting to melt, regularly located at street corners where they'd been piled up as the roads and pavements were cleared. Even though it was dark, it was still warm enough for Raisa and Tamara to walk through the Moscow streets without heavy overcoats or gloves.

But it was spring in another sense too, in the sense of hope and optimism that seemed to be shared among so many in the city. It was not unusual at this time of year, but now it was a feeling of expectation for not just a new season but a new era. Tamara did not share the belief herself. She preferred the certainty that Nikolai had brought with him. Aleksandr wanted change just like his uncle and namesake had. There was even talk of freeing the serfs. So many of Tamara's generation dreamed of it, but during Nikolai's reign had not spoken, knowing he had spies on every corner. None suspected that she might be one of them, so they did talk to her, but she didn't report them; not over matters like that.

What none of them seemed to consider was that freedom was the freedom to starve. Certainly plenty of the more able emanc.i.p.ated serfs would prosper and rise in society, but who would pay for it? It wouldn't be their former owners; the rich would always take care of themselves. Those they left behind those they stepped over alongside whom they had toiled for decades, would be the ones for whom life would be intolerably worse. Tamara preferred order. The tsar was there to protect them, all of them, serf and n.o.ble alike. How would he do that in the chaos that emanc.i.p.ation would bring? Aleksandr I had been persuaded to leave things be, against his own instincts. Perhaps the same could be achieved with Aleksandr II.

'It's getting late,' said Raisa.

'Are you expecting someone?' Tamara asked.

'No, but ...' Raisa could find no 'but'.

'They'll manage,' said Tamara.

Even so, she increased her pace. She had already been hurrying when she had seen Raisa on the other side of Tverskaya Street and hailed her. They had been walking together now for only a few minutes. Tamara took a step out into the road to make room for a family who walked past, heading down Tverskaya Street towards Red Square. The adults were around Tamara's age. The little boy, clutching a parent's hand in each of his and scarcely needing to bear his own weight on his legs, must have been about nine. Tamara let her head turn to follow them as she pa.s.sed.

'You like children, don't you?' said Raisa.

Tamara nodded. 'I had three in Petersburg.' She had said it before even thinking. It was her business and she longed to keep it so. On the other hand, there were times when she equally yearned to speak of it. The Lavrovs knew, of course, but how could she talk to them of her children when she had rejected them as parents?

Raisa stole a glance at her. The wind had strengthened and it was easier to walk with their heads down. It suited Tamara. She needed to talk, but it would help her to remain detached if she could not see any reaction in the person to whom she spoke. Raisa could be dispa.s.sionate at the best of times, but this would be even less uncomfortable.

'You left them there?' asked Raisa.

'Left them? I suppose I did. It took me six years to get away.'

'You only lived there for six years?'

'No, I lived there for fourteen years,' Tamara explained. 'I wanted to leave for the last six.'

'What happened?'

'1848.'

'The year of revolutions?'

Tamara gave a brief laugh. 'What did that matter to us?' She paused, but knew that she would tell Raisa everything. Almost everything. 'In 1848 we were living in a house on Vasilevskiy Island, overlooking the river. My husband, Vitaliy, was a doctor and we had three children, Milena, Stanislav and Luka. Luka was just two.'

'Sounds idyllic.'

'It was.' It was true, though there was little in Tamara's voice to convey it. She had moved on from Larionov by then, and seen his downfall, and was sleeping with whoever Dubyelt said she should not so many in number. But whenever she could forget that, whenever she was with Vitya or the children, she had been happy.

'Was Vitaliy successful?'

'Very he was a good doctor.'

'So what happened?'

'Cholera.' Tamara whispered the word.

'I see.'