show a little disappointment, as if he’d not been expecting Dmitry to return, but instead thought he’d be reduced to a cloud of dust by the wooden bolt that pierced his heart. It was by such little things that Iuda had managed so often to deceive, ever since he was a boy.
Dmitry was carrying a bundle of papers. That was good. He laid them out on the wooden table, next to the tools of Zmyeevich’s trade, and began to pore over them. Dmitry explained what he made of them. Iuda could not see exactly what they were looking at, but he could listen.
‘These all relate back to his time in the Third Section. They’re mostly just authorizations for interrogation.’
He was right, that’s all they were.
‘Any names you recognize?’ asked Zmyeevich.
Dmitry shook his head, but with none of the dismissiveness the papers deserved. There was nothing important in any of them, they were just dross, padding so that the real item of substance would not be too obvious.
‘These are letters from his bank, but they’re ancient.’
‘And all sent to the house in Zamoskvorechye, so even the bank would be able to tell us nothing new.’
Shame. Keep trying.
‘What about this?’ asked Zmyeevich. ‘It looks like a rental agreement. Is there an address?’
Dmitry spoke after a pause, with a slight laugh. ‘It’s just Papa’s old apartment on Konyushennaya Street. We’ve already looked there.’
Was that a hint of nostalgia in Dmitry’s voice? It was where he had grown up.
‘This one I can’t make out at all though,’ said Dmitry.
Aha!
‘It looks like a builder’s plan …’ Indeed it was.
‘But I can’t tell what for.’
Iuda sighed inwardly. He hoped he wouldn’t have to help them further. He began to think of how he could let the information slip without making it too obvious, hoping it wouldn’t come to that. They should both have been familiar with what they were looking at.
‘It looks big,’ Dmitry concluded, unhelpfully.
Zmyeevich considered, his fingers stroking his moustache. He began to nod, slowly at first, but speeding up. He turned to look at Iuda, smiling broadly, then back to Dmitry.
‘Oh, I know where this is,’ he announced.
‘Where?’ asked Dmitry.
‘Get him back in the crate,’ said Zmyeevich, nodding in Iuda’s direction. ‘We’ll have to take the railway.’
‘But where are we going?’
‘We’re going,’ said Zmyeevich, ‘to Saint Petersburg.’
CHAPTER VII
PETERSBURG WAS IN uproar. Mihail’s train had arrived the previous day and even then the news was beginning to circulate. That was Wednesday 28 January 1881, a day that would go down as one of the saddest in Russia’s history. Now on Thursday everybody knew. Everyone in Petersburg would have awoken, like Mihail, some of them happy, some of them sad, some indifferent, but after a few moments they would have remembered the news, and wished it had been a dream.
Dostoyevsky was dead.
Mihail had read everything that Fyodor Mihailovich had ever published – as should every Russian of his generation, even those who despised him for his conservatism. Mihail had seen him in the flesh and heard him speak only the previous year, in Moscow at the unveiling of the statue of Pushkin. Mihail had elbowed his way into the rear of the auditorium to listen.
Looking back, he found he couldn’t agree entirely with the great man’s message. It had been a call for national unity – a fine sentiment, but one which in Russia would require such compromise by the different factions that it would never be achieved. But the way Dostoyevsky had spoken and the words he had used had been mesmerizing. The small figure had taken to the stage quite unassumingly, so distant that Mihail could not make out his features and had to strain to hear his voice. But by the end, his presence filled the entire hall.
When he had finished there had been a brief moment of silence, and then the audience erupted. There was clapping, cheering, the banging of chairs on the floor; handkerchiefs were waved, hats thrown into the air. Ivan Sergeivich Aksakov was supposed to speak next but refused, knowing he could say nothing that would compare to what had just been heard. If anything could achieve national unity, then it was this speech and the almost Christ-like reputation of Dostoyevsky himself. Here was a man who had been a radical, who had faced a firing squad and been pardoned just seconds from death. And yet still he could see the good in Russia – the good in humanity.
The mood had faded quickly, but not completely. After Dostoyevsky’s