Field of Mars by Stephen Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

shrugged. If the editors of the collection of newspapers had managed to pass the censors, who was he to shut them down? Maybe they were paying someone off. Whatever it was he didn’t want to fool with it.
    There was only one more address on their side of the Nevsky, a café, supposedly a centre of well-heeled, intellectual, hot-blooded anarchism. When they got there the owners had already closed. Ryzhkov stepped down into the street so that he could see the topmost windows. Everything appeared to be shuttered.
    â€˜Knock anyway,’ he told Dudenko. ‘Go around the back, Konstantin,’ he said to Hokhodiev. ‘See if they left anyone up there.’ He had started to fantasize that some assassin was waiting in an upstairs room for the Tsar’s carriage, a marksman with a hunting rifle and a lot of tangled ideas about starting a Slavic version of the French Revolution. He waited while they went about their tasks. Stood there and had a cigarette and watched the street.
    The Nevsky: one of the great thoroughfares of Europe. Nearly two miles long, running arrow-straight from the golden spire of the Admiralty to Moscow Station where it turned, angling south towards the domes of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.
    Ryzhkov loved the street at the sudden start of spring, when the pedestrians came out to promenade; all of them drawn to the bustle, the elegance, and the energy of the great boulevard. Along the sides of the street the cobbles had been replaced by hexagonal wooden blocks in an effort to dampen the noise of the carriages. Still, on a busy day it was the sheer cacophony that defined the prospekt—the shouts, the whistles, the clattering of the horses’ hooves, the carriages flying past, the splutterings of the motorcars, the yelping blasts of their horns, the ringing of the bells on the trams. The murmur of thousands of conversations, the buzzing of the throng as they moved from shop to shop; laughing, arguing, complaining, lecturing. Shop assistants mingled with soldiers, who mingled with priests, who mingled with tea-sellers and princesses. Some walked briskly, desperately about on some pressing business, faces grim. Others simply idled along, content to be part of the great stream of humanity with no place better to go, admiring their reflections in the shop windows. An endless promenade; a blend of the ultra-rich in silks and feathers, with newly-arrived peasants clutching their hats in their grimy hands, staring up at the fantastic buildings. That was life on the Nevsky; it was the spine, the vibrant centre of modern Russia.
    But this morning all that vigour was restrained, forced off the balconies, and out of the windows, everything cordoned off to allow the Tsar free passage.
    â€˜I got in up there. Nothing,’ said Hokhodiev from behind him. Dudenko was talking to a man on the corner. They were pointing to the café. The man was smoking, trying not to show his nervousness at being grilled by one of the Okhrana. Dudenko nodded and the man smiled with relief and ran back across the street. Coming back to them Dudenko looked happy, almost blushing, Ryzhkov thought. Like a spring bride. Young, alive, and maybe even delighted to be pushing people around who were too scared to fight back. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he reported.
    Hokhodiev looked over at Ryzhkov again. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling up to all this?’
    â€˜I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Fine for now anyway.’

FIVE
    The upper tier of the Marinsky was more sauna than theatre; a miasma of stale perfume, cigar smoke, and sweat. After the procession, Ryzhkov and his team had been able to return to the dank dormitory that Internal kept in the basement of their headquarters building on the Fontanka. He was able to wolf down some soup, took just enough time to file a request for a St Petersburg Criminal Investigation report on the Peplovskaya Street murder, and then they were rushing across the