Sashenka

The perceptive grey eyes studied him unforgivingly, he thought.

He said nothing.

She raised her eyebrows and gestured with her hands. Then, jumping up, she gathered her karakul coat and shapka and headed for the door. She opened it.

“Wait,” he said, his head tightening like a vise. He did not want her to go. “I’ve got a headache. Let me have a toke of my tonic.”

“Go right ahead.” She watched him open his crested silver box, an heirloom set with diamonds, and, wetting his finger, take a thick layer of white power and rub it into his gums. His arteries distended, the blood gushed once more to his temples, and he wondered if she could see the seething swell of his lips.

“Our reports,” he started to tell her, “warn the Tsar of revolution. I’ve just written one that reads: If food supplies are not improved, it will be hard to enforce law and order on the streets of Petrograd. The garrison remains loyal but…Why do we bother? The new government’s a joke. Sturmer, Trepov, now this antique Prince Golitsyn, are pygmies and crooks. Rasputin’s murder hasn’t solved anything. We need a new start. I don’t agree with everything you believe in, but some of it makes sense…”

“Interesting.” She stood right in front of him so that he thought he could smell her—was it Pears lavender soap? Her finger stroked her lips. He understood that she had grown up faster than he had realized. “We’ve been back and forth, haven’t we, Comrade Petro? But now we’re getting impatient! If you think I like meeting you, you might just be right. We might almost be friends…but are we? Some of my comrades don’t think I should see you anymore. If you really sympathize with us, there are things we need to know. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ my comrades say. ‘Sagan wouldn’t give us ice in winter.’ In any case, you know your work’s all for nothing. Your world’s about to end. You need to give us something to persuade us to spare you.”

“You’re too optimistic, Sashenka, deluded. I don’t think much of the standard of your newspapers but, between ourselves, they tell the truth about the situation in the factories and at the front. I’ve agonized about this. But I might have something for you.”

“You do?” Sashenka’s smile as she said this made it worthwhile. She tossed off her coat and sat again, still in her shapka.

Not for the first time, Sagan wrestled with the infinite possibilities of who was playing whom. Sashenka’s new confidence informed him that she was still telling Mendel about their meetings. Sagan was disappointed that she was not coming just out of affection—maybe he was losing his touch—but she was surely a little fond of him? “Almost friends,” she had said. In spite of himself, the secret policeman felt a tinge of hurt. But they talked about their families, poetry, even health.

So how much did she tell Mendel? He hoped she was keeping back their closeness, because this was how it worked: the holding back of small things led to small lies and then the holding back of larger things led to big lies—this was how he recruited his double agents. He wanted to destroy Mendel, and Sashenka was the tool to do it. Duplicity, not honesty, was his métier—but if he was honest for once, she was not only a tool. She was his delight.

“Listen carefully,” he said. “They’re planning a raid tomorrow night on your printing press down the road. You need to move it. I don’t need to know where.”

She tried to conceal her excitement from him, but the way she knitted her eyebrows to assume a military briskness made him want to laugh.

“Are you leading this raid?” she asked.

“No, it’s a Gendarmerie operation. To find out the details, I had to promise to trade some information in return.”

“That’s presumptuous, Comrade Petro.”

He flicked his wrist impatiently. “All intelligence work is a marketplace, Sashenka. This has kept me up night after night. I can’t sleep. I live on Dr. Gemp’s powder. I want to help your Party, the people, Russia, but everything inside me rebels against giving you anything. You know I’m risking all by telling you this?”

Sashenka turned to leave. “If it’s a lie, this is over and they’ll want your head. If your spooks follow me from here, we’ll never meet again. Do we understand each other?”

“And if it’s true?” he called after her.

“Then we’ll meet again very soon.”

26

A gentle sepia light shone through the clouds, reflected off the snow, and burst brighter through the curtains: the opium sailed through Ariadna’s veins. Dr. Gemp had called to give her the injection. Her head dropped onto the pillow and she drifted in and out of dreams: Rasputin and she were together in Heaven, he was kissing her forehead; the Empress was inspecting them, dressed in her grey nursing outfit. Rasputin held her hand and, for the first time in her life, she was truly happy and secure.