Sashenka

“Of course not,” she answered huskily, “but I never thought of Lala like that!”

“Governesses are prone to it. I had my first love affair with my sister’s governess,” said Sagan.

“Did you?” She was suddenly disappointed in him. “And how’s your wife?”

He shook his head. “I’m spiritually absent from my home. I come and go like a ghost. I find myself doubting everything I once believed in.”

“Lala was my confidante. Who do you talk to?”

“No one. Not my wife. Sometimes I think, well, maybe you’re the only person I can be myself with because we’re half strangers, half friends, don’t you see?”

Sashenka smiled. “What a pair we are!” She closed her eyes and let the wind with its refreshing droplets of snow sprinkle her face.

“There!” shouted Sagan. He pointed at an inn just ahead.

“Right, master,” cried the sleigh driver and whipped the horses.

“We’re almost there,” Sagan said, touching her arm.

A tiny wooden cottage, with colorful wooden carvings hanging from its roof, stood all alone in the middle of the snowfields with only a few birches on either side like bodyguards. Sashenka thought the place belonged in a Snow Queen fairy tale.

The sleigh swished to a stop, the horses’ nostrils flared and steaming in the cold. The wooden door opened, and a fat peasant with a jet-black beard came out in a bearskin caftan and soft boots to hand her down from the sleigh.

Inside, the “inn” was more like a peasant izba. The “restaurant” was a single room with a traditional Russian stove, on top of which a very old man with a shaggy white beard lay full length, snoring noisily in his socks. Inside the half-open stove, Sashenka saw game sizzling on a spit. The black-bearded peasant showed them to a rough wooden table and thrust a generous shot of cha-cha into their hands.

“To a strange pair!” said Sagan and they drank. She had never been out for a meal with a man before. The cha-cha burned in Sashenka’s belly like a red-hot bullet, and this unlikely idyll—the open fire, the sleeping old man and the aromatic game in the stove—softened her concentration. She imagined that they were the only people alive in the whole of the frozen north. Then she mentally shook herself, to keep her wits about her. Joking with Sagan, whom he seemed to know, the peasant served them roast goose in a piping-hot casserole, so well done that the fat and flesh almost dripped off the bones to flavor a mouthwatering beet, garlic and potato broth. They so enjoyed the food that they almost forgot the Revolution, and just made small talk. There was no dessert, and the old man never awoke. Eventually they left, very satisfied, after another cha-cha.

“Your tip checked out, Petro,” said Sashenka as the sleigh sped over the featureless snowfields.

“It was hard to give you that.”

“But it wasn’t enough. We want the name of the man who betrayed us.”

“I might get it for you. But if we’re going to keep meeting, I need to show my superiors something…”

She let the silence develop as she prepared herself, excited by the danger of their game. “All right,” she said. “There is something. Gurstein escaped from exile.”

“We know that.”

“He’s in Piter.”

“That we guessed.”

“Well, do you want to find him?”

He nodded.

“Try the Kiev boardinghouse, room twelve.” This was the response she’d rehearsed with Mendel, who had warned her that she would have to trade some information of her own. Gurstein was apparently expendable.

Sagan did not seem impressed. “He’s a Menshevik, Sashenka. I want a Bolshevik.”

“Gurstein escaped with Senka Shashian from Baku.”

“The insane brigand who robbed banks for Stalin?”

“He’s in room thirteen. You owe me, Comrade Petro. If this was known, the Party’d kill me by morning. Now give me the name of the traitor who betrayed the printing press.”

There was just the crispness of blades slicing frozen snow, and Sashenka could almost feel Sagan weighing up the price of a man’s life versus the value of an agent.

“Verezin,” he said at last.

“The concierge of the Horse Guards barracks?”

“Surprised?”

“Nothing surprises me,” Sashenka said, exultantly.

The sky was furrowed with scarlet, as if ploughed with blood. Rabbits jumped out ahead of the horses and crisscrossed one another, making jubilant leaps. What joy! Sagan gave orders to the coachman, who whipped the horses.

Sashenka sat back and closed her eyes. She had the name. Her mission was successful. The Party would be pleased. She had got what Mendel wanted—not bad, she decided, for a Smolny girl! Somehow, together, she and Sagan had delivered. They had shared the adrenaline that all operatives feel after a successful mission. She had tricked him and, for whatever reason, he had given her his nugget of gold.

A cottage appeared in the distance, probably on the edge of some estate. The temperature was falling, and the ice was stiffening again. A clump of pines looked as if they were made of tarnished silver.