Sashenka

He showed his pass to the stationmaster, who was almost overcome with excitement as Sagan commandeered the fool’s cozy office. Warming himself by the Dutch stove and helping himself to a shot of cognac, he wrote a report to his boss, General Globachev.

Sagan’s temples were tightening, always the start of a reverberating headache. He quickly rubbed some of the medicinal powder onto his gums then sniffed two tokes. Things were not going well. He and the general were more worried about St. Petersburg than he had let onto Sashenka. But both men agreed that a crackdown and a dismissal of the Duma were necessary: it was time, he considered, for the Cossack to wield his nagaika whip. The coca tonic replaced his anxiety with a feeling of all-conquering satisfaction that drummed in his temples.

Ever since his days in the Corps de Pages, Sagan had been one of the top students, winner of the highest prize during the two years of courses at the School for Detectives. He had learned the anthropometric tables of the Bertillon system for describing the features of those under surveillance, won the bull’s-eye prize in Captain Glasfedt’s practical course on firearms and mastered the “Instructions on Organizational Conduct of Internal Agents,” which he had applied punctiliously to Sashenka. He had memorized the urbane orders of Colonel Zubatov, the genius of the Okhrana, who had written: You should look on your informer as a mistress with whom you are involved in an adulterous affair. It was indeed impossible to turn female revolutionaries into double agents without exploiting chivalry in some form, even if that meant what he called “antichivalry”—allowing silly teenagers to believe they were serious intellectuals who would never contemplate the slightest flirtation, yet alone sexual approaches. Sagan had followed Zubatov’s recommendations with one of his female double agents in the SRs and another in the Bolsheviks. Neither was a beauty but, in bed, the drama of espionage more than compensated for the often dull athletics.

Sagan always prepared himself meticulously for his meetings with Sashenka, listening to the latest tango, learning reams of that doggerel by Mayakovsky that had turned her head. Her devotion to Bolshevism made it child’s play: the humorless ones were always the easiest to crack, he told himself. Like so many of the revolutionaries, she was a zhyd, a kike, one of that race of turncoats who supported either godless Marxism or the German Kaiser. He smiled at his own liberal posturing, he who believed so passionately in Tsar, Orthodoxy and Motherland, the old order.

Now, using the stationmaster’s pen and ink, he started to write his report to the General: