Cold Blood: A Novel

By James Fleming

Charlie Doig, the hero of White Blood, returns in another magnificent and thrilling adventure set in Russia as it descends into the chaos and confusion of a full-blown revolution.

The Russian Revolution is breaking out all around him, but Charlie Doig has a private war to fight. Even if he dies in the attempt, he's going to track down and kill Prokhor Glebov, the Bolshevik who murdered Doig's beautiful wife, Elizaveta. Certain that Glebov will sooner or later turn up at Lenin's side, Doig makes his way to St. Petersburg. There, amidst the chaos of the Revolution, Charlie discovers that Glebov has been put in charge of the political re-education of the Tsar and his family in Ekaterinburg. The chase begins.

Having captured an armored train, Charlie and the ragtag private army he has recruited fight their way toward Siberia. Near Kazan, he hears rumors that the Tsar's gold reserves are in the city and that Glebov is also after them. He determines that he'll avenge Elizaveta and grab the gold in one swoop.

James Fleming is one of modern fiction's great stylists. His prose is marvelously robust and vivid, his plot breathtaking in its pace and excitement, and his protagonist, as the Independent said of the previous Doig novel, White Blood, is "the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9781416596684

James Fleming

James Fleming was born in London in 1944, the fourth in a family of nine children. He read history at Oxford and has been variously an accountant, farmer, forester and bookseller. The author of two previous novels, The Temple of Optimism and Thomas Gage, he lives in Scotland. Visit him online at jamesfleming.co.uk.

Book preview

COLD BLOOD

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION IS BREAKING OUT ALL AROUND HIM, but Charlie Doig has a private war to fight. Even if he dies in the attempt, he’s going to track down and kill Prokhor Glebov, the Bolshevik who murdered Doig’s beautiful wife, Elizaveta. Certain that Glebov will sooner or later turn up at Lenin’s side, Doig makes his way to St. Petersburg. There, amidst the chaos of the Revolution, Charlie discovers that Glebov has been put in charge of the political re-education of the Tsar and his family in Ekaterinburg. The chase begins.

Having captured an armored train, Charlie and the ragtag private army he has recruited fight their way toward Siberia. Near Kazan, he hears rumors that the Tsar’s gold reserves are in the city and that Glebov is also after them. He determines that he’ll avenge Elizaveta and grab the gold in one swoop.

James Fleming is one of modern fiction’s great stylists. His prose is marvelously robust and vivid, his plot breathtaking in its pace and excitement, and his protagonist, as the Independent said of the previous Doig novel, White Blood, is the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous.

Praise for James Fleming’s White Blood

An extraordinary novel. . . . Readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest living story-tellers.

—The Literary Review

"Crackling, flamboyant . . . [White Blood] is funny, sad and magical."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Fleming captures the contradictions of the period and the rich flavours of elegance and terror compellingly. This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who, in the best passages, bursts off the page.

—Time Out London

A pulse-pounding read . . . The action sequences virtually sing with energy, and the novel’s blistering pace never lets up for a moment.

—Kirkus Reviews

A historical novel with the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous.

—The Independent (London)

A meticulously researched act of reconstruction. . . . The narrative, the dialogue and the intensity of Doig’s emotions drive the story to a savage climax that reads like a modern thriller . . . The best sort of historical novel.

—The Spectator (London)

Beautifully written with baroque energy and style.

—The Daily Telegraph (London)

ALSO BY JAMES FLEMING

The Temple of Optimism

Thomas Gage

White Blood

COLD BLOOD

James Fleming

A Novel

Washington Square Press

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by James Fleming

Originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Jonathan Cape,

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-4165-9651-6

ISBN 978-1-4165-9668-4 (ebook)

COLD BLOOD

One

HAVING BEEN hailed as a genius at the age of twenty-three, I got too cocky. Everything had yielded to me. Fame had become my companion—lived in my pocket.

I was a naturalist. Old man Goetz was my mentor. Just the two of us—a team, like father and son. Museums competed for our services. Goetz & Doig: our names rolled off the tongue as if we’d been a shipping line. No one was better than us at discovering birds and insects that were new to science. In the name of progress we battled through jungles, waded torrents, scaled peaks, tramped through all the outer territories of civilisation.

The day everything changed for me we were in western Burma for the Field Museum. Our head porter had been murdered. We were obliged to remain in Chaungwa, a small trading town on the River Chindwin, while the matter was investigated.

I went to the post office to get a letter off to my mother, who was on an extended visit to her family in Russia. The humidity was oppressive to my northern blood. Listlessly I approached the clerk, wondering what rigmarole was in store as the passage of a letter from Chaungwa to Smolensk was considered.

It was here that Luck singled me out.

She was up there in the rafters, couldn’t have been anywhere else. A stout lady with dimpled knees, spying on the throng. To get herself into the proper mood, she closed her eyes, sang her witching song and on opening them found it was I, Charlie Doig, she was staring at. Six foot two, strong across the shoulders and through the loins. Stubborn blue eyes, lumpy nose, awkward hands. Cropped hair. Travel-stained legs—scars, sores, etc. High curling instep and bouncing stride. Chest forty-two inches.

She couldn’t have missed me. Goetz was out and about somewhere. There was only me and the brown fellows.

She took pity on me. She knew all about Goetz’s temper, about malaria and the beige curse, that I’d had a hard time of it on the expedition. She weighed it on her scales—and smiled upon me: touched my shoulder with her wand. Then she instructed a certain jewel beetle to burrow out of the teakwood pillar on the far side of the post office, the pillar where it had been laid as an egg four years ago. Yes, four years growing and nibbling its way through the wood and into the world of man— into my world and my killing bottle.

It was the first of its sort ever to be captured by humankind. Noah had missed it and Abraham and all the merry crowd until the day that I sauntered into the Chaungwa GPO.

The glory was mine alone. Goetz never had a look-in. When the museum naming committee sat, that beetle went down in the annals of science as Chrysochroa doigii Brendell 1912.

Many times I studied the letter of award. Was I to be immortal? It could mean nothing less.

In return for a decent sum, this fantastically coloured beetle got to be the property of the Field Museum. They were looking for a show-stopper. Wiz, as they called him, fitting the bill, they dolled up my story and fed it to the newspapers. That Goetz and I had only been in Chaungwa because Hpung had been murdered there (throat cut) was the icing on the cake.

A good killing sells, wrote Amy Carson, the museum publicist. So mind you send us a photograph that makes you look as if you belong to the tale.

The studio fixed me up with a patch of jungle and had me pose unshaven in my Empire shorts. The cameraman caught me crouching, my front knee sprung—the quarry was just ahead, I was holding my breath. At the last moment he made me grasp a stage rifle. In the proof I sent Amy, I appeared vigilant, murderous and decisive.

The Field mounted Wiz in a spectacular fashion, striding up a tilted piece of grey bark, looking back over its shoulder, its huge eyes liquid with nostalgia for the privacy I’d stripped from it forever. Over two thousand people showed up the day the exhibition opened.

Modesty would have served me well at that point. But I was young and bold with conceit. Had not the beetle been named after me?

Once I’d started on this line of thought, nothing could hold me back. I’d out-Darwin Darwin, go for the record—get fifty-eight doigii to my name and so beat the hero by one. I’d find a hidden-away island. All the firsts I needed would be there. I didn’t know how this would happen, but having no concept of failure, I didn’t worry. Somehow or other I’d get to fifty-eight species bearing the name of Charlie Doig. Medals would be struck for me. Mount Doig would make its appearance on maps. Or a glacier. Or a new island. Thank you, I’d say in my acceptance speech, thank you, messieurs, I always had these good feelings about myself. Success was inevitable.

But the world was not ready to submit to me. I should have taken the hint when it was offered, when Amy rejected the proof I’d sent her.

I know what I said, but the fact is that it’s a beetle, not a tiger, she wrote and had me do something tamer, with a butterfly net.

She was right, and in another sense too. I should have been content to be a name on a museum label, should have allowed the idea of smallness to find a home with me. All my troubles have stemmed from that, my troubles, my joys, my loves.

Two

ON THE strength of Wiz, I was appointed in the summer of 1914 to document the passerines—birds that perch— of Russian Central Asia. Skins of every species that bred there were to be obtained. The expedition was mine, Goetz being over fifty by then and crabbier than ever.

Disaster struck immediately. Thereafter they followed each other like sheep.

First: the European war broke out, causing old Hartwig Fartwig Goetz to remember the Germanness of his soul. He deserted me: presented me with all his collecting equipment, stepped onto a train in Bokhara and went to a patriot’s death.

Next: the Academy of Sciences stopped sending me money. The Tsar had none to spare because of the cost of the war.

Shortly after this, I broke my leg.

These sufferings were not sufficient. As soon as I was better I abandoned the passerines and set out across Russia to the Pink House, Popovka, province of Smolensk, the home of my mother’s family, the Rykovs. For company I had a young Mongolian who’d attached himself to me as a bodyguard. His name was Kobi.

The train I was on contained only recruits and their lice. I caught typhus, or tif as it’s known with us. An inch of my life was all that remained by the time Kobi got me to the Pink House. An inch, as close as that: a few dozen breaths away from the mortician’s trolley, which in my case would have been a shove out of a military wagon with a heavy boot.

But I pulled through, my will to live being stronger than the tif.

When I awakened in the Pink House, the hot summer sun was streaming through the open windows, I could smell the greenish scent of the Fantin-Latour that had been growing against the wall when I was a boy and was still growing there, and my cousin Elizaveta was writing a letter at a desk by the window. A bee came off the rose and loitered noisily half in and half out of the room.

She spoke to it: Kind and gentle bee, keep your distance, for here we have tif.

I called out. She came to my bedside. Her dark, finely boned face bent over me. I said weakly, What have you done with your hair, then, Lizochka?

Smiling at me, who was her patient, from the bottom of her black eyes: Four days a week I nurse our wounded soldiers in the hospital. None of us are allowed to keep our hair because of the lice. So we are alike, you and I, Charlinka.

And I, who had until then treated women as a hobby, fell instantly in love. There was nothing of the dewy-eyed, walks-in-the-wood romance about it. The love I had for Elizaveta Rykov was gross. It concerned one thing only: complete possession of her, inside and out, until the day I died.

However, she was already affianced. The man was one of our most dashing young officers, a real idol. He had all a soldier’s advantages: medals, fame, rank and, not least, the wardrobe of a colonel in the Garde à Cheval, which included trousers tight enough to make a maiden gasp.

Still, I went for her. Stuck my chin out and tightened my arse.

And I won her, led her from the altar as mine. She declared that her heart had belonged to me all along.

For seven days this woman was my bride—was Mrs Doig. Black hair, black eyes, brainy, angular, a small refined bosom— of greater beauty than is comfortable for most men. There can’t have been a woman like her in the entire province of Smolensk, probably not in Russia itself. I’ll bet you could have searched the ballrooms and apple orchards from Vladivostok to the Baltic and not found her equal. She had to be in the top twelve of Europe itself for beauty, intelligence and domesticity.

That I, who am imperfect, should have been found acceptable by such a woman filled me to bursting with pride. She was the sun, the moon and the milk of the stars, she was the purest treasure in existence. Sobbing with love, I’d dip my head between her sleek breasts and go back and forth kissing their nipples and murmuring of rubies, garnets and the rest of them until I ran out of words. Her eyes were jet, her skin like alabaster and her navel was folded like a cowrie.

Exclaiming, I would explore every inch of her as we lay on the bear cubs’ skin in front of the bedroom fire.

One night towards the end we were on the bearskin, she naked except for the Rykov pearls. My great-uncle Igor had given them to her. They were famous throughout Russia, the largest weighing three ounces.

I was impatient and as stiff as a guardsman. She wanted to see how long I could hold out. Laughing, she lassoed my cock and garlanded it with the pearls so that it gleamed in the firelight like an elephant’s tusk. This led her to thinking how tall our children would be. I said I’d have to measure her. Smiling— fireglow in her eyes, it was what she’d been hoping for—she reclaimed the cock-hot pearls (which had certainly seen nothing of the like when owned by homosexual Uncle Igor) and laid them out of harm’s way. She reached back with her arms, right over her head. Using the top knuckle of my thumb as an inch measure, I started off at the ball of her heel. I went slowly, paying no attention to her squeals and giggles as I passed over dells and dimples, plains, forests and peaks. Up her neck I went and over her determined chin and nibbling lips. I balanced like a mountaineer on the ridge of her nose, made a detour to take in her upstretched arms and on reaching her fingertips and kissing them, one by one—

How many? she whispered, by then not interested in my answer.

I sat back on my heels. Now it was her turn to wait. She placed both hands round my cock and tried to draw me down.

How many do you think? I said.

A thousand, I don’t care.

Seventy-five inches to your fingertips. When you raise your arms like that, you’re taller than I am.

Squirming beneath me: What’s important... do you want me to beg? Come down here, Charlinka.

I looked at her long white body on the bearskin. I smoothed my palms over her flat stomach. She made way and I entered her with a rush, the deepest penetration in the entire history of love.

We were one person that night, when Dan Doig was conceived. She declared that the thud of my sperm hitting her egg travelled all the way up her spine. She’d felt it in her brain. More than just a tingle, she said: a definite crackle, like electricity.

To celebrate Dan’s conception, she refastened the pearls round her neck. They grazed my chest as she smiled down at me, leaning on her elbow, tracing the grooves between my ribs with her forefinger.

It was as though you fertilised me in two places simultaneously. Mighty Doig!

All the happiness that had been lying around in the world unused was ours. It was drawn to us by the force of our love. I had only to put out my hand to feel it surrounding and protecting us like a soft warm billowy paradise.

Three

HOW THE gods must have detested our bliss. Break them, they roared. Do it properly this time. Leave nothing to chance.

The man they sent to do this was Prokhor Fedorovich Glebov. Pretending to be a Tsarist officer, he sought refuge in the Pink House just as our honeymoon and a week-long blizzard began. We were duped, all of us—my cousin Nicholas, his servants, my godfather Misha Baklushin, my wife. One night he murdered her ancient tutor in the room above ours. I was woken by the scream. He rode away into the forest, trailing his coat, inviting me to follow him. He was joined by a gang of deserters. Kobi tracked them through the snow. I shot and killed a man, believing him to be Glebov. It was not. Too late did I realise the depth of his deception. By the time I got back, he’d done his butchering.

He did it on behalf of Bolshevism, in the name of the common man. To compensate for the bad deal that this wretch has received from history.

It took Kobi and me two days to catch him. What I wanted to do was to cut off his eyelids so that he’d be unsleeping for the remainder of his life. Why not? Kobi wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Not one person in humanity would have blamed me.

I did not. Instead, because I suddenly visualised his eyelids fluttering on the palm of my hand, I handed him over to some wounded White officers to let them torture him as they wished. When a couple of Zeppelins bombed their hospital wagons, he escaped. Even with a broken leg, the slippery bastard managed to crawl away and hide.

I have often pondered over that failure of mine to kill Glebov. I’m not a fastidious person. No one has ever called me nice. It’s not in my born nature. I’m a vital, pushing, obstinate man. I have pride. I have ambition. I have a whole range of the minor qualities. But I am not and do not wish to be thought nice.

My uncle Igor had been a generous, unassuming, would-be pederast, the epitome of niceness. His fate—to be blown up in his carriage as he passed through the forest of Popovka. My cousin Nicholas had been almost unbearably nice. Elizaveta, Misha, Bobinski, Louis, all those slaughtered in the Pink House had been nice. Decent, honourable people, well suited to a civilised existence. And now? Dead. All these nice people were dead and gone, swept out of the way by swine like Glebov, by people indoctrinated to act without scruple or mercy.

So why did I risk staying in Russia? What did I want that I couldn’t get in another country with a fraction of the danger?

Vengeance. Nothing could be clearer. I had one mortal enemy, this man Glebov. Never again would I let him escape. I would be his nemesis. I would hunt him as a dog hunts a rat, and when I’d caught him, I’d kill him with terrible finality. Then I’d get out of the country.

I’d find my way to America, where I had high standing at the Field Museum. If the war had made collecting impossible I’d take up accountancy. I’d force myself to learn their obscure language and their runes: buy a suit and become their ally. The sense of being a Rykov, even of being a Russian, would be moulted and a bright new Doig would step forth, a respectable fellow, an all-round good person.

Time would strip my memory down to the essentials. Mother—she’d be among the first to go: she’d been a stranger to me even before I broke free.

Papa—a glorious, seething, inventive Muscovite Scotsman, with curly black hair and flashing eyes and a skin so magnetic that my normally placid mother had been unable to resist touching it. He died of bubonic plague in Tashkent, at the age of thirty-nine. Boils, pus, vomit, crying out for help from his family while in the latticed room below, the turbans clacked away at backgammon and shut their ears to his lonely terror.

I was fourteen when this happened. I was caught flat-footed. It had never occurred to me that people whom one loved could die. At first I was tearful. Then I grew angry. Then it was revealed how completely hopeless Papa had been with money, and I vowed that no one would ever take advantage of me. I would be the opposite of my father: I would devour the world.

His debts were huge. I estimated that had he been caught in the revolving doors of Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, where he often took me for lunch, and had all his IOUs, liens, mortgages, pledges, arrangements and fantastic paper schemes for our enrichment been stuffed in around him, only his curls and his laughing brown eyes would have been visible. He was a sober man, the most sober of the many Scotsmen in Moscow. His downfall lay in having a brain like a mushroom cellar and a belief that the world was nice.

So let him abide in my memory forever, central and sturdy on account of his unfulfilled dreams and of the love that we had for each other.

And above him let Elizaveta shine on the highest pinnacle visible to man. Every woman after her would be a lesser experience. Beside her in my imagination—podgy hand tugging at her long blue skirt—must be my impression of how Dan Doig would have turned out at the age of three. Belly, bluster, baby biceps...

At this point I take my leave. Some scenes are too painful, especially those that spring solely from the imagination.

In the hateful month of March, 1917, when all this happened, I was twenty-eight years old. By then I’d had a beetle named after me, catalogued the passerines of Central Asia, survived typhus, had my only family members slain by the Bolsheviks— and been compelled to shoot my wife. If that isn’t learning the hard way, I don’t know what is.

Four

ALL THIS experience, this weight of life, drained me. My Darwinian preoccupations seemed silly. Love, money, position, reward—they were nothing. In that one murderous hour at the Pink House, Glebov had chopped off all the ligaments by which I was bound to society. I was left with one purpose in my life: to kill him. It didn’t worry me that he could be anywhere in this huge country of ours. When the Revolution came, there’d be only one place for a top Bolshevik like him— the capital. So I went to St. Petersburg and waited for the storm to break.

Kobi enjoyed mocking me by saying things such as, There are 155 million people in Russia and you want to find one of them? But I knew Glebov was alive and I knew he’d show up. He was one of those people you want to see turning green before pronouncing them dead.

We went to the old Rykov Palace off the north end of Nevsky. Joseph, Uncle Igor’s house steward, was still hanging on in the hope of better times. A number of pauperous families calling themselves Socialist Revolutionaries had taken the mansion over and stuffed him into a tiny back room. He was forty-three years old, a single man of slight build, with long black ringlets, a thin black face, soft eyes and a certain gracefulness of speech and character.

His narrow face went lopsided with pleasure when he saw me. Waving the SRs away, not even glancing at Kobi, he came right up to me. Ah, Doig! he exclaimed, wrapping my name in a great gush of liquory breath. Back again! Out of the blue! Like an aviator!

I need to explain something. When my father was wooing Irina Rykov, it was not grasped by the servants that he was just a classy Scottish adventurer. They believed Doig to be his title. The word sounded so outlandish that they couldn’t believe it to be his name. So they’d always called him Doig, thinking it to be the Scottish version of Your Excellency or Your Worship. I’d inherited it.

He put his arm through mine and held me tightly. The family—I never believed I’d see any of you again. The disgrace-fulness of these times—he thought better of his arm—made as if to withdraw it—ended up by leaving it there. He waved at the leering scum. Go away, proletariat. Go and learn how to use a toilet.

To me: "They distrust it and shit on the floor. So long as the weather’s cold, one can tolerate such behaviour. But when May comes, there’ll be a stink all over the house. Lilac blossom and thawing shit, there’s a Russian spring for you... Off you go! Provalivai—scram!"

We walked arm in arm into the next huge room. There was no purpose to it. Joseph just wanted to walk somewhere with his arm through mine, to have the contact.

Something lurking in his eyes, he said, The SR muck say there are soon to be no servants and no masters. We are all to be the same, even you and I, Doig.

One of us needs to be the leader. You?

He sighed. It would be best if the Germans finished off our armies and put the Kaiser on the throne. They wouldn’t stand for any of this nonsense. Doig, if we were to be equal...

Joseph?

My first wish would be to become your servant again. You will take me with you when you leave?

Of course I will, I said, and he began to weep, out of gratitude that the family had returned and come to his rescue. He steered the talk round to Elizaveta, wanting to know why she wasn’t with me. Pretty soon there was no alternative but to go to his room and drown our sorrows. We polished off the Plymouth gin that he’d salvaged and moved on to vodka. We could have had the remains of Uncle Igor’s claret but I said it was important to transfer between drinks of the same colour.

Joseph lit a tiny mouse of a fire. After a bit he grew reckless and put on all the coal he had. It became warm. He slipped his braces and took off his shirt. The armpits of his woollen vest were a strong yellow—gamboge. He said, But you have to tell me this at least: did she suffer?

Worse than Christ.

You cannot leave me to imagine it. We must share, as we share in the agony of Our Lord.

She was seized by a bunch of deserters and raped in chorus on the floor of the stable. A Bolshevik called Glebov was behind it. He wanted to ingratiate himself with Lenin by carrying out an act of class warfare. Also there was this, that his own woman had been hanged as a Bolshevik saboteur. After they’d raped her, they razored a strip of flesh off each leg, from thigh to ankle. That was to mock the officer class, because the trousers of the Garde à Cheval are white with a blood-red stripe. She was in agony when I found her. The hospital—miles away—no drugs—it was a nightmare. She begged me to—and I did. I shot her. Now you know.

Joseph collapsed into the ghastly chrome chair my uncle had bought from an American catalogue. His mouth buckled. He bawled—howled, the tears cascading through the hollows of his gaunt cheeks.

To begin with we weren’t really tight, just high on misfortune. Then things got too much for us. We wept, we drank, we slept and night became day again. Still we continued drinking.

For some period of the second day, I got loose. Kobi came in pursuit. He captured me dancing down the centre of Nevsky. I was insane with grief and liquor. Elizaveta was in my arms. I had her ass tight in my hand. I was kissing her, pinching her, engulfing her in my arms. Her black eyes were bright with love for me—for having spared her the agony of a slow death.

Then Kobi leaned out of a horse-drawn cab and, catching me on the lurch, scooped me inside.

When I sobered up, the desire to capture Glebov and bake him alive occupied my entire being. I thought of nothing else, day and night.

However, Kobi was out of harmony with me. He didn’t drink—thought poorly of my bender. He hankered for the open road, a fast horse and a true rifle. What grabbed him was the idea of being a mercenary. It was rumoured that General K. I. Muraviev was recruiting in the capital for the civil war that he could see coming.

One day Kobi said to me, Muraviev’d give me five thousand to see me ride into his camp. You give me five thousand and I’ll stay with you. Five thousand or that’s it.

I looked him over. Waiting was so alien to him.

I said, He’s not going to want you without a horse.

You can get that for me as well. He was hot about it. The drying spittle was a white rind on his lips.

I said, Listen, Genghis, why would I want to do either of these things for you? You remember what the Lux cinema was offered to me for? Brand new? Red plush seats, electric organ from Germany, the screen, American cash register, carpeting, spittoons, a list of fittings as long as your arm plus the usherettes and their uniforms. How much?

Don’t make fun of me.

Four thousand cash. And you want me to give you five thousand plus a horse? Have a pull at your ears. It’ll stretch your brains and make them go farther.

You can do more with a horse than a cinema, he said.

You mean eat it? But then it’s gone. You’re worse off than ever.

The girlies are probably terrorists, he said, beginning to sulk. You can’t escape in a cinema, you can’t ride it away, you can’t . . . His bravado sputtered out.

And then events shut him up with absolute finality. For on the morning of Easter Monday, Joseph, who’d gone out early to queue for bread, came running down the corridor to the room he and I were sharing. Came flying, small quick bounds, like a man about to jump a barrier. I slipped out of my old Rykov campaign cot and threw open the door.

What is it?

Posters, all over the city they say. One’s even been pasted over the day’s services at the cathedral. He gulped, getting his breath back.

For Kerensky, for the generals, for the Tsar—which?

Worse, the worst possible.

The Bolsheviks?

Doig, they’ve let him back in. LENIN ARRIVES TODAY. MEET HIM! That’s what the posters say.

Kobi had taken over the space beneath the stairs for sleeping quarters. Hearing our voices, he crawled out to join us. I said, You’ll get your war now, that’s for sure.

With the trace of a sneer he said, "Will the Bolsheviks put up posters for Glebov as well when he