The King's Commissar Page 15

  I said gently, 'Alexei, did you tell me about the paper?'

  He shook his head. 'Of course not.'

  'Did anybody else know - your sisters, for instance?'

  'No.'

  'It was between the two of you, between you and your father - a secret between men?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then how do I know?'

  He stared at me, blinking.

  I said, 'Only he or you could have told me, Alexei, and you didn't, did you? So it must have been your papa, mustn't it? And the crucifix is to show you that's the truth.'

  A moment passed, and his brow cleared a little. Then he stretched out a hand for the crucifix. I gave it to him and he examined it.

  'You know it, don't you?' I said.

  Alexei rose. 'I'll bring you the paper, Commissar,' he said politely.

  With the paper safe in my pocket I next sought out Kobylinsky and took up with him the matter of the steamer Rus and her contents. Discussion produced the stratagem that I, as emissary of the Central Executive, issue papers to the vessel's master and to the Tobolsk manager of the shipping company commandeering the boat, and then handing control of it to Kobylinsky in the name of the Central Executive committee. He was greatly concerned about the position of himself and his men. Kobylinsky, after all, had no standing at all. In a country increasingly controlled by the Bolsheviks, he was an officer of a former regime and one, furthermore, tainted by personal contact and service with his old master, Nicholas. He could never live it down; he knew that and was accordingly hoping for the advance of the White armies to Tobolsk so he could join them. Kobylinsky's life was difficult. Elements of the guards from both Omsk and Ekaterinburg still remained, and though the good colonel had nominal command, it was in truth beyond his exercising. All in all, I determined, it was better that I leave at once.

  I went on horseback. The Rus had to stay where she was, and with the spring thaw now powerfully under way, a sled would prove impossible, for its runners would cut through the wet snow and scrape the ground beneath.

  So I made the decision to ride, and a foolish choice it was - one that was to cost me dear. But as I rode those first two or three miles, the document given so trustingly to me by young Alexei, and so much wanted by Lenin and by Zaharoff and apparently by half the world, was burning a hole in my pocket. From the beginning, from the very first awed conversation in Lenin's room in Moscow, I had had a notion of what it must contain. Now I found I had to know. And so, in the last of the light, I reined in my horse, took the envelope from my pocket, and broke the seal.

  I checked first that it had indeed been signed - and there was his signature: not a simple Nicholas as once it must have been, but 'Nicholas Romanov'. I saw, too, that it had been witnessed by Kobylinsky. Surprising, I thought, that it had been witnessed at all; but then I realized the document was composed in English, a language Kobylinsky did not speak.

  It was only then that I read it through. My eyes followed the typewritten lines with growing incredulity, for though something of what I expected was there in the dry, legal language, there was far more. So much more! At stake with this document was so much that my senses reeled. Then the questions flooded in. Who knew? Did King George the Fifth? I couldn't believe that] Lenin then? No, the deceit encompassed him too.

  But two men had known. Nicholas Romanov, ex-Tsar of all the Russias - he knew. And so did Basil Zaharoff, whom many held to be the most sinister figure in Europe.

  And now there was a third, for Henry George Dikeston knew . . .

  Progress in snow depends upon the condition of the snow, and a horse is as dependent upon it as is a man. Set the animal upon firm, hard-packed snow and a horse is happy and moves well. Set him upon soft slush, which is half-water, half-ice, and all treachery and discomfort, and the horse prefers to pick his way.

  It was true of all those I rode and I exchanged horses several times. They would trot, certainly; flog them hard and they'd work up a gallop? but only for a few moments. That ride back to Tyumen began in difficulty and rapidly became more and more unpleasant. On a succession of horses I splashed and slithered my way southward, part of the time through falling sleet. I grew so wet and cold that had I been asked I would have said it was quite impossible to be wetter and colder. But that was wrong. I had more than a hundred miles still to go when the horse fell and threw me and I landed in a pothole in the road, a hole filled with earthy black water, and though neither the horse nor I was hurt, by the time I had remounted and ridden a few minutes in that bitter wind, I was chilled to the marrow. J should have stopped. In a village I could have found fire and food and warmth. But I was alone, and the solitary night-time traveller in remote country had better beware, whether he is in Siberia or Somerset, especially when, as was the case with me, there was wealth in his pockets.

  So I pressed on. My teeth chattered and my feet were blocks of ice; gradually the cold crept through my body, so {hat I shivered uncontrollably. Come morning, I was aware that I was already quite unwell, for alternately I shook and was feverish, and felt increasingly foul. But I came into Tyumen still in place upon my horse's back, just in time to leap direct aboard a train bound west for Ekaterinburg.

  That journey, also, was a nightmare. The remnants of my money bought me a place only in a third-class carriage which was impossibly crowded, and not only with people, though there were three for every two places. In addition there was baggage and several animals, including a goat whose stench, I swear, was no greater than that of several of the peasants near me. Probably I stank also; certainly I steamed and in the press of humanity there were many like me: soaked and steaming. I felt increasing hunger and thirst, but there was no means of satisfying either. My health deteriorated by the hour: I was hot, I was shaking; the fever was rising, I sweated like a hog. The last three hours of the journey were spent huddled on the floor, sleeping perhaps, though it was more of a faint.

  As the voice yelled 'Ekaterinburg,' I dragged myself to my feet. It was just after eight o'clock by the station clock as I staggered out of the stinking, steamy heat of the railway carriage into the cold night air of the city.

  In an hour I must meet Ruzsky.

  I would have waited another day to see him, and should have done so. Food and a bed and healthy warmth were what was required, but I had no money for lodging, the last having been spent on the train journey. Only a few kopeks remained and with those I bought tea at the station. It refreshed me a little, as tea does, but I was in a poor way as I set off from the station towards the Palais Royal Hotel. Already I knew, from talk heard in the station, that the Imperial Family remained imprisoned in the Ipatiev House.

  Ruzsky was late. It is unimportant, I suppose, but it mattered that night to me, feeling as I did, and leaning against the rear wall of the hotel, miserable as a sick dog. But it is difficult to blame him. In the days since I had left Ekaterinburg he must have kept our rendezvous faithfully, and was keeping it still.

  At the sight of me he said wrathfully, 'Where in hell have you been?'

  I began to tell him and my teeth were chattering. He pulled a bottle from his pocket. 'Plum brandy. Drink it.'

  Then he listened as I told him about the steamer and Tobolsk. The story took little time in the telling, so that soon I could ask him: 'What news of the Romanovs here?'

  That, too, was soon told. There were no events to record; the Imperial Family remained under guard, that was all. But one change had occurred: and it struck me at once as deeply sinister. Ipatiev's house now had a new name, by proclamation. It must now be known as The House of Special Purpose!

  'But what does it mean?' I demanded. 'What special purpose?' t

  Ruzsky gave a shrug. 'Who knows? A name means nothing. Drink some more.'

  The political state of affairs was unchanged, he told me then: the Urals Soviet had been meeting almost daily, and always there was discussion of what to do with the Romanovs. 'General opinion is for execution of Nicholas.'

  'He alone?' I asked.
<
br />   'That depends who speaks. Beloborodov, the chairman, would kill the Tsar and spare the rest, or so I think. Goloshchokin's for butchering them all. With the Whites too near for comfort he thinks their presence is a danger to the city.'

  'Is there no opposition?' I demanded. 'Surely there must be - when there is talk of killing children?'

  'Hardly children,' he said, 'except for the boy, and he's fourteen now. Yes, there's opposition.'

  'How many - what's the balance of the committee?'

  'Never tested,' Ruzsky said, 'and some decline even to offer a view, on the grounds that the matter is of no importance. I'm doing what I can, but it's little enough.

  Nobody, even of the Soviet, may enter the House of Special Purpose to see the Romanovs except Beloborodov. And the guards, of course. That's the problem.'

  'How much opposition?' I repeated.

  There's a fellow named Scriabin; he's Regional Commissar for Natural Resources: one of the milk-and-water people who won't shed blood. I make a point of being close to him in spite of disagreement.'

  'So is there a chance?'

  'There's always a chance,' Ruzsky said.

  Pilgrim, despite his impatience and his professed lack of interest, continued to see Dikeston's manuscripts; he merely declined to allow thought of them to dominate his waking hours. That morning the third instalment, thoughtfully Xeroxed for him by Malory, won a small battle for his attention, a battle with the Financial Times. Pilgrim, speed-reading, his concentration firm, barely noticed the entrance of Jacques Graves to his office. He murmured, 'Important?'

  'Not really.' Graves, from long familiarity knew when not to disturb. 'Later will be okay.'

  He laid a single sheet of paper on the left side of Pilgrim's desk, and withdrew.

  Pilgrim ignored it for several minutes, then reached out a hand. The note read:

  'Account no. X253 at the Irish Linen Bank belongs to ...

  Pilgrim swore to himself, rose and marched down the corridor to Malory's room. Malory, wreathed in expensive cigar smoke, looked up. 'Have you read it?'

  'Some of it.' Pilgrim flourished Graves's note. 'Did Jacques tell you?'

  'Tell me what?' Malory removed his glasses.

  'That damned account at the bank,' Pilgrim said. 'Know whose it is?'

  'No, he didn't tell me.'

  'Then I will. How's UNICEF grab you?'

  Malory frowned. 'You know, I'm never too sure which of those things is which - WHO and UNESCO and so on. Which is UNICEF?'

  'It's the children's fund, Horace - The United Nations Children's Fund.'

  'Ah, I see.'

  'So do I. My God, fifty thousand - plus the deeds of a house worth another hundred and fifteen - and we've handed the goddam lot to a charity! We'll never see one red cent back. Have you the instructions for the next instalment?'

  An envelope lay beside Malory. He patted it with a brown-spotted hand. 'Here,' he said.

  'What do they say?'

  'I'm waiting to learn. Until I have finished reading.' Malory glanced pointedly at the Act of Parliament clock on the wall. 'Tell me,' he continued, 'are you beginning to find this interesting now?'

  'At ten pounds a word, sure it's interesting!' There was irritation in every line of Pilgrim's back as he turned and left.

  Malory put on his glasses and resettled himself to read. The temptation to turn to the end and to open the envelope were almost, but not quite, irresistible. Dikeston was clearly in terrible trouble, but equally clearly he had got out of it - with something that was worth £50,000 a year for ever.

  Deep inside myself, Malory thought with conscious realism, I am now a man torn: I deeply believed in the potential disaster, yet I am perversely beginning to enjoy the game Dikeston has set us all to play.

  I felt like death by this time. Sweat coursed down my body beneath my clothes, yet at the same time I shivered and burned.

  'What I keep pressing upon Scriabin,' Ruzsky told me, as we stood beneath the dark shelter of the hotel wall that night, 'is that the Romanov family should be brought together.'

  'Why?' I asked. Though I was awake and standing up, my mind worked barely at all. Yet I recall clearly the sound of a clock chiming near by. Oddly, in that place, it was a Westminster chime.

  'Why? Because,' Ruzsky said, 'it is foolish on all counts to separate them. Even for the Bolsheviks it is wrong. So Scriabin tells the Soviet, and I reinforce his argument as much as I dare. So long as Nicholas is here and the son at Tobolsk there will be two potential rallying points: for the Whites and for monarchists of all kinds, here in Siberia. It is even an invitation to White armies to a two-pronged attack!'

  He gave me a grin then, and tapped his nose. 'Better for us too, eh? - if the Family were together here.'

  'Why? We're helpless.'

  'Nobody is helpless,' Ruzsky said. 'Least of all you and me. But,' he went on, 'it is true we stand in need of help.'

  This was so ludicrous an understatement that I was near to laughing in his face. He looked at me hard, then forced more plum brandy on me. Perhaps he sensed what the future held for me; at all events he would brook no delay and no argument. He took my arm and began to propel me along the dark streets, talking as we went.

  'The help we need,' he argued, 'is from someone of position. You have none now; I have standing only in the Soviet and my attitude cannot alter there. We need an outside power.'

  'Of what kind?'

  'British,' Ruzsky said firmly. 'The British have a consul here. His name is Preston. His position is secure; he may even be able to force diplomatic access to the House of Special Purpose. Come along, man, you must stay on your feet an hour or two yet.'

  And I did, God alone knows how. I stayed on my feet as we trudged towards the forbidding palisade at the Ipatiev House, as we walked past it, eyed by the guards, along Vosnesensky Avenue. Ruzsky knew where he was going well enough, and when we halted at a big house with a strongly bolted door upon which the lion and the unicorn did their dance, he did not so much speak as issue an order. This was the British Consulate.

  'Knock,' he said. Obediently I did so.

  We waited. The door was opened at last by a man in a long silken dressing-gown.

  I said to him in English, 'I am in urgent need of your assistance!'

  And he, in the very best traditions of the British Foreign Service when confronted with a fellow countryman visibly in extremis, said, 'I can't help you now. It's far too late. Come back in the morning.'

  The King, thought Malory - it all began with the King, with George V, acting alone. No, not alone - through Zaharoff. But acting in a remarkably furtive manner all the same for a King-Emperor. Malory ticked off the steps one by one: the King calls in Zaharoff, who unearths Dikeston from somewhere or other and sends him off to Siberia. And there -surprisingly, if one did not know Sir Basil, but unsurprisingly if one did - another Zaharoff man is encountered. At no point, Malory noted, was the British Government involved. Or not, at least, to that point.

  But now, it seemed, the Foreign Office was about to be dragged in by its reluctant if elegant lapels.

  He stretched out a hand to the letter, broke the seal and with care extracted the sheet of paper therein. The first sentence read:

  I did not know that evening, as I spoke to Ruzsky, that on that very day Bolshevik orders had reached Tobolsk from Moscow relieving Colonel Kobylinsky of his command, dispersing his troops and replacing him with one Rodionov. Nor did I know that within a week the steamer Rus would again be used - this time to move the Romanov children from Tobolsk. But they did not journey north to the Ob river . . .

  Dikeston's instructions followed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  'Do I hear one million?'

  I don't care what was agreed!' Laurence Pilgrim's usual manner was one of brisk tolerance leavened by a streetwise New York humour. But as he spoke now he was near to a snarl. 'The idea, Horace, was that you were to stop me making a goddam fool of myself in an unfamiliar milieu. It's call
ed advice. I agreed with the international board that I would listen, because they all think you're nobody's fool.' He paused. 'That's what I used to think, too!'

  'Used to?' said Malory dangerously.

  'Yeah, used to. Let me ask you, Horace, who's it making a goddam fool of himself here? Who's buying houses and handing them to the United Nations? Who's paying cheques into 'X' accounts? This is a bank, Horace, not a bottomless benevolent society.'

  Malory crossed one immaculately creased trouser leg over the other, it is a bank I have served for a great many years. I'm entirely ready to re-examine the profit record and the growth under my stewardship. May I say that if you do as well, you will be doing very well! I can read profit and loss, I can see prospects and dangers, I can make financial assessments, all of those. But there are times, as now, when -'

  'Look, we had all this before. There's a danger and we have to know what it is, that's your case, right? So answer me just one question, Horace.'

  if I can.'

  'We've spent two hundred thousands pounds. Okay.

  Are we any nearer knowing what this danger is? Are we one single goddam step nearer?'

  Malory pursed his lips. 'We know the general source of the danger lies in the relationship between Zaharoff and the Tsar. We are learning more, stage by stage.'

  'Oh sure,' Pilgrim said angrily. 'Information is dispensed word by word by Dikeston. Dikeston met the Tsar; Dikes-ton met Zaharoff; Dikeston met the King, Lenin, Trotsky and Whistler's goddam mother for all I know. Dikeston's in charge of a train loaded with jewels. Dikeston's whizzing round Siberia like a fly with a ginger ass, and we don't even know who Dikeston is!'

  'Oh, but we do, Laurence,' Malory said gently. 'We know he represented royalty at the highest level, and business too, also at the highest level. We know when he was born and when he died.'

  Pilgrim blinked. 'Do we? Since when?'

  'Since I arranged scrutiny of the death register at Somerset House. It showed that Henry George Dikeston died on 20th October, 1968.'

  'You're sure he's dead, Horace?'

  'There is a death certificate. He died at Sainte-Maxime in the South of France. But there was no will and no property.'