A Negotiable Instrument

Chapter 2

Tursunov ran down the steps and out of the building onto the embankment of the Fontanka canal. His encounter with Radostev hadn't followed the usual bureaucratic formula and that had surprised him. He had misjudged Radostev, choosing to see in his superior only those qualities which suited his own prejudices. It was an elementary mistake. He had allowed his surprise to give way to resentment, and he had been stupid enough to let it show. Now he could feel his resentment turning to anger.

He stumbled across the slurry of mud and horse shit that had cohered into an insidious meniscus and lay suspended over the deeply rutted road. He slumped against the damp granite stonework of the canal embankment and fought to regain control of his agitated emotions, slowing his breathing, clearing his mind. He knew he must be suffering from a delayed reaction to the morning's macabre discovery at the meat market, triggered, he had no doubt, by Radostev's ability to see straight through him. He had avoided thinking about the Manasevich-Manuilov investigation, its implications for his career and, more importantly, his glimpse under the veil that shrouded the depths of corruption that underpinned the functioning of St. Petersburg society. His instincts had kept him from thinking about his own collusion in that corruption. His hypocrisy didn't keep him warm at night, but it did allow him to do his job.

He stared out over the ice that held the canal in its implacable grip. Below the ice the churning waters still flowed sluggishly on through the city's sclerotic arteries. A pristine veneer of snow lay over the opulent buildings on the opposite side of the canal and the linden trees that flanked it. Like a winding-sheet, he thought, shrouding the rotting carcass of the Tsar's imperial city. He looked back at the imposing eighteenth-century façade of Fontanka 16. With the black flag of the double-headed Romanov eagle fluttering limply in the breeze, it was the headquarters of the St. Petersburg and, by extension, the entire empire's police service, the instrument of the Tsar's will. Was the eagle simply double-headed or Janus-faced, he wondered. Did it symbolise a Russia that looked to both east and west, both backwards to its traditions and forwards to progress? Or did it signify the beginning and the end?

'Honoured Sir, do you need any assistance?'

Startled out of his reverie by the obsequious voice he swung around to see who had broken into his thoughts.

'You look so cold and pale, and if I could be of any assistance?' The small man, grinning in nervous supplication, shifted from one dirty grey fur-booted foot to the other. His moth-eaten overcoat had once fitted a much stouter frame and the flaps of his shapka, pulled down tightly over his ears, accentuated his hollowed cheeks, making his remarkably well preserved teeth look absurdly large. The man had seen better days and Tursunov, remembering Radostev's apparently inconsequential comment about his father's so-called amour fou, wondered just what social transgression this hapless little man had committed to bring himself to such a pass.

He shivered and realised that in his haste to put distance between himself and the rubble of his career he had come out without hat, coat, boots, gloves, or scarf. He looked up and down the embankment to see if anyone else had noticed. Satisfied they hadn't, he turned back to the beggar who looked up at him with eyes filled with hope.

'Assistance? Yes, I need assistance. But not from you. Go and get yourself a hot meal and a bed for the night in the Haymarket. It's going to be a long, hard winter for honest men.' He held out a few kopecks and the beggar snatched them out of his hand with a greedy strength that belied his deferential manner.

He needed to walk and he needed to think. He climbed the steps and went back into the building, avoiding eye contact with the patrolman who was on sentry duty, retrieved his outdoor clothes, and stole back out before anybody had a chance to talk to him. Back on the street he set out towards the east, compelled by the urge to lose himself amongst the teeming hordes that infested Nevsky Prospect.