The Amber Rooms

Chapter Eighteen

The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, or Protection Department, is seen as the immovable object of the Tsarist government by the irresistible forces of discontent. It is from the words Okhrannoye otdelenie, Protection Department, that the contemptuous diminutive Okhranka is formed. Protection Department affairs are supervised, along with all police matters throughout the Empire, at the headquarters of the Department of Police on the Fontanka canal. The majority of Protection Department officials are not involved in secret police work; they work in non-political, non-secret Secretariats. Those charged with clandestine matters comprise a group known as the Special Section, which is so covert that one enters it by passing through a padded door in the fourth-floor office of the Police Chief. One must bow beneath its lintel because the door is stunted by an attic beam. The office is busiest at night, which is the preferred time for arrest, and thus work. The moustachioed case officers seldom attend the arrests because they cherish anonymity. They further protect themselves with assumed names. They rarely wear uniforms.

Two Special Section Officer, Mr Alexei Draganov and Dr Naum Kaplan, are not at their desks because they are talking under circumstances of absolute insulation. They are seated in the tiled chamber of a nearby bathhouse, at 27 West 24th Street, an establishment owned by the Imperial Russian Bath Company.

While ladies enter directly at the stoop of the bath house, gentlemen use another entrance: steps that take them below the level of the street. Inside are twenty-six dressing rooms. Each is furnished with carpet, stools, couches and is valet served for assistance in disrobement.

The baths are moderately busy this morning. In the vapour-bath room, which is spacious, tube-ventilated and fitted out with Italian marble, men recline, laugh, or slip into the central plunge pool. This is fed by a constant stream of filtered water through the heads of nickel-plated lions.

In one private room can be found our secret policemen, Naum Kaplan and Alexei Draganov. Kaplan is from the Ukraine, though he has forgotten which village. He is handsome, five years from retirement, quite secular, and unpleasant to those he deems less capable than himself. Into this category he places the majority of the tobacco-addicted high-flyers at the Special Section, but not Alexei Draganov, who meets the monolithic arguments of Kaplan with the patience of a mountain climber considering an ascent. Draganov is around forty-five years old, taller than Peter the Great and equally broad-shouldered, and wears his red beard in the manner of the Tsar. He maintains his fitness through cricket, which he plays along with British expatriates in the Petersburg XI during the green winter.

The two men are continuing a conversation that has occupied them since their cab ride from the Fontanka. It was sparked by a comment from Kaplan, who, as mentor to Draganov, wishes to instil in him the peculiar difficulties facing a secret police service in modern times. Given the traffic of valets, the conversation is conducted in Latin as an imperfect but basic obfuscator. It continues along the worn lines of an argument that Kaplan enjoyed with Draganov’s predecessor, Grossman, who was thrown from Trinity Bridge by politicals not two years before. Still, the valets come and go, carrying towels and shampoo in carafes and vodka at ten degrees centigrade. Draganov interrupts one of the men and asks him to collect some theatre tickets for this evening’s performance of Boris Godunov at the Mariinksy. Unnoticed, another valet collects an empty glass and carries it, alone on a tray, to the back rooms of the bath house.

He opens a door onto a courtyard. There stands a nondescript gentleman dressed for an afternoon walk. The valet leans towards the gentleman, though he does not wish to get too close. There is something of the thug about this man.

The gentleman turns. Offers his ear.

‘Mariinksy, tonight,’ says the valet.

The gentleman has a roll of roubles in the pocket of his waistcoat. He sheds one. The money amounts to a week’s pay for the valet, who returns inside the bathhouse, somewhat grateful to have escaped further attention from this cold gentleman.

Night, which has fallen six short hours following this payment, is the medium through which Kamo moves as a planet between stars. Saskia is his moon. She is dressed as a princess and he as a prince. They approach the Mariinsky Theatre and look at its electric waterfall of light. Kamo squints at the sign. So the performance stars the celebrated Feodor Chaliapin. He smiles at Saskia.

They remain on the pavement until a private coach arrives. The middle class theatre-goers make way for Draganov as he steps once, twice on the pavement before entering the theatre. Kamo hates that instinctive deference to nobility; he is still seething at it when they enter Draganov’s private box unseen. It is late in the performance, as the Fool for Christ sings his lament.

The words, ‘Flow, flow, bitter tears,’ soar from the limelit face on stage.

The arrangement of the boxes is such that theatre-goers in the box behind can see Draganov plainly. To block him from others in the theatre, Saskia moves to his side. She smiles down. She feels Kamo, only feet away at the rear of the box, urging her. This is the instant. This is the murder of Draganov. Through a folded handkerchief, the knife slides into him by the coward’s route: between the ribs of his back.

Draganov has no time to react. He can only contort and grasp the air. Already, blood is spooling from his shirt. Kamo wants the knife; he wants to make a final cut across the neck, for safety and to make his mark. Saskia refuses and the seconds move and the audience applauds. Kamo, at last, looks away. He motions towards the door of the booth with his head. Saskia follows him out. She drops the knife on the carpet, along with her handkerchief and their theatre tickets.

To kill Draganov is to possess his nobility, Kamo thinks, to take the thing that made those people step aside as he entered the theatre.

This is the whetted edge of revolution for Kamo. This is the steady unmaking of the State. There is a calm at last in his mind. For some, the killing is a fevered action, one part panic and two parts desperation. For Kamo, the calmer the moment, the colder his blood. It is with reptilian indifference that he looks across at Saskia. He is satisfied. His suspicions of her duplicity have burned down to little more than embers.

Kamo blinks. His left eye hurts. Ever since that accident, shrapnel floats in its humour. Can he even be sure that Draganov is dead? Perhaps he should check; perhaps he should wait for the dazzle of the limelight to fade, then check the face of the man they have killed.

Kamo thinks of the gas jet striking the lime. There are tears—flow, flow, bitter tears. He misses Tiflis.

When they emerge on the street, Kamo is a calmer man.

The calmer the moment, the colder the blood.

They are too distant to hear the screams when the body is discovered, if indeed there are screams at all in these troubled times.