Siberian Red

understood. The man was dancing. His crooked arm was held about the waist of an imaginary partner. In that instant, the clumsy, swaying movements translated themselves into a waltz. Pekkala wondered who she was, this ghost of past acquaintance, and which orchestra’s music echoed in the ballroom of his skull.
    A memory, shrouded until now in darkness, came hurtling like a meteor into the forefront of Pekkala’s mind.

The door of his cottage flew open.
     
     
    The door of his cottage flew open.
    It was the middle of the night.
    By the time the Imperial Guard’s eyes had accustomed themselves to the dark, he was already looking down the blue-eyed barrel of Pekkala’s Webley revolver.
    ‘What do you want?’ demanded Pekkala.
    ‘Inspector!’ The guard had been running. He gasped for breath as he spoke. ‘The Emperor has sent for you.’
    Pekkala lowered the gun.
    A few minutes later, buttoning his coat as he ran, Pekkala followed the Guard along the gravel path which led to the Alexander Palace. Moonlight turned the lawns of the Tsarskoye Selo estate into vast slabs of lapis lazuli.
    The two men raced up the wide stone steps and into the front hall of the palace.
    The building echoed with shouts and whispered voices.
    A maid of the Imperial Household, in her uniform of black dress and white apron, drifted past them like an albatross, one hand held against her mouth to stifle the sound of her crying.
    Then Pekkala saw the Empress. Still in her mauve silk nightdress, she darted out of the Imperial bedroom. On slippered feet, the Empress glided towards Pekkala. ‘You must go to the Emperor at once!’
    On her breath, Pekkala smelled the sickly odour of the opium-laced medicine, without which Alexandra Romanov could no longer find her way into the catacombs of sleep. ‘What has happened, Majesty?’
    ‘It is the nightmare,’ she hissed.
    A moment later, Pekkala stood in the doorway to the Tsar’s bedroom.
    The Tsar lay spreadeagled on his bed. The sheets had been kicked off. Sweat darkened his nightshirt.
    Two nervous doctors hovered in the shadows.
    ‘Pekkala!’ groaned the Tsar. ‘Is that you?’
    ‘I am here, Majesty.’
    ‘Get these butchers out of the room.’ Feebly he gestured towards the doctors. ‘All they want to do is turn me into a morphine addict.’
    The two men, sombre as herons, filed out of the room without even glancing at Pekkala.
    ‘Shut the door on your way out!’ the Tsar commanded.
    The doctors did as they were told.
    Slowly, the Tsar sat up in bed. He was a picture of complete exhaustion. With twitching hands, he reached for the cigarette case which lay beside his bed. It had been fashioned out of solid gold by Michael Perchin, one of the workmasters at the Fabergé factory. The case had been engraved with gentle S-shaped curves, which reminded Pekkala of patterns he had seen as a child, in wind-blown sand down by the water’s edge at his family’s summer cottage on the Finnish island of Korpo.
    From this case, the Tsar removed a cigarette. Each one contained a blend of tobacco prepared for him alone by Hajenius of Amsterdam. The frail rolling papers were emblazoned with a tiny silver double-headed eagle, the crest of the Romanov family.
    As Pekkala stared at these objects, flinching momentarily when the Tsar struck fire from a jewel-encrusted lighter, it occurred to him how little they mattered to their owner at that moment. The Romanovs had built a wall of silver, gold and platinum to keep the world away from them. But the world still found its way in. Like water filtering through cracks in a stone, it would ultimately shatter their existence.
    ‘The Empress mentioned a nightmare,’ said Pekkala.
    The Tsar nodded, picking a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. He muttered a single word. ‘Khodynka.’
    Then Pekkala understood.
    On May 26th, 1896, the day of Nicholas’s and Alexandra’s coronation, the Tsar and Tsarina had undergone a gruelling five-hour service at the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin. Four days later‚ as dictated by tradition‚ the newly crowned couple would proceed to Khodynka Field. There, they would greet the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of spectators who had come to wish them well. These spectators would be fed and gifts marking the occasion would be distributed. The Imperial couple would then proceed to the French Embassy, where a celebration of unparalleled extravagance had been prepared. This included more than 100,000 fresh