Siberian Red

offerings to a fountain in every corner of the room.
    ‘Why are you here, Pekkala?’ asked Rasputin, and as he spoke he stretched out one leg, nudging aside the bottles on the table with a big yellow-nailed toe, searching for one that might have some drink left in it. ‘Has something caused the Emerald Eye to blink? What could it be? Not the sight of blood. You have already seen too much of that. It would not be threats. Those do not seem to bother you. No. It is something for which you were unprepared.’
    ‘The Tsar sent for me today. There is a room beneath the palace . . .’
    Before Pekkala could finish, Rasputin clapped his hands and roared with laughter. ‘Of course! I should have guessed. The Tsar has been worshipping his gold again, and it was your turn to take part in the ceremony.’
    ‘Ceremony? What do you mean?’
    Rasputin’s smile revealed a mixture of pity and amusement. ‘Poor Pekkala! Without me here to guide you, how would you ever understand? You see, the Tsar has already exhausted all the solitary pleasure he can take from his horde of treasure. What he needs is an audience. What satisfies him now is the look on the face of someone setting eyes for the first time on those bars of gold. What he wants, what he needs, Pekkala, is to see the flash of envy in their gaze. It destroys them. It ruins their lives. They never recover from the shock of that longing. And no matter how much they beg him for another glimpse of that gold, and believe me they do beg, those doors will remain closed to them forever.’
    ‘I do not envy him because of what I saw today.’
    ‘Of course you don’t! You are not like the others. The Tsar has failed to tempt you with his Fabergé eggs, his Amber Room and the art work on his walls. So now he has laid down his trump card, the thing which never fails.’
    ‘But it has failed. When I looked at that pile of gold, all I could think about was the suffering of those miners. He sent in the Cossacks to kill them!’ Pekkala’s voice rose in anger. ‘All those men wanted was the chance to work in safety, and he would not even give them that.’
    Rasputin’s eyes seemed to flicker in the candlelight. ‘But many things are valuable precisely because they are the product of pain. Think of the pearl. It begins as a grain of sand. Imagine the agony of the oyster as that tiny piece of stone digs into the soft flesh of the creature, like a knife stabbing into your brain! So the oyster surrounds the pearl with its own living shell until at last it becomes what we value, enough to kill the oyster for it – anyway, the same way the Tsar is prepared to kill his miners. The truth, Pekkala, is that beauty on this earth is set aside for the enjoyment of the few and comes at the cost of the suffering of the many. That is true for many things besides gold and pearls. It is true for the Tsarina, for example, although most of that suffering is her husband’s. Your eyes have been opened, Pekkala. You used to see the Tsar as a victim of circumstance, secretly longing to be like any other man, like a god who wishes to be mortal. You blamed the world of extravagance into which he had been born. You blamed the need of all rulers to appear larger than life, in their manner, in their wealth, in their surroundings. You even blamed his wife, I expect. Everybody else does. But the one person you could not bring yourself to blame was the Tsar himself, and so I say again – it has not failed.’
    ‘You can be very cruel, Grigori.’
    ‘Not as cruel as the Tsar,’ he replied. ‘He knew that the one thing you would respect in him was the secret disregard for all his wealth, because that was the only way for you to see yourself in him. And why else would you agree to serve a man unless you held the same things to be sacred? What the Tsar did today was to show you his true face, and in that moment, the man you thought you knew turned out to be a stranger.’ Rasputin levelled a long, bony finger at Pekkala. ‘I warn you, my friend, that treasure is cursed. Even those you trust with your own life will betray you if you come between them and that gold.’
    ‘Have you seen it?’ asked Pekkala.
    ‘Of course!’ Rasputin lifted his hands and let them fall again upon the couch, sending up tiny puffs of dust from the crushed velvet. ‘I enjoyed the experience immensely, because I have discovered that my greatest source of pleasure is neither money, nor the women who traipse into my life and