Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

He waggled his finger in front of my nose. “You’d better watch that mouth up here.” He picked up the lantern. “Come with me.”

Every instinct shouted at me to turn around and flee while I could. But it was too late for instinct. I followed him through a door into the sacristy, smelling of ancient incense and dirty hair, and out the back of the church into the snow.

I STAYED CLOSE BEHIND my surly guide and tried to walk in his footprints, sinking into the snow, struggling to keep up. I didn’t trust him. He knew I possessed something valuable. Why pay for it when he could rob me and leave me up here to freeze? Kolya, what have you gotten me into? I wanted to keen aloud like a terrified child, but instead I gripped the handle of Anton’s gun, hoping it worked, hoping there would be enough time to use it.

To my relief, we came upon a path of sorts, churned by many boots. I did my best to memorize the spot so I might find it again if I needed to flee. Now a long shedlike building coalesced in the fog. It must have been used to service one of the great dachas. A bundled man emerged from a small door. It closed behind him, and he marched off into the park. Soon my churlish Virgil pounded on its peeling gray wood, three long blows. A small bowlegged man let us in, his quick eyes taking my measure.

Servants’ quarters—for gardeners, cooks—had been converted into a kind of barracks. Men sat in the makeshift clubhouse playing cards, smoking, and eating. I could smell their cooked meat, and it made me wolfish with hunger. They glanced at me in rough disinterest. I gave up clutching the pistol in my pocket lest it draw their attention. The black-browed man led me to a door, knocked, opened it, stepped aside like a butler—or a jailer—and waved me in.

On a threadbare divan with stuffing coming out of the arms lay a handsome man of around fifty, though it could be sixty—I wasn’t much of a judge of old people. He was languid and long, with untrimmed pale hair and eyebrows, a long Swedish face with sloped nose and eyes of brightest blue, intent upon a web of string in his hands. I watched, fascinated by fingers that could move so deftly from cradle to diamonds to fish. “So?” he said, his voice dry, unimpressed.

“Shurov sent her,” said the man with the black eyebrows.

“Interesting.” His eyes flicked from my brown proletarian shawl to my wet and broken boots. “Leave her.”

My guide closed the door behind him. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit in one of the hard chairs dotting the room. I pushed the shawl off my head, let it lie on my shoulders. It was so warm here, bliss. I removed my dirty gloves, too, and rubbed my hands, wishing I could take my boots off and let them dry by the stove. My feet ached, and I wondered if they were frostbitten.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“Arkady, I guess.” I hoped I sounded nonchalant.

“I am Baron Arkady von Princip,” he said, looking only at the shifting figures between his hands.

Von Princip. I had read all about him in the nonparty papers, him and his gang. Responsible for outrageous daylight robberies and armed assaults, gun battles with Red Guards, the lurid stuff of our knitting-factory fantasies. The girls followed the stories of his bold attacks as if they were the exploits of some folktale hero.

Arkady’s clever hands turned the fox into a purse and then into a throne. “You have something for me?”

I turned my back, then unbuttoned my coat and the bodice beneath it to unpin the canary diamond. Warm from the heat of my body, it flashed in my hand. Well, Kolya, farewell… sentiment was history. I closed my dress and turned back to him, holding out the jewel in the palm of my hand the way you feed sugar to a horse so it doesn’t bite your fingers. But he didn’t reach for it, just transformed the string throne into a broom. “Very nice,” he said, not even looking. “I won’t ask how you came to receive such a fine offering from our young Shurov. I’m sure whatever you did for it, it was quite impressive.”

I didn’t think I could blush anymore. But there was no mistaking the hot tingle in my cheeks. I could see Arkady, lying there on the divan like a lizard that lived in the dark, was a man who enjoyed making people uncomfortable. He wore a tweed jacket and a knitted scarf and had a hole in his sock. Couldn’t the prince of thieves afford a new one? I dropped my hand with the offered pin.

“It’s odd, don’t you agree? That you take this from Shurov and sell it to me?” he said. “Why didn’t he just give you the money? Or is that too indecorous? Oh, youth. Tell me your name, girl.”

I knew I should lie, but something perverse in me—pride?—refused to be cowed, even for my own sake. “Makarova,” I said. “Marina Dmitrievna.”

“Dmitry Makarov.” He looked up at me now, arched one pale eyebrow.

“It’s a common name,” I said.

He regarded me wearily, as if he could see everything about me, who I was and where I came from and even what would happen to me after I left. The men in the hall were arguing, and Arkady cocked his head to listen. Evidently it was nothing that bothered him, for he went back to his string. “I know you didn’t come here just to sell me that little trinket.”

I tried to imagine what he was getting at. “Kolya said to ask for you. He said it was worth ten thousand.”

The old man shook his head, a faint smile creasing his thin, bloodless lips. “You were curious. Who is this Arkady fellow? Perhaps you wanted to hear a bit more about the fate of your elusive friend Shurov.” His strange gaze—you couldn’t feel a human being behind it. It was more like a blue-eyed tiger’s. “Perhaps your friend wanted us to meet. And this is your letter of introduction.”

I shuddered. I swore to myself I’d tell Varvara about this whole headquarters of thieves as soon as I made it back to the Petersburg side of the Neva.

“Would you like to know where our friend is at this very moment?” he asked.

“He’s in the south,” I said, and my lips were as dry as a Crimean wind. “He had a load of art. Three sledges’ worth.”

Arkady reached with his teeth to pull a length of string and loop it over his curled thumbs. “What would you say if I told you he was here in Petrograd?”

My heart dropped like a statue from a palace rooftop. Breaking like shattered plaster on the stones of a public square.

The old man nodded. “You care for him a great deal. No, actually, I put him and his goods on a train to Finland six weeks ago. He was headed to Stockholm. And from there, Paris—if he can make it through the lines.”

Was this also a lie? Some sort of test? I sensed he was telling the truth now. Kolya had gone six weeks ago. But he’d promised he would never leave the country without me. I didn’t want the languid von Princip to see me cry. I could feel him watching me, enjoying his little game. I bent down to brush an imaginary lump of snow from my broken boot, examined the sole, the awful crack. I pressed the bridge of my nose, pulled hard on my forelock.

Von Princip wove a string crown, held it at arm’s length, and squinted one eye, crowning me with it. Then he pulled it off his fingers and swung his legs over the edge of the divan, sitting up. “What do you do for a living, Makarova? Teach dancing? Give French lessons to pharmacists?”

“I work in a factory,” I said defiantly.

A smile broke slowly across his face, like a crack moving through glass. “Ah, the little proletarian. No need to get defensive. I’m quite fond of the Bolsheviks, you know. After all, they’ve made all this possible.” He rose from the divan and went to his desk, started rooting in the drawer. “Before the revolution I was only a criminal. Now I’m a regular tycoon.”

I imagined the possibilities of panic and scarcity. I knew why Kolya did it—for the excitement, the gambler’s thrill. Some spectacular bit of cleverness, perhaps gulling the uninformed but also helping when he could, that’s what he loved. More than the money. And what did this man love? “There’s nothing shameful in working for a living,” I said.

“Oh, Makarova,” said Arkady. “You’re no proletarian.” He put his bony hand on my shoulder. I was surprised that it didn’t repulse me. “You’re an adventurer. Just like your little friend Shurov.” His voice was dry, precise, raspy, insistent. “Politically. Personally. Probably sexually, too.” He was watching me with a half smile. What was he looking for? Shame? Agreement? I hadn’t lived with Anton all these months to be baited so easily. There was a knock on the door. Arkady didn’t answer it. “You weren’t born to run a lathe or whatever you do at your factory.”

Adventurers. Was that what we were, Kolya and I? Perhaps. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of labeling me. “Maybe I’m a good lathe operator. Maybe it’s my ultimate dream. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Arkady held up the diamond.

I opened my hand, not quite believing it wasn’t still in my palm. He turned the pin in his fingers, letting the lamp shatter its spectrum into yellow shards. He closed his other fist over it, opened his hands, and the pin was gone. “Another girl would have brought someone. But not you. You’re frightened, but your curiosity is stronger.” Watching my face the way a boatman scans a shore. He was standing right next to me, and I could smell wormwood, dark and a bit antiseptic, and camphor, like the church. “Hiding this all those weeks.” The pin was back in his fingers and he held it before my face. “It must have burned quite a hole in your slip, knowing you could have ten thousand rubles any time you liked. Biding your time. Consider this before you tell me you don’t play games. You have a bit of the criminal in you, Makarova. More than a little, I would say. You like secrets. You like knowing more than most people.”

“But I don’t rob them.”

“Ostorozhno,” he said, waving a finger in the air between us. Careful. “Remember, if you’re alive, it’s only by my pleasure. I could strangle you right now, throw you out in the snow, and no one would lift an eyebrow.”

I nodded, a very tiny nod. Felt the weight of the gun in my pocket.

“Though at this moment, I prefer you alive.” He pursed his lips in a coquette’s moue, which on his gaunt face was laughably incongruous. “But I won’t have my profession maligned. Without the criminal, how would people live? How much meat do you think would be sold in Petrograd? Or oil or grain? The Soviet can’t keep it on the trains long enough.” He stood next to the window in his socks, gazing out at the milky sky, the gaunt trees. “Every region takes its share, and poor Petrograd’s the end of the line. As simple as that. Without us, the city would starve.” He threaded the diamond stickpin through the lapel of his jacket and poured himself a glass of vodka from a tray on the table, poured another and held it out to me. Standing, he was tall and rather elegant in an untidy way. “Never underestimate the genius of crime. We find a way when there is no way.”

I knew I shouldn’t drink with him. It implied some kind of agreement. But to what was I agreeing? Hesitating a moment, I drank. The vodka burned my empty stomach.

“I’ll give you five thousand plus a can of cooking oil, ten pounds of good wheat flour, four of meat. And some sugar.”

My stomach rumbled. Not vobla, that bony fish, our “Soviet ham,” but something that once walked on four legs… and wheat flour… sugar, when had anyone last seen that? And cooking oil. No more of those bizarre substitutes—cod-liver or castor oil or liquids that didn’t seem to be oil at all. I wouldn’t be able to find such an offer of real food again, even with ten thousand rubles in my pocket. By comparison, money was nothing, birdseed, a shake of salt, though that, too, was hard to find.

Arkady put on a pair of leather slippers and went out into the hall, leaving me in his makeshift salon. On a wide, ugly desk dating from the era of Nikolas I lay piles of ragged papers, lists of abbreviations, and numbers scribbled on the scraps. I held one up. The baron had very small handwriting, spiked, Gothic. All in a sort of code. I considered taking a sheet and folding it into my pocket as insurance against a rainy day, but I put it down again. I suspected this, too, might be some kind of test. I turned to the stove to warm my feet and hands.

The baron returned. He pressed a thick wad of banknotes into my hand, like a paper brick. “Here’s the five.” I didn’t count it, only turned away and tucked the bills into my bodice, packing them around my ribs. When I turned back, he was studying me, unblinking, long fingers pressed to his lips. “I start to see what our friend saw in you, Makarova.” He made that terrifying moue again, contorting his bony face in a whore’s pout. “But don’t mistake my affability for idiocy. I might have something for you in a day or two. I’ll be in touch.”