THIRTEEN

 

 

BACHUA KUPRIASHVILI STRODE out through the doorway of the Tilipuchuri tavern, and, having rolled up the newspaper he’d been pretending to read, used it to signal the rest of their band, dispersed around the square. They’d taken no chances; their numbers were swelled by anyone willing to help who could remotely be trusted, making them less of a gang and more a militia.

Kupriashvili let the newspaper drop, content that those who were looking his way would have seen and that those who weren’t would have spotted the bank carriage and its retinue, which were already in view. He cocked his pistol, and the noise seemed unnaturally loud.

After all this waiting, everything was happening very quickly. He appraised their forces, and the results were both rousing and disheartening. They were a sorry lot, most of them half-starved from poverty and from devoting so much of themselves to a cause and too little to their own wellbeing. Yet at the same time, that gave them a fearsome energy, an inner heat that glowed in their faces. He’d have sooner been in their company than a thousand of the sort that made up the police, who had full stomachs and no fight in them.

He was their leader for the present, but they didn’t need much guidance. Though many weren’t Bolsheviks, and there were a few he barely knew to name, they all had their share of experience, be it in the conflict of two years ago or one of the numerous expropriations carried out in recent months. Kupriashvili hurried into the square, not caring who was watching nor disguising the weapon he held. The police weren’t trained for an altercation on this scale. They were scarcely trained at all. And they weren’t paid enough to warrant placing themselves in the line of fire over other people’s money. If they had any sense, they’d be scurrying for cover at the spectacle unfolding before them, twenty well-armed men and women moving as one.

All right, perhaps not quite as one. The truth was that they were more like crabs scattering across a dreary beach than finely honed veterans of the revolutionary war. And Kupriashvili, for all his good intentions, wasn’t doing a great deal of leading. He’d rather have yielded that authority to Koba or Kamo, the men who were truly leaders; he’d never had such aspirations. As the convoy bore nearer, he reassured himself that at least theirs was a plan that didn’t require an excess of leadership. Setting an example would have to suffice.

He paused in his advance and concentrated instead on aiming his pistol and taking a shot. He selected the foremost of the Cossacks, since they posed the immediate danger; where everyone else was panicking, they were sizing up targets. They also had the savviness to veer aside, however, and wherever Kupriashvili’s shot went, it didn’t hit the man he’d picked out.

He had been so focused on the Cossacks that he’d hardly registered the remainder of the convoy behind them. He did so now in broken snatches like reflections in a shattered mirror. He could see that the front carriage was the bank’s, and that the driver was urgently turning back the way he’d come. Well, good luck with that! Did he imagine they had nobody posted in that direction? Indeed, all he was doing was impeding the second carriage, the one full of soldiers and furnished with a mounted gun that was the sole genuine threat the defenders possessed. Generally, the soldiers had yet to orient themselves, and those who’d grasped the situation were struggling to put up a resistance that didn’t involve inadvertently murdering their allies.

Kupriashvili’s band of robbers couldn’t afford to be so squeamish. His own first shot had become a volley, as the revolutionaries opened up from every side. It was impossible to judge whether they were achieving anything, but meanwhile, they were getting closer to the carriages, which in turn were fumbling their escape. Hesitant shots were being returned, but Kupriashvili still felt profoundly unworried. Even if the mounted gun on the second carriage should join the fray, it couldn’t fire every way simultaneously, and what the soldiers failed to appreciate was that they hadn’t been engaged in a gunfight. This sally was only a means for the revolutionaries to bring themselves in range.

Right on cue, the first bomb was thrown. Kupriashvili couldn’t identify who by. Could it have been Koba? There’d been rumours he’d be somewhere around, though lately he’d been absent from many of their meetings. At any rate, that the toss fell short of the carriages didn’t do much to diminish its effect. The explosion was catastrophic, and in its wake, all Kupriashvili could hear was the tinkling of glass. The shockwave must have blown out the windows encircling the square.

The Cossacks were wheeling their horses, on the verge of disarray, and the soldiers and guards reacted like they’d come under an artillery bombardment, ducking and abandoning all efforts to return fire. Kupriashvili was rocked by a rush of euphoria. They were winning! Against the cohorts of the Tsar, these threadbare revolutionaries with their ill-kept guns and homemade bombs were triumphing! It took the whole of his resolve to remind himself they weren’t here to spill the enemy’s blood, or to make a statement, or to reignite the dreadful fighting of the abortive insurrection. They were here for one purpose, and that was the money in the lead carriage.

Further bombs flew. If Kupriashvili didn’t discern their passage, he assuredly heard them go off. He counted three separate eruptions, each more muffled than the last, drowned out by the increasing ringing in his ears. Through the rising swirls of grey-black smoke, he saw that they’d done what they were intended to. The defenders were in even greater disorder, seeking shelter when there was none to be found, with a mere handful of brave souls making the slightest attempt to fight back. More importantly, one bomb had struck the horses. Their wounds were so hideous that it would have been a mercy if they were dead, and nothing could have driven home to Kupriashvili that this was a day when mercy was vanished from the world as thoroughly as the vision of those desperate beasts endeavouring to break free while their innards slithered from their bellies.

The horses were not the only innocent victims. Bombs might be an effective weapon for a robbery, but they were proving a staggeringly indiscriminate one. All this time, the square had been clearing rapidly, as those stragglers who’d ignored the gang’s warnings recognised the cost of their stubbornness. Yet though they’d tried to get to safety, there were many blood-spattered bodies on the ground that didn’t belong to either bank guards or Cossacks. The air was choked with screams, human voices competing with the shrieks of equine terror.

But it was becoming harder to fathom the scene through the roiling clouds of smoke that filled the entire centre of the square. And blindness discouraged restraint; several of the robbers were satisfied to lob their bombs and hope for the best. Kupriashvili comprehended with muted horror that this was devolving into a massacre, and that there was nothing to be done about the fact—and worse, that he’d accepted it on some fundamental level, relinquishing any responsibility in the process. The damage was appalling, but all that remained was to ensure this ghastly sacrifice didn’t go to waste.

He could just make out the carriages as looming spectres amid the fog. One of them, the larger, was immobile and leaning to the side, its wheels blown off. But the other, to his astonishment, was moving, in a shuddering, jolting fashion. As he watched, it began to pick up speed. The dying horses had decided to express their awful panic with a last bid to flee, and they were prepared to drag the smashed shell of the bank carriage along with them if need be. They couldn’t get far, not with such injuries, and yet they were making a respectable pace, and their course would take them through the ring of robbers and out of the square if somebody didn’t do something.

So Kupriashvili would do something. Unlike most of his compatriots, he’d kept his bomb in reserve. Now he wrestled it from his pocket and strived to light the fuse with clumsy fingers. By the time he had it burning, the carriage was much nearer and more visible, as its progress sent the smoke heaving away in grey breakers. The tableau was like an episode out of a ghoulish tale told to scare children: the horses were more dead than alive, and still they ran, with a horrid, mechanical motion, crimson froth foaming from their lips.

Kupriashvili tried to remember what Kamo had taught them of the bombs. How long ought he to hold it for? He squinted in fascination at the bright spark that was travelling down toward the metal apple in his palm with a distinctive hiss. He couldn’t bring himself to think seriously about hurling the device at those suffering animals. It almost seemed more reasonable that he should hang on to it and see what would happen.

Then reality reasserted itself, and he understood that he’d already left this too late. His throw was dismally inept. In one sense, that didn’t matter; he couldn’t have missed, with the carriage and the ravaged horses well-nigh upon him. But in another sense, it mattered enormously, because the bomb came to land far too close by him. And Kupriashvili had all of a moment to regret that error before the explosion thrust him off his feet and cast him crashing to the cobbles.