Chapter Twenty-Five

No thank you, Miss, I’m Orthodox.”

The young man—a plump, rosy-cheeked Flügel-Lieutenant in Little Russia’s Aerial Navy—tipped his sky-blue and gold-braided uniform cap to Becky and dropped a silver ten-kopek piece into her collection box. She shook the box ruefully, listening to the thin rattle of a dozen or so small coins as the Russian officer strolled away.

“You were right about one thing, General …”

“Pastor Karl, please,” Custer said with a smile. They were both speaking German, a language Becky had perfected as Harper’s correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War and Custer had learned from his family.

“Sorry. In any event, Karl, you were right about them not bothering us as Plain Folk, but I’m afraid it’s put a bit of a cramp in my femme fatale style as well.”

Custer himself was dressed completely in sober black, including a flat-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat that reached to the tops of his boots, while Becky was dressed almost identically except for the addition of a black poke bonnet which covered her auburn hair and threw a shadow over a face that could have launched a thousand airships if only the Russian aeronauts had been able to see it.

“I’m sure that has more than a little to do with our lackluster audience,” he said with a worried frown, “but I have a feeling there’s something else going on as well. I’ve been here a dozen times collecting intelligence as ‘Pastor Karl,’ and all the lads know me and stop for a chat in broken German or English or Russian. Today, though, they’re all suddenly Orthodox, and they look distracted, like something troubling is on their minds.”

“Look at their airfield,” he continued, gesturing at the vast, snowy plain on the other side of the tall wroughtiron fence that extended for a mile in either direction from the sentry gate outside which Custer had built their small keeping-warm fire, a brazier-full of charcoal. “These Russians have no more notion of military security than a suckling pig, you can see everything they’ve got from here, and it consists entirely of a half-dozen barrage balloons in those sheds there, plus those two huge rigid airships over there on the west side of the field, which have been on loan from Imperial Russia since we got here and whose engines have been undergoing a refit for long enough now that American aeronauts could have built an entire squadron of new airships from the ground up. These fellows like wearing their pretty blue uniforms and drinking vodka while a gypsy orchestra keeps them amused and frankly I don’t think they’re in any shape to attack anything more threatening than a half-dozen stampeding buffalo. So why all the long faces? Why all the ‘Orthodoxy’ and bad nerves?”

As if they were bringing them an answer, a small detachment of soldiers led by an Ensign barely old enough to shave marched around the Guard House and towards the gate.

“I’m not sure I like the look of that,” Becky murmured.

“Nor I,” answered Custer. “But we’d better just stand our ground and offer them our blessings.”

A moment later the little detachment marched through the gate and up to Becky and Custer, where the Ensign abruptly sang out:

“Squad, halt!”

The soldiers came to a halt with much stamping of their feet and smacking their rifles. Then the young Ensign stepped forward apologetically and addressed them in good German:

“Good morning, Pastor Karl, Miss. I’m sorry to have to trouble you, but I’m afraid I must ask you to accompany me to the Guard House for an interview with the adjutant.”

“What, really?” asked Custer with mild indignation. “You fellows know me, you’ve stopped and chatted with me time and time again!”

“Once more, sir,” the Ensign said, reddening with embarrassment, “I really do apologize, but I must ask you to come with me. And Miss, if I may, I’d like to ask you to bring your leaflets, the Adjustant asked to see them most particularly.”

Becky and Custer exchanged a quick glance, then Custer picked up the stack of tracts and held out his arm for Becky to take hold of. A moment later, surrounded by Russian aeronauts, they were marching anxiously towards the Guard House.

Crazy Horse stopped to light a long, dark brown Russian cigarette, and gestured towards the colonnaded building ahead of them:

“You see the number 16 chiseled into the stone there?”

“With all that gold leaf you couldn’t really miss it,” Liam said, a little puzzled.

“Well, believe it or not, my foster father actually had this whole stretch of the Boulevard renamed ‘Fontanka’ so that the address of this building could be ‘Fontanka 16.’”

“Good Lord,” Liam muttered. He got it now, that address—Fontanka 16—was the one that belonged to Okhrana HQ in St. Petersburg, possibly the most feared street address throughout the Russian Empire.

“Mmm hm,” Crazy Horse said, puffing on his papirosa. “I thought you’d like that. You see all the soldiers and plainclothes agents streaming in and out? I must tell you that this is a very strange and not very welcome sight. On a normal day you might see a half-dozen or so men going and coming. Taking this in connection with the rumors I’ve been hearing, I’m starting to get a bit of a frisson.”

“What rumors?” Liam was starting to feel the same frisson himself.

“Do you know anything about the Viceroy of Little Russia?

Liam grinned a little sheepishly and shrugged. “To tell the truth I’ve never cared a hoot about Little Russia. Now every time I turn around it seems to be jumping out of the shadows going ‘Boo!’”

“Well, as it happens our revered leader is none other then Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, the Tsar’s eldest son. The old Tsar isn’t so bad, you probably remember he set Russia’s serfs free before Lincoln freed the blacks. True, the Industrial Party finally pressured him into un-freeing the serfs a couple of years ago so Russia could compete with the English factory owners and their factory serfs.” Crazy Horse smiled mirthlessly. “Still, His Imperial Majesty did say he regretted enormously having to do it.”

“Zhenya, please—the rumors …” Liam said with a touch of impatience.

“Right, sorry. Well our Viceroy doesn’t even have his father’s tender heart, as far as he’s concerned Indians aren’t any more human than horses or hunting dogs, so one might as well put them to work. He’s a huge man, the size of a bear—they say he can bend horseshoes with his bare hands. And his brains are about what you’d expect from a big, sullen bear. He likes to play the trombone, sits alone in the palace tootling on the thing while he leaves running Little Russia to my foster father. And as concerns my foster father …” Crazy Horse shrugged. “Well, why don’t I just introduce you to him, then you’ll see why the rumors say that Populist terrorists from St. Petersburg are planning to blow him up quite soon, along with the Viceroy himself and all their little helpers.”

“What terrorists? You mean Land and Freedom? The ones who assassinated the Chief of the Imperial Gendarmes?”

“The very same,” said Crazy Horse. “Now of course the police and the Gendarmes and the Okhrana back in Russia are madly arresting anything that breathes in order to make up for the blunder of letting poor old General Mezentsov get stabbed to death in the streets of St. Petersburg, with the result that members of Land and Freedom are escaping and popping up here and there all over the world ready for more mischief.”

He tossed the papirosa onto the pavement, ground it out under his heel and clapped Liam on the back:

“But I shouldn’t think they’ve reached this backwater yet, Lev Frentsisovich, so let’s go beard Papa in his den and see if we can find out about your missing Chuikov.”

As Grand Duke Sheremetev’s aide-de-camp held the door open for Crazy Horse and Liam, Little Russia’s éminence grise got up from his desk and came around it to greet them. Liam wasn’t sure just what he had been expecting, but almost certainly not the small, fussy, tired-looking gray-haired man who embraced Crazy Horse with the traditional kiss on both cheeks and smiled wanly as he held out his hand to Liam:

“Oleg Rodionovich Sheremetev, at your service, sir.”

“Very kind of you to receive us, Excellency.” Liam bowed slightly, hoping that was the right move.

“This is one of my dearest old school chums, Papa,” Crazy Horse said, “Lev Frentsisovich Mikulin.”

This time Sheremetev bowed: “I am honored to meet any friend of my son’s,” he said with surprising warmth. “I know I must seem a dusty old bore, a bit like one of Turgenev’s Fathers, I expect, but I believe even a foster parent must care for every aspect of a son’s well-being whether it be how well he eats or what sort of company he keeps.”

Liam—who had been expecting an Inquisitor out of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”—was a bit taken aback by this careworn paterfamilias.

“Ah … I think that’s highly commendable, Excellency, I’m sure Zhenya is most appreciative.” This last with a sly glance at Crazy Horse, who answered with a steely glare. “Yes, well,” Sheremetev said fussily, “of course the boy gets a bit restive from time to time, but that’s to be expected. I’m sure you experience much the same sort of scrutiny from your father, Lev Fretsisovich, back home in … let me see, shall I try to guess?”

Liam grinned a little weakly, in spite of himself feeling the hair stand up on the backs of his arms. One thing at least was clear, the old boy wasn’t fooled for a moment into thinking that Liam was the son of some landowner in the countryside around St. Petersburg. What had been his mistake? Was he going to finish this whole crazy Little Russian adventure in front of a firing squad out behind 16 Fontanka? He darted a glance at Crazy Horse, but his companion’s face betrayed nothing.

Sheremetev took the pair of pince-nez that hung around his neck on a black silk ribbon and settled them on his nose, scrutinizing Liam the way a lepidopterist examines a rare moth before sticking a pin through it. He chuckled slyly, making Liam wonder just what form getting transfixed with a pin was going to take: getting run through with a yataghan taken off some dead Turk during Russia’s southern war?

“Come now,” Shermetev said cheerfully, “you wouldn’t deny an old man the practice of his favorite hobby, would you?”

Liam shook his head queasily, wondering if Sheremetev was one of those torturers who had to play with their captives first, like a cat with a mouse. “Of course not, Excellency,” he said, alarmed to find that his throat had dried enough to make him hoarse.

“I thought not,” said the Okhrana chief with a smile. “As it happens, I am rather accomplished as a dialectologist, I’ve even written various papers on the subject for the Philological Faculty at the Imperial University.”

He steepled his fingers in front of his nose and pursed his lips judiciously. “Let us see now …” His eyes twinkled behind the pince-nez—clearly a man about to indulge in a favorite hobby. “Khersonskaia Guberniia, am I right? Perhaps I might even hazard a guess at … the city of Odessa?”

A wave of almost giddy relief swept over Liam as he tried to smile and look impressed. He had been tutored endlessly in Russian by every member of Mike’s huge family, which had escaped to New York from an internecine gang war in Odessa’s underworld. The Vysotskys—originally Polish—had felt right at home in that vast criminal melting pot, peopled by Ukrainians, Russians, Chechens, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Serbians and a motley of other peoples whose languages had all left their traces on the speech of Odessa.

“You have a very keen ear, Excellency,” Liam said. “My father is indeed a banker in Odessa,”—which was only a slight exaggeration, Mike’s father had been a renowned bank robber—“and I must admit I know Deribasovskaia Street better than I know the Nevskii Prospekt.”

“Splendid, splendid, we shall make you just as comfortable on the Mississipskii Prospekt. Do come and sit down, let us smoke a cigar.”

He gestured to a collection of comfortable-looking chairs around a low, circular table with decanters, glasses, and a large cedar humidor covered in malachite and amber which turned out to contain everything from thin Dutch cheroots dipped in powdered sugar to short, fragrant Havana Punches. After a few moments, when everybody had taken a drink and a cigar, they were interrupted by a timid knock at the door.

“Yes, yes,” snapped Sheremetev, “I’m busy! What is it?”

The door opened slightly to admit just a sliver of Sheremetev’s aide-de-camp, who was obviously trying to present as small a target as possible for his master’s wrath. He waved a couple of pages of telegraph forms and said with an odd mixture of timidity and insistence:

“I pray you will forgive me, Excellency, but you’ve just had an urgent telegram from the American Public Safety chief, Pilkington.”

Now Liam’s blood did run cold and it was all he could do to imitate Crazy Horse’s impassivity without breaking into a muck sweat. Fortunately, the young officer seemed to have pushed his chief’s patience too far:

“Damn it, man!” shouted Sheremetev. “How many times do I have to tell you not to interrupt me with rubbish? I don’t don’t care how urgent that fool in New York may think his problem is, I will… not… be… interrupted when I have guests, do you understand me?”

The aide-de-camp’s face turned a bright red and it seemed to Liam that he threw a brief, resentful look in his direction. However, the officer was too cautious to push it any further.

“Yes sir, of course, sir!” he gulped. “I’ll come back later.” The door closed and Liam started breathing again.

Prince Sheremetev resumed, his urbanity firmly back in place: “Now then, Lev Frentsisovich, how can I be of service to you?”

“I hate to trouble such a busy man with something so trivial,” Liam said, “but I’m looking for an old friend from gymnazium days who I had heard was serving here as a cavalry officer—Vasilii Ilarionovich Chuikov.”

Prince Sheremetev’s face fell: “Oh, dear!” Obviously upset, he considered for a moment and then reached out and laid his hand on Liam’s arm: “I very much regret to be the bearer of such bad news,” he said, “but there’s no point beating around the bush—I’m afraid Col. Chuikov was arrested, tried by a military court and executed as a spy some months ago.”

Liam didn’t have to put on an act to look dumfounded: his mind was racing as he tried to figure out how this would affect his agreement with Pilkington and the fate of his grandmother. Crazy Horse, seeing how badly rocked Liam was, took up the thread:

“I hadn’t heard about it, Papa. May I ask who he was spying for?”

“Of course, Zhenya, I have no secrets from you. He was given up to us by the U.S. intelligence people, who had identified him as an agent of the St. Petersburg terrorist group Land and Freedom during a visit he made to New York.” He spread his hands and produced his wan smile: “I have a sort of fraternal agreement with the head of their Department of Public Safety, Colonel Willard Pilkington, and we help each other out from time to time.”

He made a face: “Of course that means I have to appear to take his hysterical telegrams seriously when I’m in the mood for it.”

“Colonel Pilkington,” said Liam hollowly.

“That’s right,” said Prince Sheremetev, “I believe he distinguished himself in the American Civil War, at Little Round Top.”

“Little Round Top,” Liam said in a slightly strangled tone.

“I’m sorry to have had to upset you so, Lev Frentsisovich,” Prince Sheremetev said, “if there’s anything at all that I can …”

He was interrupted by a brisk knock at the door, followed without the customary wait by the eerie reappearance of the aide-de-camp, or rather his head, which seemed—as he stuck it into the room—to be suspended in mid-air halfway down the edge of the door. This time he seemed quite sure of himself:

“My profound apologies for interrupting again, Excellency, but it’s a bit of an emergency. Just a while earlier we had a telegram from St. Petersurg saying that interrogation of a member of Land and Freedom has revealed that their leader, the terrorist Georgii Plekhanov, left Russia over a week ago bound for New Petersburg. In other words, Excllency, he could appear here at any moment, so all of the appropriate security establishments have been notified. Less than an hour ago we apprehended two foreign spies at the Naval Aerodrome—a Pastor Karl, and a Sister Isolde. They’re outside now, under guard, if you would care to accompany them to the interrogation chambers?”

Liam had started sweating in earnest at this last piece of news, but fortunately Sheremetev missed Liam’s expression as he turned to Crazy Horse with a mixture of affection and exasperation:

“By Jove, Zhenya, I told you you shouldn’t be keeping company with that sausage-eating bible-thumper! If you’re in the grip of some overwhelming religious enthusiasm, for goodness’ sake let me find you a decent Orthodox monk to chat with!”

He sighed, clearly a man shouldering burdens almost too numerous to bear. “I hope you will excuse me, gentlemen,” he continued, getting to his feet, “but duty calls.”

Giving them a little half-bow, he turned and headed for the door, which opened wider to reveal the aide-de-camp—and just beyond him, in the hallway, Becky and Custer, manacled together and supervised by two heavily armed Okhrana thugs. As Liam and Crazy Horse jumped to their feet, Becky and Custer looked towards them sharply, then looked down to avoid giving themselves away.

Herding the prisoners down the hall ahead of him, Sheremetev turned back for a moment towards Liam and Crazy Horse:

“Do finish your cigars and brandy, gentlemen, I’m afraid I shall be a while.”

For a moment or two, Liam and Crazy Horse stood there in a daze, oblivious as sleepwalkers. Then Liam snapped out of it abruptly and turned to Crazy Horse with a desperate mutter: “What the Devil are we going to do? If they think Becky and Custer know something about terrorist plots, we’re never going to see them again.”

Crazy Horse shook his head grimly.

“I was a secret member of Land and Freedom when I was at the University,” he said in a flat, quiet voice. “Plekhanov and I were friends—he was a great figure in the revolutionary underground, loved to argue about socialist theory, thought terrorism was for morons.” He shook his head slowly and spat on the floor. “Then my foster father got tired of looking for Plekhanov and arrested his whole family and sent them to dig coal in Karaganda. It was January, the temperature was -20 in the daytime, and all of them—two sisters, his mother and his father—died in the mines. Now Plekhanov believes in terror.”

Liam waited, sure that Crazy Horse was heading somewhere with this. After another couple of moments, the Sioux chieftain smiled sardonically. “I remember his favorite dictum after he became a convert to terror: ‘There’s no problem so complicated that it can’t be solved by a couple of pounds of dynamite.’”

“I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where we might find some?”

“Lev Frentsisovich, what do you take me for? Of course I do, Georgie and I have been saving some up for a party!”

With that, Crazy Horse headed out the doorway and into the hall with Liam right behind him. But before they managed to get as far as the exit, Sheremetev’s aide-de-camp suddenly stepped into view from the guardroom just ahead of them, calmly covering them with a revolver and holding the sheaf of telegrams in his other hand

“I’m sorry to have to detain you, gentlemen, but we really must wait a bit until the Grand Duke can find the time to read this telegram. It appears,” he continued, staring hard at Liam, “that Lt. Mikulin may not be quite what he seems. Indeed, according to Colonel Pilkington, it seems that a vicious New York criminal named McCool who speaks fluent Russian is known to be headed towards us, bent on treason and violence.” He gave Liam a bogus little smile of apology. “I’m afraid, Lieutenant, you’ll have to explain to the Grand Duke just how it is that you came to resemble so closely the man described by Colonel Pilkington.”

Seeing Liam’s ominous expression, the officer thumbed back the hammer of his revolver. “I wouldn’t advise that, sir, I’ve just been posted here after a year on the Russo-Turkish front and my nerves are not quite what they should be.”

Both Liam and Crazy Horse knew serious business when they saw it and they consented glumly to being herded into the little guardroom ahead of the aide-de-camp’s pistol.

“I’ll take your weapons, gentlemen, and please don’t be silly.”

A moment later, their pistols tucked into his white dress belt, the aide-de-camp backed towards the door.

“Please make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen, I will return with the Grand Duke as soon as it becomes possible.”

With that, he closed the door gently behind him and locked it from the outside.

Liam was nearly beside himself. “Of all the filthy, stupid, rotten luck,” he ranted, “and for it to come from that lowlife dimwit Willie, if I live to be a thousand years old I’ll never …”

“Be quiet!” said Crazy Horse sharply, his voice sobering Liam like a pail of freezing water on his head. Wondering if it had all just gotten to be too much for the veteran warrior, Liam watched as he sat down in the middle of the little room’s floor with his legs crossed and his arms folded on his chest, his eyes closing as he began to keen something under his breath … was that the Sioux language? Oblivious to Liam’s presence and indeed to everything around him, Crazy Horse just sat there chanting incomprehensibly in a barely audible voice, rocking back and forth so slowly that the movement was almost imperceptible …

As the chanting continued, Liam began to feel increasingly uncomfortable, overcome by an incipient nausea mixed with a feeling of vertigo and a persistent sense that his eyes were going out of focus. Suddenly, for one totally unhinged second the world just seemed to stop … then Crazy Horse winked out like a candle, vanishing completely. No, wait, not completely—now, on the spot where he had been sitting, there was a small, dark scorpion, its tail curling and straightening over its back as if it were flexing the thing. Then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it ran through the gap under the guardroom door and disappeared.

Liam sat down hard on the chair behind the guard’s desk, shaking his head and wondering if something inside it had just blown out and left him in the grip of some sort of brain fever. More worried by that thought than anything that had happened so far, Liam laid his head down on his arms and closed his eyes. Perhaps when he opened them again it would all have gone away …

A brief interval passed, he had no real idea how long. Then the door was unlocked from the outside and Crazy Horse entered hastily, holding their two pistols and the sheaf of telegrams in his hand.

“Bozhe moi!” he said incredulously. “Are you trying to become some sort of monster of sang froid, sitting there napping while I run around taking care of things?”

Liam stood up, shaking his head stupidly and opening and closing his mouth like a beached fish.

“By God, you’d better explain all this to me,” he said finally.

Crazy Horse just rolled his eyes, grabbed Liam by the arm and dragged him into the hall, where the aide-de-camp was lying on the floor with his hand clutching the side of his neck, his eyes staring into nothingness with an expression of stark terror.

“Poor man seems to be suffering from a scorpion bite,” Crazy Horse said. “Come on, we’re going to have to leg it.”

As the two of them ran out the front door Crazy Horse whistled sharply between his teeth and immediately a troika jingled towards them out of the snow. Liam and Crazy Horse jumped in.

“Boris and Gleb Square!” Crazy Horse shouted to the driver. “A gold ruble if you make it in less than ten minutes!”

The driver grinned at them out of his mound of furs and shubki: “For a gold ruble, Your Honor, I will put you there in less than five minutes!”

With a crack of the whip and a din of sleigh bells, the troika whizzed away through the thickening snow.