Part 18 (1/2)

'Thank you, Konstantin. Now go, leave us at once.'

'Is that all?' he asked, a little hurt.

'Yes. Go or people will ask what a rich student is doing in the company of a maid and two workers.' She turned her back on him and began walking towards the concourse. She could hear Alexei and Pavel lumbering along the platform behind her.

She waited for them to catch up at the platform gate: 'Keep moving across the station, whatever you do. Only stop if I tell you to, is that clear? If a gendarme wants to speak to us, leave it to me.'

Pavel nodded. Alexei was biting his lip. She gave his arm a rea.s.suring pat. 'It will be all right, you'll see. Just look as if you know what you're doing.'

And on to the station concourse she led them, weaving her way through the crowd, alive to every movement, every suggestion of danger. She could see gendarmes at the entrance to the ticket office and the platform gates but it was the ones she could not see that concerned her most, the plain-clothes policemen, the informers and agents of the Third Section.

'Hey, watch out!' she heard someone shout, and she turned quickly. Alexei had driven the corner of his heavy trunk against a man's leg. The civil servant to judge from his uniform was bent double, rubbing his s.h.i.+n. Instead of muttering an apology and moving smartly on, Alexei had put the trunk down and was watching him with a guilty face.

'Hey, you!' Anna shouted. 'What are you doing with my bags? I've a cab outside and it's costing me money.'

'Look what the oaf has done,' the injured man complained.

'That can't be helped,' she replied, turning to the exit again. Two gendarmes were standing together beneath the arch, watching the traffic to and from the station. It was very unlikely that they would let workers with large trunks pa.s.s without question. She would have to distract them and hope her comrades had the sense to do what she had told them to do.

Anna scuttled towards the gendarmes: 'That man there, that man there,' she said breathlessly, pointing to the unfortunate civil servant. 'He's wanted by the police.'

The gendarmes looked at her as if she were mad or drunk or both.

'He's wanted by the police, I tell you!'

'Who are you?' the older of the two asked. 'What's he supposed to have done?'

'Quick before he gets away!' Anna said, wringing her hands. 'Look, he's going, he's leaving!'

The civil servant had obligingly chosen that moment to limp towards a platform entrance.

'Who are you?' the older gendarme asked again.

'He's got a gun! I've seen it. He's a terrorist! Oh, why won't you believe me?' Anna began rocking back and forth, her head in her hands. 'For goodness sake, are you going to stand here and let him get away!'

The gendarmes exchanged glances.

'You'd better be right,' muttered the younger man. 'Don't move from this spot.'

Anna watched for a few seconds as the gendarmes forced their way through the crowd, cannoning into travellers, tripping over pieces of luggage, then she slipped into the stream of people leaving the station. The workers were waiting for her at the cab rank with the trunks.

'Quick into a droshky,' Anna commanded. 'And you, Pavel take another. Better we travel separately. 7 Spa.s.sky, off the Haymarket.'

She was a good liar. A skill, she thought, as she sat in the droshky, her heart still beating frantically, a performance learnt in childhood when fear of upsetting her father would drive her to many simple deceits.

At the Haymarket she took possession of the trunks and took another cab to the island. The door of the safe house was opened by a pale man in his twenties with languid blue eyes and a dark beard and hair that fell in a severe fringe across his forehead.

'A delivery for a friend.'

'Anna Kovalenko? I'm Nikolai Kibalchich.'

'Good. Is there anyone who can help you?'

Anna paid the cab driver while Kibalchich and a comrade she did not recognise carried the trunks into the ground floor apartment.

'Through here,' Kibalchich shouted from the main room.

He had already lifted the trunk on to a table and was fiddling with the locks. The room was long and narrow and furnished like a laboratory, with work benches, gla.s.s beakers and flasks, coils of wire, clamps, tongs, implements she could not name of all shapes and sizes. Kibalchich was the party's explosives expert but she had no idea the executive committee had its own small factory.

'It's all here,' he said, turning to her with a broad smile, eyes bright with excitement. 'By my calculation we need 320 pounds, but 360 would be better. We're at least forty pounds short at the moment.'

'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about,' she said.

'The attempt on the palace, of course. Our man has 280 pounds in place but we need more.'

'Yes, of course,' she said with a little laugh, the colour rising to her face. No one had told her. Another attempt was to be made on the tsar's life and no one had told her. Mikhailov had kept her in the dark.

'But will he be able to smuggle it into the palace in time?'

Kibalchich shrugged: 'In time for what? As long as it's there and no one finds it, but that isn't my concern.'

'No. Of course not.'

The cab dropped her before the Anichkov Bridge and, after taking care no one was following her, she turned into Troitsky Lane and walked quickly along it until she reached Mikhailov's mansion. It was a little before one o'clock when she rang the bell and was shown up to the second floor by the dvornik.

'Did you manage the delivery?' Mikhailov asked as the apartment door closed behind her.

'The dynamite, you mean?' she said tartly. 'Yes.'

The drawing room was crowded with familiar faces Sophia Perovskaya and Andrei Zhelyabov, the son of the house serf from the Crimea, her flatmate Nikolai Morozov and others.

'Annushka, come and sit beside me,' said Sophia, drawing her by the hand to the settee. 'We've been speaking of you.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. Alexander was reminding us how easily you move unnoticed about the city.'

Anna did not reply. A tense silence fell on the room and faces turned to Mikhailov, but he seemed content to sit, his eyes half closed, hands clasped about his knee, as if enjoying the discomfort of his comrades.

'Alexander is concerned about your friends.h.i.+p with this English doctor,' Sophia said at last. 'Can he be trusted?'

'We've promised to put the party and the revolution first,' Morozov added from the table. 'It's about renouncing one's egotism for the sake of the Russian people. That is our supreme task.'

Anna looked at him with disgust. 'I'll take no lessons from you on sacrifices,' she replied. 'I don't think you've given up anything.'

'There is no need to be personal,' said Sophia.