Part 28 (2/2)

He stared at her, confused by the cold determination in her face, then he stood up slowly and took a step towards her.

'I shouldn't have come here.' Her face and neck were pink, her shoulders twitching a little with barely repressed anger: 'The party will have had its reasons.'

'No, Vera. Weren't you listening?' He was struggling to control his temper. 'Your comrades tried to murder me.'

'There is always a reason,' she said. 'You were an enemy of the people and that is enough.'

'Weren't you listening to me? Where is the woman who used to make up her own mind?' He was trembling with fury now.

'If you don't give me my coat, I'll leave without it,' she said with icy resolution. He stared at her for a few seconds she would not look him in the eye then he said, 'I must check the stairs and the street first.'

They did not speak again until he had shown her safely from the house. But at the bottom of the street, close to where he had been set upon, she turned to him with a softer expression and, after a little hesitation, she said: 'I don't think she would have known, Frederick. Really, I don't think Anna would have known.'

35.

They were the wrong couple to run the cheese shop. Bogdanovich looked the part all right, with his broad face and spade-shaped beard, the colour of a burnished samovar, but he knew nothing of commerce. The executive committee had chosen Yakimova for the role of shopkeeper's wife because of her 'democratic' manner. She had the face of a badly nourished factory girl and an accent that marked her as someone from the Vyatka province. But 'Bashka' as she was known to all knew even less about running a business.

It had been open a week when Anna Kovalenko visited it for the first time, and they had already begun work on the tunnel. The Malaya Sadovaya was a busy little thoroughfare with civil servants pa.s.sing to the justice building at the end of the street, shoppers and crowded taverns. The men working on the tunnel began long after closing and they left before dawn to avoid arousing the suspicion of the neighbouring tradespeople. But Anna went during business hours, her basket of tools covered by a neat little cloth. The shop was empty but for Bashka, who was arranging her cheeses on the counter.

'And how is your husband, Madame Kobozev?' Anna asked, placing the basket on the floor and sliding it beneath the counter with her foot.

'Not as attentive as I would like,' said Bashka, and she burst into an infectiously earthy laugh.

'That's because he's a gentleman far too good for you.'

'And don't you think women like us have something to teach a gentleman,' said Bashka with a wink and a mischievous chuckle.

'You mean about the rights of working women?'

Bashka chuckled again: 'My rights are very important to me.'

'And your business too, I hope?'

Bashka's face crumpled in a troubled frown: 'Not so good. Spirits are low. I've told them it must spur us on.'

The party was still reeling from the news that Kviatokovsky and Presnyakov would be hanged, and the rest had been sentenced to a lifetime of labour in the east.

Bashka bent low to pick up the basket: 'Can you mind the shop? I'll be back in a minute.'

'Is that wise?' asked Anna. 'I might run off with your cheese.' She was only half in jest. It was not businesslike behaviour: 'What if a customer comes into the shop?'

'Shout. But no one will come in. The only visitors we get are the other merchants.'

She slipped through the door at the back to the cellar, where Bogdanovich was clearing earth from the new tunnel. Anna used the time to examine the shop front, checking the stock, lifting the lids of the barrels. Some of the cheese was hard and barely edible, and a merchant with so little stock would surely go out of business in weeks. If they did not run the place properly and turn in a profit, the other tradesmen would begin to talk.

'Here we are, miss,' Bashka said as she swung her broad hips through the door and up to the counter. 'Some smelly Roquefort for you. It's French.' And she handed the basket to Anna.

'And how much is your French cheese?' Anna asked.

'Whatever you want to give,' she replied with a smile.

Anna shook her head with disapproval: 'Is that what you say to all your customers? Not much of a capitalist, are you? Have you visited the other cheese merchants?'

'No, of course not,' said Bashka.

'Well, you must.' And Anna tried to explain why it was important to behave like proper bourgeois shopkeepers fretting over every kopek, but there was a distant look in Bashka's eyes.

'Vera Figner was here,' she said at last, 'pretending to sell me some Gorgonzola. She wanted to know about you and the Englishman.'

'What business is it of Vera's?' Anna snapped, her blue eyes dancing like sun on hard-packed ice. 'And what do you know of him anyway?'

Bashka hesitated, startled and a little frightened by the vehemence of her challenge: 'There was talk. Your comrades were concerned . . . no one blames you.'

'Blames me for what?'

'How were you to know he was an informer?' Bashka rocked defensively behind her counter.

'Informer? Don't be stupid, he's-' But Anna could not finish. A cold sickness gripped her. 'What has he done to him?'

'Are you all right? Look, sit here . . .' Bashka lifted the counter, dragging a stool to the front of the shop.

'What has he done?' Anna repeated.

'Who?' Bashka was standing in front of her with the stool, pink with embarra.s.sment.

'Mikhailov. What has he done?' Anna reached for her, digging her nails into Bashka's shoulder. 'What? Tell me.'

'You're hurting me.'

But Anna was possessed by fear and a determination to know the truth and she began to shake her, pus.h.i.+ng her hard against the counter.

'Please, Anna.' Bashka sank trembling to her knees. 'Please.'

Anna did not reply. Her shoes clicked sharply on the stone-flagged floor, and a moment later the doorbell tinkled and the shop filled with the bustle of the street.

Alexander Mikhailov was not in the best of humours. He had finished his piece on the execution after midnight and delivered it to the press at a respectable hour of the morning. The police screw was tightening and, but for the urgency, he would not have risked visiting the apartment on Podolskaya Street by day. And so it was galling to find that Anna was not at home. The rest of the printing family were busy with the new edition of The People's Will but none of them could be trusted with what would be a most sensitive task. Anna would have been the ideal person to slip in and out of the photographer's shop. He waited at the apartment for a while, drinking too many gla.s.ses of cheap black tea, while he considered what to do. All the photographers had been warned by the gendarmes to be on the watch for anything that might be of use for illegal propaganda. A police spy had followed him to the little shop on the Zagorodny and would know he had asked for copies of portraits of Kviatkovsky and Presnyakov. But someone had to pick up the photographs. Copies to Hartmann in Paris, copies to their friends in Berlin and London a copy to Karl Marx and copies to all the newspapers in St Petersburg; they needed the pictures by this evening.

The sky was a dingy winter grey, and lazy wet snowflakes that melted as they fell were sweeping along the street. Mikhailov turned up his collar in the doorway then set off at a brisk place. It was lunch time and most of the people he pa.s.sed were hurrying home in the opposite direction, their heads bent into the wind. At the junction with Malodestskoselsky Prospekt, the stallholders were gathered round a crackling yellow fire with no thought to business. A scantily clad girl, her thin face thick with cheap make-up, stepped on to the street from a doorway and gave him a cold and hungry look. He walked on, avoiding her eye. He would take a cab from the Zagorodny to Madame Dubrovina's comfortable home. Perhaps she could be of a.s.sistance. But as he was approaching the end of the street, he saw Anna's neat figure hurrying towards him, the plain burgundy scarf he had given her when they were still friends pulled tightly about her face. She appeared distracted, and had almost rushed past him when he spoke her name.

She stopped, startled, then her expression hardened with contempt. 'You. You what have you done to him? Tell me.' She spat it at him with a fury he had not known in her before.

'What on earth . . .' For once he was lost for words.

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