A Game of Soldiers. Stephen Miller

sheet of nearly transparent onion-skin paper back into the envelope and filed it together with the police statement and Bondarenko’s cause-of-death report. Tried not to look at the little human diagram with the wounds inked on it as he put all of it in his bottom drawer. Now, he thought, all that was left of Lvova, Ekatarina, was resting undisturbed inside a green Okhrana folder, like everything else that was wrong with the world.

      Another little tail-twister vanished? What did it matter? Some marks, some bloodstains that had spread in strange patterns, some loose ends, some details that didn’t fit…What did he think he could do about it? Dig her up? Call in a few dozen of Petersburg’s richest and most prominent men for some discussions about exactly what they had been doing and to whom?

      He rubbed his hand across his forehead. He was tired, trying to do too much, too fast. He was hot, feverish perhaps. Coming down with something.

      The girl was dead and someone in the Okhrana was protecting the killer, or had at least taken steps to ensure that Bondarenko would sanitize his statement. Things like that didn’t just happen by coincidence, there had to be a reason for it. Rasputin?

      What if he had done it? The girl had been thrown out of an upstairs window at the corner of the lane. It could have only been reached by a hallway, via a staircase. Did the building have a lift? And if Rasputin had done it, how would he have made it back downstairs to the table so quickly? Perhaps he should get inside the building…run up and down the stairs with a stopwatch in hand. Certainly he should pursue the case – what if Rasputin had done it and someone was attempting to blackmail him?

      Was such a thing plausible? Rasputin was untouchable, wasn’t he? And the girl wasn’t going to come back just because he got soft and went on some idiot’s crusade. Never trust someone with an axe to grind, never trust a priest. Never trust anyone with ideals…with illusions, he told himself over and over again. Actually chanting the words under his breath ‘…Realism…realism…realism…’

      But maybe Rasputin had done it after all…

      Murder, he heard a woman scream.

       NINE

      ‘Go to sleep,’ Larissa had said. ‘It was just an accident, Vera…go to sleep now,’ she’d said.

      And she had. Even though it was a lie; it hadn’t been an accident. No. Not an accident at all.

      ‘Go to sleep, Vera…it wasn’t your fault, it’s over now.’

      Vera, Larissa, and another girl had slept on the stage in the back room that first night after the…accident. Passing out from too much konyak and exhausted from fending everyone off. When they woke up the other girl was gone.

      The owner was called Izov. He had got angry when he realized they were too distraught to provide him with any fun. Well, they certainly didn’t have to give anything away, but he had made his understanding clear. There was going to have to be some kind of payment. He left them with a last warning that it was a cabaret, not a flophouse, no matter how many people were sleeping on the floor. Not long after that he came back and fed them, grousing about the expense. Vera drank her kvass and decided that probably it was only Larissa’s smile and her smoky laugh that got them breakfast.

      The club was really two shops joined into one. At one point it had been a dressmaker’s, and after that, judging from the long glass counter and the greasy floors in the back room, it had served as a butcher’s shop. Izov had broken through the walls and converted the bottom floor into a bistro which he named Komet after the famous shooting star. The ‘restaurant’ was outfitted with tables and chairs, with a stage at one end enabling Izov to extract a little more money from his customers by providing ‘entertainment’ to go along with the ‘food’.

      Izov went out for a while and the piano-player, the one they called the Professor, came over and served the customers. He talked continuously while he ladled out the soup and took their kopeks, asking her all sorts of questions about her background. Later that evening they tried to rope her into a rehearsal. Mostly it was loud argument, shouting, and strange musical clashings. She’d fallen asleep when the ‘director’, Khulchaev, a tall boy with a sharp dark beard and a smirk, woke her up to make them all tea. As if she were his servant.

      She hadn’t even got on her feet and he started straight in, ‘Hey, these are the whores, right?’ loudly enough for the whole room to hear him. He liked to do things loudly, she saw.

      She turned away, but he reached out and pulled her around. ‘Hey, don’t run off, I’m going to use you,’ he said to her quietly.

      ‘Anyway,’ Larissa piped, ‘we’re not, we’re dancers.’ All the men laughed. Vera tried to scratch him in the face and he let her go quickly.

      ‘No…’ Vera heard the Professor say behind them. ‘No, Dmitri, I think they have the correct temperament for dancers.’ All of them laughing.

      And hiding in the lavatory and breaking down into long silent sobs, that she hid even from Larissa. ‘Don’t worry,’ Larissa saying as she paced outside the stall. ‘Don’t worry, he just wants to fuck you and can’t get it up. Don’t worry…’

      When she finally came out of there, with no alternative to having to walk all the way around the stage to get out, Khulchaev started in on her again.

      ‘Here!’ he whistled at her. ‘Here, we really do need a dancer. Hey, Dancer, come on here –’ She just kept going. They could all go fuck themselves. ‘Well, I guess she’s a whore after all then,’ he said as she was halfway through the door.

      And even when she whirled and walked back into the room and slapped him, they all laughed.

      But by the end of the week she was on stage.

      And by the end of the month, sitting before the mirror, listening to Larissa and Gloriana warming up in the hallway, observing herself in the reflection, she knew she was never going to sell it again. All that was gone now. She had turned a corner in her life on to an entirely new boulevard.

      Her face was powdered white like a Japanese mask. She’d even smoothed her eyebrows with soap and covered them with greasepaint so that she looked like a marble bust of herself. Her terrible hair had been chopped off in angled bangs, which was just fine, she’d hated it anyway. Now, no one would recognize her. In only one week, she’d transformed completely and forever. She was a new human, an adventure unwrit. An innocent girl in a mirror.

      And then the Professor poked his head around the door and said it was time to go on.

      She moved through the performance playing the part of a kind of Aztec war god crossed with an oriental nightmare. Her costume was painted with garish colours and bizarre geometric polka dots. It wasn’t real dancing, of course. All she had to do was gesture and turn and watch the fabric move about her in the lights. There was a chorus of voices that chanted between the ringing bells:

      ‘Omicron…Epsilon…Pi…Sigma…’

      With each crash Vera would tremble and react to a different invisible point in space. It was easy enough, and she had been told to ‘put her energy into it’, so she did. After her ‘dance’ she was summoned by one of the Goddesses of the Seven Winds. Her ornate feathered headdress was taken from her and a mathematical symbol was branded across her forehead – an 8 laid over on its side. Finally, when the last of the Aztec gods was destroyed by a hurricane of ribbons, there was applause, and for a moment Vera was disoriented – sweating through the make-up, all out of breath – a little lost before she came back into her new self. Applause! She bowed, smiling, with the mark of infinity across her brow.

      Afterwards there was food, and she found herself crowding to the table and stuffing herself with cakes and caviar. A man came and stood beside her, saying something over the din about how much he had enjoyed her performance. She nodded and kept on eating, and a few minutes later he was there again, the only well-dressed patron in the room, holding