1

Marble statue, strange egg, not entirely innocent. Create a kind of laudanum dream, climb inside to hide. Fugitive chips away. Outside, everything can be eaten. Hand with glass to mouth. Bite. No, glass cannot be eaten. Except in the dream that really was a dream. Come to yourself and you're eating glass. Shards, splinters, threads of it caught in your teeth and under your tongue. You’ve already bitten, now chew and swallow. Glass won’t go down. Glass must go down, it is polite. 
Katerina had gone too far, definitely she had, with the tickets booked to Constantinople for her and the artist, with whom she'd tried to have another beginning but failed. They’d been drunk on the thrill of their power together, but it was only power when they were two alone and rapidly dissolved into nothing when Alexei had confronted them. 
How much easier it would have been to surrender to Alexei’s will, to his lands, to be innocent of all blame by making no choices of her own.
On the night of the arrest, she woke without her name. She kicked off the bedsheets and got up for the feel of the solid floor. 
Alexei pulled the covers back over himself. ‘Where are you going?’ 
‘Nowhere.’ She always regretted the last thing she told him was a lie.
Into the dark from sea-sleep, she walked along the gilded landing above the open foyer. Down below, a cavern. She leaned over the balustrade but could see nothing in the deep. Where were the night lights, the watchmen, the back and forth of souls through dust preparing for the day?
She went not for peace, then, to the back of the palais and the gardens on the cliff, but to the salon window overlooking the boulevard.
From the window she could see over the palais walls, to where people wanting to be seen strolled on Saturdays, hoping to glimpse the governor-general or his countess looking out from a high window – and be seen being seen by the illustrious couple. Sometimes Katerina couldn’t tell whether she was acting a part or someone else was playing her.
Tonight beyond the walls, people and their shadows were converging into a new kind of creature and she thought about the Empress’s party. The Tsar was coming to Odesa and fear of what she was conjuring kept Katerina awake. The party would be the stage. Bearing the song bringing death to a man– But was she going too far by carrying the song of ruin?
She stepped back from the salon window. When she hosted the carnival party in twelve days’ time she would be a gypsy singer on the arm of a dissolute Russian noble. ‘Will you never let me forget my youthful excesses?’ Alexei had said.
‘Youthful?’ she’d replied. There was a rumour of another child on his country estate. The timing was telling. She tried not to listen to rumours, especially when she knew their truth.
‘But for you, dushenka,’ he said quickly, ‘I’ll seek permission. “The Peoples of Russia”, that’s really your theme? Can’t we have something more exotic? I can look out of the window for the Peoples of Russia.’
Edging back to the window, Katerina hugged her silk wrapper closed over her nightgown; the pattern of the breaking wave overlapped around her waist, holding her tight in one continuous flow. Perpetual motion. She remembered that two days ago a boy throwing stones had broken one of the lamps beside the gates. It hadn’t yet been repaired. The peoples of Russia were many and varied. Too few were willing subjects. She wasn’t one herself.
Below, the shifting shadow-creature of people and the night pressed against the gates. Then the lamps around the drive and trembling fountain went out all at once.
Katerina ran from the salon window to the head of the grand staircase. She began to fly down the steps she’d descended thousands of times, thousands and thousands, all in rehearsal for this delirious night.
‘If they come to the door with their demands,’ Alexei had said, ‘whatever you do, don’t go yourself. If you choose to do that, Katya, when properly you should stay hidden upstairs, then you’re opening the door to chaos.’
With one hand on the polished banister she skittered down and round, guided by the curving wood, the arm of a celestial ballerina preparing to pirouette the house. She leapt barefoot onto the first landing of pink marble. Tonight the breeze carried the scent of gardenia and the chime of a faraway music box playing a tune of the century gone. Confused, she hesitated. Revolutions did not emerge from seductive nights on cliffs above a calm bay, but from gun smoke and putrefaction in the city heat of July. Yet the veins on her hands pulsed with blood, drawing her down the next flight of stairs. Ten years she’d lived in this palais, persuading others to rebel, to claim their souls as their own. She alone could reason with the people’s demands.
But her bare feet, her gauzy nightdress, her fluttering silk wrapper – she hadn’t thought what these would suggest if, doubled beyond the doors, was indeed chaos. Time and again Alexei had tried to scare her: ‘When chaos divides into the parts that are they and they’ve smashed everything I legitimately own, they’ll remember your trampled body by the door and flock to make that open too.’ 
The scrape of iron bolts, below, summoned the restless night. A dark shape shifted from the gaping doors, a piece of the night detaching; she caught her heel and slipped. She clung to the banister and found her footing as the anarchic fragment approached. It grew taller, joined ceiling to floor, then shrank suddenly into the outline of man. His face was blank in shadow. He could be any man, any servant. If the people of Odesa were rebelling against the authorities, as she and Alexei had been warned many times, then of course it would come from inside their house, from those who operated bolts and latches, these simple things she no longer did for herself. She didn’t want to believe it. She loved this city of palaces and huts, the disorder, the dreaming; it was only because it wasn’t truly Russia that she could bear living here.
Stranded halfway down the last flight she had a vision of herself in a house without servants. Could she have left this life whenever she wanted, if only she could remember how to operate doors and choices for herself? Small freedoms had been hers all along, but she’d forgotten how to link them together, like the elementary movements of a dance she’d learnt as a child but hadn’t danced since.
The man who’d opened the doors stopped at the foot of the stairs. He appeared to be looking up at her but she couldn’t definitely see this, only that a piece of the house had rebelled. The opposition had always been within. How had she missed this, when this was how she thought of herself?
Faceless in the dark the man watched her. The smell of his piquant sweat and the heady gardenia blended into a vapour that rose from a subterranean stove, and she wondered: What’s held in this breath of time that I can’t yet see? 
He seemed to know her well, this man of the bolts and latches, metallic in his stench. He must have watched her before. Perhaps he wanted to see how she’d react. Perhaps he didn’t know what he wanted from her. He placed one foot on the bottom stair and stepped up to the next one, silently, then up again; he could flick up her nightgown if he wanted to. He waited there.
His hesitation made her think. The people are here for the fight and the looting, to take what they’ve been kept from, what they want to share. And they want to take it; they don’t want it given out of acceptance, out of understanding, as if to a child; they must take, to feel their own power, to feel that they are alive; and you must be alive too, or it is not glorious, is not the spoils of war; you deny their honour, their dignity, their right, if you are not alive to feel how they take it from you; you, who in this moment must stand in for everything that has been taken from them and their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, throughout all the ages in which they have been swindled of freedom.
That time you were on the outside. This time, within. One body, descending.
Through the open doorway, people blew with the dust into the foyer and fanned out across the chequerboard floor. As if reanimated, the man on the stairs sprang up toward her. He clapped his hands so close to her face the displaced air swept her skin. She yelped and fell back, catching her bare feet in the nightdress. The man laughed and leapt away. He disappeared around the coiled end of the banister and into the gloom of the servants’ passage.
The outside people approached. Sprawled in her nightwear, she was an effigy flung from an upper floor. Made to be damaged. She’d tried to open the door to change; she’d hidden herself, she’d waited; shrunk to fit the role, encased herself in marble, weathered the secret children. But it wasn’t enough. She had no power, had lost the strength of youth. Now it was too late, and yet– Was there here a rhythm, a larger-scale phrasing obscured by urgent beat, by the small patterns of the day to day submitted to, a rhythm now discovered, plainly, on this fateful night? Small subversions she’d been pursuing; it was nowhere near enough. The marble had to crack.

*

In these times of unrest, to do anything in pursuit of safety Konstantin Orlov had to risk his neck. Whether or not History made up its mind about his father, Orlov was already riding the arc of an arrow. Soaring or falling? The governor-general’s case would tell.
‘Faster!’ he shouted, but the driver ignored him. ‘Faster, faster!’
‘Can’t do it, Your Excellency. We’re too heavy for the rutted roads.’
‘But we’re transporting a traitor, it’s urgent.’
‘The carriage’ll tip.’
He ought to feel the thrill of battle; he ought to be the officer leading the cavalry loyal to the Tsar when they’d charged across the freezing square in Petersburg on the night his father joined the rebels. No, that had been a disaster. The horses skidded on the ice and the Guards, in their brass helmets and white uniforms with red collars, had answered the Tsar’s summons with parade-ground sabres; they couldn’t have cut the pages of a book.
‘Then take a longer route,’ he ordered the driver. ‘If I can’t have speed, then I want to wake the city. Get your boy on the roof to bang something and shout that we’ve got the governor-general.’
The whole degenerate city must know of his triumph. Konstantin Sergeyevich Orlov, chief of police, had arrested the most powerful man in Odesa and would imminently, or soon, hopefully, ascend to where he belonged: the headquarters of the Third Section, the Tsar’s political police. ‘Chain House’ in Petersburg. There was some kind of humour in the headquarters’ nickname that Orlov couldn’t permit himself to enjoy until he was on the inside. Theoretically, if anyone asked, which they never did, he was already on the inside. He was the chief of police of the fourth city in the grandest empire on earth. But the wrong police. Ordinary, not political. And in the south, in Odesa – ‘That nest of conspirators,’ the Tsar called it, to Orlov’s continued shame. He was on the outside of the inside; the pain was even greater than if he’d been entirely ignorant.
‘Yes, we’ll take our time,’ Orlov said, remembering that the governor-general’s wife was on her way to the police station too. ‘Better that we create a spectacle. Chain House will expect it.’

*

2

Of course there would be noise in the cells and personal insults stripped of euphemism, but Orlov hadn’t expected loose threads to ripple in the wind. Daily, this same wind blew the dust of moral decay into his office. He stood up from his desk and shut the two windows overlooking the courtyard. He sat down. Yes, he could explain the governor-general’s arrest when questioned. It was justified. He was safe. 
He continued with his report. But now the ominous wind was trapped in his office and the animated threads sought each other, coiling and tangling to create new knots and complications he’d never be able to undo. It had been a mistake to arrest the governor-general at night. Orlov’s morning routine had been disrupted and the six pencils not sharpened and now the loose ends of the case were knitting themselves into something he couldn’t perceive and–
The boy was troubling him. Not in the way children usually tormented Orlov. No, this boy was bothering him because he was dead. The boy stood with his face buried in Orlov’s overcoat, which hung on the stand beside his cabinet. Twelve years old and the boy had had the iron will to hang himself from the hook on his own bedroom door. What was he, Konstantin, at twelve? A schoolboy still pining for his papa, one long year after the man had been taken to the camps for his part in the uprising against the new Tsar. 
The hanged boy had planned it meticulously, persuading his mother to let him stay at home that Saturday afternoon because he was behind in his mathematics homework. The rest of the family strolled along the clifftop Primorsky Boulevard in the shade of the false acacias in bloom. They went to the governor-general’s palace and back, said the boy’s mother, pausing often to watch the best people go in and out of the palaces and fine hotels. She was very particular about the details, to better convince Orlov that they were a normal family. They took an outside table at Fanconi Café and dawdled over honey cake. At home, the boy tied his father’s belt around his neck and let himself fall.
Orlov spied his opportunity. The father was one of the governor-general’s senior secretaries. Orlov marched the father into the police station. Any two points in the cosmos could be connected in a mind, if that mind had prepared itself to search for links and pathways, for the divine geometry of a conspiracy against the state. After a week of interrogation, he charged the father with murder then offered a deal: the man’s life for details of the governor-general’s moral corruption.
At first the man didn’t understand, insisting the governor-general was an honourable superior, tireless in his efforts to promote the frenetic port city as a welcoming hub for trade. A beacon of light for All The Russias. Orlov included the man’s wife in the bargain. The man suddenly remembered bribes and secret meetings between the governor-general and army officers known for their liberal views; customs officials delivering crates of mysterious goods in the dead of night; and at the kitchen door Moldavanka’s worst scoundrels dressed as gentlemen, accompanied by dogs entirely superfluous to Orlov’s requirements. 
‘I’ve got names, dates, how much money changed hands,’ said the father. ‘I’ve got anything you want.’
‘It’s not about what I want,’ Orlov said. ‘I do what I must to protect this city and, indeed, the realm, from foreign influences.’ He looked at his own secretary to make sure his words were written in full. The report would go to General Pavlishchev whether the general wanted it or not.
‘But the governor-general is Russian, sir,’ said the father of the hanged boy. ‘From one of the oldest families.’
‘Yes, but he grew up in London, didn’t he, and was educated in France. I understand your sympathy, a boy can’t help his upbringing.’
‘His father was our ambassador to those parliamentary places, sir. He retired with honours.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Orlov, ‘as a boy the governor-general imbibed foreign influences with his daily coffee. He could hardly avoid it. And as a man, he imbibed the contagion in coffee houses too, which he would have gone to in full knowledge that they’re bursting with revolutionaries.’
‘I see you in Fanconi’s every Saturday, sir.’
‘That’s a Russian coffee house.’
‘It’s Italian,’ said the father.
‘But it’s in Russia, serving Russian coffee.’
‘The coffee comes from Arabia, I believe.’
‘That’s enough about Fanconi,’ said Orlov. His afternoons at Fanconi’s, alone outside at a marble-topped table flanked by laurel trees in pots, were sacrosanct. Coffee, pastries, fine ices, and Italian newspapers he couldn’t read: all were necessary. Here on the corner of two fashionable streets, society women smoked cigars to show they were progressive, while he listened to the loose talk of Greek and Jewish and Genoan stockbrokers and grain merchants in Panama hats; the squabbling of Russian matrons and their marriageable daughters after shopping on De Ribas Street – the Montmartre of Odesa, they called it, the Nevsky Prospekt; English nursemaids with their restless wards; and the bold pronouncements of university students and their masters, such as would be forbidden in Petersburg. In this way, he took the measure of the city for which General Pavlishchev was too afraid to ask.
‘Look,’ he said to the governor-general’s secretary, ‘are you going to sign your confession, or do I need to bring in your wife?’
That was a week ago. The dead boy had done his work. But still he lingered.
Orlov had brought in additional lamps to cancel the shadows cast by his hand, but now there were more shadows of many more shades, overlapping each other in subtle yet conflicting ways. The report was impossible. It must satisfy the Minister of Internal Affairs. It must satisfy Chain House in Petersburg. And it must satisfy General Pavlishchev, the head of the local gendarmes and Third Section spies. This triangle could not be squared. Why could the triumvirate not be a hexagon? A marvellous shape with the magic six points, the magic six lines, and the various ways to bisect it. Then he could definitely conceal inadvertent wrongdoing in the middle of the muddle. A triangle was too transparent. The Minister would be gravely insulted by accusations against the governor-general, who reported to him, but the Head of Chain House, who reported directly to the Tsar, needed the accusations to be unequivocal. And General Pavlishchev… Well, who knew what he wanted? You only ever knew what Pavlishchev didn’t want but not until after you’d given it to him. 
It was early days, but Orlov had a ticklish, nettly feeling about this report. On the surface it seemed unrealistic, but if he could solve the contradictions at its heart then…dare he hope it would open the door to Chain House? Paradise at last.
The father had been released. What more did the dead boy want? He sniffed into Orlov’s overcoat in an exaggerated manner. Orlov didn’t want to tell the boy to behave, it would only encourage him. Perhaps he really did have trouble with his mathematics homework. But was it enough to kill yourself over? Yes, if you were twelve and the perfect shape of your world broke apart at the joints, leaving you with nothing but points and rigid lines drifting, drifting away from one another, without your beloved papa to explain. This boy aced his final test with the successful hanging, and he had a mother and father who were free, thanks to Orlov. What was he snivelling about? When Orlov’s father had been arrested the family was stripped of all land and titles. Ten months later they found out his father had already been taken to the prison camps. Orlov’s mother left Petersburg to join her husband in exile in Siberia, taking the younger children. There were two more sisters Orlov had never met; they’d been born in the wastelands as stateless peasants.
An ordinary boy had hanged himself and awakened a mystery at the centre of Orlov. Was his father a hero or traitor? And was he himself a man rising or falling? Opinion was still divided. The Countess Katerina Petrovna Miloslavskaya, the governor-general’s wife, might be able to sway it. And he’d left her sitting outside his office in her nightwear.

*

3

The sun in its dramatic arc across the sky. Shut out of the police chief’s office, Katerina haunted the corridors of the police station. Would all now would be descent? But not falling. Not from paradise, no such thing. Ancient forms. Greek, Roman, Christian. Paradigms for stories, maybe, she thought, but for life? Always there had been other forces. In Odesa there were two currents at play in the sea: one coming, one going.
‘Two thousand souls we hold in our hands…’ She heard her own voice return from the recent past. If it hadn’t begun with the breaking of the lamps beside the palace gates, then the origin of Alexei’s arrest must be further back. ‘…and who holds ours, I wonder.’
‘This again?’ Alexei had said. ‘Hands or souls?’ 
The souls were the people he owned, the serfs belonging to his estates. She wanted them to have their freedom; she hadn’t realised the price would be her own. 
‘Souls, yes, but hands too.’ She reached for Alexei’s across the white linen and silver instruments on the breakfast table.
‘Not every soul will want his freedom.’ He smoothed his napkin already flecked with coffee. ‘Some are too afraid.’
She chose not to interpret his evasion. The birds and the leopards watched from the frescoes on the walls. A bird of paradise frouffed his tail. A leopard in his tree, she was sure, winked at her. ‘Of freedom?’ she asked.
‘And what comes with it.’
‘Then keep these souls, for the time being, and shake the others loose. Seeds to the wind. Let them land where they may.’
‘Katya, don’t speak like that in anyone’s hearing. That’s the mortal fear. Of the Tsar, the men of my class, even the serfs themselves.’ He dismissed the servants with a wave.
‘And the hope.’ She watched the footmen leave. She wanted them to stay, wanted to sow in them the seeds of discontent. ‘Let go of the reins, Alyosha. If you hold too tight and try to steer, you’ll kill any change before it’s running.’
‘Let me eat breakfast, for God’s sake.’ Alexei picked up his butter knife. The sun through the window lit the blade. He rolled the ivory handle between fingers and thumb as if to blind her with the light.
‘Soul and soil, you said. That’s the bond we have to break.’ She was the one who’d said it first, but this wasn’t part of his princely arc.
‘But to be so explicit, it’s dangerous. An experiment, that’s all. Only to see how my estates prosper. And for the purposes of Russia’s economic advancement, naturally.’
‘And not because a soul must be free for it to truly be a soul?’
‘Are you talking about people-in-law or serfs?’ 
To Alexei, their people were little more than fixtures and fittings of the house, emerging from the permanent structure to bring or open things, or set them alight. She’d gone far enough for now. ‘I’m talking about our– Your estates. So, maybe oxen, too. Horses. Cows. Definitely your dogs. You might lose a couple of borzoi to the wild, but the rest will never leave you. The mice in the wainscoting… I don’t know about them. Certainly the magpies along the drive. I see how they eye my brooches and hatpins.’
He laughed, relieved he need not take her seriously. ‘You’re perching in the trees, are you? Looking down on my burdens, cackling.’
‘Only in sympathy,’ she said. ‘I won’t snatch your shiny timepiece from your hand, I promise.’
‘I’d like to see you carry that in your beak.’
‘I’ll just steal a piece of the mechanism here and there.’
‘Of my means of telling the time?’ he said. ‘How then will I run the city and province?’
‘You’ll have to find a different way.’
‘Ah, yes, the Linnaeus flower clock.’
‘It’s real!’
‘I’ve seen the picture, that doesn’t mean it’ll work.’
‘I’d like to try planting it anyway,’ she said. ‘As an experiment.’
‘Then do. I’ll plan my meetings with the police chief by it.’
She laughed. ‘See? You do want it to fail.’
‘Only for my sake.’
A knock at the door and the handle of amber turned. The butler entered, preceded by the silver tray now his own. He strode across the intricate parquet in his red and white livery – a free man, albeit in uniform. ‘Thinks himself very much the soldier these days,’ Alexei had said. ‘My aide-de-camp delivering news of the enemy’s position.’
Morning light danced with the tray, the man’s brass buttons and the knife she flicked side to side before plunging it into the plum jam, which was so runny that when she withdrew the knife the blade was nearly clean. The butler had his freedom and she did not. Why must she serve – the living, the dead? Cast her out, cast her down with the rebel angels. Why not? Why not be beneath notice and there by her own light be free? There’d been a time, in Paris with Fabien, when she’d been a nothing. Had that been her freedom? Or was it the wealth and influence she had only through Alexei?
The butler tapped his heels, dipped his balding head. Bad news came early, to turn the coffee pungent and dry the croissants to a husk. 
Alexei took the letter from the tray and thanked the butler. The butler smiled and spun the tray on his fingertips, then departed across the parquet of exotic woods.
‘I’m not convinced by this new flourish with the tray,’ Alexei boomed. ‘Will every free man develop a quirk? Must I smile and indulge every occasion?’
‘If you claim to be their God and master, then yes.’
‘And if I’m giving up my claim to be God?’
‘Then, as their employer you must be kind.’
He puffed a loud breath onto the envelope in his hands, then opened and read the letter. ‘Ah,’ he said. He separated one sheet and folded it in half and half again, until it could be folded no more and the paper was a miniature book with pages uncut.
She didn’t say, ‘Ah, what?’ That kind of hunger, that want, was not advisable for a countess, the governor-general’s wife, a person completely secure in her role and station. She was that person, or must appear to be.
Alexei unfolded the sheet to the first crease and seemed to be contemplating whether it was worth losing the hand if it meant the letter could be excised too. ‘Ah,’ he said again. 
She held her knife aloft. ‘I do like this plum jam, don’t you? I wonder what sort of honey you could make, if you could keep your bees to the orchard. I don’t think the flowers will do for a daily clock, but perhaps a seasonal one.’ If he wanted her to know what the letter said, he would have to say it aloud without prompting. Let him bear the responsibility for her knowing or not knowing, let him defy the gravitational pull of a secret to share.
‘Seasons?’ He balled his fist around the letter. ‘The devil take this damned summer. Our devoted Tsar Nikita is coming to Odesa. It’s not to be public knowledge. How then am I supposed to make anything of it?’ Alexei spoke to the air above the long breakfast table, as if to an apparition of Odesa’s unruly public contained within a giant soap bubble, deaf to his damning of the Tsar on their behalf. ‘His family will accompany him. Because,’ – another fathomless pause in which the incoming current met the outgoing – ‘the Empress’s birthday falls during their visit. A party will be held in her honour. At my seaside estate.’
The Tsar’s beloved wife had been ill for many years, too frail for marital relations. Katerina saw at once the purpose of the party: Alexei’s seaside palace was renowned for its secret bathing area cut high in the cliffs. A party to celebrate the day of a dying empress’s birth – a closing of the circle if ever she saw one. A defence against chaos. But Katerina didn’t want to defend.
‘Am I to arrange this party?’ she said.
‘The Empress deserves an extravagance, the minister says. A show of strength and indifference to the Tsar’s enemies over the border and water.’
‘A show of indifference?’
‘It’s the minister’s contradiction, not mine,’ said Alexei. ‘And the Tsar… Well, the minister doesn’t specify what he deserves, but there’s a list of whom we should invite.’ He gave her the unfolded sheets. The list of guests included three women of title and the American adventuress Katerina had once snubbed at the opera, each of whom she’d have to conduct to the bathing area in turn, then escort back through the tunnel to the party. Such was her duty as the governor-general’s wife. Though one of them knew the way quite as well as Alexei.
‘I trust you to do what needs to be done. It would look wrong if you didn’t arrange it.’ Alexei had the decency to appear genuinely pained. He turned away to study his cold coffee and the sugar cube he’d laid on the saucer half-nibbled, a habit he’d picked up from his peasant nanny.
‘And what is it that rides upon this occasion?’ She’d first met the Tsar at a ball in his palace in Petersburg, where Alexei’s appointment had been decided. Doors and shutters from the Mikhailovsky Castle, home of the Tsar Paul, had been fitted in this very house, the governor-general’s palace. Which of these doors had been flung open by conspirators while the Tsar’s father hid behind drapes in his chamber? Did any of the conspirators close the door – a door probably now in her home – as the others dragged the man to the table to force him to sign his abdication, then murdered him and told his eldest son, ‘Time to grow up!’. 
‘What does he want from me this time?’ she said, when Alexei didn’t answer. ‘The Empress is too ill for parties.’ The nibbled sugar cube appeared to have bewitched Alexei. With his thumb he rubbed grains from the dissolving whole and rolled them around the saucer with his finger. She thought for a moment, then said, ‘I’ll create a spectacle on the terraces and lawn so the Empress can watch from the window.’
‘Very good.’ He unfurled his fist to reveal the letter. His brow and nose were shining and with his teeth set his jaw looked wider than usual, but shallow. She reached for the silver sugar tongs bearing his family’s crest and plucked the letter from his palm. She flung both letter and tongs over her shoulder. The heraldry clinked against the window. Alexei laughed, more of a bark really, deep from his throat.

*

4

The woman’s nightmare contained him. Orlov heard sobbing and chanting and a thumping sound that resonated around the walls of his office. Nothing had gone wrong during the arrest of the governor-general – it was just that the business wasn’t yet complete. Naturally there would be loose ends, like the governor-general’s wife, who’d been roaming the police station for half a night and a day. No one knew how to get rid of her without provoking her into shouting, ‘Home? And where that might be now you’ve destroyed my life?’ 
His mother had similarly lost control when the Guards came for his father that night in December twenty-five years ago and brought the winds of Siberia into Orlov’s life–
No. That pain could not be resurrected; it would transform itself into sympathy for the governor-general’s wife and then he could not do what he must. 
His report demanded an important file from the deputy. The report had a distinctive voice already – bossy, rebellious, slightly mocking – and Orlov wasn’t at all sure they were on the same side. It might even refuse to continue Orlov’s existence after his bodily annihilation.
He needed that file from his deputy. But despite his many powers he could not summon the file through the closed door. He was the police chief of Odesa, for heaven’s sake, there was no one in the city to scare him. Silently he stood up, went to the door and took hold of the brass key in the lock.
If he opened the door a crack to call his deputy, the woman in her nightwear would take it as an invitation to begin screaming at him again. Did she not realise that whatever had been decided about her husband’s fate had been decided, and no amount of screaming in his face or flaunting herself in her nightwear would change the Tsar’s directive? She would have to be forcibly removed eventually. Or he could burn down the station with her in it. One consolation: while she was outside his office she wasn’t at large in the city, denouncing him to her powerful friends and seducing the ordinary people who loved her into joining the cause. If Orlov kept the woman contained for a few days, there would be no crusade around which powerful people might coagulate. 
He shivered to think of coagulation in the streets. It would block the boulevards and prevent society from going in and out of the best hotels. Bad elements, which the city bred in abundance, would get stuck in it. The bad elements would overturn society’s carriages. The whole coagulation would be highly vernacular and he would be blamed. 
No, the city must remain open, even if he must hear tiresome Americans in tea houses claiming it as their own. Would you look at the city’s grid pattern, exclaimed Americans, and how the broad streets are set at an angle to the coast so that every desirable street has a sea view. With all the buildings a bit new, the Americans said, with all the determined walkers, how at home we feel! Why, even a cloud of choking dust, scoured by the wind from the limestone buildings, has been provided for our humble nostalgia. These were Americans. And they were not the worst.
Orlov threw open the door and bellowed down the corridor to his deputy. The woman in her nightwear slumped backwards onto his feet; she’d been asleep against his office door. With her wild hair covering his feet and ankles, she looked up at him but didn’t move. She lay there like a cat that had found a cat-hating man and decided to toy with him.
The deputy bounded around the corner and the woman jolted upright. The deputy skidded to a halt as if he’d interrupted an intimate moment and Orlov found himself kicking his leg into the air. The deputy smirked.
‘The file on–’ Orlov said, wondering how he was going to conduct police business with this nightwear woman in residence, ‘the case of the missing… You know the one. Bring it now.’ 
He receded into his office and shunted the woman in her nightwear, gently, until the door clicked shut behind her. He breathed out with relief. But then the door opened against his hand as slowly as he’d shut it. He stepped back and back, gripping the handle as if he himself were pulling it though he knew this couldn’t be true. The woman in her nightwear came with the door into his sacred place.

Orlov took three dignified strides and one leap behind the desk so as to put some solid oak between him and the woman’s nightwear. He sat down in order to insult her as a lady and a noble of higher rank. But she didn’t seem to notice the offence. And how foolish to be stuck with his legs under the desk, even a durable, pragmatic desk such as this one was. A woman unhinged by her husband’s arrest might try anything. He stood up. Then, in a moment of genius, he sprang to where his overcoat was hanging. 
‘Madam,’ he said, draping the coat over her shoulders. She pulled it closed with both hands and the troubling area between her neck and knees disappeared. He stepped back, keeping his eyes on her face for signs of rebellion, dreading yet hoping – he had theories on the contagion of criminality he dearly wanted to prove.
‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked in French, glaciating two of his humours.
‘I am not at liberty to discuss matters of state security,’ he said, in Russian, to return himself to solid ground.
‘Then he has been detained for his own protection.’
She knew very well this wasn’t the case, but as she hadn’t asked a question he didn’t reply. These society women could draw confidences from a stone with their aloof manner, if one was the sort of person who wanted to please. Besides, there was something troubling about her bare feet, but he couldn’t be seen looking at them to discern quite what.
‘And what threat,’ she continued in French, refusing to appear insulted or frightened, ‘upon his life have you detected? Your invasion of my house at such an hour can only be justified by an extreme and advanced plot.’ She looked around his office. 
Was she able to see in the air, as he could, plots and pathways connecting themselves into living growing webs? Or was she admiring the restraint with which he’d decorated – plain cabinet, closet and desk, the wall of his certificates and citations? Did she note the contrast and challenge to the governor-general's over-stuffed palace? Her eyes lingered on the shelf of his incongruous books on morphology, colour, von Humboldt’s adventures, and other German preoccupations. 
‘Indeed, madam, there is a plot,’ – this much was true, he’d been working on it since Colonel Danilevsky had delivered the directive from Chain House – ‘but please, allow me…’ He slipped around her, went to the cupboard and found the embroidered felt boots his sister had brought on her last visit. 
Were the German books a mistake? They were new additions to his office. Did they suggest romantic contradictions to wives of governor-generals? Yet they gave him comfort. He was ashamed to admit that recently he needed comfort. The German books were all he could allow. The Tsar’s wife was German and so were his mother and grandmother, who’d founded this city. German preoccupations must therefore be correct.
He placed the felt boots beside the woman’s feet. She put them on while shaking her head and in doing so let go of the overcoat. ‘Madam,’ – he tugged on the empty sleeve – ‘you’ll catch cold.’
‘In June? For heaven’s sake, stop fussing and let me see my husband. Where have you taken him? What plot have you discovered? It’d better be extremely serious. Should we go to the country until you’ve resolved it or–?’ Here she lost command of herself and cursed in several Catholic languages, which he could now legitimately write in his report so as to solicit support from the Holy Synod, should he later need to defend himself against the Third Section.
When she started shouting, someone knocked at the door. ‘Go away!’ he yelled. He didn’t need assistance. High passion was his forte, particularly helpless rage. He wished there were someone here to admire him. Anxiety, fear and pity disappeared, switched off as if he were a machine, a system of cogs and pulleys and levers, unaffected by any sort of human suffering. It was visible in his poise, he hoped, which he envisaged as that of the Russian troops preparing to put down the recent uprising in Hungary. He was no more troubled observing this woman in distress than if she were a butterfly he was pinning live to a board. 
How he did it was a mystery and this was the one perturbing aspect: he didn't fully know his own mind. But the fact remained, this woman’s husband was his prisoner and there was nothing she could do about it, not with her noble origins, her court connections, her popularity amongst the dramatic artists, merchants and bankers of Odesa, and certainly not with her provocative nightwear. He felt it was safe to watch her, because through her mist of tears she couldn’t see where his black haloes ranged.
She heaved sobs that appeared to be drawn from beneath the ground, through rock and sediment and whatever went on top of that, yet this couldn’t be so because his office was on the second floor. It had two wide eyes into the courtyard. Under the floor that was under their feet was the space around the first floor desks and their men. These men had no elemental powers; they wouldn’t lift a finger to work unless given exhaustive instructions for each task. Once finished they slumped as funeral mounds, scratching their inkless pens across the page, pretending to work until their supervisor caught them dead on the job. Even the supervisors needed their own exhausting instructions before Orlov could get anyone working again. 
The sobs the woman drew from some invisible fount filled his office and he felt peculiar stirrings that were not an integral part of the system of cogs and pulleys and levers. These stirrings were redundant, obsolete, had been excised from the machine when Zhenia bade him farewell. The woman in her nightwear bent double with the force of the subterranean vibrations using her body as a conduit. She put her hand on his desk to support herself. The back of her hand was wet so her palm would be too and it would leave a print on the polished burred oak. He couldn’t see her face for the hair that now covered it like the wings of a large bird of prey. She could be laughing under there, laughing at him; she could be smirking or smiling or doing something with her eyebrows that said she didn’t mean what she said. The commotion would, however, have to end at some point on this side of forever, then he could return to the serenity of paper that asked nothing of him except for the mark of his pen.
Eventually, she’d spent all emotion, paying with her own coin the price of affection for her husband. He felt a little sickened. She straightened up from her winged pose over his desk and parted the wet threads of hair from her face. She looked at his eyes, and where they were directly aimed. What she saw within the dark rims of his irises was terra incognita, but she seemed to be searching his face for some version of comfort. He went to the door and opened it with aplomb. Even a husk of a woman understood the symbolism. She shuffled out in the ridiculous felt boots. He batted the door closed with a flourish that no one saw but him.
Later, his paperwork no further advanced, he decided the deputy must bring him something urgent. But what? A cup of coffee would do. He flung open the door and bellowed as before. 
The deputy immediately thrust his head out of a nearby doorway and said, ‘Yes, sir?’ and nobody fell at Orlov’s feet.
‘Where is she?’ he asked.
‘Gone, sir.’
‘Where?’
‘Don’t know,’ said his deputy. ‘She just left. Viktor Antonovich saw her run into the street.’
‘Why didn’t you stop her?’
‘I thought you wanted her to go?’
‘I did.’
‘Should I have stopped her, though?’ The deputy stepped into the corridor with one arm behind his back. A playing card dropped; it caught a breeze and floated across the corridor. 
‘No, of course not.’ Orlov ignored the card. He didn’t want the deputy to know he’d noticed they were playing without him again.
‘I can go look for her?’
‘Don’t be absurd. She’ll be long gone.’         
‘Yes, sir.’
Orlov returned to his office and shut himself in. So, she was gone. He ruffled the scarf and cape on the stand to agitate the winds of Siberia. From under the cape, the dead boy appeared and spoke.

*