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It’s not far off. I can feel it.”
    We were both right: I about Kerensky being too weak, she about the beginning of the end. It gave neither of us satisfaction that when next we met, we could read in each other’s faces exactly how right we’d both been.
    By then, the only real question was when Lenin would strike. The city was alive with rumours. The day after I spoke to Cyn, I gave Joseph a hundred roubles and told him not to come back until he knew every detail of the coup.
    On the morning of 25 October 1917, not having seen him for a week, I spotted him walking wearily up the steps at the front of the palace. I went to the door. He didn’t come in, just leaned against the jamb.
    He laid his forefinger across his palm: “Tonight.”
    His second finger: “The Smolny Convent.”
    And the third: “Lenin, Trotsky—and Glebov. The three of them. By tomorrow Kerensky will be out.”
    He was exhausted. I steered him down the corridor to our room. He collapsed into the American chrome chair. “To do it a week ago was their original plan. Then someone remembered that Chaliapin would be singing
Don Carlos
tonight. So they postponed the coup. The first shots won’t be fired until Kerensky is snug in his box and the man is singing.”

Seven

    W E LEFT the palace at ten that night, going out the back way. I’d bought the trays and their smocks from a couple of
gribochki
, or mushroom sellers, as a disguise and wanted to have a stroll along Nevsky to see how best to carry the act off.
    â€œStoop, Doig,” said Joseph. “Be common.”
    That wasn’t so easy from a height of six foot two with a tray round my neck. In any case no one gave us a second glance. And the reason that they didn’t was they were watching open-mouthed as a file of Red Guards marched down the Prospekt— politely, disciplined, not on the pavement but in the gutter with the horse shit. You could even say they were marching humbly.
    A group of young officers staggered out of the Makayev champagne bar clinging to their bottles of Krug Elite and their furred-up whores. Everything was funny to them. They bayed at the beggars blinded in the war, and tossing scarves round their long necks they bayed at the moon, which was gliding along behind the battlements of a dense bank of sea fog.
    The Guards drew level with them. I heard the soldier in charge say loudly, “Smarten up, smarten your step there! Swing those arms, pick up your knees, let’s show the
boorjoi
swine who’s who in Russia!”
    â€œMake no mistake,” I said to Joseph, “the age of cigars and palaces is over. This morning it was on its deathbed. Now it’s a goner. Nothing’s surer when Bolsheviks parade down Nevsky and no one can stop them.”
    â€œWhat comes next?”
    â€œThe age of survival,” I replied, at which point Kerensky, in an act of desperation, had the electricity turned off. For aninstant the coils in the street lamps glowed orange, then there was darkness except for the charcoal beds of the chestnut sellers’ braziers. Darkness and the smell of fog.
    I was glad for that shroud of fog. When murder’s in one’s heart one looks different. One’s nerves get taut. Slips are made. In fact one’s entire behaviour is altered, and people notice this. They follow you with their eyes and quietly observe all the ways in which you’ve ceased to be normal. A man thinking of murder becomes a public spectacle.
    We walked quickly, along Konyushennaya, right past the Church of the Resurrection and into Mikhailovski Gardens.
    Everything was quiet. A couple of mallard lay tucked up on the lake, floating on the murky water like a pair of abandoned shoes.
    I said to Joseph, “This is a very tranquil affair. Are you sure?”
    He replied in a low, intense voice—grabbing my arm, “Doig, is it true that you’ve never been afraid?”
    I could think