The White Russian Read Online Free PDF Page B

what are the best interests of my child?”
    The elder Ruzsky gazed solemnly at his son. His face was deeply lined, his forehead creased by a severe frown. “If she finds you here, there will be a confrontation.”
    Ruzsky stared at the train. It was part of a set his father had commissioned for him on his seventh birthday from St. Petersburg ’s leading toymaker. Once, they had enjoyed playing with it together in the attic room at the top of the house.
    Ruzsky forced himself to meet his father’s glare. “He would be better off without me. Is that what you think?”
    There was no reply and Ruzsky felt the weight of the past upon him. He was no longer the chief investigator of the Petrograd Police Department, but a frightened eleven-year-old boy in the study at Petrovo.
    Ruzsky lowered his eyes and kept them fixed on the train as he fought to contain his emotions. He breathed in deeply. “Can a man never escape his past mistakes?” he asked.
    The elder Ruzsky did not flinch, his eyes fixed upon his son. “It is the boy’s welfare that concerns me now.”
    He turned around and walked slowly toward the study door. At its entrance, he bent down to pick up the wooden train engine and then, without a further glance, shut the door behind him, leaving Ruzsky alone in the corridor.
    The house was silent.
    Ruzsky heard a banging sound below, like a wooden bowl being hammered on a table. One of his father’s Great Danes gave a single bark and then was quiet.
    Ruzsky waited. Ever since Ilusha’s death, his life had been about that closed door. He wanted to move beyond it, but felt paralyzed once again.
    He could hear the sound of the Tompion clock on the mantelpiece in the drawing room.
    He recalled the dark winter afternoons of his childhood, marked out by the steady, rhythmic ticking of that clock. It was the sound of the inflexible regimentation of his father’s world.
    Ruzsky closed his eyes and let himself return to that day at Petrovo. He could almost feel the icy water’s embrace as his mind drifted toward a place that he knew deep in his heart would end the pain and guilt forever.
    His father had instructed him to make sure that Ilusha did not play on the ice now that spring was upon them. And even if he had not been there at the moment his little brother had made those fateful steps, even if he could have claimed that it was not his fault and that he had heard the cry and run to the lake and dived in and done his best to save him, there was no one who blamed Ruzsky more than he blamed himself.
    He should have gone with Ilusha.
     
    It was snowing heavily when Ruzsky emerged, but he didn’t take this or his surroundings in, until he had reached the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt. He stood on the street corner opposite the Alexander Garden, now, in winter, just dark, skeletal trees reaching for the sky, and tilted his face upward.
    He tasted the flakes as they fell.
    A detachment of soldiers in long greatcoats marched past him, then wheeled right onto the Nevsky. Ruzsky recognized them as members of the Semenovsky Regiment, though they hardly did justice to its reputation. They looked scruffy and marched without any of the precision that would have accompanied them before the war, when no regiment had moved anywhere in Petersburg unless immaculately turned out and in perfect order.
    Ruzsky thought for a moment of the painted soldiers he had kept neatly in boxes in his attic room in the house in Millionnaya Street. He wondered if they were still there, and if Michael played with them, also. The contrast with the St. Petersburg of his childhood was pervasive. It was the first day of the New Year, but he was certain there would be no reception in the great halls of the Winter Palace.
    Aside from the soldiers, the capital’s main thoroughfare was almost deserted. Two private sleds waited outside the Wolf and Beranger Café and, beyond them, a motor car was clanking noisily in his direction.
    Ruzsky pulled out his pocket