The Jewel of St Petersburg

Sixteen

NURSE SONYA WAS TO BE VALENTINA’S CHAPERONE FOR the afternoon. Her bulky figure sat upright on the seat in the Turicum in her best black coat and gloves, and Valentina noticed that her hat with its red velvet band was new.

“We are very privileged,” Nurse Sonya said, eyes bright. “To see the tsar.”

“That’s true.”

It was true. Valentina was acutely aware of that fact. But Arkin was sitting in front of her at the wheel of the car, and she wondered what thoughts were crowding through his proletarian brain. When the car drew up, the place wasn’t remotely as she had been expecting. She had imagined a wooden hut next to a giant hole in the ground and a rusty metal ladder fixed to the inside of the hole. She’d been nervous about climbing down and had abandoned most of her petticoats to make leg action easier. She wore a fox fur coat and hat at her mother’s insistence, as she would be in the presence of Tsar Nicholas, but underneath she’d chosen a simple wool dress with a high neck for warmth and a loose design for freedom of movement.

“Excited?” she asked the nurse as they stepped out of the car.

“To meet Tsar Nicholas will be one of the best moments of my life.” Nurse Sonya shook her head in astonishment. “I never thought I would live to see the day that I would receive such an honor.”

Arkin was standing beside the step to help her out of the car, and Valentina glanced up at his face. But she saw nothing there. He was wearing his usual bland expression, but she would bet her sable muff that he was listening to their conversation.

“Arkin,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Valentina.”

“When you have parked the car you may come back here to cheer the tsar when he arrives.” She looked straight into his impassive gray gaze. “If you wish.”

“Thank you, Miss Valentina.”

She gave him a small smile. A tiny victory in return for that rifle shot. Then she inspected the building they were about to enter. It wasn’t a wooden hut of any kind, quite the opposite in fact. It was an imposing three-story structure built of brick with an entrance framed by elaborate stonework. Most striking was the way its façade curved outward, as though imitating the curves of the tunnels that crept like thieves under the city’s streets. No giant holes in sight, not yet. No uniformed Cossacks either, the tsar’s personal bodyguards.

The doors swung open as she approached, and her pulse lost its rhythm when she saw Jens standing in the entrance. One hand was already stretched out toward her in greeting, as though impatient with the immaculate manners of the rest of him.

“Ladies, good afternoon, dobriy den. You have arrived. I thought you may have had second thoughts about coming out in this foul fog.”

Did he really think that she wouldn’t come?

He bowed over the older woman’s hand first and said, “You brighten my day, Nurse Sonya, with your glorious hat. It’s my pleasure to meet you.”

Her cheeks flushed. “This old thing. I thought its brim would protect me from any drips in the tunnels.”

“How perceptive of you,” he smiled.

Valentina wanted to snatch the nurse’s gloved hand from his, but when he finally turned to her she forgave him. Forgave him anything because he looked at her as if he had been waiting for this moment all day and counted the minutes all night. He let her see this, didn’t hide it from her. She thought that in today’s fog his eyes would be dull and colorless, but they shone as vivid as the first shoots of spring grass. He took her hand and for a moment she thought he was going to raise it to his lips, but he restrained himself. He bowed low over it instead, so that she saw the top of his head, the way his hair sprang from his scalp as though it had somewhere to go. She resisted the urge to touch it.

“Good afternoon, Jens,” she said quietly.

Their eyes held. Her fingers curled in his for a moment before she withdrew them.

“Is everyone here?” she asked him. “Ready for Tsar Nicholas’s arrival?”

His mouth tightened. “His Imperial Majesty has been unavoidably detained, I’m afraid. He will not be accompanying us on the tour of the engineering works after all.”

A squeal of disappointment came from Nurse Sonya. “Oh,” she said in a long, drawn-out sigh.

“I apologize for the unforeseen change of plan, but there are many calls on His Imperial Majesty’s time. Minister Davidov and his wife are here.”

“But no tsar?” the nurse wailed.

“No tsar.”

“Don’t be foolish, Nurse,” Valentina said sternly. “It’s the engineering accomplishment we have come to see. It will, I’m certain, make up for your disappointment.”

“Are you also disappointed, Valentina?”

It was Jens who asked, his question so sharp, so direct, it took her by surprise.

“No.”

“Truly?”

“I came to see the tunnels.”

“Then I’d better take you to them.”

He offered her his arm and they walked through the door together. There must have been an entrance hall and other people, but she didn’t notice them. She was aware only of the strong straight bones of his forearm under her hand and the warmth of his shoulder against hers.

The tunnels, she reminded herself. That’s why I’m here.

SHE’D BEEN WRONG ABOUT THE RUSTY LADDER. THEY’D descended in a heavy mechanical elevator, more suitable as an animal cage than a transporter of humans. The iron door slammed shut and Valentina’s stomach clung to the ground floor while the rest of her sank into the bowels of the earth. She’d greeted Madam Davidova, remembering her from the ball the other night, and been introduced to the other guests, but her thoughts were only with Jens and his tunnels.

They were distinctly menacing, The air underground smelled like a dead animal. Water dripped down the walls, and pockets of darkness hid from the string of lamps that looped along the arched roof.

There were twelve guests, including herself. Four officials from the project: an engineer, a surveyor, the foreman of the works, and lastly a water specialist. All of them moved through the tunnels as naturally as moles, ducking their heads without thinking when the rooflevel lowered, turning their faces automatically to one side when they passed an offshoot tunnel with its onrush of dank air.

Up in the entrance hall there had been speeches. Jens had given a talk on the aims of the project, on the need for drainage and sewer system to improve the health of the city. Two thousand dead last year, cholera rampant in the slums. So many millions of gallons pumped out each day. The low water table caused flooding because St. Petersburg was built on mosquito-infested marshes. So many million bricks, fired in Moscow and transported. A workforce that labored in twelve-hour shifts, night and day. Sewage pipes running arrow-straight all the way north to the Gulf of Finland.

Valentina stopped listening to his words. She stared at his mouth, watched the way his lips moved. He was wearing a leather hat that flattened his hair and thick rubber-soled boots that squelched through water, making slapping sounds. She liked the way everyone listened when he spoke, even the sour-faced Minister Davidov, and that when he eventually stopped speaking, he maneuvered himself into a position next to her.

“Interested?” he asked.

“Yes, very.”

“Frightened?”

“Yes, very.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “Your achievement is spectacular,” she added. “You must be very proud.”

He nodded, smiling at her, examining her face. Nurse Sonya was busy in front of them conversing at length with Madam Davidova about the use of camphor in rooms to rid a house of stale smells. She was just turning to advocate its use underground to Jens, when a sound like the crust of the earth cracking open roared through the tunnel, ripping at eardrums. The ground splintered beneath Valentina’s feet.

Lights blacked out as people’s screams echoed, only to be swallowed by the crash of rocks and bricks spilling down from above. Valentina stumbled, caught up in the panic, and would have fallen if a hand had not seized her wrist and yanked her against a wall. She groped for direction in the darkness. Blind and choking on dust, she had the sense to keep her mouth shut.

“This way.” Jens’s voice at her side was harsh and angry.

He pulled her along behind him. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Her ears hurt. She lowered her head as he dragged her into a smaller offshoot tunnel.

“This way!”

Valentina’s mind struggled. But she reached behind her, found someone else’s hand and pulled it along with her. Together the group stumbled forward. But ahead of her, even in the suffocating blackness, Jens seemed to know where he was heading, and his fingers had latched around her wrist tight as wire. He wasn’t going to let go of her. She clung to that single thought.

SILENCE. IT CAME IN THE END. THE SILENCE THAT ONLY exists underground. Jens knew it well, that total absence of sound. Sometimes he wondered if death was like this, not a burning raging hell but a cold and implacable absence. No life, no sound, no fresh air to breathe. A grinding ache gripped his skull. He lit a candle and only he saw the tremor in his hand. Around him he heard the whimpers of relief as the flame flickered into life. It was his rule never to venture underground without matches and a candle in his pocket.

“How many of us?” He counted heads. “Eight.”

Eight out of seventeen. Dear God! Minister Davidov was here and his wife, as well as Kroskin, the young surveyor. But no assistant engineer. No Prutz, the water specialist. Who else? He raised the candle higher, sending shadows scrambling through the thick dust-ridden air.

Valentina was here, crouched on the floor. For one sickening moment he feared she was hurt, but no, she was helping the nurse, both of them tending Kroskin, the young surveyor, who was stretched out on the damp ground. One of his trouser legs was shredded, and the flesh on his shin gleamed wetly. Two others stood trembling, a whiskered member of the Duma parliament and his wife. He was crying, deep hacking sobs, and she was rocking him in her arms, whispering sharp little instructions. “Hush, no tears, Jakob, hush now, wipe your eyes.”

“We’re going to die here.” His words came in short gasps.

Valentina raised her head. Her hat was gone, her dark hair coated in dirt. She turned steady eyes on Jens.

“Are we?” she asked. Just a straight question. “Are we going to die?”

All eyes fixed on him and Jens felt the weight of them as heavy as the layers of rock above their heads.

“No. Nyet. Of course not. Take a look at where we are. It’s what is called a passing chamber. Two sluice gates, one beside the other to channel and control the flow of water through the open gully over there.” He gestured into the darkness beyond the reach of the candle’s glow, and hot wax dripped onto his fingers. Keep talking. Keep crowding their minds with words to flush out their fears. “But over here”-he walked away from the huddle of figures-“on a hook, ready for emergencies, is this.”

He held up an oil lamp, like a magician producing a rabbit. He lit it from the candle flame and watched its light paint the ashen faces a sickly yellow. Their eyes grew rounder, no longer flat and stunned.

“We must give the aboveground engineers time to assess what has occurred,” he continued. “Everyone will be in shock up there at the moment, as we are down here.” He forced out a smile. “We’re safe here,” he told them. “Be thankful.”

“How do you know there won’t be another roof collapse any moment?”

It was Minister Davidov. Damn the man. Everyone scanned the curve of bricks three feet above their heads at its highest point, seeking cracks. Jens could smell their fear slinking around the chamber.

“The tunnel is strong and solid.”

“So strong it crashed down on us.” Davidov’s lean face was hollow with tension.

“No.”

“What do you mean, Friis?”

“The tunnel did not collapse because it was weak.”

Valentina rose to her feet, a small figure in the gloom of the cavern. “There was an explosion. I heard it.”

“Don’t talk rubbish, young woman. The roof was weak. It crashed down on-”

“She’s right,” Jens cut in.

Such sharp ears. She was alert, she listened. Most people didn’t listen.

“What the fuck are you trying to-”

“Andrei,” Madam Davidova said pleasantly as she laid a firm hand on her husband’s arm, “not now. Let’s get through this the best we can. Leave the recriminations till later.” She looked around her and smiled. It wasn’t a particularly convincing smile, but it helped. The tension slid down a notch.

“Madam Davidova, what you say is true. We must remain calm. The most important thing now is to check on everyone’s wounds.” Jens walked over to Kroskin, the surveyor on the floor. The young man’s arms were curled across his chest to hold in the pain. “How bad is it?”

Kroskin grimaced. “I’ll live.”

“We’ll all live.”

The nurse nodded encouragement. “The flesh is stripped off one leg below the knee but fortunately the bone isn’t broken.” Already in her hands was one of her voluminous petticoats, pressed hard against the wound.

“Here.” Jens pulled a pocketknife from his belt.

Kroskin’s eyes widened.

“We’re not going to hack your leg off, boy,” Jens reassured him. “Just cut up bandages.” He placed a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. “Do your best,” he murmured. “Davidov, come and slice up some bandages here.”

He passed the knife to the minister.

“Any more wounds?”

No one spoke. He looked around at his companions, trapped in this alien nether world of near-darkness, and he was impressed by their fortitude. He felt a rush of respect for them, even for that bastard Andrei Davidov, who had set to work on the petticoat with quick efficient strokes.

“We’ve all got bangs and bruises, I know, but”-they weren’t going to like this-“if there’s nothing else major, I’m going to leave you.”

“No. Don’t.”

It was Valentina. He noticed a graze on her neck.

“You’re going back there, aren’t you?” she said.

“I have to.”

“Because there might be others who are wounded.”

Wounded. Crushed. Pinned under rocks. Bleeding and dying. Maybe already dead. Everyone saw images in their heads.

Valentina said quickly, “It’s too dangerous to go alone. Take someone with you.”

Take me with you. That was what she meant.

He glanced across the chamber. “You.” He pointed to the Duma man, the frailest of them. “You come with me.”

Valentina made a soft noise in her throat. This close he could see the dirt caked on her eyelashes. But he couldn’t take her. He didn’t know what mangled limbs they might have to tread on down there. He relit the candle and took hold of the Duma man’s elbow, steering him back toward the mouth of the tunnel. He could feel the man’s arm trembling.

“Wait!” Valentina stopped him. “Take the lamp, you’ll need it more than we will. Leave us the candle.” She removed the lamp from beside the wounded man and carried it to Jens. She held it out. “Take it.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Spasibo.”

“Take care.”

He nodded. “Minister Davidov,” he called out, “watch out for the women.”

“Jens,” Valentina said in a low voice, “don’t you know that it is the women who watch out for you men?”

“So I should be taking you with me?”

“You should.”

“I can’t.”

“I know. No stars to look at this time.”

He couldn’t help a smile. Then he was gone, swallowed by the black tunnel so effortlessly that for a bleak moment he doubted his existence.

THE LIGHT, WHICH NOW HAD DWINDLED TO A MISERABLE candle flicker, made people more anxious, nervy as cats in a wolf cage. But for Valentina, the loss of him, that strong center of him, was the worst. Without Jens the chamber felt much emptier, the air fouler, the people smaller. The rescue that only minutes ago had seemed likely, abruptly became unlikely. She was frightened he wouldn’t come back.

She’d seen how he moved in the darkness as if he owned these tunnels, as if they were his, not the city’s. The way you own a house. And for the first time it hit her forcibly what this collapse of his beloved tunnels must mean to him. A groan came from the young surveyor, and she switched her thoughts. She had done all she could to make Kroskin comfortable after Nurse Sonya had finished binding his leg, but it wasn’t much. She had placed a scarf under his head and her fur coat over him, tucking it around him, trying to keep out the pain. His groans were muffled by the arm he had draped across his face and though she held his other hand between hers, he didn’t speak.

“Is your family here in Petersburg?” she asked.

He nodded, nothing more.

“I have a sister,” she told him softly. “Her name is Katya.” Katya, I’m not dead. Don’t believe them if they tell you I’m dead. And don’t be frightened for me. I’ll come back, I won’t abandon you, I promise. “She’s blond like you and loves to play cards. Do you have a sister?”

A nod again.

“What’s her name, your sister?”

Nothing. His shivers grew worse.

“They have safety systems,” she told him. “Rescue procedures. They’ll get us out of here, don’t worry.”

His arm fell from his face. “Is that true?”

“Of course it is.”

“She’s lying.” Davidov stood beside her, his sharp-angled shadow resting on her. “Just like she lied about hearing an explosion.”

“Why would I lie?” she demanded.

“To protect Friis. He’ll be hauled up for incompetence if we get out of here alive.”

She looked around at the others. “Did anyone else hear an explosion?”

Nurse Sonya shook her head. Madam Davidova was standing motionless, close to the candle on the floor as though nervous of leaving it. Its flame sent her shadow scuttling up the walls. She stared at her husband with a bemused expression. Only the Duma man’s wife, who had sunk down on her heels, nodded vehemently.

“I heard it,” she stated. “My ears still hurt from the blast. Don’t yours?”

“Yes,” Valentina said, and looked at Madam Davidova.

Slowly the minister’s wife nodded her head.

“An explosion,” Valentina repeated. She knew the sound. It had been blasted into her brain at Tesovo. “A bomb.”

The word splintered the fragile shell they had been sheltering under.

“Why would anyone attack the sewers?” Nurse Sonya whispered. Tears were running down her cheeks.

“It’s not the sewers,” Davidov snapped. “Are you too foolish to see the target?”

“The tsar,” Valentina stated bluntly. “They meant to kill the tsar.”

SHE WATCHED THE CANDLE, THE WAY THE HOT WAX pooled. Watched time burn. Still he didn’t return. She wanted to go after him. Instead she listened to the ever-present swirl and rush of water. She tried to assess the damage to the five faces huddled around the flame. It kept her mind off Jens’s absence.

Nurse Sonya was steady. She had seen death and damage before. Yes, there were tears, but her hands were steady as she tended her patient on the floor. The surveyor was crumbling. Sweating. Pain and fear too much for him. But Madam Davidova was harder to judge because she was schooled in self-control. Just a small crease between her eyebrows, pulled tight the way Mama did when she had a headache.

Mama? Don’t worry about me.

The Duma man’s wife was different. She couldn’t keep still. She sat, she stood, she paced, fingers fretting at her clothes, at her hair, at her throat. She was a thin woman. In the darkness she looked more like a shadow than a person. “The men have been gone a long time,” she said.

“Searching for others,” Valentina assured her. “It takes time.”

“But more rocks could fall.”

“We’d hear if they did. And, don’t worry, the men would shout to us.”

Davidov stepped between them. “We should not be too alarmed because we have among us someone who is the guarantee of our rescue.”

“Who?” the woman demanded.

Davidov directed his gaze at Valentina.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are about to become the jewel of St. Petersburg.”

“What do you mean, Andrei?” his wife asked.

He paid her no heed. “Is that not so, young lady?”

“No.”

“Valentina Ivanova is about to marry,” he announced. “Into one of the finest families in the city.”

“No.” Valentina wiped her hands on her filthy skirts. “It’s a lie.”

“Your father himself informed me of the match. Congratulations, my dear. And because of you, the Chernov family will move heaven and earth-and rocks-to get you out of here. They’ll send the army in if necessary.”

Valentina felt the air around her change. Hope fluttered faintly. Eyes brightened and hearts beat faster.

“Do you have matches, Minister?” Valentina asked coolly.

He frowned. “Yes, I do.”

“The candle is disappearing fast. We should save it.”

“What?”

“We must blow it out.”

THE DARKNESS WAS TOTAL. SHE LIKED IT THAT WAY. SHE could hide in it. She couldn’t believe she had ever been frightened of Jens’s tunnels.

Jens. Come back to us.

All six of them were seated on the cold ground in a circle, feet touching, so that all were anchored to each other. No one would feel that he or she had been cut adrift in the blackness, alone with the scurrying sound of rats slinking from tunnel to tunnel.

Valentina felt, rather than saw, the minister on her right lean close. “You are a bright and lovely creature, my dear,” he said under his breath, “far too intelligent to bow to the will of others when you so clearly have one of your own. Take this advice from an old campaigner. Use your weapons.”

“Weapons?”

“The greatest of all, my dear. Your beauty.”

“Do you know what the strongest weapon is?” she asked him in the pitch darkness. “One I will never possess.”

“What’s that?”

“Being born a man.”

He chuckled, low in his throat. She sensed him nodding acknowledgment that she was right.

WAS SHE DEAD? ARKIN WONDERED. He had asked himself that question a thousand times.

He didn’t want her dead. Or hurt. Or frightened. It shocked him how much he wanted her to be alive. Before this he had killed only strangers and always to further the cause, but this time it was different.

He glanced up at the window of her room, but she wasn’t there. He was waiting in the cold beside the Turicum outside the front door. Waiting. Half his damn life was spent waiting. When finally Minister Ivanov and his wife descended the steps, both wrapped in heavy furs, both stiff and silent with each other, they seated themselves on the blue leather and didn’t speak. They stared out at opposite sides of the street. It was a familiar routine, but it saddened Arkin that at a time like this, with their daughter missing, they couldn’t find something to hold them together. Was there so little left to their marriage?

As he drove, his mind replayed his conversation with Sergeyev.

“Tsar Nicholas is paying a visit to the new sewerage tunnels,” Arkin had told his friend. “This is our chance, Sergeyev.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. The nurse in our household can’t stop jabbering about it. She’s been invited along as chaperone to the older Ivanov daughter. It’s the perfect place for a trap.”

Sergeyev groaned. “Fuck this arm of mine. It means I’m no use to you. I’m not working underground again yet.”

Arkin had slapped him affectionately on his good shoulder. “No, my comrade, I know that. But your brother is.”

Together they started to distribute rifles, and for the first time in many months Arkin allowed himself to get drunk that night. Tension was a creature with claws and fangs, living in his guts, eating him alive.

MINISTER IVANOV DEPARTED WITH NOTHING MORE THAN curt nod to his wife and headed into the ministry on the Embankment, while Arkin turned the car around and drove back up Nevsky. Outside Madame Monique’s fashion house, he opened the Turicum’s door and though it was not his usual custom, he offered his hand to Elizaveta Ivanova to steady her on the car’s steps. To him she looked frail, the firm lines of her face blurred and uncertain. She accepted it, and before walking under the blue-and-white awning over the shop she thanked him.

“I’ll be an hour,” she said to him. “No longer.”

“Yes, madam.”

He bought a newspaper and read it in the car. But it told him little. An accident, they were calling it, a tunnel roof collapse. No mention of a bomb. No mention of an attempted assassination. Fuck the bastards. He cursed Tsar Nicholas for his fickle mind. Without the tsar, the corrupt regime would crumble because it had nothing to prop it up. When Minister Ivanov told him that His Imperial Majesty had gone ice skating that day with his children at Tsarskoe Selo instead of inspecting the tunnels, he’d wanted to howl. Where was the uprising? Where was the start of the brave new world Arkin had sold his immortal soul for?

Finally Madam Ivanova emerged, and he cranked up the engine. He waited for a tram to rattle past before pulling out in front of a monogrammed carriage, but the sight of all the extravagant shops and restaurants only deepened his sense of disappointment. He had truly believed these places would belong to the ordinary people of Russia today. He drove fast, needing to be away from there.

The noise, when he first heard it, startled him. For a second he thought he must have run over a cat. It was a single loud shriek that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Abruptly it ceased, but by then he’d realized it had come from behind him. He turned in his seat and saw Elizaveta Ivanova slumped forward, her elbows tucked into her lap, her face in her hands. She was moaning.

Arkin pulled into a side street and stopped the car. “Are you unwell, madam?”

The fur coat didn’t move. Just the low moan that went on and on. He stared at her crumpled figure and found himself breathing awkwardly. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and stood on the icy pavement, the wind snatching at his peaked cap.

“Madam?” he said.

The moaning broke off. Still the sable coat remained hunched forward, but quivers ran through it and quiet sobs began to leak between her fingers. Instinctively he slid into the seat beside her. It broke all the rules, but to hell with the rules. He sat next to her, not touching, not speaking, just being there. When the quivering finally ceased and one of her gloved hands reached into the small gap between them, he placed his own hand over it. Glove on glove, the faintest of comforts, and they remained like that. Minutes passed. Several pedestrians glanced at them with a surprised expression, but Arkin ignored them.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Slowly, Elizaveta Ivanova hauled herself back to an upright position and took a long shuddering breath. She didn’t look at him or remove her hand, but her back was ramrod straight once more and the tears had stopped.

“She may still be alive,” Arkin said quietly.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Don’t give up hope.”

Her mouth pulled into a faint parody of a smile. “I gave up hope years ago.”

“There’s no need to. Hope is what keeps us going.”

“Hope for what?”

“For a daughter still alive. For a life worth living.”

She turned her face toward him, and he saw the cold loneliness in her blue eyes. Her fur hat was crooked and a strand of fair hair had come unpinned, hanging in a curl across her cheek. He wanted to straighten both for her. To straighten her life for her.

“Is your life worth living?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She inspected him, taking in as if for the first time the dark spikes of his hair under his hat, the line of his mouth, and the careful expression in his eyes. Still her hand lay under his.

“Thank you, Spasibo,” she said again.

She sat back against the seat and closed her eyes. Beneath the almost transparent skin of her eyelids he could see her eyes moving, restless as his own heartbeat, and he waited quietly while she found in herself whatever it was she needed to go on. When it started to snow, he removed his hand, returned to the front seat, and drove her home.

JENS FRIIS CAME BACK TO THEM. VALENTINA WAS THE FIRST to sight the faint glow of the lamp, the first on her feet, the first to greet him and to see that the Jens who returned was not the same Jens who’d left them. His face had changed. In some indefinable way the bones sat differently, as if they had been taken apart while he was gone and reassembled by an unfamiliar hand. His eyes had sunk deeper in his head and a hard line ran down from each corner of his mouth. He was brusque. Unapproachable. He explained in brief sentences what he’d seen.

“The tunnel is completely blocked back there by rocks and rubble.”

Valentina studied his hands. Gloves in tatters, blood oozing down his wrist.

“It is too much to remove. The roof is unstable. No rescue teams will be coming that way because more of the tunnel roof could come crashing down at any time.”

“Did you find anybody?” Nurse Sonya asked.

The Duma man backed off to the gully and vomited into the water.

“There were bodies,” Jens acknowledged. His mouth was tight. No one asked for more.

“Now,” he said, “we wait.”

DO YOU SWIM?”

Valentina’s stomach flipped over. “Yes.” In the creek in the summer, back in the days when her sister could kick. “Yes, I can swim.”

“Good.”

“Will it come to that?”

“It could.”

She imagined the cold water. “I don’t think my nurse can swim.”

“Then we shall keep her afloat between us. Don’t look so worried. It most likely won’t be necessary.”

“I hope not. Will the water be filthy?”

“Probably.”

WHEN THE OIL LAMP WAS LIT, THEY LIVED IN ONE KIND of world. Valentina paced up and down the cavern to the limit of the lamp’s range, but she didn’t venture beyond it. That would be too much. She was thirsty, her throat dry. The older women remained seated on the damp ground, quietly discussing the desirability of a hot bath. Jens stood by the gully water and smoked cigarette after cigarette. His leather hat had disappeared and his red hair had turned a dirty gray, flattened to his head by the weight of brick dust. At intervals he walked over to the young surveyor, studied the flushed face, and exchanged a few words with Nurse Sonya.

When the lamp was off, they lived in a different kind of world, one that released the demons that fled from daylight. The small group sat in a circle again, feet touching.

“Try to sleep,” Jens ordered.

He crouched down beside Valentina, took off his coat, and draped it over her.

“Spasibo. Let’s share it,” she said.

In the total darkness she felt the touch of his hand as he spread the heavy coat over their laps. As time crawled past and voices quieted, the incessant swirl and flow of the water filled her mind and she pictured it rising, slowly, implacably, until she was drowning in her sleep.

“Hush.”

Jens’s voice in her ear. Jens’s hand on her chin. Her eyes jerked open but met only blackness.

“Hush,” he murmured again.

She was aware of his body leaning over hers.

“You were whimpering. Bad dream?”

“Yes.”

“This place invites bad dreams.”

The blackness was thicker than pitch. She could make out no trace of his face, but she heard him swallow and felt the soft brush of his lips on hers. There one moment, then gone. So brief she wasn’t certain. Tentatively she touched his face and her fingers found the high forehead, the straight line of one eyebrow, and slid down to explore his eyelid and the dense fringe of eyelashes. She had never touched a man’s face before.

“When will the water come?” she whispered.

“Soon, I imagine. They have to evacuate the tunnels that we need to escape through and rid them of water.”

She breathed carefully, drawing in the air they shared.

“Do you know what I would like now?” he asked.

“What?”

“Four slices of cool refreshing pineapple, sweet and tangy. Two for you, two for me.”

She laughed with surprise.

“Sleep now,” he murmured. “No more dreams. Don’t worry, I’ll listen for the water.”

THE WATER CAME, JUST AS JENS HAD KNOWN IT WOULD. His sharp ears picked up the change in its voice, a sudden shift in note long before it reached them: a distant sound rattling through pipes and tunnels far off in the system. Water was being redirected, sluices opened and closed. Certain tunnels had to be emptied before the trapped group could escape, and now the sound of the water grew louder.

“Just remain calm,” he told them. “As soon as the water is through this chamber, we can all climb up into the higher tunnel and walk our way out. Watch your heads; the ceiling height will be low. Keep together and take a firm hold on the rope.” It wasn’t a rope. It was their belts fixed together into a long line to stop anyone being swept away.

“How deep will it be?” the nurse asked. Her teeth were chattering.

“Not deep at all. Hold on to the rope.”

They stood in a line behind him. The wounded surveyor was belted onto Jens’s back, just conscious enough to grip around his neck. He was a skinny young man, not too much weight, but Jens worried about the open wound on his leg in the foul water. Next to him stood the nurse, dropping prayers from her lips like rosary beads. Jens raised the lamp in one hand and took a grip on her arm with the other. On the far side of her stood Valentina. He would have given much to be able to seize her hand and not release it, but he had given his word to help her nurse. One on each side of her, he’d promised, but all the time he’d be watching Valentina. He’d put Davidov behind her, then Davidov’s wife, followed by the Duma couple.

When the water came, it rose out of the gully and sneaked across the floor of the chamber as black as oil, but no one panicked. There were raw gasps as the icy flow increased to a flood, crawling over their feet, sliding up their shins, and swirling around their knees. When it reached Valentina’s thighs, billowing her skirt around her, her eyes sought his. Her hands held tight onto the rope and onto Nurse Sonya as a rat swept past them, swimming frantically.

Jens judged it carefully. “Now,” he shouted.

He raised the lamp and set off. They followed meekly, up the four stone steps to the higher-level tunnel where the outflow had slowed to a knee-high slick of freezing filth. The stench was suffocating and the roof level low. Davidov crunched his head against bricks and swore, but Jens led them as fast as he dared, pulling the makeshift rope behind him. Once in this channel, it was not far to an exit.

“All well?” he shouted out.

“Da.”

“Not much farther.”

“How long?”

But Jens’s ears had caught a sound, a rumble. Above the noise of legs splashing through the water came a distant but distinct rumble.

“Faster,” he ordered.

He lengthened his stride. “Almost there,” he called out.

“What’s that noise?” Davidov yelled.

The panic swept out of nowhere. One moment they were orderly and then suddenly they were running through the filth, stumbling and sprawling, all realizing what the rumbling heralded. The rope was abandoned. The surveyor tightened his grip till he was throttling Jens, but Jens still clutched the nurse and saw that Valentina had an arm around Madam Davidova, who was having difficulty breathing. Her husband was up ahead.

“Take that opening up there on the right. You may see daylight from it,” Jens called to him.

Daylight. It was only a word. Daylight. Jens had saved it till now. It brought hope in its wake. They hurried, scrambling and splashing to the side recess, turned the corner into it, and immediately Jens heard shouts. He came through last, dragging Nurse Sonya with him, and immediately saw what he’d known would be there. An iron ladder, a metal trapdoor above it. Daylight seeping through the small holes, air that was clean. A cheer went up, and tears were rolling down Madam Davidova’s cheeks.

The rumble of water burst into a roar right behind them.

“Up,” Jens ordered sharply.

Davidov climbed first. He raised the metal trapdoor with his shoulders, so that it clattered open onto the roadside and white air billowed in, making those in the tunnel squint as they stared upward. Quickly Jens hoisted the surveyor off his back and onto the ladder, so that Davidov could haul him up, followed by the Duma man and his wife. The water was rising fast now, up to Jens’s waist already.

“Valentina, climb!”

But she pushed the nurse onto the lowest rung. Nurse Sonya was shivering so fiercely her plump hands could scarcely hold the metal.

“Bistro! Quickly!” Jens shouted.

He hooked an arm around Valentina’s shoulders and lifted her onto the rung as a surge of water cascaded through the tunnel.

“Go,” he said. He gave her sodden boot a push.

He seized Madam Davidova’s wrist and placed her hand on the ladder. Saw her fingers curl around it. A dozen more steps and it would be over. But that was when the torrent hit. A great churning wall of water crashed into them, ripping the ground from under them, leaping up the ladder, tearing fingers from metal. The lamp went. The world blacked out. Jens was hurled into the water. Filth in his mouth. His head cracked against a wall. His lungs burned as he fought his way up toward the square of light, but something or somebody crashed against him, submerging him again.

He seized a flailing arm underwater and dragged it back to the surface. For a brief moment he held it and caught a glimpse of a terrified face before the roaring current ripped it away. It was Madam Davidova. Valentina was screaming at him. Her dark figure leapt over him, into the water.

“No!” he bellowed, “Valentina, no!”

He lashed out and caught her long hair; his fingers twisted into it and yanked it toward him against the rush of the current. Her body was small and slight, but Valentina was kicking at him. “Let me go,” she screamed, dragging them under. He didn’t let her go; he would drown before he let her go. A hand stretched out from the ladder, hurling a coat onto the water’s surface. He snatched at a sleeve and was hauled in toward the metal rungs by the Duma man.

“Spasibo,” he grunted.

Valentina was quiet now, locked in the circle of his arms, staring back along the path of the water’s torrent. Madam Davidova was gone. A low moan seeped out of Valentina, an animal sound of grief, but she didn’t resist when he lifted her up the ladder. In the cold gray light of a winter’s morning, they stood in a battered huddle, wet and exhausted, in the empty road. Davidov dropped to his knees, his face in his hands. Jens was not ready yet to look at the extent of his own failure. That time would come, when he was alone, away from the eyes of the world. For now he held Valentina’s trembling body against his and stroked the filth out of her hair.

“I could have saved her,” she whispered, the words shivering on her tongue.

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t.”

In the distance he could hear cars speeding toward them. But the future he had prepared for himself was speeding away from him, as out of control as the raging flood in the tunnels below St. Petersburg.