Blood Red, Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick Page B

mind stopped seeing anymore.
    Somehow keeping his footing, he reached her hand and pulled, felt her other hand grab his coat.
    Something slipped, and then all he knew was the noise of the tram dying away. They lay in the snow for long seconds, and only then did it all become clear.
    “My God,” Arthur said. He rolled over and looked at Evgenia, who sat up. She had a frown on her face like a sulky schoolgirl, and he almost laughed. Almost.
    “You could have been…”
    It didn’t need saying.
    She stood in front of Arthur, slightly lopsided with one heel missing.
    “Those,” she said, “were expensive shoes.”
    Now Arthur did laugh, but offered to find a drozhka to take her home.
    “You can’t do that,” she protested. “It’s far too expensive. I’ll wait for another tram.”
    “I’ll get a cab and I’ll come with you to Vasilievsky. Then I’ll get it to take me home. Haven’t you had enough of trams for one night?”
    “I have had enough of trams,” she said, smiling, and he took that for a yes. He went to find a cab, and as he did, he heard her say something else, though it wasn’t clear.
    It might have been, “but not enough of you.” The words were lost in the evening wind.
    The accident had changed things, Arthur knew that.
    It had brought them closer, helped Arthur to see the real woman, the honesty in her eyes. If Trotsky had set them up, he didn’t care. He’d done him a favor.

 
    7:20 P.M.
    THE BATH IS A THIRD FULL with the spitting hot water and now Arthur dares to let the icy cold in to mix with it. He strips absentmindedly, stirring the water with one foot, then lowers himself gingerly in as hot as he can bear it. Within seconds his skin is pink from the heat, and he feels the pain in his shoulders ease slightly.
    His body relaxes, but there is no release for his mind. His soul is tired. The wave that has rolled through Russia has been easy to ride. He’s been swept along, but nonetheless there’s horror waiting just beneath the water, and every now and again, one of the horrors surfaces.
    *   *   *
    Almost right from the start, it was unclear whose side he was on.
    He was summoned to the Smolny one day early in January, not to see Trotsky or Lenin, but another of the Bolshevik clan. Karl Radek possibly outshone his more powerful colleagues in terms of intellect, and certainly eccentricity. Arthur was shown into an office where he was greeted by a tiny man, with pointed nose and clean-shaven chin, wild and wiry hair, small round glasses, and a pipe seemingly glued to the corner of his mouth. He reminded Arthur not so much of a man as a pixie, or some sort of hobgoblin.
    On the table beside him lay a collection of books, and some other items, too. Arthur immediately recognized them as his own. When he left Stockholm, he’d feared a difficult journey and had asked Vorovsky to send much of his stuff after him. Vorovsky had sent them, just not to the right person.
    “You had no business to open that!” Arthur declared.
    “Mr. Ransome,” he said, smiling, “it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
    Thrown off guard, Arthur returned the handshake.
    “What I said to myself,” Radek went on, “is what kind of man owns such diverse and wonderful things! These books alone. What have we here?”
    He began to rummage, like a squirrel foraging, all the time a generous smile on his face.
    “Aha! Shakespeare! So I know the man is a good Englishman. “To be or not to be,” yes? “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of…”
    He broke off.
    “But why am I reciting Shakespeare to you? You are the Englishman!”
    He laughed.
    “I am a Pole,” he said. “I’m a Pole who speaks Polish badly because I talked too much German when I was in exile with Mr. Lenin and the others. But when I speak Russian I sound Polish, do I not? I speak French, too, but abominably. Hmm. But we were talking about you. How rude of me. Here we have a chess set, with folding board and