A Negotiable Instrument

Chapter 1 - Thursday, 2nd December 1909, St Petersburg

Berdichevski was feeling pleased with himself. It had been a good night. Similar to many of his nights over the last few weeks, but none the worse for that. He first began to hang around the drinking dens soon after he had been recruited. He was exactly the sort of human flotsam they preyed upon. No job, no friends, and no family, at least none who would care to admit to it. He was just another of the ever-growing horde of former serfs who had been set adrift on the sea of emancipation and now found themselves washing up on Piter's windswept shores. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty and wretched squalor of village life, very few were capable of throwing off the shackles of their peasant nature.

Berdichevski didn't see it that way, of course. He was being paid to spend the comrades' money and what more could a man ask for? The money he threw around so lavishly had got his bovine face noticed and had made him new friends. He soon discovered, just as the comrades had instructed, that as well as the illicit home-brewed samogon and the listless heavy-boned whores, a few of the drinking dens offered the opportunity to gamble. Not just for the few kopecks that were all anyone ever had back in the village. No, these were serious games for serious money played by serious men. It was, he had been predictably slow to realise, the money-launderer's mother lode.

He had lost a lot of money over the course of the evening at his new favourite haunt, but it wasn't the first time. Besides, he ruminated contentedly as he lumbered along, there was plenty more where that came from. The comrades were printing it like it was going out of fashion. And his new friends, friends who were on hand whenever he flashed his freshly-minted money around, had been impressed. He had let them know with subtle winks and significant looks, nothing more obvious, that he had other friends. These other friends, he intimated, preferred the anonymity of the shadows, but they always took good care of him.

As he plodded ponderously home past the looming factories on Polyustrovskiy Prospect, wrapped up against the cold Petersburg night in his cumbrous overcoat and scarf, his ushanka pulled firmly down over his ears, he hummed a little ditty. His rumbling baritone, uncanny in its resemblance to the plaintive lowing of an ox, resounded from the anonymous walls that lined the street. A blanket of fog swaddled the Tsar's Imperial city, blotting out any light from the moon, the gaslights casting a luminous glow that obscured more than they revealed. His new friends had been very persuasive, he had enjoyed the attention, and he was fairly sure he was even more drunk than usual.

The iron bar descended out of the shadows and struck the back of Berdichevski's skull. The force of the blow was enough to knock him to the ground. He squealed like a stuck pig, trying to struggle back up, but his face was forced into the dirt by the heavy boot on his neck.

'No move!' hissed in his ear. The accent was guttural and harsh, and he couldn't immediately place it. Two possibilities crept sluggishly through Berdichevski's befuddled brain. Either the comrades were unhappy with his dedication to the cause, probably using someone from another part of the organisation to instruct him in the error of his ways, or it was just a random act of street violence. He clung desperately to the second possibility.

He felt his arms being hauled up behind his back and his wrists tied together, then his ankles. The pressure on his neck eased as large rough hands fumbled around inside his coat until they found his money-roll. Hope soared, mingled with a growing sense of outrage. Of all the drunks staggering home that night why did they have to pick on him? He managed to force his head around and found himself looking up into a pair of small glittering black eyes sunk so deeply into the stubbled dough of a massive head that they appeared to be boring their way into the soft flesh. The huge man concentrated on peeling off a couple of red-backs from the money-roll, his breath coming in short dry rasps. Berdichevski thought he had seen the man somewhere before but his befuddled brain couldn't make the connection. The man leant his bulky frame forward, and for one incredulous moment Berdichevski thought he was about to kiss him.