Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

The clerk returned a vacant look that left Ned unable to discern whether the man was hard of hearing, dim-witted, or not yet fully awake.

“But, sir, the diplomatic cargo left Moscow on the morning train, as it always does,” the man apologized.

“I see. How unfortunate,” Ned answered with an embarrassed frown. “May I come in and take a look around, anyway? I can’t imagine why they sent me all this way unless something of ours were aboard this train.”

“Welcome,” the clerk offered with a bewildered look.

Ned took several minutes to perform a slow inspection of the car’s contents, stopping to look closely at the locked cage where diplomatic and other valuables were kept.

“Ah, very well,” he said at last. “It seems I was given incorrect information. Still, I had best remain with the mail car until we reach Petrograd, in case the consul comes looking for me. May I stay?” Ned concluded, pointing to a pile of crumpled mail sacks where someone before him had obviously lay down to sleep.

“Welcome,” the clerk repeated with a careless shrug, and returned to his hammock at the far end of the car.

Ned was aroused from a deep sleep about an hour later when the train was shunted with a loud thud onto a side track upon entering the Petrograd rail yards. He looked at his watch: it was only half past eight in the morning, though it seemed as if several hours had gone by. The station at Petrograd would be busy with rush hour traffic when the train pulled in, yet the sun would not rise for another two hours. If he could get a good head start, he might have a fair chance of evading the two thugs and boarding his ship before they could find him.

“I need to get off the train the moment it stops to look for our consul. Could you find a way to open the door a bit early for me?” he asked the baggage clerk with a conspiratorial smile.

“Against regulations,” the clerk refused, his eyes displaying a familiar Russian blend of suspicion and avarice.

“I see,” Ned answered, still smiling. “But for this, we have a special regulation. Here, I’ll show you.”

He reached inside his pocket and pulled out his wad of American currency, peeling off a ten-dollar bill, then another, and then a third. The clerk reached out to take them, but Ned held them back.

“Very special regulation, my friend. Just between you and me,” Ned added. “And if the consul comes here looking for me, tell him I’ll be right back. Understood?”

Ned held out the tenners again and the Russian snatched them up.

Ten minutes later the train ground to a halt at Petrograd’s Moskovsky Station. Ned lowered himself carefully onto the platform and melted into the crowd. The next thing he did was to pay an old one-legged soldier twenty dollars for his ragged brown Imperial Russian Army greatcoat, which Ned put on over his own jacket.

Moments later he found a droshky and hopped in.

“Drive out from the city by the fastest route,” Ned ordered.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Just drive, and I’ll tell you shortly,” Ned replied, scanning the street behind him until he was satisfied that they weren’t being followed.

“Now to the port. And quick! I’ll triple your fare if you go your fastest!”

Within ten minutes, they were at the seaport, amid freighters, ferries, riverboats, and passenger steamers bound for the Gulf of Finland and beyond. For another quarter of an hour, they wandered from slip to slip, asking random dockworkers where to find the Duchess of Mecklenburg until he finally found one who knew. Ned felt the hairs on his neck stand up, worried that the thugs might have picked up his trail or, worse yet, had assumed he would go to the port and were racing there now to head him off.

Ned told the droshky driver to pull into the shadow of a warehouse half a block from the ship’s gangplank. Ned paid the driver but asked him to wait while he surveyed the wharf’s apron for signs of pursuit. And that’s when he saw them: the same two goons in long overcoats and homburg hats, standing about fifteen yards to either side of the gangplank. He couldn’t possibly board the ship without one of them getting to him. But the Duchess was not due to sail for another hour.

He decided to wait. He paid the driver and sent him on his way before ducking into an alley between stacks of cargo. And in that moment Ned remembered what Madame Yelena had predicted while aboard the Red Cross train to Omsk. If his work with Zhanna failed, Yelena had foretold, he would suffer badly and possibly not leave Russia alive. Zhanna was dead, and he had failed to protect her. Did that mean he might be fated to die in Russia, after all?