Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

“General Graves? I’m afraid you’ve lost me. What does General Graves have to do with Russia?” Ned asked, feigning ignorance but feeling all at once as if he had been stripped naked and his deepest secrets exposed.

“Oh, pardon me, I suppose I’ve grown too accustomed to dealing with people in the know,” McCloud answered in a mocking tone.

Ned felt his face redden with indignation. How could McCloud and Cousin Pierre both know what Colonel Holt claimed was a closely held military secret?

”You see,” the journalist went on, “the President has appointed the good general to lead our new American Expeditionary Force in Russia. The announcement is due any day now.” Then McCloud moved in close and asked Ned in a low voice, “I hear you’re with the 27^th Infantry. They’re slated to ship out with Graves, you know. Good Lord, haven’t they bothered to tell you about it?”

“Not a word,” Ned answered with a straight face, though he sensed that McCloud knew he was lying. By now, Ned’s distress at the man’s revelations had subsided. So much for government secrecy, he thought. The press and bankers and the tycoons will always find out what they need to know from Washington.

“That’s all right, laddie. Either way, I can imagine how the news might come to you as a shock,” the journalist sympathized. “After all, hardly anyone in his right mind goes to Siberia by choice. I mean, Moscow is cold, but Siberia…” McCloud shook his head as if suffering a violent fit of the shivers.

“So you think they’ll really send…”

“They’ll send you, all right,” McCloud answered with lowered eyes as he let his empty glass drop to his side. “The die is cast. Just ask your Cousin Pierre…”

Ned looked aside and reached out to hand off his empty glass to a nearby waiter.

“Have a lovely evening,” he said to McCloud as he turned to leave. “And good luck in your travels.”

“And you in yours,” the older man responded with a genial wink. “Knowing the language will be a great help to you, I’m sure.”

Ned froze.

“Of all the…” he sputtered. “Where on earth did you get the idea that I might speak Russian?”

“From an admirer of yours,” the journalist answered, casting a glance across the room to where Corinne Buckner stood among a gaggle of admiring bachelors.

Chapter 4: Trans-Siberian Railway

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

—Leon Trotsky

Musical Theme: Ballet Suite No. 4, I. Prelude, by Dmitri Shostakovich

LATE NOVEMBER, 1918, IRKUTSK

Ned returned to Irkutsk from his excursion to the Dorokhin estate late Monday evening, after a fitful train ride interrupted by frequent breakdowns. Throughout the ensuing night, spent on a cot at the former girls’ school, he found it difficult to sleep. Again and again his thoughts returned to Zhanna and her determination to visit Admiral Kolchak at Omsk.

From time to time he heard shots outside the barred windows, some at a distance and some seemingly within a block or two. Though he was a military man well accustomed to random gunfire, it disconcerted him that, in a city more than two thousand miles from the front lines of Russia’s civil conflict, so much violence could occur inside its city center. At last he managed to drop off until the screeching of metal streetcar wheels woke him from a restless sleep and the familiar odors of the crowded dormitory room assaulted his nose in the early morning darkness.

An hour later, he was on the street, making his way to the American consulate for a meeting with Colonel David Prescott Barrows, intelligence chief for the AEF in Siberia and Ned’s commanding officer. Barrows was the first person Ned had sought out upon his arrival at AEF Headquarters in Vladivostok, and the colonel had gone to great lengths in organizing Ned’s orientation during his first weeks in Russia. Now, little more than a fortnight after leaving Vladivostok, Barrows’ urgent telegram summoning Ned to the Irkutsk consulate had come as a surprise, even though Ned knew that Barrows spent much of his time visiting far-flung AEF posts along the Trans-Siberian Railway,

When arriving at the former merchant’s residence that housed the U.S. consulate, Ned stated his name and asked the young female American secretary to summon Mr. McGowan, the vice consul, as instructed in the telegram. Instead of being led into the consul’s office, however, the woman escorted him to a sitting room on the second floor. There he found Colonel Barrows seated at a sun-drenched desk overlooking a rear courtyard while drafting telegrams, his unlit pipe and tobacco pouch within easy reach.