Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

“Kolchak condones this?” Ned asked. “Who are these Stavka men? Why doesn’t he cashier them?”

But before the colonel could answer, the waiter brought their plates of fried perch and a fresh carafe of vodka.

Ward delayed his response until the waiter was out of earshot. By now, more tables were occupied and a few of the newer patrons, decidedly less patrician-looking than those he had seen when he first arrived, were eyeing the two Allied officers to a degree that made Ned uncomfortable. Could these be Bolshevik agents of the kind that Ivashov and others had warned him against? Or might they work for the Stavka?

“You will meet some of the Stavka men tonight,” he replied as he lifted his fork to eat. “And you will begin to understand how they keep their grip on things.”

But through the rest of the meal, Ned felt little appetite, for all he could think of were the eyes focused on him from around the room.

* * *

Ned and Colonel Ward left the Lyubinsky Café in a sleigh driven by a British soldier, with an armed guard seated to either side. This was done to deter assassination attempts, which had been commonplace under the tsar and had lately come back into fashion at Omsk. Though Ned carried a .45 caliber auto-loading pistol for protection and believed he was too obscure a personage to have become a target for political murder, the protection seemed amply justified for Ward.

The colonel’s sleigh followed a larger one, manned by four Russian escorts, to the military city on the opposite side of Omsk, where it stopped in a rail yard opposite a row of substantial red brick barracks. Nearby stood an odd-looking church with two towers, one of Byzantine design and the other in Gothic style.

Their destination was a string of private lounge and sleeper cars that, unlike the usual grime-encrusted Russian passenger carriages, sparkled with icicles from a recent scrubbing. At the urging of their Russian escorts, the two foreigners climbed into a parlor car whose interior resembled a reading room in a fashionable New York men’s club, with horsehide wall coverings and overstuffed leather sofas and armchairs. At the far end of the room, a duty officer sat at a desk, with a Cossack guard posted at the door behind him.

As Colonel Ward had explained en route, though the Admiral used these cars to visit the front and to conduct sensitive meetings, they were not where he lived or worked while in Omsk. Kolchak rented a modest apartment at the merchant Batyushkin’s house on Irtysh Street. He worked mainly at offices located nearby at Liberty House. And his reputed mistress, Madame Timiryova, worked as a translator at the Ministry of Trade but kept separate rooms for herself and her French maid that the Admiral rarely visited.

The two Allied visitors had barely sat down in the carriage when the Russian duty officer summoned them into the adjoining car, where they were met by the striking but incongruous sight of Admiral Kolchak seated opposite eight members of his staff standing rigidly in a straight line, like a Greek chorus or a travesty of Judgment Day. While the staff members advanced to shake Colonel Ward’s hand, Ned gave the Supreme Ruler a lingering stare. Kolchak returned his look with piercing gray eyes for a fleeting moment before shifting his attention to a spot somewhere to Ned’s right.

The newly anointed dictator of Siberia was a small, dark man of erect bearing with a resolute expression etched permanently onto his lean visage. He wore a British officer’s tunic with broad Siberian epaulets, and his mannerisms reminded Ned somehow of the Emperor Napoleon, whom Kolchak was said to idolize. When it was Ned’s turn to shake the Admiral’s cold, dry hand, he felt it tremble and noticed a red rash emerging from beneath the cuff. This, and Kolchak’s habit of running his tongue over his thin, chapped lips, gave Ned the impression of a man under immense nervous strain.

When all were seated around a narrow conference table, Kolchak nodded to a tall officer about thirty-five years of age with puffy, clean-shaven cheeks, bald pate, and the rounded, fleshy appearance of a man who lived too well. This, he knew from Ward’s description, would be Kolchak’s Army Chief of Staff, Major General Dmitri Antonovich Lebedev. Lebedev rose, inflated his barrel chest, and spoke in a deep sonorous voice.

“We are here to discuss the British-American plan to improve our military communications by means of wireless telegraph. As you may recall, the idea was proposed by your General Knox during his visit to Omsk in October, then presented in greater detail by the American Colonel Barrows. At that time, the wireless devices were not yet in Vladivostok. Have they arrived now?”

“Not yet, general,” Ward replied crisply. Whether it was the ride in the cold air, or Ward’s constitution, or his supreme professionalism, the colonel showed no ill effects at all from the volume of vodka he had consumed.