Confidential
To: Roger Ballantry, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)
From: Inspector Hugh Thornton, Metropolitan Police
Enclosed are the requested documents regarding the death of the woman identified as Marie Duvall. For your convenience, I will summarize them here:
Telegrams exchanged with the Toulouse Police Department: As is standard procedure for the death of a foreign national, the appropriate authorities were notified in the woman’s city of origin. They informed us that the address on the woman’s passport did not exist and were unable to locate any friends or relatives of a woman with that name.
Coroner’s report: Death was caused by multiple internal injuries and broken bones, consistent with the force delivered by a moving vehicle.
Witness statements: While all residents of the immediate area were questioned, most did not see or hear anything unusual on the night in question. Mrs. George Weatherby was the first to come to the victim’s aid and confirms the victim was not breathing.
Shortly after receiving the enclosed telegrams from the Toulouse police, I was contacted by the Office of the Prime Minister and ordered to close our inquiry and forward the relevant documents to you. Please be assured that I am at your disposal should you require any further assistance, and I hope to one day be informed of the resolution of this most curious case.
RUSSIA
1917
Ask a historian, and they’ll tell you the Russian Revolution began on February 23, 1917, when throngs of angry women marched through the streets of my hometown. Saint Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd, in a burst of Slavic pride, but three years of war had dimmed the city’s sparkle. The shops were more than half-empty, and everywhere you saw lines of people, slumped inside their coats and stomping their numb feet, waiting for their rations of bread. A simmering frustration seemed to have infected us all: Mama moped that no one ever had parties anymore; Papa muttered about the army’s incompetence; and I was weighed down by worry for Vasily. He’d been in Galicia for more than a year, trying to push the Germans out of Poland, and his letters were infrequent and maddeningly short. I was fifteen years old, yet there were still no plans for my debut into society, let alone the new wardrobe that was supposed to come with it. Some days, it seemed like all I did was wait—for an end to the war, for my brother’s return.
And then it all changed, almost overnight.
I didn’t witness the beginning. When the factory workers made their way to the Winter Palace, demanding bread and peace, I was at school, doing sums and reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. The first I heard of any trouble was when the chauffeur took a roundabout way home, telling me the Nevsky Prospect was too crowded with protestors. Papa mentioned the commotion at supper, but there’d been similar, short-lived uprisings before. There was no reason to think this one would be any different. Papa was hardly a Socialist, but even he sympathized with the marchers’ demands: What woman wasn’t worried about feeding her children? Even our previously lavish dinners had been reduced to a single course, sometimes no better than soup and bread. Mama complained the Germans were trying to starve us into surrender.
The next morning, Papa told me I wasn’t going to school. Anna, one of our housemaids, had gone out early to buy coffee and said there were still crowds gathered around the palace.
“Best not to leave the house until it dies down,” Papa said.
And so, those first stirrings of revolution brought my own, more personal liberation. With no school or social obligations, I spent most of the day in my room, reading and sketching. I’d always enjoyed the meditative nature of drawing, the way it made time slow down. Now and then I heard gunshots, but assumed it was just soldiers, showing off. Downstairs, Papa paced and Mama fretted and Old Ivan made occasional forays outside to find out what was happening. When I came down for tea, he reported that the streets were crowded with people—factory workers, soldiers, students—all demanding an end to the war.
“Isn’t that what everyone wants?” Mama asked. She’d been telephoning friends who were similarly homebound, but the situation was so muddled that even rumors were hard to come by.
“I’ll go to the ministry tomorrow,” Papa said. “Find out what’s going on.”
All of us, still, assumed it was only a matter of time until everything went back to normal.
Later that night, I heard the distant thud of our front door knocker. I slid out of bed and into my robe, then ran to the top of the stairs, drawn by the sound of agitated voices. My uncle Sergei was standing in the front hall, flanked by Papa and Mama, who was hurling questions at her brother.
“Give him a moment,” Papa chided.
Sergei shrugged off his coat into Anna’s waiting arms. She laid the coat on a chair, pulled a cloth from her apron, and knelt to wipe the mud from Sergei’s boots. When she finished, Sergei followed Papa and Mama into the sitting room, and I crept down the steps to eavesdrop. Anna, just as curious, lingered in the hallway. I put one finger to my lips and gave her a complicit look: I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.
Sergei was talking quickly, invigorated.
“It’s incredible,” he said. “The excitement—you can feel it. Strangers are hugging each other in the street. You see people smiling like they haven’t in years.”
“I don’t see what there is to smile about,” Papa said. “Anarchy?”
“Hope.”
Mama snorted dismissively, as if the concept was ridiculous. “Hope for what?”
“For an end to this blasted war, for one thing,” Sergei said. “What has it done for our country but reduce us to misery?”
“Now there,” Papa warned, and I didn’t have to see him to picture his face: the indignant frown, the red unfurling across his cheeks. “There are brave men out there, fighting for our country.”
“Yes, men like Vasily. And even he has given up pretending that there’s anything honorable about what he’s doing.”
There was a long, weighted silence, and I remembered my brother’s last visit. Vasily never questioned his mission—he was a soldier, through and through—but it was the first time he’d been honest about the conditions on the front lines. The men in his company were peasants who’d marched off to war in boots made of bark. Vasily and his fellow officers made repeated, desperate requests for supplies that never came and in the end were told to strip the bodies of their slaughtered comrades for ammunition. Mama said his coat was a disgrace—it was dull with ingrained mud and coming apart at the seams—but Vasily refused to have a new one made. He wouldn’t go back to his men in a fresh uniform when so many of them were wearing rags. The night before he left, Mama repaired his coat herself, weaving her love into every stitch.
“It’s been two and a half years,” Sergei said quietly. “And we’re no closer to winning than we were at the start.”
According to Papa and Vasily, Russia was the greatest empire on earth, with the greatest army. Everyone complained about the war, but I’d never heard anyone admit that we might lose.
“Sergei,” Papa said, in the expansive tone of one surrendering his sword, “we could debate this for hours. As we have in the past. But even you must agree that nothing can be accomplished until order is restored. What’s being done to get these rabble-rousers off the streets?”