Free Blood Red, Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick Page A

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    His hand is on the doorknob when he hears a noise outside in the corridor. He freezes, holding his breath, straining to hear. Nothing. But he waits anyway, makes himself count to a minute before he dares move.
    Then, there it is again. A faint scuffling sound somewhere close outside.
    Inch by inch, Arthur bends over to peer through the keyhole, only to discover that with the key still in it he can see almost nothing.
    The noise comes again and he can bear it no more; he whips the door open and bursts out not knowing what he will do if there is a Cheka agent brandishing a gun, only to find an old man leaning against the wall. It’s a neighbor from along the corridor. He looks at Arthur, bemused, but smiles.
    “These stairs will kill me one day, I swear to God!”
    He sighs, and having caught his breath, shuffles off down the corridor.
    Arthur shakes his head.
    *   *   *
    It’s not far to the post office, even though the Bolsheviks have moved it from its old home. He scurries along the Moscow streets, with high pavements and dirt roads. The ancient capital is somehow less stark than Petrograd; maybe it’s the architecture. Petrograd, barely two hundred years old, was built to a formal plan as stipulated by Peter the Great; Moscow has grown organically and as a result is less regimented, less imposing somehow. Maybe it’s to do with buildings, but Lockhart says it’s the people who make Moscow more welcoming. Arthur doesn’t agree and anyway, he thinks it as odious to compare them as it would be to compare one man’s wife with another’s.
    He looks at his watch and hurries on; the post office is supposed to stay open until half past six, but there’s never any guarantee in Russia that people will stick to the appointed times.
    *   *   *
    Damn you, Lockhart.
    The words run through his mind and as soon as they do he tries to push them away. He’s made his decision, he can’t go back on it. He can’t let Robert down.
    Yes, he thinks, as he joins the queue in the post office, it was Lockhart who got him into all this, though certainly Buchanan had started the ball rolling even before the Scot turned up in Petrograd.
    And then again, there were those damn Russians; the Bolsheviks. They’re so infuriating en masse, and yet individually, they’re the most charismatic and likable men Arthur has ever met.
    He remembers his first visit to the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, the old girl’s school, to interview Trotsky, who at the time was effectively the dictator of the whole new Russia. He wandered down corridor after corridor until finally he found his way to the door marked “67.”
    Even then suspicion tapped at the edge of his mind. When he’d arrived, to talk to Trotsky, he’d been told he was expected.
    Expected? Why was he expected? How did anyone, let alone Trotsky, know about him?
    That would have been his first question, but he knew he wouldn’t have long with the powerful man, so instead he asked the question his newspaper would want him to ask: What was Trotsky going to do about the war with Germany? Were they going to keep fighting as Britain wanted, or surrender to the Kaiser and ask for peace terms?
    They talked, or rather, Trotsky talked, and Arthur listened. Trotsky held forth eloquently for fifteen minutes without pause, during which time Arthur absorbed the details of the room. It was almost Spartan. A simple dark polished wooden floor, a single desk, three chairs. In the corner of the room was an armchair and standard lamp. On the desk was a table lamp matching the other, and a telephone. An inkwell, three piles of papers. That was about it, though Arthur also noted a small neat hole, a bullet hole, in one of the windows.
    Such a small thing, but it shook him, reminding him who he was talking to, and what was at stake.
    Trotsky’s position on Germany was a simple one. Arthur asked him how he was going to get decent peace terms from Germany if he surrendered to them; it was obvious