Blood Red Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick

Author:Marcus Sedgwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

9:20 P.M. CONTINUED

LIFE IN MOSCOW WAS GETTING more and more precarious. Bands of rogue anarchists roamed the city, pillaging for food, and were holed up in numerous palaces in the better areas. They raided the American mission building, stealing a car belonging to Robins, the head of the mission, but the disturbances had not gone unnoticed by the Bolsheviks. Trotsky had decided to act, and set up a special police force he called the Extraordinary Commission, the Cheka.

Lockhart knocked on Arthur’s door, early one morning in April.

“Did you hear the shooting last night?”

It would have been impossible to have missed it.

“There were twenty-six raids,” Lockhart said. “Get your coat.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’ve been invited to survey the Cheka’s handiwork…”

“Who by?”

“The Cheka. They want me to see what they’ve been up to. They want a western journalist to see it, too.”

Outside a motor car stood running. In the back stood an officer, who introduced himself as Peters, second in command of the new special police force.

Soon, they were driving through some of the best streets in Moscow, stopping now and again to survey the result of the Cheka’s assault on the anarchist strongholds. House after house was the same, most of them badly smashed up by bullets outside and in. The mess and filth were hideous; the houses had been looted by both the anarchists before the raid and hooligans during the day after it.

Along the Povarskaya, once one of the most fashionable streets in Moscow, half a dozen houses had suffered the same fate.

The car stopped and Peters invited Lockhart and Arthur to follow him.

Arthur turned to Lockhart as they walked up the steps of the nearest house.

“Why are they showing all this? To impress us…?”

“Or to scare us?”

They fell silent as they made their way through the once luxurious house into a large atrium from which vast staircases curved up to the first floor. The destruction was terrible. Broken bottles lay everywhere. Pictures were pocked with bullet holes, or slashed by swords. Excrement mixed with the stains of wine and other fluids on what remained of the Persian carpets.

The dead lay where they had fallen. Among the bodies were officers and other men in uniform, students, boys of twenty or less, and shaven-headed men who had probably been convicts until the Revolution freed them. They picked a route past the bodies, trying not to gag at the stench. Upstairs, they found an even worse scene; the anarchists had clearly been caught in the middle of an orgy. In a perverted mockery of the party Lockhart threw at the Elite, the scene before them filled Arthur with horror. A massive table lay spread with food and drink of all kinds, glasses and champagne bottles, plates, and cutlery, yet now the table was also filled with other, more horrific things.

On the floor lay a young woman, facedown.

Peters, the Cheka man, walked over to her and, with his boot, turned her body over. She was no more than twenty. She had been

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.