The Jewel of St Petersburg by Kate Furnivall Page A

the waitresses bobbing about in black frocks with frilly white aprons and frivolous twists of white lace in their hair. All so courteous. All so polite. No anger here. No shouts. The customers were smiling and smartly dressed, bathed in the healthy glow cast by the pink glass wall lamps, picking at patisseries, sipping hot chocolate. Laughing. Talking.
    Valentina was stunned by her own fragility. No one else seemed frightened, and certainly no other customers appeared ready to bring up their lunch over the pristine white tablecloth. Everyone else was breathing normally. Was it she who was foolish, or was it them?
    “Valentina.”
    “Yes?”
    “Are you all right?” Katya was peering at her closely.
    “Yes.”
    There was a space between them that felt fragile. Breakable. Valentina refused to touch it.
    Katya deliberately changed the subject. “The new car is good, don’t you think?”
    “Yes.”
    “And Arkin was excellent.”
    “He drives well.”
    Valentina cast a wary glance at the wide arched windows that looked out onto the road through net curtains. Something in her chest gave a slippery shudder.
    “Can you hear something?” she asked. “I thought I heard...”
    Katya’s hand wrapped itself around Valentina’s and they lay on the cloth together, Katya’s fingers like fine strands of delicate porcelain, whereas Valentina’s were more robust, a strong pad of muscle on each finger. All those piano scales.
    “It’s all right to be frightened sometimes,” Katya said, “after what you went through in the forest.”
    Valentina looked back at the net curtains. “You weren’t frightened today.”
    “That’s because my life is so dull, I am too stupid to know when I should be afraid and when I should not. You have more sense.”
    “Katya,” Valentina asked softly, “do you think—”
    That was the moment when the barrage of bricks hurtled through the windows, when tiny raindrops of glass sliced like diamonds through powdered cheeks. When one arrow-shaped shard lodged in a woman’s neck, that was the moment the screaming began.

    V ALENTINA WAS RUNNING. SLIPPING AND SLIDING ON THE snow but still running. Her legs didn’t know how to stop. The wheels of the chair screeched and skidded.
    “Valentina, don’t!” An icy hand seized hers. “Please stop. Please.”
    It was Katya. Begging her. With an effort her legs stumbled to a halt, but her fingers still gripped the handles of the wheelchair as though they had become a part of it, stiff and rigid, welded to the metal. The scream of the woman with the glass in her neck echoed in Valentina’s mind. She dragged air into her lungs and felt it peel away her flesh, it was so cold.
    “Valentina, we’ll freeze to death.”
    Katya had twisted around in her wheelchair, her ungloved hand pulling at Valentina’s sleeve. Her blue eyes were panicked.
    Valentina looked around, momentarily baffled to find herself in a narrow dirty street where household slops had frozen into treacherous yellow mounds on the pavement. A drainpipe, covered in snow, was lying like a corpse in the gutter and windows were blanked out with cardboard. Paint peeled, walls cracked. A man was watching them, his beard and his dog as ragged as his clothes.
    Oh God, what had she done?
    The moment the bricks hit the window, she’d had only one thought. To get Katya out of there. Out. Away. Safe.
    Her hands had seized the wheelchair with her sister in it and had propelled her straight through the door into the restaurant kitchen, then out the back of the building into an untidy courtyard. From there her feet had started running. Out. Away. Safe. The words hurtled around in her head. She’d darted down streets she’d never seen before, as if she knew instinctively she would be safer here among the destitute and the forgotten than among her own kind, where bombs and bricks had become the tools of speech.
    Katya’s cheeks had turned white. She was freezing to death. The north wind had whipped up