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of nothing I wanted to tell him.
    We left the Gardens and went past the Circus to Engineers Bridge. The fog had overflowed the banks of the canal. I took out my Luger. All the Fontanka footbridges were haunted by cut-throats what with the canal being so handy. When the Tsars had the upper hand, Uncle Igor had told me, there used to be a policeman night and day in a box on the eastern side of this bridge. The name of the last one had been Tikhonov. He’d had a red beard.
    But times had changed. They were fresh and sparkling with the dew of Utopia and the policemen, afraid of being knifed, went around in gangs. So no Tikhonov, no red beard pimpled with droplets of moisture, no friendly salutation. Instead, we were halfway across, with the uneven grid of the iron walkway clanking beneath our boots—
    A trumpet—a single call, descending without a falter through two octaves, the player not squirting the notes out with force but releasing them reluctantly, as a mourner would the grains of soil he lets fall on a coffin lid.
    Everywhere else the city was holding its breath. The trumpeter had no competition. Even the dogs were silent.
    We too halted, for perhaps the same reason that old soldiersautomatically halt when they hear a bugle call. The sound of that trumpet was magnificent, made larger and I shall also say poignant by the fog.
    Down he went, the lugubrious fellow, down down down with his pure sweet steady notes. At the bottom he lingered, indulging himself in some delicate finger work on the pistons. The sound faded. Had he turned to look in another direction, at some Red soldiers approaching? To raise his tantalising eyebrows to a beautiful woman? Then suddenly, again at full volume, like a sailor running up a ladder, he took off and up the octaves he flew, note upon note, ever so quickly, until I was certain there was nothing further that could be obtained from the instrument—and then, after repeating three times an incredible crying howling note, which must have been heard all over the city, he ceased.
    Fanfare to the past, that’s what it was, a sort of burial. Nothing to do with what was to come—with the flame of optimism or the sacred lives of children yet unborn or going to the moon. Tonight was the end, and that man knew it.
    I started down the steps, my pistol stabbing into the silent fog.
    Never have I experienced such nothingness. Not a cough, not a footfall, not the rasp of a match struck. Not a tendril of tobacco smoke or the whiff of a tart’s pussy or the smell of a dog long dead in the canal. Why no barking dogs? There were two million people living in the immediate vicinity. Had the two million people living in the area suddenly been struck dumb or pulled the blankets over their heads? What had happened to the city’s four thousand Frenchmen who, fog or no fog, babbled like houseflies twenty-four hours a day?
    That was how it was in St Petersburg on that October night. And the reason had to be this: the city was waiting. The stuccoed façades of the princely houses knew, the cobbles knew, the water, the bridges, the absent whores, the absent thieves, the cats, the dogs, the canaries, they all knew, and probably the rats as well, which at night were usually quite free with the city but now were showing not even an inch of tail. Everyone and everything knew that after tonight it would be different.
    I said to Joseph, “You should have had my pistol at theFinland Station and shot the cunt. You’d have got a monument—thousands of them. Every main square would have had its Joseph—Joseph what?”
    â€œCulp. My mother fell in love with the short stiff moustache of the German watch repairer who lived next door to her parents.”
    â€œJoseph Culp, then. Think what immortality you’ve missed.”
    â€œI’m a coward, Excellency. They’d have ripped me to pieces. They were mad with love for him.”
    â€œBesides, you don’t know how