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Filip could not say, but his mind absorbed the logic of the revolution just as a dry sponge expands<br />
with water. Filip Orlov was that rarity: a man who came to politics by way of his head rather than<br />
his heart.<br />
When he had offered his services to the Volya, they had initially laughed, which didn’t surprise<br />
him. The Marxists were as snobbish as the Romanovs in their way and Filip knew he didn’t look like<br />
the others. Didn’t have their middle class background or university polish. Only one boy had seen<br />
through this to his potential and asked “But must we all be cut from a cloth, comrades?” Sasha<br />
Ulyanov had shown him respect, Sasha alone had opened the door to admit him, and Filip had never<br />
forgotten this. Perhaps that was why, even now, he tolerated Vlad, as a gesture of respect to his dead<br />
brother.<br />
The first time Filip had killed, it was to protect the cause. The second time, it was to save his<br />
own skin. And so again it would be with the third, but the one thing he was discovering, as his career<br />
as an assassin progressed with dizzying speed, is that murder is much simpler if you kill people who<br />
don’t matter. After an initial flare of interest, the deaths of the ballet dancers were almost forgotten<br />
and it appeared to go even better yet if you killed people who were not well liked. No one, not even<br />
her own countrymen, seemed particularly distressed by the absence of Mrs. Kirby.<br />
And so it would be with Konstantin Antonovich. Filip knew he was not the only one who had<br />
noticed the man’s arrogance, his extraordinary sense of entitlement, the sheen of his red trousers and<br />
dark hair. The way he put his hands on other men’s women as if they were his own. The women by<br />
all appearances liked these presumptions. They seemed to become whatever their dance master<br />
commanded them to be. They seemed to transform within his arms and move for him in ways they did<br />
not move with their husbands, and thus he was ideally suited as a suspect. One might even say he had<br />
practically stepped forward and volunteered to take the blame.<br />
For no matter what his nationality, rank, or political persuasion, there would not be a single<br />
man within the Winter Palace who would be sorry to see the Siberian fall.
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