He closes the book in consternation and gives it to the duchess with as much composure as he can muster. Decades before, he must have made an enemy at the printers, been high-handed to a fellow in dirty overalls who enacted this jeering, belated revenge. jésus. jésus. jésus.

Suddenly it’s cold. The basement’s empty. The needle butts against the run-off on the wax cylinder.

By 1939, history has already passed its judgement on the old man. The duchess will recall it as she’s being driven home. ‘Why, Notovitch! The scoundrel who—’

The book will languish unread and be bequeathed to the London Library on her death.

By 1939, everyone knows there’s trouble ahead. Notovitch must have a better sense than most: he’s seen Batak, after all. But no one can conceive of what’s to come. This time the carpet of bones is going to stretch right across Europe.

So much for history. The secret books allow a different kind of man: alongside the ambition, the self-promotion and, let’s face it, the outright lies, there is something else: an instinct for conciliation, a desire for the better story. He’s taken more than an old coat from MacGahan. Her regrettably brief life embodied another lesson: not just the power that stories have, but their provisionality. They can all be rewritten. Hers, and his, and yours.

Because it’s impossible to believe there’s no shape to anything. It’s impossible to shed the habits of the haruspex. Peering at the entrails of Notovitch’s book, I read jésus, jésus, jésus and it makes a queer kind of sense to me. Qin Yu Lan gathering firewood by the railway track; Dass folding his napkins in the bowels of the Derby; Pierre Thibaut cut down by gunfire, his blood puddling on a Normandy beach; an overloaded donkey on a backstreet in Istanbul; a teenager from beside Lake Van pouring adulterated wine for two strangers in a brothel; Leonard winding his puttees round his ankles, waiting for the blast of an officer’s whistle: out of all their infinite arrangements, there must be one that makes perfect sense. There must be a best story.

2: THE SAVIOUR ON BLOOD

THE SLEEPING CAR ATTENDANT rouses us with a sharp voice and tells us to get a move on. We take our bags and stumble blearily through the station concourse, past the new statue of Peter the Great that’s supplanted the old one of Lenin.

I’ve always wanted to take you here, show you things that mean so much to me, astonish you with its history, impress you with my Russian. Taxicabs are waiting at the rank outside the station, but we’ll go by foot, the better to adjust to our new surroundings. Along Nevsky Prospekt, damp May Day tricolours are flapping in the breeze that blows across the Gulf of Finland. Overhead is a tangle of trolleybus wires.

This is a young city, but over its relatively brief life it has had almost as many names as Notovitch: Saint Petersburg, Petropol, Petrograd, Leningrad, Saint Petersburg again.