“What you can do is get that lady a glass of brandy, or hot milk, or some bloody thing.”
“Sure, sure.” He seemed surprised. “I take her to my own doctor when you finish with her.”
“See you do.”
Schmidt went back to the woman on the stairs, going through lists in his head. Big man, he thought. With a knife. Mopey Raab? No, Mopey always stuck to a cosh. Fritz Schaffer was a knife man, but he’d never come this far west. Schmidt reminded himself that growing poverty was leading to growing crime. Desperate amateurs were getting in on the act.
But there’s something extra here, he thought. When they were talking in Russian, that bloody lounge lizard had been giving her instructions.
He sat himself down by Solomonova. “What do you think the man was after, Fräulein?”
She said, “Prince Potrovskov keeps the night’s receipts in his safe.” After a second she added, “They are considerable.”
Schmidt was sure they were. “And you were alone in the club—apart from the bouncer?”
Pause. “Yes.”
He looked at his watch. “That would be about four o’clock in the morning. Bit late to be working, isn’t it?”
“I often work late,” she said.
They heard the klaxon of an ambulance in the distance.
“You ought to be in the hospital yourself,” he said, grumbling. There was blood on one of her shoes.
And suddenly she was looking full at him, smiling, astonishing him. “I’ve had worse,” she said.
Walking back through the dawn to the Alexanderplatz, Schmidt knew he should have done more. Something had been going on in the Green Hat that wasn’t a straightforward, thwarted attack in the course of burglary. The woman had wit enough to call out and pretend there were other men in the building to come to her aid, but that hadn’t deterred
the fucker on the staircase. He’d kept coming. Why?
I should have searched the whole bloody building.
But he couldn’t have justified it to the big guns that slimy Russian would have brought in. Lot of important people ...all my friends.
Christ, he loathed them: important men charged with running a country, his country, spending its taxes, his taxes, on chandeliered fucking opulence and, quite probably, sin. And their people scrabbling in poverty.
The chandeliers irked him. Yesterday Hannelore had anxiously mentioned the rising price of lightbulbs.
An even bigger mystery was what the scarred woman, the only honest thing in the place, was doing there. There’d been a quality to her that didn’t belong in those ersatz surroundings.
And even she hadn’t told him the truth. Not all of it. Whatever grubby secret her boss had been hiding, she’d kept it.
Fuck it, no point in puzzling about it. Or her. He had enough on his plate with another bloody report to type out when he got in.
ESTHER SOLOMONOVA and Anna Anderson left the Green Hat for their new home later that day.
The move involved climbing up a ladder to the club’s skylight and a clamber over the rooftops of Potsdamer Platz, then down into an alley next to a cinema around the corner, in front of which a taxi was waiting for them.
Prince Nick had insisted on it, enjoying the drama. “I’m not having the Cheka follow her again.”
“He wasn’t the bloody Cheka.”
But Nick had decided that he was; it was more exciting, more glamorous, and it gave a boost to his decision that Anna was Anastasia.
Esther sighed. Last night Nick had accepted that the intruder was a robber after the contents of the club’s safe; by this morning the man had become a Bolshevik state assassin. Nick changed his theories as often as he changed the flower in his buttonhole—and this one suited him.
For herself the incident was beyond explanation. The man must have been in search of money, but there had been something . . .
something personal about the battle on the staircase, a meeting between hunter and hunted, as if the two of them had been removed from the time and space of Potsdamer Platz and faced each other far away in a lonely forest. And he’d hated her.
She didn’t want to think about it—nor was she given much time to. Before she could accompany Anna over the rooftops, there were things to be done; she had to phone the hospital and make sure Theo was comfortable and see about hiring another bouncer to fill in for him when the club opened again on Monday. A messenger was sent to the Smoleskins in Moabit with an apologetic letter saying that she was leaving them and to collect her things. Olga, who’d turned up early to find out what was going on, was directed out into Sunday Berlin to try to obtain clothes for Anna from somewhere. Nick’s luncheon appointment with last night’s inamorata had to be postponed to dinner while he made sure the new flat was ready for Esther and Anna. He also rang every influential name he could think of to ensure that he was subject to no more investigation.
At last he was satisfied. He lit a cigar. “Could have been worse, kid. We’ve kept the police out of it. Our grand duchess is still our secret.”
“Well, isn’t that good.”
None of this was passed on to Anna. She was not told that while she slept in Nick’s office, battle and near murder had taken place a few yards away. She appeared to be drugged still and was quiescent at leaving the club by a ladder, as if it were a normal manner of egress.
Nick loved it, making both women bend low as they emerged in case a Cheka bullet hit them as they appeared on the skyline. But when he’d got them and their suitcases to the taxi, he hesitated. “You want I should come with you?”
“No. Get back to your film star.” At that moment Esther wanted to be away from him, from everything to do with the Green Hat. The deep cut on her ankle had been treated, her bruises dabbed with arnica, but the sight of the staircase and her recollection of grappling on it with something she still thought of as inhuman was going to take a hell of a lot longer to fade.
They drove off.
...
NUMBER 29C BISMARCK Allee was a three-bedroom top-floor apartment in a block of houses served by a road lined with lime trees leading out of Bismarckstrasse, a good area of western Berlin, almost a suburb. There were a few dignified shops on the east side of the road— number 29 faced a bookseller’s—but the west side was solidly residential, solidly lace-curtained, solidly respectable.
Frau Schinkel, the widowed landlady who lived on the ground floor of number 29 and acted as porteress, winced at Esther’s face and last name. “Prince Potrovskov did not say you were Jewish.” She was the sort of woman who believed in speaking her mind.
“Makes a difference to the rent, does it?” With her nerves still raw and her ankle painful, Esther believed in speaking hers.
“No, no.” Frau Schinkel subsided; the prince was paying good money. “But I do not usually rent to foreigners. I expect good behavior in this house.”
“So do I,” Esther told her.
As they were shown upstairs, Esther noticed that the flat beneath theirs was empty. Times being what they were, Frau Schinkel had to take what tenants she could get.
It was a nice apartment, though Frau Schinkel’s furniture, like Frau Schinkel, was on the heavy side. Nick, it appeared, had already required the landlady to make it ready for instant habitation; the bathroom was equipped, and so were the kitchen and larder—a bright new samovar stood on a surface near the sink. The sitting room was three times the size of Esther’s bed-sit in Moabit, and as a joke—she hoped it was a joke—Nick had sent his hunting prints to decorate one of its walls.
The beds were made up in the three bedrooms. Her own—there was a card to say which was hers and which Anna’s—had a plain cotton spread, whereas Anna had been accorded satin. The third bed, she was interested to see, was also made up, but it, too, was plain. It had no card.
At the far end of the sitting room, near the window overlooking a backyard, Nick had set up a small office area with a desk, a telephone, and a Dictaphone; Esther was to be no less his secretary becau
se she was grooming his protégée with her other hand. She picked up the Dictaphone headset, pressed the button, and listened to his high, thin voice rapping out instructions. “Tonight, Esther, if you please. Needed first thing tomorrow.”
It always was.
From this window she could see the gardens of the houses behind. Along the row a maid was hanging out washing and talking to two children on a seesaw. From farther on came the whir of blades where a man was mowing his lawn. It was all very comforting.
She unpacked for herself and Anna. The girl, still unnaturally tranquil from whatever drug it was she’d been given at Dalldorf, went straight to bed.
“You’ll be safe here,” Esther told her, tucking her in.
“Where the pretty lights? And the bears?”
“They were at Nick’s club. We had to spend the night there.”
“I like them.” Anna closed her eyes.
Esther went back into the living room to go to the kitchen, welcoming its silence.
The kitchen was clean and sparse—in the days when Frau Schinkel and her family had been able to live in the whole house, it had been a bedroom. Now decorated with stiff oilcloth curtains, its window gave onto a view of the street below.
Esther opened the window, letting in a smell of sunny dust scented by the avenue’s flowering lime trees. Below, a woman waited for her dog to finish sniffing a tree trunk while she chatted across the road to the bookseller washing down his shop door. A family of father, mother, and two children, prayer books in hand, was on its way to church.
So bourgeois, she thought, so safe. In Moabit you were never safe; people lived too close to the border between survival and starvation. Since the advent of the Brownshirts, there was no protection either from a jackbooted invasion that left broken heads and windows in its wake.
But here ...she thanked God for the German middle class. No bears here. They’d never get past Frau Schinkel.
And there’d been at least one good thing from last night: she carried a healing memory of the concerned eyes of the policeman who’d sat beside her on the stairs. A stranger, a man whose name she didn’t
know, but kind. She wished she hadn’t had to lie to him.
As she turned to go back into the living room, her head exploded.
By now she’d disciplined herself not to crawl on the floor when the noise and pictures started up, but her hands gripped at her knees to try to stop her shaking. She couldn’t hear anything through the crack of gunfire. Time unraveled the pogroms into bits of chaos; one jigsaw piece illuminated dear dead faces, another showed Jews running the gauntlet of rifle butts.
She watched a rabbi’s hat fly from his head, saw him stoop under the blows to pick it up and then continue the run. It is forbidden to bare the head before the Lord.
She held on to that picture as she groped her way to a chair; it always steadied her.
When it was over, she was left panting and resentful. Goddamn it, she’d been getting better; it had been weeks since the last one. The attack on the stairs last night had resurrected an older terror.
For Esther, memory was the devil horned and stinking; she fought it with the desperation of an old-time saint saving his soul in case remembering destroyed her own. She’d seen what it could do to émigrés who’d suffered, keeping raped women in a depression they couldn’t escape, inflicting apathy on the old whose losses had been too great to bear, collapsing the nerve of others so that even a loudly ticking clock was reminiscent of a rifle being cocked—oh, God, she knew that fear. She saw it in Anna; memories could attach themselves to you like tentacles sucking away present sunlight, leaving you blundering forever in the grayness of the past.
The bastard, she thought. I’m not letting him resurrect all that. I’m going to forget him. He’s gone. We’re safe now.
IN THE EVENING Nick came by to see how they were settling in, still playing cloak-and-dagger games. “I parked around the corner, made sure I wasn’t followed. Where’s Her Imperial Highness?”
“Anna’s asleep. She’s still groggy.”
“She like the flat? Good, huh?”
“Very nice.”
“Definitely is,” he said. “Cheka assassins won’t find her here.”
One thing about Nick, Esther thought, the tentacles of memory couldn’t suck anything out of his hide. Automatically, tonelessly she said, “It was a bloody burglar.”
“Wake up, kid, it was Bolshies wanting to get her. Who’s out to bump off all the leading White émigrés? Who gunned down Petrovich in Paris the other day?”
“You said it was because Petrovich had been supplying weapons to the White Army.”
“Sure. He was.”
“I don’t see Anna as an arms dealer.”
“But who’ll the White Army put on the imperial throne when it wins Russia back?” He sat down on the sofa and clasped his hands behind his head, luxuriating in the pleasure of it. “I tell you, our Anna’s probably on the Reds’ hit list. Top of it, maybe.” He closed his eyes in joy. “If the Cheka is out to get her, she is Anastasia, pure and simple. I’m legal. I’m completely helping the rightful heir to the throne.”
“Yes,” a calm voice said, “the Cheka hate me.” Anna, in the doorway of her bedroom, extended her hand. “I am Anastasia.”
Nick got up to go and kiss it. “Your Imperial Highness.”
“Oh, give me strength,” Esther said. This was mutual masturbation. Not merely self-delusion, it was allowing Anna to explain away the real fear that had kept her moribund in Dalldorf for two years.
Anna walked across to the window and, keeping carefully to the edge, peered down into the road.
“They won’t find you here, Highness,” Nick said. “Nobody won’t look for you here. This is good cover, better than a castle with a moat—”
“Cheaper, too,” Esther said.
“And when you make your debut, I get a troop of Chevalier Gardes that nobody can’t get past.” He rubbed his hands. “But we got lot of work to do till then. Help bring back details, make you word-perfect. And I got just the person for it, someone you’ll remember, maybe— Natalya Tchichagova.”
If he expected a reaction, he didn’t get it. Anna stayed looking out the window.
He turned to Esther, relapsing into Russian. “One of my own damn employees,” he said, “I tell you, Esther, this was meant. The saints know about this. I was looking among the émigrés, someone who knew the royal family, and there she was all the time, working as a dancer at the Purple Parrot.”
“A stripper?” Esther said. All Nick’s clubs were next door to one another, though only the Green Hat had a lavish frontage. Entrances to the other two were more discreet and catered to differing clientele— the Parrot’s customers appreciated the female form, while the Pink Parasol’s preferred their entertainers to be male.
“Exotic dancer,” Nick said.
Natalya, it appeared, had been a maid at Czar Nicholas’s and Czarina Alexandra’s favorite palace of Czarskoe Selo before the revolution.
“A personal maid?” Esther asked.
“No, no. Brass-cleaning floor sweeper—but she was born there. Born there. She can tell Her Highness everything, but completely everything. And me thinking I’d have to buy one of the fucking relatives to help coach her. It was meant, Esther, meant.”
“She can’t know much,” Esther said. “They wouldn’t have been short of floor-sweeping brass cleaners at Czarskoe Selo.”
“Thousands, they had thousands.” He flapped a hand. “But she knows the geography, she heard the gossip. Servants know everything. Little Anastasia falls over, wets her knickers, puts her tongue out at the king of Bulgaria, that’s big news in the servants’ hall. Stop being a doubting damn Thomas; you get on with your job, and Natalya’ll do hers.”
From the window Anna spoke. “Want a dog,” she said.
“Sure, sure, Highness. Many as you like.” He turned to Esther. “You finished those letters yet?”
“I haven’t even star
ted them.”
“Holy Martyr, woman, I need they should go tomorrow. I’ve set you up in luxury so’s you can sit on your fanny all day? Get on with it.”
He went off, Anna retired to her bedroom, and Esther sat down at her new desk to get on with it.
She put a carbon between two pieces of paper, inserted the sheets behind the typewriter roller, realized she’d lost track of days and didn’t know what date it was, looked it up in her diary, typed it—
It stared back at her. July 30, 1922. July 30. Yesterday had been July 29. You come back here late Saturday night, July twenty-ninth—Clara
Peuthert’s voice was as clear as clear—you’ll see him standing in the shadows out there, waiting for his chance to kill the grand duchess.
Oh, dear God, had he been? And followed her?
He was taking shape again, coming up the stairs, no burglar now, but a hunting creature intent on the prey he’d been stalking for months . . . thwarted, but with every intention of hunting again in six weeks’ time.
No. No, he wasn’t. “Damn you,” Esther said out loud, “you’re not going to do this to me.” She wasn’t going to be in thrall to some phantasm conjured up by a deluded woman in an asylum.
“You’re just a bloody coincidence,” she told it, and began typing.
“WHO’S MADAM MIDNIGHT?” Natalya wanted to know on her arrival.
“She’s the landlady, Frau Schinkel. She does the door opening.”
“She sure don’t help ladies with their luggage.” Natalya was puffing.
Esther took the case from her and carried it to the third bedroom. “I’m Esther Solomonova. I’m pleased to meet you.”
Natalya Tchichagova was guarded. “Yeah, I heard about you.” She was pretty. Her bleached-blond hair was severely cut and plastered so that two ends curved around to her cheeks, where they stuck to her skin as if glued. Blue eyes peeped out from between heavily weighted black lashes, and lipstick rose in little twin peaks above her upper lip.
She approved of her bedroom and the fact that she didn’t have to share it. “Classy.” She turned her nose toward the kitchen: “Is that kotlety pozharskie I smell? Ain’t tasted that since Czarskoe Selo.”
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