City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  “Filthy Reds. I’ve got no time for the Nazi Party, but the sooner this country’s cleansed of all Bolsheviks and their Hebrew backers . . .”

  It could be the Landwehr Canal, Esther thought, studying the view. She said, “I’d like to see Anna now, please.”

  The baron gave a disgusted “Tchah” and waved her off.

  The baroness signaled to the footman waiting at the door. “Her Imperial Highness has agreed to receive you, but you can stay for only a minute or two,” she said. “She is unwell, and we don’t want her agitated. Hans, show Fräulein Solova to the grand duchess’s room.”

  She was announced into Anna’s room. It was nearly as magnificent as the one she’d just left, part sitting room, part bedroom. The curtains were carelessly drawn, allowing low winter sun to shine between openings and form shafts along the Aubusson carpet. Anna had done her best to untidy it but was presumably being thwarted by maids. Nevertheless, a breakfast tray had spilled on the bed, a towel trailed on the floor from an open bathroom door, clothes from a wardrobe.

  If these were evidence of Anna’s attempt to get up, she’d abandoned it and lay on the bed in a nightgown with her Pekingese clutched in her arms.

  She looked at Esther without surprise. “This is Liu-bang, like the emperor. Who’s his mommy’s precious little baby, then?”

  “Greetings, Liu-bang.” Esther picked up a little gilt Empire chair and took it to the bedside to sit on.

  “I do not like it here,” Anna said.

  “Why?”

  “They bring people all the time. Always I tell them I want privacy, but no, they show me off to their friends. Madam Tolstoy comes and asks questions. Her, I do not mind—she knows I am Anastasia—but then they get Volkov.”

  “Alexis Volkov?”

  Anna nodded. “Mama’s groom of the chamber. They say he will report back to the dowager empress. He ask me questions, and when I answer, he cries and kissed my hand and said, ‘Your Imperial Highness’—the baroness see it with her own eyes—but there is no word from Grandmama since he went back to Denmark to report.”

  And there won’t be, Esther thought; the day the dowager czarina acknowledges Anna as her granddaughter will be The Day.

  “You’ve got to stick it out for a while, Anna,” she said. “You’re safe here. I’m not keen on them either, but they believe in you and they’ll protect you until the killer’s caught. ...Oh, lovie, don’t.”

  Anna’s small face had shrunk; she looked ill and old. Esther put out a hand to her. The dog growled. “Listen to me, Anna,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. You’ve got to help the police catch him. He can’t hurt you then. He’s not ...fabulous—he’s flesh and blood. They can get him for what he did to Natalya, finish him.”

  Anna’s eyes wandered to the window. “These von Kleists, they tell everybody about me, show me like I am their pedigree cow, I am a display. It gives me a headache. My sight ...everything is hazy.”

  “I know about the baby,” Esther said. “The police know.”

  There was a long pause. Anna held up the Pekingese and pursed her lips toward its flat nose. “You protect me, Liu-bang. You protect your little mistress, yes you do, yes he does.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “No baby.”

  “I went to the hospital. There’s a woman in the almoner’s office who remembers that while you were in there you signed adoption papers.”

  “No baby.”

  “Tell me.”

  Anna said calmly, “Sometime I wish I die then, so I would not remember now. At Ekaterinburg. In the Ipatiev House. For Special Purpose.”

  “You were raped?”

  “You won’t tell? You wait for me to die before you tell?”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “It was Bolshevik devils, many, many. I fight, but they hold me. Many hold me. The pain was not the worst. It was the words, the terrible words.”

  Yes, Esther thought, it’s the words that stay with you. Wherever, whenever it had been done and whoever had done it, Anna had been raped; she was talking to someone who knew. Anna had transposed things that had happened to her with things she thought had happened to Anastasia. Like two different parasites, the experiences had twined themselves into her mind and fused; they could not be separated without tearing it apart.

  “What happened to the baby?”

  Anna shrugged. “Somebody adopt it. I don’t think of it.”

  “You signed the papers with the name Franziska Schanskowska.”

  Anna shrugged again. “Any name.”

  “No, that was yours. You’re Franziska. You’re Polish. The man wants to kill Franziska Schanskowska from Poland. Why?” Latet anguis in herba, Schmidt had said. The snake hidden in the grass. “For God’s sake, Anna, let’s find him and scotch him.”

  “I am Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Anastasia,” Anna said. She looked ill.

  “Don’t. Don’t do this. Not to me, not to yourself. You’re condemning yourself to a lie. Your life will be artificial and... oh, static, not getting anywhere. You’ll always be drifting around the edges with gullible posers. And for what? That throne has gone, thank God. It was built on bones. Every jewel, every bit of gold, every Fabergé egg—how could they look at them and not think of the misery each bloody thing had caused a people in their care? Beautiful ladies scattered coins as they drove by in their troikas, and starving children fought each other to pick them up. I saw them. Is that the inheritance you want? It’s gone to the dust where it belonged. Leave it.”

  There was a tap on the door, and an anxious footman looked in. She realized she’d been shouting.

  “Is all well, your Imperial Highness?”

  “Yes,” Esther said. “Get out.”

  He went, leaving the door ajar; the baron would be here in a minute. “Anna, please,” Esther begged.

  “I am Anastasia.”

  Defeated, Esther looked around the stifling room. “I suppose it’s better than Dalldorf,” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “It is.”

  They looked at each other, and for a moment Esther saw something that, however misplaced, was nevertheless courage. Whoever this woman before her was, she had made a choice while she was still able to make one, and nothing would shift her from it.

  “I’m so sorry, little one,” Esther said. “I’m sorry.”

  She put out her hands to take Anna’s, but the Pekingese snapped at her, making Anna smile. “You see, Esther. I have guard at last. Nobody will touch me again.”

  “Be safe, darling,” Esther said.

  “Who’s his mummy’s little Chinese dragon? Who breathes fire on nasty Cheka and burns them up? Yes he does, little treasure, yes he does.”

  Esther left her.

  RINGER WAS CALLING him “my dear inspector” in the tone people used when they said “nice doggy.”

  “Under the circumstances, my dear inspector, you may wish to accept the appointment.”

  “What appointment?”

  “Hanover.” Sighing, Ringer began again. “The Hanover force has appealed to us for help in a particularly difficult case of unsolved multiple killings. And under the circumstances . . .”

  “Hanover?” He was afflicted by a lassitude that made him almost deaf; the memory of Natalya’s corpse lying in the snow was overlaid by that of another body, in a hallway, its fair hair spread out on the tiles.

  Sometimes they fused together and became one image; sometimes he was worried by seeing only Natalya’s, as if his mind wouldn’t give credit to Hannelore’s.

  “My dear inspector, we would of course miss you, but the transfer seems preferable to losing you from the force altogether.”

  Force? Altogether? “Are you kicking me out?” he asked.

  Ringer’s mustache rose as he took a deep breath. “There is no question of that, but ...if you do not wish to go to Hanover, then perhaps, in your present condition, another division here would be more suitable. Records, perhaps.�
�

  “Records?” Ringer’d got his attention now; the bastard wanted to put him in with paper filers and pencil fucking pushers. He sat up. “What’s happening to the Tchichagova case?”

  “It is being put on file as unsolved. Should more evidence come to light . . .” Ringer uplifted a finger. “But as far as you are concerned, it is closed, do you understand?”

  Either he shut up about it or he became a filing clerk. Or he went to fucking Hanover. No, it was more basic than that. Either Hannelore and their baby rotted in the grave, unavenged, or he allowed himself to rot while still living on their behalf. Bolle had done his best; there was no proof that she’d been pushed downstairs, none that would stand up in court. Willi said there wasn’t, and he believed Willi. He, Schmidt, could go on beating his head against that closed door for the rest of his life, losing his job and his sanity, or he could go to Hanover.

  He said, “Suppose more evidence turns up?”

  “My dear inspector, you will be told immediately. Of course.”

  He remained an active detective or he turned into one of the madmen to be seen shambling through the streets muttering their obsessions.

  “I’ll go to Hanover,” he said. “But don’t think the case is closed. One of these days, I’m coming back.”

  ESTHER TRIED TO contact Schmidt again but was transferred to Inspector Bolle, whose interest in her was little warmer than Baron von Kleist’s—or in Franziska Schanskowska, for that matter. He was loyal to his colleague, but it was obvious that in Bolle’s mind the connection made by Inspector Schmidt between the death of Natalya Tchichigova and the unstable Anna Anderson was so much hogwash. Natalya’s killing was a straightforward case of murder by a person unknown, something to be expected when unwary women ventured into a lonely area late at night. When Esther asked after Schmidt, she was told that he had been transferred to another city.

  Crossing Alexanderplatz, Esther cast a last look back at the great red building that was police headquarters. He’d gone from there, poor man. Retired into grief and another life in another city, fencing her out.

  They’d been strange, those procedural and devastating minutes the two of them had shared, as if minds had met, as if, in the bare landscape of a killing field, they’d been aware of a secret tunnel to somewhere beautiful, they’d heard the flute of panpipes from the age-old forest.

  Nitwit, she told herself, you were his suspect and then his witness, and that’s all you were. The magic was on your side, only yours. He didn’t even approve of you—you made sure of that.

  But it had been magic to her, the first touch of warmth, the first moisture on the shard of ice that had kept her frozen for so long. Whether the thaw that was sending tears down her cheeks as she walked away from Alexanderplatz came from gratitude or chagrin that she’d ever met him, she wasn’t sure.

  Either way he’d awakened a part of her that had been dead, and if the recirculating blood hurt, it was at least a reminder that she had a life and must find a better way to live it.

  PART TWO

  17

  Berlin, July 1932

  A VISIT FROM Prince Nick was a rare event nowadays.

  Esther offered him a cocktail and watched him prowl the apartment with the resentment of a man whose butler had bought the winning lottery ticket on his wages.

  “Doing well,” he said. “Yes.” “You owe it all to me, you know.” “So you tell me.” “I gave you that damn camera.” “We are referring to the Leica I had to pawn when you left me

  and Anna and Natalya to starve, are we?” “Got it back, didn’t you?” “No thanks to you.” He’d cut her off without a pfennig when

  she’d told him she’d be neither sleeping with nor working for him again. He hadn’t minded no longer having droit du seigneur, but the loss of a confidential secretary who spoke as many languages as Esther did had been a blow he’d made her suffer for.

  Now, however, occasionally he turned up at 29c for advice, consolation, or praise—things that his succession of wives had run out of.

  She wondered what it was this time.

  She watched him studying a portrait of himself that she’d taken some years before, all sleek hair, hooded eyes, and cigarette holder.

  “Good-looking fellow, that,” he said. He still was, but the portrait, as with the man, was typical of an earlier time. To be fashionable now, he should have adopted tweeds and a pipe.

  Like all speculators and black marketeers, he’d been hard hit when Germany had finally regained control of its economy and stabilized its currency. “Are they trying to ruin me?” he’d wailed at the time.

  “Yes,” Esther had told him, “that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.”

  He’d never got over it. The amusement tax had hit his nightclubs; so had a proliferation of casinos and cabarets that took away his trade to Berlin’s newer West End. To compete, he’d lowered even his standards. It was said that there were clubs one admitted going to and others one didn’t. The Green Hat, Esther was afraid, now fell mainly into the category of those one didn’t.

  She wondered why she was still fond of him.

  “How’s Anna?” he asked.

  “She’s not enjoying America as much as she thought she would.”

  “Damn good. That bitch has been a complete serpent’s tooth to me.”

  Every mention of Anna in the newspapers—and hardly a week passed when she didn’t pop up in the world’s press somewhere—was gall and wormwood to him. “Not a word, not a fucking word. Not so much as a ‘Thank you, dear Prince Nick, without you I’d still be in a fucking straitjacket.’ Is that honor? I ask you, Esther, is that how Romanovs reward loyalty? No wonder the fucking peasants revolted.”

  The press had discovered Anna without him. Harriet von Rathlef, one of Anna’s many supporters, had published a series of articles proclaiming her as the lost Anastasia. Peter Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ former tutor, brought out a book declaring that she was a fake.

  In 1928, with the death of the dowager empress, the czar’s mother, things had heated up—an inheritance was at stake—and twelve of the surviving members of the imperial family had made a declaration that Anna Anderson was not, definitely not, Anastasia Nikolaievna, daughter of the last czar of Russia.

  On the other hand, the son and daughter of Dr. Botkin, the physician who had died with the Romanovs in the House of Special Purpose, were equally convinced that she was—and they had known Anastasia well as a child.

  It seemed that half the world’s population believed Anna to be the grand duchess and the other half didn’t. What Esther found curious was that Anna was a celebrity in both camps; if possible, those who believed she was an impostor were as avid to know about her as those who proclaimed her to be the grand duchess. More books had been written about her—for and against. A film was in the offing. Dress shops sold frocks in “Anastasia blue.” For a while there’d been a run on Anastasia-brand cigarettes.

  Nick, ignoring the fact that Natalya’s murder had panicked him into handing Anna over to the von Kleists, became a Rumpelstiltskin, stomping with rage at a woman spinning gold out of the straw with which he’d provided her. Esther tried pointing out that Anna wasn’t making money; she was being kept in the style her patrons felt a grand duchess deserved, but she wasn’t accumulating wealth, and if the supporters drifted away when the ballyhoo faded, she’d be as penniless as when Nick had found her.

  “Let’s hope for that,” Nick said. “I sure as hell won’t be picking her out of any more loony bins. And how come that assassin ain’t taken a potshot at her? She’s been public enough.”

  It was a question that had concerned Esther a lot; with Anna appearing in so many spotlights, it seemed impossible that the killer wouldn’t seize his opportunity. But either he hadn’t seen it or he’d passed it up; there had been no attempt on Anna’s life. It had taken a long time for Esther to puzzle it out. After all, Anna was still the person she always had been and therefore presumably still the object of
the killer’s hatred.

  “Do you know what I think?” she said. “She must know something from their mutual past, something that would harm the swine if it became public. Perhaps he murdered his wife, and only she knows where the body’s buried.”

  “Or she abandoned the poor bastard after he’d given her everything.”

  “The point is,” Esther said, “that if she tells the world what it is, she has to reveal that her past isn’t Anastasia’s. He knows now she won’t do that; she’s too famous; she can’t give him away without giving herself away. He’s safe.”

  “Or maybe he’s just bored with chasing the bitch. Like I am. Or maybe he was Cheka, and they got bored too.”

  “Or maybe he’s dead,” Esther said. “Anyway, she doesn’t seem as frightened as she was.”

  “How’d you know? I thought she’d dropped you, too. She become pro-Jewish all of a sudden?”

  “Not exactly.”

  For a long time after their meeting in 1923, when Esther had challenged Anna with the name Franziska Schanskowska, the only intelligence she’d gained of her was through the newspapers. Until one day she’d answered a knock on the door of 29c to have Fräulein Anderson push past her and head in the direction of her old room. “I don’t stay with stupid barons no longer.”

  Whether the von Kleists had got fed up with her or she with them, it was difficult to know. Anna said she was tired of being questioned about her history and presented with strangers she was asked to identify. “ ‘Who this, Your Highness? Who that? Remember we meet at Winter Palace in 1908? Remember your mama visit me in the hospital in 1916?’ Always on show, always questions. I don’t do it anymore.”

  Anna scorned publicity. It was at least one trait she shared with the late czar and his family, who had fought to safeguard their privacy away from public occasions. She refused interviews and threw tantrums when they were forced on her or when enterprising reporters infiltrated wherever she was staying.