The Romanov succession

by Brian Garfield

  “All right. Can you make the call for me?”

  “Yes sir. One moment please.”

  When the connection went through it was poor. He had to shout through a hiss of static.

  “Please hold on, Colonel.”

  Then a man’s voice, a little quavery with age, in hard Kharkov Russian:

  “Is that you, Alexsander Ilyavitch?”

  Alex’s face changed. “Yes General.”

  4

  He laid out his second-best uniform for traveling and showered in tepid hard water. Naked at the sink shaving, he caught his dulled scowl in the mirror. There were two puckered scars in his neck, one three inches beyond the other on the right side where a jacketed bullet had gone through-his talisman of luck: an expanding slug of soft lead would have torn his head off. But the scars were ugly and impossible to disguise.

  His hair was walnutty brown peppered with grey at the sides and cropped militarily short against the high square skull; he had sun-broiled skin above the pale vee of shirt collars, a long nose and a very large mouth that formed a rectangular bracket around his teeth if he smiled. His torso was long; the cords lay flat along his bones and he was quite thin, with a runner’s wind.

  For six months he had lived in this hot close room and done very little that he hadn’t been told to do. He had become a pest, ramrodding the battalion twenty-four hours a day, not giving it or himself any respite. Now they were pulling him out of his safe cocoon and that was what frightened him a little. They were throwing him into some War Department crush and he didn’t know if he’d had time to heal yet.

  He thrust himself into his clothes, breaking through the starch; he drank one undersized shot of bourbon and left the bottle on the table for his successor. He had been drinking the stuff for months because it was cheap and available but he still hadn’t learned to like it.

  He went back to the telephone in the hall. A G-1 major came through, waggled a hand at him and went into his room. Alex waited until the major’s door was shut.

  “Base Control. He’p you?”

  “This is Colonel Danilov. See if General Spaight’s still in his office, will you?”

  “Yes sir. One moment please.”

  Fairly quickly Spaight was on the line. “Alex?”

  “I’m not sure which one of us owes the other a favor.”

  “No need to keep books on it. What do you need?”

  “My orders give me four days TDY to report in. I need to get to New York a lot faster than that. By tomorrow night if I can.”

  “New York?” Spaight’s voice indicated his curiosity, “Okay. Where are you right now?”

  “BOQ.”

  “I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.”

  He held the hook down long enough to break the connection. Then he made one more call, kept it brief and went back into his cubicle to make a final check of things he might have forgotten to pack. He hadn’t forgotten anything of course; he never did. But it was a clue to his unease and he deliberately stood to attention and drew several long measured breaths to calm himself.

  He answered the phone on the first ring.

  “You’re all set. Be at El Paso airport at eleven sharp-twenty-three hundred hours. There’s a half-squadron of brand new bombers ferrying through to Washington. I’ve got you a lift with them. Talk to the lead pilot, a Captain Johnson.”

  “Thanks, John.”

  “Drop me a postcard now and then.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good luck, Alex.”

  He heard the car draw up, crunching gravel; Carol Ann’s horn blasted cheerfully-shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits. He gathered up his uniform coat and musette bag, glanced finally around the monastic cell and went out.

  The dazzling brilliance made his eyes swim. He crossed the yellow-brown patch of lawn and tossed his things in the back seat; he slid in beside the girl and threw his arm across the back of the seat while she put the open Chevy roadster in gear.

  “Time’s your train?”

  “Ten-fifteen,” he said, compounding the lie. He didn’t want anyone to know about the plane ride. Spaight would keep it under his hat.

  “I know a place to fill your belly.” Her long brown eyes flicked toward him. “Unless you’ve got anything else in mind you’d rather do?”

  Alex shook his head.

  Carol Ann had a shrewd quick way of smiling. “The Way the trains are these days you’d better get yourself around a good’ Southern meal.” She was a self-confident girl, a bit of a cynic and not much of a talker; they had met four weeks ago in a roadhouse bar and in a casual way they had filled needs in each other without talking about it. She didn’t know much about him and didn’t seem to want to.

  The setting sun veined the clouds with streaks of marble pink. The hot wind raked his face and Carol Ann took the dips in the road too fast for the springs on the little car.

  The Rio Grande was muddy and sluggish on his right. The landmark hills guided them into the dusty outskirts of El Paso-scrubby brush and the occasional billboard for Prince Albert Tobacco and the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous. The car’s passage flushed a covey of quail.

  Detour. Through a dry arroyo where flash floods had undercut the road. On the job a half dozen convicts in stripes worked with shovels and rakes and tar buckets, their dull Indian faces aglisten with oil sweat, and two flaccid killer guards with riot shotguns sat horseback. Their heads all turned to watch the girl behind the wheel.

  She pulled into the dusty lot beside a stucco cafe festooned with red-and-white Coca-Cola signs. He held the screen door for her and went inside and let it slap shut on its spring. A deep-fried smell ran along the counter and the radio was twanging, Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman. They were all men at the counter, Mexicans at the back, all of them in Levi’s and high-heel boots and flannel shirts with the backs of their necks creased like old leather.

  They took the booth at the front by the window where there was a little air. Fried steak, shucked corn, buttered green beans, a huge dollop of mashed potatoes with a two-spoon crater filled with lumpy gravy. The notice above the counter said We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone and beyond that there was a placard: Discussion of the President Is Prohibited. On the radio now an announcer was talking about Hank Greenberg.

  Carol Ann said, “Well then, Coop.” She fancied he resembled Gary Cooper the movie star. “I’m not going to see you again. Am I?”

  “Do you want to?”

  She was eating, watching him. She made no direct answer to the question. She caught the counterman’s eye: “I’ll have another cup of that coffee if it’s handy.”

  Gene Autry was singing Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Carol Ann stirred a lump of sugar into the coffee and fanned herself with the paper napkin. “If you ever get down this way you come and see me, hear?”

  She was bony; he could see the tendons in her throat. The thin shirt hung from her shoulders and he felt sadness well up onto the back of his mouth. Her husband was a lieutenant with a construction battalion in Alaska. She lived in a drab quick-built apartment court north of El Paso near the river. She had two little girls, five and two. It was all he knew about her except that she was lonely and she was generous, giving fully of herself when it pleased her. It had been easy and quiet between them: neither of them wanted excitement. He hadn’t realized until now that it had been important enough to make him unhappy to end it.

  “Where are they sending you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well you’ll handle it all right, now.”

  He wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to fix the rocking chair.”

  “It’s all right, Coop.”

  He paid the check and she drove him to the station. There was dust on his Oxfords and she insisted on treating him: the shoeshine boy slapped his cloth across Alex’s toes with the sound of distant artillery. Then it was time to tell her to go. He kissed her on the lips, gently. It was something he had never done with her in a public
place before.

  She said, “I am going to miss you, Coop. You take care of yourself, hear?”

  After she left it occurred to him that neither of them had asked the other to write.

  He took a taxi to the airfield and waited around the hangars for the Air Corps formation to appear.

  5

  There were six planes-the new B-24 Liberator type, long-range and fromidable. They gave him a waist-gunner’s seat in the third plane and showed him how to use the intercom and oxygen apparatus.

  Everything he owned of any consequence was in the B-4 bag at his feet and except for the pistols none of it was of moment to him; he did not carry souvenirs of his life. It was one of the things that made him feel apart from the rest of his kind-the White Russian exiles with their passionate covetousness.

  It was cold in the night sky. Through the turret perspex he watched the other planes bobbing slightly in the intangible balance of their staggered formation. The drone was hypnotic and soporific; in his mind he ran back over the tense telephone conversation with General Deniken-searching for clues to the things Deniken had left unsaid:

  “Alexsander, you have been transferred to Washington. You’ve received your orders?”

  “I’ve received orders, yes sir. I’m not permitted to discuss them.”

  “I understand. Alexander, there is something you must do for me. I ask this in your brother’s name.”

  He bridled slightly. “Yes?”

  “You must go immediately to New York and meet with someone. You must do this before you report to Washington.”

  “I don’t think there’s time for that, General.”

  “Make the time. This is a matter of the utmost importance-it is vital. The Plaza Hotel in New York, do you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must be there by tomorrow evening.”

  “Will you be there, General?”

  “No, they’re sending someone from Feodor’s group in Spain. I don’t know which of them it is. It may be your brother. It may well be Prince Leon himself. The matter is that important. I beg of you be there within twenty-four hours. I ask this in Vassily’s name.”

  There was no way to refuse the old man. If the exiled shell of White Russia had a savior then A. I. Deniken was that man. He was the greatest White general of the Russian Civil War and he had been the last Supreme Ruler of All the Russias: to the White exiles and even to the surviving Romanov Pretenders like the Grand Duke Feodor he was the next thing to a Czar.

  Put by Deniken it could not be refused.

  In the early hours they took more than an hour to refuel at Wright Field in Ohio and then they were droning on through a dull summer morning, buffeting in the turbulence of the clouds. At three in the afternoon they came into McGuire Field. Captain Johnson walked back from the leading Liberator, a parachute pack trailing in his fist. “I’ve got to report in but I’m driving over to Philadelphia right away. If you want to hang around I’ll give you a lift to the Trenton station. It’s about an hour and a half on the train to New York.”

  Alex waited for him in the PX canteen. Johnson collected him at three forty-five. He had a motor-pool Ford. Alex tossed his bag in the back seat and climbed in.

  “My name’s Paul, Colonel. Most of them call me Papp-I’m four years older than the next oldest pilot in the Thirty-fifth”

  Alex reached across his lap to shake hands. “I appreciate your trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. Always bothers the taxpayer in me when we have to ferry those big jobs empty-seems like a hell of a waste of aviation gasoline.”

  Johnson was a stocky man with blunt hands and short reddish hair and a square freckled face. He couldn’t have been much over thirty: “Pappy.” At thirty-four Alex felt old.

  Johnson drove as if pursued, flashing along the narrow roads of the New Jersey pine barrens. It was hot under the sullen sky and they kept the windows wide open; Johnson shouted to make himself heard. “They got you aboard damn quick down at El Paso. You mind if I ask where you get your drag?”

  “The base commander at Bliss is an old friend. We soldiered together in Finland.”

  A sudden sidewise glance; Johnson’s face changed. “Danilov-sure. They had a piece on you in Colliers last year, right? ‘This man goes where the wars are’-something like that. Joined up over here to train ranger commandoes, wasn’t that it? Listen, you’ve seen those German planes in action. How do they really stack up?”

  “They’re not as good as Goering and Goebbels want us to think. The Spitfires have been handing it to the Messerschmitts.”

  “Weren’t you in China?”

  Johnson’s professionalism was total: it was a characteristic of good airmen. Anticipating the question Alex said, “There isn’t a plane in the world that can match the Japanese Zero.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Colonel, you give me a B-Seventeen Fort and I’ll take my chances against those peashooters. You ever seen a Fort up close?”

  “No.”

  “Sweetest airplane a man ever built. We had a flight of prototypes for tryouts last year. You think we’ll be in this war, Colonel? I don’t think it’s going to be decided by Messerschmitts or Zeroes or anybody else’s peashooters. I think it’s going to be dogfaces and carriers and long-range four-engine bombers. That’s the three things that will decide it-the rest is all window dressing. It takes carriers to open the sea-lanes. It takes heavy bombers to flatten the enemy’s communications and supply lines. Takes the infantry to root him out and finish him. That’s the whole story of this war we’re looking at.”

  Johnson had the earmarks of a long-distance talker but Alex listened with respect because the pilot was a shrewd man and obviously it was a thing to which he’d given a great deal of thought.

  Alex said, “I’d add one thing to that list. I’ve seen panzers in action.”

  “I don’t agree. That’s only tactics. You can stop a tank easy if you’re ready for it. They’re sitting ducks. Too many ways you can hit a tank. Let me tell you something-I put my squadron through a little experiment last year. We mocked up twenty tanks on the ground out at Camp Hunter-Liggett in the Mohave Desert and then we took off. We made a regular war game out of it-phony flak, the works.

  “We plastered hell out of them. On the scorecard it was Air Corps fifteen, Armor nothing.” Johnson flashed a glance at him. “Low-level precision bombing, Colonel. You’re right on top of your target-hell you can’t miss if your bombardiers know their jobs. You know how good a target a big fat tank makes from fifty feet altitude?”

  “What if they’d been real tanks-taking evasive action?”

  “Tanks can’t maneuver that fast. They turn like bull elephants-catch them on rough terrain even the best panther tank can’t make better than fifteen, eighteen miles an hour. They’re sitting ducks. But the War Department gave me that same line. Christ I felt like Billy Mitchell. They told me to take my ideas and shove them. Well I guess that’s all right-when the time comes maybe I can talk them into taking out that report of mine and dusting it off. We’re not into the war yet, a lot of things are likely to change.”

  Johnson guided the Ford smoothly through the main street of a small town. On the outskirts he put it back up to fifty and went swaying through the bends. Light rain began to bead up on the windshield. Alex said, “You can really pinpoint a target as small as a tank, can you?”

  “It takes training, Colonel. I never said it was easy. But one of these days it’s going to help win this war.”

  6

  The train was jammed; he had to stand. It was a commuter express with stops at Princeton Junction and New Brunswick and Newark; filled with businessmen in black fedoras and wide snap-brims. There were soldiers on furlough and vacationing college students in ribboned bonnets and white shoes, giggling their way to New York where you could drink liquor at eighteen. The placards advertised Rupert’s Beer and the Radio City Music Hall feature, Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. Ivory Soap was 99.44/100ths% pure and Lucky Str
ike meant fine tobacco and the 1941 Lincoln Zephyr was the fine car for everyman. On the commuters’ newspapers the headlines bannered F.D.R. TO NATIONALIZE PHILIPPINE ARMY-Moves in Response to Jap Occupation of Indo-China. Mac-Arthur to Command.

  Pushing through the crowd he carried his bag through throngs of redcap porters up the stairs and the long Penn Station ramp past the Savarin restaurant where middle-aged women sat in flowered hats watching the big railroad clocks.

  Like battling stags two black Fords had locked bumpers in the center of Seventh Avenue and the boulevard was a tangle of hooting cars. He went through the station’s immense stone columns and made his way two blocks uptown to get out of the jam.

  It was a five-minute wait and then he was riding uptown in a taxi with his B-4 bag on the seat beside him and his hand in the strap-loop: New York traffic always terrified him. Along Seventh Avenue the menials of the Garment District pushed their heavy clothes-hanger dollies through the tangle of trucks and cars and horsecarts.

  The traffic in Times Square was intense and the big illuminated signs flashed at him painfully- I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel; Seagram’s for the Man of Distinction. Leather-throated newsboys hawked the Mirror and the Trib and tourists gawked at the enormous Paramount cinema palace.

  The taxi had the peculiar De Soto smell of old leather and cigar ash. It decanted him in the semicircular drive before the Plaza and he hauled his bag into the oak-and-marble lobby. At the mail desk he identified himself and was handed a note on the hotel’s embossed stationery, neatly handwritten in the Cyrillic characters of the Russian alphabet:

  “Alex- You are booked in. Come around at eight o’clock to #917.-I.”

  He puzzled it momentarily before he pocketed it and moved on to the reception desk. A clerk gave his uniform a glance of utter contempt. “May I help you?”

  “Colonel Danilov. There’s a reservation for me, I think.”