The Romanov succession

by Brian Garfield

  “I’m not sure there’s-oh yes, here you are. Room Nine-nineteen.” Not troubling to conceal his disapproval the clerk struck his palm down on the counter-top bell. “Front!”

  The bellboy had the red muscular face of an experienced Irish drinker. He regarded Alex’s single soft bag with displeasure, heaved it under his arm and took the key from the clerk. “This way sir if you please.”

  On the ninth floor the middle-aged boy led Alex along the deep-carpeted hall to the northeast corner of the building and into a luxuriously spacious chamber that gave him a view of the whole of Central Park and across Fifth Avenue to the lights of the Pierre and the Savoy Plaza and the Sherry Netherland. The bellboy examined Alex’s twenty-five cent piece as if he suspected its worth and backed out of the room with a stiff bow.

  Alex took his dop kit into the marble-tiled bathroom; washed and shaved and combed and emerged rereading the note. “I” could be Ivan or Igor or Ilya: there were numerous men with those names among his acquaintances in the White Russian exile organizations and families. It annoyed him a little: the passion for unnecessary conspiratorial secrecy.

  A bottle of Polish vodka lay canted in a champagne bucket filled with ice. He lifted it out and brooded at the straw of buffalo grass that lay inside the sealed clear bottle. Someone knew his taste. He poured the two-ounce bartender’s glass full and downed it; replaced the bottle and settled into a chair, and waited. He neither smoked nor drank again; he only waited.

  At eight he went out, turned to Room 917 next door in the hall and knocked.

  “Yes?” A woman. “Who is it?”

  His host had company then. Alex contained his impatience-made his face blank. “Colonel Danilov.”

  He heard soft footfalls on a carpet. A key turned in the lock and the door pivoted to disclose a stunning dark-haired woman in red.

  His face changed. “Irina.”

  Irina Markova smiled. “Come in, Alex, don’t stand there looking like a stunned schoolboy with his hat in his hand.”

  He entered the room warily; behind him the door clicked shut and Irina said in her low liquid Russian, “There’s no need to clench your teeth. Vassily’s not with me. We’re alone.”

  He turned, feeling odd.

  “Just you and I.” She smiled again. “How romantic.”

  All the old passions slid back into place entirely against his will. A spiral of heat rose from his stomach: he felt tricked. “What’s this meant to be, Irina?”

  “They need you, Alex. It’s supposed to be a seduction.”

  7

  There was a sense of mystery about Irina that ramified from her like a spreading fog of intoxicating perfume. She was clearly aware of it; she did nothing to dispel it.

  The natural shape of her blue eyes was slightly mournful-Eurasian. Her hair was gypsy-black and long. The fashionably broad shoulders and fitted long taut waist of her red dress made her seem tall although she was not unusually so. Everything seemed to amuse her as if her point of vantage over the human tribe were a bit Olympian; she seemed to have the knack of surviving the shocks of her explosive life without ever being touched by them.

  It was a luxurious two-room suite, larger than his own. She moved languidly away from him. “I’ve sherry or vodka.”

  “Sherry.” He’d need a clear head. He settled into a chair.

  “I’ve ordered dinner sent up at nine.”

  “Have you.”

  “We’re having a tryst, aren’t we? It wouldn’t look quite right if we went out and mingled.”

  Her mouth curved into a posture of wry self-mockery. She brought him a glass of sherry and then slid back into the couch that faced his chair across the low glass coffee table. She smoothed her skirt under her thighs-the gesture had a strong sensuality. “You look awfully drab in that uniform.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what game we’re meant to be playing?”

  “So matter-of-fact. Where’s your dash?” She tucked one foot up under her on the couch.

  “I’d rather you didn’t try to be coquettish. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Oh dear.” She tossed her hair back, full of subtle mischief. “Now you’ve crushed me. Have I quite lost all my charms?” When she sipped the pale sherry her eyes mocked him over the rim of the glass.

  “No.” It was an admission.

  “I’m sorry-I wasn’t really fishing for that.” But her eyes went on glittering with amusement; then she said in a different voice, “Very well. They want to see you.”

  “They?”

  “Your brother. My father. Prince Leon. All of them.”

  “Do they.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  He watched the way her muscles moved when she set her glass down. “What do you want me to say, Irina?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve no feverish desire to put words in your mouth. But some reaction-some hint of feeling. What will it take to provoke an emotion in you?”

  “The fact that I don’t parade my feelings doesn’t mean that I don’t have them.”

  “You used to burst with fires. That great Russian joie de vivre.”

  “We were all children, weren’t we? And it was a different world.”

  “You got fed up with seeing us all go on living in international luxury as if nothing had changed. The same old servants and horse races and hunts and chemin-de-fer- all our silly aristocratic posturings while Europe is falling down around our ankles. Isn’t that what you told Prince Leon the last time you saw him?”

  “Something like that.”

  She uttered a bawdy bark of laughter. “Oh really, Alex. Sometimes you act like one of those grim dedicated adolescents who hang on Oleg Zimovoi’s Socialist coattails.”

  He had a disoriented sensation because the silent conversation between their eyes was separate and wholly different from the words: their voices spoke in dispute and accusation; their mute colloquy spoke of passions, regrets, remembered love.

  “You’re a Russian. You were born in Kiev-you spent your childhood in St. Petersburg.” She spoke with surprising earnestness and heat: “You can’t deny yourself, Alex. You can’t put that behind you.”

  “I have.”

  “Your father died fighting for your country.” Her eyes challenged him.

  “It was a long time ago,”

  His father had been a Marquis, a brigadier with Wrangel in the Ukraine in 1919 and the Red artillery had destroyed the bunker with five of them in it. Alex was twelve years old and the news broke him apart.

  They were living near Kiev just then, he and his mother in a rented dacha with only four servants.

  The day after the news reached them Alex ran away to Kiev and enlisted in a White recruiting office; he claimed he was sixteen. He was in training barracks resplendent in his new uniform when his mother’s emissaries found him and dragged him home.

  They found themselves under General Devenko’s protection when the terrible White retreat began after the collapse of Kolchak’s White armies. Ilya Devenko was a high staff officer in Deniken’s headquarters; he kept the mother and son from perishing in the chaotic horde of refugees fleeing south ahead of Trotsky’s relentless Bolshevik advance. Alex had clear recollection of the packed trains, the endless throngs trudging across the frozen mud of the Ukraine.

  General Ilya Devenko had been a very tall man with a voice like lumps of coal crashing down a metal chute. Alex had known him as long as he could remember: the General had been a classmate of Alex’s father, a regular if not frenquent visitor at Danilov soirees before the war. The General’s son Vassily was twice Alex’s age in 1920 and at twenty-six was a full colonel of infantry with an outstanding record of gallantry in the field against the First Red Army.

  General Devenko’s wife had died of spotted typhus in the Kuban campaigns of 1918 and perhaps it was inevitable that the widower general should marry Alex’s mother who was a general’s widow. The ceremony took place in Sebastopol in 1921, in the Orthodox Cathedral with Alex giving his
mother away and Vassily carrying the ring for his father.

  It made Vassily a stepbrother to Alex. Immediately after the wedding Vassily returned to the line to hold the Reds back so that the city could be evacuated aboard ships of the French navy. Alex went aboard a transport reluctantly; they spent his mother’s wedding night in the crowded salon listening to the crashing of the guns. She did not see her new husband again until three weeks later when they were reunited in Istanbul: the newlywed Devenkos, General Deniken, Alex and his stepbrother Vassily, the hero of Sebastopol. With a force which at the end numbered fewer than four hundred men Vassily had kept the Bolsheviks back for a vital eighteen hours while tens of thousands of refugees had been hurried on board the French ships and taken away onto the safety of the Black Sea.

  Irina said, “It wasn’t so long ago you can have forgotten it.”

  “No.” Twenty years but he could still see the horizon lit by the night barrages; he could feel the sucking mud around his feet and taste the brass of terror on his tongue and he could smell the cold sweat of the refugee mobs clawing at the passing trains. The empty-eyed faces of the soldiers slogging back toward the front; the gnash of Renault ambulances and Daimler-Benz staff cars beating through the cobbled streets, scattering pedestrians; the screams of agony, the stink of suppurating death along the rows of old buildings taken over for hospitals; the taste of dog meat and metallic boiled water; the incongruity-he’d never been able to exorcise it from memory-of a piano heard in a rubbled Sebastopol street while dust hung rancid in the city and 75 mm shells rumbled against the quays. He hadn’t been able to hear Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto since then without nausea.

  “No-I haven’t forgotten.”

  “You’ve an obligation.”

  “To a gang of baccarat and croquet players? To a pack of foolish Romanov Pretenders spending their pointless lives at each other’s throats to claim a throne that doesn’t exist any more?”

  “To your brother for one.”

  “Vassily Ilyavitch is not my brother.”

  “There was a time when you were proud to think he was.”

  “That’s an empty refrain, isn’t it? The past doesn’t exist now-not for any of us. There’s no St. Petersburg, there’s only Leningrad.”

  An obsequious knock: the boy wheeled in the cart, fussed a while, backed his way out.

  Irina lifted the steel domes off the dinner plates. He saw chilled grey Beluga caviar in a bowl at the center. Irina said, “They claim it’s beef stroganoff but I shouldn’t expect too much.”

  “I’m used to the Bachelor Officers’ mess hall.”

  “How awful.”

  He drew up two chairs and when he seated her there was an electric contact where her hair brushed his hand. He went around the table and sat-watching her.

  She didn’t chatter; she fell upon the meal. She had always been hearty about everything she did.

  She was his own age-thirty-four-almost to the month; but you couldn’t know that by looking at her. Her stunning beauty was in the bones more than the complexion and objectively there would be no way to tell whether she was twenty-five or forty-five.

  She was the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever known.

  She said, “Is there some particular part of my face that fascinates you?”

  “All of it.”

  “You’re still a devastatingly attractive man yourself. You’ve improved with age. Those sprigs of grey around the ears- tres distingue. And you’ve never looked so fit.”

  “It must be a product of the spartan life.”

  “Now you’re being silly.” She had a rakish look-mischievous. “That American woman was quite right. You put one in mind of Gary Cooper.”

  It startled him and she laughed at him. “In one of your letters to Prince Leon. He repeated it to me with great amusement.”

  “How is he?”

  “I think the leg bothers him more than it used to. He’s not young you know-he’s sixty-four, a year older than the Grand Duke. He hasn’t spoken your name in my presence. He’s taken it for granted you and I didn’t want to be reminded of each other.”

  He let it slip by because he wasn’t ready to confront it quite yet. He finished the entree, hardly having tasted it; he took a breath. “And Vassily? I suppose I should ask.”

  She said, “I haven’t seen Vassily in several years. Not since the last time you saw us together.”

  He was amazed and did not try to hide it.

  Irina said, “Vassily wants a passionate peasant woman-he wants devotion, not questions. I’m far to abrasive for him, I don’t fit his conception of what a soldier’s woman should be.”

  She pushed her plate aside. “It wasn’t very good, was it? The stroganoff. I did warn you. The coffee’s still warm-would you like a cup?”

  He waited until she had poured; they took their cups back to the stuffed chairs at the coffee table. Then he said, “It’s time you came to the point. You’ve implied you’re acting as an emissary from Vassily and now you tell me you haven’t seen him in years. It’s time you sorted it out.”

  “I suppose it is. They want you to come back. They need you-they need your skills. As a soldier.”

  “What the devil for?”

  “They’re planning a war.”

  Finally he said, “You’d better tell me about it.”

  “I can’t.” She spread her hands. The half-smile was directed against herself. “I’m only a messenger. They don’t let women into their councils.”

  “Then why send you if you can’t explain it to me?”

  “I’m only here to ask you to come back to Spain and talk to them-listen to them.”

  “They could have asked me that in a letter.”

  “Would you have gone?”

  “I’m a soldier, Irina. I can’t just pick up and leave my duty post.”

  “There, you see? That’s why they sent me. To seduce you into trailing along with me back to Spain. Baron Oleg-you know him well enough. Something convinced him that I need only drop a handkerchief and any man in sight will become my adoring slave.”

  “You haven’t dropped a handkerchief, really. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell Oleg you would?”

  “I suppose I was evasive. I didn’t promise anything-but he drew his own conclusions when I agreed to come.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I wanted to see you.” She finished her coffee and put the cup down in the saucer. “Don’t stiffen up. That’s not a handkerchief. I’m being as honest as I’m able. I’m trying not to mislead you.”

  “I’m puzzled, Irina. Who is it you’re betraying-Oleg or me?”

  “Neither. I’ve brought you his message. I urge you to go to Spain.”

  He said, “Oleg’s always tended to be more devious than necessary. He’s been infatuated with you for years.”

  “I know.” She said it indifferently. “I’m afraid I don’t feel it puts me under an obligation to him. I’m not responsible for Oleg’s emotional foolishness.”

  “But you came.”

  “To see you.”

  “What’s Vassily’s place in this?”

  “They’ve coalesced-the factions. Oleg’s Socialists, the old-line liberal aristocracy, the reactionaries, even the partisans of each of the Pretenders. They’ve formed a consortium. It’s the first time they’ve ever worked together. Even during the Civil War they were always at loggerheads-Prince Leon insists that’s why we lost Russia to the Bolsheviks.”

  “What’s that got to do with Vassily?”

  “They’re planning something military. Vassily’s been selected to command it.”

  “Command what? There’s no White Russian army-only a scattered pack of old-time exiles.”

  “I can’t say, Alex. I do know that Vassily’s at the center of it.”

  “Whatever their scheme is-is it his idea?”

  “No; they brought him into it recently. He’s been in England you know-he’s s
till got a commission with the Free Poles.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in hiding. There’ve been threats on his life-someone’s tried to kill him.”

  His belly churned. After a moment he said. “Why?”

  “We’re not sure. Apparently Vassily wants to believe it’s someone from the past-someone with a grudge. It’s plausible, isn’t it? His arrogance must have made him a good many enemies.”

  “But you don’t believe it’s that.”

  “I’m not certain-Prince Leon thinks it must be someone who’s trying to stop them by assassinating Vassily. He’s the key to it all-he’s the leader they’ve chosen to command it. Without Vassily the rest of them might not know how to proceed.”

  He thought of Prince Leon, kindly and craggy, the best of the lot of them.

  “Will you come with me?”

  “I’ve got orders. I’m not a free agent.”

  “It’s been arranged for you.”

  He shot her a sharp glance. “You just keep chucking stones in the pond, don’t you? How do you mean that?”

  “With your War Department. Don’t look so dubious, Alex. There’s an American colonel at Fort McNair who will arrange everything for you.”

  He was working at the puzzle in his mind. “Is it their idea to throw in with Germany against the Bolsheviks?”

  “No.”

  “You said that very fast.”

  Her eyes flickered. “Would Prince Leon have anything to do with the Hitler gang? Would Oleg? Alex, I’ve told you all I can. What have you to lose? I’ve made no conditions.”

  Her eyes glinted in the lamplight. She reached for the Du Mauriers on the coffee table and leaned forward to accept a light from his match. She held his glance; he felt ripples of flame. “You’ll come, won’t you?”

  But he made no immediate answer. He watched her throw her head back to sigh smoke toward the ceiling: he watched the long curve of her throat. She said, “It’s Vassily of course. You don’t want to have to work with him. What happened between you in Finland?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No. I only know it cost him his command. He said it was between the two of you. It’s turned him bitter, you know.”