If I Had You

by Heather Hiestand

  “No kiss?” she asked bravely.

  “No, miss.” He didn’t even turn around.

  Tears pricked her eyes as she rushed into the lobby. It was as if he hadn’t even recognized her.

  A bellboy ran past, almost colliding with her as he called, “Mr. Hiram. Mr. Hiram!”

  Two fashionable girls in fur coats slipped by next, their hats dotted with snow. A nanny hauled along her charge, his dimpled knees red with cold below his short pants.

  They could have been ghosts for all she cared. Her lovely fantasy, destroyed. What a little nothing she was. Why had she thought their flirtation meant something?

  Chapter Four

  Ivan walked past the crates of late winter greens at the greengrocer’s on the ground floor of the building he and his sister lived in. At nine A.M. the local women were busily shopping, scooping up watercress and dandelion leaves and everything else that was edible. The grocer’s daughter smiled brightly at him, and her father scowled. But, dead on his feet, he ignored them both and went through the shop, then unlocked the weather-beaten door in the back that led to the two-room flat above, and slowly climbed the steps.

  He finally had his day off. He planned to sleep and sleep and maybe dream about Miss Loudon in her borrowed Vionnet dress and sexy shoes. Perhaps his dreams would put him in Peter Eyre’s place, his hand on her bare back while the beaded strands belled out behind her on the dance floor. At the very least, he hoped he would hear the tinkling ivories of that talented pianist the nightclub employed and remember the gorgeous smile of music-loving Miss Loudon.

  He and Vera had been saving up for a camera record player. They could get one for about four pounds. Not nearly as fancy as a nice cabinet Victrola, of course, but Vera could take it to parties when she catered her Russian specialties. She might even be able to charge for it, if they had the newest records. They figured they could budget for a new recording a week and build up a nice little collection rather quickly.

  In fact, he’d given her a first record as a Christmas present. He’d bought “It Had to Be You” by Isham Jones and his Orchestra, an instrumental recording that any budding singer at a party could sing over. That would not be Vera, who, as much as she loved music, could not sing. The sentiments of the song, being sad and glad together, fit how he felt about his sister and their lost family. He was glad he and his sister had a chance to start over, but wished the rest of them could have been there too, even if they’d had to stay in Russia. Damn that Ovolensky and his evil denunciation. He wondered if his cousin enjoyed the art and collectibles he’d no doubt plundered from the family dacha. Servants had taken everything portable, but that had mostly been their mother’s jewelry.

  Sergei Bakunin, Vera’s fiancé, greeted him at the top of the stairs. They had known each other as children in Moscow. One day fifteen months ago, Sergei had shown up at their door here in London. In a little while, it seemed as if no time had passed, and he easily fit into their little Russian-centered lives in the East End.

  Over time, though, Ivan had noticed Sergei was political, as political as his sister Catherine had been, though they did not share beliefs. Vera’s views had been changing too, to match Sergei’s. Sergei identified with the White Russians, who wanted a tsar back. No one really knew what had happened to Tsar Nicholas, though by now, it was assumed he had been executed in 1918 along with his family. But Sergei expressed a longing to go on a pilgrimage to Berlin to see if the reputed Grand Duchess Anastasia was real. Even though, as a female, she could never have the throne, she was a useful rallying point for the Russian exiles.

  The true tsar in Sergei’s mind was Grand Duke Kyrill Vladimirovich. He dreamed of infiltrating the small circle of Romanovs who lived in England, but had no entry into the circle. His affectations and dandified wardrobe, which he could ill afford, irritated Ivan, but he loved Sergei for his sister’s sake, and for the nostalgia of their shared childhood.

  “You look tired,” Sergei said in Russian, the only language they spoke at home.

  “Six days on, one day off,” Ivan said.

  “But it’s mostly standing. Not hard labor.” He pushed the bridge of his glasses more firmly against his nose.

  “Walking, forever walking,” Ivan said. “That has its own form of exhaustion. No letting your mind rest while your body works.”

  “But it is so glamorous,” Sergei exclaimed. He eked out a living driving a cart at a train station. “I imagine you spend most of your time paying attention to lovely ladies.”

  “Some of the time,” Ivan said with a smile. “But it hurts to look and not be able to touch.”

  Sergei let out a guffaw and slapped Ivan on the back. “It is hard to walk for ten hours with an iron rod in your trousers. Come, have a few glasses of vodka.”

  “Why don’t we work on your English, instead? So you can find a better job?”

  “Vera wants to speak to you.”

  “Not now. If you don’t want to practice, I’ll have a sandwich first,” Ivan said. “Then sleep.”

  “No time for sleep, bratishka,” Vera said, appearing in the doorway of their front room, where they cooked, sat, and Ivan slept. “We have big news.”

  Ivan looked at his sister with eyes that felt full of sand. “Unless you have recovered Mother’s diamond bracelet that went missing in Hungary, I cannot imagine I care right now.”

  “Oh, but you do,” Vera said, taking his hand and pulling him toward a plate of cheese and cucumber sandwiches she had placed on the battered table in the corner.

  Ivan sat, observing the way Sergei put his arm around Vera’s thin shoulder and caressed it. He hoped they were going to marry soon. She had lost weight recently, as if worry had been whittling her to the bone. Her neck looked too thin to hold her elegant skull upright. Picking up a glass of milk, he said, “What, then?”

  Vera looked up at Sergei, then leaned her head into his shoulder. “Georgy is coming to London.”

  “Ovolensky, you mean?” Ivan said, snatching half a sandwich. On rye, just as he liked. He took a drink of milk then a bite of his sandwich. “Yes, he’s staying at the Grand Russe.”

  “You knew?” Vera shrieked.

  Ivan nodded, his mouth full of food.

  “The Grand Russe, of course,” Sergei said, stroking his small, pointed beard.

  Vera smiled with satisfaction. “That will make it even easier. We will have no trouble avenging our parents with his murder.”

  * * *

  “Let’s work on act three, scene four,” Richard Marvin said, settling back onto the sofa.

  Alecia sat in the matching armchair—though he’d suggested they share the sofa—holding a script. “It’s Macbeth’s line first.”

  “Right.” Richard gazed at the ceiling. “Hmm, I always forget this part. The dull bits tend to escape me without a daily review.”

  “ ‘You know your own degrees,’ ” she prompted.

  “Ah, yes.” He gave the rest of the short speech with no problem, and they made it through the next exchange in the script.

  “Where is Lady Macbeth?” Richard asked, since her line was up next.

  Alecia couldn’t believe that Sybil had already begun her disappearing act. She’d hoped Mr. Eyre would turn down the aging actress and everything would go back to the way it had been during the first couple of weeks of her employment.

  “I believe she said she’d chipped a nail last night,” she said cautiously.

  “Manicure, eh? Can’t anyone at the hotel do it? There is a salon.”

  “I don’t know where she found an appointment.”

  “No doubt my Sybil had to attend the most fashionable manicurist in London, with matching wait times and costs,” Richard said. “Ah, well. You can read all the parts, except Macbeth of course.”

  “Yes, sir. ‘Pronounce it for me,’ ” Alecia said, finding her place in the script again. She wondered how long it would be before she had the Marvins’ bread-and-butter plays memorized just like they did. Mr. Marvin had
known the first two acts of the Scottish play perfectly.

  A knock came at the door. When Richard nodded, Alecia stood up and went to answer.

  “Mr. Eyre,” she said, when their guest was revealed.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Miss Loudon,” said the hotel manager.

  She wondered how he had managed to escape Sybil’s clutches. Perhaps she had gone for a manicure after all. “I’m simply surprised to see you for a second time so soon, sir.”

  He smiled, making an already handsome face devastating. A lock of golden hair had fallen over his brow. He pushed it against the darker hair at his temples. “Does it please you to see me?”

  She curled her fingers around the door, willing herself not to blush. “Of course, unless there is some trouble with the suite bill.”

  He chuckled. “Not at all, Miss Loudon. I hope you will come down to the Coffee Room some evening. You are often about late at night. As am I.”

  She inclined her head. “I have seen your crowd in the Coffee Room. All Bright Young Things. I would not fit in.”

  His gaze raked her from top to bottom. “Not in that rag,” he murmured. “Why don’t you visit our dress shop? They can smarten you up.”

  “M-maybe when I’m paid next,” she stammered.

  “A young lady like you, freshly arrived in London. You owe it to yourself to dress as the person you want to become,” he said. “Do you have any artistic leanings of your own?”

  “I just wanted to be in London.” Alecia heard steps behind her. Then Richard came up, almost against her, his body heat radiating onto her back.

  “Who is this then, Miss Loudon? A beau?” Richard peered over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s you, Eyre. What brings you to our digs?”

  “I need to discuss the command performance.”

  “Excellent. Come in. I’ll have Miss Loudon fix us a little drinkie and then she can go about her business.”

  Alecia had no idea what he meant. She shifted her weight away from him. “Business?”

  Richard inclined his head to Peter Eyre and pulled Alecia aside so he could enter. “Have a seat. Don’t mind the scripts. You can see we chose the Scottish play for our Russian guest.”

  “Excellent,” Peter Eyre murmured.

  Alecia followed Richard out of the sitting room. She balked when she saw he meant to have her enter his bedroom, but she was in a pickle now. Rubbing her hands together, she followed him into his room. He closed the door and pointed to his bureau.

  “Mix us up some manhattans, will you?”

  While she didn’t know how the drinks cart had landed in his bedroom, when it normally belonged in the main part of the suite, this routine was familiar. Alecia nodded and chose vermouth, whisky, and bitters bottles. She’d learned to make the cocktail for her parents when she was twelve. They never indulged in the maraschino cherries, though, that Richard and Sybil insisted on. Drinks-making had been one of the reasons she’d been hired. She’d had to prove she could make a manhattan, a martini, and a sidecar. Sybil had opined that Alecia’s sidecar was as good as any Ritz bartender could make, and thus, she found herself employed.

  While she poured the liquors into a cocktail shaker, Richard rummaged around in his wardrobe. She had the drinks on a tray by the time he came back, holding a small jewelry case.

  “Have a look at this,” he said, thrusting the case at her.

  She opened it to find an achingly lovely bird brooch. “It’s exquisite.”

  “Sapphire, diamond, abalone, and platinum,” he said. “Quite out of date, of course. Some Russian admirer gave it to Sybil on our tour.”

  She stroked the abalone belly of the bird. The iridescent blue shimmered. “What am I to do with it?”

  “Ask the concierge for a reputable pawnshop and pawn it,” he instructed.

  She frowned. “How sad. He’s such a pretty bird.”

  “He came from Russia, and he can be used to buy us better costumes,” Richard said. “I have some ideas for new staging.”

  “Why do you have to pay?”

  “They won’t give us a budget commensurate with the way I want to do things,” Richard said. “I won’t do anything by half. We’ll sort it out, and we’ll retrieve the bird later. Off you go now, I want to speak to Mr. Eyre in private.”

  “I’ll gather my coat then, and go. If I could have taxicab fare?”

  He grunted and found her some coins. She took the brooch and walked out of the door in his room that led to the corridor, not wanting him to even notice that doors connected their rooms.

  She was attempting to cultivate subtlety, something the nursing sisters in her failed program claimed she lacked entirely. They had let her go after she made a third patient cry. Now, however, she hovered between utter silence and complete outspokenness in her personal life, not sure what subtlety was, precisely. She went downstairs, telling herself she was thrilled to be having an adventure, not terrified of venturing into London alone.

  The concierge told her to try Poplar High Street in the East End. She was to look for the characteristic three balls hanging on the brick wall above the side entrance. In the taxicab, she drank up the metropolitan sights as best she could through a heavy downpour as the streets became steadily grittier.

  On Poplar High Street, the shop the concierge had recommended looked rather prosperous, more so than she’d expected, with a nice clock inlaid above the door, gaslights hanging over the crowded display windows, and even some ladies looking into those windows at the assortment of wares less fortunate families had made available.

  The rest of the street made her well-ordered soul quail, however. While a couple of public houses, out of several choices, were in equally excellent condition, the rest of the shops were in ill repair, and many of the windows were boarded up. Being near the Billingsgate fish market, the air had a generally marine feel to it. While she wanted to explore London, this did not seem the place to begin. She suspected this was the street where dockworkers came to drink.

  She entered the shop quickly and nervously, but the clerk seemed to be the standard London man of business, and Richard had told her the amount she had to obtain for the brooch. Thankfully, the clerk said he could probably give her more than Richard had demanded, so she didn’t need to negotiate.

  “Satisfied?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.” It seemed her adventure would scarcely be worth writing to Sadie about.

  He nodded. “I’ll just gather the owner then. Wait ’ere a minute.” He disappeared behind a curtain waving in the wall.

  * * *

  “Did any new seventy-eights come in today?” Ivan asked Boris Grinberg, his best friend in London.

  Boris, a florid-faced forty-nine-year-old who had left his Jewish faith for atheism, put down the polishing cloth he’d been using on a delicate samovar. “No, none of your bubkes today.” He softened the insult with a smile.

  “Keep an eye out. Vera’s birthday is coming up.” Ivan took a battered iron kettle off Boris’s spirit burner and poured water over the tea leaves in Boris’s own silver-plated teapot. Despite his secondhand business, Boris liked modern things.

  “This must be new,” Ivan commented.

  Boris touched the ornate cream jug with a blunt-tipped finger. “Lovely work, isn’t it? A Christmas gift to myself.”

  “If you don’t believe in religion, why do you give yourself holiday gifts?”

  Boris shrugged. “Why not?” He leaned forward and rubbed the space between Ivan’s eyebrows.

  “What are you doing?” Ivan flinched.

  “Ah, boychick, you came in with a line between your brows. I think you are having some trouble.”

  “With Vera and Sergei.”

  “Nothing you can’t fix over the samovar.”

  “Dear samovar,” Ivan said sarcastically. A time-honored tradition had disputes being settled over a cup of tea, using the family samovar as an intermediary. “Not much good, when we couldn’t possibly have a samovar in our flat.”

&nb
sp; “This just came in,” a clerk said, pushing his way through the curtain. “I thought you might want it, Ivan.”

  “Thank you.” Ivan took the record and read the label. “Bebe, a fox-trot, from Victor Talking Machine. Yes, this is exactly what I want. It’s quite new.”

  “Mr. Grinberg, a young lady is out front with an expensive brooch she wants to pawn for her employers, so she says.”

  “I’ll be out in a bit. Let her stew. If she’s dishonest, she’ll probably leave.” Boris leaned back in his chair.

  The clerk nodded and went back through the curtain.

  Boris stared at the record and put his hand to his heart in dramatic fashion. “A rejected holiday present. Did a swain present this as a gift to his lady love, and now she has spurned him?”

  “You and your fantasies,” Ivan said. He held up the record. “What do you want for it?”

  Boris tilted his head. “For you, my gonif, two shillings.”

  “Now who is the thief? This wouldn’t sell for three, new.”

  Boris lifted his hands to the sky. “How would I know this? Very well. One and six, but you are robbing me blind.”

  Ivan fished in his pocket and tossed him the coins. “There, we are both happy now.” He set his new find aside and poured the tea.

  “What is the problem with your sister and her swain?” Boris chose a lemon slice to squeeze into his tea.

  “They want to kill Georgy Ovolensky when he comes to London.”

  Boris’s fist convulsed, spraying lemon juice all over the table. Ivan snatched up his new record and wiped it carefully.

  Boris pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tidied his hand and the table, then squeezed what was left of the lemon into his cup. “Kill, you say?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I thought only your sister Catherine was involved in that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, until our family was murdered. Vera understands hatred all too well.”

  “Ah. This is the cousin of yours who turned them in.”

  “Yes.” Ivan dropped a sugar lump into his tea and watched it dissolve.

  “I thought Sergei was White Army?”