If I Had You

by Heather Hiestand

  As soon as the main clock struck eight, he went into the Coffee Room, poured two cups of coffee, and filched some rolls and butter, then went upstairs and knocked on Alecia’s door. She’d probably still be sleeping.

  When she opened the door she was still in her dressing gown, but her hair was in a night braid and looped around her shoulder. “You’re still here!” Her voice was raspy, evidence of her previous night’s ordeal.

  “Busy night for management. Here, coffee and cream.”

  She took a cup and a roll. “Ivan, I think you should leave.”

  He didn’t understand her meaning. He took a long sip of his own cup. “We need to talk.”

  She drank too, her eyes on him. “Every second you are here you run the risk of Mr. Eyre seeing you and sacking you. The longer you can avoid him, the better chance that everyone’s temper will calm. I think you should leave right away and not return until your next shift.”

  “What about you?”

  She shrugged. “I’m doing the same thing. Hiding. I’m so glad you brought me food.”

  He handed her the rest of the rolls and butter. “Then take all of these for later.”

  She smiled and deposited them in her pockets. “Come see me at midnight if you last that long.”

  He nodded, then kissed her cheek. “Sleep as much as you can to rest your throat.”

  “The coffee feels heavenly,” she admitted. “It seems like a bad dream, last night.”

  “It wasn’t.” He drained his cup. “I’ll fill this with water in the bathroom and bring it back.”

  He went down the hall to the bathroom used by the guests’ servants and filled it to the brim, then returned it to her.

  “Thank you.”

  They smiled at each other. “Everything is going to have to change,” he said.

  “We’ve had good times here at the Grand Russe. I’ve had adventures worthy of sharing with grandchildren,” she said.

  Me too. Would they be shared grandchildren? He wanted to kiss her again, but she held both cups of liquid and she needed to drink them. Instead, he stared at her for a long moment, then left to take the service lift to the basement and hopefully get his overcoat and leave before anyone saw him. If he could get home and return again, at least he’d probably be paid for one more night’s shift.

  He waited ten minutes at the service lift. It never came, thanks to being in use elsewhere. He didn’t dare use the guest lift in uniform, so he went down the stairs, all six flights, his feet aching and his heart weary.

  “What are you doing here?” Swankle asked as Ivan turned the corner on the first floor.

  “What are you doing here?” Ivan countered. They were both still dressed for their shifts, in full uniform.

  “I am still employed here. I expect you are not.”

  “Neither of us is on the clock,” Ivan countered. “Why are you skulking in the stairway?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Peter Eyre looked at his own notice on the employee board. He never came to the basement staff lounge. When Lionel Dew took over in the evenings, pinning up the notice was one of his first tasks. Tonight though, Peter had decided he needed to sack Ivan Salter in person. He’d pinned up his own notice, one that announced all Russian staff would be temporarily reassigned to the seventh floor for the comfort of their distinguished guests. All but one, that was.

  Truly, Peter wasn’t convinced the guests were distinguished. Oh, Ovolensky had fine continental manners, but the men with him seemed more like gangsters than diplomats. And he knew Ivan knew something about these men, not to mention something about a possible plot to kill them.

  Meanwhile, however, he had a hotel to run, and guests to protect. He wouldn’t choose the safety of some Russian visitors over the safety of a British citizen. Ivan had assaulted a proper British guest. Yes, he’d been provoked, and yes, Peter had to admit he’d had a hand in the situation, having encouraged Ivan to date the delectable Miss Loudon in order to learn about this supposed plot.

  But here they were. The Russians had arrived, he’d never heard anything definitive about the assassination plot, and a night watchman had beaten a hotel guest for choking his secretary while he was supposedly blocking a scene for a command performance that was real, with a real dragging scene in it. Whether that was the entire story or not, who was he to judge? A little scandal was one thing, but he wasn’t about to scare off his guests by calling in the authorities because of the fears of a paranoid night watchman.

  He felt worse about Alecia Loudon being injured. He’d had his eye on the shy secretary as well, and he knew she’d sensed the end coming. Richard Marvin’s wife wasn’t spending any time in the marital boudoir. She’d made a sexual overture at the start of the month. Peter hadn’t been tempted. The woman was about fifteen years older than he, and the years showed. She had no more refinement than Emmeline, nothing to offer that he couldn’t get at a dozen other places, and with a husband in tow, wouldn’t even be that convenient. No, she’d been easy to brush off. Of that trio in the Chinese Suite, he’d only have been willing to play with the secretary they’d victimized.

  A steady stream of people began to enter the lounge, leaving their outerwear on pegs, signing their timecards. The clock slipped forward to 7:59 P.M. Swankle and Johnson had come and gone, so where was Salter? He hadn’t seemed to be a coward.

  There he was. He came in the door at a jog, unbuttoning his coat.

  Peter stepped forward. “You are risking being late.”

  “The clock hasn’t gone eight yet,” Ivan said, then he glanced up, saw who he spoke to. His hands stilled on his buttons and his back straightened.

  “I’m sorry, Ivan,” Peter said. “But I’m going to have to let you go.”

  “You need me,” Ivan said. “To prevent disaster.”

  “Last night, my boy, you were the disaster. I can’t keep you here.”

  “You’ll regret it,” Ivan said. “He was going to rape her. I ought to be a hero.”

  “You used too much force.” Peter pulled out his cigarette case.

  Ivan stepped forward, his jaw mulish. “You’d have done the same, if you’d seen a man brutally attacking your lover.”

  Peter opened his mouth to speak, but Ivan held up his hand. “You know why she’s become my lover, you know what is at stake. I may have fallen in love with her, and that’s got nothing to do with you, but I was attempting to protect this hotel, both the buildings and the guests, when it all began, and you know that.”

  “Ivan.” Peter opened his case, then closed it again.

  “Perhaps you do not know this yet, but Mrs. Marvin has lost her new part, and Miss Loudon hasn’t received the impression that Mr. Marvin’s screen test went very well, so they are both out of work as soon as the command performance ends. Which means neither of them is going to be in residence a week from now. You’ll have sacked an excellent employee and risked people’s lives for the sake of a week’s public relations with unimportant guests.”

  Peter had never liked to be told what to do. Staff had no business speaking to him like this. “I have wasted far too much time considering these things,” he said. “I know you are good at what you do, and man-to-man, I understand how provoking the scene was for you. But all I can offer you is pay and a character.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out two envelopes. “You’ll be pleased with the letter. It should help you find another position soon.”

  “There are so many positions available,” Ivan said bitterly.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said. “But my hands are tied. You are right, public relations is too much of this, but our reputation is decidedly fragile. The best news for us is none right now, until we are reestablished.”

  “What about your reputation as a man? You are defending a rapist.”

  Peter’s fingers tightened around the letters. “You go too far.” He shoved them in Ivan’s direction before he crumpled the contents.

  “You’re dooming the Grand Russe,” Ivan said,
tucking the envelopes inside his coat. “When those Russians die, and well they deserve it, the bastards, they will kill this hotel with them.” He turned around sharply, the back of his coat flaring out.

  Peter had never noticed the military cut of Ivan’s old overcoat before. It must be something scavenged from a Russian soldier, long ago. It suited the now former night watchman. He was sorry to watch him go. Ivan had the instincts of an Englishman.

  “Here is Mr. Smirnov,” Lionel Dew said, coming into the lounge a minute later with an obvious Russian type.

  The night manager must have waited for Ivan to leave before he entered. Peter took a long look at the new night watchman. He didn’t like Smirnov’s eyes, they were set too closely together, but they’d had his application before the hotel ever opened, and he’d checked out. Someone had to be on duty; they couldn’t afford to leave the position open.

  He nodded. “Mr. Dew will find you a uniform and be with you as you perform your duties this evening. You’ll have an easy time of it. Every employee who speaks Russian is working on the seventh floor for the next couple of weeks.”

  “You have distinguished guests from Russia,” Smirnov said slowly. His accent was much thicker than Ivan’s, and his voice sounded rusty and unused.

  “Yes, a government delegation,” Peter confirmed. “Keep a close eye on the Piano Suite. You need to know who belongs on the floor. Mr. Dew will share the guest list with you.”

  Smirnov nodded. “Very well. I will keep the floor safe.”

  Peter nodded sharply and left the lounge, fumbling to open his cigarette case. Something about the man unnerved him, whereas Ivan, only a few months younger than he was, felt like someone who might have been a friend if he’d stayed a wealthy, cultured Russian, instead of being thrown to the four winds because of the revolution. But, he was only a pawn in a bigger game now, not a player.

  As Peter lit his cigarette, he wondered if the other pawn, Alecia Loudon, had been sacked yet, or if she was still on the board.

  * * *

  Ivan unlocked the front door of his flat, hoping Vera and Sergei were out. It was too much to hope that his sister might be working.

  Unfortunately, Vera and Sergei were in the parlor, along with their coconspirator, Pavel. Sergei had been growing his beard out, claiming he needed it to protect his face at work, but he had started to look like his friend.

  “Here he is,” Vera sneered. “Lost your job, did you?”

  “How did you know that?” Ivan asked, shivering as he took off his thin old overcoat. He’d had to leave his watchman’s coat and cap behind at the hotel.

  “They hired Anatoly to take your place,” Sergei said. “He started tonight.”

  Ivan shook his head. They’d put a fox in the henhouse after kicking out the rooster. And all because he’d been stupid enough to attack Richard Marvin. “So he’s going to bring in the bomb, is he?”

  “It’s none of your concern, coward,” Vera said icily.

  “How good it is for you to eat my food and rest comfortably under the roof I paid for, plotting to destroy the very lives that gave me my work.”

  “You are so enchanted by the bourgeoisie,” Pavel said, shaking his head sadly. “What must be done to open your eyes, and make you see truth?”

  Ivan stepped next to Pavel, who sat on a chair pulled away from the kitchen table, and knocked the cup from his hand. The handle cracked off. The cup rolled on the floor, spilling tea. “I’ll become disenchanted when the bourgeoisie stops providing jobs for the working class. Or possibly when you stop eating the bread others toil for. You are nothing but a parasite, Pavel.”

  “The bourgeoisie do nothing but live off the sweat and tears of the proletariat,” a man Ivan had never seen before said, stepping through the door between the parlor and the bedroom. His skin looked young, but there was gray in his sandy beard. “They do not deserve their lives.”

  “I’m confused and troubled,” Ivan said. “You are talking like New Soviets instead of supporters of the late tsar. We were the bourgeoisie, before the revolution, Vera. Where is this new element coming from?”

  “We aim to strike at the current government together,” the stranger said. “Through its vessel, Georgy Ovolensky. We are the true Marxists. We do not believe in the elitism of political leaders.”

  Ivan turned to Sergei. “Who is this?”

  “The bomb maker,” Vera’s fiancé said solemnly.

  “I think you’re being set up,” Ivan told him. “No bomb maker is going to casually come to someone’s home and chat about it. You’re building a criminal conspiracy, not having a tea party.”

  “You are too much of a coward to give us away,” Vera said, smiling in the self-satisfied way Ivan remembered from when she used to take the largest slice of cake from the tray when she was a child.

  Ivan pointed at the stranger. “I meant him. He might be a plant.”

  Pavel bared his teeth. “How dare you.”

  “You are still a spoiled brat,” Ivan said to his sister. He pushed past the so-called bomb maker, attempting to memorize his appearance, and went into the bedroom to pack a bag. He couldn’t stay here. All of them, including his sister, were going to end up dead or in jail soon. He would not be a part of that. He owed some piece of his life to Alecia now.

  Less than five minutes later, he had folded the majority of his clothing into a sheet and tied it into a bundle. He walked through the parlor without speaking, ignoring Vera’s childish insults, hurled at his back in their native tongue.

  He didn’t yet know how to rescue her from this mess, but he knew clarity would only come after he saved himself.

  * * *

  Alecia spent Friday resting as much as possible, and stayed in her room except for a brief trip downstairs at midnight to see if Ivan waited for her. She hadn’t seen him, and the music coming in through the cracks around the nightclub’s rear door didn’t hold the magic it usually did for her. After she sneaked into the Coffee Room to pocket a little of the stale food left over from the night’s revelry, she went back upstairs and tried to sleep through the night.

  Oddly enough, the nightmares that troubled her had nothing to do with her parents’ deaths, but of Ivan fleeing Russia with his sister. She could scarcely imagine the hardships they must have faced together, two pampered young people in foreign countries. Ivan had told her they couldn’t speak a word of German, during a particularly difficult phase of their travels. Luckily, he’d managed with his Russian, English, and French.

  When the knock came at her door at ten A.M. on Saturday morning, she was prepared. Her throat still hurt and the bruises were vivid, but she’d found the energy to pack her single cheap valise.

  Sybil and Richard stood together, united, in the doorway when she opened it.

  “As you know, I have lost my new role,” Sybil said.

  Richard didn’t look at either of them.

  “We won’t be able to keep you on,” Sybil said, thrusting a handful of bills at her. “Here is your pay, plus a little extra for train fare, and you can keep any of the clothing of mine that you’ve borrowed, if it is still in your room, that is. You need to be out before noon.”

  Alecia looked in her hand and decided that, yes, she did need to count the bills. She did so, while they stood there impassively. They hadn’t shorted her, and the extra would pay for a taxicab and train fare back to the vicarage. She nodded at Sybil.

  “I wish you the best, Alecia,” Sybil said.

  “I should press charges,” Alecia said in return, touching her throat. “And you should divorce him, before he does the same to you.”

  “Go back to your grandfather,” Sybil said. “You have your character, and your pay. I’m sorry we couldn’t keep you on longer.”

  Alecia shut the door in their faces. What she didn’t understand was why Sybil had come to the door with Richard. Was he meant to frighten her into leaving her room? She was happy to go. Ivan had obviously been sacked even before she had.

 
; It was only when she sank to the bed that she realized what a pickle she found herself in. When her grandfather saw the bruises around her neck, he’d be livid. He might never allow her to leave the vicarage again. And he needed her, didn’t he? With Sadie gone.

  Sadie. Her sister hadn’t yet turned up to work at the hotel. She shook her head, staring at her packed bag. While danger was unlikely for her sister here at the Grand Russe, it would not be an adventure they could enjoy, as sisters, together.

  She tucked the bills safely away, then opened the wardrobe again and pulled out the velvet dress Sybil had lent her. She’d meant to leave it there, but it was hers now, the beautiful dress that went with her dearly bought pink leather shoes. Why hadn’t she been more practical? So much had changed in her life in only a few weeks. She hugged the dress and thought about her magical night with Ivan, then stuffed it into her valise. Music started somewhere in the back of her thoughts, an Irving Berlin song that had the word “valise” in it.

  With a spring in her step that did not match the soreness of her throat, she picked up her bag and took one more quick look around the room that had been her home for more than a month. She walked slowly out of it, down the hall, saying goodbye to everything. The Grand Russe was not a hotel for the likes of her. She’d probably never be inside it again.

  The lift operator asked, “Where to?”

  She smiled. “The ground floor, please. I’m moving out.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Miss Loudon,” he said in his lilting Indian accent. “Life here simply didn’t agree with you?”

  She touched her throat. “Keep an eye out for the next secretary, will you? I wouldn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”

  “Does Mr. Eyre know?” the man asked, looking more closely at her neck.

  She nodded.

  “Then they won’t be staying here long,” he said, anger flushing his brown cheeks with red. “Just until those Russians leave. We don’t like girls being injured in this hotel.”

  “And yet they have been. They’ve even died here.” She wondered if her story would be told in the same vein as the Starlet Murders someday, when her very name had been forgotten.