The Russian Cage

by Charlaine Harris

  Lucy didn’t look shocked by that. Russians! But she did look thoughtful. “Then I will kill him first,” she said. “And my family will be safe. Peter says that is the best way, better than the other plan. Though he didn’t explain it.”

  Felix was on his feet before her mouth had shut. He was about to burst into protests. I grabbed him and pulled him down to his chair. I looked around the lobby. The desk clerk, not my buddy but another one, was sorting the mail that had just come in. He was putting it all in the correct cubbyholes, and his back was to us. There was a lull in the lobby bustle. Most customers who were going out had gone. The maids were busy in the rooms, and the dining-room staff was cleaning up after breakfast.

  “Lucy, that’s a brave offer,” I said, because it was. “Felix and Peter and I have talked about that. But we figure the killer can’t walk out of that alive.” I gave her a real straight look.

  Lucy nodded. “I’m willing,” she said simply.

  I really admired her grit, while in no way thinking she could kill a flea.

  “I will not let you,” Felix said, his voice the more intense for being low.

  “You don’t have the say.” Lucy gave him a very firm look.

  “No, Felix, you don’t,” I said. “But the situation doesn’t need to come to that.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy had a little pucker between her fine eyebrows.

  “We have another plan. Let us work that one out.” Felix looked stern, but proud.

  “I’m sure that as smart as Felix is, he can figure out a plan,” I said with a straight face. “If all plans fail, I will take care of the grand duke. Eli will go free, with no charges hanging around his neck. If the tsar does what he ought, Eli can go back to taking care of him, and everything will be smooth.”

  “You would do that for him?” Lucy’s eyes were wide.

  “I would.” Wasn’t glad about it, but I would. I tried not to think about my mother’s face. Or Jackson’s. Or my sister’s.

  “We have to find out his schedule,” Felix said.

  So we were going with the kill-Alexander plan. Rather than the pretend-to-be-the-jail-guard plan. I was likely to die either way.

  “Who would know that?” I was sure it wasn’t published in the paper, but someone with the rank of a grand duke would have a full agenda. Someone had to keep track of it.

  “His aide,” Lucy said, as gently as if we had just gotten to school and I hadn’t known what “red” meant.

  “Who would that be?”

  “I expect Captain McMurtry would know who Alexander’s aide is,” she said, still gently.

  Felix and I didn’t look at each other.

  It really was best if you didn’t have time to think about it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There were so many people in different uniforms in the imperial service I couldn’t keep them all straight. Now I was wearing a uniform myself, for the first time in my life. It was a gray dress covered with a white apron, and on top of my head perched a white cap.

  I looked awful in this getup, but I looked like I was part of the cleaning crew, which was the point. I was gathering garbage in the offices of the royal aides. It hadn’t been easy getting here, and when I say “hadn’t been easy,” I mean “had been hell.”

  First of all, Ford McMurtry had been glad to get a phone call from Lucy. After Lucy had given me a laden look, I’d realized that McMurtry admired Veronika. (Now I wondered if the tsarina had sent him to their house in the aftermath of the Brightwood death, or if it had been the good captain’s idea.) McMurtry was so pleased Lucy had called him for information that he didn’t ask why she wanted the name of Alexander’s aide. If he’d been Russian, he’d have been more suspicious. Or maybe he was suspicious but decided to pretend he wasn’t. Couldn’t tell with court people.

  Grand Duke Alexander’s aide was Captain Leonid Baranov, who preferred to be called Leo. Lucy told us it sounded like McMurtry didn’t have a high opinion of his fellow captain. Baranov was older than all the other aides and had been on the boats with the grand duke.

  Grand Duke Alexander, youngest brother of Tsar Nicholas, was now in his late fifties, and his aide was the same age.

  Nina, the woman who usually wore this uniform, had been glad to be “kidnapped” for a day, for a good sum of money… which I supplied, since Felix said he had none, and of course Lucy did not have money, at least not the kind you carried around. I’d been careful with my cash since I’d gotten to the Holy Russian Empire, but each time I took money out of my hoard, I had a twinge of guilt. Who knew how much we’d have to spend to leave the country? Or rather, how much I’d need, since I was sure if we freed Eli, he’d stay here with his family. I steered myself away from this gloomy and familiar idea, in favor of recalling Felix’s expression when Nina had shown up at his house in answer to a series of phone calls.

  Nina had brought a stack of magazines to read. She was remarkably cheerful about the whole transaction, which made me wonder about a lot of things. Was being a maid on the royal island that difficult or boring? Were her working conditions terrible? Or did she simply want a little adventure that would not lead to any serious trouble for herself? Most likely, Felix had cast a little spell on Nina. He’d gotten her name from one of his guild members. I suspected she was a frequent source of information.

  Nina had described her routine in detail.

  I’d crossed on the ferry with all the other working people on the evening shift. I had Nina’s identification card, and we didn’t look real different, so… I felt nearly all right about it. Helped by a don’t notice me spell—courtesy of Felix—the short trip had gone well. I’d only spoken to another woman who asked me for aspirin to relieve her hangover. I’d just had to shake my head.

  Nina had described another maid who worked in the same building, Irina, who had a big birthmark on her cheek that made her easy to spot. I followed Irina to the palace annex where the aides had their offices… and their bedrooms, as it turned out, since the job entailed such long and irregular hours.

  There wasn’t a supervisor on-site, Nina had told us, though their work was checked after every shift. Nina was supposed to collect her supplies (I had a list in my head) from the janitorial closet (I had a floor plan in my head), and when she was ready with those, she would clean four offices and bedrooms on the western side of the corridor.

  The ground-floor offices, totaling eight, were those of the aides to the top people: the tsar, the tsarina, Grand Duke Alexander, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna (who was the tsar’s aunt, I discovered). When the baby prince was old enough to have social engagements, he would have an aide here, too. I didn’t recognize the names of the other exalted people who’d been awarded aides. The title of the important person and the name of the aide were both on the nameplate affixed to each room door.

  At this time of the evening, they were empty, which was a big plus as far as I was concerned. I went to the janitorial closet, tossed everything that I saw Irina take into my rolling cart, and went to my first cleaning task, the office and bedroom of the tsar’s aide, Captain John Petrosky. It would have been easier if Captain John had been gone, but he was asleep in the small bedroom behind his office. Common sense told me not to wake him, so I eased the door shut on the dark room and began to straighten the office.

  This was not a challenge. I could clean a room. Nina had told me that all the garbage got tossed into a large bag with a drawstring mouth, which I would turn in as I left the building. I dusted, straightened, put the used glasses and water jug outside the door of the room as I saw Irina doing. I emptied the wastepaper basket into my large bag. I was almost out the door when Petrosky stumbled out of his bedroom. “Oh, sorry!” he said, and half-turned as if to go back into his bedroom. “I didn’t know it was maid service time.” But he gave me a little special smile as he turned, and made sure I saw that his pajama pants were not buttoned all the way.

  I nodded and headed for the door.

  “Don’t y
ou want a tip?” he called.

  I shook my head and shut the door behind me.

  Irina, from the opposite doorway, gave me a wry sort of smile. And that was the most contact we had all shift. She never gave a signal that showed she knew I wasn’t Nina, she never asked me where the real Nina was. After that one moment when she smiled, she pretended I wasn’t there. I guess that was safest for her.

  The next office was Captain McMurtry’s, and I went through it with the force of a hurricane, I was so worried he’d come back. I figured don’t notice me wouldn’t work on the good captain. He knew me as a person, so he’d be far more likely to get in trouble if he didn’t sound the alarm. His office and bedroom did not smell like cigarette smoke, as the previous suite had. That was a relief.

  McMurtry’s sheets were changed in five minutes. Bookcases, side tables, chair arms, straightened the desk, dusted. The trash emptied. Since he wasn’t in the office, I was obliged to vacuum. I had never used a vacuum cleaner, though I’d seen one demonstrated in a store window. This machine was as heavy as a mule, and about as biddable. I steered it around the bedroom and office, and switched it off with a lot of relief.

  I’d noticed McMurtry’s desk was covered with press clippings about the attempt on the tsarina’s life, and I was glad none of them contained any pictures of me.

  My next office was the one I’d been aiming for. Captain Leonid Baranov and his wife had had three sons and a daughter, and all of them looked like Baranovs, which was… salt of the earth, my mother’s term for people who were reliable and neighborly and charitable, but not gifted with good looks.

  Baranov went home to his wife at night, so his bedroom only needed a quick dusting. He was a neat man. I was delighted to find he’d typed (well, somebody had typed) everything the grand duke was doing tomorrow and had the document centered on his desk blotter. Organized.

  I couldn’t write anything down. That would be impossible to explain if I were searched for any reason. Tomorrow the grand duke was attending a funeral at the Church of Christ Victorious. From there he would go to the home of the dead man, where the family would gather for a lunch. At four o’clock he was due at a ground-breaking for the Romanov Imperial Hospital. I got that impressed into my head pretty quickly, so I was collecting the trash when Captain Baranov came in.

  He had to know someone was cleaning the offices, since it was done at the same time every day. Also, his office door was open, since the supervisor unlocked all the doors for the cleaners and then relocked them when they were done. But he made a lot out of being surprised I was there, gave me the slightest of nods, and then did his best to pretend I was invisible. He snatched up the very page I’d been studying, and he left with it, hardly disturbing the air with his brief entrance.

  I took a few deep breaths after that.

  Though my purpose was complete, I had to keep going with my work. One, Nina would need a job to come to tomorrow, and two, I had time to fill in before the ferry would take me back to the mainland.

  Xenia Alexandrovna’s aide, Vera something, was the only female on this side of the corridor. She made sure you knew it the minute you walked in.

  Her suite looked more like a boudoir than an office. The bedroom had been converted into a dressing room, and the wardrobe was stocked with dresses and shoes and wraps and hats and so on. And a full-length mirror on the inside of the bedroom door. A dressing table had been crammed in, and the top of it was crowded with stuff. All of which I had to pick up to dust, and the mirror had to be cleaned, and there were clothes on the floor, too. It took me twice as long to straighten her suite as Captain McMurtry’s, but at least she wasn’t there to make an offer like Captain Petrosky, or to pretend I wasn’t in the room like Captain Baranov.

  Irina finished her tasks about the same time as I finished mine. It was hard to watch her every move without being obvious. In her footsteps, I carried all my cleaning things into the bathroom, leaving the vacuum cleaner in the hall. The larger bathroom was for men, the smaller was for women, and we cleaned them both. Bathrooms are all the same, and cleaning ’em is never fun. As we were finishing up, Irina said, “You’re not Nina.”

  “I’m taking her place tonight,” I said, in as empty a way as I could. I didn’t want to be remembered, I didn’t want to be remarked.

  Irina nodded. We began putting our cleaning supplies away in the closet. I learned how to wind a vacuum-cleaner cord in a figure eight.

  My duties weren’t over yet. We had to take our large bags of trash to the incinerator, several buildings away. I was glad San Diego had such a mild climate.

  To my surprise, Irina and I got into a long line behind the other cleaners. We all had the same burden, the garbage. Some unlucky cleaners had emptied whole offices full, from the way their bags bulged.

  Once we got through the doors, the one line split into seven. I was careful to follow Irina into the farthest row. Once I was safe behind her, I had time to look ahead. The lines inched forward toward a row of seven men standing behind a long counter. Boys with wheelbarrows dashed back and forth behind the men, feeding open mouths filled with flame… the incinerators.

  Nina had said nothing about this. I watched the routine, concentrating hard. By the time Irina carried her bag to the table, I understood that the men were searching the trash.

  This was carrying security too far.

  Irina’s trash inspector, who had a giant mustache and looked as bored as a person can look, wore heavy gloves. He was running with sweat. The closer we got to the incinerators, the hotter it was. Mustache rummaged through the papers and cigarette butts and used tissues, finding nothing of interest until something metallic glinted under the big lights over the table. “Ha!” he said.

  Irina flinched.

  She relaxed when Mustache held up the glittery object. It was a woman’s powder compact. Even I could tell it wasn’t real gold, any more than the shiny things on top were real diamonds. The powder inside was cracked, and a lot of it had been used, anyway. Mustache told the boy behind him, “Put it in the keep-for-a-week bin.” The boy put the cracked compact into a smaller numbered wooden box on the floor. The rest of the garbage was scraped into the boy’s wheelbarrow, which he pushed to the incinerator to dump.

  I didn’t even have a shiny cheap compact to attract Mustache’s interest.

  After that was done, we were free to go back to the building we’d cleaned to get our coats and then return to the pier to wait for the ferry. The air was cold and crisp, having been washed off by the showers of the day before. I was so relieved to be through with my job, to be still free, that I had to keep telling myself I was still under observation, still was not back on the mainland.

  Few of the workers seemed inclined to visit. Some women talked about a recipe they had tried, and two men discussed the chances of the new city baseball team, the Empire Sluggers.

  The ferry lowered its gangplank, and we shuffled on board. Everyone else sat staring ahead of them into the night as we made the brief passage across the water.

  I walked to Felix’s, just in case anyone was watching. I was glad to take off the uniform and shoes that Nina had loaned me, and glad to watch her walk out of Felix’s house and vanish into the night. I was even more glad to write down the grand duke’s schedule. I was tired of chanting it over and over in my head.

  “Do you think you can be ready for the funeral?” Felix asked. “Alexander will go to the church and the graveside. But the church is a surer thing.”

  “Where is this church?”

  “I’ll pick you up at the hotel. Bring your guns. In fact, better bring all your things.” He called a cab to take me to the hotel, and I didn’t object. I had finally had a few hours of working for my living, and it had worn me out.

  I took a hot, hot bath and climbed into bed at the Balboa Palace, which was beginning to feel like home. I was tired, but I couldn’t stop my head from churning. If I’d been caught on the island, I would never have gotten on the ferry again. No one
would ever have known what happened to me. I would have been just… gone.

  It wasn’t like me to brood about what might have happened, or to worry about tomorrow. This place was giving me the creeps.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Church of Christ Victorious was new. It didn’t look like any church I’d ever seen. It had colored domes, three of them, all different colors, and they were all topped with a cross. There wasn’t any yard; it was jammed against the sidewalk. In all fairness, it was a big church, very big to my eyes.

  Christ Victorious was located in an area of San Diego where many Russians had bought or built homes over the past few years. In fact, it stood not too many blocks from the Savarov house. Maybe the Savarovs came here to the services.

  The building opposite the church was an invalids’ home, packed full of native Russians who’d been on the boats. Felix had told me that most of the “invalids” were aged aristocratic women with no family or aged retired military men, like the man whose funeral Grand Duke Alexander was attending. The church assisted with their fees for the home.

  I was wearing Veronika’s court clothes again. Though the look was a bit too fancy, I figured I could pass as a visiting relative. I’d checked out of the Balboa Palace, and Felix had all my stuff. I was carrying a cloth laundry bag from my hotel closet, and in it were my guns rolled in my jacket so they wouldn’t click together. I was delivering clean clothes to my elderly grandfather-in-law, I decided.

  In Veronika’s purse I carried extra bullets. But I realized that if I had to reload, I was in serious trouble.

  The invalid home wasn’t as massive as the church opposite, but it was big enough. I went up the steps to the front door of the stucco home and walked in, smiling at the middle-aged woman on reception duty. She was wearing a white nurse’s uniform—of course she wore a uniform—and she was busy arranging a sheaf of flowers in a huge vase. She paid me very little attention. I walked by her at a steady pace, as if I knew exactly where I was going, as if I were in and out every day.