Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

by David Dickinson

  The son of the assassinated Tsar set up the Okhrana to stem the tide of assassination and revolution. Many of the opposition fled abroad to escape the clutches of the Okhrana. They didn’t realize that the European network under the General’s control could see as far – if not further – than the home headquarters in St Petersburg. The General’s European Okhrana had very close links with the French Sûreté and its counterparts in Berlin and Vienna. They had officers in every major European capital. Their principal tactic was based on infiltrating the opposition groups. Sometimes they used agents provocateurs. They had a number of very attractive women on their books, prepared to sleep with a Bolshevik or a Menshevik, they didn’t really mind which, or delve through his rubbish bins. The General, oddly enough for a man in his profession, was not fond of violence. As a last resort he would call in his hard men, former soldiers of the Foreign Legion, who took their most reluctant prisoners to a chateau hidden deep in the mountains of the Cevennes. Some of the victims were never seen again.

  He was a great believer in punctuality, the General. At precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, on the day Powerscourt met Natasha Shaporova again, a certain Captain Yuri Gorodetsky was shown into his office. The Captain was the senior officer in London who had a special appointment to see his boss.

  ‘Good afternoon, Captain. I believe you have come on urgent business. You must have your hands full, with the Ballets Russes in town. They can be guaranteed to cause a certain amount of chaos wherever they go. God knows, they cause enough trouble every time they come to Paris. I don’t think that rogue Diaghilev has paid his hotel bill from the time he was here three years ago.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s changed, General. I don’t think he’ll ever change. I want your advice on a slightly different matter this afternoon, if you would.’

  ‘Please, carry on.’

  ‘I’m sure you remember that big bank robbery in Tiflis a few years back? The one where some people were killed and the Bolsheviks made off with an enormous amount of money?’

  The General nodded. ‘Not one of our better days, I fear.’

  ‘As you know, the Bolsheviks couldn’t get their hands on most of the cash. The haul was enormous, three hundred and forty-one thousand roubles. This was the snag. Most of the money, over a quarter of a million roubles, was in five-hundred-rouble notes. Most people have never set eyes on one of these. But the authorities knew the numbers. They sent them to every bank in Russia. Lenin organized a plot to cash some of the notes abroad. We managed to stop that. Now he’s going to try again, in London this time.’

  ‘Is he, by God?’ said the General, taking a large cigar from the top drawer of his enormous desk. ‘You’ve done well to track this plot down.’

  ‘Thank you, General. There is a link with the Ballets Russes, as it happens. Lenin has a follower who works part of the time for the Ballets Russes, a member of Lenin’s gang, currently holed up in Cracow. They spend a lot of time in the Café Noworolski apparently, reading the newspapers and planning the revolution. I don’t think this contact brought the money with him. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that the banknotes were smuggled in by the Ballets Russes. Some of those female dancers take enough stuff with them to fill Selfridge’s department store, or the Galeries Lafayette here in the Boulevard Haussmann. This is the important thing, General. Lenin’s man has been meeting with a lot of home-grown revolutionaries in London. Our friends in the Metropolitan Police keep a very close eye on these characters. We believe that they are going to send a number of local revolutionaries in their best suits into a collection of banks across the City of London and the West End. Each man, we believe, will have a packet of five-hundred-rouble notes with him. They’ll probably turn them into pounds or dollars – probably pounds, as that’s the local currency. You could change those anywhere in Europe with no questions asked.’

  ‘You have done well, Captain. Do you know when this is going to happen? And is it all meant to happen at once so the various banks haven’t got time to warn each other?’

  ‘I don’t know how soon this is going to happen, General. I believe it is going to be very soon. Our English friends hope to get the answer to that question tonight. It was they who gave me all these details.’

  ‘And what are the London police going to do? Do we know?’

  ‘That is why I am here. Our English friends want to know our wishes. Should they arrest these people and put them in jail? Or should they watch and wait?’

  The General took a long pull on his cigar. Outside, the noise of the children on the swings in the Parc Monceau floated in through the General’s open windows.

  ‘I can see the appeal of locking all those people up. It must be very tempting. But I’m always wary about sending these characters to prison. Even if you disperse them all over the country, there’s still a risk. They go to jail knowing the trade they work in and a load of revolutionary nonsense. But think of the people they’re going to meet, and the skills they could learn. You could be sent down as a carpenter and come back a burglar, or a lock picker, or a fraudster – maybe even all three. Perhaps you absorb even more revolutionary rubbish in the prison library. Is there another way round this problem?’

  ‘I think the English police worry about publicity, General. The politicians would certainly want to lock them up. That would make them popular for a day or two. They would probably like to keep them locked away for a very long time. Suppose we just observe the operation? If we have witnesses in the banks, the police can pick up the revolutionaries any time they want and charge them with money laundering. We must have records of those bloody bank numbers in the files here.’

  The General smiled a private smile as he thought of a night hunt through the grey cabinets in the long corridors down in his basement.

  ‘Do we know what they’re going do with the pounds or dollars once they’ve changed them?’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘Suppose you’re Lenin with that ghastly beard, holed up in his Cracow café with the newspapers and his Bolshevik friends. You wouldn’t want to let your English colleagues keep the money for any length of time, would you? Their wives might spend it. They could get plenty of new friends in the pub standing everybody drinks. Maybe they could buy enough dynamite to build a few bombs.’

  ‘How about this, General? Surely if you’re Lenin, now on your fifth cup of coffee of the afternoon, you’re going to get the money out the same way you sent it in. Pack it away in the Ballets Russes luggage. Next stop Paris or Monte Carlo. Plenty of banks in Monte Carlo near that great casino. You could change your new English pounds into any currency you liked in there.’

  ‘Let’s just act it through to see what the problems might be.’ General Kilyagin was very fond of amateur theatricals. The shy members of his family always dreaded Christmas and the summer holidays. ‘I’ll be the banker. You’re the Bolshevik from Bethnal Green.’

  The Captain was already reaching for his wallet. ‘You hand the money over,’ the General went on, as his colleague duly gave him two English pound notes, masquerading as large numbers of roubles. ‘Thank you very much, are you staying long? My goodness,’ the General was peering closely at the note, ‘we don’t see these very often, even in London. Let me just check our current exchange-rate tables,’ he rummaged about in his drawer. ‘Here we are. That’ll be eighty-four pounds six shillings and sixpence.’

  As the General parted with two ten-franc notes, he slapped his hand on the table very hard. ‘Damn,’ he said very loudly. ‘It’s always good to rehearse these things. I see a problem.’ The General rose from his desk and walked to the window. The children were still playing on the swings, their nannies gossiping in groups of three or four. ‘I’ve got it!’ he cried, sinking into his chair, thinking back to his days in the military. ‘We funnel them, Captain, we bloody well funnel them!’

  ‘Funnel them, General? Forgive me, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sorry. The problem is the number of banks. It’s a
long time since I’ve been to London, but that bit round the Royal Exchange in the City, that’s full of banks. I’m sure there are plenty more over in Mayfair and the West End. There must be a limit to the number of banks the Metropolitan Police can man, if you see what I mean. They could probably manage a dozen or so, but not fifty or a hundred. So they have to decide which twelve banks would suit their purposes, plenty of room to watch, that sort of thing. Then they cable all the other banks to tell them to tell any customers trying to change five-hundred-rouble notes: terribly sorry, sir, we don’t have the facilities to change those here, but Blanks Bank round the corner can do it for you. Off they go to Blanks Bank, packed full of policemen in plain clothes. That’s how the funnel works. What do you think?’

  ‘I like it, General, I like it very much. With your permission I shall return to London. I’ll send a cable to the Met before I go so they can set things in motion.’

  ‘God speed,’ said the General, ‘and good luck.’

  There was marble everywhere. It swept through the foyer of the Savoy Hotel and carried on for about a hundred yards to the suite of management offices at the end. A huge reception desk, manned by severe-looking men in frock coats, stuck out like the bridge on an ocean liner. Powerscourt thought these people could have been Roman senators in a previous life. Three other ‘senators’ in top hats swirled round the front doors, greeting the new arrivals like royalty, which they often were. A phalanx of footmen, lower in the pecking order than the senators, were also on duty. They stooped down from Mount Olympus to give directions to lost children or aged dowagers. Sometimes they escorted the new guests to their quarters in the electric lift. The Savoy was the only hotel in London which was totally powered by electricity. It was also the only hotel in the capital where all the bedrooms had their own bathroom attached.

  Powerscourt and Sergeant Jenkins had been waiting for Diaghilev since nine o’clock in the morning. By a quarter to ten he had still not appeared. They had not been invited to his suite, merely told to await his arrival in the reception.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing, Sergeant? Is the man still asleep? Eating breakfast in bed with bacon and eggs and cups of Russian tea?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I’ve never had breakfast in bed in my whole life and that’s a fact. Come to think of it, I’ve never stayed in a hotel, either.’

  ‘You will, Sergeant, you will. Lots of inspectors take their families to seaside hotels for their summer holidays. Your time will come.’

  ‘I tell you one thing, my lord. You’ll never guess where I went last night.’

  ‘Go on, astonish me,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Why, I went to the ballet, my lord. I took my mama, as she doesn’t get out that much since my father hurt his leg. She thought it was great.’

  ‘You mean the Ballets Russes, I presume?’

  ‘That’s right. My mother was bowled over by Nijinsky. There’s one dance, called The Spirit of the Rose, I think, where he does a great leap at the end and disappears right off the stage. It was amazing.’

  ‘Were you as impressed by Nijinsky as your mum?’

  ‘Yes, I was. But it was those girls in the corps de ballet who got me, my lord. Some of them were very beautiful. And they weren’t wearing many clothes.’

  ‘I’m told people don’t wear too many clothes as a rule in the ballet.’

  ‘Do you think I could ask one of them out, Lord Powerscourt? Tea in the Corner House, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. If they won’t come, then you just arrest them. Conduct your interview in the Corner House and then let them go for lack of evidence.’

  A footman was approaching with a note on a silver tray.

  ‘This has just come for you, sir. I believe Mr Diaghilev dictated it to one of our telephone girls. We always have one on duty who speaks French.’

  ‘My art is more important than police procedures. I shall arrange another appointment when I have time. Diaghilev.’

  ‘I say,’ said the Sergeant, ‘that’s bloody rude.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Powerscourt, picking up his hat. ‘I shall send a reply when I can think of something that will make him behave better in the future. It’s not as if he’s some bloody barbarian from the Russian steppes, after all. He wasn’t brought up in the wilderness in Siberia like that holy charlatan Rasputin. St Petersburg is as sophisticated as any city in Europe. The man’s well educated; he’s been to university, he moves in the best circles in Paris and London. He just doesn’t know how to behave properly.’

  ‘Maybe them Russians don’t think much of their own police force.’

  ‘Maybe. We’re going for a short walk, Sergeant. Shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Where are we going, my lord?’

  ‘We are going to the Royal Opera House, Sergeant. I don’t care any more about what that man Fokine told us about not going to see the scene of the crime without Diaghilev’s permission. Diaghilev can go to hell. We’re going anyway.’

  The head porters bowed as Powerscourt and Sergeant Jenkins left the sacred portals of the Savoy and headed off up Wellington Street in the direction of the Royal Opera House. They were just passing Covent Garden Market when Powerscourt stopped suddenly.

  ‘It’s old age,’ he said, ‘it must be. How could I be so stupid?’

  ‘What’s wrong, my lord?’

  ‘It’s the body, Sergeant, the body of Alexander Taneyev. Where is it, in heaven’s name? Don’t tell me Diaghilev’s got it stashed away in his dressing room at the Savoy?’

  ‘No, he’s not. I must be getting old too, my lord. I meant to tell you first thing this morning. Our men took the body away the evening they found it. It’s not very far away, actually. It’s in the Middlesex Hospital near Oxford Circus. Some doctor or professor or maybe both is going to conduct the autopsy this morning, my lord. He’ll be sending a written report, of course, but his office let us know that if we were to call in after two o’clock tomorrow, he would be able to talk us through his findings. Sorry about that, my lord, very remiss of me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Good to know the autopsy is being carried out so soon.’

  They made their way into the Royal Opera House through the works entrance at the rear, where the stage sets and other bulky items were brought in. A young carpenter brought them to the hole under the stairs where Alexander Taneyev, a Prince in Georgia, had jumped in at the end of Thamar.

  ‘It’s got very popular, this spot,’ the carpenter said cheerfully, as he ushered them into the little room. ‘I think they ought to charge people to come like they do at Madame Tussaud’s. Mind you, Mr Diaghilev’s had it all cleaned out and redecorated.’

  There was still a strong smell of paint. The walls were pale blue. There were bare boards with no carpet on the floor.

  ‘My God,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Who gave Diaghilev permission to tidy everything up? Why wasn’t this room sealed off? Do we know what it looked like before, Sergeant?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, we do sir. There were loads of mattresses piled up for the dancer to fall into. He was stabbed in the front. The killer appeared to have left nothing behind.’

  ‘He might have left a hair behind, or something like that. He might have been blond, for heaven’s sake. We’ll never know now. Damn Diaghilev. To be fair to him it’s perfectly possible he was told to leave everything as it was but the policeman didn’t know that Diaghilev doesn’t speak a word of English. Maybe it’s a failure of communication rather than a deliberate attempt to destroy the evidence and cover up the scene of the crime.’

  Powerscourt and the Sergeant went on a tour that took them round the scenery dock where the body was found, past the dressing rooms and up to the back of the main stage. Fokine was still shouting at the corps de ballet. Powerscourt wondered if it was the same complaint he had been making the day before.

  ‘Tell me, my lord,’ Sergeant Jenkins had noticed that Powerscourt’s normal good humour seemed to have returned, ‘they alway
s emphasize on police courses how important it is to inspect the scene of the crime. You’re meant to do it in person. Do you think it’s very important?’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve been told the same thing. Probably by a policeman, mind you.’

  ‘Have you ever solved a crime or found the murderer by visiting the scene of crime?’

  ‘Come to think of it, I’m not sure I have. Maybe they should revise the police manuals. What do you think, Sergeant?’

  Sergeant Jenkins had been staring at the stage very hard. ‘Sorry, my lord, it’s those girls. Just look at that blonde one over there. And to think that some lucky bloke probably gets to pick that one up and throw her high in the air six nights a week. It doesn’t bear thinking about. What was your question again, my lord?’