Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

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Death Comes to the Ballets Russes Page 5

by David Dickinson


  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Powerscourt, patting the young man on the shoulder. ‘It’s not important. It doesn’t matter at all.’

  Powerscourt had a standing invitation to tea at the Shaporova household any time after four o’clock. Natasha welcomed him with the finest English tea. Powerscourt was slightly disappointed. He had brought Sergeant Jenkins along because the Sergeant had told him that he, Jenkins, had always wanted to have tea from one of those samovar things. Never mind, Powerscourt said to himself: looking at Natasha for a while will take the Sergeant’s mind off the corps de ballet.

  Powerscourt told her about the disappearing Diaghilev and the repainted crime scene.

  ‘Typical Diaghilev,’ she said. ‘Don’t flatter yourself that you’ve been singled out for special treatment. It’s perfectly normal, it happens all the time. Now then, I want to ask your advice, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve got a proposition to put before you.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Well,’ she said, pouring some more tea, ‘you know how Diaghilev and Nijinsky are invited to all the best houses in London? Not just Lady Ripon; she and the Duchess of Devonshire are just the tip of the iceberg. Everybody wants to show the Ballets Russes people off in their own houses. So my plan is to invite the entire corps de ballet to lunch or tea here. Mikhail knows the Russian Ambassador quite well. I think the Ambassador owes Mikhail’s bank a heap of money so he’ll have to come. I can ask the priest in charge of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Ennismore Gardens in South Kensington. That’s The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary to you heathens. Maybe he’ll be able to rustle up a metropolitan or two to dress the set. We’ve got some icons praying away in a spare room upstairs. We’ll give them an outing down here. Tea in the samovar, Russian food, lashings of vodka. Home from home in Chelsea Square. We’ll make them our friends. I’ll invite some Russian speakers to make them feel at home. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it is a very cunning plan, actually,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I’m not sure I see why you call it cunning,’

  ‘Well, if they are our friends, they may tell us things we wouldn’t otherwise know. They could be like our spies in the Diaghilev camp. I presume you would wait until after the tea party before we start interviewing them?’

  ‘I think it would work better that way, yes.’

  ‘I tell you what, Natasha. It could be a great help if all these important people turn up – the Ambassador and a metropolitan or two. I’ve always worried that Diaghilev will simply instruct all his people to say as little as possible. He has the purse strings. He hands out the contracts. Do you want to spend the summer in Paris or not? You could ask your distinguished visitors to impress on the corps de ballet how important it is in the eyes of God and Mammon that they should cooperate fully with the English authorities. If they don’t they could be stuck here in London for a very long time. They are ambassadors for the good name of the Tsar and Mother Russia, that sort of line. You follow me?’

  ‘I do,’ said Natasha with a smile. ‘By the time you’re through with this case, you’ll be about as devious as Diaghilev, Lord Powerscourt. In fact, I suspect you already are.’ She smiled.

  ‘There is one thing I want to ask you about these interviews, Natasha. Do you think the girls would say more if it was just you doing the talking? If I wasn’t there, in other words?’

  Natasha clapped her hands three times and laughed. ‘Goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, I don’t think that is a good idea at all. For a start I might not ask the right questions. And the other reason is clear as daylight to a woman, but obviously not so clear to a man.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You are an English milord. You are a member of the aristocracy. You know prime ministers and those sorts of people. These girls may be beautiful dancers but they are very young. Their heads may be turned. Maybe they will dream of becoming the mistress of an English milord. They can come and live in London. You must remember to wear your smartest clothes when you come to meet the girls. If you’ve got a real coronet in your dressing-up box, you’d better bring that too.’

  4

  Ballon

  Ballon means ‘to bounce’, where the dancer can show the lightness of the movement. This is a quality, not the elevation or height, of the jump. Even in small, quick jumps (petit allegro), dancers strive to exhibit ballon. A dancer exhibiting ballon would spring off the floor and appear to pause mid-air before landing.

  George Walker was there. He was a docker. Albert Smith was there. He worked on the railways. The brothers William and Thomas Baker were there. They were porters at Euston Station. Arthur Cooper was there. He drove a bus. Henry Farmer was there. He too worked in the docks. Frederick and Alfred Butcher were there. They were miners from Kent. Joseph Turner was there. He was a schoolteacher. John Jones was there. He too was a docker. Walter Shepherd also worked on the railways. Herbert Thatcher was there. He drove a train.

  These men were the twelve principal disciples of Lenin’s revolutionary movement in London. The Bolsheviks weren’t the only revolutionary group represented at the private meeting room in the Fox and Hounds in Rotherhithe. There were Syndicalists and Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, all united by extreme hatred of the capitalism that employed them at what they saw as minimal wages, maximum hours and very little concern for safety. For much of 1911 and 1912 they had been on strike or on the verge of a strike all over the country. Some of them wanted a minimum wage. Others, like the supporters of Lenin, wanted the complete overthrow of the capitalist system, an end to the power of the House of Lords, universal suffrage and the replacement of the monarchy by a Republic. Preferably all at once. Just as Christian Evangelicals believe personal salvation has to be experienced before true entry into the Church, so the Bolsheviks believed that conversion to the thinking of Karl Marx, principal saint in the Bolshevik religion, was a key part of being a true revolutionary.

  Arthur Cooper, the bus driver and active trade unionist, called the meeting to order.

  ‘Comrades,’ he began, ‘let me begin by thanking you all for coming to this meeting, especially when I didn’t feel able to tell you what it was about.’ He paused and took a long draught of his pint of mild and bitter. ‘Now I can give you the full story. Very soon now we are all going to take part in a major assault on the capitalist system. We are going into enemy territory. We’re going into the banks.

  ‘Let me explain. Several years ago our colleagues in Russia organized what the capitalist Press would call a bank robbery in the Georgian city of Tiflis. You and I would say it was setting the people’s money free. So tight-fisted were those bankers that they kept notes of all the numbers on the five-hundred-rouble notes. Five-hundred-rouble notes, comrades, are for so large a sum that no worker could possibly have owned one, let alone seen one. Those notes were indeed the fruits of the oppressing and exploiting class. Comrade Lenin and Comrade Stalin couldn’t change these notes in Russia. They tried to change them abroad but were foiled by counter-revolutionary forces. Now it is our turn. We will have a series of bundles of notes, one for each man present, ready for distribution shortly. We will have prepared individual street maps with bank addresses so that you will all be going to different banks. This revolutionary action should start at precisely eleven o’clock. The reason for the coordination is to stop the capitalist bankers ringing up their collaborators and raising doubts about our plan. If the lackeys at the counter ask where the large note came from, you are to say that it was sent to you by the lawyers looking after the will of a rich relation in Moscow. Please ask to change the money into pounds. Please be polite. Revolutions are not won by guns alone. You are asked by Comrade Lenin to bring the money back here. We will organize its transfer to Lenin’s current location to further the work of the revolution. I will try to answer any questions but I feel that revolutionary discipline should prevail. The less you know the better.’

  Cooper looked round his
little audience. Nobody asked any questions.

  ‘Inside a week we shall further the cause of progress. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! Let us close our meeting with “The Internationale”.’ The song had been used by socialists, communists, anarchists, democratic socialists, all the different varieties of revolutionary factions.

  This is the final struggle

  Let us group together and tomorrow

  The Internationale

  Will be the human race.

  Powerscourt had suspected for some time that his wife Lucy slipped bad news into the conversation at times when he could not complain very loudly. They were just about to go to the theatre in a taxi when she announced that her Great Aunt Theodosia was coming to stay for a few days. She was a Stratton, this Theodosia, related to Lady Lucy on her mother’s side, and very rich. Her family lived in a vast house with more servants than rooms on top of one of the largest and richest coal seams in the country. This aunt was extremely old, extremely deaf and extremely difficult. Powerscourt had once claimed that in any contest to find the most reactionary person in Britain, Great Aunt Theodosia would win at a canter.

  ‘Why is she coming to stay with us, Lucy? Why can’t she take a room at the Ritz or book a suite at the Savoy?’

  ‘Honestly, Francis, she’s a relation. People don’t want to stay in strange hotels when they’re as old as she is. They want to be in the bosom of their family.’

  ‘What happens if the bosom of the family don’t want them?’

  ‘You’re being unreasonable, Francis, you know you are. Anyway, she has to come up to town on business. That’s what she said, anyway.’

  ‘What sort of business? Doctors? Wills? Solicitors? That sort of business?’

  ‘You’ll just have to wait and find out.’

  Powerscourt remembered a previous conversation with Great Aunt Theodosia in the drawing room at Stratton Hall in Yorkshire. They may have been sitting on top of thousands and thousands of tons of coal up there, but the rooms were always freezing. The old lady would raise a topic and then use her victim’s reaction to reveal the strength and depth of her prejudices.

  ‘What about these women going about the place smashing things up?’ she demanded after dinner. ‘Suffragettes they call themselves, I believe. They’d certainly suffer if I were in charge, I can tell you. I suppose you approve of these monsters pretending to be proper women, Lord Powerscourt? It’s the sort of thing fashionable people are said to agree with nowadays. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, realizing all too well that these waters were treacherous, ‘I don’t support their methods, Great Aunt Theodosia, but I do support their objectives. I think women should have universal suffrage. Wouldn’t you like to have the vote yourself?’

  ‘I most certainly would not, young man. Two of my relations sat in the 1832 Parliament when the Great Reform Act was passed and let some of the rabble vote. They sat for those splendid rotten boroughs which have, unfortunately, been abolished. But they voted against the changes every time they could. A great uncle of mine was in the 1867 House of Commons and he opposed the later reforms to let even more of the rabble vote. And I had three relations who voted with the Diehards last year when the House of Lords had to agree to a ridiculous Act cooked up by that wicked Asquith to rip up the constitution and limit the powers of the House of Lords. One of them wrote the closing speech for Lord Selborne: “The question is, shall we perish in the dark, slain by our hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies?”’

  Great Aunt Theodosia stared at Powerscourt as if he were one of the ringleaders of this ongoing treachery over the voting system. He could still remember her final blast up there in the cold of Yorkshire.

  ‘And another thing. They’re not educated, most of the women in this country. I fancy some of the suffragette people may have learnt to read, but even those who can read don’t spend their time following the passage of Bills through Parliament or the twists and turns of foreign policy. They read those dreadful magazines full of foolish gossip about film stars and people in the music hall. These women won’t vote on the issues. They will vote on the looks of the candidates. Do you call that democracy?’

  ‘Do you want to see the body? Some people don’t.’ Dr Thomas Harrison, the doctor who had conducted the autopsy was a small, sunburned man who looked as if he spent a lot of his life outdoors. Sergeant Jenkins was to tell Powerscourt later that the doctor loved walking in the Alps in spring and summer, returning with a fine tan and further specimens for his collection of wild flowers. He was in a small office next to the Middlesex Hospital morgue.

  ‘Yes please.’ Sergeant Jenkins sounded confident. This, in fact, would be the first corpse he had ever seen on duty. The doctor led the way. He nodded to the attendant to pull a body out of the trays on the wall.

  Alexander Taneyev looked very peaceful and absurdly young.

  ‘I’ve heard about you from my colleagues, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Dr Harrison. ‘They say you like complicated cases. Well, let me tell you, this is one of the most straightforward murders I have ever seen.’

  ‘Really?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I’ll show you the wound that killed him, if you like. Our estimated time for his death, based on the rigor mortis and so on, coincides with the timetable of the ballet. End of Thamar, down he leaps, the murderer is waiting, stabs him with one of those evil knives, that’s the end of poor Alexander.’

  ‘Have you seen the murder weapon, doctor?’

  ‘I have indeed. The ballet people offered to let me hang on to one until all the formalities were complete. I said no. I didn’t want one of those lethal instruments knocking about on my premises. I sent it straight back.’

  ‘Could you describe it for us?’ Sergeant Jenkins was keeping his eyes well away from the sight of the gaping wound.

  ‘Of course. They told me it is a Cossack knife. It’s very slim and incredibly sharp at the end. They’re cleaned and sharpened regularly, I understand. The murderer knew enough about human anatomy to strike upwards from below rather downwards from above. The boy would have died immediately. It would have been very sudden.’

  ‘Could you hazard a guess as to whether the murderer was a man or a woman, Doctor?’

  Dr Harrison winced. ‘Normally we associate death by knife wound with men. But we don’t know much about the culture of these ballet people. It could have been a man or a woman. That dagger is so sharp, a child of twelve could have done it.’

  Natasha Shaporova had hired a suite in the Fielding Hotel for interviews with the Ballets Russes. The girls wouldn’t have to travel across an unknown city to a police station. They wouldn’t have to change out of their costumes if they were in rehearsal. They would come in groups of three so they wouldn’t feel too frightened or too alone. A samovar and a couple of miserable-looking icons had been imported from Chelsea Square.

  The party for the corps de ballet in the Shaporova house the day before had been a great success. The Ambassador had turned up and made a splendid speech about the importance of proper behaviour and cooperation with the local police. It was, he assured them, rather like being invited to the country house of a rich relation you hadn’t met before. You want to be asked back. This had gone down very well with the girls. The local priest had managed to enlist not one but two metropolitans. Powerscourt felt sure they must have heard about the quality of Mikhail’s wines, which all came from the most prestigious vineyards in Burgundy and the Rhone valley. The holy men had glided about the room, crucifixes swaying by their waists, blessing the girls and reminding them of the church services in the cathedral. They led the gathering in singing traditional Russian hymns and folk songs at the end. Powerscourt had dressed the set, as he put it to himself, smiling at the corps de ballet like a benevolent uncle. Sergeant Jenkins had been bowled over by the beauty and the sheer numbers of the Ballets Russes dancers.

  Powerscourt and Natasha had worked out a rough pattern for the interviews. She had borrowed a biling
ual secretary with excellent shorthand from Mikhail’s bank. Olga Penovsky was going to take notes in Russian and then type them up in English. Sergeant Jenkins was particularly pleased to be relieved of his note-taking duties.

  Where were you when Alexander Taneyev jumped to his death? Did you hear anything unusual? Had you seen any strangers wandering round the backstage and the dressing rooms? When did you hear that there had been a murder? This was what Powerscourt called the first round. But, he had emphasized to Natasha, it was the second round that he was really interested in. For, as Natasha pointed out, it would have been virtually impossible for any of these girls to have carried out the murder. They were on stage at the time.

  Do you have any particular friends in the corps de ballet? Do you like Mr Diaghilev? Do you like Michel Fokine? Do you like Nijinsky? What do you make of Alfred Bolm? Did he have any particular enemies? Did Alexander Taneyev? Why does Michel Fokine shout at you so much? Were there any feuds in the company that you were aware of? Is there anything you think the police ought to know?

  After the first three interviews, Natasha gave Powerscourt a summary of what she had heard so far. The girls had been sent to another room for coffee and chocolate cake and could be brought back if necessary before they returned to the Royal Opera House.

  ‘It’s more or less what you would expect, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘but there are one or two interesting bits. They’re all frightened of Diaghilev. He seems very big to them. They were nearly all on stage at the time of the murder and heard or saw nothing unusual. Fokine shouts at them so much because he is such a good dancer himself and he thinks they are very slow to understand what he wants them to do. Deep down, I think they’re quite fond of him. Alexander Taneyev was the same age as a lot of the girls. He didn’t seem very interested in them. One of them wondered if Diaghilev fancied him. They all mentioned Diaghilev’s affair with Nijinsky. ‘He thinks we don’t know, but he’s wrong,’ one of them told me. ‘Everybody knows all about it.’ The really interesting thing is this: they don’t like Alfred Bolm at all. One of them blushed scarlet when his name was mentioned. Another looked down at the ground. Maybe he’s tried to make love to them.’

 

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