The Masque of the Red Dress

by Ellen Byerrum

  “Oh, we have refreshments too,” Lacey said. “Vic brought wings.” Vic pointed at the big platter, still covered with foil.

  “Excellent! We love American wings. But first we have something for you.” Olga Kepelova offered a bag to Lacey. “You have a plate? For the caviar?”

  “Caviar?” Lacey peeked into the sack. Caviar and chicken wings! All my favorites!

  “And a small silver spoon. Da?”

  “Yes, I have a plate and spoon.”

  “Must be silver.”

  Gregor’s sister always carried an air of unimpeachable authority, even in someone else’s home. She marched into Lacey’s small galley kitchen, fingers trailing the counters, touching the cabinets. Perhaps she was doing a sweep of her own.

  Lacey produced a delicate silver platter with a fluted rim that had belonged to Aunt Mimi, and one of Mimi’s best silver spoons. Olga deemed these acceptable. She placed the caviar in the middle and surrounded it with crackers.

  “It will do.” Olga dipped the spoon into the black goo and spread it on a cracker. She tasted it, and closed her eyes in bliss. “Try it. Is good.” Olga gazed at her intently, insistently.

  One cracker’s worth is polite enough, Lacey decided. She took a bite. It was incredibly salty and made her mouth pucker—not in a good way. Her palate was more prosaically American than one accustomed to exotic fish eggs.

  “That’s really something,” she said. Olga smiled, satisfied. Whew.

  Marie scooped a dollop of the dark delicacy on a cracker and popped it into her mouth.

  “I didn’t know you liked caviar, Marie,” Lacey said.

  “Cher, down in Nawlins we eat alligator and frog’s legs and suck the brains out of crawfish. This is delicious.” She picked up a plate, filling one side with crackers and caviar and the other with chicken wings and sauces. The others followed suit. Except for Lacey. She dug into the grapes.

  “With caviar we must have vodka,” Gregor announced. “Olga?”

  “Of course, brother. You must pour the vodka,” Olga said.

  Gregor looked at her. “I thought you brought the vodka!”

  “I thought you had it!” Olga looked wildly at Lacey. “Smithsonian! You must have vodka!” Before Lacey could answer, Olga flung open the refrigerator door. There was a long silence.

  Oh my God, Lacey thought. No one brought the vodka. We’re doomed. Doomed!

  “Ah! Champagne!” Olga emerged triumphantly with one of Lacey’s bottles of champagne. The best one. “Excellent! Even better! You have champagne glasses?”

  No, I drink it straight from the bottle. And I may start. “In the cupboard over the sink, Olga. Make yourself at home.”

  “So nice of you. A very good champagne. Perfect with caviar.”

  Marie sent Lacey a smile and a little shrug. Her look said clearly, There’s nothing to be done about Olga, just chill. Lacey smiled back.

  Wings, caviar, beer, and champagne were flowing freely when another knock sounded on her front door.

  “I’ll get it.” Vic strolled to the door and peered through the peephole. He opened it, and a large yet graceful man stepped into the entryway.

  “Turtledove,” Lacey said.

  “Lacey.” He lifted his head and sniffed the air. “I smell wings.” His teeth were large and white and looked fearsome when he grinned.

  “Lots of wings,” Vic said. “Help yourself, Forrest.”

  “Vic invited me,” he said to Lacey. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “You know you’re always welcome.” She ushered him into the living room. “And thank you for moving the crimson costume.”

  “My pleasure. Course I’m a little curious to find out why it merits the James Bond treatment.”

  “And you will. But first, have some chicken. Beer. Caviar. Champagne.”

  Kepelov soon called the meeting to order. Lacey curled up on the sofa next to Vic. The others pulled up chairs in a circle.

  “As you know, we are here because our friend Lacey Smithsonian has once again pulled on a red thread and tickled a terrible tiger,” Gregor said, mixing metaphors.

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Lacey said. “And we don’t know about the tiger yet.”

  “I think we do,” Vic said.

  “You have a gift,” Olga said. “A dangerous gift.”

  “I’d be willing to bet on it,” Turtledove added. “I just gave the five-star protection service to a dress. The story has got to be the best part.”

  “This is the truth, Lacey Smithsonian, no use arguing,” Gregor said. “This EFP is more than just paying close attention to clothes, noticing things others do not see.”

  “I got that.” Lacey leaned her head back against the sofa. “I don’t have anything solid yet.”

  “You have more than you know,” Gregor said. “And more than I know.”

  Lacey wondered if Marie had taken another Valium. She seemed to be on a very even keel. Maybe it’s the caviar and champagne.

  “That is why we must proceed with the utmost caution,” Gregor added.

  Turtledove paused over a wing. “Caution. How so?” Everyone looked at Lacey.

  “There is something very unusual about that dress, Turtledove.” Lacey sat up straighter. “Every garment has a hem at the bottom. It seems insignificant, but it protects the fabric’s raw edges and helps give the skirt its shape. Sometimes the hem is weighted down to enhance the movement of the dress, especially in a long formal gown, like the red dress. The weights can be nearly anything small and heavy. Coins, buttons, metal washers. Coco Chanel weighted her jacket hems with gold chains. With this particular costume, someone weighted the hem with commemorative medals of Lenin.”

  “Lenin? As in Vladimir Lenin?” Turtledove asked. “Russian revolutionary, famous communist? Corpse kept on display?”

  “That is the Lenin,” Gregor said.

  “These particular medals were hollow. Apparently used by spies,” Lacey said.

  “Not ‘apparently.’ They were used by a spy. One spy. And better to say agent.”

  “The ones in the hem were empty,” Lacey continued.

  “Empty? What were they for originally?” Turtledove asked. “Microfilm?”

  “To explain,” Olga began. “These medals were KGB, or perhaps FSB or GRU. They once contained poison needles.”

  “An assassin,” Turtledove said. As a friend of Damon’s and a loyal reader of DeadFed dot com, he was well versed in spies and conspiracy theory. “A dress is a pretty weird place to put something like that.”

  “Exactly,” Vic said. “So it fell to Lacey to discover them.”

  “How?”

  “I peeked. I felt the weights and I was curious. I asked Vic to snip open the hem, and there they were.” Lacey wondered why others didn’t see what she saw.

  “You’re onto an assassin, presumably poisoning people?” Turtledove devoured another wing.

  “Let me summarize,” Gregor said. “We have a red dress, or crimson costume, if you prefer, which comes from Kinetic Theatre, a theatre run by Russian émigrés.”

  “They are quite good,” Olga interrupted. “It is a mix of music and dance and beautiful bodies. We saw a show last night.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. “As I was saying, we have two dead women, both connected with the theatre. An actress and the stage manager.”

  “Twelve years apart,” Lacey said. “Could be a coincidence. Both were described by the police as accidents. But both had broken necks.”

  Gregor put up a hand for attention. “What do they have in common? Kinetic Theatre and the blood-red costume. One wore it in a production. The other tried to prevent it from being sold. More curious, it was sold to Lacey’s colleague LaToya Crawford. The stage manager fought with LaToya over it. It was witnessed by many. Including Lacey Smithsonian.”

  “It was more of a schoolyard tussle than a fight,” Lacey interjected. “LaToya bought it at that the multi-theatre yard sale thing. Last Saturday.”

&nb
sp; “But then at the last minute,” Gregor went on, “Miss LaToya, very intelligently, decided Smithsonian should make sure for her that it was free of clothing voodoo.”

  “Who told you that?” Lacey asked him.

  “Sorry, darling,” Vic said. “It must have slipped out.”

  “That part makes sense, Lacey,” Turtledove said. “You have the touch, you know you do.”

  “You’ve been discussing this behind my back. The three of you.”

  “Private investigator here. Occupational hazard,” Vic said, sheepishly.

  Turtledove reached for a napkin and another wing. “No worries, Lacey, I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  “You thought it was funny.”

  “No, ma’am.” He tried to keep from laughing.

  “Not so funny for LaToya when her apartment was broken into,” Gregor said. “And something was strange about that as well, is that not so, Smithsonian? Tell our friend.”

  “Her clothes were taken out of her closet and set up around the room. Stuffed with paper to look like they were almost human. Like the Invisible Woman’s costume parade. They were deliberately arranged around the room in outfits, the way she might wear them, with matching shoes and bags and scarves. Creepiest thing I ever saw. The next day, I found out Amy Keaton was dead.”

  Turtledove took it all in with a nod of the head. “Do you know why they’re dead? Were they targets of an enemy operative? Do you have a person of interest?” He finished his plate.

  “When the killer is in disguise, in deep cover, it’s difficult,” Gregor said. “No way to know yet, but we will try to bring the threads together.”

  “In disguise?” Lacey wondered if she had missed something.

  “He is not revealed to you yet,” Marie said. “But you have met him. He is close.”

  “So it is a man?”

  “I’m eighty percent certain, cher.”

  Gregor took Marie’s hand and gazed into her eyes. “Of course, my wonderful one, you are right. Lacey has met our person of interest.”

  “It would be easier with a name,” Lacey said. “And if he was at the theatre— There were hundreds of people there last night.”

  “But you only met ten or twenty,” Olga said.

  Marie closed her eyes and tried to cover a yawn. “I’m trying, y’all, but information comes when it comes.”

  That’s convenient, Lacey thought. “I have two meetings tomorrow. One with the costume designer Nikolai Sokolov, and one with Maksym Pushkin.”

  “Both Russians, but who is this Pushkin?” Gregor asked. “Related to the famous Alexander Pushkin?”

  “He says not. He played Prince Prospero in that production of The Masque of the Red Death. He was the male lead, opposite the actress who died. She played Death.”

  “He’s a dancer?” Olga looked at Lacey intently.

  “In the past. Now he’s an attorney. Brooke’s run up against him in court.”

  “And what does Brooke think of this guy?” Vic asked.

  “That he’s a tool of the Evil Empire, and possibly a Russian agent.”

  “Many of us are from the Evil Empire,” Gregor said with a grin. “We are not all evil. Counselor Brooke makes me laugh. Tell me more about this Maksym Pushkin.”

  “He supposedly came to this country when he was a kid. I think he might be sweet on Brooke. She says he’s a smooth liar who cheats in court.”

  “Poor guy. Doesn’t stand a chance with her,” Vic commented. “But why do you need to talk to him?”

  “He might remember something from the original show, or something about Saige Russell, the actress who died,” she said for Turtledove’s sake. “He might know who hated her enough to send her flying off a set. Or he may know something that seemed insignificant then, but that might be interesting now. And he called her Parsnips, her pet name from people who didn’t like her.”

  “And this has something to do with the medals?” Turtledove asked.

  “I don’t know, but Saige was the first woman to wear the dress. It was made for her. I don’t know if the medals were there from the beginning, or they were added later. Or one by one, over time.”

  “We believe there are other deaths we have not discovered yet,” Olga said. “One death for every empty Lenin medal.”

  “If Amy Keaton was murdered, there is no Lenin for her, because LaToya Crawford bought the dress before Keaton died,” Lacey pointed out.

  “So we presume the killer wants the dress back to put another medal in it?” Turtledove asked.

  “If it’s a memorial to the people he killed, then yes,” Marie said. “Memorial, or trophy.”

  Turtledove took a small notebook from his pocket. “I have to jot some things down to keep this straight.”

  “Right now, we don’t know the exact reason for the medals, except they appear to be a tally of seven poison needles that had to have ended up somewhere,” Vic said.

  “Exactly right,” Gregor added. “More important, we are dealing with a monster.”

  “This is always my favorite part, sweetheart,” Vic whispered in her ear. “You and the monster.”

  She poked him in the ribs. “Really, it’s not my favorite part.”

  “This is important,” Gregor said, commanding their attention. “We are talking about certain people in Russian intelligence services. They are not like me. KGB is gone, but many intelligence agencies live on. Bigger, harder, smarter, even more dangerous. They recruit, when they can, a certain very special type of person.”

  “Not like you?” Lacey said.

  Gregor smiled. “I am happy-go-lucky fellow, Smithsonian. I have done dark things when my profession demanded, but I have a light soul. Full of love. Honor. Humor. Hope.” Marie was smiling at him and she hugged his arm.

  “They have no sense of humor, then?”

  “Worse than that. They have no souls.”

  Where did that come from? Lacey looked to Marie for a clue, but Marie was concentrating on Gregor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is no light in their eyes, Smithsonian. No humanity in their hearts. You stare into their eyes and nothing looks back.”

  “I’m not feeling very secure here, Gregor.”

  “Another psychopath? Not like the last one, I hope.” Turtledove leaned forward tautly, at full attention. His muscles rippled beneath his polo shirt.

  “You make it sound like this is a habit,” Lacey said. “It’s not.”

  “No, Lacey. It’s your mission,” Marie said. “Life chooses you because of your talents.”

  “That is one word for them,” Gregor said. “Of course not every psychopath is a stone cold killer. Many are smiling politicians.”

  “We’ve all met a few.” Turtledove turned to Lacey and winked. “Some of us have stabbed a few.”

  “Tell them, Gregor, “Marie said.

  “Very well. Olga and Marie and I believe we know who this person is.”

  CHAPTER 33

  “Who is it? And why? And how do you know this?” Lacey was suddenly standing up and shouting.

  “Who is complicated. And why is question of the ages,” Gregor Kepelov replied calmly. “I only have an old codename for this person. I believe we are dealing with a legendary operative. Legendary in a very quiet way.”

  “Wait a minute, Kepelov,” Vic said. “A spy? Or not a spy?” He stood up too, to stand by Lacey. But Lacey couldn’t stand still. She was pacing the room.

  “Are you telling me,” she asked Gregor, “that this someone is not only connected to Kinetic somehow, but he or she might also be a Russian agent?”

  “Everything points to this. And I fear this person has our Lacey Smithsonian in his sights. This of course is no surprise. But this is an amazing opportunity. You have drawn him out.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “The existence of this person is spoken of in select circles. You have heard of the Russian businessman beaten to death in his Washington hotel room?”

 
“Brooke mentioned it. And a few others. First reported as a heart attack.”

  “Brought on by a severe beating and head trauma. Seems to be going around.” Gregor inclined his head. “Your charming attorney friend is crazy, but often right.”

  “Brooke sees connections we don’t see,” Marie said. “Not with the psychic eye, but with her mind, and her sense of right and wrong.”

  “She does that, all right,” Lacey agreed. “Does this monster have a name?”

  “Many names. Many faces,” Olga said.

  “He is a man of a thousand faces, cher,” Marie added.

  The psychic had described faces changing continually, morphing into another and another and another. “He’s what you saw? A master of disguise?”

  “That’s what I saw, cher,” Marie said. “He is connected to the dress, and to Gregor, because he is a former spy, and now to you, because— Well. More champagne, anyone?”

  It was definitely time for more champagne, even though this was hardly a celebration.

  “Sure.” Lacey lifted the bottle.

  “Yes, please, more champagne, Lacey.” Olga put out her glass.

  “How do you know this man, Gregor?” Lacey asked.

  “I know of him. Brilliant Russian operative, almost mythical. Some people think he was made up, just a story, or a composite of many agents. He was suspected in many deaths. Disappeared long ago. Or perhaps in very deep cover.”

  “But it’s a man?” Lacey said. Volkov? Sokolov? Pushkin? Cameron?

  “So far as we know. Remember the different faces. Male, female.”

  DeeDee Adler? Katya Pritchard?

  “Most were men, some were women,” Marie said. “Whether they were him or her in disguise, or victims, I don’t know. They sped by so quickly.”

  “Until he is caught and his true face is revealed,” Gregor said, “he is a man of a thousand faces. In Moscow a name I heard him called most often was ‘the Centipede.’ Killer, spy, assassin, cold-blooded son of a bitch. But very successful.”

  “The Centipede?” Lacey pondered that image.

  “One drawback to our theory, Smithsonian,” he continued, “is that the Centipede is dead.”

  There was a silence. Lacey stopped pacing. “Dead? That is a drawback,” she said.