She opened the first bathroom door with one hand, while shaping the hair at the back of her neck with the other, trying to give her locks some curl. Going straight to the mirror, she frowned at the flyaway strands in a nimbus around her head. She turned on the water, wishing she’d taken the time to check her hair upstairs.
When she saw the man in front of the open service closet across from the toilet, she stopped in shock. “My apologies.” She backed away from the sink, bumping the door with her back.
Tall and broad, the man filled the space as he turned to face her. His reddish beard, though neatly trimmed, dominated his face as it grew high up on his cheeks. When he stared at her though, his eyes dominated, though they weren’t large, but deep-set and piercing, a strange jumble of streaked blue and gold. Oddly enough, his hair was dull blond. Dye, maybe, as it didn’t match the beard in the least.
“What?” he barked.
“My apologies,” she repeated. “You didn’t lock the door, but I’m quite sure you don’t belong in the service cabinet.”
His skin curved around the thick bones of his cheekbones as he sneered. “What business is it of yours, little girl?”
Russian. The man had a Russian accent. After the last few weeks, she’d have recognized that under any circumstances. She squared her shoulders. “I work here, and I know you do not.”
He stepped forward. “I am new.”
She shook her head, sliding her back along the door. “I don’t believe you.”
He reached out his hand, but she darted into the hallway then backed down the hall. She heard the door lock as soon as it was closed. Dashing down the hall, she was out of breath by the time she reached the staff lounge and Olga.
“Olga,” she cried, as soon as she reached her supervisor. “There’s a very scary Russian man locked in the first bathroom from the service lift!”
Olga looked up from her clipboard. “What is this?”
Sadie repeated her words, punctuated by pants. Olga then stood, and Sadie remembered that this woman was a princess. She had the fierce, piercing gaze of a Cossack.
“Show me,” Olga growled.
Sadie grabbed a dry mop from a bucket as she passed it, wanting some kind of weapon in her hands. Olga pulled her keys from her apron pocket when they reached the bathroom, then put her ear to the door.
“Nothing,” she reported, trying the door.
“Locked, right?”
“What if he is using the facilities?” Olga asked with distaste.
“He said he worked here, but that’s not right. You and Ivan are the only Russians, correct?”
“Not true. There are two or three Russian immigrant waiters, and one of the page boys is Russian, though he was just a little thing when his family brought him here. Not to mention the Jewish Russians who have been here for a generation. We have at least one attending in the Reading Room, and Rachel, the fourth floor chambermaid, is also a Russian Jew.”
“It didn’t occur to me,” Sadie said. “Glory, I hope this man isn’t one of the waiters. He’d scare anyone off his dinner.”
Olga pounded on the door, then put her ear to it. She waited thirty seconds then shrugged and found the master key for the bathrooms. The lock turned easily and she pushed open the door. Sadie held her mop in both hands, not sure of how she would use it as a weapon.
The bathroom seemed to be empty. Sadie frowned. “There aren’t any windows.”
“Maybe he left while we were talking in the staff lounge,” Olga said.
Sadie stepped in. “Perhaps.” She turned in a circle. The toilet tank wasn’t running, and the sink and bathtub were dry. “But he didn’t use anything.”
“Now what?”
Sadie pointed at the storage closet. “He had that door open. What’s in it?”
“Paper goods?” Olga shrugged and tucked her keys away.
Sadie turned the closet door knob. The door opened easily, exposing a dank cupboard with nothing in it. Olga peered over her shoulder.
“I can’t see much.” Sadie stepped out of the way and Olga lit a match, holding it out.
“Do you see that hole?” Olga pointed at the back of the closet.
Sadie went back in and put her finger in the hole Olga had seen. “This is just a sheet of wood.” She realized it as she hooked a finger around the back of the hole, and easily tugged the wood to the right.
Olga muttered something in Russian when a tunnel was exposed.
“Glory,” Sadie gasped.
“I had no idea this was here,” Olga said. “Put the sheet of wood back into place.”
“But the man will come back.”
“Maybe not,” Olga said. “I will tell Mr. Eyre about this. I’m sure he’ll want to block off the tunnel.”
“We could lock the closet door.”
“If he’s a large man as you say, he’ll just break the door down,” Olga said with a philosophical air. “No, we’ll let Mr. Eyre take care of this. It is his job, not ours.”
“What about that man? Why was some bearded Russian man wandering about the hotel basement?”
“I don’t know. Remember, we don’t know that he wasn’t one of the waiters.”
“I really don’t think so.” Sadie’s words had a shaky undertone. She realized she was in shock.
“We’ll lock this door and the bathroom door from the outside,” Olga said. “I will report to Mr. Eyre immediately. You go and have a lie-down, Sadie. I don’t like your color. We’ll see you in the morning.”
Sadie nodded. Her head spun as she did so and she walked out of the bathroom carefully, heading for the lift. She’d tell Les. He’d know what to do, if they should even stay at the Grand Russe when there were strange men in the basement. What if he was a Bolshie? There had been that bomb threat. Alecia had told her quite a bit about the story, and that the bomber was missing. What if that man was a Bolshie bomber attempting to blow up the hotel again? With her in it. And just when she’d begun to dine with film stars.
* * *
Peter Eyre leaned forward and tapped his cigarette against his battered brass ashtray. He had circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there the night before.
“Late night?” Les asked.
Eyre rubbed under his right eye with his free hand. “No, I think all this business with the Russians is giving me hives.”
“If you are allergic to Russians this is not the business for you,” Les quipped.
“Allergic to things out of my control, more likely.” Eyre picked up his tea cup, which had the same green-and-red pattern around the lip that was stenciled in the Grand Hall, albeit in miniature.
Les picked up his own cup, filled with a fragrant Russian Caravan tea. The scent swept him back to his late mistress Natalia, and one of the better cabins in which she’d found refuge. She’d torn up an old petticoat to block chinks in the log walls, using mud as an adhesive. It had been cozy for a time, until the army camp had moved again. Whenever Les could come by, she’d brew tea in the open fireplace for him, no samovar, just a pot and the wood fire.
He rubbed his face. “I think the stress is getting to both of us. But tell me, has something new happened, or is this the same old fear?”
“Not at all,” Peter said. “That’s why I called you down. Your wife saw a man in the first bathroom off the lift in the basement less than twenty minutes ago and when she and Olga went to investigate further, they found a tunnel behind a false wall in a cabinet.”
“Konstantin?”
“I’m not sure. This man didn’t have any gray in his beard, according to Sadie.”
“Easily managed,” Les murmured. “What are you doing about it?”
“First, let me say that it occurred to me that the money your wife found was meant as a payment to this Russian she saw.”
“You might be right. At least it was intercepted.”
“Indeed. I contacted Detective Inspector Dent. His men should be here any moment. Olga was just here in my office. I sent for you whe
n she left.” He pulled out a piece of thick drawing paper and handed it to Les.
Les stared at the drawing. “Olga?”
Eyre nodded. “I had a set of colored pencils. As you can see, reddish beard, pale hair.”
Les considered. “The build is right, but our big win here is the green eyes. We need to see if Ivan Salter can agree on the eyes, since he’s seen Konstantin for certain.”
“He’ll be here in a few hours. We can telephone the greengrocer in his building and have him wake Salter up now if you like.”
Les set the sketch down once he’d memorized every detail. “No need. This man is a problem for us, whoever he is.”
Hugh Moth poked his head in the door. “DI Dent is here, sir.”
Les inhaled through his nose. “I’ll take him downstairs. I want to see this, too.”
“Very well.” Eyre stubbed out the last part of his cigarette and rubbed his eye again. “Is there anything else? Any news from your surveillance? I saw you had a delivery late this morning.”
Les nodded. “I had a recording analyzed. The Russians were speaking about hotel towels and cricket among other things.” Les scratched his chin. Eyre’s fidgets were getting to him. “It didn’t sit right with me.”
“What did your men decide?”
“That they were speaking in code, but they need more data.”
Eyre chuckled. “The government.”
“Based on what we know, hotel towels could be these tunnels,” Les said. “They were discussing the quality of hand towels versus bath towels.”
“Did you tell your men that?”
He smiled at Eyre. “No. The idea just came to me. Let me use your telephone, will you? I’ll just ring someone up, then go down.”
“What about cricket?”
“Hell and the devil,” Les muttered. “I wish I knew. An assassination tally? They mentioned a Bolshevik assassin whose daughter is definitely in England these days.”
Eyre scratched again. “I’ll let you get to it, but I must say, when I reopened the hotel, these are not the kind of problems I expected to deal with. We might as well be in a war.”
Les cocked his head. “That could only be spoken by a man who has never been on the front lines. I have, I’m afraid. A foot soldier has none of these comforts on the battlefield.”
“There is more than one kind of war.” Eyre leaned forward, looking very hard. “And more than one kind of battlefield. As always, Rake, I am at your disposal.”
Les gave Eyre his most ironic stare, then stood and left the room. He wondered how Eyre would have done as a spy. While he had the brains, there was a bit too much ego dancing behind those hazel eyes. He would have been an asset though, with an appearance that could be converted to any number of nationalities with only a little subterfuge.
He found DI Dent and led the man and his plainclothes Special Branch men downstairs, ruminating on the fact that he’d had to hear from Peter Eyre about his wife’s fright. Very appropriate, of course. She’d gone to her supervisor, who had then gone to her supervisor. However, he felt a strange sort of unease. Whatever Sadie was to him, she was also now his lover. Still, he had a cover, and the fact that she didn’t go to her secret agent husband meant his cover was working. He’d managed to fool his own wife for quite some time now. Well, he didn’t have to like it.
“No McCall?” Les asked as they went down the stairs.
“We were afraid your wife would be hanging about. Mrs. Rake knows him as a friend of yours.”
Les nodded. “A fair point.”
Olga met them in the staff room and took them to the bathroom. Now she was one who would be hard to mistake for anything other than what she was: an ice queen, a Russian aristocrat. No matter how lowered, she would never lose that regal bearing.
“How long has it been since the tunnel was discovered?” Dent asked the Russian princess.
“About half an hour,” she said, with a frown at Les.
He frowned back at her. “I’m starting to think my wife is not safe in Mr. Eyre’s employ. I want to see this tunnel for myself.”
Olga glanced from Les to the three other men and shrugged. Les doubted she was fooled, but that didn’t mean she’d share her suspicions with Sadie.
When they were inside, the junior detectives both pulled out pocket torches and illuminated the tunnel. Dent turned back to Olga. “Thank you for your help. You may return to your duties.”
“Should I escort Mr. Rake upstairs?” she asked.
“That won’t be necessary,” Dent said calmly. “You may go.”
Olga stared hard at Les, then left the bathroom, shutting the door behind herself. The detectives vanished into the tunnel.
“Terrifying woman,” one of the detectives said, sticking his head out of the closet.
“A Russian princess, of all things,” Les told him, assessing the longevity of the spider webs in the corners. The room looked like it had been cleaned a week or ten days ago.
The man shook his head. “That poor Romanov family murdered, bless them.”
“The bloodshed is far from over,” Les said. “Let’s try to keep it off our own soil, eh?”
The second detective reentered the room. “I followed the tunnel. It goes into the wing you found before, where the explosives are.”
Les frowned. “We know there is a way out from there because we followed it before, but the man shouldn’t have been able to escape. It’s been blocked off.”
“He might have left through the hotel,” Dent said. “We’ve had half an hour where no one was really watching.”
“Maybe he exited through the employee entrance,” Les suggested. “It can’t be locked down unless they give every employee the key to the door.”
“I’ll tell Eyre to consider it. It would have to lock from the inside,” Dent said. “What I don’t get is, how did we miss this tunnel before?”
“The other side was hidden behind a panel, like this one,” the detective said. “It’s a fair miss in the darkness.”
Dent frowned. “Incompetence is never fair. We have to be smarter than these people. I want you to comb every inch of this tunnel. What if the piece we miss is a spot where explosives are being held? Then what?”
The detectives nodded solemnly and went back in. Dent put his hands on his hips and turned to Les. “You have anything useful to tell me?”
“I suspect the trade delegation staying in luxury upstairs knows about the tunnels,” Les said. “But it’s conjecture. We’ve a poor operation.”
“No staff,” Dent agreed. “Government doesn’t realize we’re still fighting a bloody war. They knocked the teeth out of all the budgets of the intelligence operations.”
Les nodded. “Meanwhile, we still have our work to do. There is a possibility Konstantin is freely roaming the halls. My wife found a bundle of cash upstairs while she was working that might have been intended to be a payment to him.”
“Bloody frustrating. I’ll be in touch.”
“Yes. I should return to my microphone,” Les said. “Though they weren’t in their suite earlier. And my wife is up there now.”
Dent laughed without humor. “Did you really need a wife for this operation?”
“She was meant to help me with my cover in the trade unions, and with the Kozyrevs. We’d hoped I might be able to develop her as a source since she works here, but it will take time to get her into a position where she can hear anything useful.” Les paused. “She’s already been promoted once. I could press for more, but the princess is suspicious as it is.”
“Why don’t you develop her instead of your wife?”
“We need to dig into the princess’s loyalties,” Les agreed, especially since his own erotic interludes with Sadie might limit her length of employment. “I’ll bring Olga to the attention of my section head. A good thought, Dent. Thank you.”
* * *
Sadie thanked the chambermaid who came to the door with fresh towels and declined her offer to tidy up. She
had nothing better to do than tidy up herself. There was nothing much to tidy anyway. Since Les didn’t smoke, there weren’t any ashtrays to empty, no ground debris in the carpet, smells to air out of the suite. If it wasn’t for Les’s books, magazines, and papers lying about, a chambermaid would hardly know anyone was staying there.
She hummed to herself as she stacked his magazines and fashioned a bookmark for his Zorro book out of an unused piece of paper. Books shouldn’t be left open. It damaged the spine. She smacked her lips, imitating the beat of the song running through her head, then regretted it. Her lips were chapped and sore from the hotel’s dry heat. Half an hour later, she was out of chores again, and contemplating the basket of fruit on a side table. She picked up an apple and set it down, then saw a lemon nestled underneath.
While she wasn’t hungry, she remembered reading a beauty article about the uses of lemon on skin. She could use the lemon to exfoliate her lips, and if she had darkened skin on her knees or elbows the juice would lighten them. If she had any sunlight she could use the juice to lighten her hair. That would be the best, but pouring lemon juice on her hair and walking outside in February was worthless. She decided to exfoliate.
In the bedroom, she found Les’s rather wicked looking pocket knife in a drawer. He had two of them and had sheepishly told her it was a “man” thing when she’d noticed the pair. She cut the lemon in half, then put it on a towel and went back to the sitting room. A mirror hung above a comfortable reading chair and she could get closer to it than she could to the bathroom mirror, which was blocked by the sink. She crawled up on the chair and faced the mirror, then delicately began to rub the cut half on her lips.
“Ouch!” The juice stung her lip. She hadn’t realized it was cut. Her hand jerked and the lemon half fell on the neat stack of books. A drop of juice fell on the face of Zorro. She snatched up the lemon and picked up the book so she could wipe it with her sleeve, then she checked the pages around the outside to make sure she hadn’t dripped on them.
With a sigh, she decided to give up on exfoliating, and settled back with the book. She’d already read page one over Les’s shoulder, so she flipped to the next page.
I Wanna Be Loved by You Page 21