“Is he crazy?”
“Yes, chronic schizophrenia with atypical features. Didn’t you notice anything? What do they teach medical students in Paris? To stroll around the Latin Quarter with pretty girls?”
Doctor Esquirol was a bit lost.
“Did you see his eyes?” Eckener went on. “The way his head moved? You didn’t notice anything? Luckily, that boy has never set foot in the Hitler Youth. Otherwise, a man in a white coat would already be experimenting on his brain in a laboratory somewhere.”
“So —”
“I’m sheltering him. He may have been sent by some of my university friends. Or by chance. It doesn’t really matter. He’ll lift gas bottles and boxes in our hangars at Frankfurt. It’s better for him that way.”
Unable to utter a word, Esquirol was still holding the letter.
“I’m sorry,” he said eventually.
“I have to choose between blood and honor every day, Doctor.”
Eckener stood up, put a note down on the table to cover the bill, thrust the knife into it, and headed for the door.
“Wait. When can we see each other again?” Esquirol called out.
Eckener looked surprised.
“What about May, and the embarkation of the Hindenburg? Are you telling me it’s not a serious appointment after all?”
He stepped outside. In the street, he was a sight to behold with his white mane of hair and his alpaca coat. Esquirol watched the commander stopping the cars with a wave of his hand, like Moses crossing the Red Sea.
Esquirol drank a glass of water and thought for a few minutes.
He asked for the telephone, and was pointed toward the basement. Ten minutes later, after battling with a telephone operator using the few German words he knew, he finally managed to connect with a number in Geneva.
He asked for Vincent Valpa.
“Mr. Valpa? It’s me, Doctor Esquirol. I’m in Berlin. Everything will be ready for the beginning of May.”
Not a word from the other end of the line.
“Can you hear me? We’re leaving from Frankfurt on the third of May.”
The person on the other end hung up.
It was always the same story.
Whether he was disguised as Vincent Valpa, Madame Victoria, or any of his other avatars, Voloy Viktor never spoke on the phone. He listened and he hung up.
Moscow, April 20, 1937
A bare-chested stranger stood on the stairs, wearing only a pair of trousers. He was staring at Mademoiselle, who had just opened her front door and looked taken aback.
“Is Ivan Ivanovitch Oulanov in?” asked the stranger.
“No. Who are you?”
“When will he be back?”
Mademoiselle didn’t answer, but the man wouldn’t let it drop.
“What about his wife?”
“She’s been working nights in the factory now that Mr. Oulanov isn’t here anymore.”
Mademoiselle felt uncomfortable standing opposite this man in the middle of the night. He seemed rather stiff, and he kept his hands firmly by his sides. She had opened the door the moment she heard the knocking because she still hoped that the father of Kostia, Zoya, and Andrei would be safely returned to them.
“I’m the neighbor from the first floor,” the man informed her. “I know the family’s got some problems.”
“Please don’t worry on their behalf,” said Mademoiselle, trying to shut the door.
“Wait.”
The man blocked the door with his foot.
“Please,” whispered Mademoiselle firmly. “The children are asleep.”
She pushed the door against the man’s shoe and managed to shut it.
“Open up,” he called out.
“Come back tomorrow. I’m alone with the children. I’m not allowed to open the door.”
“Wait,” he whispered. “Hear me out! I’ve just received a telephone call from Andrei. He wants to talk to his father. He’s going to call back in a few minutes.”
There was a long silence, and the door opened very slowly.
“Andrei?”
“The Oulanov son. Sometimes he sends messages via us. Andrei got on well with my son. He wants to talk to his father.”
“I’ve told you: his father isn’t here anymore.”
“Well, come with me, then. He’s going to call back for news of his family.”
“I’ve never met Andrei. What am I going to say to him? He had already left when I arrived. I’ve taken over his bedroom.”
“You’re the only person who can answer him.”
“But the children . . . I can’t leave them.”
“They’re asleep.”
Mademoiselle thought back to what Andrei’s father had told her about their linked destinies: what Andrei did determined their lives.
The man took a broom from the landing and propped it across the doorway.
“Come with me. The door will stay open.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Come on.”
“I can’t.”
But as she spoke she was already making her way downstairs, and turning around to check on the door. She walked into the first-floor apartment. The telephone was in the kitchen. They made their way along a gloomy corridor to find an old woman sitting at the kitchen table.
“This is my mother. My wife is asleep in the bedroom, next door.”
All three of them sat around the table. A cup of tea was poured for Mademoiselle. The old woman served the tea just like in the grand houses Mademoiselle had once known. They waited. The telephone was fixed on the wall near the door.
“We’ll leave the room when he calls,” the man announced. “I don’t want to hear what you say to him.”
On the wall, there was a brand-new poster celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the revolution. Mademoiselle looked at the faces depicted on it. A child carrying bricks in his arms, a woman pointing to the horizon with a trowel. Opposite Mademoiselle, the old woman sat very still, her hands on the table, as she stared at the visitor.
“Are you French?” the woman asked in French.
“Yes,” said Mademoiselle.
The woman smiled.
“I grew up and worked over there, in Paris,” explained Mademoiselle. “But I haven’t been back home for a very long time.”
It had been years since she had last divulged such simple facts about herself.
“I’ve never been to France,” replied the old woman. “But I used to speak good French. And I haven’t forgotten it. I talk to myself in my bedroom.”
“Be quiet, Mother,” said the man, who couldn’t follow the conversation.
They didn’t say another word until the woman rattled off, “You need to return to Paris. People need to go back home one day. My husband died in exile, sadly.”
To avoid her son’s wrath, the woman stood up and carried the teapot over to the sink, before heading for the kitchen door. Just as she was in the doorway, the telephone rang.
The man offered his arm to his mother. They left, closing the door behind them. Mademoiselle was next to the telephone. On the fifth ring, she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
The voice sounded very far away and unsure of itself.
“Mother?”
“No.”
Mademoiselle was panic-stricken. What could she say?
“Hello?” came Andrei’s voice again. “Who’s there?”
“This isn’t your parents, Andrei.”
“Who’s there?
“I am the tioten’ka who looks after your brother and sister.”
“Where are they?”
“Your father’s been taken away. I don’t know why.”
At the other end of the line, the voice had gone quiet.
“Hello?” said Mademoiselle.
Perhaps the line had been cut off. Confronted with this loud silence, she suddenly felt bolder and began to talk.
“I don�
��t know why your father’s been arrested, Andrei, and I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. I don’t know anything. I don’t know you. Can you hear me? Your violins are under my bed. Under your bed. I came here by chance. No one tells me anything.”
She listened to the crackling of the line before continuing.
“But I want to warn you about something. It is my belief that your actions are being watched by someone, that your actions affect what happens here. That’s what your father explained to me before he went. I’m afraid they may have taken your father because of you.”
Not a sound in the receiver. Perhaps Mademoiselle was talking to herself in the kitchen, just like the old woman every evening when she recited Verlaine’s poems to the empty table, the big poster, and the samovar.
“Andrei, can you hear me? Tell me if you can hear me. Think this over. Is there one thing you could do that would help bring your father back? He needs you. Your brother and sister need you. Your mother needs you. Are you still there, Andrei?”
She clung to the telephone and whispered, “Good luck, if you can hear me . . .”
The line hadn’t been cut. Andrei had heard everything. But he was speechless. He was in Inverness, Scotland, in Gregor’s Colors paint shop, and it was the middle of the night. He had dared to make this phone call.
The crackling grew louder. Then nothing. He replaced the handset and put his head in his hands. His father . . .
He no longer had any choice. His plan had been ready for a long time. Four words in a telegram. All he had to do was take it to Everland. But he had wavered for weeks about using Ethel in order to save his family.
Andrei stared at the telephone on the desk: there couldn’t be many calls to Moscow made from it. In any event, he would be far from here by the time his boss received the bill. And Vango would already be in the Vulture’s clutches.
As she returned to the apartment and tucked in little Kostia, who was crying in his sleep, Mademoiselle didn’t realize the gravity of what she had just done. In those few words to Andrei, she had relaunched the hunt for Vango.
Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea, the next day, April 21, 1937
Setanka was locked in her father’s study. She was listening to her nurse, Alexandra Andreyevna, shouting at her from behind the door.
“He’ll be here any moment and he won’t be happy. Come out, or I’ll break down the door.”
Setanka knew that her nurse would never break down the door of Joseph Stalin’s study. She even felt a bit ashamed making the woman she adored, who was like a surrogate mother to her and much more besides, resort to such threats.
“He’s holding me prisoner in this house. I want to go back to Moscow! It’s not fair making me stay here when I’m only eleven!”
Sitting in the desk chair, she opened a drawer.
Setanka had been at the dacha in Sochi for almost four months, ever since she had been rescued from the garage where the father of her friend Zoya worked. The political police had referred to a kidnapping attempt. Setanka would gladly have been kidnapped, but as it was, she explained to everybody that she had simply tried swapping families. She didn’t mention the envelope, which she had mailed to Italy on behalf of the tioten’ka. She loved secrets.
“Setanotchka, open the door for me. . . . Your father’s coming.”
Sometimes, in order to make Setanka come out when she had spent the whole day hiding behind the furniture, the nurse would toss two handfuls of sugar into a hot pan and wait. The sweet scent of caramel was too delicious to resist.
From the drawer, Setanka took out a letter that she often came to look at. The paper was very old and the handwriting seemed to have been blown sideways by the wind. It was a very mysterious letter. Addressed to Dear Mother, it had always seemed to Setanka as if she could have written the opening sentences: I am alive. I know that you haven’t forgotten me. . . . Setanka would have liked to address these words to her own mother, who had died in the year Setanka had turned six. Why did her father keep a letter in his drawer that was written by a stranger who gave his Dear Mother an appointment on a bridge in Moscow and who also told her: Please don’t get out of the carriage; don’t even stop. You’ll see me beneath the sculpted horses on the bridge, and you’ll know that I’m alive.
Setanka was particularly staring at the drawing that served as a signature: a word that wasn’t written in the Russian alphabet — Romano — and a capital W just below.
“This time he really is coming, Svetlana. Come out quickly!”
A door slammed downstairs. Setanka put the letter back and closed the drawer. Alexandra Andreyevna could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs. Then she saw Joseph Stalin appear on the landing.
“Comrade, the little one is locked inside your study. The key must be jammed.”
“Poor, poor little one . . .”
The nurse could immediately tell that he was in a good mood.
“Didn’t you try climbing in through the window to rescue her, Nurse?”
He was smiling. She didn’t answer. Stalin took a large key out of his pocket and went over to the door.
Setanka was waiting on the other side. She saw the key she had used fall out of the lock and land on the carpet. A second later, the door flew open.
“There we go, rescued!” declared her father.
He scooped Setanka up in his arms as if he wanted to rescue her from a fire. But she wasn’t laughing.
“I want to go back to Moscow,” she said.
Joseph Stalin put his daughter down on the landing.
“I want to go back to Moscow.”
“Yes. I think you’ll be able to go back soon,” he told her with shining eyes. “The little problem has almost been sorted.”
The little problem had been bothering him for exactly twenty years. The problem was called Vango.
Setanka headed off along the landing.
Her father went back into his study, closing the door behind him. He stared through the window at the mournful rosebushes beyond. He had neglected them for some time now. He opened the drawer of his desk and took out the letter. There it was. He would soon be done with this obsession: this perpetual hunt. He would soon be able to tear up the letter his men had found in a ransacked palace in Petrograd, among family photos and holy images.
Back then, he had been young and had recently returned from several years of exile in Siberia.
It was the revolution of 1917, and Stalin was back in the capital of the tsars. He didn’t want anything of the former empire and its descendants to remain. And then this letter had been thrust into his hands. It mentioned a child who was going to be born.
In 1929, two of his men, Kakline and Antonov, who were Moscow’s official representatives for the zeppelin’s world tour, had discovered the same signature on board, but this time it was embroidered on a handkerchief belonging to a fourteen-year-old boy. Stalin had immediately been informed. Having just assumed full powers in his country, he had only to give the order. The manhunt had been going on since that summer’s day. The Bird seemed impossible to catch.
But at last he was going to be shot down out of the sky.
Paris, a week later, April 28, 1937
In the private mansion of Ferdinand Atlas, from the cellar to the attic the party was in full swing. But his daughter, the Cat, was on the roof.
Down below, they were playing the foxtrot and a new fast waltz called the java. Couples danced opposite each other, making the glasses on the tables clink and the marble floor vibrate. There were two orchestras. Upstairs, a string quartet brought couples closer together. People were whispering on the banquettes. There were candelabra on the mantelpieces. The doors to the wine cellars had been flung wide open, and guests headed down to serve themselves. Some of the elegantly dressed men hid bottles of wine in their wives’ handbags to take back home with them. Madame Atlas pretended not to notice.
The Cat was watching her father as he sat on the balcony below her. He had carried a wood
en kitchen chair outside and was keeping an eye on the guests continuing to arrive in the courtyard. Nobody could see him behind the stone railing. He was like the punished child everyone has forgotten, but who doesn’t dare to stand up from his chair.
The Cat had abandoned her bedroom when one of the guests had tried forcing her door. It was an invasion. They were everywhere.
The Cat still regretted not following Ethel when she had met up with her that same morning in Montmartre. They had spoken for only a few minutes before going their separate ways. The news was worrying. They ought to have set out together in search of Vango. At least that way the Cat wouldn’t be here defending her bedroom against marauders.
She had pushed the wardrobe against the door to stop anyone from entering. An hour earlier, she had heard laughter on the landing.
“That’s their daughter’s bedroom. . . .”
“They’ve got a daughter? You’re joking.”
In the end, the Cat had grabbed her blanket and taken refuge on the roof, from where she could observe her father.
Someone appeared behind Ferdinand Atlas. The Cat recognized the chauffeur.
“It’s very kind of you to have come up, Pierre. Put the parcel down on the table.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Pierre,” her father called out to the chauffeur, who was already on his way again, “what was the name of the small town you were talking about this morning?”
“Guernica.”
“Is that where you come from?”
“It’s on the other side of the border, but it’s my country. I’m Basque.”
“Guernica.”
“Yes.”
“Have they destroyed it?”
“Hitler wanted to test his planes. It happened yesterday.”
“How many dead?”
“I don’t know.”
Ferdinand Atlas nodded in silence.
“Pierre, do you believe that this is the beginning of a war?”
“The war has been going on in Spain for nearly a year now, sir.”
“But why are the Germans in Spain?”
“I don’t know.”
The Cat saw her father loosening his black tie around his neck. He waved at Pierre.
“Thank you. You can go to bed now. I’m jealous. I’ve got to go back down and join all these people.”
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