City of Silence (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  It was just then that the servant had reappeared and surprised Rayley by addressing him in English. “Steam or sauna?” he had asked.

  “What is the difference?”

  “Steam wet, sauna dry.”

  Ah, so that moist and hissing cave must have been the steam room. Anything would be better than that, and at least in the dry room he would be able to see his hand before his face.

  “Take me to the sauna,” Rayley said decisively, wiping his spectacles on the robe. “And would you be so kind as to tell me who sent the invitation you delivered? I am uncertain as to how I might thank my host.”

  But the man’s English appeared to be limited to the distinction of “Steam wet, sauna dry,” for he had looked at Rayley blankly, then turned and walked toward a second hallway. Rayley had little choice but to follow, which had resulted in his arrival in this place, a long and thin wooden room, the walls of which smelled quite pleasant in the manner of a cedar forest and were lined with benches. Seven or eight men were already seated, all of them alarmingly nude, causing Rayley to wonder if the ability to see detail was really an advantage.

  But when in Rome, he’d supposed, and unknotted the red robe. Due to the slick texture and elegant weight of the garment, it had fallen to the floor decisively, leaving Rayley as naked as the others and announcing his Judaism and thus his outsider status in one fell swoop. And so he had sat, trying desperately to look nonchalant, and noting that while the heat of a sauna did not rush at one all at once in that sort of breath-snatching, skin-flushing assault of the steam room, it was still a formidable enemy. A film of perspiration was slowly growing across his chest and the wire rims of his glasses were beginning to burn against his temples and the bridge of his nose. Just as Rayley had been about to flee the sauna and return to the relative sanity of the dressing room, he had been approached in conversation by Filip Orlov.

  “Your English is very good,” Rayley said.

  “It is one of the languages of the court,” Filip answered with such notable modesty that it was evidently a point of great pride.

  “The court appears to have many languages.”

  “We are not so uncivilized as the westerners think.”

  Just then the definitive sound of a slap filled the sauna and one of the naked men let fly with a muffled moan. He was bent over one of the wooden benches and two of his fellows were merrily pounding away at his buttocks and back with bullrushes. By now there were a dozen men in the room, most of them sitting sedately on the benches with towels folded beneath them, staring straight ahead in the disinterested manner of passengers on a train. One of them looked a good deal like the photographs of the Grand Duke Serge, which Rayley had seen scattered around Ella’s apartments on the day they had arrived in Russia. Yes, the more Rayley observed his handsome but haughty face, the more convinced he was that this was Ella’s husband and, judging by the mottled quality of his skin and the sheen of sweat across his chest, the Grand Duke had been sitting in the sauna for some time. Personally, Rayley wondered how much longer he would be able to endure this bizarre environment. The heat was oppressive, but the growing claustrophobia even more so, and Rayley had struggled to maintain his composure in small spaces ever since the time of his captivity in Paris.

  “Yes, we are in the same line of work,” Rayley said, reaching to adjust the tangled robe which he had thrust under his buttocks as protection from the slowly advancing warmth of the benches. “Is this why I was invited to the gentlemen’s enclave? As a professional courtesy?”

  “We are comrades, are we not?”

  “I suppose we are,” Rayley said, thinking that a more unlikely pair of comrades would be hard to find. He was pale and thin, his ribs slightly sunken, while Filip’s torso was broad and hairy with a scar which ran diagonally across his side like a military sash.

  “Wounded in duty,” Filip said, noting that Rayley’s eyes had settled on the scar. “I took a bullet for the tsar two years ago.”

  Rayley’s eyebrows shot up. “In the famous assassination attempt?”

  “It is famous? As far away as London? That is surprising. As assassination attempts go, I assure you this was a very feeble one.” Filip looked down reflectively. “The bullet did not strike anything vital, which was fortunate. I tell people that it hit me in my fat.”

  Rayley smiled. It sounded like something Trevor would say. “Then you were fortunate indeed.”

  “It was my lucky bullet,” Filip said, “for it won me the tsar’s unfailing trust. See, I keep it close to me like a saint,” and he leaned toward Rayley abruptly, startling him as their chests almost touched. Filip turned a thin silver chain that had been hanging down his back, revealing the crushed shape of a bullet. By the way he dangled it before Rayley, he was expecting some sort of reaction, so Rayley extended a fingertip and recoiled immediately. The metal of the bullet was nearly sizzling to the touch, explaining why Filip had turned it from his chest. Filip smiled, pleased at the intensity of Rayley’s reaction. “I was one of many before this bullet, and now I am head of the private guard.”

  “Such a post must be deeply gratifying.”

  Filip considered Rayley through narrow eyes. “You also have suffered wounds in your work?”

  “I fear that my scars lie deeper inside.”

  The heavy man sat back with such a definitive gesture that the bench they were both sitting on trembled. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I have this kind too.”

  A surprising degree of subtlety coming from someone who looked like such a brute on the surface and Rayley inclined his head to study the man more closely. If Filip, who had been suspiciously quick to deem the British bodyguard a “comrade,” had truly been the source of this invitation, he must have had a reason. A reason beyond showing off his bullet and his English.

  “My partner Welles would have found all this most invigorating,” Rayley said, as one of the men tossed a ladle of water on the coals and the room was shrouded in a subtle but most welcome mist. “But since that business yesterday with Mrs. Kirby, the Queen refuses to be without one of us constantly at her side.”

  A bit clumsily stated, but at least the door was open. Would the Russian walk through?

  As it turned out, he was more than ready. Filip leaned back toward Rayley in his confidential manner and said “Our suspicious lie with a dance master from Siberia, a man by the name of Konstantin Antonovich. He was already our most likely suspect for a previous double murder of two young ballet dancers. We believe the Kirby woman may have also suspected him of this crime.”

  “Any what if she did? An aging lady in waiting would hardly confront a strong young killer, would she? If she had any information linking this Antonovich to the first murder surely she would have taken her suspicion to the authorities.”

  “She was British as well, you know.”

  “Yes, of course I know.”

  “In service to the Queen’s granddaughter.”

  “All of which goes without saying. What are you really getting at, Orlov?”

  In true police fashion, the man answered the question with a question. “So does the Queen wish for you and Welles to investigate this second crime, this killing of a British woman on Russian soil?”

  Rayley paused and took a deep breath of the dry, punishing air. It is hard to measure a man’s degree of anxiety in a sauna, he thought, and hard to gauge the degree of hostility which might be lying beneath the surface of seemingly civil discourse. If everyone is flushed and sweating, with a pounding heart and shallowness of breath, how is a detective to gauge the level of anger or fear? Rayley glanced around them, but none of the other men appeared to be taking even the slightest degree of interest in his conversation with Filip.

  “The Queen is concerned about the murder, just as I mentioned,” Rayley finally said. “It would be unnatural if she were not, given that Mrs. Kirby was British, a respectable widow, and in service to the royal family.”

  “The woman was a rash,” Filip said bluntly, but wit
h no apparent rancor. “Everywhere at once and she liked to talk to servants.”

  Servants often talk to other servants and gossip is the currency of life within any palace, but Rayley did not wish to contradict Filip or make him question the wisdom of such extraordinary candor. So Rayley merely nodded and said “Private citizens who take it upon themselves to snoop about and ask questions are the bane of lawmen around the world, are they not?”

  Filip nodded back with great enthusiasm. “The Kirby woman was seen in the ballroom on the morning the bodies were discovered. Perhaps she was there earlier too. If she happened to know something - or even if Konstantin Antonovich thought she did - he may have felt the need to…the phrase escapes me.”

  “Hush her up.”

  Filip smiled, his eyes glittering with pleasure. “Yes. Hush her up.”

  “The costume she was found in–“

  “It is his. Which makes the matter easy to understand, does it not?”

  Actually, no, it did not. Unless Filip was implying that Antonovich was foolish enough to kill a woman and then dress her in his own clothes, his theory made no sense at all. Surely even the palace guard would have to realize that the use of Antonovich’s costume served to exonerate him. Glancing at Filip’s self-satisfied face, Rayley tried another tack.

  “What would this dance master’s motive be? Not for killing Mrs. Kirby, I mean, but why would he have wished the two dancers dead?”

  “They were going to Paris, part of a grand tour.” A groan rang through the sauna as another man bent forward to take the beating of the rushes and Filip observed the scene with a placid expression. “You are quite certain that you do not wish to give our small custom a try? I assure you that the rushes will not hurt you very much, at least not once you get used to them, and the results are quite invigorating.”

  But Rayley was frowning, too intent on the Russian’s last words to be distracted by the scene before him. “You cannot be suggesting that Antonovich killed the ballet dancers through professional jealousy. No sane man would cut the throats of two children simply because he was envious of the fact that they were going to perform in Paris.”

  “You forget you are in Russia now. We are a passionate race. Quicker to act on our emotions that the British criminals you perhaps are accustomed to. But shall we continue our conversation in the smoking room?”

  “Gladly,” said Rayley, scrambling to his feet. As he followed Filip toward the narrow door he considered that he was talking to a man who had caught a bullet meant for another, a man who had undoubtedly seen any number of innocents slaughtered for the causes of love, ambition, politics, or God. As they paused in the foyer outside the sauna to once again don their robes before moving on to the next room in the dimly-lit hall, Rayley wondered at the reasons behind Filip’s eagerness to suggest Konstantin Antonovich as a suspect for all three murders. No doubt this was why he and Trevor truly had been invited into the gentlemen’s enclave – to make sure they got a generous dose of the Orlov’s propaganda against the Siberian dance master.

  Rayley was relieved to find the smoking room a more conventional affair, with deep padded chairs around a fire. Despite the fact it was June, Rayley chose one close to the hearth for now that he had left the sauna he was chilled by the return to normal air. Filip plopped down beside him and opened a cigarette box.

  “Try one,” he said. “They are treated with opium. Just a touch, so there’s no need to fear the loss of your senses.”

  Opium? Rayley observed the slender cigarettes with interest, including the brightly lacquered box which held them. “Where do they come from?”

  “Another part of the homeland,” Filip said airily, causing Rayley to once again reflect that this monstrosity of a nation stretched from Europe to the Pacific, enveloping a dozen distinct cultures along the way. “Pleasures you cannot imagine can be found in the east,” Filip continued, his voice already dreamlike, as if the even the idea of the opium or the feel of the small cigarette in his large palm was enough to impart an anticipatory intoxication. “Those oils the men rubbed on themselves back in the sauna, did you happen to notice the aromas? Each was rendered from a different exotic plant, all with unique properties of healing, and most of them from Asia. The plants of the east….and their women…” He abruptly jerked a thumb toward the door. “Later I shall show you the passageway we use to bring them in and then, of course, back out. Have you by chance ever lain with a woman from Japan?”

  “Never,” Rayley said. ‘I’m not sure I’ve even seen one. At least not up close.”

  “The sensations they evoke are extraordinary,” Filip said. “Their feet are corrupted in the most intriguing way. Twisted, you know.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about it. I always thought the practice was cruel.”

  Filip shrugged, as if the statement was undeniably true but inconsequential. “All human pleasure comes at the cost of another creature’s pain.”

  “What an extraordinary suggestion.”

  “Remember it the next time you sit down to dine,” Filip said, finally striking a match and lighting the cigarette in his hand, then taking a deep drag before putting it aside to light a second one for Rayley. “The next time you sink your teeth into a leg of chicken pause for a moment to consider the final seconds of the chicken’s existence in this earthly realm and you shall see at once what I mean. But somehow I’ve found that contemplating the suffering of the chicken doesn’t make her leg any less juicy.” Filip gave a quick consult to the clock on the wall. “We do not have much longer until you will see what I mean.”

  “The women are on their way now? So early in the afternoon?” For some reason, Rayley found this the most depraved detail of all.

  Filip smiled. “But what difference does the hour make? Why should anyone care if it is day or it is night?”

  “I must confess, the longer I remain here, the less I can distinguish them myself.” Rayley looked at the lit cigarette with suspicion then took a tentative puff. He was not immune to botanical pleasures and had dabbled in a few back in London, but had always made it a policy never to mix this particular indulgence with work. Still, considering he had already witnessed the sauna and the oils and the slapping of bullrushes and was sitting here, nearly naked, discussing philosophy with some manner of a hairy beast, he supposed such a small smoke couldn’t hurt. He had been commissioned by Welles, after all, to explore the rituals of the men’s enclave in their entirety.

  “The passageway which leads to the docks is quite cleverly designed,” Filip said. “I believe the detective’s part of your mind will be intrigued. And as your host I must insist that you make the acquaintance of one of the eastern women before our time together is past. You’ve only had British, I presume.”

  And not so very many of those, Rayley thought wryly, feeling the first puff of the opium curl down his throat and through his chest, unloosening everything, each tension and doubt that it found there. It was sweet to the smell and the taste but, he suspected that, like most sweet things, it had the power to sting.

  “I was with an American whore once,” he told Filip.

  “Ah,” said Filip. “I cannot claim that particular pleasure. And how was it?”

  “A bit like your sauna. Bizarre at first. but in the end, most invigorating.”

  The two men laughed and then, in unison, they raised the small dark cigarettes to their lips and pulled the velvety smoke in yet again.

  The Winter Palace – Guest Quarters

  1:30 PM

  Their search of the balcony in the west-facing corner of the ballroom had revealed little. Certainly nothing that would suggest that a woman had been killed there, even by the bloodless method of strangulation followed by a twist of the neck. They had been ready to write the entire venture off as the waste of a morning when Davy had spied a lone thread, tucked beneath a chair, its wiry texture indicating it most likely came from a rope. With it reverently folded within a piece of paper, Tom, Trevor, and Davy returned to their rooms
where they sat down in straight chairs and stared at each other wordlessly.

  “We’re missing quite a lot,” Trevor finally said.

  “Indeed,” said Tom. “As in witnesses, suspects, a murder weapon, and a motive. Other than that we’re well on our way.”

  “I would not say we’re entirely missing motive,” Davy said. “Mrs. Kirby was most certainly killed because she knew something about how or why the ballet dancers died.”

  “Agreed,” said Trevor. “Something that for some reason she neglected to mention to us.”

  “Oh, and we’re missing a table,” Tom said. “It feels rather strange to sit here in straight chairs without one, does it not?”

  “None of the rooms in this part of the palace seem to have desks or working tables,” Davy said. “They have angels on the ceiling and flowers on the bedposts but they don’t have tables.”

  “I hadn’t noticed, but you’re quite right,” said Tom, looking thoughtfully around him. “I suppose it’s because no one who has stayed in these rooms before us has ever felt the urge to do any sort of work.”

  “You know when the Queen first described Mrs. Kirby to me she said the woman was a crack shot,” Trevor mused. “Certainly a unique trait in a female of her age and background, and it implies she was the owner of a pistol. Yet we found no such weapon among her things, nor did she have one with her when she died.”

  “Two possibilities come to mind,” Tom said, idly slapping out a rhythm on his thighs as he talked. “The gun is still in her room and well hidden, which implies she did not perceive herself to be in danger, at least not of the type which would prompt her to carry a weapon wherever she went. Certainly not when meeting me. The other scenario is that she did have the pistol with her when she was attacked, but since she was likely jumped from behind, did not have the chance to use it. Her killer could have disarmed her after death, which leaves us with the unsettling possibility that a man who used a knife the first time, and his hands the second, now has a brand new and far more efficient toy with which to play.”