The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  But no, he was already shaking his head, smiling that confident smile. I could see he didn’t want me involved.

  ‘As for the date, well, it all depends on when our German colleagues arrive, of course,’ he said, and he couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘All I know is that, when the time comes, Skoblin and I will slip off to meet them somewhere quiet … Passy … Auteuil … you know.’

  The smartest bits of residential Paris, beyond the Trocadéro: retired ministers, countesses walking Pekes, big spreading trees, the rudest taxi clients. Everywhere was somewhere quiet in those secluded streets. ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know exactly where myself, dear boy,’ Father said, and again I heard an unfamiliar note of weariness in his voice, as well as caginess. ‘I think he might have said rue Jasmin, or rue Raffet, but I’m not really sure. I’m everyone’s prisoner, as you know. That’s all in Skoblin’s hands. But now – I’m in yours. Will you take me home?’

  I wanted to say something loving; something that would dispel the fatigue in his voice, and show that, even if I detested the idea of the alliance he wanted to make, I supported him with every fibre of my being. Always had. Always would.

  But I didn’t know how, any more than I had words for the helpless, childish rage locked away inside me that he could be so indifferent to what I felt or wanted for him. Even if he was the family I’d chosen, the family I’d always choose, that was just how things were. There was no point in quibbling. So I nodded and picked up his briefcase.

  My taxi-driving knowledge told me that there wasn’t even a café on the rue Jasmin or the rue Raffet, which met each other between Passy and Auteuil: just old money and conventional good taste behind the shutters for as far as the eye could see in every direction. But, I was thinking, if I could find out when the planned meeting would take place, perhaps I could at least sit outside, in my cab, and keep watch till Father came out.

  It was the last thing I wanted to be doing with my life. But I needed to keep busy. I needed not to think.

  32

  Evie

  There was something a bit furtive in the way Marie-Thérèse looked up from the dish she was prodding with a skewer. A very large meaty object secured in a net was bubbling in a pan on top of the stove, in a broth seasoned with vegetables, parsley, peppercorns and salt. There was far too much of it for just me. But then I’d worked out, by now, that her cooking fed not only me, her and her husband, but also assorted other out-of-work family members: all those cousins and nephews who couldn’t find jobs in the Billancourt car factories. I saw the casseroles in the pantry, lids tied on with string, waiting to be delivered, and sometimes I saw Gaston taking them out to the car or, of a morning, bringing back empties. Well, that was fine by me. I’d learned that the cuts of meat she chose for these cookathons were economical ones. I didn’t particularly want to eat a whole calf’s head myself anyway. And I knew these were hard times for many.

  ‘Mm,’ I said politely. ‘That smells good.’ I wanted to put her at her ease. But there was uncertainty in her answering nod.

  ‘It won’t be ready until dinner time,’ she said, averting her eyes. ‘You need to boil it for at least five hours to be sure it’s cooked.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not hungry now,’ I said quickly. Heavens, I’d only just had breakfast.

  I wanted to ask her a quite different question. Something Plevitskaya had said yesterday about Grandmother had been coming back into my head all morning: ‘… her death so unexpected … when dear Constance was so full of life just a week ago.’

  It had made me wonder: had Grandmother’s stroke been brought on by a sudden shock?

  For a while that morning, that thought, gloomy though it was, had at least been a distraction from the emptiness that not thinking about Jean kept leaving me with. But then an awful new thought had struck me – had the shock perhaps been the prospect of my arrival?

  ‘I’ve been wondering,’ I went on casually, ‘what you think made Madame la Comtesse take ill so very suddenly … when, as everyone says, she was so full of life just before?’

  Looking relieved, and suddenly interested, too, Marie-Thérèse put down the meat skewer. ‘It was very sudden,’ she said. ‘I’ve wondered that myself. As if something had happened to bring it on. But, you know, mademoiselle, there was nothing …’

  Leaning against the cooker, she added reflectively, ‘She was in the study that evening, where the young men had been working with that machine. Ah, cette musique! Playing the same tune over and over again, far too loud – enough to make anyone ill, you’d think; my head was certainly aching from it. But she was fine; she didn’t seem to mind it in the least. Then, that last evening, after they’d gone, she took her apéritif in there – well, it’s the best place to watch the sunset from. She was right as rain when I took it in – even asked me to make up a bed for you and get Gaston to meet your train, nice as anything. But then, just a few minutes afterwards, she came staggering out, calling for me. I could hear at once that her voice wasn’t right. I rushed out from your room, where I was making up your bed. But she’d already collapsed, right there in the doorway, before I’d got halfway down the corridor.’

  She nodded, not without gloomy satisfaction. ‘So you see,’ she finished, ‘there can’t have been a reason. It just happened, from one moment to the next; the will of the Lord.’

  I nodded back, feeling fractionally reassured that Marie-Thérèse had at least said Grandmother had sounded calm when she’d told her I was arriving in Paris.

  ‘But of course it was those men coming back the next morning that finished her off,’ Marie-Thérèse added crossly. ‘The Russian thieves.’

  Well, I thought dispiritedly, not wanting to argue, it did look as though, this time at least, she must be right. Those men had just taken their chance and pinched the machine.

  It was painful for me to remember that morning’s commotion – the shouting and barging, and Marie-Thérèse’s hiss of ‘Sacrés Russes!’ as the door slammed behind them. I’d never forget it, because that was also the moment when, behind the bedroom door, Grandmother had woken up, and had her second, fatal attack. I was never going to be able to banish the horror in her face, the hand flapping, her agonized ‘MMMM!’ and the pandemonium that had followed, or the way I’d failed to listen; the way I’d run away.

  But right now the person I felt sorriest for was Plevitskaya — because the only real loser from that morning’s theft was her and her recording, which had vanished with the machine. She must have thought, when we’d last spoken, that I could get the recording back and have it finished. She must think I had the machine. But I didn’t. It had gone with the engineer thieves. She’d never have her disc.

  I sighed. On second thoughts, the person I felt sorriest for now was myself.

  Leaving Marie-Thérèse to her pots, I wandered back to my bedroom, taking stock.

  There was no Grandmother in Paris, no cosy friendship with the General, no cosy friendship with Plevitskaya either (she’d really only been so nice to me to get her recording finished, I could see now), and no Jean – nothing but dead ends.

  What I should have said to Marie-Thérèse when I went into the kitchen just now was that I was giving her and Gaston notice. (Details were running through my head at a great pace. I’d give them wages until Christmas; she could have Grandmother’s fur coat; would it be absurd to give Gaston the car?) Only cowardice had stopped me, or inertia – the same inertia that had stopped me even thinking of wiring the family news of Grandmother’s death (which I now saw, in a sudden, separate agony of self-reproach, had been terribly wrong, because however estranged Mother had been from her, she’d surely have wanted to be told that her own mother had died. Anyone would). Now was the time to face up to these things, because, whatever anyone said when I got home, and however much I might be dreading my return, I had to accept that there was nothing left to do here but get ready to leave.

  33

  It didn’t take long.
Even with Grandmother’s box, and the photo, and the book I’d written my scrappy translations of those letters into, I didn’t have much.

  When my box was closed, I pulled it into the study. What I should do soon, I knew, was to sit down and write to Mother to set her mind at rest about me and tell her about Grandmother. Not just a wire; a proper letter. But I couldn’t quite face that yet. So I was relieved when I realized I could keep busy, for now, by making a list of the pictures Grandmother had left me. I’d get a piece of paper from the desk, number them, give the list to Marie-Thérèse, and ask her to get them crated up and shipped after me.

  Organizing the actual shipping of the pictures wasn’t something I needed to do myself. But I’d go out in a minute and ask Gaston to take me to the shipping office to pay for everything, and for my ticket. I could probably be on the train to Le Havre tonight.

  For a moment, I stood looking round, wishing all this had ended differently.

  I walked over to the big expanse of desk. It was spotless, with two chairs drawn up against it.

  I tried to imagine it covered in a clutter of whirring machinery, with those two men I’d heard sitting at these chairs wearing big headphones. I could still see the socket on the wall which they must have plugged the equipment into, because the electric cable from the nearer desk lamp, which would normally be plugged in there, was still trailing uselessly along the floor. Marie-Thérèse must have forgotten to put it back.

  Kneeling down myself I plugged it into the wall.

  It was only when I was down on my knees, on the parquet floor, that I saw the other wire. It had been pushed along the small gap between floor and skirting board. Only the end was sticking out.

  At first I just thought it was an uncharacteristic piece of mess in the otherwise immaculate room. Gingerly – what if it was still connected to something? What if it gave me an electric shock? – I pulled. Several feet of cable came out from the wall: enough, I could see, without even trying, to stretch comfortably to the desk.

  At the wall end, this dark-coloured cable, which you could hardly see against the brown of the parquet, went right into the floor, a few inches below the electric socket in the skirting board.

  I shuffled closer to the wall, intrigued despite myself. From here I could see that the two oblongs of parquet next to the wall were no longer properly glued down to the floor. They were just lying there, held by the other pieces around them, like loose bits in a jigsaw puzzle. Turning to reach for a paper knife from the desk, I ran the blade round one of them. It flipped up easily.

  A small square had been cut in the floorboard underneath, and the dark-brown wire ran down through that square into the ceiling of the room one floor below.

  I knew what that room was. I’d been in it. It was General Miller’s private office.

  I hadn’t taken seriously those stories Jean had told me about the Soviet agents circling his father’s office, waiting to attack. But now I sat back on my haunches, with the piece of parquet still in one hand and the paper knife in the other, looking slowly from the end of the wire that disappeared downwards, then back to the end that would reach so easily to the desk.

  Then, feeling increasingly uneasy, I got up, put down the things in my hand, picked up the other end of the wire and walked with it to the desk. When I sat down at the desk with it still in my hand, I could see that it really was a perfect length to come just to about here … the exact place where a machine might have been placed on the mahogany surface. There were even dents in the cable at the end of the desk and at the floor, indicating exactly how it had lain.

  But there was no way of seeing how the wire would have plugged into anything. Not any more. The end of the cable in my hand had no fitting. It had been cut – one neat, quick knife stroke. The men who’d taken the machinery away had been in a hurry, all right.

  I felt suddenly sick. Whether those young Russian men with the recording equipment had been editing a recording of Plevitskaya’s voice at all now seemed in doubt. The only thing that this wire showed for sure was that they’d definitely been doing something else, too – using Grandmother’s study to spy on the General’s office downstairs.

  It made a whole different, and more sinister, kind of sense of the way the two men had just grabbed their stuff and rushed off with it so hastily as soon as Marie-Thérèse tried to shut them out of the apartment, saying Grandmother was ill. If they were spies, they would have wanted to clear their equipment out. They’d say: better safe than sorry; and make off.

  Other thoughts came pounding into my mind.

  Had Grandmother sat in here, on that evening, looking at this wire, and putting two and two together just as I was now doing? Was it this discovery that had brought on her crise?

  And had it been the return of those two men, the next morning, which had brought on her second, fatal seizure? When she’d started trying to speak, buzzing with the sound she couldn’t quite get out, and I’d rushed out of the room to fetch the housekeeper, mustn’t she have wanted me, someone, to stay with her, and listen, and understand?

  I couldn’t feel sorry for Plevitskaya any more either – not at all. She’d got this equipment in here, in the first place, playing on Grandmother’s pity and affection – so she must have been involved, mustn’t she?

  And then everything became clear. I got up.

  It didn’t matter what Plevitskaya’s role had been. I didn’t have time to worry about her.

  The only real point was General Miller. Someone was spying on him. I didn’t have to work out who it was. But I did have to hurry.

  I realized, with something like relief, that all I needed to do was to find Jean and, whether or not he wanted to speak to me, tell him what I knew – that his father was in danger.

  It might also have been, I thought, remembering her urgent moan of ‘MMMM …’ (‘Miller?’), what Grandmother had wanted to tell me.

  34

  Nadya Plevitskaya had got up early to curl her hair. She was wearing a ruched dress with red flowers on a black background and, under her chic Wallis Simpson hat, big gold hoop earrings. It was hot enough, even by the end of breakfast, to make her rather regret the black linen jacket she’d added to the ensemble. But she’d put a big red chrysanthemum in the buttonhole, which looked festive, and the jacket did, at least, cover up the bulges at either end of her corset.

  Throughout the long-drawn-out breakfast on the sunny terrasse of the rue du Colisée café, she flirted cheerfully with the proprietor and various fellow clients. After commenting that her husband was not fond of too much talk this early in the day, even on a holiday like this, when they were off to select stage outfits for her from no less a personage than Monsieur Epstein of Chez Caroline, she sent out a waiter for a newspaper for him to read while she talked and breakfasted. When the young man returned with Le Figaro, she looked at it in playful horror before saying that she couldn’t possibly let her husband read the thoughts of a perfume manufacturer – and, to gales of sycophantic laughter from the proprietor, sent the waiter breathlessly back out again for La Croix.

  ‘That’s women for you, eh, Jacquot!’ the proprietor chuckled, slapping his nephew on the shoulders, the second time back. She was doing a magnificent job, she thought, and holding half the street’s attention: teeth flashing, laughter pealing out – unlike her uncharismatic husband, who was barely even trying. The only time anyone could have told that he wasn’t actually dead was when he’d held out a hand for the paper.

  She drank three bowls of chocolate. She dipped a tartine with strawberry jam into her first milky drink (until she caught her husband’s glance up from La Croix, at least). Then (to hell with her figure, and her husband) she ate two more croissants.

  The sun rose. She was damp under her black jacket. She waved her hands around flamboyantly enough that, from time to time, without seeming to be looking, she caught a glimpse of the time. How slowly the hands on her watch seemed to be moving.

  ‘Bozhe,’ she cried when, eventually,
they said ten o’clock. ‘Is that the time already?’ And she rose, without waiting for her husband, and sailed off down the street towards the waiting car.

  The last thing she expected was for the American girl – who, as she only noticed too late, had been running in her direction – to cannon into her in the street.

  Not by accident, either. The girl, who was a good six inches taller than she was, grabbed her by both shoulders. She had none of yesterday’s forlorn, crossed-in-love charm. She was panting and indignant. Good God, Plevitskaya thought, disconcerted, she’s making straight for me; and she looks as though she’s about to shake me …

  She glanced quickly behind. Her husband – never there when you wanted him – was still on the terrasse, folding up the paper and waiting for his change.

  ‘I found the wires,’ the girl was stammering, so angry she could hardly get the words out. Plevitskaya didn’t know what she was talking about. Politely, she tried to wriggle herself free. But the girl was clutching on to her shoulder pads for grim death.

  Then, practically spitting into her face, the girl went on furiously: ‘Wires down through the floor to the General’s room. Was your recording – the one you wanted me to pay for – something to do with spying on ROVS?’

  ‘No!’ Plevitskaya said. ‘Of course not!’

  And, in the breathy silence that followed, she took advantage of the girl’s look of doubt – and weakened grip – to shake herself loose.

  Well, really, she was telling herself – feeling indignant, too – recording or no recording, whoever did this girl think she was? Why, she’d never been manhandled like that in her life …

  And then, just as she was puffing herself up into a fluff of hurt pride and shock, she realized what the American girl must mean. Wires – from the recording equipment.

  She stopped. Blackness flooded through her: a depth of cold rage such as she’d never known.