The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  Was that the real reason why her husband had been so helpful about persuading Constance to have the recording edited at her home? Just so he could bug Miller for the Moscow team, before the kidnapping?

  When she glanced around again and saw him, newspaper folded under his arm, finally sauntering up the street towards her, smiling as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, she was appalled at the certainty she suddenly felt.

  Of course it was. Moscow wouldn’t have invested all this effort and money in her husband just on trust. They’d have wanted him to lead from the front. They’d have wanted him to prove he was ready to betray Miller himself.

  Which meant that the recording that she’d invested so much hope in, but he’d dreamed up, had just been a ploy – a Trojan horse, to get wires into Constance’s apartment.

  He hadn’t given a hoot about her career. He’d been playing dirty tricks on her, all along, as surely as he had on that fat old fool Miller. And here she was, helping him out.

  Suddenly all she wanted was to walk away, and for the whole thing to fail. Why should she care? If it all went wrong today, she’d end up in Moscow. And she’d a million times rather be there, looking for her son, than propping up her snake of a husband here.

  She gazed back at the American girl, with her mouth half-open, listening to those unhurried footsteps coming up behind her, bursting with words – but too painfully full of all the contradictory things she wanted to say to be able to manage a single one.

  And then she sighed, and the words all went away, because it was too late. She thought of the crab salesman, and knew she was afraid. She’d have to go through with it after all.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ her husband said, with a formal bow and smile to the stunned-looking American girl (who didn’t challenge him, she noticed). She felt his arm slip through hers. With dreamlike dignity, she nodded, too.

  As they moved slowly off, she heard herself saying almost apologetically to the American girl in whom she’d so nearly, for that one moment of insanity, confided, ‘You see, I have an appointment at the dressmaker’s.’

  35

  Evie

  I hadn’t meant to go rushing up to Plevitskaya. But when she appeared, right in front of me, I saw red. All that sweetness, yesterday; all that concern … I could still remember how comforted I’d felt by her embrace. And all the time she was part of something so unspeakably awful as spying on General Miller. I couldn’t help myself.

  But it felt like a dream, my moment of anger, because nothing came of it. She and her husband just went smoothly off, with their arms linked, leaving me standing there.

  Except …

  Except, now that I came to think of it, that when I’d first mentioned the wire she’d looked, for a moment, as shocked as I’d felt when I’d first seen it. And then she’d turned and glanced at Skoblin coming up behind, with his meek little half-smile and his paper.

  And when she’d turned back to me, her face had changed. Could she have been scared?

  I was standing in the street with the sun beating down on me. But, when I now called to mind the face of Skoblin – the neatly combed, thinnish hair, its once-black colour turning to iron; the small moustache and quiet eyes – I suddenly felt cold.

  Perhaps it had been his presence that had frozen me. He knew ROVS. He knew spying. And she, after all, had had every reason to want the recording completed. Wasn’t he likelier than his wife to have wanted to do this, and known how?

  I couldn’t make it out. But I had a vague sense, even then, out there in the innocence of the hot Paris morning, that just beyond my inner fog of incomprehension, a new landscape of unimaginable deceit might be about to loom into view.

  I was still standing, transfixed, when I heard the sound I’d been waiting for.

  A taxi drew up in front of Grandmother’s building. I saw Jean get out and go to the passenger door.

  ‘Jean!’ I called, rushing towards him. ‘General Miller!’

  I was a good hundred feet away. As I ran, I saw the General rise above the chassis, look in my direction and then, with irritation and embarrassment plain on his face as he saw who was calling out, hasten off towards the front door. ‘Wait!’ I called, frantically waving. ‘Please!’ But he was fiddling with his key, and looking away.

  The door clicked shut behind him just as I reached the taxi.

  I would have let myself into the building behind him and banged on the door of ROVS until they answered, but Jean stepped in front of me and barred my way.

  ‘Please,’ I panted, hardly daring to look into those blue eyes. I had my hands on the tensed muscles of his upper arms. He was so close that I could smell soap and the cigarettes of the station café on him. ‘We need—’

  ‘Just leave him alone,’ he interrupted with cold anger. ‘Let him get on with his work.’

  I let go of him. ‘You don’t understand,’ I said desperately. ‘Please don’t go.’

  He looked at me then. He stopped. Waited.

  ‘It’s not about me, I promise,’ I went on, trying to make my voice steady and persuasive. ‘It’s about him. He’s being bugged.’

  Jean rolled his eyes to the heavens and turned on his heel.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘I’ve found a wire.’

  He’d already opened his car door by the time what I’d said sank in.

  Then he stopped.

  ‘What wire?’

  It took what seemed forever to persuade him to come up and see for himself. I was all fingers and thumbs with the keys and locks and handles.

  But when I did finally get him into the study, and pulled out the wire, and held it so he could see how it had been cut through the floorboards and fed down into his father’s study ceiling, he stopped scowling and looking sceptical.

  Instead he went very quiet.

  Then he came over to where I was standing, and – quite gently – took the wire out of my hands. He tugged a little. But it was attached to something under the floor. It didn’t come loose.

  ‘I thought’, I whispered, ‘that it must have been connected with the recording they were editing up here; you know, of Plevitskaya’s voice.’

  He took no notice of me. He just stared at the wire.

  ‘Because,’ I went stammering on, feeling foolish, ‘even if the other end has been cut, you can see it was just the right length to have reached the machine …’

  He looked up, straight at me. I knew this wasn’t the moment for personal feelings, but I still couldn’t help a pang of joyful relief when I saw that he wasn’t angry any more – at least not with me. His eyes said, as clearly as anything, ‘I now see that you’re not just meddling.’ But some other emotion had overwhelmed him. He was searching for words.

  ‘The meeting’s a trap,’ he said. I stared back, lost. He didn’t explain – not, that is, unless a quick, appalled headshake and a mutter of ‘Skoblin’ counted as an explanation.

  ‘Skoblin,’ I repeated, wishing he hadn’t looked away again. ‘Because it’s his wife’s recording? Yes, that’s what I thought, too …’ But Jean was shaking his head and looking sick.

  He threw down the wire, grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the door. In spite of everything, I was grateful to feel his skin against mine.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ he said breathlessly. By then we were clattering downstairs and into the ROVS office. ‘I’ve got to talk to Father.’

  We charged in through the front door, hand in hand, barging past the bewildered man who’d opened the door, and through the room full of uniformed secretaries typing at their desks – who all stopped and stared – and down the short corridor to the General’s room.

  No one bothered with translating. ‘Gdye Ghe-nye-RAL?’ Jean called loudly over his shoulder, or that’s what it sounded like; and – though it was a shock to hear him speaking Russian – even I could more or less understand when the young men, pointing towards their boss’s office, started rising to their feet with the beginning of alarm. I could hear their footste
ps, following ours.

  But as soon as we opened the door it was clear we were too late.

  The French windows at the back of his office – the ones opening on to the courtyard, from which you could sneak out of the service door into the back alley – were open, and the dingy muslin drapes were blowing in the wind. We stepped in with the young men following us. But the room was empty. General Miller had left.

  It was only in the aftermath – once Jean started yelling in panicky Russian, and the young men started shouting, too, and then two of them chased out through the courtyard to see if they couldn’t stop the General somewhere further down the street, if he hadn’t gone far, while a third rushed to the phone and began calling, all with interruptions and orders from Jean – that, at last, he started explaining. It was only then that I heard what Jean was suddenly so frantic with anxiety about.

  First, Skoblin had been planning a meeting between his master and two German agents. It had been supposed to be so hush-hush that none of the secretaries knew. Jean had pestered the secret out of him, as well as a vague sort of address. He had sensed his father was still holding back on him, but thought that was only because they both knew he so disapproved of the whole notion of the alliance with the Nazis that his father so wanted. (‘And not just me – I was imagining what you would say, too,’ he added, shaking his head. He didn’t quite look at me.)

  Now that Jean had seen that someone, and it must be Skoblin, was also behind the clandestine bugging of the General’s office, this planned rendezvous – which was about the only thing, except Grandmother’s funeral, that would have lured his father out of the safety of his office – was taking on a still more sinister colouring. This one extra piece of knowledge made it seem all too likely that the talk of a secret meeting had, all along, been just a ploy to get the General out of his office. Skoblin might have other masters, maybe even Soviet Moscow.

  The two young men soon came back, looking frightened. It was obvious they hadn’t found the General. I’d had no time to form an opinion of the General’s startling intention of forming a pact with the Nazi government before hearing the equally startling information that the plan had probably never existed outside his own head, and Skoblin’s.

  I sank down on to one of the leather armchairs in the secretaries’ room, to keep out of the way of all the pacing and scurrying. The returning young men rushed to their phones, too. They picked them up, but even I could see they didn’t know whom to call. They waited, with the earpieces up and hands poised, mutely asking for instruction. They were underlings, I could see, and there was no fight in them, now there was no one left to give commands.

  ‘Jean,’ I said, putting a hand on his arm.

  He raised his head a fraction and looked at me with blank, appalled eyes.

  ‘Do you remember the address your father told you?’ I asked.

  He nodded, and his eyes quickened with relief. Perhaps he was tired, I thought. This was when he’d normally go to sleep, after his night-long job driving. But I could see his purpose returning.

  ‘Go there,’ I said. ‘Now. Go in the taxi. See if you can get there in time to stop them.’

  He stood up. ‘Will you come?’

  It was a request. His voice was humble. I could hear he wanted me with him.

  ‘No,’ I said, because I could still hear Plevitskaya’s voice saying, ‘I have an appointment at the dressmaker’s.’ ‘I’m going to find Nadya Plevitskaya. She knows about this, I’m sure.’

  36

  I knew where Plevitskaya and her husband had had breakfast. And I knew she was a talker. So, as soon as I’d found out from the café owner which couturier she’d been boasting of visiting, I jumped in a taxi myself, and followed.

  Of course it was a long shot. But I couldn’t believe that the woman who had embraced me so tenderly yesterday, who’d briefly been so full of sorrow and understanding – whom I’d so wanted to trust – could have been plotting something so evil. And what I was counting on was that fleeting look of shock and uncertainty that I’d surprised on her face earlier: the possibility it seemed to hold out that, if she were involved in all this, she might in some way be willing to talk to me.

  All mixed up in my tumult of feeling, as I slammed the door of the cab and sat, perched on the edge of my seat, willing the driver forward, was the flickering possibility of a rage more intense than anything I’d ever experienced – because if Plevitskaya had been sitting at the restaurant with me, drying my tears, holding my hand, hugging me, reminiscing, talking about her pain at losing a child she loved and ordering up champagne, when all along she was planning to steal the man Jean loved so much … why then, it was betrayal of the most unforgivable kind.

  My knuckles tightened to white points as I clutched the car seat.

  Chez Caroline turned out to be on one of the twelve opulent avenues that radiate out from the place de l’Étoile. As we turned off from the Arc de Triomphe, I recalled the pride in Jean’s voice when he’d told me, on an earlier drive along the Champs-Élysées to this central tourist point, about its Russian connections with the past. The great white arch had been commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 to celebrate winning the Battle of Austerlitz, but had then been abandoned, half-finished, for many years, because soon afterwards Napoleon had been forced into retreat and defeat after trying to conquer Russia in 1812. My heart wrenched with pity at the memory.

  My taxi drove quite a long way down the broad, tree-lined avenue Victor-Hugo towards Passy; I should have gone with Jean after all, I was thinking as we got caught up in a slow-moving crowd of honking taxis, between towering hôtels particuliers in grey-white stone with delicate wrought-iron balconies. Then, on a suddenly empty stretch of road with no cars parked for several yards in either direction, my driver stopped and let me out.

  I’d been half expecting pink fur bears, dresses with trompe-l’oeil drawers for pockets, necklines trimmed with lobsters – the alarmingly avant-garde Surrealist Paris fashion scene that New York magazines were always writing about. But instead I found myself in front of a small, expensive-looking but respectable store, just right for this neighbourhood. It was the kind of place I could imagine my mother enjoying. Under an awning on which the word ‘CAROLINE’ was written in dignified capitals, its window contained a single slender dummy kitted out in quite conventional evening glitter: a black ball gown with an ugly, over-sequinned halter neck, and a glistening mink wrap above. Still, my heart was pounding as I rang the bell.

  An intimidatingly groomed and very tall young woman answered.

  I took one look at her supercilious expression, recognized her type, and decided not to rush in with any explanations about wanting to have a frank and perhaps unpleasant conversation with one of her clients whom I thought might be inside.

  ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ I began instead, stepping smartly forward as I started on my alternative story about the imaginary party for which I had no dress, and how struck I’d been by the chic of the pre-assembled ensemble in the window, which would go so splendidly with my diamond earrings. Even if I had no appointment, did she think I might, just possibly, try that dress and mink stole on?

  I kept my accent almost laughably American throughout on the assumption – correct, as it turned out – that, however haughty the shop assistant might appear, the thought of the mighty greenback I represented would persuade her to let me in.

  Finally, after careful examination of the quality of my shoes, bag and dress – I’d never been so grateful for that understated dress Mother had bought me – she nodded, sweetened visibly and led me up to the first floor. We entered a high-ceilinged, chandeliered salon that took up the entire space. Its walls were done out in pale-grey velvet panels, with knick-knacks and armchairs everywhere, in the manner of a luxurious private home. I could hear conversation from two remote corners of the room, each screened off by a small fence of Chinese lacquer-work.

  After moving another Chinese screen around the armchair she’d arranged me in and tak
ing a few tape-measurements, she wafted off, now all flirtatious smiles and come-hitherishness, promising to have a glass of champagne sent to me while she found the clothes I wanted to see modelled.

  Knowing I’d have a good five or ten minutes before she reappeared before me, wearing the dress herself, no doubt with elbow-length evening gloves and possibly a cigarette holder, I applied myself to listening as hard as I could to the conversations coming from behind the other screens. There were two stages to this buying process: first the sales model sashaying around, looking magnificently bored yet perfect in a long, slim version of the chosen outfit; then the customer trying a wider, shorter model. The screens were intended to spare everyone’s blushes if the effect, at that second stage, was less alluring than the designer had intended.

  I needed to establish where Plevitskaya was, but, for the moment, all I could hear was everyday sales patter – ‘The line, you see, so fluid …’ and ‘The stuff, chère madame, so fine …’ – which didn’t give the slightest clue as to the identity of the customer.

  And then, suddenly, I intuited which was the right conversation. Not because Plevitskaya herself had spoken – her deep Russian rumble would have been an unmistakeable giveaway – but just because of the excessively sycophantic tone the entourage was taking. ‘Ça, c’est magnifique!’ a man’s voice was cooing, delightedly, while lesser female voices echoed, ‘Ah oui! Épatant, madame!’ and ‘Ça alors!’

  What that told me was that Plevitskaya must be on the second, try-it-yourself stage, and require theatrical adulation. Quietly I got to my feet and sneaked out round the edge of my lacquer screen.

  I peeped through the slit between the two panels and, sure enough, there was Plevitskaya, pirouetting in front of a mirror in a long gold dress whose intended slinky line was so interrupted by the billows of flesh in her centre that it was hard to tell how it had originally been meant to hang. She was absorbed in contemplation of herself.

  I could see from her expression in the glass that she was enjoying the praise from her audience. Infuriatingly, and quite against my will, I found myself warming to her childlike showing-off. I could see, too, that she was red-faced and almost unable to breathe for holding her tummy in, and – from the dissatisfied sideways glances she kept giving her reflection – uncomfortably aware of the way the surplus flesh on her exposed upper arms was drooping and quivering.