* * *
Glass glanced over the sheath of papers his secretary, Lucy Drover, had brought him late Wednesday morning. All routine stuff that he would normally deal with in his office if he weren’t stuck in the field. That was it had been routine until he reached the bottom of the file and found a report from Hull, a hotbed of Bolshevik activity.
The Secret Intelligence Service knew Irina Kozyrev lived up north and kept a close eye on her activities because she was the daughter of the “Hand of Death,” the legendary Russian assassin Mikhail Lashevich.
He stacked his paperwork together and returned it all to the envelope. He went to the chair across from the suite’s door, where Miss Drover waited for him. “I’ve signed everything that needed it. I need to obtain our best likeness of Mikhail Lashevich.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bring it over to me as soon as possible.”
The secretary added the envelope to her satchel, which also contained Glass’s report and the disks that had been recorded. She’d brought a fresh stack of them.
“How are we doing with recruiting? I didn’t see a report,” he said as a final thought struck him.
“You would think, with unemployment as high as it is, that we’d find some good candidates.”
“It’s best to recruit young,” Glass told her. “At the universities, or just out of the army. We need to have people in the right places, but we’re stretched so thin that we aren’t doing it properly.”
“Do you have money to hire anyone?”
“One more operative,” Glass said. “For the Big Smoke.”
The secretary nodded. “I’ll have that photograph or sketch or whatever we have to you this afternoon.”
* * *
At four, with the Russians absent from their suite, Glass went downstairs with his Lashevich sketch and asked to see Peter Eyre. Hugh Moth, the front desk clerk, led him behind Reception and through the business office to the hotel manager’s private office.
Glass found Eyre alone, tapping the butt of a cigarette into a battered brass ashtray.
“What ho, Lord Walling?” he asked.
Glass sat in one of the visitor’s chairs and picked up the small elephant on Eyre’s desk. He let it slide through his fingers, enjoying the cool feel of the jade. “Have you ever been to India?” he asked, setting the elephant back in its place.
“No. I’ve been to the great European capitals and to New York, but nowhere very exotic,” Eyre said, popping open the cigarette box on his desk.
Glass waved his offer away.
“You’re right.” Eyre sighed, closing the box. “I mean to cut back myself. No more of this chain smoking. What can I do for you? I’m just back from a wedding, and I have no idea what’s been transpiring in the hotel today.”
“This isn’t news about goings-on,” Glass said. “We didn’t have another party upstairs last night.” He’d already made Eyre aware of the near-violent end of the party on Monday night. Eyre had wanted the Russians out of his hotel but had been overruled by the government because of the listening post that they’d set up.
“Glad to hear it. Prostitutes are a necessary evil in hospitality, but I don’t want them being roughed up.”
“Nor do I. This is about a Russian assassin.”
“Surely we don’t have any more Russians hiding in the basement,” Eyre exclaimed. “Isn’t everything sealed up now?”
“Mikhail Lashevich is probably in the north. His daughter lives in Hull. But he’s an important player, and I expect he’ll show his nose in London eventually. I wanted hotel staff to be alerted to his appearance in case he decides to meet with Ovolensky or his thugs.”
“Understood.” Eyre took the envelope Glass offered and opened it.
“That photograph is many years old, but hopefully he hasn’t changed in appearance, much. The sketch is only about three years old from an operative inside Russia.”
“He gained a scar on his cheek.”
“Yes, but it could be covered by a beard,” Glass said.
Eyre nodded. “I’ll have one of the employees do a sketch of him with a beard and put all three images up in the Staff Lounge with one of my daily notes.”
“Thank you. This man is a trained assassin. It would be best if he never came anywhere near London.”
Eyre set the envelope aside. “Speaking of Russians, Olga finished the art exhibit yesterday.”
“I’m surprised. She didn’t take anything from my suite in the end.”
“I think her artistic eye only wanted those oranges and reds in the Firebird. While your suite has some of the best art in the hotel, none of it had that color scheme.”
“Fair enough.”
“Want to take a look? I’ll unlock the Coffee Room.”
Oddly enough, Glass found that he was interested in what Olga had completed. He stood. “Very well.”
Eyre stood as well and escorted him back to the Grand Hall and across it to the quadruple-paneled double-height doors. He unlocked them with an old-fashioned iron key and gestured Glass in before closing and relocking the doors behind him.
“This must be your favorite room in the hotel.”
“Very much so. It is my throne room.”
Glass heard the laughter in the man’s voice as he turned on the lights. His vision was momentarily dazzled by the swirl of colors in the room.
“What an eye,” he said.
“Olga is an artist,” Eyre said simply. “She thinks of herself as the bereaved fiancée of one, but she has her own skill. In a way I am glad she didn’t marry young. She might never have had the opportunity to develop her skills.”
“What is her medium?” He slowly rotated to take in the full display.
“She paints. She has her own pieces in a gallery. Or at least she will. The gallery opens with its new installations tomorrow night.”
“Good,” he said, taking in the swirl of rich jewel tones on the walls of the screens that led toward a lighter-colored wall of art at the back of the room. “Her eye is very clever.”
“I think her every waking thought was consumed with the layout recently.”
Glass wondered if she’d been thinking about art when they’d kissed. No, he was reasonably sure she’d thought about a bit more than art in the past days regardless of her considerable talent. “As you say. She told me you are old friends. Did you know her sister and other family members growing up? She said she had cousins here as well.”
Eyre shot him a sideways glance. “Suspicious of everyone, aren’t you, Lord Walling?”
Once again, he’d used the wrong tone. If only there were a spy school where he could take a refresher course. “My interest might be romantic.”
Eyre chuckled. “You and a chambermaid?”
“I thought she was management.”
“I’ve promoted both her and Ivan Salter, but they are still doing their original jobs. Over time they will focus on management tasks. For now, Olga is more likely to be seen changing your bedsheets than sitting behind a desk working on charts.”
“So you don’t recommend I take her on a second date?”
Eyre’s expression matched the confused look on the elongated, Cubist woman in the painting behind him. “You took her on a first?”
“Yes. I can’t say it ended well.” He pushed thoughts of that kiss to the back of his mind. “She seemed to think I was buttering her up to get better service.”
“Hoping Pater will approve a Russian princess as your wife? I admit most of the Russians are penniless, but it’s all relative. There are better-heeled princesses afoot in London.”
“I take it you don’t want to lose this one?”
“Her independence is dearly won.” Eyre reached into his coat pocket for his cigarette case, glanced at the paintings around him, and seemed to think better of lighting up around them. “A No Smoking sign, I think.”
“It seems wise,” Glass said. “Back to my original question.”
“Of course, my lo
rd,” Eyre said with a hint of a sneer in his voice. “Yes, I did know Princess Fyodora as a child, but I had no idea there were cousins.”
“Odd. You’d think that England-based cousins would be exactly who the princess would have applied to for aid rather than her distant imperial relations.”
“Obviously the families were not close. I would guess they aren’t based in Surrey or London. I’d have found it hard to miss them if they had been.”
Glass ran his tongue across his lower lip, catching a faint taste of marmalade from his breakfast toast. Dash it, he wanted the taste of Princess Olga Novikova on his lips again. As he stared at the dizzying array of Russian art around him, he began to formulate a plan.
Chapter 4
Her cousin Konstantin had shaved his beard for the occasion. Olga was happy to see that. He looked very different clean shaven. His face had seemed too narrow for his neck once he’d grown into adulthood. When he wore a beard his lower face and neck blended together, creating more harmony but making him look like someone who dwelled in a cave.
He lifted his hands when he saw her and came out of the shadows on the street corner. “You see, Cousin? I came,” he said in Russian.
“That suit is older than my dress,” Olga said, looking at him. How did he spend his money? He didn’t wear a coat despite the chill air, but then he never seemed to feel temperature.
“We are Russians. We do not need anything new.”
“Let us hope some Russians need new art. I could buy a new wardrobe if my work sells.” Smiling at him, Olga straightened her glove, unable to hide her pleasure that her cousin had joined her. If he spent more time among regular people, maybe he would finally realize his illicit activities could hurt people. “Shall I take your arm?”
“No,” Konstantin said quickly. “You know I don’t like attention.”
“I wonder why,” she said, “with the terrible things you’ve done.”
“It’s all finished now,” her cousin said, bumping her shoulder as they walked down the street toward the Imperial Art Gallery.
“No more bombs?” she said, careful to speak low and in Russian, not betraying her sense of relief.
“Not unless I need money,” he said, looking at her sidelong as they walked under a street lamp. “Will you give me some?”
He blackmailed her, and when she didn’t give him money, he did stupid things. She was reminded of poor, beleaguered Grand Duchess Xenia and her large family, forever asking for handouts, still attempting to live a royal life in reduced circumstances. In her case, she only had Konstantin, but he was a bottomless well of need, just as his parents had been to her father when she was a child.
“I’ll give you everything I earn from my art.” She stopped two doors down from the gallery and put her hand on his sleeve. He hated to be touched, and she usually respected that, so she hoped he understood the import of her statement. “But only if I have your promise that you will stop making bombs, for once and for all.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“You have to promise. If that plot against the hotel had succeeded, I’d have lost my position. I might even have been killed. Where would your money come from then?”
He shrugged. “I’d make more bombs.”
“Have you no family feeling? No conscience?” she demanded. As soon as she said it, she glanced away. He probably didn’t. Ninety percent of the time he behaved more like an animal than a man. She’d learned long ago that she couldn’t count on him. To think she’d reassured the dowager empress that she had family waiting in London to care for her back in 1919. What a lie that had been.
“I’m being chased by the police,” Konstantin said, ignoring her questions. “I’m on the run. Always, I must pay rent, and then I cannot stay in the rooms because they are discovered.”
“Yet people who want bombs can always find you.” Her recrimination did not find a target. He didn’t even glance at her.
Ahead of them, two cabs pulled up simultaneously on the street. Guests were arriving for the gallery show. Too many people would be around them, some of them Russian speakers.
“Never mind,” she said. “Put on your glasses. They help hide those distinctive eyes of yours.” The lightly amber-colored glass in his spectacles distorted the color of his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, taking them out of his pocket and perching them on his nose.
No matter what, she kept trying to bring Konstantin out in the world. Maybe he’d notice that more people existed in the world than just him and stop doing such destructive things. One of these days he might hurt people and not just property before she could figure out how to make her only living relative stop.
* * *
Glass had obtained the name of Olga’s art gallery from Peter Eyre at the close of their rather unnerving conversation. Much more subtlety was required of him in the future, especially given that the princess still might be involved with the Bolsheviks somehow. At least being seen as a suitor was better than being recognized as a secret intelligence agent with the scent of prey in his nostrils.
He alighted from his taxicab in Grafton Street, happy to see the princess rated a gallery exhibit in Mayfair, despite what she did to earn a daily wage. Raindrops pelted his hat as he exited onto the pavement. He walked into the gallery behind a rotund couple, the woman dressed in a shapeless mink coat and the man in mothball-scented gray wool.
Inside, the Imperial proved to be a warren of small rooms. He wondered if it had once been a tavern. To his left, he saw one room filled with photographs of society beauties. Ahead of him appeared to be prints of the ragingly popular Scottish landscape variety. Not surprisingly, most of the gallery’s patrons were clustered around the landscapes. He’d read about the American lust for limited edition prints and the enormous sums being exchanged for them. This gallery could well afford an exhibit of obscure Russian artists if they were also selling prints by Cameron and his ilk.
He took a right, following the general flow of traffic. A temporary coat check had been set up behind cloth-covered screens. He handed off his damp Callaghan of London coat and best Lock & Co. snap-brim fedora. The fur-lined wool coat would not only be warm enough to get him through a Russian winter but also worked perfectly for surveillance on London’s damp streets. The fedora, on the other hand, only suited occasions like this one. He preferred a battered homburg for surveillance. Easier to hide under. Beneath his coat, his blue-and-gray-checked Savile Row suit had remained dry, despite the provocation of the late February weather.
“Douglas? Is that you?”
He tucked his coat check ticket into his coat as he turned around. A pretty woman in her mid-thirties had her head tilted so far sideways that she looked to be in danger of falling over. Faint lines creased in her forehead as she righted herself.
“I’m sorry. It’s Walling now, isn’t it? You ended up with the title.”
“Margery Coulimore,” he said slowly.
“Margery Davcheva now.” Her lips curved up in a smile of embarrassment.
“That’s right.” He nodded. “I remember now. You married, what, about four years ago?”
“Five, yes.” She touched his arm. “Danny had been gone more years than that by then.”
He patted her hand, sorry that she felt any sadness upon seeing him. “I know. You mourned long enough. My brother would have wanted you to marry, have children. I didn’t realize you’d married a Russian.”
She waved at a young woman in a stunning embroidered dress and her elderly male companion. “Yes. We opened this gallery a couple of years ago.”
“He is an artist?”
“No.” She stared over his shoulder, nodding at someone else. “I used to dabble myself. It seemed like a good business to be in. I knew the right people, the right customers.”
He vaguely remembered the smart set Margery and his second brother, Danny, had run in before the war. They’d had their wedding date set when war broke out, and Danny had enlisted with a group of frien
ds, saying he’d be back before Christmas and they would reschedule the wedding. He’d never come home. “As I recall, that’s perfectly correct. And it looks like what you are selling is all the rage.”
“We do very well. I’m trying to recall exactly how old you are. You haven’t married, am I correct?”
“No, I’ve stayed busy with work.”
“I can introduce you around.” She twisted the heirloom-quality triple rope of pearls draped around her neck. “I know positively oodles of people. I have at least two girl cousins in their twenties, lovely young women. I could invite you to a dinner party next week, pair you up with someone delicious.”
A woman walked up to the coat check. He recognized the orange silk-and-fur cape. The princess. The man next to her wasn’t familiar. Had Olga brought a date to her opening?
“Who are you staring at?” Margery asked. She did her head tilting thing again, bending sideways from the waist.
Olga pulled off her cape. Her companion didn’t aid her. Underneath, she wore a dress that was much boxier than the slinky black number she’d worn to dinner. This dress was gray blue, probably silk, though he didn’t really know fabric, with a lot of black embroidery on both the bodice and the skirt. It looked expensive but a bit dowdy on her long frame.
“Is she your type, Douglas?” Margery queried. “Blonde? Statuesque?”
“I know Her Serene Highness,” he said.
“Do you? I wonder how.” She broke off when Olga took her ticket and turned, glancing straight at them. Margery lifted her hand and wriggled her fingers in a wave. “I must go to her, darling. She’s one of my artists, you know.”
“She’s why I came,” Glass murmured.
“How lovely. You must buy something. She’s desperately poor, you know, like so many of the Russians. My husband was so lucky to have a father with a large deposit in the Bank of England before the revolution.” She brushed past him in a cloud of chiffon and went to Olga, taking both of the princess’s hands in hers.
Glass took the opportunity to stare hard at Olga’s companion. He wore strange spectacles, more like sunglasses than normal glasses. Some sort of light sensitivity. Given that he had Konstantin Novikov on the brain, he examined the man against what little description he had. This man had no beard, but his basic body type matched. That could be true of so many men. The glasses hid his eyes. And, according to Sadie Loudon Drake, the bomber’s eyes were supposed to be quite unusual, a cloud of amber around the iris and that surrounded by blue. Glass knew he’d have to keep an eye on the pair, but it wouldn’t hurt anything if he looked at Olga’s pieces.
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