Romanov Succession

by Brian Garfield

  But the Grand Duke was an old man and infirm. It was his first cousin, Prince Leon Kirov, who managed the Grand Duke’s villa—as well as his widespread business affairs, his social and familial obligations and his life.

  Feodor’s estate was maintained by twelve house servants, five gardeners, two grooms and four chauffeurs. On the grounds they kept a string of jumpers and thoroughbred pleasure horses, seven automobiles and a flock of ducks and geese on the man-made pond. The Romanovs and Kirovs took their exercise on bridle paths or playing tennis on the lawn or practicing archery against targets stuffed with straw. There were garden parties all summer long and none of the motorcars parked below the porte cocèhre was below the rank of Duesenberg or Hispano-Suiza.

  The thick green lawn stretched away from the house two hundred yards down a wide swath bordered by formal woods. The main gate at the foot of the lawn, just visible to the assassin, was made of heavy wrought iron and it was guarded by two liveried sentries who wore sidearms. Beyond the gate waited a ravenous pack of tattletale journalists from international gossip rags; now and then when a stately car drew up a photographer would rush forward and crouch to get a picture but that was all right so long as they remained outside the gate.

  The assassin watched a silver-grey Rolls approach the gate. He focused his field glasses on it until he could read the number plate. It hardly paused; it swept grandly through the portals and up the driveway. The assassin lowered his glasses. He had watched long enough to know the security procedures and that was all he needed. It was inside the villa that he’d have to do the job. He glanced at the sky, slung the field glasses and walked back through the wood.

  He opened the boot of the gleaming black Packard. He seated the Zeiss binoculars in their case and changed from his scuffed climbing shoes into a pair of elegant black pumps—a better match for his evening clothes.

  The Packard moved slowly down the rutted dirt track toward its intersection with the road that ran past the gate of the villa.

  2.

  Within the villa the gathering of elegant people sprawled through more than half a dozen of the building’s public rooms on two stories. In the vaulted main ballroom—a spaciously proportioned chamber of seventeenth century grandeur, hung with old masters and ornate tapestries—a string orchestra played saccharine music and guests nibbled tidbits from an immense Louis XIV table set with crystal and silver and candelabra and vased blossoms from the villa’s greenhouse.

  Toward the rear of the villa in the high arched gallery which gave out through glass panes onto formal gardens a separate balalaika orchestra provided accompaniment to a band of hired Cossack dancers who entertained inexhaustibly, squatting and leaping, grunting and shouting ferociously. Now and then a noble White Russian general would get swept up in the spirit of it and join the dancers.

  Upstairs in the great drawing room the more sedate and elderly guests sat talking after each in turn had made the ritual pilgrimage into the bedchamber that contained the Grand Duke Feodor, confined to his canopied bed by a painful S-curved spine, the result of degenerative disc ailments that had afflicted him for more than a decade. The Grand Duke was sixty-three—not very old by Romanov standards of longevity—but the athletic strength of his St. Petersburg youth had been mocked by two decades of malaise, and what once had been a splendid towering physique was now twisted and cadaverous. A palsy of alarming intensity afflicted his long-fingered hands, mottled with cyanotic spots; his eyes blinked rapidly and his jaws worked and he looked at least eighty; his mind was lucid only at intervals. Prince Leon employed a Swiss physician full-time to watch over the failing Grand Duke with the help of two registered nurses from Harley Street and one of the three was always in attendance in Feodor’s antechamber.

  The drawing room was occupied by a male elite. Most of them were fifty or more; all of them held titles or high military commissions from the long-ago Empire of Czar Nicholas II. The room was filled with cigar smoke and the fumes of Courvoisier and vodka and voices that said War, Invasion, Hitler, Minsk, the Stalin Line, Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht, the Red Army, Soviet Disaster—the last phrase spoken frequently and with energetic relish. To the extent that the rambling discussion was led its leader was Count Anatol Markov and he was speaking furiously. Betrayal, he said, and Vulnerability. Consequences. Country. Responsibility. And, he said, Decision.

  3.

  Sergei Bulygin drove fast down the narrow gravel tracks of the Spanish foothills, enjoying the freedom and the sense of solitary control, the exhilaration of the twelve-cylinder roar and the rush of wind about the cockpit of the open Mercedes touring car. It made him understand what drew the young Prince Felix so obsessively to motor racing and airplanes. The young prince had explained it once to the old soldier, the white teeth flashing in his long tan face. “We’re a useless class of people, Sergei. Our circumstances prohibit us doing the ordinary things that you can do—working, earning a living. A man’s got to take an interest in something to justify his existence.” It had sounded cynical but he knew better: the young prince lived for the racing.

  The gravel road carried him down a narrow ladder of bends and on down the river through the farms and villages of the valley. Most of it was cluttered with carts and pedestrians and the occasional chain-drive lorry and he made poor time but he had anticipated that; he arrived in ample time at the corrugated metal airport terminal of Barcelona, parked at the curb and went into the primitive waiting room; it was just past five o’clock and Alexsander’s plane was due.

  There was no sign of the aircraft but that was not alarming. The German-dominated customs people at Lisbon enjoyed enforcing their petty bureaucratic power by hectoring foreign travelers with endless paper delays.

  Sergei had not seen young Alex since Helsinki but there wouldn’t have been much change unless the American food had put weight on him; scars at the throat now, of course, from that Bolshevik bullet on the Finland border but perhaps Alex had taken to wearing a scarf to cover that. A scarf would be good, Sergei thought: it would give Alex a dashing look like an aviator.

  He was only a valet now in the service of Prince Leon Kirov but Sergei was a soldier, that was his real calling and he looked forward keenly to Alex’s arrival because he had a feeling it meant there would be soldiering to do. There was a big war on and there ought to be a piece of it for Sergei Bulygin who had been a lance corporal in the Imperial Russian Infantry.

  Sergei watched the sky through the dusty window of the waiting room and finally he was rewarded. The airplane appeared suddenly at low altitude; it described a slow turn at the far end of the tarmac. Sergei stood up.

  Alex and Irina were the last of twelve off the plane. Irina was radiant, beaming up into Alex’s face, holding his arm—it was like years ago and Sergei felt a warm thrill of pleasure.

  Alex wore a Shetland jacket and butternut trousers; against his thick brown hair the darkly tanned face looked hard and outdoor-wrinkled. He was leaner than ever and he towered over the other passengers walking across the tarmac. The sunlight lit the grey of his eyes as he turned out of sight into the customs-and-immigration doorway and Sergei was shaken momentarily by the coldness of them.

  By twos and threes the arriving passengers appeared in the doorway with their luggage, were met and greeted and sometimes embraced; and trooped away across the waiting room. Finally Sergei was alone by the door and he saw them coming from the customs. Alex was folding visas and inspection documents into his passport and sliding it into his pocket, trailed by two porters carrying their grips. Then Alex looked up and found Sergei there.

  The smile made him look very American. It was what Sergei had hoped to see. He lifted his big arms.

  Alex laughed and folded Sergei in his strong hug. “Old friend—it’s so damned good to see you.”

  Irina Markova had the expression Sergei could never fathom—like a cat’s. “I told you I’d bring him back, Sergei.” But then a shadow seemed to cross her face and suddenly her cryptic stare unsettled Serge
i. He reached for their luggage.

  He thought, Vassily Devenko should have died in Finland. “I’ll take you to the car. Was it a good flight? Was it the Portuguese who made you late? Has America changed at all since we were there?” He kept talking too fast for them to answer, all the way out to the car. They were laughing at him but it was good laughter and when he started the engine he made it roar out of his sheer exuberance.

  The air was warm and a little damp coming off the Med. Irina found Alex’s hand and clasped it quietly. The Mercedes sighed in the road and the hair whipped around Irina’s face but she didn’t scarf it or tie it back. They passed under the lee of the mountain with Sergei monopolizing the talk and then they were curling along a river with the low sun stabbing through a spindle tracery of brush and trees. Small clouds scudded over the peaks. Alex felt deaf in the wind.

  Sergei said, “The General Vassily Ilyavitch was not yet at the villa when I left. He is expected.”

  “Yes,” Alex said. He turned and found Irina’s face deathly calm, chiseled in profile.

  Sergei turned the car smoothly toward a massive open gateway. Flashbulbs erupted around them and Irina stared without expression past the photographers: they were beneath her recognition. They angered Alex—petty mongrels scrambling for scraps—but he didn’t let it show. A guard waved Sergei through and when he switched off amid the herd of big cars below the porte cochere the engine pinged with heat contractions and Alex heard music and a multitude of voices muttering from the villa. Colorfully costumed guests walked amid the profusion of formally shaped flower beds in the garden.

  The car swayed when Sergei got out: he was a huge old man, a Kuban bear with his kind brown eyes and his wide Russian peasant face. The door opened under Sergei’s hand and Alex got out and waited for Irina; she swiveled to emerge and gracefully smoothed her elegant grey skirt. “You’ll enjoy the villa—it’s rather grand. Sergei, perhaps we can slip in by the kitchen? We’ll have to dress.”

  But Sergei was looking past them toward the hills beyond the garden. Alex followed his gaze and saw a solitary horseman cantering down the distant bridle path.

  “Heroes are always sculpted on horseback, aren’t they,” Irina said. “Isn’t it just like Vassily to arrive like that.” Then she laughed and the echoes rang back.

  4.

  The assassin saw the horseman from the open veranda above the garden. The rider threaded the hillside pathways with a Cossack cavalryman’s precision. The evening sun outlined him sharply on the crests—a tall horseman with heroic shoulders and the equestrian posture of a field marshal.

  A long low ridge made a wall beyond the meadows and when the rider disappeared behind it the assassin knew it was no good waiting for him to reappear. Devenko was on the alert and he wasn’t simply going to ride boldly up to the villa. Devenko had a guerrilla’s appreciation of distraction and deception. While a hundred guests stood rooted waiting for him to ride out of the shadows of the ridge Devenko would be galloping circuitously toward the back of the villa; he’d leave his horse tethered somewhere in the woods and they wouldn’t see him again until he made his entrance through an unexpected doorway.

  He knew that much because he’d made a study of Devenko. The man was a curious amalgam of melodramatic dash and practical caution. Too proud not to make his appearance here today; too careful—because of the prior attempts against him—to make an easy target of himself. That was why it had to take place inside the villa. There’d have been no point in waiting in ambush by the road because Devenko had anticipated that and had come on horseback rather than by car.

  It was much too difficult to get a bead on a man if you didn’t know him. That was what the assassin’s employers didn’t understand; it was why the first two attempts had failed: they hadn’t given the assassin sufficient information.

  The first shot had been in London. They’d given him a photograph of Devenko, a place and a time—“You’ll have no trouble. You’ve got five days to arrange your getaway and the exact scheme—that’s up to you. But he’s got Haymarket tickets on the twenty-ninth. The interval’s at nine-fifty and the curtain comes down at eleven-ten. You might think about catching him on his way back to the car afterward—at least that’s the way I’d handle it. But it’s your gambit.”

  It was only a voice on a telephone. He’d tried to get more: “Where does he live? What’s his routine? What’s he like?”

  But the employer refused to be drawn. “You’ve got all you need to go on. You’re supposed to kill him, not marry him—what difference does all that make?”

  So he’d botched the first one because he’d had no way of anticipating the speed and agility with which the target was capable of reacting. He’d paced the target toward the underground garage until the moment came when no one else was abroad in the blacked-out street. Then he’d quickened his pace and drawn the gun but the target heard all of that and without even looking behind him he’d dived between two parked lorries and that was that: the assassin ran forward and snapped a running shot but he knew he’d missed and then the target was out of sight in the heavy shadows and you couldn’t go running through the streets of London brandishing a 7.62 Luger with a big perforated silencer screwed to the barrel.

  “He’s faster than the telegraph,” he’d reported back. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well you know it now.”

  It was nearly a month before the employer called back. “You’d better not blow it this time. It’s an RAF airfield in Kent—Biggin Hill, do you know it?”

  “I can find it.”

  “They’re flying him from Scotland. Some sort of conference with three or four Russian exiles. It’s set up for a hotel in Maidstone but we want him taken out before the meeting—so it’s got to be the airfield or the road. It’s the A20.”

  “I know the road. What kind of car will he be in?”

  “It’s a Bentley saloon, grey, two or three years old.”

  “Number plate?”

  “Angel Kevin six three three.”

  “Chauffeur?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then that’s two of them. The price is higher.”

  “The price is the same, after your last fiasco.”

  He didn’t fight the point too hard; only a token face-saving riposte: “I’d have had him last time if you hadn’t been so jealous with information.”

  “Never mind. It’s July fourteen. The meeting in Maidstone’s set for eight in the evening. You’ll have to work back from there to get his ETA at Biggin Hill.”

  “There’s another way. Where does the Bentley live?”

  “It belongs to one of the White Russians. He lives in London but he’ll be staying at the hotel in Maidstone. The name’s Ivanov. He’s got a detached house in Highgate. Shepherd’s Hill, Number Forty-three. They’ll be going down to Maidstone sometime on the fourteenth.”

  “Bastille Day,” the assassin remarked, and cradled the phone.

  On the fourteenth he’d parked on the verge with the nose of his Morris pointed out toward the main road; got out of the car with a brush and a jar of black watercolor ink. His license plate number was IPF 311; he closed the characters to make it read TBE 814. Then he screwed a new silencer onto the Luger and put on a white jacket, a pair of clear-glass spectacles and a white trilby hat. Any witnesses would remember only the disguise, and there would be at least one witness: if they weren’t going to pay for the chauffeur he wasn’t going to give them the chauffeur.

  He had to wait more than an hour. Several cars and military vehicles came out of the service road and he kept watch in the driving mirror until the Bentley’s big square snout appeared.

  He put the first bullet into the front tire because he wanted to prevent the target escaping. Then he had a clear shot at Devenko and no way to miss it because they hadn’t spotted the source of the trouble yet. He squeezed the trigger with firm gentle pressure and the Luger recoiled, mildly as it always did; the bullet left a small grey smear on
the window, obscuring his view of Devenko’s left eye.

  “It’s your own fault again, blast you. If you’d told me I’d have worked a way around it.”

  “Around what?”

  “It’s bulletproof glass in that Bentley.”

  So this time he’d do it his own way. He turned into the passage behind the villa’s dining hall and let himself into a walk-in cleaning cupboard. It took a moment to find the light switch. He screwed a stubby silencer onto the Luger and then checked the loads and worked the jack-leg-action to seat the top cartridge so that he wouldn’t need to thrash around cocking it when the time came. He set the safety and slid the pistol down between his belt and his trouser-band against his left ribs under the formal jacket; unobtrusive but instantly available to his right hand. There were flatter automatics than the Luger but the flat ones didn’t fit his hand as well: didn’t point as naturally. The 7.62 bullets were small, the equivalent of .32 caliber, but he’d loaded them himself with the maximum charge of smokeless powder and at close range he had no qualms about their stopping power: the bullets were perforated into quarters and designed to expand violently on contact.

  He had a pocket mirror and he inspected his disguise. The coat and slacks were cut very generously to make him look heavy; the dress Oxfords had five-centimeter lifts in them. They’d remember him as a man of substantial bulk and height when in fact he was five-feet-nine and weighed just over 150 pounds.

  The rest of it was more traditionally stagy. He had a partial skullcap spirit-gummed over his forehead to hide the widow’s peak of his natural hairline; they’d remember him as half bald. He’d darkened the rest of his red-brown hair with a dye-pomade designed to cover grey; it gave him a Mediterranean cast he had confirmed with a pencil-thin divided mustache gummed to his upper lip. His features were unexceptional: he had always had the benefit of an anonymous appearance and he had learned long ago to eschew striking disguises.