by John Lawton
The idea of someone not being “real” entered Troy’s consciousness and vocabulary, to germinate, to grow, and to lodge there permanently.
§111
Troy was getting ready to leave for the evening. Jack had gone twenty minutes ago—relieved Onions had not called upon him to speak, boasting of the “totty” he had lined up for the evening—and the temptation to ignore the telephone’s ringing wrestled with Troy’s curiosity. It might be Stan, wanting to bury their confrontation in some Soho pub, anonymity coming more naturally to him than it did to Troy. Troy wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t Stan. It was Churchill.
“Find a blank evening in your diary, Freddie. I think I might have got to the bottom of the mystery of the Fabergé gun, and I have a tale to tell you.”
“Now is as good a time as any.”
“Shall we say half an hour?”
Troy rooted around in the bottom drawer of his desk. He kept the odd bottle hidden from Jack for occasions like this. If Churchill had a tale to tell, he could hardly turn up empty-handed. He found a bottle of claret, a Duhart-Milon-Rothschild ’34. He had the vaguest memory of his father saying 1934 had been a very good year, and God knows the old man had bought enough of the stuff.
Churchill answered the door in person, no Chewter, no jacket, red braces holding up the capacious pants, shirtsleeves. About as clear a statement that they were after hours and off duty as a man could make. If it were Rod he’d have kicked off his shoes and be padding around in odd socks.
“I like August evenings,” said Churchill. “June and July can be too hot for me. I like August; you can feel the city begin to cool off a bit.”
He rambled as they squeezed into the lift up to his office and workshop—that was fine with Troy.
“Y’know the French almost evacuate Paris in August. I wonder London doesn’t do the same in June.”
“Protestant work ethic,” Troy replied. “And where would they all go? There are only so many boarding houses in Torquay, Ilfracombe, Bognor . . .”
“Okay, Freddie, I get the point. You can stop the list of undesirable British seaside resorts before we get to Skegness.”
“Which can be so bracing.”
“Nothing on the North Sea is bracing. The word is cold.”
Seated at his desk, reading glasses on, Churchill handed Troy the corkscrew, listened to the pleasing glug of a decent claret hitting the glass, and placed the gun on another clean sheet of paper. It almost shone. He had removed every scrap of paint. The tracery of Fabergés loops and swirls stood out with a detail and a delicacy the paint had masked and rendered crude. Only the gems were missing.
“Did your parents ever mention to you the name of Astrov? Prince Yevgeni Astrov and his wife Natalia Astrova?”
“No. But there were so many tales of the old country . . .”
“And this will be another. Astrov was a favourite of the Tsarina Alexandra in the nineties and the noughts. She adopted oddities as we know—Rasputin is the best known of her odd choices. Astrov was a much more conventional courtier. A nobleman, after all. But . . . he was a pig of a man. A brute who beat his wife, consorted with whores, and squandered her fortune. It was said that he even brought whores back to the family home in full view of his wife and the servants. Princess Astrova tired of this. In 1903, she took a lover, Count Ostrog—a perfectly decent man who would have married her if she could ever have been free of Astrov. After about six months, Astrov found out about the affair, challenged Ostrog to a duel, and shot him dead.
“It was at this point that I think the princess approached a Moscow gunsmith named Verdiakoff. She commissioned from him two pistols, the guideline being that they should be as small as her own hand. Verdiakoff sent to Switzerland for the mechanism. The Altmanns were experimenting with small guns and had already produced 22s and 17s, but nothing as small as this and, as I suggested to you when you brought me this, they had to make the ammunition, too. Eventually, Verdiakoff delivered two plain, identical .15 automatic pistols to the Princess Astrova—quite possibly the only .15 guns in the world—and she took them to the court goldsmith, Peter Fabergé, who engraved the gunmetal and added the jewels. I can think of two reasons for this—it enabled her to pass them off as art, perhaps toys might be a better word, something designed to be decorative, never to be used, like the canteen of cutlery every pair of newlyweds gets, that spends the rest of its life set aside for ‘best,’ but ‘best’ never arrives. I think the touch of genius here was in having the bullets made of silver. If Astrov had ever found the guns, it would have reinforced the idea that it was simply a way to spend money. One can almost hear her saying they were for shooting vampires or some such beast. The second was that it made some of her personal fortune very portable. I’ve no idea who painted the gun black, but there was no paint in the gem settings, and I’d be prepared to bet the one stone you found was black when you found it.”
Troy just nodded. This was not a time to interrupt.
“But of course, she did mean to use them. And the moment arrived at Christmas 1904. Astrov came home drunk, decided she needed a beating. The gun was up the sleeve of her dress, light enough to be held there by elastic. When Astrov hurled himself upon her, she simply pressed the gun to his heart and pulled the trigger.”
Troy could not help thinking that she had indeed killed a vampire.
“Of course, it was murder. And you can imagine what rights a beaten wife had in the tsar’s Russia, and, of course, Astrov had been a court favourite. There was a trial. But Moscow was divided. It became, as it were, a surrogate trial of the Romanovs themselves—she was in the dock for murder, they were in the dock of public opinion for favouring and promoting a beast like Astrov—and in the end no jury would convict her. All the same, she was a social outcast and the doors of the great houses were closed to her and her son. Later that year, the revolution of 1905 . . . you know better than I the circumstances . . . Princess Astrova took her five-year-old son and vanished.”
Churchill was silent for a moment, rolling the claret around on his palate. Troy knew the circumstances of ’05 very well—it was the moment his parents had fled westward, to Vienna, to Paris, to London—a child in each city, thereby Troy had a Viennese brother, Parisian twin sisters and was nicknamed “my little Englander” by his mother.
It was Troy’s turn.
“And this is the gun that killed Astrov?”
“No, that’s in the police museum in Moscow. This is its twin. I’d bet a fiver it had never been fired until that day on the Northern Line.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
“No. She disappeared without trace. Nice trick if you can do it, and damned difficult. I’d say one has to go to South America these days to do a convincing vanishing trick. Everything in Europe is so knowable. There was talk she had reverted to her maiden name but I’ve no idea what that was. I’ve got as far as I can with this. What you need now is an old Russian with a good memory for the ancien régime.”
“Like . . . my mother?”
“Precisely.”
Troy swigged claret, mused a while.
“Y’know . . . this would fit together more neatly if this were the gun that killed Astrov, if this gun had stayed in Russia when Princess Astrova left and had become the property of the Soviet Union.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because André Skolnik was a Soviet agent and, during the Olympics last month, three Czech agents working for the Russians came looking for him.”
“Bugger!” said Churchill.
“I don’t know whether there’s bluff or double bluff going on here. But Skolnik was assassinated by one side or the other.”
Churchill was shaking his head. Vigorously.
“The last ingredient, Freddie. The potato.”
“I’d almost forgotten.”
“Quite. I paid it no mind when you first mentioned it. This gun would not have made much noise in the first place. A potato would not have silenced whatever noi
se it did make. All the potato did was confuse you and me. You know what this looks like to me? The improvization of an amateur. And the gun itself . . . whoever pulled the trigger was lucky it fired. The cartridge was forty years old. The Altmanns made only fifty bullets and that was in 1904. You cannot buy .15 ammunition. No assassin, and you will agree that if this was an assassination there has to be an assassin, would trust such a weapon. A handgun useless at more than a couple of feet? Freddie, I can’t dispute what you say about Skolnik or the concern the Russians have shown for the fate of their man . . . but this was the work of an amateur. This was right up your street, plain old-fashioned murder.”
“Oh, bum,” said Troy, “I’ve just told Jack Wildeve, Stanley Onions, and a chap at MI5 that it was a pro job.”
Churchill opened a second bottle. Let the evening fall softly upon the two of them. Troy marvelled at his capacity, but pound for pound he weighed twice what Troy did. The more flesh and blood to absorb the booze. If anyone paid the price with a hangover it would be Troy.
At the end of the evening, it was pitch dark. August leeching into September. Churchill slipped the gun, the silver bullet, and the ruby into a brown paper bag and handed it to Troy as he left. The walk home took less than five minutes. Across the Charing Cross Road, behind the National Portrait Gallery, down Cecil Court, past the Salisbury pub, and home. He arrived clear-headed but tired, opened the small drawer in the hat stand where he usually kept keys, dumped in the entire contents of the brown paper bag, and forgot about them entirely.
§112
Troy took Sunday lunch with his mother out at Mimram. After lunch, Rod had constituency matters to attend to, Cid insisted on her children getting exercise and enforced a walk upon them, leaving Troy alone with Maria Mikhailovna.
“Mother, did you ever know the Princess Astrova?”
“I met her once or twice. We did not moof in ze same circles.”
If Troy had been talking to his father this would have been enough to set him off on a train of thought and chat that would, sooner or later, have answered all Troy’s questions. With his mother, it paid to have a follow-up.
“But you remember her trial?”
“Who could not? It was ze biggest scandal of ze time. First ze killink of poor Ostrog, and zen ze killink of Astrov himself. A dreadful man. Zey talked of little else in Moscow zat winter.”
“I don’t suppose you recall her maiden name?”
Maria Mikhailovna thought a while.
“I can see her face . . . she was younker than me . . . in her midseventies if she is still alive . . . but her name . . . she was . . . Nadia . . .”
“Natalia.”
“Yes . . . Natalia . . . Natalia . . . Natalia Oblonskaya.”
Troy wondered.
“And her son was Sergei,” the old lady added as he wondered.
That clinched it. Troy might have fallen for the “Oblonskaya,” but not for the “Sergei” as well. Her memory was playing tricks upon her. Perfectly logical tricks—Oblonskaya was the maiden name of Russian literature’s greatest heroine and greatest adulteress, Anna Karenina . . . who had killed neither husband nor lover but, herself . . . and Sergei, Seriozha as Anna called him, was the name of her son. It was as useful as if he had asked her the name of the president of France and she had replied “Bovary.”
§113
The following Wednesday, Anna phoned him at the Yard.
“Have you had a holiday this year, Troy?”
He hadn’t.
“I’m in a bit of a pickle. I’ve booked into hotels in North Devon. The summer’s been such a stinker, I fancied sea breezes and a dose of ozone. I had it in mind to walk some of the coast. You know, start at Ilfracombe, round past the headland and down to Baggy Point and Woolacombe, past Barnstaple and Bideford to points west, as it were.”
Churchill’s disdain for English seaside resorts flashed through his mind. He’d been pretty scathing about the pleasures of Ilfracombe himself.
“What’s the problem?”
“Angus. He’s gone walkabout on me. Just upped and buggered off and I’ve no faith in him being back by lunchtime on Friday.”
Angus did this. He was capable of disappearing for weeks at a time. It was why he lost clients; it was why he lost friends. Every so often Anna would get a call from an obscure police station—Sixpenny Handley, Wyre Piddle, Frisby-on-the-Wreake—and be asked by a deferential station sergeant to collect an errant husband who might otherwise be charged as drunk and disorderly (and few men did disorder quite as well as Angus), and, “after all, ma’am, none of us wants to throw the book at a war ’ero.”
“I’m puzzled,” said Troy. “A walking holiday with a one-legged man?”
“Oh, he was just going to drive from one watering hole to the next. I was walking alone. Angus would have been company in the evenings, otherwise I’d be dining alone. That’s sort of why I’m calling. You don’t fancy this, do you, Troy? You don’t have to do the walk. Just be there in the evenings.”
“Do you think hotels will take to a Mr. and Mrs. Smith routine?”
“I booked separate rooms. Lately, Angus’s snoring has reached danger level.”
Troy had never quite known what his relationship was with Anna. Less so since he had met her husband. He found this statement oddly reassuring. It was as though she’d said, “no hanky panky.”
“Okay,” he said, “and I will do the walks with you.”
“Thanks, Troy. It’s four days on foot. I thought we might take my car as far as Ilfracombe, park it at the Imperial, and bus back to it on the Wednesday after. I’ve saved up loads of petrol coupons and I’d rather not trust to that jalopy of yours.”
Troy’s car was past its best. They hadn’t made them since 1930, and he clung to it in part because his father had given it to him.
“I’ve a better idea,” he said. “Let’s pool our coupons and arrive in style.”
He could hear the mixture of anticipation and anxiety in her voice.
“Not . . . not that Rolls you and Rod have mothballed in the garage in Hampstead?”
“No . . . my mother’s Lagonda. You’ll like it. It’s got a V12 engine. It’ll do one-ten on the flat.”
“Gosh.”
The word almost stopped Troy midflow. So English; too English.
“We could rip down the Thames valley, have lunch at the Rose Revived . . .”
“The what?”
“Trust me . . . it’s a sweet old Elizabethan pub right on the river at Newbridge.”
“And rip, Troy? Rip?”
“Rip . . . roar . . . you don’t just motor in a Lagonda.”
§114
Ilfracombe was fading fast. Whilst he thought the idea of the grand tour unlikely ever to be revived, something would surely come along to render the traditional English seaside holiday resort redundant. All it required was an open Continent and cheap petrol. Rod had assured him they’d not be going into the next election with petrol still rationed and who knew how long the restrictions on foreign exchange might last? Given the vagaries of the English summer—he had memories of years when summer simply failed to arrive, as though the turning planet had skipped a season—if an ordinary family could choose between the cosmopolitan delights of Paris and the sun, sand, and vino of the Amalfi Coast, why would anyone choose Blackpool, Broadstairs, or Ilfracombe? Even the names were enough to put you off. Siena, Firenze, San Gimignano?—they spun magic.
Troy thought Anna had probably been thinking prewar—a habit they would both find impossible to break, and in years to come would run a contest to see how many times each began a sentence with the phrase “before the war”—when she booked the Imperial. Perhaps the name alone had been evocative? Was there a seaside town in England without an “Imperial” any more than there was a suburban street south of the Trent without a “Dunroamin” or a “Monabri”?
During the war, the Royal Army Pay Corps had taken over this one-hundred-room anachronism—a battalion of clerks had s
pent four years here, all pink forms and inky fingers. It seemed to Troy that they could have left but minutes ago, the dreariness of clerkery miasmic in the air.
When he told Anna as much, she said, “You hammer the English for their class obsession and their snobbery and then you come out with lines like that. There are times, Troy, when I think it’s easier to get a handle on that mad bugger I married than it is on you.”
But by then they were well on their way out of town, stepping westward, the morning sun behind them, knapsacks on their backs, stout walking shoes upon their feet. Anna had chosen to walk in culottes, a chance, as the enlisted man was wont to say, and as she did, “To get me knees brown.” And a chance for Troy to gaze on said knees. He hadn’t seen them in a while. Anna had been an early convert to Christian Dior’s “new look” the previous autumn—coupons saved and coupons blown on way-below-the-knee skirts and rustling petticoats. If it caught on, and it had been slow to dent the moral authority of short skirts in a time of clothes rationing, Troy doubted he would ever see a seductive pair of calves again.
“I’ve hit on a super way to cut down on the hump and carry,” she said. “I’ve posted clean knickers and socks to each of the hotels we’re booked into. Every morning I shall get up to clean knickers and dry socks and know that whatever the day holds I can be run down in the street with no embarrassments in the ambulance.”
“You might have shared this plan when you knew we’d be leaving the car back there.”
“Never thought men gave a toss. Angus leaves the same sock on his tin leg from one year’s end to the next. He’ll tell me tin doesn’t sweat of course, but it’s the principle of the thing. Mens sana . . . wotsit . . . wotsit. If you end up in crusty pants because you haven’t planned ahead, will you actually mind?”