by David Linzee
Growing up, Renata had noticed that where other children had relatives, she had stories. The grandfather who embezzled a small fortune from his firm and simply disappeared. The uncle who got drunk and drove his Jaguar off the Hammersmith Flyover. The cousin who was murdered because of a gambling debt. The aunt, who after a scandalous divorce moved to Australia and never sent back so much as a picture postcard.
Renata’s father had died when she was in her twenties. After pursuing a clandestine affair with his dentist’s secretary for twelve years, he had finally run away with her. Their plane, bound for the Costa del Sol, had crashed in France. Three years later her mother, who had taught maths at a comprehensive all her life and hated it, dropped dead of a brain aneurysm in front of her horrified class.
Renata’s therapist had told her that, in his professional opinion, her anxious, gloomy disposition was not neurosis. It was justified.
Now, aside from a great-aunt she visited in the nursing home and a couple of cousins with whom she exchanged Christmas cards, she had no one but her brother. His feckless, antic, self-deluding behavior constantly reminded her of all the dead Radleighs. She felt she owed it to their ghosts to pull him back from the brink.
If possible. Why did the fool have to get Peter’s back up, and enjoy doing it so much? Don took other people too lightly. It had cost him dearly all his life. As a boy, he used to come home from school battered and bruised, having taunted a classmate too long and too cleverly. As a teenager, he had occasioned several mortifying phone calls to their parents, from the parents of girls who had not welcomed his attentions as much as he’d thought they had.
Now he had ignited the fire in Peter’s belly. He’d become the crusading reporter, standing up for the little guy against a malefactor of great wealth. The fact that he no longer had a newspaper to write for had slipped his mind.
Once the planet revolved a bit more and daylight came to the Midwest, Renata’s boyfriend was going to start “tailing” her brother. This was bound to turn out badly.
She came out of her reverie to find that, on autopilot. she had made her way to the station, through the ticket gate, and down the escalator to the platform. The train swooshed in, raising a warm wind that lifted the litter. As usual, not enough people alighted, and too many boarded. She resigned herself to standing.
Then a blond boy in a blue school blazer rose and offered her his seat. She thanked him and took it, with the usual mixed feelings. She was glad chivalry wasn’t quite dead in Albion, but why her? Did she look that old, or that woebegone?
She’d resolved that if she got a seat, she would spend the ride studying her solo. She opened the bag and took out the score of the Haydn High Mass she was on the way to rehearse at the Brompton Oratory. But it was simply not on. She stared blindly at the notes while her mind churned away.
Peter was right. If Don meant well but his boss did not, trouble lay ahead. Much depended on the sort of person this billionaire speculator turned out to be. It was maddening that she had been in the same room with him on Saturday night. Had seen his face, if only in the unfocused way she saw any of the faces of the audience she was performing to. But he had slipped irrevocably away.
The next moment she said to herself, Why irrevocably? She knew Maestro Vladimir Grinevich, and Grinevich knew Don’s boss. Maestro would tell her his name. Then she could find out if he was lying to Don and manipulating him. She could warn Don to bail out before he did something criminal and wound up in jail. Again.
It would be easy to get in touch with Maestro. He was in rehearsal at Covent Garden. She could go there now. It would mean missing her own rehearsal, but she’d just have to lump it. When the train reached Euston Station, she alighted and headed for the Piccadilly Line.
The narrow lanes of Covent Garden were not as packed with tourists as usual, for it was a wet, cold day. She had a clear view of the big white opera house with its red awnings and row of Corinthian columns supporting a noble pediment. She walked by it, noting the posters for Maestro’s new Eugene Onegin opening tomorrow, and turned the corner. A wet gust of wind hit her full in the face. She pulled down her hat brim and wiped her eyes. At the stage door, Maestro’s car, an especially hideous and hulking American SUV, was waiting. So were the demonstrators.
Vladimir Grinevich was popular in the West, applauded as he mounted podiums from Berlin to Los Angeles. But he insisted on hanging on to his primary job as music director of the Maryansky in St. Petersburg, which meant publicly supporting Putin. So wherever Maestro went, he was pursued by small but bitterly determined groups of demonstrators, who reminded him of Putin’s latest outrage, and of Grinevich’s own statements of patriotism and personal loyalty.
This lot looked pretty miserable, hunched in their soaked anoraks, holding signs hooded with protective plastic bags. But they had an air of anticipation. The car had been summoned, which meant that rehearsal was about to break and Grinevich would soon appear.
At the desk inside the stage door they knew Renata, but extra-tight security was in effect when Grinevich was in the house, and she had to pass through a metal detector. After she was judged to be harmless, she walked down narrow backstage corridors and emerged in the famous auditorium. Its rows of red seats ascending steeply heavenward looked even plusher when they were empty.
Wave upon wave of Tchaikovsky at his most anguished surged and crashed onstage as Onegin pleaded and Tatiana resisted. Renata took a seat down front and watched Grinevich at work.
He was one of those conductors who wanted the audience to be in no doubt about who was in charge. He did not use a baton, so he could have both hands free. He pointed at a singer when it was her turn to sing, a mannerism that annoyed Renata, who knew her cue perfectly well, thank you. To the various sections of the orchestra, he made gestures as if clawing the music out of them. Throughout a performance, he would teeter on tiptoe, crouching, lurching. Some day he would fall off the podium and many musicians would rejoice.
Gymnastics indicative of Russian soulfulness accompanied the final crescendo. Silence fell, but only for a moment. Then Grinevich released Tatiana and held Onegin back. Renata knew why. In an earlier part of the scene he had been just a fraction of a beat behind the orchestra, and Grinevich, whose musicianship was impeccable, had noticed. With Grinevich it wasn’t enough to hit the note, you had to hit the center of the note. A perfectionist herself, Renata respected him for that. He made Onegin repeat the passage, which the baritone did resentfully, singing of love and despair while standing with his hands in his pockets as if waiting for a bus. Satisfied, Grinevich released everyone.
He stepped down from the podium, looking like a boxer who has won on points. His cheeks were flushed above his gray beard, his forehead beaded with sweat. Damp ringlets of graying dark hair were plastered to his neck and ears. He took a deep breath and buried his face in a towel.
When he lifted it, he saw Renata and smiled. Whatever his political sins and personal quirks, he had done her a few good turns over the years and always remembered her name. He waved off a worried-looking young man who was holding out a phone to him and sat beside her.
“Morning, Maestro. It seems to be going well,” she said.
“We open tomorrow. Too soon. This part is all right, but Act One has problems.”
“Olga?”
He nodded. “The mezzo cannot sing “Akh Tanya, Tanya.” I mean, she can hit the notes, but the character has eluded her. I wish I had you in the part, Renata.”
It was an indiscreet remark, but Renata wasn’t complaining. For the next three quarters of a minute, Maestro talked knowledgably and appreciatively of her performance of “Akh, Tanya, Tanya” on Saturday night at his house. Every word engraved itself in her memory. At discouraging moments over the next few years, she would recall them.
He toweled his face again and said, “Anyway, thank you for coming and giving us that lovely number. Sorry about the audience.”
“They were your neighbors?”
“M
ostly.” He made one of his expressive Russian gestures, hunching his shoulders and turning down his lower lip. “London is getting as bad as Moscow. And it’s the same people making it that way. My neighborhood is going downhill.”
It was a curious thing to say about Billionaires’ Row. She raised her eyebrows.
“My so-called neighbor two doors down? I’ve never met the man. He’s in Monaco. He only bought the house as a way of laundering money. Has no plan of living there. Doesn’t maintain the place. It can fall down for all he cares. He can still sell the land for more than he paid.”
Now she remembered reading about the derelict houses of Billionaires’ Row, which were the cause of considerable indignation among Londoners like herself, living four to a basement flat. She asked, “Did you know most of the people at the party?”
He shook his head. “My staff made up the guest list. The only criterion was having a lot of money and maybe being willing to donate some to the Fidelio Foundation.”
“Maestro, I was wondering if I could see that list.”
He did not reply at once. Raising his arm, he ran a hand through his hair. His bare forearm had left a sweat stain on the armrest. She wondered fleetingly if tonight’s patron would be indignant to find a stain on his three-hundred-pound seat. He might be consoled if he knew it was Grinevich’s sweat.
“Why do you want to see it?” he asked.
“Well … this is going to sound odd. I unexpectedly met my brother that night. And he told me he’d got me the job by asking his boss to put in a good word for me with you. I was just wondering—”
“Not true. My staff picked the singers. I have no time for things like that.” Realizing this sounded a bit graceless, he recovered handsomely. “If I was doing it, I wouldn’t have needed a hint to invite you.”
“Thanks. Can I get a look at this list?”
Grinevich gave signs of Russian indecision, wagging his head and stretching his full, ruddy lips this way and that. “Maybe best not, Renata. These people are touchy about their privacy.”
“Well … all right. In fact, I don’t need to see the whole list. I just want to see who brought my brother, Don Radleigh.”
Grinevich glanced at his aide, who was still waiting tensely a few feet away, the mobile clutched to his breast. Somebody important and impatient was probably on the other end. “Why do you want to know this man’s name?”
“Um … again, this is going to sound odd. Don’s acting as agent for this man in a big land deal in America. I’m curious about him.”
“Why don’t you ask Don?”
“I have. He won’t tell me.”
Another moment’s hesitation, and Maestro turned to her and smiled. Grinevich’s charming smile was famous in the opera world. It was what he gave you when you weren’t going to get anything else.
“Peculiar business, Renata. I would feel uncomfortable getting involved.”
Heaving his bulk out of the chair, he went to his assistant, who held out the mobile. As Grinevich took it, other people who had been loitering around the stage approached. Soon there was a solid ring around him. Renata gave up.
Outside the rain had stopped, but the overcast had not thinned. She walked slowly toward the station, feeling dissatisfied with herself. She should have thought this through beforehand. Only now did she realize she’d been hoping that Grinevich would say he knew Don’s boss and the man simply wasn’t the sort to set up as a transatlantic slumlord. Renata could read all about him in the Economist or the Financial Times and put her mind a rest.
Instead, what Grinevich had to say about his neighbors only gave her more cause for worry. Maybe Peter’s suspicions were justified. He himself had no doubts about that. In a couple of hours, he would wake up, put on his mackintosh and false mustache—or whatever—and begin following Don. No matter what Peter said about his expertise, she felt certain that Don would twig and the escapade would end with her lover and her brother brawling in the street.
She’d skipped rehearsal for nothing. Even if it was just a church performance, Renata felt guilty. The last time she’d missed a rehearsal—three years ago—she’d been down with pneumonia. She simply had to do something productive with the free morning she had given herself.
She paused to call and deliver a plausible lie about why she had missed the rehearsal. A friend who had been robbed was distraught. She would do whatever was necessary to atone.
By the time she stepped through the gate at Covent Garden Station, she had worked out a plan. She’d had dealings with Grinevich’s staff before. Maestro’s professional life was as chaotic as his personal one. His staffers spent their days dealing with one cock-up after another. They were permanently frazzled. If she caught one of them at a distracted moment and asked nicely, the girl might just hand her the guest list.
Chapter Eight
On Saturday, she had arrived after dark, in a taxi full of singers, and hadn’t got much of a look at London’s most expensive street. Arriving now after a long walk from Hampstead station—proximity to the Tube obviously wasn’t something billionaires looked for in a residence—she strolled along it slowly and found it an odd sort of place.
It didn’t feel spacious. The lots were enormous by London standards, but the houses were, too. Bounded on all sides by high walls or fences, they looked pent up. And jarringly diverse. Unlike the rich of the past, who’d had to live in Belgravia in identical attached houses, the rich of the present were free to indulge their architectural whims. She walked by Palladian colonnades next to Queen Anne turrets next to Dutch gables. As Maestro had said, she passed several derelict mansions, with “no trespassing” signs on their chained and padlocked gates.
Grinevich’s house was in eighteenth-century style. It had no street number but a name, on a placard attached to the black, cast-iron fence. It was called Whitecroft. The house certainly was white. It looked the way Buckingham Palace would have looked, if the palace had been built yesterday.
She approached the high gates and the security kiosk. It seemed excessive to have a gatehouse only fifty feet from one’s front door. Grinevich must be more worried about the anti-Putin demonstrators, or somebody, than he let on. A man in a dark generic uniform, with a short haircut and flat eyes, saw her and slid the glass pane open.
“Help you?”
From his tone, “help” was the last thing on his mind.
“I’d just like to pop in and see Antonia for a moment.” She hoped Antonia was still here. Turnover was rapid on Grinevich’s staff.
“Name?”
She gave it.
The guard glanced at a clipboard. “You’re not on the list. Sorry.” The apology was about as heartfelt as the offer of help.
“Can’t you ring through to Antonia and say I’m here?”
“No point. She’s not allowed to put people on the list if they’re not previously authorized.”
“I am authorized. I must be. I was here Saturday, and you lot checked my ID and photographed me and did everything but give me a DNA test.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Then how does it work?”
But he was already sliding the pane closed.
Renata spun on her heel and stalked away. She was annoyed—but a fat lot of good that did her. She thought of Peter, who had much more experience than she of pestering important people and being turned away by their gatekeepers. He dismissed such rebuffs as lightly as they were dished out. By now she was across the street, and she stopped walking and asked herself, What would he do now? He’d wouldn’t stalk away in a huff. He’d hang about for a while. It was almost lunchtime. Antonia or someone else she knew might come out. Or the kiosk shift could change, giving her another guard on whom to try another story.
She walked down the street until she was out of sight of the kiosk and found a wall to shelter her from the wind. She leaned against the cold brick surface and buttoned up her coat. She did not feel too conspicuous, because Billionaires’ Row was no quiet by-
way. It was a wide, straight, busy street. Vans from FedEx, UPS, and DHL passed on the way to make deliveries, along with the smaller, more chichi vans from Asprey’s, Fortnum & Mason, and Berry Bros. and Rudd, Wine Merchants by Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen. There were also long limousines and sleek sports cars with loudly gurgling exhaust pipes.
Renata’s toes were going numb with cold, and she was thinking of giving this up, when she saw someone approaching down the empty sidewalk. It was a young man, pulled by an unruly team of large dogs. He crossed the street toward the gate of Whitecroft. Renata followed at a distance. The unhelpful guard came out of his kiosk all smiles. He took charge of the dogs, and the dog walker went up to the house. The front door opened and a teenage girl appeared with the lean borzoi Renata had met on Saturday. She handed the leash to the dog walker. The man reclaimed his pack and set out in Renata’s direction.
“Oh, hello,” she said as he drew near. “I think this is an old friend of mine. Is her name Katya?”
“His name is Pechorin,” said the dog walker gruffly, but he pulled in the reins like a charioteer. This allowed her to get close to the borzoi, who was used to admiring humans and permitted Renata to stroke his floppy ears and silky fur.
“But surely this is the Grineviches’ dog?”
“It is, but it’s Pechorin.”
“Of course. My memory’s at fault.” Down on one knee, she continued to stroke the complaisant dog and tried to think of what to say next. Peter would have prepared a story for every contingency while he was waiting.
“Look. I’m paid to walk ’em.”
“Sorry.” She jumped to her feet. “Mind if I walk along?”
“Suit yourself.”
“Do you take them out on the Heath and let them have a run?”