The Exile

by Allan Folsom

  Kitner had the knife, the film, and, in Neuss, the eyewitness, and because of it Alexander had little choice but to comply. And the Baroness had been forced to sign the pact along with him, because Kitner knew that she had been the true architect of the deed and had driven him to it.

  As the handsome, Russian-born Swedish wife of the French philanthropist Baron Edmond de Vienne and as Alexander’s legal guardian, the Baroness was one of Europe’s grandes dames; her path often crossed with Kitner’s own, and they kept a cordial and businesslike relationship. But beneath that carefully styled facade was a deeply disturbed yet highly ambitious woman, who had been summarily spurned by Kitner and his family and had spent the rest of her life obsessed with settling the score.

  Had he been wiser, he might have had some sense of what the future held years before, shortly after they met and were in the early stages of a youthful romance. It came in the form of a story she told him on a cold blustery day when they were walking hand in hand along the Seine. It was a story she said she had never told anyone and concerned a close friend from Stockholm who, when she was fifteen, had been visiting Italy on a school field trip. One day in Naples her friend became separated from her schoolmates and their chaperones. In trying to find her way back to the hotel where they were staying, she was confronted by a young street tough who showed a large knife and swore he would kill her if she didn’t come with him. He took her to a dingy apartment where he put the knife to her throat and demanded she have sex with him. Terrified, she did what he demanded. As he lay recovering from his own ecstasy, she picked up the knife and stabbed him in the belly and then cut his throat. But it wasn’t enough, and she bent down and cut off his penis and threw it across the floor. Afterward she went into the bathroom and carefully cleaned herself, then dressed and left. Thirty minutes later she had found her way back to the hotel and was reunited with her school friends, never telling any of them what had happened. It was more than a year before she finally confided in the Baroness.

  At the time Kitner thought the tale slightly bizarre, if not simply made up, and passed it off as the machinations of a twenty-year-old trying to impress him with her knowledge of life’s experiences. Yet the one thing that struck him, whether the story was true or not, was the mutilation of the man’s body. He could understand her friend retaliating against a man who had raped her, even to the point of killing him. The mutilation was something else. Killing wasn’t enough; she’d had to do more. Why, or what drove her to it, there was no way to know. But clearly there was something inside this woman that, when triggered, compelled her to exact a revenge that was not just brutal but savage.

  The moment he saw the film of Paul’s murder in the park he remembered her story and knew it had not been made up, nor had there been any friend. The Baroness had been talking about herself. In a blink she had gone from victim to murderess to butcher. It made the killing of his beloved young son by a teenaged half-brother he didn’t even know he had far more than a simple act of murder, perhaps even with the same knife. It was a cold-blooded unveiling of the truth about what had really happened in Naples, done to let him know without doubt who and what he was dealing with; an unforgiving, murderous former lover, fully determined to destroy not only his heart but his soul.

  Biblical, Shakespearean, ancient Greek all in one, the Baroness had become a sadistic, self-appointed goddess of darkness. Too old and prominent to any longer commit the act herself, in Alexander she had fashioned a new messenger, instilling her own twisted hatred of Kitner in him from infancy. Kitner should have killed her himself—and his own mother, were she alive, probably would have—but, as forceful as he was, that kind of thing was beyond him, and so instead he made a pact to keep the Baroness’s personal assassin from his door. For a long time it had worked. And then they had both come back.

  Kitner’s eyes crept to his image in the mirror. He suddenly looked old and fearful and vulnerable, as if all at once he had lost control of everything in his life. How darkly like the Baroness to have had Alfred Neuss murdered in the Parc Monceau. The same stage where Paul had been slain. And with Neuss, the lone eyewitness to Paul’s murder, dead, and the murder weapon and film undoubtedly in Alexander’s possession, the pact he’d made with them was useless.

  Kitner would be in Davos with his wife and children. The Baroness would be there, too, and so would Alexander, and there was nothing he could do about it. They knew of the announcement, and knowing that, they would know its substance. What if the Hell-Goddess sent her messenger again, Spanish switchblade in hand, to surprise himself or Michael or his wife or one of his daughters?

  The thought chilled him to the quick.

  A telephone was on a wall mount at his elbow. Immediately he snatched it up. “Get me Higgs.”

  “Yes, sir,” Barrie’s voice came back, and Kitner could hear him punch a speed dial number on his keyboard. A moment later his security chief came on.

  “Higgs, sir.”

  “I want to know where Alexander Cabrera and the Baroness de Vienne are right now. When you find them, put them under surveillance immediately. Use as many men as you need. I want to know where they go, who they meet, and what they do. I want to know exactly where they are twenty-four hours a day until you hear differently.”

  “It will take a little time, sir.”

  “Then don’t waste it.” Kitner hung up. For the first time since Paul had been murdered he felt panicked and unsure. If he was being crazy or paranoid, so be it. He was dealing with a madwoman.

  61

  HÔTEL SAINT ORANGE. SAME TIME, 6:45 P.M.

  “Tell me about Kitner.” Nick Marten leaned across Kovalenko’s small desk, intent on the Russian. “He’s a Romanov but doesn’t use the name. He has a son who lives in Argentina who has a Spanish surname.”

  Kovalenko poured a thimbleful more vodka into his glass and let it sit there untouched. “Kitner divorced Cabrera’s mother before the boy was born and within the year remarried his present wife, Luisa, a cousin of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Fourteen months later Cabrera’s mother drowned in a boating accident in Italy and—”

  “His mother, who was she?”

  “A university student when Kitner knew her. In any case, after her death her sister became the boy’s legal guardian. Soon afterward the sister married a titled and very wealthy French philanthropist. Later, when Cabrera was a young teenager, she moved him to a ranch she owned in Argentina. He took the Cabrera name himself, supposedly after the founder of the city of Córdoba.”

  “Why Argentina?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is Cabrera aware Kitner is his father?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Does he know he’s a Romanov?”

  “Same answer.”

  Marten stared at Kovalenko for a moment, then indicated the Russian’s laptop. “Large hard drive. Lots of memory?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If, as you said, it was Kitner who was Raymond’s intended victim, you probably have a file on him in your database. True?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it probably contains all kinds of information, maybe even photographs of Kitner and his family. And since Cabrera is a member of that family, you just might have a photograph of him. If we believe Halliday’s notes, we can suppose he’s had cosmetic surgery. Maybe it was severe, maybe not. I know we have a photograph of Raymond; if you have one of Cabrera”—Marten smiled just a little—“we bring them up side by side and see if they match.”

  “You seem fixated on the idea that Alexander Cabrera and Raymond Thorne are one and the same.”

  “And you seem just as convinced they’re not. Even if they look as different as day and night, at least I would get some idea of what Cabrera looks like. It’s a simple question, Inspector. Do you have a photograph of Alexander Cabrera or don’t you?”

  62

  STILL THURSDAY, JANUARY 16. 7:00 P.M.

  The streets of Paris were all but abandoned and
nearly impassable in the heavy snow when Octavio turned the Alfa Romeo down the Avenue Georges V and began looking for the house at number fifty-one.

  In the seat behind him Grand Duchess Catherine glanced at her son, then at her mother between them, and then looked out to the snow-choked streets. This would be the last time they would travel like this—faceless, in a nondescript car, almost as if they were fugitives.

  In two hours, three at most—if family members supporting Prince Dimitrii raised too loud a voice over the supporters of her son and forced her to present the letters of support she had from the president of Russia, the mayor of St. Petersburg, and the mayor of Moscow, the letter with its accompanying pages containing signatures of three hundred of the four hundred and fifty members of the State Duma, and, the coup de grâce, the personal letter from His Holiness Gregor II, the Most Holy Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church—she would still triumph, and Grand Duke Sergei would become Tsarevich and, storm or no storm, they would be leaving the house at 151 Avenue Georges V not in the backseat of this everyday automobile driven by a scar-faced thug but in a flurry of limousines and under the guard of the Federalnaya Slujba Ohrani, the FSO, or Security for the President of Russia.

  “We are almost there, Your Highness.” Octavio slowed the car. Ahead, through the snow, they could see bright lights and street barricades and the policemen manning them.

  Absently, Grand Duchess Catherine touched her neck and then looked at her hands. She wished she had felt safe enough to bring the diamond rings, the ruby and emerald necklace and earrings, the gold and diamond bracelets that should be worn for an occasion like this. She wished, too, that her overcoat had been elegant fur instead of the wool traveling coat she had been forced to wear under the circumstances—mink or sable or ermine, the kind of coat that befitted the most royal of the royal Romanov family. A coat and magnificent jewels suitable for the personage she was about to become and how she would be called from then on. No longer a simple Grand Duchess but Tsaritsa, mother of the Tsar of All Russia.

  63

  HÔTEL SAINT ORANGE. SAME TIME.

  Nick Marten hunched over Kovalenko as the Russian brought the LAPD booking photograph of Raymond up on the laptop’s screen. “Now bring up Cabrera,” he urged.

  There was a click, Raymond’s face vanished, and the Russian detective brought up a digital photograph. It showed a tall, slim, neatly bearded, dark-haired young man in a business suit getting into a limousine outside a modern office building.

  “Alexander Cabrera. Taken at his company headquarters in Buenos Aires three weeks ago.”

  Click.

  A second photograph: Cabrera again, this time in overalls and hard hat looking at blueprints spread out on the hood of a pickup truck somewhere in the desert.

  “Six weeks ago in Shaybah oil field in Saudi Arabia. His company is preparing to build a six-hundred-kilometer pipeline. The construction contract is just under a billion dollars U.S.”

  Click.

  A third photo: Cabrera yet again, now wearing a heavy coat and smiling and surrounded by several winter-dressed, grinning oil-field workers with a huge oil refinery in the background.

  “December third of last year at a LUKoil refinery in the Baltic, working on plans to link the Lithuanian oil sector with Russian oil fields.”

  “Now split the window,” Marten said, “and bring up Raymond next to Cabrera.”

  Kovalenko did.

  Cabrera had the same physical build as Raymond, but little else was familiar. The nose, ears, and facial structure were completely different. That he wore a beard made it all the more difficult.

  “Hardly twin brothers,” Kovalenko said.

  “He was worked on by a plastic surgeon. There’s no way to know if it was simply to reconstruct broken facial bones or to purposely make him look different.”

  Kovalenko clicked off the machine. “What else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Frustrated, Marten walked away. Suddenly he turned back. “Do you have photos of him from before his ‘accident’?”

  “One. Taken on a tennis court at his ranch several weeks earlier.”

  “Put it up.”

  Kovalenko turned the machine back on and clicked through several files until he found what he wanted.

  “Here, see for yourself.”

  Click.

  Marten stared at the screen. What he saw was a relatively distant shot of Cabrera in tennis gear as he left the court, racket in hand. Again, he saw what he had before, a man with the same physical build as Raymond but little else. Instead of the blond hair and blond eyebrows he remembered when they had first taken Raymond into custody, he saw a man with dark hair and dark eyebrows and a much larger nose that made his facial appearance entirely different.

  “That’s all. The only shot you have from before?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about in Moscow?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “We were lucky to get this. It was the only shot taken by a freelance cameraman before he was thrown off the property. Cabrera is a highly private person. No media photos, no stories about him. He doesn’t like it and has a bodyguard who keeps people away.”

  “You aren’t the media. As you just proved, if you wanted photos you could get them.”

  “Mr. Marten, then it wasn’t important.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  Kovalenko hesitated. “Nothing.”

  Marten crossed to Kovalenko. “What wasn’t important?”

  “It’s Russian business.”

  “It has to do with Kitner, doesn’t it?”

  Kovalenko said nothing; instead he reached for his vodka. Marten picked up the glass and moved it away.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Kovalenko demanded.

  “I can still see what was left of Dan Ford when his car was pulled from the river. I don’t like what I see. I want an answer.” Marten stared at the Russian detective.

  Outside the wind howled and the snow came down harder. Kovalenko blew on his hands. “Run-down Paris hotel, Russian winter.”

  “Answer me.”

  Deliberately Kovalenko reached for the glass Marten had taken away. This time Marten let him. The Russian picked it up, swallowed what was in it, and stood.

  “Do you know of the Ipatiev house, Mr. Marten?”

  “No.”

  Kovalenko walked to the table where the vodka was and poured more into his glass, then did the same with the glass Marten had used earlier and handed it to him.

  “The Ipatiev house is, or rather was before they bulldozed it, a large home in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains many miles southeast of Moscow. The distance doesn’t matter. It is the house that is important because it was where the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas the Second, and his wife, their children, and servants, were held as hostages by Bolsheviks during the Communist revolution. On July 17, 1918, they were rousted from bed in the middle of the night, taken to the cellar, and shot to death.

  “After the shootings the bodies were loaded on a truck and driven over heavily rutted roads into the forest and the designated burial site, an area of abandoned mines in a tract called the Four Brothers. The trouble was it had been raining all week and the truck kept getting bogged down in the rutted roads, so finally they put the bodies on sleds and dragged them to the selected mine shaft. Then in the predawn light they stripped the bodies and burned the clothes to destroy any possibility of identification if somehow the corpses were later discovered.

  “Remember, this is central Russia torn apart by revolution in 1918. Corpses were hardly unusual, and investigations into killings were rare if done at all.

  “In the meantime other high-ranking members of the imperial Romanov family had been murdered. But others escaped, helped in large part by European monarchies. So you had the clear line of succession to the throne severed by the murders at the Ipatiev house and the others in the imperial line, or what is called the Russ
ian dynasty, scattered all over Europe and eventually the world. Ever since, one or another of them has stepped forward with some kind of evidence trying to claim the crown for himself.

  “Today the surviving Romanovs break down into four main branches. Each descends from Emperor Nicholas the First, the great-great-grandfather of Tsar Nicholas who was killed at the Ipatiev house. It is the surviving members of those four branches who are meeting tonight at the house at one-fifty-one Avenue Georges V.”

  “Why?”

  “To select the next Tsar of Russia.”

  Marten didn’t get it. “What are you talking about? There is no Tsar of Russia.”

  Kovalenko took a sip of vodka. “The Russian parliament has secretly voted to reinstitute the imperial crown in the form of a constitutional monarchy. The president of Russia will make the announcement on Saturday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The new Tsar will be a figurehead with no ruling power. His sole and primary purpose will be to rally the spirit and the pride of the Russian people and unite them in a time of national rebuilding. Maybe even,” he grinned, “do a little public relations work around the world. You know, be a kind of global super-salesman for Russian goods and services, even help build up the tourist industry.”

  Marten didn’t understand any more now than he did before. The idea that Russia would actually vote to return the monarchy in any capacity was staggering, yet he still saw no relationship between that and what was going on here.

  Kovalenko took another pull at his drink. “It might help if I told you the people we believe were murdered by Raymond Thorne in the Americas before he went on his rampage in Los Angeles had more in common than the fact that they were Russian.”

  “They were Romanovs?”