Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  Gwen had put her arm around her and said encouragingly, “It’s a whole new world, beginning again.”

  But there were reminders enough of Tatty’s old world. She sought them out. More than she indulged herself with the piano, she read. Gwen already took The New York Times. Tatty, promising to pay her back, had her subscribe as well to the Washington Post and several magazines that dealt with foreign affairs, anything that might contain news of developments in Russia.

  Gwen had saved the stories that had appeared in the Times about her. The first, announcing her murder and Jack’s confession and arrest, had begun on page one, though at the bottom of the page. Those that followed, stating basically that nothing had changed, that her body had not been found and that Jack had not yet been brought to trial, dwindled in size and crept deeper and deeper into the paper. The last one, a statement from her stepfather that the family was not satisfied she was actually dead, had appeared in the “People in the News” column.

  There was news of another kind as well. The same edition that first announced her murder also carried the notice that Sid Greene’s play starring the rock star was closing after only five performances. Curiously, the item brought Tatty her most cheering moment in weeks.

  There was other news from Russia. Every day seemed to bring a story that the Soviet premier was still ailing—one day that he was in rapid decline, the next that he was showing improvement, the true nature of his ailment never authoritatively stated. Twice in these several winter weeks both the Times and the Washington Post had printed rumors that he had died, only to report him alive again a few days later.

  Griuchinov’s name appeared briefly in the Times dispatches, first in a Tass report announcing that he had become seriously ill, then as a mention in the stories about the ailing premier.

  On Christmas Day, the old deputy premier, Feliks Alekseyevich Popov, died, or so Tass reported. Shortly after, it was announced that Popov had been replaced as deputy premier by Defense Minister Kuznetzov, who would retain his military offices.

  Tatty pressed her face against the window pane. She gathered that the old man in the black car was still alive, but he had not prospered. He was probably in deep political trouble. It perhaps should be no wonder he had not killed her. She was his only witness to the fact that Kuznetzov was a murderer.

  What she could not comprehend was why he had let her go, indeed, helped her to escape; why he hadn’t snatched her away to some secret protective custody in the Urals or Siberia?

  But, for the KGB, a safer place would be much farther away, in another country, even the United States. Perhaps especially the United States.

  Could the KGB now know she was here? Could they reach out and take her whenever they wished?

  Standing with face pressed against the glass, watching the wind pile up snow against Gwen’s small garage and the elm tree beside it, she could not answer that question with any certainty. She could not say there was not some Russian, or some Russian operative like Ramsey, watching her at this very moment.

  Russian. She was Russian. She was talking about Soviets. Communists. Scum.

  The next morning’s Times had said that the new deputy premier was coming to the United States in March, to address the United Nations General Assembly. The good Marshal Kuznetzov was going to enhance his foreign policy credentials, an initiative necessary for an heir to the Soviet throne.

  Tatty left the window and refilled her glass. She turned the radio to a station playing “beautiful music,” and began to read a copy of The New Yorker, devouring every distracting word.

  Gwen returned a short time after four in the afternoon, as she always did. She set down her notebook and papers, fetched Tatty another drink, and went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. She came out of the kitchen intermittently, to talk of her day, chattering on through dinner and as they did the dishes. She loved most to talk of early times, not of their marriages or the summer in the Hamptons, never of any of the men they knew, but of when they were young girls together, playmates, schoolgirls, college roommates.

  Some of it Tatty enjoyed; much of it she did not. Gwen was almost giddy. Tatty had never seen her so happy.

  Tonight she would not be.

  As Gwen prepared to go to bed, leaving Tatty to her whisky, her newspapers, her deep and intense thoughts, Tatty, slightly tipsy, said, “Gwen. I’m going to try to reach my family. Probably tomorrow night.”

  Gwen sank against the door frame, her expression slack, her hands somewhat aflutter. She had been such a beautiful girl in her youth. Now just thirty, she was becoming thin and pale, too old for her years, hell-bent for scrawny, spinsterish middle age. David Paget could have—should have—spared her that.

  “Tatty, from all that you’ve said, it could be very dangerous.”

  Tatty had told her nothing more than that she and Jack Spencer had gotten into serious trouble in Russia and that Jack was in jail and she was in danger. Tatty wondered why Gwen hadn’t pressed her further. She suspected that Gwen wanted to do nothing that would jeopardize this windfall of a circumstance. A life of her and Tatty, no one else.

  “You’ve been wonderful,” Tatty said. “But it can’t go on much longer this way. You go to school. I play the piano. I read. I get drunk. You come home, we eat, you go to bed. I stay up and drink some more. This might seem paradise to some, even to you, but it’s been too long. I’ve got to resolve this, Gwen. I can’t just become a recluse stuck away in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I’ve just been resting up, Gwen. Now I want to fight back.”

  Gwen pushed her hair back from her forehead, then sat on the arm of an upholstered chair.

  “Whatever you need to do, Tatty.” She spoke almost in a whimper. Her eyes were glassy with tears.

  Tatty set down her glass.

  “Gwen. I still may have to stay here for some time. And you’ve been extraordinarily kind. But I have to get started now. And the place I must start first is with my family. I have to try to reach my stepfather, my sister.”

  “I know, but it could be very dangerous, Tatty. You said so.”

  “I’ll be very careful. If I could, I’d like to borrow your car.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  She came and kissed Tatty on the cheek, then hurried off to bed.

  When Tatty finally went to bed, close to two A.M., she stopped for a long time in the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror above the washbasin. Gwen had said something that first night, that Tatty had changed, that her face had gone hard. When Tatty pressed her on this, Gwen recanted, saying she meant merely that Tatty looked tired.

  Tatty stared intently at the blond woman in the mirror, studying, examining her face inch by inch, following each line and curve of bone, finding only herself. There was some bitterness there, yes; some sadness, and much seriousness. But she hadn’t changed. The cuts had healed and the bruises had faded. She had not aged. Only a few weeks had passed. She was still only thirty.

  She leaned closer, this time concentrating on her blue-gray eyes, the color of the Arctic sea.

  Now she saw what Gwen had seen. She had killed a second man. Another man had died violently in front of her. Men had died all around her. Because of her, more men might be dying still. The woman Raya might be dying.

  It showed in her eyes.

  She left the next night after dinner, borrowing not only Gwen’s old battered Volkswagen but some money and Gwen’s driver’s license as well. Except for the difference in hair color, they resembled each other enough for the license to suffice as identification should some policeman stop her in the darkness. Gwen insisted she take it. Tatty did, though it was not policemen she was worried about.

  It was a cold night, with flurries of blowing snow. It wasn’t far to Greenwich on the Connecticut Turnpike, but Tatty took a longer route, following Highway 25 up to the Merritt Parkway and using that instead, approaching her stepfather’s estate from the open countryside up near Westchester. Once off the parkway, she stayed on back roads, traversing
a reservoir she remembered as a necking spot, finding remembered trees and houses at the end of remembered curves in the road. She had come this way with Ramsey once, during their second affair, shortly after she was married. She was still in her early twenties then, but had fancied herself much the worldly woman, sophisticated in the brittle fashion of Noel Coward heroines. As Ramsey had always been that way, their affair proceeded famously. There was a television film the two of them had seen, Edward and Mrs. Simpson. Ramsey had always made much of his resemblance to Edward VIII, contending that if he had been blond they would have looked like brothers. Though he complained that the actor playing Edward did not look like him, that he was “unbeautiful,” Ramsey was transfixed by every aspect of the king’s behavior. Tatty was much more taken with the music, all period pieces from the time. She had bought a record of the sound track, and learned all the songs.

  She memorized all the lyrics, practiced them in the English style of the thirties. She had sung them with Ramsey in the car, which came to irritate him; and sung them by herself, driving at high speeds the country roads of Connecticut and Westchester.

  She sang them again now.

  “I’ve danced with a man,

  who’s danced with a girl,

  who’d danced with the Prince of Wales …”

  She sang them again, twice, three times, then fell silent. She was on her road, a road she had traveled home, schoolgirl, debutante, Smith girl, and woman, thousands of times.

  Turning off onto a side road perhaps a half-mile short of her stepfather’s drive, she followed it up and over a hill, pulling off into a wooded area just shy of a small stone bridge over a frozen creek. She had walked this creek many times. She knew every bend.

  Gwen had lent her an old pair of boots. They were a bit tight in the calves, but Tatty was grateful for them. There was old, deep snow on the hillside leading up to the house’s rear lawn. She crept up through the vineyard, past the old stables, up along the steep grade of the strange swimming pool that fell from a depth of one foot to fifteen in only sixty feet. She remembered it all so well: the tool shed, the formal gardens to the right, the large garage and its apartments for servants above to the left.

  There were many lights on in the house. Tatty waited, then darted across the expanse of snow and winter grass. She heard nothing, except perhaps an unseen animal in the brush beyond the formal garden. She could hear a television set on somewhere within the house. The back door, leading to the large pantry and kitchen, was locked. She moved around to the left, to the cellar window whose latch had never been properly repaired, through which the teenaged Tatty had gained surreptitious entrance to the house at all hours of the night.

  It still opened. She pulled it up and slipped inside, dropping to the cellar floor with little noise, just like always. There were things in her way she couldn’t possibly have remembered, but she felt her way around them, at last reaching the wooden stairs, climbing them quietly. She pushed the door open, entering the dark kitchen, hearing the television quite clearly.

  It was Chesley there, in the sitting room off the main hall, watching one of those sex-laden prime time soap operas. Chesley had a master’s degree in fine arts, had had a book published on the history of windows, and had for two years held a job as curator of a Connecticut art museum.

  Tatty had been offered a role in one of those television series, and had declined. It was her first and last encounter with Hollywood. The producer, an extraordinarily unpleasant man, had asked her out to his beach house in Malibu to discuss it. She didn’t go.

  Tatty stepped into the room, moving silently to where Chesley was curled up in a thick, antique unpholstered chair, eating caviar on melba toast and drinking white wine resting in an ice bucket. Tatty grasped her shoulder and kissed the top of her head, her lips touching the silken finish of Chesley’s rich, dark hair.

  “What? Tatty? Tatty?” Chesley untangled her legs and quickly rose, turning to face Tatty directly. “Good God. Tatty! It is you. My God, it’s you. Why aren’t you dead?”

  “I’m just not.”

  Chesley, totally without expression, stared at her, her dark eyes full and hesitant. Then at once she stepped forward and pulled Tatty to her, holding her more tightly than Tatty remembered her ever doing before. She kissed Tatty’s cheek, a glancing brush of lips, perfectly soft despite the harsh winter weather.

  Then she stepped back. Taking her wine glass, she snapped off the television, and seated herself on one of the four couches in the room, as though Tatty had been away only a few days.

  Chesley was thirty-six. She looked the same as she had at twenty-five, as she would at forty-five. She was so utterly perfect, a “great beauty” in every best sense of the term. In the England of Sargent, Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and such philanderers as Edward VII, she would have been one of the “PBs”—“professional beauties.” She could have been mistress to anyone in the realm, including and especially the king. Except that Chesley was not a woman to be mistress to anyone.

  “What’s happened? Why did the Times say you were dead? Why is Jack in jail?”

  Tatty went to the fire. She had borrowed one of Gwen’s dresses, and it was too thin for the cold.

  “I got into trouble in Russia, very serious trouble. It was worth my life to get out of there, and I did so only with great difficulty. Jack’s claiming that he murdered me was his way of helping. It was a lot of help. It was a very selfless, brave thing for him to do. I was surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Never mind. Is Daddy home?”

  A dark look passed over Chesley’s face, but was quickly gone. When Tatty and her mother had first entered the Chase household, she had taken to calling her stepfather Daddy Chase. He had insisted on just Daddy. Chesley had been greatly irritated.

  “He’s in the city, working late. He’s been spending much of his time trying to get friends in the State Department to do something about you, to find out what happened to you. He never believed you were dead. He never believed Jack would have done you any harm, though I did.”

  Their eyes held each other, then Chesley looked away.

  “What do you mean?” Tatty said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about Jack.”

  Tatty could have said the same thing to Chesley, but did not. Here was Chesley eating caviar and watching television soap operas. There was Jack in some cold stone cell, or worse.

  “May I have something to drink, Chesley? Not wine. Gin, or Scotch. I’m so very cold, and my nerves are shot. I’ve had a very bad time.”

  Chesley started to ring for a servant, but Tatty shook her head violently. With a shrug, Chesley went out of the room, returning shortly afterward with a bottle of her father’s rare unblended Scotch and a crystal glass.

  “What sort of trouble did you get into, in Russia?” she asked, as Tatty drank.

  “I suppose you could say it was political. I don’t want to tell you any more. I don’t want to involve you or Daddy in this in any way. It could be very dangerous for you. I mean that. Some people have been killed.”

  Chesley made a face. “Really, now.”

  “Yes, really, Chesley. I killed one of them myself.”

  They stared at each other. This time Chesley did not look away. “How did you get involved in it? You went there for some theatrical reason. A one-woman show.”

  “It has to do with my ancestors. My Russian grandmother’s people.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The Romanov connection.”

  Chesley again made a face, and gave her bitterest laugh. “That’s twaddle, Tatty.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Twaddle. Or, as Jack would put it, a lot of crap. I’m sorry, but I’ve never believed it. I’ve never had reason to believe it. If you don’t know it by now, I’m sorry, but you ought to. Your grandmother was a fraud, my dear. She was a very attractive and extraordinary woman. And I don’t doubt her people were well off. But royalty? Nobility? Please, Tatt
y. If there had been as many Russian ‘nobles’ in St. Petersburg as there are now in Westchester, the Communists wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  “Why are you saying this to me? Why now?”

  “Because it’s true. It was bad enough your grandmother and mother traipsing through the house babbling endlessly in Russian; but the pretension, Tatty. All that condescension to us mere mortals. It got a bit thick, especially when it turned out to be so phony.”

  Tatty turned and looked into the fire. If someone didn’t attend to it shortly, it would begin to go out. But she didn’t want to touch it, or anything else in the house. Chesley was making her feel very much the stranger.

  “I’ve seen proof of what she said.”

  “Please, Tatty. After your mother died, Daddy tried to find out everything he could, to settle her affairs. There was nothing, Tatty, not even a birth certificate. Not for your grandmother, not for your mother. It wasn’t easy making you the sole heir to your grandfather Hoops’s estate. Daddy even had trouble getting you your father’s military benefits. He had to go to Washington and work through friends.”

  Tatty stared at the fading flames, and drank the rest of her whisky. Finally, she went to where Chesley had put the bottle on the coffee table and refilled the glass, this time all the way.

  “You’re going to end up like your mother if you keep drinking like that.”

  “You’re being very unpleasant, Chesley.”

  “I’m sorry. My own nerves are in a bad way. It’s not been easy, with Daddy so upset. With Christopher asking about his father. And now you suddenly appear, breaking into the house.”

  “It’s my house, too, damn it!”

  “Yes. I know. Daddy made you that promise. But you’ve been with us so little in recent years. You’ve become such a Long Island person. All those strange people.”

  Tatty took a sip of her drink. “Look, Chesley. We can find a better time to play out all these old grudges, all this sibling rivalry. At the moment, I need help. I’m in a great deal of trouble. I’m going to need some money.”