Rasputin's Revenge (24 page)

N
ow it is ten o’clock. The bells have just stopped. I’ve been writing for over six hours, trying to get it down.

I’ve sent my man to Lupa’s every hour to no avail. Now that the murders are solved, Borstoi and Kapov should be arrested, the egg returned, and Nicholas reassured. The iron is hot and I must strike.

But Lupa has disappeared and I am beginning to feel that I must report to someone. Borstoi could awake at any moment and find the egg gone. Knowing he has been betrayed, he will either run or warn Kapov. If the latter, I am in grave danger. If the former, I could not forgive myself. And the stakes are too great to take any risks.

Now, at least, the truth is committed here to paper. I really can wait no longer. If Lupa isn’t in, I will go to Alexandra and tell her myself.

I have made what could be a costly mistake.

After pacing outside Lupa’s door for a while, waiting for him to return and trying to decide on my best course of action, I finally chose to see the Empress myself. After all, she was Lupa’s employer—he might even be with her—and she was most concerned to find the Palace killers.

I had a small argument with a lady-in-waiting over the propriety of seeing Alexandra without an appointment at such a late hour, but I said it was an emergency, and demanded that she announce me. If the Czarina wouldn’t see me, I would abide by her decision, but I was sure she would.

I was right. After a short wait, I was admitted back into the Royal chambers, decorated in the homely fashion of the Palace at Tsarkoye Selo. Alexandra was sitting in a mauve easy chair, wrapped in a purple sleeping gown. Her quite spectacular reddish hair hung down over her shoulders,
and she sat with one leg curled under her. She was extremely attractive, with her natural regal bearing softened by the informality of her attire.

It could also have been the contrast. Across from her, in a white formless sheet embroidered heavily with what looked to be rhinestones and brightly colored yarns, sat Anna Vyroubova, pudgy hands clasped in her lap, a cane leaning against her chair, her rather large feet planted solidly on the floor.

As soon as I entered the room and bowed, I detected the chill. At first I thought it might have been the interruption, but then I remembered the misgivings about my tutoring that she had mentioned to Nicholas only yesterday.

And I remembered that Alyosha hadn’t been allowed to see me today.

Without thinking too much, wanting to please her and set her mind at ease about her husband and my own loyalty and good faith, I went to one knee.

“Your Majesty,” I began, “I beg you forgive me the lateness of the hour, but what I have to say cannot wait any longer.”

She looked down on me, not motioning for me to rise. There was in her glare that fixity I had noticed before when she’d been with Rasputin, and it briefly crossed my mind that she might be under some posthypnotic trance, especially concerning me.

“Yes?” she said coldly. “Go on.”

So far was she from the gracious and warm person who had met me and asked if I would tutor her son that I felt I must have misread her on that occasion. I even looked at the Vyroubova woman for support, which of course was not forthcoming. The peasant woman and the queen were, at that moment, cut from the same cloth.

Thinking to throw oil on the waters, I changed tack slightly. “But first,” I said, forcing a smile, “I’m sure your Majesty will be relieved to have this back.”

I took the box from my pocket and presented it to her. For a fraction of a moment, her eyes lit up again, especially as she opened the box and looked at the egg itself. But faster than it had come, the expression was gone, replaced by a sterner displeasure than previously.

“How did you come by this?” Alexandra asked. “I gave this to Lupa.”

“Our plan …” I began.

“Our?” Her voice was deep as thunder. “I gave this egg to Auguste Lupa under his personal assurance that he would be responsible for it. And now you return it to me.”

“Yes, but …”

“What other conspiracies are afoot here that no one sees fit to tell me about?”

“There was, is, no conspiracy, Madam, but …”

Her eyes now flashed, the color high in her cheeks. “I am not ‘madam,’ Monsieur. I am the Czarina of Russia, and you will address me properly.”

“Yes, your Majesty.”

She turned to Vyroubova. “See how they treat me? Oh, our Friend was right, I’m afraid. It’s everywhere.” Again she turned on me. “You think I’m the German whore, don’t you? Some impediment to be gotten around? Well, I am not. I am my husband’s guardian. No one else watches out for him. It is all traitors and knaves.”

“Your Majesty, please.”

“Enough from you!”

Vyroubova struggled to her feet and limped across to Alexandra, where she sat at her feet as the queen patted her hair as though she were a dog.

After a tense little while, she faced me again. “I will determine what’s to be done with you and Lupa. Now leave us.”

“Your Majesty …” At least I had to try and tell her I had found the murderers. Maybe that would calm her, but she stopped me with another glare. There was no choice. I bowed meekly and backed from her presence.

My hands shake.

On the way back here to my rooms, I stopped by Lupa’s and he was still not in. Where can he have gone?

I had assumed he’d told the Empress of our plans, or at least outlined them. Surely she knew my role here was as much with Lupa as with Nicholas or Paleologue. Could it be Lupa hadn’t told her? And if he hadn’t, why hadn’t he informed me of it? Might he have simply forgotten?

What could account for Alexandra’s mistrust of me, for such an abrupt and uncalled for change of heart? It really does seem that she is under some sort of spell. Certainly she is not rational. But, as she pointed out, she is the Czarina of Russia. Irrationality in her, in a twinkling, becomes the law.

My hands will not stop shaking.

I’ve had two small glasses of vodka from the room’s bottle. It scarcely helps. Now, in my robe, I sit waiting for a knock on the door—from Lupa, or from the Palace Guard.

It comes.

It is Elena, her face streaked with tears. She waits in my sitting room. I go to join her.

  PART  
TWO

15

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F
or all of Alexis’ promises, the excitement of his parent’s arrival in St. Petersburg evidently overshadowed his involvement in petty domestic issues such as the fight between his sister and Elena. When she knocked at my door on the night I’d been to see Alexandra, Elena told me that Tatiana had refused to see her for the third day running. During the day, she had waited for me to appear with the news that all had been somehow reconciled, but I never showed up.

As the day wore on, she became more and more frantic about the tenuousness of her position. She even thought I had abandoned her. In desperation, she finally decided, on my earlier advice, to swallow her prejudice and appeal to Rasputin because of his great influence on Tatiana.

She huddled deep in one of the chairs in my sitting room, flushed with the cold, with running through the streets back to the Palace from Rasputin’s apartment.

(I, in my robe, had admitted her. I am not a young man. It serves no purpose to pretend I wasn’t aware of the implications of the situation.)

I brought her a cup of tea from the samovar, and she sipped at it gratefully. She did not sob, and yet tears glistened in her lovely eyes. Occasionally they would brim over.

“It was horrible, Jules. I didn’t know people could act like that.”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said gently.

“No. I think I should. It might help.” She cradled the cup in both hands, blowing on it softly. The room was dimly lit by two flickering gaslamps, one on a table beside the sofa on which I sat, another on the
wall behind Elena. In spite of her desire to talk, the silence came to envelop us. Our eyes locked across the room.

Finally I had to speak. “What exactly happened?”

She sighed, then shivered as though with cold. Her voice was low and controlled, as if she feared that if she let a trickle of emotion into it, a torrent would follow. “After I didn’t see you, I don’t know what happened to me. Suddenly there seemed to be no hope. And I remembered what you’d said about the monk. He did know the girls. Maybe he could intercede for me.

“Still I put it off. You know how I feel about him, Jules. He is so …” She let that remark hang.

“Don’t dwell on it,” I said. “Go on.”

“Anyway, finally I didn’t know what else I could do. I had even gone to bed, saying that things would look better in the morning. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing myself turned out of the Palace, with no place to go and no friends.”

“You will always have a friend in me.”

She smiled, sniffed, sipped at the tea. “Thank you. But I even came by here earlier and you weren’t in.”

“I was visiting the Empress.”

She nodded, still absorbed in her demon visions. “Then it seemed there was only one hope left, and that was Rasputin. One of the pages drove me to his flat, and I could see there was some strange party going on. But I had come this far, and I brushed aside my misgivings and fears and knocked at his door.”

She shuddered, her voice now no more than a whisper. “Jules, half the court was there. People I have seen as courtiers, dukes, ladies-in-waiting—except there they all seemed crazy. The music was wild, people had their clothes off, someone grabbed me and touched me,” she paused, embarrassed, “where he shouldn’t have.” She stopped. “And above everything, I kept hearing Rasputin’s laughter. He wasn’t laughing at anything, Jules. He seemed out of his mind, insane.”

I recalled the other party the night before. “And what did you do?”

She looked down. “I ran. I was afraid. I’m still afraid. I came here. I didn’t know what else to do, who else to turn to.” She looked at me imploringly. “Oh, Jules, would you please hold me for a moment?”

We both stood, and I held out my arms and encircled her slender, womanly body. I could not help but be aware of her curves as she pressed herself to me, hiding her face against my chest. I’ve no doubt she could feel the stirrings of my own passion, for suddenly she pulled half away and looked up at me, her eyes wide and shining.