Romanov Succession (8 page)

No one was in sight in the long wide hall. Vassily stopped abruptly. “A word with you.”

Through the bank of high windows the setting sun fanned the cloud bellies with marbled streaks of crimson and pink. A warm hint of cologne and tobacco smoke drifted under the tall arch-buttressed ceiling. Alex said, “Go on,” reserving a great deal.

Vassily shook his head. It emphasized the weary cast of his deep-lined features. “Doesn't it strike you the way they all go on as if nothing's changed? Living on the international scale, perpetuating this idiotic love affair with deluxe pleasures and genteel pastimes. And half the world's blowing up just over the horizon.”

“You can't change them.”

“I am not condemning them for it. If they gave it all up and put on sackcloth and ashes it would not make a bit of difference to the world. But the unreality of the way they can just go on and on like this—how hard it will be to persuade them to set aside their illusions.”

In jodhpurs and belted grey jacket Vassily had the look of a Prussian martinet; it struck Alex that all it would take to complete the image would be a riding crop slapping into his open palm.

Vassily said, “I asked them to bring you into this.” He put the emphasis on the first person pronoun and it startled Alex as it had been meant to. “I did it for several reasons. First because you are patently the best for the job—best qualified and best situated. Second because you once forced me to make a very careful reexamination of my own impetuosity—and it may be useful to have you in a position where you can do that again if the events call for it.”

Vassily was offering an olive branch but it didn't have a pure color of truth.

Alex didn't answer. Vassily nodded as if Alex's silence confirmed a suspicion. “It is important we find some way to reconcile our quarrel.”

“I don't carry grudges.”

“No. But you are certain I cannot be trusted. I must find a way to earn your trust back. If you cannot have confidence in my judgment none of this is going to work.”

Alex put it bluntly. “I don't see how you're going to do that.”

The weariness seemed ground into Vassily like grit. He glanced out the windows, his squint far-eyed with his visions; his face picked up the reddish reflection of the sunset and seemed very bitter. “They have tried twice to kill me. They will go on trying until they succeed. At first I thought it was an old enemy but it is not likely—too coincidental. Someone has learned of the scheme. They think by killing me they can prevent it happening. They cannot—they are fools. It is a historical turning, one of those events whose time has come. A thousand assassinations would not stop it.”

As if to shake off his premonitions he drew himself up to a parade-ground posture, hands behind him. “When they reach me there must be someone to pick up the baton.”

His face came around swiftly. “It is not a favor to you. It may make you their next target. But you are the best choice to succeed me.”

“Why?”

“Because
I
trust
you.
”

“How can you know that when I haven't even heard the plan yet? I may think it's drivel.”

“You will not.”

“Once before you thought I'd go along with your plans.”

“It was different. You must believe me.”

It was the closest he'd ever seen Vassily to begging.

Vassily said, “Do not fight me in there, Alexsander. It is too big a thing for personal quarrels. And the decisions may be yours soon enough—you would be a fool to shoot it down before you've had a chance at it yourself.”

“You're talking as if they've already killed you.”

“I won't make it easy for them.”

“Kill them first.”

“I would have done. If I knew who they were.”

“You have no hints at all?”

“Only suspicions and too many of those; they cancel one another out. We are getting off the subject. I want your backing in there. Have I got it?”

“I can't promise it. If I can't support the plan I won't support you.”

Vassily brooded at him and the humanity evaporated from his hard face. “Then we shall have to persuade you of the Tightness of the scheme, won't we? Come on then.” He swung with an abrupt snap of his big shoulders and strode across the gallery to a huge door. With his back braced as if against an awaited bullet he rapped his knuckles on the oak and almost immediately the door pivoted on oiled hinges and Irina's father was there: Count Anatol Markov with his impeccable clothes and his urbane countenance.

Count Anatol gave them both a quick unemotional scrutiny and then averted his eyes as if he regarded them both as applicants for a servant's job who had arrived for an interview at a time when the Count had more important things on his mind. It meant nothing at all, it was only his habitual manner: aloof, contained, distracted, ascetic. It was always off-putting at first and you had to get back into an almost forgotten gear to deal with these people: their lives were overwhelmingly opulent and until you acclimated yourself you didn't see how anyone who lived in such surroundings and with such mannerisms could have any substance. The fact was that Anatol Markov had one of the cleverest minds Alex had ever encountered.

“We have been waiting for you. Please come in.”

The drawing-room furniture was elegant with intricate fragile curves. The heavy velvet draperies reached from ceiling to floor and they were drawn shut to keep out the waning daylight; electric lamps made the big room richer and warmer. It could have been a calculated effect, shutting out the Spanish vista so that they could have been anywhere: the old villa in France or even the drawing room of the Imperial
dascha
put-side St. Petersburg from which the Grand Duke Feodor had brought most of these furnishings in 1918.

The chairs were drawn up in a conversational circle and Prince Leon Kirov sat at its focal point beside a table on which was heaped a litter of documents in open folders.

There were eight chairs in the circle; three of them were empty. The five men sat back with their legs crossed, smoking cigars and pipes, watching Vassily and Alex. They nodded and lifted cigars in greeting but they didn't erupt in customary Russian expansiveness. The seriousness of the occasion was an evident weight.

Count Anatol shut the door behind them and nodded toward the farther doors. Alex paced Vassily across the room; put his hand on the latch and went through.

In his high four-posted bed the Grand Duke raised eyes cloudy with dim sight. A woman in white moved courteously away from the bedside and the visitors approached the bed. The old man's fingers plucked at his lap robe.

“Your Royal Highness.”

“Who is that? Are you Deniken?”

“Vassily Devenko and Alexsander Danilov, Your Royal Highness.”

Vassily bowed briefly; it went unseen. The Grand Duke seemed indifferent. “It is kind of you to come and see me.”

Alex said, “We wish you better health.”

“Yes …”
Da,
and the quavering voice trailed off. But then abruptly he groped for Vassily's hand. “You have come.”

“Yes, Highness.”

“Are we to be restored then?”

“I cannot say, Highness.”

“But the Bolsheviks …”

“The Bolsheviks are finished,” Vassily Devenko said.

7.

The assassin didn't put much credence in anything beyond the five senses but the woman disturbed him. He knew who she was; he'd seen her photographs. But he'd never been face-to-face with her. There was no way she could have known him from any other complete stranger. Yet in her eyes at the foot of the stair there'd been knowledge. More than suspicion; certainty. It was there as if she could read him like cold type.

He drifted into the hunt room and took a glass of sherry from a servant's tray and walked through the crowd carrying it—not drinking. He overheard snatches of talk—the weather at Marbella, the rationing under Vichy—and he put on a pleasant face but spoke to no one.

He took his sherry back along to the ballroom and saw the woman in red dancing with an old gentleman. He turned away, not so quickly as to bring attention to himself, and retreated from her sight. He argued with himself: there was no mystery to it, it had been coincidence; she was the sort of woman whose face could create imagined trouble—as if her inscrutable beauty were meant to be invested with whatever you chose to read into it. He had to dismiss her from his concentrations.

But he couldn't. It stayed in the back of his mind that the woman could spoil it.

8.

Alex's host was awaiting him at the Grand Duke's door when he emerged from the bedchamber: craggy old Prince Leon on whom the entire retinue-in-exile depended so much.

“Glad to see you here, Alex. Very glad,” he murmured in his slow splendid deep voice. Genuine feeling trembled in it; he gripped both Alex's shoulders and gave his grave paternal nod, the next thing to a smile; and limped back toward the others. His hair had thinned and gone silver; the lameness of his battle-shattered leg had grown worse; but his eyebrows remained thick and black over the obsidian eyes and he was very much in command of it all. The name at the head of the family was that of the Grand Duke Feodor but it was Leon who had kept them all together in their endless gypsy exile.

Alex waited for Vassily Devenko to reappear; the Grand Duke was still pressing his dream of restoration.

Count Anatol Markov had returned to his seat—in the circle yet apart from it, quietly drinking vodka from a chilled glass. He watched Alex as he might watch an inanimate object.

Alex had been a long time seeking clues to Count Anatol's composition; it was very hard to understand the chemistries that had produced Irina out of Anatol's genes. He was dry, distant, epicene in disposition; cynical and suspiciously skeptical of everyone. He was thin as a sapling, the hair lying across his neat little cannonball head in lonely strands. His face was pale and his mouth in repose looked like a surgeon's wound.

Tragedy seemed to have hovered around him for decades. At Ekaterinburg in 1918 a Bolshevik fanatic named Jacob Sverdlov had engineered the assassinations of Czar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra and their children. A month after the brutal murders Jacob Sverdlov had been found beaten to death in a Moscow street; systematically bludgeoned out of existence, every bone in his body shattered. It was fairly well accepted by a good number of the White exiles that it had been Count Ahatol who had thus avenged the Royal Family. It was said that it was the first and last time in his life that Anatol had shown passion; but surely Irina Anatovna was not the product of an emotionless conception.

Of the seven men in the room—Vassily would make the eighth—one was not a Russian.

Prince Leon said, “Our American representative, Colonel Alexsander Danilov. Alex, I am sure you know General Sir Edward Muir.”

He'd seen the old photographs; now he made the connection. The Scotsman nodded to Alex, neither rising nor offering a hand. He was a very tall old man, noble and grand with a white military mustache stained to amber by cigar smoke. His longevity appeared to fall little short of immortality: he'd commanded the British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea in 1919 and he'd been on the verge of retirement age even then.

Prince Leon said, “Sir Edward is here to represent the viewpoint of the British crown.”

“Unofficially of course.” The Scotsman spoke in a Russian that was fast and without hesitation but thickly accented with an Edinburgh burr. He wore grey evening clothes well-cut to his long gaunt frame but too heavy for the Mediterranean climate; there was a sheen of perspiration on his smooth ruddy face.

Alex moved toward the chair beside Prince Leon's. “Am I here as an American army officer or as a White Russian?”

“Decide that for yourself,” Count Anatol said coolly. “After you have heard our plans.”

“Here is General Devenko,” Prince Leon said. “We can begin now, I think.”

“About bloody time,” said Baron Oleg Zimovoi in his harsh peasant Russian.

Before Vassily sat down he gave each man in turn a studied scrutiny. Alex saw him nod his head half an inch to the British general; Sir Edward cracked a sliver of a smile. It was the extent of their greeting—two men who'd soldiered against a common enemy in the bleeding Crimea of twenty years ago.

Vassily's face was ungiving: he looked like a man who knew better than to expect too much. “What is it to be then—action or only more debate?”

“The decision will be made tonight,” Prince Leon said. “Every man here has made assurances of that.”

Vassily's intolerant gaze swept their faces, lingering briefly on Anatol's and Baron Oleg Zimovoi's. “I remind you all—Hitler is not standing still while you dispute politics.”

Anatol's eyes narrowed to slits in the pale flesh. “You doubt our word, Vassily?”

“Only your willingness to keep it if it means the sacrifice of some petty political objective.” Vassily snapped it; clearly his nerves were on a raw edge.

Prince Leon said, “We must put Sir Edward and Alexsander in the picture before the decisions are taken.”

Vassily leaned his head back against the top of the chair. He crossed his legs and closed his eyes. “Let us get at it then.”

“We are eight here,” Prince Leon said, “but some of us represent the proxies, so to speak, of large blocs of interest. I have commitments from General Deniken and his group, and of course I speak for the house of the Grand Duke Feodor. Prince Michael”—he inclined his head toward the old man in the chair beyond Vassily's—“is here to speak for the house of the Grand Duke Dmitri. Baron Oleg Zimovoi has undertakings from his followers to honor the decisions we make here.”

The council's spectrum was remarkably full—Oleg on the far left with his following of thousands of White Russian Socialists, the rest of them scattered across the center toward the right where Anatol the monarchist held the extreme position. They'd found a unanimity for which Alex could find no parallel in his experience.