The Keeper of the Walls (6 page)

Claude had colored. But it was his father who replied. “Oh, we wouldn't have it any other way. Business is business.”

“Then tell your lawyer to call mine, and we'll draw up the contract,” Misha declared.

To signal that the interview was at an end, Prince Ivan rose. Misha rose. The Bruissons scrambled to their feet, hands extended. This time they both held out their hands to the son, not the father. For a second Misha stared at them, levelly. Then, inclining his head with an ironic half smile, he put out his own hand and allowed the two contractors to shake it. But from Claude, he withdrew his own almost at once.

At the door, the young man suddenly turned, and Misha noted that his eyes were once more glittering with something not unlike bravado. “Your Excellency,” he said softly, “I forgot. My sister, Liliane, sends you her best regards.”

Misha smiled. “How charming of her. Please convey to her my humble greetings.”

The two men exited, and Prince Ivan sat down again. He looked at his son. They both started to laugh. “The father is a pork and the son a weasel,” Prince Ivan stated.

“Would that we didn't have to deal with such scum.”

“Nevertheless, this is France. We can't ignore these people. They're still one step above the Blums and the Herriots who will soon be leading this country, pushing it closer and closer to what we fled from in Russia. . . . Tell me, you know this young man's sister?”

Misha nodded, offhandedly. “I've met her.”

“Is she like the father, or like the son?”

“Like neither.” There was a silence, and Prince Ivan's eyes stayed on his son. Misha was not elaborating. Prince Ivan's scrutiny became more intense.

“Clean up your life, my boy,” he whispered softly. “It's time, don't you think?”

But Misha didn't answer.

L
ily's room
was separated from Claude's only by her bathroom, to which, unbeknownst to her, he possessed a key. Now, as his footstep passed her closed door on the way to his own, he stopped, hearing her voice. She was chanting something, in a low, soft tone. Claude held his ear to the door panel, but the voice was muffled. He walked into his own room, slipped off his jacket, and went to a hardwood box on the secretary. He opened it and withdrew a key. Then, smiling, he inserted the key in the lock of the door that connected his room with Lily's bathroom.

He slid in, soundlessly. She'd left her own connecting door ajar, as she often did. Good. Crouching, he approached the sink. From there he could see perfectly what his sister was doing. She was kneeling by her bed, her hand on her rosary. And she was speaking.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us poor sinners, now, and at the hour of our death . . .”

He let out a sigh, exasperated. Just a Hail Mary. But just as he was about to tiptoe out through his own door, he heard her again. “Blessed Virgin,” she said, her voice beginning to break. “Help me not to think of him, because it isn't meant to be. Help me not to have images of him, but to forget.”

Claude stood tense, alert.
Him?
That young American, Mark what's his name?

He'd call Marguery tonight and arrange for a meeting.

T
he nightmare pursued him
. Hours before, his father and Rochefort had gone home, and the subaltern employees, receptionists, and female secretaries had locked up their work before leaving. Beyond the velvet curtains, Paris gleamed black, with dots of yellow from the streetlamps. He tried to think of the apartment on the Avenue de la Muette, off the Place du Palais de Chaillot in the distinguished Sixteenth Arrondissement, where his father was probably sipping cognac and warming his feet by the fireplace. The Russian
maître d'hôtel,
Arkhippe, whom Prince Ivan had hired in Paris, where he had found him waiting on tables at Maxim's, himself a refugee from St. Petersburg, would be standing discreetly at attention, and in the kitchen, the cordon bleu chief cook, Annette, and her two assistants would be preparing a delectable five-course dinner.

But Misha couldn't concentrate on this soft image of habitual luxury. He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep again that night. He pressed his fingertips against the sockets of his eyes, pushing out the dull, aching throb. He saw red dots on the inside of his eyelids, from the pressing of his fingers. Red dots that became swirling crimson flames rising in the air, and suddenly, a young, anonymous woman screaming as the flames engulfed her. Misha's fist banged on the desk, and he knew that his face was wet. In his nostrils he could breathe the smell of burning flesh, a smell he would never forget. If this was Hell, then it existed, and he'd seen it, like Nebuchadnezzar.

Like all the times before, he thought desperately: My country is no more—my past is dead. Who
am
I?

He stood up, his legs shaking. In his breast pocket he found the neatly pressed linen handkerchief with his monogram. He wiped his face. Always a vain man, he carried with him, like a woman, a small hand-mirror. He glanced at his reflection and realized how much he had aged in these three years. Below his eyes, the skin was puffy. He was thirty-three.

Abruptly, he buttoned his jacket and turned to leave the office.

W
hen he'd been young
, and visited Paris during his university days, the place to go had been Montmartre, dominated by the white cathedral of the Sacré-Coeur. Now, in the twenties, the place to go had shifted to the Left Bank, in Montparnasse. Misha was aware that he knew almost all the
bistrots
and cabarets of the area; he was on first name basis—one way, of course—with all the owners of the
dancings
and all the eateries and bars and jazz clubs on the Left Bank. It didn't help.

He'd been a member of the “golden youth” of Moscow, all the young aristocracy who chose to spend their nights carousing till dawn. He'd enjoyed being young, being rich, being single. He had to answer to no one but himself. Now he thought, in his customary brutal way, that his conscience was clean. He'd had hundreds of women in his day, and if they'd suffered, it hadn't been through any fault of his. He'd never lied. Brasilov princes never lied. They told the truth and got away with it.

Once in a while he worried. About the possibility of a child somewhere, unknowing and unclaimed.
That
would have been wrong. But he didn't think one existed. The women had been honest. He'd helped all the ones who'd been in trouble. He'd known a midwife, in Moscow, and she'd taken care of each one he'd sent, and brought him the bill. He'd always been kind, never derisive. But usually that was the last the girl had ever seen of him. He was afraid. Afraid of being trapped by a pregnant woman, the wrong woman.

Until now he'd never been faithful: he'd had every one, the princesses, the milliners, the married women and the virgins. He'd had them all.

As he parked the royal blue De Dion-Bouton between two Citroëns on the large Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, Misha pushed the vague guilt of the Casanova out of his mind. Next to a secondhand dealer's was the Cossack
boîte de nuit
Les Djiguites. He pushed open the door and smelled shish-kebab and cheap perfume. The muscles in his neck, along his spinal cord, began to relax.

It was dark, but he could make out familiar faces at the bar and around the tables. Cossack music made his eyelids sting, as it always did the first moment. He'd spent some years doing military service in the distinguished Division Sauvage in the Caucasus. Memories. Drinking songs. Before the end of his Russia, the mutilation of his people.

His eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness. He needed some vodka. He sat down at the bar, listening to the hum of human voices. Good. This way he couldn't think. The barman said: “Your Excellency, Prince Michel! A lady was just looking for you!”

“Looking for me
here?”

“Well, we all know you come here two or three times a week. I put her over there, in the corner. . . .”

Misha stood up, depressed. He'd hoped not to run into anyone he knew well. He possessed too many nodding acquaintances to ever have the luxury of being alone. But maybe that was why he'd come here. Aloneness meant the recurring nightmare. He'd never told his father that. Maybe then Prince Ivan would have understood. . . . Maybe he already understood.

He walked over to the corner table, and saw her. She was very thin, and wore her hair in a pageboy around her oval face. She'd dyed it burgundy, which shocked. Her face was dusted with white powder, and kohl rimmed the slanted amber eyes. She was pretty, in an elfin way. Her dress was a simple red sheath hiding the smallness of her bust but emphasizing the trim hips. She wasn't alone. With her was a young man with a headful of curls, and another elegant young woman with a washed-out, exhausted face. Too much opium, he guessed, and the next instant he was enveloped in a warm, slightly moist embrace that smelled of Shalimar.

“Chéri,
” she said, and he was amused, because he hadn't seen her for some time. “This is Mark MacDonald, of the Charlotte
Clarion,
and Nini, the newest model
chez
Lanvin. Meet my beautiful Russian prince. His name is Charming.”

Her name was Henriette, Rirette to her intimates, and he supposed that if she'd been looking for him, he was one of the latter. He remembered they'd met some months ago. She'd been a model
chez
Poiret, and at night she sometimes danced naked for private parties. She had a nice, firm, strong, athletic body. They'd made love almost right away, and he'd wanted her with an urgency that had made his performance passionate. She'd wanted more. He'd taken her to Deauville and spent three days and nights locked up in the Hotel Normandie with her. Then he'd cooled off. She was too vital, and seemed too old. She wasn't quite thirty, but looked as if she had been through it all, and had turned hard. He didn't need that: it was too demanding.

But still, when he'd wanted a woman to take his mind off everything, he'd often come back to her. Now she'd been looking for him. He sat down. The washed-out model from Lanvin bored him without even opening her mouth, but he wondered about the reporter. The reporter, too, was evidently wondering about
him.
“I don't suppose we'd be polite to call you just ‘Charming,'” he was saying, smiling.

Misha thought he looked intelligent, but with an American, that was hard to tell. “Mikhail Ivanovitch Brasilov,” he said, holding out his hand. In passing he thought that he had shown more familiarity to this stranger than to the two men who had been in his office that day. There was something genteel about the young man, something agreeable about his classical features in the small face.

“Mark was telling us all about the United States. He hopes to become a great novelist one day,” Rirette said.

“Actually, your Excellency, I was telling Rirette and Nini the dull story of my apprenticeship on the
Clarion.
But probably you've never even heard of my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. It's beautiful—but it's not that large. The city editor was a college friend of my father's, and so he took me on as a cub reporter. Later he discovered that I am in some ways like my mother—I love gossip. So he put me in charge of the society section.”