City of Shadows, Page 3

  “Nick, you saw her. She doesn’t even speak Russian.”

  “Would you?” The fork summoned up a funeral drum. “If your own people took you down to a cellar, Russians, and shot your daddy, your mommy, your brother and sisters in front of your eyes, wounded you, maybe, would you want to speak the same as those bastards? Not if you didn’t have to—and those girls were educated, remember. They had other languages. They were . . . what’s the word?”

  “Polyglot?”

  “Yeah, polyglots. Why’d she want to talk Russian? With those memories? Too terrible. She sticks to German. That makes sense, the press’ll understand that.” He began eating again, swaying slightly to the symphony in his head.

  “The press?”

  “Obviously we’ll call a press conference once she’s ready.”

  “You’re calling a press conference,” she said flatly.

  “Not yet. We’ve got a long way to go, but . . .” He faced her look. “Esther, we’ll be doing people a favor. That was a terrible thing happened at Ekaterinburg. Made the whole world sad. Maybe as a Jew you don’t feel it the same, but for us loyal subjects”—he thumped himself on the chest—“that pierced our hearts. We’ll never get over it.”

  He was frightening her; he was sobbing. She wanted the cynic back. This was an alien being crying real tears. Her own eyes were stony dry.

  “Beautiful things happen sometimes,” he said. “Now and then the saints in their grace grant us a miracle. They just did. We got one of them back.” He knuckled his eyes with his forefingers, wiping them. “I tell you, such a cheer will go around the earth. Stock market’ll go up, maybe. I must get in touch with my broker.”

  That was better. Nick the opportunist she could cope with.

  “It won’t work,” she said. “She’s just a sick, scared young woman.”

  He became impatient. “Sure she’s scared. Maybe she thinks the Bolshies are out to get her. ‘You want to stay here forever?’ I said to her— she understands German well enough. ‘You’ve got me to protect you now.’ ”

  “And suppose the Romanovs say she’s not Anastasia?”

  “They’ll have to. New teeth, plenty of coaching . . .” He began tapping his own teeth with his fork and then waved it at her. “Listen, Esther, there’s a hole in the market just waiting for her. People want a happy ending, I’m giving them one.”

  Another thought struck him. “What a movie it’d make. I could get rich out of the film rights alone.”

  “And Little Miss Unknown has agreed to all this, has she?”

  “Anna Anderson,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Anna Anderson. That’s who she’s going to be for now. I suggested the name, and she liked it. Nice and neutral. It’s the name I’ll get put on her identity papers.”

  Esther raised her eyes to heaven. “She’s agreed to this arrangement, has she?”

  “She will. Fifty-fifty, I told her.” Absentmindedly, he took over Es-ther’s plate and began clearing it. “Maybe I’ll make it seventy-five–twenty-five, I’m going to have a lot of expenses.” He beckoned to a white-aproned waiter. “Do you make palatschinken here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Two portions.”

  He was silent until the pancakes came, and then he said, “You could put her up in the new apartment I’m getting for you.”

  Ah.

  “Suddenly Moabit’s looking attractive,” she said. “I think I’ll stay there.”

  “Moabit’s a shithole. I was going to take you out of it anyway.”

  “I’m not going to do it, Nick. It’s fraud on a grand scale. It’ll hurt people.”

  “Not if she’s the real Anastasia. Who’s it going to hurt? Her? I’m going to restore her to her rightful place, cherish her like she should be. At least she gets out of Dalldorf. The rest of the Romanovs? I spit on ’em. They can’t even wipe their own asses without whining there’s no servant to do it for ’em.”

  It was true. They had become shabby in their obsolescence. Since the revolution, princes, grand dukes, who’d once roamed Europe in their private trains, kept their mistresses in luxury, flung roubles to peasants lining the roadway, patronized great artists and gambled millions on a throw of cards at Monte Carlo, had become pathetic emperors without clothes, still clinging onto their titles and expecting to live on the generosity of others.

  Grand Duke Cyril, Nicholas’s cousin and now heir to the nonexistent throne, had declared himself “Czar of All the Russias” from a farmhouse in France where the occasional émigré turned up to bow to him. “Makes the farmhands walk backward,” Nick had said.

  Only Grand Duke Dmitry, Nick said, was showing a grasp on reality; he’d become a champagne salesman and was allegedly pursuing an American heiress.

  None of the bluer-blooded émigrés would invite Nick, the arriviste, to the homes other people had given them. But they were glad enough to go to the parties he threw, Esther thought, quick enough to touch him for a loan that they had no means and no intention of repaying. She’d seen them at his clubs in lachrymose gatherings, remembering the good old days, still pretending to dignity, still unable to believe that the serfs they’d maltreated didn’t want them back.

  What right had they to look down on him? Bereft of their palaces and jewels, they’d been landed back in the primeval soup to begin the business of survival all over again. And they weren’t good at it. The ruthlessness of their ancestors that had given them the palaces and jewels in the first place had been bred out of them. Instead the energy to crawl onto dry land belonged to men like Nick, hungry, unhampered by tradition or morals.

  “I tell you, Esther, we’ve found her. We’ve made the discovery of the century. You want to leave her in that place?”

  “No.” Whatever happened, they were going to have to get her released if they could. Just seeing her had laid that responsibility upon them. Walk away from it and that silent little form in the bed would haunt her dreams forever. “Get her out by all means, but after that you’re on your own. I’m not going to help you.”

  “Really?” He leaned back in his chair and slowly lit a cigar, watching the smoke as it curled up from his lips before he looked at her. “What are you going to do instead?”

  “I see,” she said quietly.

  It was that important to him; she’d become his right hand, but for this he was prepared to cut it off. She met his gaze. “I’ll manage. There’ll be some other twister who needs his dirty work done in five different languages.” And wondered where the hell she’d find him.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Then he changed gear. He’s going to tell me I owe him, she thought.

  “You owe me, Esther,” he said.

  And she did. A Russian émigré, a Jewish Russian émigré, a disfigured Jewish Russian émigré didn’t rate high in the endless unemployment lines of a Germany with galloping inflation. She was only on dry land now because she’d clung to his back. Not just her, but the dozens of other poor White Russians he employed in his clubs—and what about the Jews who’d been able to get to the States and begin new lives because of him?

  All right, it had been self-interest, not philanthropy. But that was capitalism for you: sharks allowing little fish to feed on the bits between their teeth.

  She watched him shoveling in pancakes, persuading and cajoling. Automatically, she took the spoon out of his right hand and replaced it with a fork.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said. And she would; in a fractured way they were each other’s best friend.

  “So don’t,” he said. “All you have to do is take in a poor female, be her companion. You got class, Esther, haven’t I always said? You know things—art and books. Let some of it rub off on her. That’s completely all you got to do, I swear. As for the Anastasia thing, you won’t be involved. I’ll find someone to coach her in the Romanov stuff.”

  “If she’s a Romanov, why does she need coaching?”

  “She’s forgotten, for God’s sake.”
He was amazed at her obtuseness. “It’s been four years since Ekaterinburg. The saints know how she’s had to live, what she’s been through. Brain fever wiped out her memory, maybe. All you do is remind her how to be a lady again. Is that so much?”

  His persuasion ebbed and flowed in and out of her mind as she considered—and weakened.

  “Come on, Esther. It’ll be fun.”

  Yes, she could see that. By God, to set a cat among the pigeons that still believed they had a right to the Fabergé eggs and the rubies and the pearls distilled out of a people’s sweat and tears. She was amazed they could lay claim to them. They’d learned nothing.

  “You want to leave her in that hellhole?” he continued.

  Yes, I owe him, but he doesn’t know what he’s asking. It’s not wickedness to him; he doesn’t know what wickedness is. Neither do I anymore. I merely make a choice of sins.

  “. . . get her doctors. Who’s the one that’s good with loonies? Freud, I’ll get her Freud.. . .”

  Anyway, it’s too impossible to come to anything.

  Oh, God help me, I can’t go back to being hungry, I can’t. With my face I couldn’t even earn a living as a whore.

  “Be her friend, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “Oh, shut up and finish your bloody pancakes,” she said.

  He grinned at her. “That’s my girl.”

  “That’s me,” she said. “Sadly.”

  THE TROUBLE WAS that the woman who was now Anna Anderson refused to leave Dalldorf.

  For three days she wouldn’t even desert the dugout of her bed. During their afternoon visits, Esther kept the other women of the ward at bay while Nick, cajoling in a whisper across the pillowed barricade, extolled the marvels that awaited his protégée in the outside world—without result.

  “Has she said anything yet?”

  “Not a fucking word.” He brightened. “But she’s listening.”

  It wasn’t that the asylum wished to keep her; the doctors were willing to sign her release. They’d made no progress with her in two years and feared she was institutionalized. The matron wanted her out; Frau Unbekkant, being indigent, was costing the place money.

  “And she can cause considerable trouble,” the matron told Esther.

  “Really?”

  “Indeed. She’ll put the hospital in an uproar if she gets disturbed.”

  “I should think she gets enough disturbance in that ward.” The place would send anyone mad within minutes.

  “She refuses to leave it. It’s secure, you see. She won’t countenance transference to an open ward. It’s men. A new window cleaner appearing at the window, an unfamiliar doctor entering the ward at night, especially if he’s tall. Big men ...I tell you, Fräulein, she can be almost uncontrollable.”

  “She was raped, then,” said Esther gently.

  The matron, as the one who had to impose order on chaos, lacked sympathy. “She should pull herself together; she could if she put her mind to it, of that I’m sure. She’s not as defenseless as she likes to appear.”

  Clara Peuthert, too, maintained that her grand duchess was terrified, but she was more specific about the cause. “Bolshevik agents,” she said. “Out to assassinate her.”

  “Really?” Esther was attempting—not very successfully—to keep Clara from intruding on Nick and Anna’s tête-à-tête by sitting with her on her bed underneath one of the ward windows.

  “You think I’m telling lies?” Clara’s temper was quick to surface. “Seen him with my own eyes. Lurking in the shrubbery at nights, watching the building. Comes regular. Big bugger. All them Red agents is big.”

  “When was this?”

  “I got out,” Clara said. “Slipped past Klausnick when she opened the ward door. Got into the garden. Ran at him in the dark. ‘You leave Her Imperial Highness Tatiana alone,’ I told him. ‘You kill her, you got to kill me.’ That saw him off.”

  “She seems to believe she’s Anastasia.”

  “She’s Tatiana. I told her she was. Looks like Tatiana.”

  In Esther’s view Anna Anderson looked vaguely like all four princesses—or what the princesses might have looked like if they’d lacked their front teeth and survived the trauma that Anderson obviously had. Perhaps people had commented on the likeness. Perhaps Clara’s recognition of her as a grand duchess had acted as a catalyst, allowing Anna’s hurt mind to accelerate and improve on a fantasy it had always harbored.

  “Came back, though,” Clara said gloomily.

  “Who did?”

  “The Bolshie. That agent. But this time they wouldn’t let me get at him.” She nodded toward the window. “He was out there. Watching.”

  It was said with a certainty that caused Esther to stand up and look out. A long back lawn gave onto copses and fields where Dalldorf cows grazed, flicking their tails—the asylum was virtually self-supporting, with its own dairy. The sun was high, shadows were short, an old man was mending a gate. Nursery-rhyme land. Oh, God, to be locked up here, unable to go out and lie under one of those trees. No wonder minds festered and created their own nightmares.

  “We mustn’t frighten her, Clara. There’s nobody there.”

  “ ’Course there isn’t,” Clara said. “Ain’t the sixth week, is it? That’s when he comes, every six weeks. Oh, don’t you smile at me, miss.” Furiously, she delved underneath her mattress and brought out a large and creased calendar advertising Klingenberg Engineering. The dates on the page for July were below a large picture of nuts and bolts and had been filled in with pencil scrawls: “Painters in,” “Solitary again,” “Shit on Klausnick,” but dominating all of them was “Here again!” written across the squares for June 17 and June 18, through which Clara had drawn a dripping dagger in red ink.

  “And see here.” Clara’s big hands flipped back the pages to a May represented by iron pipes of various sizes where, among the scrawls, another “Here again!” red and bloody dagger pierced the weekend of May 6 and 7, as another did on March 25 and 26 and yet another six weeks previously in February.

  “That’s when I spotted him first,” Clara said. “February. I reckon that’s when the Bolshies found out where she was.”

  “How?”

  “Traced her from the hospital. Got somebody there who told ’em she’d been transferred here.”

  “The weekends,” Esther said. “He comes here hoping to assassinate her every sixth weekend.”

  “Yep,” Clara said. “Has to go back to Russia in between. Got to report to his masters in the Cheka.”

  “Of course.”

  “Just you wait, missy.” Clara’s fist was waved under Esther’s nose. “Think I’m touched, do you? Just because I’m in here don’t mean I lost my eyes. You come back”—she consulted her calendar—“July twenty-ninth. That’s six weeks from last time he was here. You come back here late Saturday night, July twenty-ninth, and you’ll see him standing in the shadows out there, waiting for his chance to kill the grand duchess.”

  “Peuthert’s fueling that poor child’s fear,” Esther told Nick on their way home. Whatever horror had put Anna Anderson in here in the first place was being given an up-to-date shape to fit the grand-duchess legend. “She says there’s a Cheka agent lurking in the grounds waiting to assassinate Anna.”

  “She does?” He put his foot on the brake. “Holy Martyr, wouldn’t it be dandy if there were?”

  “What?”

  “It’d prove it, don’t you see? Bolshevik Secret Service doesn’t bump off just any old loony. The Cheka knows Anastasia got away. They’ve got to get rid of her. Afraid a counterrevolution’ll put her back on the throne. Heir to All the Russias. I tell you, Esther, it fits.”

  “Really? Well, this assassin’s part-time. He only turns up one weekend in six, according to Clara. Every sixth weekend she keeps a night vigil and watches for him—and there he is.”

  “Oh.” He was disappointed.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “we’re dealing with sick people, Nick, and you’re
sicker than any of them.”

  “Peuthert’s a pain,” he admitted. “Keeps interrupting. I got to find some way of getting Anna away so I can work on her in private.”

  They drove on. It was a glorious day.

  “Picnic,” he said, suddenly. “We’ll take her into the grounds for a picnic. Sunshine, champagne, strawberries—she’ll love it.”

  “With all those imaginary Cheka agents in the bushes? She won’t go.”

  “Mmm.” Another mile passed before he solved that one.

  “We’ll bring one of the bouncers along. Big Theo, maybe. Make her feel protected.”

  “She’s scared of large men, and they don’t come larger than Theo.”

  On the other hand, Esther thought, they didn’t come milder either. The great Yakut, once a heavyweight wrestler and bodyguard to Prince Ivan, radiated a calm that usually reduced troublemakers at the Green Hat without the necessity of throwing them out. Or, if he had to throw them out, he managed it with the minimum breakage to their bones. “We could try, I suppose,” she said. An afternoon in the fresh air could be a start to Anna’s rehabilitation.

  ANDERSON BEGAN TO scream the moment Big Theo appeared in the ward doorway. Esther ran to her bed, dragging the bouncer with her. “Look at him,” she said. “Look.”

  She cupped the contorted face so that its eyes were aimed at Theo’s, beaming down on Anna like a beneficent yellow moon. “It’s not him,” she said. Whoever he was, she thought.

  The screaming stopped. The rest of the ward, which had become restless, settled down.

  Theo had been rehearsed. He picked up Anna Anderson’s hand, almost losing it in his, and kissed it. “Don’t you scare now, Highness,” he said in his bad German. “Ain’t no damn anybody hurt you with me.”

  For the first time since they’d met, Esther saw something like youth return to the woman in the bed; not a smile, exactly, but a smoothing out of her features. She nodded.