Romanov Succession Part 2

A bottle of Polish vodka lay canted in a champagne bucket filled with ice. He lifted it out and brooded at the straw of buffalo gra.s.s that lay inside the sealed clear bottle. Someone knew his taste. He poured the two-ounce bartender's gla.s.s full and downed it; replaced the bottle and settled into a chair, and waited. He neither smoked nor drank again; he only waited.

At eight he went out, turned to Room 917 next door in the hall and knocked.

"Yes?" A woman. "Who is it?"

His host had company then. Alex contained his impatience-made his face blank. "Colonel Danilov."

He heard soft footfalls on a carpet. A key turned in the lock and the door pivoted to disclose a stunning dark-haired woman in red.

His face changed. "Irina."

Irina Markova smiled. "Come in, Alex, don't stand there looking like a stunned schoolboy with his hat in his hand."

He entered the room warily; behind him the door clicked shut and Irina said in her low liquid Russian, "There's no need to clench your teeth. Va.s.sily's not with me. We're alone."

He turned, feeling odd.

"Just you and I." She smiled again. "How romantic."

All the old pa.s.sions slid back into place entirely against his will. A spiral of heat rose from his stomach: he felt tricked. "What's this meant to be, Irina?"

"They need you, Alex. It's supposed to be a seduction."

There was a sense of mystery about Irina that ramified from her like a spreading fog of intoxicating perfume. She was clearly aware of it; she did nothing to dispel it.

The natural shape of her blue eyes was slightly mournful-Eurasian. Her hair was gypsy-black and long. The fas.h.i.+onably broad shoulders and fitted long taut waist of her red dress made her seem tall although she was not unusually so. Everything seemed to amuse her as if her point of vantage over the human tribe were a bit Olympian; she seemed to have the knack of surviving the shocks of her explosive life without ever being touched by them.

It was a luxurious two-room suite, larger than his own. She moved languidly away from him. "I've sherry or vodka."

"Sherry." He'd need a clear head. He settled into a chair.

"I've ordered dinner sent up at nine."

"Have you."

"We're having a tryst, aren't we? It wouldn't look quite right if we went out and mingled."

Her mouth curved into a posture of wry self-mockery. She brought him a gla.s.s of sherry and then slid back into the couch that faced his chair across the low gla.s.s coffee table. She smoothed her skirt under her thighs-the gesture had a strong sensuality. "You look awfully drab in that uniform."

"Why don't you tell me what game we're meant to be playing?"

"So matter-of-fact. Where's your dash?" She tucked one foot up under her on the couch.

"I'd rather you didn't try to be coquettish. It doesn't suit you."

"Oh dear." She tossed her hair back, full of subtle mischief. "Now you've crushed me. Have I quite lost all my charms?" When she sipped the pale sherry her eyes mocked him over the rim of the gla.s.s.

"No." It was an admission.

"I'm sorry-I wasn't really fis.h.i.+ng for that." But her eyes went on glittering with amus.e.m.e.nt; then she said in a different voice, "Very well. They want to see you."

"They?"

"Your brother. My father. Prince Leon. All of them."

"Do they."

"Is that all you can say?"

He watched the way her muscles moved when she set her gla.s.s down. "What do you want me to say, Irina?"

"I don't know. I've no feverish desire to put words in your mouth. But some reaction-some hint of feeling. What will it take to provoke an emotion in you?"

"The fact that I don't parade my feelings doesn't mean that I don't have them."

"You used to burst with fires. That great Russian joie de vivre."

"We were all children, weren't we? And it was a different world."

"You got fed up with seeing us all go on living in international luxury as if nothing had changed. The same old servants and horse races and hunts and chemin-de-fer-all our silly aristocratic posturings while Europe is falling down around our ankles. Isn't that what you told Prince Leon the last time you saw him?"

"Something like that."

She uttered a bawdy bark of laughter. "Oh really, Alex. Sometimes you act like one of those grim dedicated adolescents who hang on Oleg Zimovoi's Socialist coattails."

He had a disoriented sensation because the silent conversation between their eyes was separate and wholly different from the words: their voices spoke in dispute and accusation; their mute colloquy spoke of pa.s.sions, regrets, remembered love.

"You're a Russian. You were born in Kiev-you spent your childhood in St. Petersburg." She spoke with surprising earnestness and heat: "You can't deny yourself, Alex. You can't put that behind you."

"I have."

"Your father died fighting for your country." Her eyes challenged him.

"It was a long time ago,"

His father had been a Marquis, a brigadier with Wrangel in the Ukraine in 1919 and the Red artillery had destroyed the bunker with five of them in it. Alex was twelve years old and the news broke him apart.

They were living near Kiev just then, he and his mother in a rented dacha with only four servants.

The day after the news reached them Alex ran away to Kiev and enlisted in a White recruiting office; he claimed he was sixteen. He was in training barracks resplendent in his new uniform when his mother's emissaries found him and dragged him home.

They found themselves under General Devenko's protection when the terrible White retreat began after the collapse of Kolchak's White armies. Ilya Devenko was a high staff officer in Deniken's headquarters; he kept the mother and son from peris.h.i.+ng in the chaotic horde of refugees fleeing south ahead of Trotsky's relentless Bolshevik advance. Alex had clear recollection of the packed trains, the endless throngs trudging across the frozen mud of the Ukraine.

General Ilya Devenko had been a very tall man with a voice like lumps of coal cras.h.i.+ng down a metal chute. Alex had known him as long as he could remember: the General had been a cla.s.smate of Alex's father, a regular if not frenquent visitor at Danilov soirees before the war. The General's son Va.s.sily was twice Alex's age in 1920 and at twenty-six was a full colonel of infantry with an outstanding record of gallantry in the field against the First Red Army.

General Devenko's wife had died of spotted typhus in the Kuban campaigns of 1918 and perhaps it was inevitable that the widower general should marry Alex's mother who was a general's widow. The ceremony took place in Sebastopol in 1921, in the Orthodox Cathedral with Alex giving his mother away and Va.s.sily carrying the ring for his father.

It made Va.s.sily a stepbrother to Alex. Immediately after the wedding Va.s.sily returned to the line to hold the Reds back so that the city could be evacuated aboard s.h.i.+ps of the French navy. Alex went aboard a transport reluctantly; they spent his mother's wedding night in the crowded salon listening to the cras.h.i.+ng of the guns. She did not see her new husband again until three weeks later when they were reunited in Istanbul: the newlywed Devenkos, General Deniken, Alex and his stepbrother Va.s.sily, the hero of Sebastopol. With a force which at the end numbered fewer than four hundred men Va.s.sily had kept the Bolsheviks back for a vital eighteen hours while tens of thousands of refugees had been hurried on board the French s.h.i.+ps and taken away onto the safety of the Black Sea.

Irina said, "It wasn't so long ago you can have forgotten it."

"No." Twenty years but he could still see the horizon lit by the night barrages; he could feel the sucking mud around his feet and taste the bra.s.s of terror on his tongue and he could smell the cold sweat of the refugee mobs clawing at the pa.s.sing trains. The empty-eyed faces of the soldiers slogging back toward the front; the gnash of Renault ambulances and Daimler-Benz staff cars beating through the cobbled streets, scattering pedestrians; the screams of agony, the stink of suppurating death along the rows of old buildings taken over for hospitals; the taste of dog meat and metallic boiled water; the incongruity-he'd never been able to exorcise it from memory-of a piano heard in a rubbled Sebastopol street while dust hung rancid in the city and 75 mm sh.e.l.ls rumbled against the quays. He hadn't been able to hear Tchaikovsky's first Piano Concerto since then without nausea.

"No-I haven't forgotten."

"You've an obligation."

"To a gang of baccarat and croquet players? To a pack of foolish Romanov Pretenders spending their pointless lives at each other's throats to claim a throne that doesn't exist any more?"

"To your brother for one."

"Va.s.sily Ilyavitch is not my brother."

"There was a time when you were proud to think he was."

"That's an empty refrain, isn't it? The past doesn't exist now-not for any of us. There's no St. Petersburg, there's only Leningrad."

An obsequious knock: the boy wheeled in the cart, fussed a while, backed his way out.

Irina lifted the steel domes off the dinner plates. He saw chilled grey Beluga caviar in a bowl at the center. Irina said, "They claim it's beef stroganoff but I shouldn't expect too much."

"I'm used to the Bachelor Officers' mess hall."

"How awful."

He drew up two chairs and when he seated her there was an electric contact where her hair brushed his hand. He went around the table and sat-watching her.

She didn't chatter; she fell upon the meal. She had always been hearty about everything she did.

She was his own age-thirty-four-almost to the month; but you couldn't know that by looking at her. Her stunning beauty was in the bones more than the complexion and objectively there would be no way to tell whether she was twenty-five or forty-five.

She was the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever known.

She said, "Is there some particular part of my face that fascinates you?"

"All of it."

"You're still a devastatingly attractive man yourself. You've improved with age. Those sprigs of grey around the ears-tres distingue. And you've never looked so fit."

"It must be a product of the spartan life."

"Now you're being silly." She had a rakish look-mischievous. "That American woman was quite right. You put one in mind of Gary Cooper."

It startled him and she laughed at him. "In one of your letters to Prince Leon. He repeated it to me with great amus.e.m.e.nt."

"How is he?"

"I think the leg bothers him more than it used to. He's not young you know-he's sixty-four, a year older than the Grand Duke. He hasn't spoken your name in my presence. He's taken it for granted you and I didn't want to be reminded of each other."

He let it slip by because he wasn't ready to confront it quite yet. He finished the entree, hardly having tasted it; he took a breath. "And Va.s.sily? I suppose I should ask."

She said, "I haven't seen Va.s.sily in several years. Not since the last time you saw us together."

He was amazed and did not try to hide it.

Irina said, "Va.s.sily wants a pa.s.sionate peasant woman-he wants devotion, not questions. I'm far to abrasive for him, I don't fit his conception of what a soldier's woman should be."

She pushed her plate aside. "It wasn't very good, was it? The stroganoff. I did warn you. The coffee's still warm-would you like a cup?"

He waited until she had poured; they took their cups back to the stuffed chairs at the coffee table. Then he said, "It's time you came to the point. You've implied you're acting as an emissary from Va.s.sily and now you tell me you haven't seen him in years. It's time you sorted it out."

"I suppose it is. They want you to come back. They need you-they need your skills. As a soldier."

"What the devil for?"

"They're planning a war."

Finally he said, "You'd better tell me about it."

"I can't." She spread her hands. The half-smile was directed against herself. "I'm only a messenger. They don't let women into their councils."

"Then why send you if you can't explain it to me?"

"I'm only here to ask you to come back to Spain and talk to them-listen to them."

"They could have asked me that in a letter."

"Would you have gone?"

"I'm a soldier, Irina. I can't just pick up and leave my duty post."

"There, you see? That's why they sent me. To seduce you into trailing along with me back to Spain. Baron Oleg-you know him well enough. Something convinced him that I need only drop a handkerchief and any man in sight will become my adoring slave."

"You haven't dropped a handkerchief, really. Have you?"

"No."

"Did you tell Oleg you would?"

"I suppose I was evasive. I didn't promise anything-but he drew his own conclusions when I agreed to come."

"Why did you?"

"I wanted to see you." She finished her coffee and put the cup down in the saucer. "Don't stiffen up. That's not a handkerchief. I'm being as honest as I'm able. I'm trying not to mislead you."

"I'm puzzled, Irina. Who is it you're betraying-Oleg or me?"

"Neither. I've brought you his message. I urge you to go to Spain."