City of Shadows (23 page)

At the Green Hat, even in those terrible minutes at Charlottenburg, she’d been aware of being warmed, cared for, tucked in, as she hadn’t for many cold years.

But...Schmidt the married man, she thought. It was all over him, in the neat darn on the back of his sock, the home-knitted pullover.

In the hallway the bridge between them could have been measured in inches and the chasm below it in miles; him with his bloody niceness, her with her scars and disrepute. And pride. So she’d kicked the bridge in there and then—better for both of them.

She went upstairs to grieve for Natalya. There was time now.

12

It was dark
by the time they reached number 42 Pariser Platz,

and they kept making mistakes.

“Felix Yusupov?”

A man wearing a top hat and standing on a pair of steps out
side the house stopped trimming the ivy decorating its frontage by torchlight. “I am Count Rutkowski. Ring damn bell.”

They rang it. “Felix Yusupov?”

“What you want?”

“Police.”

The youth who’d opened the door staggered. “No, no. No, no.” He pressed the back of one hand to his forehead and used the other to prop himself up against the doorpost. “You cannot have him. Take me, take me in his place.” He began to cry.

He was pushed out of the way by an oak of a man wearing cavalry boots and an apron, balancing a tray of tea on one enor
mous hand.

“Felix Yusupov?”

The man snorted. “Do I look like? I am bastard cook.”

Willi pointed at the weeping figure still clinging to the doorpost. “Who’s that?”

“Bastard majordomo.” He kicked open a door to the left of the en
trance hall. “Get in.”

They got in. The room was full of the elephantine furniture typical of rented nineteenth-century houses, but somebody had touched it with grace. A lighted candelabrum picked out the richness of Persian rugs and Indian shawls thrown with apparent carelessness over chairs. From an enormous birdcage of white wood fretted like lace, a gaudily colored parrot stared at them and said hello in English. The smell of good cigars mingled with incense.

For a man who, if Potrovskov were to be believed, was down on his luck, this prince lived in style. The mild, painted eyes of the late czar looked down from a massive carved and gilded frame that alone, Schmidt reckoned, would fetch enough on the international antique market to keep himself and Hannelore in comfort for months.

He touched the latch of a jeweled egg standing on the mantel shelf. Immediately its top flew up, there was a click, and a tiny train began running round the lines of a miniature golden track.

A voice from the doorway said, “Pretty, isn’t it? Fabergé made it for me. One of the baubles one managed to save when one left. Alas, one fears it will have to go.”

Schmidt shut the lid. “Felix Yusupov? We’re the police. I’m Inspector Schmidt, this is Sergeant Ritte.” He was tired of strange and beautiful Russians—one of whom at Bismarck Allee had just given him a meta
phorical kick in the balls.

This man was the most beautiful of them all, if not the strangest. He was wearing lipstick and a skirt and blouse under a quilted dressing gown.

Willi, who’d heard the rumor, positioned himself with his back firmly against a painted cupboard.

“My dears,” Yusupov said, “why does nobody tell me these things? I thought you were here for the meeting. Never mind, let’s make ourselves comfy. And you must have a drink. What would you like? We’ve run out of champagne, I fear, but one always feels a Bloody Mary starts the day well, and I’m sure you do, too.” His large eyes rested on Willi
standing like a guardsman against the cupboard, his thumbs in regimental line with his trousers. “You, my darling, look like a beer man.”

He went to the door and shouted, “Beer and bloody vodkas, Dmitri! He turned back to Willi, who was now pressing so hard against the cupboard it was tilting backward, and smiled at his discomfiture. “Big, isn’t he?”

“Very big,” Schmidt said, cheered; there’d be weeks of mileage to be got out of this. Himself, he found this declaration of effeminacy inof
fensive because the man was so obviously at ease with it. Unlike Potrov
skov, Yusupov was not straining after effect; outrageousness was his environment, and though the world that had pampered him in it was gone, he carried it with him, instilling it into this ordinary Berlin house and making Inspector Schmidt and Sergeant Ritte the oddities.

Lipstick apart, he was naturally and pleasantly good-looking, fine skin over fine bones, with a set to his jaw and mouth that suggested in
telligence. His German was almost accentless, and he spoke it with the soft
g
of the Berliner. Only the eyes showed that he was mad.

Could he cut somebody’s throat?

He’d cut Rasputin’s. Stabbed him anyway. But that had been in the fantastically colored, highly charged, onion-roofed court of a fairy-tale empire where an insane and mystical Russian peasant had acquired too much power over the czar and czarina, alienating them from their people, and where this equally insane prince had, according to Schmidt’s re
searches, assassinated him in the hope of nullifying said influence and bringing said czar and czarina to their senses.

Killing a little nightclub stripper with no political pretensions was hardly in that league. However, it couldn’t be ruled out.

He began his questions.

Yusupov fielded them all, sitting on the arm of a sofa, swinging his feet in their turned-up Turkish slippers, alternately addressing his replies to the parrot and Willi, whom he teased by flickering his fingers at him every now and again in flirtatious hellos.

“My darling, but I was at a party. At the Green Hat. You must know the Hat, it’s run by a perfectly piggy parvenu called Potrovskov—I say, that’s rather good, isn’t it? All those
p
’s. Oh, you’ve met him. Well, just ask him. I didn’t move all night. Oh, yes, I did. Some pals and I went
on to a truly awful dive called the Pink Parasol—another one of the parvenu’s, I believe. Got a teeny bit tiddly, between you and me, and feel perfectly awful this morning.”

“It’s evening,” Schmidt said.

“Is it?
How
time flies. Where’s Dmitri with those drinks?”

Dmitri didn’t appear; neither did the drinks. “He never does a
thing
I tell him.” At one point a woman almost as beautiful as Yusupov, and similarly dressed, floated in, picked up the parrot cage, and carried it out. No introductions were made, and Schmidt was left to assume that she was Yusupov’s wife, which, again if his researches were correct, made her the late czar’s niece. He must tell Willi that they had a child.

Did he know a Natalya Tchichagova? Or an Anna Anderson? An Es
ther Solomonova?

One knew so many people, but no, one couldn’t recollect those names.

Did he recognize this? Schmidt gave him the note that had been de
livered to 29 Bismarck Allee to let him read it. He’d fetched it from Alexanderplatz; the paper had been examined for fingerprints and was now acquiring Yusupov’s.

“Not my writing, dear,” he said, handing it back. “Far too neat.”

Schmidt tucked it away and produced a photograph of Natalya’s face taken by the Forensics Department. “Do you recognize this young woman?”

“I don’t . . . oh,
oh,
she’s dead, isn’t she?”

“She was murdered on Saturday night. We believe she responded to that note.”

“Well, I didn’t write it, dear. Didn’t kill her either. Who is she?”

“Natalya Tchichagova. She’s Russian.”

Yusupov tutted. “Sometimes I think they’re trying to wipe us all out.” He looked at the photo more closely. “Poor little soul. No, I don’t know her.” He gave it back. “No, I can’t help you.”

“What do you think the note means by ‘authenticate you’? Who or what would you be in a position to authenticate?”

“One authenticates things all the time, darling. I’m a positive
guru
among our poor scattered community. The big auction houses are con
stantly onto me to tell them whether this necklace or that was the same
one I last saw on a bosom being whisked about the czar’s ballroom. Some poor devil’s having to sell it to stay alive, you see, and my word adds to its provenance, which in turn puts up the price. I
do
know my jewels.”

“And people? Do you have to authenticate people?”

“Oh indeed. The nouveaux riches love employing impoverished aristo
crats, and I’m always being asked is my chauffeur really the grand duke this or is my maid really the countess that. Hideously embarrassing, and
so
banal, so
offensive.
Only the other day in Paris, somebody actu
ally turned up with a spotty youth they insisted was the czarevitch.” He sighed at Schmidt’s incomprehension. “The czar’s son, Alexei? This acned wonder, my dear, was supposed to be the heir to all the Russias. Sacrilegious little bastard even had the impertinence to address me as ‘Uncle Felix.’ All the authentication he got from me was the toe of my boot up his carbuncled young ass, I can tell you.”

“And he wasn’t? The heir to all the Russias, I mean?”

“Of course he wasn’t.” The playfulness dropped away. “Nobody got out of that cellar.”

“Cellar?” Keep asking questions.

“They were slaughtered in a cellar in Ekaterinburg.” Yusupov got up and turned his back to them. “All of them—the czar, the czarina, the grand duchesses, little Alexei.” He was silent for a minute, drumming his fingers on the mantel shelf. When he faced them again, he’d got himself under control. “Eleven souls—three servants were with them. Butchered like cattle by the fucking Bolsheviks, my dear. But for some reason the myth persists that one or the other of them got away—hence our adolescent im
postor hoping to get his dirty little hands on the remains of the royal for
tune. Really, the things people will sink to. Necrophilia gone mad.”

“Is there one?”

“Fortune?” Yusupov shrugged. “There are rumors of money in En
gland, but I doubt if dear King George will let it out of his clutches. He did fuck-all to rescue the Romanovs—and the poor czar his own first cousin. Can you believe it? His own
cousin,
and he wouldn’t give him sanctuary. His Imperial Majesty Cunt George, I call him. I tell you, once we’ve got Russia back from the Bolshies, I’ve a good mind to in
vade England.”

They all believe that, Schmidt thought. He hadn’t yet met a Russian émigré who wasn’t convinced that his or her exile was merely tempo
rary, that Communism was a passing fad, and that within a year or two their subjects would be pleading, cap in hand, for them to come back. He stood up.

“You’re not going? Won’t you stay for the meeting? People are coming by to listen to me tell the tale of how I killed Rasputin. Everyone clam
ors to hear it—I really ought to sell tickets. You’d love it, big boy.” This was to Willi. “So
gory.
”

He stood on his steps to wave them off.

“God save us.” Willi was still sweating. “You should’ve arrested him.”

“He didn’t kill her, Willi.”

“Doesn’t matter. Thing like that ought to be behind bars.”

“He’d probably enjoy it. Actually, I thought he was rather brave.” Schmidt savored the moment. “And he liked you
very
much, big boy.”

“You bastard.”

“ ‘Sir’ to you, Sergeant.”

“You bastard,
sir.
”

On the way back to Alexanderplatz, they stopped at the cabstand to ask Count Chodsko one more question and receive an answer.

The canteen, which was supposed to offer refreshment around the clock, had closed for lack of anything to refresh anyone with. A water
cooler had been placed on an otherwise empty counter for those with a thirst.

“Go home,” Schmidt told Willi. “Wait a minute—before you do, try to find me a dictionary. I’ll be upstairs.” He settled himself in his office. It was cold and smelled of the cigarette butts piled in his ashtray. Han
nelore would be waiting supper for him, if she had any, but there were reports to read and another to make before the night ended.

He was hungry, and his brain ached with Russian voices clamoring for its attention, most of them saying significant things. Overriding all of them was the flattest:
“Because every now and again he fucks me.”

Uncalled for. An unprovoked attack. Like a bloody sniper bullet. He’d merely been showing concern for her—and why he’d felt it in the first place, he couldn’t now remember. Potrovskov was welcome to her; they could fuck each other until their eyes popped, and good luck to ’em.

Willi came in with the dictionary. “Pinched it off the desk of some

little bastard in Accounts trying to improve himself.” “Thanks, Willi. Good night.” “Boss . . .” “What?” “All these bloody foreigners today ...We’re getting overrun.” Schmidt regarded him cautiously. “We’re not going to be discussing