City of Shadows (60 page)

dynasty ended by the illness of a little boy.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sweetheart, I’m so damned sorry.”

“What for?” She opened her eyes.“Finding us? For saving our lives? Being magnificent?”

Great-Grandmama, he was thinking. Queen Victoria.“Takes some getting used to,” he said.

“Don’t think about it,” she said. “I’m the woman who loves you.”

The workmen had picked up their knapsacks and were leaving, say
ing, Good night. As he passed, one of them said, “You all right, missus?”

She smiled at him. “Very well, thank you. And you?”

The café owner went to the door, struggling with the drunk to throw him out. He came back, dusting his hands. “You two going to be much longer?”

“Probably,” Schmidt said. “We’ll have two more glasses of schnapps.”

“And coffee,” Esther said.

“I looked up ‘pogrom’ in the dictionary once,” Schmidt said. “ ‘An or
ganized massacre in Russia for the annihilation of any body or class: es
pecially one directed against Jews.’ Pogroms don’t have to be against Jews.”

“Two pogroms,” she said.“The House of Special Purpose. Then one against Rosa’s people. Oh, don’t look at me like that. What has changed?”

“Nothing. It just . . . takes some getting used to. I’ll get over it. I still want to get you into bed.”

“Good,” she said briskly. “And if you don’t mind, I’d rather we didn’t settle in England. Admirable country, I’m sure, but Uncle George could have offered us asylum and didn’t—too afraid of a revolution on his own account.”

Uncle George, he thought. King George V of England.

He said, “Suppose Anna wins her case, gets the inheritance?”

“She can have it. But she won’t win; the family will never let her. I doubt if they’d have let even me have it if I’d declared myself—I haven’t seen most of them since I was a little girl. They quarreled with Mama.” She gritted her teeth, ugly again. “They left her isolated, suffering for Alexei, with only Rasputin to turn to.”

She’s seen history, he thought. Legend happened to her.

“It was a terrible thing I did,” she said, “letting Anna happen. But at the time...Nick would have dropped her like hot coals if he’d known she was a fake, and it seemed a way of getting her out of that awful asy
lum. I would have taken her away, but I couldn’t support her.” Esther shook her head. “And she
was
Anastasia—more like something that had come out of the House of Special Purpose than I was—she
wanted
to be Anastasia.”

“At least you speak Russian,” he said.

She was watching his face. “Don’t,” she begged. “Don’t even think of it. I don’t want it, I don’t
want
it. It was a fraud—we ruled one-sixth of the world’s land by a confidence trick. We conned one hun
dred and thirty million people into giving us allegiance. I remember riding in Aunt Xenia’s troika and scattering coins to the poor as we passed and thinking how kind we were being. They took off their caps and bowed to us. They should have had us arrested.” She shrugged. “In the end they did.”

He toasted her in schnapps. She toasted him back and drank her coffee. The radio commentator, temporarily exhausted, was allowing his microphone to pick up the passing strains of another “Deutschland über Alles.”

“Will she be all right?” she asked. “Sins escalate. Oh, God, how they escalate. Mine did. Suppose Hitler does use her?”

“I doubt he will in the end,” Schmidt said. “Anyway, Mrs. Noah, if there’s one thing I’m sure about in this whole fucking business, it’s that little Anna Anderson will survive Adolf Hitler.”

She grinned at him, astonished and astonishing. “She will, won’t she? I do love you, Schmidt. Who do you love?”

“Esther Solomonova,” he said.

“That’s right.” She cleared her plate. “I feel better. I’m going to miss German herring.”

“Think you can make it now?”

The grand duchess Anastasia put on her coat, tied her scarf more tightly around her head, and picked up her handbag. She leaned over and kissed him. “We’ll make it,” she said.

In turning
the story of the woman, Anna Anderson, who called herself Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of the last czar of Russia, into a thriller, I have taken great liberties with her life. But then, so did she.

I think she was a fraud; the DNA tests after her death showed that she was. As one of my characters says of the slaughter of the eleven people, the czar’s family and his retainers, at Ekaterinburg in 1918: “Nobody got out of that cellar.” It’s fairly certain that Anna was, in fact, a Pole called Franziska Schanskowska.

Nevertheless, she was a mystery. Her knowledge of the Romanovs was minute and the impassioned, ongoing belief of her supporters that she was in truth the grand duchess is understandable—photographs show a marked likeness between the two. Also, rumors that there were at least two survivors from the massacre began very early—Romanov impostors were begin
ning to present themselves in the 1920s. Even after investigation of the mine the corpses were thrown into, only nine bodies were discovered.

Prince Nick, Esther, Natalya, and Schmidt, et al., are fictional,
of course. As far as one can tell, the only person who groomed Anna to play the part of Anastasia was Anna herself. There were no murders in her life apart from the fact that she lived through the years of one of the greatest serial killers of all time, Adolf Hitler. And from what is known of the real Franziska, she came from Pomerania and not Polesie, which is the birthplace I’ve given her.

However, what I
don’t
think I have distorted too much is Anderson’s character. Despite severe illnesses, mental and physical, she was amaz
ingly tough and lived until she was eighty-two years old, fraying the nerves and fortunes of nearly everyone who helped her as well as the man she eventually married. She was an anti-Semite and even if she
didn’t
meet Hitler—and as far as I can make out we have only her word that she did—she certainly approved of him.

It is not an anachronism to present the SS as more or less taking over the Prussian police in January 1933, despite the fact that their official formation wasn’t until April. That particular section of the SS had been infiltrating the police force for some time, even if it did not use the name “Gestapo.”

I owe three people for help on this book. Sarah Molloy, enduring friend. Emma Norman, for her intuitive and exhaustive research. And Helen Heller of Heller Agency, who provided the basic plot and who, being the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of thrillers that she is, so bril
liantly and patiently engineered me through it. Thank you.

Designed by Judith Abbate/Abbate Design Jacket design by Marc J. Cohen Jacket photograph by Marc Yankus