City of Shadows (13 page)

“But the children...the children?”
Gilliard had begged.

“The children have suffered the same fate as their parents,” Sokolov told him. He convinced Gilliard by showing him an odd collection of coins and nails and bits of string he’d found among the detritus.

Esther said steadily, “It was the stuff Alexei used to keep in his pockets.”

For a while the sitting room was silent.

“No mention of my ma and pa?”

Esther shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Natalya shouted, “What about that, then, Your Imperial Highness? How did you escape being shot and cut up? Fairies took you away, did they? Angels flew you off?”

“I don’t know!” Anna shouted back. “I don’t know how. I faint. Every
thing is blue and noise. Everything . . . blood everywhere. I did not know days. I was mad, I think. The Tchaikovsky brothers rescue me.”

“Who?”

“You don’t believe, but is true. Peasants. They say they hide me. Took me to Romania, I remember Bucharest—was terrible,
terrible.
Then they disappear, first Alexander Tchaikovsky, then Serge—the Bolshe
viki kill them, I think, because they would not tell where I was. The Cheka looked for me to shoot me. I am alone, so alone.” She put her clenched hands up to her eyes and stood. “I don’t tell more. You do not believe. Nobody believe.”

They heard the slam of her bedroom door.

After a while Natalya said, “She’ll have to do better than that.” The stove sizzled as she spit on it. “Tchaikovsky brothers. Tchaikovsky, I ask you—I bet it’s the only Russian name she knows.” She began to cry. “Oh, Ma,” she said. “Oh, poor Pa. What did they do to you?”

Since Nick brought
most of their supplies and the milkman, baker, and coalman delivered the rest, there was no necessity for the three women to set foot outside the house. If Prince Nick had been given his
way, they wouldn’t have. “I’m not having Nasha slipping off to gossip with her pals at the Parrot. You see she stays in.”

“Damned if I do. I’m not a prison guard.” The autumn was glorious; Esther wasn’t going to let it go by without Natalya or herself breathing some of its air.

“Okay, but she goes out, you go with her.”

It suited them both: Natalya to get away from Anna, Esther to get away from the tension the other two women created when they were to
gether. Anna didn’t want to come—“Cheka will see me.” She was equally scared to be left alone, and they had to ask Frau Schinkel if Anna could sit with her while they were out. It meant that the outings had to be restricted to the daytime, because Anna refused point-blank to be left, even in Frau Schinkel’s company, when darkness fell.

Kurfürstendamm, the great street that had rivaled anything in the city center and had once been described as “the coffeehouse of Eu
rope,” wasn’t the fun it had been. Due to inflation its shops, theaters, and cinemas were beginning to shut down. For a while the two women were able to order coffee in one or another of its cafés and eke it out for an hour or more while sitting at one of the pavement tables, but when the price of a cup became more than Esther earned in a week, that lux
ury was denied them and they took to walking instead.

Then the weather changed. Rain and wind became incessant, um
brellas were blown inside out. They were forced to stay indoors, a situ
ation that fed the nerves, especially Natalya’s; she would tense the moment Anna came into the room, eyes glinting sideways at her, wait
ing for a wrong move. And a wrong move was inevitable. Anna wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, judge the situation. She made the ill-considered remark, continually left the place in a mess.

Esther found herself yelling at them to shut up—and realized she was more on edge than either of them. Next Saturday would be October 21.

Stop it, she told herself. You are not going to live in fear, not again.

Nevertheless, she reverted to panic when the telephone shrilled on Friday evening and she walked into the living room to find that Natalya had answered it and was talking to somebody. “Yeah, just the same,” Natalya was saying drearily. Seeing Esther, she said, “Got to go,” and hung the receiver back on the wall.

“Who was that?” Esther demanded.

“Friend of mine.”

“You gave him this number?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’m not allowed to talk to a pal now?”

“You gave him this number?”

“Yes I did,” Natalya said, mouthing it. “Pal of mine at the Parrot. I was keeping in touch. I can do that, can’t I? Stuck in this fucking tomb? And I gave him the number, not the bloody address.”

“I told you,” Esther said, “phone out by all means but nobody phones in.”

“You think your guy can find us through a telephone number? What is he, psychic? You’re paranoid, you are.”

She pushed past Esther. “I’m going to bed. Fuck-all else to do.”

Esther was left in an empty room. He’s not my guy, she thought. He’s Anna’s, and Anna is my responsibility. I’ve got to be paranoid for her.

Was
she paranoid? Was she scaring herself with an entity that didn’t exist?
Could
you find out an address from a telephone number? Maybe not. But maybe.

Stop it, she told herself. Just stop it. It’s being cooped up in this god
damned flat, it’s making us all paranoid one way or another.

Nevertheless, she called Nick at the club to remind him to send Theo around on Saturday.

He was irritated that she was holding him to it. The Hat was going to be busy on Saturday. The von Schwerin boys were bringing a large party; Theo would be needed.

“Find another bouncer for the night,” she told him.

“ ‘Oh, Nick, it’s the sixth weekend,’ ” he said, mimicking her. “ ‘Our friend’s been saving up his pfennigs for the train fare to come and knock Anna off.’ Sweetheart, I don’t like to tell you this, but the Cheka ain’t that poor.”

“Neither are you,” she said. “Find another bouncer.”

Natalya was as caustic as Nick, but by now Esther had the bit be
tween her teeth. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “Maybe there’s nobody after Anna. But if I’m not ...well, believe me, you don’t want to meet him on the stairs.”

Big Theo, a hat pulled over his eyes, was unloaded in Bismarckstrasse on Saturday morning, and Esther, watching out for him, saw that Nick had given him instructions to make sure he wasn’t followed. As he turned the corner and lumbered up the avenue, he paused to crouch be
hind every tree and peer around its trunk back to the way he’d come— about as conspicuous in Bismarck Allee as a hippopotamus.

She explained his duties to him. “I just want you here as a watch
man. I don’t want you hurt again. If somebody knocks on the street door, ask who it is before you open it. If he hears a man’s voice, he’ll probably run away.”

“He the same fella stuck me at the Hat, he won’t do no running. I’m tearing his legs off.”

“Oh, God.”

Explaining Theo to Frau Schinkel wasn’t easy. “One of Fraulein Tchichagova’s admirers from her theater days has been trying to find her new address. He may be ...overenthusiastic, and we think it would be a good idea if only Herr Theo answers the front door for the next two days.”

Esther’s more fevered imaginings involved a knife cutting Frau Schinkel’s capacious throat unless Anna was handed over.

Frau Schinkel’s distrust of foreigners, modern young women, and theater people was confirmed. If renters hadn’t been hard to come by— her second floor was still empty—the girls in 29c would have been out in an instant.

As it was, Theo charmed her. He carried coal, replaced a lightbulb too high for normal reach, and played choo-choo in the hall with Frau Schinkel’s grandchildren when her daughter visited on Saturday after
noon. He was even given supper and only returned, replete, to 29c and his bed on the living room sofa in the evening.

Apart from the family visit, the one time the front doorbell rang all day was when a parcel arrived for Frau Schinkel by the second post. Esther, hearing it and going to the kitchen window to check, called down to Theo to answer it, more for the look of the thing than because she really believed that Anna’s would-be assassin had dressed up as a postman.

The night passed peaceably to the tune of Theo’s snoring.

Sunday came and went without incident.
“Told you,” Natalya said.
When Nick turned up to fetch Theo on Monday morning, he said

nothing so loudly that Esther told him to shut up. She felt like a fool. On the next sixth weekend, December 2 and 3, she didn’t bother

with precautions. Nothing happened then either.

On an evening
toward the end of December, Nick arrived with a large suitcase as well as the usual supplies. “Here’s a cache to keep you ladies in style while I’m away. Don’t spend it all at once.” He opened the suitcase, revealing an interior stuffed with high-denomination German banknotes.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m taking Eloise away for Christimas. Boris is taking care of the clubs. Eloise hates the cold—she’s warm-blooded.” He rolled his eyes. “Boy, is she warm-blooded.”

Finding that his reception lacked enthusiasm, he said, “And great news, Esther. Come the New Year, we’re going to launch the good ship Anastasia. I’ve heard from Aunt Grand Duchess Olga, got her interested. I reckon our girl’s ready now. Where’s Nasha?”

“Out.”

“I told you she wasn’t to go out nights. Where is she?”

“She’s visiting a friend at the Parrot.”

“Shit.”

She let him rave. Natalya, too, had raved; her incarceration
had begun to affect her to a point where Esther feared that if she were closeted with Anna much longer, there would be another murder.

“And while we’re about it, Nick,” she said, “I have to tell you that the day you launch the good ship Anastasia is the day I leave you. I don’t approve. I never have.”

He was quiet for a moment, walking around her. “You studied the secretarial job market lately, Esther?”

“I don’t care.”

He quoted a Russian proverb: “A dog is wiser than a woman. It doesn’t bark at its master.”

“I still don’t care.”

Now he was anxious. “You wouldn’t give her away, though, would you?”

“She’ll give herself away.”

“Want to bet?” He recovered his good humor. “We’ll see. You don’t go to Tula with your own samovar.” He was full of old Russian proverbs tonight—she’d never known what that one meant. He put his arm around her. “We’re still friends, ain’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Of course we are. Of course we are. You and me, we’ve come a long way together. Just keep our Anna safe till I get back. A couple of weeks, that’s all I’m asking. Can you do that?”

“I suppose I’ll have to.”

“That’s my girl.”

Soon after he’d left, Natalya came home, screaming with rage. “Well, that’s done it! I can’t go back. I burned my bridges for that bitch, and now I’m stuck with her. I’ll kill Nick when I see him!”

“What on earth’s the matter?”

“I mean there isn’t a job for me anymore. The Parrot’s closing down. Oh, yes.” Esther had opened her mouth. “He’s keeping the Parasol and the Hat, but he’s closing the Parrot. Janni told me. Isn’t paying its way what with inflation or some goddam thing.” She tore off her hat and threw it across the room. “ ‘Double pay, Nasha. Help the grand duchess to her rightful position, Nasha. Make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Nasha.’ He never said, ‘If it don’t work, you’re on the street, Nasha.’ Sneaky, slippery, swindling bastard!”

Esther agreed with her. Nick hadn’t mentioned his intention to close the Purple Parrot to her either. Naturally Natalya was panicking; Nick was taking away her safety net.

She put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “There’s always a place for talent. There are other clubs.”

“And I’ve been in ’em,” Natalya said. “Smoky little cellars where the customers put paper money in your spangles and stick their finger up your crotch while they’re doing it. The Parrot was
respectable.
”

Probably why it’s closing, Esther thought. As the mark’s value went down, so did standards.

“Well, I ain’t going back to that,” Natalya said, “I’m an artiste, and I’m going to be a movie star.” She shook herself free of Esther’s arm. “That cow better turn out to be Anastasia, because if she don’t,
I’m
ap
plying for the job.”

Esther was left alone, watching rain splatter against the windows. The year had been spent concocting a lie; it was as if time itself had be
come weary of it and broken down, exhausted, leaving them all trapped in a dimension that didn’t move.

For someone whose
future was reliant on Anna—perhaps because it
was
reliant on Anna—Natalya was incapable of dealing patiently with her. Came the evening when Anna once more got up from the table without clearing it and, called back by Esther, refused. “Is not for me. Let her do it.”