City of Shadows (4 page)

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 dis
turbed.”

“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 appear
ing at the window, an unfamiliar doctor entering the ward at night, es
pecially 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 ap
pear.”

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 obvi
ously had. Perhaps people had commented on the likeness. Perhaps Clara’s recognition of her as a grand duchess had acted as a catalyst, al
lowing 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.” Fu
riously, 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 re
port 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 leg
end. “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 week
end 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 pic
nic. 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, al
most 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.

Theo was chased from the ward, pursued by lustful catcalls from some of the beds, and Esther helped Anna into the dress she’d bought for her, the prettiest she’d been able to find in Kurfürstendamm’s newest and most expensive store. Overlarge hospital slippers went oddly with it—Esther hadn’t been able to guess Anna’s shoe size—but since the woman’s legs wobbled under the unaccustomed exercise of walking, they were just as well.

They picnicked in a summerhouse in the asylum’s neat and scented rose garden. The huge figure of Big Theo on guard blocked light from the doorway, and the sun came through the slats in horizontal stripes to shine on the contents of a hamper that Nick’s chef had filled with deli
cacies fit for a Russian princess—caviar, blinis, pelmeni—“so’s your Imperial Highness can feel at home.”

Anna looked at it with suspicion and, somewhat wisely in view of a stomach inured to hospital food, chose a chicken leg and nibbled at it cautiously with her canines.

Sniffing a choice of champagne and “good old Russian kvass,” Anna—again wisely in the opinion of Esther, who’d always loathed kvass—agreed to sip a glass of champagne. Esther herself took the long-forgotten opportunity of wolfing down blinis stuffed with caviar and sour cream.

Nick was tremendous—talking, laughing, painting the future, recall
ing happy Romanov state occasions of the past, trying to draw some royal memory or acknowledgment from his guest.

Nothing. The great violet eyes studied him and Esther, and rested, perhaps with comfort, on Theo’s back, but the sunken mouth didn’t open.

It was only when Nick had admitted defeat and he and Esther were packing the food away that a soft voice said, “Want a dog.”

Nick actually looked around in case somebody else had slipped in through the summerhouse slats. “Sure, sure, Your Imperial Highness, you have all the dogs you want. You ready to leave with us? I got the car outside.”

Her Imperial Highness wasn’t ready. “I go back in now,” she said.

With Theo’s bulk covering them, they helped her back to the hospital.

“You reckon we’re making progress, Esther?” Nick asked on the way home.

“I don’t know. At some time or another, that girl was terrified by some man—raped, probably. She can’t get rid of the memory. It haunts her.”

Enslavement to memory was something Esther knew about; freeing herself from her own was an everyday struggle. Sometimes she won, sometimes she didn’t.

“Yeah, well I can’t spend all my time in a loony bin. I got a business to run. What the grand duchess needs is sessions on her own with a nice lady companion like she was used to, discuss Old Russia, improve her German, girly talk, win her confidence—all that stuff.”

“Me?”

“You.”

Esther sighed, but he was probably right; with her distrust of men, Anna’s rehabilitation was more likely to be achieved by a woman. “Am I going to be paid extra for this?”

“For spending afternoons chatting? You want extra?”

She was at least allowed the use of his car and, with Theo beside her, drove it every afternoon to Dalldorf, returning them both to the club in the evening, where she caught up on her typing and translation, not for
getting to point out that doing so kept her working into the early hours.

Anna was content to leave her bed as long as Theo was by her side and they didn’t venture too far from the main building. Even then her eyes were never still, always aware and looking for movement. A rustle made by quarreling birds in the bushes could make her curl up like a hedgehog.

The sun continued to shine, it was nice for Esther to get out of an airless office to sit in the asylum’s immaculate gardens—and the ses
sions with the unknown woman were compelling.

For one thing, she had no curiosity. Esther’s attempts to fill in for her the years that had been spent in a hospital ward were useless. The rev
olution that had made Germany into a unified, if shaky, democracy, the reparations demanded by the victors of the Great War that were bleed
ing it dry—these things were met with complete lack of interest.

The latest fashions evinced a flicker of response, but it soon went out. She seemed to have taken Prince Nick at face value as someone who’d come into her life with the intention of helping her, but she was incurious as to why.

“What
do
you want to talk about?” Esther asked desperately.

“Russia.”

“The revolution?”

“No. Was bad. Old Russia. Romanovs, tell me about Romanovs.”

Even then she showed more interest in the magazine articles Esther brought her on the subject than in Esther’s stilted attempts to describe royal state occasions.

Her German was ungrammatical and she spoke it with an accent Esther couldn’t identify. Any inquiries about her past—how she’d come to jump into the canal and why—were met with silence, and the
day Esther persisted with them ended in Anna’s demand that she be

taken back to her ward.

Esther watched her go.