City of Shadows (8 page)

It always was.

From this window she could see the gardens of the houses behind. Along the row a maid was hanging out washing and talking to two chil
dren on a seesaw. From farther on came the whir of blades where a man was mowing his lawn. It was all very comforting.

She unpacked for herself and Anna. The girl, still unnaturally tran
quil from whatever drug it was she’d been given at Dalldorf, went straight to bed.

“You’ll be safe here,” Esther told her, tucking her in.

“Where the pretty lights? And the bears?”

“They were at Nick’s club. We had to spend the night there.”

“I like them.” Anna closed her eyes.

Esther went back into the living room to go to the kitchen, welcom
ing its silence.

The kitchen was clean and sparse—in the days when Frau Schinkel and her family had been able to live in the whole house, it had been a bedroom. Now decorated with stiff oilcloth curtains, its window gave onto a view of the street below.

Esther opened the window, letting in a smell of sunny dust scented by the avenue’s flowering lime trees. Below, a woman waited for her dog to finish sniffing a tree trunk while she chatted across the road to the bookseller washing down his shop door. A family of father, mother, and two children, prayer books in hand, was on its way to church.

So bourgeois, she thought, so safe. In Moabit you were never safe; people lived too close to the border between survival and starvation. Since the advent of the Brownshirts, there was no protection either from a jackbooted invasion that left broken heads and windows in its wake.

But here ...she thanked God for the German middle class. No bears here. They’d never get past Frau Schinkel.

And there’d been at least one good thing from last night: she carried a healing memory of the concerned eyes of the policeman who’d sat
beside her on the stairs. A stranger, a man whose name she didn’t

know, but kind. She wished she hadn’t had to lie to him.

As she turned to go back into the living room, her head exploded.

By now she’d disciplined herself not to crawl on the floor when the noise and pictures started up, but her hands gripped at her knees to try to stop her shaking. She couldn’t hear anything through the crack of gunfire. Time unraveled the pogroms into bits of chaos; one jigsaw piece illuminated dear dead faces, another showed Jews running the gauntlet of rifle butts.

She watched a rabbi’s hat fly from his head, saw him stoop under the blows to pick it up and then continue the run.
It is forbidden to bare the head before the Lord.

She held on to that picture as she groped her way to a chair; it always steadied her.

When it was over, she was left panting and resentful. Goddamn it, she’d been getting better; it had been weeks since the last one. The at
tack on the stairs last night had resurrected an older terror.

For Esther, memory was the devil horned and stinking; she fought it with the desperation of an old-time saint saving his soul in case re
membering destroyed her own. She’d seen what it could do to émigrés who’d suffered, keeping raped women in a depression they couldn’t es
cape, inflicting apathy on the old whose losses had been too great to bear, collapsing the nerve of others so that even a loudly ticking clock was reminiscent of a rifle being cocked—oh, God, she knew that fear. She saw it in Anna; memories could attach themselves to you like ten
tacles sucking away present sunlight, leaving you blundering forever in the grayness of the past.

The bastard, she thought. I’m not letting him resurrect all that. I’m going to forget him. He’s gone. We’re safe now.

In the evening
Nick came by to see how they were settling in, still playing cloak-and-dagger games. “I parked around the corner, made sure I wasn’t followed. Where’s Her Imperial Highness?”

“Anna’s asleep. She’s still groggy.”

“She like the flat? Good, huh?”

“Very nice.”

“Definitely is,” he said. “Cheka assassins won’t find her here.”

One thing about Nick, Esther thought, the tentacles of memory couldn’t suck anything out of his hide. Automatically, tonelessly she said, “It was a bloody burglar.”

“Wake up, kid, it was Bolshies wanting to get her. Who’s out to bump off all the leading White émigrés? Who gunned down Petrovich in Paris the other day?”

“You said it was because Petrovich had been supplying weapons to the White Army.”

“Sure. He was.”

“I don’t see Anna as an arms dealer.”

“But who’ll the White Army put on the imperial throne when it wins Russia back?” He sat down on the sofa and clasped his hands behind his head, luxuriating in the pleasure of it. “I tell you, our Anna’s proba
bly on the Reds’ hit list. Top of it, maybe.” He closed his eyes in joy. “If the Cheka is out to get her, she
is
Anastasia, pure and simple. I’m legal. I’m
completely
helping the rightful heir to the throne.”

“Yes,” a calm voice said, “the Cheka hate me.” Anna, in the doorway of her bedroom, extended her hand. “I am Anastasia.”

Nick got up to go and kiss it. “Your Imperial Highness.”

“Oh, give me strength,” Esther said. This was mutual masturbation. Not merely self-delusion, it was allowing Anna to explain away the real fear that had kept her moribund in Dalldorf for two years.

Anna walked across to the window and, keeping carefully to the edge, peered down into the road.

“They won’t find you here, Highness,” Nick said. “Nobody won’t look for you here. This is good cover, better than a castle with a moat—”

“Cheaper, too,” Esther said.

“And when you make your debut, I get a troop of Chevalier Gardes that nobody can’t get past.” He rubbed his hands. “But we got lot of work to do till then. Help bring back details, make you word-perfect. And I got just the person for it, someone you’ll remember, maybe— Natalya Tchichagova.”

If he expected a reaction, he didn’t get it. Anna stayed looking out the window.

He turned to Esther, relapsing into Russian. “One of my own damn employees,” he said, “I tell you, Esther, this was meant. The saints know about this. I was looking among the émigrés, someone who knew the royal family, and there she was all the time, working as a dancer at the Purple Parrot.”

“A stripper?” Esther said. All Nick’s clubs were next door to one another, though only the Green Hat had a lavish frontage. Entrances to the other two were more discreet and catered to differing clientele— the Parrot’s customers appreciated the female form, while the Pink Parasol’s preferred their entertainers to be male.

“Exotic dancer,” Nick said.

Natalya, it appeared, had been a maid at Czar Nicholas’s and Cza
rina Alexandra’s favorite palace of Czarskoe Selo before the revolution.

“A personal maid?” Esther asked.

“No, no. Brass-cleaning floor sweeper—but she was born there.
Born
there. She can tell Her Highness everything, but completely
everything
. And me thinking I’d have to buy one of the fucking relatives to help coach her. It was meant, Esther,
meant
.”

“She can’t know much,” Esther said. “They wouldn’t have been short of floor-sweeping brass cleaners at Czarskoe Selo.”

“Thousands, they had thousands.” He flapped a hand. “But she knows the geography, she heard the gossip. Servants know everything. Little Anastasia falls over, wets her knickers, puts her tongue out at the king of Bulgaria, that’s big news in the servants’ hall. Stop being a doubt
ing damn Thomas; you get on with your job, and Natalya’ll do hers.”

From the window Anna spoke. “Want a dog,” she said.

“Sure, sure, Highness. Many as you like.” He turned to Esther. “You finished those letters yet?”

“I haven’t even started them.”

“Holy Martyr, woman, I need they should go tomorrow. I’ve set you up in luxury so’s you can sit on your fanny all day? Get on with it.”

He went off, Anna retired to her bedroom, and Esther sat down at her new desk to get on with it.

She put a carbon between two pieces of paper, inserted the sheets behind the typewriter roller, realized she’d lost track of days and didn’t know what date it was, looked it up in her diary, typed it—

It stared back at her. July 30, 1922.
July 30. Yesterday had been July 29.
You come back here late Saturday night, July twenty-ninth
—Clara

Peuthert’s voice was as clear as clear—
you’ll see him standing in the shadows out there, waiting for his chance to kill the grand duchess.

Oh, dear God, had he been? And followed her?

He was taking shape again, coming up the stairs, no burglar now, but a hunting creature intent on the prey he’d been stalking for months . . . thwarted,
but with every intention of hunting again in six weeks’ time.

No.
No,
he wasn’t. “Damn you,” Esther said out loud, “you’re not go
ing to do this to me.” She wasn’t going to be in thrall to some phantasm conjured up by a deluded woman in an asylum.

“You’re just a bloody coincidence,” she told it, and began typing.

“Who’s Madam Midnight?”
Natalya wanted to know on her arrival.

“She’s the landlady, Frau Schinkel. She does the door opening.”

“She sure don’t help ladies with their luggage.” Natalya was puffing.

Esther took the case from her and carried it to the third bedroom. “I’m Esther Solomonova. I’m pleased to meet you.”

Natalya Tchichagova was guarded. “Yeah, I heard about you.” She was pretty. Her bleached-blond hair was severely cut and plastered so that two ends curved around to her cheeks, where they stuck to her skin as if glued. Blue eyes peeped out from between heavily weighted black lashes, and lipstick rose in little twin peaks above her upper lip.

She approved of her bedroom and the fact that she didn’t have to share it. “Classy.” She turned her nose toward the kitchen: “Is that kotlety pozharskie I smell? Ain’t tasted that since Czarskoe Selo.”

Esther had to admit she’d bought it ready-made from the Russian delicatessen near the Inselbrücke. “I’m no cook, I’m afraid.”

“You can afford to buy it cooked, you don’t have to be. I ain’t eaten chicken in a year.”

Esther, honest to a fault, explained that the money came from Nick. His insistence that Anna must be well fed meant that Esther herself was eating better than she had done for a long time, though the sight of the lines at the food shops and of starving beggars on the streets flavored
every mouthful with guilt. Without telling Nick, she was giving some of his money to the Salvation Army canteen around the corner in Cauerstrasse.

“Kotlety pozharskie,” Natalya said fondly. “Maybe this job won’t be so bad.”

“Did you think it would be?”

It appeared that Natalya hadn’t wanted the job of coaching Anna An
derson. Her removal from the stage of the Purple Parrot had caused dis
appointment to an appreciative audience and inspired her resentment. She’d enjoyed stripping. “I’m an artiste,” she said. “One of my regulars says I’m a natural entertainer. He’s going to put me in his next film.”

However, like Esther, she owed her livelihood to Prince Nick and had been persuaded to do the work of tutor by a doubling of her salary.

“Gloomy old area, this,” she said, though. “What am I going to do for nightlife?”

“You aren’t,” Esther told her.

“Yep, that’s what Nick said.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said”—Natalya squeezed her eyes shut—“I was to help Her Im
perial Highness remember everything as happened at Czarskoe Seloe, who did what and where everything was, and if I was a good girl and the grand duchess got what was coming to her, he’d buy me my own film studio, but if I ever said a word about it, he’d cut my tongue out.”

She opened her eyes. “
Is
she Anastasia? Nick says she is, but Nick’d say the moon was green cheese. Way I heard it, nobody escaped Eka
terinburg.”

“I heard that, too,” said Esther. Natalya was going to have to make up her own mind.

“Wouldn’t it be peachy if she was?” For a moment, Natalya’s face soft
ened. “Near broke my heart, Ekaterinburg. Where is she?”

“In her room.” Actually Anna was sulking; more and more she was spending her time in isolation.

“Ain’t she going to eat with us?”

“It’s me,” Esther said. “She’s decided she doesn’t like taking her meals in the kitchen, especially with a Jew.”

“I heard you was a Jewess,” Natalya said cautiously.

“I’m a Jew,” Esther told her. “I don’t eat pork, but I’m partial to the occasional boiled baby, and I don’t like the word ‘Jewess.’ ”

“Why not?”

“It has derogatory connotations.”

“What’s that mean?”