Dance with Death

by Will Thomas

  He walked to the center of the room and looked about with his hands on his hips. “I presume that stack of barrels at the end there is your gallery. There is a rough circle out of chalk.”

  “That’s it,” I replied. “That’s the target we were using.”

  “Does it look the same as when you were here last?”

  “It’s just a bunch of barrels with more of them on top.”

  “Aye, but the placement, lad. Close your eyes. Remember the way the barrels were set up, then open them again.”

  I hate remembering things. The very act of doing so pushed the memory further away. I sighed, closed my eyes, and tried to visualize what I had looked at when shooting with Nicholas, and then opened them again. Nothing. Well, almost nothing.

  “That barrel on the top, to the left. It might be out of place.”

  “Mr. Hercules, could you please live up to your name and boost me on top of that first barrel.”

  Jim said nothing, but hurried to the barrel, knit his fingers together, and waited for Barker’s boot. His face was stricken. It had happened just as he feared. The tsarevich was missing and in danger.

  Barker stepped onto the barrel then. He inspected a dozen or so and when he thought it was taking too long, he began pitching them over onto the floor. The noise of the bouncing casks was deafening, but he gave them no heed.

  “Here!” he boomed, his voice echoing in the long gallery.

  We rushed over. The three of us scrambled up the side of a barrel as best we could. It’s amazing what a man can accomplish when it is absolutely necessary.

  We jumped from barrel to barrel until we reached one at the far end. Barker was bent over it, a faint light illuminating his features. We circled the barrel and looked down. A ladder was affixed to the side of it, going down into a chamber below. The cask was stationary, part of the floor, and the rest of the barrels had been moved around to conceal it.

  “There’s your tunnel, Thomas,” the Guv said. “Remind me to take your suggestions more seriously.”

  He plunged down the hole and we followed after him. I was the last. As I looked about, I knew exactly where we were.

  “It’s the end of the tunnel in the Goat Tavern! The walls are identical. Those barrels at the far end concealed the opening entirely!”

  The four of us raced down the narrow passageway. Jim arrived at the end first, crouching through a low entrance and swarming up the side of one barrel. Then he turned and pulled the rest of us up. There were more barrels in the cellar of the Goat Tavern than in the shooting range, but we were able to push our way through them one by one. When we finally burst through and jumped down we saw that the small stockroom was lit by a single candle, no more than an inch in length, that probably would have guttered within a few minutes.

  “They came through here,” Barker rumbled, his voice echoing. “Only a noble would be so careless as to leave a burning candle in a cellar full of casks soaked in ale and whiskey.”

  We took the steps leading upward two at a time. I could see Hesketh Pierce’s plebian face slick with perspiration. Then I saw something I should have expected. He had a pistol in his hand. I imagined my partner did as well.

  “Idiot,” I said to myself, pulling my Webley from under my waistcoat.

  There was a door above us on the stair, a perfectly functioning door with a knob for a handle. It would have turned and opened easily. That didn’t matter. Barker and Hercules kicked it into splinters. When we burst in I saw three things at once: the barman looking at us with surprise, both Prince Georges passed out drunk at the bar, and Nicholas and Grand Duke Sergei just opening the door of the establishment to step outside into the night.

  Hercules, Pierce, and I trained our pistols, but Barker charged at the front door. Sergei looked back at us and I saw it then. Desperation. A plan to be accomplished at all costs. I knew at that very second it was he who had hired La Sylphide to kill his cousin, the future heir of the tsar.

  At the very last minute my partner dropped and began to slide, one heavily booted foot in front of him. It plowed into them, knocking the tsarevich completely off his feet. Nicholas’s arm had been around the grand duke’s shoulders and as he fell he pulled Sergei down with him. There was a familiar buzzing sound, and a cry from Mathilde’s protector, and then bullet fragments shot in every direction inside the Goat Tavern. Hercules was unscathed, but Pierce had one rip through his jacket.

  We ran to the door, not really certain what we would find. The grand duke lay on the floor, bleeding from the shoulder. Barker lay on his back, his suit dusty and more the worse for wear than he. And Nicholas, the hope of all Russia, was asleep in Barker’s embrace, as if in his own mother’s arms. Either that or he was passed out drunk. The choice is yours.

  I did something idiotic then, not for the last time, for certain. I stepped out into Kensington High Street and spread my arms. I knew she was out there, eyeing me from a hundred yards or more.

  I waited for a bullet that never came. She did not spare me; she was probably disassembling her air rifle and would be on her way in a moment or two. Sofia, clad in black, would fade into the night as she had probably done a dozen times across Europe already.

  Cyrus Barker was annoyed when I returned. I had needlessly put myself in danger while the future leader of all Russia was sprawled across him, tight as a boiled owl. Jim was trying to lift him, but he was deadweight. However, the Guv slipped out from under him, and between them, they set him in a chair, his face buried in his arms on the table.

  “Drugged,” Hesketh Pierce said.

  He was bent over Prince George, the future king of Greece. The royal groom was drugged, as well. Sergei had not planned to give anyone an opportunity to save the tsarevich. I wondered if, in fact, Sergei had gone to Japan with his two friends when Nicholas was attacked.

  “Have you a telephone?” Pierce demanded of the publican.

  “No, sir.”

  “Drat,” he cried. “I’m going across the street and call the Home Office, as well as an ambulance. You gentlemen stay here!”

  “Of course,” Barker replied.

  We sat and waited. The two Georges and Nicholas were in the arms of Morpheus. Sergei moaned every now and again. We wrapped his shoulder in bar towels, but there was no way to make a tourniquet for a shoulder wound. Jim Hercules went to stand out front, not being welcome in the pub. Barker and I stood in the doorway. I resolved to stop frequenting the establishment, rarebit or no.

  “Do you believe what happened this evening will stop an assassination tomorrow?” Jim asked.

  “No,” Barker said.

  I agreed.

  “I supposed not. I need to see if Pierce is done with the telephone. I have some calls of my own to make. I’ll see you tomorrow, gents.”

  We watched him leave, a man uncomfortable with London. Possibly a man uncomfortable with the entire world.

  “That was so close,” I said to the Guv. “A foot to the right and Nicholas would have been as headless as Bayles.”

  “He is alive,” Barker replied. “The distance doesn’t matter.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Telephone calls were made in the middle of the night. The Russian ambassador arrived in a closed carriage to convey Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich to a doctor’s care. There would be no indiscreet visit to a hospital. We were intended to follow and wait, as unofficial members of the tsarevich’s delegation. A hotel was readied and a Russian physician was waiting when we arrived.

  “This has happened before, gentlemen,” Ambassador de Staal said. He had come from his bed to oversee the process. “Russians being shot in your country, that is. It happens more often than you would expect, enough that we have written protocols for it.”

  We watched as the grand duke was examined. He had been shot high in the chest. The bullet passed through the flesh near his shoulder and had expanded after it exited. There was damage to the shoulder, of course, but he would recover. He’d been given a drug, but before it too
k effect, he asked to speak to us both.

  “I’ve been in battle before, Mr. Barker,” Sergei said. “But I ran a battery of artillery. I’ve never been shot before. It feels … strange. Somehow, both more and less painful than I anticipated.”

  He was in a hotel bed and a robe was thrown over his bare shoulders. A bandage across his chest had a bloom of red in the middle the size of a poppy.

  De Staal entered and they had a brief argument in Russian. Then the ambassador frowned and sat down in a chair.

  “I’d like to make a clean breast of it, gentlemen,” Sergei said. “I’m the one who paid to have my cousin shot.”

  “Of course,” Barker responded. “But why?”

  “Does it really matter?” he asked. “My uncles and cousins want his title. He will make a weak leader at a time when we need someone strong to keep the rebels in check. But I suppose the real reason is obvious.”

  “You love Mathilde Kschessinska,” the Guv stated.

  “Madly,” Sergei admitted. “She is my sun and I must revolve around her. You cannot imagine the hell my life is when I drive her to a rendezvous outside of Saint Petersburg for a tryst. I want to kill him. And yet, there is the Potato Club. We are royals together and we have larks, and as bad a leader as he might be, he’s damned entertaining and he is my cousin. We grew up together. I bloodied his nose in a fight when we were seven, and when I was eleven he helped me to the palace when I fell out of a tree and broke my leg. We’ve been through a lot together. When he asked me to take care of his mistress, of course I said yes, but that was before I met her. She is so bewitching. I think I fell in love with her on the first day.” He paused. “Could I have some water, please?”

  I poured a glass from a tumbler and brought it to his lips.

  “How do we know it is you who hired La Sylphide and not Miss Kschessinska?” Barker asked. “You are gallant, and as you say, bewitched.”

  “There was no need for her to do so. She railed, of course, but that is just her way. She is beautiful and Alix is not. She is alluring. She is intelligent, even cunning. She is monumentally ambitious and she can influence and decimate men in a way no other twenty-one-year-old could. She knows what she wants and she knows every stratagem, and what she wanted was to be tsarina. I regretted the decision to hire an assassin almost immediately, but it was too late. I had no way to contact her. It never occurred to me that they would break up on their own.”

  “Do not tax yourself,” the doctor said.

  “Oh, get out, you imbecile. When I need your attention, I shall call you.”

  There it was. Breeding. He was every inch the royal. No lowly physician was going to tell him what to do.

  “She had not yet lost, you see,” the grand duke continued. “Did you know that wagers were made over whether she would become tsarina? The odds were in Mische’s favor, but then Alix is German and no Russian can abide a German. Mathilde was the favorite, even if she is a Pole. She will become the prima ballerina of Russia. She seemed a sure thing, but a great number of men will lose their money over that bet. And now? Nicholas will have to pay for her for the rest of his life to keep silent what everyone already knows.”

  I gave him another sip of water. He was pale and there was a sheen on his face.

  “It feels good to tell someone,” Sergei said. “I never even told Mische how I felt and she never guessed. She has no interest in me, you see. I might as well be a coachman or a banker for all I mattered to her. And yet I convinced myself if I got rid of Nicky she would grow to love me.”

  “Who paid for the services of La Sylphide?” Barker asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you? My uncles financed it. They would pay for it, but they would never be the ones to suggest it. They are all cowards. When the end comes they will scatter across Europe like cockroaches.”

  “You believe the revolution will happen, then?” I asked.

  “A spark will ignite the masses, and what is Nikolai but a spark? An incendiary. It would have been better for millions of people if he had died tonight.”

  “There would be war,” I said.

  “A skirmish or two. You see, the masses don’t like the military. It will all go to hell now,” he said. He sounded sleepy. The medicine was taking effect. “She’ll never love me. She’ll never forgive me, even though I shall be the one to take care of her for the rest of her life. I should have hired La Sylphide to assassinate me, instead.”

  Barker rose. “Let us leave him, gentlemen.”

  De Staal and I followed the Guv out of the room.

  “You realize he has royal status and cannot be prosecuted by your government,” the ambassador warned.

  “We are not part of the government,” Cyrus Barker replied. “We are private agents. What will happen to him now?”

  “We’ll spirit him away on a boat in a few hours. Once he is in Saint Petersburg and fully healed, he will return to his artillery battery.”

  “Will this be a battery that will face some of the heaviest fighting?” I asked, thinking of Uriah the Hittite.

  “Gentlemen, he did just come within a horse’s breadth of killing the future leader of Russia,” the ambassador said. “And the tsarevich is still in danger. An open carriage and a long-range assassin? The boy should be quaking in his boots.”

  The Guv cleared his throat. “We will see what can be done. I have one idea, at least.”

  “What I don’t understand, Mr. Barker, is why Sergei Mikhailo-vich should feel the need to unburden himself to you. How well do you know him?”

  “I only met him one time and that was for—what would you say, Mr. Llewelyn, ten minutes at most?”

  “And you are English,” de Staal said.

  We were Scots and Welsh, but we weren’t going to quibble.

  “Why confess to you, a perfect stranger, as opposed to me, the ambassador to his own country?”

  “That’s not difficult to understand, Baron de Staal,” Barker replied. “I shall without doubt be the first one in the door tomorrow morning, telling Nicholas what his cousin conveyed to him through me.”

  De Staal looked away for a few moments, then looked back.

  “I cannot argue with that,” he said. “I do not necessarily believe it but I can’t find an argument that will stand in its place. Very well, tell him. I will put Mikhailovich aboard a ship early in the morning. This will not be set before the public, do you agree?”

  “I don’t see how doing so would benefit anyone,” the Guv answered.

  “We are agreed, then,” the ambassador replied, putting out his hand.

  Barker hesitated, then reached forward and shook it. We turned and left the hotel.

  “Interesting,” I said as we stood in front of the hotel. It was perhaps two in the morning and the street was empty.

  “Very well, Mr. Llewelyn,” Barker said, in no hurry to reply. “What do you find interesting?”

  “Mathilde Kschessinska’s financial support will be on a boat in a few hours,” I said. “Who is going to pay her billet at the Metropole? Where will she get food?”

  “You fear for her well-being?”

  “No. I think it’s marvelous,” I said. “I hope she falls with a loud bump. This entire tragedy is because of her.”

  “She has certainly caused enough trouble,” the Guv replied.

  A cab bowled by, but we felt no need to stop it. It was quiet and calm. The air was cool, with no breeze to speak of. London was shuttered for the night and I felt that we and the cabman who passed us were the only people in the City who were awake.

  “In a few days when the tsarevich is on his way back to Russia,” the Guv said, “remind me to search for relations of Joseph Bayles. They deserve some recompense for his death. The fact that he was mad and tried to kill Prince George is incidental. I sent the poor fellow to his death, merely to gain an audience with Nicholas.”

  “You couldn’t know he was going to be killed,” I reasoned.

  “That is immaterial. Were he snug in his b
ed in Colney Hatch, he’d be alive now. I was culpable in his death, and it is not the first time. There is blood on my hands. A hazard of the enquiry trade.”

  We passed Nelson’s Column and stepped into Whitehall Street again. We couldn’t walk all the way to Newington and yet we let more cab horses trot by. Having attended a masked ball, met an assassin, found a tunnel, stopped the murder of the future tsar of Russia, and listened to a confession like a couple of priests, a quiet walk seemed just the thing.

  “Did you suspect Sergei from the start?” I asked the Guv.

  “Of course I did. Putting a mistress in the hands of a young and unmarried aristocrat with time on his hands was just the sort of decision that proves what sort of leader Nicholas will become. She is beautiful, or so you say since I never saw her. She is ambitious and surrounded by admirers?”

  “A coquette,” I replied.

  “One cannot put all the blame on her shoulders, however. He could have accepted that Miss Kschessinska was not his property.”

  “Do you believe Sergei feels remorse?”

  “I think he felt it even before he hired Miss Ilyanova,” he said. “He felt it after he hired her; he felt it when he knew he could no longer stop the assassination, and I’m certain he felt it keenly when he sat with the two of them and Nicholas showed that he felt safe with his cousins, the so-called Potato Club. It must burn in the grand duke’s soul. Or so it seemed to me when we were talking with him.”

  “It had nothing to do with politics at all, then,” I said. “Not the Socialists or the Communists or the anarchists or the nihilists. Not even the Okhrana.”

  “The Okhrana was obsessed with Chernov. It clouded their judgment. If they weren’t so quick to jump to conclusions, perhaps they would have captured Miss Ilyanova.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Remember Occam’s razor. The easiest choice is often the correct one. I think that was their standard method of investigation. Rachkovsky is a menace.”

  “What disturbs me is that his methods are no different from the days of Catherine the Great or Ivan the Terrible. It is barbarism. But he was never a suspect in an assassination attempt on Nicholas. He was genuinely hunting the killer, whom he believed was Chernov. He wanted the man to confess, ingratiating himself with the tsar. Like Mathilde, he is ambitious.”