City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  Natalya went on, still carefully. “But he happens to have heard Olga doing her I-know-everything-that-goes-on-in-this-place, so he thinks, ‘Okay, Olga’ll give me Anna’s address. Next time I get a couple of days off, I’ll do some more lurking outside the Green Hat, follow Olga home, and beat the shit out of her until she gives it to me.’ Which he does. Is that it?”

  Esther said, “I know it sounds far-fetched.. . .”

  “Phhh.” Natalya’s lips formed a perfect cupid’s bow as she sucked breath through them. “I wouldn’t say far-fetched, exactly. The police won’t say it’s far-fetched—they’ll just treat you kindly and take you straight to Dalldorf to be with your pal Clara.”

  “I’ve got to tell them.”

  “Of course you have, of course you have.”

  “Stop that.”

  Natalya ceased her soothing. “All I’m saying is you’ve built this whole story out of a diary some loony kept in Dalldorf.”

  “You think the timing’s just coincidence,” Esther said.

  “It is.”

  “But Anna’s definitely afraid of something.”

  “She’s another loony, for God’s sake.”

  “Natalya, he tortured Olga. Tortured her. What for? She didn’t have money. Her place wasn’t turned over—he could see she didn’t have money. Nick kept her on starvation wages. So what was he after if it wasn’t to know where Anna was living?”

  “Esther, my little rosebud, I don’t like to tell you this, but there’s men who like torturing women. Gives ’em a hard-on. All right, Olga was unlucky, but living in a place deserted at night, she was asking for trouble. Could’ve happened anytime. There’s nothing to say it’s the same man as the one at the Hat, is there? Is there?”

  Esther sighed. “No.”

  “No.” Natalya nodded. “Go to the police if you like, but your sixweek murder theory’ll just amuse ’em. I mean, what sort of killer only turns up when he gets around to it? What is he? A traveling salesman with a nasty disposition?”

  “No.” She almost smiled. Whatever he was, the killer was feral. The man on the stairs stank of the jungle; she couldn’t see him selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. She knew she was losing her case. If she couldn’t convince sharp, streetwise Natalya, with how much less belief would that lumbering inspector at Alexanderplatz receive her?

  She should go to him, nevertheless. He’d find her ridiculous, a crackpot foreigner, but she would have discharged a duty—that the whole matter be recorded in case, in case, in six weeks’ time, the killer tried again and murdered somebody else.

  The phone rang. “Esther? How’s Anna? Get her ready, kid, we’re going to put her through a little test. I’ve found a Romanov we can show her to. Ne coupez pas, for Christ’s sake.”

  Nick was in Nice and having the usual trouble convincing a French telephone operator that he wanted to stay on the line.

  “Nick, about Olga . . .”

  “Yeah, terrible. You seeing to the arrangements? No, I’ve not finished, mam’zelle. Ne coupez pas.”

  “Olga. Nick, did you tell her where Anna and I are living?”

  “What’s that? Of course not. Nobody knows, except me. Don’t want the Cheka getting to her, do we? Now, listen, Esther, I’ve found this old lady, the grand-duchess girls used to call her Tante Swanny. She’s willing— No, mam’zelle, I’m still talking. Ne coupez pas. Tell you what I’ll do when I’ve finished the call, I’ll put the phone down— You still there, Esther? I’m going to fly her up tomorrow. Anastasia was her favorite, she knew her well. We’ll have a trial run with our filly, see how she goes over the jumps.”

  Esther tried to divert him: “Nick . . .”

  “We’ll be arriving Tempelhof eleven A.M. Okay?”

  “Olga’s murder, Nick ...I think ...”

  But Nick had lost his battle with the French telephone system.

  Esther put the receiver down. She went back to the sofa and poured herself more schnapps. “He’s bringing some elderly Romanov to meet Anna tomorrow.”

  “She’s not ready.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Loomed over by Olga’s death, the game they were playing was shabby and intolerable.

  “It matters,” Natalya said with energy. “There’s a film to be made when she’s recognized as Anastasia—and I’m going to star in it.”

  Esther stared at her.

  Natalya was defiant. “Well, she can’t play the part, can she? You imagine her on a movie set? She’d scream every time they clapped the clapper board.”

  “I see,” Esther said. “That’s why you don’t want me go to the police. They might find out who she really is.”

  “Go,” said Natalya icily. “They’ll enjoy a good laugh. But I’ll tell you this, if I believed the shit you believe, the last thing I’d do is tell the police—and get our Imperial Highness killed alongside of Olga.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Natalya, leaning forward, “that half the Berlin police force is on the books of some newspaper or other. I got a friend on the Morgenpost, and he pays out for any good story. Anastasia back from the dead—that’s a very good story. You tell the cops, and before Frau Schinkel knows it, she’ll have flashlights and reporters ten deep outside her door.” She sat back. “That killer you dreamed up, he won’t have to torture anybody to find out Anna’s address; he’ll just have to buy a paper.” Her eyes searched Esther’s face for a moment, and then she nodded. “With that happy thought, I’m going to bed. We got a grand duchess to prepare in the morning.”

  Esther stayed where she was, clutching an empty schnapps glass to her chest. Self-interest, she thought. Every argument Natalya had propounded was in Natalya’s own interest.

  On the other hand, that didn’t make them less viable.

  Shit, shit. Go to the police and give them a chance to catch the killer. Don’t go to the police, thereby ensuring that the killer didn’t catch Anna.

  If there were a killer after Anna. Which Natalya was sure there wasn’t. And which, through the unaccustomed fumes of schnapps, she, Esther, was also beginning to doubt.

  She’d sleep on it.

  ...

  MARIE IVANOVA NARISHKIN had once been a ballet dancer. It was stretching a point to call her a Romanov; she’d merely slept with one, having at one time been mistress to a cousin of Alexander II. When her lover died, she’d occasionally been invited to St. Petersburg as a form of charity.

  Now a fat, elderly woman, she’d been tempted out of retirement in France by Nick’s offer of all expenses paid as well as the opportunity to pass judgment on a young woman claiming to be Anastasia.

  On greeting her, Esther decided that Nick had chosen his subject well. Marie Ivanova’s self-importance and delight at being taken out of obscurity would undoubtedly ensure that she proclaimed Anna to be the grand duchess, however slight her acquaintance with the imperial family had been.

  Oh, God, Esther thought, I want nothing to do with this. Now that it came to it, they were crooks using an old woman in a confidence trick.

  There’d been difficulty in getting Anna ready for the meeting. Anna had panicked. “I do not see this person. I am not meat to pick over. I see only Aunt Olga and Aunt Xenia. I do not see Swannies. I go to bed.”

  Natalya was infuriated. “Holy Martyr, even you’d be a better Anastasia, scar or no bloody scar.” This was to Esther; they were tidying Anna’s room, which was in its usual chaos. “Why doesn’t Nick let me do it? I can play a lady. This one don’t know the meaning of the word.” She chucked a load of dirty underwear into a basket. “But oh, no, Natalya, you take the part of the maid because that’s what you’re good at.”

  “Marie Ivanova,” Nick said, ushering his guest into the flat, “may I present Esther and Natalya, Her Imperial Highness’s companions.”

  Marie Ivanova kept her eyes shut and wheezed from the climb up the stairs. Behind her, carrying wraps and handbags, was a thin, embittered-looking woman, her companion. Nick introduce
d her as Mademoiselle Mycielcka.

  “Where is this creature I have come to see?” Marie Ivanova demanded when she’d got her breath back.

  “Esther, inform Her Imperial Highness that Marie Ivanova is here.”

  Esther shook her head; she wasn’t going to be party to this. Nick’s eyes flicked at her and away. “Natalya, if you would be so good.”

  Natalya shrugged. “She won’t come out of her room.”

  There was a gasp from Mademoiselle Mycielcka and a hissed “Shit” from Nick.

  Marie Ivanova remained unconcerned. She nodded. “If she is whom you say, that is correct. I go to her.”

  They followed her to the bedroom and stood in its doorway while Marie Ivanova went in and regarded a hump under the bedspread. “I am here, young woman.”

  The hump remained motionless and silent.

  Marie Ivanova crooked a finger at her companion. “The feet.”

  Mycielcka darted forward, whipped up the bottom of the bedcovering, and laid it back, exposing Anna’s legs.

  “The shoes.”

  Mycielcka began untying laces.

  “You should know,” said Marie Ivanova, “that the grand duchess Anastasia had deformation of her feet. Hallux valgus. She was most conscious of it. We talked of it often, she and I, because, like most ballet dancers, I share the complaint.”

  The shoes were off.

  “The stockings.”

  Anna’s stockings were unhooked from her garter belt. Anna, her upper body and head still covered, did not move.

  Peering over Mycielcka’s shoulder, Nick, Esther, and Natalya stared at Anna’s bare feet. They were small and rather ugly. If hallux valgus meant bunions, Anna had them.

  Marie Ivanova studied them through her lorgnette, then passed her hand over them. She was crying. “I am here, my child,” she said. “I am with you.”

  Anna’s head appeared like a tortoise’s from the carapace of bedclothes. “Tante Swanny?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna disengaged her right arm and held it out. As the old woman bent to kiss her hand, she leaned forward and applied her lips to the wrinkled forehead. “Come back,” she whispered in English.

  “I shall.”

  Mycielcka began guiding her mistress from the room.

  Esther heard Natalya’s whisper: “She’s backing out. She’s backing out.”

  Anna Anderson had been declared royal.

  A grinning Prince Nick took Marie Ivanova and her companion off to lunch at the Adlon, turning around and jiggling his hips at the two women standing silently watching their departure.

  “She did it,” Natalya said.

  “Yes.”

  “She did it right.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Natalya was suspended between belief and disbelief, resentment and elation.

  “I don’t know.” Esther felt very tired. She’d spent the night racked by indecision over what to do about Olga’s murder. “I suppose Swanny was always going to believe it.”

  “But she really did—believe it, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  Natalya allowed resentment to win. “It don’t prove anything,” she said. “Everybody’s got bunions. I got bunions. You got bunions? How d’you get bunions?”

  “High-heeled shoes,” Esther said.

  “Exactly.”

  FULL OF ANNA’S triumph, Nick came back from seeing the ladies off at

  the airport. “Got old Swanny eating out of her hand, didn’t she?”

  “And that’s good, is it?” Esther asked.

  He was surprised. “Sure, it is.”

  Natalya, anticipating the row to come, said good night and took herself off to bed.

  Esther said, “I’ll tell you what isn’t good.” She didn’t spare him any details of Olga’s death—if she was right about the murderer, there was a sense in which Olga had died for Nick. Then she gave him her opinion as to the reason for it.

  He didn’t argue. “You’re probably right.”

  She was surprised. “You agree it was the same man?”

  “Maybe. The Cheka doesn’t give up that easy.”

  “It isn’t the Cheka.” She was tired of saying it. “It isn’t the Cheka because Anna’s not Anastasia.”

  He lit a cigarette and puffed smoke at her. “Tante Swanny says she is.”

  “Tante Swanny’s a credulous old woman. Nick, we must go to the police.”

  “We did, didn’t we?”

  “I mean, tell them that the man’s been trailing Anna since Dalldorf, tell them to interview Clara Peuthert, get her to describe him.”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s a great way to get Anna killed, but okay. Crazy Clara tells them Anna’s the grand duchess—and she will. Next thing we know, Anna’s picture’s in the papers and she’s a target. Bye-bye, Anna, but never mind, little Esther’s been a responsible citizen.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer she always put on the table for him. “Look, kid. Maybe you’re right and someone’s hanging around outside the Hat trying to get a line on Anna. I say he’s Cheka, you say he’s . . . whatever you say he is. It doesn’t matter. Why d’you think I’m keeping this address secret? Those ladies just now, they had no idea which street they were coming to because I didn’t tell ’em. Why do I park two blocks away when I visit? Why do I dodge into doorways and look behind me? For fun? We’re dealing in life and death here.”

  She considered. “You’re certain that if we tell the police what we know, the newspapers will get hold of it?”

  He displayed his hands. “Ring up the editor of the Morgenpost, why don’t you? Cut out the middle man.”

  She went for the flaw in his argument. “So all Anna’s schooling is for nothing. You’ll never be able to present her in case the Cheka shoots her down.”

  “Esther, Esther.” He shook his head at her obtuseness. “That’ll be a big occasion, and I mean big. Guards, Secret Service men with shooters. Nobody gets in without being frisked. A proper press conference, international, radio, movie cameras—the whole borscht right down to the beets. How’s Her Highness’s English coming along, incidentally? The Yanks’ll be there in force.”

  She was defeated. “Well, I won’t be. It’s still fraud—and Olga died

  for it.” He peered at her. “Ah, come on, baby. You’re tired. Let’s go to bed, uh?” He picked her up and took her to her room, and for a while her body

  was able to separate itself from the film loop that went around and around in her head.

  MARIE IVANOVA DIED four days after returning to France.

  “The trip was too much for her,” Mademoiselle Mycielcka informed Nick over the phone with a fury that was not assuaged when he asked if Tante Swanny, before her death, had contacted the Romanovs with the news that Anastasia had returned from the grave.

  “She did not.” The phone banged down.

  Nick took the setback with equanimity. “Word’ll get around,” he said, and flew off to the funeral, partly to make sure word did get around and partly to woo the aristocratic young Frenchwoman he’d met on his previous visit and whom he had hopes of bedding.

  Anna’s reception of the news did not disturb the lofty confidence she’d acquired after Tante Swanny’s authentication. “Like she’s been crowned by the archi-bloody-mandrite,” Natalya said.

  It was Esther who experienced a sting of grief and guilt. Here was another death. They were collecting them.

  Word did get around. It didn’t reach the German newspapers, which had too much to occupy them with the by-now-runaway inflation and its inevitable consequence of strikes, unemployment, a rising death rate, and street battles between Left and Right.

  But, whether it came from Clara Peuthert or Mycielcka or Nick, there was a sudden excited sprinkling of question marks in the Russian émigré press. IS ANASTASIA ALIVE? DID GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA ESCAPE EKATERINBURG? WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS ANNA ANDERSON? To homesick, despairing White Russians, the idea that the czar’s daughter had survived the slaug
hter and, like Persephone, returned to them from hell was almost unbearably beautiful.

  At 29c Bismarck Allee, Anna searched for Anastasia’s picture among the bundle of newspapers Nick had sent from France. “What they say? What they say about me?”

  “They say there’s a mystery woman in Berlin who claims to be Anastasia.”

  Anna became agitated. “They don’t say where I live?”

  “They don’t bloody know where you live, do they?” Natalya said. Anna’s celebrity was sticking in her throat.

  “That woman with Tante Swanny, she knows.”

  “No,” Esther told her, “she has no idea. She just knows she came to an apartment in Berlin. Lots of apartments in Berlin.”

  There’d been more street killings of White Russians, and one of the papers said, “Her privacy must be guarded. If Her Imperial Highness Anastasia is alive, she may be a target for another assassin’s bullet.”

  Esther didn’t translate that one. The decision not to pass her fears on to the police was validated; if there was this fuss over a mere rumor, the resultant jamboree—should the press track Anna down—didn’t bear thinking about.

  And she’d trapped herself in the confidence trick because, while there was the remotest chance that in six weekends’ time the killer would be looking for Anna again, she, Esther, had to guard her—be-cause she, Esther, was the only one who believed that he might.

  And even she didn’t really believe it.

  On the clear, blue mornings of that St. Martin’s summer, she’d castigate herself for thinking that Olga’s murder was anything but a random killing. Yet when night fell, she’d see Anna go to the kitchen window—as the girl had begun to do now that the evenings were drawing in—to peer through a crack in the curtains, watching shadows form under the trees in the street below. Then Esther would remind herself that Olga’s killer, random or not, was still at large.

  “What the hell are you scared of?” Natalya demanded of Anna. “There’s nobody bloody there.”