“He had no time after he became Statthalter, is that what you’re saying?”
“Partly that, but also my mother objected to the inevitable streams of messengers and minions running through our house. Actually, I think she hated having Klaus Kilber lurking around. So Alec started going to the Vigilzhi officers’ gym at the old convent.”
“The Vigilzhi kicked out a bunch of nuns?”
He laughed. “The Soviets did. They made us build an up-to-date gym for their officers, and the Vigilzhi took it over when they left. The Clares who used to live there now live behind the hospital.”
“Do any of you have actual jobs?” I asked, as Niklos took on Phaedra, pressing her hard.
“Danilov and Honoré sit on the High Council—began as soon as they reached twenty-five.”
“High Council? I thought it was just the Council.”
Tony looked across the room in Honoré’s direction, then shrugged. “We usually call it the Council. As opposed to the General Council, whose members are elected.” He gave me one of those sardonic looks.
“So Danilov didn’t run for his Council seat?” I couldn’t imagine the elegant Danilov stooping to campaign, even a low key campaign of the sort Alec had told me about during summer.
“The five families have hereditary seats, as does the mayor of Riev, the guilds’ rep—you could think of him as the unions’ rep. Then there’s the bishop, the chief rabbi, and the Orthodox metropolitan. There is actual work involved. Whether we tend to that work or appoint someone to serve as proxy is a matter of . . . negotiation.” He dropped his voice and continued in English, “Phaedra has always wanted to be an officer in the Vigilzhi. Alec once promised her that the Vigilzhi would be open to women—with Dmitros Trasyemova’s full support.”
“But it isn’t?”
“No. I also promised,” he added with a humorous shrug, “and also failed to keep the promise. In Alec’s case, the change was to have been initiated after Milo’s return, at which time the Statthalter would be retired. As Statthalter Alec has one vote. If Milo returns, Alec would have two votes: as the Ysvorod on the High Council and as heir. The old generation is mostly holdouts for the old ways. His two votes would have broken the deadlock, and opened the Vigilzhi to women.”
I glanced at the others. Phaedra was still fencing Niklos. Danilov leaned casually against the wall between a gilt portrait of a Renaissance matron and an oval picture of a family group in eighteenth century satin, posed in a sylvan setting. Danilov offered highly technical commentary on the match.
I pointed my blade Phaedra’s way. “She’s good.”
“She’s a first-rate sharpshooter, and she rides like a Cossack.” Tony grinned. “She’s usually my tango partner. You know the tango?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Used to do it a lot.”
“Interesting.” Tony’s brows lifted again. “I’m glad you told me that.”
“What’s so special about tango?”
Tony said, “You must be aware that it is . . . seduction without words.”
I snorted. “Tango is a dance. A fun dance, but it’s a dance.”
He said mockingly, “Yours must be a very weak style.”
Stung, I retorted, “I won some awards, as it happens.”
“Your partner was a lover?”
I laughed. “Hardly! My favorite partner is gay.”
Tony looked up sharply as a young guy entered. Though he didn’t wear any special outfit he had the air of a messenger. He headed for the Danilovs.
Phaedra and Niklos broke off their match. Tony caught up with them in a few long strides. The messenger spoke, then Tony said something to Danilov, who gave a short nod. Tony issued some orders to the messenger, who left even more swiftly than he’d come.
During all this Honoré lounged at the other end of the table, as though he existed in a separate sphere, until Danilov beckoned and talked to him in a low voice.
Tony came back to me, his mouth tight. “It looks as if our day has filled up, so we’ll have to call it quits.”
“What’s wrong?”
“A summons from my mother.” His voice was clipped as he sent a questioning glance at Phaedra.
Before she could speak, Honoré said, “I will take Kim.”
THIRTEEN
THE OTHERS GAVE HIM these looks that not only revealed their surprise—with subtle clues such as narrowed eyes, interrogative angles to their heads—but also hinted at some meaning or message that I couldn’t decipher.
“It’s almost noon,” Phaedra said, drawing the word out in an are-you-sure? sort of tone.
“I know what time it is,” Honoré said, and to me, in perfect English, “They know me for a creature of habit. It’s a curiously civilized comfort, to perform certain tasks at the same hour each day, and from noon to four I work on a project. But it can wait.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
Honoré gave me a polite nod. “I will return shortly.” He left through one of the side doors.
Danilov went to the double doors and called out to someone. A couple of guys, one young, one old, appeared to take away the tea service as Danilov wiped down the blades himself. Phaedra hung the jackets over the racks to air out.
Honoré reappeared a few minutes later, his hair damp, his clothes changed. He pulled on a snow cap and shrugged into a coat over shirt, woolen vest, and dun-colored jeans.
By then I’d wintered up. He led the way out.
To break the lengthening silence, I said, “What’s your project? Of course, if it’s a big secret—”
“Not secret at all.” His smile was fleeting. “You might have noticed that the old library building is being restored.”
I had no idea where the “old library” was, but I made an affirmative noise. He gave me a glance that recalled last summer and said with gentle reproof, “It’s above the park named for King Alexander. Across the bridge from Ridotski House.”
He obviously didn’t care for white lies, so I said, “I know you all live fairly close together, but I don’t know the streets at this end of the city. Last summer I spent most of my time holed up in Ysvorod House or being driven around.”
“Fair enough.” His equable tone was back. “The library was burned, of course—”
“By the Germans?”
“Actually, it was by the Soviets. The Germans left it alone once the Gestapo determined that we did not have any Jewish texts. As those had been removed and hidden, they believed our claim that we’d expelled the Jews two centuries before, and they took no further interest, other than seeing that the schools were all supplied with copies of Mein Kampf and similar rubbish.”
“Ech. We had to read it for a history class.”
“An amazing trifecta of evil, mad, and boring,” he said over his shoulder as he opened the door. “The library was destroyed on the order of the first Soviet commander. We were to become good Soviets, you see, so they systematically attempted to eradicate our history. My paternal grandmother tells of how they woke up at midnight thinking the sun had risen early and discovered the library in flames.”
We cleared the eaves of the house and bent into the wind. The snow was thicker than ever. Honoré’s car was a sturdy Swedish model built for snowy driving—it had no problems bumping gently down the driveway, which was visible mostly as a pointillist landscape in a thousand shades of silver, white, and gray.
As he eased slowly into the street, I said, “So tell me about the project.”
“What with that fire and many of our elders having fled their homes, we actually have relatively few historical documents left. Just for the amusement of our families, I’ve been reconstructing an annotated genealogy. The sort of thing that would bore anyone else, but is highly satisfactory when it’s your own forebears.”
“That sounds cool.”
He sent me one of those considering looks, and then came the smile. “Most of the family have tired of hearing about it. I will have it printed and suitably bound, wher
e it will look handsome on their shelves, and probably remain untouched once they’ve read about themselves and the most scandalous of their forebears.”
He chuckled softly, and I grinned. There was no use in denying the obvious.
“I’ve been at it ten years, you see. If you’d like to have a look at it, I can stop at my house. You might recall that I live on the next street over.”
“Are you kidding? I’d love to see it.”
Another of those long glances, then he gave a little nod and swung the car around. We reached his place a minute later and turned up the driveway. He flashed his beams a couple of times and slowed. The garage door opened so promptly it was clear someone was waiting on his arrival.
We drove into the garage. When we stepped out, Honoré said, “Thank you, Zoldan. Please. Go join your family.”
A red-cheeked middle-aged man in a quilted coat looked from Honoré to me, hesitating.
Honoré said, “I believe I will not perish from tending the garage door when I take Mademoiselle home. Go enjoy Stefan-Zarbat.”
The man touched his cap and shut the garage door, closing himself outside.
Honoré opened the inner door, and we passed through a plain white hallway. I’d noticed that the insides of most of the buildings whiffed of wood smoke. Fireplaces were still in use for heat, and they had plenty of wood. Honoré’s place had the same smell, but slightly sharper—a chemical scent. I was wondering if that was normal when Honoré sniffed, and frowned. “Smells like one of the fireplaces is smoldering. Zoldan must have shut the windows tight against this weather—”
The click of toenails on the polished parquet floor preceded the exuberant appearance of a chocolate brown wolfhound, who bounced in, flagged tail wagging, tongue lolling, until he sniffed me. Then he went on alert, gaze fixed, tail lowered.
“This is Shurisko,” Honoré said, ruffling the dog’s long ears. “Shurisko, Kim is a friend.”
I held out a hand for him to sniff as Honoré said, “Our ancestors lived with that stink year round, apparently. Every other letter, and most of the diaries, complain a lot about smoky fires, especially at the start of winter. My theory is that the stork nests would drop twigs, which singed then burned away.”
Shurisko gave me a tentative tail wag—permission to touch. I ran my hands down his back, scratching his spine. He stretched his muzzle upward, his eyes half shut with pleasure. When I straightened up, I was rewarded with a quick lick, and then the dog bounded out again, pausing only to sniff an enormous tortoiseshell cat, who paced languorously across a hall, tail high, ignoring the dog with disdain.
“This way,” Honoré said as the dog vanished somewhere down one of the long halls.
We passed quickly through the empty house. During summer my visit had been confined to the formal salon, which was another of those eighteenth-century sitting rooms. The rest of the house was much more interesting, I discovered. Some relative had loved Art Deco, and so there were long, languid lines. Most of the furniture was black. The bookcases were made of a very dark wood, with gilding in art nouveau motifs. Throughout were Tiffany lamps with multi-faceted crystals worked in.
On each bookcase rested a pair of marble busts of famous figures from Greek and Roman times. On one bookshelf there appeared to be two busts, until I saw that the extra was actually a living black cat in meatloaf pose, back hunched, front paws curled neatly. In the long windows, crystals hung from curtains, catching light as they winked and gleamed.
We passed through two or three small sitting rooms, each with at least one bookcase, and then up a beautiful sweep of stairs and onto a long hall with doors on both sides. We walked to one end, and he opened a door to reveal a very narrow stairway. “The secret room is up here. I made it over for the Project.”
“Secret room?”
His quick smile was lopsided like mine, like Mom’s, like so many of us descendants of Armandros. Yet it wasn’t Tony’s pirate grin. The lifted corner gave it a whimsical charm.
“One of my great-great grandmothers was the mistress of a prince. She had the old secret passage fitted up. He tipped quite generously, so the servants maintained that he merely came to call. A steadfast assertion for forty years.”
“Forty years!”
“And when the princess died, he married Karolina in secret. Here we are.”
He opened the door to a cool chamber, a librarian’s dream. It was solid books—the tastes of a sophisticate of a hundred years ago on one wall, and two hundred years ago on the next. Signs of ancient passion were long gone.
“Is that the secret passage?” I pointed back at the narrow stair, as the big tortie walked daintily in, followed by another cat, a young, lanky Persian.
“No.” He smiled as he shut the door. The young Persian began to wind around his ankles, its purr loud and rusty. “That was the stairway for the servants’ quarters. This room became the upstairs linen closet during the years of Karolina’s grandson, who had six daughters before he got a son to inherit. The scandalous passage was covered up. It lies beyond that wall.” He tipped his head toward a short bookcase on which sat a bust of a man with a Vigilzhi high collar. “Here’s the Project.”
He indicated the only pieces of furniture, a fine rolltop desk with a zillion little drawers, and a comfortable chair. Neatly stacked on the desk were several piles of papers. The Project was completely handwritten, in a beautiful old-fashioned italic hand.
I looked closer and read: . . . the bullet holes can still be seen in the wall outside the shop, which is now a shoe repair. The fire fight continued down to the intersection with St. Marcos Street, where Shimon was able to dodge into the alley, and gain the cellar at Litvak’s (St. Marcos) Wine Shop. Milo and Kilber kept them running
And there it broke off.
“I hope you’ve made copies,” I said, hesitant about touching.
“We haven’t copy machines here. And I don’t need copies. I am careful when I take notes, then the books are put back—though taking notes is tedious because I want all the details to be right. In this particular incident, the Soviets were going to shoot some nuns caught teaching catechism to the children and Dobreni history to the teens.”
He tapped a small, very battered, bound book: a journal or diary.
“Shimon Ridotski, the current Prime Minister, heard about the order to execute the nuns. He contacted Milo and decoyed the MGB agents—forerunners of the KGB—while Milo and his aide-de-camp, Klaus Kilber, extracted the women.”
“Into a cellar? Wouldn’t that be a dead end?”
“Ordinarily,” Honoré said.
“What do you mean, ordinarily? Oh. There are tunnels?”
He hesitated, which was an answer in itself; I was an outsider again.
So I went on, “I remember that incident from reading Milo’s journal last summer. Though he gave no details.”
Honoré said, “Milo’s reticence is well known. Not loved by archivists. His journal is useless for much of anything other than a memory device. He and his people were excellent, however, about seizing leftover files whenever one set of invaders gave way to another. I promised on my life that these records will never leave this room until they go back to their various archives. We lost so much during the past half century.”
He gave me the whimsical smile again, as he touched a sheaf of thin carbons so aged the faded ink on them was barely legible.
“That diary belongs to one of Kilber’s agents. These here are carbons of MGB orders, stolen from their office by the old woman they employed to clean.”
“Didn’t they discover the missing carbons?”
“Of course. But by the time they caught up with her, she was about to be buried after a heart attack. Or so they thought. Another elderly woman who had recently died was substituted with the collusion of both families. The MGB forced their own people to do the cleaning after that—” He paused, raised his head, and sniffed. “Does it smell stronger to you?”
“Yes, but everything smells a
little like fireplace smoke in your houses, to me.” I hesitated, unsure whether I should mention the other smell that tugged at memory. I couldn’t quite identify it.
“Cum tacent, clamant,” he muttered under his breath as he lifted his nose. “I’m going to look around. Feel free to examine any of these materials if you wish, but please do not take them out of the room.”
“Got it,” I said, dredging up the familiar quotation. Oh yes. Although they keep silent, they cry aloud; their silence is more expressive than words. “Cicero?” I asked.
Honoré gave me an odd look. “It’s habit,” he said slowly, then with a sudden, whimsical smile, “I promise I did not intend to be irritating this time.”
He left, closing the door on the sharp scent of wood fire. This time? Because he wasn’t there to ask, my mind moved on to wondering if the servants had left something in the oven. The smell reminded me of barbeques. Except it wasn’t roasted meat.
I bent over the fragile carbon copies, careful not to touch. The blurry purple was in Cyrillic, already difficult for me to read, so I switched to the diary, which turned out to be written in a hodgepodge of Dobreni, German, and Latin. No wonder the project had taken ten years, if these were the sorts of sources Honoré had to work with.
But as I pored over the diary, my hindbrain was supervising the wrestling match between memory and subconscious until I recognized what I was smelling. “Lighter fluid,” I said to the Persian cat, who had settled on one of the piles of papers as if it was a nest.
We’d never been a barbeque sort of family, but the Castillos had invited us often enough for me to have sensory memory. It took longer to identify that scent, as it was so unexpected in this house, with fully operational electricity, which was, to many, still a futuristic concept. But it was that same incongruity combined with the flee! instinct that goes with the whiff of burning, that caused me to shut the diary.
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