If I Had You

by Heather Hiestand

  “Yes, on the first floor. Some of the conference rooms can be opened into one larger room, I understand. They don’t need anything as large as the ballroom since it is a dignitaries-only audience.”

  “Are they going to build a stage?”

  “One of the conference rooms has a higher floor than the other for exactly this reason.”

  Ivan nodded as their waiter appeared, to take their order. “I didn’t know that. Fascinating how they plan these things.”

  “I remember when this hotel was first opened,” her grandfather said. “Under the old name, of course, before the scandals. I was quite young then.”

  “The nineties, wasn’t it?” Alecia asked.

  “Yes. A rather famous family was involved. Aristocrats and wealthy merchants.”

  “I have wondered who Peter Eyre is, Grandfather,” Alecia said. “He’s the hotel manager and much too young for the job, plus he has such an air of mystery. Just the sort of person you’d twig for a secret earl or millionaire.”

  “And here he is,” Ivan said with a faint air of distaste.

  For the first time in her life, Alecia had that thrilling feeling of being caught between two suitors, as Mr. Eyre approached the table. It was hard not to contrast the two men. Ivan with his bold, foreign, dark good looks and shabby clothes; Eyre, the consummate Englishman with the fashionable clothes, golden hair, and narrow face that sounded the bell “aristocrat” to her.

  Even their sexual styles were different. Eyre had a mistress but seemed to always have an eye on the next conquest. Ivan boldly propositioned a mere secretary but, for now, left the game in her hands.

  “You look very cozy today, Miss Loudon,” Eyre said, smiling genially at her.

  “This is my grandfather,” she said. “And you know Mr. Salter, of course.”

  “Mister Dean,” Eyre said, taking her grandfather’s hand.

  Alecia, startled by the fact that Mr. Eyre knew how to address her grandfather properly, exchanged a glance with Ivan. How did Mr. Eyre know her grandfather was the most senior priest in his diocese?

  The hotel manager exchanged a few inconsequential remarks with her grandfather and winked at Ivan before drifting to another table. She hadn’t realized he policed the Coffee Room even in the daytime. He was like a ghost attached to one part of the hotel.

  “You must know all the stories about this hotel, Grandfather, since you remember it from when it opened. I haven’t had time to look into it much.”

  “I wish there was a scrapbook,” Ivan said. “A history of the hotel? But if there is, it’s not available to the employees. People ask me questions I don’t know how to answer.”

  “That may be for the best, young man,” her grandfather said. “This hotel gave Sodom and Gomorrah a run for its money just after the war. They say when you stayed here, you didn’t even need to go to the Chinese for drugs. They’d be delivered right to your door.”

  Two waiters arrived, one with a tray of teapots, and the other with tiered silver trays holding finger sandwiches, scones, lemon tarts, and some kind of chocolate treat. Alecia was glad she’d skipped luncheon.

  “And those famous murders?” Ivan asked.

  “Theatrical people,” her grandfather said. “When do they ever come to a good end?”

  “I wonder that you allowed Miss Loudon to take this position with the Marvins, especially here at the hotel.”

  “You misunderstand, young man. She didn’t ask my permission. That’s the sort of modern girl she is. She and her sister both. They don’t listen to their elders.”

  Her grandfather said this in a measured tone, but she saw a twinkle in his eye. Somewhere, beneath the starch, he enjoyed his granddaughters’ independent ways. To a degree, at any rate.

  The conversation moved on to Russian politics and a discussion of a British-Russian trade conference in London in the spring, which Ivan didn’t know much about. Alecia wasn’t sure politics were better than talking about the war, but she couldn’t expect her grandfather to engage in a conversation about dancing or dresses. Ivan spoke lyrically about his childhood though, extolling the virtues of Russia’s natural beauty. How he’d ended up in a large city she’d never know. He made himself sound like a country boy. Maybe it was his somewhat mysterious sister who insisted on city life.

  Finally, both her grandfather and Ivan revealed they had dinner arrangements, and she realized this was Ivan’s day off, and once again, she’d made him spend part of it at his workplace.

  “Thank you both so much for coming. Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked, as they left the Coffee Room.

  “I’ll see you during my rounds,” Ivan said.

  “I will call for you at midday and take you for luncheon, if that is acceptable to your employers,” her grandfather said.

  “I’ll meet you in the Grand Hall tomorrow. I will telephone your hotel if I learn otherwise,” she promised.

  When she went upstairs, she didn’t go straight to her room. The early evening was peaceful and the suite’s parlor had much better furnishings than her small room. She found a copy of the O’Neill play Sybil had been cast in and began to read.

  Richard came in at eight, when she was just finishing reading it. He noticed and came over to her. “Not your sort of life, eh?”

  “I wanted to understand the part in case Sybil needs any assistance,” Alecia told him, closing the script. “Did the blocking go well?”

  “I should have had you there to make notes. We’ll forget half of it.”

  “I’ll retrieve my notepad now and you can tell me everything you remember so it won’t be forgotten.” She stood up, discovering too late that this made her bump up against him. He’d been standing over her and she hadn’t realized how close his feet were to hers.

  The next thing she knew, he had his arm around her and they were back on the sofa. She stared up at The Chinese on the wall, stunned. Scooting to the edge of the sofa, she said, “How clumsy of me. I’ll just gather my things.”

  He slid his arm around her more, trapping her. “Where is my wife?”

  “At her meeting still, I suppose. No one has delivered a message from her.”

  “I wonder if she’ll come back tonight. Slipping through the net, she is.”

  “I imagine it is a great deal of work, starring in a play,” she ventured, trying to separate herself, inch by inch.

  “You have no idea. A great deal of responsibility. And here you are, to make our lives easier.”

  “Yes, and I want to do that by helping you to remember your blocking. Next time I’ll know to come with you.”

  “Do you know, that’s quite a naughty thing you said.” He nuzzled her hair.

  She could smell lemon and alcohol on his breath. He’d stopped his blocking for cocktails at some point, and would have been drinking without eating much, either, since he was reducing as well. She knew dieting and drinking together meant he was likely to behave irrationally. “I do not know what you mean by that remark, sir, but I think you should go to your bed.”

  “Why don’t you come with me? I could show you a few things.”

  “Nothing I’d like to know, with all due respect.”

  He tilted his head back. “Why, a kitten with claws.”

  “I think you are not at your best, Mr. Marvin, and may regret this in the morning, so I will go to my room.” She debated the wisdom of passing through his room to get to hers, or going out into the hallway. That seemed the wiser course.

  “When did I stop being Richard?” he asked, his tone going soft.

  “When it became unacceptably intimate to call you that,” she snapped.

  “Come now, I was just having a little fun. Order me a steak and chips and we’ll get to work.”

  She contemplated him. Were the cocktails wearing off? “I think your wife would say we were done for the evening. Good night.” She left the suite, remembering just in time to reach for her keys, and ran for her room, wanting to make sure she was inside and the connecting
door was locked before his alcohol-slowed impulses allowed him to attempt to reach her bedroom.

  * * *

  In the back room of Boris’s pawnshop, Ivan leaned over his plate of sausages and sauerkraut to reach the bowl of lentils in a sour cream dill sauce. “I do love coming here to eat. You’re a better cook than Vera.”

  “What does your sister do all day?” Boris asked, cutting a piece of dark rye bread from the loaf on the table.

  Ivan wondered if his friend had made the bread too. He could have been a professional cook, but instead, food had become his passion while he traded in used goods. “She intrigues, I suppose.”

  “I don’t think catering should be her profession if I am a better cook,” Boris said.

  “You are the best cook. There is no comparison,” Ivan said with a smile. “She does well enough, and cooking for parties is less sophisticated than cooking for friends.”

  Boris’s chest puffed. “Is there enough work for her around here?”

  “No, and that’s why we purchased the gramophone, so she’d have something else to offer. Even people without a lot of money are going to want to dance after dinner. For a few shillings she can rent out our gramophone and seventy-eights.”

  “Not a bad plan.” Boris forked up an overlarge piece of sausage and chewed reflectively for a moment. “Is that Sergei ever going to marry her?”

  Ivan wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, then dug in again. “How could they afford to live? I’m not going to share a one-bedroom flat with a married couple, and pay the majority of the bills besides. As it is, I feel like I’m feeding half of the Whites in London.”

  Boris winced theatrically. “Surely not half. You don’t have the dispossessed aristos at your table.”

  “No, only the people who have nothing to gain under any regime,” Ivan said, picking up his wineglass and draining it.

  Boris smiled. “You’ll never be one of them, my boy.”

  Ivan tipped the wine bottle over his glass. “I never wanted to be. I won’t be involved in this bomb mess.”

  “Bomb?” Boris’s shadowed eyes opened in alarm. He set his fork down and repeated the word. “Bomb?”

  Ivan nodded. “They had an idiotic notion that I would be willing to carry a bomb into the Grand Russe and plant it for them, in the room where Macbeth is to be performed for Ovolensky.”

  Boris ground his teeth and swore in Hebrew. “So you were to die for a cause you don’t believe in, while they huddle next to their samovar miles away?”

  That image reflected exactly what Ivan believed, for some of them at least, and they would feel no shame in not carrying out their bombing themselves. “It’s not a cause for Vera, it’s revenge for our parents’ deaths. Which I don’t mind. Making Ovolensky pay, somehow. However, I am not going to ruin the hotel that puts bread on our table, and I would never risk Miss Loudon’s life.”

  Boris’s eyes took on a speculative gleam. “So you’ll allow your sister to risk her life, but not Miss Loudon’s?”

  Ivan made a flicking gesture with one hand. “My sister is a fool. I can’t even tie her to a chair until she sees reason, because I am not home enough hours. She has all these fellow fools who could rescue her. But Miss Loudon is completely innocent. She took a position with those actors so she could come to London. A vicar’s granddaughter, and the old gent is very nice.”

  Boris took up his fork again and expelled a long sigh. “You might want to spend more time thinking about how to protect your sister from her so-called friends, and less about how to protect Miss Loudon.” Boris paused. “Unless, of course, you are in love with her.”

  “Love?” Ivan said it again, softly, under his breath. “Love. What do I know about that?”

  “You may be in the uncomfortable process of discovering exactly what you know,” Boris observed.

  Ivan considered that, then shied back into practical matters. “I know I can’t have any part in the attempt on Georgy’s life, not if it risks Miss Loudon or any other innocent party. I don’t want to help this plot along at all.”

  Boris swirled sour cream through his lentils. “I think it is time for a man-to-man talk with Sergei. Insist they marry and pay for their own bread. You can stay with me while it all shakes out. I imagine you’ll let your sister keep your furnishings.”

  Ivan pounded his chest where it felt like an entire sausage link had lodged. “They are too busy trying to kill Georgy to marry.”

  “Then they will soon be dead, or in police custody,” Boris said, forking his last piece of sausage into his mouth. “A pity. Your sister would have beautiful babies. Have you thought about finding her a nice Englishman?”

  Ivan drank deeply, trying to dislodge the nonexistent piece of sausage. “I don’t think she cares about any of that. My parents’ deaths are a cancer eating away at her. She cannot let them go. She’s lost faith in me. She’d never let herself be courted by someone of my choosing.” He was struck by a stray thought, that of Miss Loudon pacing the halls at night, tortured by nightmares of her own parents’ passing.

  Boris leaned over his plate. “What is it?”

  Ivan winced. “Miss Loudon is not over her parents’ deaths either, but I never hear her cursing the Germans over it.”

  “It is more impersonal, sinking a ship versus a firing squad.”

  “They are no less dead.”

  “That, boychick, is philosophy.” Boris sat back and poured the last of their wine into his glass.

  Ivan reached for his glass again and saw it was empty. Time to drink water. “Do you think, if I introduced Vera to Miss Loudon, that it might have some effect?”

  “It depends on how deep she’s gone. How nihilistic she’s become.”

  Ivan nodded. “I would like Vera to put a human face on this command performance. If she sees who she might kill in the process, maybe she will relent.”

  Boris smiled sadly. “Vera is not the ringleader.”

  “Maybe not, but one step at a time. I can’t save everyone.”

  “You shouldn’t spare a thought to help the others, unless you mean Sergei. Just try to minimize the damage they can do to your sister.”

  “Wise words, my friend. I did speak to her about the brooch. It sounds like it once belonged to my mother.”

  His friend shook his head. “A pity. It’s a very expensive piece.”

  “I know. I have no claim on it.”

  “I wish I could afford to give it to you, if the present owner fails to claim it.”

  “No.” He thought about what Vera had said. “I wouldn’t want it.”

  Boris covered his mouth as he belched. “We’ll have to break out another bottle, or should we just move on to the vodka?”

  * * *

  Alecia took her grandfather to the café where she had dined with Ivan, since she didn’t know of anywhere else.

  “This isn’t what I expected Londoners to eat,” he said, breaking his plate of eggs into bite-sized portions.

  “This is simple workday food for office people,” she said. “I don’t know London yet. I spend most of my time at the hotel.”

  “I was afraid the Marvins would be taking you out at night, forcing you to live a decadent lifestyle.”

  Alecia recalled New Year’s Eve at the nightclub. She’d be willing to go out every night if she could listen to music, but the Marvins weren’t like that. They let Max Parker visit the parties and hot spots for them, while they had small parties of equals in their suite. “No, it isn’t like that. I expect my evenings to grow even quieter when Mrs. Marvin’s play opens.”

  “What about Mr. Marvin?”

  Her grandfather seemed to have intuited some piece of the truth. She couldn’t not ask him for help. “Mrs. Marvin isn’t spending very much time with him. Everything is fine generally, even if he and I are alone working. They are genuine professionals.”

  “Generally? Something has happened?”

  She let her chin drop toward her chest. “He made advances las
t night. I don’t know where his wife was.”

  He frowned at his eggs. “Do you think she expected it?”

  Alecia thought back. “Yes. But she told me some time ago not to trouble myself. She didn’t expect me to comply with his demands.”

  “I should think not.” Her grandfather’s shoulders straightened and his cheeks seemed to have moved toward his nose, making fierce lines down the center of his face.

  A shiver passed down her back at the memory of last night. “Do you think I am in real danger from him? He had been drinking and he didn’t pursue me when I refused.”

  “This may sound like a separate issue, but it isn’t. The fact that you introduced me to Mr. Salter tells me that he is important to you.”

  “Yes, Grandfather, he is.” She hesitated. “Of course, I’ve only known him two weeks, really.”

  “You’ve been here a month.”

  “I never spoke to him until just before the New Year.”

  “Do you think a proposal is forthcoming?”

  “Oh.” She was taken aback. “No.”

  “No?” he repeated.

  Ivan wanted to be her lover. Did he mean for that to move into a commitment? In her sheltered life the answer would be yes. In fact, she’d never known a girl to be her fellow’s lover until she was properly engaged, though some anticipated the wedding date. Who had the template for correct behavior in these modern times?

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I would want better for you than a night watchman, but Mr. Salter seems to have the eye of the manager, so he has prospects.”

  “He’s very intelligent,” she enthused. “And think of what he’s come from. A privileged background. He escaped Russia because he was close to Finland with his sister when his family was killed. He was on the run from one country to the next for about four years before coming here. So his career now doesn’t reflect his true prospects, because he’s been a refugee.”

  “He might not ever catch up. So much success is in who you know. Where does a Russian like him fit into our class structure?”

  “I believe his family was gentry.”

  “That was in Russia. I don’t know what your life would look like as his wife.”