“A few days later, or nights rather, I was waked from a deep sleep by a bright light in my face and the order to dress and follow in silence. I did not need anyone to tell me that this was the work of the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police were then known. I was taken to a metal-lined room and subjected to a most brutal interrogation. They had word that some of the new recruits were former AK, and they wanted names. I somehow managed to convince them that I knew nothing about the underground army, and I was eventually released.
“The next night, my friends and I escaped under the wire and joined up with an AK outfit operating from the forests not far from the training camp. I stayed with them, fighting the invasion of this new enemy, until it became evident that the struggle was in vain and that to remain meant certain death. I then decided to leave my beloved Poland behind. I returned home for Gregor and my family, and there I met Zosha.
“I wish you could have known her, my young friend. She was truly not of this world. The first time I met her was the night of our escape, I suppose Gregor told you that. Yes, after a seven-month absence, I arrived back to my family home in the dark hour before dawn, chased by any number of ghosts, both seen and unseen. Gregor was there to meet me, as I hoped, and with him was a woman. At first sight I thought she was an angel who somehow had hidden her wings. After all these years, I am still not sure I was wrong.
“Her face was luminous, Jeffrey. Lit from within by the love she held for my cousin. She would look his way, and the room was bathed in a light that touched the farthest recesses of my cold heart. I have never in my life felt unworthy, save for that moment. I watched them share their glances of otherworldly love, and I knew that here was something that was forever beyond me.
“Still,” Alexander continued, his voice filled with gentle yearning, “I was blessed to know her as I did. The ruling force in my life at that time was a desire for revenge. Then I would speak with her, or see her with my cousin, and I would know that if I were to be worthy of even the smallest place in her life, I would have to cast my hatred aside. It was hard, so very hard, but even so I did it. For her.
“Zosha, Zosha,” he sighed, his vision cast to another time, a different world. “Even to be loved as a friend by her was more than one man deserved. I suppose she was beautiful, but I am not sure. I believe her hair was somewhat dark, and perhaps a bit long, but it matters not. Even then, when I was away from her, I could not recall how she looked. Her heart gave off such a blinding light that I was unable to see anything else about her very clearly.
“When she died—” he began, and had to stop. After a moment he went on, “When she passed on, the world’s light was dimmed. A candle passed from this earthbound home to burn more clearly in a heavenly sanctuary. Although we never discussed it, my cousin and I, this thought held me intact through those first dark days after her departure: that she was never meant for this world. Her place, in truth, was elsewhere. Her heart was made by heavenly hands to serve in other, more holy lands. Angels such as Zosha possessed hearts too great to ever be held for long in a fragile earthly vessel.”
Chapter 30
Ivona stopped outside the Kuznetahny Market’s main entrance to button her purse inside her jacket. As she rejoined the jostling crowd, she passed a relatively well-dressed young man who stood on an empty wooden crate and called to the crowd in an official-sounding voice, “Watch out for your valuables. There are pickpockets at work in the market.”
Ivona watched as men patted their pockets and women clutched tighter to their purses. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted two other youngsters who noted the motions and passed the information on to a series of runners. They in turn sped off to tell the pickpockets which newcomers looked to be paying less careful attention and where their money was kept. It was a ploy introduced several weeks ago by the Uzbeki mafia, who now controlled Saint Petersburg’s largest market. She had been warned of the danger by the person she was here to meet.
There was now an alternative to the endless Russian food lines. At least, there was an alternative for those with money. Free-enterprise markets, they were called, stalls tended by greedy babushkas and unkempt men charging vastly inflated prices. An average Russian’s weekly wage for a bag of lemon-sized oranges. A pensioner’s entire monthly check for five kilos of beef. Meanwhile, rats feasted on refuse at the stallholders’ feet.
Health regulations were becoming the source of numerous jokes, humor remaining the populace’s safety valve when facing problems out of their control. Out of anybody’s control, in truth. The government remained in a state of flux, with inspectors’ wages set at the old levels and prices now out of sight. Most could be bought with a pittance.
Stallholders sold food tainted with salmonella, used contaminated chemicals for canning, mixed poisonous mushrooms with safe, offered botulism as a main course. Cats and dogs were disappearing from the streets. Butchers dangled lit cigarettes over their work and used ashes as a universal spice. People bought meat pies from street vendors, then waited for them to cool before taking the first bite; if it was a genuine meat, like beef or lamb, the fat solidified and became visible. Food poisoning was so prevalent in hospital emergency rooms that orderlies were taught basic treatment. Outside the major cities, epidemics of hepatitis and meningitis and amoebic dysentery worsened daily. Authorities were powerless to take protective measures.
Laws were left at the market gates. Restaurants and bars did a booming business in empty whiskey and brandy bottles, which enterprising stallholders purchased and refilled using grain alcohol colored with old tea.
The word for street market was tolkuchka, which translated literally as “crush.” The word applied as much to the trash that formed borders around the poorly policed areas as it did to the hordes that crowded the rickety stalls. Chinese brassieres, French cosmetics, Russian T-shirts, Spanish faucets, German shoes—the wealthier stall owners offered smatterings of whatever they had managed to pick up from unnamed sources. Hunting knives glinted beside stacks of disposable diapers. Plastic cola bottles shouldered up to rat poison.
Next to the professional stallholders crouched old-age pensioners, whose social security payments no longer kept body and soul intact. With the ruble’s tumble from financial power, Russian old-age support was set at forty-seven U.S. cents per day. The result was a forced sale of whatever was not desperately needed. They at least escaped the mafia’s control, at least so long as not too many of them appeared.
Ivona passed an old woman crouched on the curb, offering two rusty cans of imported hot dogs. An old man sold sweaters not required in the summer heat; winter worries could be left until after today was survived. An elderly couple offered cracked flower-pots, a container of oatmeal, three boxes of matches, and a pair of expressions locked in silent desperation. A woman held up a second pair of shoes with her only pair of laces; the ones on her feet were roped to her ankles and lined with newspapers. One offered a half bottle of old hair dye, another a ratty pullover with one sleeve unfurled, yet another a battered kitchen pot. The meager possessions on display were a loud condemnation of the crumbling regime.
Years of chronic scarcity had taught Russians to barter whatever was not needed. But today was different. The tone of pleading was not one of simple need. Despair and panic overcame the shame of begging. Hunger contaminated voices. Men and women alike shouted silent accusations with rheumy eyes. Medals tarnished with bygone glory hung listlessly from lapels in a declaration that here, this person, this one who had sacrificed and risked all, now deserved better. Was owed more. No matter what the regime, they should not be left to know such shame.
The stallholder Ivona sought sold fresh fruit, the produce of fine Ukrainian orchards brought here because, even after the mafia took its share, the profit was ten times what the husband-and-wife team would earn at home. They paid the mafia’s price and counted themselves lucky to have a place in the market at all. Ivona picked up and examined beautifully fresh apples. “Yours are the nicest in the entire m
arket.”
“You touch, you buy,” the woman declared harshly. “Four hundred fifty rubles a kilo.”
Ivona could not help but gape. “That’s twenty times what the state stores charge.”
“You want state produce, go stand in line,” the husband said loud enough for the benefit of passersby. “Here you pay the price.”
Ivona fumbled inside her jacket for her purse. “A half kilo, then. It is all I can afford.”
“More than most,” the man replied, more quietly now as the crowd before them thinned out. “You see what they did to Tortash?”
“Who?”
“Next stall but one. The man with the bandaged face.” Ivona spotted a man bearing a heavy white gauze strip running from eye to chin. Around the edges of the bandage peeped a violent rainbow of blue and black bruises. “He had two bad days in a row, sold almost nothing, and didn’t pay on time,” the shopkeeper told her softly. “They have men who like that kind of work. Call them brigadiers.”
Ivona accepted the package. “I understand. Your information is safe.”
“Nothing is safe,” his wife grumbled as she stacked fruit. “To live in these times is dangerous, to say what you know is worse. Better your eyes do not see than to speak.”
“Yet I have seen,” the husband said, placing a trio of pears upon the weighing machine. He waited for a shopper to pause and ask prices and shake her head and walk on, then said, “I saw a crate of paintings at the warehouse when I went for my fruit.”
“When?”
“Four days ago. And another of icons. In gold. Old, or so they looked.”
“And did your mind not scream danger?” His wife crumpled an empty packing crate with violent motions. “Did you not have a care for your children?”
“There were more boxes, but smaller and closed,” the man went on, twisting the bag closed and handing it over. “And in the office when I went to pay there were people. Dangerous people.”
“And still you speak,” his wife hissed, her eyes darting everywhere. “Still you risk speaking. And for what?”
“For the church,” Ivona said softly, handing over money her eyes could not even count. “For us. For our children and their heritage.”
The woman faltered, turned sullen. “Say it then. Be swift.”
“Southerners,” the man said. “Some of them, anyway. Of the Chechen clan. From the Tombek family. Senior men.”
Ivona thought of what Jeffrey had told them before his departure. “Tombek is mafia?”
“Tombek is death,” the wife declared. “Even their shadows are poison.”
“They are here from time to time,” the man went on. “There is some agreement with the people who control the market. Transport, probably. Tombek controls the roads into Saint Petersburg.”
“And the harbor?”
The man shrugged. “I have heard so, but cannot say for sure. We have no dealings with the sea.”
“Better we had dealings with none of this,” his wife retorted. “Not ever again.”
Ivona stowed her purchases in a shopping bag pulled from her pocket. “I and all who cannot be seen thank you for this gift,” she said, and turned away.
Chapter 31
“I express-mailed all the completed bid documents to you yesterday,” Jeffrey reported to Markov by phone. “Along with a copy of my report.”
“How long have you been back in London?” The man’s voice sounded decidedly strained.
“Three days. I waited to call until after I had the photographs and had worked through the documents with your lawyer. Everything looks in pretty good shape.”
“Excellent.” Markov was decidedly less than enthusiastic.
“The documents, I mean, not the house,” Jeffrey added. “Well, the house is in fairly decent shape as well, all things considered. A group’s been using your ground floor as a warehouse for the past few months. The floor’s pretty badly scarred.”
“You don’t say.”
“There was also a company with offices upstairs, but they’ve gone bust. They seem to have left everything pretty much intact. All the ornate fittings have been stripped, of course. And there’s virtually no furniture left anywhere, so there was nothing for me to evaluate within my own area of expertise. Basically, all that’s left are some wardrobes.”
“What?” He turned positively alarmed.
“They’re in the suite of rooms that I believe were your father’s chambers,” Jeffrey said, wondering where he might have made a mistake. “His dressing room has some really nice built-in mahogany wardrobes. They’ve been painted this awful matte white, but you can tell that they would be worth fixing up.”
“I see,” Markov said, subsiding.
“The garden is overgrown, and the outbuildings have pretty much surrendered to the march of time,” Jeffrey persisted. “You’ll probably have to gut them and start over.”
“Quite, quite.” Worriedly.
“I have an architect going over everything right now. Which brings us to my next question. The architect won’t have his blueprints and repair estimates done for another week, maybe two. But the Saint Petersburg authorities are pressing for some kind of formal bid. They’re really eager to see this manor taken off their hands. So I was wondering if you’d review the package and give me a figure I could use as an opening bid. I’ll make it contingent upon the architect’s finding no serious structural damage, of course.”
“Fine, fine.”
“You need to make your bid for the actual sales price, but they will only be able to offer you a lease for the moment. I guess you already knew that.”
There was a heartbeat’s pause, then a shrill, “A lease?”
Jeffrey explained the current legal situation. “The contract with the city authorities will state that they will sell the palace to you once the laws have been passed. Until then, you will have a thirty-year lease, with all payments going to the eventual purchase price.”
There was the sound of breathing, then, “I shall look forward to receiving your report and then will come back to you immediately. Until then. Goodbye.”
****
“Someone who nobody in Russia knows, you said,” General Surikov told him. The man’s guttural voice was flat as an empty barrel. “Somebody with a name in Eastern Europe, yet unknown in our area.”
Prince Vladimir Markov shifted uncomfortably. “It could be just a fluke.”
“Indeed. A fluke that the young man arrives in Saint Petersburg with Bishop Denisov’s secretary, then proceeds to make contacts with a series of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with his assignment. A fluke. Indeed.”
“Speaking of flukes,” the prince countered, “you said that if I were to cooperate with you on this, the palace would be mine once more.”
“Once more?” The general showed frosty humor. “It has never been such.”
“Mine, my family’s, there is no difference.” Markov hated the way his voice sounded to his own ears. This was too much like begging. He hated not having the money to simply go in and purchase the palace on his own. But that was completely beyond his reach.
Almost all the family’s wealth had been tied up in land and houses and possessions in Russia, every cent of which had vanished with the Bolsheviks’ arrival, along with every member of his family save for his father, who had been saved simply because he had been in France at the time of the October Uprising. The same father who had squandered away almost all their remaining funds upon mistresses and drink and gambling and entertainments the family could hardly afford. The same father who had left him a crumbling Riviera palace he had not been able to keep up, along with burning desire to see his family’s position restored.
Markov had been forced to accept the reality that, given his own financial situation, he would never be able to afford the repurchase of his family’s Saint Petersburg estate. The sale of his current, smaller Riviera home would barely cover the cost of renovation. No, Markov had decided, the purchase funds would have t
o come from elsewhere.
And then the general had appeared.
“The agreement,” Markov reminded him, “was that my palace would be used as a warehouse for your goods. My company would be granted your required export licenses, your shipments would be made, and I would be left in peace to restore my family’s name and honor. And home.”
Markov had struggled long and hard before agreeing to allow himself to be used as a front. Front for what, Markov did not ask nor care to know, but he assumed it involved drugs or something equally dangerous, illegal, and expensive.
Surikov’s group had initially approached Markov solely because of his name. They had seen the prince with his gradually declining wealth as a perfect front for their export activities. Markov had then responded with the plan that was now unfolding. In return for allowing his palace to be used as a warehouse, his company as a basis for the export of their goods, Markov would be granted the return of his old home.
It was the sort of work that Markov felt was not beneath his station. All was to have been kept at arms’ length, and his hardest task should have been to wait for all to unfold. Until now.
“Such loyalty is to be admired,” the general said dryly. “In any case, the holdup is a mere formality. Parliament will pass the required laws any day now.”
“That may well be,” Markov replied. “But what of my home?”
Surikov showed confusion. “What of it?”
“Your group will pay the required lease amounts until your shipments are completed,” he said bleakly. “And then you will leave me with a debt I cannot pay, for a palace I will not be allowed to keep.”
Winter Palace Page 25
