Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

by David Dickinson

  ‘What would happen if you didn’t come from Europe? Suppose you were a New Zealander or an African?’

  ‘Empire dead would get a sergeant like me. Africans, I’m not sure what would happen to them. They might be lucky to get a detective constable, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Have you been able to talk to anybody at all? Any of the witnesses?’

  ‘This is bad, my lord, I know it’s bad. Fact is, I don’t speak a word of Russian. That lot on the stage, they don’t speak a word of English. One of them, the bloke who seems to be in charge, tried to talk to me in what I thought might be French, but I don’t speak bloody French either. The office are busy hunting for fluent Russian speakers in the schools and over at the university, but they haven’t found anybody yet.’

  ‘Well, I can get by in French. I’ll see if I can have a word with that man in charge when he’s calmed down and they’re not so busy with their rehearsal. You haven’t come across a fellow called Diaghilev, by any chance? He’s the head man of the whole thing. Big fellow. Astrakhan collar on his coat. Oiled hair. Monocle. Ring any bells?’

  ‘I’ve not seen him at all this morning, my lord.’

  ‘Lord Powerscourt! Lord Powerscourt! How very good to see you again!’

  Natasha Shaporova was skipping down the aisle of the auditorium of the Royal Opera House. She was wearing a pale-blue coat and a rather raffish hat. Her feet, Powerscourt remembered from his time in St Petersburg, were clad in the usual high Russian boots. She looked as though she might be on her way to Ascot or Henley.

  ‘Natasha, you look prettier than ever!’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I introduce my companion in arms, Sergeant Rufus Jenkins of the Metropolitan Police?’

  Natasha Shaporova smiled at the young man. He was hers for life now.

  ‘I heard about all this from Lady Ripon yesterday, about the murder and so on. I called at your house just now and Lady Powerscourt said I’d find you here. I’ve come to offer my services, Lord Powerscourt!’

  ‘How nice to have you on board, Natasha. I feel happier about this investigation already.’

  ‘I’ve come to help, Lord Powerscourt. When I was talking to Lady Ripon yesterday, I suddenly realized that there are going to be problems with the languages, Russians and ballet people not speaking English, and the English not speaking Russian. Well, I didn’t know much English when we met before in St Petersburg, but I’m nearly fluent now. I will be able to translate Russian into English or French as you wish. I’ve lived here for a few years now. The last time we worked together, you had Mikhail as a translator. This time you can have me. I might not be so fluent but I like to think I’m better looking!’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Now then, Lord Powerscourt, why don’t you wait here a moment and I’ll go and speak to that fellow onstage. I think he’s called Michel Fokine. He’s quite a celebrity back home. Is there anybody in particular you’d like to speak to?’

  ‘Well, yes, there is. I’d like to speak to Mr Diaghilev as soon as possible. I don’t think I should talk to anybody else until I’ve spoken to him.’

  ‘Very good. Hold on. I’m just going to set my brain to Russian – do you know, I don’t think I’ve spoken it for a couple of months now. Mikhail makes me speak English at home. Says it’ll be good for me. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Natasha tripped forward to the edge of the stage. Powerscourt and Sergeant Jenkins stared in wonder as the corps de ballet began to move about the stage. It looked as if they were one single person, not fifteen.

  The ballerina who had transported the jewels from the Fontanka Quay was not the only Russian with a mission in London that summer. Members of the Bolshevik Party, an extreme revolutionary sect, planning to take power and bring socialism to Mother Russia, had two reasons for sending a man to England. They were still sitting on the proceeds of a bank robbery they had organized in Tiflis several years before. A number of people had been killed in the shoot-out, but the haul had been enormous: 341,000 roubles. The only problem for those advocating the final liquidation of the capitalist system was that most of the money was in 500-rouble notes. And the authorities had the numbers. They could not be used or exchanged in Russia. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, and his follower Joseph Stalin had both been involved in the organization of the robbery. One of Lenin’s disciples had a close friend in the Ballets Russes. So the notes were to go to London, where the disciple was instructed to contact as many revolutionaries as he could – Lenin had all the names and addresses – and enlist them in his mission. Between eleven and twelve o’clock one weekday morning, a guerrilla band of ten comrades were to take many thousands of roubles each into a series of different banks and change them into pounds. The day chosen was some days after the corpse was discovered beneath the trapdoor of the Royal Opera House. Lenin’s friend was to make contact with his fellow revolutionaries, most of whom lived in working-class districts in the East End.

  Lenin’s disciple had a further mission. As well as the notes, concealed in the false bottoms of a trunk and a couple of suitcases, he was entrusted with another of Lenin’s revolutionary tracts, proclaiming the inevitability of world revolution and describing the vanguard role to be played by the Bolsheviks. Cracow, Lenin’s latest bolt-hole, was so infested with agents of the Russian Secret Service, the Okhrana, or local policemen hired to work on their behalf, that it was impossible to have anything printed in the city. Lenin’s man was to have five hundred copies printed in each language and sent back to St Petersburg in the Ballets Russes luggage. The money to pay the printers was to come from the proceeds of the bank robbery.

  Natasha was looking grave when she came back from the stage. Michel Fokine was shouting at the corps de ballet again.

  ‘This isn’t a very promising start, I’m afraid, Lord Powerscourt, Sergeant Jenkins. Fokine says that Diaghilev is in a terrible temper. It’s not just the murder, apparently. His inner circle suspect he’s run out of money and can’t pay the bills. It’s happened before, they say. Somehow or other he always manages to pull the squirrel out of the hat.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Is that right? Squirrel, I mean? Something tells me it’s not the squirrel.’

  ‘Rabbit,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘It’s a rabbit out of the hat. But I’m sure it might have been a squirrel.’

  Natasha laughed. ‘One of the ballerinas said Diaghilev was going to see Lady Ripon. He got a lot of money out of her last year, apparently. He promises to bring Nijinsky down to her house to dance in front of her friends. She’s built a little stage at the edge of her ballroom, they tell me. After Nijinsky has danced for his tea or his supper, she coughs up.’

  ‘I suppose that makes sense,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Anyway,’ Natasha went on, ‘Fokine says we’ll just have to wait. He’s going to ring me when he’s got some news. Nobody will speak until Diaghilev gives the all-clear. They won’t even let you visit the scene of the murder without his say-so. Maybe we should all go and have a cup of coffee round the corner?’

  Natasha took them to the Fielding Hotel near the Royal Opera House, where she and Mikhail often had supper after the performances. Sergeant Jenkins looked ruefully at Bow Street Magistrates Court across the way, as if he would have felt more at home giving evidence in court rather than consorting with prima ballerinas and temperamental impresarios.

  ‘Natasha,’ said Powerscourt, ‘can you tell us about the ballet? I don’t mean the composers or the choreographers or the artists, but the world of the dancers. What’s that like?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know a great deal about the ballet, I’m afraid. I have a brother back in St Petersburg who knows all about it. He’s a great ballet lover, what they call a balletomane. I can always ask him for more information. Let me see . . .’ Natasha paused to help herself to a piece of chocolate cake.

  ‘I think the ballet and the opera people all get trained at the Imperial Theatre School in Theatre Street in St Pe
tersburg. I think they can go there as boarders when they’re still quite young. They get a proper education, as well as being trained in their particular speciality, dancing or singing. Nijinsky was a pupil there – I remember my brother telling us that he was going to be the most famous ballet dancer in the world.’

  ‘Do they get on with each other? The ballerinas?’

  ‘You should try some of this cake, Sergeant,’ said Natasha with a smile. ‘It’s really good. There’s a bakery round the corner that’s one of the best in London. In answer to your question, Lord Powerscourt, I don’t think the world of ballet is an advertisement for brotherly love. Or sisterly love either. I don’t think they have regular readings of the Sermon of the Mount at mealtimes.’

  ‘Do they not get on with each other at all?’

  ‘I think there is one word that explains so much about their behaviour. Jealousy. Just imagine, Lord Powerscourt. You’ve been friends with this boy or girl for a number of years. You’re in the same class. You’re sharing your schooldays. Then, one day, out of the blue, your friend is promoted. He or she is made up a grade. They can see their way right up to the top now, premier danseur or prima ballerina, the summit of your profession, the chance to make dramatic leaps all over the stage and heaps and heaps of money off it. But you, the one not promoted, may spend years stuck in the corps de ballet. You could be there until you take your pension. People are sometimes so possessed with jealousy that they do terrible things.’

  ‘Stabbing each other to death with Cossack knives just used in a performance, perhaps?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I’ve never heard of anything that bad, but there are some terrible stories. One female dancer, who thought she was the one people came to see, was dancing with Nijinsky not long ago. At the end it was clear that the applause and the standing ovations that rang round and round were for him, not her. She’s never danced with Nijinsky again.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Then there was another prima ballerina who found that her roles were drying up. She was cast in fewer and fewer ballets and her parts were getting smaller. She only found out the reason by accident. Another prima ballerina had gone to the choreographer Fokine we saw just now and told him that he, Fokine, must not put her rival in too many roles. She was consumptive. Too much dancing would be very bad for her health. Smaller roles, not too many performances, that was the secret.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit like London gangsters to me – why don’t we knife the boss of the gang next door?’ Sergeant Jenkins was brushing chocolate crumbs off his jacket. ‘I’m obliged to you, Mrs Shaporova, for the coffee and the cake. You were right about that. It’s delicious. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to the station. My inspector may have found somebody who speaks Russian for me by now. I wish you both a very good day.’

  Natasha Shaporova was also preparing to leave. ‘I will let you know the minute I hear from Fokine, Lord Powerscourt. Do you have any plans in the meantime?’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I’m going to find out all I can about the gentleman Alexander Taneyev was staying with, Mr Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. In my rather disagreeable profession, Natasha, we learn a number of disagreeable truths. Jealousy may be one motive for murder. Money, especially money to be inherited, is undoubtedly another.’

  3

  Relevé

  Literally ‘lifted’. Rising from any position to balance on one or both feet on at least demi-pointe, which is heels off the floor, or higher to full pointe (commonly for girls), where the dancer is actually balancing on the top of the toes, supported in pointe shoes. Smoothly done in some versions, a quick little leap up in other schools.

  ‘The buildings in the City of London are pygmies, just pygmies,’ Powerscourt said to himself as he made his way up Lombard Street. The capital’s skyline was still dominated by the same landmark buildings that had been there for centuries, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Monument, Big Ben. In New York, as his son Thomas continually told him (as part of Thomas’s campaign to be taken there on holiday), there was a race towards the stars. The 1890 World Building, at over 300-feet high, had been overtaken by the Singer Building in 1908, which had forty-seven storeys and rose to 612 feet. Its reign as New York City’s tallest building didn’t last long. It was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Building, measuring 700 feet, a year later.

  The London Building Act, Powerscourt remembered, prohibited buildings over eighty-feet high; that became law as a direct result of Queen Anne’s Mansions, a block of flats in Westminster that were over 100-feet tall, which prompted many complaints – including from Queen Victoria herself, who objected to the new building blocking her view of her Parliament from Buckingham Palace.

  Powerscourt was going to talk to his financier brother-in-law William Burke, who had risen to become very powerful in the world of money. Burke was sitting in a comfortable chair close to his marble fireplace. Powerscourt noticed that the portrait of Burke’s wife – Powerscourt’s sister – by the American artist John Singer Sargent, had now been joined by two further Sargents depicting the two eldest Burke daughters. The man’s family is now growing on the walls of his office, Powerscourt said to himself, just as it did in real life when they lived in Chelsea all those years before.

  ‘Francis,’ said the financier, taking off his spectacles and putting down a great folder, ‘how nice to see you. You’ve rescued me just in time.’

  ‘Rescued you from what, William? Bankruptcy? Debtors’ prison? The Marshalsea?’

  ‘Sometimes, you know, from where I sit, those places can seem very attractive. I’ve got to decide whether to buy another bank or not. I’ve got to make a recommendation to the Board in two days’ time. Do you know, Francis, I can’t make up my mind.’

  ‘I thought that you swallowed banks like other people might swallow a strawberry, William. You’ve been doing it for years.’

  Burke laughed. ‘It’ll do me good to take my mind off it for a while. What can I do for you this morning? I sometimes think you only come to see me when you want information.’

  ‘Richard Wagstaff Gilbert,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What do you know of the fellow?’

  ‘Is he about to be recommended for a place on the Court of the Bank of England, Francis? A knighthood, perhaps?’

  Powerscourt told him about the murder at the Ballets Russes and the fact that the victim had been staying with his uncle in a large house in Barnes guarded by two stone lions.

  ‘I see,’ said Burke, ‘but before I tell you about Gilbert, does this mean that those bloody ballet dancers are back in town? The ones who were here last year? Ballets Russes, did you say? I was nearly bankrupted last summer with the wife and daughters going to see them over and over again. And for some reason, they had to have the most expensive seats in the house so they could see everything properly. I got so sick of hearing about Nijinsky every morning that I took myself off to a hotel for breakfast.’

  ‘You’d better make a block booking at the Savoy for the fried eggs and bacon, William. They’re back. They’re here for about five weeks, I think. I’m surprised your women haven’t begun pestering you already.’

  Burke sighed. ‘It could be worse, I suppose. Thank God they’re not interested in racehorses. Now then, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. I don’t know a great deal about him. I know he’s very rich. Some wag once said that there are basically three ways to get rich. Inherit it. Marry it. Make it at the gambling tables. Our friend has done two out of three. He inherited one heap of money from his mother. She was an American heiress whose family owned a lot of stuff in New York and Chicago. Hotels, was it? Jewellery shops? Grocers? I’m not sure. Richard Gilbert himself made another fortune at the roulette table and traded in diamonds for a while. I think he’s involved with a lot of investment trusts. Some people don’t care for him at all. They say he sails a little too close to the wind. Is that any good?’

  ‘Very helpful, William, thank you very much. Are there a
ny children, grandchildren perhaps, running round Barnes Pond with their nannies?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of a wife and certainly never heard of any children either. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, it’s rather a long shot. You see, just at the moment I can’t make much direct progress with this case. I can’t talk to the man Diaghilev who runs the show. He’s disappeared. But until he gives the all-clear, I can’t talk to the dancers. I can’t even see the place where the body was hidden.’

  ‘I don’t see, Francis, what this has to do with Gilbert.’

  ‘Switch on your most suspicious mind, William. We investigators have to look for all sorts of things in our work: the how, the where, the why. In my experience, jealousy is a very potent weapon for murder, especially when love and marriage and fidelity are involved. But there’s one other motive we meet much more often.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Greed,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt. ‘Simple, old-fashioned greed.’

  Very few people in Paris had heard of General Peter Kilyagin. His neighbours thought he was a retired soldier. In fact, General Kilyagin was the Chief of the Okhrana, the Russian Secret Service in France. From his grand offices near the junction of the Rue de Monceau and the Boulevard Malesherbes in the fashionable eighth arrondissement, he supervised a staff of forty full-time officers and a small army of part-timers who ranged from waiters in the fashionable hotels and restaurants to the manufacturers and shops dealing with weaponry and high explosives.

  The senior ranks of the Russian military have always tolerated passions and obsessions of every sort. Mistresses, of course; hunting, music, yachting. But the General was the only one in history known for a passion for filing. This had started when he was in charge of the movement and accommodation for his regiment. Everything was carefully filed. Everything had its place. When he took on his new post with the Okhrana, he was in his element. General Kilyagin was now an expert in the alphabet soup of the Russian opposition: SDs, FDs, SPDs, old Decembrists, anarchists, syndicalists, communists, Plekhanovites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks. He kept on file every detail his team discovered about a suspect, great or small. He could find out in a moment where Lenin last had his hair cut or the address of some minor anarchist’s mistress. He felt it was necessary, this vast network of surveillance that never slept. Russia was a very dangerous place, especially if you were a tsar or a senior government official. Tsar Alexander II, who had liberated the serfs, had been blown up by a terrorist bomb in the heart of St Petersburg. Grand Duke Serge, cousin of the present Tsar and Governor of Moscow, had been smashed to smithereens by a nitroglycerine bomb near the Nicholas Gate in the Kremlin in 1905. Only the previous year, the Russian Prime Minister Pierre Stolypin had been shot dead at the opera in Kiev. The Tsar and members of the Imperial Family were in the theatre to see him die. The opera was Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan. General Kilyagin liked to tell the tale of Stolypin’s end. ‘We told him,’ he would say rather sadly, ‘nobody could say we didn’t tell him. We warned him not to go to Kiev. We said there was a plot to shoot him dead. But he didn’t listen. The fool didn’t even wear the bulletproof vest we gave him. He said it smelt bad.’