A Prince Without a Kingdom

by Timothee de Fombelle

  She arrived back home at two o’clock in the morning and entered through the front door so as not to wake her two pigeons, who were asleep on the gutter.

  “Emilie.”

  She stopped on the third step of the staircase. The chandelier was suddenly switched on. Her father was standing above her on the second floor. He was in evening attire, involving layers of vest and jacket, as well as a gray cape edged with silk. He let go of the light switch and walked over to the balustrade. With his top hat and gloves in his left hand, he waved at the Cat.

  “Emilie . . .”

  She held on to the banisters and kept climbing slowly. Her father sat down on the top step. He put his hat down on the carpet. Was a white rabbit about to appear out of it?

  “Could you come and sit down here for a minute?”

  His voice sounded weak.

  The Cat sighed and crouched where she was, a few steps lower down. For several months now, her father had been a changed man. He had come to a stop.

  For years, she had only ever seen him standing still in the large painting in the drawing room, with his slim mustache and the lion skin at his feet. And even in that painting, he held a watch attached to a gold chain in one hand, and was staring intently at it.

  For years, he had only blown through her life like the wind. He would leave her visiting cards on the dresser in the entrance hall with a command scribbled on them. Sleep. Eat. Obey. The year when she had been sick, he had sent two words to the sanatorium where she was convalescing: Get better!

  To begin with, she stored his visiting cards safely away in a box. They were always exactly the same: Ferdinand Atlas, with five or six different addresses around the world, so that no one would ever find him. And those scrawled commands: Work. Stop. Love your mother.

  And then one day, without warning, when life had begun to take a different turn for him, he had started speaking in whole sentences, and even saying Emilie’s name, saying it over and over again, when it no longer meant anything to the Cat.

  Because for her, it was too late.

  He could smile at her, he could reach for her hand in her pocket, he could smoke her out with kisses on her forehead, with the whiff of tobacco in his scarves, he could talk to her in never-ending phrases, he could show his open wounds, and even prostrate himself at her feet like a lion skin. But none of it would do any good.

  Right now, she was the one, on the staircase, who seemed to be looking at her watch, impatient for all this to be over.

  “I’d like to take you somewhere with your mother,” he said. “I want to leave with the two of you. I’ve finished. I’ve done what I wanted to do. We need to leave quickly and find a refuge. Your mother won’t accept that our time is over.”

  The Cat had heard all this before.

  “Your mother wants to stay here. She doesn’t want to start over again.”

  When his daughter didn’t reply, Ferdinand Atlas asked her, “What about you?”

  The Cat got up and climbed the remaining stairs. She gave her father a wide berth, like a ship avoiding the reefs beneath the calm surface of the sea.

  Ferdinand Atlas remained sitting on the top step. He felt a hand on his shoulder. His daughter gave him a peck on the cheek. He closed his eyes.

  In her bedroom, the Cat half-opened the curtains to look at her pigeons. They were sleeping, resting against each other. She threw her clothes into a pile at the foot of a chair, put a record on the phonograph, and wrapped the horn in a towel to muffle the sound. She hesitated for a moment and looked out her window again, before finally lying down in her own bed. Her bed! She had been doing this rather a lot recently. It made her feel old, after years of sleeping only in a hammock on the roof.

  The record was a piece of violin music.

  Andrei had never said where he had gone, or where the lead was that he was following. She was afraid that he would find Vango before she did. But she was also afraid that he might never find him. Because if Andrei didn’t complete his mission, Vlad wouldn’t give him a second chance. What was Andrei’s family like, back in Moscow? His little brother, Kostia; his sister, Zoya . . .

  A few days later in Moscow, May 1936

  “Are you hungry?”

  It was a fine day. Mademoiselle led both children by the hand, up the steps to the Central Post Office. Konstantin and Zoya were wearing their school uniform smocks with no overcoats.

  “We’ll go to the park afterward. This will only take a minute. Look —”

  Mademoiselle kept glancing anxiously all around her. And talking to the children without drawing breath: “Look how many steps there are! Kostia, pull your trousers up. I used to come here in the old days. You weren’t even born then. I just want to see how much it’s changed.”

  She had hidden the letter inside Zoya’s pocket. Mademoiselle felt ashamed of taking advantage of this little girl to carry her secrets. She thought of seven-year-old drummer boys sent onto the battlefield to cross the enemy lines.

  Mademoiselle had been living with the Oulanov family for a year and a half now. Her abductors had taken her from Sicily to Moscow, with no explanation.

  As she walked into the Central Post Office, with its great row of booths, she stopped and held her breath. She was remembering the last time she had come here, to visit this hall the size of a railway station. That memory was over twenty years old now. But it had been the turning point of her life, the event that had led her to Vango.

  Back then, she used to teach French and English to children in a family in Saint Petersburg. There were six children. The job had lasted only a few months. She was young, and she had been summarily dismissed: accused of trying to seduce the master of the house.

  One evening, she had cooked him a meal when the rest of the family, including the governesses and cooks, had already gone to the country house for the summer.

  The family’s town house on the banks of the Neva River was deserted.

  The wife had returned unexpectedly and seen the table laid for one, a small portable stove, and, in a cooking pot, a bewitching recipe that was as dusky as it was intoxicating.

  “What is that, Mademoiselle?”

  “It’s for Monsieur. He comes back late at night. He never eats.”

  “What is that?” the wife had repeated.

  “I thought . . .”

  But the wife’s shouting became louder and louder.

  “What is that?”

  An extraordinary smell wafted from the half-open lid. The sauce was simmering. The meat was rising to the surface of this magic potion. Sometimes, when a passing breeze blew the flame, the bubbling made the sound of a kiss. A white cloud floated over the edge of the pot.

  A few centuries earlier, Mademoiselle would have been burned at the stake for cooking such a meal. But on this occasion she was put out on the street with her suitcases. And her beef bourguignon was thrown onto the cyclamen at the bottom of the garden.

  She had first caught a train to Moscow, where, in 1915, she had found herself in transit in this same post office with a letter announcing her hasty return to an aged aunt who represented the only family she had left in France. The boy at the booth had sold her the stamps and pointed to the mailbox on the other side of the hall. She had hidden behind her handkerchief to hide how upset she was.

  It was at that moment that he had come over. He had appeared as if by magic. He was wearing a red Cossack scarf and a woolen jacket.

  “Are you French?”

  Mademoiselle didn’t dare reply. She hadn’t yet let go of the letter for her aged aunt: the envelope was halfway through the slot.

  “I heard you speaking Russian.”

  “Yes.”

  “And can you speak other languages as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which ones?”

  “A few.”

  The man was about the same age as she was. Mademoiselle tried to stand tall and proud to distract from her eyes, which were puffy from crying. But slowly she withdrew her envelo
pe.

  “Would you like to work?” he said.

  She took another step backward and checked that her hat was firmly fixed on her head.

  “Why?”

  Her cautiousness was an effort. This man only inspired confidence.

  “It would be to look after a child.”

  “In Moscow?”

  “No, somewhere else. I don’t know where. He’s not born yet.”

  The man’s eyes were shining.

  She raised her chin proudly.

  At first, she had feared this might be an indecent proposal. But his smile reassured her once again.

  “Mademoiselle, please, if you would care to come with me . . .”

  “Don’t you want to ask any other questions of the person you’re hiring?”

  “No.”

  She pretended to deliberate. But she knew that her employer in Paris, from before Saint Petersburg, had died the year before. Nobody was expecting her. It was 1915, and France had been at war for months now.

  “Please,” said the man.

  Without realizing it, she had already put the letter for her aged aunt back into her bag. He picked up her suitcases, and she caught the train with him to Odessa, where they boarded a boat sailing for Constantinople. They disembarked at night. Mademoiselle couldn’t understand what was happening to her. Two sailors were waiting for them with a lamp. The war was raging on distant coasts. A long boat carried them from the port toward another boat lying at anchor farther out.

  Suddenly, the man made the oarsmen stop and listen.

  Mademoiselle had heard something too. Behind the sound of the dripping oars, above the hubbub of the old city of Stamboul, the cry of a newborn baby could be heard coming from the lit-up boat.

  They looked at each other.

  That was Vango’s first cry.

  Now that she had entered the same busy post office twenty-one years later, with Kostia and Zoya clinging to her skirts, Mademoiselle kept expecting the man in the Cossack scarf to appear behind her at any moment.

  But times had changed, and the world was no longer the same. The secrets in the letter she was trying to post weren’t intended for an aged aunt.

  Once more, she headed toward the large mailboxes that had been expecting her for more than two decades.

  “A stamp for Italy,” she murmured to the post office worker.

  She had changed trams three times with the children, to make sure she wasn’t being followed. The little girl’s feet were starting to hurt. Mademoiselle kept spinning around to check whether anyone was watching her.

  By leaning forward from time to time, she could see the edge of the envelope at the bottom of Zoya’s pocket. Would this letter come to rest, one day, on the table of the good Doctor Basilio, between the fig trees and the black rock of the Aeolian Islands?

  There was a note for Basilio inside, and another envelope, smaller but thicker, addressed to Vango.

  There wasn’t much else in the letter to the doctor, but already, for the first time in eighteen years, she had referred to the island as their home.

  “I want to go home, Tioten’ka.”

  The little girl was looking at her.

  “Yes, my sweetheart, we’ll go home.”

  At last, they were in front of the mailbox with its brass mouth.

  She reached over to Zoya’s school smock.

  “I popped something in there; stand still a moment.”

  Sliding two fingers inside the little girl’s pocket, Mademoiselle grabbed hold of the envelope.

  She felt a hand lock on to her arm.

  “Don’t do it, Mademoiselle.”

  She turned around.

  “They’re watching you. They’re behind the glass in the booths, or else in the gallery, up there. Don’t do it. Or they’ll send you to Siberia.”

  Time stopped for a moment. A man was standing in front of her: the father of Zoya, Kostia, and Andrei.

  “Please, Mademoiselle. If I’d allowed you to go through with it, I would have been condemning both of us.”

  She let go of the letter in Zoya’s pocket. The children threw themselves at the man’s legs.

  “Daddy!”

  The man hugged them tightly, while still talking to Mademoiselle.

  “As long as they’re sure I’m watching over you, they’ll let you live with us. Don’t try anything else in this vein. My older son, Andrei, is abroad. They’re playing us off against each other. I was asked to keep you in my home. I’ve got no idea what you’ve done, but our lives, and the life of my son, have been linked for nearly two years now.”

  Mademoiselle knew that she slept in Andrei’s bedroom, beneath his childhood drawings. She had seen a photo of him, tucked inside the accounts book. She knew that his family was worried about him. But she had never made any connection between her own fate and that of the serious-looking boy in the white-framed photo, his cheek against his violin.

  “Come on.”

  The children held their father’s hands.

  Mademoiselle followed them.

  They emerged into the bright May sunshine, at the top of the steps, and clung to one another as they made their way down, slowly, like mountain climbers linked by a rope on the ridge of a glacier.

  New York, summer 1936

  History books don’t account for what happened during the summer of 1936 on one of the most important construction sites in Manhattan. But building work on a tower was interrupted for several months. It all started in the spring, when one of the workers fell from the top. There was nothing unusual about this — dozens of similar accidents occurred every year — but it turned out that the victim was a Mohawk, forced to work on the construction site against his will. Out of solidarity, the other men laid down their tools for several days.

  The morning they were due to return to work, the men had discovered mysterious inscriptions on the walls as well as up the service stairs. Incomprehensible graffiti had been painted in red letters, as tall as a fully grown man. It was a sinister sight.

  ERAT AUTEM TERRA . . .

  University linguists were summoned to the premises by the police. An elderly Latin specialist set to work.

  He was able to decipher passages from the Bible. First of all, there were nine verses about the Tower of Babel, taken from Genesis. They spoke of mankind’s desire to build a tower that would reach to the heavens. And of how God had managed to stop them. There was also a line in Greek taken from Revelation, in which an angel sounded his trumpet, “And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast down upon the earth.”

  In the wake of the Mohawk’s death, the workers were frightened by all these signs. On the top floor, in the middle of one of the rooms, they had found the name RAFAELLO spelled out using eight of the nine letters intended for the illuminated sign above the tower.

  Some of the men had recognized the name of the archangel Raphael, one of the soldiers of God: perhaps he was the angel referred to in the line from Revelation painted in bloodred letters. The workers revolted again.

  Access to the work site was forbidden, pending further orders. Above all, the architects wanted to avoid anyone ransacking the building. So the workers were kept at a distance.

  One morning, the owner of the tower paid a visit.

  He took the freight elevator up to the top floors, with his female assistant and the architects following at his heels. Everybody called him the Irishman. In less than a quarter of a century, he had established a sprawling bank with business interests on both sides of the Atlantic. The rumor was that he had even ended up buying the small hotel where he had arrived as a young migrant.

  Now, aged fifty, here he was walking along the scaffolding of his own tower. His many rings glinted as he held on to the girders. There were still at least another three months to go before the great tower would be finished. Staring out through a window frame with no glass in it, the Irishman ate a banana. Opposite, rising up as if to taunt him, was the Empire State Building, which he
had vowed in all the newspapers that his new tower would outstrip. The Irishman gave his banana skin to his assistant. He started laughing loudly when the architect promised to bring all the problems to a speedy resolution. He walked over to him and pretended to push the architect over the edge.

  As he was about to leave, the Irishman noticed a pile of damp ashes in a corner.

  “Do you have fires here?”

  “Never,” replied the foreman.

  The Irishman bent down to dip his finger in the damp charcoal.

  “So what’s this?”

  He drew a black cross on the foreman’s forehead.

  “Finish the tower on time.”

  Then he headed back down again.

  His visit did nothing to change the workers’ minds.

  The first stage of Zefiro’s plan could be heralded as a success. His theatrical flourishes had produced the desired results.

  That August, Zefiro and Vango were able to set up their equipment at the top of the tower. They had positioned a high-precision telescope on a tripod, pointing at Voloy Viktor’s windows. They were equipped with three typewriters, new clothes, and a makeshift office at altitude that was well stocked with rubber stamps, seals, and paper of all kinds. They had sold a ruby to pay for everything.

  Tom Jackson, a young beggar from Thirty-Fourth Street, had been recruited for ground missions.

  From their observatory, they followed every event in Viktor’s daily routine. They noted the comings and goings in minute detail. Their aerial view of the different rooms of the eighty-fifth floor enabled them to keep a log of the times at which the guards were replaced, the regular visitors to the fortified tower, and the frequency of their visits.

  Every evening, for example, most of the curtains were drawn, and the last visitor was always an elegant man whom Zefiro referred to as the lawyer. He appeared to address everyone as if he were master of the household. He would settle in the study. The closed curtains prevented them from seeing Voloy Viktor, who must have been dictating his last correspondences of the day to him from his bed. Then the lawyer would leave. But he was the first to return the following morning, at dawn, in time for Madame Victoria getting up. He would not be seen for the rest of the day.