Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  “I fear friend Gwen has been playing the makebate.”

  “She has not! Whatever that means.”

  “Tatty. That man you killed was the only Russian who knew anything about you. He made no report. We’ve confirmed that. The KGB made only the most cursory investigation. They lose a dozen miscreants like that every day.”

  “Ramsey. I have absolutely no interest in visiting Russia. Not for the rest of my life. And certainly not at your invitation.”

  “I’m only thinking of your career, Tatty. You’ve not exactly had a great deal of work, lately.”

  “That’s subject to change. This week.”

  “Perhaps. I hope so.” His blue eyes held kindness. “I’ll leave our offer open. The Russian tour is not to begin until early November. We can deal with the paperwork quite quickly. All of this can be attended to with the utmost celerity. Quite remarkable for something involving the Soviet Union.”

  She hugged her bare knees. Her legs were becoming unpleasantly cold.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I appreciate your good intentions, if that’s what they are. But I’m quite leery of things Russian just now. Especially after yesterday. This extraordinary book came in the mail. My Russian grandmother wrote it, years ago. It was a handwritten, leather-bound manuscript, the only copy, an account of how my grandmother’s relatives were killed in the Revolution. It had completely vanished. Yet there it was, in my mail.”

  “I know,” said Ramsey. “I sent it to you. Ready about!”

  Sid Greene was late for their luncheon at the Plaza, making Tatty all the more nervous. The maitre d’ recognized her, and led her to a table by one of the windows facing the park, but the waiting proved unpleasant. It lasted for two long sherries. A few people glanced her way, but there was no one in the room Tatty knew.

  Sidney entered the room with the tentative aggressiveness of a bull trotting into a corrida. He glanced warily about, then broke into an enormous smile upon seeing Tatty, and charged toward her table. She rose in time for his embrace, and he stepped back to hold her at arm’s length, admiring her beige suit, matching Ferragamo shoes, and Henri Bendel purse.

  “Class, class, class,” he said, as he always said.

  He took his seat after Tatty, and then took command, summoning the waiter, ordering cocktails, lunch, and wine for them both. He ordered well, but even if he had not, she would not have said anything. He talked volubly, with great gestures, about his summer; the early autumn weather; Vienna, from which he had just returned; a new gallery exhibit. Nothing about the theatrical season.

  “Well, Sidney,” she said, alarmed that they were nearing the end of the main course. “Is this a luncheon at which my agent should be present?”

  “Tatty. With you and me, an agent is always a formality.”

  “And?”

  “Yes?”

  “The World War I play. The British part.

  “I have a great part for you Tatty, and it’s a British part. Noel Coward. Hay Fever.”

  “Sidney. That’s his worst play. What are you talking about?”

  “Coward’s coming back. The critics love Coward. Anyhow, we’ll start you in Washington, at the Arena. It’s a season ticket house. But if it clicks, on to Chicago.”

  “Chicago? With Noel Coward?”

  “Liz and Dick were SRO there in Private Lives. Tatty, I can’t think of an American actress who can do Noel Coward better than you. If there is the kind of Coward revival they’re talking about, you could click.”

  “Chicago. Who’s my co-star? Forrest Tucker?”

  “Tatty, right now, it’s that or the dinner-theater circuit. And you’re not even a has-been.”

  “When do rehearsals begin?”

  “Next spring. Maybe late spring. June. The Arena has a couple of Off-Broadway things they want to put up first.”

  “What about on Broadway? What about Macabee’s World War I play?”

  Sidney lifted his hands and eyes to the heavens in a bad parody of Zero Mostel.

  “That’s completely out of my control, Tatty. They’re going with Dahlia Symmes.”

  “Dahlia Symmes?!!” Tatty half rose from her chair. “She’s a goddamn rock singer!”

  “Pop singer. But she did well in that Gilbert and Sullivan thing last year. And she is British.”

  “Cockney.”

  “It’s out of my hands, Tatty. The money man. Dahlia’s a sure thing.”

  She set down her fork. She had no more taste for food or wine. She felt suddenly extremely tired.

  “So all we’re talking about, Sid, is probably two weeks in Washington doing bad Noel Coward.”

  “Possibly Chicago.”

  “And not until nearly a year from now.”

  He shrugged, actually better than Zero Mostel could have done, under the circumstances.

  “Larry’s got a made-for-TV movie going,” he said. “A 1920s thing. Gangsters. I could work you into that. Legs Diamond’s socialite girlfriend. It would mean three months in L.A.”

  “Thank you, Sidney. But no thank you.”

  “Tatty. These are hard times. You gotta go with sure things.”

  “I said thank you, Sid.”

  He touched her hand, but Tatty, staring at her plate, did not respond. Greene usually had a brandy after lunch, but now he just called for a check.

  Outside, on Central Park South, he hugged her. She merely let him. She did not respond. When he at last pulled away to charge toward the taxicabs parked across from the fountain, she asked herself with some pain if she would ever see him again, if she ever wanted to see him again. She started walking west, into the golden light of the New York afternoon sun, only because it was the opposite direction from that Sidney was taking. In a moment, Ramsey Saylor was in front of her.

  “Why, Tatty!”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.”

  “What a wonderful coincidence. I was just thinking of you.”

  “Just stop it, Ramsey. This is no coincidence. You’re just going to haunt me all fall, aren’t you? Like some creep on the street.”

  “Well, actually, I was thinking you might be passing this way.”

  “I’m sure you’ve been lurking here for hours. Pushing your Harriet Beecher Stowe tour again.”

  “I’d like to talk to you again, Tatty. Let’s hop into the Oak Bar. You look like you need a drink. A need majuscule.”

  He was particular about their table, demanding one by the window. It provided a good view of the street and the entrance to the bar, and also of the huge painting that dominated the room. It was of the fountain sculpture in the plaza outside, a nude woman of perfect form and classic Roman features. Jack Spencer had once told her that the model for that statue had in her old age been the desk clerk in a cheap apartment hotel where he’d lived in the East Thirties. Her name was Vera, and in her youth she’d been an actress in the Tenderloin.

  There were tears flooding Tatty’s eyes. There was no point in her trying to hide them.

  “That was your producer friend?” Ramsey said, having ordered Courvoisier for them both.

  “Yes,” said Tatty, dabbing at her eyes with a beige handkerchief.

  “He turned you down.”

  “Not entirely. He has something for me next spring.”

  “On Broadway?”

  “No. If I’m lucky, Chicago.”

  “God,” he said, touching her cheek. “You must be absolutely devastated.”

  “Your concern is touching, Ramsey. Pardon me for being suspicious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m feeling very vulnerable now. What better opportunity for you to make another pitch for this Russian trip?”

  “Have you changed your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Then I won’t say another word about it. But there’s something else I’d like you to do. Come up with me to Westchester for an afternoon.”

  “Why? Where in Westchester?”

  “Near Braddock Wells. That old Russia
n duke who had your grandmother’s book? He’d like to meet you.”

  “You mean he’s alive?”

  “Of course. Didn’t I make that clear? He’s ninety-five or ninety-six now, but he gets around. His memory is quite intact. I mentioned that he’s done some work for us, didn’t I? No? Well, he has; quite a bit. That’s how I came to know him. He has a wonderful knowledge of the old Bolsheviks and what they did. He served in the White Army in the underground, well into the 1920s. A very brave fellow, actually. He—”

  “Ramsey. I don’t want to see him.”

  She sipped the cognac, wondering how she would spend the rest of her day and evening.

  They sat for a very long time in silence. Finally, Saylor signaled for the check.

  “You don’t want another one, do you, Tatty? Actually, you really ought to ease up a little. You were outdrinking me on Long Island.”

  She looked away.

  “Well then, Tatty. I suppose this will be it for a while. I have to go back to Washington next week.”

  They rose, Ramsey taking her arm.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “The Beaton Place Hotel,” he said. “I always stay there now. It’s just a few blocks from our United Nations mission. I do a lot of work there.”

  No doubt. Spencer had told her the U.N. was perhaps the biggest spy nest in the world.

  “I’ll call you before you leave,” she said.

  “To say good-bye?” he said.

  “I may change my mind. About the Russian duke. But I doubt it.”

  Her apartment was near the East River, but the view from her living room window was over Fifty-seventh Street. It was an opulent view, the window high enough to take in a northerly sweep of the Upper East Side. She sat by the window, staring morosely, but not at anything in particular.

  There were two parties that evening, one at Amanda’s place in the Village, the other at Elaine’s still terribly chic restaurant. Tatty had no interest in going to either. If Sid Greene had given her good news, if he had not pronounced her talents as meager compared to those of a Cockney pop singer, she might have gone to the one at Elaine’s. It might have been something of a triumph. Tatty Chase, back on the stage. Back in action.

  She would go to a movie instead. There was a new Claude Lelouche film in the neighborhood. It would keep her from drinking. God, how she had been drinking.

  Who was a person like Sidney Greene to trifle with her life so? Was she not the descendant of czars?

  She didn’t make it to the movie. That night, she called Ramsey Saylor and told him she would go with him to visit the old Russian duke.

  4

  Ramsey hated driving. To Tatty’s knowledge, it was his only manifestation of cowardice. She picked him up in her MG-A, having to wait until he emerged late and grumbling, then spent the next half-hour fighting surprisingly heavy Saturday morning traffic all the way out of the city. An easier hour after that, they were in upper Westchester, descending the hilly curve that led into the three-century-old village of Braddock Wells. Ramsey slept most of the way.

  This warm, golden Semptember afternoon, hinting at the explosion of bright color soon to come, reminded her of the beginnings of school terms so many years before. Westchester had always been an ill-manicured, rough-edged, somewhat unsettled version of her part of Connecticut, a wilderness of sorts for a Greenwich girl, the state line at Banksville a true frontier. She had come up here only to visit her grandmother and for odd dates and parties. She had also come for her grandmother’s funeral. Her last visit had been her mother’s funeral.

  Tatty drove the MG around the Braddock Wells village green then pulled to a stop in front of a hardware store, where she remembered having been horribly overcharged for some things for her grandmother years before. She poked Saylor awake. He opened his blue eyes, instantly recognizing where they were.

  “Six or seven houses down Pommel Ridge Road from your grandmother’s is a dirt road going down to an old mill,” he said. “You recall it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Past the mill, across the stone bridge and all the way up to the top of the hill, there’s a great stone house on your left.”

  She remembered it vaguely. In her youth they had said it was haunted. Tatty had once petted in a Jaguar XK-140 roadster backed ever so carefully into the house’s lower driveway.

  “The duke lives there?”

  “He has since 1931. Let’s get up there, please. I think he had in mind a late lunch.”

  The driveway ascended from the road to the summit of the hill in a great sweeping curve that lost sight of the house. It was a bizarre construction, high wooden eaves and stone turrets set chockablock; ivy, vines, and overgrown gnarled trees obscuring most of it. Unlike most houses of its size and place, it boasted a porte-cochere that was less an imposing entrance than a welcome protection against the clutching overgrowth.

  The bell rang sonorous chimes deep within. When the great wooden door was finally, closely, swung open, it was by the old duke himself. Tatty caught her breath at the sight of him.

  He looked as old as Ramsey had said, his skin the color and seeming consistency of ash. Yet he was an enormous and certainly a once very strong man, easily six foot six, with huge hands, shoulders, and head. He was stooped, to be sure, but still towered over them, and his strong jaw was still square and jutting. The long teeth in his hanging smile were healthy and his own. His cheekbones and brow were massive, framing huge, piercing gray eyes that reminded Tatty uncomfortably of her grandmother’s. Great age or not, they were full of vision, like a staring old cat’s.

  He was dressed in slippers and gray flannels, a gray wool sweater pulled over an old white shirt with long, frayed collar, and a strange, old-fashioned, high-collared green jacket with military pockets and epaulets. A strand of some sort of jewelry was visible at the base of his wattled, old man’s neck.

  “Your Excellency,” Ramsey said, “as I promised. This is Mathilde’s granddaughter.”

  Ramsey then drew himself full-up, militarily, almost comically.

  “General Vladimir Mikhailovich Suvorov, I present Tatiana Alexandra Iovashchenko Chase.”

  It was well that Ramsey did not use the Russian patronymic, what with Tatty’s grandfather having been christened Elwood, and her father Bobby. Bobbyevna, indeed. For a bizarre moment, Tatty almost laughed. But then the duke took her hand, and there was no thought of laughter.

  The old man had a cane she had not initially seen, but seemed in little need of it. As he conducted them down the wide hall, he pointed with it at several oil paintings on the dark, oak walls, portraits mostly, including those of Czar Nicholas and his wife, and one of Mathilde as a young woman, or at least a woman no older than Tatty’s age. Mathilde looked quite striking, far beyond the flattery of the artist’s brush. The slightest flush came to the old duke’s face as they looked at the painting, and he stood even straighter.

  “Your grandmother, as you must recognize,” he said, his speech slow with age and his accent. “As you may know, we were somewhat related. Distantly. But through the Romanovs.”

  Tatty had never heard of the duke before Ramsey’s revelations of the weekend. She wondered why there were no servants about. If he could afford this great house, certainly he could afford servants. At his age, he would need them.

  It was at this point that she began to hear the music, very Russian music, with a great many people singing, perhaps with only people singing. Their voices were so rich she could not tell if there were instruments. There was no evident source of this music. As he led them into his library, the sound grew louder, but again she could not divine its source. There was no phonograph visible, no speaker. There was a fire, not a small, glowing fall afternoon fire but a full roaring blaze feeding on several large logs. The duke took a seat in a huge armchair beside it. Tatty, feeling a diminutive Alice in Wonderland, sat in a huge matching chair opposite. Ramsey went to a corner shelf where there were glasses and several decanter
s, and poured Scotch whiskies and water, with no ice.

  “Forgive my seeming presumption,” he said, handing them around, a very small glass for the duke. “I come here quite often. You don’t mind Scotch, do you, Tatty?”

  She minded it without ice, but was reluctant to complain. The duke was staring at her, but with what she took to be a friendly expression.

  “Tatiana Alexandra Iovashchenko,” he said. “Granddaughter of Mathilde and daughter of Chloe. You favor them both. But you favor better, someone else.”

  His wrinkles and wattles pulled themselves up into a smile. Then he slowly rose and moved to a near bookshelf, reaching with the ease and familiarity of a blind man for a leather-bound album. He brought it to Tatty and leaned over her, somewhat painfully. It was an album of photographs, all of the same person: Tatiana Romanov, as baby, child, girl, and young woman. The book contained an extraordinary number of them, but the duke kept turning the pages, until at last he came to the one he sought. The grand duchess was wearing winter clothing, a heavy, high-collared coat, and a large fur hat that came down close over her auburn hair, showing only a curl of it on either side of her face. The face, thus delineated, was embarrassingly beautiful. It was Tatty’s face, exactly.

  “Is astonishing, yes?” he said, after laboriously reseating himself and taking a small sip of his whisky. “Mathilde had told me of the resemblance, but I thought she had, as you remember she did, exaggerated. But no, she was so right. Is astonishing.”

  He closed his eyes. For a moment, she thought he had fallen asleep. Then she feared he had become ill, though his breathing did not sound labored. At length he revealed that he had only been concentrating.

  “I cannot recall the exact relationship,” he said, his eyes again open, and fixed on hers. “I cannot recall so many things. But you are as close a relative of the Romanovs as am I. You and the Grand Duchess, she would now be almost as old as am I, you and she would be, were, cousins. I will show you all this in another book. Is in another room. Later.”

  His voice trailed off and his eyes closed again. Tatty quickly realized that this time he was asleep. She looked to Ramsey, who put a finger to his lips, shrugged, and flashed his droll smile. She cupped her glass with both hands and stared into the fire, letting the music command her attention and then completely overwhelm her. It seemed there were a thousand people singing, the voices of strong, long-suffering men and women, voices rising from Russia’s rich and bitter soil. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes as well.