It was not a walk; it was a trek. They should have driven, but Raya was apparently intent on being perverse and difficult. It was almost as though she knew of Tatty’s czarist blood, and was falling into the role of the revolutionary guards of 1917, behaving as correctly as ordered but subjecting her ward to petty irritations and humiliations. Nevertheless, Tatty was enjoying the outing. She had felt confined and restricted from the moment she had arrived in Russia. For the first time now she was feeling the space of the place.
When they reached the Alexander Palace, she felt as though she had crossed half the country, and there was little vigor left to her stride.
The palace was nearly as large as the other, but its lines were graceful and less imposing, less flagrantly imperious. Tatty stood with hands clasped behind her back, studying the palace facade.
“Don’t you want to go in?”
Inside would be the empress’s mauve boudoir, the children’s playroom and schoolroom, the study where the czar had first received Kerensky, the bedroom in which Tatiana had recovered from typhoid, the rooms Tatty remembered from her grandmother’s telling and from recent reading, rooms too intimate and personal, too depressing.
“No, Raya.” She began walking, her boots kicking up small sprays of snow. At the far corner of the long building she came to a raised, covered veranda with ornately carved balustrades, a structure more balcony than porch.
“Is empress’s balcony,” said Raya. “Private for her.”
“Raya, when the grand duchesses entertained their friends, when they gave garden parties, where would that have been?”
The other woman shrugged, then pointed to some distant hedges.
“There maybe. Those are formal gardens of park.”
“No. It would have been a place nearer the house. A place where the girls would entertain close friends, or relatives. Where they might serve refreshments.”
“Around the other side, maybe. That would be close to the kitchens in this wing.”
They went around the next corner, two women in red against so much whiteness. With the snow and so many decades passed, there was no way of telling where the flower beds might have been. Tatty walked about until she had a view of the house that resembled what she remembered in the background of the photograph in her grandmother’s bloody memoir. She stared at the house for a long time.
“It could have been here. It could very well have been here.” She scuffed at the snow until she had cleared a patch of moist black earth. Scooping up a handful, she held it close, finding it as black as her glove. She clenched it tightly, then scattered it in lumps across the snow at her feet.
“Kuzina,” she said.
“What did you say? Did you call me your cousin?”
“No. Let’s go. I’ve seen what I came to see.”
They did not speak again until they were in the car and driving away. Raya, going too fast in the snow, kept shaking her head, as though puzzled by the folly of this excursion.
“Those grand duchesses,” she said, finally. “They were parasites.”
Tatty leaned her head against the window. She would escape Raya by closing her eyes and feigning sleep. But, before she could, something glittered at the periphery of her vision, sunlight reflecting on the chrome bumper of a parked car. It was an American car, sitting back down an unplowed side road in an avenue of tall, bare trees, exactly the same color and model of car as that which had welcomed her at the airport.
She meant to ask Meadows about that quite directly on the way to the theater, but he did not appear. Instead, there was Raya in the lobby, Raya without her little car.
“Tonight we are driven in Soviet government car,” she said, leading the way outside to a black, gleaming Ziv with a chauffeur.
“Comrade Griuchinov?” Tatty asked.
“You have very much impressed him.”
“Lucky me.”
Griuchinov was not in the audience that night. Neither was he waiting in the car for her when the performance was over. So it went for the next several nights. On the evening of her next to last performance in Leningrad, the routine changed. Raya was not in the lobby. There was only the military chauffeur. And in the rear seat of the Ziv, smiling generously as she leaned forward to enter, was Griuchinov. She hesitated, but there was no point to that. It was far, far too late for that.
“Good evening, Miss Chase.”
His pronunciation had improved slightly. She was no longer “Meese Chess.” Now she was “Meese Chass.”
“Good evening, sir,” she said, in as gracious yet cool a tone as she could muster. “This is most kind of you.” She lowered herself stiffly into the plush seat, gathering the skirts of her evening dress away from the door just as the chauffeur swung it shut.
“Is my pleasure, Miss Chase. Is wrong that such a great actress should be conducted through our streets in such little car as Tovarisch Postnikova’s.”
“You’re too kind.” She was doing her best frosty Grace Kelly. It was her most perfect role. Grace Kelly movies were what had attracted her first to acting.
“I enjoyed very much your first performance. I am told tonight you are reading from new works. Yes?”
He stayed well to his side of the car. She was afraid he would reach to kiss her hand again, or start patting it like Meadows.
“Yes. I’m including some writings by Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech. I’m dropping Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“I am not familiar …”
“Frederick Douglass was a slave who won his freedom and became an abolitionist lecturer and eventually an ambassador. It’s said Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech won him his party’s presidential nomination.”
“And Uncle Tom …?”
“The book was very important in its time. But it’s too juvenile.” She paused, then smiled, frostily, adding, “For your sophisticated Russian audiences.”
“Yes. So your recital becomes more political.”
“In a nineteenth-century sense, I suppose that’s true. But it’s good politics, isn’t it, Gospodin Griuchinov? Opposition to slavery?”
He seemed unfazed by both her use of the czarist-era term for gentleman and her oblique reference to the gulags.
“Yes, yes, Miss Chase. But is no matter. All words are beautiful when you speak them.”
Now she let her frosty Grace Kelly lapse into Vivien Leigh’s fluttery Scarlett O’Hara.
“Mr. Chairman, you are just so sweet.”
She had touched his arm. She pulled her hand away.
“You are leaving Leningrad soon, Miss Chase?”
“My last performance is tomorrow.”
“I am returning to Moscow myself. I shall be looking forward to seeing you there. I am wondering if tonight, after performance, if you might be liking to join me for dinner?”
“I can’t.”
She uttered the words reflexively, without thought. She had to be with him somewhere, someplace more compromising than a chauffeured car in a public street, or a public hall. But not now. She was not yet ready to cope with that moment. She must keep the monster trailing along.
“I’ve already eaten,” she said, lying. “I have quite a nasty headache, and I’m just utterly exhausted, as I’m sure you understand. If I’m to be any good at all in Moscow, I simply have to have a thoroughgoing good night’s sleep.”
His expression had become somber, his glittering eyes hard and serious. In the darkness, he seemed a great bear peering out from the recess of a cave.
“So what about tomorrow night?” she said, with an elegant Grace Kelly inflection. Before he could respond, she put a fluttery hand to his arm again. “There’s a restaurant, the Baku? In Sadovaya Street? Raya says it has the best zakuski in Leningrad. Yet we have not been. I should be delighted to dine with you there.” And not in some plush, old man’s hideaway. “That is, if you haven’t more pressing business?”
“Oh no. Nothing that cannot wait. No. This makes me most very happy, Mi
ss Chase. I shall be envy of all Soviet Union.”
With good bloody reason, she thought.
At the theater, he kissed her hand again, his lips lingering over-long. She did not smile at him until he finally released her.
“No fish,” she said.
“Yes. No fish. Ha ha ha.”
She ran into the theater.
He was most attentive during the performance, especially when she read the Douglass and Lincoln speeches directly to the box where once again he sat alone. He did not appear afterward. There was only the chauffeur, and Griuchinov’s empty car. He had apparently taken another, as though fearing that if he came into her presence again now he might say or do something to make her change her mind.
The next morning, Tatty got rid of Raya, feigning a need for more sleep that proved real once she returned to her suite. She awakened again after eleven, then went for a solitary walk along the river. Moored to the quay alongside the Pirogovskaya Embankment was a warship. It had been part of the view out her window but she had assumed it was just another ship of the Soviet navy. As she looked at it now, it seemed much too old-fashioned for that. And there was no crew visible aboard; only a militiaman in a fur hat standing outside a sentry box by the gangway. The name on the bow, in Russian letters, was Aurora.
The cruiser Aurora. Mathilde had told her something about this ship. It had to do with the Bolshevik rising. The Aurora fired the guns that had begun the Bolshevik rising and driven Kerensky and the Provisional Government from the Winter Palace. And here it was, on display, just like the U.S.S. Constitution.
Tatty looked at the guard and gestured toward the ship. “Razreshayetsya?” He nodded curtly. It was open to the public.
Finding little of interest on the deck, she ducked through a hatchway, discovering that the old ship was maintained as a museum. Throughout the interior were artifacts and enlarged and mounted photographs of the revolutionary period, not only the two uprisings of 1917, but also of the 1905 disorders. On a lower deck was a massive photograph of the bloody demonstration outside the Winter Palace, the enlargement intensifying the deadliness of the soldiers’ weapons, the panic and desperation on the faces of the fleeing people, the horror of the dead.
She felt confined, and oddly frightened. This ship could serve as the perfect prison for her, a Dantean hell for the claustrophobic, crowded with searing reminders of the blood and misery that was the reign of czars and the end of czars. She went back to the stairway and hurried up it, up past the main deck and all the way to the bridge, glad as she stepped out onto it to be returned to the space of the sky, river, and city.
The ship was moored almost directly opposite the hotel entrance. Standing there, watching her, was a man in a brown leather overcoat. A block down the street was Raya’s small red car, a figure in red visible inside. A hundred yards in the other direction was another man in an overcoat, leaning against the wall of the embankment. This wretched, stupid country. Even if it had been as bad under the czars as they said, nothing had changed. All those millions of people, including her cousin Tatiana Nicolayevna, had died for absolutely nothing. All that had changed was the name of the secret police.
She stomped her way out of the ship and down the gangway, stopping to give an exaggerated spasibo, or thank you, to the young militiaman, who seemed embarrassed by her. Then, walking with long, quick strides, she crossed the river to the Kutuzova Embankment and went west toward the palace. She assumed they were following her, but didn’t look back to see. Reaching the broad expanse of Dvortsovaya Square, she marched out to the center of it and then whirled around to face the palace and the balcony from which the czar had so often spoken to his people. She stood defiantly, her hands on her hips, legs apart, watching as the little red Zhiguli car pulled to a peeking halt just around a corner of the palace, feeling suddenly a great joy in her czarist blood.
Then she walked rapidly back across the square, and into the museum entrance of the Winter Palace. They would catch up with her, of course, but it would require some inconvenience. Moving through the exhibits at a tear, she did her best to make it a considerable inconvenience, complete to ducking out a side exit that said, in Russian, No Exit.
Back at the hotel, she went up to the foreigners’ bar on the top floor for a drink, and stayed for an expensive lunch she had to pay for in American dollars. Back in her suite, she had another drink, forsaking the chair by the big window to pace about her sitting room. Finally, she did sit, on the edge of her bed, holding the rim of her glass against her lips.
Like most theatrical people, she was a person of habit—routine and ritual. When she was indulgent and disorderly, even that followed a pattern. Ramsey had told her in France this was a dangerous failing.
But now it had a value. It told her that something was amiss, out of place. She looked about the two rooms. They had been victim to the maid’s clumsy neatenings, but the maid would not have touched her suitcase. Someone had. It was set many inches away from where she had set it down snug against the side of the bureau. And it had been turned with the zipper and lock side facing out, instead of against the wall as she had left it. The combination lock was set, but the three rolls of numbers had been turned to only a few numerals distant from the combination, and not spun wildly as was her custom.
She opened it, reaching immediately for the small pistol. It was gone. It was nowhere in the suitcase; nowhere in the room.
She returned to the edge of the bed, nervous, sipping her drink and trying to calm herself. If they were going to arrest her for some weapons infraction, there would have been militiamen awaiting her upon her return. Perhaps they were merely being discreet, in their totalitarian way. Firearms were forbidden. As she had one, they simply took it, no questions asked, no questions needed. They may well have relieved previous theatrical guests of drugs in the same fashion.
In any event, she was now without Ramsey’s charming little gift. She laughed. She had not much need for it. The only one threatening her with “a fate worse than death” was old Griuchinov, and she certainly wasn’t going to shoot him.
That she was going to leave to the Russians.
She pulled on her coat. She would go out to the street now and march right up to Raya’s little car. She would make Raya take her to the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the Zoological Museum, all sorts of places. She would make Raya perform as a tour guide, and then some.
But when she went out, the red car was not to be seen.
Her performance that night, though her finale in Leningrad, was her worst. It was in fact execrable. Doubtless those following along with the Russian translations didn’t notice or care, but New York reviewers would have hooted her off the stage. She was wooden and clumsy, hurried and slurred. She wanted only for the show to be over with, so she could go and dine with Griuchinov and get that over with. And soon—get Russia over with.
The seats, fittingly enough, were sparsely filled, with Griuchinov the only occupant of a box. He, too, appeared impatient.
In the car he held her hand and talked volubly about Moscow all the way to the Baku restaurant, which was not far away in Sadovaya Street just off Nevsky Prospekt. The main dining room was on the second floor and, by Russian standards, quite elegant, if noisy. There was a dance orchestra and singers, and a boisterous response to the music from the many diners. Griuchinov had obviously been intent on making a discreet entrance, but the restaurant manager and his staff reacted to their arrival with a frantic, nervous deference that Nicholas himself could not have commanded before the revolution. A quiet corner and three tables had been set aside for them and the security entourage that had materialized from following cars. Their table was quite large, but the only two chairs at it had been set close together. Tatty had prepared for that. She had prepared herself for every eventuality.
The menu given her was in both English and Russian but she spoke her choices to him in the latter, ordering amply of the Azerbaijani dishes, commencing with smoked sturgeon and pickled peppers. She
also asked for a large carafe of vodka. He smiled at this, as though he thought it augured well for his plans for the night, not knowing her mind.
“You speak our language well, Miss Chase,” he said, lighting what looked to be an English cigarette. “Is surprising.”
“My grandmother was Russian.”
“Yes?” He seemed much interested in this.
“An immigrant.”
“Not Jewish.” He said it in the manner of a little joke. For a moment, she had an impish impulse to say that she was, but there was the possibility that might frighten him away.
“No. She was of the Russian Orthodox faith, though in the United States she became a Catholic.”
“You are then Catholic?”
“Oh no,” she said, smiling as though this was all the most wonderfully witty dialogue. “Worse. I’m Episcopalian, as much as I am anything religious.” She quickly found another subject in the music. A woman was singing now, a ballad very haunting and moody, yet a song that could only be Russian.
“What is that song?” she asked.
“‘The Pear Tree.’ Is country song. Very much romantic, yes?”
“Yes,” she said, allowing him to hold her hand again, but taking it away when the waiter hurried up with the next course.
She drank thirstily of her ice-cold vodka. So much hand holding with the old Russian gentleman. The word applied to Griuchinov, for, all else aside, he was as courtly a fellow as the old duke in Westchester. It was just unfortunate he was a courtly old murderer.
He began coughing violently, the spasms not easing until he took several swallows of water and then some vodka.
“Excuse, Miss Chase,” he said, grinding out his cigarette. “These are what killed Brezhnev, and here I am doing same thing to me. Doctors make me stop smoking, but I thought for tonight, for special occasion, I indulge myself.”
“Do I provoke you to indulgence, Mr. Chairman?” She fluttered her eyelashes.
Blood of the Czars Page 12
