Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  Her escort for the Foreign Ministry gala was the American ambassador himself, whom she had taken for a western-looking Russian when she had noticed him in the audience. His name was Crabtree and he was an extremely wealthy man, a benefactor who had donated an entire theater to a college in upstate New York where Tatty had once given readings much like these. The chairman of one of New York’s largest banks, he was a busy, impatient man who sat leaning toward the glass partition of his limousine and drummed his fingers constantly on the leather seat.

  “Damn big show tonight,” he said. “Damn big show.”

  “Do you mean my readings, ambassador?”

  He smiled politely, but shook his head with some irritation. He seemed at once displeased by the nuisance of her visit yet flattered to have an attractive woman in his company. He was a self-made man at or near sixty. She guessed his wife would be forty or less, elegant and beautiful, and not the first woman he had married.

  “No. Sorry. I mean this dinner. Dobrynin, the foreign minister, is going to be host. Deputy Premier Popov is going to be there. Marshal Kuznetzov, the defense minister. Party Secretary Furtseva. Almost everyone except the premier and General Badim.”

  “Of the KGB.”

  “He is the KGB, that son of a bitch. Very cool character. Seldom comes to social events, though he has the best table manners of all of them.”

  “What has occasioned tonight’s damn big show? Certainly not little me.”

  “You’re a very charming lady, Miss Chase. And very talented. But I think they’re seizing upon the occasion to break some new ice. We’ve had practically no social contact with them for over six months. In fact, four months ago the bastards started another fire in the embassy. Time to have the firemen change the microphones again, right? No, they’re up to something new. Maybe something big. The premier’s had another heart attack, you know. It could be …” He clamped shut his mouth, then sat back and gave a sheepish grin. “I talk too much. Excuse me.”

  “You said ‘everyone,’ Mr. Ambassador. Would that include Mr. Griuchinov, the chairman of the council of ministers? He was very nice to me in Leningrad.”

  “Yeah. I heard.” A quick embarrassed smile. “Sure. He ought to be at something like this.”

  He was not. Dobrynin, whom Tatty remembered from innumerable newspaper photographs taken during his many years as ambassador to the United States, sat at the head of the table and put Tatty immediately to his right. Deputy Premier Popov, an amiable if slightly doddering old fellow, sat at the table’s other end. Marshal Kuznetzov, sitting obliquely opposite her, stuck in Tatty’s mind because of his great height. He was easily six and a half feet tall in an assemblage where most of the men were no more than five foot eight. He moved very clumsily; his gestures were awkward and nervous, and he kept pulling at his military collar. Tatty wondered how Ramsey could see him as such a great hope for the West. The only one there she found at all attractive and likeable was the venerable Dobrynin. Perhaps he had become irretrievably Americanized. He talked to her charmingly throughout the dinner. She hoped Ramsey’s short list of possible heirs to the Bolshevik throne was longer than he had thought.

  When she returned to her room at the Rossiya, there were fresh bottles of Armenian brandy and vodka waiting on the bureau, and another of Griuchinov’s cards.

  The next day, in a very wet snow, Raya drove her in a large purple car out to the Economic Achievement Exhibition in the suburbs. All morning she was marched by displays of consumer goods manifesting the Soviet Union’s economic might, though most of the goods came from Eastern European satellites, especially the decent-looking furniture. After a bad lunch, Tatty was made to stand in the middle of a dizzying circular Cinerama that had great yellow Sovietski trucks and tractors bearing down on her from all directions. At the space achievement pavilion, Tatty decided she had had enough.

  “How many warheads?” she said, looking up at a badly maintained old space rocket.

  “Is Americans who began arms race,” Raya said.

  “Is not Americans who kill people with yellow rain. Or shoot down civilian jetliners.”

  “Is Americans who are only people ever to kill human beings with atom bombs.”

  “We must go back, Raya. Once again, I’m exhausted.”

  There was no message from Jack Spencer, nothing from Griuchinov. She slept, and was taken to the theater by the American ambassador’s chauffeur. His dinner party afterward was the most impressive of her tour, of any of her tours, yet Dobrynin was the only Soviet luminary present, the places of the previous night’s luminaries taken by cultural and trade officials. Most of the Americans there, aside from the ambassador, were relatively low-ranking as well, complete to Meadows leering at her from the far end of the table. It quickly became clear that the true purpose of this event was a private conversation between Dobrynin and the ambassador at some discreet opportunity during the evening. When it came, shortly after the serving of brandy and liqueurs, Tatty excused herself and summoned the chauffeur. As the guest of honor, it was de rigueur for her to leave before anyone else anyway.

  Meadows escorted her home, chattering away in the embassy car about all the gossip he had picked up at the dinner. Approaching the Rossiya, he had the driver stop some distance from the entrance. As they got out, he said seriously, “Ramsey was not pleased with your performance in Leningrad.”

  “Ramsey? Someone in the USIA?”

  “Stop being a twit. The drunk scene in the restaurant did us no good. Ramsey wanted pictures of you whispering intimately into Griuchinov’s ear, not snoring in your plate.”

  “I’m sorry. I was very nervous. I drank too much vodka.”

  “We noticed. You’re supposed to be portraying a clever spy, my dear, not a lush.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  They were almost to the entrance. Meadows stopped, turning to look into her face. They were standing very close, and he was not much taller than she.

  “This has to be very, very convincing,” he said. “We’re not dealing with morons.”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “It isn’t very good. We were counting on his inviting you back to the little pied à terre he keeps in Leningrad. You ruined everything.”

  “This isn’t exactly easy for me.”

  “There’s still a chance he might ask you to his flat here in Moscow. We’re going to count on that.”

  “He hasn’t even called.”

  “Encourage him. If he takes you anywhere, suggest going to his place.”

  “Like a brazen hussy.”

  “You are not an unsubtle woman.”

  “He hasn’t called. He hasn’t come to the theater.”

  “There’s still time.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “If you didn’t want to go through with this, my dear, what are you doing here?”

  “You’re right. I think I’ll go back to New York.”

  “Oh no. Not now. You’re going to do what’s required of you. This isn’t a trivial matter. You know what’s at stake here.”

  “I might just get on a plane and go home.”

  His long, steady disquieting look made her turn away. “This is Russia,” he said.

  “The man at the door is watching,” she said.

  “He’s always watching.”

  “They took away that pistol you gave me.”

  “I can get you another.”

  “No. I want nothing more to do with guns.”

  “We have many people here. They’re looking out for you. We promise you, there’ll be no surprises. Just do what you’re supposed to, what you agreed to. Ramsey thinks very highly of you. Don’t disappoint him.”

  She looked at the headlights moving along the roadway on the opposite bank of the river. “I’m cold,” she said.

  Meadows put his arm around her waist and they continued toward the doors. He began chattering again, about the new ballet at the Bolshoi. At the entrance, he kissed her cheek, whispering in her ear.


  “Remember your father.”

  Again there were no messages. In her room, the opened brandy bottle had been replaced by a full one, but the untouched vodka was still there, joined by a second carafe. There was again a card. She had kept them all. If this went on long enough, she’d be able to hand them out as party favors on some mad Hamptons evening.

  And how long might this go on? He should have been at the Soviet party; he could have been at the Americans’. He ought to have been at the theater. She damn well ought to be in his apartment.

  She took off her clothes, then put on her robe, poured vodka, and went to the chair by the window, turning it completely around so that she would not see the bed she had so recently shared with Spencer, that she so badly wanted to share again now. Lyubov. Love. “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Glorious Shakespeare. No one had ever let her play Shakespeare, except in college. She raised her cold glass. She wanted to drink to the Russian moon again, but there was none. There were not even stars. It had begun to snow.

  After the strangest breakfast of her stay, breaded boiled eggs called tkhum-dulma, she and Raya went to the Museum of the Revolution in Gorky Street, a former noblemen’s club that had been crammed full of memorabilia from the Bolshevik rising; precious little of the general revolution that had brought the Kerensky moderates briefly to power and made Bolshevism possible. There were endless dioramas and paintings of the Russian civil war, doubtless many of Tatty’s relatives depicted in the slaughter.

  They came to a horse-drawn cart bearing an antique machine gun. “Look,” said Raya. “Machine gun cart of Red First Cavalry Army.”

  Tatty had used up her illness excuse, her fatigue excuse, her “I-have-to-go-over-my-readings” excuse. She went to the cart, pounded her gloved fist against the wheel, and shouted, “Look! I’m damned tired of your revolution!”

  Raya was a restrained volcano, topped with ice.

  “Miss Chase, you are stupid woman. Come now. We go to Marx and Engels Museum.”

  “No! No more. I’m going back to the hotel.”

  If only she could go back to the United States. If only she could take Jack Spencer with her.

  Once again, there were no messages. She had lunch alone at the Rossiya’s twenty-first-floor restaurant. Staring out the window at the Stalinesque grotesqueries that were Moscow’s skyline, she ate her pilaf, as most of the men in the room stared at her unabashedly.

  Feeling lonely, she returned to her room. She drank, read, slept, read, slept, drank, and paced her room. The Russian sky darkened toward night. Finally the phone rang.

  “I have a health bulletin. I no longer hobble.”

  “Jack?”

  “I still don’t walk very rapidly, but I don’t cry out vulgarly.”

  “You’re feeling better?”

  “I’m feeling more than better. I’m feeling lustful. It seems like centuries since, since …”

  “I cannot tonight, Jack.”

  “No?”

  “Jack, this tour. There are some things that must come first.”

  “That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Jack, please.”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. We shall have lunch tomorrow, come what may. And I mean that. I have sworn off revolutionary points of interest.”

  “Too bad. I have one in mind. Lefortovo. It’s somewhat distant. Leave at noon. You’ll be there by twelve-forty-five. Tell your taxi driver you want the restaurant, not the prison.”

  “Lefortovo. Lyubov.”

  “Lyubov.”

  She hung up the receiver reluctantly. Tomorrow at noon, she could be having lunch with Griuchinov.

  He didn’t call. Raya picked her up at the appointed hour and drove her to the theater in the purple car. A third or more of the auditorium seats were empty. As in Leningrad, her audiences seemed to dwindle with each performance. This night, it did not include Griuchinov. Raya spoke only perfunctorily on the short drive back, and once again there were no messages. The evening’s alcoholic gift this time was not brandy or vodka but Johnnie Walker Black Label. She glanced at his card on the bureau; it looked quite the same. What did this move mean in his silly game? Was something so special as the West’s best Scotch intended as a good-bye gift? Was he pulling out of this fruitless pursuit?

  She lay on her bed nearly an hour before accepting reality and ordering a lone dinner for herself from room service. It was another hour before it came. She ate in silence. When she had shoved the service cart back out into the hall, irritating the spasibo lady, she changed into her nightgown, turned the room radio to the least depressing of the three channels, and then went to work on the good chairman’s Scotch.

  With all the lights on in the room, her trim bare feet propped up on a table, she set her mind to how she might yet improve her performance before the tour ended, how she would handle Griuchinov if the final invitation ever materialized. She had made her decision. She could bring herself to have sex with him, to do whatever such an old man might require for his pleasure.

  Ramsey was right. What was needed was the stuff of an airtight divorce case. Flagrante delicto, captured by clever Ramsey’s tapes and cameras. Then they would have to get rid of him. Then she would truly have administered the coup de grace, her body for her father’s blood, for so much blood.

  She imagined Griuchinov in some ragged, padded labor camp uniform, trudging a daily path to death in a snowy, Arctic gulag east of the Urals. She saw him kneeling on the cold stone floor of a Moscow prison, as a bullet was fired into his brain for treason. Or would they do something worse? Was it possible that in some fashion her own father’s death might be approximated?

  No it was not. They would do nothing to Comrade Chairman Griuchinov. Because he would never call her. With her foolish, drunken antics in Leningrad, she had thoroughly frightened him away. The continuing gifts of liquor were meant to insult her. Each one of them said to her, “You are a disgusting little decadent lush.”

  She drank, then set down her glass to squeeze tears away from her eyes with the heels of her hands. She was a failure, a loser. This Russian journey had affirmed that in every way. Nothing so well represented the pathetic decline of her theatrical career as the dwindling attendance at her readings. Nothing so well defined her general ineptitude at life than her inability to lure one demonstrably lascivious old man to her convenient bed. An obnoxious actor she had once worked with had said her only talent was being pretty. He was probably right.

  How had she come to such misery? Had she kept to the course set for her by the kindly Mr. Chase—logically following Miss Porter’s and Smith and her marriage to the pleasant young stockbroker, to her own house in Greenwich, the Junior League, children, and work in Republican politics—she might now be quite well content. Surely those things were all that poor Gwen had asked from life. But Gwen was not sister to Chesley Anne Hammond Chase. With Chesley her most proximate example of the fully lived life, Tatty could never be content.

  And now she had Chesley’s most prized possession, the man Chesley had taken to the altar when no other woman could, the man who had driven Chesley to extraordinary passions just by refusing to be completely possessed by her. He belonged to Tatty now, as much as he had ever belonged to Chesley, as much as he would ever belong to any woman again. Tatty had a sure instinct for that. She was as certain of Jack Spencer’s feelings for her as she had been of Dexter Johns’s or so many others before him.

  Yet the value of Jack’s love seemed diminished by his giving it to her. She still cared for him, dearly, for all the things he still was as well as for what he had been. But he was much the loser now, a burned-out newsman whose best future meant simply keeping his job, an aging man who already had an ailment that could kill him at any time, a man discarded by Chesley. That he would turn now to her made him seem all the more the loser.

  If she called him now he would come to her room or she to his apartme
nt and they would lose themselves in vodka and frantic sex, two forlorn people clinging to each other in the middle of this huge, cold, oppressive country.

  No. Lunch tomorrow would have to do. Their relationship ought to be after Russia, more than Russia. She really ought to bloody well finish her goddamn job here before doing anything else.

  She would have one last Scotch before retiring, she thought. She had three. Her last thought was of a reproachful, disdainful, unforgiving Ramsey Saylor, greeting her upon her return with a cold, murderous stare.

  Raya was angry that Tatty declined breakfast, angrier that Tatty declined a tour of the Battle of Borodino Museum, and confused when Tatty asked her to drive her out to the Lefortovo Restaurant—for lunch with a friend. Tatty dressed with great care, choosing again her black suit and red silk blouse, almost defiantly adding the antique jeweled pin. On the way out, she glanced again at Griuchinov’s card, stopping to put it in the drawer with the others. As she had not noticed the night before, there was writing on the back, in Russian, and a telephone number. He was asking her to call. The message, as best she could translate it, said he hoped she was feeling better and that, if she was, she was to call. Please to call.

  She was running late. She started for the door, hesitated, then hurried to the phone, dialing quickly.

  Jack was certainly correct. Without Raya to tell her, it was difficult to determine which was prison and which was restaurant. Raya was sullen, having been told this was a private luncheon to which she was not invited and then being dismissed for the day.

  “By yourself, you may get in big trouble,” she said, and then sped away, no doubt no further than just around the corner.

  Jack was at a side table, his back to the wall, looking strikingly civilian amidst so many military officers; looking haggard, too. He took her hand, his smile suddenly that of a small, happy boy.

  “Czarina.”

  “Why have you chosen this dreadful barracks as a place to eat?”

  “The set lunch is only one ruble, making it popular for Soviet army types. I’m working, you see. Vodka?”