Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  Not long out of Warsaw they crossed a border that wasn’t there.

  “Before World War II, this was Prussia. East Prussia,” Rodnieski said. “The Russians treated these people more terribly than any other. Stalin understood Nazis but was paranoid about Prussian military. All Prussian people who were not killed were moved away. Most of Prussia was given to Poland. A small part was kept by Soviets. Kaliningrad, where we go, was Prussian city of Königsberg.”

  Tatty remembered the old duke’s telling her that her connection with the Romanovs was not through her Russian relations but Prussian ones: she was in some part Prussian. This dark countryside they were now traversing was to a degree an ancestral homeland, home to ancestors she knew nothing about. Royalty? Peasantry? All family trees were rooted in peasantry. She wondered if in some recent century there had been an ancestor, a blond Prussian girl, much like her. Someone who lived in this strange, flat country, who loved it well.

  Now it was owned and inhabited by Poles. Prussians, Poles, Russians, Balts, fighting and fornicating with each other over all those centuries, armies and camp followers surging back and forth until they all became the same people. Yet how they still fought and hated each other.

  “Why are you so loyal to Jack Spencer?” she said, abruptly.

  Rodnieski did not speak for a very long time, then cocked his head to one side and smiled.

  “I was in great danger once. Jack Spencer saved me from it.”

  “How?”

  “He killed a man.”

  “Jack killed someone? In a fight?”

  “No.” He frowned. “You are leaving Poland. You must never speak of this. I would not want him to know I told you.”

  She nodded.

  “The Jaruzelski government knows I still deal with the Solidarity people but they think I do it as their agent. There was a police spy who found proof that it was other way around. He put me under arrest and was taking me away. Jack hit him over the head. He broke the man’s skull. We threw the body under a train.”

  Tatty sat in silence, listening to the thumps and groans of the speeding truck, taking her north to the sea, but back into Russia.

  “But I would be Jack Spencer’s friend even if that had not happened. He was very good to us.”

  After crossing what she was told was the Lyna River, she was put back in her crate. The truck was stopped several times, once for a very long time, but no one disturbed the cargo. Perhaps the likelihood of Poles fleeing into the Soviet Union was too small. Perhaps Rodnieski knew best after all, though she still suspected she might now be in West Germany if she had gotten to Gdansk within that first forty-eight-hour period.

  She could tell when they reached the city, sensing as soon as they reached the dockyard area that they were in trouble. The driver suddenly accelerated, swerving and weaving the truck violently around what Tatty guessed were other vehicles or stacks of cargo. All at once the truck lurched to a stop. She heard someone tumble into the rear and begin to jab open the lid of the crate with a small crowbar.

  “Tatiana,” said Rodnieski, prying it open. “You must find the ship yourself. It is the Rän. The Rän.” He pulled her out of the crate and all but threw her out of the truck. “Go, Tatiana! Good luck! Good-bye!” He pounded twice on the wall of the truck and the driver jammed it into gear, jerking forward. She could hear a siren, and running footsteps. In the distance was a searchlight.

  She ducked into the stacks of cargo, listening as the truck drove away rapidly. Soon she could not hear it anymore. Then she heard gunshots.

  The Icelandic captain was gruff and unfriendly, obviously displeased with her presence and very worried about the disturbances in the dockyard. A police car with searchlight blazing had pulled into view just as she had scrambled up the Rän’s gangway.

  “You must go below at once to the galley. If they come aboard, I want you working. Cleaning fish. Peeling potatoes. I’m not going to hide you. If they were to search the ship and find you, we could all go to Polish jail. You are here as a cabin boy. If they discover you, I will admit to taking you aboard without papers but will say nothing else about you. I can do nothing more for you. I did not expect all this trouble.” He turned to his second officer, a young man with a full black beard. “Take her below.”

  The young officer was very nice. He explained that, in Norse mythology, Rän was the name of the wife of Aegir, god of the sea. All the waves of the sea were her children. It was a lucky ship, he said. She recalled the sailor’s superstition about a woman aboard a ship.

  The cook was an old but pleasant man. The young officer spoke to him quite firmly in Icelandic; Tatty hoped he was telling him to be considerate to her. There was an actual cabin boy, a teenage youth with long dark hair who looked more feminine than she did.

  “It will be a long, hard night for you,” the officer said. “We are not to get underway until late tomorrow morning. We must onload more cargo.”

  When he left, the cook smiled, patted the top of her fisherman’s cap, and proceeded to give her every dirty job he could find. He and the feminine boy sat and watched her work through much of the night.

  Parties of men came aboard twice, but no one came below.

  Once they had left the harbor, the captain became friendlier, but he refused to free her from her galley rigors. “You come aboard as cabin boy, you stay cabin boy.” But she was given increasing amounts of time for herself, much of which she spent out on the deck, in good weather, standing up at the prow, staring at the sea, in her mind’s eye at all the seas toward which they sailed. She spent much of Christmas Day this way. As the Danish coast receded behind them in the winter dusk, Russia seemed thousands and thousands of miles away, the Romanovs merely names in books. She would cleanse herself of all this. She would return to life.

  After they had passed the northern capes of Scotland and were on their final course setting for Iceland, the captain relented and freed her from her galley duties entirely. For her last night, he even provided her with a large, well-furnished cabin on the deck level just beneath his, quarters comparable to a stateroom on the old liners. With her sailor’s clothes off, lying between the clean, crisp sheets with her eyes closed, she could have been in her Fifty-seventh Street apartment, but for the ship’s roll. It amazed her that she could ever have been unhappy in that place, such a short time ago.

  The captain, almost fatherly at the end, walked her up from the Reykjavik docks to the taxi stand near the little Icelandic capital’s central square. Sverrir Axelsson’s apartment was in what amounted to suburbs, though they were quite near. She had no idea whether he was home, but in Reykjavik, with only eighty-five thousand people, there were so few places he could be.

  He was at home, coming to the door in stocking feet, sleeves rolled up and tie askew, a glass of beer in his hand. He was probably Spencer’s age or older, but he looked almost boyish and something of a scholar, pale blue eyes behind thick black-rimmed glasses. Jack had said he was a columnist for Iceland’s largest afternoon newspaper.

  He appeared curious, and perhaps a little irritated. It was very late in the evening.

  “Are you Sverrir Axelsson?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “My name is Tatiana Chase. I am the sister-in-law of Jack Spencer. He said you were his friend. He said I should come to you. I’m in trouble.”

  Curiosity and irritation abruptly vanished, replaced by horror, disbelief, and then confusion.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Oh yes, yes. But you are supposed to be dead. Jack Spencer has been arrested in Moscow for your murder.”

  She quickly pushed past him into the flat, as though escaping some dark, unseen danger in the street. They stood awkwardly in the hallway for a moment, then he took her coat and cap, and ushered her into a very modern, very expensively furnished living room. She sat down on a leather couch, still feeling awkward, not to speak of frightened and confused.

  He studied her face. “Yes, it’s you. Just l
ike the newspaper picture. I’ll show you. But first, would you like something to drink? A beer? Or something stronger? Almost anything is stronger than Icelandic beer.”

  “Something very strong, please.”

  “Brennivin, then. Our local firewater. There is nothing stronger than our Icelandic brennivin. We call it ‘Black Death.’”

  He brought her a clear liquid in a tall, narrow Scandinavian glass. He was right about its murderous strength. She coughed. She had had nothing alcoholic to drink since leaving the Rodnieski’s house, and poor Waldemar had been very sparing with his vodka.

  He then gave her a newspaper called Kvoldbladid, turning it to page four. There was a small wire service photo of her, a theatrical agency portrait probably six years old. She could not read the short, accompanying article, which was in Icelandic.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wait. There was also a story in the Paris International Herald Tribune.”

  It was very short, but told her all she needed to know. American news correspondent John Spencer had been arrested by Moscow police for the murder of Broadway actress Tatty Chase, who was on a tour of the Soviet Union. Spencer, the estranged husband of Miss Chase’s sister, surrendered to police and confessed to beating her to death and throwing her body in the Moscow River. He blamed an alcoholic rage. Though her purse, hat, and coat were recovered, her body was not found. The article concluded with a reference to her last starring Broadway role, three years before.

  She set the paper down, drank the strange liqueur, and then pressed her hands against her eyes. Jack Spencer was now in some basement cell in Lubyanka. He had done that for her. When she took her hands away, they were moist. She drank more, and asked for another.

  “How did you get here?” he asked, as he poured it.

  “On an Icelandic freighter. Jack suggested it, when he suggested that I might come to you. There were other things I could have done, but it worked out this way. I had gotten as far as Poland, and there was an Icelandic ship in Kaliningrad.” He seated himself opposite her, looking very serious.

  “What is this all about?”

  She wondered how good a friend of Spencer’s this Icelander was. She must presume a good one indeed, for Jack had sent her to him.

  “It’s about murder, Mr. Axelsson, but not mine. Some Soviets, some very nasty men, tried to implicate me in something very awful. Tried to set me up as a patsy. Jack rescued me. Well, he helped me get out of Moscow. I’d no idea he’d done this, too. I feel very bad about it. God, is there any other news of him?”

  Axelsson shook his head. “It’s been only a short while. I’m sure he’s all right. For now. Tell me more of this.”

  Axelsson was a newspaperman. She had already told him too much.

  “You shouldn’t know any more, Mr. Axelsson. For my sake, for Jack’s. For your own sake. People have been killed. Do you understand?”

  He smiled, but it was a serious expression.

  “In Iceland, we are not very familiar with such things.”

  She drank. For the first time, she realized there was music playing, a woman’s voice, very sad and lonely, singing in Icelandic. A book, what looked like an American war novel, entitled Fragments lay open and face down on the coffee table. She glanced about the room. There was nothing to indicate if he was married. She wondered where she would sleep. She wondered if he would allow her to stay.

  “You must excuse me. I’m a little distraught. I feel sort of helpless at this point. Getting from Moscow, I’ve gone from man to man. I mean, it’s been like chapters in a book, but now I’ve come to the last of them. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What to do? That’s simple enough. You go to the American embassy. It’s not two miles from here. They will inform the Russians you are alive and Jack will be let go.”

  As simple as that. End of story. Except that Ramsey Saylor and Marshal Kuznetzov would not want it to be the end of the story. They would write new chapters, their own chapters, ending with her and Jack Spencer dead. Jack might never get out of Russia alive.

  She wondered why Badim had not simply had her killed, had her remains liquefied in some acid, as the Cheka butchers had failed to do successfully with the Romanovs. The man in black must kill people every day, bureaucratically, signing papers. That would have foiled Kuznetzov thoroughly.

  Axelsson’s apartment was well heated, but she felt cold to the bone.

  “Miss Chase?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid my mind’s a mess.”

  “Do you want to go to the American embassy?”

  “No. I don’t want anyone to know where I am, that I’m alive. Not yet. I’m afraid of what might happen to me.”

  “And Jack?”

  “And of what might happen to Jack.”

  “What do you want to do? My wife is visiting her parents in Norway. You could stay here, for a few days.”

  “No. I want to get back to the United States. The answer to my problems is in the United States.”

  “Have you money for air fare?”

  She smiled, embarrassed. “I have two hundred fifty-six dollars. Also Jack’s press ID and some jewelry. That’s all I have. My ring, I think, is fairly valuable. If necessary, I could …”

  He shook his head. “Flying is perhaps not a good idea. Our customs people are, well, they can be tolerant on occasion, if necessary. But in New York, I don’t know how you could get through. It’s worse in Chicago. Icelandair doesn’t fly anywhere else.”

  “What do I do?” She made a weak joke. “Your train and bus service is so poor.”

  He smiled politely. “I think you must go to sea again. Because of our winter storms, some of our trawlermen work the Grand Banks this time of year. One could take you to Canada. Is it easy to cross the U.S.–Canadian border?”

  “Yes. Especially into New England.”

  “The fishermen would do it for nothing, for the sister-in-law of Jack Spencer.”

  And whom had Jack killed in befriending the Icelanders? “The captain who brought me here never heard of him.”

  “A freighterman, no. But some fishermen revere him. He covered our 1975–1976 cod war with Britain. The damned British were destroying our export fishing industry, and that’s the basis of our economy. Jack sailed in our coast guard boats against the British. He got into a couple of the fights. He wrote a series of articles taking our side, warning that we would throw NATO out of the big air base at Keflavik if the British did not withdraw from our fishing grounds. A short time after they appeared, the American government ordered the British to stop it and they did. Everyone in Iceland who knows of this is most respectful of Jack Spencer.”

  And so she’d be handed off to another man, someone else obligated to Jack. In Canada, at least, at last, she’d be on her own.

  “All right. I’ll do it.”

  “It will be a very rough voyage.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “It will take a long time.”

  “That’s all right. I have time. I need time.”

  And every day she took, Jack Spencer spent in some wretched Russian cell.

  With her mind full of fresh and unwanted memories of mountainous waves, seasickness, the stench of fish and diesel fumes, and the coarse talk and behavior of open-sea fishermen, Tatty set foot on the North American continent near a fishing town called Port Dufferin up the Nova Scotia coast from Halifax. Three days later she crossed the U.S.-Canadian border on a Greyhound bus near St. Albans, Vermont. She reached Bridgeport, Connecticut, that night.

  It was raining when she came up the street. The neighborhood was quite old and the houses very modest, but they were well kept up. She found the one with the right number and, joyously, saw lights in the window. Hesitating, Tatty glanced up and down the street, so paranoid that she even looked for shadowy figures in the nearby cars. She was being ridiculous. This was sanctuary. She rang the bell.

  Gwen showed neither shock, horror, disbelief, nor confusion; only inordinate happiness. Her eyes
shining, she threw her arms around her friend, hugging and kissing her almost ferociously, saying over and over, “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew you weren’t dead. I knew you’d come back to me.”

  PART THREE

  In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.

  —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

  13

  Gwen had a small spinet piano, and it became the saving grace of Tatty’s confinement. For much of every day while Gwen was away teaching school, Tatty sat plinking and plunking at it until, after a few weeks, despite the piano’s being slightly out of tune, her playing sounded respectable again. As her roughened, battered hands healed, she improved still further. This day she felt confident enough to attempt her favorite pieces, all by Erik Satie, his three Gymnopédies and the five Gnossiennes. Her favorite of all, the Cinquième Gnossienne, she did over and over until she could lift her mind from the keys and just listen to the music, her left hand producing the slow, somber chords, her right the strong dramatic notes and trilling interludes and responses. The strange, melancholy timing of the piece had always made it seem, surreally, a man and woman dancing in a large, elegant room at twilight, yet a dance so slow and macabre that they might be dead.

  Her fingers lingering, she finished the last notes, and once more found she wanted to hear them again. She suppressed this desire, gently closing the lid. It was her rule never to drink while playing, and now, under new rules, it was past noon, and time to drink. She had abandoned vodka; she thought she would never drink it again. At great expense on her small teacher’s salary, Gwen kept her supplied with Scotch. If this odd exile in her own country kept on much longer, Tatty would have her switch to cheaper bourbon, or gin. She didn’t mind martinis, even in the winter’s cold.

  She filled half a large glass with Johnnie Walker Red, added a small amount of water from the kitchen tap, and then went to a window that overlooked the surprisingly expansive rear yard. It was snowing again. That first night, the dull, steady rain had changed to snow and become something magical, falling heavily and clinging to every surface of roof, branch, and twig, until everything in view was wonderfully white.