Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  No. The security guards would keep “anyone” away, just as they did when the secretary general came and went. Another minute. She rubbed her eyes. Paget had wiped the hotel room free of their fingerprints. Had he gotten them all? Was there some odd place she had reached? Would it matter? Hotel rooms must have thousands of fingerprints all over them. They didn’t exactly scrub the walls every day. She had no fingerprints in anyone’s file. She had never been arrested in all her life except in Russia, and there they had only stripped her of her clothes and thrown her in a cell.

  Another minute passed. The elevator was a jail cell. What if Ramsey had her fingerprints? He’d have had ample opportunity to get them. What if Kuznetzov and his party were accompanied by the head of U.N. building security? He’d not recognize her. He’d think something wrong. She’d opened the panel that allowed her to operate the elevator manually. She could close the doors at will. But could she close them in time?

  She stopped looking at her watch and stood stiffly erect, remembering the sentry at Lenin’s tomb. It would be only a short while before Kuznetzov came. Then she’d be free. Almost.

  The security guards stirred again. A group of people were approaching. She could hear their voices and footsteps. The guards assumed new positions to let them pass. Tatty squinted to mask her eyes. She’d abandoned her now too-recognizable sunglasses.

  They were closer now. She lowered her head, as though subserviently. How many people looked at the faces of elevator girls? How many at doormen or parking attendants? These would all be high-ranking Russian officials. An elevator girl would be a mere servant.

  The first figure appeared, a tall European, undoubtedly a U.N. official. He looked not at her but at his charges following behind, standing aside and ushering them into the car. There were so many, four or five short burly men, then a much taller woman and the giant Kuznetzov, and then two men almost his height, probably GRU security agents.

  She pushed the button that closed the doors, taking a longer glance at Kuznetzov and the woman. Her stomach contracted into a tight, hard, painful knot. She felt dizzy. It was Raya.

  Tatty kept her head averted, her eyes fixed on the panel before her. She had to go through with it. There was no way out. She reached to touch the button for the top floor, which lighted. But with her right hand, with a slight, surreptitious pressure of her little finger, she depressed the manual switch for “down.”

  The Russians began talking as the elevator descended. Tatty looked up at the little screen indicating their floor number, as though puzzled. The Russians were becoming excited. It was only a short way to the subbasement, and they reached it, the doors opening.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “I’ll get the engineer. Wait.”

  She squeezed by one of the GRU agents, quickly pressing the “close” button as she did so. He needed only to reach and grab her shoulder. He did not move to make room for her, as Russians never move in crowded conveyances, but he did not stop her. She got past and out the doors as they began to close.

  “Ustanovityes!” shouted Raya, frantically. Halt!

  Tatty was free, lunging away. She heard one of the Russians hit at the safety bar in one of the moving doors, halting it.

  But he was too late. Paget’s arm moved in front of Tatty’s vision, throwing an ignited grenade. She looked back to see it explode, the great flare of strangely sputtering, sparkling flame. Horrified, she saw Raya’s hair catch fire and all the Russians’ faces whiten in the brilliance of the incandescent pyre. Their screams became a din, but were quickly muffled as the doors finally closed for good.

  “You said it would be a gas grenade!” Tatty shrieked at Paget. “A nausea gas that would knock them out. All those people are burning alive!”

  Paget gave her a rude shove, almost sending her sprawling.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Get moving!”

  She cursed him, hating him, but did as he said. Back in the darkened press workroom, she took off the elevator girl’s uniform and Selma Peabody’s shoes, and put on the clothes from her bag. Sondra Hochmeister was unconscious but still alive. Tatty dropped the uniform on the closet floor beside her, along with the wig. She checked again, to make sure her memory and mind had not failed her. Yes, a label with the name of the Madison Avenue wig shop was there. Everything was done.

  “Let’s go!” he said. “Move!”

  Reaching the curving corridor, they fell into a slow step, as planned. They talked gaily, she responding from time to time with brittle, almost theatrical laughter. Pushing through the doors into the public area, they strolled on past another pale blue-uniformed guard, who observed them without much interest.

  “Into the gift shop,” he said.

  Paget bought a Chinese basket, because its bulk would require a large plastic shopping bag with a U.N. logo on the side, enhancing their image as innocent tourists. She purchased a matryoshka, the traditional Russian nest of wooden dolls, each but one with another inside. Her mother had given her one once, but she had lost it. She had been planning to buy another on her last trip to Russia.

  Tatty had just paid for it when they heard a great commotion. Security guards were herding the tourists out of the shops and up the staircase to the main level above. “We’re evacuating the building! Please leave at once!” People looked unsure, but no one panicked. From the top of the stairs, it was a short distance to the main doors leading out to the north terrace.

  “What is it?” Paget said to one of the guards.

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Then why are we having to leave?”

  “There’s an elevator fire in the Secretariat, sir. Nothing to worry about. But you’ll have to go.”

  They stayed with the crowd, moving tightly together up the stairs, then easing apart as they reached the upper lobby and fanned through the doors leading outside. Most of the crowd simply reformed once on the terrace, entranced as fire engines and police cars arrived seemingly by the dozen. Tatty and Paget moved back to the rear, and then a slight ways further, where no one could hear.

  “How soon will you call your Cuban friends?” she asked.

  “In fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  She looked directly up at the sky. It was a clear, pale blue but for a few dirty cumulus clouds.

  “Could there be a war because of this?”

  “No. That’s the first question I asked myself. I can’t see them doing it. They helped Castro and the mob kill Kennedy, and we took no reprisal. No, Kuznetzov wouldn’t be worth the risk. The Kremlin’s going to be a torn-up anthill for the next few weeks, Tatty. There’ll be no one in enough control to be ordering ICBM strikes.”

  A hand gripped her shoulder. She looked up into a policeman’s face.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  He pushed his way through. Two other policemen followed.

  “Let’s go,” she said to Paget.

  Walking slowly, Tatty swinging her shopping bag like some carefree tourist, they made their way west to Second Avenue, and finally to an Irish bar and restaurant neither of them had ever been in before. They took a table at the window, as tourists would do and fugitives would not. Paget ordered a beer for himself and a Bloody Mary for her without consultation. The waiter brought menus with the drinks. She caught herself thinking it was better to have a waiter than a waitress. He would notice only that she was an attractive woman. The waitress would notice details.

  Was her mind always going to work this way? What had she become?

  “I’ll call now,” he said. He crossed the room toward a short hallway leading to the lavatories, looking much too military, stopping at the pay phone. There were entirely too few people in this place.

  The police would not be looking for them. They would presently be looking for Golda Isaacs. And the Russians for Ramsey.

  She opened the menu, glanced over the items, and then closed the menu cover as though to some unpleasant sight. She could not eat now. Her stomach was hard and knotted.

&n
bsp; “He left at once,” Paget said, returning to his seat. “Within two or three minutes of the sirens he was out of his office and into a cab. It went up First Avenue instead of turning west. He may not be going to his hotel. I think maybe the airport.”

  The drinks came, her Bloody Mary unusually spicy and hot.

  “Are they any good, these Cubans?”

  “The best. They do this sort of thing all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told them Saylor double-crossed us in a drug deal. They’d take him out for us if we wanted. If we paid.”

  “You mean kill him.”

  “They do it all the time.”

  “No. I just want to know where he’s going.”

  Her drink was so red. Her mind’s eye filled with Raya’s flaming, screaming, dying face.

  “Why did you use that grenade, Captain Paget?”

  “That son of a bitch blew away a lot of my people in Vietnam.”

  “That’s why you decided to help me. You planned to kill Kuznetzov from the start. It had nothing really to do with me at all.”

  “Don’t say that. He wasted your father, too.”

  “The others in the elevator had nothing to do with that.”

  “They weren’t the Russian Red Cross, lady.”

  She looked down at her expensive new shoes. They could still hear sirens in the distance.

  “What was in that horrible grenade?”

  “Whitey Pete,” he said.

  “What?”

  “White phosphorous. Incendiary grenade. We used them in Vietnam. They used them in Korea. It’ll burn through a tank. After incinerating those people, it probably burned its way through the elevator floor. Look, Tatty, it’s not a nice way to die but it’s fast.”

  “What if it’s all for nothing? What if Ramsey just disappears and the Russians don’t even go after him?”

  “They’ll go after him. The police may back off when they discover there’s a CIA man involved, but the Sovietski will be relentless.”

  “What if they find him before we do?”

  “My Cubans are good. I’ll call them again in a few minutes. If he’s going to LaGuardia, we should know soon.”

  He ordered a sandwich and another beer, then left to make another call. Tatty turned away to look out the window. She wanted to leave this man, wanted never to see him again. They had had a bond in Gwen, in youthful memories, in the place where they had grown up. But that was gone now.

  Paget took his seat and grinned.

  “He went to LaGuardia, all right. He went into the Eastern shuttle terminal, then out the other side and onto an airport bus for Kennedy.”

  She finished her drink. There were many strollers on the sidewalk. Normal people, as she had once been.

  Tatty gathered up her belongings.

  “I’m going to Kennedy,” she said. “You stay here.”

  “I told you before, we can leave everything to the Cubans.”

  “I’ll call you when I get there. Where will you be? Here?”

  “No. Some place more likely. A hotel bar.”

  “The Waldorf. The bar in the Bull and Bear. I’ll call you there.”

  She rose. He remained seated.

  “Am I going to see you again, Tatty?”

  “That’s hard to say, isn’t it, Captain Paget?” She took his hand. It was as warm as hers was cold. “Be there when I call.”

  He was. The bar sounded rather crowded. All to the good.

  “I’m at the Pan Am Terminal,” she said.

  “You’re in the wrong place. My friends tracked him to Eastern.”

  “I’ll get over there.”

  “You’re too late. He’s airborne. He bought a ticket to Bermuda, under the name Sargent. Flight One Hundred. Can you believe that? How does anyone hide in Bermuda?”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  “It’s two hours’ flying time. You can cut your deal with the Russians for Ramsey’s flight number, and we can be out of here tonight.”

  Two hours was not long enough to get Jack Spencer out of Russia.

  “Good-bye, Captain, Have a nice life.”

  17

  She lay on her back in the sand, naked, eyes closed against the late morning sun. She had brought a towel with her, along with a small waterproof beach bag, holding both of them high above her head as she had splashed through the surf around the sharp black rocks to this hidden cove. But having now removed her bathing suit, she wanted no other fabric against her, only the cool, silky Bermuda sand. The sun was warm, though the sea water was cold, no more than sixty-five degrees. The great black lumps of barnacled rock behind her and to either side were fortress walls against the wind, but occasionally a shift of breeze would bring a swift, cool puff through the opening to the sea, tickling over her legs and belly, breasts and face and hair, then subsiding, like the small, lapping waves that splashed near her feet.

  Tatty felt none of it. Her body responded instantly to every tactile sensation, but her mind did not. As from her first day here, when she had plunged into the cold surf without any care of it. If a great wave were now to come smashing up between the walls of rock and boil over this sandy floor, her mind would continue with its thoughts as though undisturbed. Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Arabia, a great hero of her father’s, had been fond of amusing himself in front of others by putting out matches and cigarettes with his fingers. A corporal once tried it and cried out in pain, exclaiming, “It hurts!” “The secret,” Lawrence said, “is not to mind that it hurts.” Tatty no longer minded. Whatever happened to her now could not matter. She did not much believe in souls, but it seemed as though hers had become detached from the confines of her body.

  She now realized it was this she had sought in those interludes in that quiet retreat behind her house in the Hamptons. A form of peace transcending all around her, all within her. It had always been elusive; now it enveloped her, even here at the edge of the blustery, noisy sea.

  Lines of plays and verse stirred from her memory. Rimbaud had written: I have bathed in the poem of the sea.

  She had lain like this that odd morning at the end of the last summer, eyes closed and exhausted on the cold Hampton’s beach after her mad, frantic run.

  If she kept her eyes closed she might again hear Gwen’s feet in the long grass, Gwen delivering her her grandmother’s leather-bound book of death. So many people were now dead because Gwen had brought her that, dead for much the same reason that all the people in the book had died, rendered dead in much the same manner. The grand duchess had died no more horribly than had Gwen or Cyril, Griuchinov or the woman Raya. And Tatty had been death’s messenger, bridging, though fraudulently, the violent past of 1918 to the violent present.

  In a way she was grateful to Chesley for her cruel revelations, grateful to learn that she was not related to those people, that she had no czarist blood. What she had done was not just another selfish act by one of that all too selfish royal Russian tribe. What she had done was merely a mistake.

  Squinting, she opened her eyes to find the sun and measure its level. It was nearly time to go. She had made a schedule for herself here on Bermuda, and she kept to it.

  A moment more of this cold, still, quintessential peace. She recalled Jack Spencer arguing with someone, most likely Chesley, in one of her more liberal moods.

  “You keep insisting that the alternative to war is peace,” he said. “The alternative to war is not peace, it is slavery, degradation, robbery, and murder.”

  The first principle of war, then: The alternative to death is death.

  Perhaps it was not some transcending peace she felt. Perhaps she had simply moved through all this into a dimension closer to death.

  Perhaps death was the only peace there was.

  She stood up, stretching, staring out at the sea and the sunlight dancing upon it. The tide was rising. If she did not hurry, she might have to swim instead of wade around the rocks to regain the hotel beach. She b
rushed the sand from her skin and then pulled on her bathing suit. Striding out to the waves, she brushed her hand against the wall of barnacled rock. The sand was so smooth beneath her bare feet; the rock seemed covered with a thousand tiny knives.

  Her custom here after rising was to go for an early run and swim, dress, have breakfast in the hotel’s main dining room, return to the beach for her interlude in the cove, then retreat to beneath the sun umbrella of a table on the hotel’s swimming-pool deck for a Bloody Mary and a read of the newspapers.

  She had registered as Ann Shaw, and the black, supremely courteous waiter greeted her as that. Because of her theatrical Greenwich, Miss Porter’s accent, he like many in the hotel thought she was English. Tatty didn’t mind that at all. She certainly felt less Russian than she ever had in her life.

  The Bloody Mary, which she ordered with gin instead of vodka, was perfect. If the Windsor Beach Hotel was not the very finest hotel in Bermuda, it was quite close, and it was certainly the most English.

  The news about the Soviet Union in the Washington Post and The New York Times the waiter brought her was much like that she had read throughout the past week. The premier was still ailing, but improving, and had been seen muffled in black overcoat, scarf, and fur hat, on the balcony of his dacha. Acting in his stead, supervising the government day to day, was a committee of Politburo members including Foreign Minister Dobrynin and KGB Chairman Badim. Relations with the United States were moderating after the initial hysteria. Both countries had put military forces on alert and the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been recalled. Ambassador Crabtree in Moscow remained at his post, seeking, without success, an audience with Dobrynin. The U.N. secretary general offered to resign, and several Eastern bloc nations suggested it would be a good idea. As Tatty feared, flinching when she read the headline of the story, the Arab delegations, led by Syria but with Egypt abstaining, denounced Isreal as a threat to world peace and renewed demands for its ouster from the General Assembly.