Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  The police aspects of the story were reported in the Times’s metropolitan section. Raids had been made on the Committee for Jewish Revenge, and most of the group’s few members had been arrested, three of them injured in the process. Tatty had told Paget how troubled she was by the prospect of this, but he shrugged her off.

  “They’ve bombed two Russian consulates,” he’d said. “The streets’ll be healthier without them.”

  Tatty thought of the girl in the subway in prison. But the Times reported that most of these people were being released, only those who had fought the police in the initial arrests being kept in custody.

  There was no mention of any other arrests. There was no mention of any kind, anywhere, of Ramsey Saylor. The Russians may well have gotten to Tatty’s hotel room before the police. The police might have turned that aspect of the case over to the tight-lipped FBI. The CIA might have moved in before anyone else.

  She opened the morning’s Bermuda Mid-Ocean News. There was a wire-service story from Moscow. Dobrynin had been named deputy premier. He had agreed to meet with Crabtree at the end of the week. The president had ordered U.S. forces to stand down from alert, except for those in West Germany. Israeli and Syrian aircraft had clashed over Lebanon, but there was no major ground fighting.

  Tatty closed the paper, folding it, and set it on the table. She had no more need of such news. But now she had to concern herself with life and death as it would be fought for on this small, fragrant, enchanting island. The few miles it stretched from St. George to Dockyard were the universe, the quantitative limits of her universe. Ramsey Saylor was now both God and devil in her life.

  Finishing her drink, she returned to her room and showered the sea salt from her hair and body, changing into a blouse, khaki Bermuda shorts, and Topsiders, as she did every day at this time. In a parking area adjacent to the hotel’s main entrance was the powder blue mini motorbike she had rented for her stay. She set her purse into its wicker front basket—carefully, for she had her pistol in it—then pulled on the required safety helmet. The security guard at the end of the drive waved at her as she roared past him into South Road, accelerating into the left-hand lane and the first of the swinging curves that led down the hill toward Hamilton. When she had first come to Bermuda, some twelve years before, there were few cars and more bicycles and horse-drawn carriages than these noisy little machines. Now every road and street was as frantic as a gokart track. The speed limit was still twenty miles an hour, but no one seemed to respect it. She had nearly been driven off the road three times until she had gotten the hang of the traffic. Twisting the handlebar throttle to maximum speed, she swung around two old women on mopeds then raced along after a taxicab.

  Turning around the rotary at the eastern edge of Hamilton Harbour, nearly colliding with a large pink bus coming out of Trimingham Road, she glanced quickly to the left, twice, three times, capturing the view of moored sailboats and turquoise water in fragmented segments. She let her eyes savor all this, but her mind stuck to its cold business.

  Entering the broad expanse and thick traffic of Front Street, the great cruise liners moored at the quay on the left, blocks of stores, shops, and offices with gaily painted British colonial facades on the right, she slowed, put-putting along, just another British or American lady going shopping. But she was hard at work. Tatty moved along with the traffic, looking quick and hard at every face she passed. She made a complete circuit of the town center, as she did every day. Finally, she descended the hill back down to Front Street again, pulling up in a carpark and locking the silenced motorbike’s front wheel. She went through the same area now on foot, stopping in Trimingham’s to buy a straw hat and a khaki skirt, the store’s plastic shopping bag a badge of identity as she moved back out onto the street. Then up Queen Street to the central art gallery. She looked into all the little art galleries nearby, the campy little shops, all the very British places, all the places he would most enjoy. Again Tatty found nothing, not even a false alarm, no one who even resembled him. As always.

  She took lunch in a second-floor restaurant on Front Street, asking for a table on the veranda, which overlooked the quay and harbor just opposite the Hamilton ferry terminal. She ordered an avocado salad, with Bermuda’s spicy pepper pot soup to begin, and a gin and tonic to be served at once. It was her second drink of the day, and she savored it.

  All the world’s secret armies of cold-minded, bloody-handed, soulless spies would be looking for Ramsey. The West would seek him in the East, the East in the West. They’d look for him in the slums of Mexico City, the slums of Calcutta, the high-rises of Singapore, the villas of Cap d’Antibes. They’d seek him in farmhouses in North Dakota and steambaths in Tokyo. But the smartest would look for him here; the rabbit would run to his own secret briar patch, his own thicket of brambles and thorns. Ramsey knew every foot, every beach, road and house of Bermuda. Of all the hiding holes in the world, it was the one where he’d fit in most naturally, indeed, perfectly. It was the single place in all the world that he loved best. If he were finally to be cut down, he would want it to be here.

  Yet it was proving extraordinarily difficult for her to find his exact hiding hole on this little island. She had spent her first week prowling St. George and all the communities east of Hamilton, being especially cautious near the U.S. Naval Air Station of St. David’s Island, working her way back every day until she had covered all the territory west to Grape Bay. This afternoon she planned to devote to scouting the yachting clubs in and near Hamilton, and if that was unsuccessful, turning that night to some of the bars in Hamilton most popular with gays.

  She would search and search until she found him. Ramsey was here, somewhere.

  And now at last she had her proof, for there they were, pulling up in a black compact station wagon with red upholstery, Ramsey’s favorite colors, at the sidewalk leading to the ferry terminal, the same muscular black man with the same massive forehead getting out the passenger side. He wore an earring and a gold chain, a black T-shirt, tight blue jeans, and white tennis shoes, dancer’s clothes. As Tatty quickly drained her gin and tonic, the black man went to the rear of the station wagon. The driver, the same man who had been at Cyril’s that dreadful night, complete to flowered shirt, close-cropped hair, and mustache, got out and opened the hatch for him, handing out two shopping bags. There was a third person in the rear seat of the car, but Tatty could only see a portion of his back and shoulder.

  Bags in hand, the black man started toward the ferry. The driver returned to his seat and restarted the engine. Tatty pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and rushed through the veranda doors, thrusting it upon a waiter. She hurried through the restaurant along the bar, then, putting on her sunglasses and her new straw hat, down the stairs. She had just a few seconds in which to decide—run for the car park and her motorbike in hopes of catching up to them, or follow the black man.

  She chose the latter. Running might draw their attention without getting her to her motorbike in time. Whatever happened on the ferry, it was bound to take her closer to Ramsey. If the black man recognized her, she had her pistol.

  There weren’t many on the ferry. Tatty took a seat up by the bow, facing slightly to the rear, the entire deck within her field of vision. The black man had seated himself against the rail on the starboard side. He looked at her, but as he looked at everyone else on board. Then he crossed his legs and tilted back his head, closing his eyes as the ferryboat chugged backward from the dock.

  The grinning black captain spun the helm till the wallowing boat had reversed its course, then thrust the engines into forward, heading out past Point Shares through Two Rock Passage into Bermuda’s Great Sound. Tatty looked about her, at the passing islands and houses, ahead to the opening waters where a cruise liner was steaming in through the channel by Spanish Point.

  The black man got off at the Watford Bridge dock, a narrows far up the left hook of the island not far from Dockyard, the first of three stops the ferry woul
d make before returning to Hamilton. Tatty let him gain some distance from her, realizing her mistake as she stepped onto the quay. He dropped his two bags into the oversized basket of a yellow minibike, unlocked it, and, with an athletic stomp on the starting pedal, pushed off the kickstand and roared away. By the time, half-running, she reached the road, he had disappeared. She had to wait fifteen minutes before one of the pink buses came. She took the rearmost seat, the one over the engine, accepting the bouncing discomfort in return for the greater visibility.

  The visibility was useless. She saw nothing of the black man, or his minibike, or anything that might have anything to do with Ramsey Saylor. This was one of the oldest and poorest parts of Bermuda, a section favored by middle-class English tourists. The building exteriors seemed more drab than on the rest of the island, more weary from the years of sea and weather, the vegetation more overgrown. Here and there beneath the lowering limbs of great green trees she could glimpse the facades of great gray houses. It was her guess that Ramsey was in one of these, but she could not know.

  After the bus crossed Somerset Bridge, a ten-foot wooden span purported to be the shortest drawbridge in the world, she gave up looking for the black man. She eased back against the seat, ignoring the spectacular view, thinking.

  The long bus ride back to Hamilton took nearly all the rest of the afternoon. Returning to the Windsor Beach Hotel tired and disgruntled, she went out onto the balcony of her room for her third drink of the day, a rum and Coca-Cola. With a pistol close to her chair and her straw hat pulled down almost to the top of her sunglasses, she sipped it sparingly, looking down the hillside of meandering paths and pines and banana trees to the beach with its squealing children, supine adults, and the sparkling waters beyond.

  She spent an hour with her drink and her thoughts, then went inside and napped. Afterward she showered, changing into another Diane von Furstenberg dress. She would dine at the hotel tonight. Foregoing the gay joints this time, she would pass the rest of the evening at the hotel’s nightclub. The Esso Steel Drum Band was appearing, the finest in the West Indies. She hoped that, with his deep fondness for the islands, Ramsey might appear.

  She watched the skies darken to night, then dined on Vichyssoise, crabmeat, tournedoes of beef, asparagus, potatoes Anna, and a glass of St. Julien. She descended to the nightclub and nursed a Cointreau for an entire performance of the extraordinary musicians, who played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the inverted halves of fifty-five-gallon gasoline drums. Ramsey did not appear. Neither did his friends.

  In her room she mixed a stinger, changed back into shorts and a blouse, foregoing underwear and shoes, and then walked down a meandering path to the concrete promenade, and down the stone steps to the beach, which the hotel kept floodlit until well after midnight. The sand was quite cold, but refreshingly so. She crossed the beach’s wide expanse and stood for a moment with the waves lapping to her toes and ankles. She walked forward, until the sea reached her knees. There were stars in the sky, and far out, the rocking lights of a large boat. She moved about in the cold waters, stirring it against her cold flesh, finding something sexual in that. Then she stood still again, legs parted and taut in almost military fashion. She felt immensely strong.

  She turned abruptly. On the promenade, back from the stone railing but caught in outline by the beach floodlights, she saw the slight figure of a formally dressed man, clothed in a white suit and dark tie. He seemed to have white hair. Stepping back, he disappeared into shadow.

  Tatty stood, her back to the sea. If she were to survive, or even succeed with her plan, she could consider no one, not the slightest shadowy figure, innocent. If she went back now, up the steps and path to the main hotel building, she could be shortly dead. But she could not stay here, exposed in the midst of these floodlights. She could not stand still. She must keep moving, moving forward, pressing him, pressing them all.

  With both the doors to the interior hall and her balcony locked, chairs tilted against them beneath the doorknobs, and her pistol on the bed beside her, Tatty prepared for bed.

  She had brought her nest of wooden matryoshka dolls with her, separating them and lining them up in their descending order on her dresser. She looked at them over the rim of her glass. She still wore the emerald ring the spurious czarist duke had given her. She would keep that much. It was perhaps the only thing in all of this that was genuine. The red imperial pin that Ramsey had given her she had thrown into the sea.

  She sipped, and turned out the last of the lights.

  The next day arrived with the sky bright though the sun was not yet up. She put on her bathing suit, a covering jacket, and a towel, and ran down to the beach. The surf was higher and colder than it had been since her arrival. The cold and violent force brought her body very close to her mind.

  Retreating much farther up the sandy floor of her secret cove than usual, she looked all about her. There was nothing, no one, to be seen. She pulled off the two pieces of her bathing suit and stood naked, the nipples of her breasts becoming erect in the stimulation of the cold, vigorous wind. She owed herself this interlude, at the beginning of what could prove to be the climactic day. It could be a most important indulgence. It could be her last.

  Nothing happened; not until she had finished her usual shopping and luncheon rituals, her perambulating reconnaisance of the town. She was on her way back to the hotel again, going eastbound past the main stretch of Front Street, put-putting by a dusty wine and spirits shop on the left. There was the little black station wagon, its hatch open, revealing the same red upholstery. Tatty had not remembered the license-plate number, but it did not strike her as different.

  She slowed, glancing inside the shop. She saw the close-cropped man in the flowered shirt at the counter, standing next to a taller, more youthful man with long blond hair.

  Tatty pulled off into a side street, swerved her motorbike up onto the sidewalk, then jerked it around, leaning over it as though tinkering with the throttle. She had her safety helmet on, and her sunglasses.

  The black station wagon roared by. Tatty lunged the motorbike off the sidewalk and after it, barely avoiding a following truck. She skidded into the right-hand lane momentarily, then regained control and sped along Crow Lane toward the rotary. The station wagon accelerated around the circle, turning into The Lane, the main road leading to the west. But just beyond a small park, it snapped into a sharp right-hand turn, following a twisting, turning shore road leading out along the southern reaches of the harbor. Keeping the motorbike at top speed, using the soles of her Topsiders to brake, skip, and skid around the tight corners, she stayed with it. She could see that the driver was watching her in the rearview mirror. The other man had turned in the seat, his eyes fixed on her. She wondered if he might suddenly start shooting. They couldn’t recognize her, with her safety helmet and sunglasses, but they might guess.

  She opened the flap of her handbag, pulling the pistol up to where she could easily reach it. The road now wound up a grade, a sharp cliff falling steeply on her right to the harbor. She could see the city of Hamilton, rising uphill from behind two ocean liners, the pink fortress of the Princess Hotel just beyond. The station wagon was escaping her now. She could only hope to catch up once they reached the top of the hill.

  At the top, the little station wagon spun left into Chapel Road, heading south across the island. Shoe to the ground, Tatty slid around after it. The road was straight, allowing the car to accelerate and gain more ground. But it had to slow for a left turn into the Middle Road, and then right again for Pinnacle Hill. Disregarding even the thought of other traffic, Tatty sped after it, narrowing the distance.

  After another straight stretch, the road swung violently into three S turns leading up one of the steepest grades on the island. It was all she could do to keep her cycle upright and prevent herself from skidding across the abrasive pavement on her knees.

  At the top, she found them now too far away for any hope of catching up. Descending the gra
de beyond, they’d connect with the main thoroughfare that was South Road, leaving her far behind, caught in traffic. All she could do was watch the car recede toward the line of trees on the horizon.

  Tatty slammed to a stop and took the pistol from her bag. Holding it with both hands, leading the station wagon with the gunsight, she fired, the echoing shot a sound seldom heard in Bermuda.

  Now they would know it was she.

  For the rest of the day and evening, she fairly much followed her routine, though again remaining at the hotel instead of prowling the Hamilton bars. At bedtime, however, taking blanket and pistol, she slipped out of her room and down the hall to a back stairs. The hotel was set against a hillside. Taking the stairs up two flights, she emerged on a concrete walkway that led to the spongy grass of the slope. She gathered the blanket under and around her, and nestled against the trunk of a pine tree far enough along the ridge to allow her a view of her balcony. She had also brought along a bottle of rum. Her nerves were chafing now. She needed the rum.

  Sometime after midnight, it began to rain, and kept up for more than an hour. Huddling beneath her blanket, sipping the liquor, she endured. It could be worse. She could be slogging through winter Russian woods.

  No one came. She dozed off several times, but never for long. When morning light broke the grayness, she returned to her room. Nothing was disturbed, most especially, the talcum powder she had sprinkled over the carpet just inside the door. No one had stepped in it.

  She had two hours for sleep before her scheduled morning swim and breakfast. She bolted the doors and fell into a gentle slumber, the pistol in her hand. When she awoke, the sun and a warm southern breeze seemed to have driven the rain and its harboring clouds away.

  The morning gradually became hot, especially in the enclave of her private cove. Her bathing suit removed, she first lay on her belly, the sun’s heat tingling her buttocks, but faced toward the waves, toward the only access anyone could have to her. She closed her eyes, keeping her ears alert for every unexpected sound, the pistol in her waterproof bag inches from her hand.