Romanov Succession (15 page)

He glanced into the car park. Drivers and pfficials were pulling out. He said, “Have you got a car with you?”

“Yes.”

“I was going to borrow DeFeo's to get to the airport. Run me out there—we can talk on the way.”

Irina said, “Alex was going there anyway.” There was something poignant about the way she said it.

He said to Alex, “I thought you were cleaning rifles in Texas or something.”

“He came to his senses,” Irina said drily.

“Marvelous,” Felix said. “Then you've decided to rejoin our gay little band of Ruritanian fops?” He turned with them and they walked along past the wire fence. Cars shot past, throwing up dust. Someone waved and shouted at Felix from a passing roadster; he waved casually and went on talking to Alex: “I don't know if there's going to be much of a polo season for you. The war and all that.”

Irina said, “It's rather more serious than that, Felix.”

He saw the open Mercedes touring car by the road. Sergei Bulygin loomed beside it in chauffeur's livery. “My God there's the old warmonger.” He trotted forward and embraced the old man; Sergei thrust him back and beamed at him and Felix said, “Home from the wars, are you, old friend?”

“Why I imagine that's only temporary, Highness.” Sergei gave Alex a pointed look; Alex only smiled; and Sergei opened the doors of the touring car. Irina slid into the front and Felix found himself moving into the rear seat beside Alex.

Irina twisted around to face him. “Are you still flying your own plane?”

“Of course.”

“Where on earth do you find fuel for it?”

“If you're filthy rich there's always a black market.”

Sergei knew the outskirts of the Spanish capital well enough to choose the empty roads and they drummed along at a good speed with the wind dry and hot in their faces. Alex said, “It's no good talking now. We'll find a spot at the airfield.” It wasn't altogether clear whether he was concerned about the noise of the wind or the presence of Irina and Sergei.

Felix said, “Well then let's talk about something interesting like the recipe for an American dry martini. You do have one, I hope?”

The hangar's makeshift toilet room was rancid with the smell of disinfectant. Felix leaned his forearm against the wall over the urinal and dropped his forehead against the back of his wrist.

It was like Alex to come out of hibernation in the Texas desert and trigger a volcanic eruption in his life.

After a while he rolled his head back and forth, stood up straight and went to wash his hands.

He spent longer at it than he had to. Looking at himself. The eyes against him did not dance; the high cheeks were impassive. He had a lot of straight dark hair and his eyes were a very dark blue: the face was precise lines and angles and he looked like one of those French cinema stars, the ones who played troubled artists who inevitably fell in love with the wrong women. The appearance of physical fragility was false; the cliché about women was true enough. Perhaps it was simply because he had been born to that physical stereotype.

Old enough to know better; nothing to show for his life but an empty royal title and a steamer trunk full of racing trophies and a juvenile penchant for foolish bravado, casual promiscuity, pointless trivialities, adolescent pranks. He was ten years too old for all that and he knew it but ordinarily he arranged his life so that he didn't have to think about it.

He had a look at the towel and shook his hands as dry as he could and went back through the big cluttered hangar. At the mouth of it Alex and Irina stood two paces apart, not talking; the low sun threw their shadows across the tarmac like something out of El Greco. Irina held herself severely upright. A close-guarded distance held her that way. He had been surprised to see her with Alex again; he was not surprised at her evident reserve. Devenko's death would have done that. Her shoulders were high and taut; her body had its graceful pride and her face was striking as always but less willing now to display haughty amusement. Her long fingers touched the vee of her collarbone; her neck seemed very long because her hair was done up high. Her beauty never failed to stir him but he had never made advances to her—partly because she was a bit taller than he was and that had always mattered to him.

“I have communed with the wise water spirits of the loo,” he said. “Unfortunately they seem to be preoccupied with the outcome of Dominguez's next bullfight.”

A fly alighted on the corrugated metal edge of the vast doorway, washed its legs and took off into the air. Felix's hand flashed, cupped the fly and tossed it away over his shoulder. He said, “Outrunning the best in a motor race—I'm told that's better than sex. It isn't, but it's probably better than prancing about in a bemedaled suit making puerile speeches to unwashed hordes.”

Irina strolled away, kicking pebbles, pretending an interest in the sparse row of light planes parked against their chocks outside the hangar. Felix's was one of them.

Alex looked weary: his eyes were bleak. “You don't need to like the idea.”

“I see. I'm expected to bow before the wisdom of a group of dreamers whose continued existence is nothing so much as proof that there's life after death.” He made his voice lavish with scorn. “I'm expected to be dutiful and responsible—I'm expected to be grateful for having been born the son of a Grand Duke. I'm expected to live up to the family name no matter what my own pleasure may be.”

Alex said, “You're too angry, aren't you.” He said it gently with the suggestion of an American smile. “What were you fighting the Germans for in that race? Couldn't have been Russian pride, could it?”

Felix threw up his hands. “What's going to happen to my lifelong ambition to marry a rich widow with a bad cough?”

His exasperated tones melted away in the smoky clattering racket of a revving Curtiss Hawk. The biplane turned slowly against its rudder and bumped out toward the runway. Its propwash swayed around Irina, pasting the clothes to her body, unraveling her hair. She lifted one hand to shade her eyes and watch it take off.

Felix was a dialectical man and knew it; filled with contradictory moods. He said, “Suppose I accept this absurd proposition today and begin tomorrow to regret it for the rest of my life? I'll try to be honest, Alex—I suppose I've got to for once. Look here, I'm the sort of chap who's in demand at dinner parties because I'm good at charming the old ladies, but I
will
sometimes slip a dose of tartar emetic into some old fool's claret. Now I'm sure Prince Leon can't expect these qualities to disappear magically as soon as he hangs a mantle on me. My morals are a bit of a nervous tic, aren't they—something I can't help.”

“Are you worried about that? I'm not.”

“You're very reassuring.” He watched the fine line of Irina's profile turning to indicate her interest in the departing Curtiss. “Of course I'll accept. I'm too vain not to. Emperor of Russia? The question is whether they've got any business offering it to me. I'm just not suitable for it, am I?”

“That decision's already been made.”

“It can be unmade.”

“The timetable doesn't allow for that.” Alex gave him a grave look. “They had good reasons for choosing you.”

“An accident of birth. They neglected to consider my character.”

“Don't think so little of yourself.”

He shook his head dismally. A kind of desperation made him change the subject: “Let me understand this—what's re quired of me?”

“I've told you that.”

“No. I mean immediately. What's my part of this adventure of yours?”

“You'll go in with us.”

“In battle?”

“They feel it's important—politically, for the future.”

“To say I was one of the first, you mean.”

“To say you were
the
first. You're to be the one who leads the liberation.”

“That's absurd. I've got all the leadership qualities of a lemming. The truth would get out—then where'd we be?”

“What truth?”

“That I didn't lead anything. That you were the real leader.”

“When the time comes you'll be the one to give the order. That will be the final truth.”

He looked down at his hands as if they were unfamiliar objects. “It's suicidal. We'll all be captured. They'll hang us from the highest gallows in Moscow.”

Alex shook his head gently. “You risk your life every time you drive on the racecourse.”

“That's a different thing—it's for my own amusement.”

Alex said in his slow spare way, “I know the way your juices shoot up when you've got your neck stuck out a mile. You're alive because you're in immediate danger of being dead. Stop fighting this—you'll enjoy it.” He looked at his wristwatch and shot his cuff. “I've got a plane to catch. You'll go back to the villa with Irina.”

“This instant? I had plans.…” He realized the inanity of it but it was too late to recall it.

Alex said, “There's a good deal to do. Prince Leon will lay it out for you.”

“Like jewels on a dark velvet cloth,” he said dubiously. “What do they expect me to contribute at this stage?”

“If you're going to be the leader of a liberation movement you've got to start acting like one.”

Irina was staring at Alex; they were exchanging some sort of private signals with their eyes and the intensity of her expression astonished Felix: he was convinced that was exactly the way she'd look with a man on top of her.

Shaken by it he said lamely, “We're all making a ridiculous mistake.”

PART THREE:

September 1941

1.

It was the same as before: the bustling uniformed messengers, the corridor, the sergeant rattling his typewriter outside the door, the sitting and waiting because Colonel Buckner once again was “at the White House” and late for the appointment.

“Look,” Buckner said when he finally appeared, “I don't do it on purpose. While you're waiting for me I'm up there cooling my heels waiting for an audience with him. He always runs two hours later than the appointments secretary figured. You know what it's like to live in a small town that used to have four thousand people and now it's got eighteen thousand but there's still only one doctor in town? That doctor's waiting room—that's the White House.”

Buckner slid out of his black raincoat and hung it with his floppy fisherman's hat on the standing rack just inside his door. Then he went to his desk and waved Alex to a seat.

“Next time I'll remember to come at eleven for a nine o'clock meeting,” Alex said. He smiled to show he was joshing.

“Okay. Tell me about the red epaulets.”

Alex wore khakis with red tabs on the shoulder straps. He said, “They've put rank on me.”

“Three pips. Lieutenant General?”

“Major General,” he said. “The ranks are a little different.”

“Yeah,” Buckner said. “The Russian army still has third lieutenants too.”

It had been done that last morning at the villa: Prince Leon had brought out a velvet-lined box made of inlaid woods. The red epaulets were in it together with a collection of medals and yellow citations brittle at the edges. “They were Vassily's father's. We are settling a commission on you.”

“In the White Russian Army?”

“Deniken is still the commander-in-chief. It is by his authority.”

“A Major General? That's absurd. I'm thirty-four years old.”

“Please do not dispute it, Alex, it is a matter of politics. Governments will deal with a Major General at high level where they would force a mere colonel to use the servants entrance.”

“It's a rank that implies command of at least a combat division—ten thousand men.”

“On paper you will have one. Never mind, it is all politics.”

“The cable from Barcelona was a little cryptic,” Glenn Buckner said. “How did Devenko die?”

“We put it out that it was natural causes. Heart attack. But he was shot—a paid gun.”

“Did you catch the killer?”

“Yes.”

Buckner leaned forward, intent. “What did you find out from him?”

“Nothing. He's dead.”

Buckner made a face and sank back in the chair. “Crap.”

“He had nothing in his pockets except a forged invitation to the party.”

“Did you fingerprint him?”

“No. I doubt it would have mattered. We didn't want it reported to the authorities there—and anyway what could we have found out? We might have learned he was a gunsmith from Milan or a greengrocer from Cardiff but that wouldn't have got us anywhere. It was a paid job. Maybe if we had an army of detectives and a year to poke around we'd have found out who hired him.”

“Shouldn't you have tried? Don't you need to know
why
?”

“We've got more important problems.”

Buckner rubbed his mouth with his knuckles. “It must have had to do with this operation. Otherwise it would be too coincidental.” His hand dropped onto the desk. “Now they've given you Devenko's job.”

“That's right.”

“Which may make you the next murder victim.” Buckner scowled, picked up a pencil and bounced its point on the blotter. “I'm going to put heavy security on you while you're in this country. We can't afford to have you taken out.”

“Just don't restrict my movements.”

“They'll be Secret Service—they know their jobs, they don't get in the way.” The American's wide face broke into a crooked grin. “It isn't you I have to care about—it's the goddamned operation. Christ I don't like wars much.”

“It's nobody's favorite pastime.”

“I get a feeling it was Devenko's.”

“I didn't know you knew him.”