The White Russian (11 page)

But heart-following wasn’t his destiny. He shook his head (carefully, realizing as he did that he shouldn’t have toasted Constance’s passing in vodka in the middle of last night, without so much as a
zakuska
to help the alcohol down;
it wasn’t good for his heart). No, no, he was a man with responsibilities. He’d better look at that letter, and start making plans. He started making his way heavily towards the desk, hating the juxtaposition of mahogany slab, white paper rectangle and jacket neatly hung on the chair, dreading sitting at it again and closing down his heart.

He was still walking across the room when he heard the taxi outside pull away.

He stopped. He changed direction.

What he’d imagined he would do now was to go to the window.

But instead he went to the door, opened it – no one there – and slipped out in his shirtsleeves. They’d never know he’d gone, he told himself, opening the door at the back of the courtyard, as long as they could see his jacket on the back of his chair.

The bright crowd in ragged motley came clattering into the little church, looking about them and whispering in many different languages. Some of them I recognized from the artists’ refuge the day before yesterday; one of them, a large woman ostentatiously kissing people through a mass of attention-seeking black feathers, I was almost certain was the Russian singer I’d met in New York. Marie-Thérèse and Gaston, beside me in the front pew, near the coffin, were rigid with disapproval. But I didn’t mind. Even if no one except me had bothered to send flowers, there was no disrespect intended in their too-loud chatter. The door shut behind us.

Then, just as the priest approached the altar to begin the service, the door opened again. A sombre-looking elderly man of a quite different sort, in shirtsleeves and correct, if worn, cavalry twill trousers, stuck his head in. He didn’t look the type to go out without a jacket. His hair had just been damped and combed over his big head, and he had a neat grey imperial beard and side-whiskers. He was composing himself, but he was still out of breath. He looked as though he must have been running.

He blinked once or twice as his eyes got used to the interior twilight. For a long moment, he looked around. I saw his eyes fix on the waving black feathers above that woman’s splendid shelf of a bosom. I couldn’t help smiling to myself at the horror on his face as he took in the appearance of the crowd.

Then he retreated. The door shut, very quietly, as the first word of prayer began.

I forgot about the unknown worshipper for the next few hours. Marie-Thérèse had set out wine and canapés for the guests back at the apartment, and until the middle of the afternoon the artists were there, talking, mostly incomprehensibly in languages I couldn’t understand, and gesticulating, and drinking, and eating. Hardly anyone bothered to come and tell me the stories about Grandmother that I’d been so hoping to hear. They were too busy knocking back food and drink. I asked everyone I did speak to if, by any chance, their name was Yevgeny, but I just got headshakes in reply. Increasingly disappointed, I resolved that, once we’d got rid of them all, I would go and visit the sister of Grandmother’s dead husband – the one Marie-Thérèse had told me ran an orphanage in the suburbs somewhere. I’d got her name, Maria Sabline, from the art-colony man with the donkey. He couldn’t remember her address, but he told me it would be in the phone book. He’d laughed rather sadly at the thought of her, and added, not very distinctly, ‘It’sh been a long time shince it was an orphanage there. Children grow up; they all grow up …’ before grabbing at some cheese slices being passed around by Gaston and forgetting about me. It had occurred to me that the orphanage woman’s
brother – Grandmother’s dead husband – might have been called Yevgeny.

Only the singer – Plevitskaya
was
her name, I now knew for sure – came waddling over to offer condolences, but even she was soft with brandy before she remembered me. ‘It is good to see you again,’ she slurred, pushing back strands of black feathers that kept slipping down from her enormous hat. Her breath was pure Rémy Martin, but she clearly remembered meeting me before. ‘And here in Paris. But so sad, so sad, that we are at funeral of my dear old friend.’ She was clutching at my shoulders, hugging me to a too-warm, too-padded breast. Some of the artists came up and said something kind but discouraging to her, in Russian, but she shrugged them off in exclamatory English. ‘No! This is grand-daughter of my dear Constance! We are acquainted! Like grandmother, this beautiful young lady came to hear me sing in New York – then came to Paris to find Russians. Grandmother too – dear, dear Constance. Years ago, she hear me in New York – love Russian music so much – followed me to Paris. Same story. One Russian voice, and they are enchanted.’ Her eyes filled with tears.

‘
Da ladno
,’ one of the young men said tenderly, gently detaching her from me and taking her away to rest on the sofa. ‘I ask forgiveness!’ she said, looking at me in glistening alarm. ‘But I have another question!’ It came out as ‘kvesshon!’ I smiled uncertainly, but I didn’t go and join her on the sofa. She was too drunk, and too unmanageable. I could barely remember why I’d wanted to show her the paper with Grandmother’s writing on, the other day. There’d be someone easier to ask, I now felt sure. I didn’t really believe Grandmother had come to Paris as a result of
hearing her sing, any more than I’d come because of that, but I felt sorry for her tears, all the same. The others didn’t. They just winked and grinned at me, as if sharing a joke, and moved on.

Plevitskaya wasn’t the only one who seemed overwhelmed by the plentiful refreshments. The sofas were filling up fast with shouting, weeping people. ‘It’s unbelievable, what they’re getting through,’ I heard Marie-Thérèse mutter as she came rushing out of the kitchen with another tray of food. ‘Gaston says they’re drinking the cellar dry.’

I smiled and spread my hands in resignation, signalling: Oh, let them gorge themselves. They don’t look as though they eat enough, usually. It was my guess Grandmother would have wanted a cheerful send-off.

But after a while – once I’d seen Plevitskaya consult her watch, then totter out in a not completely straight line – I slipped away too and left the rest of them to it and went back to the churchyard. I thought I’d sit by Grandmother’s grave and clear my head, and Gaston could see off the stragglers and clear up.

To my surprise, there was someone else at the graveyard already, under the old yew tree spreading shade next to that morning’s mound of upturned earth, with its flowers. He was sitting with dignity on a stump, straight-backed, not seeming to notice how uncomfortable it must be. And he was gazing into the distance, cradling something square in his arms. His eyes were reddened and his face looked rough, as if he hadn’t slept. But his expression was calm. It was the same elderly man I’d seen in church: the one in crumpled shirtsleeves, with the beard and whiskers. There
was something familiar about him, I thought now. Perhaps I’d seen him around here somewhere before or perhaps it was just I could now see that his silvered hair, no longer neatly combed down but blowing all over the place in the breeze, was, rather like mine, prone to rising up irrepressibly in two places at the temples. His, unrestrained by the grips that held mine, had started to look a little comical as it fluttered in the wind. Between the two wiry kinks that had escaped their moorings and were pushing out and up, the softer hair from the middle part of his forehead had blown forward to hang limply over his eyes, which must be why, every now and then, he was unconsciously shaking his head, like a horse flicking its mane about to rid itself of flies. Looking at him made me smile, even as it reminded me, sympathetically, of my own struggles with my disobedient hair.

I stopped at the gate. I couldn’t know if it were Grandmother’s grave that had drawn him there, or if he were just sitting there by chance. He hadn’t stayed in church for her funeral, after all, but I didn’t like to disturb him, all the same. I could sense the depth of sadness in him.

There was so much sadness in this city, I was just beginning to see; so many people hugging secret sorrows to their hearts. There was so much I didn’t yet understand.

I was already walking away by the time I realized there’d been something else about that scene. I’d been expecting to see just my bunch of flowers on the grave. But someone had brought more since I’d left the churchyard. There’d been a whole scatter of loose red and white carnations, just now, blowing over Grandmother’s grave.

The feathers kept getting in Plevitskaya’s eyes as she walked. In spite of the havoc being wrought on her feet by these excruciating New York high heels, she’d chosen to walk all the way to the 17th arrondissement, rather than hail a cab, because she could tell she’d somehow got a bit tiddly at the wake and wanted to sober up before she met her husband and the others for the early dinner they’d planned. This meeting might change both their lives. She couldn’t let him down.

Irritably, she brushed the tickly black fringe out of her face. If only the sun weren’t so hot, and her dress so tight. She wasn’t the type to drink, she told herself; it was just the once, because she was sad, and that was understandable enough …

As soon as she’d peeped round the door of Constance’s office, at the start of the wake, she’d seen that the equipment for her voice recording, which had been lying everywhere just the other day, beeping and gleaming, had all gone. Vanished. She’d meant to ask the girl what had happened to it, but sadness had overwhelmed her, and the girl had been too busy to concentrate. It was clear that the recording
would never be made now. She’d pinned so much faith on it. She’d so hoped that being on phonograph, especially this superior type, which would show her at her best advantage, was going to revive her career. She’d been dreaming about it non-stop ever since her husband had come home, looking pleased, and said he’d put the question of paying for it to Constance so subtly that she’d almost ended up thinking it was all her own idea. Her husband, despite his pursed lips and moodiness, did, often, still think of wonderful ways of pleasing her. It wasn’t his fault this one hadn’t worked. But it was a reverse, a considerable reverse. No wonder she’d poured out the cognac with a more generous hand than usual today. The frustration was enough to make a saint weep.

Pausing at the bottom of the rue Daru, clutching at a lamp-post and shifting around for a minute to ease the pain in her feet, she looked around in distaste at all the tatty Russian restaurants running up one side of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, the heart of Little Russia. The waiters and waitresses moved from one restaurant to another, here or elsewhere in their adopted city. Sometimes they became proprietors themselves, drinking champagne on the opening night and putting out announcements in the Russian papers:

Substantial artistic programme. Daily performances by the public’s darling, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the Tsar’s Nightingale.

She could hardly bear to call to mind the magnificent chandeliered halls in which she’d once sung, back home, so unlike these nasty little dumps. She didn’t have to look, or go in, to know the meagre size of the restaurant interiors, the steel-and-glass flowers on the table, the little lamps with shades, and the squashed space they offered at the back for a single singer to cram herself onstage and do her best to entertain their drunken, unappreciative, cheapskate audiences. As for the fees – she grimaced. The only dates in her diary, these days, were in these unworthy venues. Without that recording, which might have done so much for her, it really was possible that she was all washed up.

Shaking her head, as if to get rid of the bad thoughts, Plevitskaya straightened up, thrust her feet back into the agonizing shoes, and walked on.

Of course, today, they weren’t going to meet their secret guests in this central zone of gossipy Little Russia where everyone knew everyone. No, her husband had chosen a more private meeting place on the other side of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in one of the cafés behind the art deco concert hall. It was only five minutes’ walk away, but it might as well have been a different country, for those cafés were inhabited by an entirely different tribe: impecunious music lovers, skinny young things spinning out single glasses of wine for hours with their noses stuck into scores and librettos. None of them would notice a few
stray Russians sitting in a corner. No one would understand a word they said.

So Plevitskaya walked away from the rue Daru, and the cathedral, and the rue de la Néva and the rue Pierre-le-Grand, turning her broad back decisively on the triangle of streets that constituted Russia abroad and on her career worries. Now wasn’t the moment to think about that, she admonished herself, feeling quite sober by now. She had to concentrate on the important business meeting with the crab salesman, and the benefits it might bring to her husband.

Her husband needed a boost in life, she reflected. He’d lived with disappointment for so long. Before Kutyopov had been kidnapped, her husband had thought
he’d
be named the next head of ROVS. It was the job he’d always wanted. But then, as the result of the unhelpful rumour that had got about that he’d had a hand in the kidnapping himself, he’d been passed over, and General Miller appointed instead. She had to imagine how disappointed he must have been – perhaps almost as intensely disappointed as she now felt at the disappearance of her recording – because he’d never complained. He’d taken the number-two job instead, without a murmur. He’d never said a bad word against that fat old fool Miller, in all these seven years, even if he’d got more grumpy and disagreeable at home. It was time he got his chance to shine now. A bit of real success might make him less irritable, and less penny-pinching, too. It might turn him back into the pleasant consort he’d once been.

Her husband and the two guests – one in a cheap Moscow suit and the other in a market-trader’s apron smelling of crab – were already at a table on the
terrasse
by the time
she found the back-street café. Her husband was looking irritably at his watch. That made her nervous. And feeling nervous made her act flamboyant. Breaking into their quiet conversation about cargo – she heard a few words about when the freight carrier
Maria Ulyanova
should stop at Le Havre to pick the cargo up for dispatch to Leningrad – she kissed, and exclaimed, and smiled, all the while trying not to stare too openly at the crab salesman, who she knew was the boss, despite his workman’s clothes.

She could feel her husband’s disapproving eyes on her. ‘We’ve ordered,’ he said. ‘You were late.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve ordered water for you. The wine’s for the men. You just need food.’

She subsided into a seat, still flashing smiles around the table and wishing she could have a glass of wine to calm her nerves. Not looking at her husband, she told the hovering waiter she wanted the lobster. Well, she knew this was a meal that would go on somebody’s expenses, probably Moscow’s, and if everything went according to plan their money worries would soon be a thing of the past, anyway. She could afford to treat herself.

If there’d been just the two of them there, she thought, her small extravagance would definitely have made her husband furious. But the crab salesman just nodded expressionlessly, and the waiter went away.

The crab salesman, Plevitskaya thought, sneaking a proper look at him as she reached for the bread basket, must be in his late thirties. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. Under his beret was dirty-blond hair and a flat, wide face, the ordinary Russian kind with a short nose and wide mouth. His hands were big and calloused.
It was only his stillness, and those ice-blue eyes, that made him a little frightening.

Suddenly he smiled directly at her. ‘A magnificent choice,’ he said in a nasal Moscow voice. The smile made him look quite handsome. But Plevitskaya started feeling clammy, all the same. (Perhaps it was the brandy.) ‘And a magnificent woman is just what we are going to need.’ Plevitskaya nodded, quiet as an obedient child.

‘Your job, on the day,’ he went on, ‘will be to provide Skoblin here with an alibi.’ He turned and smiled at Plevitskaya’s husband, who, like Plevitskaya, remained silent and round-eyed. ‘It will be a simple task for a magnificent woman like you. We’re going to send you out shopping at Monsieur Epstein’s boutique.’

Monsieur Epstein’s boutique! Feeling suddenly happier, Plevitskaya sucked in her tummy, sat up straighter, and carried on nodding as she listened to the rest of the plan.

It was only when the crab salesman had finished speaking, and everyone started saying how clever and foolproof the plan was, that Plevitskaya felt her husband stir. She glanced at him. She could see from the eager way he was smiling that, although he was scared of saying the wrong thing, he was also desperate enough to impress the Muscovites – especially the crab salesman – to venture a remark of his own.

‘The old man doesn’t suspect a thing, you know,’ her husband said. ‘He read the letter twenty times in front of me. He was practically jumping for joy. And he’s been shut up alone in his office with it ever since, thinking out his strategy for his secret meeting.’ Leaning forward, he put a tentative, tender hand on the crab salesman’s arm. ‘So your
German must be up to snuff!’ he finished, then exploded into what Plevitskaya thought was probably unintentionally loud laughter.

The crab salesman didn’t even crack a smile in return. Plevitskaya felt almost sorry for her husband as he put a napkin to his red face, turned his laugh into a cough, and, still gasping for breath, spluttered, ‘Crumb in my throat … sorry,’ into the silence.

‘Have some water,’ the crab salesman said. Quietly, she passed him her glass.