City of Shadows (12 page)

Word
did
get around. It didn’t reach the German newspapers, which had too much to occupy them with the by-now-runaway
inflation and its inevitable consequence of strikes, unemployment, a rising death rate, and street battles between Left and Right.

But, whether it came from Clara Peuthert or Mycielcka or Nick, there was a sudden excited sprinkling of question marks in the Russian émigré press.
is anastasia alive? did grand duchess anastasia es
cape ekaterinburg? who is the mysterious anna anderson?
To homesick, despairing White Russians, the idea that the czar’s daugh
ter had survived the slaughter and, like Persephone, returned to them from hell was almost unbearably beautiful.

At 29c Bismarck Allee, Anna searched for Anastasia’s picture among the bundle of newspapers Nick had sent from France. “What they say? What they say about me?”

“They say there’s a mystery woman in Berlin who claims to be Anas
tasia.”

Anna became agitated. “They don’t say where I live?”

“They don’t bloody
know
where you live, do they?” Natalya said. Anna’s celebrity was sticking in her throat.

“That woman with Tante Swanny, she knows.”

“No,” Esther told her, “she has no idea. She just knows she came to an apartment in Berlin. Lots of apartments in Berlin.”

There’d been more street killings of White Russians, and one of the papers said,
“Her privacy must be guarded. If Her Imperial Highness Anastasia is alive, she may be a target for another assassin’s bullet.”

Esther didn’t translate that one. The decision not to pass her fears on to the police was validated; if there was this fuss over a mere rumor, the resultant jamboree—should the press track Anna down—didn’t bear thinking about.

And she’d trapped herself in the confidence trick because, while there was the remotest chance that in six weekends’ time the killer would be looking for Anna again, she, Esther, had to guard her—be-cause she, Esther, was the only one who believed that he might.

And even she didn’t really believe it.

On the clear, blue mornings of that St. Martin’s summer, she’d castigate herself for thinking that Olga’s murder was anything but a random killing. Yet when night fell, she’d see Anna go to the kitchen window—as the girl had begun to do now that the evenings were
drawing in—to peer through a crack in the curtains, watching shadows form under the trees in the street below. Then Esther would remind herself that Olga’s killer, random or not, was still at large.

“What the hell are you scared of?” Natalya demanded of Anna. “There’s nobody bloody there.”

“Cheka,” Anna parroted. “They want to kill me.”

“I know how they feel.”

“Want a dog.”

Natalya would appeal to Esther. “She’s mad, she’s bloody mad.”

And Esther would think, Probably. But perhaps so is the man she’s scared of. At nights, in an apartment darkened by constant electricity cuts, fear was infectious. The silence from the empty flat below was pronounced. A creak on the stairs made them all jump. More than once Esther went out on the landing to peep down the stairwell—and saw nothing. Every night, before going to bed, she made sure that windows were tightly closed and their front door bolted.

When Nick returned from Tante Swanny’s funeral, Esther told him, “Think what you like, but on October twenty-first I want this place pro
tected.”

“That another sixth weekend?”

“Yes.”

He humored her. “Sure, sure, you can have Theo spend the night, two nights. Want I should set up a machine-gun nest?”

“Theo will do.”

His mind was on his new conquest in the South of France. “I tell you, Esther, this is the one, completely, you should see her.”

They were always the one, completely. “Another thing, Nick, we think it’s time Nasha went back to her old job.”

“That’s right,” Natalya said. “I’ll stay on to keep the girls company, but I’d like to start back at the Parrot at nights. I done what I can here, and I got my career to think of.”

Nick turned on her in a temper. “Your job’s finished when I say it is.”

A shouting match ended in Natalya’s stomping out of the room.

“For God’s sake, Nick,” Esther said.

“She’s a blabbermouth. I’m not having her selling grand-duchess sto
ries to the papers before I’m ready.” He relapsed into sentiment.

“Eloise, now . . . Esther, you should meet her. She’s got royal blood in her veins, this one. A real Bourbon. Descendant of Louis XIV.” He sighed at his plethora of noblewomen. “I tell you, I’d marry her ...but then I maybe have to marry Anna, so I think, wait a bit. That’s my trou
ble, too many damn princesses.”

“Must be a problem,” she said. “Nick, you should let Natalya go.”

“No. She’ll give the game away before I’m ready. She’s getting double pay—what more does she want? No, she’s hired for the fucking dura
tion.”

“And how long is that going to be?”

“When I make my plans. You think you can raise a grand duchess from the grave just like that? You got to set the stage—international press, lights. Maybe I’ll hire Tchaikovsky for the music. He writes a nice tune.”

“He’s dead.”

“He is? Okay, somebody else. But first we got to get her authenti
cated.”

Seeing it as
a democratic duty to her student, Esther tried to interest Anna in
why
the Czar of All the Russias had fallen.

Anna believed that the situation was straightforward and temporary. The czar (good) had been toppled by the Bolsheviks (bad)—and the Jews had a hand in it somewhere. His people would soon see this. So
viet Russia would be returned to the good days of the monarchy.

“They weren’t good days, and they won’t come back,” Esther told her. “Whatever happens, the world has changed forever.” She wanted the girl to gain a different perspective of the Batiushka-Czar, father of the Russian people, and a revolution that had shifted the earth’s political axis. Outside Czarskoe Selo, the czar’s peasants had lived in a famine-stricken Middle Ages, his Jews in terror, and his Moslems consistently harassed by the Russian Orthodox Church. He’d employed, and lis
tened to, ministers who regarded liberalization as a senseless dream— an immediate challenge to the revolutionaries.

“They warned him, Anna. Time and again he was told what would happen.”

Anna wasn’t interested. “Was a good man,” she said. “You think Rus
sia better now, under Bolsheviks?”

Forcing Natalya’s memory of those precarious days was disturbing areas of it she’d suppressed for her own good. “Getting as bad as you,” she said to Esther. “I’m having nightmares.”

“
Do
I have nightmares?”

“I hear you shouting sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Esther said. In her dreams her head turned into a cinema in which she sat alone. The soundtrack screamed. On the screen was slaughter, frame by frame. “What are your nightmares about?”

“Ma and Pa. I know they’re dead, but I want to know what happened to them. Nobody don’t seem to know what the Reds did to the servants that went to Ekaterinburg with the family.”

Only recently had anybody been able to find out what had happened to the family itself. The British government had promised Kerensky to send a warship to fetch them but had dithered; Prime Minister Lloyd George was reluctant to offer asylum, and King George, though fearful for his cousin, did not want to court unpopularity with his anticzarist public. With the collapse of the Kerensky government in 1917, it was too late anyway. Overnight a new man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, stood at the head of a new Soviet state. Czar, czarina, children, and servants were sent to Ekaterinburg, a town under the control of the most ex
treme Bolshevik soviet in the Ural Mountains.

After that . . . silence.

Rumor had intensified horror among the Russian émigré community, but now an official version, no less terrible, was emerging from investi
gators who had busied themselves taking depositions from those who could piece the story together.

You don’t want to know, Esther thought. Humiliation first, that’s how it works; degrade the thing you want to kill so that you can kill it. It’s what was done to Jews.

“If they’re dead, they’re dead,” she said. “Does it matter how?”

Natalya was vehement. “Yes it does, thank you for asking. I don’t know what happened to your people, but what happened to mine bothers me.”

“Was terrible for all of us,” Anna said unexpectedly. “I don’t want to hear. Too bad to remember.”

“Then fuck off,” Natalya told her. She appealed to Esther. “Don’t any of the books say something about it?”

There was one. A new one that had just been published in France— also by the imperial children’s tutor, Peter Gilliard:
Le Tragique Destin de Nicolas II et de Sa Famille.
Nick had brought it to Esther to trans
late. She had left it unopened. A pogrom was a pogrom, whether it slaughtered royalty or Jews; the same bullets smashed into flesh, the same bayonets caught the light as they slashed downward. And the af
termath was the same, bodies twitching on the ground, that sudden quiet into which a child whimpered and a dog barked before they were silenced.

I will not read it. I’ve been there.

But Natalya was becoming insistent. The once self-assured, perky stripper had become haunted by questions that, Esther knew, should not have been raised but which, now that they had, must be answered.

She opened the book and began reading aloud.

Of those who knew the whole story, not one had lived to tell it. Sur
vivors who glimpsed the Romanovs in their last weeks gave vignettes scalded into their memories: soldiers lounging in the family’s room, pocketing souvenirs, insulting Alexandra, spitting on the servants.

At Ekaterinburg railway station, Gilliard and some of the retinue were separated from their charges and got a last glimpse of the Ro
manov children as they were taken along the platform. Alexei, too ill to walk, was being carried in the arms of his attendant, Nagorny. Anasta
sia was carrying her little dog and struggling to pull along a suitcase too heavy for her. Alexei’s spaniel followed them.

They were taken to a house that had belonged to a merchant named Ipatiev. It had been prepared for them.

“The House of Special Purpose,” Anna said.

Esther looked up from the book. “How do you know that?”

“That’s what the Bolsheviks called it.”

“Yes, they did.” She put the book aside. “I’m not reading any more.”

But Natalya slammed the book back on her lap. “You got to. It’s my ma and pa was there, not yours. What
happened
?”

So Esther took them back to July 1918 in a house in the Urals that had been prepared for a special purpose
.. . .

On the night of the sixteenth, eleven people—all seven Romanovs, their doctor, and three servants—were woken up and taken down to a small basement room.

Esther said wearily, “This account came from one of the guards. The czar was told he and the others were going to be moved because the White Army was approaching to rescue them. There were rumors that loyalists were organizing an escape.”

“Why didn’t they, why the hell
didn’t
they?”

“I don’t know. It was all a mess.”

By the time the White Army arrived, the House of Special Purpose was empty, the walls of its basement room were pitted with bullet holes. Alexei’s spaniel, Joy, was whimpering outside.

“Even then they couldn’t believe that the Reds had shot the children. Not the children.”

Natalya urged time forward. “Who was with them when they were shot?”

“Dr. Botkin and Kharatinov—”

“He was the cook.”

“Trupp, the footman, and Demidova.”

“Demidova,” Natalya said softly. “Funny little thing.”

“And Jemmy.” Anna’s voice was harsh. “Don’t forget Jemmy.”

“Anastasia’s spaniel?” Natalya said. She was weeping. “I remember him as a puppy. He piddled in the Grand Salon. I had to wipe it up. What they kill him for?” She wiped her eyes. “What happened to the others?”

Esther said, “Nagorny was taken away from Alexei. He was put in an
other prison, the same one as Countess Hendrikov and Mademoiselle Schneider and Prince Dolgoruky. Gilliard thinks they were all shot. Leonid Sednev—”

“They didn’t shoot Leo, did they?” Natalya asked. “He was a kid, can’t have been more than fourteen. Worked in the kitchens.”

“No, they let him go, but I can’t find out what happened to him.”

The Whites put a trained legal investigator, Sokolov, on the search. Eventually, at the site of a mine several miles away from Ekaterinburg, he found evidence that bodies had been hacked to bits and then burned with acid. He’d reported back to Gilliard. The work had been
hasty; hundreds of fragments belonging to the family—the czar’s belt buckle, one of the czarina’s earrings, Dr. Botkin’s false teeth—identi-fied them.