Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (12 page)

‘Gorodetsky, you old rogue,’ the voice of his master boomed out of the phone with considerable force, as if the General himself was one of those night-time phantoms. ‘What news of the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green?’

‘Good morning, General, the news is most unusual.’

‘What do you mean unusual?’

‘I mean, I don’t think anybody could have predicted it!’

‘Out with it, man. Have those pocket-sized London Lenins robbed the banks as well as changing their money?’

‘It’s nothing like that, General. They simply ran away.’

‘What do you mean? Did they never even get as far as the bloody banks?’

‘You’re nearly there, General.’

‘They got as far as the bloody banks and couldn’t face going in?’

‘Exactly so, General. Only one of them had ever been in a bank before and that had to do with his mother’s funeral.’

‘Hold on a minute, Captain. Did our funereal friend at least make it inside the doors?’

‘On the contrary. His experience deserted him, or maybe it didn’t. He told the leader afterwards that he was so overcome by the memories of his mother’s death that he started running back to the East End as fast as he could go.’

‘Do we have eye witnesses to this tragic story?’

‘Mostly the head porters, sir, the men on guard at the entry to the banks. They’re pretty formidable fellows and they claim they intimidated the revolutionaries so much that they didn’t dare go inside.’

‘Revolutionaries be damned!’ The General was in full boom now. ‘England is safe from the Communist International and all the other crackpot bodies these fellows belong to! It’s as if the sans-culottes and the rest of the Paris mob took one look at the Bastille and simply ran away. It’s unthinkable. Just imagine French history without the storming of the Bastille – they’d probably still have a bloody monarchy, for God’s sake. This is the best news I’ve heard for a month, Captain. Are they regrouping, the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green? Planning another assault by running away from the Bank of England with those pink-coated porters guarding the doors and the gold?’

‘I understand there is a plan to try again, sir. They’re going to go into a lot of smaller banks with very small deposits or to open accounts for themselves.’

‘Sounds to me like they’re joining the capitalist system, Captain. Any word in London about the ghastly Lenin with that bloody beard, in his Polish exile?’

‘Not as yet, sir. I think they’re not going to tell Lenin and his people for a while, if they tell him at all. One
of the revolutionaries pointed out to his fellows that Lenin wasn’t doing much for the revolution just now, holed up in that café in Cracow reading newspapers and writing pamphlets. That’s hardly the first wave of the proletarian vanguard is it?’

‘“The opening scene, a green forest glade of tall willows and beeches, joined by a rocky bridge, and in the distance the red glow of the setting sun. In the semi-darkness, a strange band of wood sprites, with olive-green bodies and large pointed ears emerged from the shadows, some hopping half upright, some gliding on all fours.”’

It was breakfast time in Markham Square. Powerscourt was reading from the arts pages of his newspaper.

‘What on earth is that, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy Powerscourt, who knew precisely what it was. She had been dreading this moment for days now.

‘There’s more,’ said her husband, ‘loads more . . . “Karsavina was dressed in a violet pleated peplum, decorated with silver leaves, her long hair loose and hanging down her back. There was one inimitable gesture, which made the whole ballet worth while: the burying of her face in the crook of her arm, a moving demonstration of her grief when Narcissus disdained her love. Nijinsky wore a fair Grecian wig, a white
chlamys
with one shoulder bare, and green and gold sandals with the legs cross-gartered.”

‘We know somebody else who was cross-gartered, Lucy, do we not? And his dress made clear that Malvolio had lost his wits at the end of
Twelfth Night
.
Has London lost its wits over these Russian dancers, Lucy?’

The dancers of the Ballets Russes had conquered Covent Garden and Lady Ripon’s little theatre at Coombe. Now they were laying siege to Markham Square and Lord Francis Powerscourt – a reluctant convert, if, indeed, convert he was.

‘I think that must be
Narcissus
, Francis, that ballet you were reading about. Your sister Burke and her daughters were raving to me about it only yesterday.’

‘
Narcissus
be damned,’ said her husband. ‘I said I didn’t care for it before they arrived. I still don’t care for it now it’s here, with all this fuss.’

Lady Lucy did not tell her Francis, but she had tickets for a box that very evening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, entry despatched only yesterday by Natasha Shaporova, who seemed to have access to innumerable tickets, most of them, it had to be admitted, in the more expensive parts of the theatre. Lady Lucy had not yet worked out how to lure her husband into the building, but she was sure she could think of something.

The blinds were drawn in the back room of Messrs Neeskens and Sons, diamond and fine jewellers of Antwerp. Mathias Neeskens was an old man now, his eyes so weak that his grandchildren felt it was unfair to play hide-and-seek games with him as he could see so poorly. He had on his thickest glasses as he checked again through Mr Killick’s haul.

‘These are the finest jewels I have seen for years,’ the old man said. ‘You were right to bring them to me. My
son Jacob runs the business now and he has a wider and younger clientele than me. But there is still nothing like a glittering diamond to cheer up an old lady. It makes them feel their dancing days may not yet be over and that it is worth dressing up once more.’

‘Do you think you will be able to place some of them?’

‘I believe I could place a fair number with my clients here. They come from all over Europe, as you know. We have a partner we do a lot of business with in Vienna. They are nearly as fond of jewels there as they are in St Petersburg. You said you believed there was a Russian connection, I believe?’

‘I did, there was talk of a bank in Moscow and a grandfather. The bank is well known and very respectable.’

‘I do not think these gems came from Moscow. These are jewels to adorn the aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg, not the wives of the rich merchants of Moscow. Jewels usually follow a king or a tsar or an emperor in Europe, as they hold the most glittering balls. It is different in America, my nephew Joshua tells me. He is on loan to an old firm of jewel merchants in New York before he returns to join our business here. He says that over there the most glittering jewels always go to those whose husbands or lovers have the most glittering bank accounts. It must make life easier, don’t you think?’

‘Indeed, Mr Neeskens. Now tell me your plan of action. I came here to place myself in your hands, after all.’

‘Thank you. You were wise to do so. Tomorrow Jacob sets off to Vienna on a train so early he will
hardly go to bed at all. I shall transact my business from here. For yourself I propose that you set off for Munich. I shall furnish you with the name of a firm we trust in that great city. They have wide contacts across Germany. We shall be in touch three evenings from now.’

Powerscourt might have been unwilling to visit Diaghilev’s creations, but the same morning the Ballets Russes came to him just as he was about to go out.

‘Monsieur Fokine of the Ballets Russes, to see you, my lord.’ Rhys the Powerscourt butler coughed his usual cough when announcing visitors, ‘Monsieur Michel Fokine.’

Fokine was a tall slim young man with dark hair and a dazzling smile.

‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, please don’t get up, and pardon me for calling on you out of the blue,’ he began, settling down on the edge of the Powerscourt sofa and disturbing the twins’ cat.

‘How very nice to see you, Mr Fokine. The Ballets Russes are the talk of London,’ said Powerscourt, waiting for the young man to declare his business.

‘I have come to apologize for the lack of cooperation between our company and yourself and your associates, Lord Powerscourt. All I can say is that Diaghilev is a hard and occasionally erratic taskmaster. His thoughts are always on the ballets. I know he regards the murder as an irritant, a flea to divert him from his real purposes.’

‘And what would you say they were, those purposes, Mr Fokine?’

‘Well, Sergei Pavlovich wants to create the finest ballet company the world has ever seen. And it will be a Russian ballet company, for he is very conscious of the country he comes from, even if his creations are always seen in the lands of others. He does not work alone, Diaghilev, in spite of his love of publicity – which he says is always about the ballet and never about him. There are a group of people – writers, artists, musicians, set designers and costume designers, composers and so on – who form his inner circle. He leads but he always brings them with him. He has a craving for the new. He is, if you like, a dictator of whim, a dictator of passing fancies, of awful temper and a gift for making enemies where he need not and then being reconciled to them. I think he is the greatest impresario the world has ever seen. I know, for example, that I too will be out of fashion one day for Diaghilev and his ballets. Then I will also be cast on the scrapheap of Diaghilev’s ambitions, like so many before me.’

‘And what would you say is the reason for the Ballets Russes’ success?’

Fokine suddenly began to pace up and down the Powerscourt drawing room, as if he were Powerscourt himself.

‘Forgive me,’ said the young man, ‘I often think better walking up and down. Let me put it this way. Suppose your house here, Lord Powerscourt, is the world of ballet before Diaghilev came along. The composer lives in the basement. The librettist is in the attic along with the corps de ballet. The producer is in the other half of the basement. I, the choreographer, am in your study with the telephone I saw on my way upstairs. The set designer lives on the first floor along
with the scene shifters. The other choreographer is on the second floor. So is Diaghilev. Nobody speaks to each other. Each prepares his part in the performance without any contact at all with the other elements. That is what Diaghilev changed. They may all still live in this house, but they talk to each other all the time now; there are non-stop meetings to build an integrated whole, here in your drawing room. It’s this cooperation, this cross-fertilization of ideas, that has made the ballet what it is.’

‘Were you surprised by the murder, Monsieur Fokine?’

‘Of course I was, Lord Powerscourt. We all were. Jealousy, feuds, factions, temporary ganging up on somebody for no apparent reason; all these are commonplace in a group of people forced to live very closely together for long periods of time. I expect you could find similar displays of emotion in any other similar organization. But murder is something new. After an interval of six months or so, I expect Diaghilev to order somebody to compose the music for an opera about a murder, only it will take place in the seraglio of some Eastern potentate, with dramatic colours to be provided by Bakst and dance choreographed by me. The murder, if you like,’ here Fokine stopped walking and resumed his seat, ‘was the culmination of things that had gone before, but things that had always run their course without the terrible outcome of death on the stage.’