Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (16 page)

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had found his translator at last. She was a teacher, Anna Okenska, and plied her trade at one of London’s leading public schools for girls. The students were delighted to hear that Miss Okenska would be away from school until further notice. Miss Okenska had the reputation of being very strict in class and even stricter in the matter of homework. Miss Irene Delarue, who replaced her, was always susceptible to diversions in class and bouts of generosity on the question of the prompt arrival of written work from home.

Sergeant Jenkins found Anna difficult at first, with her strict dark clothes and no apparent interest in important things like football. But their relationship began to thaw when they discovered a common love of the ballet, for Sergeant Jenkins had taken his mama again after that first rapturous evening. For some reason she only wanted to come when Nijinsky was dancing, or ‘on the menu’, as she put it.

Their task – and it was not a happy one – was to find the strangers whom M. Fokine had identified as wandering round the back of the Royal Opera House during performances. So far they had found two messengers bringing items from the corps de ballet hotel that had been left behind before performances; one drunk who was obsessed with the ballet but too poor to buy a ticket and too far gone to understand what was going on if he had; an eccentric accountant who passed by on his way home eager for a sniff of the world of the Ballets Russes (as his wife would divorce him if he ever went to a performance); and an old lady tramp, festooned with castoffs, who came along to see if any useful clothing had been left behind. This person, Miss Olenska maintained in the face of all opposition, was Sherlock Holmes in disguise, since he often used disguise in such clothes and must be bored to death with those bloody bees in Sussex. There was also, one witness said, a middle-aged man in a long coat who looked foreign.

General Peter Kilyagin was staring moodily at a telegram from his masters in St Petersburg. His faithful deputy Major Tashkin was on the other side of the desk, waiting for orders. The Major usually dealt with the rougher side of things and kept in regular contact with the outstations of violence and torture.

‘Why would Lenin courier London?’ said the General crossly. ‘You’d think they had no bloody money left for telegrams, wouldn’t you? And then it goes on for nearly half a page: our assessment of the purposes of the visit; if this is meant to spark a signal of outbreaks of revolutionary violence across Europe; if it means
that there is to be a revolution in England; if Lenin has plans to come to the English capital? I ask you. Have they nothing better to do back there?’

‘It may depend on which faction of the Okhrana or which faction in the Winter Palace sent it,’ said the Major, who would have liked nothing better than to get his hands, literally, on Lenin and sweep him off to one of his special offices where the nearest neighbours were ten kilometres or more away.

‘It is hard to tell who the hell is sending the bloody messages sometimes,’ admitted the General.

‘But the answer’s obvious, surely,’ said the Major. ‘He’s come to find out about the money. Have they got it or haven’t they? That’s all. Come to think of it, General, have they got the money or haven’t they? You’ve been in touch with our man in London, surely?’

‘Any day now, Major. Maybe later today we’ll hear about the money. I think they’ll get it myself. The interesting thing is what are they going to do with the money when they’ve got it. If you were in charge, at long range, of a group of people about to come into such enormous sums, what do you think they’d do with it?’

‘That depends on the hold Lenin has on them, doesn’t it? They could steal half of it for themselves. They could steal most of it for themselves. I can’t see the whole total going straight to Comrade Lenin out there in Cracow, I just can’t see it.’

‘Think of it another way, General. This courier can’t expect to bring the money back himself, can he? He’d be picked up at every customs house between here and Warsaw. So what is he doing?’

The General laughed. ‘Paranoia perhaps, Major. Imagine you are Comrade Lenin, on the run most of
the time, forced to take up residence wherever our secret police or somebody else’s secret police may keep an eye on you but won’t actually pick you up and send you back to Russia. I can never understand why somebody’s secret police doesn’t just kill the bugger and be done with it. It might bring forth a howl of squeals and wails from the liberal Press and parliamentarians, but across the whole Continent, honest law-abiding citizens could sleep more easily in their beds, even if they’d never heard of the Lenin person in the first place.’

‘You don’t suppose Lenin wants to do something with the money once his man has got it?’

‘Do what? Order a few hampers of the finest food from Fortnum and Mason’s for immediate delivery to that café in Cracow? God knows. Why did he send the money to London and not to Milan, for God’s sake? Does he have a better way of getting it out of London that we don’t know about? That could be anything or anybody: Duke’s family with left-wing daughter going to Marienbad to take the waters, dozens and dozens of bloody trunks, all stuffed with useless clothes you could hide the money in?’

The General looked at his telegram once more. ‘I’ll just have to send the usual reply. I must have sent it so many times they’ll think it’s the last version, come again by mistake.’

The General picked up a pad in front of him. ‘Here we go again. “Important intelligence germane to your inquiry expected this office within twenty-four hours. Will send details once received. Yours, Kilyagin.”’

Lady Ripon called shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, as if she expected the world to be ready for action.

‘Powerscourt!’ she bawled. ‘Some of your people must have been talking out of turn. There’s been a leak. The story is all over the
Daily Mail
. I’ve talked to the proprietor already. He says all the journalists in the capital will be onto the story by lunchtime, if not before. What do you propose to do about it?’

Powerscourt felt slightly annoyed at having his morning disrupted with such a rude message.

‘You didn’t feel able to tell your Press lord’s friends to pull the story from their pages and instruct all the rest of the newspapers to do the same? Surely you’re capable of that, Lady Ripon?’

‘I did think of that, believe me, but I could hear one of his men in the background saying that it could prove very good for circulation. I think the man said that nobody’s going to check what’s written about St Petersburg, it’s too far away.’

‘Give me half an hour, Lady Ripon. I’ll have a plan. And you might ask the chairman and the general manager of the Royal Opera House to be ready to appear in public later this morning. Don’t bother with the Ballets Russes – I’ll talk to them, but I doubt very much if they’ll put in an appearance. Anyway, the journalists won’t speak French, let alone Russian.’

‘This is the very devil, Lucy,’ he said to his wife who was sorting out a slightly earlier breakfast. ‘The journalists have got wind of the murder at the opera house. Every one of them will be sniffing round the bloody story now. Dead dancer from foreign parts slain in the heart of theatreland. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I’m off to the study and that better telephone line. I’m going to get hold of Rosebery and Patrick Butler from
The Times
.’

Rosebery was an old friend of the family and a former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. He could tell you the name of the oil that lubricated the passages of power in Whitehall and Westminster. Patrick Butler had been involved in a previous Powerscourt investigation as a young editor in the provinces, and was now deputy home editor of
The Times
. Powerscourt told them all he knew, including about Johnny Fitzgerald’s interviews with the dead Alexander’s aunt.

Rosebery’s advice showed his experience in handling cases of this kind. ‘You’ve got to keep them concentrating on St Petersburg, the theatre school he will have attended, the performances he will have taken part in at the Mariinsky Theatre. Order up a couple of ballerinas who knew him well to give glowing accounts of his personality. Find a translator who can do the business for them to be interviewed about four o’clock this afternoon wearing their skimpiest tutus. That should take care of the next morning. Once the vermin get hold of the English angle, English mother and two aunts living here in London, you’ve lost control of the story. You’ve had it. They’ll print anything. One last thought: say there’s a talk of a memorial night for him, some scholarship, maybe, to his theatre school in St Petersburg.’

Patrick Butler agreed totally with keeping hold of the story. ‘It’s the devil of a job for the participants, Lord Powerscourt. Here’s what I would suggest. Chairman and general manager of the Royal Opera House on parade at the Royal Opera House this morning. On
the proper stage, with the journalists sitting in the front rows of the stalls. That’ll help to keep them quiet. What is needed is a lot of sonorous verbiage that means nothing but sounds good: Anglo-Russian relations, bereaved families, St Petersburg in mourning. You could write that sort of stuff with your eyes closed, my lord, pretend you’re an orotund bishop whose best choirboy has been found murdered in the choir stalls. And, most importantly, say there will be a conference every morning at eleven and another at four o’clock, beginning today, and at the same times every day and afternoon after that. Book a couple more ballerinas – I presume the supply line must be almost inexhaustible – and the Russian Ambassador for tomorrow afternoon. Couple of aged metropolitans with enormous beards for the day after. Now, I’d better go and organize the ring round the newspapers or the journalists won’t turn up.’

Powerscourt began drafting speeches for the chairman and the general manager of the Royal Opera House. There was, of course, one flaw in the preparations for the morning of mourning in Covent Garden, and that was the man who had raised the alarm in the first place, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, with his large collection of investment trusts and wide experience cheating at cards across the river in Barnes. Powerscourt arranged to meet him at his home in Barnes at eleven o’clock in an attempt to keep him out of the picture for the events of the morning. The English end had to be stopped for as long as possible. Keep it out of the papers for a week or so, Patrick Butler had told him, and the journalists won’t be interested in any uncles – alive or dead – after that.

At eleven o’clock Powerscourt the speechwriter was on parade on the stage of the Royal Opera House. The journalists had their notebooks open and pencils ready. Powerscourt’s representative in Covent Garden was Lord Roderick Johnston, chairman of the Royal Opera House and a dozen other companies:

‘. . . a sad day indeed in the long history of friendship between our two countries . . . young life, so full of promise, so brutally cut short . . . extend our deepest sympathy to the ballet authorities in St Petersburg and to the theatre school where the young man learned his trade over so many years . . . sympathy and condolences to the bereaved family who live, we understand, just off that great artery of life in the Russian capital, the Nevskii Prospekt . . .’