Rasputin's Revenge (22 page)

Out on the street, the low clouds were visible in the dark sky. The wind had died down, but the cold’s grip on the city was still firm. Barricades testified to the earlier riot—which I’d all but forgotten—and their jagged and crossed angles gave a spectral cast to the night’s shadows.

My steps, unbidden, took me where they would. The capital was deserted, bundled up, quiet. Occasionally a yellow streetlamp crossed swords with the gloom—always it was a losing battle.

And then, almost inaudibly, I heard the strains of music. It was somehow familiar, though unrestrained and wild, as though melody and meter had given way to noise and frenzy. Looking up, I realized I had wandered to Gorokhavaya Street. The music was coming from the far end of the block, from the window of a brightly lighted room three flights up. As I came closer, I noticed that automobiles lined the curbs. The music grew louder, more discordant—gypsy guitars and tambourines and voices out of key.

I was still halfway down the street when my heart stopped. A hooded figure stepped gracefully from one of the cars and made for the entrance to the apartment. When she half-turned and looked in my direction, I couldn’t help but call out.

“Elena!”

But it could not have been her. The face was in shadow, and she showed no hint of recognition of the name, vanishing immediately into the blackness of the stairway.

I came abreast of the building. From my angle, I could only see shadows cast upon the ceiling of Rasputin’s flat. As I watched the satyrlike figures dancing in strange contortions, my head swam with all sorts of grotesque visions.

Suddenly the music stopped, the window was thrown open. Rasputin, naked at least to the waist, thrust his black-bearded face into the teeth of the cold. Laughing hysterically, obscenely, he shouted out over the rooftops, and though the words had no meaning to me, in them and the accompanying laughter I heard the thin-edged sound of unmistakable madness, accompanied with what I can only describe as a howl not of insanity but, unaccountably, of triumph.

13

L
upa was at the door to my chambers before dawn, our differences of the day before forgotten. Still in my robe, I admitted him, and he helped himself to my breakfast of tea, cakes and eggs while I made my toilet.

When I returned and poured myself some tea, he commented that I looked tired, and I explained that I hadn’t been able to sleep very well. My walk, with its unsettling vision of Rasputin, had depressed me, and I had continued wandering around the deserted and despairing city until well after midnight. Finally retiring, I had lain awake trying to devise a stratagem that would convince Borstoi of my sincerity.

Lupa tut-tutted me, a smile playing at his lips. “I told you not to worry about that, that I would take care of it.” To say Auguste Lupa looks smug is more or less an exercise in redundancy, but clearly he was quite proud of himself.

Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a rectangular black leather box, about the size of his hand, with a monogrammed “F” tooled into its cover.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Your proof.”

He passed it to me and I opened it to one of the great shocks of my life. Nestled in peacock blue velvet was one of the fabulous Fabergé eggs!

“My God!”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It is quite a piece of work.”

I could do nothing but stare at it. It was at once precious, fragile, and breathtaking, its value inestimable.

I had come across references to these eggs in my briefing notes. The tradition had started in 1884 when Czar Alexander III presented his wife,
Marie, Nicholas’ mother, with one of them for Easter, the greatest Russian holiday. Nicholas, when he became Czar, had continued the tradition, every Easter presenting one specially designed egg to the Czarina and another to the Queen Mother.

There are only fifty-six Fabergé eggs in the world! Though I hadn’t seen any others, descriptions of them beggared the imagination. Each of them opened to what Fagergé called a “surprise”—gem-encrusted vistas or scenes from Russian folklore and history.

One of the most celebrated eggs was the Great Trans-Siberian Railway Easter Egg, which Nicholas had commissioned for the birth of the then-new century. Its “surprise” was a working model of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, constructed of enamel, diamonds, rubies, pearls, and gold.

The egg I now held in my hand, though much smaller, was no less impressive. The blue-white porcelain seemed more fragile than any real egg. Etched into the top were two Imperial eagles in gold and gold leaf. Twin large, perfect diamonds braced each side at the widest point.

“Squeeze the diamonds,” Lupa said.

I did so, and the egg opened to reveal its “surprise.” I had wondered at the name of the piece, “L’Aube,” which was inscribed in the finest filigreed gold on the inside of the box. When I opened it, however, I saw that the surprise captured the dawn sky to perfection.

Inside the egg, set into its lower concavity, was a scale-model of a typical Russian pastoral scene. Little diamond dewdrops flecked a field of emeralds in the foreground. A ruby sun rose on the upper half of the egg, whose background was a lighter shade of the same peacock blue as the velvet lining the box, brushed with what had to be gold and ruby dust. On the right, the sun cast its golden rays over the shimmering onion-shaped dome of an Orthodox church. The dome was the centerpiece—a flawless yellow topaz the size of a quail egg. On the left, a sapphire river coursed through a meadow in full flower. All this, and the thing was only the width of my hand!

I finally tore my eyes away and looked at Lupa in disbelief. “How did you get this?”

He leaned back sipping his tea. “I asked for it and the Czarina gave it to me.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “In that case, why didn’t you just ask for two?”

“Jules, don’t be angry again.”

“I’m not angry. I’m amazed and a little nervous. Mere possession of this thing without permission—”

“Would undoubtedly be a capital offense. But there is nothing to worry about. We have permission.”

“And you want me to give this to Borstoi? Alexandra gave her permission for that?”

He paused. His fingers began to drum methodically on my writing table. “Not exactly. I presume she would want it back.”

“And so what, exactly, am I supposed to do with it?”

“That, I’m afraid, Jules,” he said, sighing, “is up to your own discretion. I left my proposed use of it rather vague.”

“But to be valuable to us, as proof for Borstoi, I have to use this some way?”

“You’ll probably have to give it to him. We may have to steal it back.”

I rested the closed box containing the egg on the table. “This is getting dangerous,” I said evenly.

He shrugged. “It was dangerous to begin with. And now, as you pointed out yesterday, time is running out. We have to make something happen.”

“And you think Borstoi—”

“Is a good place to start. We know he has tried to kill Nicholas, and he admits succeeding at some other damage already. I need to know what that was.”

I agreed. Dangerous or not, if this was the route to progress, it had to be taken.

“By the way, Jules. I had an interesting ally when I met with Alexandra after you left me yesterday.”

“Oh?” I said, again taking the box into my hands and looking at it. The thing would probably buy my entire estate in France. “Who was that?”

“Rasputin.”

I almost dropped the egg. “That’s impossible!” I said. “I saw him at his apartment last night.”

“You visited him?”

“No. I saw him. There was some sort of party and I passed under his window.”

Lupa shook his head. “Well, I assure you, he was with Alexandra and me in her room not twenty minutes after you left me.”

I thought about it, and there had been time. He could have left the Palace after meeting with Lupa and the Czarina and easily made it back to his flat, especially if he drove, before I arrived there. But it somehow disconcerted me. The monk seemed to be everywhere lately.

“What did you think of him this time?”

The look of distaste that twisted Lupa’s mouth spoke volumes. “I don’t understand his hold on Alexandra.”

“Alexis,” I said. “She thinks he can keep her son alive. He’s evidently done it more than once.”

“If you believe that,” he began, then checked himself. “What I don’t understand,” he did say, “is that Rasputin convinced Alexandra to give me the egg. I don’t think she would have parted with it otherwise. He stared at her in that fixed way, and put her almost in a trance. Then he said, ‘What are mere possessions compared to your husband’s peace of mind? If this egg can provide that, it is worth the sacrifice.’

“And that settled it. After the shortest reflection, she walked directly to the case, unlocked it, and handed me the egg.”

“I know. He had the same kind of effect on her at Minsky’s last party.”

Lupa was silent a moment, then shook his head. “Women,” he began, and I sensed he was about to launch into his familiar tirade, so I spoke up.

“What are your plans for today?”

“I have three interviews scheduled. By the way, if you see Miss Ripley, you can tell her she is no longer a suspect.”

Here, at last, was some welcome news, though I had never seriously entertained the thought. “She wasn’t aware that she had been,” I said, “but I’m glad you’ve reached that decision. May I ask what happened?”

“Anastasia. I ran into her yesterday and she told me that Miss Ripley had stayed at her house the night of the party at Vyroubova’s. She was escorted by a group of Minsky’s brothers-in-arms, and they continued with him to his house.”

“Did Anastasia know any of the men?”

“She hardly noticed. It was late, and dark. A group of young officers, she said.”

“Kapov?”

He nodded. “The man who would kill a hundred Minskys? Yes, Jules, the thought had occurred to me.”

Derevenko, surly as ever, and bolder without Alyosha by his side, tolerated my presence only by an obvious act of will. Though he volunteered nothing, eventually I got him to tell me that my tutoring that morning had been canceled—the dinner with the Royal Family had kept the prince up late, and he would be sleeping in today.

Almost as an afterthought, he handed me an envelope embossed with the royal coat of arms. It was closed with the seal of the Czarevitch and I opened it as soon as I was out in the hallway alone.

Dear Monsieur Giraud:

Please forgive my absence today. My mother believes I need some extra rest. I think she is angry that I spoke so freely to Papa, and wants to punish me for a day. I will see you tomorrow.

A.

It was upsetting. If Alexandra was angry with Alyosha and thought I was somehow infecting him, as Nicholas had intimated yesterday, I would be well-advised to keep my “lessons,” as my predecessor Gaillard had done, to the milder humanities. I liked Alyosha, very much, but I could not have my position at court ruined by a misunderstanding with the Czarina.

Looking in at the alcove where I had been meeting Elena, anxious to tell her the news of her “acquittal” by Lupa, I was disappointed to find it empty. But then, I realized, it was several hours earlier than we usually met. She was undoubtedly tutoring the girls.

I thought of the woman I had seen outside Rasputin’s last night. Similar experiences, I suppose, are commonplace—I mean situations where one wants to believe something so badly that the facts surrounding it come to be meaningless. Last night, I was so tired and lonely that I was seeing Elena in every shadow. I wanted to see her; therefore I did see her. But, in fact, it hadn’t been her.

I was beginning to realize how Lupa’s decision regarding her had lightened my spirits. Sukhomlinov and Elena were now out of it. Who did that leave? Borstoi and Kapov, and perhaps Pohl, and we would be drawing the net ever tighter today. It was a relief. We were finally moving ahead. Progress was being made. We might, in fact, succeed before it was too late.

My appetite returned with a vengeance. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in two days, so I stopped in at one of the booths in the children’s wing of the Palace. I was loath to walk the streets carrying Fabergé’s egg in my pocket any longer than was absolutely necessary. The meal also afforded me time to come up with some plan as to how to best use the egg.