Romanov Succession (3 page)

Everything he owned of any consequence was in the B-4 bag at his feet and except for the pistols none of it was of moment to him; he did not carry souvenirs of his life. It was one of the things that made him feel apart from the rest of his kind—the White Russian exiles with their passionate covetousness.

It was cold in the night sky. Through the turret perspex he watched the other planes bobbing slightly in the intangible balance of their staggered formation. The drone was hypnotic and soporific; in his mind he ran back over the tense telephone conversation with General Deniken—searching for clues to the things Deniken had left unsaid:

“Alexsander, you have been transferred to Washington. You've received your orders?”

“I've received orders, yes sir. I'm not permitted to discuss them.”

“I understand. Alexander, there is something you must do for me. I ask this in your brother's name.”

He bridled slightly. “Yes?”

“You must go immediately to New York and meet with someone. You must do this before you report to Washington.”

“I don't think there's time for that, General.”

“Make the time. This is a matter of the utmost importance—it is vital. The Plaza Hotel in New York, do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“You must be there by tomorrow evening.”

“Will you be there, General?”

“No, they're sending someone from Feodor's group in Spain. I don't know which of them it is. It may be your brother. It may well be Prince Leon himself. The matter is that important. I beg of you be there within twenty-four hours. I ask this in Vassily's name.”

There was no way to refuse the old man. If the exiled shell of White Russia had a savior then A. I. Deniken was that man. He was the greatest White general of the Russian Civil War and he had been the last Supreme Ruler of All the Russias: to the White exiles and even to the surviving Romanov Pretenders like the Grand Duke Feodor he was the next thing to a Czar.

Put by Deniken it could not be refused.

In the early hours they took more than an hour to refuel at Wright Field in Ohio and then they were droning on through a dull summer morning, buffeting in the turbulence of the clouds. At three in the afternoon they came into McGuire Field. Captain Johnson walked back from the leading Liberator, a parachute pack trailing in his fist. “I've got to report in but I'm driving over to Philadelphia right away. If you want to hang around I'll give you a lift to the Trenton station. It's about an hour and a half on the train to New York.”

Alex waited for him in the PX canteen. Johnson collected him at three forty-five. He had a motor-pool Ford. Alex tossed his bag in the back seat and climbed in.

“My name's Paul, Colonel. Most of them call me Papp—I'm four years older than the next oldest pilot in the Thirty-fifth”

Alex reached across his lap to shake hands. “I appreciate your trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Always bothers the taxpayer in me when we have to ferry those big jobs empty—seems like a hell of a waste of aviation gasoline.”

Johnson was a stocky man with blunt hands and short reddish hair and a square freckled face. He couldn't have been much over thirty: “Pappy.” At thirty-four Alex felt old.

Johnson drove as if pursued, flashing along the narrow roads of the New Jersey pine barrens. It was hot under the sullen sky and they kept the windows wide open; Johnson shouted to make himself heard. “They got you aboard damn quick down at El Paso. You mind if I ask where you get your drag?”

“The base commander at Bliss is an old friend. We soldiered together in Finland.”

A sudden sidewise glance; Johnson's face changed. “Danilov—sure. They had a piece on you in
Colliers
last year, right? ‘This man goes where the wars are'—something like that. Joined up over here to train ranger commandoes, wasn't that it? Listen, you've seen those German planes in action. How do they really stack up?”

“They're not as good as Goering and Goebbels want us to think. The Spitfires have been handing it to the Messerschmitts.”

“Weren't you in China?”

Johnson's professionalism was total: it was a characteristic of good airmen. Anticipating the question Alex said, “There isn't a plane in the world that can match the Japanese Zero.”

“I'll tell you something, Colonel, you give me a B-Seventeen Fort and I'll take my chances against those peashooters. You ever seen a Fort up close?”

“No.”

“Sweetest airplane a man ever built. We had a flight of prototypes for tryouts last year. You think we'll be in this war, Colonel? I don't think it's going to be decided by Messerschmitts or Zeroes or anybody else's peashooters. I think it's going to be dogfaces and carriers and long-range four-engine bombers. That's the three things that will decide it—the rest is all window dressing. It takes carriers to open the sea-lanes. It takes heavy bombers to flatten the enemy's communications and supply lines. Takes the infantry to root him out and finish him. That's the whole story of this war we're looking at.”

Johnson had the earmarks of a long-distance talker but Alex listened with respect because the pilot was a shrewd man and obviously it was a thing to which he'd given a great deal of thought.

Alex said, “I'd add one thing to that list. I've seen panzers in action.”

“I don't agree. That's only tactics. You can stop a tank easy if you're ready for it. They're sitting ducks. Too many ways you can hit a tank. Let me tell you something—I put my squadron through a little experiment last year. We mocked up twenty tanks on the ground out at Camp Hunter-Liggett in the Mohave Desert and then we took off. We made a regular war game out of it—phony flak, the works.

“We plastered hell out of them. On the scorecard it was Air Corps fifteen, Armor nothing.” Johnson flashed a glance at him. “Low-level precision bombing, Colonel. You're right on top of your target—hell you can't miss if your bombardiers know their jobs. You know how good a target a big fat tank makes from fifty feet altitude?”

“What if they'd been real tanks—taking evasive action?”

“Tanks can't maneuver that fast. They turn like bull elephants—catch them on rough terrain even the best panther tank can't make better than fifteen, eighteen miles an hour. They're sitting ducks. But the War Department gave me that same line. Christ I felt like Billy Mitchell. They told me to take my ideas and shove them. Well I guess that's all right—when the time comes maybe I can talk them into taking out that report of mine and dusting it off. We're not into the war yet, a lot of things are likely to change.”

Johnson guided the Ford smoothly through the main street of a small town. On the outskirts he put it back up to fifty and went swaying through the bends. Light rain began to bead up on the windshield. Alex said, “You can really pinpoint a target as small as a tank, can you?”

“It takes training, Colonel. I never said it was easy. But one of these days it's going to help win this war.”

6.

The train was jammed; he had to stand. It was a commuter express with stops at Princeton Junction and New Brunswick and Newark; filled with businessmen in black fedoras and wide snap-brims. There were soldiers on furlough and vacationing college students in ribboned bonnets and white shoes, giggling their way to New York where you could drink liquor at eighteen. The placards advertised Rupert's Beer and the Radio City Music Hall feature, Gary Cooper in
Sergeant York.
Ivory Soap was 99.44/100ths% pure and Lucky Strike meant fine tobacco and the 1941 Lincoln Zephyr was the fine car for everyman. On the commuters' newspapers the headlines bannered
F.D.R. TO NATIONALIZE PHILIPPINE ARMY—Moves in Response to Jap Occupation of Indo-China. Mac-Arthur to Command.

Pushing through the crowd he carried his bag through throngs of redcap porters up the stairs and the long Penn Station ramp past the Savarin restaurant where middle-aged women sat in flowered hats watching the big railroad clocks.

Like battling stags two black Fords had locked bumpers in the center of Seventh Avenue and the boulevard was a tangle of hooting cars. He went through the station's immense stone columns and made his way two blocks uptown to get out of the jam.

It was a five-minute wait and then he was riding uptown in a taxi with his B-4 bag on the seat beside him and his hand in the strap-loop: New York traffic always terrified him. Along Seventh Avenue the menials of the Garment District pushed their heavy clothes-hanger dollies through the tangle of trucks and cars and horsecarts.

The traffic in Times Square was intense and the big illuminated signs flashed at him painfully—
I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel; Seagram's for the Man of Distinction.
Leather-throated newsboys hawked the
Mirror
and the
Trib
and tourists gawked at the enormous Paramount cinema palace.

The taxi had the peculiar De Soto smell of old leather and cigar ash. It decanted him in the semicircular drive before the Plaza and he hauled his bag into the oak-and-marble lobby. At the mail desk he identified himself and was handed a note on the hotel's embossed stationery, neatly handwritten in the Cyrillic characters of the Russian alphabet:

“Alex—

You are booked in. Come around at eight o'clock to #917.—I.”

He puzzled it momentarily before he pocketed it and moved on to the reception desk. A clerk gave his uniform a glance of utter contempt. “May I help you?”

“Colonel Danilov. There's a reservation for me, I think.”

“I'm not sure there's—oh yes, here you are. Room Nine-nineteen.” Not troubling to conceal his disapproval the clerk struck his palm down on the counter-top bell. “Front!”

The bellboy had the red muscular face of an experienced Irish drinker. He regarded Alex's single soft bag with displeasure, heaved it under his arm and took the key from the clerk. “This way sir if you please.”

On the ninth floor the middle-aged boy led Alex along the deep-carpeted hall to the northeast corner of the building and into a luxuriously spacious chamber that gave him a view of the whole of Central Park and across Fifth Avenue to the lights of the Pierre and the Savoy Plaza and the Sherry Netherland. The bellboy examined Alex's twenty-five cent piece as if he suspected its worth and backed out of the room with a stiff bow.

Alex took his dop kit into the marble-tiled bathroom; washed and shaved and combed and emerged rereading the note. “I” could be Ivan or Igor or Ilya: there were numerous men with those names among his acquaintances in the White Russian exile organizations and families. It annoyed him a little: the passion for unnecessary conspiratorial secrecy.

A bottle of Polish vodka lay canted in a champagne bucket filled with ice. He lifted it out and brooded at the straw of buffalo grass that lay inside the sealed clear bottle. Someone knew his taste. He poured the two-ounce bartender's glass full and downed it; replaced the bottle and settled into a chair, and waited. He neither smoked nor drank again; he only waited.

At eight he went out, turned to Room 917 next door in the hall and knocked.

“Yes?” A woman. “Who is it?”

His host had company then. Alex contained his impatience—made his face blank. “Colonel Danilov.”

He heard soft footfalls on a carpet. A key turned in the lock and the door pivoted to disclose a stunning dark-haired woman in red.

His face changed. “Irina.”

Irina Markova smiled. “Come in, Alex, don't stand there looking like a stunned schoolboy with his hat in his hand.”

He entered the room warily; behind him the door clicked shut and Irina said in her low liquid Russian, “There's no need to clench your teeth. Vassily's not with me. We're alone.”

He turned, feeling odd.

“Just you and I.” She smiled again. “How romantic.”

All the old passions slid back into place entirely against his will. A spiral of heat rose from his stomach: he felt tricked. “What's this meant to be, Irina?”

“They need you, Alex. It's supposed to be a seduction.”

7.

There was a sense of mystery about Irina that ramified from her like a spreading fog of intoxicating perfume. She was clearly aware of it; she did nothing to dispel it.

The natural shape of her blue eyes was slightly mournful—Eurasian. Her hair was gypsy-black and long. The fashionably broad shoulders and fitted long taut waist of her red dress made her seem tall although she was not unusually so. Everything seemed to amuse her as if her point of vantage over the human tribe were a bit Olympian; she seemed to have the knack of surviving the shocks of her explosive life without ever being touched by them.

It was a luxurious two-room suite, larger than his own. She moved languidly away from him. “I've sherry or vodka.”

“Sherry.” He'd need a clear head. He settled into a chair.

“I've ordered dinner sent up at nine.”

“Have you.”

“We're having a tryst, aren't we? It wouldn't look quite right if we went out and mingled.”

Her mouth curved into a posture of wry self-mockery. She brought him a glass of sherry and then slid back into the couch that faced his chair across the low glass coffee table. She smoothed her skirt under her thighs—the gesture had a strong sensuality. “You look awfully drab in that uniform.”

“Why don't you tell me what game we're meant to be playing?”

“So matter-of-fact. Where's your dash?” She tucked one foot up under her on the couch.

“I'd rather you didn't try to be coquettish. It doesn't suit you.”

“Oh dear.” She tossed her hair back, full of subtle mischief. “Now you've crushed me. Have I quite lost all my charms?” When she sipped the pale sherry her eyes mocked him over the rim of the glass.

“No.” It was an admission.

“I'm sorry—I wasn't really fishing for that.” But her eyes went on glittering with amusement; then she said in a different voice, “Very well. They want to see you.”