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  Blood of the Czars

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Pamela, and Moscow nights

  PART ONE

  ’Tis not easy, brother mine,

  In a foreign land to live.

  —old Cossack song

  1

  The unexpected slam of the screen door meant that someone was coming out to her, which at that particular hour of the morning was forbidden. Tatty Chase was not an unreasonably demanding hostess, even by the permissive standards of the Hamptons, but the guests at her place in East Hampton were subject to three strictures: they could not invite anyone else to the house without Tatty’s permission; they had to contribute to the liquor supply; and on sunny days between ten A.M. and eleven A.M. they were to stay off the back lawn, for that was where and when Tatty sun-bathed in the nude.

  The ritual was in part a professional consideration. Tatty was an actress—not quite as successful and active an actress as she would have liked, but for all her wealth a hard-working professional member of Actors Equity who had had some good parts on Broadway and still enough television and summer stock work to stave off rumors of a failing career, and who had never used her family’s name, money, or her own body to further her ambitions, except to keep her body and face as attractive as possible.

  She possessed a lovely body. Her first major role, at eighteen, had been that of a slender blond ingenue. She had now just turned thirty, and was still playing slender blond ingenues. With the dedication of a professional, she had kept her figure just so, and these regular sun-bathing sessions kept her tan just so.

  She could hear the swish of approaching feet in the too long grass, but because of the screen of hedges she had planted for privacy, she could not see who it was. All she could view was her private section of sky, the limitless blue of a few minutes ago now retreating before a gathering veil of cloud.

  If it was one of the two men who were staying at her house that weekend, she would send him packing back to New York City on the next train.

  Tatty closed her eyes, waiting for the intruder’s voice, not making a move to cover herself. One of the season’s Lotharios had made a boorish comment upon seeing her close her eyes at the beach. Tatty’s Anglo-Saxon features were English country-garden perfect, a harmonious proportioning of delicate chin and lips, aristocratic nose and brow. But her cheek bones were high and wide, almost Asiatic. When her blue gray eyes were open, the Lothario had observed, her face seemed “an illuminated palace.”

  “But when you close them,” he had said, “you are just a Slav.”

  She had not given the ass an opportunity to see her with her eyes closed again.

  “Tatty?”

  She looked up to see Gwen Alderidge, a thin, freckled, auburn-haired woman her own age, barefoot, wearing a thin, billowing summer housedress, and holding a package. Tatty sat up. The sky was going quickly to gray.

  “I wouldn’t have bothered you, but this just came special delivery.”

  Gwen had once been considered as beautiful as Tatty, when they were young and close friends in Greenwich, Connecticut. They had been childhood playmates, boarding school roommates, debutantes together, had made their first trips to Europe together, and double-dated in college. The Alderidges had never really had all that much money; her father had been an industrial manager who lived entirely off his salary. When Gwen’s young architect husband died six years after their marriage, she had been left penniless and compelled to support herself by teaching school. When school was not in session, she lived with Tatty, at Tatty’s request.

  “Thank you,” said Tatty, taking the package. She thought at first it might be a script someone had sent her. “I’ll be having lunch at the house today. I’ll be in shortly.”

  “They all will, I’m afraid,” Gwen said, with a faint, troubled smile, a frequent expression. “They’re predicting rain.”

  Tatty nodded, but said nothing more. Even as Gwen turned to walk away, Tatty was staring transfixed at the return address on the package: Mme. Mathilde Iovashchenko Hoops, Pommel Ridge Road, Braddock Wells, N.Y.

  Mme. Hoops was Tatty’s grandmother, now nine years dead. The address was that of her grandmother’s huge, tottering old country house in Westchester, now a religious home of some sort.

  The screen door slammed shut as Gwen reentered the house. Tatty held the package closer, staring hard at the handwriting. It looked like her grandmother’s, even to the fragile shakiness. Mathilde had had a series of small strokes in the weeks before she died. Tatty recalled the terrible, trembling grip of her grandmother’s hand the last time they had been together, just a few days before her death.

  “Never forget that you are Russian,” she had said, pulling Tatty close as she uttered her raspy, imperious command, ice gray eyes as wide and mad as those of the principals in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. “You have the blood of czars, Tatiana. Your people have ruled the land that is the center of the world. You are Russian. You are Iovashchenko. Never forget.”

  Tatty Chase, a product of Miss Porter’s and Smith College, descendant of a member of the Continental Congress and step-daughter of R. Hastings Chase, one of the wealthiest bond lawyers on Wall Street, had disobeyed her grandmother’s command as much as possible. She felt no affinity for this Russian blood. With her grandmother and mother chattering in it constantly, she had been compelled to learn the Russian language as a child, but with no relish. She never spoke it in public.

  The label on the package that bore Tatty’s name and address—Tatiana Alexandra Chase, Sandrow Road, East Hampton, L. I., New York—was quite old and worn in places like rubbed velvet. She turned it over. It had been opened once before and resealed. Almost violently, she began tearing at the paper and tape.

  Inside was an old leather-bound manuscript, but nothing to do with Broadway. The pages were handwritten, largely in French, with occasional phrases and notations in Russian or English. Les Morts Russe—Russian Dead—was the title. It was subtitled Murders of My Family.

  A large, cold drop of rain struck Tatty on the back of her neck. The blue was utterly gone from the sky.

  She began leafing through the pages, struggling with both Russian and French. She had heard of this book of Mathilde’s, but had never seen it. It had not been found among her grandmother’s possessions. Tatty’s mother, Chloe, herself now dead, had been extremely upset by its disappearance, calling it the most important writing to have come out of the Russian Revolution.

  She paused at one entry: “The Murder of the Princess Denzhevsky.”

  The Princess Irina Arkadyevna Denzhevsky, a striking beauty who had studied the dance with the great Tamara Krasavina and who performed at court as well as at entertainments for guests at her estate near Petrograd, was the wife of my mother’s brother, General Mikhail Ivanovich Denzhevsky. When the Revolution broke out, he was at the Galician front in command of a division of Imperial Polish troops. She refused to leave Petrograd until he could join her, and when the Bolsheviks seized power from the Kerensky government eight months later, she was unable to flee the city and so took refuge with a maid in the home of Madame Dulski, a milliner she had for years richly patronized. The Princess remained with Madame Dulski until the spring of 1918.

  The h
andwriting was difficult to read so she abandoned an exact translation and began glancing quickly over the passages, following the story as best she could. The princess had managed to reach an estate once owned by friends near Novgorod, on the Moscow Road. Her first hope had been to get to Finland, a former province that the Revolution had rendered an independent and neutral country. But the civil war with the Whites was underway and the Bolsheviks had sealed off that escape route. Instead, the princess decided to attempt a much longer route south and west to Poland, where she still had wealthy friends. Had she disguised herself as just another peasant refugee, Tatty gathered from the text, the princess might have succeeded, but instead she hired a car and driver in hopes of making speed, paying him with one of the many jewels she had sewn into her clothing when she had fled Petrograd.

  No more than a hundred miles from Novgorod, they were stopped by a patrol of Red cavalry and turned over to a local unit of what ultimately became the Cheka, Lenin’s state security police. The driver apparently told them about the hidden jewels.

  Her grandmother’s account of what had followed was so compelling that Tatty now found the French and Russian words easily returning to her.

  They dragged the Princess and her maid to a room at the rear of a farm house. It was a low-ceilinged chamber, rude, with a dirt floor. Animals were likely kept there in the wintertime. They accused Irina Arkadyevna of theft of property of the Congress of Soviets, meaning her jewels. When she denied this, she was thrown to the floor and her clothing was pulled from her and torn and slashed to shreds with knives and other sharp instruments.

  The same treatment was accorded the maid, though no jewels were found. The jewels yielded by Irina Arkadyevna’s hat, cape, dress, and corsets filled a small basin. As the two women huddled naked on the floor, Bolshevik police inventoried the jewels and made entries in a ledger. The maid was then given some filthy peasant clothes to wear, was told there were no charges against her, and was allowed to leave. One of the policemen escorted her to a nearby forest and shot her once in the back. Wounded only slightly, she feigned death until he was gone, and then made her way to a woodcutter’s hut. She recovered from her wound, and eventually reached Poland.

  The body of the Princess Irina Arkadyevna, naked, riddled with bullets and stab wounds, and with blood still clotted in her beautiful blond hair, was found along the bank of the River Velikaya. She was buried by peasants, but the grave was left unmarked lest the Cheka discover what they had done. All this is fact and was later recorded in an official report to Admiral Kolchak, head of the White Government. This was the fate of the Princess Irina Arkadyevna Denzhevsky, my aunt-in-law. Her murder has not been avenged.

  A drop of rain again, and then another. More fell on the page. Tatty closed the manuscript, and her eyes.

  She felt her damned Russian blood again, flowing forth in its mad, dark, Asiatic richness. Her grandmother had reached out to her once more, just as she had from her deathbed. Her grandmother, or someone else who knew her well. Who? And, for God’s sake, why?

  A heavy rain began to fall. Tatty pulled on her robe and stood, tying it closed. Clutching the old manuscript tight against her breast, she walked quickly to the house, her head lowered.

  Her guests were all in the kitchen. Gwen was at the stove, stirring something in a large pot. Helping her was Becky Mather from down the road, a tiny young woman in Bermuda shorts and a Beethoven sweatshirt. Becky had gone to Endicott College for Women in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her father owned a restaurant and motel near East Hampton. Her sister ran a boutique in Southampton. They were descended from the same Mather family involved in the Salem witch trials.

  Witches. Cold, wet forms raised from the tidal pools dead and dripping, tied and slumped in crude wooden chairs teetering on long stout poles, showing the pleasure of God.

  The Princess Denzhevsky, sprawled on a river bank with blood thick in her hair. Tatty shook her head.

  Amanda Ensor, an artist friend, was in the far corner of the windowed breakfast nook, still wearing her morning caftan and reading a small book, her very long red hair falling over her brow. Next to her this weekend, not wearing his military uniform, thank God, was Captain David Paget, a longtime friend of Gwen’s from Westchester who had ardently dated her while in college and had pressed a continuing correspondence over the years in the vain hope that she would marry him, first as an alternative to her architect husband, and then as one to widowhood. He was a few years older than Gwen and Tatty, a thin, fair-haired, muscular man with a nice smile in a scarred face, whom Tatty found strangely attractive. He was a Special Forces officer, rumored to have killed some people somewhere in Latin America, but had also had poems published in The New Yorker and the Atlantic, poems about death. He was arguing now across the table over some point of history with the other male guest at the house that Labor Day weekend, Cyril Greene. She presumed Paget would prevail.

  She did not like Cyril Greene. She was fond of his brother, Sid, a fitfully successful and earthily warm-hearted New York producer who had hired her for her two best roles. He had not had occasion to hire her for anything at all the past two seasons, but they were still close enough to exchange Christmas presents. And there was a new production Sid was putting together for the fall, a very contemporary morality play set during World War I. There was a part for her, possibly: a young British noblewoman pacifist. Tatty had a very good British accent.

  Cyril Greene had a British accent, among his many other failings. He was a pitiful example of the futility of attempting to be something one was not—in his case, utterly not. He carried leather-bound copies of the classics about with him, and sometimes wore knickers on the streets of Manhattan. He had no real job. Having graduated from Columbia, he had continued attending classes all his life—in medieval painting, hibachi cooking, needlepoint, Yugoslavian cinema, Portuguese, Kung Fu—endlessly, and without significant success. He occasionally earned money as a tutor, dog walker, sales clerk, or something of the sort, but lived mostly off his brother, other well-off relatives, and their friends. Like Tatty.

  A pink-faced man with weak blue eyes and reddish blond hair, he had not been all that bad looking as a young man, but in his thirties had gone to fat and now had two chins. He had tried to offset this with a silly mustache, but it only worsened the effect. He looked like a red-haired, Jewish Oliver Hardy.

  Cyril had more or less invited himself out to Tatty’s that weekend, though he had contrived to have Amanda make the invitation official. Tatty suffered him for a number of confusing reasons: because she was Sid Greene’s friend, because there were times when Cyril Greene was actually quite charming, because she was beginning to fear Sid Greene would never offer her a worthwhile part again.

  Cyril had brought a woman with him this time, a rabbity little creature named Clara. She sat next to him in the breakfast nook, nibbling on bread and lettuce, listening raptly as though Cyril were actually besting Paget in the argument, which he demonstrably was not.

  Alice Mettering, a newspaper writer friend of Tatty’s who had the month before divorced her second husband, was on a wooden chair by the corner windows, applying a violently red nail polish to her toes and sipping from a can of beer.

  Tatty put down her head, hoping to pass through the kitchen without having to speak to any of them, but Alice ambushed her in midstride.

  “A hair ribbon, Tatty?” she said, peering over the rim of her beer can. “You’re lying out there naked yet still wearing a goddamn prep-pie hair ribbon? I swear you’ll go to your grave in a hair ribbon, and maybe a plaid wrap skirt.”

  Tatty hurried on, but was caught again.

  “I’m making pea soup,” said Gwen, with that same faint, worried smile. “Your favorite.”

  “That’s fine, Gwen,” Tatty said. She paused. Cyril Greene was staring at her, his imagination doubtless dispensing with her robe. She wanted the sanctuary of her room. She wanted to read on in this strange, terrible, fascinating, and mysterious book. She found herself
extremely nervous and agitated, on the verge of trembling. She would have a drink. It was close enough to lunch.

  “I think I’ll have a gin and tonic,” she said to Gwen. “I hope there’s gin.”

  “There should be.”

  But there wasn’t. The antique liquor cabinet was empty but for a large bottle of Pernod and a few other liqueurs. The gin, vodka, Scotch, bourbon, and rum that had been there had vanished. It was Sunday, and the liquor stores were closed.

  Cyril was talking quite volubly.

  “The rule here is that everyone contributes,” Tatty said, loudly, noting that no one except Gwen returned her gaze.

  Cyril grinned, looking down at the table. Paget abruptly rose and went out into the rain. Tatty snatched up the Pernod, took a clean glass from the sink, and, letting her anger show in her stride, left the kitchen, climbing the broad front stairs to her room.

  It was a corner bedroom, a quite large chamber with a fireplace and a view of the sea. She filled the glass with the strong pale green liqueur, and nestled in a big armchair by the sea-view window, opening the manuscript once again. Now she was trembling. She drank, tasting licorice and wincing as the Pernod seared its way to her stomach.

  “God,” she muttered to herself. The rain was now drumming on the roof. She began reading again, from a chapter describing the fate of a Prince Vasily, godfather to Mathilde. He had stayed with his regiment in Petrograd until the Bolshevik takeover.

  There was a knocking at her door, polite, but firmly insistent.

  “Gwen?”

  “It’s David Paget.”

  Fuming, Tatty left her chair and went to the door, wrenching it open and slamming it back against the wall. His face impassive, he held a bottle. Vodka. Stolichnaya. Expensive.

  “I had this in my kit,” he said. “Consider it my contribution.”

  She calmed herself. He was always doing nice things like that.