Blood of the Czars Read online

  “That’s expensive vodka,” she said.

  “I paid nothing for it. A souvenir from Nicaragua.”

  “Souvenir? Stolichnaya?”

  He handed her the bottle.

  “I can get more,” he said.

  She wondered if he was trying to impress her. He seemed so matter-of-fact.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said, even more matter-of-factly. “I’ll join you all later. After I’m dressed.”

  With a quick smile, she shut the door. Before returning to the manuscript again, she sat a long moment, sipping the Pernod, staring out at the sea. She had planned such a wonderful weekend. A novelist friend of hers and his wife were to have come but had had to decline her invitation at the last moment. So had a ballet dancer, a favorite friend. She’d been left with the old crowd, a military friend—and killer—and Cyril Greene. And her grandmother’s bloody book. She picked up the manuscript and continued reading.

  Prince Vasily had been arrested in his own home by the Cheka. They had tied him to a chair in the central hall, harangued him with charges and accusations for several hours, then blown out his brains with a large caliber pistol. This, too, was officially entered in the records of the White Government’s special commission.

  A cousin Dmitri, a renowned botanist with no firm politics anyone knew of, was dragged off a train in the Urals and, with his fellow passengers, machine-gunned to death in a snow-filled ditch. An Uncle Misha was beaten to death in his home by a Red mob. Cousins Sasha and Boris, little more than children, disappeared on a cold night in Petrograd. Colonel Alexander Borisov, a distant cousin, was captured in civil war fighting in the south of Russia and executed.

  The Countess Valentina, elder sister of a close friend of Mathilde’s, had been shot for her elegant clothes in the winter of 1919. The Duchess Marie Pavlovna Gamov was caught in Pskov and burned alive in her car.

  Tatty was interrupted by another knock at the door, followed by Gwen’s voice. She entered, bringing lunch on a tray—a large bowl of soup, thick rye bread and butter, and a pot of tea. Tatty accepted it gratefully, touching Gwen’s arm. Gwen left quietly. As Tatty was biting into the bread, it struck her how Russian the meal was. It was becoming Russian Day. Soup. Stolichnaya. A book full of dead Russians. What would be next? The only Russian thing in her own life was the fact that her stepsister Chesley’s ex-husband, a newspaperman named Jack Spencer, had been transferred from Washington to Moscow, and had recently sent a postcard, addressing her as “Czarina,” as he often had in the past. She wondered how the postcard had gotten out of the Soviet Union.

  She ate most of the bread and soup, but left the tea, returning to the Pernod. If it was going to be an odd, ridiculous, utterly insane sort of day, she would behave to suit it. The rain was continuing, even harder than before. As she sipped the liqueur, she remembered a little song Chesley had sung when she was a child and Chesley a teenager:

  All night long, the glasses tinkle,

  While outside, the raindrops sprinkle,

  Do you think another drink’ll

  Do us any harm?

  Tatty’s grandmother Mathilde had married Elwood Hoops, a well-to-do Westchester surgeon, shortly after arriving in the United States as a refugee. As his daughter, Tatty’s mother Chloe was a descendant of one of the oldest families in America, but Mathilde brought her up as though she were one hundred percent Russian, as though she had never left St. Petersburg.

  Mathilde was pleased when Chloe became an actress—the arts were the only profession suitable for the temperament and station of a Russian aristocrat—but unhappy when Chloe married a military man, an Air Force pilot and very handsome Virginia gentleman named Bobby Shaw.

  Chloe had stuck with Bobby, from air base to air base, their infant daughter Tatty in tow. In 1963, Bobby was shot down on a special mission over Laos. He was later discovered to have been tortured to death in a Communist prison camp run by Pathet Lao. A year after that, Chloe, having resumed her stage career, married a wealthy admirer, R. Hastings Chase.

  Chesley was Chase’s daughter by his first wife, who had died in pregnancy along with her second baby. Tatty supposed that she in a way had become that second daughter he had lost. Hastings Chase had been inordinately kind and generous to her, more so perhaps than he was to Chesley.

  Jack Spencer was socially acceptable enough, from Bedford in Westchester and a well-to-do family; but he drank all the time and was an incorrigible philanderer, as Chesley must have known. She could only wonder why Chesley had suddenly decided to divorce him, after having been so complaisant about his flaws for so many years. It may have been merely that he was getting old.

  At any rate, Chesley had divorced him.

  And now he was in Moscow.

  Her mind was entertaining implausibilities, impossibilities. Jack Spencer could not have sent the manuscript. He was a witty man, who liked his little jokes, but was not the sort for anything so ghoulish. He or Chesley might have come upon the book in the Chase family summer place on Cape Cod, where Mathilde had been a frequent visitor, but they would have forwarded it to Tatty or her mother at once. The package bore a postmark dated just two days ago, a Braddock Wells, New York, postmark. Spencer had been in Moscow for several months.

  She poured herself a full glass of Pernod, stared at the manuscript’s cover for a long moment, then drank and began to read again. She must be done with this thing, but she could not be done with it until she had read it all. It was as though her grandmother’s strong, trembling hand were still gripping her arm, holding her close.

  The next chapter was about a family Chernevkov, cousins to Mathilde, St. Petersburg gentry who lived off income from mines in Siberia and a factory in Kiev, neither a place they ever went near. When the czar abdicated, they fled Petrograd at once, traveling by rail east toward the Urals. It took the family four years to reach their ultimate destination in China, Shanghai, and by then only Nathalie Chernevkov and four of her children were alive of a family group that had numbered fifteen. Nathalie herself committed suicide in Shanghai in 1936, a death Mathilde, with great invective, blamed on the Bolsheviks.

  This mad, bloody procession of uniquely Russian tragedies continued inexhaustibly. The cumulative effect of the recountings seemed to increase Mathilde’s zeal for the writing. Tatty’s was the opposite response. She remembered something James Boswell had jotted in a notebook: “Saw three men hanged; effect diminished as each went.” It was happening with each turn of a page. What was at first shocking became tragic and then merely pathetic and finally all but comical. These poor, ridiculous, ancestor-worshiping aristocrats had been utterly unable to comprehend the wrenching social dynamics that were tearing their medieval social system apart. Feckless in the face of it, clumsy and frantic in their attempts at escape, they succumbed to the ultimate horrors like frightened animals, mewing and bellowing. Tatty could only half convince herself these people were her relatives. She was no liberal. She was in fact a Republican who had kept a George Bush bumper sticker on the rear of her MG-A since the 1980 primaries. But there was nothing more logical in what she knew of world history than the Russian Revolution. She sometimes damned these Russian ancestors of hers. They and those like them had so foolishly made the Revolution inevitable, made it possible for a minor if ruthless fringe political group to swiftly seize such massive power. They were directly responsible for the catastrophe brought upon themselves, for the tyranny the Communists unleashed upon all Mother Russia, and the further tyranny that they now threatened to inflict upon all the world.

  Midway through an account of the drowning of a little girl, a distant cousin of hers through some connection, Tatty closed the manuscript and went to stand at the window. The rain had abated, but the haze was thick and gloomy, the sea visible only as an ill-defined grayness above the line of trees. She emptied her glass, noticing that she had already consumed more than half the Pernod.

  The rain began again. It was imprisoning her in this house. Judging by the volume of vo
ices, all her guests were still downstairs, trapping her in this room, for she was in no mood for the frivolous and contentious yak that had been the fare that weekend. She was trapped with this book and the memories it provoked—and a half bottle of Pernod.

  She took the manuscript to her wide old canopied bed, and sat on its edge, turning on the lamp on the bedside table. There were so many characters, too many characters, and not just in the book. This assemblage of dead princesses and royal colonels was an unwanted intrusion, but no more so than the clutter of people downstairs, than the clutter of all the people in her life. Now they were crowding her, obscuring her, drowning her lines with their chatter. She had thought that in using her money to become mistress of this huge house she could more firmly control her life and surroundings, but her circumstance was little different from being caught in a crowd on a New York street. She should have taken Gwen’s advice and bought instead a small cottage, something not in the Hamptons. Perhaps Montauk, or on Nantucket. Or in France.

  No, not France. No longer France. Plus jamais. It hadn’t been willingly, but she’d removed France from her life forever.

  She lay back on the bed, thinking of her sister’s ex-husband, and her little-girl love for him. Had Jack Spencer been irrevocably removed from her life, as small a part of it as he had shared? Moscow was a million miles away, and Chesley had so thoroughly, almost viciously, discarded him.

  Tatty had been married once, several years before. At times, she almost forgot the man’s name. It was Dirk.

  She sat up again, turning the book’s pages until she came at last to an unread chapter. It opened with an old photograph firmly pasted to the paper, one of two young women in World War I–era dresses and wide-brimmed hats, standing with parasols in what looked like a formal garden with other figures walking in the background, including several men in uniform. Both girls—looking closer, Tatty decided they were teenagers—were strikingly attractive. The one on the left, a blonde with large eyes and a staring, serious expression, was her grandmother Mathilde. She did not recognize the one on the right, though it struck her, strangely, that the girl somewhat resembled herself. The hair was too dark, but the eyes were as wide and luminescent as her own, and the lips, chin, and nose were much the same. The cheekbones were exactly the same.

  She looked to the handwritten caption at the bottom of the page. The girl with Mathilde was the Grand Duchess Tatiana Nicolayevna Romanov, the second daughter of the czar. The photograph had been taken in 1915, when Tatiana Romanov was eighteen and Mathilde two years younger. Tatty’s mother had once told her she had been named for a daughter of the czar, but Tatty had dismissed it as more Russian mumbo jumbo.

  The text on the following page began with a complicated genealogy that linked the Iovashchenkos with the royal Romanovs as cousins of cousins, descended from a common ancestor. From Tatty’s mother, this would have seemed just so much theatrical nonsense, but Mathilde was too fiercely serious about her heritage and tireless in her research for this passage to be anything but the truth.

  Tatty sat fully erect again, feeling tipsy now. “I am a cousin of the Romanovs,” she said. “I am of the blood of czars.” It sounded so silly, so melodramatic. She drank again. Everything sounded silly.

  As Mathilde related, Tatiana was the tallest, slimmest, most elegant, and—though only second eldest—most commanding of the royal children. Mathilde quoted an Imperial Guard officer as saying, “You knew at once she was an emperor’s daughter.” Auburn-haired with deep gray eyes, she was the closest to the Czarina Alexandra, the dominating figure in the royal family, and shared her mother’s zeal and drive. She excelled at French, at the piano, at theatrics, and was the most active in society. She was the decision-maker. She reminded Tatty of Chesley.

  Page after page followed filled with details of Mathilde’s social encounters with the imperial family. Most of these occasions were quite formal and involved large numbers of guests, but Mathilde had apparently achieved a genuine if not overly intimate friendship with the Grand Duchess Tatiana, who had several times had Mathilde to the family country retreat at Czarskoe Selo without inviting any other guest. In gratitude, Tatty gathered, Mathilde had responded with the fullest measure of devotion. Had there been no revolution, Mathilde might have become a favorite at court.

  Had there been no revolution, Tatty would never have been born. All those millions of people slaughtered, and thus Tatty lived.

  Tatty was growing weary, and, she supposed, not a little drunk. She’d not had her shower, which would revive her. Finishing this last glass of Pernod and leaving her grandmother’s book on her bed turned to an unread page, she went with some clumsiness to her adjoining bathroom, shed her robe, turned the water to as high a temperature as she thought she could tolerate, and stepped into the shower. She stood there for a long time, head back, eyes closed, the steamy water cascading over her entire body, until its temperature began to lessen, a sign that the basement hot water heater’s capacity had been exhausted.

  Turning off the faucets, Tatty returned to her bedroom without pausing to dry herself. She lay down on her bed, every muscle relaxed. The effect of the shower had been just the opposite of that desired. Without another thought of Russia, she quickly fell asleep.

  She was half awakened by a rattling sound, which she thought must be rain against the window. Struggling to escape her woozy sleep, she opened her eyes to darkness and realized that there was no rain. The sound was a rapping on her door.

  “Yes?”

  It opened to noise from downstairs and Gwen’s unmistakable silhouette against the hall light.

  “Tatty? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, sort of.”

  “There was a call for you. Two actually. From the same person. A woman. A secretary, I think.”

  Tatty rubbed her eyes.

  “Secretary? On Sunday?”

  “A man’s secretary, a friend of yours. She said he’d be coming out here this weekend. I came upstairs the first time she called, but you were in the shower. The next time I came up you were asleep.”

  “Gwen. What is this man’s name?”

  “Oh. Ron.”

  “Ron? I don’t know any Ron.”

  “That’s what she said. Actually, the way she pronounced it, it sounded more like Ran, but I never heard such a name.”

  “Neither have I. She said this weekend? Tomorrow’s Labor Day. The weekend’s almost over.”

  Gwen shrugged.

  “It must be some mistake,” Tatty said. She sat up, brushing her hair back from her face with her hands. Gwen came and sat on the bed beside her. Here she was naked again, with Gwen looking at her.

  “Tatty, you’re all right?”

  “Yes,” she replied, reaching for her robe. “I … I’ve done something very silly. I’ve been drinking all afternoon. It’s this book. It was in that package. My grandmother wrote it. It’s about all of her relatives, my relatives, too, I guess, who were killed in the Russian Revolution. I’ve been reading it all day, and drinking. I’m sorry.”

  Gwen touched her shoulder.

  “It’s all right. It must make you very sad.”

  “Not really. I never knew them. Who’s here? It sounds like quite a crowd.”

  “Allan Michaels and his wife came over,” Gwen said, referring to a New York magazine editor who lived nearby. “And Dexter.”

  Dexter Johns, a Wall Street customer’s man and another neighbor, had proposed to Tatty at a party the week before. It was the third time he had done so that summer.

  “Actually, we’re having a good time. Joe Walsh is here, too.”

  Walsh was one of the town policemen.

  “What on earth are people drinking?”

  “Cyril found some wine and a case of beer in the cellar. You must have forgotten it. Will you be coming down?”

  She could hear laughter. Cyril was performing.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you want something to eat? David’s brought some pi
zza and clams.”

  “No thank you. Just leave me to my Russians. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She waited until Gwen had closed the door, then turned on the lamp again. The chapter Mathilde had written about Tatiana Romanov and her family was an extremely long one but apparently the last. She would finish it that night.

  She began to read, then froze, her jarred memory finally performing its function. The name was not Ron, or Ran. It was Ram, as Gwen should have known. She and Tatty had met F. Ramsey Saylor on Cape Cod the summer before their sophomore year in college.

  No wonder the secretary had been working on a Sunday. Ramsey was an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Tatty went to the window and stood a moment, then began pacing back and forth, two fingers pressed to her lips in nervous habit. She had not spoken with Ram Saylor in more than a year. Not since France.

  She brought the glass and the vodka bottle to the night table, and then Mathilde’s manuscript to the bed. Loosening her robe, she climbed beneath the covers, turning onto her side and pulling the book into the lamplight.

  The March revolution had caught the czar on his military train near the front and his family at Czarskoe Selo. The country retreat almost at once became a prison. Mathilde anguished voluminously over their plight, though it seemed a not uncomfortable house arrest.

  After his abdication, the czar was quickly reunited with his wife and children, but their imprisonment at Czarskoe Selo continued without interruption, as the Provisional Government led largely by Alexander Kerensky continued to debate their fate. In August 1917, with the knowledge of only three others in his government, Kerensky finally arranged to have the imperial family taken by secret train to Tobolsk, a friendly town in Siberia.

  In November, as the Siberian winter began to close on their new prison, Kerensky’s Provisional Government fell.

  In January 1918, a new unit of soldiers came to guard them. Many were brutes and oafs, who took perverse pleasure in carving obscene words into the wood of the swing used by Tatiana and her sisters. They endured this until April, when Red cavalry arrived with orders to return the imperial family to Moscow. The commander’s plan was to do so by taking a circuitous rail route that would avoid Ekaterinburg, a town on the eastern slope of the Urals that had long been hostile to czarist rule and was filled with Bolshevik militants.