A Prince Without a Kingdom (28 page)

Sitting in the desk chair, she opened a drawer.

Setanka had been at the dacha in Sochi for almost four months, ever since she had been rescued from the garage where the father of her friend Zoya worked. The political police had referred to a kidnapping attempt. Setanka would gladly have been kidnapped, but as it was, she explained to everybody that she had simply tried swapping families. She didn’t mention the envelope, which she had mailed to Italy on behalf of the
tioten’ka
. She loved secrets.

“Setanotchka, open the door for me. . . . Your father’s coming.”

Sometimes, in order to make Setanka come out when she had spent the whole day hiding behind the furniture, the nurse would toss two handfuls of sugar into a hot pan and wait. The sweet scent of caramel was too delicious to resist.

From the drawer, Setanka took out a letter that she often came to look at. The paper was very old and the handwriting seemed to have been blown sideways by the wind. It was a very mysterious letter. Addressed to
Dear Mother,
it had always seemed to Setanka as if she could have written the opening sentences:
I am alive. I know that you haven’t forgotten me. . . .
Setanka would have liked to address these words to her own mother, who had died in the year Setanka had turned six. Why did her father keep a letter in his drawer that was written by a stranger who gave his
Dear Mother
an appointment on a bridge in Moscow and who also told her:
Please don’t get out of the carriage; don’t even stop. You’ll see me beneath the sculpted horses on the bridge, and you’ll know that I’m alive.

Setanka was particularly staring at the drawing that served as a signature: a word that wasn’t written in the Russian alphabet —
Romano
— and a capital
W
just below.

“This time he really is coming, Svetlana. Come out quickly!”

A door slammed downstairs. Setanka put the letter back and closed the drawer. Alexandra Andreyevna could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs. Then she saw Joseph Stalin appear on the landing.

“Comrade, the little one is locked inside your study. The key must be jammed.”

“Poor, poor little one . . .”

The nurse could immediately tell that he was in a good mood.

“Didn’t you try climbing in through the window to rescue her, Nurse?”

He was smiling. She didn’t answer. Stalin took a large key out of his pocket and went over to the door.

Setanka was waiting on the other side. She saw the key she had used fall out of the lock and land on the carpet. A second later, the door flew open.

“There we go, rescued!” declared her father.

He scooped Setanka up in his arms as if he wanted to rescue her from a fire. But she wasn’t laughing.

“I want to go back to Moscow,” she said.

Joseph Stalin put his daughter down on the landing.

“I want to go back to Moscow.”

“Yes. I think you’ll be able to go back soon,” he told her with shining eyes. “The little problem has almost been sorted.”

The little problem had been bothering him for exactly twenty years. The problem was called Vango.

Setanka headed off along the landing.

Her father went back into his study, closing the door behind him. He stared through the window at the mournful rosebushes beyond. He had neglected them for some time now. He opened the drawer of his desk and took out the letter. There it was. He would soon be done with this obsession: this perpetual hunt. He would soon be able to tear up the letter his men had found in a ransacked palace in Petrograd, among family photos and holy images.

Back then, he had been young and had recently returned from several years of exile in Siberia.

It was the revolution of 1917, and Stalin was back in the capital of the tsars. He didn’t want anything of the former empire and its descendants to remain. And then this letter had been thrust into his hands. It mentioned a child who was going to be born.

In 1929, two of his men, Kakline and Antonov, who were Moscow’s official representatives for the zeppelin’s world tour, had discovered the same signature on board, but this time it was embroidered on a handkerchief belonging to a fourteen-year-old boy. Stalin had immediately been informed. Having just assumed full powers in his country, he had only to give the order. The manhunt had been going on since that summer’s day. The Bird seemed impossible to catch.

But at last he was going to be shot down out of the sky.

Paris, a week later, April 28, 1937

In the private mansion of Ferdinand Atlas, from the cellar to the attic the party was in full swing. But his daughter, the Cat, was on the roof.

Down below, they were playing the foxtrot and a new fast waltz called the java. Couples danced opposite each other, making the glasses on the tables clink and the marble floor vibrate. There were two orchestras. Upstairs, a string quartet brought couples closer together. People were whispering on the banquettes. There were candelabra on the mantelpieces. The doors to the wine cellars had been flung wide open, and guests headed down to serve themselves. Some of the elegantly dressed men hid bottles of wine in their wives’ handbags to take back home with them. Madame Atlas pretended not to notice.

The Cat was watching her father as he sat on the balcony below her. He had carried a wooden kitchen chair outside and was keeping an eye on the guests continuing to arrive in the courtyard. Nobody could see him behind the stone railing. He was like the punished child everyone has forgotten, but who doesn’t dare to stand up from his chair.

The Cat had abandoned her bedroom when one of the guests had tried forcing her door. It was an invasion. They were everywhere.

The Cat still regretted not following Ethel when she had met up with her that same morning in Montmartre. They had spoken for only a few minutes before going their separate ways. The news was worrying. They ought to have set out together in search of Vango. At least that way the Cat wouldn’t be here defending her bedroom against marauders.

She had pushed the wardrobe against the door to stop anyone from entering. An hour earlier, she had heard laughter on the landing.

“That’s their daughter’s bedroom. . . .”

“They’ve got a daughter? You’re joking.”

In the end, the Cat had grabbed her blanket and taken refuge on the roof, from where she could observe her father.

Someone appeared behind Ferdinand Atlas. The Cat recognized the chauffeur.

“It’s very kind of you to have come up, Pierre. Put the parcel down on the table.”

“Good night, sir.”

“Pierre,” her father called out to the chauffeur, who was already on his way again, “what was the name of the small town you were talking about this morning?”

“Guernica.”

“Is that where you come from?”

“It’s on the other side of the border, but it’s my country. I’m Basque.”

“Guernica.”

“Yes.”

“Have they destroyed it?”

“Hitler wanted to test his planes. It happened yesterday.”

“How many dead?”

“I don’t know.”

Ferdinand Atlas nodded in silence.

“Pierre, do you believe that this is the beginning of a war?”

“The war has been going on in Spain for nearly a year now, sir.”

“But why are the Germans in Spain?”

“I don’t know.”

The Cat saw her father loosening his black tie around his neck. He waved at Pierre.

“Thank you. You can go to bed now. I’m jealous. I’ve got to go back down and join all these people.”

When the chauffeur opened the door, the bedroom was filled with laughter. Three or four people rushed in, led by Madame Atlas.

“There he is, dear old Ferdinand. Look, he’s sulking!”

The Cat’s father got up off his chair.

“Ferdinand, these ladies wished to see our bedroom and the balcony.”

The guests let out shrieks of amazement before trampling a tiger skin rug and rushing out onto the balcony.

The Cat crouched on the roof. She watched her father calmly lift his wooden chair and raise it above his head. The merry shrieks stopped. He hurled the chair with all his might toward the bedroom: it went through the French windows, which shattered.

“Ferdinand!” exclaimed his wife.

But he had disappeared.

Attracted by the noise, clusters of guests turned up and entered the bedroom. The Cat watched her father, down below, striding across the courtyard.

After a few minutes of people walking around the bed and slipping on pieces of broken glass like tourists on a battlefield, the orchestra downstairs lured nearly everyone back onto the dance floor by playing “Tout va très bien Madame la Marquise,” a song that was all the rage in the open-air cafés and dance halls.

The Cat thought she was on her own at last, but three men had stayed behind to smoke on the balcony.

“There’s trouble ahead,” said one of them.

“Let’s enjoy ourselves while we can. There won’t always be parties in this house.”

It wasn’t possible to hear the third man, whose words were muffled. But someone answered him, “Yes, his name has been cited in the Chamber of Deputies by Monsieur Vallat or one of his friends. . . . There was a terribly witty pun about his extravagant business dealings; I can’t quite remember how it went.”

“If they go for Atlas, they won’t leave him in peace.”

The man with the muffled voice must have suddenly remembered the play on words, because he said something short and punchy that prompted his friends to burst out laughing. The only thing the Cat heard was the word “Jew”: the same word she had seen scrawled on the gate one morning, before it was painted black again, a word she had never heard spoken at home. She removed a piece of slate from the roof.

Out on the balcony, they were talking about the paintings they had seen in the drawing room, about how charming Madame Atlas was despite everything, and about the quality of the champagne. Someone mentioned a debt of loyalty to their host, who had always been so hospitable. Indeed, he wished to discuss the matter with the deputy of the Ardèche region.

“Loyal, yes, I’d defend him!”

“At least until the champagne runs out!”

The others pretended to be shocked. But they were tipsy, and it was hard to stop laughing.

Just then, the three men saw a piece of slate appear out of the night sky, spinning in their direction. It decapitated a champagne glass and grazed the cheek of the man with the muffled voice. Then it splintered on the parquet floor of the bedroom. The Cat, who’d had enough, jumped onto the neighbor’s roof.

The orchestras were enjoying a break, which meant that the slate could clearly be heard skidding over the wooden floor like a piece of ice hurled onto a frozen lake.

The Cat was already running over the rooftops. No sooner had she thrown the slate than she noticed somebody rise up and begin to chase her. She had taken to the rooftops when she was seven. Usually, it was easy for her to throw someone off her trail. She outran the gutter cats and feared nobody on this terrain. The person following her, however, was cut from the same cloth. He didn’t exactly tread in her footsteps, but he followed her at the same speed, slightly to the right, as if he knew that a stampede on the rooftops meant that bits of metalwork or tiling might work loose, and the person behind in the race would risk slipping.

The Cat couldn’t believe that one of the three men had managed to react so quickly. Luckily, a bit farther off, in a courtyard between the buildings, stood a chestnut tree in which she could shelter. There were just two more buildings to traverse: the first had a large roof terrace, while on the second there were three stacks of chimney pots that she had to climb one after the other. When the Cat turned around as she stood on the gutter opposite the tree, her pursuer was no longer behind her. The highest branches were below her now. She took a deep breath and jumped. While she was in midair, she saw a shadow burst from the other side of the courtyard and throw itself into the branches.

It was as if a pigeon fight had broken out in the leaves of the chestnut tree. The branches were shaking. The two opponents chased each other from one end of the tree to the other, and then everything went very still.

“Are you going to stop?”

Silence.

“Who’s there?” asked the Cat eventually.

“It’s me,” answered Vango.

The Cat quickly climbed to the top of the tree and found herself face-to-face with Vango. They hadn’t seen each other for three years.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to the party hoping to find you.”

“You were there?”

Their hands didn’t touch. The Cat was trembling and out of breath.

“You barricaded yourself in when I tried to come into your bedroom,” Vango told her.

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“That was you?”

“And when I climbed onto the roof, you ran away.”

“I didn’t realize.” The Cat smiled. “It wasn’t because of you.”

She was happy to see him. She grabbed hold of his sleeve, which was the most affectionate gesture she had ever made.

“So, have you seen Ethel?” asked the Cat.

“No. I’m on my way to her place; I just wanted —”

The Cat pulled away.

“But didn’t you see her today? Does she know you’re here?”

“Don’t worry. I know she doesn’t want to see me anymore. . . .”

“Vango . . .”

“I must talk to her.”

“Vango!” exclaimed the Cat, raising her voice. “She’s already gone.”

“Who has?”

“She received your message. She’s set off to find you.”

Vango twisted the branch above him to let in some light. But it did little to shift the shadow over the Cat’s face.

“Where is she?”

“She’ll have left Paris this evening.”

“But where has she gone?”

“You wrote to her, telling her to join you.”

“What are you talking about? She’d asked me not to write to her.”

“She showed me the telegram. Four words in a telegram. You were asking for her help.”

Vango felt his heart racing.

“They’re going to follow her,” he said. “They’ll follow her in order to find me. Where is she?”