A Prince Without a Kingdom (7 page)

He took a deep breath.

“Where have you come from?” Ethel wanted to know.

“The corridor.”

“Before that?”

“The staircase.”

“Before that?”

“The kitchen.”

She gave up and glanced at young Nicholas next to her. Ethel smiled, while the gardener’s son looked distraught. Unlike him, she didn’t feel embarrassed in the slightest. She didn’t care what other people thought. No, Andrei alarmed her for more serious reasons.

“You think that you can just walk into my bedroom one morning . . .”

“I want to work.”

“And what about when I had ten horses in the loose boxes this winter, with all their straw to be transported; you didn’t want to work then?”

“I was with my parents.”

He’s lying,
she thought instantly. But she could also tell that the word “parents” rang true: there was the same pain in his voice that there would have been in hers.

“I’d like to speak with Master Paul.”

“Me too,” she answered back. “I’d like that very much.”

She stood up, and Lily the doe got up at the same time.

“But Master Paul isn’t here.” She sighed. “Go downstairs. Wait for me there.”

Andrei left the bedroom. The way back felt very different, and not just because the doe was following him this time.

Nothing panned out the way he had been expecting.

Andrei didn’t see Ethel again for a while, but he was given back his old bedroom next to the stables, where there was only one horse left. Mary made Andrei eat his lunch at eleven o’clock at the big staff table, before everyone else, like a naughty boy. In the afternoon, he saw Nicholas heading off in the direction of the lake. An hour later, he was asked to saddle the horse and tether it near the tower. At sunset, a slender figure could be seen galloping toward the lake. Andrei recognized Ethel. For a long time, he watched her disappearing into the distance.

Toward eleven o’clock that evening, he heard the sound of hooves on cobbles. He got up and went outside. He had left a light on in front of the stables, beneath which Ethel was unfastening her horse’s girth. She saw him and looked away, with a peculiar smile on her face. When Andrei tried to help her, she was so lost in her thoughts that she nearly collided with him.

Again, Andrei felt that troubling sense of anger gaining hold of him. What was she thinking about? Or whom? And where had she just come from?

He left her to her own devices and went back inside the stables.

“For as long as Paul’s away, you can stay here. I’ll let you know when I need you. Paul will decide your fate once he gets back,” declared Ethel, who had just entered the building.

Andrei nodded.

She went over to him and tilted his chin a little, so as to pin the Russian with her gaze.

“I’m keeping a close eye on you. I’ve never understood why you’re here.”

It was then, as he looked up, that he saw something on the band tied around her wrist: in the middle of the blue silk that shone in the light was the letter
V
and a saffron-colored star.

He knew that she had seen Vango again.

Paris, rue Jacob, at the same time

“It’s him.”

When Madame Boulard heard the knocking at the door, she put her knitting down on her lap.

“It’s your Professor Rasputin.”

The arrival of this visitor always set her on edge. Why couldn’t he use the nice new doorbell that she’d had fitted?

“Don’t call him Rasputin,” said Auguste Boulard. “And anyway, you can go to bed now, Mother. We’ll be working in the dining room.”

Superintendent Boulard went into the hall and opened the door.

“My dear fellow, you’re right on time. As always.”

It was the stroke of midnight. Vlad the Vulture was standing before the detective on the threshold.

The old parquet groaned as they made their way into the dining room. Superintendent Boulard went to draw the curtain across the glazed door separating them from the sitting room. Through one of the panes, he gave his mother, who had stayed in her armchair, a forced smile. The curtain closed.

Marie-Antoinette Boulard immediately put her knitting to one side. She was about to turn eighty-seven, and nobody was going to make her swallow tall stories.

These Russian lessons had worried her from day one. It had all begun back in March with the sudden arrival of Vlad. He had entered the apartment without warning, holding a metal bar in one hand, while the superintendent was enjoying his bath. Boulard had eventually gotten out of his soapy water and, after a stunned silence, had politely led Vlad into the dining room for a chat. He had emerged an hour later in the company of his visitor, who was, as he explained to his mother, his Russian teacher.

“Russian?”

“Yes, Russian.”

“But . . . why Russian?”

“Because . . .”

Boulard attempted a Slavic dance step.

“Russian is interesting,” declared the superintendent, who was still wrapped in his damp towel.

“And this gentleman is really a Russian teacher?”

“Vlad?”

“Yes.”

“The best.”

Vlad looked more like a butcher from the taiga. In his big hairy beard, Madame Boulard could see a resemblance to the photos of the terrible monk Rasputin, tales of whom had made the rounds twenty-five years earlier.

And now, for the fourth time in two months, Rasputin was here, in the next-door room. She could hear the sound of muffled voices. Madame Boulard tiptoed over to the door and pressed her ear to it.

What she could hear sounded like gibberish for the most part, but she thought she could make out the word “revolution.” Just then, there was a scuffling noise in the hallway. She rushed over to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

The door opened to reveal Blanche Dussac, the concierge of the building.

“Well?”

“Rasputin’s here.”

“I saw him go past my office,” said the concierge. “Do you need any help?”

Madame Dussac revealed that she was hiding a carving fork in her nightie.

“Not yet. Don’t intervene yet. I’ll tell you when.”

“Are there any new leads?”

Blanche Dussac was tantalized by this gripping story. She had climbed up the ranks from confidante to Madame Boulard’s right-hand woman.

“He was talking about a revolution.”

“Jesus wept! It’s political.”

“My son doesn’t get involved in politics.”

“Marie-Antoinette, do you really know your son?”

This was the first time the concierge had called Madame Boulard by her first name.

“I couldn’t say, these days,” admitted the superintendent’s mother with a little sob.

“Where there are Russians involved, it’s always political.”

“Heavens above!”

“We need to warn the police.”

“But my son
is
the police.”

“Yes. Good point. Right.”

“Let’s wait. Next time, I’ll hide in the dining room sideboard. Go back to your apartment now, Madame Dussac. I’ll pop by to see you tomorrow.”

An emotional Blanche Dussac gave the superintendent’s mother a hug.

“Be brave. And take this. No, really, I insist, just to be on the safe side. You never know. But I need it back before Sunday; I’ve got my niece coming for lunch.”

The intrepid Blanche Dussac headed back downstairs, leaving the carving fork in her friend’s hands.

There were noises coming from the adjoining room. Madame Boulard rushed back to her armchair and picked up her knitting again. Vlad the Vulture and the superintendent appeared briefly, and then the front door slammed shut.

It was half past midnight. Madame Boulard could hear her son in the kitchen boiling the water for his hot-water bottle. He came back into the sitting room.

“Why aren’t you in bed, Mother?”

“I don’t feel sleepy.”

Boulard noticed that she hadn’t gotten very far with her knitting in the past half hour: she was still on exactly the same stripe of that woolen hat.

What had she been doing during their interview?

He screwed up his eyes. The superintendent was even suspicious of his own mother. In fact, he was feeling so confused that he thought he had just seen a pretty blond girl on the gutter in front of the window. He wiped his hand across his face. And why not pink elephants, too? He was worn out.

“I’m going to bed, Mother.”

Before he disappeared, Madame Boulard challenged her son. “Auguste! How do you say ‘good evening’ in Russian?”

He didn’t answer.

On the rooftops of Paris

The pretty blonde was the Cat.

She made her way around the tiled edge of the roof before jumping over a small courtyard and crossing a sort of zinc terrace that, in the dark, looked like it was twinkling with quartzes. Leaning over the other side, she saw Vlad turning onto the rue de l’Échaudé.

The Cat avoided a series of skylights with the lights on. She flanked one of those gardens in captivity, hemmed in by apartment blocks. She often thought about the animals that lived there as her neighbors, unaware that the rest of the world, with its grasslands and forests, even existed. The Cat spotted Vlad again at the bottom of the street, which looked like a canyon from her vantage point. She crossed the rue Visconti via the electric cables, conscious that from this point the route was impassable. So she let Vlad move out of sight while she dropped down onto the rue des Beaux-Arts.

The Cat ventured along the pavement, but the Vulture had disappeared. She ran as far as the Seine before retracing her steps. Vlad wasn’t fast enough to have disappeared in a matter of seconds. And no car could have driven him away. So he must have gone inside somewhere.

Just then, the Cat noticed a metal shutter half pulled down over a shop front. It belonged to a small café that wasn’t quite closed yet: students and vultures were still being served. One glance revealed that Vlad was at the bar. Drink was the only thing that had the upper hand on Vlad. The tyrant became a slave when he could smell a glass of clear alcohol from a long way off.

The Cat found an old carriage entrance where she could sit in the shadow. For the first time, she had been able to hear everything that was said between Superintendent Boulard and the Vulture. Usually, the dining room window was shut. The Cat would be stuck on the gutter without understanding anything. When the frustration got to be too much, she would go to watch Boulard’s mother starring in a drama of her own making, as she played the spy in her bathrobe, egged on by the concierge.

This time, Paris was basking in the balmy May air, and the window had been left open. The Cat hadn’t missed a word. The conversation had proved very different from what she had been expecting.

She had always assumed that Boulard paid Vlad to carry out the dirty assignments he couldn’t entrust to his regular police officers. This theory explained everything: the Vulture’s visits to Boulard at home, the fact that they were both equally motivated to find Vango. . . .

In the Cat’s eyes, Boulard was the mastermind. Even handsome Andrei was under his thumb. They were all relentlessly on the hunt for Vango, the murderer of Father Jean at the Carmelite seminary one April night in 1934.

But the truth, which the Cat had heard this evening, was much less straightforward. Boulard had lost control of the situation. The Vulture had him in his claws and was playing with him. Quite simply, he was using Superintendent Boulard and the French police in order to find Vango. He was helping himself to this world-renowned support for free.

The Cat had taken several minutes to grasp the terms of the blackmail. What kind of pressure could have gotten the better of the incorruptible Superintendent Boulard?

At one moment, in the dining room mirror, as she leaned in a bit, the Cat had seen the Vulture grabbing hold of a cake cutter and hurling it across the room. It had stuck in the heart of the pretty peasant girl painted on a small canvas.

“Mother!” Boulard had gasped.

And it was indeed possible to recognize his mother, seventy years younger, in front of an Aveyron inn. Her portrait had been painted by one Uncle Albert, who had moved to Paris to become an artist in the 1870s, and with whom the young Auguste Boulard had lodged when he had arrived in the capital to study law.

It was the only painting they had left by Uncle Albert. It was called
Nénette at Aubrac.
With Vlad watching, Boulard had rushed over to unhook the lacerated painting and hide it under the sideboard. The mark left behind by the frame was like a ghost on the wall.

The Vulture’s action explained everything. The terms of the blackmail were set as Madame Boulard’s life. If the son didn’t cooperate, the Vulture would exact his revenge on the mother.

The Cat hadn’t found out much more. Boulard seemed weary of the situation. He had tried explaining to the Vulture that his lines of investigation hadn’t amounted to anything. He had reissued the description of a wanted person to every town in France. He had even alerted embassies abroad. The chief of police had expressed surprise at the investigation being reopened two years on. Boulard had needed to convince his superiors that another recent murder might also be attributable to Vango.