A Prince Without a Kingdom (8 page)

“I’m short staffed,” he had explained to Vlad the Vulture. “My loyal deputy is suffering from a few health problems at the moment. He’s been out sick rather a lot these past few months. Be patient.”

Patient? Vlad didn’t know the meaning of the word. He had about as much patience as a lit fuse at the end of a bundle of dynamite. Under her archway on the rue de Seine, in front of the little café where three art students from the Beaux-Arts were waving their theatrical farewells, the Cat, as she often did, turned her thoughts to Andrei.

Months earlier she had witnessed the meeting in the snow between Vlad the Vulture and Andrei, in the knowledge that Vlad had come to kill the young student. Hidden above them, the Cat had come close to calling out and throwing herself off her perch in order to save Andrei. But from the outset the meeting had taken a different direction.

Andrei had spoken very quickly. He claimed that he had a lead, that he was finally going to see some results, that nobody should touch a hair on the heads of his brother or his little sister back in Moscow. The thick snow blotted out the echo of Andrei’s voice as he repeated the two children’s names: Kostia and Zoya.

The Cat could picture Andrei so clearly, his violin case pressed against his body, swearing he would find Vango as quickly as possible. By some miracle, the Vulture had been convinced.

And she remembered how, perched up on her rooftop, she had chosen to follow Vlad rather than Andrei a few seconds later, because that was where the threat lay: the man with a bloody knife hidden in his pocket, not the boy with the pleading eyes. And yet she wished she could have followed Andrei, to have become his shadow and never left him. On the sweet trail of the person she loved, who had no idea that she even existed.

But since that day, she hadn’t set eyes on him again.

The sound of the students’ voices petered out, and the Vulture left the café. The way he zigzagged across the Pont des Arts reassured the Cat. There was no chance of him disappearing into the night. She followed him as far as his hotel, behind La Samaritaine department store. He woke up the receptionist by kicking the front desk, then grabbed his keys and disappeared into the stairwell.

He was deep in his cups and wouldn’t move before midday. One strike of a match and the Vulture would have gone up in flames like a Christmas pudding.

It took the Cat only five minutes to reach the Louvre. She slipped through the iron railings of the Jardin des Tuileries and sought the cover of the linden trees, which, at night, could have been mistaken for a fairy-tale forest. The park warden and his lamp were visible in the distance as he did his rounds with a dog on a leash. But the animal didn’t pick up on the scent of the Cat in the middle of all those sweet springtime smells. One more flower wasn’t going to make a dog bark.

She arrived back home at two o’clock in the morning and entered through the front door so as not to wake her two pigeons, who were asleep on the gutter.

“Emilie.”

She stopped on the third step of the staircase. The chandelier was suddenly switched on. Her father was standing above her on the second floor. He was in evening attire, involving layers of vest and jacket, as well as a gray cape edged with silk. He let go of the light switch and walked over to the balustrade. With his top hat and gloves in his left hand, he waved at the Cat.

“Emilie . . .”

She held on to the banisters and kept climbing slowly. Her father sat down on the top step. He put his hat down on the carpet. Was a white rabbit about to appear out of it?

“Could you come and sit down here for a minute?”

His voice sounded weak.

The Cat sighed and crouched where she was, a few steps lower down. For several months now, her father had been a changed man. He had come to a stop.

For years, she had only ever seen him standing still in the large painting in the drawing room, with his slim mustache and the lion skin at his feet. And even in that painting, he held a watch attached to a gold chain in one hand, and was staring intently at it.

For years, he had only blown through her life like the wind. He would leave her visiting cards on the dresser in the entrance hall with a command scribbled on them.
Sleep. Eat. Obey.
The year when she had been sick, he had sent two words to the sanatorium where she was convalescing:
Get better!

To begin with, she stored his visiting cards safely away in a box. They were always exactly the same:
Ferdinand Atlas,
with five or six different addresses around the world, so that no one would ever find him. And those scrawled commands:
Work. Stop. Love your mother.

And then one day, without warning, when life had begun to take a different turn for him, he had started speaking in whole sentences, and even saying Emilie’s name, saying it over and over again, when it no longer meant anything to the Cat.

Because for her, it was too late.

He could smile at her, he could reach for her hand in her pocket, he could smoke her out with kisses on her forehead, with the whiff of tobacco in his scarves, he could talk to her in never-ending phrases, he could show his open wounds, and even prostrate himself at her feet like a lion skin. But none of it would do any good.

Right now, she was the one, on the staircase, who seemed to be looking at her watch, impatient for all this to be over.

“I’d like to take you somewhere with your mother,” he said. “I want to leave with the two of you. I’ve finished. I’ve done what I wanted to do. We need to leave quickly and find a refuge. Your mother won’t accept that our time is over.”

The Cat had heard all this before.

“Your mother wants to stay here. She doesn’t want to start over again.”

When his daughter didn’t reply, Ferdinand Atlas asked her, “What about you?”

The Cat got up and climbed the remaining stairs. She gave her father a wide berth, like a ship avoiding the reefs beneath the calm surface of the sea.

Ferdinand Atlas remained sitting on the top step. He felt a hand on his shoulder. His daughter gave him a peck on the cheek. He closed his eyes.

In her bedroom, the Cat half-opened the curtains to look at her pigeons. They were sleeping, resting against each other. She threw her clothes into a pile at the foot of a chair, put a record on the phonograph, and wrapped the horn in a towel to muffle the sound. She hesitated for a moment and looked out her window again, before finally lying down in her own bed. Her bed! She had been doing this rather a lot recently. It made her feel old, after years of sleeping only in a hammock on the roof.

The record was a piece of violin music.

Andrei had never said where he had gone, or where the lead was that he was following. She was afraid that he would find Vango before she did. But she was also afraid that he might never find him. Because if Andrei didn’t complete his mission, Vlad wouldn’t give him a second chance. What was Andrei’s family like, back in Moscow? His little brother, Kostia; his sister, Zoya . . .

A few days later in Moscow, May 1936

“Are you hungry?”

It was a fine day. Mademoiselle led both children by the hand, up the steps to the Central Post Office. Konstantin and Zoya were wearing their school uniform smocks with no overcoats.

“We’ll go to the park afterward. This will only take a minute. Look —”

Mademoiselle kept glancing anxiously all around her. And talking to the children without drawing breath: “Look how many steps there are! Kostia, pull your trousers up. I used to come here in the old days. You weren’t even born then. I just want to see how much it’s changed.”

She had hidden the letter inside Zoya’s pocket. Mademoiselle felt ashamed of taking advantage of this little girl to carry her secrets. She thought of seven-year-old drummer boys sent onto the battlefield to cross the enemy lines.

Mademoiselle had been living with the Oulanov family for a year and a half now. Her abductors had taken her from Sicily to Moscow, with no explanation.

As she walked into the Central Post Office, with its great row of booths, she stopped and held her breath. She was remembering the last time she had come here, to visit this hall the size of a railway station. That memory was over twenty years old now. But it had been the turning point of her life, the event that had led her to Vango.

Back then, she used to teach French and English to children in a family in Saint Petersburg. There were six children. The job had lasted only a few months. She was young, and she had been summarily dismissed: accused of trying to seduce the master of the house.

One evening, she had cooked him a meal when the rest of the family, including the governesses and cooks, had already gone to the country house for the summer.

The family’s town house on the banks of the Neva River was deserted.

The wife had returned unexpectedly and seen the table laid for one, a small portable stove, and, in a cooking pot, a bewitching recipe that was as dusky as it was intoxicating.

“What is
that,
Mademoiselle?”

“It’s for Monsieur. He comes back late at night. He never eats.”

“What is
that
?” the wife had repeated.

“I thought . . .”

But the wife’s shouting became louder and louder.

“What is
that
?”

An extraordinary smell wafted from the half-open lid. The sauce was simmering. The meat was rising to the surface of this magic potion. Sometimes, when a passing breeze blew the flame, the bubbling made the sound of a kiss. A white cloud floated over the edge of the pot.

A few centuries earlier, Mademoiselle would have been burned at the stake for cooking such a meal. But on this occasion she was put out on the street with her suitcases. And her beef bourguignon was thrown onto the cyclamen at the bottom of the garden.

She had first caught a train to Moscow, where, in 1915, she had found herself in transit in this same post office with a letter announcing her hasty return to an aged aunt who represented the only family she had left in France. The boy at the booth had sold her the stamps and pointed to the mailbox on the other side of the hall. She had hidden behind her handkerchief to hide how upset she was.

It was at that moment that he had come over. He had appeared as if by magic. He was wearing a red Cossack scarf and a woolen jacket.

“Are you French?”

Mademoiselle didn’t dare reply. She hadn’t yet let go of the letter for her aged aunt: the envelope was halfway through the slot.

“I heard you speaking Russian.”

“Yes.”

“And can you speak other languages as well?”

“Yes.”

“Which ones?”

“A few.”

The man was about the same age as she was. Mademoiselle tried to stand tall and proud to distract from her eyes, which were puffy from crying. But slowly she withdrew her envelope.

“Would you like to work?” he said.

She took another step backward and checked that her hat was firmly fixed on her head.

“Why?”

Her cautiousness was an effort. This man only inspired confidence.

“It would be to look after a child.”

“In Moscow?”

“No, somewhere else. I don’t know where. He’s not born yet.”

The man’s eyes were shining.

She raised her chin proudly.

At first, she had feared this might be an indecent proposal. But his smile reassured her once again.

“Mademoiselle, please, if you would care to come with me . . .”

“Don’t you want to ask any other questions of the person you’re hiring?”

“No.”

She pretended to deliberate. But she knew that her employer in Paris, from before Saint Petersburg, had died the year before. Nobody was expecting her. It was 1915, and France had been at war for months now.

“Please,” said the man.

Without realizing it, she had already put the letter for her aged aunt back into her bag. He picked up her suitcases, and she caught the train with him to Odessa, where they boarded a boat sailing for Constantinople. They disembarked at night. Mademoiselle couldn’t understand what was happening to her. Two sailors were waiting for them with a lamp. The war was raging on distant coasts. A long boat carried them from the port toward another boat lying at anchor farther out.

Suddenly, the man made the oarsmen stop and listen.

Mademoiselle had heard something too. Behind the sound of the dripping oars, above the hubbub of the old city of Stamboul, the cry of a newborn baby could be heard coming from the lit-up boat.

They looked at each other.

That was Vango’s first cry.

Now that she had entered the same busy post office twenty-one years later, with Kostia and Zoya clinging to her skirts, Mademoiselle kept expecting the man in the Cossack scarf to appear behind her at any moment.

But times had changed, and the world was no longer the same. The secrets in the letter she was trying to post weren’t intended for an aged aunt.

Once more, she headed toward the large mailboxes that had been expecting her for more than two decades.

“A stamp for Italy,” she murmured to the post office worker.

She had changed trams three times with the children, to make sure she wasn’t being followed. The little girl’s feet were starting to hurt. Mademoiselle kept spinning around to check whether anyone was watching her.

By leaning forward from time to time, she could see the edge of the envelope at the bottom of Zoya’s pocket. Would this letter come to rest, one day, on the table of the good Doctor Basilio, between the fig trees and the black rock of the Aeolian Islands?

There was a note for Basilio inside, and another envelope, smaller but thicker, addressed to Vango.