A Prince Without a Kingdom (9 page)

There wasn’t much else in the letter to the doctor, but already, for the first time in eighteen years, she had referred to the island as
their
home.

“I want to go home,
Tioten’ka
.”

The little girl was looking at her.

“Yes, my sweetheart, we’ll go home.”

At last, they were in front of the mailbox with its brass mouth.

She reached over to Zoya’s school smock.

“I popped something in there; stand still a moment.”

Sliding two fingers inside the little girl’s pocket, Mademoiselle grabbed hold of the envelope.

She felt a hand lock on to her arm.

“Don’t do it, Mademoiselle.”

She turned around.

“They’re watching you. They’re behind the glass in the booths, or else in the gallery, up there. Don’t do it. Or they’ll send you to Siberia.”

Time stopped for a moment. A man was standing in front of her: the father of Zoya, Kostia, and Andrei.

“Please, Mademoiselle. If I’d allowed you to go through with it, I would have been condemning both of us.”

She let go of the letter in Zoya’s pocket. The children threw themselves at the man’s legs.

“Daddy!”

The man hugged them tightly, while still talking to Mademoiselle.

“As long as they’re sure I’m watching over you, they’ll let you live with us. Don’t try anything else in this vein. My older son, Andrei, is abroad. They’re playing us off against each other. I was asked to keep you in my home. I’ve got no idea what you’ve done, but our lives, and the life of my son, have been linked for nearly two years now.”

Mademoiselle knew that she slept in Andrei’s bedroom, beneath his childhood drawings. She had seen a photo of him, tucked inside the accounts book. She knew that his family was worried about him. But she had never made any connection between her own fate and that of the serious-looking boy in the white-framed photo, his cheek against his violin.

“Come on.”

The children held their father’s hands.

Mademoiselle followed them.

They emerged into the bright May sunshine, at the top of the steps, and clung to one another as they made their way down, slowly, like mountain climbers linked by a rope on the ridge of a glacier.

New York, summer 1936

History books don’t account for what happened during the summer of 1936 on one of the most important construction sites in Manhattan. But building work on a tower was interrupted for several months. It all started in the spring, when one of the workers fell from the top. There was nothing unusual about this — dozens of similar accidents occurred every year — but it turned out that the victim was a Mohawk, forced to work on the construction site against his will. Out of solidarity, the other men laid down their tools for several days.

The morning they were due to return to work, the men had discovered mysterious inscriptions on the walls as well as up the service stairs. Incomprehensible graffiti had been painted in red letters, as tall as a fully grown man. It was a sinister sight.

ERAT AUTEM TERRA . . .

University linguists were summoned to the premises by the police. An elderly Latin specialist set to work.

He was able to decipher passages from the Bible. First of all, there were nine verses about the Tower of Babel, taken from Genesis. They spoke of mankind’s desire to build a tower that would reach to the heavens. And of how God had managed to stop them. There was also a line in Greek taken from Revelation, in which an angel sounded his trumpet, “And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast down upon the earth.”

In the wake of the Mohawk’s death, the workers were frightened by all these signs. On the top floor, in the middle of one of the rooms, they had found the name
RAFAELLO
spelled out using eight of the nine letters intended for the illuminated sign above the tower.

Some of the men had recognized the name of the archangel Raphael, one of the soldiers of God: perhaps he was the angel referred to in the line from Revelation painted in bloodred letters. The workers revolted again.

Access to the work site was forbidden, pending further orders. Above all, the architects wanted to avoid anyone ransacking the building. So the workers were kept at a distance.

One morning, the owner of the tower paid a visit.

He took the freight elevator up to the top floors, with his female assistant and the architects following at his heels. Everybody called him the Irishman. In less than a quarter of a century, he had established a sprawling bank with business interests on both sides of the Atlantic. The rumor was that he had even ended up buying the small hotel where he had arrived as a young migrant.

Now, aged fifty, here he was walking along the scaffolding of his own tower. His many rings glinted as he held on to the girders. There were still at least another three months to go before the great tower would be finished. Staring out through a window frame with no glass in it, the Irishman ate a banana. Opposite, rising up as if to taunt him, was the Empire State Building, which he had vowed in all the newspapers that his new tower would outstrip. The Irishman gave his banana skin to his assistant. He started laughing loudly when the architect promised to bring all the problems to a speedy resolution. He walked over to him and pretended to push the architect over the edge.

As he was about to leave, the Irishman noticed a pile of damp ashes in a corner.

“Do you have fires here?”

“Never,” replied the foreman.

The Irishman bent down to dip his finger in the damp charcoal.

“So what’s this?”

He drew a black cross on the foreman’s forehead.

“Finish the tower on time.”

Then he headed back down again.

His visit did nothing to change the workers’ minds.

The first stage of Zefiro’s plan could be heralded as a success. His theatrical flourishes had produced the desired results.

That August, Zefiro and Vango were able to set up their equipment at the top of the tower. They had positioned a high-precision telescope on a tripod, pointing at Voloy Viktor’s windows. They were equipped with three typewriters, new clothes, and a makeshift office at altitude that was well stocked with rubber stamps, seals, and paper of all kinds. They had sold a ruby to pay for everything.

Tom Jackson, a young beggar from Thirty-Fourth Street, had been recruited for ground missions.

From their observatory, they followed every event in Viktor’s daily routine. They noted the comings and goings in minute detail. Their aerial view of the different rooms of the eighty-fifth floor enabled them to keep a log of the times at which the guards were replaced, the regular visitors to the fortified tower, and the frequency of their visits.

Every evening, for example, most of the curtains were drawn, and the last visitor was always an elegant man whom Zefiro referred to as the lawyer. He appeared to address everyone as if he were master of the household. He would settle in the study. The closed curtains prevented them from seeing Voloy Viktor, who must have been dictating his last correspondences of the day to him from his bed. Then the lawyer would leave. But he was the first to return the following morning, at dawn, in time for Madame Victoria getting up. He would not be seen for the rest of the day.

At the end of the month, the first letter left Zefiro’s scaffolding and crossed the road, care of Tom Jackson, who was unrecognizable in his attire as a young gentleman. The secret operation had begun.

So as not to be recognized, Tom kept his left hand (on which were tattooed the words
“
God Bless You”) hidden in his pocket: the tattoo contributed to his notoriety across a patch of five streets and three avenues. He crossed the lobby of the Plaza Hotel as if he were thoroughly at home. He had never set foot on the marble floor before, but had spent his life staring at it through the glass.

Tom Jackson was the only person on Zefiro’s payroll. Aged nine, he earned fifty cents per week plus a clothing allowance: a fortune.

Tom drank a glass of seltzer water at the bar, then moved off again, discreetly dropping the letter close to the reception desk. The security guards hadn’t recognized him.

A Plaza employee picked up the letter and handed it over to the receptionist. Stamped with a European postmark, it was addressed to the occupant of the suite on the eighty-fifth floor. That same evening, it was presented to Dorgeles, who in turn gave it to Madame Victoria.

From their observatory, Zefiro and Vango watched the reaction to their letter. A meeting was instantly convened. That night, a dozen men in dark suits gathered in the main reception room of Voloy Viktor’s suite. These men got out of their cars, posted vigilantes in the streets, and disappeared behind the Plaza’s doors to reappear a few minutes later, three hundred meters up in the guest apartments. Zefiro had spotted several of them before in Viktor’s entourage.

None of them looked like gangsters. Zefiro recognized a tailor from Brooklyn, a senator, and some businessmen. They were wreathed in cigar smoke.

“Let the show begin!” said Zefiro, with one eye glued to the telescope.

It would take months, but this time he was going to destroy Voloy Viktor. He was convinced of it.

Vango was getting ready to go out.

“See you later, Padre.”

“Where are you going?”

The padre didn’t like it when Vango ran away like this.

“Don’t forget they’re watching out for you in town.”

“Look at me! Who would recognize me now?”

And sure enough, in the midst of all the rubble, by the light of the oil lamps, Vango was transformed.

Dressed in a brown suit, his hair slicked back and hat in hand, he swiveled on one foot and grinned. He’d had a pair of small tinted glasses made for him: they were all the rage on Wall Street that summer. Vango didn’t even recognize himself.

Ten minutes later, he was heading down Fifth Avenue toward Madison Square.

For the past few weeks, he had spent his nights in the Italian districts of New York. Vango had started with the cafés in the Bronx, combing one after another. Now he had moved on to southern Manhattan, where he had found a few restaurants that rose up like Sicilian islands in the middle of America.

On this particular night, he walked through the door of La Rocca. One of those islands in Little Italy that smelled of capers and bird’s-eye chili, La Rocca was tucked behind brightly lit windows on the corner of Grand Street. It was Vango’s first visit.

Toward midnight, the restaurant turned into a dive bar. The card players took over, and the lights were dimmed. But there wasn’t the usual hushed concentration you might expect to find in a gaming room. The chef did the rounds of the tables serving parcels of delicious pastry, stuffed with pungent sausage meat, that oozed cheese when he sliced them on the board. The restaurant was noisy, and the backyard was filling up with empty bottles.

Vango settled over by the bar. He put his hat down beside him. There were only men in the room, apart from a young woman who stayed behind the stronghold of her bar.

She was permanently on the move, going from the serving hatch to the storeroom door. One moment she was on tiptoes trying to reach the bottles, the next she had disappeared, crouched down by the ramparts. It was as if she were performing a dance.

Vango thought of Ethel, whose eyes also landed on things deeply but fleetingly, like tiny daggers that were immediately withdrawn.

Recalling Ethel’s gaze made him brush his fingers against the note in his pocket, which he had received from her a few days earlier. Three cold lines telling him to bide his time, not to return to Scotland without warning her, and making it clear that she was busy. Little daggers.

Vango didn’t need to beckon the waitress. She shouted something he couldn’t understand.

“What d’you want?” she repeated, moving in closer.

“I’m waiting for someone.”

She had called him Lupacchiotto, which means little wolf. And Vango did look like one of the young wolves that roamed New York, hoping to seize their chance.

He was sitting near the sink. He knew that she would be back, sooner or later, to rinse the piled-up glasses. For now, she was filling five glasses from a bottle with no label. It was once again legal for bars to sell alcohol, after the bootleggers had thrived on fifteen years of Prohibition.

The waitress put one of the glasses in front of Vango. He hadn’t ordered anything, but she slid it toward him. The manager came for the tray that was loaded up with the four other glasses. There were cheers on the other side for a win at
briscola
or poker.

“I’m looking for someone called Giovanni,” Vango announced.

The waitress, who had started washing the glasses, glanced up to take a good look at him.

“Giovanni? Half my suitors are called Giovanni. So is my father, and my grandfather too.”

“Giovanni Cafarello.”

With her forearm, she pushed away a lock of hair from her eyes and stared at him.

“Cafarello?”

“Yes.”

“Cafarello . . .”

She stopped and dried her hands. Her black eye makeup gave her a slightly older appearance, but she couldn’t be more than eighteen. She shook her head slowly.