The Stargazey (44 page)

She sat there talking Russian history. She had made no move to deny that it was she who had instigated the theft of the Chagall and that it was she who had paid the woman called Dana. As far as the murder of Kate McBride was concerned, she'd had nothing to do with that. “That Dana did on her own. Quite a remarkable woman.” Ilona had smiled.

Jury had not returned the smile. “Simeon Pitt?”

She shrugged. “He threatened to expose Sebastian and the gallery.” She paused. “It was the October uprising and its aftermath that murdered the men in my family. These revolts are usually carried out, and quite stupidly, by fanatics. Lenin, going around in disguise, could never keep his wig on; he kept dropping it, and on the night of the uprising he
forgot his makeup. Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and that utterly mad policeman, Dzerzhinsky—that's what it needs for a revolution: craziness and fanaticism and sadism. The storming of the Winter Palace?”

As if they had asked. They let the tape run. Jury was in no hurry. Wiggins kept getting up and sitting down, but he didn't interrupt.

“It was completely haphazard. The ministers thought it laughable and did nothing; the Bolsheviks didn't know what they were doing. My husband, Michel, was there. He was a young man then. Much later, when he was one of the curators of the museum, he participated in crating and sending off all these works of art to save them from destruction during the siege. He was taken from the Winter Palace and executed. Do you know why? Because he knew these paintings so well and could describe them so vividly he could make you see them. Art was his life.

“The revolutionaries replaced murder, plunder, looting, rape, pillage, and riot with murder, plunder, looting, rape, pillage, and riot. Rioting by mobs, who are on no side but their own. The Reds committed atrocities; the counterrevolutionaries—the Whites—committed atrocities, perpetrated pogroms. Russia has spawned generations of ignoramuses. In the Great War, my father was a cryptographer. Telephone wires were scarce, so orders were passed by radio. Code books were also scarce, so the orders were sent in clear. Russians by the thousands, the army, had no weapons and had to wait until one of their comrades died to pick up his.

“There were massacres and more massacres. Lenin loathed the kulaks, the peasants; Stalin loathed everybody. He had anyone executed whom he perceived as a threat. Kirov, the Leningrad Party boss—his murder was of course ordered by Stalin, who then wept publicly over what he called an atrocious act. It was the excuse for the purges that began then. My uncle was one of Kirov's bodyguards. He was mysteriously killed in an unexplained crash.

“My brother was convicted in one of Stalin's show trials, the Shakty trial. There were a dozen others with him, all innocent. Confessions extracted under torture. Those trials! When you want to deflect the blame from your own failure—and it was certainly Stalin's failure—stage a trial.”

Wiggins interrupted. “This Dana. How did you get hold of her?”

Ilona Kuraukov looked at Wiggins as if he were a simpleton. “I knew her. I didn't know her as Dana, of course, but I'd known her as a girl.”

“What's her name?”

“I imagine you mean her real name? Anna Kerensky. I don't expect it will do you any good to know that, though.”

“She's Russian?”

“Belorussian. She was orphaned when her father was publicly interrogated and whipped and shot by the NKVD as a spy. Her whole village was exterminated. Her uncle was a priest who gathered his parishioners inside this small church. Sanctuary? He must have been simpleminded. The Bolsheviks took everything we had, all our furnishings, certainly our art. I steal one painting and think it's hardly recompense.

“Try them, beat them, torture them, murder them. My father, my husband, my brother, my uncle: all murdered.” Ilona Kuraukov inhaled deeply of the cigarette she had twisted into the long ebony holder, exhaled a thin stream of smoke.

“The trouble with such plans is that they often involve more than was intended. Kate McBride. Simeon Pitt. An old Russian cleaning woman. Justice begins with one person, doesn't it?”

Her eyes slid away from his face and back again. “Ah, that
sounds
good, Mr. Jury.” She shook her head.

“Mother Russia.” And she fell silent.

I
can't believe it,” said Jury, who had pulled up the same chair that Trueblood had pulled up only two mornings before. He had not, however, commented on its provenance.

“Everybody seems to be visiting me in bed these days. Can't even wait until I've had my tea,” said Melrose testily.

Jury had appeared early this morning. Good Lord,
eight?
Surely the clock had stopped. Melrose picked it up and banged it down a couple of times to get it running. “You must've left London at dawn.”

“I did. Would have been here sooner if I'd got the message.”

“Where in hell were you? Nobody knew where you were.”

“I was . . . out cold, you could say.” Jury studied the ceiling molding.

“Ha! At least you're getting your sleep. More than I can say.” Melrose made a production of yawning and then neatened the sheet and blanket across his chest. He felt a little like royalty, felt as if supplicants were paying obeisance to him in his bedchamber as he couldn't himself be bothered to rise.

“You look like Wiggins.”

That
was not the effect he was striving for. Even more testily, he said, “All I can say is, where are the police when you need them?”

“Believe me, I'm really sorry.” Jury put his hand on Melrose's shoulder. “If there'd been any way—” He dropped his hand.

Jury's tone was so totally heartfelt and sincere that Melrose felt ashamed. He dropped the act and swung his legs out of bed.
“Aargh.”
He dropped his head in his hands. “Diane and I had a drink or two. One Demorney martini is the equivalent of a year's worth of Absolut ads.”

“Well, it's obvious she wasn't aiming at the vodka. Too bad she missed.”

“Want some tea?” Melrose tugged at the tapestry bellpull beside his bed.

Jury nodded. “Breakfast, too. I didn't get any.”

“Oh, Martha will be cooking up a repast for both of us, make no mistake.” Melrose was up and tying his robe.

Jury regarded its texture. “Cashmere?”

“Isn't everything? I've got to wash.” Melrose padded into his bathroom.

 • • • 

“If we dawdle, it'll be time to go to the Jack and Hammer.”

“It's only a little after nine,” answered Jury, tucking into his second plate of eggs and bacon. He looked over at Melrose, who was tap-tap-tapping his boiled egg. “You're not going to do soldiers again?” Jury pointed his fork at the oblongs of toast Melrose had cut.

“I always do. Now that we're settled down, answer my questions.”

“Answer one for me first. You left me a message—”

“Ah, yes. Did it help?”

“It might've done, except you gave it to Carole-anne. This is tantamount to not calling in the first place. It was something about futons. I was to look them up in Fodor's. According to Carole-anne, that is.”

Melrose dropped his head in his hands and moaned gently. He sat up. “Not
futons
, for God's sake,
Fauchon's.”

Jury studied his eggs for a moment. “I should have been able to work that out, really.”

“You shouldn't have
had
to work it out.” Melrose picked up a soldier.

Jury looked at him. “Well?”

Melrose crunched his toast, swallowed. “Oh. According to this travel guide, Fauchon's is one of those swank stores whose policy is ‘Hands off
the goods!' You know, it's like squeezing pears or something at Fortnum. The customer does not help himself.”

“And so Sophie . . . ”

Melrose nodded. “And so
Sophie
. Little Sophie couldn't have been—”

Jury leaned back, shook his head. “—bagging potatoes.”

“Now, tell me: What about the coat? What about the body? Being moved, I mean.”

“The reason she wore the sable was the same reason she got off and on the bus. She wanted to be remembered. But she didn't want her
face
engraved on anyone's memory, so that ankle-length, swanky, and highly controversial fur would be what stuck in people's minds. She was right, too. That's what the witnesses recalled. And the two of them certainly looked enough alike that there'd be no jarring note there. As for the body, she hid it for a couple of hours so that she could establish an alibi,
if
Kate McBride—that is, herself—ever came under suspicion. She wouldn't have, not if I hadn't been on that bus.”

“You remembered the face as well as the coat.” Melrose dipped an oblong of toast in his egg and regarded Jury keenly.

Jury nodded but said nothing.

“You knew it was she.” Melrose prompted him.

“Say I knew it was
someone.”

“You know what I mean.”

Jury spoke then as if he hadn't heard. “But not Kate McBride. Not her because she was dead.”

Melrose paused. “This woman—what does she call herself?”

“Dana.”

“She
wanted
the police to work out that she was the dead woman, that the dead woman was Nancy Pastis, and that Nancy Pastis was actually Dana. That way she could go her merry way and not be hunted. Why, then, did she make it difficult for you to discover this? I mean, why not leave ID on the body—like Nancy Pastis's passport? Did the dead Kate McBride not resemble the passport picture enough?”

“Oh, she did. Amazing what a few tricks with hair and makeup will do to blur the line between one woman and another, if the fundamental similarity in looks is there to begin with. No. It's a good question. I'd say
the answer is because identification on the body would be too obvious. This woman has a super-subtle mind. She likes to play games. And she is very, very cool.” Jury rose and went to the sideboard, where he removed a silver dome and plunked a rasher of bacon on his plate. “Also, I think she was bored.”

Melrose swung around to regard Jury. “Bored? Am I to suppose she murdered my friend Pitt out of
boredom?”

“No.” Jury reseated himself. “Because Pitt knew and told Fabricant he knew. The Fabricants—Seb or Ilona Kuraukov—got in touch with Dana.” The name was as foreign to his tongue as the taste of some exotic honeyed melon on one of those Pacific islands. He shook his head as if to loosen the name. “I'd say it was Ilona Kuraukov's idea; she got it when she saw what Rees was doing in St. Petersburg.”

“You know, I find it hard to think of Ralph Rees as doing this. His conscience, misguided as it is, just seemed unsullied.”

“Oh, he wasn't in on it.”

“How could he
not
be?”

“Tack the sandpaper over the stolen painting, then paint it. Ilona is a painter. She could have done it with no trouble. Unless, of course, one believes that white lot a work of genius. I don't think Nicholas was in on it either. Not if his pal Rees wasn't.”

Melrose was cracking the top of another egg with his spoon. “But how in God's name did she get it out of the Hermitage?”

“They still don't know. It was cut from the frame—”

“Good lord, they have guards! They have a security system.”

“Seems a few moments before the damage was discovered, the guards were distracted by something going on elsewhere. As far as getting it out goes, it wasn't a large painting. The Hermitage people think it might have been rolled and stuck in something like a hollow cane.”

“They make you park things like that—canes, walking sticks—by the door before you go in, don't they?”

Jury shrugged. “I would think so, but given the cops got there so quickly and nobody left and everyone was searched—” He shrugged again.

Melrose dipped another bit of toast. “So it's still missing. And so is she.”

“It is, and she is. Yes.”

 • • • 

When Jury and Plant walked into the Jack and Hammer a little after eleven, Trueblood jumped up from where he'd been sitting between Diane Demorney and Agatha and wrung Melrose's hand, saying to them that this was the most excitement they'd had since the body in the
secrétaire à abattant
days.

“Or the Man with a Load of Mischief days.”

Jury smiled at Diane. “You were brilliant, only—”

Diane rolled her eyes as if suffering an onset of terminal boredom. “Now you're going to ask if I have a license to carry the thing, Superintendent.”

“No. I was going to say what you did was very dangerous—”

“A violation of the ‘reckless disregard for life and limb' statute?”

Jury laughed. “Okay, okay.”

“I
mean”
said Diane, leaning very close to him and tilting her head so that her crow-black razor-cut hair fell across a well-turned cheekbone, “given
some people
weren't available for protection, one has to improvise.” Diane sat back, plugged a cigarette into the ivory holder, and wiggled it for a light. She might brandish a revolver about, but certainly not a match. Trueblood lit it. Then she said, “Are we having a drink or has everyone taken the oath?”

“We're just trying to decide who's in the chair.”

Without any hesitation, three pairs of eyes fastened on Jury.

“I get the point,” he said, and called over to Dick Scroggs, who came, for once, as if he'd grown wings. He liked Jury.

Hands under his apron, Dick said, “Oh, you needn't order, sir, as I know just what everyone wants. Martini with a twist . . . half pint of Old Peculiar . . . Campari and absent. . . . ”

“Absinth
, old trout. Lord, you're a publican and you don't even know what you're selling?”