The White Russian (25 page)

Even Plevitskaya was gazing straight back at me now, with wide, shocked eyes.

‘Adopted him where?’ she asked.

‘I think near Kursk?’ I replied stupidly, before realizing this was just another diversion. She was trying to change the subject again. I shook my head, and tightened my grip on her, feeling the soft material of her dress crease under my hands.

‘That’s why I’m asking, please, Madame Plevitskaya,’ and I could hear now how imploring my voice had got, ‘to stop General Miller being kidnapped. If there’s anything you know, anything at all, then
please
…’

I gulped. I wasn’t acting at all. That half-sob had just come out.

‘Zyzyrovka,’ Plevitskaya said into the lengthening silence. Her voice was flat. Then her eyes flickered, and she looked away.

‘I must find my husband,’ she said suddenly, as if she’d made a decision. ‘Monsieur Epstein, please.’

Hastily, he undid the pins, and she went behind the screen. None of us could look at each other any more. The couture-house people weren’t going to help me, I could see – well, it had been naive to hope they might step in and clap handcuffs on her. I knew that, really.

A few moments later, she emerged in a black-and-red flowery dress, doing it up as she walked past us, without a word to or a look at anyone. Her shoes were in her hand.

It was only when she’d reached the door that I realized she was off, without even her jacket.

‘Hey!’ I called. The door slammed. I ran after her. But by the time I reached the street, she was already getting into a taxi. As luck would have it, there were no others at the rank. ‘Rue de Grenelle,’ I heard her say, swinging herself inside. ‘Number 79.’

There was nothing I could do but stand in the midday sun and watch the taxi head into town.

When, a few minutes later, another taxi drew up, the first thing I asked was, ‘What’s at 79 rue de Grenelle?’ I had decided to follow her there, and catch her with Skoblin.

It was only when the driver answered, with a scratch of the head, ‘The Soviet embassy, mademoiselle; is that where you want to go?’ that I finally gave up.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I need to go home.’

Plevitskaya sat very still in the taxi until, after it had crossed the pont de l’Alma and turned along the Left Bank, down the tree-dappled quai d’Orsay, she bent down and put on her painful shoes.

She wasn’t watching the traffic, or the glitter on the Seine, or the fishermen on the banks, or the
bateaux-mouches.

If it all goes wrong, go to the Soviet embassy and ask for the crab salesman, she was repeating to herself, inside her head.

Well, now that the American girl’s interference had prevented her from establishing her husband’s alibi, it
had
all gone wrong.

But still, this taxi journey was the last one in the world she wanted to be making.

She shut her eyes, feeling sick, when she thought of the crab salesman. No, it was unbearable to think of
his
reaction …

She could hardly bear to think of her husband, either, who wasn’t even aware yet of how wrong it had all gone, so would be turning up at the gare du Nord in an hour, as planned, as part of the group waving General Kutyopov’s
daughter off on a train ride. She winced as she imagined how he’d be expecting her to join him there, so they could go on making a show in front of the others of having been enjoying a jolly day out together all the while, and talking loudly about their purchases from Monsieur Epstein.

It would only be when everyone started asking, ‘But where is your wife, Nikolasha?’ that he’d begin to guess. Then he’d have to get in his own taxi, and head with all haste towards embassy-land and, later, she supposed, the hold of the freight ship
Maria Ulyanova.
But even this was in doubt, because what if someone had already had the wit to get the police out to the gare du Nord to arrest him?

She felt sicker still when pictures of the inside of the
Maria Ulyanova
, chugging through grey waters to Leningrad, started crowding into her mind. Would they have to see Miller again, in there? Would he look at them, from above his gag and bound hands, with eyes full of hurt and hate? Or, and now she began to feel really sick, might they all end up gagged and bound, she and her husband just as tightly as Miller, and all being delivered, at the other end, in the same van marked ‘bread’ or ‘milk’ to the Lubyanka? When she called to mind the crab salesman’s quiet eyes, anything seemed possible.

That she could ever have hoped for today’s project to fail now seemed unimaginable. That she could ever have wanted to be sent back to Moscow felt insane.

She laced the fingers of her hands together, and squeezed them tight to stave off panic.

She’d thought she might search for her son if she got home to Russia, hadn’t she? But what if he’d been gone for years, just as she had? What if he’d emigrated?

It had never occurred to her, until today, that he might have left too. Never, until that damn girl had started talking about Miller, and about his son – whom she was so clearly in love with – and Plevitskaya had remembered Zyzyrovka, where she’d lost
her
son …

‘What’s that you say, madame?’ the taxi driver asked.

It was only then that Plevitskaya realized she must, without intending to, have muttered the place name out loud.

‘Nothing,’ she said. And then, ‘No! I meant, I was saying, let me out here. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going on.’

A moment later, she was standing alone on the pont Alexandre III, with its exuberant art nouveau lamps, cherubs, nymphs and winged horses, with its foundation stone somewhere far below the waters which had been laid by the last Tsar, long before he’d known he’d be murdered. She watched the taxi she’d just been sitting in dwindle and disappear, too, into the distant heat haze beyond the shining glass of the Grand Palais, and wondered what to do with the freedom she was taking, and which tomorrow to choose.

Evie

I failed, I told Jean, as soon as I arrived back at ROVS. She knows. I found her. But she got away.

I failed, too, he told me.

All he’d found had been a piece of paper skewered on a railing in the rue Jasmin – a torn-off bit of the German letter his father had been carrying around for days.

The entire Russian community was now mobilizing. But this didn’t help a bit.

There were a lot of people already in the ROVS front office, and every hour brought more. The growing cast of characters wouldn’t have been out of place in a Chekhov play. Men in uniforms, both the absurd imperial kind and the blue salopettes of Parisian workers, or in sombre suits; women in darned black European clothes or peasant headscarves, young, old, older, ancient … It was uproar. There were people rushing in and out, crying or shouting, some muttering darkly to whoever was next to them, some striking their heads in gestures of elaborate despair, some covering their eyes, some phoning (though it was beginning
to seem to me that the entire Russian community of Paris was already here). Yet none of them were achieving a darn thing. It was true I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and might be missing a nuance here or there. But I didn’t need to. I’d never seen such a parade of uselessness.

In the small back room, which had been Skoblin’s office, a particular type of despair was being addressed with vodka. Thank God, I thought – numbly watching mournful old men troop through the main room, one by one, on their way to the bathroom – that Jean never drinks.

Jean had got the secretaries ringing around every single place any White Russian had ever been to in Paris and beyond, in case, by some chance, General Miller had shown up there.

But no helpful information had come back from the Russian aristocratic estates – from Kovalyovsky’s house at Meudon and Prince Troubetskoi’s at Clamart, and even Petrovka, down near Marseilles, home of the Tian-shansky family – or, for that matter, from Madame Sabline’s old people’s home in the château which I’d once visited with Jean, or the host of other places with connections to Russia. Jean called the newsrooms of
Latest News
and
Renaissance
, the two biggest Russian-language papers, but they hadn’t heard anything either.

No one had seen the General.

It was only when the delegation that had been seeing someone important off at the station thronged in, too, that one fragment of news about Skoblin filtered into the room. He’d briefly appeared on the station platform, looked dazedly around the group for a moment, said his wife was feeling unwell and he had to go to tend to her at the nearby
café where he’d left her, then walked straight off towards the taxi rank. No one had seen him since, either.

The only result of all the telephone calls was that, one by one, people from all the various Russian organizations showed up at ROVS.

Jean and I sat, watching them mill about, in the dusk. Finally he lowered his forehead on to his hand.

‘I should be doing something,’ Jean said. He was pale. Well, he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. But his voice was oddly bright and conversational. ‘Not just sitting here helplessly, watching events unfold. But I have no idea what.’

‘Call the police,’ I whispered. ‘You’ve got to.’

Jean shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t help,’ he said. ‘The French police can’t understand foreigners – unless they’re very definite ones, maybe, like Americans.’ He looked at me. ‘But we Russians, well, we’re just ghosts to them. They can’t pronounce our long names. We don’t even have proper passports. And they know what an unlucky lot we are. Of course they steer clear. We’re no good for cops who want flesh-and-blood people, with beginnings, middles and ends – people who leave evidence.’

‘Well, change your luck! Don’t give up!
Get
them some evidence, now!’ I hissed. ‘We need to talk all these idiots round! Show them the evidence and make them agree you can call the police, because there still might be time to get your father help – but only if you hurry.’

He looked at me. I could see he didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘Didn’t you say you were always on at him to leave a note in his desk, saying where he’d gone?’ I asked.

He nodded, looking utterly forlorn. ‘But he didn’t,’ he said.

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I shook my head.

‘Perhaps you just didn’t look properly,’ I whispered determinedly. ‘Perhaps you missed it. Which would be a pity, because
if
you had a note in your hand, signed by him – saying he was heading to the rue Jasmin with Skoblin to meet men he’d been told were German agents, but suspected it might be an ambush and Skoblin might be in cahoots with Moscow; and
if
it also told the reader to call out the police if he didn’t come back by afternoon – well, then, the police would
have
to do something, wouldn’t they?’

I opened my bag, pulled out a notebook and a pen and passed them over.

After a moment, he took them, and began to write.

It was a few more minutes before he slipped off to search his father’s room again.

When he came back in, to what by now was the almost complete darkness of the front room, he announced his return by switching on the electric light.

The hubbub stopped. They all turned to stare.

Holding up a note, he began to speak to them in a voice that carried through the apartment, deeper and stronger with every word.

How I wished I understood. But, in a way, I
could
understand the really important part.

It was only after a surprisingly short crowd discussion, which ended with everyone muttering agreement, and after one of the secretaries had picked up the phone and was asking to be put through to the police, that Jean looked
over at me, and nodded. There was a ghost of a smile on his face.

But the French police search was no more successful than the Russian hunt had been.

The second half of the General’s letter was picked up before dawn, several miles away, in a quiet street not far from the market and slums of Les Halles. He must have dropped it. A baker’s apprentice walking to work in the dark unscrewed the ball of thick, expensive paper, hoping for a banknote inside. When he saw official-looking German writing, then realized that the crumpled-up letter was lying outside an empty building whose green street door had been left gaping open, he reported a burglary in the hope of a reward.

Skoblin must have given the General a rendezvous at one end of Paris, then delivered him right across town to another address, and to his kidnappers, we worked out later.

The General must have had enough presence of mind to leave the letter, in pieces, as a trail. In due course it became known that the building with the green door belonged to the Soviet embassy. And it was immediately clear that he hadn’t left it peacefully. Behind the green door the police found rags, rope and a used bottle of chloroform. An unknown van parked on the street for an hour at the end of the previous morning had blocked the traffic.

There were no more clues.

For a day or two, France’s ports and borders were closed.

For a day or two, a public furore convulsed Paris.

Word got about that the kidnappers, who had
disappeared as completely as their victim, must be hiding in the Soviet embassy, where General Miller was probably also a prisoner. A crowd several thousand strong besieged the pretty mansion on the rue de Grenelle – not just White Russians, but reporters, police and ordinary Parisians like Gaston, too. They booed and roared and threw things when Monsieur Suritz, the ambassador, with his little Trotsky beard, came out to announce that the French police had no right to target Soviet territory, that he would not allow a search of his premises, and that anyway General Miller would not be found. But they could do no more than shout. The law was with the Soviets.

Thousands of scandalized words were published in the next day’s papers about the kidnapping, the exotic murder habits of Russians, and the police investigation.

I spent those days, scratchy-eyed with exhaustion, imagining a truck trundling towards the ports of the north French coast, carrying a box which occasionally emitted bangs and groans. I imagined men in the cab, sweating and smoking cigarettes. Maybe one would have Skoblin’s eyes, under a beret. I pictured the dread on their faces as the police flagged down their car – and then the smirks as they waved them on.

It was almost a relief once the crowds thinned and the newspapers found something new to write about, because our sense of failure was so crushing. I don’t remember properly sleeping or eating in those few days. We sat in ROVS while people came and went. We dozed on armchairs. Occasionally I went upstairs for a change of clothes or a bath. Sometimes I slept for a few hours upstairs. Jean looked exhausted, with shadowed eyes. I don’t know
if he slept at all. If he did, he must have fallen asleep at the desk or on the sofa, at ROVS. Sometimes the police were at ROVS. Sometimes we were at the police station. There was a lot of talk. Nothing much mattered.

Jean was lost in a Russian world, barely speaking except in his native tongue. I could see that, by being there, and helping the ROVS people come to terms with what was happening to them – with what I could see was dignity – he was trying to be worthy of his father. As a true foreigner for the first time, someone who didn’t speak the language everyone around me was talking, I understood so little of what went on that I was of no practical use. But I knew he wanted me there. He touched me, blindly, from time to time; reached for my hand, hugged me close. I knew from that alone how lost he felt. I couldn’t leave him. Not for a moment.

But we couldn’t talk, either. The only subject would have been the General, and his kidnappers, and the tragedy enveloping him, and this was too painful. I couldn’t even think of the two people who’d destroyed him – for Skoblin and his wife had both vanished, and must both be equally guilty – though I heard their names come up all the time in the puzzled, angry, defeated (and otherwise incomprehensible) conversations in Russian all around me. Between ourselves, Jean and I certainly couldn’t share out loud our private questions about where the General now was – if he was still alive at all: how long it took to reach Moscow by ship; whether he’d have survived until he met the interrogators waiting for him at journey’s end; and the awful, formless terror of what might happen next. And I’d never now be able to ask Jean why he’d always done so much
for, and been so loyal to, a man I thought so flawed. All I could do was respect his anguish, and observe the silence.

I knew too that home, for me, was now where Jean was. My search for Grandmother, which had started from some flickering memory of a past love of her, had maybe not led me to her Zhenya, as I’d hoped, but it had at least led me to find meaning in loving this man, here, now. Grandmother had shown me
my
Zhenya. I had to stay.

Still, I treasured the few moments when the gloom briefly lifted. Marie-Thérèse redirected her food packages downstairs, for all comers.

‘You don’t mind, mademoiselle? They’re respectable, serious people, those ones,’ she said to me in an undertone, putting down a giant tureen of soup on one of the secretaries’ desks, talking as if she’d been trying to persuade me for some time that not all Russians were bad lots. ‘Army officers. Hard-working family men. Educated. Not dirty thieves like that other lot – the Soviets.’

I nodded, almost relieved when she explained the other reason for her change of heart, sending a soft glance in the direction of Jean, who was talking to a policeman in a corner of the room.

‘He’s nearly as French as I am, that one, wherever his family came from,’ she said approvingly from the doorway. ‘A good lad. He doesn’t deserve this.’

It was maybe the third or fourth evening, when all the light had leached out of the sky and there was hardly anyone left at ROVS, that our vigil ended. Jean woke me from my doze in a ROVS armchair. ‘Can we sleep?’ he said dully. ‘I need to sleep.’

Arm in arm, we walked through the downstairs lobby, not stopping to look at the two policemen snoozing at either side of the door of the ROVS office. Slowly, we climbed the stairs.

Jean inclined his head questioningly towards the salon. But when I thought of all the spindly, uncomfortable chairs behind that door, I walked past it, leading him instead to my room.

To hell with what Marie-Thérèse might think. I didn’t think she’d mind, anyway.

Nothing seemed to matter any more. I didn’t believe there’d be a happy ending, or even any ending. I’d spent all those days listening to words I didn’t understand, until I was stuck in the same dark fog as Jean had lived in for so long. Like him, I was by now just being swept helplessly along in the darkness.

We both collapsed heavily on to the bed. I barely had time to drop my shoes to the floor before sleep overcame me. We’d lost the General. He wasn’t coming back.