A Prince Without a Kingdom (34 page)

The Irishman had stopped two kilometers away in a field, just for the fun of it. He was smoking in front of this spectacle, sitting on the hood of his car, as if he were watching the sunset.

Ethel emerged barefoot from the debris. She had walked over embers, and one by one she had pulled out anything with a human shape from the flames around her. Strangely, she was soaking wet in the middle of this furnace. Water reserves had saved her life, by bursting just above her the moment the fire had broken out. It was as if she had been hurled, screaming, into the Victoria Falls. Now that help was at hand, she only wanted one thing: a car to New York. It was a matter of life and death. Someone noticed a severe burn that began at her right shoulder. The firemen were trying to catch her, but she was thinking of Vango and managed to escape them. She kept running toward the shell of the
Hindenburg.
Perhaps there would be a car on the other side.

When she spotted the blue handkerchief on the burned body, she didn’t stop right away. She tried to erase what she had seen and keep on running.

A car. New York. Fifth Avenue. Thirty-Fourth Street. That was all that mattered.

But she could feel herself slowing down, then retracing her steps. Very slowly.

She knelt down next to the faceless corpse and, silently, she took the handkerchief in her hands.

At that instant, Vango saw her from far off. He called out to her, but she didn’t hear him. He started running. Twenty meters away, he came to a stop.

A man was watching Ethel. He wore a burned coat. He didn’t take his eyes off her for several minutes. The survivor, who looked like Rasputin, seemed very calm. Vlad the Vulture was drinking from a small metal flask.

The man drew closer, tossing his bottle far behind him in Vango’s direction. Ethel was paralyzed in front of this unrecognizable body on the ground.

“Vango . . .”

Vango picked up the flask from the grass. He recognized the snarling bear engraved on the neck. They were still after him. He was convinced that his death alone could bring everything to a halt. Only then would he no longer be a danger to anyone.

A group of rescuers had gone over to Ethel. They were talking gently to her, but she didn’t even notice them. She clutched the handkerchief as they took her by the arms; she tried to put up a struggle, but there were four of them. She was screaming.

Other men were busy transporting the bodies of Zefiro and Schiff on stretchers. They had already counted twenty-one dead and twelve missing. There were sixty-four survivors, which was a miracle.

Vango kept his eyes trained on Ethel through the cloud of smoke. She was repeating his name over and over again.

Vlad the Vulture made his way slowly toward the main arrival building. He needed to let Moscow know. It was all over.

Vango made directly for the deserted field.

A man stopped the two stretcher bearers who were carrying Zefiro.

“I’m looking for my brother,” he said, and they allowed him to lift the cloth that covered the padre’s face.

“Is that him?”

“Yes.”

“My condolences. Give us his name. It will help.”

“He was called Padre Zefiro.”

For the first time in his life, Voloy Viktor took great pleasure in pronouncing his former confessor’s name.

While the vultures hovered over the ruins of the most recent zeppelin, Vango was walking through the grass. Flashes of lightning streaked the sky toward the north.

He had torn off his shirt. He was leaving everything behind him, even his love.

He didn’t know that his father, at the end of the preceding century, had experienced something similar. A rebirth.

Mademoiselle had told him all about it in the letter that was waiting for Vango, in Basilio’s home. One morning, his father had forged a new path. Taken for dead by the rest of the world, he had started again from nothing. And like his father, Vango sensed the same hunger and terror surging through his body that is felt, perhaps, though nobody knows, by newborn babies.

Abbas Tuman, Russian Caucasus, July 10, 1899

The setting was a wooden palace with colorful rooftops, balconies, and turrets rising up between the pine trees. All around were wooded hillsides. The fairy-tale palace looked deserted, but the low waters of the river Otskhe could be heard singing over the pebbles or pausing in the nooks and crannies behind the rocks. It was nine o’clock in the morning and the dew had already evaporated from the grass. It was going to be a scorching-hot day.

A man was contemplating this landscape from the roadside. He wore a pale jacket, which hung so loosely he appeared to be floating inside it, together with a pair of white trousers in the style of the Uhlan Cavaliers. Behind him was an extraordinary-looking machine: the first model of motorbike invented by the De Dion-Bouton workshops a few months earlier, consisting of a tricycle with a three-hundred-cubic-centimeter engine. The man had brought it from Paris by train.

He had spent eight years living in this valley in the Caucasus, arriving as an invalid in 1891. Tuberculosis had seized him during a grand tour around the world, which he had embarked on with his brother. They were in Bombay when he had spat up blood for the first time: he had been forced to leave Nicky behind and return home.

Out of the dozens of palaces that his family possessed, he had chosen to live alone in this one, guarded only by a few soldiers. The waters of the region were supposed to have healing properties, but they hadn’t healed him.

In the shadow of these forests, the man known to his sister and his mother as Weeping Willow had become even more of a wild romantic figure.

They had given him this nickname back in the days when his English teacher, Mr. Heath, had taught him fly-fishing. George had become solitary and lugubrious, spending whole days beneath the willows at the water’s edge. His sister, Xenia, used to say that he would take root, like the willow posts planted by the riverbank that instantly turned green.

Now, all these years later, he was weak; and yet he ran around the countryside until dusk. He was solitary but would sometimes hold celebrations for which the entire region arrived in costume. The guests would dance and bathe in the river before sunrise. Weeping Willow often slept out on the mountainside, watching the stars. He lived far from the capital and had embroidered on a handkerchief, which he never took out of his pocket, a phrase that he liked from the philosopher Pascal:

Everything was contained in these words, written by Pascal as a reflection on mankind’s modest place in the universe, but which Weeping Willow applied chiefly to his life’s dream: living apart from the world. How many kingdoms know us not.

However, no kingdom was really unaware of him. There were always rumors about him. He had been claimed as dead on several occasions. There had even been an article in the
New York Times
announcing his disappearance. Imaginations ran riot about him taking a mistress among the princesses of the Caucasus. Hidden children and secret marriages were invented for him. And this twenty-eight-year-old man, who was solitary and sick, was the subject of all these myths.

His mother, Maria, loved him more than her other children. Sometimes she would pay a surprise visit from Saint Petersburg. He would pretend to be convalescing sensibly and doing well, spending three days on the wooden terrace with her, sipping lukewarm tea. But he would creep away to cough into a pillow. And when Maria Fiodorovna, who looked more youthful than her son, disappeared as her carriage reached the other side of the bridge across the river, he blew her kisses with his slender hands. He always believed it would be the last time. He would stay there, listening to a bird, watching the trout in summertime, or noticing the snow falling off the tops of the pine trees in winter.

But on the morning of the tenth of July 1899, his farewells to this valley in the Caucasus were for good. Lieutenant Boissman, guarding the main entrance, had allowed him to drive off on his motorbike, against the advice of his family and doctors. The only thing the officer had mentioned was the bear.

“Someone spotted it higher up, on the river. Take my gun.”

Weeping Willow had declined with a smile.

Moments later, directly above the palace, he switched off the engine on a path strewn with pine needles. After surveying the world he was about to leave behind, he drove off at top speed westward, his shadow gently ahead of him and the roar of the engine deafening him. He overtook a horse-drawn cart transporting milk cans. The motorbike flashed past with the ten-liter fuel can that he had attached at the rear. He wanted to drive to the Black Sea and head along the coast as far as Constantinople. He had organized a boat there, in secret. His plan was to vanish.

After two kilometers, Weeping Willow slowed down, then stopped. He could feel some thick liquid in his mouth. When he tried to spit it out, his white jacket was splattered with blood. He turned off the engine by a ditch and bent over to cough.

He could barely get back on the motorbike. The cart laden with milk was trundling toward him. He knew he didn’t have many more days left to live, but he wanted to die alone, at sea. He had set it all up. He didn’t want to disappear into this ditch, in the middle of the mountains. He needed a few weeks of freedom, the only such weeks of his life, far from the gaze of onlookers.

The motorbike edged its way forward in slow motion, tracing a loop and sliding backward. The woman driving the horse cart saw the young man wobble from side to side as he clung to the handlebars. The engine cut out. Having recognized him when he had smiled and overtaken her a few minutes earlier, the milk woman climbed down. She didn’t know whether she had the right to approach him or not, but arrived just in time for him to collapse into her arms. He was covered in blood.

“What should I do, Your Highness?”

“Nothing,” he answered. “Nothing.”

His face was turning pale and his hands no longer had any strength left in them.

Horrified, the milk woman laid him down on the ground. She turned toward her cart to fetch a container of water. She wanted him to drink it, but he kept his teeth clenched. In the end, she washed his face instead. Then he lost consciousness. And yet, from the depths of his blackout, he heard her sigh, “He is dead. The tsarevitch is dead.”

She left him there alone in order to announce the news, abandoning cart and horse.

Half an hour later, twenty soldiers from the Palace Guard returned with Lieutenant Boissman. They found the motorized tricycle, the cart, and traces of blood on the ground. But the tsarevitch’s body had disappeared. The milk woman’s tears were flowing thick and fast.

“He died in my arms!”

The horse was no longer there either, having broken free from its harness. Meanwhile, Boissman was hunched over the bloodstains. The earth had been churned up and the bracken trampled by the side of the road. The lieutenant’s first thought was of the bear.