City of Silence (City of Mystery) (5 page)

“But
what we must remember is that they do not see it as such,” Trevor said. The
clock behind Tom trembled in anticipation, and then began to strike twelve. 
Trevor waited for each gong to sound.  They had overstayed, as they so often
did, had drunk more than they should, had eaten past the point of satiety and
into excess, had teetered once again on the edge of discord.  The ponderous
sequence of the twelve bells of midnight gave Trevor time to compose his thoughts. 
He knew he might not see these people again for weeks, perhaps the better part
of a month, and he did not wish to leave them like this, to conclude their last
meeting in such an inconclusive way.

“Criminals
most often do not see themselves as criminals,” he continued, when the final
gong had sounded, leaving a subtle reverberation in the air.  “I doubt very
many men, or women as the case may be, awaken in the morning and think to
themselves ‘Today I shall go out and perform a criminal act.’  They instead
feel justified in their actions, and this is what we must remember.  That they
consider themselves to be righting some great wrong, as avenging either their
own suffering or that of someone they love, as merely setting the tipped scales
of justice on balance once again.  It is easy for us to sit here with our
brandy and declare them animals, but I suspect that in most cases there is an
interior logic to their motives, a logic we must understand if we hope to
thwart the actions which result from it.  Otherwise, we will spend our lives
solving crimes instead of preventing them.  The science of forensics will become
nothing more than mopping up bloodstains.”

Davy
quickly nodded.  Emma bit her lip.  Rayley murmured “Here, here” and Geraldine,
who had dozed off some minutes before, gave a little snort as her chin bobbed
lower toward her chest.  Tom, his feet still propped on the table, his chair
tilted precariously back, pulled a cigarette from the silver case in his pocket
and slowly smiled.

“Quite
a speech, Welles,” he said.  “I’m surprised the clock doesn’t chime again, just
for emphasis.”   

Chapter
Three

The
Winter Palace, St. Petersburg - The Private Rooms of the Orlovs

June
14, 1889

9:20
AM

“There
was a disturbance in the theater last night,” Filip said, without looking up
from his plate.

Her
pulse quickened, just has he had undoubtedly intended for it to do. 

“What
sort of disturbance?” Tatiana said, her voice carefully pitched to sound calm,
even slightly disinterested.  She had trained herself how to do this throughout
the twenty-seven months she had been married to Filip Orlov.  Anxiety made the
voice rise, especially on the final syllable of the last spoken word.  It had
the effect of turning any statement into an implied question, of indicating
uncertainty, even in the most everyday of matters. Tatiana now automatically
lowered her voice as she finished each sentence and the irony was that this
soft growl, which had begun as a survival technique, was largely cited among
her acquaintances as evidence of a flirtatious nature.

Tatiana
and Filip were sitting at their breakfast table just as they had for each
morning of their married life.  Which would make it – let’s see, what was twenty-seven
times thirty?  Dear God, over 800 consecutive mornings that the two of them had
spent precisely as this one:  Filip already in uniform, already wearing his
boots.  She in her peignoir, imported at considerable expense and bother from
one of the better ladies’ boutiques of Paris, idly grazing over a bowl of fruit
and grain, all the while sipping her favorite morning concoction.  It was pink
froth in a wine glass, a mixture of pomegranate juice and flat champagne,
whatever dregs happened to remain from the night before.  Filip ate eggs, but
exclusively the yolks, an idiosyncrasy that resulted each morning in a plate of
abandoned egg whites, lying lacy and flat on his blue plate like the dried foam
which was left behind on the beaches of the Crimean Sea. Tatiana and Filip
summered there and would be departing for their villa soon, just after the Tchaikovsky
ball.  Half their trunks were already packed.

Tatiana
did not anticipate the trip.

Filip
did not answer her at once.  Perhaps this hesitation was a type of calculated
torture, perhaps merely the result of his preoccupation with his breakfast.  He
pierced another yolk and yellow spilled across his plate.  He requested them
barely done, these eggs, liked them as runny as possible, and if he was not in the
tsar’s own guard, Tatiana had little doubt that her husband  would truly prefer
to swill the yolks raw from a glass.  The social nuances of the imperial court
were a perpetual mystery to Filip.  He enjoyed the benefits of being within the
circle of the tsar’s most trusted staff – Tatiana herself was one of those
benefits – but was still ill-at-ease with the constant ceremonies of life
within the Winter Palace.

“Two
dancers killed themselves,” he finally said. “They were to play Romeo and
Juliet in the ballet next week.  Original, yes?”  He grinned at her, showing
the square white teeth which always seemed just a bit too small for his beefy
face, clearly amused by his little joke.

“Who
were they?”

“I
told you.  Ballet dancers. “

“Yes,
but what were their names?”

He
shrugged.  “Do ballet dancers have names?”

Tatiana
hesitated.  “They’re sure that it was a double suicide?  And not something
else?”

“What
else would it be?”

“Murder
might be posed to look like suicide.”

“Who
would want them dead?”   He pierced another yolk, then dragged a crust of bread
through the gelatinous puddle.  “They were nobodies.” 

As
soon as Filip was out of the apartment, Tatiana dressed.  She did not call for
her maid, who was probably somewhere having her own breakfast or gossiping with
a gaggle of servants.  Tatiana was a lounger and often returned to her bed
after breakfast, most generally not ringing for assistance in dressing until
noon.  So she struggled unattended into a smocked dress designed to be worn
over her swim costume at the coast and thus reasonably easy to don in a rush.  Once
she was suitably covered, she pulled on her shoes and exited the front door,
looking both left and right as she stepped into the hall, craning her neck like
a character in some absurd comic play.

She
could not say why she was skittish, so unwilling to be seen. Tatiana had lived
within the Winter Palace for the entirety of the time she had been married to
Filip and had as much right to come and go through these halls as anyone.  The
size and location of their private quarters was the result of a single day, years
ago, when Filip had taken a bullet in the side during some street fracas and
thus immediately risen in the tsar’s estimation.  It took a man like Filip, bold
and broad and very nearly fearless, to earn a full apartment in a wing not far
from the imperial family’s, to earn his wife a position, even a lesser one, in
the tsarina’s court of ladies.

Her
feet followed the familiar path, turning corners and navigating the great rooms
at the end of each hall without thought, moving up and down staircases without
the effort of the movement striking her consciousness.  The Winter Palace was grand
only in appearance, pleasing to the eye with little regard for the rest of the
senses.   In fact, as homes went, it was not even comfortable.  It contained antiquated
plumbing, unpredictable lighting, primitive heating, and utterly ineffective ventilation,
resulting in the sort of daily inconveniences that would have been unthinkable
in a European palace and making it the least popular of the tsar’s three residences.
 

The
significance of the place lay largely in the fact that its sheer size allowed
it to function as a contained city.  In one direction, the Palace took up a huge
expanse of shoreline along the Neva River, with several pavilions leading down
to individual docks, and on the other side it stretched the equivalent of three
city blocks.  In the high season, somewhere between six and seven thousand
people lived within its walls, more than the entire population of the town
where Tatiana had been born.  This was not the high season.  As its name so
obligingly indicated, the Winter Palace was the tsar’s primary residence in the
winter and the majority of the aristocracy, along with their staffs, spent
summers in their country homes or villas by the sea.  In this particular summer
the season was being delayed until the conclusion of the Tchaikovsky ball.

The
Winter Palace was not only the size of a city but was laid out like one as
well, much in the manner of the old fortress towns - or an egg, should one pause
to think of it - with layers of protection radiating out from a vital hub. The
yoke of this particular egg was the lavish chambers occupied by the tsar, tsarina,
and their five children.  Tatiana had never personally visited these quarters,
but if rumor was correct, the rooms there were awe-inspiring upon first glance
but in reality just as unsatisfactory when it came to matters of lighting and
plumbing as the rest.  The next layer contained the extended family members of
Alexander and his Danish-born wife - the minor royals, one might say.  Then
came the halls where Tatiana and Filip lived.  They belonged to the segment of
the staff that was considered elite, those who resided in the nether world
between privilege and service.  Governesses, doctors, dancing masters, portrait
artists, jewelers and dressmakers, musical directors, the members of the
private guard.  Beyond them, in the more farther-flung wings, were the true servants. 
The sort who washed and cleaned and cooked and carried.

Even
after more than two years within its walls, Tatiana could not claim to
understand entirely how the palace protocol worked.  For example, she and Filip
both were servants and had servants, a concept which she still found a bit hard
to grasp.  This morning her porridge and his eggs had come as they always did,
on a high-domed tray which presumably had been prepared in some kitchen
somewhere, another place she would most likely never see.  Their clothing was
carried away dirty and carried back clean.  Things appeared.  Flowers on a
table, apples in a bowl.  Fires were laid in the winter and damped down in the
spring.

The
first morning, shortly after her marriage, that Tatiana had awakened in the
Winter Palace had been very telling.  She had risen and, through the most instinctive
of habits, made her bed.  The maid had entered minutes later, inquiring what she
might like for breakfast.  When the woman – twice the age of Tatiana, who had
been no more than twenty at the time – spied the neatened bed, her mouth had
closed into a hard, tight line and Tatiana understood that her error had been
grave indeed.  The maid had bustled forward and most resolutely mussed the bed,
throwing pillows to the floor and crumpling the coverlet in her hands.  And
then she had made it again.

Tatiana
had simply curled up on her chaise and watched.  The woman’s gestures could
have been interpreted as a slap in the face or were perhaps kindly meant, a
silent illustration of how life in the royal palace was intended to work. 
Tatiana had never made that mistake again.  In fact, understanding this new
reality in ways she could not have begun to articulate, she often made a point
of leaving a bit of a deliberate mess:  a napkin dropped to the floor, a bar of
soap sent skidding into a corner, a dress with a button dangling, an overturned
glass.  To create no work for her staff would have been rude, even cruel.  It might
have cost someone their position and thus left them with no roof over their
head or no way to feed their children.  Over time Tatiana had slowly but
steadily acquired the sort of exaggerated helplessness that always seemed to
come with privilege.  When she approached a closed door she would simply stand
still and wait for someone to open it. 

As
she now walked through the Palace, navigating from the private wings into the
public, the effort gradually calmed her and forced her thoughts into more
linear patterns.  The dancers who had allegedly killed themselves… Filip had
said they were in the ballet, and the ballet troupe was a different entity entirely
from the cadre of royal dance masters.  Konstantin was in no danger.  It was
unlikely he had been anywhere near the scene at all.  There was no need for her
to visit the theater on her own, especially at this hour when there was no
logical explanation she might give for why she was there.  And yet she walked,
hall after hall, room after room, staircase after staircase, passing mirrors
and portraits and statues without number, striding beneath grand chandeliers
from Italy and across deep carpets from China.  Retracing the familiar route as
if she were lost in a sort of dream.  

At
last she reached the theater and slipped through the double doors which led to
the performers’ level, where the dressing and rehearsal rooms were located.  She
found the stage below her flooded with light, each bulb glowing as if the room
had been lit for a grand performance.  She walked to the top of the staircase
and scanned the floor below - the box where the royal family gathered, furs
tossed around their feet and legs, the entrance doors, the pulleys with the
platforms which raised and lowered props, the stage itself. 

No
Konstantin.  

At
the bottom of the staircase lay the lovers, as yet unmoved, although any number
of men were buzzing about their bodies, presumably members of the palace
police, a separate division from that of her husband.  The brains, not the
muscle, of the large force which existed solely to protect the imperial
family.    

“Who
are they?” she called. 

The
theater was acoustically perfect.  Although she had barely raised her voice,
each man below her turned and stood.  She doubted that any among them recognized
her face, but something in her clothing, or perhaps her bearing, seemed to
convey well enough from which part of the palace she’d come. Thus they were
prepared to humor her questions, at least for a few minutes.

“Dancers,”
one of the men answered.  “Do not come any closer, please. Not until we’ve
finished.”

Tatiana
gazed down at the bodies.  Both slim and fair, the dancers could have passed for
siblings as easily as tragic lovers, and they lay in the pose which concluded
their scene in the performance.  This final bit of juvenile theatricality made
their deaths all the sadder, although not for the reasons they’d likely
intended. 

“I
can see that they’re dancers,” she said. “What I’m asking is their names.”

The
request, while simple, gave pause to the men beneath her, who clearly did not
think of the bodies in such specific terms.  If she had ever doubted Konstantin’s
claim that the dancers in the royal troupe were all anonymous, interchangeable,
as replaceable as flowers in a vase, the reactions of these men were surely
proving him right.  Even in death these children were not to be granted the
dignity of a name.

“Don’t
worry,” one of them called back up, a man who had removed his hat to reveal a
bald head and heavy-boned face.  “We shall all be out of the way far before
your rehearsal time. This incident shall not affect the imperial waltz.”

Good
god, he thinks I have come here because I’m worried about the waltz scene,
Tatiana thought and her eyes swept the room again, more slowly and carefully
this time.  Konstantin still did not appear.  But then again, he did not sleep
with a member of the tsar’s private guard.  Perhaps he did not yet know that
this “incident” had even occurred.