The Property of a Lady (16 page)

“Not quite.
First
Solovsky is Russian,
then
he’s a man.”

She glanced up defensively. “I’m only doing what you asked—for
our
country, remember? Besides, he only asked me to do what you did—and he told me even less. But he did tell me about the billions.”

“Did he?” Cal looked thoughtful. “But you still decided to skip out of Geneva without telling me?”

“I was just impatient to get started, that’s all. I had some personal things to consider … I had to rearrange my schedule. I meant to call you as soon as I arrived.”

“So? What’s your next move?”

“I … I haven’t thought it out yet. I’ll let you know.”

He nodded and glanced at his watch. “Fine,” he said. “Remember to do just that. I’ve got one or two things of my own to take care of. You must be tired; after all, you had no sleep last night. Why don’t you give me a call in the morning and we can discuss how to proceed?”

Suddenly he was all business and she found herself on her feet and on her way out of the door. The meeting was over! “But—” she exclaimed.

“But what, Genie Reese?”

His reddish-brown eyes were gentle again as he looked at her and she sighed with relief. “I thought you were really mad at me. I’m doing my best. I’m just not used to accounting to other people, I’m used to working on my own.”

“No problem,” he said abruptly. “Just don’t disappear again without telling me. You got me worried.”

She walked slowly back to her room feeling the pull of fatigue in her spine, wishing he had asked her to have dinner with him again tonight. But she told herself that anyway she would never have made it, she was just too exhausted. Too much had happened in too short a space of time and her whole life had been turned upside down. All she wanted was sleep—and tomorrow, somehow, she would get to meet the man who had bought the Ivanoff emerald. Though she wasn’t about to tell Cal Warrender that yet.

Maryland

Missie pinned the brooch with the five diamond plumes at the neck of her blue dress, holding up the mirror to admire it. She touched the golden wolf’s head, remembering when Misha had given it to her and the awful time when she thought she had lost it forever. The brooch and his photograph were her most precious possessions, along with Azaylee’s childhood photographs and those of her beloved Anna.

Of course she had had other jewels, but this one piece had signified both her love for Misha and the end of an era, because when they had left Russia she had been plunged into a world she had not known existed.

She glanced around at her calm, luxurious suite, with its pale peach walls and silk curtains, the soft cream carpets and her beautiful antique Turkish rugs. Her familiar paintings hung on the walls and a fire glowed comfortably in the elegant marble fireplace. And outside, beyond the swagged peach taffeta curtains drawn against the cold night, were green lawns and shade trees and the lake with the swans and the mallards. Fairlawns was light-years away from Constantinople at the end of 1917.

Constantinople

They had arrived with only the few rubles Tariq had given them. Those had soon disappeared in payment for their room and board at a small wooden house high in the hills overlooking the Golden Horn.

Sofia had unpicked the jewels from Missie’s skirt and Azaylee’s pinafore and taken them to a Chinese merchant, who, after inspecting them for a long time, had said that the beautiful settings were worthless to him and he would pay only for the gems themselves. For a bagful of jewels worth a fortune, he offered the equivalent of two hundred American dollars. They had no choice but to accept.

Sofia had said it would be unwise to linger in Constantinople; the city was full of Russian agents and they must move on. Missie had been sent to buy them new clothes, simple, cheap, and serviceable, and within days they were at Sirkeci Station boarding the Orient Express en route for Vienna.

They had held their breath as the inspector checked their tickets and travel documents endlessly. But then he had smiled, handed back their papers, and clipped their tickets.
“Bon voyage,”
he had said, patting Azaylee’s head as they filed through the gate onto the platform.

Sofia held Azaylee’s hand and Missie carried a small cardboard valise containing their new clothes and the
Ivanoff tiara hidden beneath a pile of underwear. “If all else is lost,” she had told herself, “we shall still have the tiara. It is our insurance policy for our new life.”

They were elated as the train finally departed, settling into the uncomfortable second-class compartment and telling each other they were finally free. But their troubles were not yet over. The Russian secret police were patrolling the train and their papers were inspected at great length at Kapikule and again at Belgrade, where the stony-faced guards returned them reluctantly as if disappointed to find nothing wrong.

“It’s no good,” Sofia had said. “If they catch us, they will kill us. And you too, Missie, even though you have no real part in Russia’s drama.” She had thrust a wad of money into her hand. “Take it,” she had whispered, “go home to England,
milochka
, while you can. You are only a young girl, all your life is before you. Forget what has happened, forget the Ivanoffs. Please, I beg of you, go home.”

Missie had stared at the money and then at the rolling Serbian countryside flashing past the window, thinking longingly of Oxford’s beautiful colleges and pretty cobbled streets, the familiar bookshops and the tearooms, and beyond, the green expanse of the Cotswolds. Then she had glanced at Azaylee playing happily with her new Turkish doll and asked herself how she could leave an old woman and a child to fend for themselves.

Sofia had shaken her head despairingly when she had refused. “God knows what will become of us all,” she had whispered tiredly.

Their hazardous journey had continued through Hungary to Budapest and finally to Vienna, where they had taken cheap lodgings behind the Opera House and soon discovered that there was a large transient community of White Russian emigrés. Sofia was still afraid but Missie talked to them in the coffeehouses and learned from them where the best places were to sell valuables such as icons and jewelry, and that they could not expect fair prices
because the dealers knew the market was flooded with Russian refugees in dire need of money and were exploiting the situation, just the way the Chinese had in Constantinople. They told her there was no work and that many noble-born people were living in poverty; the lucky ones had found jobs as doormen in nightclubs or as waiters. They said it was even worse in Paris, that the Cheka were everywhere, searching out noble refugees who had managed to slip their net. Every day, they said, you heard of someone else who had just “disappeared.” Vienna was no longer safe for those with something to hide, nor was Paris.

Sofia removed all of the smaller diamonds from the sunburst tiara and sold them cheaply, and with money again in their pockets, they began their long slow trek through Austria to the Italian coast, where they booked the cheapest passage to New York.

The
Leonardo
, out of Genoa bound for New York, was on its final voyage. It was old, its engines were obsolete, its fittings worn, and its furnishings shabby, but for two short weeks it was their refuge. Five months had passed since they had fled from Varishnya, where, lying in the forest, Missie had thought she was going to die. “I am only eighteen,” she had told herself then. “I’m too young to die.” Now she knew she wanted to live and she would begin her life right there, in New York.

Her long brown hair escaped from its black ribbon, blowing in the stiff breeze, as she leaned on the rail of the lower deck while the
Leonardo
steamed up the Hudson River, watching Manhattan’s skyline coming closer and closer, wondering what lay in store for them now.

Their papers were checked carefully at Immigration, but there were a lot of Americans returning from the troubles in Russia, and the inspector was sympathetic. He smiled at Azaylee and patted the dog, and Missie and Sofia stared as the stamp was finally placed on their documents.
They were really Americans now, and their new identity was official.

New York was big, sprawling upward and outward, noisy, dirty, intimidating, and bitterly cold. They found a small rooming house nearby that looked cleaner than the rest and counted their dollars and cents carefully while they searched for an apartment, but they soon found that an apartment was beyond their pocket: a couple of rooms maybe, and in the very cheapest area, the Lower East Side, where they could live unnoticed and unremarked on, just three more immigrants among thousands of others.

In the end, the only choice was between a dark room with a single window looking into an airshaft and a lighter, more expensive one with a window onto the street. Despite their poverty Sofia insisted they take the one with the window overlooking Rivington Street. It had a sink with a cold-water faucet in one corner and a shared toilet down the hall, and the furniture consisted of an ancient brass double bed, a small fold-up iron cot, a scarred unpolished wooden table, and four mismatched wooden chairs.

Missie could tell from Sofia’s face that she was thinking that this was the end of the line, they could sink no lower, and she was determinedly cheerful as she rushed them back down to Rivington Street, shopping among the pushcarts for the cheapest cotton sheets and blankets and the thinnest towels. She bought eggs and butter and bread for their supper and a few meat scraps mixed with rusk and a bone for the dog; she found a piece of flowered oilcloth to cover the stained wooden table and a bunch of shiny evergreen leaves to brighten up the place because it was March and there were no fresh flowers. And that night when they sat down to a simple feast of boiled eggs and crusty bread, with the dog gnawing contentedly on his bone beside them, they smiled at each other, thinking maybe their little room wasn’t so bad. And after all the
running and hiding and the fear, it seemed a haven of peace and security.

As she tucked Azaylee into the sagging brass bed later that night, Missie said confidently, “Don’t worry, Sofia, tomorrow I shall get a job and we shall soon have a proper apartment of our own.”

Maryland

Now, looking back on those years, Missie smiled as she thought of the optimism of youth, when a boiled egg and a slice of bread, a roof of sorts over one’s head, and a bunch of green leaves decorating the table was just a beginning. And tomorrow would surely bring success.

She unpinned her brooch and put it away in its little Cartier box, and took out the old photograph album. As she looked through it, she thought what a beautiful child Azaylee had been; so sweet, so quiet, so gentle. A dream child that any mother would adore. Poor Azaylee, poor little girl, orphaned so tragically, and so young. Who could blame her for what happened later? Certainly not she.

She shut the album with a sigh as Nurse Milgrim came in bearing a tray with her nighttime cup of tea and her sleeping pill.

Maybe tonight, she thought, just for once, she would not have the dream. But she knew she would.

New York

It was another breathless New York day. The sun beat down from a brassy yellow sky, filling the stifling little room with the stink of fish and rotting cabbage from the pushcarts below in Rivington Street. The constant noise—of iron-rimmed wheels on the cobblestones and harsh voices bargaining shrilly in Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, of children crying and drunks cursing as they staggered down the street on their way back from the saloon—the dirt and gray grinding poverty filled Missie with despair.

She wished she could close the window and shut it all out, but then they would surely suffocate as the temperature soared into the hundreds. The cramped tenement room that had seemed like a haven the night they found it seemed to have shrunk, trapping them in its four walls. Sofia lay in the sagging brass bed, looking pale and ill though she claimed she was only resting, and Azaylee was sitting on the rickety iron fire escape, her thin arms clasped round her knees, watching the endless activity in the street four storeys below. Viktor’s tongue lolled in the heat and Missie could see his ribs sticking out under their thin covering of fur and flesh. She knew that if she looked in a mirror she would see her own ribs sticking out just like Viktor’s, but it no longer upset her. The desperate hunger of youth clawed perpetually at her stomach; lying in bed at night with only a bowl of thin soup and a piece of stale black bread inside her, she thought she would go
crazy with her dreams of food: eggs, chicken, good bread, and sweet fresh butter. But she knew it was only because of Sofia’s resourcefulness that they managed to eat at all.

She asked herself time and time again how a woman like Sofia, who had never even thought about food except to instruct her chef what to serve for lunch or dinner, knew how to shop and bargain among Rivington Street’s pushcarts. But Sofia always came home in the late afternoon with a bag of vegetables bought for a few cents because they were bruised and shriveled, and by tomorrow would have gone bad. She would have a newspaper parcel with a bone “for the dog” on which the sympathetic butcher had left enough meat to flavor their meager soup, and occasionally she would buy cheap offal, liver, kidneys, even brains, to add to their diet. She had told Missie that she had often seen the villagers at Varishnya cooking such things, and now she learned how to make tasty meals from them herself. So with Sofia’s ingenuity they ate, and meanwhile Missie looked for a job.