The Property of a Lady (27 page)

Moscow

Major-General Boris Solovsky stared at the copy of the decoded message lying on his desk. It was from Valentin addressed to Sergei, and the message was brief. Valentin had found no positive evidence yet as to who had bought the emerald, but it was definitely not the Americans. He was following up several other leads. Meanwhile would Boris please call off his heavies because as a senior diplomat he was not used to such harassment. And besides, they were so clumsy and obvious, they stuck out like a sore thumb. He would report back in a few days.

Boris banged his fist angrily on his desk. Valentin was just like his father: arrogant, clever, and too good-looking.

He sat back in his chair, his shaved head gleaming under the lamp and his fleshy, brooding face set in a venomous mask. His jaw was tense with anger, deepening the lines from nose to mouth, and his jutting forehead seemed to lower itself over his small, sharp eyes.

He had always hated his foster brother. Right from the beginning, he had known Sergei was different: He had looked different, he had acted different, he had talked different—when he spoke at all, that is. That bastard Sergei had even
smelled
different.

When his father had first brought the boy home, he had told them that he was an orphan of the revolution, that his name was Sergei, and that he would now be their son.
He remembered how his mother’s pale-blue eyes had widened in sympathy as she had stared at the dirty, exhausted little boy. She had flung her arms impetuously around him, hugging him to her ample bosom, murmuring soft words of comfort. The first spark of bitter jealousy had flared in Boris’s heart that day, and in the following years it had grown into a bonfire of hate, stoked by his father’s strange pride in Sergei’s every winning action.

When Boris was eleven years old and Sergei only seven, the younger boy could beat him at almost anything, and there was no doubt that his father was well aware of it. Grigori made no secret of the fact that he was proud of Sergei’s progress at school. He had already skipped a couple of grades and was only a year behind Boris. It wasn’t that his father ignored Boris. He went out of his way to praise his industry and efforts, but Boris had to work three times as hard to achieve reasonable marks. Somehow Sergei had made everything he did, from riding a horse to book learning, seem easy.

But there had been things about his new brother that his father did not know. Secret things that Boris knew because he slept in the same room with him, and sometimes Sergei talked in his sleep. And the strangest thing of all was that Sergei talked in a foreign language. Boris had not understood what language it was because he had never heard anyone speak anything but his own Russian dialect. He also knew that in the old days, unlike the peasants and the working classes, all good Russian households spoke French or English as their first language, and he suspected that Sergei was not what he was pretending to be. He had been determined to find out what he was saying but had only been able to make out a few names: “Papa” and “Maman,” “Missie” …

He had forced himself to stay awake at night, straining his ears into the silence, waiting for Sergei to speak, until his mother grew worried at his shadowed eyes and white
face and dosed him with an evil-tasting tonic she brewed from the bitter leaves of plants, just the way her grandmother had done when she herself was small.

One day they had been out riding, Boris, his father, and Sergei. There was a certain high wooden fence over which he had been practicing jumps for weeks, screwing up his courage every time he set his horse at it. Finally he had mastered it. Aware of his father riding behind him, he had kicked his horse into a gallop, hurdling the fence clumsily, managing to stay in the saddle only by clinging to the horse’s mane. Behind him he had heard the thunder of hooves and his father’s admiring cry as Sergei took his horse over the same fence as gracefully as if it had wings.

There had been no doubt that his new brother had been devoted to his father. He followed him around whenever he was home until, laughing kindly, Grigori would tell him to be off about his own business. Nevertheless, Sergei’s gray eyes would be fixed unwaveringly on him like an eager pup awaiting his master’s signal of a walk.

Boris had decided there and then that one day he would find out Sergei’s secret, and then he would expose him to his father as a fraud and a liar. He vowed he would find out, even if it killed him.
Or killed Sergei
.

His hands clenched into two tight fists as he remembered that vow. If he had been cleverer, he would have killed Sergei years ago and been done with it. Now he would have to deal with both him and his son. Grabbing the message, he stalked across the red carpet to the heavy double doors. The two armed soldiers outside snapped smartly to a salute and he raised his hand in a perfunctory response, marching through the lofty halls, down the marble stairs, across the courtyard to his brother’s office.

Sergei saw him coming from the window; Boris was nothing if not predictable. He was wearing the uniform he had devised for himself and which, like that of the old German SS, was designed to intimidate—military jacket
glittering with gold epaulettes and a chestful of ribbons, cavalry jodhpurs though he had never been near a military horse, and tall shiny boots with built-up heels to boost his dwarfish height. His peaked cap, glinting with gold and flashing with red insignia, sat squarely on his bald bullet head.

Sergei thought of Grigori, wondering how such a fine man could have fathered such a psychopath. He remembered when Grigori had first taken him home and introduced him proudly as his new son. He had been too shocked to notice much at first, but he had liked his new mother immediately: She was warm and bustling and sang snatches of happy little songs when she was working about the house. But he thought sadly that she wasn’t in the least bit like his beautiful, elegant Princess Maman. He had still hoped that his real father was alive and that one day he would meet him again. Maybe tomorrow, he’d thought in the beginning, then maybe next week, maybe next month … but as the months slid into a year, that dream had faded.

His new brother, Boris, was short and stocky with the lank black hair and sharp dark eyes of his peasant forebears. Sergei knew that the other dead sons had all been blond like their mother, and he wondered if Grigori had saved him because he looked like them. But right from the beginning he had understood that Boris hated him. He would feel his hawkish dark eyes boring into him as he sat quietly at the scrubbed wooden table in the simple three-room cottage that was considered luxurious by local standards, but which to him seemed poor and spartan. Even in the darkness of the room they shared at night he could feel Boris’s inimical stare. Sometimes he thought he must be dreaming, but then he would catch the glitter of Boris’s eyes in a shaft of moonlight and know it wasn’t a dream. Besides, the only dream he ever dreamed was the one about his mother.

It was always the same. She lay on the snow in front of
her captors, her long pale hair tumbled about her. Her pleading golden-velvet eyes met his for a fleeting second—and then her face exploded into a bloody redness, so glaring it burned his eyes. Screaming, he would fall to his knees, covering her tenderly with her fine dark sables, and then he would lie down beside her and bury his face in the softness of the fur, breathing the scent of the violets she always wore pinned at her shoulder until he was drowning in their scent. He would jolt awake, gasping for breath, the powerful scent of the violets still in his nostrils so strongly that he believed he was home again and she had come to kiss him good night.

He had trained himself not to cry out in case he woke Boris. He would lie quietly, bathed in the sweat of remembered horror, until the shaking had stopped, and then he would slide his hand cautiously into the straw filling of his pallet. His fingers would close around the smooth cabochon stone and he would sigh with relief that it was still there. There had been so much dark-red blood spilled on the snow that no one had noticed the ruby ring lying beside Princess Anouska. Now it was all he had left of the past, and in his heart he knew he would never have more.

Natalya and Grigori knew nothing of these dreams and the ring. They were his secret, as were his memories. In his waking moments he never allowed himself to think of the past, yet even though he had seen the orange glow in the sky that meant Varishnya was burning, there was always a tiny hope left that Papa was safe.

Grigori was his hero. He had plucked him from the jaws of death and had avenged the murder of his mother. He owed him his life and he determined that from then on everything he did would be to please his new papa. He would no longer be Alexei Ivanoff, a prince of all the Russias, but Sergei Grigorevich Solovsky, and he would make his new father as proud of him as he was of his own son. He wanted with all his heart to become the man Grigori
wanted him to be. Yet somehow, try as he might, he was never able to forget who he really was and truly become that other person.

A few weeks after the incident at the fence he was riding back from the grandfather’s house where he had been sent to help with the cows. There was a path running alongside the stream that he liked to take at a gallop. Here and there the trees crowded closer together, stretching their low branches across the path, and it had become a game with him to gallop as quickly as he could, ducking instinctively to avoid the overhanging branches. He smiled as he set his horse on the track, spurring him on to greater speed, and the animal snorted with delight, enjoying the game. He was aware of sunlight reflecting off the fast-flowing stream far below and of the breeze stirring the silvery leaves of the birch trees.

He could never be sure whether he actually saw the thin cord stretched between the trees in front of him, or whether, with his new awareness, he just suddenly sensed danger. He heard the horse’s terrified whinny as he pulled its head sharply to the side and then they plunged together down the rocky bank into the deep-flowing stream. The horse rolled frantically in the water, struggling to its feet and shaking itself. Gripping a slippery boulder with one hand, Sergei managed somehow to hang on to the reins. The water was turbulent and icy, and a few yards downstream he could hear the roar as it tumbled and gushed into a gorge a hundred feet below.

Shivering with fear and cold, he climbed back on the horse and guided it through the mossy rocks to the safety of the bank.

He lay for a while across the horse’s neck, waiting for the fear to subside. Then he dismounted and walked back along the track to where he had seen the cord. It had disappeared. He examined the branches, noting the broken twigs; then he stared around him, his spine prickling,
sensing that he was being watched. But there was no sound, only the noise of the water rushing over the gorge.

Sergei walked back thoughtfully to his horse. He had been brought up alongside the peasants at Varishnya; his father had treated them as family, he had looked after them well, and in return they had taken young Prince Alexei out hunting with them and let him help around the stables where they had taught him their peasant tricks. One was how to garrote a speeding horseman by the simple method of stretching a thin taut cord across his path, just at the height of his throat. It never failed, they had said, grinning at his awed young face.

He rode slowly back to the cottage. He knew there was only one person who might want to kill him.

Boris avoided his eyes at the supper table that night, but Sergei said nothing. The pattern of their relationship was set. Through the years, from school to university, his own rise through politics and Boris’s through the army, the rivalry had deepened. And there had been nothing Grigori Solovsky could do about it. Sergei knew Boris had wanted to murder him all those years ago, and he was still trying now. Every way he could.

There was no preliminary knock on the door. The head of the KGB simply strode in.

“Well, Boris,” Sergei said quietly, “our mother taught us better manners than that. I might have been in a meeting.”

“You weren’t,” he said, flinging the paper with the message onto his desk. “I’ve come to ask you if you know what this means. Or are you as much in the dark as the rest of us about Valentin’s actions?”

“You? In the dark?” Sergei laughed. “What an admission for the head of the KGB. I thought you were supposed to know everything.”

After placing his hands flat on the desk, Boris leaned across it, thrusting his face close to Sergei’s. “Don’t get
smart with me, comrade,” he whispered. “I know everything about you and your son.”

Sergei looked him coolly in the eye. “Perhaps you are forgetting that the Party is meant to be the arbiter of the
people’s
aspirations? Is this business in the interests of our country, Boris, or is it a
personal
vendetta you are pursuing? I thought your job was to use your men to find the ‘Lady.’ And Valentin’s was to use
his brains.”

Boris snatched up the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it at the wastebasket. It missed and his face purpled with rage.

Sergei said mildly, “You never were any good at ball games.”

“Why did your son not secure the emerald?” Boris asked tightly. “Who the hell did he let beat him to it? And why?”

Sergei shrugged. “You know the game, and the players. Why not take a guess?”

“Valentin was not sent to
guess
. He was expected to carry out his task efficiently. Now we don’t even know where he is.”

Despite himself, Sergei laughed. “It’s a good thing the CIA can’t hear us now, Boris,” he said. “You must have had a dozen KGB men in Geneva, and yet you say none of them knows where Valentin is. That’s ridiculous.”

Boris thumped on the table angrily with his fists. “Well then, where the hell is he? He must have contacted you.”

Sergei shook his head slowly. “I have no idea where Valentin is. Had he telephoned me, you would have known about it.” He looked coldly at Boris: They both knew he tapped Sergei’s phones. “I think we must just trust that he is getting on with the job, just as he said in his message, brother.”