The Property of a Lady (5 page)

One winter morning Grigori walked the twenty kilometers into the ramshackle town and presented himself at the door of the little wooden schoolhouse. The
klassnaya dama
stared at him in astonishment. He was small for his age with a peasant’s stocky body and strong legs, and he was bundled up in layers of rough homespun garments, the traditional high-necked shirt and baggy pants topped with a makeshift cloak. He wore rough
velenki
, felt winter boots bound to his legs with birch bark, and his bushy black eyebrows sparkled with a coating of early-morning frost. But there was no mistaking the intensity of his purpose as he stared at her with deep dark eyes and told her he wanted “to learn.”

“But what do you want to learn, little son?” she had asked, smiling as the warmth of the old tiled stove defrosted his eyebrows, sending a shower of droplets down his face.

Grigori didn’t even notice. “Everything,” he had answered simply.

The teacher had sighed with satisfaction. A year of tutoring a reluctant brood of young students who would far rather be out sledging and throwing snowballs at each other in winter, or dipping themselves in the river in the softer days of summer, had left her frustrated in her chosen
career. At last she had someone who wanted only “to learn.”

Arrangements were made for Grigori to lodge in the teacher’s tiny house, where he slept on a narrow wooden shelf over the tiled stove that warmed the house in winter and on the tiny porch in summer. The
klassnaya dama
taught him to read and write, and when he had mastered that, she opened up the entire world to him through geography and history, sharpening his mind even further on mathematics and scientific matters. In return he brought her water and wood, ignoring the scorn of the other children because he was doing “girls’ work.” And every now and then his father left precious little parcels of fresh eggs and butter on her doorstep.

When Grigori was almost thirteen she knew she had taught him all she could, but he was ready for more. A scholarship was applied for and won to a school in Moscow, and the
klassnaya dama
herself accompanied her prize pupil to the city. But first she took him to the local tailor, an enterprising Jewish man who, with Novosibirsk’s tenuous new prosperity, had set himself up in business there. The man made Grigori his first proper pair of trousers and a coat, for which the teacher paid. Blushing with pride, Grigori vowed that somehow, some day he would repay her.

Feeling strange in his new city clothes, Grigori had finally ridden the train that had bypassed his life for so many years. The teacher deposited him at the school, and under the curious gaze of its middle-class pupils, she kissed him good-bye affectionately before leaving to visit her family in St. Petersburg. Grigori was alone and terrified of his new environment.

His new clothes were exchanged for a blue-gray military-style uniform and his terror was hidden under a mask of aggressiveness. But it still didn’t stop him from blushing angrily when he heard the girls, demure in
brown dresses and black aprons, giggling behind their hands about the new “wild boy from the sticks.”

A month later his beloved
klassnaya dama
was killed in a train accident near Moscow, on her way back to Siberia, and for a while Grigori wanted to die too. She was his only link between his past and his new life, and alone, he didn’t know how to cope with either. It was his steely core of ambition that came to his rescue. That and the magic of his classes.

He survived the school by keeping to himself, ignoring the baiting of the smart city children until eventually they left him alone. At the age of eighteen, and still a loner, he entered the St. Petersburg Politeknik College on another scholarship. The students were mostly the sons of nobility or the military and professional classes, with very few from the working class and even fewer from the peasantry. Grigori had no affinity with any of them, but he acquired a bitter grudging envy for the noble sons who treated their studies with such carefree contempt and who spent more money every night on drink and gypsy girls than Grigori had ever conceived of having in his pocket. One part of him longed to be like them and the other part hated them, because he knew it was impossible. It was then that he realized that he, and others like him—for by now they were growing in numbers—formed a new class, and he knew that one day it would be a force to be reckoned with.

Young Grigori was a willing victim of the new ideology. He absorbed the teachings of Marx and Engels, Trotsky and Lenin, eagerly, because they struck a chord in his heart.
He
was the man they were talking to, the peasant who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps through hard work and education.
His
were the brains and skills the new Socialist Democratic Labor Party would need when the time of revolution came, as it surely would. Grigori joined the Party and the secret meetings were the highlights of his week. He was soon given minor administrative
jobs to do, and by his diligence and dedication earned the respect of the area leaders.

When he graduated from the Politeknik with a degree in engineering, he got a job with the railway company in Moscow. At last he knew how to build the bridges he had dreamed about as a boy. But that dream was already fading into one of the new Russia owned by the people, for the people, a utopia where ultimately all social categories would be eliminated. Grigori truly believed in his heart that with this accomplished, all men would be equal and would share in their country’s prosperity.

He became more and more active in the Party, touring the regions, recruiting members, and encouraging the local workers’ committees, or “Soviets,” to strike for their rights. The Bolshevist leader, Lenin, the man glimpsed on the bleak station platform in Siberia twenty years before, remained his idol.

It was on one of these trips that he met Natalya. She was sixteen years old, the age his own mother had been when she married his father, and she had the cool white skin, rosy cheeks, and bright blond hair typical of the region of Byelorussia. Natalya became his only other obsession. It didn’t matter that she was uneducated. The stocky dark peasant was sensually in love with her plump milky fairness. It was enough just to touch her smooth, flawless skin, to kiss her cherry-red lips that were as innocent as his own and run his hands through her coarse yellow hair. Her family knew he was a catch for Natalya, and the couple were married within a month.

Grigori took his new bride back to the dismal room that was his “home” in Moscow, and the country girl struggled her best to cope with life in the big city. She kept the old-fashioned samovar bubbling so that she could serve tea to his “friends” when they came for meetings and was secretly shocked when all they drank was vodka. But she had no idea of what their talk of “anarchy” meant, and Grigori traveled so much she was often alone.

He knew she was unhappy, and after a few months, when she was pregnant with their first child, he took her back to her family in Byelorussia, visiting her as often as he could. Four sons were born in quick succession. He was happy and over the years his prestige with the Party increased. And then tragedy struck with the typhus epidemic that wiped out many thousands of people, including three of his boys. Only Boris, the youngest, was spared.

In 1914 Russia went to war against the Germans and Grigori was inducted into the army. Because of his degree and his riding skills, he was made a noncommissioned officer in a cavalry unit of the tsar’s army, but the war quickly took its toll with great losses for Russia, and suddenly he found himself promoted to full captain. He was sickened with the futile waste of life he saw every day at the front. Passage over Russia’s narrow muddy roads was slowed to a crawl by supply wagons that never got through, and his men were being mown down by an inexorable enemy. The frozen, hungry soldiers were being slaughtered or were dying of dysentery, and he was helpless to do anything about it.

The revolution he had worked toward for so long began with riots in St. Petersburg in February 1917 over shortages of bread and coal. After returning from the front, Grigori helped to form the new militant Soviet of Works. Soon Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate. But as the months passed it became obvious that the new government was incapable of dealing with the food shortages. Lenin arrived back in Russia and under his leadership the October Revolution began.

Grigori’s finest hour had been when he was presented to his hero. Lenin had looked just as he remembered him, pale-faced, bearded, and frail, with an intense gaze that seemed to see into Grigori’s soul. He had known then that he would give his life for this man if necessary, because
he was convinced that only Lenin could save Russia. He had never wavered from that decision.

He glanced at the boy, huddled beneath his greatcoat. Now he was going to prove to himself that he could make a revolutionary from the class they were overthrowing.

The town of Dvorsk was a mere cluster of dark wooden houses spread in a straggling line alongside the railway. Grigori was billeted above the bakery, and even though the baker had only a meager supply of flour to make his bread, at least the place was warm and there was always a bowl of steaming hot potato soup and a crust of bitter dark rye bread to eat and a glass or two of home-brewed vodka to wash it down. His men would sleep on the floor of the bakery. After telling them to get warm and to eat, Grigori rode on to the station. The train to St. Petersburg had been due at seven that evening, but the hour had come and gone and there was still no sign of it. The stationmaster had had no communication, and no one knew when it might be expected—it could be hours, days, weeks even….

After telling the Stationmaster to inform him immediately when he had news, Grigori rode back to the bakery and carried Alexei upstairs to his room, where he put him on the small iron cot that served as his own bed. The boy’s face was chalk-white and his hands icy, but his eyes were wide open, and still transfixed with the memory of horror.

Grigori sat beside him on the bed, talking to him quietly in English, the first language of all good Russian families and one he had acquired at the Politeknik. “So, young man,” he began, “for after tonight you can no longer be considered a mere boy; we must look to your future now and not the past.” He spoke sharply. “I want you to put what you saw from your mind. Your father and mother are dead. You are no longer the son of Misha Ivanoff.
Now you are my son and your name is Sergei … Sergei Solovsky. Do you understand?”

Alexei nodded, staring at Grigori with wide, fathomless gray eyes. His father’s eyes.

In fact, Alexei looked so like Prince Misha Ivanoff, whom Solovsky had seen many times at the meetings of the
Duma
, the Parliament, that he was afraid he might be recognized. He wondered again if he had done the right thing, but with a shrug he told himself it was too late now to turn back; he would just have to keep the boy out of sight for a while. Besides, his experiment excited him. He was going to reverse the natural order of things. He was a common man who because of his education had become part of the new elite. Now he would turn this elite young princeling into a common man—and then he would see what he could make of him.

After telling the boy to go to sleep, Grigori blew out the candle. He wrapped himself in his coat, stretched out on the floor beside him, and was asleep in minutes.

Geneva

Cal Warrender stared into his champagne glass thinking that it had seemed like a good idea at the time. The bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage was softly lighted and luxurious, but outside the windows flurries of snow swirled in the wind before settling in soft white drifts. The sudden storm had closed Geneva airport, and he faced a lonely dinner and the worrying knowledge that he had failed to secure the Ivanoff emerald. He had been beaten to it by a smarter adversary.

Valentin Solovsky was sitting at the bar silently drinking vodka with two other Russians. They looked as glum as Cal felt, and he wondered if that meant that Valentin too had failed to buy the emerald and, like him, was no farther along the trail that led to the “Lady.” Yet if it wasn’t the Russians, then
who
had bought the Ivanoff jewel?

He knew Valentin was there for the same reason he was: He had been delegated to find the “Lady.” And both he and Valentin knew it wasn’t just for the money, it was for the mines.

When Prince Ivanoff had met the maharaja all those years ago, they had traded their gifts in celebration of the prince’s purchase of certain lands in the state of Rajasthan. The prince had discovered that the lands contained valuable deposits of tungsten, an element used to harden steel, and had realized their value to a newly mechanized
world. But after the revolution the Russians had claimed ownership of the mines, saying they had the legal documents signed by Prince Misha Ivanoff making them over to the new Soviet Republic. They stated that in any case, as all property was now owned by the state, the mines rightfully belonged to Russia. The authenticity of the documents was questioned at the time, but as no member of the Ivanoff family had ever come forward to dispute their claim, nothing had ever been done about it. Though the mines were valuable, they had never seemed of great importance to the rest of the world. However, they had recently been found to contain vast quantities of certain strategic elements essential to modern industry—especially defense.
Or war
. And now the entire world was prepared to dispute Russia’s ownership.