Vango (40 page)

Moscow, a month later, December 1935

The little boy was rolling around in the snow. He looked about seven.

“Kostia! Kostia!”

The woman who had called out to him was sitting on a bench on the other side of the path. She had a girl on her lap who looked the elder of the two children.

“Do you think they’re going to come, Tioten’ka?”

“Don’t worry. They always come,” the woman replied.

She was such a gentle
tioten’ka
. The little girl was already very fond of the mysterious woman who had appeared in their apartment only five or six weeks ago.

Where had she come from? A man had brought her to them one October day. She had a funny accent when she spoke Russian. The girl’s parents had been told that she would live with them from now on and that they should call her Tioten’ka, which means little aunt, so as not to arouse any suspicion from the neighbors.

Her parents had offered her their double bed, but Tioten’ka had turned it down, making herself comfortable in a little storeroom off the entrance hall, where their big brother used to sleep when he was still with them.

The whole family had given up on treating her as a guest of honor. She insisted on undertaking more than her share of the household tasks. It was hard to stop her. As well as her tiny bedroom, Tioten’ka had inherited two winter coats from the big brother. It was emotional for the family to see them hanging from the hook on the back of the door, like in the old days.

Kostia headed back toward the bench, soaking wet.

“I’m cold,” he said.

“Me too,” piped up his sister, Zoya.

Their nurse opened her coat and tucked them both inside it.

“Will you bake us the white cake again this evening?” requested Kostia, already dreaming of a crystallized violet on top of the whipped cream.

Tioten’ka was such a magical cook, she was straight out of a fairy tale.

On her excursions to Sokolniki Park, twice a week, Mademoiselle wore both the coats, which were too big for her. Those layers of fur kept her warm in the freezing wind. One was turned inside out, with the furry side against her skin, while the one with the fur on the outside became white with frost. She would stroll around the park with Konstantin and Zoya.

Mademoiselle knew that every step she took outside was being watched. She always wondered which of the passersby were her shadows.

When they had abducted her from Salina, she had been worried they would send her to a gulag in the Arctic Circle, but instead she found herself in the heart of Moscow. She was in captivity in the middle of a family in a tiny apartment, between the coal bucket and the icons hanging on the walls.

“Here they are!” chirped Zoya, emerging from her furry nest.

She ran toward a little girl who had just let go of her nanny’s hand.

The children and the nannies kissed each other and huddled up on the bench.

This scene had been played out twice a week for the past month. It was a Wednesday and Sunday friendship between two little girls and two women, under the friendly gaze of Kostia.

The little girl was named Svetlana, but her nickname was Setanka.

Her nanny never mentioned Setanka’s family. She preferred to talk about times gone by, when she belonged to the great houses of Saint Petersburg, before the Revolution. She had served princesses and people in the theatrical world. Once, she had almost gone to Paris!

Mademoiselle barely said a word. She listened. Sometimes there were tears in her eyes. She enjoyed these stories from the past.

Zoya and Setanka, for their part, talked in hushed whispers. One spoke about her brother, who had gone away, and the other about a boy she called the Bird, someone she had never set eyes on.

“What are they telling each other, those two?” Setanka’s nanny would sometimes whisper with a sidelong glance.

But the girls didn’t hear. Each was listening fervently to the other’s tale. In the course of those Wednesdays and Sundays, almost without their noticing it, their secrets were changing hands. Setanka was falling a little bit in love with Zoya’s big brother, as was Zoya with Setanka’s Bird.

When it was turning dark, they went their separate ways at the park gates. There was always a black car waiting there for Setanka and her nanny. The others went down into the subway at Sokolniki Station. They loved the subway. The first line had opened the previous spring.

“Look at me, Tioten’ka. Look!”

Kostia was running through the station as if through a gray marble palace.

That evening, when they got back to their apartment, which smelled of melted candle wax and incense, the children’s mother seemed very emotional.

“There’s a letter from your brother,” she announced in a flat voice. “He sends you lots of love.”

“Can I read it?” asked Zoya.

“It’s supper time now!”

She wouldn’t let her children read it later on either.

This was the first letter. It had come via the neighbors so that the political police wouldn’t seize it. The family was under house arrest.

Oddly, the letter had a stamp from Great Britain.

In the middle of the night, when the father returned from his working day, Mademoiselle, who had already gone to bed in her little room, heard the mother rushing to the front door.

“There’s a letter from our son, my darling. A letter from Andrei.”

A silence followed, as if she was about to burst into tears.

“Our Andrei isn’t doing well. . . .”

Mademoiselle looked up at the three small violins hanging from the wall above her bed.

Paris, the same night

It happened in a café at the foot of Montmartre, a little before dawn. The customers had been drinking heavily. The Cat was the only person ordering a fruit cordial.

Next to her, Boris Petrovitch Antonov took off his wire glasses. He wiped his hand over his waxen face and rubbed his small yellow eyes. His other hand was placed affectionately on top of the Cat’s. He didn’t want to let go.

It had all started two hours earlier.

The Cat had been waiting in the gutter above the Russian cabaret on the Rue de Liège. The bright lights on the sign for
SHERAZADE
had just been switched off. It was four o’clock in the morning, but the man she was waiting for hadn’t come out yet.

The Cat was following Boris Petrovitch Antonov, in the hope that he would lead her to either Andrei or Vango.

Thanks to a surprise visit, she had lost all trace of Andrei for several weeks now. The Cat’s parents had dropped by to spend a few hours with her, and this had interfered with trailing Andrei.

The Cat had found her father a changed and anxious man. He had sat down in front of her. He had even taken off his coat and hat. He talked about selling his businesses and moving to America. He said he was just back from Frankfurt. His name had been removed from the brick walls of his factories and replaced by another name that chimed better with the times.

He had lost everything in Germany.

“You’ve still got France! And the factories in Belgium,” his wife called out from the bathroom.

He frowned. It wasn’t so easy in France now either.

And so, exceptionally, he had spent several minutes talking to his daughter. He was looking at her in astonishment, as if seeing her for the first time.

“And what about you, Emilie? Are you all right?”

The Cat didn’t utter a word. It would take more than calling her by her first name, winking at her three times, and asking her a couple of questions to win her back.

“If they strip me of everything,” her father was saying, “the three of us will set off together.”

His wife was laughing loudly in front of her mirror and calling him a scaredy-cat. She emerged smelling of rose and jasmine. She hadn’t even taken off her woolen hat and promptly reminded her husband that they were expected for dinner in town.

She ran her powdered glove over her daughter’s cheek.

“We’ll see you soon, my angel.”

An hour later, the Cat observed that Andrei hadn’t returned to his bedroom in the boardinghouse on the Rue du Val-de-Grâce.

Nobody else was coming out of Cabaret Sherazade, so where had that dreadful Boris Petrovitch Antonov gotten to? She’d certainly seen him go in there, just after midnight.

The Cat could remember a time when the word
loneliness
meant nothing to her. A time when she had lived suspended above the city and its people, when she hadn’t suffered in any way. That time was long since gone.

Now Vango had disappeared, Ethel had gone back to Scotland, and, particularly in Andrei’s absence, the Cat had become an expert in loneliness, a world champion. She felt as if a part of her was permanently missing.

But she picked herself up again. Bonds don’t break just because the people themselves have gone away. She still felt connected to the others, and it did her a world of good to feel these bonds. It was as if she was awake at last, after being asleep for the longest time.

She was very fond of Ethel, and Vango. And she cared deeply about Andrei, even if he didn’t know she existed.

The Cat slid down a zinc pipe: it was time to take a look, close-up.

The street was deserted. She reached the ground and took a few steps through the snow toward the cabaret. Just as she’d made it to the middle of the street, the door was flung open. Now they were face-to-face. And Boris Petrovitch Antonov was with another man. They stopped talking when they saw her.

The Cat was at precisely that age when half the men she met asked her, “Have you lost your parents, little girl?” and the other half asked, “Can I buy you a glass of something, you pretty young thing?” All she needed to do was change her posture or the smile on her lips ever so slightly.

With one hand on her hip, she made sure the two men belonged to the latter category.

Boris Petrovitch Antonov swayed as he watched the young girl.

The snow was pocked with black footprints.

Cold or fear? Boris couldn’t tell which was making his shoulders tremble. The man behind him had a loaded pistol in his pocket. He was called Vlad. Boris was fully aware that, when it came to human relationships, Vlad was about as refined as a vulture in mid carve-up.

Vlad was there to bump Boris off the job.

For months now, Boris Petrovitch Antonov had unearthed nothing in his search for Vango. He knew that, given half a chance, Vlad the Vulture would take him out in cold blood on some street corner to make this mission his own.

For two hours, in a corner of Cabaret Sherazade, Vlad had tried to piece together the file. He wanted access to all of Boris’s leads before disposing of him. But Boris wasn’t in a chatty mood. He knew what lay in store for him at the end of their conversation.

The cabaret lights had been switched off, and when the last of the dancers had put their coats on over their red boleros glinting with precious stones, the remaining customers were asked to leave.

Now all three of them were standing under the street lamp on the sidewalk. Who was this girl?

“Won’t you join us for one last drink, you pretty young thing?”

It was Boris’s only chance of survival. Vlad the Vulture wouldn’t kill him in front of a witness. He would almost certainly have been ordered to act with complete discretion. If the girl agreed, she’d become his accidental bodyguard until daybreak.

“Leave her alone,” said the Vulture.

He spoke only in Russian.

“We’re in Paris,” replied Boris. “We can’t leave a pretty young girl all by herself. . . .”

“Shut up. Tell her to be on her way!”

The girl looked starry-eyed.

“Just a glass, then. I’m tired, but I don’t like walking alone at night.”

Vlad didn’t have time to intervene. The Cat gave Boris her arm, which he clung to for dear life.

“You’re quite right,” he said. “These streets aren’t safe.”

They spent a long time looking for a bistro that was open at that hour. In the end, they found one on the slopes of the Sacré-Coeur.

As she sat down, the Cat felt dizzy. The room was small and smoky. The customers were talking loudly. She could feel her claustrophobia getting the better of her again.

“I’ve got to go outside,” she declared, standing up.

“What?”

She looked at the two men and, in that same glance, she saw Boris’s terror and Vlad’s satisfaction. Her eyes half closed, she breathed out slowly through her mouth.

“A double grenadine, please.”

Bravely, the Cat fell back into her seat.

Only the Vulture’s look of glee had made her change her mind.

An angry Vlad was trying to obtain the final missing pieces of information. Next, he had to locate Andrei. That boy was useless, but he knew too much.

Vlad had orders to eliminate both of them.

“What happened to that young boy you hired, the violinist? I’ll need to speak with him too.”

“Andrei?”

The two men were talking in Russian, but the Cat recognized Andrei’s name. She stopped drinking her grenadine. She had even forgotten her claustrophobia. Recalling Andrei’s gray eyes was enough to turn the roof above her to glass.

Boris responded with a few words, including one that the Cat could pick out:
meeting.

He must just have told the Vulture where and when he would be able to meet up with the boy with the violin. This was why she had followed Boris in the first place. The Cat could sense how much danger Andrei was now in.

The Vulture had understood that he wouldn’t get anything more out of Boris. He stood up and used a sign language of sorts to ask where the phone was. A small staircase leading to the basement was pointed out to him.

A moment later, the Cat noticed that Boris Petrovitch’s waxen face had broken out into beads of sweat.

“I’ll be back.”

She saw him heading off in turn. He went down the spiral staircase, grabbing a butcher’s knife on his way past the kitchen.

The Cat held her breath.

People at the bar were laughing. They were coming in from the local nightspots in Pigalle. From the Boule Noire and the accordion dance hall, L’Ange Rouge, which had just opened on Rue Fontaine. The Cat knew these places only by their rooftops, from where she watched the fights between warring gangs in the surrounding streets. Two years earlier, she had witnessed the battle of the Corsicans against the Parisians.