The feathers kept getting in Plevitskaya’s eyes as she walked. In spite of the havoc being wrought on her feet by these excruciating New York high heels, she’d chosen to walk all the way to the 17th arrondissement, rather than hail a cab, because she could tell she’d somehow got a bit tiddly at the wake and wanted to sober up before she met her husband and the others for the early dinner they’d planned. This meeting might change both their lives. She couldn’t let him down.
Irritably, she brushed the tickly black fringe out of her face. If only the sun weren’t so hot, and her dress so tight. She wasn’t the type to drink, she told herself; it was just the once, because she was sad, and that was understandable enough …
As soon as she’d peeped round the door of Constance’s office, at the start of the wake, she’d seen that the equipment for her voice recording, which had been lying everywhere just the other day, beeping and gleaming, had all gone. Vanished. She’d meant to ask the girl what had happened to it, but sadness had overwhelmed her, and the girl had been too busy to concentrate. It was clear that the recording would never be made now. She’d pinned so much faith on it. She’d so hoped that being on phonograph, especially this superior type, which would show her at her best advantage, was going to revive her career. She’d been dreaming about it non-stop ever since her husband had come home, looking pleased, and said he’d put the question of paying for it to Constance so subtly that she’d almost ended up thinking it was all her own idea. Her husband, despite his pursed lips and moodiness, did, often, still think of wonderful ways of pleasing her. It wasn’t his fault this one hadn’t worked. But it was a reverse, a considerable reverse. No wonder she’d poured out the cognac with a more generous hand than usual today. The frustration was enough to make a saint weep.
Pausing at the bottom of the rue Daru, clutching at a lamp-post and shifting around for a minute to ease the pain in her feet, she looked around in distaste at all the tatty Russian restaurants running up one side of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, the heart of Little Russia. The waiters and waitresses moved from one restaurant to another, here or elsewhere in their adopted city. Sometimes they became proprietors themselves, drinking champagne on the opening night and putting out announcements in the Russian papers:
Pyotr Vasilyevich Sidorov has the honour of informing his dear friends and clientele that he has opened his own restaurant, Tsarskaya Okhota, in such-and-such a street. Head chef: Valery Ivanovich Karpov. Large selection of hors d’oeuvres. Plat du jour – today rasstegai; tomorrow, suckling pig in sour cream.
Substantial artistic programme. Daily performances by the public’s darling, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, the Tsar’s Nightingale.
She could hardly bear to call to mind the magnificent chandeliered halls in which she’d once sung, back home, so unlike these nasty little dumps. She didn’t have to look, or go in, to know the meagre size of the restaurant interiors, the steel-and-glass flowers on the table, the little lamps with shades, and the squashed space they offered at the back for a single singer to cram herself onstage and do her best to entertain their drunken, unappreciative, cheapskate audiences. As for the fees – she grimaced. The only dates in her diary, these days, were in these unworthy venues. Without that recording, which might have done so much for her, it really was possible that she was all washed up.
Shaking her head, as if to get rid of the bad thoughts, Plevitskaya straightened up, thrust her feet back into the agonizing shoes, and walked on.
Of course, today, they weren’t going to meet their secret guests in this central zone of gossipy Little Russia where everyone knew everyone. No, her husband had chosen a more private meeting place on the other side of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in one of the cafés behind the art deco concert hall. It was only five minutes’ walk away, but it might as well have been a different country, for those cafés were inhabited by an entirely different tribe: impecunious music lovers, skinny young things spinning out single glasses of wine for hours with their noses stuck into scores and librettos. None of them would notice a few stray Russians sitting in a corner. No one would understand a word they said.
So Plevitskaya walked away from the rue Daru, and the cathedral, and the rue de la Néva and the rue Pierre-le-Grand, turning her broad back decisively on the triangle of streets that constituted Russia abroad and on her career worries. Now wasn’t the moment to think about that, she admonished herself, feeling quite sober by now. She had to concentrate on the important business meeting with the crab salesman, and the benefits it might bring to her husband.
Her husband needed a boost in life, she reflected. He’d lived with disappointment for so long. Before Kutyopov had been kidnapped, her husband had thought he’d be named the next head of ROVS. It was the job he’d always wanted. But then, as the result of the unhelpful rumour that had got about that he’d had a hand in the kidnapping himself, he’d been passed over, and General Miller appointed instead. She had to imagine how disappointed he must have been – perhaps almost as intensely disappointed as she now felt at the disappearance of her recording – because he’d never complained. He’d taken the number-two job instead, without a murmur. He’d never said a bad word against that fat old fool Miller, in all these seven years, even if he’d got more grumpy and disagreeable at home. It was time he got his chance to shine now. A bit of real success might make him less irritable, and less penny-pinching, too. It might turn him back into the pleasant consort he’d once been.
Her husband and the two guests – one in a cheap Moscow suit and the other in a market-trader’s apron smelling of crab – were already at a table on the terrasse by the time she found the back-street café. Her husband was looking irritably at his watch. That made her nervous. And feeling nervous made her act flamboyant. Breaking into their quiet conversation about cargo – she heard a few words about when the freight carrier Maria Ulyanova should stop at Le Havre to pick the cargo up for dispatch to Leningrad – she kissed, and exclaimed, and smiled, all the while trying not to stare too openly at the crab salesman, who she knew was the boss, despite his workman’s clothes.
She could feel her husband’s disapproving eyes on her. ‘We’ve ordered,’ he said. ‘You were late.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve ordered water for you. The wine’s for the men. You just need food.’
She subsided into a seat, still flashing smiles around the table and wishing she could have a glass of wine to calm her nerves. Not looking at her husband, she told the hovering waiter she wanted the lobster. Well, she knew this was a meal that would go on somebody’s expenses, probably Moscow’s, and if everything went according to plan their money worries would soon be a thing of the past, anyway. She could afford to treat herself.
If there’d been just the two of them there, she thought, her small extravagance would definitely have made her husband furious. But the crab salesman just nodded expressionlessly, and the waiter went away.
The crab salesman, Plevitskaya thought, sneaking a proper look at him as she reached for the bread basket, must be in his late thirties. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. Under his beret was dirty-blond hair and a flat, wide face, the ordinary Russian kind with a short nose and wide mouth. His hands were big and calloused. It was only his stillness, and those ice-blue eyes, that made him a little frightening.
Suddenly he smiled directly at her. ‘A magnificent choice,’ he said in a nasal Moscow voice. The smile made him look quite handsome. But Plevitskaya started feeling clammy, all the same. (Perhaps it was the brandy.) ‘And a magnificent woman is just what we are going to need.’ Plevitskaya nodded, quiet as an obedient child.
‘Your job, on the day,’ he went on, ‘will be to provide Skoblin here with an alibi.’ He turned and smiled at Plevitskaya’s husband, who, like Plevitskaya, remained silent and round-eyed. ‘It will be a simple task for a magnificent woman like you. We’re going to send you out shopping at Monsieur Epstein’s boutique.’
Monsieur Epstein’s boutique! Feeling suddenly happier, Plevitskaya sucked in her tummy, sat up straighter, and carried on nodding as she listened to the rest of the plan.
It was only when the crab salesman had finished speaking, and everyone started saying how clever and foolproof the plan was, that Plevitskaya felt her husband stir. She glanced at him. She could see from the eager way he was smiling that, although he was scared of saying the wrong thing, he was also desperate enough to impress the Muscovites – especially the crab salesman – to venture a remark of his own.
‘The old man doesn’t suspect a thing, you know,’ her husband said. ‘He read the letter twenty times in front of me. He was practically jumping for joy. And he’s been shut up alone in his office with it ever since, thinking out his strategy for his secret meeting.’ Leaning forward, he put a tentative, tender hand on the crab salesman’s arm. ‘So your German must be up to snuff!’ he finished, then exploded into what Plevitskaya thought was probably unintentionally loud laughter.
The crab salesman didn’t even crack a smile in return. Plevitskaya felt almost sorry for her husband as he put a napkin to his red face, turned his laugh into a cough, and, still gasping for breath, spluttered, ‘Crumb in my throat … sorry,’ into the silence.
‘Have some water,’ the crab salesman said. Quietly, she passed him her glass.