Troy was getting ready to leave for the evening. Jack had gone twenty minutes ago—relieved Onions had not called upon him to speak, boasting of the “totty” he had lined up for the evening—and the temptation to ignore the telephone’s ringing wrestled with Troy’s curiosity. It might be Stan, wanting to bury their confrontation in some Soho pub, anonymity coming more naturally to him than it did to Troy. Troy wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t Stan. It was Churchill.
“Find a blank evening in your diary, Freddie. I think I might have got to the bottom of the mystery of the Fabergé gun, and I have a tale to tell you.”
“Now is as good a time as any.”
“Shall we say half an hour?”
Troy rooted around in the bottom drawer of his desk. He kept the odd bottle hidden from Jack for occasions like this. If Churchill had a tale to tell, he could hardly turn up empty-handed. He found a bottle of claret, a Duhart-Milon-Rothschild ’34. He had the vaguest memory of his father saying 1934 had been a very good year, and God knows the old man had bought enough of the stuff.
Churchill answered the door in person, no Chewter, no jacket, red braces holding up the capacious pants, shirtsleeves. About as clear a statement that they were after hours and off duty as a man could make. If it were Rod he’d have kicked off his shoes and be padding around in odd socks.
“I like August evenings,” said Churchill. “June and July can be too hot for me. I like August; you can feel the city begin to cool off a bit.”
He rambled as they squeezed into the lift up to his office and workshop—that was fine with Troy.
“Y’know the French almost evacuate Paris in August. I wonder London doesn’t do the same in June.”
“Protestant work ethic,” Troy replied. “And where would they all go? There are only so many boarding houses in Torquay, Ilfracombe, Bognor . . .”
“Okay, Freddie, I get the point. You can stop the list of undesirable British seaside resorts before we get to Skegness.”
“Which can be so bracing.”
“Nothing on the North Sea is bracing. The word is cold.”
Seated at his desk, reading glasses on, Churchill handed Troy the corkscrew, listened to the pleasing glug of a decent claret hitting the glass, and placed the gun on another clean sheet of paper. It almost shone. He had removed every scrap of paint. The tracery of Fabergés loops and swirls stood out with a detail and a delicacy the paint had masked and rendered crude. Only the gems were missing.
“Did your parents ever mention to you the name of Astrov? Prince Yevgeni Astrov and his wife Natalia Astrova?”
“No. But there were so many tales of the old country . . .”
“And this will be another. Astrov was a favourite of the Tsarina Alexandra in the nineties and the noughts. She adopted oddities as we know—Rasputin is the best known of her odd choices. Astrov was a much more conventional courtier. A nobleman, after all. But . . . he was a pig of a man. A brute who beat his wife, consorted with whores, and squandered her fortune. It was said that he even brought whores back to the family home in full view of his wife and the servants. Princess Astrova tired of this. In 1903, she took a lover, Count Ostrog—a perfectly decent man who would have married her if she could ever have been free of Astrov. After about six months, Astrov found out about the affair, challenged Ostrog to a duel, and shot him dead.
“It was at this point that I think the princess approached a Moscow gunsmith named Verdiakoff. She commissioned from him two pistols, the guideline being that they should be as small as her own hand. Verdiakoff sent to Switzerland for the mechanism. The Altmanns were experimenting with small guns and had already produced 22s and 17s, but nothing as small as this and, as I suggested to you when you brought me this, they had to make the ammunition, too. Eventually, Verdiakoff delivered two plain, identical .15 automatic pistols to the Princess Astrova—quite possibly the only .15 guns in the world—and she took them to the court goldsmith, Peter Fabergé, who engraved the gunmetal and added the jewels. I can think of two reasons for this—it enabled her to pass them off as art, perhaps toys might be a better word, something designed to be decorative, never to be used, like the canteen of cutlery every pair of newlyweds gets, that spends the rest of its life set aside for ‘best,’ but ‘best’ never arrives. I think the touch of genius here was in having the bullets made of silver. If Astrov had ever found the guns, it would have reinforced the idea that it was simply a way to spend money. One can almost hear her saying they were for shooting vampires or some such beast. The second was that it made some of her personal fortune very portable. I’ve no idea who painted the gun black, but there was no paint in the gem settings, and I’d be prepared to bet the one stone you found was black when you found it.”
Troy just nodded. This was not a time to interrupt.
“But of course, she did mean to use them. And the moment arrived at Christmas 1904. Astrov came home drunk, decided she needed a beating. The gun was up the sleeve of her dress, light enough to be held there by elastic. When Astrov hurled himself upon her, she simply pressed the gun to his heart and pulled the trigger.”
Troy could not help thinking that she had indeed killed a vampire.
“Of course, it was murder. And you can imagine what rights a beaten wife had in the tsar’s Russia, and, of course, Astrov had been a court favourite. There was a trial. But Moscow was divided. It became, as it were, a surrogate trial of the Romanovs themselves—she was in the dock for murder, they were in the dock of public opinion for favouring and promoting a beast like Astrov—and in the end no jury would convict her. All the same, she was a social outcast and the doors of the great houses were closed to her and her son. Later that year, the revolution of 1905 . . . you know better than I the circumstances . . . Princess Astrova took her five-year-old son and vanished.”
Churchill was silent for a moment, rolling the claret around on his palate. Troy knew the circumstances of ’05 very well—it was the moment his parents had fled westward, to Vienna, to Paris, to London—a child in each city, thereby Troy had a Viennese brother, Parisian twin sisters and was nicknamed “my little Englander” by his mother.
It was Troy’s turn.
“And this is the gun that killed Astrov?”
“No, that’s in the police museum in Moscow. This is its twin. I’d bet a fiver it had never been fired until that day on the Northern Line.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
“No. She disappeared without trace. Nice trick if you can do it, and damned difficult. I’d say one has to go to South America these days to do a convincing vanishing trick. Everything in Europe is so knowable. There was talk she had reverted to her maiden name but I’ve no idea what that was. I’ve got as far as I can with this. What you need now is an old Russian with a good memory for the ancien régime.”
“Like . . . my mother?”
“Precisely.”
Troy swigged claret, mused a while.
“Y’know . . . this would fit together more neatly if this were the gun that killed Astrov, if this gun had stayed in Russia when Princess Astrova left and had become the property of the Soviet Union.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because André Skolnik was a Soviet agent and, during the Olympics last month, three Czech agents working for the Russians came looking for him.”
“Bugger!” said Churchill.
“I don’t know whether there’s bluff or double bluff going on here. But Skolnik was assassinated by one side or the other.”
Churchill was shaking his head. Vigorously.
“The last ingredient, Freddie. The potato.”
“I’d almost forgotten.”
“Quite. I paid it no mind when you first mentioned it. This gun would not have made much noise in the first place. A potato would not have silenced whatever noise it did make. All the potato did was confuse you and me. You know what this looks like to me? The improvization of an amateur. And the gun itself . . . whoever pulled the trigger was lucky it fired. The cartridge was forty years old. The Altmanns made only fifty bullets and that was in 1904. You cannot buy .15 ammunition. No assassin, and you will agree that if this was an assassination there has to be an assassin, would trust such a weapon. A handgun useless at more than a couple of feet? Freddie, I can’t dispute what you say about Skolnik or the concern the Russians have shown for the fate of their man . . . but this was the work of an amateur. This was right up your street, plain old-fashioned murder.”
“Oh, bum,” said Troy, “I’ve just told Jack Wildeve, Stanley Onions, and a chap at MI5 that it was a pro job.”
Churchill opened a second bottle. Let the evening fall softly upon the two of them. Troy marvelled at his capacity, but pound for pound he weighed twice what Troy did. The more flesh and blood to absorb the booze. If anyone paid the price with a hangover it would be Troy.
At the end of the evening, it was pitch dark. August leeching into September. Churchill slipped the gun, the silver bullet, and the ruby into a brown paper bag and handed it to Troy as he left. The walk home took less than five minutes. Across the Charing Cross Road, behind the National Portrait Gallery, down Cecil Court, past the Salisbury pub, and home. He arrived clear-headed but tired, opened the small drawer in the hat stand where he usually kept keys, dumped in the entire contents of the brown paper bag, and forgot about them entirely.