In the meantime, Alyosha continued to report every word back to Superintendent Chenot.

  25.

  The heat of an Indian Summer had curdled inside the walls of the Hôtel de Nantes, and in his airless room, Yury sat in a stupor on the wooden chair by the open window. An aria from Rigoletto played on the gramophone, and every now and again garbled voices, children’s laughter, and the occasional whistle floated up from the street.

  ‘You’ve not much to say for yourself this evening, Alexei Fyodorovich,’ Yury said.

  Alyosha was standing in front of a little mirror shaving his face by the weak light of the small carbon lamp. He told Yury that the letter he’d posted to his mother in Biarritz had been returned to him that morning unopened, and on the back, in red ink, the hotel manager informed the sender that Madame Dashkov had vacated the hotel without leaving a forwarding address – or settling her bill.

  Yury’s sympathy and concern were sincere, Alyosha felt more uncomfortable then ever: being a Judas was dirty work. He hated quizzing Yury about his fellow White Army officers, and hated betraying his own people – men who had suffered the blood and agony of the Civil War, men who had lost everything and were living a miserable existence as exiles.

  ‘Are your documents all in order?’ asked Alyosha.

  ‘I don’t have a permis de séjour at the moment, but I hope to have a new one stamped by the end of the month. These things always take time. Why?

  ‘You’d better try and have it stamped before then.’

  ‘I can’t pay for it until I’m given my wages.’

  ‘Then don’t be in your room on Thursday night. Stay away – all night.’

  Yury looked doubtful. ‘Why? What have you heard?’

  Alyosha felt dirty.

  ‘Are you in any trouble? No, there’s no need to tell me, I know you are. You’ve got yourself into some scrape, that much is obvious. A debt? A woman? Blackmail? What?’

  How to answer? Alyosha felt marooned on an island of loneliness where he couldn’t share his worries with anyone.

  ‘Come on – out with it. What’s troubling you?’

  ‘I can’t tell you…’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  Alyosha dithered for a while, and then, under further pressure from Yury, came clean and told him all about Superintendent Chenot.

  ‘Grass on who exactly?’ Yury asked. ‘Me?’

  Alyosha told him the whole story from beginning to end.

  ‘You’re playing a very dangerous game.’

  Alyosha knew that better than anybody.

  ‘Yes, a very dangerous game. What exactly have you told them?’

  ‘Nothing really…’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yury reflected on his predicament and then said, ‘You need to clear out of here. Find somewhere else to live. And keep clear of this Chenot for good. Seriously. We already know about him and he’s a sly bastard. He tried his best to recruit me last year but I told him where to go.’

  That Thursday night, there was much pounding on the doors of hotel rooms in the area as the police worked diligently to round up anybody who didn’t possess official papers. On the night of the raid, Alyosha wandered the streets, slipping in to a bar or café when he needed to warm up. He eventually fell into an uneasy sleep propped up against an oak tree in the Jardin de Luxembourg.

  This was no kind of life.

  Things had to change, but a visa on the black market would cost him an arm and a leg. To pay for it, Alyosha needed to find work immediately, and that wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. There was only one thing for it. He would break in to his Uncle Artyom’s house.

  He kept an eye on the comings and goings there for a few days, and noticed that Zepherine usually went out shopping in the afternoons. He waited until he saw the maid take Bibi out for a walk in his pram at three, and then climbed up to a back window, watched from a branch of the birch tree by a jet-black crow, with yellow eyes and glossy feathers. He smashed the window and climbed into a bedroom. This was where he had slept when he first arrived from Berlin in the spring of 1924. Almost three years had gone by since that day when he first walked into his uncle’s house, clutching his cardboard suitcase. He’d vowed to himself he wouldn’t go near his uncle, but, as the French bureaucratic nightmare of trying to settle in Paris had engulfed him, he’d had no choice but to go to the house to ask for help, although he’d loathed himself for doing so. He remembered being ushered by his Uncle Artyom down the wide, black-and-white marble-tiled passage, into the square living room, with its magnificent chandelier hanging from the high ceiling. Underfoot had been a carpet and modern, brightly-coloured paintings had hung on the walls. He remembered the suspicious look the fair-haired, buxom young girl had given him.

  ‘My nephew, Alexei Fyodorovich – Alyosha, this is Zepherine. He’ll be staying with us for a while,’ Artyom had stated, before offering: ‘Campari?’

  ‘Perfect,’ Alyosha had managed to answer.

  ‘Zephie?’

  She’d still been considering him, and eventually she’d asked him exactly how long he was thinking of staying.

  ‘Until he finds his feet darling,’ Artyom had answered.

  She’d still looked a little sulky as they’d sipped their drinks. Then she’d asked, as if Alyosha hadn’t been there, ‘Is he anything to do with her?’

  Her to Zepherine was always Jeanette, Artyom’s first wife.

  ‘No.’

  Artyom had a son by Jeanette, Dimitri, but the ties between father and son didn’t seem very strong. Zepherine was a jealous woman at the best of times so their names were never to be mentioned in front of her.

  In his uncle’s study, he broke the flimsy lock on the bureau easily enough and started rifling through its contents, making as much mess as he could. Then, he emptied cupboards, drawers, shelves, tossing everything he had no use for on the floor. He stuffed as much loot as he thought he could sell – not as much as he’d hoped for – into his pockets.

  He was stopped short for a moment by an old photograph of his mother and his uncle when they were children. Then he came across the deeds to Manoli Les Pins, a villa Artyom had bought in 1921, a few miles inland from Nice. He pocketed the deeds, safe in the knowledge this would cause a great deal of inconvenience to his uncle at some point. He wanted to injure his uncle, injure him as much as he could for stealing Grete away from him. He would never forgive him for that.

  He walked out of the front of the house confidently, and strode up the street, past a little old gypsy woman carrying her load of pegs on her back, her colourful rags blowing around her tiny frame in the wind. His head was spinning with elation at his success, and he felt as though for once he had done an honest day’s work.

  26.

  A friend of Yury – an ex-soldier who’d fought with the White Army under Baron Wrangel, but who now worked on the production line in the Renault factory at Boulougne-Billancourt – found some proper work for Alyosha. He also told him that he knew of a room going in an apartment block in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement, not too far from Place de Costa Rica, behind the Trocadéro.

  ‘I don’t think my feet stink too badly,’ said his new co-tenant, ‘but if they do, open the window.’

  Smelly feet or not, what choice did Alyosha have? He had to find a place to lay low in order to stop being Inspector Chenot’s stooge, and so he moved his meagre possessions over to Passy. The new room had an alcove in the wall, which passed for a wardrobe, and a small shelf by the window, where he placed the copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Yury had stolen from the Sorbonne Library, and his father’s volume of Catullus, along with the deeds to his uncle’s villa.

  His co-tenant was out every night driving his taxi, so Alyosha didn’t see much of him, which suited him very well. Sometimes Yury would meet him after his shift in the Renault factory, and would attempt to pull his leg in his deeply unhumorous way. ‘Don’t you think it’s ironic that one of the children of the bourgeoisie has joined the proletariat? Eh? Think about it. Before long you and your lot will be the working class. People like you will inherit paradise here on earth, at the end of history with a capital H.’

  Alyosha snorted at his friend’s idiocy.

  ‘You can snort, but isn’t it true?’

  One evening, the two of them went to a charitable evening to raise money for a Russian library for émigrés. The author, Ivan Bunin, was giving a reading, along with some other émigré writers and poets, and there was a short musical interlude; some Mozart and Schumann. The evening was well attended, and, after the official programme came to an end, people lingered to drink and smoke and return to their fantasy of going head-to-head with the communists and destroying the Soviet Union. These were the people whose secrets Alyosha had been expected to betray to the police, and he felt very pleased that Chenot no longer featured in his life.

  ‘Alexei Fyodorovich,’ somebody greeted him wheezily. ‘Dear friend, son of your dear father, how are things with you? What a very nice surprise to come across you here.’

  Alyosha racked his brains but the elderly man with a grey moustache and silver spectacles looked unfamiliar. He wore a sheepskin hat, a shabby but well-cut grey fur jacket, and he carried a battered black leather briefcase under his arm.

  Suddenly, Alyosha remembered who he was. Yevgeny Karpovich Kedrin had been his father’s lawyer for over twenty years back in Petrograd. He’d been a prominent Freemason, as well as a member of the Kadet Party in the last Duma before the 1914–1918 war.

  ‘Alexei Fyodorovich, I couldn’t be happier to see you.’

  Yevgeny Karpovich took his hand, squeezed it tightly and lowered his voice until it was almost inaudible. He wondered if he could have a private word? They moved to a corner, but it was only so that he could ask to borrow some money. Alyosha had none to give. Yevgeny Karpovich continued to press Alyosha’s hand, and changed the subject to talk about Russia. It became clear that he was seething with bitterness, and struggling to find some meaning to his life. Since the revolution, he seemed to have misplaced the person he used to be. Yevgeny dreamt of returning to his grandfather’s estate in Turkestan, where he had spent all his summers as a boy, but he could never truly escape the pain of his present, for he was starving in the middle of plenty, failing where he should be succeeding. How was it possible for a man such as himself to retain his dignity in this foreign city?

  After Yevgeny Karpovich finally drifted away, no doubt to try to borrow money from somebody else, Yury told Alyosha how the man had enraged half the émigré community of Paris the previous year, when he claimed in the letters page of Posledniia Novosti that Tolstoy had stolen the plot of his great novel War and Peace from something by Lermontov. The more people took issue with his claim, the more stubbornly he clung to it. The letters flying back and forth became more and more insulting, until the paper had to bring the correspondence to a close, for fear of a libel suit. Alyosha, faced with the long walk back to Passy for the want of an omnibus fare, could not have been less interested.

  27.

  Nobody could call brushing a mile and a half of factory floor inspiring work. The best of it was spending his days among Russians, former soldiers from Baron Wrangel’s army. For Alyosha, hearing his mother tongue all day was a huge pleasure. Still, it didn’t make the work any less boring, and he spoke to the foreman in the hope of something better.

  After a couple of weeks, he was promoted to screwing the doors of the Renault cars into place, working on the production line for the 8CV, the 10CV and the 18CV models. He was soon thoroughly bored of endlessly tightening screws all day, and went back to the foreman, but this time he was told curtly to get on with it or get out.

  On his way home to Passy at the end of his shift that night, he called in at a shop on the Rue de Montparnasse. His fingers slid along the shelf of spirits, and when nobody was looking, he slipped a narrow bottle of Salignac Cognac up his sleeve.

  After the foreman had sampled his present, Alyosha was moved up the line to where the motor cars were painted. On either side of him were two men from Khuzestan, their faces empty of emotion under their round caps of white fur. But who should be sitting on the stool opposite, with a small brush in his hand, but Prince Yakov Sergeyevich Peshkov. They had last seen each other on the day the Prince and his fellow White officers left the dacha in the Crimea on horseback, during the Civil War. Accompanying them was his French governess from Petrograd.

  Alyosha remembered the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach when Mademoiselle Clementine Babin left him on his own. She had insisted that he stay behind, because the journey back to Petrograd was too dangerous for him to undertake. He remembered how he stood at the door, gazing at their retreating backs as they trotted down the lane. That was the last time he saw Mademoiselle Babin.

  Prince Yakov hadn’t changed at all. He still had that smooth-skinned face, with those rosy cheeks like a young priest’s. As the two worked, Prince Yakov told him what had happened to Mademoiselle Babin.

  ‘She talked about you quite a bit…’

  A long time ago, thinking about her used to make Alyosha hot all over, but, by now, she was a faded memory.

  ‘…she was a tender-hearted young woman and her decision to leave you in the dacha weighed heavily on her conscience. She told me several times how ashamed she was of what she did to you. She even wanted to turn back on a few occasions. I had to persuade her how foolish that would be, after we were already so far from the Crimea.’

  He told Alyosha how he’d returned to his regiment, which had been heading north, as the battle plan was for the White Army to attack Moscow. But, even with Baron Wrangel at the head of the army, the Whites had been repelled and the soldiers had fled in disarray, despite their officers’ best efforts to stop the rout. In the end, Prince Yakov and Mademoiselle Babin had fled too, and had found shelter in a mansion house in the country, in an area that was yet to taste the poison of Bolshevism. It stood on the outskirts of Horlikva, and belonged to a rich merchant called Ryabinkin. When the Prince and Mademoiselle Babin had arrived, they’d been given food and drink, but, with the front so close, the Prince had agreed it was safer for the family to burn his uniform and bury his sword, as those found giving succour to White soldiers were harshly punished. They had come up with a story about the Prince being a blood relative of Ryabinkin, who had been prevented by the war from returning to Paris, where he and his French wife lived.

  It proved a short-lived refuge, and, in no time at all, a detachment of Red Army soldiers had arrived on horseback.

  ‘That’s when I began to fear the worst.’

  When the hammering had begun at the door, Mademoiselle Babin had started to shake. The Prince had taken her hand, and whispered something comforting in her ear, but Ryabinkin had already made up his mind that only one course of action was possible, and had opened the door.

  A dozen or so dust-encrusted soldiers had entered the mansion, been greeted by the family, and ushered to the table, where they had been provided with a handsome meal. Ryabinkin had given a short speech, telling them, ‘Let us all enjoy the blessings of the table together. I know you will commandeer the house, gentlemen, and everything in it, for the soviet which you will establish in this corner of the world…’

  Grunts of assent from the soldiers.

  ‘…and that everything I own, after tonight, is the people’s property. So if it belongs to everybody, let everybody enjoy it.’

  The soldiers had looked at each other uneasily, suspecting some bourgeois trap, but after the first few glasses of vodka had been knocked back, they’d relaxed, and were soon eating, talking and laughing with the family as though they were all old friends. Ryabinkin was a very funny man, with a vast store of anecdotes to keep them all entertained. The soldiers had been doubled up with laughter, and when the vodka had run out, the champagne bottles had been uncorked, followed by wine, and they’d all drank like there was no tomorrow. It had been an unforgettable night.

  The whole thing had been a ruse of course. While the soldiers had been drinking themselves into a stupor, two of Ryabinkin’s men had loaded all the gold and jewellery into a specially constructed box hidden in one of the hay carts used on the farm, pulled by two docile carthorses.

  Before dawn, when Lenin’s men had still been snoring stentoriously, the family, dressed in servants’ clothes, had crept out of the house by the back entrance.

  ‘Did you and Mademoiselle Babin go with them?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What about her? What happened?’

  ‘That’s the thing…’ The Prince touched up the motor car with light, delicate strokes, concentrating intensely. ‘Ryabinkin had a house in Moscow as well, and before fleeing for the country, he’d buried yet more gold and gems in the garden there. So now he didn’t want to leave Russia without them. He really wasn’t being sensible, and his wife begged him to join the rest of us in the cart, but he refused. He thought he could get the better of the Bolsheviks, but another word for a man’s fate is egotism. He couldn’t be talked out of it, and Clementine wasn’t willing to leave Russia either, so she left with Ryabinkin for Moscow, though it was Petersburg she hoped to reach in the end. That’s when I came to realise that she had just used me for her own purposes. She said – she swore – that she was still in love with your uncle, Kozma Mikhailovich.’

  That was the last time the Prince saw Mademoiselle Babin. He never heard from her again and had no idea what happened to her. Later, though, he learnt that his father had been murdered and his brother killed in battle at Ufa, in Siberia, though his mother and sister had managed to flee to Riga. From there, they’d found a passage on a ship transporting bulls to Malmo, and from Malmo they’d crossed to Bremen by ferry, and from Bremen to Berlin until, eventually, they’d reached Paris.