Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

27

The four black funeral horses were standing very still outside Arthur Cooper’s house. The driver, also dressed in black, waited at his post. The back of the hearse was empty. Inside, in Arthur Cooper’s front room, three of his revolutionary colleagues were transferring money from a large container, sent under guard from the bank that held his account. In vain had the bank’s manager pleaded with Arthur to leave some of the money behind. Nobody, he said, should leave their accounts completely empty. Surely, the bank manager had continued, Arthur would need some reserves for the inevitable rainy day.

It was all in vain. The three comrades had taken it in turn to guard the container all through the night.

‘If you’d said to me when I joined the movement, Arthur, that I would spend an entire night guarding money from a bank rather than stealing it, I’d have said you were mad.’

‘But it was stolen in the first place, liberated from the capitalist class in Russia,’ Cooper had replied, ‘and think of the good use Comrade Lenin will put it to when he gets his hands on it.’

‘I tell you another thing,’ said the comrade from Stepney. ‘No customs man is going to be in a hurry to open this lot, I can tell you. I doubt if opening coffins is in their job description. Once it gets to the Continent, all those bloody customs men will be crossing themselves and saying their Hail Marys at top speed.’

Now the money was all tightly packed in the bottom of the coffin, with piles of bricks lining the upper levels. Very slowly, and with all due solemnity, the coffin was carried out of the door on four sets of shoulders and slid into position. On the top and the sides was a very clear description of the contents. Ballets Russes. Props Department.

Arthur Cooper took up his position beside the driver. Two other comrades rode at the back as the strange hearse with its four black horses set out west across London to the fruit and vegetable market at Covent Garden, where it would be stored along with all the other props in the Ballets Russes section of the storage facilities of the Royal Opera House.

General Kilyagin was tired of waiting for news from London. He rang Captain Yuri Gorodetsky at his post in the little office in Holborn.

‘What on earth is going on, Captain?’ he boomed down the phone line. ‘It’s days since I’ve had any news from London! What in God’s name have you been doing? Inspecting the Tower of London? Going to the bloody ballet?’

‘No, sir. I have news for you — important news that will change this case and take it out of my area of responsibility.’

‘Out with it, man. What have those Bolsheviks been doing?’

‘Everything is now secure in the luggage section of the Ballets Russes, General. Our English colleagues watched both consignments right into the building in Covent Garden.’

‘You’re still not making sense, Captain. What consignments?’

‘Sir, both the revolutionary tracts and the money are now in the care of the ballet people. There they will remain until the whole lot moves off back to France or wherever they’re going next.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Absolutely certain, General. Could I ask you a question?’

‘With that answer you could ask me anything. Fire ahead.’

‘What is going to happen to them now?’

‘I do not have full authority to tell you that, Captain. They will be watched all their way to the final destinations. And by that I don’t just mean Comrade Lenin and his revolutionary friends. We will watch the leaflets in particular right to their final destinations from Lenin’s address list, be that in Moscow or Siberia or Kiev. Once they have been delivered, the recipients will receive a visit from the Okhrana. They may end up joining Lenin in exile, or, more likely, they will find themselves taking a long journey to Siberia.’

They kept Powerscourt in bed in a private wing of a military hospital for five days. The wing was sealed off. In that time a number of doctors came to see him, all in uniform. They listened to his breathing; they prodded his chest; they asked him to walk up and down. They were particularly keen to inspect the yellow pallor on his face. They didn’t seem very bothered about his arm, though they did say it was healing well. They passed no judgement on his condition. They were waiting, they told him, for the man from London, who was a civilian and whose background had to be thoroughly checked before he was allowed to pass judgement. Dr Archibald Forester had a large and distinguished practice in Harley Street.

‘Lord Powerscourt, I am delighted to make your acquaintance,’ said Dr Forester, when he finally arrived.

‘Perhaps you could enlighten me as to what is happening,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I have no idea where I am, apart from the fact that this is a military hospital. Nobody has told me what is going on. I feel like a parcel that is being passed round and round except that the music never stops.’

‘Let me see what I can do to help. This hospital is near Aldershot. In spite of the best efforts of Mr Danvers Tresilian of the Cabinet Office and the military doctors, I have persuaded them to let me tell you what we know.’

Forester drew a chair up to the side of Powerscourt’s bed.

‘The problem with you, Lord Powerscourt, is that you are a medical freak. Indeed you are a freak in two ways, a double freak if you like. I don’t mean that in any personal sense. I mean that you should not be alive at this moment. You should have been dead five days ago. According to the calculation of these military doctors, you stayed in that Devil’s kitchen longer than anybody or anything, man or sheep or goat is meant to. Yet you are still here, and showing marked signs of improvement. You have caused a major headache for the military personnel preparing these lethal mixtures. Perhaps the dose is too small; let’s not beat about the bush, if the gas needs to be made more potent to kill or maim a lot of humans, they are going to need the formula — the recipe if you like — to be made more powerful. That is going to cost money. I have no idea what our friend Danvers Tresilian is going to do about that.’

‘Well, doctor, I am very pleased to be a freak. At least I’m still here.’

‘I haven’t finished yet, not by a long way. The other factor that makes you a freak is this. Nobody has ever tested this mixture on humans. Not properly. It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. The staff at that Devil’s kitchen have special clothes to wear, so they are protected. Because we have not tried these dreadful potions on humans rather than animals, we have no idea what treatment will work or what treatment will make it worse. If a patient comes into my rooms in Harley Street with a respiratory problem or a heart condition, we know what to do. There are textbooks. Among the medical fraternity there is a pool of educated knowledge. If I do not know the answer or an answer — God knows we’re not infallible, however much we try to give the opposite impression — I can send my patient to a colleague or to a leading teaching hospital where they will know more than me.

‘There is no medical textbook for you, Lord Powerscourt. You are first in the field. You are, quite literally, opening the batting. No doubt your case will feature prominently in the medical literature if anybody decides to use this form of warfare and our hospitals at the front are crowded out with victims. You are the first human, rather than animal, victim of gas warfare in this country. And, as far as I know, none of the animal victims has survived. So we are in terra incognita. We could try some form of treatment but we have no idea if it would work.’

‘This is all very gratifying, to know I am first in the field, Doctor Forester, but can you tell me how much longer I have left to live? I have had enough of members of your profession inspecting me as if I were some form of freak in a circus. Do I need to revise my will today? Or tomorrow? Or can I leave it for a while?’

Doctor Forester laughed. ‘That’s a very good question, Lord Powerscourt. Indeed it may be the only question. I would not wish to insult you by putting a figure or a time on your life expectancy. The short answer is that I haven’t a clue how long you will live after this ordeal. Neither has anybody else.’

Powerscourt thought he liked this doctor from London. At least he told you the score.

‘To continue with my answer, you could live for years. Or the poison gas may carry you off rather sooner. These military doctors are keen to try out a number of different treatments. I propose to tell them that they could do more harm than good. Your arm will heal naturally over time, we believe.’

‘So what are you going to suggest for me? What is the best treatment for a human guinea pig?’

‘I am going to suggest that you go home tomorrow and rest. I don’t mean that you should stay in bed all day. I’m sure you have had enough of that for now. Do whatever you would normally do, but don’t for heaven’s sake take any violent exercise just yet. It could be bad for your heart. I shall come and see you once a week. It may be that your body, like your arm, will try to heal itself, we just don’t know.’

‘I would ask you all not to look at me as if I were an exhibit in a zoo or some exotic animal in a circus,’ Powerscourt began five days later, surveying his little audience in the drawing room at Markham Square. His left arm was still in a sling. Lady Lucy was in her favourite position, opposite her husband, on the other side of the fireplace. Natasha Shaporova and Inspector Dutfield were on the sofa. Powerscourt had told Johnny Fitzgerald the whole story the day after he came home from the hospital. His reaction had been typical. He was on his way back to Warwickshire.

‘There you go again, Francis. How many times do I have to tell you that you mustn’t go on these dangerous expeditions without me. I’m not saying you haven’t come through it very well, mind you. But you’d have been a damned sight better off with me by your side.’

‘I have to tell you,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘that I had to dissuade the authorities from making you all sign the Official Secrets Act before we met today. I told them that you were all responsible adults and would not dream of passing on anything that I say here this afternoon. And I have to say that a lot of the fresh information about events at the Ballets Russes comes from Inspector Dutfield and his police sources. And some of it comes from a mysterious gentleman at the Cabinet Office who is gatekeeper and guardian of most of the nation’s secrets. Rosebery persuaded him to talk to me on the grounds that I had nearly been killed and deserved to know the full facts while I was still here, if you see what I mean.’

‘I’m sure I can speak for us all, my lord,’ said Inspector Dutfield, ‘when I say you can depend on us, with or without the Official Secrets Act.’

‘I have been thinking about the best way to describe this investigation,’ Powerscourt carried on, ‘and I think I would like to begin at the outsides and work in towards the heart of the matter.

‘Consider first, if you would, the wicked uncle in Barnes, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. A shady financier with a penchant for cheating at cards, a wicked uncle, a very wicked uncle, who liked to torment his nephews with the prospect of a glittering legacy when he died. Johnny talked to the remaining nephews and to the remaining sisters of Mr Gilbert. There was only one possible warning note in their evidence, that Mark the croquet player had been attending the Ballets Russes here in London. Johnny was convinced that the boy was not a killer, and he also believed his story that he had to leave as soon as the performance was over to get back to his college. The vicar and the teacher nephews need not detain us, but I must say my favourite memory of this investigation will be the thought of the vicar on the day of the great performance at Blenheim Palace attending to his garden and contemplating his sermon for the Sunday morning service as he pulled out the weeds. We can leave all that family in peace waiting for their inheritance.’

Powerscourt paused and took a drink of water. His bandaged arm was beginning to itch and he didn’t think scratching it would be appropriate in the circumstances.

‘There was the strange story of the French bonds being sold in large numbers but there was a perfectly sound reason for that. They too can be discounted.’

‘And the jewels, Francis, the stolen jewels from St Petersburg? Can they too be discounted as being irrelevant to the murder?’

‘How right you are, Lucy. There is a certain element of poetic justice in that affair. Inspector Dutfield told me yesterday that the thieves from the Premier Hotel have been apprehended and a lot, though not all, of the money recovered. I say poetic justice in that the money from the jewel raid was stolen, just like the jewels. Anastasia will just have to say that the money recovered was all they got from the sale of the diamonds and the rubies and so on. I’m sure she will be able to manage that.

‘There are further Russian links I’d like to come to in a minute, but consider, if you will, the possibility that the first murder, the one here in Covent Garden, was carried out by a jealous husband, possibly even one from Paris who would have had to cross the Channel to restore the family honour. I didn’t think there had been enough time here in England for Bolm to have his way with any compliant wives — the murder was committed shortly after the Ballets Russes arrived and Alexander Taneyev was killed during the first performance here in London. I didn’t believe in the French connection either, so that trail can be discounted. The boy wasn’t killed by a jealous husband.’

‘But what about all the girls in the corps de ballet, Lord Powerscourt? Bolm was after them all the time.’ Natasha Shaporova had collected the evidence on this count and she wasn’t going to let it go just yet.

‘I agree that Bolm behaved very badly with those girls. But there is only evidence of flirting, nothing more. Pretty serious flirting, by all accounts, but there was the added problem that those girls were on stage at the time the murder was carried out. So while Bolm is responsible for some pretty unacceptable behaviour — very unacceptable if you happen to be one of those girls — it wasn’t Bolm who was killed. It was Taneyev.’

Powerscourt finally relieved some of the itching on his arm with a rub rather than a scratch. He didn’t think the doctors would mind.

‘We now come to a strange series of events that had nothing to with the murder. And while it may be too early to talk in detail about the Ballets Russes, they did have a key role to play in this subplot. Most of my information on this comes from Rosebery’s friend in government intelligence, and the rest of it from Inspector Dutfield and his colleagues. It helps, I believe, if you think of the Ballets Russes as a sort of glorified postbox. If you are a spy or a revolutionary, it’s a perfect vehicle for your plans. There is a man called Lenin who is the principal revolutionary in Russia. He is, more or less, on the run. He cannot stay in Russia or he would be sent to Siberia or somewhere worse. He has stayed in Switzerland from time to time and he has stayed several times in Russia. He’s even lived in London for a time and worked at the British Museum. He is currently in exile at a place called Cracow.’

‘Why don’t the Russians just go and arrest him? And take him back to Russia,’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘That’s a good question, and I have to say I don’t know the answer. Maybe the Russians think of him as a source for information or a point of contact for all the other revolutionary leaders he is in touch with. If they locked him up, this useful information would just dry up.’

‘I’m sure Lenin’s mail and his visitors are known to the Russian authorities at all times,’ said Inspector Dutfield. ‘They may even read all his letters before he does.’

‘Several years ago,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘the revolutionaries organized a bank raid in a place called Tiflis. It was a bloody affair, but the raid realized an enormous haul of money for Lenin and his colleagues. Unfortunately most of it was in large denomination banknotes, and the banks knew the numbers. So the revolutionaries couldn’t change it. They tried in a neighbouring country but that didn’t work. Remember what I said about the Ballets Russes being a sort of postbox? Lenin or his cronies must have had a friend or a supporter in the company, not necessarily a dancer. They took the money to London in the Ballets Russes’s luggage. It has been successfully changed into English pounds, and those will eventually return the way they came, in the Ballets Russes’s luggage. They may even have done this by now.’

‘From what you say, Francis, the authorities could have put their hands on this money any time they liked. Why didn’t they?’

‘I suspect, Lucy, that they are waiting to see where the money ends up. Then they may make their move, when they know the final destination. There is a further twist to the Lenin affair. He is a great scribbler, always producing pamphlets and books to enthuse his followers and keep them on the right course. You could regard them as the revolutionary equivalent of St Paul writing all those letters to the faithful across the ancient world — the Ephesians, the Corinthians and so on. It’s to make sure there is no backsliding among the converts. Anyway, he sends a new pamphlet in Russian to London to be printed in Russian and English, five hundred copies each. I don’t have to tell you how it’s going to leave the country.’

‘I believe, my lord,’ said Inspector Dutfield, hunting through his notes, ‘that the intelligence people think that these too will be waved through customs and everything else so that the Russian secret service, the Okhrana, can follow them, not just to Lenin in Cracow but to all the people he sends them to. That would provide a sort of Who’s Who covering Lenin’s revolutionary circle.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Powerscourt, ‘exactly so. All of which brings us to the two principal characters in our deadly drama. Alfred Bolm and Alexander Taneyev.’ He took another drink of water.

‘Nobody who has seen Alfred Bolm dance can have any doubt that he is a complete master of his craft. He was trained in the classical tradition of the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg and has been delighting audiences all over Europe. The key question in this whole affair has been, Who was the intended victim: Bolm or his understudy Alexander Taneyev? For a long time I thought it must be Bolm. I was wrong. Bolm was not the killer either. If you think of him as a one-man version of the Ballets Russes postal system, you wouldn’t be far wrong. One of the great difficulties for spies — I remember it well from the Boer War — is how to get your information back to your masters. Let us suppose we have Spy A, sent from St Petersburg in search of information about military experiments. He thinks he has some very important information. But he may be watched. So he takes his information to the postbox — Bolm, in this case — and the postbox passes it on to Spy C, possibly over games of chess at that club near the British Museum. Spy C might be thought of as a courier rather than a spy, perhaps. His job is to get the information home. The information about military experiments came to Bolm this way. It was Alexander Taneyev’s misfortune that he happened upon this material while it was still in the postbox, as it were. Bolm had not yet had the time to pass it on to Spy C.

‘We have all heard of the thought processes of Alexander Taneyev from his letters home, and that diary which ends so abruptly. We know that he was deeply worried about this information. I suspect that he confronted Bolm with what he had read. I believe he told him that he was intending to pass it on to the English authorities or, equally likely perhaps, that Bolm thought that was what he intended to do. Bolm passes this information on to Spy A, the most important link in the chain, who has already garnered crucial military intelligence. Spy A, operating under the pseudonym Andrei Rublev, kills Alexander Taneyev to shut him up. He can’t talk to the authorities if he is dead. I suspect Andrei Rublev was rather good at that sort of thing. I would be surprised if Alexander was his first victim. Taneyev must have let slip to Bolm that he had told the dancer Vera of his plans. That was why Spy A went to Blenheim Palace to kill her too. He had to get rid of them both before they had time to walk into an English police station. After that, Spy A moved on to the experiment near Goring where he met me.’

‘Do you know who the identity of the spy is, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha had been staring at Powerscourt for some time, trying to work out what the yellow on his skin meant.

‘I do not; I mean, I do not know his real name. Thanks to the activities of Colonel Brouzet in Paris, and what the man said to me when we met at Goring, we know his work name was Rublev, Andrei Rublev. But I have no more idea of what his real name is than I do the name of the man in the moon.’

‘Andrei Rublev was a famous icon painter hundreds of years ago,’ said Natasha. ‘Would I be right in thinking, Lord Powerscourt, that you are unable to tell us anything more about the nature of that military experiment? I presume that was what caused the injuries to your arm and your skin.’

‘I cannot say any more than I just have. It took me two and a half hours of argument before the secret people allowed me even to use the phrase “military experiment”. I should say that Andrei Rublev is dead. He met with an unfortunate accident at the military experiment and will not trouble us any more. Inspector Dutfield is in the middle of a report to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police saying that the case of the murder of Alexander Taneyev and the poor girl at Blenheim Palace is now closed.’

‘I see,’ said Natasha.

‘Perhaps I could reassure you, Mrs Shaporova,’ said Inspector Dutfield, ‘that even I have not been permitted to know what went on at that experiment.’