Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

5

Johnny Fitzgerald, Powerscourt’s oldest friend and companion in arms, was back in town. Ever since the affair of the Elgin Marble he had lived mainly in the country, supposedly researching a new book on the birds of the Midlands. Lady Lucy had long ago established that Johnny’s principal interest in the Midlands was not, in fact, the local wildlife, but a rich widow in Warwickshire. Lady Lucy had enlisted series after series of interlocking circles of friends and relations in the search for the identity of the lady concerned. She was almost certain that her prey was a certain Lady Caroline Milne, widow of the late Colonel Sebastian Milne, formerly of the Life Guards and a previous Master of the Harbury Hunt. Lady Lucy had been on the verge of asking Johnny a number of times if Lady Caroline was indeed the object of his interest, but she had resisted. If Johnny had wanted them to know, she reasoned to herself, he would have told them. All in good time, as her grandmother used to say.

‘Well, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I hear you’re consorting with ballet dancers and that man Diaghilev. That’s what they’re saying round the town.’

‘How very perceptive of you, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt with a laugh. He gave Johnny the details of the case.

‘And I presume that you have some delicious assignment lined up for me?’ said Fitzgerald, who had visited many Valleys of Despair and Sloughs of Despond in previous cases with his friend. ‘Lunch with the prima ballerinas? Dinner with Anna Pavlova if she’s in town? That sort of thing?’

‘I’m afraid not, my friend, I’m afraid not. Would that such entertainments were within my gift. Alas, that is not the fate I have in mind for you. But it could be worse.’

‘What do you mean worse?’ said Johnny darkly. ‘Tell me the truth now.’

‘There is a rich City businessman involved in the affair, Johnny. Name of Gilbert, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. He lives in a big house in Barnes near the pond. He’s very rich. He also happens to be a relation of the dead dancer Alexander Taneyev. He’s his uncle. I want to know all about him.’

‘Why? Are you looking for some hot investment tips, Francis? Buy Latin American copper, that sort of thing?’

‘Well, you never know when that might come in useful. The first major problem in this case is this: who was meant to be the victim? The boy Alexander was the understudy. A much more famous fellow was meant to be dancing the part of the Prince, but he cried off. I know you’re going to ask me why and when he vanished from the stage, as it were, and I can only say that I don’t know yet. I haven’t been able to talk to him. Relations with Diaghilev are a bit frosty at the moment, so that may have to wait even longer. Our friend in Barnes appears to have no children. We know Alexander was his nephew. How many more nephews, cousins, brothers or sisters does our man have? That would be interesting.’

‘Francis,’ said Johnny, looking sadly at his friend, ‘you’re getting too devious for your own good. It must be these Russians. I think you suspect that Alexander whatever he’s called might have been Gilbert’s heir. If that is the case, who might the new heir be? He would, certainly, have a strong motive for lurking round the bowels of the opera house with a nasty dagger in his hand. Is that what you want me to find out?’

‘It is.’

‘Why didn’t you say so at the beginning? I’ll get started right away.’

Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had recruited a couple of English assistants among the younger members of staff at the Royal Opera House. The elder boy, Jamie, had just started work when the Ballets Russes first appeared in London the year before. He was employed because his father was chief electrician. Jamie could even remember some of the ballet dancers’ names, something the Sergeant thought might be beyond his powers. He, the Sergeant, had bought himself a little book that claimed to teach you how to speak Russian. The Sergeant realized very quickly that this would be hard work. French, as he used to say to his mother, had always been Greek to him at school. Why did the Russians have to have a different alphabet? Furthermore, why did they have to have so many letters — six more, by the Sergeant’s arithmetic, than the English version? Why did ‘Cc’ sound like ‘s’ in see and ‘Pp’ sound like a rolled ‘r’, for heaven’s sake? It was enough to make a man despair.

Sergeant Jenkins’ other recruit worked as a stagehand and scene shifter and general dogsbody. Nicholas wanted to be an actor and this was the only job he could find that took him into a theatre. And it was Nicholas who provided the first burst of news from the world of the Ballets Russes, over a pint of bitter at the Lamb and Flag in Rose Street, known as the Bucket of Blood in an earlier century. Jenkins didn’t want the Russians to see the connection between himself and his in-house spies, as he mentally referred to them.

‘It was a fight, Sergeant, right in the middle of the stage, must have been about eleven o’clock this morning.’

‘Not so fast, my friend. Who was on stage? What were they rehearsing? Who was fighting?’

‘Well, from what I heard, I think they were running through a new routine for Les Sylphides.’

Nicholas had a pair of aunts who lived in Brittany, so he had picked up some idiomatic French, including a number of swear words, the precise meanings of which he was unsure.

‘That choreographer who shouts at them all the time, Mr Fokine, he was doing his stuff.’

‘And who was doing the fighting?’

‘Two girls from the corps de ballet. One of them was that tall redhead called Kristina. The other one was a brunette and I don’t know her name. I could point her out to you next time you’re in the place, if you like.’

‘That would be very kind. Was it like a boxing match? Wrestling maybe?’

‘It was pretty fierce stuff. The brunette had apparently accused the one called Kristina of having given in to Bolm’s advances. She denied it. There was a lot of shoving and a lot of biting. The redhead was trying to pull something out of her stocking when they were stopped. It might have been a knife.’

‘A knife like the one used in the murder? One of those Cossack daggers?’

‘God help me, I hadn’t thought of that. It could have been, I suppose, but I’m not sure.’

‘So who stopped it?’

‘Mr Fokine and one of the big stagehands, one of the Russian ones, had to force them apart. The redhead had blood pouring out of her shoulder. The other one was limping. They were both taken away. Mr Fokine gave everybody else half an hour off. I saw him having a very large vodka all by himself in the bar. It’s always open for the Russians that place, even at breakfast time.’

‘Nicholas, you’ve done well. Please try to find out what they were fighting about. Maybe there’s going to be another round.’

The early evening sun was still streaming through the great windows of Lady Ripon’s drawing room at Coombe. She had just rearranged the flowers to her satisfaction. Honestly, it was so hard these days to find staff who knew how to do things properly. She had already been to the ballroom where she had recently built a small stage for the ballet, the floor raked at an angle like the one at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Russian dancers always complained about the flat floors of London and Paris. Round the stage, twenty seats had been placed. Here at least the work had been carried out perfectly, probably because Lady Ripon had supervised every move herself.

She was wearing her rubies tonight, with the Nattier-blue taffeta dress. She had recently had all her jewels reset by Cartier in the fashion of the day, rather than the heavy gold settings of Victoria’s time. The dining room was her last port of call with Crooks, the butler, in attendance. She was, as she told her maid later that evening, only just in time. The first problem was the table itself. ‘Just look at those champagne flutes, Crooks. Can’t you see they’re in the wrong order? Sort it out, please. My word, you have to have your eyes about you these days.’

Lady Ripon turned her attention to the seating plan. Crooks held out the red leather pad with slits to hold the names and place settings of the guests and the order of precedence on the way into dinner.

‘Good God, you don’t expect me to be taken in to dinner by that fool Twiston-Frobisher, do you? I don’t care if he isn’t English, I must be taken in by Mr Diaghilev. It’s my party and he’s the guest of honour. I do believe Frobisher’s the stupidest man in England. And you can’t put Sir Ernest next to Lady Trumpington, he’ll be bored to tears. And the Ambassador — he’ll expect to be next to Mrs Sackville. He’s been crazy about her for years.’

By eight o’clock all the guests had arrived except the Russians. Lady Ripon began to grow anxious. Her husband, an older and larger figure, was deep in conversation about cricket with the retired Brigadier who lived next door. By half past eight, Crooks the butler was whispering that the food could not be delayed much longer or it would spoil. He also pointed out that in the absence of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the only appropriate person to take Lady Ripon in to dinner was Sir Felix Twiston-Frobisher. The guests were beginning to look at their watches in a pointed fashion by now. At ten to nine the butler reported that the chef and the sous chef were threatening to leave and take up another position in a house where their skills would be properly recognized. At five past nine Lady Ripon relented and was taken into dinner by the stupidest man in England. Half an hour later, as the lobster was being served, she had changed her mind. She was now sure that Sir Felix must be the stupidest person in the entire world.

Diaghilev came with the pudding. He was, he assured Lady Ripon, so fond of pudding that he would gladly forgo all the previous courses so as not to disturb the pattern of such an elegant dinner. Lady Ripon’s spirits began to rise. They rose still further when she led the way to the little stage in her ballroom. It was lit entirely by candlelight. Nijinsky danced part of his role in The Spirit of the Rose. The guests were enchanted. Lady Ripon’s Russian evening was saved.

Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Captain Yuri Gorodetsky’s right foot was beating out a permanent rhythm on the wooden floor of his office. The Captain was normally a placid and peaceful soul. The uncertainties of military life had been replaced by a more regular occupation, even if that was being a secret service officer in pursuit of terrorists and revolutionaries. Captain Yuri Gorodetsky felt he had made a mistake — well, oversight might be a better way of putting it. He was walking up and down and waiting for the man who could reprimand him — who was also the man who could solve his problem — to speak to him on the telephone. The people in Paris had assured the Captain that General Peter Kilyagin, the man in charge of the Okhrana in Western Europe, was in his headquarters building. He had not yet gone home. He would be with the Captain in a moment.

‘Gorodetsky! My dear fellow, how are you?’ The General’s voice was very loud, almost as if he was speaking from the next room.

‘I am well, General. But I fear I may have made a mistake.’

‘What’s the problem? I’m sure we can sort it out.’ At least the General seemed to be in a good mood. He had a fearsome temper and had once shouted at one of his subordinates for twenty-five minutes without stopping.

‘It’s about those revolutionaries trying to change the money from Lenin’s bank robbery in Tiflis, General. You remember your plan to funnel them into twelve banks rather than let them spread out all over London?’

‘Of course I remember. Bloody Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green. What’s gone wrong?’

‘I forgot one thing, sir. The bankers have spotted the problem and they want an answer tonight. Do they hand over the money — the English money, I mean. They say that if you can’t change the money in Russia it’s probably worthless. They suspect that the Russian authorities have cancelled all these notes.’

‘What do they want us to do about it?’

‘They want a guarantee that they will be fully recompensed for all the English pounds they may hand over tomorrow. You won’t have forgotten, General, that we could be talking about a quarter of a million roubles.’

‘I haven’t forgotten. I’d be surprised if that amount of money goes on parade in the City of London tomorrow morning, mind you. I’m sure some of the notes will have disappeared, liberated on their journey, as our revolutionary friends might put it. Do you know, that’s more than the annual budget for my whole department.’

‘Mother of God!’

‘Let me think for a moment, Captain. Don’t go away. I’m just going to put the phone down for a minute.’

Captain Gorodetsky thought he could hear very faint footsteps coming down the line from Paris. Perhaps the General was marching around his office. General Kilyagin was tracking the bureaucratic route map he would have to use if he followed normal procedures for a question of this sort. This would involve not only the state bank, but also a number of different departmental bureaucracies. It would at some point enter the Winter Palace or the Tsar’s Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in the country close to St Petersburg. At this time of year, the bloody Tsar might be on his yacht, or even going to Livadia in the Crimea on his special train, always accompanied by an identical special train to confuse the men with bombs. General Kilyagin felt certain that once his problem was inside the magic circle of Tsar Nicholas, his ghastly wife and the totally unpredictable Rasputin, any sensible request could be thrown out on a whim. Some grand duke might roll up and scupper the whole thing. General Kilyagin thought of phoning the Minister of Finance direct, but he thought the man might be drunk by this time of day. He was to say later that his mind was made up by a carriage on the Rue Monceau that performed a daring series of swerves to avoid running over two small boys who had wandered into the middle of the road.

‘I’ve got it!’ he yelled down the phone. ‘Give the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green the money! All of it. Don’t hesitate. Pay up! Tell these miserable bankers that the Russian authorities will compensate them for every last pound or rouble they may have to pay out. You can give them my word on that!’

‘Thank you for that, General, thank you very much. Would you like the English police to arrest the Bolsheviks and confiscate the English money? They’re in receipt of stolen goods, after all.’

It was at this point that the General showed he was a master of strategy as well as a master of tactics.

‘No, no, leave them be. Let’s play this little game out right to the end. And let’s take a leaf out of their Bolshevik book. Ask the English bankers to hand the money over in the largest possible denominations, hundred-pound notes if they’ve got such things. And for God’s sake tell them to make a note of the numbers on the notes they hand over. We can circulate every bank in Europe with those numbers and arrest every Bolshevik who tries to turn them into any other currency, Polish zlotys or roubles or Swiss francs. There’s only one proviso, Gorodetsky. You’ve got to keep your eyes on what happens to the money. The English revolutionaries will want to get rid of it as soon as possible. They will have to go to somebody who can get it back to Russia or maybe even to Lenin’s café in Cracow in the Ballets Russes luggage. You’ve got to watch that luggage like a hawk, my friend. Like a hawk.’

‘Should our English friends intercept the luggage before it goes on its travels?’

‘I said we should play the game right to the end, Captain. We follow the luggage. We follow whoever picks up the money out of the luggage. We follow them wherever they go. At the point when the handover is actually happening, we arrest everybody. That would also be the time for our English friends to arrest the Bolsheviks from Bethnal Green if that’s what they decide to do. If they arrest them any earlier, word will get to Lenin in his bloody café and the whole plan will be changed. We’ve got to play it long.’