Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

21

Natasha Shaporova thought she had found something at last. It wasn’t much and it was contained in a letter to his brother shortly before he was murdered. ‘Thank you for your advice about those papers I should not have seen. People like me were certainly never meant to read them. Your advice is very sensible.’ Natasha sent them verbatim to London.

‘Why is nothing ever definite about this bloody case?’ was Powerscourt’s first reaction when he read them in Markham Square. ‘Alexander could be talking about anything.’

‘Let’s just think about what he might be talking about, Francis. You’re usually very good at working out the possibilities in a case like this.’

‘Love affair,’ said her husband. ‘Alexander has fallen for a married woman, or for a member of his own sex?’

‘Can’t we discount the last one about his own sex? Alexander would hardly be likely to ask his father, would he?’

‘Or he could have discovered about a love affair in the Ballets Russes that could be very complicated. Tamara Karsavina fallen for the principal scene shifter, that sort of thing?’

‘It’s possible. Any more?’

‘It has to do with the future plans of the Ballets Russes. They are totally bankrupt, perhaps, and are going to have to go back to St Petersburg on the next train.’

‘Wouldn’t that have happened by now, if it was going to happen?’

‘Well spotted, Lucy. Maybe there’s another change of plan with the Ballets Russes. They’re going to rip up the timetable and go back to Paris immediately.’

‘More?’

‘Well, this is a bow drawn at a venture. Suppose what Colonel Brouzet said is true and there is a link between Russian spies using the Ballets Russes as a kind of postbox. I can’t see it, myself. I can’t see how young Alexander could ever have come to see something confidential.’

‘You do know what all this means, Francis.’

‘I do, Lucy, I do. It means we are still no further forward. I think I shall send a message to Michel Fokine asking him to drop by. He might be able to tell us if the information concerns the Ballets Russes or not.’

Johnny Fitzgerald had taken a generous helping of Treasury notes from the Powerscourt war chest in Markham Square. He did not believe Sweetie Robinson would talk about the size of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert’s fortune out of the goodness of his heart. He had decided one thing about the nephews and the aunts. Four nephews being reduced to three was one thing. Three reduced to two would be something else again. If anything happened to Mark the Croquet Ball, as Johnny referred to him now, there would only be two — and two, moreover, in the same family. Four down to two would be more than suspicious; it would be a motive for murder.

Sweetie Robinson was doing further damage to his teeth with a large mint from the bowl in front of his desk.

‘Ah, Mr Fitzgerald, fresh from your travels round the surviving nephews, I presume. What news of Mark the spendthrift, as I gather he is? The earnest vicar? The schoolteacher? All well, I take it?’

‘All well, thank you, Sweetie. It won’t take you long to work out why I have come today.’

‘I can’t imagine, Mr Fitzgerald. Put me out of my misery, please.’

‘I won’t beat about the bush, Sweetie.’ Johnny was convinced that his man would have started to form an opinion of the wealth of Richard Gilbert the moment he had set his eyes on him. It was part of his trade, an instinct that would go with him whenever he met somebody new. Trading on this kind of knowledge, after all, provided a fairly large segment of his income. ‘How much is he worth, our friend Gilbert?’

‘You wouldn’t expect me to hand that over without some kind of consideration for all the time spent working out the answer, would you now, Mr Fitzgerald?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Johnny. ‘How much?’

‘I don’t think I like to go in for that kind of arithmetic. I prefer a slower kind.’

Johnny had heard of this other kind, a sort of torture by money where the amount handed over had to increase with the value of the subject’s financial position.

‘All right,’ said Johnny, ‘let’s say he’s worth over a thousand and I’ll give you ten pounds.’

‘Thirty.’

‘Twenty.’

‘Done, he’s worth more than a thousand pounds. Your next suggestion, Mr Fitzgerald?’ Sweetie popped a fresh mint into his mouth. He was grinning with pleasure at his business.

‘He’s worth more than ten thousand pounds, Sweetie: how’s that?’

‘You’re going rather fast for me. Shouldn’t there be a bridge or two on the way? A calling station on the road?’

‘OK Sweetie, he’s worth more than five thousand pounds. Ten pounds, but we both think he’s worth more than that.’

‘I’ll give you five thousand for twenty pounds, Mr Fitzgerald.’

‘Done,’ said Johnny. He took the money out of his pocket and laid all the notes spent so far on the table and pushed them over. In Sweetie’s world you never knew when or indeed if people were actually paying you real money or not. Sweetie inspected the notes with great care. Forty pounds in notes were now by the side of the sweet bowl. Johnnie hoped their presence would make future transactions easier.

‘Done, and another twenty for over ten thousand.’ Johnny added another twenty to the pile.

‘I agree. And seeing that you have been a man of your word, Mr Fitzgerald, I’ll give you the total, as I understand it. Otherwise we could be here all day. You give me thirty pounds more and I’ll tell you his worth and a little jewel for you to take away.’

Johnny had spent more or less as much as he thought would be necessary so far.

‘You’re a hard man, Sweetie.’ He brought out another couple of notes and added them to the pile. ‘I think that should do it, don’t you?’

Sweetie Robinson grinned a rather terrible grin, revealing to a watching world just how much damage had been done to his teeth by his years of confectionery consumption.

‘You’re a hard man, Mr Fitzgerald, and that’s a fact. I tell you that friend Richard Wagstaff Gilbert — Waggers to the City of London — is worth between ten and twenty thousand pounds. And closer to the twenty than the ten.’

That’s enough to set a mother’s heart racing, Johnny said to himself. ‘And what’s your little jewel, Sweetie, the one you’ve been saving up?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Mr Fitzgerald. I told you before that he cheats at cards. This information is even more valuable.’ Sweetie popped another humbug into his mouth and leant forwards across his desk.

‘Richard Wagstaff Gilbert has been married. He married a girl called Katie Shore in a village called Blexham when he was in his twenties. He’ll deny it, mind you. He keeps it very secret. That’s all. I don’t know if he has had any children with this Katie. Wouldn’t those mothers and aunts just love to know?’

Powerscourt was looking forward to his visit to the chess club. He knew who most of the visitors would be. Scholars toiling during the hours of daylight to produce the definitive history of the English Civil War; imperial propagandists scribbling away on the divine providence that gave England her great empire beyond the seas; revolutionary foreigners, surrounded by the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, producing the definitive blueprint for revolution today or tomorrow, crackpots bent on proving that the descendants of Alfred the Great had settled in Weybridge and were awaiting the call to arms to save England from her troubles. When darkness fell in winter, or when the museum closed in the summer, a number of these citizens, supplemented by some mathematically minded civilians no doubt, crossed the road to the chess club in Great Russell Street.

There was a sullen porter at the door. Powerscourt was shown into a large room where there were no overhead lights. On each of the twenty chess tables was a lamp, lit if a match was in progress. One hundred and sixty pawns, forty castles, knights and bishops and twenty queens were ready for action to defend their king.

‘Where’s the manager, please?’ Powerscourt addressed the nearest player, who looked like a schoolteacher fled from his marking and his preparations. He moved a knight forward to what looked to Powerscourt like a dangerously exposed position. He himself had given up chess since Thomas began defeating him every time at the age of twelve.

‘In the office. Down there at the back.’

The office was small and looked out across all the various battlefields.

‘Got to keep an eye on what’s going on,’ said the manager. ‘We had a fight in here the other day about a disputed castling. Morgan’s the name, by the way, James Morgan.’

‘My name is Powerscourt. I am an investigator. I am looking into some strange circumstances at the Ballets Russes.’

‘And how can we help you here? We offer recreation for the mind of a different kind to the Ballets Russes, but there must be some similarities.’

Powerscourt brought out a publicity photograph of Alfred Bolm and showed it to the manager.

‘This man here, Alfred Bolm, does he come here at all?’

The manager looked at Bolm as if he were an old friend. ‘Why, it’s Mr Bolm. I didn’t know he was in the middle of his dancing days. He came here last summer, certainly, and he has been here three or four times this year.’

‘Is he a good player, the dancing Mr Bolm?’

‘Well, he’s good by our standards, he can beat most of the ordinary players here, but he’s not very good by Russian standards. Most of them — and we have about half a dozen here — can beat Mr Bolm quite easily. Calm down over there! Calm down, for God’s sake, or I’ll have you expelled!’

A couple of foreign-looking players at a table by the corner were on the verge of a fight.

‘Tell me, Mr Morgan, was there anything unusual about Mr Bolm? Did he play with anybody in particular?’

‘Well, there is one thing. He’s been in a couple of times with the same chap — they’ve signed in and paid their dues in the normal way. Mr Bolm always brings a briefcase with him. I’d say his partner was Russian, probably, with one of those little beards they go in for and a cap pulled down over the eyes.’

‘And you didn’t notice anything unusual about their game?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Not really, no.’

Before he left, Powerscourt scribbled his address in Mr Morgan’s client book and asked to be kept informed about any further visits from Mr Alfred Bolm. Particularly ones where his companion was the same Russian as before.

Blexham is one of a multitude of English villages that have no claim to fame whatsoever. Its bulls win no prizes at agricultural shows. Its football team languishes at the bottom of its league. Even its wives and mothers win no awards for cakes or prize puddings. Its sons and daughters have brought no national renown in good works or politics or anything else back to adorn their village. It lies along a lengthy street with a couple of shops at one end, the pub — the Laughing Cow — in the middle and the church at the other end.

Powerscourt decided the church might provide a better chance than the pub, as this was late afternoon and the regulars were presumably still out in their fields. He found the vicar puzzling over the church accounts in his vestry.

‘Powerscourt? Lord Francis Powerscourt, did you say?’ The Reverend William Fortescue must have been in his late sixties, with white hair and very thick glasses. ‘Forgive me, but a little Irish genealogy is a hobby of mine. Would I be right in thinking that you sold Powerscourt House to a member of a big brewing family some years ago?’

‘You are correct, vicar. I am married to a lady called Lucy and we have four children, if that helps in your researches at all?’

‘That is very kind of you.’ The vicar pointed to his account books, full of details of church restoration and money for the repair of damaged tombstones. ‘They used to balance, these books — what came in, what went out; but the population has dropped so much our income must have gone down; fewer weddings, virtually no baptisms, a lot of funerals. You can’t ask a lot for funerals. Enough of our troubles here. How can I help you today?’

‘I am looking into some strange goings-on at the Ballets Russes in London. As part of that investigation, we need some information about a man called Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, currently resident in Barnes in London. We believe he got married here some years ago.’

‘I won’t ask you why you are interested in this gentleman. That would be presumptuous. What age did you say he was?’

The Reverend Fortescue moved over to a shelf with large dark red ledgers labelled ‘Births, Marriages and Deaths’.

‘He is now in his sixties, must have been born in the eighteen fifties. We’re not, you’ll be relieved to hear, in quest of a baptism; only a wedding, which would have happened round about the eighteen seventies, if our man was typical of the time — though people in real life never are, in my experience.’

‘This volume here starts at eighteen seventy, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps we could begin our search here.’

Powerscourt wondered, as the vicar riffled through his pages, if all candidates for ordination for the Church of England had to take handwriting classes. For the writing was excellent, even as vicars came and vicars went.

‘They say Blexham is a coming up and going down sort of place,’ the Reverend Fortescue said, peering through his pages. ‘The Bishop or the Dean or whoever sits in those glorious seats in the choir at Salisbury Cathedral up the road, sometimes they give it to a young man on the way up, his first parish — as it were; and then they give it to somebody on his way down, the last parish in a man’s career. That’s me.’

Powerscourt saw that his eyes read the entries a lot quicker than the vicar’s as generations of Blexham hopefuls, Grants and Smiths and Hoopers and Farmers joined their lives together in Holy Matrimony. But of a Shore and a Gilbert there was as yet no sign.

The year eighteen hundred and seventy-six contained what they were looking for, a Katie Shore married to a Richard Gilbert. There were the usual attendant signatories. The vicar sounded relieved but tired.

‘There we are, my lord, I’m so glad to have been able to find it for you. It wouldn’t do to disappoint a member of the Powerscourt family.’

‘I’m sorry to have to trouble you further, vicar, but could we check the births and the deaths register for the few years after?’

‘Of course. It’s likely that they moved away, mind you. A lot of people of their age moved away to Salisbury, or even to London to look for work that wasn’t based on agriculture. That’s why our local population keeps falling.’

An hour later, Powerscourt decided to call it a day. The unfortunate Sergeant Jenkins could begin his work at Somerset House at the year 1882, when Gilbert should have been thirty years of age.

‘You could look in the graveyard here, if you like, Lord Powerscourt. I just hand over the money to the man who tidies up the grass and props up the falling headstones. I don’t think I’ve ever read the names, now I think of it. There’s enough to do, looking after the living.’

Powerscourt did indeed check on the headstones, the same names coming to meet him that he had seen born, married and buried in the register. If the little church of St Michael and All Angels Blexham had any secrets about the family of Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, it was keeping them close to its heart.

Captain Yuri Gorodetsky didn’t have to wait for his master to speak this time. The General came straight on the line when he placed the call.

‘Gorodetsky, you idler, what is going on in your neck of the woods? What news of the Bolsheviks of Bethnal Green? What are the bastards up to now?’

‘Nothing is happening here, General. The Bolshevik money remains in the capitalist bank in the City of London. There is absolutely no sign of any plans to move it just yet.’

‘And the printer you wrote to me about, the rogue, overcharging like that? You’d think that an outfit dedicated to the equality of man could at least offer a decent price, rather than an exorbitant one for running off a few pamphlets. No intelligence there yet, I suppose. And what do our English colleagues have to say for themselves? I find it hard to believe that there is no activity at all.’

‘They pay their informers well, as always, the English. They’ve had years of experience doing that. They say things do turn quiet sometimes. The comrades go about the place doing their work and recruiting for the cause. They still have the occasional meeting to rally support. I think they may be waiting for instructions about Lenin’s pamphlet. I can’t believe a number of those won’t be left behind for the believers in Bethnal Green.’

‘I have news for you, Captain, but you must keep it a secret. I am not meant to know myself. I only found out about it by accident and I don’t propose to let you in on how I came across it.’

Most people lower their voices when speaking of secrets. General Peter Kilyagin raised his as far as it would go, so the Captain had to hold the instrument away from him.

‘Headquarters, that’s St Petersburg Okhrana, have sent a man to England. They sent him some time ago — how long, I do not know. His mission is known only to a select few at the very top of the Okhrana. I know nothing about the details of his mission.’

‘But why, General, why are we sending one of our top men to London? Why not to Berlin or Hamburg or Wilhelmshaven or one of those naval construction places?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Gorodetsky! Are you expecting our masters to behave rationally? Anybody who has spent time in the domestic department of the Okhrana knows only too well the fantastic lengths the revolutionaries will go to in order to blow up a train or a bridge. Their minds — I’ve always believed this — are shaped by that experience of bombs and explosions and they take it with them into the foreign service.’

‘I still don’t understand, sir.’

‘Never you mind. You just keep your eyes fixed on those Bolsheviks. And remember the great maxim of intelligence gathering: ‘Hold your friends tight but hold your enemies tighter.’

Michel Fokine was in cheerful mood when he called on the Powerscourts in Markham Square. Inspector Dutfield was organizing his forces, some to Somerset House, some to shadowing Alfred Bolm, some to search for more information about strangers on the night of the murder at the Ballets Russes.

‘You’ll never guess the success of those Blenheim Palace performances,’ Fokine said happily. ‘We’ve had invitations to come to all sorts of places: an Elizabethan jewel of a place called Montacute, wherever that is; a place with a room for every day of the year at Knole (and I do know where that it is); and one from the Rothschilds at Waddesdon Manor. The Waddesdon people even offered to build a special replica of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg to be ready when we come back in the autumn. They said it wouldn’t matter if it rained. Why, there was a rumour that the Queen, who is interested in these things, wanted to send an invitation for us to give a small evening performance at Buckingham Palace.’

‘Was the rumour true, Monsieur Fokine? The one about Buckingham Palace, I mean?’

‘No, it wasn’t. People say that the King put his foot down. If I have this dancing lot in, he is supposed to have said, who the hell else is going to come through my doors and bore us all rigid? So that was the end of that.’

‘Monsieur Diaghilev must be vey pleased with the way it went.’

‘He is. But he says he’ll never do it again. The whole event, he says, was much riskier than anybody thought. He hadn’t counted on the people cheering and all that. Suppose they’d decided they didn’t like it, he said, the good people of Blenheim Palace and Woodstock. We, the Ballets Russes — my Ballets Russes, as he refers to them — could have been booed off the stage and into the lake.’

Powerscourt told him in very general terms about Alexander’s letters home and the messages they contained.

Fokine began pacing up and down the room again. ‘The business about being English or Russian is something he talked to me about. I thought it perfectly natural. London is pretty overwhelming when you see it and its people in all their pomp at the ballet.’

‘So what did you tell him?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I told him not to worry. I said it was perfectly natural to feel English in England — he’s been here loads of times before seeing family and so on; he speaks English at home — and equally natural to feel Russian in St Petersburg or Moscow. I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you, I told him.’

‘And the other stuff, about the papers and so on?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I’ve been thinking about that, my lord, and my only useful thought is that it concerns the future of the Ballets Russes.’ He paused for a moment and looked out into the square.

‘He could perhaps have seen something on Bolm’s desk when he was being made up; Alexander could have popped in to wish him good luck or some gesture like that.’

‘And what could that have related to?’

‘Well, Bolm is one of the senior dancers, so he’s given a sight of some of the upcoming plans to make sure he knows what’s coming. It could relate to one of two things. They might make a very small ripple here in Chelsea, Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powerscourt, but they could create a huge wave in the Ballets Russes.’

‘Are you able to tell us what they might be?’

‘Yes, I’ll try. You’ve been more than generous to me while I’ve been here. The first could relate to the Ballets Russes going to perform back home in St Petersburg. We, the Ballets Russes, have never danced in our own country. Diaghilev had some fearsome row with the theatre authorities some years ago. Maybe he has sorted that out. Maybe I haven’t been reading my mail, which I hate doing. That could be one surprise. It would cause a sensation all over Europe, the prodigal Diaghilev bringing his art and his artists home again.’

‘And the other thing?

‘I think the other thing would only make sense to somebody who lived inside the company, my lord. It concerns Stravinsky, the composer. There have been rumours for months now that he was writing the music for a new kind of ballet altogether, one that would change the rules. Nobody knows what it is called. Nobody knows when it will be finished. But it is going to be very different, composed to sound like some ancient dancing, and the music of Slav and peasant Russia, not the classical sound of the cosmopolitan elite of the great cities. It will be more primitive, more rustic. Many in the ballet do not like the sound of it. They prefer the classics like Chopin or Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky’s music would bring out the tension between the western capital of St Petersburg and the peasant dances and folk music of the interior. It still has no name, this ballet — but, believe me, any news of its coming could rock the Ballets Russes to their foundations.’

‘Does it have a date for the first performance, the opening night?’

‘Nobody knows the answer to that, but if Diaghilev is in charge, and I’m sure he will be, the first night will be in Paris next year.’