The King's Commisar

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Visit to a Black Widow

Malory's tame Oxford historian had produced, at Sir Horace's request, and upon two sheets of foolscap, a kind of timetable of known events concerning the Romanov family and the city of Ekaterinburg in May, June and July of 1918. Coming to the end of Dikeston's narrative, with its reference to the Germans, Malory reached for the foolscap list and ran his eye down it. 'Germans, bloody Germans

. . .?' he murmured quietly to himself. They'd be there, they always were. What was it Churchill had said: They're either at your feet or at your throat. He smiled in quiet private malice and then saw the reference:

'Throughout the months of May and June a German train is reported to have been standing, with all blinds drawn, at the station in Ekaterinburg. Source of information: Baroness Buxhoeveden, the Tsarina's l ady-in-waiting, who was in the city throughout this period, in her book Left Behind.' Dikeston, thought Malory as he pushed the list aside, was a fox. The narrative showed him to be something of a clown, and a pompous one at that, but he yet contrived to be everywhere of importance; not an easy matter to achieve, as Malory well knew. A fox then. A fox with a secret he had kept for six decades. A fox who knew where everything and everybody was, during one of the century's more mysterious episodes. He asked Mrs Frobisher to take Dikeston's narrative to Pilgrim's office. It was an hour before Pilgrim responded. Then the intercom buzzed beside Malory. 'Got a minute, Horace?'

Entering the room, Malory noted the satisfaction that was in Pilgrim's expression. It was well-contained, even suppressed, but there.

'Interesting about the Germans, wouldn't you say?' Malory mumbled. "Morning, Graves,' he added, for Graves stood at Pilgrim's shoulder. 'Been busy, have you?'

'At work in the vaults, Sir Horace.'

'Oh?'

'And,' said Pilgrim, 'old Jacques has found pay dirt.'

'Pay dirt, eh?'

'I got the idea,' Pilgrim said, 'of going through the old books to see if there were any references to Zaharoff's pensioners. Jacques has been down there hunting for three days. He found one or two things.'

'Do go on, dear boy.'

Pilgrim was smiling. 'Actually he found three. All dated from the First World War, or from the very early

'twenties. The way Zaharoff did it was to deposit enough straight cash to buy an annuity and cross-refer it back to Senior Partner's notes.'

'He would. Done it myself,' said Malory. 'Which company?'

'Condor Planet Mutual. In Senior Partner's Notes it simply says "Authorized, ZZ." '

'Who was he paying?'

'Widow of a French politician.'

'Briand?'

'That's the one. Then there was some guy in the Balkans.'

'In Bulgaria,' said Graves.

'Who's dead,' Pilgrim said.

'Which leaves one, I think?' Malory's eyebrows lifted interrogatively. "Who is that?'

Pilgrim grinned. 'You're right about the "is", Horace. It's an old lady. Lives in Nice. Name of Bronard.'

'Bronard, eh?'

'Yup. Paid since - guess, Horace.'

'I would suspect nineteen-eighteen.'

'You'd be wrong. Nineteen-twenty.'

'And is the lady unfortunate enough to be a widow?' Malory asked.

'I don't know.'

Malory looked at Graves, who said, 'I don't know, either. But I'm on my way to Nice on the afternoon plane to find out.'

Pilgrim rubbed his hands. 'We're really gonna crack it, Horace! That name Bronard - it has to be the same one, huh?'

'I would imagine so.'

'Sure it does. We're gonna get the whole thing. No more Turners, no more goddam Georgian houses. The whole thing, Horace!'

Malory smiled, I do hope so,' he said.

'Oh, sure, Horace. Dikeston's had his fun. Here's where we get the answers he keeps holding back from us.

It was hot in the town of Nice, and had been so for weeks. So, as always in the summer there, the day's heat came not only from the sun overhead: it came from stones which had long been absorbing it, from paving baking beneath the feet, from asphalt cracking like dermatitic skin to reveal tar shiny beneath. Graves toiled up the steep narrow alleyways of the old town. His jacket was off and slung by a finger over his shoulder, his tie loose at his throat, and sweat made wide wet patches on his back and beneath his arms. He was where the taxi-drivers would not go, for the narrow alleys with their rough projecting stones unfailingly made expensive scrapes on bodywork.

Graves swore as he climbed. The rule still held, that apparently inalienable rule he had noted after Dikeston's first appearance in his life: the rule that said - you will encounter discomfort. You. Not Pilgrim, not that old bastard Malory, but you, Graves.

If he turned and looked back, the blue Mediterranean glittered with invitation no great distance away. In a quarter of an hour he could be in the water, all this behind him, encompassed by a profound feeling of comfort. Pretty girls to look at, long drinks to sip.

He cursed again, and climbed on.

The square was tiny, barely meriting the name; really it was no more than a place where alleys met. In it there was nothing of what the world understands when the name of Nice is mentioned: there was no sunshine, no palms, no sand, no beauty, no self-indulgent luxury. But then, the richest cities always have places for the poor.

Graves, glancing round him, understood that at once. A few feet above, an ancient olive tree thrust its gnarled trunk from a wall and darker shade lay in an inviting pool beneath it. He stepped into its comfort and lit a cigarette, and he stood very still as sweat ran down his body. Five minutes passed. He saw a tin sign half-fastened to a wall opposite. Byrrh it said. An open doorway stood beside it, the room beyond very dark. He levered his moist body off the wall and took the few paces that were enough to cross the little square. It was cool inside the tiny bar. There was a zinc counter, a sink, a few bottles, and water dripping. The woman was in black and her face was much lined from the sun.

'Une bi ère, madame, s'il vous plaît. '

'Pas de bi ère. '

Anything cold would do.

'Pas de glace. '

In Nice! he thought. No ice, in Nice.

He took a glass of white wine, far from cold, and it was sour on his palate. The woman kept her eyes on him.

He finished the wine in a gulp. 'I am looking for Madame Bronard.'

No answer.

'She lives close by?'

Just the black eyes on him. He tried again. Once. 'She must be very old now, Madame Bronard. You know her, madame?'

-A shake of the head.

He walked out into the heat. A man sat on a rock that jutted from a wall. Graves went over to him. 'I am looking-'

'For Madame Bronard. Oui. I heard.'

'You know her?'

'Oh yes.' The man looked at him with a strange expression. 'But do you?'

'No. But I want to see her.'

The man began to roll a cigarette in thick, stiff fingers. After a moment of concentration he looked up again. 'She is very old.'

'I know.'

'Also hostile to strangers.'

'Nevertheless. . .'

A shrug. A thick finger pointing. There was a doorway at the mouth of the second alley; its door stood open to admit air. 'The house there, m'sieu. Third floor. She's-she's not easy, well, to . . .'

Thank you.' Grave's smile was answered with another shrug.

He found stairs of worn stone, uncarpeted, and began to climb. It was refreshingly cool in the house, and there was a draught of sorts down the stairway. Poor old soul, Graves thought, all these stairs to climb!

The door was old, oaken and blackened. Spidery handwriting on a grubby card said 'Bronard'. He knocked, and something scraped at the far side of the door. An ancient voice said, 'Who knocks?'

He saw that a little grille had moved, and tried to look through it. 'My name is Graves, madame, Jacques Graves.'

'What do you want?' A harsh tone now in the weak voice.

'To talk to you. On business.'

'Business?' Shrill and surprised. 'I have no business.'

'I'm from London.'

Silence. He said it again, slowly. 'Did you hear, madame? I'm from London. From England.'

'Oh, I heard. My pension. It's about my pension?'

'Well, yes.' He heard movements inside, beyond the door; the click of a bolt withdrawn. A full minute passed, then the cracked voice said, 'You can come forward.'

Graves raised the iron lever and stepped inside. There was no hall, no passage. He was at once in the little room, and it was clear this was where she lived. A bed stood against one wall; there was one small table, one chair, a small chipped stone sink.

Madame Bronard sat in a wheelchair on the far side of the room. Behind her were narrow floor-to-ceiling french windows, flung wide, and a tiny iron-railed balcony. She was little more than a silhouette against the shadowed light outside, and moreover was dressed head to foot in black. On her knee was a bag of black canvas which Graves's imagination first told him must be a black cat. Macbeth, he thought: Act One, Scene One. You can find a blasted heath anywhere. She said, 'My pension. You are from the company, hein?'

'From a company, madame.'

'Pffft. The people who pay. With the so foolish name.'

'Condor Planet Mutual. No, madame, I am not.'

'Then who?'

'I must explain. May I sit down?' He took a step towards the solitary chair.

'No.' Her hands moved incessantly, like big trembling white insects on the black bag. She said, 'Three pounds English, you understand? Enough when it began.'

He suddenly understood the bitterness.

'But not for years. I have had half a century of grinding poverty. You hear me, m'sieu from Londres?'

Graves said. 'It was never increased?' and cursed himself for failing to think about how much interest the principal would produce, for not asking Condor Planet Mutual for details.

'Increased? Never! I wrote. I begged. They stopped answering. Just the few scus, every month. Who are you from?'

Graves made his tone emollient. It was a weapon in his armoury: his voice could be made very soothing, and it rarely failed.

'A bank,' he said. 'I may be able to help you.'

'Bank?' she said. The cracked voice had an edge like a saw. 'Which bank?'

'I doubt if you'd know -'

'Which bank, m'sieu?' She was the secret, black and midnight hag incarnate, every inch, and growing more agitated by the instant.

'Hillyard, Cleef,' Graves said gently. 'It's a kind of private -'

She said, 'Zaharoff's - it's Zaharoff's bank?'

Graves smiled. 'Not for a very long time, madame. Sir Basil Zaharoff died in nineteen-thirty-six. I believe your late husband worked for Sir B-'

She said, 'I have been waiting.’ The hands never stopped moving on the bag. 'All these years I have waited. So you, m'sieu, are Zaharoff's man?'

Graves laughed gently. 'Well, no, madame. As I told you, he died long ago.'

'Like my pension,' she said, and cackled.

Something made a shiver run down Graves's back - the cool after the heat, he thought.

'Well, we can try -'

She interrupted again, head shaking. 'It's too late. Fifty years too late. If my man had been dead it would be three times more, but there was no proof that he was dead, hein? So old Zaharoff didn't pay me, hein?’

'I'm sure -'

'So am I, m'sieu. Very sure.' He now saw that the apparently aimless movement of the old hands had achieved something. The bag was open at the neck and her hand was inside. 'But I saved something, m'sieu,' she said, 'as you will see -' and there was an ancient pistol in her hand, a massive, monstrous thing; her hands shook with its weight - 'for Zaharoff. He is dead, so - for his agent.'

Graves said, in astonishment, 'But -' Her forefinger was tightening, and the wavering pistol was enormous.

She fired.

'Just there,' said the man in the square to the agent-de-ville. 'I was sitting on that stone, smoking a cigarette. Heard this loud bang and looked up, and she came flying backwards over the balcony, wheelchair and all. My wife went to her and I ran upstairs, but the man was dead. My God, but there was a hell of a hole in him, did you see it?'

'I'm not surprised. Kill an elephant with that gun - God knows where she got it. They're rare, guns like that,' said the agent-de-ville. 'You'll come down and make a statement?'

'Naturally.'

'What a way to go, eh? Surprising, isn't it,' said the agent, musing, 'what fate has in store? An old lady what was she? Eighty-six - an old lady actually flying off to Heaven!'

The man chuckled. 'To Hell,' he said. 'And I never doubted she'd fly there.'

The agent looked puzzled. 'No?'

'Yes - on her broomstick!'

In the height of the dog days, it made a very pleasing story: Mystery of the Banker and the Crone - that was the way most of the English papers played it. The French press had more fun: 'Was it an assignation?' asked Nice-Matin. There was an inside page feature on the celebrated strange tastes of the British. Zaharoff was not mentioned, of course, since Mme Bronard, who would gladly have yelled curses on his name from the rooftops, was silent in refrigeration, and nobody else who was willing to talk knew about him. But Hillyard, Cleef were in the papers again. Senior executives of private banks are not shot every day by old ladies wielding revolvers so powerful that the recoil hurled the firer to her death!

And this was, in any case, one of the men, and certainly the banking house, which had figured so recently and so much in the still-extant controversy over Turner's great painting.

'Lousy goddam jokes!' Pilgrim complained. 'They have this great reputation for wit, the English, but there are no laughs, just sniggers.'

'Usually,' Malory agreed.

'I was at a Bank of England lunch.'

'Luncheon, yes.'

It was the Governor, too. Some discussion on spelling. He said -' Pilgrim attempted an Old Etonian languor-'he believed everybody at Hillyard's could spell necrophilia.'

Malory frowned. 'Naughty.' He paused. 'We will live it down, Laurence.'

'I'm not so sure. You may. I won't.'

'Rubbish.'

'Rubbish it's not, Horace. Maybe it's something in the air here. I never goofed in my life before. Here I goof all the time. Who set this ball rolling? I did. Who got Graves shot? Who had to be saved from Pepe Robizo? Every time, the answer's Pilgrim.'

Malory said with a kind of gruffness: 'My fault really, m'dear boy. I insisted on following through.'

Pilgrim shook his head. 'So I'm going,' he said harshly.

'Where to?'

'Back to the States. I tell you, Horace, on Wall Street I feel safe, my feet are on rock, my head's clear. Here I make mistakes. I don't feel I have a foothold. I'm going back where I can operate!'

'You're wrong.'

'No. We can't have a joke running this place and I'm turning into a joke. Every time we look at each other, Horace, every time we talk, Pepe Robizo'll be there with us. No thanks.'

'I repeat, you're wrong. The joke who ran this bank was me. That's why you came in and I moved over. In any case, the joke's on me, too.'

The difference,' Pilgrim said, 'is that you're an old, respected City figure. I'm Johnny-come-lately and all those bastards are enjoying it!'

Malory pursed his lips. 'You'll go back and do what?'

'What I did before. It's no problem.'

'It is for me, dear boy. Lady Malory intended that I retire. Now Lady Malory is likely to be severely displeased and I tell you that is no small matter. In any case, there's the Grim Reaper-1 hear the scythe swish occasionally. It's not on, you know.'

'It's on,' Pilgrim said, I see two scenarios here. The first is where I go and you take hold again and everything slides nicely into place. The second is where I go back to Wall Street and some other guy comes over here and runs things. Neither way should the names of Pilgrim and Hillyard, Cleef be bracketed in this City again!'

Sir Horace spread his hands. 'It must, of course, be up to you.'

'And I've decided. Naturally, I'll send my apologies to Lady Malory -'

'She collects amethysts,' Malory murmured.

'She does? I'll be sure to remember that. Anyway, you won't have to hold the baby long, Horace. Wall Street's full of bright young -'

'Yes, isn't it!' said Malory.

Within days Pilgrim was in New York, Harrods were packing his impedimenta, and Horace Malory, once again in control at 6 Athelsgate, was spending another fraught hour in contemplation of the most recent instructions from Dikeston. In order to obtain the next - the sixth, and penultimate instalment of the narrative, certain conditions were to be fulfilled. Sir Horace frowned as he read and re-read the typed sheet, sniffing for hidden snags but unable to detect them. That there would be snags he did not doubt, and he was reasonably sure the Turner painting must be involved, because: Six large copies, photographic or otherwise, of the painting Naval Vessel and Plymouth Hoe now in your possession, are to be despatched, one copy each to the following institutions, together with the number appropriate thereto.

There followed a list of six United States banks. Opposite each name appeared what looked like an account number, consisting of two or three letters and up to a dozen digits. The consequent happenings were not described but it was clear to Malory that, where Dikeston was concerned, nothing came cheap. The copies had been made, for speed's sake photographically, on 10 x 8 inch transparencies.

He buzzed for Mrs Frobisher. 'Will you send one of these to each of these.'

'Yes, Sir Horace.'

'Air freight them. And get them off today.'

'Yes, Sir Horace.'

Six American banks, Malory noted, his thumb stroking idly at the numeral which hung upon his watch-chain.

Next day he was taking tea in mid-afternoon when the call came. 'A Mr Ed Sochaki is on the line,' Mrs Frobisher reported, 'from the Custerbank in Santa Barbara, California.'

Malory glanced at his watch. Mr Sochaki, he reflected, must be one of those tiresome people who went to his desk at seven in the morning. He picked up the phone. 'Hello, Mr Sochaki?'

'Sir Malory?'

'Horace Malory speaking, yes.' Curious how often people got it wrong.

'I got your picture.'

'Must be a little puzzling to you,' Malory said. 'Matter of fact it puzzles us, too. Eccentric client, just following his instruction. Haw, haw.'

'Yeah, well we got something for you. Deposited years ago, along with the instructions.'

'Oh? Well, good,' Malory said. 'What is it?'

'Looks like some papers. In a packet.'

'That's fine, MrSochaki. I'd be grateful if you could send them - express if you would. '

'Why, sure. Be glad to. There's just one thing.'

'What's that?'

Sochaki said, 'Well, it sounds kinda crazy, but this packet only gets sent to you after we read something in the newspapers. You understand that, Sir Malory?'

'At the moment, no. What is it you are required to read?'

'That you people have given something to your country.'

'We do it all the time,' Malory said. 'It's called income tax.' But he knew what was coming. And it came. 'A painting. By a guy called Turner.'

'When you read that,' Malory said sadly, 'then you send the packet. Not before?'

'Why, no. Our client's instructions -'

'Cannot be varied?'

'Certainly not, Sir Malory. This is the Custerbank of California.'

Malory thanked him and hung up.

Later in the day something drew him to the boardroom. It was an old-fashioned place, not often used, furnished in heavy Victorian mahogany. The long table shone with polish; the hide upholstery remained soft from much waxing over the years. For Horace Malory the place was full of people and memories. Half-close his eyes and he could see his father again, frock-coated at the side table, pouring one of the brandies that finally felled him at eighty-eight. His grandfather, too, had sat in this boardroom, though Malory, hardly surprisingly, had never met him. Few people, in fact, actually believed in Malory's grandfather, who had been born before the French Revolution (i.e, in 1786), had served as a lieutenant in Collingwood's flagship Royal Sovereign at Trafalgar, had fathered his only son at the age of 68 in 1854, and had lived to ninety on a diet of lobster and Mosel wine. At Malory's birth, his own father had been fifty years of age, and the three of them therefore spanned better than two centuries. Years of increasing prosperity, too, Malory thought. Until now. There were cigars in the humidor, and as he stood selecting one, his eye fell upon the chair that was the only piece of oak in the room ; it was dark and very old, and of a design that was probably Greek. A tiny silver plate affixed to the side of one arm bore the initials ZZ.

Malory lit the cigar with care, and in the wreathing fumes had little difficulty in picturing Sir Basil seated in the chair.

'What would you have done?' he murmured. 'Would you have given away three million and more in money?'

On this day, it was as though he heard the answer in his head: 'I did, I did.' Malory smiled. 'Yes, but with a purpose. Always that.'

It was extraordinary how clear the image was: the blazing eyes, the little Second Empire beard and moustache, the authority. Malory daydreamed infrequently, but his visual memory was powerful, and as a young man he had conversed often with the great man, and always in this interrogatory style; somehow, under the influence of Zaharoff's personality, people discovered answers to their own questions. Three million and more to find out - what? That the Tsar was dead, had been murdered in Ekaterinburg? At least I'd know, then, he thought. Hell of a price, but I'd know. A long echo seemed to float down the years, of a light voice, faintly accented: 'It is necessary always to know.'

Malory smiled to himself. He'd tell his wife tonight, and she'd be impatient, but then she believed in ghosts. He didn't: but his memories were powerful and could be used. He reached for the telephone on the side table beside the chairman's place. 'I should like to talk to whoever administers The Turner Bequest,' he told Mrs Frobisher. 'And then to the Press Association, Reuters, and - no, make it the Associated Press first!’ Mr Sochaki's expressed packet arrived two days later, bearing Pan American stickers.