Free Romanov Succession by Brian Garfield Page B

cloudy with dim sight. A woman in white moved courteously away from the bedside and the visitors approached the bed. The old man’s fingers plucked at his lap robe.
    â€œYour Royal Highness.”
    â€œWho is that? Are you Deniken?”
    â€œVassily Devenko and Alexsander Danilov, Your Royal Highness.”
    Vassily bowed briefly; it went unseen. The Grand Duke seemed indifferent. “It is kind of you to come and see me.”
    Alex said, “We wish you better health.”
    â€œYes …” Da, and the quavering voice trailed off. But then abruptly he groped for Vassily’s hand. “You have come.”
    â€œYes, Highness.”
    â€œAre we to be restored then?”
    â€œI cannot say, Highness.”
    â€œBut the Bolsheviks …”
    â€œThe Bolsheviks are finished,” Vassily Devenko said.

7.
    The assassin didn’t put much credence in anything beyond the five senses but the woman disturbed him. He knew who she was; he’d seen her photographs. But he’d never been face-to-face with her. There was no way she could have known him from any other complete stranger. Yet in her eyes at the foot of the stair there’d been knowledge. More than suspicion; certainty. It was there as if she could read him like cold type.
    He drifted into the hunt room and took a glass of sherry from a servant’s tray and walked through the crowd carrying it—not drinking. He overheard snatches of talk—the weather at Marbella, the rationing under Vichy—and he put on a pleasant face but spoke to no one.
    He took his sherry back along to the ballroom and saw the woman in red dancing with an old gentleman. He turned away, not so quickly as to bring attention to himself, and retreated from her sight. He argued with himself: there was no mystery to it, it had been coincidence; she was the sort of woman whose face could create imagined trouble—as if her inscrutable beauty were meant to be invested with whatever you chose to read into it. He had to dismiss her from his concentrations.
    But he couldn’t. It stayed in the back of his mind that the woman could spoil it.

8.
    Alex’s host was awaiting him at the Grand Duke’s door when he emerged from the bedchamber: craggy old Prince Leon on whom the entire retinue-in-exile depended so much.
    â€œGlad to see you here, Alex. Very glad,” he murmured in his slow splendid deep voice. Genuine feeling trembled in it; he gripped both Alex’s shoulders and gave his grave paternal nod, the next thing to a smile; and limped back toward the others. His hair had thinned and gone silver; the lameness of his battle-shattered leg had grown worse; but his eyebrows remained thick and black over the obsidian eyes and he was very much in command of it all. The name at the head of the family was that of the Grand Duke Feodor but it was Leon who had kept them all together in their endless gypsy exile.
    Alex waited for Vassily Devenko to reappear; the Grand Duke was still pressing his dream of restoration.
    Count Anatol Markov had returned to his seat—in the circle yet apart from it, quietly drinking vodka from a chilled glass. He watched Alex as he might watch an inanimate object.
    Alex had been a long time seeking clues to Count Anatol’s composition; it was very hard to understand the chemistries that had produced Irina out of Anatol’s genes. He was dry, distant, epicene in disposition; cynical and suspiciously skeptical of everyone. He was thin as a sapling, the hair lying across his neat little cannonball head in lonely strands. His face was pale and his mouth in repose looked like a surgeon’s wound.
    Tragedy seemed to have hovered around him for decades. At Ekaterinburg in 1918 a Bolshevik fanatic named Jacob Sverdlov had engineered the assassinations of Czar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra and their children. A month after the brutal murders Jacob Sverdlov had been found beaten to death in a Moscow