Autumn Leaves Read online

  I smoked half a packet sitting on that windowsill, watching as the breakfast menus were put away and the lunch ones put out, watching hungry crowds emerge from nowhere to drink and talk, watching as the day swelled, as the wind teased the reddening leaves from the trees before dropping them on the road. I even managed to read some of the newspaper I’d bought, catching up on the gossip and politics, until an elated faintness forced me down into the street for food.

  A taxi honked at me from across the street as I walked to the Café de la Rotonde. I ignored it; I was distracted by being here, by the meal I would order now that I was finally relaxed enough to eat. I’d even chosen a loose-fitting dress in anticipation of a feast, emerald green cut into a wide-skirted style with a loose sash at the waist, embroidered with black roses at the neckline, with my favorite black velvet opera cape to complete the feast-feasible ensemble. My star-patterned shoes had been waiting in my cupboard and their heels tapped on the cobbles as I tried to decide if I wanted my first meal here to be moules frittes or scallops still in their shells or—the taxi honked again as it parked.

  “Kiki!” the driver called before his long legs climbed out of the car. I knew those legs, that voice, that face with its flop of dark hair.

  “Theo!” I ran across the street and straight into his arms. “Oh goody, you still taste like licorice drops.”

  “Kiki, you still take my breath away. What a greeting! I didn’t realize how much I missed you until this moment.”

  “Theo, don’t you know that ardent desire is not at all elegant?”

  “I’m Russian. If I don’t have desire, I have nothing.”

  “You’re a prince and a Romanov. You’ll always have that.”

  “What good is being a prince if I have to work half the night for a handful of francs?”

  “Only half the night? Then you’re doing better than most. Besides, if you didn’t have a taxi we might never have met.”

  “I’d forgotten how much you liked my taxi.” His hold around my waist tightened.

  “It’s my first night back in Paris. We need dinner and drinks to celebrate. You’re taking the night off work.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” He gave a mock salute, then tucked my hand in his arm and walked me to the café.

  Amid the glitter and chatter of the Rotonde, Theo made small talk as only a prince can, polite yet gossipy with a perfect memory for all the details of family and fate. In the soft, smoky light he looked exactly the down-at-heel aristocrat, with his expertly cut suit shiny with wear, his shirt-cuffs almost frayed, and his tall, slender elegance a little hollow with hunger. Theo was Feodor Alexandrovich Romanov, nephew to the murdered tsar of Russia, born in the Winter Palace in what was now Petrograd. He was a prince in a family of princes, princesses, grand dukes and duchesses, and emperors just a whisker less powerful than gods. Their fall in the Bolshevik Revolution had been swift and spectacular. Those who had escaped the revolution with their lives rarely escaped with any money. They had washed up in all corners of Europe, abandoning their careers as nobility to become champagne salesmen or fashion designers or, in Theo’s case, a taxi driver. Last year I’d hailed his taxi, not knowing we were headed to the same party. Once I found out, naturally I had to know more about this high-class cabbie. That night had turned into a summer spent exploring anywhere his taxi might take us.

  “I searched for you last autumn, Kiki, but I was told you had gone home to Australia for your mother’s funeral. Please tell me that’s not true.”

  Several answers crowded my tongue but none took flight, leaving me just blowing smoke at the sparkling reflections in the café mirrors.

  “Oh, my golden one.” He looked at me with proper sorrow in his face. “I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve any more suffering.”

  “Neither of us does. At least I had a funeral to go to.”

  There had been no funerals for his family, he’d told me, no ceremonies to mourn his entire way of life that had been killed off by the Revolution. As a consequence, much of his family was in perpetual mourning. This information had been revealed in little flashes through the summer, smoking at my windowsill, under the stars on the beach, wandering a riverbank near the former front line. The long summer afternoons had seemed timeless, or out of time, as though we had somehow survived past the end of the world and it was just the two of us, wandering the earth. Then a car would splutter or a train rumble past, his stomach would grumble and I would need a cigarette and we would return to the present and its subterranean sadness.

  I took the cigarette he lit for me and handed him a refilled champagne glass in return, the wine glowing in the reflected, refracted light. Our starter of pâté had been taken away, our ashtray swapped for a clean one, as we swapped sympathetic looks for the suffering we had each endured.

  “But I have all my immediate family here.” He sipped his champagne; the warm lights of the café made his eyes seem especially dark. “Though sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

  “Quite. Why do you think I came to Paris in the first place?”

  “Because it’s Paris?”

  “Well, there is that… are you still living with your sister?”

  “It’s not Irène I’m talking about. It’s Felix.”

  “I’ve never met your brother-in-law.”

  “That was deliberate.”

  Our moules frittes had arrived, spicy with garlicky tomato, messy and sensual. I broke open one of the shells and slid the mussel into my mouth, licking my lips to clean up the sauce that clung to them. I was so glad to be here, with him, the happy patter of the other diners over the accordion playing in the corner, cigarette smoke mixing with the smells of sweet alcohol, fresh tomato, cooked cream. Theo watched me with an expression that wavered between wanting and wistful.

  “Oh, Kiki…”

  “Have a chip.” I dipped one in the sauce and fed it to him. “And tell me about Felix.”

  “Felix,” he said as soon as he’d swallowed, “Felix is up to it again.”

  “Up to what?”

  “His obsessions, his political meddling, just like last time.”

  “What happened last time?”

  Theo gave me an incredulous look.

  “Of course, Theo, how could I be so dense? Rasputin.”

  “Rasputin.” Theo nodded. His brother-in-law, Felix Yusupov, was one of the men who had murdered Rasputin six years ago. Rasputin was the shaman, seer, holy man that Theo’s aunt, the tsarina, had kept at court to help heal her sick son. All Rasputin had really achieved was to make the German tsarina even more unpopular.

  “But how is this the same?”

  Theo frowned. “Felix had never been passionate about anything except clothing, parties, and Irène. Then he heard Puriskevich’s speech in parliament denouncing Rasputin as the Antichrist. Overnight he became inflamed with desire to rid Russia of ‘this devil,’ as he put it. Felix was extreme in his views and in his actions. It was harrowing to see him change from an urbane prince to a brick-throwing protestor, albeit one in a Savile Row suit. Since then, his extreme views seem to come and go… though what I suspect is that he hides his views from Irène, and indulges them with his increasingly extremist friends. Dima—my cousin, Dmitri Pavlovich—was one of his political coterie, and may still be, for all I know. They were always extremely close. Can one say suspiciously close?”

  “It depends what you suspect them of.”

  “Of being lovers.” Theo shrugged. “I’m not fussed about that. In any case, I think they left that particular peccadillo behind in London with their youth. But I don’t want to see Irène hurt, and she will be, if Felix continues with this obsession.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Dima, your cousin?” Theo shook his head. “I haven’t spoken to him since he was exiled. Not since the Revolution. We… don’t, though I know he’s in Paris.” Theo dipped a chip in the sauce but put it down with a sigh.

  “So, come on—what does Felix want?”

  “He wants to reverse the Revolu
tion.”

  I laughed and Theo looked startled.

  “I’m not joking.”

  “But that’s preposterous! The entire White Army couldn’t do that.”

  Theo played with a fork, his head bent so that the lights shone in his dark hair.

  “Theo, Russia has just spent two years in a horrible civil war. There were rumors that all their war allies helped.”

  “I know, I heard that too…”

  “So, if Denikin and Wrangal and Kolchak, with the help of London and Paris and Rome, couldn’t unseat Lenin, how does your brother-in-law think he can manage it?”

  “With the Fascists, he says. Have you heard of them?”

  I had heard of the Fascists, but not since last year, not since my last mission for Fox. I nodded.

  “Well, you’re one of the few, Kiki. Where did you—”

  “Journalist friends.” I waved my hand dismissively; I didn’t want to tell him about Fox or Tom or my other life. “Where did Felix meet a fascist? Was it the German or Italian type?”

  “Russian, actually, among others.” Theo surveyed me with a colder look than I had seen from him before, calculating and regal. “You know your groups, I’m impressed. Actually, I’m glad. The last few weeks have been so…” He shook his head and shook off his princely stare, his eyes wandering over the red and gold décor of the café. Some society women tried to catch his eye, they looked like American tourists, but if he saw them he didn’t show it. I called the waiter for two whiskies and another packet of Gauloises.

  “Explain everything to me, Theo. Unburden yourself.”

  “Most beautiful Mademoiselle Bouton. I don’t know how I survived without you.”

  His eyes had lost their aristocratic courtesy and became windows into the abyss of his loss, a loss that spanned a continent and a three-hundred-year reign. They held me in place as surely as his hand held mine. I might have stayed like that, if a waiter with the whiskies hadn’t interrupted my thoughts.

  “Felix the fascist. Who does he meet with?”

  Theo sent a plume of smoke to the ceiling and leaned back in his seat as he considered the question. “Well, he used to meet with another émigré, some kind of art dealer, called Arkady Nikolaievich. The English we meet refer to him as Lazarev with somewhat of a sneer, and I’m not surprised. Nadya, our maid who’s been with Irène forever, called him an absolute peasant, which is her worst insult. I think Arkady Nikolaievich is the son of a school teacher or provincial clerk or some such. Anyway, Lazarev might be a nobody but the men he introduced to Felix appear to be somebodies. ‘People like us,’ Felix calls them, by which he means princes and dukes and such.

  “But Felix hasn’t met Lazarev for a while, as far as I know. Mostly Felix meets another man called Edouard. They discuss secrets, it seems, as their undertones stop as soon as anyone else walks into the room, when they either stare at the intruder or pretend they were talking about shooting or riding or the cigars that neither of them smoke. I don’t know how Felix can stand to spend time with that Edouard, with his high-pitched voice and soft, insinuating touch. Yes, touch—he seems to be always sliding his hand over his trousers or the chair or Felix’s arm. I can’t help but think of him as a snake, pale and vicious and obviously lethal.”

  Lazarev—Fascists—this had too much to do with my previous mission. For a minute, I forgot the past year. All that existed was this city and this moment, as I was plunged again into the excitement of possible spy work. Last year, my spy mission from Fox had been tied up with my gossip columnist work, a mission tailor-made for a society Parisienne. I had a feeling that my next mission would be along similar lines… not that I was admitting to myself that there would be another mission, that I not only expected it but welcomed it, that I wanted, even needed, that kind of sweet danger. I could admit none of that. I could not even countenance the idea that I was mining Theo for information. No, I was simply being a good friend, an excellent listener.

  Theo had even less idea of what I might be doing, judging by the way he kissed my hand which he then laid on his thigh. I sipped my whisky to stop myself from jumping in with revealing questions, my tension confined to my jiggling foot.

  “Anyway, Edouard,” Theo picked bits of tobacco off his tongue with too much distaste for such an ardent smoker, “ ‘Edouard’—he wants me to call him Eddy, in the English style, but I refuse—wants us to join him in ridding the world of Bolshevism and establishing a new hierarchy based on, oh something outrageous, ‘European purity’ or ‘blood and honor,’ something like that. I can’t listen, it makes me sick.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Kiki, really… well, because it advocates more violence, more… because I’ve seen what this type of fervor does, this… fanaticism. In Petersburg—Petrograd—whatever they want to call the city, servants we trusted were suddenly roaring outside the doors, they let filthy robbers into the bedrooms via the kitchen, they even ripped the tiles off the boiler and smashed them as examples of bourgeois privilege. Of course, we’re far above the bourgeoisie, and they’ll just have to replace the tiles eventually as the boiler needs some sort of insulation…” Theo rubbed his brow, his eyes wide and staring at a place far away from a sweet Parisian autumn, a place where the snow was bloody and the air filled with screams.

  “But I’d seen it before, this rage, this derangement, with Felix over Rasputin. Felix really should have been one of Peter the Great’s generals, he has the right kind of ferocity. He thought of nothing else but Rasputin for weeks. He put the plan into deadly effect and didn’t recoil from, from…” Theo pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. “This is hardly the talk of reunited lovers.”

  “My apartment can be our sanctuary.”

  “It always was.” But his slender suited body stayed hunched over his glass. “Well… Rasputin’s body was fished out of the river with a bullet hole or two as decoration. If Felix didn’t actually pull the trigger, he certainly cheered on the man who did. He was banished to his country estate and now he’s in Paris with the same preoccupations: ridding Russia of its undesirables through fire and blood.”

  “Who will light the fire with him? This Eddy character?”

  “Yes. Felix can’t help boasting about it. Edouard is some kind of minor English peer, but he knows German princes, English princes, all manner of nobility. They all went to the same school, I think, as Edouard never mentions anywhere else, no parties, no country weekends, no marriages, none of the ways I know the sons of other Russian families… it seems an odd system, to all go to the same school, but then I have always thought our English cousins were slightly odd.”

  “Your English cousins?”

  “Yes, the current princes, David—sorry, you know him as Edward—and Albert, Henry, and George. Admittedly they’re distant cousins, but we tend to keep an eye on each other.”

  The heirs to the British throne; I lit another cigarette to stop myself laughing or scoffing or in some way betraying my middle-class outpost-of-Empire origins.

  “Edouard comes to our flat once a week and Irène does what she always does when she’s furious: she hides in the kitchen to eat biscuits, getting under cook’s feet and generally making all the staff nervous. She can’t stand this Edouard any more than I can, not for his views, but for the way he makes her redundant. Edouard’s world is a man’s world and women are a nuisance at best.”

  “And at worst?”

  “A hindrance to be disposed of. He brushes her off with breathtaking rudeness. As Felix supports him, Irène feels she can do nothing; she won’t be the nagging wife, she told me. I come home from a day in my taxi and Irène is in the kitchen alcove laying waste cook’s best macarons, the maids keep dropping things and sniping at each other, Felix and Edouard are in the front room whispering over vodka, and I can hardly stop myself from getting into a fight. I couldn’t stop myself, a few weeks ago. It wasn’t that Irène was in tears, or that I was exhausted and stank of cigarettes, or that Edouard sneered at me. It was Felix
’s manner. He’s started to treat me like a servant, as though by working I have demeaned myself. This is a man who got himself excused from serving in the war!”

  “So what would he know?”

  “Exactly. He ordered me to fetch him and Edouard drinks, and then caviar, then he actually dismissed me! I couldn’t help myself, I sat down and pretended to be interested in all their nonsense. Felix was furious, he considers me an embarrassment, but the snake indulged me and tried to pander to what he assumed were my notions of lost prestige, hatred of commoners, and desire to restore the old order. His eyes slithered over my dirty work suit and nicotine-stained fingers as he talked. All I could get from him was that he was finding ‘like-minded men’ to ‘restore the world to its rightful order.’ ”