Chapter 1
Zina
Almost Twenty-Four Years Later
Instead of going out to some café or cabaret brimming with life, music, and handsome men, the Friday night before it all started I was trapped in the consulting room, preparing for the famous Valentina Lenormand’s weekly séance.
To me, she was just Baba Valya or Babushka—the only family I had left in all the world, and my employer, as I lived and worked in her tearoom.
The consulting room was dim and, as yet, empty. But I felt a velvety midnight-blue vibration to the air as it waited for the night to begin. I sensed the energy, the auras, of people and places as part of my fortune-telling affinity, and this room was no different.
My magnificent cat, Zefir, let out a bored meow.
She was as white and fluffy as the marshmallow-like meringue confections we often served with our tea.
I knelt and gave her a fond caress, sympathizing with her boredom.
My grandmother expected me to assist with her fortune-telling nearly every night, and on séance nights, also with her sitters.
I heard their loud chatter and even louder laughter all the way from the kitchen, where they were commencing the champagne-soaked affair.
Baba Valya’s sitters were the quaint yet frightfully old and out-of-touch Russian ladies of the rue Daru community—the tangle of streets by the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral called Little Russia by most everybody in Paris, comprising Russian émigrés and exiles of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war.
Baba Valya was an émigré, too, having moved from the Russian Empire in the last year of the last century with my mother, Svetlana.
My grandfather had died when Mama was a baby, though I didn’t know how.
Meanwhile, I was born and have lived in Paris all my life.
The closest I came to the old country was Samovar, nestled in the heart of Little Russia on the corner of rue Pierre le Grand and rue Daru.
I went over to the big, round mahogany table, Zefir playfully clawing at my feet, and set out coffee cups for the ladies.
Samovar might have been a tearoom by day, but with dusk, the coffee came out.
As there weren’t enough tea leaves in Russian-style tea brewing, fortunes were whispered over coffee cups, séances performed instead of evening tea service—though the spirits that Baba Valya summoned were as make-believe as the old country seemed to me.
While our fortunes were real—fortune-telling and divination were passed down from generation to generation of the Lenormand family, from woman to woman, each with her own psychic affinity—our séances were fraudulent, embracing cheap theatrics and phony apparitions.
Real séances were complex, requiring the psychic to also be a spirit medium with an affinity for communicating with the dead.
Real séances also had a higher risk of tapping into the dark, unnatural power—the nechistaya sila, or “the unclean force”—threatening all divination and spiritualist practices.
Selling séances was plain good business, my grandmother said, and harmless.
We provided comfort to those poor souls who needed it.
What did it matter if our “spirits” were ultimately fake?
I was just fine with being a fraud and with the real work of fortune-telling, even if mostly under Baba Valya.
Not so with the menial tasks of séance nights, catering only to her clients, only on her terms, with no say and with little reward.
She insisted on doing the séances herself, preferring me to focus on fortune-telling and divination.
I lit the tall taper candles arranged in a circle on the séance table one by one until they danced and glimmered. Baba Valya told our clients that light attracted the spirits with its warmth.
I certainly had never seen any spirit, though I was curious about them.
The candles’ waxy, fatty smell drifted over to me, mingling with the cinnamon and lemongrass I’d burned earlier.
The tearoom tonight stifled, the candles’ smoke catching in my throat.
It reminded me that I hadn’t had a cigarette all day.
I had run out, and Baba Valya abhorred the habit and refused to purchase them.
A whisper came from the doorway, startling me out of my thoughts. “Zina.”
I turned to see the always lovely dark-haired, dark-eyed Katya, Baba Valya’s assistant and my friend, waving me over—elegantly, as was her way.
As a well-bred lady of the fallen, now penniless aristocratic House of Sherbatsky from imperial Russia, and several years older than me, Katya refused to let her emotions show.
But her expressive eyes betrayed her; they glinted like black onyx.
Her usually tranquil sunny-yellow energy spurted fiery orange in excitement.
Each attempt at escape was a fresh challenge.
I rushed to Katya, Zefir at my heels. “When do you think we can slip away?” I asked eagerly in French. I wished to be done and on our way to the cafés.
“Hopefully earlier than last Friday,” Katya said with a sigh. She ran a hand along Zefir’s back before leading me into the hallway—to her ugly paisley carpetbag.
The rue Daru ladies’ chatter and laughter reached its crescendo in the kitchen.
Katya and I rolled our eyes at each other; the ladies were already, predictably, oiled up for the production to come.
I felt the old familiar pang—a desire for my own clients, on my own terms, treating me as a fortune teller in my own right, and paying me what I deserved.
My grandmother gave me a mere pittance. And though I’d had clients, they had always been under her watchful eye.
Most preferred her skill and experience anyway.
It didn’t help that she still treated twenty-four-year-old me like the baby she had taken in upon Mama’s death.
And not just in fortune-telling. The past I was curious about, our family’s beginnings in the old country, was rarely spoken of.
My grievances evaporated when Katya pulled out two brightly colored cocktail dresses, both embellished with beads, rhinestones, and fringe. “You raided your mama’s closet again, you naughty girl!” I gasped.
“She will not know. She never does. She is too busy slaving away in Mademoiselle Chanel’s workrooms to notice much of anything around her.” Even me went unsaid.
I patted Katya’s hand and touched the dresses in wonder, the satin flowing like water against my fingertips. Zefir reached out a paw. I tugged the dresses out of her grasp just in time, or the fabric would have been in shreds.
“Where do you wish to go?” asked Katya.
I thought about sharing that cigarette with somebody I could have a little fun with—Baba Valya loathed when I came back the morning after an outing with Katya, clear that I had spent the night anywhere but in the tearoom with her. “Montparnasse is never a wrong choice.”
“I quite agree.”
We smiled at each other conspiratorially just as Baba Valya’s Russian cut through to us. “Why don’t we proceed to the consulting room, ladies?”
Zefir sniffed at the air and tumbled away—she hated the stale, flowery scents of the old.
Katya and I dashed back into the consulting room, to our hiding places behind the mournful black drapery with which Baba Valya covered all the room’s windows, doors, and mirrors.
This was to prevent the unclean force from flying inside.
Not a moment too soon, Baba Valya appeared in the doorway, small in stature yet with a regal, commanding air, queen of her tearoom, her cloudlike white hair gathered in a pert bun on her head like a makeshift crown.
The rue Daru ladies paraded in after her with the click of long-worn heels and the rustle of plain brown skirts.
I caught the sharp smell of alcohol, of the buzzy, restless anticipation that clung to their figures in a fine purple mist. Their eyes were wide as they swiveled their heads and peered about.
It was whispered on rue Daru that Samovar was haunted.
Though Baba Valya never spoke of it, Mama had been murdered in the tearoom, her murderer never found.
No matter how many times anyone visited Samovar, they searched for her spirit as if we concealed it for pure shock value and she would leap at them from the shadows.
Even if Samovar were haunted, Mama’s spirit had never showed itself to me.
It was a small group that night—the tall, rail-thin Inessa Gippa, a philosopher and writer somewhere in her fifties, waiting for her vampire-like husband to die back in Russia; the matronly, domineering Karina Kolyshnaya, wife of a disgraced imperial general who had disappeared in Paris without a trace the year before; and the bent little old lady, Masha Starinina, searching for a son not seen since going off to fight in the Great War on the Russian front.
The men were missing and presumed dead, except for Inessa’s husband, who was ill but who Baba Valya secretly told me would live for at least twenty more years.
Still, my grandmother cleverly stoked uncertainty, particularly when bills were due.
One séance, no answer; the next, the spirits would grace us with their presence.
Each woman placed a photograph of their loved one against the obscenely large vase of white lilies that Baba Valya claimed ushered in the dead, if they were, indeed, dead.
I kept my eyes firmly on the women now taking their seats at the table.