Chapter 11
Zina
Olga and Alec didn’t respond to my note. They showed up in the tearoom three evenings later, in their sparkling evening clothes and impossibly chic fur coats. Though when I looked closer, there was a shabbiness to them.
“Darling!” Olga trilled in her perfect French.
Her brother smiled charmingly. “Dearest Zina, how good of you to write to us!”
“Weren’t we meeting at a café?” Though I was alone, my voice was edgy.
The needle crosses I had put up with Katya—whom I had told about the talisman and my talk with Baba Valya—weren’t working. They kept falling down. So it had been another day of dark, buzzing energy, not to mention burnt baked goods, spilled teas and coffees, and disgruntled tearoom patrons.
Worse, Inspector Allard had stopped by the tearoom again.
He had handed me his glass with a wide smile. I thought you could pour me some more of that tea. It tasted of oranges, of my childhood in Provence, he said, before asking me if I had baked him his chocolate dessert yet.
I scoffed at the preposterous idea of making him anything. He was sniffing around my home, his lack of questions making me suspicious. I gave him a couple of vanilla trubochki wafers to send him on his way. I licked their powdered sugar from my fingers, thinking I should start charging him.
Inspector Allard traced the gesture with his eyes. So is your grandmother in?
No, I answered, suddenly prickly from that incisive blue gaze.
He had left, munching on the trubochki and sipping his tea. I was already regretting giving him the glass.
“Why meet at a café when we can come to collect you?” Olga winked now, peering about. Her energy was restless and colorless, smelling of nothing, like the tearoom. “Besides, you said your grandmother isn’t here on Sundays.”
“She isn’t,” I said, this time feeling the prickle of guilt for keeping secrets from my grandmother. I glanced out the window nervously, at rue Daru with its watchful eyes, Baba Valya’s unseen spies. “Should we go?”
“Why the rush, darling?” Olga eyed the hallway with the stairs on one side, the kitchen and consulting room on the other. “How about that tour?”
“If I didn’t know any better, Princess, your fascination with our tearoom is more than just curiosity. Your father used to own it, no?”
Olga stilled. “Why, yes, he did,” she finally said. “That is why, dear one, we are positively dying to see it.”
“We can be perfectly discreet. The old lady need not know.” Alec winked, but unlike Olga’s wink, it felt disingenuous, as slick and slimy as his energy.
“I feel like a drink,” I said, also feeling strange at their snooping. “A tour can wait, Paris cannot.”
Alec shrugged. “True enough.”
Olga grabbed my arm with a smile that was both sweet and sharp.
“Forgive us, darling. We have been incredibly rude. We are just so curious about your tearoom. Not only because of Father, but how it operates, what you do here, the fortunes you tell. It is all so mysterious. It must hold so many secrets.”
I guided them out onto rue Daru, relieved to be leaving. “It is not so mysterious. We serve tea during the day. After closing time, we read fortunes for a bunch of old ladies. Then we go back upstairs to sleep.”
“What about the old men?” Alec led us to a cab, which hummed and waited at the curb. “You don’t read fortunes for them?”
“A few men, though men rarely believe in fortune-telling.”
“My father believed in it.”
He had indeed. “Men have more control over their fates than women. They don’t need fortune-telling to tell them anything. They already know it. Did your father—?”
“Where shall we go, Sister?” cut in Alec.
Olga thought for a moment, her eyes lighting. “To Father’s favorite place.”
This turned out to be Maxim’s. I had never set foot in the restaurant, as it was entirely too fancy and costly for the likes of Baba Valya and me.
But even I knew it had been a premier establishment of the later Belle époque and a favorite of the Russian grand dukes, princes, and other European royalty, not to mention le Tout-Paris.
“Only”—Olga shrugged off her fur coat—“Zina will need to put this on.”
The fur coat was thrown over me, and I was drowning in Olga’s powerful fragrance, again Chanel No. 5. Though Maxim’s was all the way across town, near the Place de la Concorde, the driver made it a quick ride.
Before I knew it, we were tumbling out of the taxi.
While Olga and Alec paid the driver, I hungrily inhaled the fresh air and examined the famed bistro’s red awning.
It proudly announced Maxim’s, the building’s expansive windows blocked out by thick white drapery that hid the exclusive insides from street view like a reticent, tight-lipped Russian doll stubbornly holding on to her secrets.
I pictured the Grand Duke entering the restaurant that I was about to enter, complete with his top hat, cape, and cane.
I turned back to the cab—and froze, noticing a figure standing across the street.
It was no more than a wisp of smoke. Still, I could see a long, old coat, the gray of moths; mud-spattered petticoats peeking out at the bottom; lace-up boots rife with holes.
But it was the eyes that shocked me. Gray, like its coat, like my own eyes.
Yet with a hungry, reckless desperation to them.
For a second, the figure, the apparition, looked directly at me.
Then I wasn’t sure, for she was looking at the restaurant.
There I heard the ghostly slamming of doors, the echo of sparkling laughter, the avid chatter of ladies and gentlemen from a long-buried past. And I saw a tall, dark figure with curling black hair and prominent features.
A cigar smoked lazily in his beringed hand.
He was bringing it to his lips—when his dark, now-familiar eyes cut to me, or maybe to the figure across the street.
“Mama?” I whispered. And was the man the Grand Duke?
“What is it, darling?” Olga was by my side.
The figures vanished, Maxim’s entrance as empty and unremarkable as before.
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Nothing. Let us go in. I cannot wait to see it.”
But inside, a dark feeling pressed into me, a strange whiff of déjà vu.
As though I had been there before. The pulsing ruby-red lights were lurid and somehow wrong.
And the restaurant’s curvy, sensual Art Nouveau shapes created a twisty Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland distortion to its interiors, decorated with glaring red poppies that seemed to bleed, monstrous butterflies and dragonflies, exotic birds I imagined tearing me apart.
Suddenly, the figure from across the street flickered back to life. She was in front of me now, threading through the white-clothed tables. They were filled with chatting, laughing men and women in evening wear, who didn’t appear to notice us.
I forgot all about Olga and Alec and took off after the shadow woman, through the dining room to the very back of Maxim’s.
The woman stopped at a door, which swung open.
I saw people milling about in the room, which was doused in shadows.
I breathed in the aromatic smoke of their expensive cigars, the fizzing, sparkling champagne soaking the air.
Other scents, too, rich foods and perfumes and eau de cologne.
The shadow woman made her way to a round table where the shadow man from outside motioned her to a chair opposite him.
She sat elegantly, pulling out of her coat a deck of cards.
A shudder rippled through me. I recognized Mama’s favorite cards, their dusky, star-strewn colors drawing my eye. Now I couldn’t glance away even if I tried.
This was Mama. I knew it. I knew her. And I knew she had looked directly at me.
The man was watching her intently as she shuffled the cards, then had him shuffle before starting to lay out the deck, five rows of five cards each.
His eyes never left her face. They overwhelmed me with that dark déjà vu, as if he were looking at me instead of her.
There was something hungry, possessive, even wild in that gaze.
It burned with an entitlement, an ownership. It seemed to swallow Mama whole.
Suddenly, I was being shaken. I blinked and realized I was standing before a closed door, a hand on my shoulder—Olga’s.
“Are you quite all right, Zina?” she asked to the blare of the music.
Smoke and spirits were heavy on the air, and I blinked again. I sensed a rush of blood to the head. “What is this room?”
“Ah.” Olga smiled knowingly. “A private room that Father frequently reserved for himself and a few close friends.”
The privileged, the wealthy, the royal, the people whom Baba Valya first catered to, then started to hate.
Mama’s shadow doing a card reading for the Grand Duke must have been a vision…
Was it part of my affinity, or was Mama’s spirit trying to tell me something?
Given how she had looked at me, I thought the latter.
Even if she couldn’t answer my call, maybe the vision was her way of communicating with me.
Her only way, wherever she was. “Is this where your father met my grandmother and mother?” I asked aloud.
“Probably. Many unseemly ladies circled Father, at Maxim’s especially. Fortune tellers, mediums, witches, prostitutes. They gravitated to the coins in his pocket, the jewels he promised them. Your family excluded, of course!” Her laugh chimed, but not prettily. Like glass splintering.
I didn’t like the way Olga spoke about Mama and Baba Valya.
“Maxim’s was where everybody except the épouse légitime went for a rollicking night out,” she went on.
“Where prostitutes paraded around with twenty-million-franc pearl necklaces that they received as gifts on platters of oysters. Others with their cards or calendars or other crafts of trickery and deception.”
Trickery. Deception. Did she mean those women were tricksters, or those of the occult in general? “Did you spend much time with my grandmother and mother?”