Chapter 11 #2
“Oh, here and there. I was then too young to frequent Maxim’s. I would see them at our house, where they would often do readings for Father.”
“Sometimes for you, too,” put in Alec.
Olga waved him off. “Once or twice, when they moved in. I am not one for the occult.”
“They what?” I was stunned. But if the Grand Duke were my father, it made a kind of sense. Wait, not one for the occult? What did she mean by that?
“Your mother became positively indispensable to Father. He would not make a single decision, do anything, go anywhere, commit to any business venture, without her advice or her cards. Her person.” Olga’s voice was strained. “But your grandmother kept her on a tight leash.”
That I believed. “Did they move into the tearoom after living with you?”
“I am not sure. One day I came home, and they were gone.”
“Can you tell me more about my mother?”
That chiming laugh again. “All in good time, my dear. We have plenty of it!”
Maybe the subject of her father would draw Olga out again. “Did your father become interested in the occult in Paris?” I asked as Alec led us to a nearby table.
“No, initially in Saint Petersburg, as a boy. His mother, my grandmother, like all society ladies, was positively dependent on the occult. It only became his obsession in Paris. The occult was popular here, not a dirty little secret wives kept from their husbands, like in Russia. Your family was simply in the right place at the right time.”
I thought I felt a whiff of that cool, colorless energy, this time whitened to odorless ice.
But it was gone too quickly for me to really register it.
“What was it like, the Belle époque?” I had caught the tail end of it before it had been cut short by the Great War, which I tried to forget.
The lack of food—we served tea and beans—of patrons, especially men.
Though Baba Valya’s séances did particularly well with the French during that time.
Olga’s laugh rang over the music. “Oh, darling, it was marvelous. Money flowing, everything sparkling, and not only the ladies’ gowns.
I was young then, only fifteen and sixteen the two times I visited Father.
But I remember walking the Bois de Boulogne arm in arm with him, sneaking into his soirees, being dragged by Mother to the latest art salesroom or exposition, where she would buy up the acquisitions that became the envy of all of Paris. ”
“What happened to your mother?”
Olga’s energy darkened to gray, sad and wistful and smelling like rain.
“Her heart gave out after she was attacked on the street by a revolutionary. She died a few days later. It had all proved too much for her.” Olga sounded genuinely sorry.
“I wish she had lived. Not long after, Alec and I were able to catch a train with friends to Kislovodsk, then some months later, to Novorossiysk, from where we left Russian soil on an Italian liner. Oh, the relief we felt! Remember, Brother?”
“I shall never forget it. Nor our shabby clothes when we were served by those impeccably dressed waiters!”
“Yes, yes, I almost died of mortification! But we were safe. And we would never have been safe in Russia.”
“But we left a part of ourselves there.” Alec’s voice was distant.
“Of course.” Olga’s sad energy had dissipated. “We went from Bosporus, to Constantinople, to Berlin. And now, Paris. It has always been my home.”
Alec snorted. “You visited it twice before.”
“Still”—she shot him a withering glare—“it has always felt like home to me.”
“But why…?”
“Didn’t we come sooner?” Olga arched an eyebrow. “You know the émigré life. Money is quicksand. Once you settle somewhere, it feels a bit like home, until it doesn’t. And everybody wants to come to Paris, which certainly doesn’t help.”
Her emeralds made me question their money troubles. Other things, too. “Your father disappeared so long ago. Why now?” Why us—me? But I did sympathize, thinking of my own lost father, my desire to find him.
“Mother insisted we stay in Russia, and I was too young to argue. Father had disappeared after the second time I visited Paris, in 1900, when I was only sixteen. By the time I was free, we started to have problems in Russia. And women were discouraged from traveling alone, my brother unwilling to make the journey.”
“I was ill and needed fresh sea air,” Alec retorted.
“Anyway, by the time we were ready, the Great War had started.”
I was no longer paying attention. “I was born in 1900.”
That chime of a laugh. “One dies, one is born. Isn’t it the natural way of things?”
“I suppose.” But I was bothered by it. Inspector Allard was right; the cases into the Grand Duke and Mama were indeed related. “And you have not heard from him since?”
“No. But you think you have? At the séance?” Olga met her brother’s gaze, and they shared that private smile.
I am not one for the occult, she had said.
Did she seek me out solely because her father believed in it?
Or was it an excuse, a way into the tearoom?
“Yes, I saw your father,” I said, skimming over the Grand Duke’s claims, as they would implicate Mama and Baba Valya.
“We can try again. Maybe he will talk this time.”
“Another séance?”
“Yes, maybe at your house, once you remove there.” I was being rude, I knew it, but I needed to secure my next invitation, to try another séance in Olga’s and Alec’s presence, though not in the tearoom because of Baba Valya.
And the Grand Duke’s former home might be a powerful setting for a séance, which might help me.
“What do you think, Brother?” A flicker of that laughing little smile. Were they laughing at me—at the occult? “Should we try reaching out to Papa again?”
“Oh, why not.” Alec snickered. “He cannot be more disappointed in me in death than he was in life, can he?”
“You are positively dreadful, Brother!” Olga swatted him as she gave me a blinding smile, her energy all warm green and sweet again. “Alec has always been jealous of our father’s attention on me.”
“You certainly demanded it loudly enough.” He turned to me. “She frightened the neighbors with her screaming. Then I was left alone while she went off on her rest cures.”
The glare at her brother was back, but her smile at me was perfectly charming.
“Well, what can I say? I am a woman. We need to assert ourselves more than men, or we are overlooked and forgotten, no?” Her green eyes found me.
“Besides, there is nothing wrong with a good rest cure. Everybody in Europe takes the waters, no?”
Everybody rich, I wanted to say but withheld at the last moment, nodding, playing at agreeable instead.
“I knew you would understand me, dearest Zina. You had to survive here in Paris, just as I had to survive, well, everywhere. All women must survive, no matter their station or where they live. No man truly understands this. Now, come”—Olga signaled smoothly to a waiter—“why don’t we properly get to know one another?
Maybe you can tell me more about that tearoom of yours. ”
We did get to know one another. The proper Russian way—with vodka.
By the end of the night, I was just sober enough to evade Olga’s questions about my grandmother’s tearoom but drunk enough to think about Inspector Allard as more than just the police.
His smirk of a smile, those penetrating ice-blue eyes, the mist-like sea blue of his aura, the shadows at its edges.
Truly like the sea. He was starting to haunt me like the Grand Duke’s spirit.