Chapter 17
Zina
Paris, France
It was a few weeks before I returned to Boulogne-sur-Seine.
As I entered the crimson drawing room, I saw the corner table—this time, without the dreaded Ouija board—blazing with tapers and filled with the usual favorites: Countess Bobrinskaya, Vera and Claudia, the poet Boris Antipov.
Olga and Alec took their seats, completing our séance circle.
I nearly gagged when the prince gave me a conspiratorial wink.
At least they had complied with my request: Inspector Allard wasn’t in the room.
True to his word, he was loitering on the premises. I am only here to make sure your séance goes smoothly, he had said as he opened the door instead of Olga.
How generous, I responded coolly. Yet I suppressed a smile and my hand, which itched to reach over and touch the smirk on his face. Smooth it out.
I didn’t, especially since he had recently questioned both Katya and Baba Valya, who showed him the deed to the tearoom, among other things.
His questions had been similar to the ones he had asked me, though they focused much more on the Grand Duke with Baba Valya.
I tried to ask her about what she had told him, where the supposed deed was, but she only scoffed, muttering something about rotten apples.
Thankfully, nothing had yet come of his questioning.
Now I dropped into my seat and met the Grand Duke’s hard gaze in his photograph, forgetting all else.
I would swipe it at the end of the séance.
I only hoped I wouldn’t lose consciousness.
I felt Olga’s eyes on me, watching, waiting.
As if she knew. Either way, this was my first and last séance with her and her émigrés.
I took up Boris’s dry hand, Claudia’s childlike one.
I wanted to avoid the photographs, pretend to do a séance as I had done so many times with Baba Valya.
But I was a stupid moth drawn to the flame.
I looked at each picture, committing each face to memory.
“Close your eyes and think of the loved one you wish to summon.” I shut my own eyes, and a lick of darkness more powerful than any I had ever experienced sparked in my chest. It burned to the very tips of my fingers, which crackled with static. “Are you here? Will you speak to us?”
I felt a surge of salt-infused cold, and my eyes snapped open to a very different kind of darkness. It simmered as though alive. A gust of wind lashed at my cheeks, whipping my hair into a frenzy, knocking over lamps and vases from the tables, paintings and photographs from the walls.
Gasps and exclamations of surprise rose from the sitters, several mon Dieus, hands sketching the cross.
A door banged open, then rapid footsteps as somebody rushed into the room.
I couldn’t catch a glimpse of who it was. Shadows twisted and morphed into the photograph-like figures with glowing eyes from my first séance with Olga and Alec. I prayed the sitters didn’t see what I was seeing.
The ghostly whispering started then. And that dead non-smell, the absence of life, seared into me.
Before I knew it, the shadows rushed at me in a blur of yellow and gray and bloodcurdling cold that turned into that black wave.
The shadows surrounded and crowded me. They reached their dead hands out, skeletal, long nailed, made of air yet with a solid touch as they plucked at my blouse, tugged on my hands, got in my face.
A flash of ice cold as a shadow woman touched my skin with her nonexistent flesh. Borya, she wailed, the nickname for Boris—the one beside me? She thrust her hazy face into mine. I know! My sister, how could he?
I was about to ask what she meant, when a shadow man in an old imperial officer’s uniform floated up to me. Claudia, tell—I—was killed—Crimea. Somewhere—mountains. Dark, so dark. I couldn’t see. I—
A tug on my skirt, and a little shadow girl was looking up at me with singularly blue eyes that shone through the gray. Tell—my brother—I cannot move on.
“Why not?” I forced out.
She shook her head, her shadowy curls trembling.
I swallowed down my fear, reached for the heat, the desire for the dark. I found I wanted to help this little spirit, wondering who she belonged to. “You can tell me.”
I cannot move on because—he cannot move on.
“Who is your brother?”
The dead girl raised an arm and pointed.
I spun around—to face Inspector Allard, who must have heard the commotion and burst into the room.
His eyes passed over the girl, not seeing her or me speaking to her—perhaps to him, I still sat in the same pose I had started in. Instead, he took in the dark, buzzing room, the sitters springing up, talking all at once.
But the séance wasn’t finished. A tall shadow man appeared in his sister’s place—the Grand Duke. He grabbed my face, forcing me to look into his orb-like eyes. The tearoom is the key. His furious whisper was so close that I felt his dank breath. Find it. Daughter. My fortune.
A scream, so like the ones from the tearoom that I craned my neck to peer behind the spirit. I saw the Grand Duke’s shadow chasing Mama’s shadow. Let go of me!
He caught her by the waist and pressed his body against her body, wrapping one hand around her neck.
Forcing her face against his. They are gone, as promised.
Now, belong to me…He lowered his mouth onto hers and grabbed at her skirts with his other hand, greedily wanting to take, to claim, to possess.
No! She pushed him away.
He was panting, his face darkened in outrage. I will kill you.
The next I knew, the candlelight blazed up, the stuffy warmth seeped back in, the séance participants crowded me instead of the spirits.
They all spoke in tandem, assaulting me with questions, their energy wild and boundless and demanding.
I swayed, my gaze snagging on the photograph.
I pushed the darkness from my vision, forced my body to cooperate.
I lunged forward as though in a stumble and swiped the photograph from the table, stuffing it in my skirt pocket.
Then I let myself fall back, feigning the swoon within reach.
But Olga’s gaze was on me. Somehow, she saw through the pretense, my inability to answer questions about the séance. Her energy was a cold nothingness. It crystallized into a wall of ice between us, jagged tongues of glacier that could never melt.
My mind was fuzzy, my body liquid-like, seemingly boneless. I will kill you echoed in my mind. Did he? Was she in some place I couldn’t reach, the visions her way of telling me?
I barely registered leaving the mansion, then sliding into a cab.
Dimly, I felt Inspector Allard beside me, heard his instructions to the driver to take us somewhere; I couldn’t grasp the address.
Not until I saw the round sign above Closerie des Lilas as he guided me onto the patio.
A passing rain must have driven most everybody inside.
There was nobody out except for us and a couple at a nearby table. They looked familiar.
I dropped into a chair. It was wet, but I didn’t care. I gulped at the rain-soaked air.
The inspector handed me a cigarette, and I instinctively inhaled.
A little clarity rushed back in. I heard the chatter of the couple as they spoke in English, American, as far as I could tell; the whiz of the motorcars rushing by on rue Notre-Dame des Champs, though I couldn’t see them past the riot of ivy climbing the patio wall.
A cold glass of apéritif was thrust into my other hand, and I instinctively drank.
When the alcohol eased my nerves, my eyes fell on the couple.
The man was handsome in his smart suit and lively with dark intelligent eyes; the woman, equally intelligent and vivacious, playfully flipped her wavy hair.
Both were plastered and couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
“Who are they? I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere before. ”
“The Fitzgeralds,” the inspector said, with a wave at the couple.
Oh. The writer Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who were waving back with bright, drunk smiles and a Hallo, old boy! “You know them?”
“Yes, I assisted with…an incident at their home.” The inspector was now watching me. “What was that, Zina? The wind? The candles? Something was wrong in that room.”
Find…my fortune, the spirit had said. The tearoom might have been taken by Mama and Baba Valya, might hold a fortune inside, might have been witness to something bad indeed, another murder, the Grand Duke’s.
Blood, tea, police. But this, Olga’s and the émigrés’ stories, didn’t make sense given the Grand Duke’s violence in the visions.
Perhaps the inspector was right, and the Grand Duke did kill Mama, but then who killed him?
And Mama and Baba Valya weren’t completely blameless.
I recalled their thieving friend…Still, a hidden treasure, if Olga knew of it, would be a convenient remedy to her lack of funds.
It would also explain her interest in the tearoom and why she had sought me out.
The stolen photograph in my pocket rustled as I moved, as though in answer.
I took a drag of my cigarette. “You weren’t supposed to be in that room. ”
“When I heard all that noise, I…didn’t know what to think.”
“Did I make a believer out of you after all?”
“How did you do that, Zina?” The inspector sat forward and reached over the table to grasp my hand.
At the contact, I felt the same static as during the séance.
Something hot and tight ballooned in my chest; I could scarcely draw breath.
His skin was rough and calloused, evidence of his work in the field.
He leaned down and studied both my hands, turned them this way and that.
“How did you do that?” he repeated, this time in wonder.