Chapter 18
Zina
“No, I haven’t heard from Olga,” I told Inspector Allard a few days later as we walked through Parc Monceau near rue Daru, my favorite park ever since I could remember.
I tried not to think about the dead body.
Or that dagger. Of course, Baba Valya had taken to visiting her clients in their homes, so I hadn’t been able to speak with her.
Even when she was at the tearoom, the time hadn’t been right.
Worse, that morning, an unsettling symbol formed in my coffee dregs: a woman’s severed head with a crown.
When the inspector asked to meet, I assumed the worst. But he only inquired if I had heard from Olga.
It was a miracle I didn’t blurt out that I hoped never to hear from her again.
“Why do you ask?” I caught his vivid blue eyes on me, prompting that itch.
“It is out of character. I wanted to see if she had reached out to you.” But his energy was as dark and sulfurous as the bottom of the ocean. What was he hiding?
I shook my head. “She hasn’t.”
The sunlit trees were greener, puffier with unfurling leaves, the city fragrant with wisteria and chestnuts.
We followed a path busy with passersby toward the lily pond with its bridge, the sprawling Roman colonnade.
It gave a touch of the exotic to the Parisian park.
As though it were from another time and place.
“Maybe they have gone to Choigny.” I broke the silence, curious to see what the inspector knew.
“It could be. I believe they have an uncle that lives there.”
“I heard Olga and her brother intend to mount a claim against their Uncle Nikolasha, to become the Romanov heirs. All they are missing are the funds.”
“Yes, I have heard the rumor.”
I stopped and faced the inspector. “Have you thought about the distinct possibility that she could be lying?”
He stopped also. “Well, sure, I think that with most everybody.” His eyes pierced me as though to say, Including you.
“Then you must realize she might be lying her way into our tearoom.”
“Or, since she knows it had been her father’s, she thinks something of his, now hers, was left there for her.”
“I cannot imagine what that could be.” I had yet to see this fortune.
We walked onto the bridge and looked into the mirrorlike surface of a pond fringed with trees and shrubbery emerging from their winter slumber.
I rested my elbows on the stone railing, remembering Baba Valya’s tales of murderous rusalki sirens singing for their long-lost lovers in watery depths like these.
“Perhaps she believes her father left her an inheritance of sorts—if he is dead—and that it is in the tearoom.”
This was too close. I ground out a laugh, especially when I caught the inspector watching me closely. “All émigrés dream of long-lost fortunes. But only the Yusupov family has managed to find theirs.”
Inspector Allard pulled up his shirtsleeves, also leaning his elbows onto the railing, the hair on his bare skin brushing against my arm. “I don’t need to ask if you have seen anything resembling…”
“A treasure?”
“Would you tell me if you have?”
“Of course.” Not. I wished to ask if there was progress in Mama’s case. But that would raise the question of the Grand Duke, and I didn’t wish to go there. I watched the water below simmer under a sun with real heat to it.
“So are we going to talk about it—the other night, the café?” The kiss? unsaid.
I felt my face positively flame with heat. “Is that what you do with everybody you question, Inspector?”
“Still ‘Inspector,’ eh? Did you not say you answered my questions?”
“Did I?”
He was silent a moment. “So nothing happened.”
In the light of day, the kiss seemed a poor idea. “Nothing happened,” I echoed with a wink, “Inspector.” But there was something there that was quite real, and sincere, and very brittle. The heat from the sun was suddenly too much. I felt the heat from the inspector’s—Gabriel’s—skin, too.
I was considering changing my mind, when somebody shouted, “Allard!”
Inspector Allard whipped around, in the direction of the voice, which was gruff and rose above those of the passersby.
A tall man in his fifties was stalking toward us, with blond hair streaked silver at the temples and a bushy mustache covering half his face.
Deep lines were carved into his cheeks as though by a blade.
I instinctively knew they weren’t just wrinkles but marks of suffering.
His entire aura exuded it in spurts of midnight blue and a dry golden brown tasting of autumn.
Something told me it was a suffering of his own making.
The man stopped in front of us, planting his large tanned hands on his barrel waist. He glared down at Inspector Allard, who for the first time in our acquaintance shrank into himself, losing his usual self-possession. The man glanced at me next.
I nearly went out of my mind in fear, imagining the dead body lying secreted away in my grandmother’s garden, imagining this man finding out.
But his face loosened, became scattered as though in shock. “You are needed back at headquarters,” he said, his unflinching gaze back on Inspector Allard.
“Inspector Laurent, I am sorry, I was—” he stammered. “This is Mademoiselle Lenormand, Chief. She works at the tearoom on rue Daru, Samovar.”
Inspector Laurent’s features softened subtly, and his eyes shone, or maybe it was a trick of the light.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, mademoiselle. I do hope Inspector Allard has been behaving himself. If you have any concerns or questions, please do telephone me.” He slid a white card out of his pocket and handed it to me.
Upon the brush of our fingers, I felt his energy more vividly than ever—hard and immovable yet restless, with inexplicable regret tingeing the spirit. It confused me. Which is probably why I, for once, could think of nothing whatsoever to say.
He turned back to Inspector Allard. “I was under the impression that you learned all you needed to know from Mademoiselle Lenormand. But if that is the case, what are you doing with her, here, of all places?” His gaze cut between us, razor-sharp, suspicious.
“I asked Mademoiselle Lenormand to—”
“Your excuses are of no interest to me. As I said, you are needed.”
Inspector Allard looked as though he would argue but seemed to change his mind. Shooting me an apologetic glance, he hurried after his superior.
I stared after the two men, entirely at sea, as they receded into the distance and were swallowed up by the green of the park’s trees. Yet my tension eased, the dead body in our garden safe for now.
I retraced my steps through the park, back onto boulevard de Courcelles.
The motorcars dashed by in a noisy chorus of blaring horns, rattling engines, and screeching brakes, the traffic heavy, the exhaust evil-smelling.
I was thinking about whether I had made the right decision with the inspector, and about the unsettling meeting with his superior, when a hare scampered by in front of me.
For a second, I stood there on the street, frozen.
A hare in one’s path was an ill omen. And how was one in the middle of Paris?
“Dearest Zina!” I heard suddenly. If possible, I froze even more.
Olga was waving at me from the curb, an automobile humming behind her with the passenger’s window lowered to reveal Alec at the wheel, also waving at me.
The motorcar must have been a remnant of their father’s former luxury, being a Delaunay-Belleville from the turn of the century.
It was called Sa Majesté le Tsar because the same model had been purchased by Tsar Nicholas.
I knew this because Baba Valya had taken an interest in automobiles soon after factories had sprung up in Boulogne-Billancourt and elsewhere and started to employ Russian émigrés.
But what were Olga and Alec doing here? What did they want?
Most frightening of all, what were they capable of?
“I have been looking all over for you!” exclaimed Olga.
“You have? Why?”
“We are so grateful for your entertaining our dear friends, we wanted to give you a ride.”
“To where? The tearoom is only a short walk from here, as you know.” I tried to read their energy, but it was stingy and evasive, clear as glass yet smelling of nothing but the fumes from their automobile. I didn’t like it. “Well, I best be on my way.”
Olga glanced behind me, toward the park. “Out on a walk, were you?”
“Yes, it is rather nice out.” But the weather had changed again, as it was wont to do in springtime, and the skies above us were the smudged blue of bruises, swollen with unshed rain that I could smell on the air. “Well, it was.” I gave a light, nervous laugh.
“All the more reason to accept our offer. We can give you a ride to the tearoom, if you like.” Her smile was that fixed, frozen thing; the teeth could cut right through me.
“Thank you, dear Princess, but I don’t wish to inconvenience you.” I tried to sidestep her, as when we had first met on rue Daru.
But again, she blocked my way. “No inconvenience at all.”
I glanced at their automobile, Alec smiling and waving at me through the window, toad-like in his swampy green tweed suit. Given the hare earlier, I knew it would be a poor idea for me to accept their offer. “I am sorry, not today,” I said firmly.
Olga’s expression hardened. “Get into the car, Zina,” she said, her voice still chiming but glassy, splintering.
“No.” I backed away from her.
Suddenly, something metallic glinted at me from within the motorcar—a revolver, in Alec’s hands.
Olga followed my gaze, grasping me by the elbow, hard, her long nails digging into my flesh.
“We dare much more than you realize. Now, I do not recommend doing this the hard way. Let us remain friends, dearest Zina. It will make it all much easier—for you, and for us.” I moved to free myself from her grasp, but she held fast. “He will shoot before you get very far. For being so lazy, my brother is a surprisingly accurate shot.”
“All right,” I said, resigned. All the while, I was thinking about that hare, how it would survive in the center of Paris, how it would likely end up beneath the wheels of an automobile exactly like the one I was stepping into.