City of Shadows Read Free Page A

did she do then? Grow wings?”
    “That’s the trouble with you Jews,” he said. “No soul. She’s wandering alone in Siberia, she’s found by true Russians, they smuggle her over the border, she’s helped again, crosses Poland, arrives in Berlin. She’s hurt, destroyed by grief, lost her mind and memory for a while maybe .. . . ”
    “Please don’t tell me what I think you’re going to tell me,” Esther pleaded.
    “Yep. She ends up in a German loony bin. It makes sense.”
    “Oh, it absolutely does,” she said. “And which of the grand duchesses is she? Olga, Tatiana, Marie, or Anastasia?”
    “Tatiana. One of the inmates recognized her from a magazine.”
    “That proves it, then,” she said. “How did you hear about her?”
    “Word gets around,” he said vaguely. Nobody had his ear pressed more firmly to the ground than Prince Nick; he could hear a penny drop in Kazakhstan—and make a profit from it.
    She laid her hand on his sleeve. “Don’t do this, Nick. Whatever’s in it for you, don’t do it.”
    “This is sacred, Esther, in the name of God. You think I’m out to make money from it?”
    “I bloody know you are.”
    “You hurt me.” He put his foot on the accelerator. “All right, maybe she is Tatiana, maybe I help her to her inheritance, and maybe I take a percentage, but I tell you . . .”
    He took his hands off the wheel to slam them on his chest. “If I do this, I completely do it for my dead czar, for the soul of Russia, for the Holy Church.”
    “Oh, shut up,” she said.
    It’s another of his schemes, she thought. Like the time he tried to marry the kaiser’s aunt. It’ll come to nothing.
    He was driving like a mad thing now, punishing her. People came out of their doorways at the sound of the car, only to find it had already gone by, leaving them in its dust.
    It didn’t worry her. She’d got used to being out of control and cling ing on to life as it dragged her helter-skelter through its scrub, lucky when she didn’t encounter anything too hard, not yelping when she did. At the moment it wasn’t hurting too much, which was all she could ex pect of it. Numbness was her chosen state; after being in hell, limbo had much of heaven’s attraction. Anyway, her body enjoyed being whipped by warm air. Physical sensation was the thing.
    He was slowing now to look at some written instructions that he had, and crawled until he saw a sign above some gates, then turned into them, fast. She had just time to read the word “Dalldorf ” before they were haring up the drive, scattering pigeons and rooks.
    Dalldorf, then. A place with such echoes that its name had entered the Berliners’ language as a euphemism for madness. He belongs in Dalldorf. Let you out of Dalldorf, have they? Carry on like that, you’ll end up in Dalldorf.
    The building was large and, on a day like this, didn’t look oppressive, though one felt that it would if it could. A few people wandered the lawns at its front, watched by a man in a white coat.
    The front door was opened by a large porter; their names and busi ness were inquired into before they were allowed into a big hall smelling of antiseptic. The place was ordered and almost empty. Noise—a lot of it—was somewhere in the building, but not here. They were shown into the office of the matron, a large woman with starched white cuffs and cap, who asked them what they wanted. She had a bunch of keys hang ing from her belt.
    Nick kissed her hand. “Prince Nikolai Potrovskov, madam. This is my secretary.”
    He never gave her name at first meetings in case its Jewishness put people off. He catered to anti-Semitism in other people without having any himself; Jew, goy, black, white—they were all the same to him as long as they served his purpose. Esther often wondered whether his to tal amorality caused his total lack of prejudice, or the other way around.
    Anyway, he’d discovered that people were flustered by her face and that this was useful,