Satori - Don Winslow [56]
Voroshenin went to Rizhsky Prospect.
His Chekan subordinates, suitably bribed and cowed, arrested her in the morning and took her to the train.
Voroshenin, of course, never turned up.
She knew that she had been outsmarted and was lucky he had let her take her belongings into exile.
This was the story that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna told her son.
How Yuri Voroshenin had taken her honor and his inheritance.
42
VOROSHENIN SET DOWN the file.
Staring out the window, he forced himself to focus on the current applications and not drift into the realm of memory.
The reports, many of them copies of old and handwritten documents, were unanimous in the opinion that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna had fled Russia in 1922, but that much Voroshenin already knew. Apparently she took the quite common eastern route, through Manchuria and into then wide-open China, where she was reputed to have settled in Shanghai. Although she had all her household possessions, she was otherwise penniless — but, again, Voroshenin knew that — and survived by using her wit, beauty, and seductive skills to charm a series of wealthy expatriates and adventurers.
Voroshenin had no doubt about her seductive powers, having experienced them himself. The memory of her lush body, satin skin, and …
According to the reports, Ivanovna had seduced a German nobleman, become pregnant by him, and then refused the pro forma offer of marriage from the young Keitel zum Hel. Sometime around 1925 or ‘26, she gave birth to a son, whom, unreconstructed aristocrat that she was, she christened Nicholai.
Nicholai Hel, Voroshenin noted, was almost precisely the same age as Michel Guibert. It was a coincidence, but the men Voroshenin knew who believed in coincidence were all dead men.
Such as zum Hel, who had died at Stalingrad.
Ivanovna disappeared from intelligence reports until 1937, when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and her house was commandeered, literally, by the Japanese general, Kishikawa. The cited informants salaciously repeated gossip that the relationship became something a bit more than hostess and hosted, and Voroshenin felt an unexpected twinge of jealousy, remembering afternoons in …
The countess might very well have made herself vulnerable to charges of collaboration had she survived the war, but she died of natural causes.
But what of the son? Voroshenin wondered.
On the subject of Nicholai Hel, the files had nothing more to offer. The boy simply disappeared from the record, which was not unusual, Voroshenin reassured himself. In the chaos that was wartime Asia, hundreds of thousands of people simply disappeared.
Now, as Voroshenin sat in his office at the Russian Legation, he wished that he had ordered Ivanovna to be executed — or done it himself — before the bitch could spawn.
But is it possible?
Is it possible that this Guibert is Hel, come for his vengeance?
Just when I am on the verge of making my escape?
43
THEY TOURED ALL the major sights.
Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Bell and Drum Towers, and Beihai Park.
“Which you’ve already seen,” Chen remarked.
He was relieved when Nicholai suggested that they go to Xidan Market to sample the street vendors’ wares. It was bitterly cold now, in the gloaming dark of late afternoon, and they paused by the open braziers and trash-can fires to warm their feet and hands as they wandered through the hutongs of Xidan. During one such hiatus Nicholai finally learned that the driver’s name was Liang Qishao and that he was a Beijing native, as he treated both men to fried dough cakes, mugs of hot green tea, scorched sausages, roasted chestnuts, and bowls of sweet porridge.
Nicholai enjoyed the outing, a colder and somewhat tamer version of his youthful forays into the seedier parts of Shanghai, and the common food was as delicious as anything served in the finer restaurants.
Sated, he said to Chen, “Now I would like to go to church.”