The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [15]
He glanced at the boy, huddled beneath his greatcoat. Now he was going to prove to himself that he could make a revolutionary from the class they were overthrowing.
The town of Dvorsk was a mere cluster of dark wooden houses spread in a straggling line alongside the railway. Grigori was billeted above the bakery, and even though the baker had only a meager supply of flour to make his bread, at least the place was warm and there was always a bowl of steaming hot potato soup and a crust of bitter dark rye bread to eat and a glass or two of home-brewed vodka to wash it down. His men would sleep on the floor of the bakery. After telling them to get warm and to eat, Grigori rode on to the station. The train to St. Petersburg had been due at seven that evening, but the hour had come and gone and there was still no sign of it. The stationmaster had had no communication, and no one knew when it might be expected—it could be hours, days, weeks even….
After telling the Stationmaster to inform him immediately when he had news, Grigori rode back to the bakery and carried Alexei upstairs to his room, where he put him on the small iron cot that served as his own bed. The boy’s face was chalk-white and his hands icy, but his eyes were wide open, and still transfixed with the memory of horror.
Grigori sat beside him on the bed, talking to him quietly in English, the first language of all good Russian families and one he had acquired at the Politeknik. “So, young man,” he began, “for after tonight you can no longer be considered a mere boy; we must look to your future now and not the past.” He spoke sharply. “I want you to put what you saw from your mind. Your father and mother are dead. You are no longer the son of Misha Ivanoff. Now you are my son and your name is Sergei … Sergei Solovsky. Do you understand?”
Alexei nodded, staring at Grigori with wide, fathomless gray eyes. His father’s eyes.
In fact, Alexei looked so like Prince Misha Ivanoff, whom Solovsky had seen many times at the meetings of the Duma, the Parliament, that he was afraid he might be recognized. He wondered again if he had done the right thing, but with a shrug he told himself it was too late now to turn back; he would just have to keep the boy out of sight for a while. Besides, his experiment excited him. He was going to reverse the natural order of things. He was a common man who because of his education had become part of the new elite. Now he would turn this elite young princeling into a common man—and then he would see what he could make of him.
After telling the boy to go to sleep, Grigori blew out the candle. He wrapped himself in his coat, stretched out on the floor beside him, and was asleep in minutes.
Geneva
Cal Warrender stared into his champagne glass thinking that it had seemed like a good idea at the time. The bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage was softly lighted and luxurious, but outside the windows flurries of snow swirled in the wind before settling in soft white drifts. The sudden storm had closed Geneva airport, and he faced a lonely dinner and the worrying knowledge that he had failed to secure the Ivanoff emerald. He had been beaten to it by a smarter adversary.
Valentin Solovsky was sitting at the bar silently drinking vodka with two other Russians. They looked as glum as Cal felt, and he wondered if that meant that Valentin too had failed to buy the emerald and, like him, was no farther along the trail that led to the “Lady.” Yet if it wasn’t the Russians, then who had bought the Ivanoff jewel?
He knew Valentin was there for the same reason he was: He had been delegated to find the “Lady.” And both he and Valentin knew it wasn’t just for the money, it was for the mines.
When Prince Ivanoff had met the maharaja all those years