The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [219]
“She was physically fit so the birth wasn’t too difficult, and I’ll never forget the love on her face as she held the baby toward me. There, matiushka,’ she said proudly. ‘She is just as beautiful as Anouska.’
“Of course she wasn’t. She was a funny-looking little thing, almost bald, and her nose looked too big for her tiny face, but to her she was a miracle of beauty. She gave the child the Russian family names and her stage name, Adair. Anna Adair.
“With Anna’s birth she seemed to come to life again. Six months later she began looking for work and I was left to bring up the child. There were just two things I wished: that Misha could have seen his granddaughter and that Zev could have been there to share her with me.
“Sometimes Azaylee worked, sometimes she didn’t, but she was always involved with some man or other, usually bad ones, and she was still in and out of the sanatorium. Until one day when Anna was six, she just went into the clinic and never came out. Her mind had finally cracked under a depression so acute that she became a virtual zombie, not even able to recognize us or communicate. At first I used to take Anna there to visit, but it was no good for her and finally I stopped. That’s when I met Tariq Kazahn again, in Paris, and Anna’s whole life changed. At last she had a real family.
“At this point too I discovered that most of Azaylee’s money had been squandered by her lovers and that she was virtually penniless. My own money was being eaten up on her clinic and doctors’ bills. They told me it would make no difference to her if I put her in a state institution because she didn’t even know where she was, but I would never do that.
“Azaylee died tragically in a fire at the clinic in 1972. Despite my sadness I was glad she had finally escaped from her years of torture and glad that Anna would no longer have the burden of knowing her mother was insane. Ava Adair was a middle-aged woman but all anyone talked about in the newspapers and magazines was how beautiful she had been, and how talented. They said there would never be anyone like her and that she and her movies would be remembered forever. And I was left alone to bring up twelve-year-old Anna.
“There was not a great deal of money left,” she said quietly to Cal. “Most of what I had had gone on Azaylee, and now I was left with a mountain of debts for her medical care and the house. I would have to live carefully if I was going to see young Anna through college and into a career and a life of her own. I only hoped I would be spared long enough to accomplish my task.” She laughed. “I didn’t realize then that maybe I would be spared too long. Because you see, Cal, if I had died earlier, none of this would have happened. Anna knows only part of the story. She sold those jewels innocently in order to keep me here in luxury. It’s her way of saying thank you for all I did for her mother.”
It was seven in the morning and the sun was shining brightly as Nurse Milgrim rustled through the door. “It will take days to get over this,” she whispered angrily to Missie. “A whole night’s sleep lost.”
“Oh, Nurse Milgrim, this has been much better than sleep: a catharsis, a relief. And now Cal can take over.”
She looked at him appealingly and he knew how lovely she must have been. “Two questions,” he said quickly. “Do you know where she has gone?”
“Why, to Istanbul. To the Kazahns, of course,” she said as if it were the most logical place in the world.
He nodded. “And do you know if she has any papers, any legal documents …?”
“The lease to the mines, you mean? Oh, yes, Anna had everything. She took the lot when I came in here.” She laughed. “You can hardly keep an old cardboard valise full of priceless jewels under a bed at Fairlawns. They would sweep it out with the cobwebs.” She looked at him and said, “There is something else I have to explain. When I saw the young Russian diplomat, Valentin Solovsky,