The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [40]
Tariq was thirty years old, a big man, tall, with powerful shoulders and strong hands. He had thick curling black hair, a bushy black mustache, high Tartar cheekbones, and flashing blue eyes. When he smiled he showed a set of teeth as big and white as those of the fierce young stallion he rode with such ease and grace. And he was hot-tempered, impetuous, and intelligent.
Tariq was already a soldier in the army of the tsar when he met and married a Chinese woman of the Manchu race, and they had three small children: a son, Michael, named for his childhood friend Prince Michael Ivanoff, and two girls.
He had heard the rumor that the Ivanoffs were second after the tsar on the Cheka’s death list and knew that unless he acted quickly, they would surely be killed.
He had promised Missie he would save them; now he had to figure out how. As always, he went to his wife, Han-Su, for guidance. She was living in an old fisherman’s cottage near Yalta’s waterfront and managing somehow to feed her family on the small amounts he sent her from time to time and on the vegetables she grew herself in the patch of fertile soil at the back of the house. Han-Su was a tiny, birdlike, graceful woman with shining black hair that she always wore in a heavy knot at the nape of her neck; her sloping dark eyes held centuries of wisdom, and Tariq had learned to trust her judgment.
“What shall I do, Han-Su?” he asked. “I have promised the girl that I will guide the Ivanoffs to safety. I will do it … I must do it.”
“You must send them here at once,” she told him. “Not under cover of night, because that is what the Cheka expect runaways to do. Let the child come first. She must carry a posy of flowers as if she is visiting friends. No one will suspect her alone. Later the young woman will take the dog for a walk. She will stroll along the seafront, maybe stop and have a cool drink in a café. She will wander along the shore, casually, until she reaches here. The old lady must wear peasants’ clothing, a black dress, a shawl, a babushka. She will carry the basket of vegetables I will give you, and she will make as if to call at a few houses, selling them, making her way through the streets to this house.”
“And after that?” he asked eagerly.
“You must go see the thief, Vassily Murgenyev. He is making a fortune issuing false papers using the collection of official rubber stamps he stole from the municipal offices and the foreign embassies. Tell him you want papers that will get three people to Constantinople and then across Europe. He will ask too much money but you will bargain with him. Meanwhile they will stay here with me. I shall speak with the harbormaster at Alupka, just along the coast. He is half Chinese and comes from my province. He will help get them a boat to Constantinople.”
“Han-Su, you are wonderful,” Tariq cried, hugging her passionately, but she merely smiled.
“Misha Ivanoff was your friend,” she said calmly. “It is our duty to help his family. There is just one problem, Tariq. It will cost a great deal of money.”
His face fell as he remembered that Missie had told him they had none, then he drew himself up proudly. “Leave that to me, Han-Su,” he told her. “I shall find the money.”
The following day he went back to the churchyard where he had arranged to meet Missie and told her what to do. Everything went like clockwork, and by the next afternoon the three of them and the dog were installed in the fisherman’s cottage by the sea. For a week Tariq patrolled Yalta’s hills, collecting