“Where Madame Natasha always sits at lunchtime.” La directrice’s features became impassive. “For the last five years while Piotr was bedridden, she remained his companion. I’ll introduce you.”
Helpful now, Madame Gobulansky guided her across the hallway. Either Aimée had scared Madame la directrice or she’d cooked the wrong rabbit, as her father would say, and was getting fobbed off. “Just a moment, s’il vous pla?t.”
Companion? Aimée wondered.
The nursing home was a museum. To the right swept a nineteenth-century staircase, brass rods holding dark maroon carpeting in place. Lining the hallway were oil portraits of Empress Catherine II, Emperors Alexander I, II, and III, a marble bust of Nicholas II, and an oil painting of tight-lipped Alexandra Fédorovna. In the corners clung a musty old-world smell. From another age, a vanished tsarist Russia of long ago. The only things missing were the cobwebs and Cossacks.
Her nose crinkled at the old-people smell that the disinfectant didn’t cover.
Madame Gobulansky beckoned her inside before disappearing in a rustle of polyester.
The high-ceilinged salon held a cloying old-lady rose scent and a large télé. On the screen played a ballet—vintage black-and-white reels without sound.
“Bonjour, Madame, maybe you can help me.”
“Moi?” Madame Natasha, in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube clipped to her nose, was applying mascara. “God blesses those who help themselves.” A fine dust of wrinkles covered her otherwise taut, translucent face. Her clawlike fingers wavered. Aimée wanted to reach out and guide the mascara comb.
“Not bad for ninety-eight, eh?” She gave a quavering laugh. “Go ahead, tell me I don’t look a day over eighty.”
“You don’t.” Aimée smiled. Must have been a beauty in her day. Clear sapphire eyes, erect posture in the wheelchair. Hopefully her mind was as clear.
“May I take a few minutes of your time?”
“Time? But that’s all I have now.” She pointed to the télé screen. “Of course, you came to hear my stories of the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. That’s me, the third from the left.”
Aimée stifled a groan. “Fascinating. But I’d like to know about Piotr Volodya. I hear you were his companion.”
“Where’s Piotr gone?” She tugged a crocheted throw over her withered legs. “He’s late.”
Late?
“His son Yuri sent me.” A semi-truth.
“That son who never visits him?” Natasha put down her mascara. “I outlived four husbands.” Natasha gave a theatrical sigh. The corners of her wrinkled red lips turned down. “We’re engaged. See my ring from Piotr.” Natasha flashed a blue-veined hand with a garish red stone like a cherry on her swollen, arthritic middle finger. Not even glass.
“Exquisite.” Aimée stared, her heart sinking.
“Spoils of the tsar.” Madame Natasha leaned over her wheelchair arm. “We must speak in code. They’re listening.”
No wonder Madame Gobulansky had complied, Aimée thought. The old biddy drifted through time with a good dose of paranoia.
“Who’s listening?”
“The Okhrana. The tsar’s secret police.” She put a thin finger to her lips. Nodded. “Piotr knows. Lenin told him.”
The white-tutu’d ballerinas flickered on the screen. Great. A ninety-eight-year-old ballerina with dementia.
Natasha’s lips parted in a wide smile. For a moment the years fell away. “Men have always given me things.”
Aimée scanned the dull gold icons on the walls, an assemblage of pastel and watercolor paintings. In the corner a bronze samovar bubbled and steamed.
“Can you tell me about Piotr and Yuri’s relationship?”
“After we have tea, Mademoiselle.”
Aimée contained her impatience as Natasha wheeled herself to the samovar. She passed Aimée a steaming cup of tea with a cube of sugar. “Suck. Like this.”
Aimée followed suit, propping the cube between her tongue and teeth as Natasha did. The Kusmi Russian tea trickled down her throat like a sweet, wet, smoky breath.
Natasha opened a worn scrapbook with yellowed ballet programs, thrust it at Aimée. The last thing she wanted to see.
“Diaghilev worked us hard, let me tell you. Olga, my garret mate, married Picasso, you know. They met while he was designing our ballet,” Natasha said. “He ignored me, thank God, the little toad with a barrel chest. Diaghilev’s buried out in the cemetery. Nureyev too, that upstart. Rudi was charming when he wanted to be, but I heard he was a devil to work with.”
Sad, but Aimée hadn’t come for wistful historical remembrances. The fact that Yuri had been murdered so soon after his father’s death meant something.
“Let’s get back to Piotr’s relationship with Yuri,” Aimée said, setting her cup down. “Wasn’t there a painting?”
“Shhh. Piotr’s on a mission.”
And he wouldn’t be coming back.
“But you must know the code or you wouldn’t be here,” Natasha said.
Best to play along with her. Learn something. “Bien s?r, but Yuri said.…”
“Yuri knows only part of the code. I let him think he understood. It’s all in the letter.”
“Letter?” Aimée took a closer look at the scrapbook. Opened the back pages. “One of these?” Stuck in between were yellowed parchment envelopes with old canceled stamps addressed to Mademoiselle Natasha Petrovsky.
“Not my old love letters.” A flicker of the gamine crossed her eyes. “Les pneus.”
A code? So far she’d gotten nowhere. And then, wedged in the scrapbook, she saw a letter addressed to Monsieur Piotr Volodya postmarked Paris, March 1920.
Natasha glanced toward the samovar. “More tea?”
“Non, merci,” said Aimée, slipping the letter in her pocket. “Les pneus? I don’t understand.”
“A pity. The two hadn’t spoken in years. But Yuri was in such a rush that day.”
Aimée saw an opening. “That’s why I’m here. Piotr told you his stories, non? He left Yuri a painting from his collection.”