‘Bonds, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘People have been selling French bonds in considerable quantities. If it goes on like this, it could cause a financial crisis all across Europe. It is French government-issue bonds that have brought us here together this morning.’
Outside the birds were still singing and one or two of the cleaning staff could be heard complaining to themselves down in the square. It was going to be a beautiful day.
‘The movements in these bonds coincided with the presence in Paris of the Ballets Russes and their various appendages. I have to tell you that nothing would surprise me regarding the behaviour of the Ballets Russes.
‘As you know, gentlemen, the French government has authorized, some would say organized, vast loans to Russia, many of them designed as bonds due for repayment at some date in the distant future. This, as we all know, messieurs, is war policy disguised as finance. The more Russia is industrialized, the more factories she can build with the money raised from these bonds. She can pay for new facilities to make armaments for use in any future war with Germany. A stronger Russia means a stronger France. Monsieur le Ministre?’
It was an unusual scene. Here, in the afterglow of the belle époque, the French Minister of Finance, M. Blanc, looked as though he should have been head of dustmen, and the leader of the dustbin men, M. Nivelle, looked as though he should be Minister of Finance. The minister was wearing an old suit, much frayed, with a wing collar that looked as if it had been made for his father at the time of the terrible days of the siege of Paris and the Commune back in 1870. The suit, like his vast estates near Chambord and in the poorer quarters of the capital, was part of his inheritance.
‘War and a strong Russia, gentlemen,’ he began, ‘is in the hands of ministries other than my own.’ The man sounded as if every single person in his own department was also part of his immediate family.
‘We follow the instructions of the President of the Republic. It is now a good number of years since the great treaty between our country and Russia was signed. The President charged my predecessor with the task of binding Russia economically to us as part of the stance of the Republic towards our neighbours across the Rhine.’
It seemed that the poor man couldn’t even bring himself to say the word ‘Germans’. It was widely known how unpopular the Germans had been in Paris in 1870 and 1871, proclaiming the new German Empire in France itself, against the advice of Bismarck, who warned it could lead to a hatred that could last for generations. Well, that hatred had survived for forty years or more. It was still going strong. The scars had lasted till this day. The wounds were still suppurating.
‘Perhaps you could give us a brief outline of your methods, Monsieur le Ministre?’ Olivier Brouzet looked closely at the painting from the Louvre that had replaced the Watteau that had hung happily behind the director’s desk for the past seven years. Now it was Fragonard’s The Swing, the girl flying higher and higher, pushed from behind by an old man who must have been her husband, and watched from the front by her lover hiding in the woods.
‘You’ve always done well with jobs for the workers, I’ll give you that,’ the dustbin men’s leader, M. Nivelle, in his immaculate suit, suddenly made his first contribution of the day. ‘The loans have made a difference. There are now lots of working class districts around St Petersburg and the great cities. My people are grateful for that, even if the wages are still terrible.’
‘To our methods.’ The Minister of Finance picked up where Brouzet had left off. ‘Russia is not a democracy like we have here in France or in England.’ He nodded at Ambassador Myddleton. ‘Laws are passed by the Duma, the toy-town Parliament with no real powers, and sent to the Tsar. There they are either rejected or amended by the last person to talk to the Tsar. At the present time, that means the unspeakable Rasputin, or his lover, as St Petersburg gossip would have it, the appalling Alexandra, wife of the Tsar.’
‘Why is she appalling?’ asked the British Ambassador. He would have used a milder term himself.
‘She is German,’ the Minister replied, spitting out the word as if using a mouthwash at the dentist’s. ‘During the Terror here in Paris, the mob called Marie-Antoinette “l’Autriche”, which means either ‘Austrian’ or ‘ostrich’ — with its head in the sand. How right they were. It is the same in that vast Russian hinterland beyond the cities. Religious societies, like ours here in France, and in the Russian Orthodox Church, need a Holy Mary, a Madonna. They need the counterpoint too, the bitch goddess to make up their simple pantheon.’
‘Lucy, my love, do you think she’s telling the truth, that poor girl upstairs?’ Lord Powerscourt asked his wife.
‘Anastasia? Well, as a matter of fact, I do. Don’t you? It’s rather an odd question to ask, surely?’
‘Well, I do think she’s telling the truth. But what a fantastic story. It could almost be something to throw us off the scent. Whatever the scent is. At the moment I’m not quite sure. But think it has to do with jewels stolen in St Petersburg that have come to London, presumably in the luggage of the Ballets Russes. The jewels must have been sold through a dealer. And then the money itself is stolen. It’s vanished. It’s all too fantastic for words.’
‘Do you think it has to do with the murders?’
‘I don’t, except for the Ballets Russes connection. I suppose I’ll have to ask that poor man Inspector Dutfield to put his people onto the Premier Hotel.’
‘But there’s no mention in Anastasia’s account of any connection with Bolm or Taneyev, is there?’
‘If Natasha Shaporova finds any connection in St Petersburg to the stolen jewels, my love, I’ll take you to New York for a fortnight.’
Lady Lucy and their eldest son Thomas had been waging a persistent campaign for the oldest members of the Powerscourt family to go to New York and stay in a skyscraper. But so far the plan had failed.
‘What would you do, Lucy, if your jewels were stolen?’
‘Here in London?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go to the police.’
‘And I suppose you’d do the same thing in St Petersburg, though by all accounts the police there aren’t as good as ours. Would you employ a private detective to bring them back? Would you employ me?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘I’m not sure I would accept the case, Lucy. Count Powerscourtski would decline. Do you suppose that’s why the Russians are so fond of detective stories? At least in the fiction the crimes get solved, which they don’t in real life. Anyway, Inspector Dutfield will be here in a moment with his account of the movements of various people around Blenheim Palace on the evening of the murder.’
The Ambassador looked closely at Fragonard’s The Swing. He felt that any society whose aristocrats and princes of the Church dabbled in art beyond baroque and beyond rococo must be on the brink of revolution. Art had lost its moorings with society. Fragonard, the Tiepolos, Boucher all lived in a pink universe that was not connected to the people, except perhaps in subject matter and the strings on the swing. He included Poussin in his charge sheet, a John the Baptist for the horrors to come.
‘Perhaps we could return to the bonds,’ growled M. Dubois.
‘Of course, forgive me,’ replied M. le Ministre. ‘My young men with their degrees in mathematics from the École Nationale Supérieure and the other grandes écoles here in Paris have one thing in common. Their eyesight is already going from too many hours spent staring at figures. Many of them wear those owlish glasses you see on the Left Bank these days. They look out for hot spots or hot people, places where money well invested could increase and multiply and encourage the growth of other enterprises. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. They spotted the sudden and apparently inexplicable sale of these bonds.’