'Hardly children,' he said, 'except for the boy, and he's fourteen now. Yes, there's opposition.'
'How many - what's the balance of the committee?'
'Never tested,' Ruzsky said, 'and some decline even to offer a view, on the grounds that the matter is of no importance. I'm doing what I can, but it's little enough.
Nobody, even of the Soviet, may enter the House of Special Purpose to see the Romanovs except Beloborodov. And the guards, of course. That's the problem.'
'How much opposition?' I repeated.
There's a fellow named Scriabin; he's Regional Commissar for Natural Resources: one of the milk-and-water people who won't shed blood. I make a point of being close to him in spite of disagreement.'
'So is there a chance?'
'There's always a chance,' Ruzsky said.
Pilgrim, despite his impatience and his professed lack of interest, continued to see Dikeston's manuscripts; he merely declined to allow thought of them to dominate his waking hours. That morning the third instalment, thoughtfully Xeroxed for him by Malory, won a small battle for his attention, a battle with the Financial Times. Pilgrim, speed-reading, his concentration firm, barely noticed the entrance of Jacques Graves to his office. He murmured, 'Important?'
'Not really.' Graves, from long familiarity knew when not to disturb. 'Later will be okay.'
He laid a single sheet of paper on the left side of Pilgrim's desk, and withdrew. Pilgrim ignored it for several minutes, then reached out a hand. The note read: 'Account no. X253 at the Irish Linen Bank belongs to ...
Pilgrim swore to himself, rose and marched down the corridor to Malory's room. Malory, wreathed in expensive cigar smoke, looked up. 'Have you read it?'
'Some of it.' Pilgrim flourished Graves's note. 'Did Jacques tell you?'
'Tell me what?' Malory removed his glasses.
'That damned account at the bank,' Pilgrim said. 'Know whose it is?'
'No, he didn't tell me.'
'Then I will. How's UNICEF grab you?'
Malory frowned. 'You know, I'm never too sure which of those things is which - WHO and UNESCO
and so on. Which is UNICEF?'
'It's the children's fund, Horace - The United Nations Children's Fund.'
'Ah, I see.'
'So do I. My God, fifty thousand - plus the deeds of a house worth another hundred and fifteen - and we've handed the goddam lot to a charity! We'll never see one red cent back. Have you the instructions for the next instalment?'
An envelope lay beside Malory. He patted it with a brown-spotted hand. 'Here,' he said.
'What do they say?'
'I'm waiting to learn. Until I have finished reading.' Malory glanced pointedly at the Act of Parliament clock on the wall. 'Tell me,' he continued, 'are you beginning to find this interesting now?'
'At ten pounds a word, sure it's interesting!' There was irritation in every line of Pilgrim's back as he turned and left.
Malory put on his glasses and resettled himself to read. The temptation to turn to the end and to open the envelope were almost, but not quite, irresistible. Dikeston was clearly in terrible trouble, but equally clearly he had got out of it - with something that was worth£50,000 a year for ever. Deep inside myself, Malory thought with conscious realism, I am now a man torn: I deeply believed in the potential disaster, yet I am perversely beginning to enjoy the game Dikeston has set us all to play. I felt like death by this time. Sweat coursed down my body beneath my clothes, yet at the same time I shivered and burned.
'What I keep pressing upon Scriabin,' Ruzsky told me, as we stood beneath the dark shelter of the hotel wall that night, 'is that the Romanov family should be brought together.'
'Why?' I asked. Though I was awake and standing up, my mind worked barely at all. Yet I recall clearly the sound of a clock chiming near by. Oddly, in that place, it was a Westminster chime.
'Why? Because,' Ruzsky said, 'it is foolish on all counts to separate them. Even for the Bolsheviks it is wrong. So Scriabin tells the Soviet, and I reinforce his argument as much as I dare. So long as Nicholas is here and the son at Tobolsk there will be two potential rallying points: for the Whites and for monarchists of all kinds, here in Siberia. It is even an invitation to White armies to a two-pronged attack!'
He gave me a grin then, and tapped his nose. 'Better for us too, eh? - if the Family were together here.'
'Why? We're helpless.'
'Nobody is helpless,' Ruzsky said. 'Least of all you and me. But,' he went on, 'it is true we stand in need of help.'
This was so ludicrous an understatement that I was near to laughing in his face. He looked at me hard, then forced more plum brandy on me. Perhaps he sensed what the future held for me; at all events he would brook no delay and no argument. He took my arm and began to propel me along the dark streets, talking as we went.
'The help we need,' he argued, 'is from someone of position. You have none now; I have standing only in the Soviet and my attitude cannot alter there. We need an outside power.'
'Of what kind?'
'British,' Ruzsky said firmly. 'The British have a consul here. His name is Preston. His position is secure; he may even be able to force diplomatic access to the House of Special Purpose. Come along, man, you must stay on your feet an hour or two yet.'
And I did, God alone knows how. I stayed on my feet as we trudged towards the forbidding palisade at the Ipatiev House, as we walked past it, eyed by the guards, along Vosnesensky Avenue. Ruzsky knew where he was going well enough, and when we halted at a big house with a strongly bolted door upon which the lion and the unicorn did their dance, he did not so much speak as issue an order. This was the British Consulate.
'Knock,' he said. Obediently I did so.
We waited. The door was opened at last by a man in a long silken dressing-gown. I said to him in English, 'I am in urgent need of your assistance!'
And he, in the very best traditions of the British Foreign Service when confronted with a fellow countryman visibly in extremis, said, 'I can't help you now. It's far too late. Come back in the morning.'
The King, thought Malory - it all began with the King, with George V, acting alone. No, not alone through Zaharoff. But acting in a remarkably furtive manner all the same for a King-Emperor. Malory ticked off the steps one by one: the King calls in Zaharoff, who unearths Dikeston from somewhere or other and sends him off to Siberia. And there -surprisingly, if one did not know Sir Basil, but unsurprisingly if one did - another Zaharoff man is encountered. At no point, Malory noted, was the British Government involved. Or not, at least, to that point.
But now, it seemed, the Foreign Office was about to be dragged in by its reluctant if elegant lapels. He stretched out a hand to the letter, broke the seal and with care extracted the sheet of paper therein. The first sentence read:
I did not know that evening, as I spoke to Ruzsky, that on that very day Bolshevik orders had reached Tobolsk from Moscow relieving Colonel Kobylinsky of his command, dispersing his troops and replacing him with one Rodionov. Nor did I know that within a week the steamer Rus would again be used - this time to move the Romanov children from Tobolsk. But they did not journey north to the Ob river . . . Dikeston's instructions followed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
'Do I hear one million?'
I don't care what was agreed!' Laurence Pilgrim's usual manner was one of brisk tolerance leavened by a streetwise New York humour. But as he spoke now he was near to a snarl. 'The idea, Horace, was that you were to stop me making a goddam fool of myself in an unfamiliar milieu. It's called advice. I agreed with the international board that I would listen, because they all think you're nobody's fool.' He paused. 'That's what I used to think, too!'