Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Such a pity,” Madame Olga said when she saw Temple catching up to her. “Such glory. All fallen.”

Temple eyed the fittings from the Czars’s private apartments; exotic woods inlaid with mother-of-pearl and green-veined malachite and capped with gleaming gold ormolu decorations.

“So exquisite,” Madame Olga murmured. “Hard to believe that anyone lived like that. Our Swan Lake tutus were real swans’ down. Genuine diamonds studded our tiaras. Our strained muscles and bleeding toes were our own, however. We last dancers of the Old Regime. Oh, not myself, Miss Barr. I was too young for that. But the tradition lingered on. Even today, I am watched. Not that they can stop me. Even though I defected twenty years ago, and it is now legal, old habits are stubborn and they fear bad press. They fear an ancient of days and dance like myself. Mighty Mother Russia, who feared no one, not even Napoleon! Now my home is a bankrupt republic and its rulers are the Russian Mob, not the liberated mob of the people. Bullies will always be bullies, only some will be refined.”

“Is wrong ever refined?”

Madame Olga finally glanced at Temple. “Perhaps not. So. My brother, poor wounded swan, is dead. He was poetry in Swan Lake once. Now I could not knit a missing wing for him to fly one short distance with.”

Temple instantly recognized the fairy tale of the maiden indentured to weave wings for her seven brothers before they were turned into . . . what? The proletariat?

“Someone,” Temple said, “wanted you to help steal the scepter for your brother’s sake.”

“Ah. A young woman with imagination.” Madame Olga lowered her imperial receding chin to focus on Temple’s face instead of the glittering artifacts surrounding them. “And a knowledge of folk tales. Yet you look so . . . Paris Hilton. Perhaps it is just an American affectation of corrupted innocence.”

Temple cursed her bleached blond locks for the eighth time. Goldilocks was not a useful role model for modern women. Nor was Scarlett.

“It’s the look of someone who wants an answer,” she said. “There was more to your brother’s fall from grace than you let on.”

The old woman pinched the top of her Roman nose as if clearing her brain of blood. Strong nose, weak chin. Always a deceptive physiognomy in a woman. Temple tended to believe the nose, not the chin. Some of the feistiest breeds of lapdogs and the boldest belly dancers were zilch in the chin department. The recessive chin, in fact, was a snare and delusion for men who needed to think they were in charge. Her own was neither leading nor retreating, but just right, like Baby Bear’s bed. Which was still a bear’s bailiwick and very dangerous to be caught sleeping in.

Hmmm , speaking about being caught sleeping in . . .

Madame Olga laughed. “You have not lived in a totalitarian state, ma petite . Your face is a mirror of your emotions. I read guilt and it will cloud your judgment.”

“You called me ‘ ma petite .’ ”

“Are you not petite?”

“Did you live in France for a time?”

“Mais oui . We all did. We Imperial Russian entertainers spurned, our artistry despised by the New Order. We fled to France, always a haven for the artistically disenfranchised. Your Negro musicians, for instance, and dancers. Josephine Baker, the divine Afrique . Erté, the gay blade of Art Deco designers. My poor brother took a pseudonym from him.”

“ ‘Art Deckle,’ a play on the Art Deco style. I always think of the paper when I hear the name. Deckle edged.”

“Yes. He was a man of culture at the beginning, anyway, which may be why he used white-face for a disguise that night. Then he was a man of any way he could make a living. Being an exile does that.”

“And you?”

“I suppose women have it better. We can always settle for decorative. I became a dressmaker’s model for a time. Everyone sketched me. I was quite famous for a mystery woman.”

“Still, that must have been a fabulous time.”

Olga leaned her Roman nose hard against a Plexiglas barrier, staring at a mannequin wearing a Russian court dress with a glittering white train as long as a snail’s trail at dawn.

“My brother’s body was broken, I was impoverished and forgotten. Our history was . . . considered trivial and decadent. We went our ways. His were secret and demeaning. I was eventually . . . rediscovered. Asked to teach master classes in Paris, London, New York City. I never saw him again until I came to this”—she sighed, looked around the vast museum-within-a-hotel-casino space—“this proletarian paradise. What hath Lenin wrought? Las Vegas. Anyone can win. Or lose. A people’s paradise.”

“Someone won possession of the Czar Alexander scepter,” Temple heard herself saying. Hypocrite!

Temple felt horribly guilty for playing dumb, but she still needed to determine whether the earlier death was part of a separate plot. Damn Max for putting her in this position! For the first time, she understood Molina’s fury at being sure he was guilty of something and being unable to touch him. And now Max had really become a thief. Was it possible he had killed Andrei? The idea was unthinkable, but Max had been doing a lot of the unthinkable lately. No wonder Temple herself was contemplating the formerly unthinkable.

“Not I,” Olga said in her measured way. “And certainly not poor dead Andrei.”

“Were you working together to get it, though?”

“No. Never working together. Not again. Not dancing together. Not for decades. Working apart to the last.”

She eyed Temple askance through her crepe-paper eyelids, so like an aged serpent’s.

“Someone had enlisted him for this cursed venture. I discovered his participation too late. He never dropped me. Not once. When we danced. Until here. And he did not drop me here either. I dropped him, I suppose. It is the perfect pitiable end to Swan Lake that a ballerina should be the cause of her supporting prince’s fall. Brother, lover, it does not matter. Do not cause any man’s fall, my petite interrogator. It is not something one ever lives down.”

When, Where,

Why For?

Temple fled from the nihilism of Madame Olga to the urbane charms of Count Volpe, even though he reminded her of some rapacious object of Molière’s wit.

He was always ready to oblige a young woman, an attractive young woman, as he told her freely.

“Are there any unattractive young women in your opinion?” Temple asked.

“Not really,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “Why are you worrying yourself white about these exhibition-area deaths? It was obvious that someone would attempt to steal the scepter and someone did. Quite dramatically. Pity about the acrobat. I don’t believe the thief intended to drop her, although that fact did slow down the pursuit.”

Volpe’s urbane Old World sexism and New World frankness almost undid Temple. She supposed if she had seen an old political order perish she might be somewhat cynical too.

“I’ve just come from identifying the body.”

“My dear girl! Pardon my blasé pose. It’s expected of me. Here. Sit down. Why would the police impose on you for this sad duty?”

“I’m the only one around at the moment who’d seen Shangri-La out of her concealing makeup.”

“Surely the tiger-faced fellow—?” He waved a veined but exquisitely fluid hand.

“The Cloaked Conjuror had never seen her face-to-face.”

“How bizarre, when you think of it. Two strangers performing life-threatening antics on wires and cords. It did lend itself to substitution, didn’t it? Is it certain that the Cloaked Conjuror we saw before the fall was indeed him?”