Robert Goddard - Found Wanting

‘Who can say, my dear?’ Straub took on an air of stoic puzzlement. ‘We must be grateful, however, that chance has come to our aid so… remarkably. Perhaps we will be able to reach an agreement with Marty after all.’

‘It’s certainly remarkable that you decided to come to Copenhagen,’ Eusden observed.

‘I insisted,’ said Regina, sailing once more in her full-rigged fashion to Straub’s rescue. ‘I couldn’t pass up the chance of taking a look at Hvidøre.’

‘The Dowager Empress’s home in Klampenborg.’ Straub shot Eusden a triumphant little smile. ‘We plan to visit it tomorrow.’

‘You might like to come along,’ said Regina. Eusden was beginning to sense she thought he could prove a more agreeable companion than Straub. ‘How’d that be, Werner?’

‘It’s up to Richard. He may have… other plans.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Eusden, thinking rapidly ahead. ‘Could I let you know?’

‘It’d be great if you could make it,’ said Regina. ‘I’ve read such a lot about the place. There’s a tower on the roof where they say Dagmar used to sit and look out to sea – east, towards Russia. So much scheming and intriguing went on there. It’s where all those grand dukes and duchesses put their treacherous heads together and signed the Copenhagen Statement denying Anastasia her birthright. I see the month of Dagmar’s death – October 1928 – as the turning point in the whole conspiracy against my cousin. Wouldn’t you agree, Werner?’

‘I would,’ Straub replied, breaking off from a carefully considered appraisal of the wine.

‘By your cousin,’ Eusden began, ‘you mean…’

‘Anastasia. Well, cousin-in-law, I guess I oughta say.’

Regina set off without the need of further encouragement on an animated but not always coherent account of the intertwined genealogies of the Bonaventures of North Carolina (Celeste was merely her married name) and the Manahans of Virginia that carried them through their starters and some of the way into their main courses. Eusden eventually deduced that much of her vagueness about assorted aunts, uncles and cousins once, twice or thrice removed was designed to obscure the year, indeed the decade, of her birth. The impression she gave of her age fluctuated bewilderingly. Sometimes she seemed no older than forty, sometimes no younger than sixty. Exactly when she had married her late husband, Louis Celeste, of Celeste Ice Cream Parlors fame, was far from clear. What was clear was that she had applied her well-funded widowhood to a pursuit of proof positive that Anna Anderson, late-life bride of her distant cousin Jack Manahan, was in truth Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna.

‘I had the pleasure and honour of attending her eightieth birthday party, in June 1981, and her very last birthday party, two years later. There never was a doubt in my mind she was who she said she was. You know true royalty when you meet it.’ (Eusden idly wondered how extensive Regina’s experience of true royalty actually was.) ‘I had my suspicions about the whole DNA thing right from the start, let me tell you. The Martha Jefferson Hospital finds a sample in a jar of Anastasia’s intestine they’d supposedly had standing on a shelf in a cupboard since an operation back in 1979. We don’t have any way of knowing how securely it’d been stored over the intervening decade and then some, but there surely were strange things going on in Charlottesville in the fall of 1992, when the hospital came out and said they had no sample, then changed their mind and said they did after all. I dug out a report in the Daily Progress of a janitor at the hospital being knocked cold by an intruder one night in November of that year, a few weeks before the change of mind. Now, what do you make of that, Richard?’

‘That’s the Charlottesville Daily Progress ,’ Straub smilingly clarified.

‘Poor cousin Jack was dead by then, thank the Good Lord,’ Regina proceeded, sparing Eusden the need to say what he made of anything. ‘If he hadn’t been, I reckon the rank injustice of that whole proceeding would have finished him. The Romanovs saw their chance to foist that Polish peasant identity on Anastasia and they grabbed it. You can’t deny their thoroughness. They must have thought they had her right where they wanted her for all time. But now we might be able to turn the tables on them. If we can find your friend Marty Hewitson, Richard.’

‘You’ve no idea where he is?’ pressed Straub.

‘None at all, I’m afraid. I’ll just have to… keep looking.’

‘He didn’t happen to open the case in front of you, did he?’ asked Regina.

‘No such luck. I actually know less about the contents of the case than I imagine you two do.’

‘There will come a time to put that right if you can locate it,’ said Straub, holding Eusden’s gaze.

‘Amen to that,’ said Regina, gulping some wine. ‘It could be the answer to our prayers.’

Regina ordered a dessert after the main courses were cleared, then adjourned to powder her nose. It was a moment Eusden had been preparing himself for, when he and Straub could drop the pretences they had both been maintaining. And Straub had obviously been preparing for it as well. The second the door leading to the loo had closed behind her, he launched in.

‘Are you about to repay me the ten thousand euros, Richard?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Marty did not leave the money at my mother’s apartment. Therefore he accepted it. But he did not deliver his side of the bargain. Where is the real attaché case?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘Not really. But it is true. He told me the real case would be waiting for him in Amsterdam and he encouraged me to go back to London, just like I told you. But I’d been put through so much by then, thanks to the tricks the pair of you were playing on each other, that I decided, after setting off for the airport, to go back and demand a slice of whatever the contents of the case were worth. I reckoned I was owed that.’ Straub’s expression suggested he found this credible. Eusden was gambling that a confession of greed on his part would be more convincing than anything else. ‘I’ve been ripped off by Marty a good few times over the years. The ten thou is obviously nothing to what he and you think the letters will fetch. So, why shouldn’t I get a cut of the action?’

‘It is a… an understandable point of view, I would have to admit.’ Straub’s tone hinted at relief. He was comfortable with venality. He knew how to deal with it.

‘I thought I’d be able to catch up with Marty at the station, but he wasn’t waiting for the Amsterdam train. It was pure luck I was in the right place at the right moment to see him leaving for Copenhagen.’

‘And where was that place, Richard?’ The question, apparently trivial, was actually a vital piece of fact-checking. Straub knew Hamburg central station as well as a native of the city would.

‘I was on the walkway above the platforms. The train had pulled out before I could get down there. I came after him by the next train. I think it’s pretty clear he had the case sent here, not Amsterdam, don’t you?’

‘It would seem so, certainly.’

‘If I can find him, I’m sure I can persuade him to rope me in. But into what? He’s a dying man, Werner. I doubt he has the energy, the resources or the contacts that you do. In other words, I doubt he can get such a good price as you can.’

A smile flickered around Straub’s mouth. ‘Are you proposing some kind of deal, Richard?’

‘I’ll track him down sooner or later. When I do, I’ll contact you. After all, you’re the one with the buyer in place, aren’t you?’