Duncan Kyle - The King's Commisar

'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!'

'Used to?' said Malory dangerously.

'Yeah, used to. Let me ask you, Horace, who's it making a goddam fool of himself here? Who's buying houses and handing them to the United Nations? Who's paying cheques into 'X' accounts? This is a bank, Horace, not a bottomless benevolent society.'

Malory crossed one immaculately creased trouser leg over the other, it is a bank I have served for a great many years. I'm entirely ready to re-examine the profit record and the growth under my stewardship. May I say that if you do as well, you will be doing very well! I can read profit and loss, I can see prospects and dangers, I can make financial assessments, all of those. But there are times, as now, when -'

'Look, we had all this before. There's a danger and we have to know what it is, that's your case, right? So answer me just one question, Horace.'

if I can.'

'We've spent two hundred thousands pounds. Okay.

Are we any nearer knowing what this danger is? Are we one single goddam step nearer?'

Malory pursed his lips. 'We know the general source of the danger lies in the relationship between Zaharoff and the Tsar. We are learning more, stage by stage.'

'Oh sure,' Pilgrim said angrily. 'Information is dispensed word by word by Dikeston. Dikeston met the Tsar; Dikes-ton met Zaharoff; Dikeston met the King, Lenin, Trotsky and Whistler's goddam mother for all I know. Dikeston's in charge of a train loaded with jewels. Dikeston's whizzing round Siberia like a fly with a ginger ass, and we don't even know who Dikeston is!'

'Oh, but we do, Laurence,' Malory said gently. 'We know he represented royalty at the highest level, and business too, also at the highest level. We know when he was born and when he died.'

Pilgrim blinked. 'Do we? Since when?'

'Since I arranged scrutiny of the death register at Somerset House. It showed that Henry George Dikeston died on 20th October, 1968.'

'You're sure he's dead, Horace?'

'There is a death certificate. He died at Sainte-Maxime in the South of France. But there was no will and no property.'

'No property! When he had fifty thousand a year for -'

'None in France or England, I meant, Laurence. None that can be traced.'

'What else do we know?'

Malory's eye inspected the shining toe of his hand-lasted shoe. 'I have a tame historian. Consider this, Laurence. It seems that in the first months of the nineteen-fourteen war, the Tsar sent huge amounts of money out of Russia. Much of it was part of his own personal fortune and he was undoubtedly at that time the richest man on earth.'

'Oh, come on, Horace. Not that stuff about Romanov millions scattered all over Europe and America and never claimed! You're not going to feed me that one?'

'I fear not,' Malory said. 'I'm going to feed you, as you put it, the report of Professor Bernard Pares to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and quoted in Lloyd George's War Memoirs, that relations between Britain and Russia were being gravely jeopardized by the failure of Vickers, Maxim & Co, to supply munitions.'

'Who was Pares?'

'A scholar with political ambitions. Lloyd George had sent him to Russia. You know who represented Vickers, Maxim?'

'Zaharoff?'

'Zaharoff indeed.'

Pilgrim passed a weary hand across his brow. 'Okay, I get it. You think Zaharoff fleeced the Tsar.'