Dangerous Obsession Read online

  He turned the pistol on me as I entered, and shoved it into his belt with a wry grimace when he recognized me. I couldn’t have been gone longer than three minutes. He finished dressing and looked around.

  What’s the matter?” I asked. “Have I forgotten something?”

  "I had a cloak. Black fur.”

  "Yes,” I nodded, “I know where they are. I will get it."

  I found his cloak in the small room near the front doors. I also took a wrap for myself, a rich cape of black ermine that belonged to my aunt, and a couple of deep fur hats.

  “We will need a key to get out,” I told my co-conspirator. “He locks everything up at night so that I won't get away. You search him.” I didn't want to touch Alexei.

  Seth Garrett found a bundle of keys in my uncle's coat pocket. We gathered up our things and left the house together, two fugitives, partners in crime.

  2

  The Troika

  WE TRAMPED through the snow without stopping until we were well away from my uncle’s house. A light wind filled our tracks with snow as soon as we made them, and although Seth Garrett was wary and watchful, no one followed us. After a couple of hours we took shelter in a doorway for a moment while he got his bearings. The city was just coming to life. A few sleds scraped past and harness bells jingled in the crisp pre-dawn air.

  “Let’s see,“ he said, “there should be a drovers’ inn just around the next corner.“

  “How do you know that?“ I wondered. “I thought you were a foreigner.“

  “It would be a stupid fox that didn’t know where to hide when the dogs were after him," he grunted. I nodded approvingly. It was a good Gypsy type sentiment. “You speak Russian?" he asked.

  “Of course,“ I said. “Don’t you?"

  He gave me an impatient look. “No. I don’t. You’ll have to translate."

  The floor of the public room of the drovers’ inn was littered with sleeping bodies. The air was heavy with the drone of snores, and pungent with the stink of unwashed bodies, urine, and liquor. We found a space in a dark corner and sank down on the floor, grateful for a chance to rest until the men awoke. My companion opened his valise and took out a small flask, which he uncorked and tilted to his mouth. He put it away without offering me any. After a while the bodies began to stir. The men coughed and snorted. It was the start of another work day for them.

  Finally Seth Garrett stood up and said to me, “Ask if there is anyone who has a troika for hire, to go a long distance. I’ll pay well.”

  I translated for him. My girlish voice sounded strange and incongruous in that roomful of men, and they turned baleful eyes upon me.

  “Bah, Gypsy,” one growled. “I have never heard of a Gypsy paying for anything. You want to lose your troika and your horses, then take a Gypsy with you and you’ll get where you’re going with nothing but your boots, if you’re lucky.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said tartly. “The man with me is no Gypsy. He is a great gentleman from a foreign land, and he is very wealthy. I have seen his purse, bulging with gold pieces! Well, come on, who will take us?”

  Sullen stares and suspicious muttering.

  “What’s the matter?” Seth demanded impatiently. “What’s the problem?”

  I wasn’t about to tell him that I was the problem, so I said, “They want to know just how far you want to go. I will tell them.”

  I spoke rapid Russian, hoping Seth wouldn’t catch the word “Bryansk.” But he did catch it.

  “We’re not going to Bryansk,” he said in a tight voice. “Get that through your head.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go to Paris,” I said reasonably. “And Bryansk is on the way. You wouldn’t have to lose one day on my account!”

  A burly giant swathed in furs came over. “You say you want to go to Bryansk?” he asked in French. Bah, I thought. Just my luck that this devil speaks French.

  No,” said Seth. “I want to go to Paris, by way of Warsaw is the quickest route, I think. But if you could take me even as far as Brest—”

  ‘So what’s all this about Bryansk?” the man growled. Bryansk is a hundred and sixty versts to the south, about a week’s journey.”

  I grabbed at Seth’s arm. He flinched at my touch but I ignored that. “You must take me there!” I pleaded. Please, please, Monsieur! Remember your promise back at the house.” I saw his eyebrows go up a quarter of an inch. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to remind him that we were the joint sharers of a very guilty secret. “It wouldn’t be much out of your way,” I went on. “And I will pay you, I swear it! What is a week in the face of a lifetime? Nothing!” I snapped my fingers. “Less than nothing! Now I know that you do not want to be delayed in Moscow, Monsieur,” I said meaningfully. “That wouldn’t be a very good idea, would it? But if you don’t take me—”

  He picked me up by the collar of the ermine cape. My feet barely brushed the hard-packed dirt floor. I gagged and plucked futilely at his hands.

  “If you want to be a red stain on the ground, like your uncle,” he said in a low menacing voice, “you’ll keep running your mouth. I suppose if I leave you behind you’ll raise the hue and cry, eh? I doubt that, little Gypsy miss. I doubt it very much.”

  “There is trouble, eh?” the driver rumbled.

  “Big trouble,” Seth said. He released me abruptly. I regained my balance and pulled myself up with haughty disdain.

  “I should have known that no Gypsy would come by a fur like that honestly,” the man said glumly. “It is only a matter of hours before the Czar’s police get after you. We’d better hurry. My horses are fresh and we can do twenty versts today, at least. This snow is nothing. But you must decide quickly. To Brest directly, or by way of Bryansk?” I held my tongue but pleaded with my eyes. A full minute passed before he answered. I held my breath.

  Indeed, the room seemed to fall silent as we awaited his pronouncement. Finally he spoke one word.

  “Bryansk.”

  Everyone relaxed. I wanted to hug him, to dance with joy, to shout out my happiness for the whole world to hear. I wanted to say, “You see, Alexei Nicolayevitch, you dead bastard, you see! I am going back to the Gypsies after all!” But I contented myself with a broad appreciative grin.

  “Three hundred rubles,” the driver said brusquely.

  “Fine,” said Garrett. “Half now, half when we arrive in Brest.”

  Three hundred!” I yipped. “The man is robbing you! Don’t give him any more than—”

  “Shut up,” the stranger snapped. He picked up his bag and stalked out of the room.

  “Blast you, Gypsy,” the driver growled in Russian. “What are you trying to do, ruin me?”

  “Gypsies aren’t the only thieves in the world,” I sniffed. “Peasants are just as bad.” I picked up my bundle and followed Seth Garrett into the cold morning.

  In less than an hour we were ready to go. The driver lashed our luggage securely to the back of the sled and covered it with heavy canvas. The three horses, a tall gelding in the middle flanked by two smaller mares, pawed the ground impatiently and snorted. Their breath hung in the snowy air like frosty puffs of smoke. The snow was a foot and a half deep already and it showed no signs of stopping. The world swam through a thick haze into the color the hours between darkness and morning. And the bells in the tower above Spassky Gate tolled seven.

  Our driver climbed up on the seat in front of us and flapped the reins. Seth Garrett and I tucked our fur lap robes more snugly around our legs. The sled glided rapidly over cobbled streets and rutted lanes, past snow-shrouded houses and exotic gold-topped churches, through the already bustling markets in Red Square, in which buyers and sellers seemed to take no notice of the snow and the cold. We drove past St. Basil’s Cathedral and the lively inns and wooden hovels that seemed to cling to the walls of Kremlin like barnacles to the sides of a great wooden ship.

  I saw the contingent of the Czar’s special police before either of the others. They were wearing long grey coats and they w
ere mounted on tall horses. They seemed to be checking every vehicle that was crossing the wooden bridge over the Moskva River.

  “You, driver,” I called. “You are travelling with me alone, understand? And let me do the talking.”

  “Wait a minute,” Seth said. ‘‘What—”

  “Shut up and get down, here, under these robes. Hurry, before they see you!” I pushed him under the furs. He crouched on the floor, under my legs, and I arranged the robes to hide him. I pulled the diamond bracelet out of my shirt pocket and slipped it over my wrist.

  We drew to a halt at a signal from one of the policemen. “Everyone out, please,” he said. “Come on, hurry.”

  “Just a minute,” I said imperiously in what sounded to me like good French. “What is the meaning of this? How dare you stop this troika! I am in a hurry. Drive on, man!”

  “Pardon me, Madame,” the man said patiently, “but I have my orders—”

  “And I have mine. Do you know who I am?” I lifted my chin and hoped my neck was clean enough for royalty. “I am the Princess Tatiana Katerina Petrushka Razin! God daughter of the Czar himself! And I am on my way to school. Do you have any idea what will happen to me if I am late?” I rattled my diamonds under his nose and moved my shoulders haughtily inside my ermine. “Why have you stopped us? What are you looking for?”

  “Well, your excellency, we have heard that a certain Frenchman—”

  I didn’t let him go any further. “Frenchman! You dare to tell me that you have delayed me this morning because you are looking for a Frenchman? What is your name? Come on, tell me quickly.” The man actually looked shamefaced. “You can see that there is no Frenchman here, can’t you? You have eyes, don’t you? Then get out of our way, Igor, drive on!” I shouted.

  Our driver touched his hat to the uniformed men and we jerked forward. They didn’t try to stop me. When I looked back I saw that they were quizzing another traveler.

  “Stay where you are until we’re well out of the city,” I said to the pile of furs at my feet. “And remember, this is the second time I have saved your life.”

  Soon a gently rolling white landscape lay in front of us. I looked back once again and watched as the towers of the ancient city grew smaller and gradually disappeared in the snowy mist.

  I lifted the fur robes. “All right, you can come up for air.” Seth Garrett emerged, looking red and furious. “No, don’t thank me,” I said airily. “Just consider it part of my payment to you.” He maintained a steadfast silence. “I don’t know why you’re angry with me,” I said. “Unless you still resent bringing me along. But you had no choice. Do you know what I saw in your hand last night, right before the death omen? My own face! After such a sign hot even the Czar of all the Russian could have refused me. And you, you’re still acting as if I had tricked you. It was fate, I tell you. I must tell old Ursula about this when I see her. She knows about these things. She will be able to tell me if I truly have the gift of fortunes or if it was just some miracle.”

  He continued to ignore me. I shrugged at his stubbornness and curled up to sleep. What did I care about his moods? I was free and I was on my way back to the Gypsies. Life was good, very good.

  After a few hours we stopped at a way station to rest and water the horses. I was wide awake and I told the men about my little stepbrothers, Sasha and Vanya and Alyosha. I told them about the time I had taken them begging with me in Istanbul and we had brought back a pile of money.

  “These gorgio will believe anything,” I said. “Even that a girl of twelve—me!—could be mother of a baby of four years! Stupid, no? And then another time a man asked me if the Gypsies had stolen me. A lot of gorgio think that Gypsies steal children, but why should they when they have plenty of their own? Anyway, my hair is yellow and that’s what he thought. So I told him yes, thinking he would feel sorry for me and give me the money to go back to the home that I had lost. But God is my witness, the foolish one was the chief of police and he took me to prison and also my father and Lyubov, our leader. But I was very small then and my mother was still alive, and she came and showed herself to the police and showed them her long yellow hair. The Grandfather once asked me why I thought his daughter ran away with the Rom. What a question! Because my father was handsomer than any gorgio, I told him, and because she wanted to be free! What other answer could there be?”

  “Gypsies,” our driver snorted. “They could talk the legs off a horse if you let them.”

  “Ha,” I sniffed. “These nags of yours couldn’t go any slower if they had no legs at all.”

  “What do you mean?” The man’s face grew red. “This is the finest troika team in all Russia!”

  “Bah. I have seen better horses carting the dead. Why don’t you do them a favor and shoot them?”

  The man started to bluster. “Why, you little witch. I’ll give you some more bruises to match those you’ve already got, just see if I don’t.” He waved his fist threateningly over my head.

  “I am not afraid of you, you big peasant,” I said tartly. “If you’re not careful I’ll put a spell on you. All your hair will fall out and your fingers will drop off.”

  “Mother of God!” The big man crossed himself. “If I were you, sir,” he said to Seth, “I would leave her here, in the middle of nowhere. She is the daughter of Satan himself!”

  “You are a liar and a scoundrel,” I jeered.

  “If you were my child I would have drowned you at birth!” the driver shouted.

  “If you were my father I would not have been born!” I retorted. “I would have shrivelled up in the womb, may my tongue drop out of my head if—”

  “Quiet!” Seth Garrett’s deep voice split the freezing air. We stared at him. “Both of you get back in the sled,” he said softly. “We’re ready to go.”

  But the driver drew himself up. He was taller than Seth, well over six feet, and just as broad. The furs he wore made him seem immense. He had black hair and a bristling black mustache, and he wore a patch over one eye. His skin was seamed and leathery and his age was indeterminable. He could have been forty-five or seventy-five.

  “I am Ivor Andreivitch Krasskey,” he said stiffly. “And I am a Cossack! I lost my eye fighting at the side of the great General Kutuzov, against the bastard French. I am no man’s serf, no man’s slave. I may be too old to go to war, but I am not too old to whip the pants off some young whelp who thinks that with gold he can buy a man’s pride as well as his troika! I will drive this Gypsy no further! You must decide, sir. If you want to travel with this devil’s child, you must find another driver.”

  It took Seth Garrett an hour of cajoling and arguing and another one hundred rubles on the spot to persuade Ivor to continue the journey. By then we had lost valuable daylight and Ivor said we would be lucky to make only fifteen versts that day.

  Seth climbed into the troika beside me and said in a low voice, “If you delay us just once more, I swear I’ll throw you into the nearest snowdrift and leave you. I don’t care where we are.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked in an injured voice. “I only spoke to him as one would speak to a stupid peasant.”

  “And I’m speaking to you as one would speak to a dirty Gypsy,” he replied. “Hold your tongue!”

  Now I knew very well that I was dirty, and I was certainly a Gypsy. But the sound of those two words linked, as he had said them, was an insult.

  “I am not a dirty Gypsy,” I pouted. “And I am free! I say what I please.”

  We continued our journey in hostile silence. The snow had stopped and the skies were clear when we halted at a mean-looking inn ten miles north of the town of Kaluga. We all climbed out to stretch. Ivor Andreivitch went around to the back of the troika to unload the baggage. I wandered towards the front to make friends with the horses.

  “Hey, you Gypsy!” Ivor looked up. “Get away from my horses!”

  “I was mistaken earlier, Ivor Andreivitch,” I said loudly. “These are very fine horses indeed. Very intellig
ent, and they work so well together! Worth a lot of money at a horse fair. But I must tell you, this one on the end is looking a little bloated. Not much, just a little. You must give her a light purge tonight and follow up with some molasses in her feeding. I guarantee, she will be better, go faster.”

  “Oh, so now you’re a horse doctor!” Ivor sneered. “You’re a little liar, Gypsy. There is nothing wrong with that horse.”

  “She is slowing the other two down,” I told him. “She is easily winded because you let her eat too much.”

  “I never—”

  “Oh, she tricks you!” I laughed. “When you leave them at night, she eats for the other two and then finishes her own food. She is greedy, no?”

  “She’s always had a big appetite,” Ivor admitted. “But I have never seen her—”

  “Because she is too smart to misbehave in front of you. Listen, Ivor Andreivitch, tonight when you put them in the stable, separate this little one. In the morning you will see, the other two will have food left and this greedy mare will be asking for more.”

  Ivor grunted and thought this over. Seth Garrett leaned against the troika with his arms folded over his chest. He looked bemused. I left the horses and stood in front of Ivor.

  “Ivor Andreivitch,” I said humbly, “I did not know that you were a Cossack or I would not have spoken as I did. You are a brave man, and Gypsies admire bravery above all else. I am only a miserable girl child and I have a loose tongue. I have been without my mother for many years and there is much I have not learned. I have no right to expect one so worthy as yourself to carry a poor creature like me to far off places. The way is long and hard , and the days are getting shorter and colder. I will find my people by myself, before the really heavy snows come. I am half-Russian, and you are Russian. Surely we can speak to each other with respect. I ask your forgiveness for my rudeness. I have no wish to be your enemy.” I sighed plaintively. “It would be a very great honor to drive with one who lost his eye fighting for Russia with the great Kutuzov. I have been very stupid.”