The Final Fabergé (3 page)

Finally, Karsalov jostled his way into the bread shop, gave two coupons, then grasped whatever it was that was pushed out of a dark opening in the wall onto the grimy counter. Each piece was the size of a fist and no longer resembled bread, but was nearly black, without aroma, and hard like dried wood. He dropped the black lumps into a sack, looked about for someone to complain to, but a voice said, “Keep moving . . . move ahead . . . keep moving.” A woman standing between two uniformed militia repeated the instructions in a bored, dull voice. Clearly, complaints would be ignored.

It was shortly after eight in the morning, the time when Karsalov took his son, Vasily, to fetch bread and go on to the edges of Gorodskoy Park, where he was usually able to buy several logs and kindling. On this day he was followed and when he had collected the wood and had put it into a sling to carry home, he was greeted by a gruff, yet pleasant voice: “You are comrade Karsalov?”

Karsalov was a reluctant comrade, and played the part grudgingly. “Yes, and you?”

“Pavlenko. I have done plaster work in the galleries. Remember?”

Karsalov studied the man, seeing an unusually healthy specimen, ruddy and full-faced, with particularly uncommonly clear, wide-open eyes. He shook his head. “No. When would this have been?”

“Before all this. Two years, a little less perhaps. In a gallery of Chinese art—there was water damage. You were there, I saw you.”

“I apologize,” Karsalov said. “I don't remember.”

“It's no matter,” Pavlenko said. “I am in a new business, no more plastering.”

Karsalov nodded. “I'm happy for you. No call for plasterers in these
times.” He pulled on the ropes to his son's sled and started to walk. “My son is cold.”

“My new business may be of interest to you, comrade Karsalov. Where can we talk?”

Karsalov stopped and looked again at Pavlenko, computing he was younger by ten years, dressed in a handsome beaver-lined heavy coat, well fed. Then he asked himself why he had been chosen.

Karsalov said, “I prefer not. My daughter is still in the hospital and when I am not at my work or on errands, I have no time for my son, or for myself.” He spoke temperately, as he had been trained to treat people with respect, whether friend or stranger. “But, thank you.”

“Let me come tonight to your home. I promise I will not take too much of your time. And after your son is in bed.” He stared hard at Karsalov. “It is important.”

Karsalov hesitated, then curiosity drove away his reluctance. “All right,” he sighed. “Come before nine o'clock. I live at—”

“I know,” Pavlenko interrupted. “You are at 68 Petra Lavrova, off Liteyny Prospekt.” He put both hands on his black wool hat and pulled it down over his ears and walked quickly out of the park.

The apartment was on the third floor in a turn-of-the-century building, large for a nonprofessional, but Karsalov lived only in the kitchen, the other rooms sealed off to conserve the small amount of heat generated by the every other day's fire built in an ancient cast iron stove. Little Vasily had not been able to keep down his tiny meal and by early evening the three-year-old was having severe chills and crying without a pause. Karsalov prepared a mixture of sour-tasting vodka and warm tea, put him to bed, then crawled beside him to help keep him warm. Finally, at a few minutes before nine, the youngster fell into a troubled sleep.

Punctually at nine, Pavlenko arrived and was let into a tiny hallway that led past closed doors to the kitchen. He emitted what seemed to be the warmth of a July sun, and had also brought with him a heavy paper sack and from it he took a bottle and package and offered both to Karsalov. “A small gift,” he said cheerfully.

In the bottle was a pepper-flavored vodka and in the package a portion of sausage, more meat than Karsalov had seen in four months. “I
don't want your food,” Karsalov protested. “We don't know each other, and I . . . I can't repay you.”

“There's no obligation.” Pavlenko grinned widely, brushed past Karsalov into the kitchen where he found glasses, and poured the yellowish liquid. He handed a glass to his baffled host. “Let's toast a new friendship.”

Hesitantly, Karsalov raised his glass, then took a deep sip, then more. It was superior vodka, with flavor, and strong.

Pavlenko went to the bed where Vasily lay in a small lump under blankets, a gentle wheeze rising up from the little one.

“Do you have enough food?” Pavlenko asked, his hand about where the little boy's shoulder would be, patting it.

“No one has enough,” Karsalov answered bitterly.

“I am sorry about your wife,” Pavlenko said kindly but without any deep feeling. “They took her ration card—and your daughter's. I know.”

“Is that your business? To know who died and who lost a ration card?”

“Not precisely.” He turned back to Karsalov and nodded. “Yet, you might say that food is part of my new business.”

“To look at you it must be,” Karsalov said. “Our rations were cut again, no butter today, no fish, no meat.”

“This comes at the right time,” Pavlenko said, pointing to the package of sausage.

Karsalov said somewhat irritably, “Explain why you're here. Why me?”

Pavlenko unbuttoned his coat, reached inside for a cigarette case, opened it, and held it out to Karsalov, who looked first at the broad smile on Pavlenko's face before he took one and lit it by the match Pavlenko was holding in his other hand. Pavlenko sat in a straight wooden chair next to the table and crossed his legs comfortably. He also lit one of the cigarettes, inhaling the aromatic smoke and blowing it out in a steady stream. He held out the cigarette case to Karasalov. “Do you know what this is?”

“A cigarette case, of course,” Karsalov said sharply, and lowered himself into the chair across from his guest.

“No doubt about that,” Pavlenko said. “But do you know who made it?”

Karsalov took the case and looked at it carefully. He had seen cigarette cases like it before, when he had been in the service of Prince
Yusupov, when all the gentry and high government moguls had carried a snuff or cigarette case as grand as the case he was holding, its heavy silver skillfully chased with a military scene. He turned it over. On the back was imprinted G. FABERGÉ. Karsalov said, “Expensive . . . when it was new,” and gave it back to Pavlenko.

“It's still worth a good deal, not because it's a Fabergé, but for the silver and gold. Not now, not in this city. Nothing has any value except food.”

Karsalov savored the cigarette, tasting the smoke and allowing the sting of it in his throat and lungs to grow more intense as the tobacco burned hotter. It made him dizzy but it was so different a feeling from the boring discomfort of cold and hunger that he didn't want it to stop. He consumed nearly all of it, until the hot ash burned his finger. Then, reluctantly, he put the remains in a tin and let it smolder. When the last bit of smoke was gone, he looked up and said, “You haven't answered my question. Why have you chosen to come here?”

Pavlenko sat back, his right arm resting on the table, his hand holding the cigarette case, which, very gently, even tantalizingly, he tapped on the table every several seconds with the insistent precision of a metronome.

“I'll explain,” he began. “Petersburg is under siege and if Hitler has his way, the Panzers will crush every one of us. There are no means to bring large quantities of food or fuel into the city, no trains, the highways are blocked, and only when Lake Ladoga freezes over can our truck convoys deliver supplies. Even then the German air force may destroy that hope. So the trick is to survive, and to survive we must have food, good food. The bread you got today was made from substitutes . . . wood dust and tree bark.” Pavlenko reached for the bottle of vodka and poured a generous helping into each glass. He raised his for a toast. “To your son.” He waved his glass in the direction of Vasily. “May he be warm and have a full stomach.”

Karsalov sipped from his glass, then he drank it all in a gulp. He was immediately warmed by the strong drink, and looked enviously at the cigarette case. Pavlenko snapped it open and offered it to Karsalov, who took a cigarette and immediately struck a match.

Pavlenko turned over the case and pointed to the name. “Does G. Fabergé mean anything to you?”

“It was one of the best shops in Petersburg. Expensive, I couldn't afford to go there.”

“But you do have something that was made by Fabergé. Isn't that so?”

Karsalov inhaled again. “No,” he said softly.

Pavlenko poured more vodka into the glasses. He smiled and said, “Let us drink to an improvement in your memory.” They both drank and Pavlenko continued. “Near the end, the man who employed you—Felix Yusupov—invited the crazy monk to his house. You saw him, Rasputin. Remember?”

Karsalov looked away and said softly, “I knew nothing of what went on. Not until they took him away.”

“Rasputin came that night with a package. Correct?”

“A gift for Yusupov, perhaps.”

“No. It was something Rasputin had picked up earlier from Fabergé, something he planned to take home with him, but—” Pavlenko drank the rest of his vodka. “—he never left the house alive.”

“That part is true, but it was twenty-five years ago, I have no memory of the rest.” He stood, “Thank you for the vodka, but take what is left, and take the sausage, too. I must ask that you leave now.”

“Please comrade, I think you will want to hear what I have to say.”

Karsalov stood with his back to the stove, arms crossed with hands high, the cigarette in one. “Quickly, then.”

“In the package was an Imperial egg that Rasputin had ordered from Fabergé himself, a gift for the Czarina. You took the package to your room. A house cleaner saw you do it, she had come down from her bed after she heard the shooting.”

The cigarette again. Karsalov drew heavily on it. “Who tells such wild stories?”

Pavlenko smiled. “I was told all of this ten days ago. That was when I learned of your wife's death and that sad news helped me find you. After all, there are others with the name of Karsalov in Petersburg, but only one Nikolai Karsalov.”

“Who said all these lies?”

“Someone who knows, someone with a long memory.”

“Even if this was true, how is it your business?”

“Your Fabergé egg has no value, comrade Karsalov. Go on the street and offer it for a loaf of bread and they will laugh. Yet in spite of that, I will buy it.”

Karsalov put the vodka and sausage in the paper sack and pushed it in front of Pavlenko. “Take it and go.”

“I will pay you with food. Food enough to keep you and your son well fed until the ice road opens.”

“Do I look like a complete fool?” Karsalov pushed his chair away noisily. “I've asked you to go.”

Pavlenko's smile was unconvincing. He tapped the cigarette case twice more on the table, then reached inside his heavy coat as if to put it away. When his hand reappeared it was holding a long-barreled revolver. It was Russian-made, heavy and menacing.

“Comrade Karsalov—”

“Don't call me by that fucking word.”

“
Mister
Karsalov,” Pavlenko said with oily politeness. “I have offered to take the Czar's egg in exchange for bread, meat, and sugar . . . food enough to keep you and your son alive until the Germans are driven away.”

“I heard your damned offer,” Karsalov said, “but I don't have the Czar's egg, or anything else that belonged to him.”

The room was lit by an electric light in a frosted globe suspended over the table, and another, dimmer bulb in a floor stand next to the bed. Pavlenko got to his feet and went over to the bed. He pulled away the blanket and pointed the gun directly behind Vasily's ear.

“Put the egg on the table or I will save your son from the agony of starvation.”

“You won't shoot a helpless child,” Karsalov said.

“Two thousand children die every day in this city. Another one?” He laughed. “It's quite simple—squeeze slowly—”

“It's here, I'll get it!” Karasalov yanked open a cupboard door and reached in behind a stack of bowls and brought out the box, now wrapped in newspaper, tied with a heavy cord. He put it on the table.

“Unwrap it,” Pavlenko said.

Karsalov began to untie the cord, doing it slowly, his eyes on Pavlenko and the revolver. “I was saving it for the children,” he said, visibly shaken. “It belongs to them. I promised my wife they could have it when the war was over, when it would be worth something again.”