The Diamond Secret (Once Upon a Time) Read online

  Just the night before, Nadya had served and cleaned away dishes here as the rowdy customers devoured cold borscht, rough bread, and greasy sausage or leaned against the long plank-wood bar where they downed shots of ice-cold Russian vodka, chasing them back afterward with warm beer in mugs. She’d been in Mrs. Zolokov’s employ for just under a year. It was exhausting work, but it beat starving in filthy squalor on the street, something she’d done long enough to understand that it was to be avoided at all costs.

  She was dressed for morning work in her faded blue shift and brown flat shoes. In the evening, when the place was crowded, Mrs. Zolokov insisted she look more presentable and had provided a flounced secondhand black skirt and a flowing, embroidered peasant-style blouse. Sometimes male customers, mostly ironworkers and miners, told her she looked attractive—though they often expressed the sentiment in cruder terms. In her own opinion she was scrawny and too pale, with dark circles under her eyes and the curse of drab, lackluster hair.

  Grabbing a handful of her snarled dark blond hair—not yet swept into its usual messy updo—she breathed it in. It stank of last night’s cherry-scented tobacco from cigars and pipes. And lately customers had been smoking those disgusting cigarettes, too.

  Nadya would have to wash it soon, but the water from the outside pump was just so cold! Would spring never arrive?

  Something lying on the wooden floor caught her eye. It was a small, gray windup mouse that one of the customers had shown his raucous dinner companions the night before. As she was cleaning away their plates she’d heard him brag about buying the novelty in Moscow for his cat. The man probably had become so obliterated with vodka that he’d forgotten all about it. Now, after examining its lifelike tiny ears and tail, she slipped the toy mouse into her skirt pocket.

  Yawning as she moved through the kitchen, Nadya went out the back door into a small yard to get some of the chopped wood from the pile. A light snow had fallen during the night and had dusted everything in sparkling white.

  Three geese huddled in the goose shed while the lead male waddled out to the far end of his pen to honk angrily at her. “Oh, pipe down, you blabbermouth,” Nadya scolded back. “I’ll get your breakfast as soon as I can. You’ll live till then.” With a shudder of self-consciousness, Nadya realized she was starting to sound like Mrs. Zolokov. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said to the noisy goose a bit more kindly.

  Nadya gathered an armful of wood. A chilly wind made her shiver, and she hurried back into the tavern. She tossed a piece into the kitchen’s woodburning stove and dumped the rest into the main fireplace. Attempting to light a match, Nadya found that her hands were trembling from the cold. Even when she finally managed a flame, the damp wood refused to ignite.

  “Newspaper,” she muttered, disgruntled. In the trash can behind the bar she found old papers that customers had left behind. She lifted out the top two and stuffed them under the wood in the fireplace, and then struck her match to set the paper ablaze.

  Remembering the demanding goose, Nadya went into the kitchen to retrieve the plate of stale bread she’d set aside for his meal. When she returned from feeding the geese, the paper was charred but the wood had failed to catch fire.

  Mrs. Zolokov was due any minute. Glancing through the front window, Nadya saw the heavily bundled woman barreling toward the tavern; her head, covered in a flap-eared khaki-green woolen hat, was bowed against the swirls of blowing snow.

  She’s going to be mad, Nadya noted silently, quickly digging in her pocket for more matches.

  Instead, Nadya’s hand wrapped around the toy mouse.

  A plan hatched. A distraction! That’s what was needed!

  Hurrying to the door, Nadya unbolted it and, stepping aside, wound the artificial mouse with rapid strokes.

  Mrs. Zolokov turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  Nadya set the toy mouse scurrying toward her boss.

  “Mouse! Mouse!” the heavy woman bellowed in terror the moment she noticed the creature scurrying in circles around her feet. Hoisting her cumbersome frame onto a chair, she knocked it over as she scrambled up onto the table. “Nadya, do something! We have a mouse!”

  Biting hard on her laughter, Nadya snapped up a straw broom from the side of the bar and flailed it at the toy mouse, pounding it. “I’ll get you, you nasty rodent!” she cried. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Z., I’ll save you!” Nadya continued to whale on the toy mouse until its windup mechanism ran out. “Got it,” Nadya announced proudly.

  Trembling, Mrs. Zolokov made frantic shooing motions toward the kitchen with her two chubby hands. “Throw it out the back door.” Then her keen, beady eyes narrowed into two suspicious black glints. “Let me see that creature. Bring it here.”

  As much as Nadya feared Mrs. Zolokov’s rage, the comedy of the situation overcame her, and she could barely suppress a guilty smile. Dangling it by its leather tail, she presented the windup mouse.

  “Why, you rotten girl!” Mrs. Zolokov cried, climbing down from the table. “I should have known this was another one of your pranks.”

  Nadya sang out an uncontainable hoot of hilarity. “You should have seen your face!” she cried.

  Mrs. Zolokov growled with aggravation. “You are the craziest girl I’ve ever met.”

  Nadya’s smile melted and she scowled darkly. “Don’t say that,” she snapped.

  Mrs. Zolokov returned Nadya’s dark expression meaningfully. “If the shoe fits….”

  Nadya turned away from her.

  “Why is it so cold in here?” the woman demanded irritably. When Nadya explained that she couldn’t get the wood to light, Mrs. Zolokov took another pile of old newspapers from the trash can. “Stick these among the logs. Haven’t you learned anything by now?”

  It was senseless to protest that she’d already tried it, so Nadya wordlessly approached to retrieve the papers Mrs. Zolokov held out to her. But a headline on the back page caught Mrs. Zolokov’s eye. “Let me see that,” she said, pulling the papers back in order to read:

  GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA

  BELIEVED TO BE ALIVE!

  EXILED EMPRESS OFFERS

  REWARD FOR HER RETURN

  LENIN OFFERS

  COUNTER-REWARD

  Mrs. Zolokov sneered with derisive laughter. “What a fool!” she scoffed, the wattles under her double chins shaking with coldhearted merriment. “That girl is dead, dead, dead, just like the rest of the useless Imperial Family.”

  “Couldn’t it be possible that she escaped?” Nadya questioned.

  “No! You’re just as daft as the empress Marie if you think so. The Bolsheviks took care to get rid of them. They’ll never again be able to live in fat luxury while the Russian people starve. And I say good riddance. The only place you’ll find Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov is in a grave.”

  “Then why would the head of the Communist party offer a counter-reward?” Nadya argued.

  Mrs. Zolokov pulled the paper closer and quickly scanned the story. “Oh, it says here that Lenin thinks it’s nonsense. But if anyone does, by some miracle, come up with the girl, they are not to take her out of the country. They are to bring her in so that the comrades can handle the situation.” She looked up from the paper. “You know how they’ll handle it, of course.”

  “No. How?”

  “They’ll finish the job.”

  Nadya raised her hand in protest. “Don’t say that. I don’t like it.”

  “Such a silly girl,” Mrs. Zolokov said, annoyed. She thrust the newspaper back at Nadya. “Here! Take this trash and put it to some good use—warming up this place.”

  Nadya took the paper and stuffed it, with the others, into the fireplace. Glancing at the headline regarding Anastasia, Nadya held a match to it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Girl Dressed in Goose Feathers

  Ivan waved yesterday’s newspaper excitedly as he and Sergei—more formally known as Count Sergei Mikhailovitch Kremnikov—walked through the streets of Yekaterinburg. Ivan wa
s careful to sidestep the noonday melting snow while Sergei hopped over snowdrifts, sometimes deliberately landing up to his knees in a high mound just for the fun of it.

  “Are you paying attention to me?” Ivan impatiently demanded of his ebullient friend.

  “How can I, when spring is in the air?” Sergei protested.

  Ivan stretched out his arms in an expression of incredulous disbelief. “You call this spring?”

  “It’s coming. I can smell it,” Sergei exulted.

  “Look here, man. This is serious,” Ivan insisted. Often it seemed to Ivan that he and his friend were a study in opposites. Ivan was slim, dark, and intense—a total contrast to the barrel-chested, blond, and sunny Sergei. Despite the five-year difference in their ages—Ivan was twenty, Sergei twenty-five—Ivan felt like the older of the two. Ivan sometimes worried that the horrors he had witnessed during his soldier service in World War I and then in the Communist Revolution had aged him prematurely, hardening him beyond his years. But then, Ivan also knew Sergei had suffered more personal losses than Ivan had. It was a mystery to him how Sergei’s heart seemed so unbruised.

  But Sergei frustrated Ivan when he refused to pay attention to the business at hand. It was as though he didn’t really want to find an Anastasia look-alike. They’d interviewed many girls already, and Sergei would have accepted a number of them, but Ivan always found a reason to reject them. It couldn’t be a girl who only approximated Anastasia’s looks; the girl they chose also had to embody the lively, animated spirit of the grand duchess as Ivan had witnessed her.

  If they were going to focus, Ivan would have to snap Sergei out of his infatuation with the melting snow and its promise of spring. With one sweep, Ivan brushed his unruly brown hair back from his face. “The news has made it into the paper. It’s no longer our exclusive scoop. Now everyone in Russia will be searching for the grand duchess. We have to move or all the work we’ve done for the last two months searching for someone to play the part of Anastasia will be wasted! We must find someone to be Anastasia!”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the girl lived?” Sergei suggested, his bright blue eyes shining at the idea. “You are absolutely sure Anastasia is dead?”

  “We’ve been through this a thousand times. I saw it with my own eyes,” Ivan said, a note of exasperation in his voice. Sergei was an old-time Russian loyalist from the former aristocracy. Although in this new Communist Russia it would have been dangerous to reveal his love for the czar and his family, in private Sergei was unabashedly fond of them, sometimes even swept to the point of tears when he talked about what had befallen them.

  It annoyed Ivan when Sergei gushed about the old days. For his part, Ivan didn’t want to think about any of it. It was over and done with. He had hardened his heart and shut the door, and now he just wanted to make some money. “She’s not alive, so forget it,” he said. “But if we can provide a convincing substitute to present to the grand empress, there will be a big payday for us. We can’t waste time, though. Do you think we’re the only two unscrupulous frauds in Russia? Anastasia look-alikes will be popping up all over when people see this story.”

  “Then why haven’t we been able to find one in nine weeks of searching in two cities?” Sergei questioned. “Why are you being so exacting?”

  “Because I saw her; these other Anastasia impostors won’t be nearly as convincing as the one I can choose. When I see a girl who is a double for Anastasia, I’ll know it better than most others who have only seen pictures of her. The empress will be able to spot the fakes because they won’t have the movements and, you know, that certain indefinable something.”

  The rumor that Anastasia might be alive had first circulated among the Red soldiers, one of whom had shared it with Ivan at a tavern. Ivan came up with this plan to escape his poverty and a possible jail term. With the money, he could start a new life in a different country.

  The Dowager Grand Empress Marie Feodorovna Romanov had sagely escaped to England while the Imperial Family was exiled in Siberia, and she was now living in Paris. Ivan understood that what he intended to do was fraud, but he knew what comfort it would give the old woman to have her granddaughter—reportedly her favorite granddaughter—restored to her. It also would lift some poor girl into a world of unimagined luxury.

  This was practically a service, and if he could take home the 1,600,000 livres offered by the grand duchess, well, all the better. It was certainly more than he’d get from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolshevik Communist leader. It wasn’t as though he was turning some poor girl over to be murdered by the Bolsheviks just so he could collect that reward money—though it would have been easier. No trip to Paris, and Lenin would be easier to convince since he didn’t really know the girl.

  No, he and Sergei were doing the right thing, the noble thing, by finding a girl to bring to Empress Marie. The empress could afford it; he heard she lived quite well in Paris—more smuggled jewels, no doubt. Ivan’s would be a scenario in which everyone came out ahead.

  Sergei, too, would benefit. He had a son and a wife who had gone missing, lost in the turmoil of the Russian Communist Revolution. Sergei’s search for them had exhausted the little he’d salvaged of his former fortune. The reward money would allow him to go on searching for his family. Ivan was sure it was the only reason he’d been able to talk Sergei into the plan.

  “Remind me again why we’re in this grim city?” Sergei said, looking around at the dirty street flanked by stores and utilitarian eateries.

  “Because this is not far from where the Romanovs were assassinated,” Ivan explained. “It was where the rumor began that she was alive. It might help if our girl had some knowledge of the place. Besides, we’ve already searched all over Moscow.”

  They walked toward The Happy Comrades, and Sergei looked it over with interest. “Why don’t we get a bite to eat?”

  “And how are you paying for this bite to eat?” Ivan questioned.

  Sergei scooped out some coins from the pocket of his frayed velvet jacket. “With the money I saved by running out on our rent back at the hotel.”

  Ivan heartily clapped Sergei on the back. “So that’s why you rushed me out of there so fast this morning! You are a gentleman of forethought and sound economic judgment,” Ivan commended him, with a sudden rise of jocular good humor. Ivan had assumed there would be no lunch for them that day, and the thought of eating immediately lifted his spirits.

  They entered the plain establishment with its rough-hewn floor and uncovered tables. At least it was warm, with a fire roaring in the large stone fireplace. “Anyone here?” Sergei called into the empty room.

  “Hold your horses! I’ll be there in a minute!” a youthful female voice shouted from an adjacent room that appeared to be a kitchen.

  Ivan looked to Sergei with sardonic laughter in his eyes. “I see we can expect hospitable service,” he joked.

  “Nothing but the best,” Sergei agreed with a smile, seating himself at a table.

  A thin young woman of about seventeen or eighteen stomped into the room. She appeared to be out of breath, her hair held back in a messy bun, her pale brow glistening with sweat. She seemed to be covered in black-and-white feathers; they stuck to her hair and out from the weave of her blue dress. The feathers fluttered from her as she approached. “We have borscht and pork sausage, beer and vodka. That’s pretty much it,” she told them unceremoniously, seemingly oblivious to the falling feathers.

  “We’ll have the sausage,” Ivan ordered. “Two.”

  Sergei bent and lifted a feather from the floor. “I believe you dropped this,” he offered with exaggerated gallantry.

  A confused expression crossed the girl’s face as she took it from him, but then she blasted with laughter. Realizing she was covered in the feathers, she began pulling them from her hair. “It’s that goose! He got loose from the pen. I had to jump on him to get him back. He sure put up a good fight.”

  “Do you serve goose?” Ivan asked.


  “I’d like to cook that one right now! But no, the owner sells them, mostly around Christmas. These geese were left over. If you haven’t noticed, times are tough.”

  “We’ve noticed,” Ivan muttered.

  “So you still have the lucky geese that didn’t get eaten over the holidays,” Sergei surmised.

  “Yeah, and this particular goose wasn’t going to stick around until his luck ran out, either. If it were up to me, I’d set them all free just to get rid of them—they’re horrible, smelly things. But that would cost me my job.”

  Ivan couldn’t take his eyes from the girl. The movement, the body language, the facial expressions—they were all very like the Anastasia he had seen in fleeting glimpses and observed so briefly on her last terrifying day in the woods. “Do you live here in Yekaterinburg?” he asked.

  “What’s it to you?” she replied suspiciously.

  “Just asking.”

  “I have a room upstairs.”

  “You don’t live with your parents?” Ivan pressed.

  The waitress tilted her head and narrowed her eyes, taking him in. “You’re nosy.”

  Ivan waved a hand dismissively. “Interested. How old are you?” he asked her.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What?” Ivan cried. “How can you not be sure?”

  The young woman took him in uneasily. “Maybe I’d rather not tell you.”

  Her defensive tone and distressed body language made Ivan sure that—incredible as it seemed—she wasn’t certain of her own age. How could that be possible? What terrible past could create such a situation?

  “I’ll be back with your sausage,” she grumbled as she left, plucking feathers from her dress as she went.