City of Shadows by Ariana Franklin

Author:Ariana Franklin [Franklin, Ariana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780061834165
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-12T23:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

17

Berlin, July 1932

A visit from Prince Nick was a rare event nowadays.

Esther offered him a cocktail and watched him prowl the apartment with the resentment of a man whose butler had bought the winning lottery ticket on his wages.

“Doing well,” he said. “Yes.” “You owe it all to me, you know.” “So you tell me.” “I gave you that damn camera.” “We are referring to the Leica I had to pawn when you left me

and Anna and Natalya to starve, are we?” “Got it back, didn’t you?” “No thanks to you.” He’d cut her off without a pfennig when

she’d told him she’d be neither sleeping with nor working for him again. He hadn’t minded no longer having droit du seigneur, but the loss of a confidential secretary who spoke as many languages as Esther did had been a blow he’d made her suffer for.

Now, however, occasionally he turned up at 29c for advice, consolation, or praise—things that his succession of wives had run out of.

She wondered what it was this time.

She watched him studying a portrait of himself that she’d taken some years before, all sleek hair, hooded eyes, and cigarette holder.

“Good-looking fellow, that,” he said. He still was, but the portrait, as with the man, was typical of an earlier time. To be fashionable now, he should have adopted tweeds and a pipe.

Like all speculators and black marketeers, he’d been hard hit when Germany had finally regained control of its economy and stabilized its currency. “Are they trying to ruin me?” he’d wailed at the time.

“Yes,” Esther had told him, “that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.”

He’d never got over it. The amusement tax had hit his nightclubs; so had a proliferation of casinos and cabarets that took away his trade to Berlin’s newer West End. To compete, he’d lowered even his standards. It was said that there were clubs one admitted going to and others one didn’t. The Green Hat, Esther was afraid, now fell mainly into the category of those one didn’t.

She wondered why she was still fond of him.

“How’s Anna?” he asked.

“She’s not enjoying America as much as she thought she would.”

“Damn good. That bitch has been a complete serpent’s tooth to me.”

Every mention of Anna in the newspapers—and hardly a week passed when she didn’t pop up in the world’s press somewhere—was gall and wormwood to him. “Not a word, not a fucking word. Not so much as a ‘Thank you, dear Prince Nick, without you I’d still be in a fucking straitjacket.’ Is that honor? I ask you, Esther, is that how Romanovs reward loyalty? No wonder the fucking peasants revolted.”

The press had discovered Anna without him. Harriet von Rathlef, one of Anna’s many supporters, had published a series of articles proclaiming her as the lost Anastasia. Peter Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ former tutor, brought out a book declaring that she was a fake.

In 1928, with the death of the dowager empress, the czar’s mother, things had heated up—an inheritance was at stake—and

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