The Prince of the Soviets

4. BARON BREMER’S TREASURE

Nina made an excellent job of the sewing task she had been set, but Fyodor Stepanych told her she would not be getting paid for her work.

“Can’t you already sit by a warm stove and eat in our canteen?” he said. “What more do you want?”

Nina realized that she had fallen into a trap. Shilo had still not brought her the promised coat, and now the weather had turned so cold that Nina could not even put her nose outside, let alone go to the market and buy herself something warm.

“I’ve been put in prison without a trial!” she protested.

Fyodor Stepanych only laughed. “But you’re free to go. Nobody’s keeping you here.”

He was only too happy to have a seamstress who could handle expensive material and would work for him free of charge. Nina’s handiwork provided outfits for the prostitutes, bringing in a good profit for Fyodor Stepanych.

He watched Nina like a hawk to make sure that she did not help herself to offcuts and came in from time to time to count the leftover scraps of material. If he was in a good mood, he would sit for a while in the vestry, reminiscing about his youth.

He told Nina he had lived in Khabarovsk, working as a peddler who went door to door selling petty goods. His dream at that time had been to go to Canada. He had heard that the Canadian National Railways needed people to maintain the tracks that ran through remote forested regions. A family with two adult males could get an electric saw and an interest-free loan for twenty-five years. But it turned out that Canada would not take Chinese workers, only whites, and Fyodor Stepanych, smarting from the insult, had joined the Bolshevik party and enlisted in the fight against imperialism by becoming a warden of a women’s prison.

Shilo would sometimes come to see Nina too. If she had a drink or two in her, she would always start telling stories of her past.

“We’re like sisters, you and me,” Shilo told Nina, perching on the cutting table. “Only my family’s grander than yours. Have you heard of the Barons Bremer? Well, that’s us.”

She would describe in detail the luxury life she had once enjoyed and relatives so distinguished they had all but served in the court of the Tsar himself. But in all these stories, there was only one detail that rang true: during the revolution, Shilo had been raped by a group of soldiers and thrown out of a window. Her mind had been affected ever since.

“We had a great big house on Petrovka Lane,” Shilo enthused. “Beautiful—like a palace. There were these carved oak panels in the dining room commissioned by my mother with portraits of all of us children as angels.”

“So, what happened to your siblings?” asked Nina

“My brothers were shot in 1918, and my mother never got over the shock. She had a heart attack on the spot. But my father survived the revolution and the war. He worked as a shoeshiner on Pervomaisky Street, right opposite our apartment block. Only this summer, he was run down and killed by a cart.”

Nina sighed. Everybody, it seemed, had lost loved ones.

“I had a fiancé once, you know,” Shilo said one day. “He was a military attaché from France.”

Suddenly, she began to speak French—correctly and with barely a trace of an accent. As she told the story of her romance with Jean Christophe, how they had met at the racetrack and later begun a correspondence, Nina listened, dumbstruck, glancing now and again at Shilo’s raddled face. Who knew, perhaps she really had been a baroness? Nowadays, there were any number of doormen who had once been army colonels and cleaners who had been born princesses. They all survived as best they could, changing not only their appearance but also their very nature.

All the same, Shilo, with her fevered imagination, was capable of dreaming up any number of extraordinary things: an aristocratic past, angels in army helmets, or a samovar that whistled the “Internationale.”

“Do you know what else I remember?” Shilo said. “I hid some sweets under the windowsill in the library. My brother Mishka was always stealing them from me, and I made a secret hiding place—I was clever, see. There was a panel you could pull out and hide things behind.”

Shilo grabbed a pencil and began to draw a plan on a scrap from an old sewing pattern. “So, this is Petrovsky Lane, and this is our house. This is the gate and the courtyard. You go in and go upstairs…”

She told the story in such detail that Nina did not know what to think.

“You don’t believe me, don’t you?” Shilo asked. “I can prove it! I know where all our papers are. Father buried them in the yard after the revolution. There’s a whole treasure trove there. If you go and dig it up, you’ll see for yourself.”

Only the day before, Nina had read an article in a newspaper about treasure hidden away by the “bourgeoisie” for a rainy day. Workers who were repairing former townhouses belonging to the nobility would sometimes find collections of porcelain, old embroideries, gold coins, and family silver.

“Do you remember exactly what your father buried in the yard?” Nina asked cautiously.

Shilo shrugged. “There was definitely a photograph album. There’s a picture in it of me at seventeen.” Shilo laughed and hugged Nina. “When I saw you on the tram, I stared and stared, and I couldn’t believe my eyes; you were so like me on this picture!”

“Wait,” Nina slipped out of her embrace. “Do you know where the treasure is hidden?”

“You bet I do. You go in the yard and count out five bricks on the wall to the right. The fifth one has a chip in it where Mishka threw a horseshoe and knocked a bit off. You need to dig right under it—” Shilo cut herself short. “But I’m not going there. There are evil spirits there.”

Nina frowned. “Which evil spirits?”

“Those devils who threw me out of the window.”

“But that was ten years ago!”

“I’m not going, I tell you. Go yourself if you want. I can take you there.”

“But I don’t have a coat.”

“I’ll let you have your coat for a bit. Listen. If you get our photograph album back, I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life. I’ll do anything for you! I’d love to have another look at my family after all these years.”

That night, Nina could not get to sleep. Maybe this was her chance to escape? If the treasure really existed, it might contain something valuable. She could sell it to pay for her ticket back to Shanghai and return the money to Shilo later.

But who knew what was happening now in the Bremers’ former mansion? There might be a police station there or worse.

Shilo went to Petrovsky Lane to see how the land lay.

“They’ve moved some government office into our house,” she said to Nina. “They don’t have a sign, and there are no dogs or groundskeeper. But there’s a motor car parked in the coach house.”

In the evening, Shilo brought Nina her Chinese coat. She also produced a small shovel. “Look at what I got from our grave robbers! Their business is bad these days. They’re going around the city cemeteries, but there’s only poor folk buried there—they don’t even have gold teeth. Recently, they went to the funeral of a commissar specially, to have a look, and they saw him lying in his coffin with his boots on. But when they opened up his grave, the boots had gone. Someone had already taken them.”

Nina could not imagine climbing into somebody else’s yard—it was a sin after all. But then again, she had nothing to lose now, not after making church robes into dresses for prostitutes. She would never get into heaven with her record anyway.

“What if I’m caught?” Nina asked.

Shilo grinned. “The police will decide you’re a thief and put you back in here.”

Nina decided that if she was successful, she would not come back to Fyodor Stepanych. So, before she left, she changed into a dress she had made out of a gray priest’s robe, trimmed with dark red velvet panels. It was comical to set off on a treasure hunt dressed for a cocktail party, but it would be a shame to leave the dress for the prostitutes—it was the best piece Nina had made.

As it got dark, Nina and Shilo set off for Petrovsky Lane. Snow began to fall. There was nobody about and no light from the windows—luckily for the treasure hunters, all the electricity in the district had been turned off.

“There’s my house,” said Shilo, pointing to a recently refurbished house opposite the Korsh Theater. “Do you see the window on the second floor? That’s my window. I wonder who has that room now. It’s a good thing they’ve put an office in there. If they’d put in tenants, they’d have messed the place up already.”

Nina nodded.

Now that proletarian tenants were being packed into former mansions, they would alter them to their own taste without a thought for the architecture. In Moscow now, at every step, you could see the disfigured facades of buildings—their windows bricked up and their balconies destroyed.

Shilo tugged at Nina’s sleeve. “Come on. I’ll show you the best place to climb over. There’s a woodpile on the other side of the fence here. You can get up on that and jump into the yard.”

Nina looked doubtfully at her. “Maybe we should go together after all?”

“Are you starting that again?” snapped Shilo. “I’ve told you!”

“But what if I don’t find anything?”

“You will.”

“But what if someone catches me?”

“Just hit him in the face with your shovel, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Good lord, thought Nina. What on earth am I doing?

Shilo helped her climb onto the snow-covered woodpile. “Come on, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker—don’t let us down!” She made the sign of the cross over Nina. “When you dig up the treasure, give me a shout, and I’ll help you get out of there.”

Nina felt like Aladdin sent by the evil sorcerer into the magic cave to find the lamp.

She jumped down into the snowdrift, and a minute later, the shovel came flying over the fence after her.

The small yard was covered in snow. All that could be seen on the ground were the dark marks of car tracks by the coach house.

Holding her breath, Nina stole along the stone wall. She reached the gate and began to look for the chipped brick. It was snowing more heavily now, and she could see very little in front of her.

At least it will cover my tracks, Nina thought as she ran her hands hastily over the brickwork.

At last, she found a deep pit in one of the bricks. She got down and began to clear away the snow beneath the fence. The ground had not frozen solid, but her shovel kept hitting some roots. Nina chopped away at them with the shovel, and the blows were so loud that they could have been heard a mile away.

Then there was a scraping of metal, and the shovel slipped along a flat surface. Nina threw it aside and began to dig with her hands. Her heart was beating fast with excitement and a sort of superstitious fear. She felt as if she was about to dig up not buried treasure but a coffin.

With a final effort, she pulled out a large metal box, its surface rough with rust. But it was too early to celebrate. She still had to get out of the yard.

Nina stood up, brushed the dirt from the hen of her dress and… froze in horror. Before her stood a huge, strapping man with a shaven head and dressed in an unbuttoned greatcoat.

“Do you need some help?” he asked with a grin.

Nina rushed to the fence, forgetting all about the box.

“Get me out of here!” she called, but there was no answer from Shilo.

Nina dashed to the locked gate and again to the fence.

The terrifying shaven-headed man came striding out of the swirling snow, grabbed Nina by the arm, and dragged her toward the house without a word. She started to scream, but he shook her like a doll. “Stop yelling!”

They were met in the dark entrance hall by two more people: a young man in a silk dressing gown and a large black woman—a servant with a paraffin lamp in her shaking hands.

“Oscar, we should call the police,” barked the shaven-headed man. “I’ve caught a thief.”

The young man took the lamp from the servant and began to examine Nina as if she were some exotic animal. Her red velvet coat, now covered in earth and snow, clearly made an impression on him.

“What are you doing here?” asked the man with a strong American accent.

Nina gawked at him, trying to catch her breath. This Oscar looked quite civilized. He had a well-groomed, pale face, close-set hazel eyes, and a fashionable pencil mustache.

“I didn’t want to steal anything,” Nina said in English. “I just needed some documents.”

“What documents?” snarled the shaven-headed man, who clearly knew English but preferred to speak in Russian.

“I left a box out there in the snow—”

“Yefim, bring it in,” ordered Oscar.

“Then the girl will do a runner!”

“No, she won’t. Theresa and I will watch her.”

Yefim went outside, and Nina took a look around her. She was not in an office but in a rich private house. The hall had parquet floors, and there was a whole array of expensive canes in a carved umbrella stand by the door and a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

Nina turned her gaze on Oscar.

Who is this man? she wondered. He was living in the center of Moscow like some lord. He even had a black servant.

Yefim came back with the rusty box, put it down on a pier table, and began to take out yellowed envelopes and paperwork. There was no sign of any money or valuables.

Oscar picked up a leather-bound photograph album.

“Property of Baroness Nina A. Bremer,” he read the inscription on the cover.

On the first page was a picture of a young girl in a fancy dress and a fetching hat pulled down over one eyebrow.

“Look! It’s her!” exclaimed Theresa, pointing at Nina.

Clearly, the photograph showed a young Shilo, and there was a definite resemblance to Nina. They did indeed look like sisters.

“So, you’re a baroness, are you?” asked Oscar, looking at Nina with interest. “Well, I’m very pleased to meet you. Will you have dinner with me?”

Nina had expected that the evening might end in any number of ways—scandal, hue and cry, police procedures—but she had not expected an invitation to dinner.

“Th-thank you,” she stammered. “I’d be delighted.”

“Theresa, lay another place at the table, would you?” asked Oscar.

“Very good, Mister Reich.”

They can think what they like about me, thought Nina, so long as they don’t call the police.

Nina followed Oscar through a succession of rooms, and she was barely able to believe her eyes. Here, in the heart of communist Moscow, was a veritable oasis of capitalism. Every chair and every vase was a work of art.

What is Oscar Reich’s line of work? she wondered. Was he a foreign diplomat? How could the Soviet government allow him to live in such dazzling splendor?

Nina had many questions she wanted to ask, but she bit her tongue. She had a feeling this man might be able to help her. The important thing was not to frighten him off.

As she went past a large mirror, Nina felt secretly pleased that she had decided to wear the beautiful dress. It would have been horribly awkward to dine with Oscar in her darned skirt and faded blouse.

Theresa ladled out soup into bowls. Nina tried a spoonful—it was real New England Clam Chowder served with thin pieces of melba toast and fresh herbs. She was prepared to act the imposter for a while for the sake of pleasures such as this. Shilo’s grand title clearly opened the door to certain privileges.

Nina pointed out the wooden panels around the ceiling to Oscar. “Do you see those angels? They’re portraits of me with my brothers. Mother had them carved specially. That’s Mishka, and those two are Ilya and Anton,” she said, naming the other brothers off the top of her head. Who knew their names, anyway?

Oscar looked at her with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. “So, where have you been living all this time?”

Nina improvised a tragic story about how she had spent many years roaming the country after the revolution and had finally decided to go abroad.

“There’s nothing for me here,” she said woefully. “I need money and documents, so I dug up my box.”

“I understand,” Oscar nodded.

Everything seemed to be going to plan.

I’ll flirt with him for a bit and then ask him for a loan, thought Nina. It’ll be nothing to him to give me some money with his fortune.

After dinner, Oscar told Theresa to light a fire in the library and to bring in a bottle of wine and two glasses.

Nina was delighted. This was a good sign!

In the library, she went straight to the window. As Shilo had said, under the windowsill was a tiny hiding place covered with a small piece of wood. Nina moved the wood to one side, reached into the crack, and took some sweets in silver wrappers, hardened with age.

“Help yourself,” she said, holding one out to Oscar.

He laughed. “Antique sweets! Whatever next.”

He had unnaturally white teeth that looked as if they were made of porcelain. How much do crowns like that cost? Nina wondered. They had to be more expensive than gold ones.

“Will you join me in a drink?” asked Oscar, opening the bottle. “Wine isn’t like sweets—it gets better with time.”

They chinked glasses and drunk to Nina’s health.

Encouraged, she could not resist asking a question. “Tell me, who are you? What do you do?”

“I’m a Red capitalist,” answered Oscar. “When there was famine in Russia, I brought a fully equipped field hospital over from the States and sixty thousand dollars’ worth of canned goods. After that, the Soviet government gave me a concession, and now I have my own pencil factory at the Dorogomilovskaya Gate.”

Nina was bewildered. The fight against capitalism was the mainstay of Bolshevik ideology. Why was an American allowed to own a factory in Moscow?

Seeing her confusion, Oscar laughed. “The Bolsheviks want to build a new kind of society, but they don’t have the technical specialists they need: they’ve all either run away or died during the war. Currently, eighty-five percent of the population of the USSR live in rural areas, and half of them can’t read and write. The first thing the country needs is to fight against illiteracy, and there’s a huge demand for pencils and pens. So, they made an exception for me.”

“Aren’t you afraid that the Soviet government could just take away your factory?” Nina asked.

“You shouldn’t confuse politics with the propaganda aimed at the man in the street. You may have noticed that the Bolshevik press likes to attack the English, the French, the Poles, and the Chinese, but they hold up the USA as an example—a model of modernization and business acumen. They’re no fools in the Kremlin; they know very well that to get industry back on its feet, they need close ties with the United States. Europe is still recovering from the Great War, and America is the only country that will provide technology and long-term loans. The success of my business is like a pledge—a guarantee that one day Washington will acknowledge the USSR and create an embassy here. And as soon as that happens, foreign investors will start to move in.”

“You’re a brilliant diplomatist, it seems,” Nina said, delighted.

Oscar shrugged. “I guess I just have a feel for business. I earned my first million when I was nineteen years old.”

They sat on the divan and talked. Nina now felt completely relaxed, perhaps from the warmth and comfort or the excellent Italian wine. When all was said and done, she thought that had to be one of the greatest pleasures in life: to sit and chat with an intelligent man who clearly showed an interest in her.

She did not want to think about the future at all, not even the immediate future. But still, she glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was already long after midnight. She hoped Oscar would let her stay the night in his house. Surely, he would not throw her out—Nina hinted several times that she had nowhere to go.

Oscar took a last sip of wine, put his glass down on the floor, and, without a word, pushed Nina down on the divan.

“What are you doing?” she cried out in a muffled voice.

He put his hand over her mouth and began fumbling hastily at the buttons of his trousers.

Yefim, his cigarette in his mouth, took aim at a ball with his cue and sent it rattling into the far pocket.

“You’ll get yourself a dose of syphilis one of these days,” he said, sullenly, as Oscar came whistling into the billiard room.

Oscar waved him away impatiently. “Skip it. Turns out this one was a nice little lady. Just a little shy for my liking.”

Yefim put his billiard cue back in the rack. “I wanted to show you something.”

He brought in one of the large gray envelopes belonging to Baron Bremer and tipped out its contents onto the green baize of the billiard table. It was a bundle of securities in German and Swedish firms along with a will registered with a solicitor, stating that all the baron’s property was to pass to his children on his death.

Oscar looked at Yefim with amazement. “Do you think these papers are genuine?” he asked. “Is our baroness a millionairess?”

“It’s possible.”

Oscar scratched his head. “Well, it’s impossible to get ahold of this fortune in the USSR, anyway.”

“You need to think how to go about it,” said Yefim. “We need all the money we can get.”

Oscar liked to tell everyone that his business was going well, but in fact, things were getting worse every day. According to the original plan, he was to become a model concession-holder and attract foreign investors into the USSR, but nothing had come of it mainly because in the Bolshevik camp, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. One government department would hand out guarantees of private capital while another would threaten to destroy every last capitalist on earth. Who would start up a business in Moscow under such conditions?

But worst of all was the fact that the Bolsheviks kept altering the rules in their own favor. When Oscar had come to Russia, he had been promised that he could change Soviet money into foreign currency at the greatly reduced official rate and transfer the profit from his business into foreign bank accounts. But now there was a foreign currency crisis in the country, and the State Bank was doing all it could to prevent Oscar from taking a single cent out of the country.

Besides all this, Oscar was constantly hounded by various commissions connected with the trade unions or the police or the Chief Committee for Concessions. All these officials pretended to be concerned about the conditions of his workers when their real mission was simply to extort bribes.

Yefim had been the first to suggest to Oscar that they needed to get out of the USSR, and the sooner the better. He had never had any illusions about the Bolsheviks. Before the revolution, he had been the owner of a luxury bathhouse with private suites and had been through all the cycles of nationalization. He had had his accounts and property confiscated and eventually lost his house. If Oscar had not taken him on as his assistant, Yefim would have taken to drink long ago.

Oscar too understood that it was time to fold up his business and get out. But he had put everything he owned into his factory, and it was impossible to sell. He felt like a foolish child who has been warned countless times not to play with fire. Oscar had never heeded such warnings—he was a business genius after all. But now the genius had lost.

The securities belonging to Baroness Bremer could be just what Oscar needed to save him, but he had ruined everything.

A week of courtship, flowers, and chocolates, and Nina would have fallen for him hook, line, and sinker. Instead, he had treated her as just another victim of the revolution—a lishenets girl with whom he could do whatever he wanted.

Lishentsy was the name given in the USSR to former aristocrats, priests, and other “socially hostile elements” who had been stripped of their electoral rights. They could not find a job or receive credit, so in order to survive, young and attractive women in this position often resorted to working as escorts or sometimes even prostitutes. This was something of which Oscar took full advantage. Deep down, he was engaged in his own class struggle. He was Jewish, and once upon a time, princes and barons would not have let him past their thresholds. Now, their daughters were submitting themselves willingly to his embraces.

But this time, he had made a serious mistake.

He hurried back to the library. He had to convince Nina that he had been swept off his feet by a fit of uncontrollable passion.