City of Silence (City of Mystery) by Kim Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

and
Juliet in the ballet next week.  Original, yes?”  He grinned at her, showing
the square white teeth which always seemed just a bit too small for his beefy
face, clearly amused by his little joke.
    “Who
were they?”
    “I
told you.  Ballet dancers. “
    “Yes,
but what were their names?”
    He
shrugged.  “Do ballet dancers have names?”
    Tatiana
hesitated.  “They’re sure that it was a double suicide?  And not something
else?”
    “What
else would it be?”
    “Murder
might be posed to look like suicide.”
    “Who
would want them dead?”   He pierced another yolk, then dragged a crust of bread
through the gelatinous puddle.  “They were nobodies.” 
     
     
    As
soon as Filip was out of the apartment, Tatiana dressed.  She did not call for
her maid, who was probably somewhere having her own breakfast or gossiping with
a gaggle of servants.  Tatiana was a lounger and often returned to her bed
after breakfast, most generally not ringing for assistance in dressing until
noon.  So she struggled unattended into a smocked dress designed to be worn
over her swim costume at the coast and thus reasonably easy to don in a rush.  Once
she was suitably covered, she pulled on her shoes and exited the front door,
looking both left and right as she stepped into the hall, craning her neck like
a character in some absurd comic play.
    She
could not say why she was skittish, so unwilling to be seen. Tatiana had lived
within the Winter Palace for the entirety of the time she had been married to
Filip and had as much right to come and go through these halls as anyone.  The
size and location of their private quarters was the result of a single day, years
ago, when Filip had taken a bullet in the side during some street fracas and
thus immediately risen in the tsar’s estimation.  It took a man like Filip, bold
and broad and very nearly fearless, to earn a full apartment in a wing not far
from the imperial family’s, to earn his wife a position, even a lesser one, in
the tsarina’s court of ladies.
    Her
feet followed the familiar path, turning corners and navigating the great rooms
at the end of each hall without thought, moving up and down staircases without
the effort of the movement striking her consciousness.  The Winter Palace was grand
only in appearance, pleasing to the eye with little regard for the rest of the
senses.   In fact, as homes went, it was not even comfortable.  It contained antiquated
plumbing, unpredictable lighting, primitive heating, and utterly ineffective ventilation,
resulting in the sort of daily inconveniences that would have been unthinkable
in a European palace and making it the least popular of the tsar’s three residences.
 
    The
significance of the place lay largely in the fact that its sheer size allowed
it to function as a contained city.  In one direction, the Palace took up a huge
expanse of shoreline along the Neva River, with several pavilions leading down
to individual docks, and on the other side it stretched the equivalent of three
city blocks.  In the high season, somewhere between six and seven thousand
people lived within its walls, more than the entire population of the town
where Tatiana had been born.  This was not the high season.  As its name so
obligingly indicated, the Winter Palace was the tsar’s primary residence in the
winter and the majority of the aristocracy, along with their staffs, spent
summers in their country homes or villas by the sea.  In this particular summer
the season was being delayed until the conclusion of the Tchaikovsky ball.
    The
Winter Palace was not only the size of a city but was laid out like one as
well, much in the manner of the old fortress towns - or an egg, should one pause
to think of it - with layers of protection radiating out from a vital hub. The
yoke of this particular egg was the lavish chambers occupied by the tsar, tsarina,
and their five children.  Tatiana had never personally visited these quarters,
but