The Russian Cage Read online

  Felix owned a car. That would make him a rich man in Segundo Mexia.

  The teakettle whistled, and Felix said, “Want tea, Lizbeth? Peter?” Peter accepted, but I’d had enough of tea at the Savarov home. The rich man asked me if I wanted a Coca-Cola instead. Felix also owned a Penguin refrigerator, a Canadian import, and the drink would be cold, so I said yes.

  Though the day was moderate, the cold sweet liquid felt good in my throat.

  When we were all beveraged up, we sat in the living room, Peter and I on the couch and Felix in the armchair.

  “So, Eli’s jail cell,” I said to Peter. I wanted to get the conversation moving so it would be over with sooner.

  “The grigori cells are below the regular jail. The cells are spelled to keep magic suppressed. There are special jailers, people who have no magic at all and aren’t affected by it. They call them nulls. There are harsh punishments for prisoners observed trying to use magic.”

  “How many cells?”

  Peter counted mentally. “Just six, three on each side. One person to a cell.”

  “Which one is Eli’s?”

  “He’s in the third cell on the left when you enter the cellblock.”

  “Can he see anyone who asks to see him?” Felix said. “Or is there a list of approved visitors?”

  “They wouldn’t let Mother in, but I don’t know if she was on a list or not. She didn’t say. They didn’t explain. When I went, I didn’t see the jailer consult any list. I just said I was his brother. They searched me and handcuffed me and let me sit on a bench outside his cell so we could talk.”

  “Handcuffed?” I said.

  “So he couldn’t use his hands to cast spells,” Felix told me, in a way that said I’d missed something remarkable. “Peter was wearing his grigori vest, I’m sure.” Felix looked right into my eyes and tilted his head toward Peter.

  I looked at the boy and saw what I should have commented on right away.

  Peter had earned his vest. That was a big landmark in a grigori’s education, a coming-of-age marker. Peter was looking down at it, doing everything but patting it. The fabric still looked stiff and new.

  I complimented Peter on his achievement, and I even managed an apology for not saying anything earlier. Peter had clearly been waiting for me to remark on it.

  When I’d said as much as I could summon to satisfy his pride, I returned to the important thing: the facts about Eli’s jail.

  “Was there a time limit for your visit?” I wanted to know everything I could before I tried to see Eli.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Peter said.

  “How many are in the cells now?” Felix leaned forward in his chair. It was a dark crimson velvety thing someone’s mom had tired of. Peter and I were on the couch, which was similarly dark and cushioned but blue.

  “Let’s see.” Peter stared at his hands. “Okay, there were two women.”

  “Aren’t women in a separate jail from men? Or a separate wing?” That had always been my experience in any town of more than five thousand.

  Felix said, “Magic users are all together. There aren’t enough grigoris in jail to keep two separate cell areas.”

  “Jane Parvin,” Peter said. “And Svetlana Ustinova.”

  Felix looked worried, an expression I’d never seen on his face. These women must be grigoris of some reputation. “Jane’s in for killing one of the new grigoris in a test combat. Svetlana, I don’t know. Who else?” he asked.

  “A man I didn’t know. At least twenty years older than me.” Peter was just barely eighteen, I thought.

  “What did he look like?” Maybe Felix could identify the other prisoner from a description.

  “Very tall, big head, reddish beard,” Peter said. “He’s next to Eli. The women are across the corridor.”

  “That’s John Brightwood,” Felix said. “He’s a killer.”

  “I haven’t met a grigori who wasn’t,” I said.

  Peter looked from one of us to the other, his mouth open. He’d seen me kill his father and his father’s hired hands, but I was no grigori. Maybe Peter hadn’t ever seen what Eli could do, what Eli’s deceased partner Paulina had been capable of doing, by way of destroying another person.

  From Peter’s look of dismay, for the first time I wondered if all grigoris weren’t death dealers. “Are there grigoris who don’t…?”

  “Kill others? Yes, there are.” Felix grinned. “You didn’t know.”

  “How could I? The only other grigoris I’ve ever seen were trying to kill me.”

  Peter was still recovering. “Truly, Lizbeth?”

  “Truly,” I said.

  “How did you survive?”

  “I killed ’em first.” How else?

  “You… shot them?”

  “I did.”

  “Eli knows this?” he said.

  “Eli was with me.”

  “Does Eli…?”

  I felt a little bad for Peter, who was shocked, like his world had been turned upside down. I reminded myself that Peter had been prepared to kill his own father. “Peter, Eli was given a job to do. Some other grigoris didn’t want him to be successful. They did their best to kill us. I don’t enjoy killing, but I’d always rather it be them instead of me.”

  I didn’t know what world Peter had been living in, but it wasn’t the same one as mine.

  Felix was smiling, but when I looked at him, the grin vanished. He said, gently for him, “Peter, we have to do whatever is necessary to get your brother out of jail. Otherwise, he’ll be dead before he sees the outside of that cell.”

  “But why? What has he done?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. We’ll get him out. Felix, you’re in?”

  “Yes,” Felix said.

  “Why are you helping?” Peter asked. “Felix, you’ve always impressed me as, excuse me… selfish.”

  I was curious to hear the answer, because I’d thought the same thing. Why was Felix willing to risk his life and career for the sake of Eli?

  Both Peter and I were astonished when Felix answered, “I want to marry your sister, Peter.”

  “Which one?” Peter was definitely out at sea now, and I was right along with him.

  “Lada. Lucy.”

  I was glad it was Lucy, since she was older. But that only meant she was seventeen. I was sure Felix was thirty. At least Lucy seemed braver and smarter than her sister or mom.

  “Does Lucy return your feeling?” Peter was suddenly the head of the family, at least in Eli’s absence.

  “She doesn’t hate me,” Felix said mildly.

  But there was a lot Lucy didn’t know about Felix, I was willing to bet good money. I’d never pegged Felix as the marrying kind.

  I did enjoy the moment, because it was the first time I’d ever heard Felix sound anything but confident.

  “We need to finish talking about Eli. Peter, are you in?” I said.

  “Eli is my brother,” Peter said with dignity. “Yes.”

  So I had another crew. I didn’t wholly trust or like Felix, and Peter hadn’t been tested yet. But I didn’t have to crack Eli out of jail by myself.

  We talked a little more, but it was late afternoon by that time, and I needed time to think by myself.

  Peter returned to Hickory Street, which was where he’d been headed when he’d spotted me and Felix. He was staying at his home about half the time now, because the atmosphere in the school dormitory was hostile, he told us.

  Felix, who had also been on his way to visit the Savarovs when he’d seen me, offered to drive me back to my hotel. I was glad to accept. The traffic was heavy, so I kept quiet as Felix drove. I was thinking it would have been a busy afternoon for the Savarov women if Peter and Felix had not followed me.

  As I got out of the car in front of the Balboa Palace, Felix said, “Let’s meet tomorrow. I have to be on duty for six hours, but after that we can work on a plan.”

  “When and where?”

  “I’ll come by here
at four o’clock.”

  “See you then.” I went into the hotel, got my key from Paul McElvaney, and went to my room to ponder. In no particular order, I thought about these things: (1) Felix and Lucy as a couple felt funny and odd. (2) Peter was sure green for a man his age. (3) Maybe some of the grigoris in the cellblock with Eli would be released before we made our attempt to free him, or more would be under arrest. Random factors.

  (4) I wondered if there was any way I could carry a concealed gun. I felt very uneasy without one. I could be attacked at any moment. I’d been keeping my eyes open as I walked today, and I’d seen a few clusters of men I deemed dangerous. And I had enemies here; now the older brothers, Dagmar and Bogdan, knew what I looked like. I was real sure they slipped that maid money to find out what happened in the Savarov household.

  Maybe bloodshed could be avoided if I could make my way in to speak to the tsar. Though if a genuine aristocrat like Eli’s mom was convinced she couldn’t get in to see Alexei, I didn’t stand much of a chance… if I tried to get in the normal way.

  When I’d reached that point in all my wondering, my room felt too small, so I went to get some dinner. Afterward, I could have gone to a movie (something I’d only done once before), but I wasn’t in the mood to have fun. So me and my big ball of worry went back to my room to play catch some more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I found the jail on Folsom Street early the next morning. It was designed in Spanish style and looked almost like a hotel… at least from the outside. There was a sort of plaza, and then you walked through an archway. I stood across the street from that plaza and archway for a long time.

  Eli was just in there. Only yards away. I touched the little pouch that hung around my neck.

  In a sheer crazy moment, I decided I’d go back to the hotel. I’d get my guns from the safe. I’d return to this spot and walk through that archway and shoot everyone I saw. Take the keys from the corpse of the jailer. Free Eli from his cell. We would leave, leave this city.

  I struggled against this impulse with all the strength I could muster.

  “Keep off the sidewalk if you ain’t walking,” a stumpy man growled at me as he shoved me aside.

  I nearly drew my knife. That proved to me that I wasn’t thinking clear. The man didn’t deserve to die for shoving me. Probably.

  I lingered for five more minutes. I wished with all my heart that Eli could know I was close.

  Then I made myself leave before someone in a police uniform noticed me.

  I went by Felicia’s school, but the woman on duty in the reception room said Felicia was in class and couldn’t be disturbed. I asked the grigori to tell Felicia I’d been there, and she said she would. I believed her. She was nicer than that Tom O’Day.

  At loose ends, fighting the urge to return to Folsom Street and yearn across the pavement some more, I walked through the botanical gardens. I didn’t have anything else to do. It was pretty, if you liked plants. The climate of San Diego was so moderate that flowers were showing now, in January.

  My mother would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

  I was standing outside my hotel at four when Felix pulled up to the curb.

  “You look like death warmed over,” he said as I climbed in. He pulled right back out into traffic, which was heavy. And noisy.

  “Yeah?” I said. I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch. I thought I’d eaten breakfast? Maybe. And I hadn’t slept well, despite all the walking I’d done the previous day. I’d been thinking of Eli in a cell.

  “This has to end soon,” I said.

  Felix gave me a quick sour look. “You haven’t twitched when people died in front of you. But Eli’s arrest has wiped you out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re so strange. Pull your socks up, gunnie.”

  “Pot’s calling the kettle black.” I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head as I repeated her favorite saying.

  “Fair.” Felix nodded.

  “Do you really want to marry Lucy?” I said. This was not an unrelated thought.

  Felix gave it some thought. “I respect her,” he said at last. “She’s young, and she’s been brought up an aristocrat, but she’s strong. Lucy would be career suicide for most men, after her father was branded a traitor. For me, it won’t make a difference. And that would leave only one sister’s future for Eli to worry about.”

  I figured it was possible Veronika Savarov wanted a future, too. She couldn’t be much more than forty. Maybe Felix thought Veronika had had her chance.

  There were some words I hadn’t heard that I’d hoped to hear. “Love” and “affection,” mainly. Even knowing what I knew of Felix, those were possible. “So you’ve decided to marry Lucy to help out Eli,” I said. It sounded unbelievable even as I said it.

  “No one cares what grigoris do.” Felix shrugged.

  “Somebody sure seems to care what Eli does.”

  “Oh, of course, maybe princes like Eli. But I’m nobody, in a social sense,” Felix said. He didn’t sound particularly bitter. “I have no pedigree to live up to. Lucy will be lowering herself if she accepts my proposal. But I think marriage to me is preferable to staying home with her mother and sister for the rest of her life.”

  “Romantic,” I said. “That’ll sweep her off her feet.”

  Felix shrugged again. “It’s the truth. And it’s also the truth that I think we would suit each other. Lucy’s young, yes, ten years younger than me. But I don’t care. Maybe she won’t.”

  I understood Felix’s reasons for marrying Lucy, and they were all practical. I wondered if such a marriage would live up to Lucy’s expectations. Only if she were very unworldly or very… hell, who cared about my opinion, anyway?

  “Do you think Peter can carry out a plan?” I said, changing course. “He doesn’t think before he acts.”

  “Peter almost got you killed, Eli told me.”

  “Hadn’t been for Peter’s interference, I wouldn’t have gotten shot. Or at least, not shot so bad.” I had worked out my plan so carefully. Peter’s sudden appearance had set off the chain of events that had put me in the hospital.

  “I think if he has clear directions and we drum it in that he has to stick to them, Peter will be fine. He loves Eli, and he’s talented. He may be as good as Eli, someday, if he lives that long.”

  “Also, no one else is going to volunteer to help,” I said.

  “That is absolutely the truth.” Felix looked grim.

  “I have a plan,” I said.

  “You too? All right, we’ll hear yours first. Now, we’re going to go to my house, and I’m going to watch you eat something and drink a lot of water or lemonade. Then we’ll plot.”

  So that was what we did.

  “Plot” sounded like we were doing something wrong, and getting Eli out of jail was absolutely right, so I preferred to call it “plan.”

  Felix fried sausages and potatoes at his house.

  I watched him moving around the little kitchen. Maybe I didn’t dislike Felix as much as I had. He was not friendly, and he was a killer, and he loved secrets, but he’d done a few decent things.

  I couldn’t sit idle while he worked, so I began to straighten the living room. Felix didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t like I mopped. It was a matter of refolding newspapers, stacking magazines, dumping the wastebasket. I found what might be a dustrag and used it to wipe surfaces.

  “How long have you known the Savarov family? Did you come over on the boat with them?” I called, so he’d hear over the pop of the grease and the scrape of the pans.

  The fleet following the ship on which Nicholas Romanov and his family had fled had been ragtag and varied, all sizes of boats crowded with all sorts of people. The refugees were united by one thing: the fact that they would have been killed if they had stayed in Russia.

  A bullet had actually whizzed past Nicholas’s head as he’d boarded. He’d insisted on being the last to get on the ship, so he would be the last to leave Russian so
il. Romantic. Dumb.

  Felix stood still, spatula in hand, and looked down at the potatoes like they were a crystal ball. “My sister and I were on one of the smaller vessels, hardly better than a fishing boat,” he said finally. One corner of his mouth turned down. “Our father just qualified to be on the boat, since he was one of the tsar’s favorite attendants. Our mother was dead by then. The quarters were crowded. That’s putting it mildly. But that didn’t last long.”

  I waited, because I was sure he was going to tell me more. I was right.

  “We didn’t have enough food or water. We were as hungry as we’d been in Russia. My sister died on the boat. We had to push her body into the ocean.” Felix turned the sausages over again, but he was doing it without thought.

  I was sorry I’d asked, but now I felt obliged to hear the rest of his story.

  “We wandered for years, waiting for someone to give us asylum. When William Hearst offered a temporary refuge to the tsar and his family, the rest of us disembarked as well. A few of us went to the Hearst ranch with the royal family, but he hardly wanted all of us to camp around it. At least the tsar found a barracks for us to stay in, down where the palace is now. Many of the sailors had died—were dying—from the influenza. We scrubbed out a building and lived in it. We didn’t exactly have American permission, but no one told us we couldn’t.” Felix smiled to himself, though nothing about the story was funny. “Then America cracked apart, and California needed its own government, and behold! There was a true hereditary ruler on California soil, and the Romanovs had become the favorites of the rich and of the movie industry. Finally, someone offered Alexei a job he was qualified to do.”

  That was debatable, considering the state of his realm now. But I would not open that can of worms.

  “Did you know the Savarovs?” I said.

  As Felix put the food on plates, he nodded. “I knew Eli a little. We were both magic users. His mother and father were invited to San Simeon; the children weren’t. Prince Savarov wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to bond himself to the old tsar and Alexei, who was thirty by then. So he left Eli and the girls in the barracks with us. Veronika had a connection, Maria Orlova, an aristocratic old lady with a lot of dignity. She hired Maria Orlova to keep an eye on her children, and she hired my mother to help Madame Orlova. My father was busy helping to clean out the barracks, and we needed the money.” Felix shook his head. “I don’t know how Madame Orlova managed with the two oldest, Eli’s half brothers. I think she more or less washed her hands of them. They were thugs. But Eli, Peter, Lucy, and Alice were good children, or as good as children ever are. I helped my mother keep track of them, keep them busy. I would take Eli with me when I tried to earn a little extra money, so we could eat. Even before the tsar was asked to rule here, Rasputin founded the school, though he didn’t have a building at first. When the starets founded the school, it saved my life. And by then, I knew Eli had the power and saw the possibility in Peter.”