“A peasant girl I trusted took him when bandits broke into the estate and she has him here in Paris. Varinka. She won’t give him up.”
“Dear God. But you’re his mother.”
Sofya and Luba gathered me closer.
“We went to get Max at school,” Sofya said. “But Madame Fournier, the headmistress, refuses to give him to us. Says the man Max is living with may be a Cheka agent—the Red secret police—and threatened her. She’s terrified, poor woman.”
“What school?”
“L’Ecole Cygne Royal.” Sofya handed me a school letter.
Just seeing Max’s first name in print brought tears to my eyes. “I know the school, of course.” It was one of the most exclusive crèches in Paris.
“Can you help me get him from there? We must arrive before Varinka takes him home at four. These people, Taras and Varinka, are dangerous. Taras helped attack our family, he and Vladi, who stabbed you on the tram.”
I reached out for Sofya’s hand. “Oh no, my dear—”
“I think Taras is only here to kill nobility fleeing Russia. I must try again to get Max. Maybe you can persuade her?”
“Perhaps we can go to the police.”
“The police will do nothing, Eliza. Did you get the bracelet?”
“Here.” I held out my wrist.
“On folded paper inside are account numbers from banks all over Europe and their passcodes. Father left them with us for safekeeping.”
I clasped one hand over the bracelet. “Heavenly day.”
“The money from those accounts could be of tremendous help to the Whites.”
“Perhaps it can buy us some help with the school,” I said. “Maybe I could contact some official with influence.” I’d left New York with a long list of Mother’s acquaintances whom she’d asked me to check in with, including a former Russian officer.
Sofya leaned in. “My thought exactly.”
I folded the paperwork and slipped it in my handbag. “Well then, I’ll do my best. I know someone who might help. Will ask him to appeal to the school to release Max to us. He can offer Madame protection, certainly.”
“I’m sorry to draw you into all this, Eliza.”
“I do love doing the impossible. We’ve got a whole army of Russian émigrés staying out in Southampton.”
“Of course you do.”
She smiled and for the first time I saw the old Sofya.
“Luba can wait for us at my apartment and you and I will visit Mother’s friend and then the school.”
“We must hurry. Soon as Varinka knows I’m here she will leave town with Max and we’ll never find him.”
* * *
—
SOFYA AND I TAXIED to the Place Vendôme in eleven minutes flat and entered the grand lobby of the Ritz with just enough time to talk to General Yakofnavich and then make it to school to fetch Max. The lovely old place had survived Germany’s bombs nicely and changed little since my parents took me to tea there weekly during our August stays in Paris.
The lobby stood as usual, the reception area, with its ten-foot-high ceilings and eighteenth-century furnishings, doing everything it could not to look like a reception area. Our footsteps echoed on the marble floor as we stepped to a lovely, leather-topped Louis Seize desk. Behind it sat the concierge—Charles, according to his name tag, who spoke at length to someone on the telephone while wearing the vigorously bored countenance Parisian hotels encourage in their concierges.
“Name?”
“Eliza Ferriday and Sofya Streshnayva Stepanov. Visiting from New York.”
“Your business?”
I paused. How to phrase: We need to deliver bank passcodes critical to saving the Russian White Army in exchange for help releasing my noble godson from a Cheka assassin?
“I need to speak with General Yakofnavich. Important diplomatic information concerning the Streshnayva family. It’s most urgent, Charles.”
“On hold,” he said. He covered the receiver with one hand. “The general has a food taster. Can you imagine? It’s like a novel.”
Was it my first-name familiarity that opened his spigot of gossip?
He leaned across the desk. “The general is a mean one. Someone’s mad they lost the war. Even his two bodyguards fear him. Big ones, those two. They don’t worry about having their food tasted. One ate a whole salmon, head and all.”
I checked the wall clock. 3:30.
“Please, monsieur. We’re terribly late.”
Charles hung up the phone and waved in the general direction of the elevator.
“Fifth floor. Room fifty-two. Be prepared to do battle, ladies.”
I held Sofya’s hand as the elevator ascended and I practically vibrated with excitement. Perhaps I missed my calling and should have been a spy, or at least an ambassador.
A servant answered the hotel room door and ushered