Swiss Vendetta (Agnes Luthi Mysteries #1)(36)

“The dress has value, a history,” said Agnes.

“You don’t see value the way they do. The marquise values honor and Napoleon is not her idea of honor.” Arsov sucked on a cigarette. “I may collect history but the Vallottons don’t, they live it.”

Mulholland set his wineglass on the table with a thump and called to the butler for more. Agnes considered dragging him outside and giving him a short lesson in manners. A weekend with her mother-in-law would be good for him.

“You’ve surely lived your share of history,” she directed at Arsov.

“You think being born in Russia means Doctor Zhivago. Your generation thinks that is war. Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in fur, with tales of love and ice palaces.”

“I think Doctor Zhivago was an earlier generation than mine and an earlier war than yours.”

“Zhivago should have left Russia. I did. No one cared who died there. My family, my friends, my comrades-in-arms were killed as fodder for the egos of our leaders. When I decided to abandon my home country it took me weeks traveling at night along the Volga to find a way out. And that was by accident. Literally I ran smack—you say smack—into a man during the worst snowstorm of my life. It is fortunate that after my family was killed I had traveled to Stalingrad. I told you my brothers were there? In Stalingrad?”

Agnes shook her head.

“Well, they were. In the Red Army. And I found them. They were killed a few months later in the siege. That is another reason I left. There was no one for me.” He puffed a ring of smoke, watching it dissipate. “Before they died, my battle instincts were honed. In Stalingrad the enemy could be around any corner. We occupied sections of buildings, ran past each other in parallel tunnels, risked meeting a sniper at every opening, and lived because of our instincts. You will not believe me, you think I must have had a sign that night during the blizzard—a military emblem on his collar, the feel of his hat, his cologne, his stink, something that told me this man who had his back to me was a Nazi. This, like heroism, you cannot understand until you see it for yourself. I know that my subconscious acted before I had chance to think. I slipped my knife into his side and ripped up, lucky that I struck soft tissue, fortunate that I had done this before.”

Estanguet moaned and Agnes turned toward him, fighting her own sense of revulsion.

“He fell,” Arsov continued. “There were others and I struck again.”

Estanguet turned gray and Agnes wondered if his health was failing. Seeing the body, twenty-four hours of cold, and now this violent story. She considered asking a servant to accompany him to the chateau.

Estanguet gulped the last of his wine and walked toward the windows, turning his back on the conversation.

“Two more died that night in the snow,” continued Arsov, “and I was face-to-face with a fourth. This one had a gun in his hand. Just before I thrust my knife and he fired his weapon, I swore. In Russian. He swore at the same time in English and that is what saved us. A word in German and the next moment would have been my end.”

Agnes shivered, remembering the storm the previous night. She could imagine the whiteout. A fight in blinding conditions. Killing blindly. She rose and walked to stand next to Estanguet. Checking his coloring in her peripheral vision. He looked better.

She breathed on a small glass pane to clear the ice, but it was too thick to melt that way. Although it was impossible to see out, she had walked the property enough to know it now. She could picture the cliff behind them, and the broad flat knuckle of land that gave the chateau and the mansion a panoramic view across the lake south toward France. Old trees, now bent by the weight of ice, trickled out from the base of the cliff, ending in the grove where Felicity Cowell had died. Apart from this grove there was a neatness to the plateau, with the various outbuildings blending in almost too well: summer pavilion, old stables now used as a garage, the ice house, and the Orangerie at the end of the formal gardens. Did Felicity’s assailant cross the lawn from one of these hiding places or was he or she lying in wait? Using the state of the body, and the timing of the arrival of the storm, Blanchard had narrowed the time of death to within about an hour and a half. Agnes had asked Carnet and Petit to talk to everyone again and get a better sense of their activities and of the storm during that period of time. How visible was the grove? Could Felicity even see where she was going? Why didn’t someone see her attacker from the dozens of windows?

“You ran into a regiment of Brits?” Mulholland said behind her. “In the Soviet Union in 1942? Bloody unlikely.”

“Yet the man was British,” said Arsov, “cut off from his company. It was not a fighting unit. Their task was information gathering—spying if caught out of uniform. I came upon him just after he ran into the Germans and he believed I saved him. He was right. He was scouting for information about the movements of the armies, and about supply possibilities of the Russian oil fields, for oil was important to all sides then as now.”

“Shame they stayed allies. Could have ended a bunch of nonsense right then,” Mulholland said.

“Ah, but you needed us as a fighting people just as he needed me that night. We took shelter in a barn, unwilling to risk walking farther in the storm. I had such detail about the situation in Stalingrad that he decided to bring me to their headquarters.”

With a glance at Estanguet, Agnes returned to her seat, wondering why Mulholland was here. He didn’t seem like the neighborly sort. On the other hand, they were all stir-crazy in the aftermath of the storm. She pulled a blanket over her legs, testing to see if she could see her breath. She could.