‘Very.’
‘We could talk there. And from what Werner tells me, we have plenty to talk about.’
‘Indeed,’ said Straub. His guarded expression revealed some scanty hints of alarm mixed with determined opportunism. He obviously did not want Eusden to tell Regina what he had done to Marty, though it was equally obvious he would merely utter a horrified and doubtless credible denial. But nor did he want Eusden to melt away into the night. Happenstance had given him the chance to probe his opponent’s defences, albeit vicariously. But it was a chance that cut both ways.
‘I’d be delighted to join you,’ said Eusden.
The Restaurant Els was indeed close by, only a short step away across the square, a candle-lit haven of mirrors and murals presided over by the prominently mounted head of the eponymous elk. Or, as Regina described him, ‘My Lord, a moose.’
They were settled at a table and supplied with menus. Aperitifs were declined on the grounds that champagne had already been quaffed at the d’Angleterre. Eusden was happy to go along with this. His head was clear despite the amount he had already drunk, but he needed to keep it that way. He and Straub had embarked on a battle of wits, with Regina as unwitting referee. Predictably, Straub sought to seize the initiative, by creatively refashioning the circumstances of their acquaintance for Regina’s benefit.
In this version of events, Eusden had been visiting Marty in Amsterdam after hearing of his friend’s illness, and had accompanied him to Hamburg at the time of Marty’s initial discussions with Straub about selling his grandfather’s archive of Anastasia-related documents. ‘I had intended we would both meet you in Frankfurt, Regina,’ Straub continued, ‘but Marty was too ill to travel. Then came our great surprise, Richard. When we arrived at the Vier Jahreszeiten yesterday, we found you and Marty had left.’
‘Destination unknown,’ put in Regina, who had discarded her furs to reveal a helmet of tightly curled gold-grey hair, a dramatically cut purple dress and an extravagant amount of cleavage. With her huge eyes and vast, ever-present smile, she seemed cast as cheerleader for Straub’s artfully ad-libbed cover story. He had clearly done a lot of thinking on his feet over the past couple of days. And now it was Eusden’s turn to do the same.
Supplied with extra thinking time by the taking of food orders and Straub’s theatrical agonizing over the wine list, Eusden embarked on what he reckoned was the least implausible of many improbable explanations for his presence in Copenhagen. ‘Marty persuaded me to go home on Tuesday. He said he was feeling a lot better and I had work commitments to deal with in London, so it seemed to make sense. I booked a flight and set off for the airport. But I had the impression Marty was trying to get rid of me. I don’t know why. It worried me. In the end, I couldn’t go. I thought he might be sicker than he was letting on. So, I doubled back to the hotel. To my surprise, they said he’d just booked out. The porter said he’d put him in a taxi to the central train station. I headed off there. It’s a big place, as you know, Werner. Logically, I stood no chance of finding him. But, as it happened, I did spot him, boarding a train to Copenhagen. It pulled out before I could make it to the platform. I had no idea what he was up to. I still haven’t. I followed by the next train. I’ve been trawling the hotels since I arrived, trying to track him down. So far, without any luck.’
‘You’ve rung him, of course,’ Straub prompted.
‘No answer. It’s very strange. I’m seriously concerned about him.’
‘Of course.’ Straub nodded sympathetically. ‘I was annoyed, I must admit, that he left Hamburg without warning, but from what you say he may be in some… difficulty.’
‘What kinda difficulty might that be?’ asked Regina. It was undeniably a good question.
‘Who can say, my dear?’ Straub took on an air of stoic puzzlement. ‘We must be grateful, however, that chance has come to our aid so… remarkably. Perhaps we will be able to reach an agreement with Marty after all.’
‘It’s certainly remarkable that you decided to come to Copenhagen,’ Eusden observed.
‘I insisted,’ said Regina, sailing once more in her full-rigged fashion to Straub’s rescue. ‘I couldn’t pass up the chance of taking a look at Hvidøre.’
‘The Dowager Empress’s home in Klampenborg.’ Straub shot Eusden a triumphant little smile. ‘We plan to visit it tomorrow.’
‘You might like to come along,’ said Regina. Eusden was beginning to sense she thought he could prove a more agreeable companion than Straub. ‘How’d that be, Werner?’
‘It’s up to Richard. He may have… other plans.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Eusden, thinking rapidly ahead. ‘Could I let you know?’
‘It’d be great if you could make it,’ said Regina. ‘I’ve read such a lot about the place. There’s a tower on the roof where they say Dagmar used to sit and look out to sea – east, towards Russia. So much scheming and intriguing went on there. It’s where all those grand dukes and duchesses put their treacherous heads together and signed the Copenhagen Statement denying Anastasia her birthright. I see the month of Dagmar’s death – October 1928 – as the turning point in the whole conspiracy against my cousin. Wouldn’t you agree, Werner?’
‘I would,’ Straub replied, breaking off from a carefully considered appraisal of the wine.
‘By your cousin,’ Eusden began, ‘you mean…’
‘Anastasia. Well, cousin-in-law, I guess I oughta say.’
Regina set off without the need of further encouragement on an animated but not always coherent account of the intertwined genealogies of the Bonaventures of North Carolina (Celeste was merely her married name) and the Manahans of Virginia that carried them through their starters and some of the way into their main courses. Eusden eventually deduced that much of her vagueness about assorted aunts, uncles and cousins once, twice or thrice removed was designed to obscure the year, indeed the decade, of her birth. The impression she gave of her age fluctuated bewilderingly. Sometimes she seemed no older than forty, sometimes no younger than sixty. Exactly when she had married her late husband, Louis Celeste, of Celeste Ice Cream Parlors fame, was far from clear. What was clear was that she had applied her well-funded widowhood to a pursuit of proof positive that Anna Anderson, late-life bride of her distant cousin Jack Manahan, was in truth Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna.
‘I had the pleasure and honour of attending her eightieth birthday party, in June 1981, and her very last birthday party, two years later. There never was a doubt in my mind she was who she said she was. You know true royalty when you meet it.’ (Eusden idly wondered how extensive Regina’s experience of true royalty actually was.) ‘I had my suspicions about the whole DNA thing right from the start, let me tell you. The Martha Jefferson Hospital finds a sample in a jar of Anastasia’s intestine they’d supposedly had standing on a shelf in a cupboard since an operation back in 1979. We don’t have any way of knowing how securely it’d been stored over the intervening decade and then some, but there surely were strange things going on in Charlottesville in the fall of 1992, when the hospital came out and said they had no sample, then changed their mind and said they did after all. I dug out a report in the Daily Progress of a janitor at the hospital being knocked cold by an intruder one night in November of that year, a few weeks before the change of mind. Now, what do you make of that, Richard?’
‘That’s the Charlottesville Daily Progress,’ Straub smilingly clarified.
‘Poor cousin Jack was dead by then, thank the Good Lord,’ Regina proceeded, sparing Eusden the need to say what he made of anything. ‘If he hadn’t been, I reckon the rank injustice of that whole proceeding would have finished him. The Romanovs saw their chance to foist that Polish peasant identity on Anastasia and they grabbed it. You can’t deny their thoroughness. They must have thought they had her right where they wanted her for all time. But now we might be able to turn the tables on them. If we can find your friend Marty Hewitson, Richard.’