Within the villa the gathering of elegant people sprawled through more than half a dozen of the building’s public rooms on two stories. In the vaulted main ballroom-a spaciously proportioned chamber of seventeenth century grandeur, hung with old masters and ornate tapestries-a string orchestra played saccharine music and guests nibbled tidbits from an immense Louis XIV table set with crystal and silver and candelabra and vased blossoms from the villa’s greenhouse.
Toward the rear of the villa in the high arched gallery which gave out through glass panes onto formal gardens a separate balalaika orchestra provided accompaniment to a band of hired Cossack dancers who entertained inexhaustibly, squatting and leaping, grunting and shouting ferociously. Now and then a noble White Russian general would get swept up in the spirit of it and join the dancers.
Upstairs in the great drawing room the more sedate and elderly guests sat talking after each in turn had made the ritual pilgrimage into the bedchamber that contained the Grand Duke Feodor, confined to his canopied bed by a painful S-curved spine, the result of degenerative disc ailments that had afflicted him for more than a decade. The Grand Duke was sixty-three-not very old by Romanov standards of longevity-but the athletic strength of his St. Petersburg youth had been mocked by two decades of malaise, and what once had been a splendid towering physique was now twisted and cadaverous. A palsy of alarming intensity afflicted his long-fingered hands, mottled with cyanotic spots; his eyes blinked rapidly and his jaws worked and he looked at least eighty; his mind was lucid only at intervals. Prince Leon employed a Swiss physician full-time to watch over the failing Grand Duke with the help of two registered nurses from Harley Street and one of the three was always in attendance in Feodor’s antechamber.
The drawing room was occupied by a male elite. Most of them were fifty or more; all of them held titles or high military commissions from the long-ago Empire of Czar Nicholas II. The room was filled with cigar smoke and the fumes of Courvoisier and vodka and voices that said War, Invasion, Hitler, Minsk, the Stalin Line, Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht, the Red Army, Soviet Disaster-the last phrase spoken frequently and with energetic relish. To the extent that the rambling discussion was led its leader was Count Anatol Markov and he was speaking furiously. Betrayal, he said, and Vulnerability. Consequences. Country. Responsibility. And, he said, Decision.