Page 268 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

256 Jack Fritscher

she’d have the good sense to keep her fortune to herself.
Borodin: Certainly the Grand Duchess Anastasia, when restored,
will set up a court in exile.
Olga: So the likes of you can stuff your dogs with caviar? Never!
Borodin: I was an Imperial Officer.
Olga: You were ever impotent, Borodin...Where were you “of-
ficers” when the Imperial Family needed rescue? I would not
give you a ruble.

BORODIN rises in a huff, tucks his poodle under his arm,
and pushes off. The SHOT FOLLOWS him and HOLDS,
as he exits out of shot, on the three REPORTERS.

Roberts: (About BORODIN) That is certainly the “end of the
line.”
Lorre: That man hopes against hope. He has called my newspa-
per already with two false Anastasias.
Wilson: Even if she survived the shooting, no self-respecting
Anastasia could survive this circus.
Roberts: Of those two Anastasias, one was a venereal chamber-
maid from the Berlin Hotel...
Lorre: ...and the other a lunatic woman from a Bavarian mental
ward. Cuckoo.
Roberts: ...“Survive the shooting,” Old Man? No one survived
the shooting.
Wilson: You miss the point.
Roberts: The point?
Wilson: All accounts agree. All the witnesses agree: Anastasia was
not killed in the first volley of shots. She stood up. She rose
up among all the bodies of her dying family.
Roberts: But the Chekas clubbed her down again.
Lorre: They bayoneted her right foot.
Wilson: Provable points on any claimant. The chin. The foot.
Evidence.
Lorre: Europe is full of wounded people.
Roberts: The entire family of Czar Nicholas Romanov is dead.
Wilson: Then why are you here?

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