Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
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Chapter 23
Dr. Slater, ever the hospitable team leader, had offered the virologist, Dr. Lantos, who had arrived in Port Orlov just a few hours earlier, a window seat on the Sikorsky Skycrane, but she had demurred.
“I’m not a fan of flying,” she said, “and looking out the window of a helicopter is about the last thing I want to do.”
Even now, as the chopper flew toward the forbidding cliffs of St. Peter’s Island, she was sitting very still in the seat facing him, her eyes closed behind her thick glasses and her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Professor Kozak, whose ample bulk was strapped into the seat at Slater’s side, was craning his neck for a better view out of his own window.
“We’re coming up on the cemetery,” he said over the headphones, and as they whooshed over it, he pressed his forehead against the Plexiglas for a better view.
Slater took a look, too, but they were over it so fast it was all he could do to catch a glimpse of the spot where the cliff had given way.
“You see that?” Kozak said, and Slater asked him what.
“Something moved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Might have been a wolf down in the graveyard.”
“There are wolves?” Dr. Lantos, said, her eyes still closed.
“A few,” Slater replied. “But Nika tells me that if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.” He had assigned Nika to the second chopper, which would follow in a couple of hours, so she could help guide Sergeant Groves and his crew. She’d looked at him a little suspiciously, afraid that this might be some ruse to keep her off the island and out of harm’s way, after all, but he had laughed and said, “You know, you should really work in Washington.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got all the natural instincts.”
Frowning, she said, “I’ll take that as a compliment, for now.”
The helicopter started to slow down, banking to one side, and Slater saw Dr. Lantos swallow hard. For all her fearsome reputation in the lab and in academic circles, where her work was always ahead of the curve and so meticulous as to be indisputable, she was plainly as unhappy in the air as she had claimed. He wondered how she’d made it on the five separate flights that had been necessary just to get her all this way from M.I.T.
“We’re over the landing zone,” the pilot’s voice crackled on the headphones. And then, as a gag, he added, “Please make sure your tray tables are completely secured, and your seats are in the upright position.” As if these hard seats could be made to budge an inch.
Wobbling back and forth, the Sikorsky slowly settled itself on the ground, its tires giving the craft a jounce as they made contact with the ground. Dr. Lantos let out a long breath, and for the first time since boarding, unclasped her hands and let her shoulders fall.
When she opened her eyes, Dr. Slater said, sympathetically, “Maybe we can get the Coast Guard to ferry you back when we’re done here.”
“I get seasick, too.”
As the rotors wound down with a sigh, Professor Kozak unlatched the cabin door, threw it open, and clambered down. Lantos followed him, a trifle unsteadily, and Slater brought up the rear.
One of the pilots was already on the ground, heading for the cargo hold. And though Slater was eager to oversee the unloading of the lab gear – with the rest of the heavy equipment coming on the second chopper – he had to stop and simply look around. He had not actually set foot on the island, much less inside the colony, until this second, and whenever he arrived at the site of any epidemiological expedition, he immediately needed to get the lay of the land. From the first flyover three days before, he knew the general layout of the settlement, but it was only when he walked away from the helicopter now and did a 360 that he had a true sense of it.
And it felt like he’d stepped inside a ghostly fort.
Despite all the gaps in the timbers, the stockade wall was still formidable, and the abandoned buildings – with their empty windows and gaping doors – seemed eerily tenanted, anyway. He knew there was no one inside the structures, but that didn’t stop him from feeling as if he was being observed. A bucket swung from a rusty chain above an old well, and he marveled that the chain was still intact at all. At the other end of the compound, and tilted slightly on its raised pilings, stood a wooden church with its distinctively orthodox onion dome. He could imagine the hard and uncompromising lives of the Russians who had carved this place out of such an unwelcoming wilderness, making a home for themselves in this most inhospitable and inaccessible spot. A place where they considered themselves impregnable and unreachable … until the Spanish flu had found them.
Again, Slater wondered how. What sly mechanism had the virus used to journey across the frozen waters of the Bering Sea, up onto this isolated rock, and in through the wooden gates that stood behind him?
“The ramp’s down,” the pilot said. “Should we start unloading?”
Slater said yes, and turned back to supervise it. Kozak was smoking a cigar, the pungent aroma wafting in the wind, and Dr. Lantos was bundled up in her coat, the hood raised over her nimbus of frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, stamping her feet on the frozen ground to keep the circulation going. Glancing up at the murky gray sky, Slater reminded himself that he had a window of only a few hours in which to get some tents and other protective structures set up. The alternative – bunking down in the rotted cabins or the leaning church – would not, he suspected, go over very well.
* * *
By the time the second Sikorsky flew to the island with Nika and Sergeant Groves aboard, piles of equipment had been off-loaded into the central area of the compound, and temporary landing lights had been arranged in a wide circle. The lights were more than a precaution; although it was only midafternoon, the dark was falling fast.
The sergeant and his crew had arrived that morning, and Nika had been able to bring Groves up to speed. He was a powerful figure, with a thick neck and an intense expression, but she immediately took to his no-nonsense attitude and the quickness with which he grasped everything she had to say, from the topography of the island to the sensitivity of the local Inuit population about what was going to go on there, on ground still considered theirs. She also had the feeling that he would do anything for Dr. Slater; apparently, they’d been through some very tight spots together, and the bond between them was strong.
The moment their chopper landed on the spot now vacated by the first one, Sergeant Groves leapt from the cabin and began directing the crew members on the unloading and disposition of the remaining materiel. He and Slater exchanged a look or two, a few words, and the rest of their communications seemed to be done telepathically, working together seamlessly to get the first things done first, and as rapidly as possible. A generator shed was erected, and thick coils of wire were run across the ground along grid lines that they must have worked out beforehand. A mess tent was set up, and Dr. Lantos was quick to go inside and open her laptop computer on top of a rations crate. In just an hour or two, electric lights were up and running, a lavatory was discreetly but conveniently placed in the shelter of a stockade wall, and flags had been stuck in the ground where the prefab labs and residential tents would be constructed the next day. Nika, impressed by the military precision and speed, did her best just to stay out of the way.
Not that she didn’t feel she had her own duties to perform. Dr. Slater might have thought that she had been using her status as the tribal elder simply to secure herself a berth on the island, but he was wrong. She took her duties seriously. She was an anthropologist by training – a scientist – but she was also imbued with a powerful spiritual urge, one that connected her not only to the Inuit people but to the worldview that they maintained. She was not someone to discount the legends and practices of her people, or to deny the possibility of things simply because our ordinary senses could not see or hear or smell them. So long as 90 percent of the universe was composed of something routinely called “dark matter,” who was she to set any limits on what might, or might not, be true?
The night had truly fallen now, and while the others gathered in the mess tent – its green walls glowing like a firefly in summer – Nika pulled her collar up around her face and walked into the blackness of the compound. She listened to the wind, hoping to hear the voices of the souls who had once lived – and died – here. She peered into the cabins and open stalls, trying to imagine the settlers’ faces peering out. And all the while, she was trying, in her own way, to communicate with them. To reassure them that she, and the others with her, had come not to pillage or intrude, but to accomplish something of great magnitude … something that might help keep others from succumbing to the same terrible fate that they had.
Despite whatever benign intentions she was trying to telegraph, however, she was getting no such messages in return. Just a howling, empty void.
Stopping in front of the church, which sloped ever so gently to one side, she felt that she had come, not surprisingly, to the fulcrum of the colony. The one place where the power – and the essence – of the sect had been most concentrated. And even as she heard Sergeant Groves bellowing out into the darkness that it was dinnertime—“and we close the kitchen at eight!”—she dropped her backpack and sleeping bag on the church steps. Precisely because it gave her the willies, and because it had been the one place she could be assured that all the souls here had regularly gathered, she knew that this was where she would need to bunk down later that night.
Chapter 24
Rasputin had been right.
But Anastasia had to struggle to remember his very words.
He had predicted that if a member of the aristocracy, or more specifically her family, were responsible for his murder, it would signal the end of the Romanov dynasty. Pamphlets secretly published by his irate followers proclaimed that the streets would run with blood, brother would turn against brother, and no one in her family would be safe.
And lo and behold, so far it was all coming to pass.
This day – August 13, 1917—was to be the last one the Romanovs spent at their beloved Tsarskoe Selo. The country had been torn apart by war, then by revolution in the streets. Ana could hardly keep straight all the different factions fighting for power – Reds, Whites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, the supporters of President Kerensky and his provisional government. All she knew was that her father had been forced to abdicate the throne, and that ever since then, she and her family had become virtual prisoners, kept under close supervision and constant guard.
And not by the Cossacks who had been their loyal defenders, or the four proud Ethiopians who had stood sentry at their doors.
No, now they were guarded by insolent soldiers and common workers, wearing red armbands and surly expressions. Men who had refused even to carry their trunks and suitcases to the train station, from which they were to depart that evening. Count Benckendorff had had to give them each three rubles to do it.
The night before, Ana had been awakened from her sleep by the sound of gunfire, but when she ran out onto the balcony in her nightgown, the soldiers had looked up and hooted, and an officer had lifted the head of one of the tame deer that they had been rounding up and shooting for sport. Her spaniel, Jemmy, barked furiously through the balustrade, and that only made the soldiers, if you could even dignify them with the term, laugh harder.
Now, that same officer was milling about the grand entry hall, poking his nose into their suitcases. Even the count could do nothing to stop him. Her mother and father were reduced to standing meekly to one side as the contingent in charge debated how and when to move their prisoners to the train station. Apparently, there was some question about their safety once outside the gates of the imperial park. It was hard for Ana to believe it was any worse out there than it had been in here.
“Just do as they say,” her father had told her, and it made her both angry and sad to see him – once the Tsar of All the Russias – so diminished. “Kerensky himself has guaranteed that he will find a way to get us out of the country.”
How could he do that, she wondered, if he could not figure out a way to get them from the palace to the train depot?
It was nearly dawn when the orders were finally given to convey the exhausted royal family, and a handful of their faithful retainers, to the station. A troop of cavalry accompanied them. The train, disguised with a sign and flags proclaiming it to be on a Red Cross mission, was stuck on a siding where there was no platform. With as little courtesy as possible, the soldiers hoisted the Tsaritsa and the other women up into the cars. Ana hated having their hands on her, and brushed her skirts madly as soon as she was out of sight inside the cabin.
And so began their long journey eastward, into the wide and empty spaces of Siberia. The train itself was comfortable and well provisioned, and enough of the family’s household members were accompanying them – such as her father’s valet, her mother’s maid Anna Demidova, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, and best of all the cook – that the trip occasionally took on the aspect of an outing to the royal estates in the Crimea, or some other country retreat. Every evening at six o’clock, the train stopped so that Jemmy and her father’s dog, too, could be walked. Ana couldn’t wait for these little breaks, to feel the solid soil under her feet instead of the constant rumble of the train tracks. And she found a beauty in the green marsh grasses and endless vistas of the steppes. If a grove of white birch trees happened to present itself, she and her sisters sometimes played hide-and-seek, a child’s game that took them back to happier days. Her mother, laid up by her sciatica, would watch them from the train window, and Alexei, if he was feeling well enough, would stroll along the side of the tracks with his father.
Once, when Ana had strayed too far from the train while picking cornflowers, a young soldier, thin as a rail and with a struggling brown moustache, had warned her back. Anastasia, gesturing out at the vast wilderness, said, “You think I would make a run for it? Where do you think I would go?”
The soldier, who seemed flustered to be speaking to a grand duchess at all – even a deposed one – said, “I don’t know. But please don’t try.” His tone was less admonitory than it was pleading. He was doing his duty, that she could see, but he wasn’t entirely at ease with it. She smiled at him – he couldn’t be more than a year or two older than she was, nineteen or twenty at the most – and he held his rifle as if it were a hoe, something she suspected he was much more familiar with.
“Sergei!” another of the soldiers hollered from atop a nearby hill. “Get that limping bitch back here!”
Sergei blushed deeply; some of the soldiers enjoyed delivering insults to their royal prisoners. Ana, who had grown accustomed if not inured to it, glanced at the bouquet of bright blue cornflowers in her hand and said, “I have enough.”
When she dropped one on her return to the waiting train, Sergei picked it up and, bobbing his head as if in a furtive bow, tried to give it back to her.
“You keep it,” she said, and if she thought he had blushed before, it was nothing compared to the crimson flush that filled his young face now. He looked so much like a tomato she laughed and said, “Don’t let the others see that you have it, Sergei. They’ll call it imperial property and take it away.”
He stuck it into the pocket of his frayed military tunic as if it were made of gold.
After that, Ana got used to Sergei’s guarding her. Whenever she stepped off the train with her spaniel, Jemmy, she expected to see him trailing her at a distance, and the other soldiers, too, seemed to regard her as his charge. Her sisters kidded her that she had found a suitor. Usually, the train would not stop anywhere near a station or a town; Ana didn’t know if it was because the Red Guards thought the local people would attack the imperial family, or try to liberate them. On one day, a village was in sight – a prosperous-looking one, judging from the flower-filled window boxes, the green fields, and busy barnyards – but it was safely removed on the other side of the river. Ana noticed that Sergei was gazing at it longingly, his rifle drooping even lower than usual.
“What’s the name of that village?” she asked, and at first he was so lost in thought he didn’t answer.
When she repeated the question, he said, “That is my home.” And then he turned toward her and said, “It’s called Pokrovskoe.”
Now Anastasia looked at it, too, with special attention. Pokrovskoe. She had heard Rasputin speak of it often. It was his own hometown. And he had predicted that the Romanovs would see it one day.
Could he have imagined it would be under circumstances like these?
She did not need to ask the next question before Sergei said, “Father Grigori lived in the house you see with two stories.”
It was unmistakable, looming over all the other cottages in the town the way Rasputin himself had always dominated whatever company he was in. Anastasia wondered who lived in it now – she had heard rumors of a wife and young son. But then there had been so many rumors, most of them scurrilous, that neither she, nor the Tsaritsa, to whom they were often whispered, knew what to believe. She was eager to alert her mother, who was still on the train resting her bad back, where they were; she would want to know.
Coming closer than he ever had before, but keeping an eye out lest the other guards grow suspicious, Sergei said, “There are those who still communicate with the starets.”
“What do you mean, communicate with him? Father Grigori is dead. He is buried in the imperial park.”
Sergei’s eyes earnestly bore into hers.
“I put a white rose on his coffin myself,” Ana said. Her fingers, without meaning to, went to her chest and touched the cross beneath her blouse.
“There are those who keep the fire alight,” Sergei said, just before the whistle on the locomotive screeched. Jemmy barked back at it.
“All aboard,” an officer hollered from on top of the royal train car, “and now!” The whistle went off again, and there was an impatient chuffing sound from the engine.
Sergei ostentatiously lifted his rifle barrel and nudged his prisoner in the direction of the train. Anastasia walked back toward the tracks, Jemmy trotting at her heels. Her sisters were already mounting the stairs, followed by her father in his customary khaki tunic and forage cap. He was holding Alexei, identically dressed, by the hand. The engineer was waving a flag.
Anastasia turned around to say something to Sergei, but he was sauntering back to the troop car with a pair of the other guards and pretended not to notice.
Moments later, the train resumed its journey, and as Ana watched from the window, the flowers and fields and whitewashed barns of Pokrovskoe slid from view. She had forgotten to ask which house had been Sergei’s, and deeply regretted that now.
Chapter 25
“Kushtaka,”Nika said, and Slater had to ask her to repeat it, partly to catch this new word again, and partly because he simply liked to hear her say it.
The lights in the mess tent were wavering, as the wind, only partially blocked by the old stockade, battered the triple-reinforced nylon walls with a dull roar. The temporary electrical grid Sergeant Groves had slapped together was still holding, but the lamps, strung up on wires, were swaying above their makeshift dinner table. Tomorrow, Slater thought, they’d have to get the backup generator online, too – just in case.
“Kushtaka,”Nika said. “The otter-men. If you were an unhappy soul, still nursing some grievance on earth, you were condemned to linger here, unable to ascend the staircase of the aurora borealis into heaven. Or maybe you just drowned, and your body could not be recovered and properly disposed of – either way, your spirit could become a changeling, half-human and half-otter.”
“Why otter?” Dr. Eva Lantos asked, as she dunked her herbal tea bag one more time.
“Because the otter lived between the sea and the land, and now your spirit lived between life and death.”
“We have many such legends in Russia, too,” Professor Kozak said, mopping up the last remnants of his stew with a crust of bread. “I grew up with such stories.”
“Most cultures do have something similar,” Nika agreed. “The kushtaka, for instance, were sometimes said to take on the form of a beautiful woman, or someone you loved, in order to lure you into deep water or the depths of a forest. If you got lost, you could wind up becoming a changeling yourself.”
“So if I see Angelina Jolie in the woods,” Kozak said, “and she is calling to me, ‘Vassily! Vassily! I must have you!’ I should not go to her.”
“You might at least want to think it over,” Nika said with a smile.
Kozak shrugged. “Still, I would go.”
Slater leaned back against a crate and surveyed his team like a proud father observing his brood. In only a matter of hours on the island, they had begun to come together nicely as a team. Professor Kozak was an industrious bear, quickly unpacking his ground-penetrating radar equipment and itching to get started the next day. Dr. Lantos had checked all the crates of lab equipment and supplies, and advised Slater on where they should set up the autopsy tent. Sergeant Groves was off on rounds right now, securing the premises (from force of habit, since the island held no hostiles) and getting to know the Coast Guardsmen who had been left to complete the construction of the prefabs, lighting poles, and ramps the next day.
If the weather allowed, that was. A storm was heading their way, and already its winds were scouring the colony like a steel brush. Slater prayed they wouldn’t get a heavy snowfall, which would mean just that much more digging to get to the graves.
And then there was Nika, whose presence here he had so opposed at first, and who was rather like a spirit herself – a friendly, woodland sprite, filled with native tales and history and lore. Slater found himself immersed not only in her words, but in the light that seemed to be captured in her jet-black hair and eyes. Her tawny skin had taken on a positively golden cast in the glow of the lamps, and he noticed that she frequently touched a little ivory figurine, no bigger than a jump drive, hanging outside her blue-and-gold Berkeley sweatshirt. He was grateful when the professor, perhaps noting it too, asked, “Is that a figure of a little kushtakaaround your neck?”
“No,” Nika said, holding it out on its thin chain so that they all could see it better. “That would be bad luck. This is a good-luck charm. We call them bilikins.”
Slater leaned closer, his coffee mug still in his hand. Now he could see that it was an owl, expertly carved with its wings furled and its eyes wide open.
“The owl represents the perfect guide because he can see even in the dark of night. The leader of the hunt traditionally wore it.”
“Walrus tusk?” Kozak said, turning it over in his stubby fingers.
“Maybe,” Nika said. “But my grandmother gave it to me, and her grandmother gave it to her, and if the story is true, it’s made from the tusk of a woolly mammoth. They’re frozen in the soil all around here, and every once in a while one turns up.”
What else, Slater couldn’t help but think, was he going to find in the frozen soil of St. Peter’s Island? A perfectly preserved specimen, its viral load stored within the flesh like a ticking bomb, or a decaying corpse, whose deadly contaminant had been leeched away by decades of slow exposure and erosion?
“Yes,” Kozak said, “the topography and geology of Alaska is like Siberia, and is well suited to this sort of preservation.” Now that he knew its provenance, he looked even more impressed by the humble bilikin.
An especially strong gust of wind battered the tent, and the lights flickered again. Slater reached into his shirt pocket and removed several plastic packets, each one containing a dozen blue capsules and a dozen white.
“I think brandy is more usual after dinner, yes?” Kozak said, examining his packet.
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t mix well with these,” Slater said.
Dr. Lantos had opened her packet, and said, “Prophylactic measures?”
“Yes. The blue one’s a standard anti-influenza drug; you’ll need to take it every day for the next six days, whether we’re still working here or not. The white one is a neuraminidase inhibitor that’s shown both preventative and therapeutic results in trials done at the AFIP.”
“I never heard of these trials,” Lantos said, examining the white capsule skeptically.
“The results haven’t been made public yet. And tomorrow,” he said, with a grin, “may be the best field test we’ve ever run.”
“So we are the guinea pigs?” Kozak said.
Slater nodded and washed one of each of the pills down with the last of his coffee. Kozak and Lantos did the same, but Nika sat silently, waiting.
“Where’s mine?”
Swallowing, Slater said, “You won’t need them.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not coming into contact with any of the bodies.”
“Who said so?”
“The exhumations are a very dangerous and very grim spectacle. There’s no need to subject yourself to any of that.”
But Nika dug in her heels. “Do we really need to go through this again? As the tribal rep, and a trained anthropologist, I insist on being there.” She held out her palm, flat.
Slater glanced at Lantos and the professor, and they both looked at him as if to say, “Not my call.”
Slater dug into his shirt pocket, removed the packet he was planning to give Groves when he got back from his rounds, and plopped it in Nika’s hand, instead; he’d make up another one later for the sergeant. She smiled in victory and held the little plastic baggie up like a trophy, and the others laughed. Slater had to smile, too; no wonder she’d become mayor.
“Now they might make you drowsy,” he advised, “so take them just before you go to bed.”
“And where would that be?” Dr. Lantos said, glancing around the mess tent, one of the few structures erected that day.
“I’m afraid this will have to double as the barracks for tonight.”
“Then I’ve got dibs on this juicy spot under the table,” she said, tapping her foot on the insulated rubber flooring.
“And I will put my sleeping bag on top of that fat pile of cushions,” Kozak said, gesturing at the stack of mats that would be laid down to make a path to the graveyard the next day.
“Nika,” Slater said, “I was thinking that you could—”
“I already know where I’m sleeping tonight,” she said.
“You do?”
“I do.”
* * *
As they trudged across the colony grounds, covered with crates and bundles of supplies unloaded from the Sikorskys, Slater continued to argue with her, but Nika would have none of it. She felt it was her duty to make this gesture of atonement to the spirits who had once inhabited this place. There was no explaining such a “metaphysical” view, however, to a man as empirically oriented as Frank Slater. She recognized that it was his job as an epidemiologist to look at things as squarely and objectively as possible, and to keep all other considerations out of the equation.
It was herjob, as she saw it, to remain open and attuned to it all – the seen and the unseen, the facts and the faith. She had grown up among the legends and the folklore of her people. Her first memories were of fantastic natural phenomena – the swirling lights of the aurora borealis, the barking of a chorus of seals draped like mermaids on the ice floes, the sun that set for months at a time. You could not grow up on the coast of Alaska, one shallow breath below the Arctic Circle, and not feel both your remoteness from the rest of the world and your oneness with the vast and timeless elements – the impenetrable mountain ranges, the impassable seas – that surrounded you. Instilled within her was a sense of wonder – wonder at humanity’s place in the great scheme of things – and an innate respect for any people’s attempt to create a belief system able to encompass it all.
When they arrived at the church steps, she expected Slater to stop, like a boy dropping off his date at her home, but he started up the stairs instead.
“Wait,” she said, and he turned to look down at her. One of the two doors had fallen off its hinges and left a narrow opening.
“Don’t go in,” she said.
“Why not? The whole place is tilting already – let’s see if it’s safe.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said. What she didn’t say was that she didn’t want his presence to disturb the vibe inside, whatever it might be – and she knew that if she so much as hinted at that, he’d think she’d completely lost her mind. She was surprised herself at how much she already valued his good opinion of her; it wasn’t something she’d experienced in a long time. The dating pool in Port Orlov was meager, to put it kindly.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, grabbing up her bedroll and backpack and sidling past him.
He looked unpersuaded.
“Here,” she said, taking the bilikinfrom around her neck and dropping it down over his head. “Now you can keep an eye on things even in the dark of night.”
“You’re going to need it more than I do,” he said, glancing toward the church doors.
“It’s the leader of the hunt who’s supposed to wear it.”
For that split second it took her to put the necklace on him, their faces had been very close, and she had felt his warm breath on her cheek. She had seen the stubble on his chin, and a faint scar along his jawline. Where, she wondered, had he come by that? And why did she have such an urge to run her finger gently along its length?
“See you in the morning,” she said, to break the mood. “Put me down for French toast.”
