Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
Chapter 31
Apart from a sliver of one small pane, all the windows in the big, brick house had been whitewashed. That way, none of the Romanov prisoners could see outside or be seen in turn by anyone passing by.
Not that the peasants or shopkeepers in the tiny, Siberian backwater of Ekaterinburg would even have dared to look toward the house. Any suspicion that you were a Tsarist sympathizer, and your life wasn’t worth a ruble.
The Bolsheviks had evicted the rightful owner – a merchant named Ipatiev – and installed Anastasia and her family, along with a few of their remaining servants and friends, in five rooms on the upper story. The ground floor was reserved for the commissars, most of whom had been angry, disgruntled workers at the local Zlokazovsky and Syseretsky factories before the revolution. A five-foot-tall fence had been built around the perimeter of the house and its interior courtyard, and it was constantly patrolled.
But Anastasia knew when it was time for Sergei to make his rounds, and she always stationed herself at that small slice of window – left clear so that the Romanovs could consult a thermometer attached to the wall outside – when he was due. Even then, she was afraid to wave, and he was afraid to do anything more than cast a furtive glance in her direction. If they were caught, the rest of the window would be promptly whitewashed, and Sergei would be shot as a possible accomplice to the imperial family.
“So, is he there?” her sister Tatiana whispered as she bent her head over her sewing. She was opening a hem in a dress and secreting there a handful of the diamonds the Romanovs had so far successfully smuggled on their long odyssey. They were sewn into every garment, under every button, into the brim of every cap and the stays of every corset.
“Not yet,” Anastasia said, “but sometimes he is delayed if the other guard wants to stop and have a smoke with him.”
Smiling ruefully, Tatiana shook her head and said, “You know, don’t you, that you were supposed to marry a German prince and cement the alliance? Not fall for some revolutionary guard.”
“And so were you,” Anastasia replied.
“No, I was destined for the Bulgarian.”
“I thought Maria was to marry the Bulgarian.”
“Maria was going to marry an Austrian duke. I forget which one.”
How far they had come from all that, Anastasia thought. Royal weddings, international alliances, princes and palaces and languorous vacations at Livadia, their seaside retreat in the Crimea. Now, here they were, the whole family, confined to a few hot and stuffy rooms, with no locks on the doors and guards who enjoyed nothing more than barging in at any moment to catch them unawares. As a precaution, Olga was keeping watch in the next room; at least the soldiers’ boots made a lot of noise as they came tromping down the wooden hallway.
“There he is,” Anastasia murmured, as the gangly Sergei sauntered into view outside. He was holding his rifle over his shoulder, as a sentry was supposed to do, but he looked no more comfortable with it than before. In stolen moments together, Anastasia had learned that he had been the youngest son of a farmer, whose wheat fields adjoined those of Rasputin’s family; they had all lived in the village of Pokrovskoe from time immemorial, and though Sergei had been conscripted into the Red Guard, his sympathies lay still with the holy man whose healing powers had once saved him from a deathly illness.
And if Father Grigori was a true and loyal friend to the Romanovs, then so, too, would Sergei be. He did not trust, or even much like, his comrades in arms; Ana had seen that right off. But it had taken some time before she put her faith in him – and even then it was only over the warnings of her family. Ever since, however, he had proved to be a reliable confidant, and a necessary conduit of news from the outside.
He stopped now, knowing he was in plain view of the unpainted window, and without looking up at all held his cigarette between two fingers upraised in a V.
“He has a message for us!” Anastasia said, seeing the signal.
“Are you sure?” Tatiana said, stopping her stitching so abruptly a loose diamond rolled off her lap.
“Yes, yes!”
For weeks now, there had been rumors of a rescue plan – three hundred officers, loyal to the monarchy, were to ride into the town and liberate the Tsar and his family. From what little the Romanovs knew, civil war had broken out all across Mother Russia, and on many of the long Siberian nights, when the dusk lingered until almost midnight, they could hear the distant rumble of artillery and were left to wonder whose guns they were. Could they be the White army advancing on the Red Guard strongholds, determined to overturn the Revolution and save the captives in the Ipatiev house? Last night the cannons had sounded closer than ever before, and as Anastasia had tossed and turned in her metal cot, she had barely been able to constrain her hopes.
And now Sergei had another message from the outside world, which – if their luck held – he would smuggle in with their daily provisions.
Olga coughed violently in the next room, patting her chest operatically, and Anastasia flew away from the window and Tatiana buried her needlework under her wide skirt, then snatched up the volume of Pushkin by her side.
The new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, a sinister creature with a thick mane of black hair, a black goatee, and a gratingly insincere manner about him, burst in, apologizing for the intrusion at the same time that his cold gray eyes scanned the room for contraband or mischief of any kind. “I expect you heard the barrage last night.”
“We did,” the Tsar – now simply referred to as Nicholas – said, as he entered from the adjoining study. He was wearing his customary military tunic – with its epaulettes ripped off by the Red Guards – and a pair of threadbare jodhpurs.
“I trust it did not interfere with your sleep.”
Anastasia knew, as did everyone, that his concern was a joke, but it was a joke that they all had to play along with. She could see a faint fire blaze up in her father’s eyes, but as usual he suppressed it and simply assured the commandant that they had all slept soundly.
“Further precautions may have to be taken to ensure your safety,” Yurovsky said, and seeing the Tsaritsa – called merely Alexandra now – inching into the room with one hand pressed to the small of her aching back, added, “A hot compress, with powdered sage, will do much to alleviate the pain of sciatica.” He said it with the same bland authority he always assumed. Anastasia had the impression that he wished to be taken for a physician, though Dr. Botkin had assured her privately that the man was a complete fraud.
“Thank you,” Alexandra replied, in the same even tone her husband adopted. “If you would be so kind as to provide some sage, I will try it.”
Anastasia knew Yurovsky would never send the sage, and even if he did, her mother would never use it. It was all a grand pantomime in which her whole family, and their ruthless captors, continued to engage. The Bolsheviks pretended to be protecting the imperial family from harm, the Romanovs pretended to believe it, and everyone walked on pins and needles, afraid of provoking the situation into an explosion of some kind.
“How is the boy?” Yurovsky asked. “Walking yet?”
Alexei, bored out of his wits at the confinement, had played a stupid trick, riding his sled down some stairs, and the injuries ever since had laid him up. Dr. Botkin, with limited means at his disposal, did everything he could, but the pain was excruciating, and the former heir to the Russian throne was stuck in his bed, his legs raised, and much of the time delirious from fever.
“No, not yet,” Nicholas said. “If he could once again receive the electrical stimulation treatments provided by the doctor in town, it might help.”
Yurovsky nodded thoughtfully, and said, “I shall look into that.”
Ana knew what that meant. Nothing.
“Will we be receiving some rations today?” Alexandra asked, and to this Yurovsky said, “As soon as the soldiers and my staff are taken care of, I’ll see what’s left.”
Oh, how he must have relished the opportunity to put the Tsaritsa in her place like that. Ana thought she even saw her father’s right hand clench into a fist for a second, before he slipped it behind his back. She wished that just once her father would let fly, hang the consequences.
After Yurovsky had completed a brief inspection of the premises – lifting Alexei’s blanket to be sure his leg still looked purple and swollen, studying her mother’s many icons just so he could sully them with his touch, licentiously fingering her sister’s nightgowns neatly folded at the foot of their cots – he strolled out, and everyone at last breathed a temporary sigh of relief.
It was then that Ana shared the news that Sergei had another message for them. Several times over the past few weeks, he had brought messages from an anonymous White officer who was planning a daring rescue mission, and perhaps this would be the one announcing that the attempt was imminent.
An hour or two later, when she heard the cook, Kharitonov, outside in the courtyard, she was able to peer through the window and see that Sergei was indeed carrying brown eggs and black bread, curd tarts and a bottle of fresh milk, in a wicker basket. The food was provided by the sisters in the nearby monastery of Novo-Tikhvin, and without it Ana wondered how her family would have survived at all. Yurovsky let the baskets pass because he first helped himself liberally to every one of them that arrived. (The tarts seldom made it past him.)
With her family’s silent encouragement, Ana scurried downstairs to the kitchen, with her dog, Jemmy, panting close behind. How she wished she could move as gracefully as her sisters, or that she wasn’t quite so chubby. (Her mother always insisted that she was just short-waisted.) But Sergei didn’t seem to mind, and even though Ana knew as well as everyone else that this was just a silly fancy, there was so little happiness in her family’s life right now – and so little help available to them from any quarter – that no one saw any reason to interfere. Fate, the Romanovs had learned, could be as bitter as it was unpredictable. Be grateful, her father told her one day when they saw a blue jay preening on a tree branch, for every beautiful thing, no matter how small, that the Lord provided.
When she came in, the cook was exclaiming over the provisions he was laying out on the kitchen table. “Look!” he said to Ana. “Flour! White flour. And raisins.” She could see he was already debating how best to use them; Kharitonov was a master at making something from nothing.
But Sergei sidled closer to Anastasia, and in a voice that even she could barely hear, he said, “Be ready.”
“For what?” she whispered. The cook was showing off his bounty to her mother’s maid, Anna Demidova, who had come in to see what all the commotion was about. Anastasia saw her surreptitiously pop a raisin into her mouth as Jemmy scoured the floor for anything that might have fallen.
“I don’t know, but telegrams have been coming and going from Yurovsky’s office all morning.”
“Are we going to be rescued?”
“And a truck has been hired in the village.”
Ana had no idea what to make of that, but she prayed it would have something to do with their liberation. Perhaps the commandant was planning to steal whatever he could from the Ipatiev house – there were still some nice sticks of furniture downstairs – and clear out before the Tsar’s loyal troops arrived.
“Thank you,” Ana said, “for being our friend,” and as she spoke she let the sleeve of her blouse brush up against his arm. Just as she expected, he blushed furiously, and she took a delight in that. She, and her sisters, had all led such a sheltered and protected life in many ways. Oh, at the beginning of this war, and before the Revolution of course, they had been allowed to assist wounded soldiers in the Army hospitals – indeed, their mother had made their duties there compulsory – but of romance Ana had known almost nothing. She had briefly nursed crushes on their music teacher or French tutor or riding instructor, but then, for want of any alternatives, so had her three sisters. Sergei, though just a common boy, was at least all her own.
“It is my honor,” he said, “to serve you,” but his voice was full of greater meaning than the words alone conveyed.
Before she could answer, another guard, a burly fellow with broken teeth, staggered in, and the maid Demidova made a quick exit. Taking one look at the food, he ripped the loaf of black bread in two and stuffed half of it into his mouth, almost all at once. When the crumbs fell and Jemmy went for them, he kicked the dog to one side with the toe of his muddy boot.
“How dare you!” Ana said, snatching up her dog.
“I’d do the same to you,” he said, bits of bread flying from his lips. Glancing at Sergei, he said, “Shouldn’t you be out on patrol, comrade?”
Sergei wavered, just as she had seen her father do with the commandant, before deciding that discretion was the better part of valor. Turning on his heel, he picked up the empty basket and went out the kitchen door to the courtyard.
Anastasia glared at the filthy guard, who chewed the bread with his mouth open, but when the cook Kharitonov threw her a warning look, she snuggled Jemmy closer in her arms and went back to the stairs.
“We should have a dance sometime,” the guard said, no doubt mocking her gait as she climbed the wooden steps.
Chapter 32
“Just shut up,” Harley said, as he crouched in the shadow of the crooked church, “and let me think.”
For once, Eddie and Russell did as they were told, but he knew it wouldn’t last long.
Looking out over the colony grounds, Harley was amazed at how the place had been transformed in the space of a couple of days. There were half a dozen green tents, some in the traditional peaked style, others more like Quonset huts, but all of them solidly built and interconnected by pathways laid down with rubber matting and lamp poles and guide ropes. Even over the sound of the rising wind, he could hear the hum of generators from an aluminum shed, erected near a lavatory platform raised above a pair of portable holding tanks.
But what he didn’t see was any people; in fact, right now, the place looked as abandoned as it had the first time he’d been here. The Coast Guard guys were gone, and so was their chopper. When he’d heard it lift off hours ago, he’d hoped that its departure signaled the end of the expedition to the island; at last, he thought, it would be safe to get back to grave-robbing.
But he’d sure as hell been wrong on that score. Somebody was here, and it looked like they were planning to stay a while. Damn, damn, damn.
“I’m freezing my ass off,” Russell muttered. “What’s the plan?”
Harley was having to recalibrate, and quickly. They were carrying their shovels and pickaxe, along with some steel pitons he hoped to use to loosen up sections of soil this time around. He saw no one patrolling the grounds, but he knew it would be far too dangerous to try to make their way across the open colony. If somebody unexpectedly came out of one of those tents, there’d be nowhere to hide.
Crawling backward, he said, “Let’s go straight to the graveyard.” There was only another hour or two of weak sunlight left in the day, and he couldn’t afford to waste any of it.
Skirting the colony by sticking to the other side of the wooden stockade, he led them through the thickets of spruce and alder and hemlock, batting a course through the snow-laden branches, until to his own surprise he saw that a parallel trail had been neatly cut and laid all the way down from the colony gates to the wooden posts of the cemetery. Lights, too, had been strung up the whole way, and they were switched on even now. Although he couldn’t figure out how the government had heard about the emerald cross he’d found, he thought it was pretty clear, from all of this construction, that they had heard about it somehow. His brother Charlie wasn’t stupid; it was unlikely he’d spilled the beans to anyone, but Harley had a lot less faith in that greedy bitch his brother had married, or her idiot sister. Bathsheba would tell anyone anything.
And now look what he had to contend with as a result.
“Check this out,” Eddie said, holding open the flap to a dressing shed built to the left of the gates. Harley glanced inside and saw a rack of white coveralls and booties and visored headgear, all neatly arranged. Before he could stop him, Russell had slunk inside and put on one of the helmets.
“Take me to your leader,” he said, with his arms outstretched, and Harley had to snatch the helmet off him and slap it back on the shelf.
“Get out of here,” he ordered, “before I kick your ass all the way back to Port Orlov.”
“Yeah,” Russell sneered, “you and what army?”
The graveyard, luckily, was as deserted as the colony, and the fresh snow had nicely covered their tracks from the previous grave they’d opened. But now there were tight nylon lines stretched all over the place, with little pennants stuck into the ground here and there, marking the whole graveyard off in some kind of grid. And off at the far end, where the cliff gave way, whole strips of sod had been laid, crisscross, on top of a tarp, along with a fallen marker. As Harley got closer, he could see an open grave yawning.
“Looks like they got the job done better than we did,” Eddie said. “Shit, I wonder what they used.”
Harley was less interested in how they’d done it, then why. They hadn’t just dug up the grave and searched for treasures; they’d taken the whole damn body. As he stood beside the empty plot, he wondered what they wanted with a corpse. Did they think there was something inside it, something they could only extract elsewhere? Maybe after thawing the thing out? All that was left here were the remnants of the wooden coffin, a lot of it cracked and splintered.
“Hey, check it out,” said Russell, craning his head over the edge of the cliff and pointing down at the beach below. “It’s a boat.”
Harley gingerly approached the cliff and saw what he was pointing at – an RHI up on davits. This was the first piece of good news he’d had in days; the Kodiakwas still stuck on the rocks and taking on water, and he had not known how to break it to his crew that the thing would probably never make it back to shore. Now he had an alternative, courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.
The only problem was, he’d be returning virtually empty-handed if he left now. Those rosary beads couldn’t be worth much.
“So,” Eddie said, scanning the desolate cemetery, “where do we start?”
Harley wished he knew. He’d picked wrong the last time, guessing that the most impressive headstone would be sitting atop the greatest booty. It was like that stupid game show, Deal or No Deal. Who knew where the serious loot was hidden?
“Russell, I’m going to need you to keep watch,” he said. “Go down that trail about twenty yards, lie low, and wait there. If you see or hear anyone coming, get back here and warn us.”
“Wait a second,” Eddie complained. “I did the digging last time. Why don’t I get to be the watchman?”
“Just do what I say,” Harley said, “both of you.”
Russell plainly didn’t need to hear another word; the idea of not working was sweet, and he tossed his spade to Eddie and meandered back toward the lighted trailhead. Eddie picked up the spade in the hand that wasn’t holding the pick and looked at Harley with a sour expression that said, You’d better get it right this time.
Chapter 33
Russell couldn’t believe his luck. All the way to the graveyard, he’d been thinking how bad it would suck to have to try to dig up a frozen grave. Just chipping the ice away from some of the intake valves on his oil-company job was a bitch and a half. Waiting until he was safely through the cemetery gates and out of Harley’s sight, he reached into the pocket of his parka and pulled out one of the beers he’d been carrying. One thing you could say about Alaska – the whole damn state was a cooler.
He went down the trail, looking for a comfortable perch – which wasn’t going to be easy. Everything was covered in snow and ice, and the ground was as solid as a rock. He wished Harley and Eddie a lot of luck, especially after their last dig had turned up nothing but a bunch of crystal beads on a string. As far as he was concerned, this whole trip was going to be a bust, and he’d be lucky to get back to the Yardarm with ten bucks in his pocket.
If he wanted to score Angie Dobbs, he’d need more than that as bait. Christ, it was hilarious that Harley thought it was such a big deal he’d fucked her. Who hadn’t?
In the harsh glow of the next light pole, he spotted a glistening stump just off to one side of the trail. It was an old tree trunk, covered in moss and lichen, and though it wasn’t exactly a Barcalounger, it was the best prospect he was likely to uncover. Brushing the snow away from the matt of rotting leaves around its base, he picked up a bunch of them in his arms and made as much of a cushion as he could. Then he plopped down on top of the pile before the rising wind could blow them away, pulled the string on his hood to cinch it closer to his face, and waited.
Everybody was always talking about the pure and unstained beauty of Alaska – Russell had seen all the brochures and ads and commercials the state tourist bureau put out – but as far as he could see, it was a load of crap. The place was cold and wet and dark and the rotting leaves he was sitting on stank. He took another slug of the beer. Without alcohol, and pussy, there’d be no reason to go on living.
And pot. He shouldn’t forget the value of grade-A weed, which was never more plentiful than when he was behind bars at Spring Creek.
He hadn’t been sitting on the stump for very long – the can of beer still had a few drops left in it – when he thought he heard something.
Quickly, he swiped the hood back off his head, and listened hard.
Was that a voice, or just the wind sighing in the boughs?
He stood up, gulped the last of the beer, and tossed the can into the bushes.
Yes, it was. It wasa voice, talking in some weird accent. Russian. For a second he thought, It’s the ghost of one of those dead settlers. The legends about the island are all true!Then he got hold of himself, and before he knew it, his feet were carrying him back onto the trail, and through the woods, past the lighting poles, between the carved gateposts of the graveyard. Harley and Eddie were wandering around like they still hadn’t picked a target yet, but he knew he couldn’t shout at them. Instead, he ran among the graves, waving his arms like a lunatic, until they saw him and grabbed up their gear and took off in all directions. Russell tripped over a hole in the ground – shit, was this the grave they’d already opened? – and by the time he got up again they were gone.
He could hear another voice, too, now, carried on the wind and coming up the trail, and he ran helter-skelter out of the graveyard and into the surrounding woods. The branches tore at his sleeves and the thicket was almost impenetrable but he just kept running. The breath was hot in his throat, and he realized, not for the first time, just how out of shape he was. Two years in the penitentiary can do that to you. So it was a miracle when he stumbled into a tiny glade where an ancient hut still stood. All that was left of the place was a few boards holding the walls in place and a door made out of wooden staves, but right now it looked better than the Yardarm to him.
He banged through the brittle door, closed what was left of it behind him, then bent over double, gasping for breath. The beer came up in a rush of hot vomit, splashing onto his boots. The wind rattled the sticks of the door. He saw a table, and an old, empty dynamite crate drawn up to it like a stool. He leaned one hand on the side of the table. An old leather book was on it, with the frozen nub of a candle in a pewter dish. His head was pounding so hard he thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. Get a grip, he told himself. You haven’t even done anything wrong yet. It was Harley who broke open the grave. I’m just along for the ride.
He sat down with a thump on the dynamite box, which groaned but remained intact.
All he’d done, he reminded himself, was trespass – and maybe on government property. What could the penalty be for that, anyway? It couldn’t be that bad, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was still on parole, it wouldn’t have even been worth worrying about. But he wason parole, and if he ever had to go back into that cramped cell in Spring Creek – where the walls had pressed in tighter every day – he’d kill himself.
First, however, he’d kill Harley Vane for getting him into this mess.
