Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
Chapter 41
Sergei was pushing a wheelbarrow back toward the Ipatiev house when he heard the sound of gunshots. For days, there had been the rumble of distant artillery, but this was small-arms fire, and much closer to home.
It sounded like a string of firecrackers.
The wheelbarrow was filled with several gas cans. Commandant Yurovsky had sent him into town with orders to siphon the fuel out of every vehicle he could find, and if anybody asked any questions, to refer them to the Kremlin. This was not the sort of duty the Bolsheviks had promised him when they came to his village and dragooned him the previous spring.
The shots were coming one at a time now, and Sergei stopped in the middle of the dark road, fear gripping at his heart. Who was doing all this shooting, in the dead of night, and why?
Pushing the wheelbarrow as fast as he could over the bumps and ruts in the dirt road, he arrived at the sharp-staked palisade surrounding the house, and when the sentry called out who was there, he said, “It’s Comrade Sergei Ilyinsky. With the gasoline.”
“Bring it around back.”
In the courtyard, Sergei found a truck waiting, and the stench of gunpowder in the air … and blood. His eyes shot to the iron grille covering the basement window, but it was dark inside and he couldn’t see a thing.
Yurovsky, stepping out of the house, saw the gas canisters and said, “That’s all?”
“There aren’t many tractors in Ekaterinburg,” Sergei said, careful to keep any emotion out of his voice.
“Go upstairs and get the sheets and blankets.”
Sergei mounted the back steps and found the house in commotion. Other guards were trooping up and down the stairs, their arms filled with linens, their mouths crammed with food, a couple swigging vodka from a jug. By the time he got to the room Anastasia shared with her sisters, the four cots had already been stripped bare. Books and diaries, combs and shoes, were scattered around the floor. Arkady, one of the Latvian guards who had recently been brought to the house, was stripping some curtains from the whitewashed windows.
“What’s going on?” Sergei said. “Where are they?”
Arkady looked at him quizzically, and said, “In Hell, if you ask me.” Then, tossing the curtains to Sergei, he said, “Take these to the basement.”
His arms clutching the curtains, Sergei stumbled down the stairs, his mind refusing to accept the awful reality of what must have just happened, then across the courtyard and down to the cellar. The acrid smell of smoke and death grew stronger with every step he took, and Sergei’s heart grew as heavy as a stone. At the bottom, Yurovsky, in his long coat, was holding a lantern and directing the operation.
The floor was so awash in blood that the soldiers trying to roll the bodies up in the sheets and drapery kept slipping and sliding.
“Just get them out of here!” Yurovsky was barking. “The truck’s right outside.”
Sergei scanned the carnage; he saw Dr. Botkin’s gold eyeglasses gleaming on his bloody face, he saw Demidova with a bayonet still stuck in her chest. He saw the Tsar’s worn old boots sticking out of a sheet, and his young son Alexei – one side of his face obliterated by a close gunshot to the ear – being wrapped in a tablecloth, like a shroud.
But where was Anastasia?
“Don’t just stand there!” Yurovsky said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Get to work.”
Sergei stepped into the morass, searching for Ana, and found her beneath the corpse of her sister Tatiana, soaked in blood, her little dog crushed beneath her. Her hair was caked with blood, her clothes were ripped to shreds, her hands were clutching something under her bodice.
Sergei felt the anger and the bile rise in his throat, and if he could have done it, he’d have killed Yurovsky and every other guard in the house on the spot. The House of Special Purpose – that’s what the Ipatiev mansion had been officially called, and Sergei had always taken it to mean imprisonment.
Now he knew that it meant murder.
He laid the curtains on the floor – they were the color of cream, and imprinted with little blue seahorses – and gently rolled Ana’s body onto them. He looked at her face, smeared with blood and ash and tears, then closed the ends of the curtains over her as if he were wrapping a precious gift.
“Move along,” Yurovsky shouted, “all of you!”
Sergei could hear the truck engine idling in the courtyard. The Latvians were throwing the remaining bodies over their shoulders like carpets, and carting them out. Sergei picked up Anastasia in his arms, as if carrying a child to bed, and leaving the cellar he heard Yurovsky joke, “Careful not to wake her.”
Sergei was numb with shock and grief, and when the guards told him to toss the body into the back of the truck with all the rest, Sergei simply climbed inside instead, and slumped against the side wall with the body between his knees.
“You always were sweet on that one,” a guard cracked. “That’s why the commandant sent you into town tonight.” He slammed the half panel at the back of the vehicle shut. “Now you can help bury her.”
He banged on the side of the truck, and the engine was put into gear. With a jolt, the truck lumbered across the courtyard, out through the palisade, and onto the Koptyaki road. The pile of corpses – Sergei counted ten others in all – gently swayed and rocked, as if it were all a single creature, at every bump and pothole in the road. The Tsar and his valet, the Tsaritsa and her maid, their daughters, the heir to the throne, the cook, the doctor … all tangled together in an indiscriminate mound of blood-soaked linens.
Sergei wondered where the truck was headed … and what he would do when he got there.
An old car, crammed with shovels, gasoline, and Latvians was jouncing along behind them.
For at least an hour, they forged through the forest on old rutted mining roads. Sergei could hear tree branches on either side scratching at the sides of the truck and the tires squelching in the mud.
And then – unless his mind was playing tricks on him – he heard something else, too.
He bent his head.
It came again.
A moan.
He pulled the cream-colored curtain away.
“Ana,” he whispered, “are you alive?”
Her eyes were closed, and her face twitched like someone still caught in a nightmare.
“Ana, be still!”
Her face was wrenched in agony, her lips parted, and she started to cry out.
Sergei pressed his palm to her mouth, and said, “Ana, don’t make a sound. Do you hear me? It’s Sergei. Don’t move.”
She tried to scream again, and again he flattened his hand on her lips.
“If they know you’re alive, they’ll kill us both.”
Her eyes opened, filled with panic, and he leaned even closer so that she could see him better. Despite all that had passed between them, in looks and words and flowers, the bounds of propriety had never been crossed. Until this night, Sergei would no sooner have dreamed of holding a grand duchess of Russia than he would have imagined himself becoming the Tsar.
Even as his heart soared – the love of his life was cradled in his arms! – Sergei’s mind raced. How had she survived the slaughter? Was the blood covering her body her own – or her sister’s?
And how could he ever spirit her away from this caravan of death?
The truck was going up a hill, the gears grinding, when he heard the thundering of hoofbeats and wild shouts coming through the forest. The brakes squealed, and even as the truck stopped, Yurovsky was leaping like a demon from the car behind, cursing and brandishing a long-muzzled Mauser.
Was Anastasia going to be rescued after all? Were these the White cavalry officers, loyal to the Tsar, that Ana and her family had long prayed for? Or could they be renegade Czech soldiers who abhorred the revolutionaries? Sergei didn’t care, just so long as there were enough of them to overpower the Red Guards. He’d take his own chances.
“Keep still,” he said to Anastasia, smoothing her befouled hair with his hand.
He could hear horses snorting, and the creak of wagon wheels.
“We were promised we’d get them!” someone was shouting. “All of them – alive!”
“Well, you’re too late for that now,” Yurovsky replied. “But this truck can’t make it any farther. We’ll need those carts to get the bodies to the Four Brothers.”
Sergei knew that the four brothers referred to the stumps of four towering pine trees that had once stood where nothing but coal pits and peat bogs now lay. Was this how Yurovsky had planned to dispose of the bodies? By throwing them down the abandoned coal shafts?
“I promised my men that they’d have some fun with the duchesses,” the man complained. “And I planned to have the Tsaritsa myself.”
“Shut your trap, Ermakov, and do what I tell you.” Yurovsky was struggling to remain in command of the rowdy horsemen; that much Sergei could tell from the strained pitch of his voice. “Unload the bodies, and the first man I see stealing anything, I’ll shoot.”
What would they steal, Sergei thought? The rings on their fingers? But even as he heard a few of the men dismounting, and the Latvians clambering out of the car, he knew that this might be his only opportunity to save Ana. As soon as the back panel was dropped flat again, and he saw the faces of the peasants leering in at the bloody cargo, he stood up, teetering a little as if he were drunk, and said, “Take them away, comrades.”
A few dirty hands reached in, grabbed the dangling arms and legs of the dead and dragged them out of the truck. Sheets were pulled aside, and one man called out, “I’ve got a duchess, but I’m damned if I know which one.”
There was laughter, topped only when another man shouted, “And I’ve got the queen bitch herself!”
Picking up the body of Anastasia, and handling it with deliberate carelessness, Sergei stepped over the corpses of the maid and the cook and hopped down onto the ground. The road was illuminated by the headlights of the car, but the forest was thick on both sides, and as the hay carts were brought around back, Sergei carried his bundle past one wagon, and then another, and when a cry went up at the discovery of the Tsar—“Who wants to spit in the face of Nikolashka himself!” Ermakov exulted – Sergei pretended to drunkenly stumble off the rutted path and into a pile of brambles.
But no one called out after him, and no one noticed. Everyone was so intent on defiling the corpse of the Tsar that they didn’t see him disappear, and hoisting the girl over his shoulder like a sack of grain – and how many times had he done that very thing in the fields of Pokrovskoe? – he trotted into the dense and pitch-black woods. Ana groaned, and all he could say was, “Hush, Ana, hush.” She was heavier than he thought she would be, and her body was harder and stiffer, but in all the hubbub and confusion, the Reds might not even notice that one of the duchesses was missing until they assembled all the bodies at the Four Brothers. By then Sergei planned to be miles away, hidden in the one place he knew would provide a safe refuge for the lone survivor of the imperial family.
Chapter 42
Harley had just spent the worst night of his entire life, and he was not about to go through another one like it. He’d broken into Russell’s remaining stores of beer and drifted off into sleep for half an hour here and there, but every time he did, he’d awakened again with a start, expecting to see that old lady from the cliffs, or Eddie, bruised and bloodied, cursing him out for cutting the rope.
Or that mangled guy on the autopsy table in the tent.
As far as he was concerned, St. Peter’s Island was even worse than all the stories and legends he’d ever heard about it. It was one big haunted house, fit for nothing but the dead and anyone else who felt ready to join them. He needed to get off of it while there was still time.
Ifthere was still time.
As soon as the storm abated enough to let a little daylight shine, he’d ventured out of the cave to see if the trawler Kodiakhad been freed by the surging tides.
Freed wasn’t the word. Scuttled was more like it. The boat had settled deeper into the cove, and he could see pieces of it drifting away on each icy wave. The groaning he had heard the night before was its hull being scraped on the rocks, its cabin flooding, its masts and doors and gangways being rent by the pounding surf.
As for the skiff – not that he could ever have made it back to Port Orlov in that flimsy thing, anyway – it had been dragged down by the tide and reduced to a pile of splinters and sawdust.
There was really only one option left to him – the RHI that he’d spotted down on the beach below the cemetery, where the Coast Guard must have left it for an emergency evacuation.
Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, then what the hell was?
Trekking over that way again was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do – that black dude with the rifle was never far from his thoughts – but he just didn’t see any way around it. He also knew that if he debated it much longer, he’d lose the few hours of daylight he had left. Earlier, he had emptied his coat pockets – vials, icon, and all – willy-nilly into his backpack, and now he threw in some Power-Bars, a bottled water, and the handgun Russell had been kind enough to leave behind. He’d have liked to take more, but he wanted to be sure he was traveling light. He wasn’t feeling up to par and wouldn’t have been surprised if he was running a bit of a fever. By the time he got back to his trailer, he’d probably be sporting a full-blown cold.
Walking back toward the beach and the stone steps leading down to the inflatable boat, he saw that his tracks from the day before had already been obliterated. Alaska had a way of doing that. Every sign of human life was soon wiped away by nature, and the stuff that lasted at all – like the colony – just wound up being a reminder of how empty, short, and hollow life really was. Sometimes, like right now, Harley thought it might have been a good idea to go and live someplace else, after all. He should have done it the day Charlie had moved his two crazy women into the old house.
As he approached the rear of the stockade, Harley could hear the cawing of crows and noticed that a pair of red hawks were circling lazily in the sky. If he could have avoided cutting through the colony again, he would have, but the wind on the cliffs was so strong – and his memories of the specter he’d seen there so fresh – he felt the risks were better just scuttling across the campground and out through the main gates. Despite the bitter cold, he was sweating inside his parka.
There were even more birds circling in the sky above the side of the old church, and a whole flock of them on the ground strutting and pecking around a spot close to a jagged hole in the foundation. A snowdrift had been blown up against one wall, but just as Harley crept past, the birds reluctantly took flight, and he could see that there was something lying there, mostly hidden under the crust of snow. It appeared that other animals had been burrowing into the drift, too, and he could see that the snow had a faintly pinkish cast … and that what he’d thought was a twig sticking up was actually the toe of a boot. He moved a little closer, and with the tips of his glove brushed some snow away. He didn’t need to see anything more than the torn shreds of a propane company work shirt to know that these were the remains of Russell, and that the local critters had been heartily chowing down.
Just as the crabs had probably made the most of Eddie by now.
It wasn’t that he was completely heartless – after all, he’d known these guys a long time – but it couldn’t help but occur to him that whatever the diamonds in the icon were worth (and it had to be plenty), he’d now be splitting the money only two ways, instead of four. Charlie would probably claim it was all the hand of God at work.
Staying low to the ground, he hurried past the colony tents, through the main gates, and over to the side of the cliff. The mist that clung to St. Peter’s Island was lying a hundred yards offshore, but on the beach below he could still see the yellow RHI, firmly tied and clamped between makeshift davits made out of driftwood logs. It was just about the first piece of luck he’d had since this whole damn nightmare had begun, he thought.
The steps that some crazy Russian must have carved into the cliff a hundred years ago were only a few inches wide at most, and zigged and zagged their way down to the waterline. Even if he hadn’t been feeling peaked, the descent would have been a bitch. The wind, skirling off the Bering Strait, forced him to flatten himself against the rock and shimmy his way down, putting out one foot at a time and nudging it around until he had cleared the snow and scree – and sometimes the birds – from the lower perch, then gingerly placing his weight there. More than once, the birds came back, flitting around his head, defending their turf, but he didn’t even bother to bat them away. He needed both hands to cling to the slippery rock.
The backpack, even with its contents stripped down, was more of a burden than he expected, and the weight of it kept threatening to throw him off-balance. He tried to control his breathing and not to look down any more than he had to; if he panicked, he was a goner. His arms ached from embracing the rocky walls and his knees started to quiver from the strain, but eventually he could hear the waves sloshing on the sand and pebbles, and he could feel the ocean spray blowing onto his face. When the stone steps gave out, and he felt his boots crunching on the hardscrabble beach, he collapsed in a heap, his head down, his hands splayed on either side.
Never again, he told himself, never again was he going to get involved in something this stupid.
Still conserving what little strength was left in his legs, he crawled, breathing heavily, across the gravel and sand. The fog had drifted in, which was going to make it that much harder to steer a course through the rocks and shoals that rimmed the shoreline. But then that figured – this island had been bad luck from start to finish, and he couldn’t wait to get off it.
Slapping a hand on the firmly inflated side of the RHI, he hoisted himself up onto his knees, enough to groggily assess the craft. A waterproof and heavy-duty black tarp had been tightly sealed across the interior, but as he fumbled at the snaps and knots that kept it in place, he had the discomfiting feeling that there was something under it. Once or twice, under the rumble of the crashing waves, he thought he heard a furtive noise, the sound of something scuttling for cover. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and focused on loosening the rest of the stays. Once, he even thought he heard the crunch of a boot on the sand behind him, and whirled around groping for his gun, but all he saw was a rolling column of fog … and no one in it.
Eddie was gone, he reminded himself. Splattered on the rocks on the other side of the damn island.
And Russell … well, Russell was just that lump under the snowdrift.
He untied the last of the straps holding the tarp down, and yanked it back.
Two startled eyes were staring back at him, and before he could even register his shock, the creature flew past him, a blaze of wet brown fur and black claws.
Harley stumbled backwards, as the otter scampered up the beach, its tail swishing, before abruptly changing course, turning toward the water again and slipping silently into the icy wash.
It was all over in a matter of seconds, but it took Harley a minute or two to calm down again and get back to work.
Damn otter. He vaguely recalled some legend about otters, some native bullshit, but since they were probably bad luck – like everything else out here – he didn’t try too hard to remember it. On the Vane’s Holy Writ broadcasts, Charlie was always trying to prove how the Inuit stories had something to do with Jesus, but Harley didn’t buy it. He thought his brother was just trying to con a few more bucks out of the locals.
With frozen fingers, he freed the clamps holding the boat to the davits, then, tugging the braided rope, dragged it down to the water.
The bright yellow boat bobbed on the surf like a rubber ducky, and it took him three tries before he could hoist himself, boots and pants dripping wet, onto its fixed seat in back, and get the motor running.
Turning the boat parallel to the shore, he took it away from some jagged rocks, and slowly out to sea. He knew that no one in his right mind would be trying this, which was precisely why he’d probably get away with it. The fog was so thick it was like churning through clam chowder, but it would dissipate once he got a little farther from the island. His plan was to run parallel to the cliffs, then due southwest to Port Orlov. But he wasn’t so dumb that he’d sail it right into the harbor; no, he was going to put in at the old family wharf a few miles away, then, when everything had blown over, maybe he could strip the boat and sell it for parts.
The spray was blowing into his face and even when he wiped it away with his sleeve, he couldn’t see much better – his coat, too, was sopping. And he was starting to feel truly shitty. He coughed, and he didn’t like the sound of it. What he needed was a good hot meal at the Yardarm, and Angie Dobbs back in his bed. Yes, a little Angie in the night would cure whatever ailed him.
His progress was slower than he thought it should be, and he gunned the engine higher.
Although the boat was carrying so little weight that it should have been skimming along, the current was either stronger than he estimated, or the prow was weighted down somehow. The wind was howling so loudly in his ears that it seemed like he could hear voices; it would have been okay if it had been Angie telling him how good he was in bed, or Charlie – the old Charlie – telling him how to pull off an easy con.
But it wasn’t, and they weren’t.
It sounded more like Eddie, asking him why he’d cut the goddamned rope … or Russell, screaming as the wild animals had taken him apart.
Fuck Eddie. Fuck Russell. They’d taken their chances. Harley wasn’t their keeper.
The boat bucked a wave, and Harley clutched the throttle tight.
Christ Almighty he was cold. He pulled the loose tarp all the way up to his waist.
And in the billowing fog that engulfed the boat, he could swear that for just one instant, he saw them both – his two accomplices – sitting toward the bow, waiting for him to ferry them back home. Deadweight, he thought, as always.
When he blinked, they were gone – Harley knew an hallucination when he was having one, and this damn island seemed to specialize in them.
But when he blinked again – oh, sweet Jesus – there they were again, looking at him like it was all his fault somehow.
