Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"

Автор книги: Robert Masello

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

PART FOUR

Chapter 61

It was a strange situation. That much, Dr. Frank Slater would have been the first to admit.

On the one hand, he was a patient at the Nome Regional Health Center, most of his time spent lying in the cranked-up hospital bed and under observation by closed-circuit camera and through the glass panels of the ICU doors, and on the other hand he was in charge.

The explosion on the bridge had left him with a concussion, two fractured ribs that made him wince with every deep breath he took, and more cuts and bruises than he could count. His malarial meds had had to be airlifted in – normally, there wasn’t much call for them in Alaska – but if anything, it was his chronic disease that had helped to save his life. Because of his already compromised immunological response, and the ingestion of his retroviral drugs, any exposure he had undergone to the Spanish flu had been mitigated. His system was already too weakened to mount the kind of stiff resistance that engendered the fatal cytokine storms that had killed so many millions.

It was the first time he’d ever been grateful for that damn mosquito bite.

But even as he was being nursed back to health, he knew that he bore the responsibility for running this quarantine unit. He had improvised it himself – first by commandeering the ICU, then by putting the staff through intensive, on-the-spot training. They were a lot more accustomed to routine problems like heart attacks and hunting accidents, but even as they were wheeling him in on the gurney, he had begun to issue instructions on how to deal with a virus as potentially deadly as this one. He had strictly cordoned off this area of the hospital’s top floor, nearly all communication was done through the intercom system, and only a limited number of personnel, always outfitted in full hazmat gear, were ever allowed in or out. Right now, the unit had just one other patient – Nikaluk Tincook.

And she had not fared as well as he had. Like Dr. Lantos, she had been brought in suffering not only from the flu, but from septicemia, a flood tide of bacteria clogging her bloodstream. The minute Slater had been told about the red lines on her palm, he had personally drained and sterilized the wound site, but it was too little, too late. The flu and the sepsis were like old pals, reunited now and working in deadly concert, and if he didn’t calibrate his responses perfectly, he could lose her to either one. The fear gnawed at him like a rat.

Dr. Jonah Knudsen, the crusty old coot who normally ran the hospital, had advised that she be sent on to the state-of-the-art facility in Juneau, where Dr. Lantos was being treated. Standing outside the door and speaking through the intercom, he had told Slater that Rebekah Vane and her sister Bathsheba had also been sent there.

“Have they presented symptoms of the flu?”

“Rebekah has,” he said, “but then she apparently had greater physical contact with Harley Vane and his bodily fluids.”

“His bodily fluids?”

“She served him tea and toast, and later, after he’d vomited, she cleaned up the mess.”

Then it made some sense.

“Although her condition is otherwise stable, she does have a fractured jaw and other minor injuries, and just so you know, she has named you, in addition to the federal government, in a lawsuit for a host of damages. First and foremost, of course, is the loss of her husband.”

Of course, Slater thought. Even as they were fighting to save her life, from an incident that would never have occurred if her family had not gone on an illegal treasure hunt in the first place, she was lying in her bed concocting lawsuits. It was the new American pastime, and it made him, more than ever, want to find a way to get away from everything that it suggested and implied. He simply wanted to practice medicine again, in a place where his talents and his work would be valued and the bureaucracy extended no further than the usual burden of insurance forms. His days as a globe-trotting epidemiologist might be over – Dr. Levinson had made that perfectly clear – but his efforts to save Lantos, and now Nika, had reminded him of the satisfaction to be had from healing just one person. What was that old Hebrew proverb he’d once heard Dr. Levinson herself say—“If you save one life, it’s the same as saving the whole world.”

Right now the only life he wanted to save, even more than his own, was Nika’s.

All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.

She’d been young and healthy and athletic, and now it was the very strength of her immune system that was threatening to kill her. It was kicking into overdrive … and throwing her whole body into shock. Many patients, he knew, never came back from it.

The hospital staff, panicking, looked to him for guidance, and he ordered up a fresh barrage of IV antibiotics – cindamycin and flucytosine this time – along with vasopressors to constrict her blood vessels and treat her hypotension, insulin to stabilize her blood-sugar levels, corticosteroids to counteract the inflammation. The diseases were burning through her like a forest fire, consuming her just as her Inuit ancestors had once been consumed, and he had to find a way to sustain her long enough to let the contagion burn itself out.

“Dr. Slater,” one of the nurses said after he had maintained his vigil for hours on end, “why don’t you go back to your own room and take a break? We’ll alert you if anything changes.”

“I’ll stay,” he said, perched in a fresh lime-green hazard suit on the plastic chair in the corner. Every few hours, the chair, like everything else in this section of the old ICU, was sprayed from top to bottom with a powerful disinfectant.

Surrounded by the machines and screens, tubes and wires and IV trolleys, Nika could barely be seen. But every fluctuation in her respiration or temperature, cardiac rate or cerebral activity, was being tracked and monitored by the array of instruments that had been brought into the room. Slater, exhausted, slumped backward in the chair, and felt the ivory bilikinon its leather string swing against his damp skin.

The little owl, with its furled wings. On the island, Professor Kozak had asked about it, and Nika had said it was purportedly from a woolly mammoth.

Impressed, Slater had looked at it even more closely.

“That would make it, perhaps, eleven thousand years old,” Kozak had later informed him.

Slater wondered if it had gained some extra charge, some supernatural potency, over all those centuries it had endured. Although he wasn’t a believer in such things – how could he be? – right now he was ready to accept any help he could get.

Dr. Knudsen appeared, hovering in a white lab coat, through the glass panel in the door.

That was not the help he had hoped for.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Knudsen said, sounding not sorry at all as he bent toward the intercom box, “but I thought you should know.”

“Know what?” Slater said, already dreading the reply.

“It’s about Dr. Eva Lantos. She died one hour ago.”

It was like a hammer blow to his already bruised chest.

“For purposes of public safety,” Knudsen continued, “the official death certificate entered in Juneau is recording it as simply a lethal bacterial infection. But her body was immediately removed to the AFIP labs in D.C. by Army air transport.”

Slater could see that the doctor was holding a clipboard against his chest, and rocking on his heels.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

But Slater didn’t think he looked any more regretful than he sounded; he looked like a man who didn’t mind telling his privileged guest, the one who had taken over his own ICU, that he wasn’t such a hotshot, after all.

It was the first time Slater had lost a colleague on one of his missions; you could not be a field epidemiologist, in the world’s most deadly and undeveloped regions, and not be aware of the risks you were taking. It was something that lurked in the back of your mind the whole time.

But Eva Lantos? She’d been holed up in her M.I.T. lab, safe and sound, and he had lured her out. While nothing that happened on the island could have logically been foreseen – it was a place where logic seemed to hold no sway – he blamed himself, all the same. It was a simple, straight line he could draw – if he had not phoned her that afternoon from his office at the institute, she’d be happily teasing out the rat genome in Boston today. Instead, she was dead in an isolation tank at AFIP.

Slater closed his eyes and wished that Knudsen, this angel of death, would leave him be. When he looked again, Knudsen was gone. Thank God for small favors. And then he realized that, through the fabric of his suit, his fingers were clutching the ivory owl.

The monitors kept up a steady beeping, the ventilator whooshed, the machines hummed, and Nika – silent, still, her eyes shut – fought on. He remembered the first time they’d met, when the helicopter had chased the Zamboni she was driving right off the ice rink. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot, especially when he was so slow to realize that she was the mayor of the town– andthe tribal elder, to boot. He’d had a lot of catching up to do.

But he had quickly come to recognize her virtues, her skills … and her beauty. That last item he had tried to overlook – he knew he had serious work to do, and it was no time to become distracted. Slater had always maintained a strictly professional demeanor in the field, and on an expedition of this importance, it was especially critical. He had never intended to feel the way he did now, he had never seen it coming. Like that fantastic display of the aurora borealis they had watched together one night, it had taken him utterly by surprise.

And now … what did he do with these feelings? He had never told her how he felt. He had never told her that he had fallen in love with her. But if she died tonight, in this terrible place, away from her home and the people she loved, he did not know how he would bear it.

He had lost all track of time. There was a clock on the wall, but he had no idea if it was 10 A.M. or 10 P.M. There was only one window, down at the end of the hall, and even that one was tinted and permasealed. Meanwhile, the Alaskan daylight was coming later, and growing shorter, all the time. How the Inuit had survived in this intemperate world astonished him still, but they were a hardy lot … and that, in the end, was what he was counting on. Nika’s ancestors had been among the sturdy few to survive the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and perhaps that acquired immunity had been passed down to the young woman fighting for her life now.

He unzipped his suit enough to pull the ivory owl through, and then he snapped the cord. He smoothed a spot on her blanket and laid the bilikindown on top of it. He knew that she was in a very dark place, and if the owl could truly prove to be a guide, then now was the time.

Chapter 62

The deacon, not surprisingly, was the first to succumb.

It was he who had first embraced Anastasia on the beach, he who had held her hands – the very hands that had caressed the cheek of the dying Sergei – as he escorted her up the steps chiseled into the cliffs and through the main gates of the colony. The others, maybe three or four dozen in all, were beside themselves with joy when she arrived. She was brought into the church, where a supper had been hastily laid on a table in the nave, and the bell in the church dome was rung over and over. Her safe arrival was considered a harbinger of a bigger, and even better, thing to come. She was the long-anticipated psychopomp, the bird who heralded the return of Rasputin himself.

Anastasia was seated at the head of a long and narrow refectory table, and to her embarrassment an old peasant woman summarily removed the sopping boots from her feet, and soaked her aching, frozen toes in a bucket of warm, salted water. The embarrassment immediately gave way, however, to a tingling sensation, and a not-altogether-pleasant throbbing as the blood once again began to circulate in her feet and ankles. Deacon Stefan offered her a glass of something she imagined to be grog – Nagorny the sailor had described such stuff – as bracing as it was vile. Other women were still bringing hot bread and pots of stew to the table, and Anastasia, though so grief-stricken at the loss of Sergei that she could barely eat, took what she could, and thanked them profusely. All of them – men, women, and a handful of children – stared at her unabashedly, and she could not help but notice how often their eyes went to the emerald cross. Several times she saw the older colonists cross themselves while gazing upon it. They listened, enraptured, as she recounted the journey that she, and the missing Sergei, had undertaken. It was rare enough, Ana surmised, that they saw anyone new here, and rarer still when that newcomer was one of the grand duchesses of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.

Here, if nowhere in Russia anymore, that title commanded respect, even reverence.

A cabin was set aside for Ana, but when she saw that it was filled with someone else’s personal belongings – a hand-stitched quilt, an icon of St. Peter, pans and kettles on hooks above a potbellied stove, a dress in the armoire – she tried to decline. “I don’t want to put anyone out of her home,” she said. “I can sleep anywhere – the church would be fine.”

But Deacon Stefan had insisted. “The people vied for the opportunity,” he said. “Vera would be mortified if you didn’t accept her hospitality. She is honored.”

And so she had accepted. She did not even remember saying goodnight to the deacon. The second she had sat down on the straw-filled mattress, she had been overwhelmed by fatigue and fallen into not so much a sleep as a stupor. She had a vague recollection of the old woman who had bathed her feet coming into the room and removing her other damp clothes. The quilt was thrown over her, tucked tight to her chin, and a bearskin was thrown over that. Ana did not move a muscle; she felt she couldn’t even if she tried. For many hours – she never knew exactly – she lay there, half-asleep and half-aware of everything and everyone. Her mind traveled back over the endless journey that had brought her to the island at last, combing over every detail, revisiting every scene, from the attic room at Novo-Tikhvin to the cramped compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway (where a conductor had become so inordinately curious about Ana that Sergei had made them disembark in the dead of night at the next fueling station).

Sergei. One more name to add to the list of the dead and beloved in her life. The list was already so long, and she was barely eighteen. How long would it become? Forgive me, she prayed. Forgive me for the suffering my family and I have brought upon so many. She felt herself both blessed – she alone had survived the slaughter in the house with the whitewashed windows – and at the same time accursed. No one else would have to live on, knowing exactly what had happened there, reliving it in dreams … and nightmares.

Late the next day, when she arose, the few hours of sunlight had nearly passed. She ventured out of the tiny cabin and into a frostbitten twilight. All around her rose a stockade wall, and within it a small but tidy colony had been erected. Apart from the church, which stood at one end and appeared to serve also as a meeting house and dining hall, there were cabins and livestock pens, vegetable gardens, a blacksmith shop and apothecary, even a common outhouse, with separate doors for men and women. However bleak the surroundings, it was a world unto itself.

A man splitting logs looked up from his chores and touched the brim of his fur cap. Then he returned to his work. A woman in a long peasant skirt, with a woolen shawl drawn over her head and around her shoulders, carried a bushel basket of roots and mushrooms into one of the cabins; a pale and dismal light crept across the threshold before the door was closed again with a creak and a thump. A cold wind whistled between the timbers of the stockade, and Ana was inevitably reminded of the palisade that had been built around the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky had said it was for the protection of the imperial family as they took the air, but no one had been fooled by that. It might just as well have been iron bars.

“So you’re awake?” she heard, as Deacon Stefan strode through the main gates; he was carrying a fishing pole over one shoulder and a couple of halibut on a line. “I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a log.”

He wasn’t wearing his cassock anymore but a thick fur coat that fell to his ankles. Long strands of his hair, so blond as to be almost white, spilled from under his Cossack-style hat. “Are you feeling well?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think so.” She hadn’t even considered the question, there was so much else to absorb and take in.

“The man you mentioned at dinner – Sergei,” he said, his blue eyes cast downward, “there has been no sign of him. I have searched the shoreline.”

Anastasia nodded.

“But the sea often yields in the end,” he said. “We will keep looking.”

Ana thanked him, but he brushed it aside.

“We will say a mass for him every day until he has been returned to us.”

And then he coughed, just once, into the back of his clenched hand, and Ana felt her spine stiffen.

“You’ve been out fishing in this cold?” she said. “I hope you haven’t caught a chill.” She had not mentioned Sergei’s illness. She had only said he was thrown from the boat during the crossing.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but coughing again. “No one ever recommended this place for its weather.”

“No, I don’t imagine that they do.”

“Let me get these fish into a frying pan,” he said. “We all eat together in the church, as soon as it is dark.”

“What can I do to help?” Anastasia said. Although a grand duchess by birth, she had been brought up to treat the common people with respect and to share their burdens when possible. It was why their father had made them sleep for years in ordinary cots in plainly decorated bedrooms, and their mother had ferried them to the Army hospitals to tend to the wounded. It was a puzzle Anastasia would never solve, how the peasants and workmen and soldiers of Russia had been convinced by a heartless revolutionary named Lenin that her family had not cared for and loved – yes, “loved” was not too strong a word for it – all of them.

Needless to say, she no longer felt that way at all, and she wondered what Father Grigori would say if she were able to tell him so.

“Never fear,” the deacon said in answer to her last question. “There’s no shortage of things that need to be done in the colony. You’ll fit right in, Your Highness.”

He threw her a half smile over his shoulder as he marched on with the fish swinging on the line over his shoulder. She tried to return the smile, but her face smarted, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the cutting wind or the fact that she was so unaccustomed to the expression.

Chapter 63

Nika was running, running so hard the blood beat in her ears and muffled all other sounds. Running so hard the breath was raw in her throat and her lungs ached. Running so hard that her legs were starting to wobble and her shoulders to sag.

But she had to keep going, across the frozen hills, through the brush and barren trees, on and on … toward a low rise overlooking a tiny village huddled on the shoreline. There, she stopped, doubling over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

It was late autumn, and while some of the natives had already erected their igloos, with domed roofs and walls of packed snow, others were still making do with the tents made of caribou skins, stitched together with long ropes of sinew and anchored with bones. She waited, watching, but even from the ceremonial hall – the qarqui—at the far end of the village, there was no sign of any human activity. There were no fishermen hauling their kayaks onto the rocky beach, no children playing, no women tending to the huskies. (And where werethe dogs?) It was an eerie sight, the lonely village, lying under a fresh blanket of snow, with a dense, dark cloud bank advancing across the Bering Sea and swallowing the last pale rays of the sun as it came. The only sounds were the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, and the cries of cormorants circling overhead.

How odd, she thought, to hear cormorants. They had gone extinct years ago.

But then, this wasyears ago. Even now, Nika was aware that what she was experiencing was real, but unreal … that she was only a dreamer, inhabiting a dream, in which she nevertheless had a crucial role to play. She adjusted the straps of the knapsack digging into her shoulders, careful not to damage the precious ampoules that she knew – simply knew – were nestled inside.

She felt as if she had been traveling for days without stopping, all the while burning with fever, or racked with chills. She felt racked and depleted, and her mouth was filled with the acrid taste of her own blood. Her mukluks were slick with ice, her sealskin coat damp with her own perspiration. But she knew that she had to go down into the village. It was there her work had to be done.

Her boots skidding in the snow, she slid down the hill and approached the outermost of the igloos. The entryway was dug several feet down into the earth, and driftwood had been used to make a crude door. But when she tried to push it open, it stuck. Crouching down, she pushed harder, and something that was leaning against the other side gradually fell to one side, and she was able to peer into the gloom.

The kudluk, the lantern that was normally burning bright with seal oil, was extinguished, but the skylight let in enough illumination for her to make out several people scattered around the floor in contorted postures. Their faces were frozen in rictus, and their eyes stared blankly. Splashes of blood spotted the hides and straw that had been laid down on the hard sod. The body that had been slumped behind the door was a young man still in his rawhide coat, the hood raised, his hands clenched around a hunting knife buried to the hilt in his own gut. It appeared that he had chosen to take his own life rather than endure what the others had suffered.

Nika backed out, pulling the door closed behind her. Horrifying as the sight had been, she was not surprised by it; it was as if she had known what to expect behind that door, as if she had remembered it from some deep well of the collective unconscious. And as she stepped away, she felt her foot catch on something under the snow – a chain. She jerked it up, and found it was attached to a stake embedded in the permafrost … to which a husky had been tethered. She brushed some of the snow away, and found the dog, dead of exposure, or starvation. It lay there now like a concrete statue, its tongue, lolling from its mouth, as blue as the ice in a crevasse.

Looking around at the neighboring huts and igloos, she saw similar mounds, where other dogs presumably now lay dead and frozen solid.

As she moved among the dwellings, poking her head in one, then another, she saw similar grisly scenes, native people lying dead on blood-soaked sod and animal hides. As she came to the last one before the qarqui, she heard sounds from inside, and thought she might at last find some survivors. Throwing back the antelope skins that covered the doorway, she stepped inside and stopped dead as the startled dogs, their jaws and fur matted with blood, looked up from their feast. A couple of them still trailed the leashes and stakes that they had managed to rip from the ground. Mingled among their paws were the ravaged remains of the corpses they had been tearing apart.

A big white dog, its snout dyed pink by now, growled menacingly, warning her away from the banquet.

Slowly, she stepped back and let the antelope skins conceal her from view.

The clouds had filled the sky now, and the last of the daylight disappeared as she hurried to seek refuge in the ceremonial house, the town hall, as it were, of the Inuit people, where the villagers would traditionally come to sing and dance and perform their sacred rituals during the long, dark Arctic winters. It was a big, oval-shaped building, made from chunks of tundra and slabs of driftwood, knitted together with all sorts of skins and pelts, and the moment she ducked her head to enter the passageway that led to the narrow door – fashioned from what had once been the bottom of a kayak – she again heard noises. But not the sound of scavenging dogs this time. When she stood still, she heard a woman’s voice – faint and elderly – speaking in her native tongue.

She opened the door, which swung on a hinge made of caribou gut, and saw the old Inuit woman, short and squat, stirring a pot with a long ivory spoon. In the yellow glow of the fire, several children – their black eyes filled with grief – gathered around the old woman like bear cubs keeping close to their mother.

When Nika said, “Thank God some of you are still alive,” they all turned and stared at her as if she were a messenger from a foreign planet. Stone benches lined the walls, and the ceiling was hung with antlers and ornamental figures carved from whale baleen and walrus tusks. A totem pole, identical to the one in the center of Port Orlov, stood proud and tall as a mast at the far end of the lodge. Looking at its vivid colors and erect carriage, Nika was reminded of all that it represented, and felt a wave of shame. If she were given the chance, she resolved to do what she should have done long before.

“Nikaluk,” the old woman said in a weak but tender voice, “I knew you would come.” She had high, Asiatic cheekbones and her few remaining teeth were worn down to yellow nubs. “I knew it.”

If only Nika herself had been so sure. The flu had burned through her as it had burned through nearly everyone else, but somehow, she – like the children and the old people, whose frail bodies could not mount such an overwhelming, and self-destructive, resistance – had lived through it. Her chest, which had once felt like it was filled with smoldering coals, was cooler now. Her throat was no longer choked with a rising tide of her own blood. Her eyes, which had burned like shining pebbles on the beach, felt as if they had been bathed in a stream.

The old woman came toward her, the children clinging to her ragged skirts, and said, “You will save us.”

“Yes, yes,” Nika said, remembering her mission and slinging the knapsack off her shoulders. Quickly kneeling to undo the straps, she dug inside for the ampoules of serum … but to her horror they weren’t there. She dug deeper, but all she found inside was icicles, clattering like glass. How could she have been so deceived?

She had failed. At this, the most critical time, she had failed her people, and the shame, even greater now than it had been when she first saw the totem pole as it should have been, made her almost unable to look up into the old woman’s eyes.

But then she felt a hand on her head, like a benediction, and when she did look up, the old woman said, “You will save us,” and pressed something into Nika’s palm.

It was small and smooth, a piece of ivory, simply carved. In the flickering firelight, Nika saw that it was an owl, a guardian spirit of the Inuit people. Nika wasn’t sure if she should accept it – perhaps it was the only thing of value the old woman possessed – but she knew it would give offense if she tried to refuse it.

The old woman stroked Nika’s hair and smiled. A smile that reminded her of her own grandmother. Or, could it be … her own great-grandmother?

In that instant, Nika suddenly understood that she had not come to this place to give at all. She had come there to receive.

Bowing her head, she said, “I will try … I will try.”

But then, as if from the end of a long tunnel, she heard her name.

“Nika?”

This was not the old woman’s voice anymore, nor did she feel her hand on her hair. A white light suffused the room, a light too bright for her eyes, and a different hand – in a cool glove – was smoothing her brow.

“I will try,” she said one last time, before the old woman faded away, along with the children, the campfire, and the ancestral carvings hanging from the beams of the qarqui. The last thing to disappear was the grinning otter on the totem pole.

“Nika,” she heard again, and cracked her eyes open enough to see Frank, perched beside her bedside, surrounded by blinking screens and softly beeping monitors. “Nika,” he said, pulling off his visor and tossing it aside.

His cheeks, she could see, were wet with tears.

“You’re all right now,” he said, though somehow she knew that already. “You’re going to be all right.”

He lifted her hand off the blanket and pressed his lips against it, and she could tell that she was holding something tight. When she opened her palm, she saw the ivory bilikinthat she had once given him. It seemed like ages ago.

But the little owl had done its job, she thought … guiding her through the darkness, through the other world that she had just left, and back into the land of the living. She would never forget its help, nor the sacred trust she now knew that it signified.

“I was so afraid,” Frank said. “I thought I might have missed my chance.”

“Your chance?” Nika said, her throat as dry as parchment. Frank looked haggard and drawn, and it was plain that he hadn’t shaved in days.

“To tell you that I love you.”

If Nika had not already been lying down, and drained of all energy, she knew she would have reacted quite differently. All she could do now was squeeze his hand with what strength she had, and say, “That’s a relief.”