Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"

Автор книги: Robert Masello

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Frank, taken aback, straightened up in his chair and laughed. “A relief?”

“I didn’t want to be in this thing alone,” she said.

Chapter 64

The next morning, the deacon was not awake to ring the church bell. At dinner, he hadn’t had much of an appetite for the fish he’d caught, and he’d complained of a headache and chills. When Anastasia was shown to his cabin, she warned the others not to enter and went in by herself.

Although it was well past breakfast time, the sun had not yet risen. By the light of the oil lamp flickering beside his bed, Ana could see that the deacon had contracted the flu. His white-blond hair was damp and stringy, spread across his pillow, and his brow was beaded with sweat. His pale eyes were wandering distractedly around the room, and there were gobbets of dried blood on his blanket. She had seen soldiers like this in the hospital wards … and she had heard their bodies, shrouded in sheets, trundling down the grain chute and into the waiting wagons.

Stepping outside, where several of the colonists were waiting apprehensively for word, she called for hot water and broth, extra blankets, firewood, and brandy if they had it. She tried to remember what Dr. Botkin had prescribed and guess what he would have done, but in her heart she knew that it was all in God’s hands already. The Spanish flu took whomever it wanted – the strongest, first – and most of the time it took them fast.

For the rest of the day, Anastasia stayed by the deacon’s side, administering to him, trying in vain to get him to take some sustenance, mopping his brow and wiping the flecks of blood from his lips after he had been racked by a coughing fit. Occasionally, he muttered the name Father Grigori, and it was clear to Anastasia that he was speaking to him as if he were there. Several times, the conversation seemed so real that Ana turned in her chair, or went to the door and peeked outside, but each time all she saw gathered in the gloom were a handful of colonists, tolling their beads, clutching and kissing holy icons, and murmuring prayers for the deacon’s recovery. So many of them focused on the emerald cross she wore around her neck that she eventually grew self-conscious about it, and tucked it away. Whatever powers they thought it possessed were proving useless against the onslaught of the flu.

Once or twice, she heard muffled coughing among them, which only exacerbated the dread in her heart.

By the following dawn, the deacon was dead.

Anastasia cleaned him as best she could, then took his black cassock, with the sleeves lined in scarlet silk, and put it on him. She crossed his hands across his chest, then sat down at the wooden table that served as his desk. On it, there were writing materials, loose pages from his sermons, and an icon of the Virgin Mary, adorned with three white diamonds. Something so valuable could only have come from the hand of Rasputin himself. Using a scrap of paper from one of his sermons, she wrote a prayer for the soul of Deacon Stefan, curled it up, and slipped it into one of his lifeless hands, then, in the other, she placed the icon. He was as ready to meet his Maker as anyone would ever be.

Not for the first time she longed to make that final journey herself … to see Sergei, her family, her friends, kindly Dr. Botkin, Nagorny, the maid Demidova. Despite what the Russian Orthodox Church might believe, Anastasia was sure that her dog Jemmy would be waiting for her there, too. In a world so awash in hate, why should love – of any kind – not find a safe haven in the next?

Weary, and famished herself, she blew out the oil lamp, closed the door, and went to the church, in search of company and a communal meal. But unlike before, when dozens of people had drawn up chairs and pews to the sides of the long refectory tables, there were only ten or twelve souls present, and even they shied away when she came through the double doors. Vera fell to her knees in front of the iconostasis screen, crossing herself three times. The man who had been chopping wood bent his head over his soup bowl and barely dared to look up.

A woman laying pewter plates on the table asked, “How is the deacon?”

“The deacon has passed away,” Ana replied, and she saw the woman cast a quick look around the room, as if to confirm that everyone had heard. Several people cried out, an old man hurled his pipe at the floor, and there was a general exodus from the church. Some of them nodded solemnly in Ana’s direction as they left, their haggard faces filled with fear and incomprehension … but all of them, without exception, gave her a wide berth.

Standing alone in the nave, she realized that she had not only come to the ends of the earth, but to the end of everything this life had to offer. Already, she had gone from the herald of the prophet Father Grigori, celebrated and welcomed, to the harbinger of doom. And though she still carried the aura and the emblem of Rasputin himself, she had sown confusion in his flock. They no longer knew what to make of her, or how to interpret the trouble she had brought upon their heads. Had they committed some error, they no doubt wondered, in their way of life? Had they failed in their devotion? And was Anastasia an instrument of divine retribution?

Even if they had summoned the courage to ask, these were questions she could never have answered herself.

What followed over the coming days was as inevitable as it was tragic. One by one, the colonists came down with the flu, and one by one the survivors used dynamite and pickaxes to open shallow graves in the ground and give the dead some semblance of a Christian burial. Ana attended the interments – indeed, the colonists would not have proceeded without her silent presence, such was her prestige as a princess and Rasputin’s chosen one – but after a while it became nearly impossible for her to bear. The graveyard was poised on the cliffs above the Bering Sea, and Ana had to fight an overwhelming impulse to hurl herself off the precipice and into the waiting sea below. All that kept her from doing so was an even greater fear – a fear that the power of the emerald cross was so great she might find herself alive even then, tossing and turning beneath the icy waves for eternity.

Among the last to die was the sexton, and Ana took over his job, dutifully recording the names of the deceased and the dates on which they died. Some of them, in their delirium, had wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again, while others perished on the rocks below the colony, their bodies lying crumpled and still until the tide took them out to sea. For the rest, Ana scrounged among the half-completed headstones and coffin lids that the sexton had left, and provided each of them with as much of a proper burial as could still be managed. The sexton – plainly as industrious as he was fatalistic – had also had the foresight to leave a number of empty graves … more than enough, as it turned out, to accommodate his fellow colonists.

And then, one day, there was no one left to bury, no one left to mourn. There was no one else at all. She had walked to the edge of the cemetery, clutching the emerald cross when she saw a dark figure lying on the beach below, the tails of a sealskin coat spread like a bat’s wings across the pebbles and sand.

She stopped dead, her toes already extending over the precipice, and stared down at it. Could it be? After all this time?

Making her way down to the beach, she approached the body as if it were a trap waiting to spring. She did not believe her own eyes. But as she came closer, she saw that even now, a brown cowlick, frozen stiff, was standing up at the back of his head. She knelt, the freezing sand crackling under her boots, and gently turned the body onto its back. Coated in ice, Sergei looked as if he were made of glass.

“The sea often yields in the end,” the deacon had said. And so it had.

In the cemetery, an empty grave remained; it was the one closest to the cliffs, and Anastasia had wondered if anyone would be left to put her in it one day. Now she could use it to embrace the body of her beloved protector, Sergei, instead – which was precisely what she did.

As he lay there now in his open casket, she reached in under her coat. Lifting out the emerald cross, she read one last time the blessing Rasputin had engraved on its silver frame: “No one can break the chains of love that bind us.” A play on her name, as the breaker of chains. But she wanted the chains broken now. She wanted whatever force it was that tethered her to this earth to be sundered forever.

She raised Sergei’s head and draped the chain around it, the emerald cross resting on his chest. Then she lifted the lid of the coffin – an elaborately carved piece with an image of St. Peter himself on it – and fitted it into place. Something, she thought, had told her to preserve this coffin until now. Then, driving home the traditional four nails, she shoveled as much dirt and snow as she could loosen into the grave. One of the black wolves that haunted the island appeared at the gates to the cemetery, the gates where she had obsessively whittled her pleas for forgiveness, and raising its head, let out a mournful howl. But Ana wasn’t afraid. These creatures, she knew, were only souls as lost and bereft as she was … sentenced to the same kind of purgatory. They, too, were trapped in a world not of their own making, as unable to transcend it as they were to find peace. From the moment the black wolf had licked the tears from her face on the beach, she had recognized that their fate and hers were conjoined – weren’t they all Rasputin’s faithful children? – and she had known that they would only end their unhappy journey when hers, too, had come to an end.

Chapter 65

As soon as Slater saw Nika wheeled to the ambulance, protesting all the way—“I can walk, you know! I don’t need a wheelchair!”—he was sure she was back to being herself. Hospital protocols, however, dictated that she leave the Nome Regional Health Center in a chair, and prudence dictated that an ambulance convey her all the way back to her home in Port Orlov.

“I’ll see you there in no time,” Slater said, leaning down for one last kiss, as the orderly pushing the chair politely looked away.

“The work on the totem pole should be done by now,” she said.

Indeed, it was almost the first order she had given once the fever had broken and she had become fully conscious again. Although he had never asked, Slater knew that something had happened to her while she hovered in that land between life and death, something that compelled her to restore the totem pole in Port Orlov to its former glory and prominence.

“The unveiling is going to be a pretty big celebration for a town like ours.”

“Sounds like a party I can’t miss.”

“Then don’t.”

She was allowed to sit up front with the ambulance driver, and once they had pulled away, Slater crossed the snowy parking lot to the waiting Coast Guard helicopter. This time, he was alone in the passenger compartment, and the pilot, starting the engine, ordered him to buckle in immediately. “We’re on a very tight schedule,” he said, showing him none of the respect that had been shown back in the day when he was Major Frank Slater, or even the Dr. Slater in charge of the St. Peter’s Island operation. Now he was just some civilian taking up government resources.

But far from being irritated, Slater felt like a weight had been taken off his shoulders. His life was his own now – and he had made some definite plans for it.

The chopper headed straight for the sea and followed the coastline north. Slater leaned his head back and stared out the window. He was still weak from the ordeal and needed to put on a few more pounds, but he’d come to grips with what had happened and made a kind of peace with himself. Maybe he couldn’t save the world anymore; maybe it was better just to save a little piece of it. He couldn’t wait for the right time to tell Nika.

In the weak afternoon light, he could see on the horizon the familiar plateaus of Big and Little Diomede, and the icy blue channel between them that marked the meeting point of the United States and Russia. The sky was clear – a pale gray the color of a pigeon’s wing – but as they neared the island, he could see that the wind, the never-ending wind, was busy as usual, stirring the fog around its rocky shores.

Hard to believe that such a short time had passed since he had first made this approach. It felt like ages.

As the helicopter came closer, he noted that there were two or three Coast Guard vessels lying offshore, and that the colony itself was far more extensively lighted, fenced, and occupied than when he had left it. To accommodate the chopper, there was even a circular helipad, marked with reflectors, slapped down between the old well in front of the church and the green tents that Slater’s own crew had erected.

“Hang on,” the pilot announced over the headphones, as the chopper, slowing down to make its landing, was buffeted by the gusts off the Bering Strait and the whole aircraft wobbled. Slater held on to the straps, and no sooner had the wheels touched down and the engines been cut, the rotors spinning to a stop, than he saw Professor Kozak and Sergeant Groves running to open the hatchway door.

“It is so good to see you,” Kozak said, slapping him on the back, as Groves clasped his hand in a firm grip.

“A lot’s changed around here,” Groves added, shepherding them all out from under the chopper’s blades.

“I could see that from the air,” Slater replied. Indeed, as he looked around now, he could see that several walkways had been laid down, running between extra tents and aluminum Quonset huts. Aerials were poking up everywhere, and an additional battery of generators was humming away under a covered port. Several Coast Guardsmen were scurrying among the various structures.

“How’re you feeling?” Groves asked, but before he could even answer, Kozak interjected, “You are well, yes? You must be, or they would not have let you go.” The professor looked him up and down, and regardless of what he might have been thinking, said, “Yes, you appear very well.”

Slater smiled; Kozak was such a bad liar. He knew that he still looked like he’d just been in a bar brawl. The bruises on his face had faded to a faint blue, but many of the cuts and abrasions had yet to heal completely, and unless he walked carefully, his fractured ribs gave him a jolt.

“And Nika?” Kozak asked. “How is she?”

“On her way back to Port Orlov,” Slater replied.

“They are lucky that she is their mayor,” Kozak said.

“You can say that again,” Groves said, chuckling. “But she’ll be governor before you know it. There’s no stopping that one.”

And then, as if all of their thoughts had pivoted in the same direction like a covey of birds, there was a moment of deep silence.

“Dr. Lantos was a very brave woman,” the sergeant finally said, and Kozak, solemnly crossing himself, added, “And a very good scientist.”

“None better,” Slater agreed. Whatever else had been lifted from his shoulders, the death of Eva Lantos had not; it would always weigh heavy on his conscience.

Off in the direction of the cemetery, there was the rumble of heavy machinery – to Slater it sounded suspiciously like a cement mixer – but before he could ask about it, Rudy, the fresh-faced young ensign, hurried toward them.

“Welcome back, Dr. Slater,” he said, saluting quite unnecessarily. “Colonel Waggoner, the acting commander, has ordered that you report to HQ immediately upon arrival.”

Ordered. It was funny how little import the word carried for Slater now.

“Better make sure you straighten your tie and shine your shoes,” Groves said dryly.

Slater knew that there was no love lost between what was left of his own team and the new regime.

“It’s this way,” Rudy said, starting in the direction of the largest Quonset hut, where the lab tent – altogether gone now – had once stood. How, Slater wondered, had they disposed of the deacon’s remains? To do so safely, a host of critical precautions had to have been taken. But were they?

“Frank,” Kozak said, snagging his sleeve, “we must talk. As soon as you have time.”

Rudy stopped and called out, “Dr. Slater? I’m afraid it’ll be my ass in a sling.”

“It’s very important,” Kozak added, in a low but urgent tone.

Slater figured it probably had something to do with the geological studies he’d been completing, but what could be that pressing? The graveyard, he had been advised, had been cordoned off – for good this time – and the whole island made a secured site. But scientists, he also knew from experience, always assumed their own work to be critical. “First thing,” he assured him, before turning to follow his impatient escort.

The headquarters was bustling with activity, and the far end was reserved for Colonel Waggoner’s office. He had the square jaw, the square shoulders, and the square head that Slater had encountered all too often in his military career. He was standing up and on the SAT phone when Slater was shown in, and he motioned brusquely at a chair positioned across from his desk.

Shades of being sent to the principal’s office, Slater mused.

When Slater had been made to sit there long enough for the point to have been made, Waggoner ended his call and said, in an admonitory tone, “Guess you’ve noticed that we made a few changes. We run this operation pretty differently now.”

“You should have waited,” Slater said. “There are safety protocols that need to be observed.”

The colonel looked taken aback. “We have an AFIP officer on-site, handpicked by Dr. Levinson in Washington.”

“Who?”

“Captain Stanley Jenkins, M.D.”

“He’s a good choice,” Slater said, relieved. He’d never worked with him personally, but he’d read the man’s reports from the field and knew he was an up-and-comer. “Do whatever Captain Jenkins tells you to do and you won’t go wrong.”

Waggoner looked even more put off. “Dr. Jenkins is here in an advisory capacity only, and he takes his orders from me. Maybe you’ve forgotten how the military branches of our government work since your court-martial, Dr. Slater.”

It was a cheap shot, but Slater let it pass.

“As for your associates, Professor Kozak and Sergeant Groves, I have asked them to restrict their movements to the base. Kozak’s been completing some ground studies inside the colony walls. I can’t say what the hell they’ll be good for, but they keep him away from the cemetery and out of my way. As for you, the debriefing will take place at 0900 hours tomorrow morning, so collect any notes or data you might have left lying around here and bring them. Also, make sure you gather up your remaining gear because as soon as we’re done, you and your pals will be flown off the island. There will be no further access.”

After ordering Slater, in addition, to restrict himself to the common areas within the perimeter of the stockade, he dismissed him with a flick of his wrist. Slater had the impression that the colonel had waited his whole life to sink his teeth into an operation of this importance – though how long the Coast Guard would maintain its sole jurisdiction here was an open question – and he could tell he would brook no interference.

Once outside, Slater blew out a deep breath and rubbed his aching ribs. The seat harness on the chopper had given them a workout. Looking around, he noticed that high-power spotlights had been mounted atop the stockade walls, and given that the sunlight was already fading, they had been switched on. The grounds were bathed in a harsh white light that threw stark shadows in every direction and lent the colony, with its old log cabins and storehouses, an oddly artificial appearance. The crooked church, with its decrepit onion dome, looked like the haunted house from an amusement park. Yellow tape had been stretched across its doors in a big X, along with loops of heavy chain.

But no one, he also noted, was watching him. Ensign Rudy was nowhere to be seen, and a couple of other Coast Guardsmen were busy wheeling a cart of cables from one tent to another. If he was going to make a run at the one place he was most eager to see – the old graveyard – he wasn’t likely to get a better shot than this.

With the colonel’s order not to leave the colony grounds still ringing in his ears, Slater sauntered toward the main gate, jauntily saluting the Coast Guardsman stationed there, before heading down the ramp that led to the cemetery. He didn’t dare look back, but he had no sooner approached the woods than he saw that a wide swath of the trees had been felled and the ramp had been replaced by a gravel driveway fifteen feet wide. He could see the muddy tire treads, and the rumble of machinery got louder all the time.

By the time he got to the spot where the old gateposts had once stood – they, too, were gone – he had noticed the unmistakable smells of powerful disinfectant chemicals and hot tar. Hanging back, he saw the funnel of a cement truck pouring a thick, even coat of concrete over the remaining ground. All the tombstones and crosses had been removed, and half a dozen workers in full hazmat suits, hard hats, and hip waders – a novel combination – were smoothing the surface as it was laid down. The decontamination shack had been left standing, but huge, empty cylinders of malathion, an organophosphate widely used in places like Central America where DDT had lost its sting, were strewn around outside it. Slater didn’t have to ask. Rather than running the risk of exposing any more of the bodies, the AFIP must have decided simply to poison the ground, to saturate it with concentrated, industrial-strength chemicals, then seal the graveyard for good measure under a foot of fresh concrete.

It wouldn’t last, he thought. The warming climate would eventually shift the earth again, and crack the cement. But that was government for you. Do the temporary fix for now, then form some committees to debate the problem for several years to come.

A curious worker spotted him, and instead of ducking out of sight, Slater waved and shouted, “Good job! Keep it up!” The worker returned to spreading the concrete.

Then Slater turned around and followed the well-lighted drive back to the colony gates. Behind him he felt like an old and terrible giant had been put to bed beneath a new blanket. He prayed it would sleep there soundly forever.

Inside his tent, he found that his cot and personal effects had been left untouched. A vial of his Chloriquine pills was lying beside an empty coffee cup and a report he’d been annotating. Professor Kozak popped in, and perching awkwardly on a campstool, said, “You saw the cemetery?”

Slater nodded while stacking some loose papers. “Did they disinter any of the other bodies first?”

Kozak shook his head. “They took one look and sent in the bulldozers to level the place.”

Slater nodded and started gathering up his notebooks.

“How did it go with Waggoner?” Kozak asked.

“Pretty much as expected,” Slater replied, stuffing the notebooks into a backpack. “We’ve got till maybe noon tomorrow before we’re exiled for good.”

Kozak stroked his short silver beard thoughtfully. “Then there is no choice. It will have to be tonight. At midnight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve got to get back in the church.”

“Why go back?” Slater asked, mystified. “There’s nothing inside the place but old broken pews and tables. What’s the point?”

Kozak took his iPhone out of his pocket, swiped his finger across it a couple of times, then held it out. Slater saw a photo of an old headstone, with what looked like a pair of doors etched on either side of a Russian name.

“Okay,” Slater said. “Nice carving. But what about it?”

“That is the tombstone of the man we dug up,” Kozak said. “Stefan Novyk. The deacon.”

Slater still didn’t understand.

“The two doors are called the deacon’s doors. They are the way through the iconostasis.”

“You mean that wooden screen, right, the one with all the junk thrown together in front of it?”

“Yes. The altar is behind it.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But even if you think there’s actually something of value back there, do I have to remind you that we’re not the raiders of the lost ark?”

“No, we are not,” Kozak agreed. “But we are scientists, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And historians?”

That one was questionable, but Slater nodded in agreement anyway, just to get him to finish.

“For instance, wouldn’t you like to know how the flu got to this place in the middle of nowhere?”

It was a question that had indeed puzzled Slater, but the Spanish flu had been ingenious that way. All it might have taken was a single lost kayaker from the mainland.

Kozak put the phone down, dug deep into the other pocket of his coat, and produced the sexton’s ledger. He must have been keeping it under wraps, Slater thought, or the colonel would surely have confiscated it by now. Turning to the last pages, and with his stubby finger underscoring a final section, written in a florid, feminine hand, Kozak translated the words.

“Here it reads, ‘Forgive me. I have become the curse of all who know me.’ ” Kozak looked up. “Do you remember the words carved into the gates of the graveyard, over and over?”

“They said, ‘Forgive me,’ ” Slater replied, and the professor nodded with satisfaction before returning to the book.

“There is also a burial entry. For the deacon. The writer says that he saved her from the wolves and gave her shelter on the island, and this is how she has rewarded him.”

“With what? The flu?”

Kozak simply went on. “This last burial entry was for someone named Sergei. He must have been lost at sea, but his body washed up onshore. She writes that she had to bury him herself, with a cross around his neck, because no one else was left to do it.”

Slater was moved by this anonymous woman’s terrible ordeal, but before Kozak could go on, he said, “This cross – does she say anything more about it?”

The professor scanned the faded ink again and said, “Yes, since you ask – she calls it the emerald cross.”

Nika, Slater recalled, had retrieved just such a cross from the wreckage on the bridge. It was found in her pockets when she passed out at the hospital in Nome, and for all he knew, it had been hermetically sealed and sent to the AFIP labs by now along with every other single thing they had been carrying. The widow Vane would no doubt bring suit to get it back.

“By the time she’s done with the journal,” Kozak continued, “the writer is claiming that her soul is doomed to live on in this awful place forever.”

“Who could blame her?” Slater said. “She must have been raving mad by then.”

“Exactly,” the professor replied, “No one could blame her, especially considering what else she had already endured. This was a girl – a young woman – who had seen Hell itself.”

“You know who it is?” Slater said. “She’s signed it?”

Kozak, nervously clearing his throat, turned to the last page. “Here, she is begging Heaven to release her from her earthly bonds. And then, below that, she wrote her name.” He underlined the signature with his finger again.

Slater waited. “Well?”

“It reads,” Kozak, said, stroking his silver beard and holding Slater’s gaze, “ ‘Anastasia, Grand Duchess of All the Russias.’ ”