Archive 17 (19 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
M
ELEKOV SHOWED
up for work in the kitchen with a bandage on his face and two black eyes.

The two men did not speak about what had happened the day before.

Pekkala was just finishing his breakfast duties, when Tarnowski, Lavrenov, and Sedov barged into the kitchen.

Melekov, with a mound of fresh dough balanced in his hands, stood paralyzed with fear.

Tarnowski grabbed the cook and pushed him to his knees. The dough fell with a splat onto the floor.

At the same time Lavrenov produced a leather cord from his sleeve, looped it around Melekov’s neck, and began to strangle him.

Melekov’s face turned purple. His eyes bulged. Feebly, he clawed at the leather cord which had sunk into the soft flesh of his throat.

“Enough!” Pekkala shouted.

Lavrenov, his teeth bared with the effort of strangling Melekov, glanced first at Pekkala and then towards Tarnowski.

Tarnowski jerked his chin.

Lavrenov let go of the cord.

With a gasp, Melekov collapsed onto the floor.

“We weren’t going to kill him,” explained Sedov.

“Just teach him a lesson is all,” said Lavrenov.

Tarnowski went to Melekov and rolled the man over with his boot. “I told you to leave him alone.”

Melekov nodded weakly, his hands pressed to his throat.

“Now get out,” Tarnowski ordered the cook. “Come back in half an hour.”

Crawling on his hands and knees, Melekov departed from the kitchen.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Pekkala told them. “We had already made our peace.”

“With him, perhaps,” replied Tarnowski, “but what about the
next one? And the one after that? Because, believe me, there will be more, which is why I have come here to make you an offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

“The chance to save your life.”

“How?”

“By getting out of here,” said Tarnowski.

“You mean escape? What makes you think I’d stand a better chance than anybody else who’s tried to leave this place?”

“Because we are coming with you,” replied Sedov.

Lavrenov nodded in agreement. “We have a plan. If it works, we’ll soon be living like kings.”

“That doesn’t sound like a plan,” answered Pekkala. “It sounds more like a fantasy.”

“It is indeed a fantasy,” Tarnowski agreed, “but one a man can bring to life with pockets filled with gold.”

“What gold?” demanded Pekkala.

“The last of the Imperial Reserves,” whispered Lavrenov.

Pekkala stared at the men with a look of pity on his face. “I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the Imperial Reserves are long gone. The Czechs handed them over to the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk, in exchange for being allowed to pass through the Lake Baikal tunnels, which the Reds would have destroyed otherwise. By the time this occurred, you were already in prison. Perhaps nobody ever told you—”

“We know about the Czechs,” Sedov interrupted. “We know how they betrayed us and that they gave everything they had to the Bolsheviks.”

“The thing is,” said Lavrenov, “they didn’t have it all.”

“That is a secret we have kept for many years,” Tarnowski said, “but the time has come for you to know the truth.”

“Colonel Kolchak had told us that the safest place for the gold was in the hands of his uncle, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who had
gathered together an army of anti-Bolshevik forces,” Sedov told Pekkala. “Getting to them meant crossing the entire length of Russia, but if we could do it, not only would the gold be safe but we would also be out of danger. You see, we made that journey as much for ourselves as for the Tsar. By the time we reached the city of Kazan, we had crossed almost half the country, but the Red Cavalry was catching up with us. We knew we’d never make it if we tried to hold on to the gold.”

Lavrenov picked up the story. “We made the decision to hide the Imperial Reserves in Kazan. The Czech Legion was behind us, but moving along the same route and heading in the same direction. They were a much stronger force than our own, over thirty thousand men. If only we could have linked up with them, we would have been safe from the Reds, but the Reds had positioned themselves between our two forces. If we had stayed where we were and waited for the Czechs to catch up with us, the Reds would have finished us off long before the Czechs arrived to help. We managed to get word through to the Czechs about where the gold was hidden and they picked it up when they passed through Kazan.”

“You say they didn’t have it all. What happened? Did you spend it along the way?”

“Some of it,” admitted Tarnowski. “At almost every town we came to, the locals demanded bribes or tried to overcharge us for food or feed for our horses. We had used up three crates of gold by the time Colonel Kolchak declared that from then on, we would simply take what we wanted. But those three cases were only a fraction of what was missing from the Imperial Reserves that the Czechs handed over at Irkutsk.”

“You mean they just left the rest of the gold behind in Kazan? Is that it?”

Tarnowski shook his head. “What happened was that at the last minute the colonel decided we should take some of the gold with us.
His uncle was expecting that gold and Kolchak was afraid to come to him empty-handed. We were moving more quickly when we pulled out of Kazan, but still not quickly enough. The Reds caught up with us. What happened after that was a slaughter.”

“But how did you manage to prevent them from capturing it?” asked Pekkala.

“When we realized the Reds were only a day or two behind us,” continued Lavrenov, “we sent Colonel Kolchak on ahead. At first he did not want to go, but we knew what would happen if the Bolsheviks got hold of him. We begged the colonel to save himself, and finally he agreed.”

“Before he left,” said Sedov, “he swore that he would not abandon us, and in return each man who stayed behind took an oath that we would never give up the location of the gold. That night, once we were sure that the colonel had gotten away safely, we buried the crates in the woods beside the railroad, not two days’ march from this camp.”

“How can you be certain it’s still there?”

“If it had been found,” replied Lavrenov, “word would have reached us by now.”

Pekkala realized he was right. If that gold had been discovered, Stalin would have made sure that the whole country knew about his final triumph over the Tsar. He also knew the area where the Comitati had buried those crates. It was as wild and inhospitable a place as any he had seen. Once the gold was underground, no one would have stumbled upon it by accident, even if trains passed by not more than a stone’s throw away.

During his years as a tree-marker in the Valley of Krasnagolyana, the railroad had marked the northern boundary of the Borodok timber-cutting region. Beyond it lay a region assigned to another camp, a notorious place called Mamlin-3, where experiments were conducted on human subjects. To be caught outside this region meant certain death.

If the wind was right, Pekkala could hear the sound of the Trans-Siberian Express passing through the forest. Sometimes, overcome by loneliness, he would trudge through the woods on his homemade snowshoes until he reached the tracks. There, standing at the edge of his world, he waited for the train to go by, just to catch a glimpse of another human being.

The railway guards aboard the train would shoot at Pekkala if they saw him, whether on orders or for sport he did not know, so he always stayed hidden, eyes fixed on the stuttering images of passengers staring bleary-eyed out at the impenetrable wilderness of Siberia, unaware that the wilderness was staring back at them.

“The next day,” said Tarnowski, “the Reds attacked. The battle took place almost within sight of this valley. We held out for three days, but they outnumbered us by four to one. We knew we couldn’t win, but still we made them pay for every inch of ground. By the time it was over, of the two hundred men in the expedition, there were only seventy of us left. The Reds marched us straight to Borodok and we have been here ever since. Since the Bolsheviks found no gold, they concluded that we must have left it all with the Czechs.”

“And now your idea is to reclaim it?”

“Exactly,” replied Sedov.

“But this time,” said Lavrenov, “we are keeping it for ourselves.”

“That gold belongs to us now,” muttered Sedov. “God knows, we have earned it.”

“A hundred times over,” agreed Lavrenov.

“Where will you go once you’ve escaped,” asked Pekkala, “assuming you can even make it through the gates alive?”

“The border with China isn’t far from here,” Sedov told him. “Once we cross over, we’ll be safe.”

“But until then, you’ll be in the country of the Ostyaks. How do you plan to get past them when no other prisoner has ever succeeded before?”

“The colonel will take care of us,” Sedov answered. “We have waited many years, but at last the day of our deliverance is near.”

“Are you insane?” stammered Pekkala. “Now, listen to me, for the sake of your lives. I admire your loyalty to Colonel Kolchak. No one could have asked from you more than you have already given. But that loyalty has not been repaid. The colonel is gone. He has been gone for a long time. Even if he’s still alive, a fact of which I am by no means certain, whatever special powers you have granted him will not persuade the Ostyaks. Those men out there will kill you. They do not care about your faith, in God or anyone else. They care about the bread and salt Klenovkin gives them in exchange for your frozen corpses.”

Sedov only smiled and shook his head.

“Soon you’ll understand,” said Lavrenov. “Just wait until you set eyes on the gold.”

“I already have,” said Pekkala.

It was a Sunday afternoon in August
.

Pekkala had been sitting at his kitchen table, trying to read the newspaper. On either side of him lay large bowls filled with ice. In spite of this effort to cool himself down, he was still drenched in sweat. The newspaper stuck to his damp fingers. The ticking of the clock in the next room, which under normal circumstances he only noticed if it stopped, now seemed to be growing louder, as if a woodpecker was tapping against his skull
.

At the moment when it seemed as if his mood could not get any worse, he received a summons to the Alexander Palace. The message was delivered by a horseman from the Royal Stables. Dressed in a white tunic with red piped collar and cuffs, the rider appeared so dazzling in the glare of sun off the crushed stone pathway that Pekkala wondered if he might be hallucinating
.

The summons caught Pekkala by surprise, since he had thought the Romanovs were away at their hunting lodge in Poland until the end of the
following week. They seemed to have perfectly anticipated the heat wave, which had clamped down on St. Petersburg less than a day after the royal train departed for the west
.

“The royal family has returned from Spala?” he asked the horseman
.

“Only the Tsar. He came back early.”

“Any idea what this is about?”

The man shook his head, then saluted and rode away. Horse and rider seemed to merge in the heat haze, until they appeared to have transformed into a single creature
.

Pekkala did not keep a horse, nor did he own a car or even a bicycle, so he walked to the Alexander Palace. The route took him along the edge of Alexander Park. There was no shade along this stretch, since the trees originally planted here obscured the Tsarina’s view of the park from the room where she took breakfast every morning, so she’d had them all cut down
.

Head bowed in the heat, Pekkala resembled a man who had lost something small on the ground and was retracing his steps to find it. The blood pounded behind his ears as he walked, stamping out a rhythm in his brain. Pekkala thought of stories he had heard about birds in the city of Florence which, driven mad in the summer heat, flew straight into the ground and killed themselves. He knew exactly how they felt
.

When, at last, Pekkala reached the Alexander Palace, he paused beside the Tsukanov fountain, mesmerized by the glittering cascade of water
.

The Tsarina had commissioned it from the architect Felix Tsukanov, who specialized in fountains and had been making the rounds of royal enclaves in Europe. These days it was no longer fashionable to have a palace without one of his creations
.

The centerpiece was a large, tulip-shaped structure, from which the water spouted in three directions at once, falling into a waist-deep basin decorated with mosaics of koi fish
.

The Tsar had confided in Pekkala that he hated the fountain. It was noisy and garish. “And what is a fountain for, anyway?” the Tsar had declared in exasperation. “The horses won’t even drink from it!”

Pekkala stood at the edge of the fountain, droplets splashing against his shirt and face. If he had given any thought to what he did next, he never would have done it. Before he knew what was happening, he had climbed into the fountain, without pausing to remove his clothes. He even kept his shoes on. As if compelled by forces beyond his control, he lowered himself into the water until he was sitting on the bottom and the water rippled above his head
.

He remained there, eyes open, a pearl necklace of bubbles slowly escaping from his lips. It occurred to him that he had discovered the real purpose of this fountain
.

There was no time to return to his cottage, change clothes, and make his way back to the palace. A summons from the Tsar required immediate action. And the Tsar, being the Tsar, had probably calculated exactly how long it should take Pekkala to walk the distance
.

With as much dignity as he could manage, Pekkala clambered out of the fountain and made his way up the staircase to the palace balcony. With each footstep, water squelched from his shoes
.

It was only when Pekkala reached the top of the stairs that he realized the Tsar was sitting on the balcony overlooking the front courtyard and must have witnessed the whole thing
.