The Romanov Cross: A Novel (18 page)

As Charlie’s wheelchair was maneuvered down the aisle, the other people seemed to take quick notice of him, then turn away. Charlie knew that his entourage made something of a spectacle, and he liked that. This town had always been too small for him and his ambitions, but it wasn’t until the accident—and his being saved—that he’d found the message, and the means, to make himself heard around the world. Vane’s Holy Writ wasn’t a powerful force yet, but he had every confidence that one day it would be. In His own good time, the Lord would show him how.

Rebekah stopped the chair beside the very front pew, and Charlie was pleased to see that the mayor and a couple of men beside her—one of whom looked like a Russkie—had to scoot down to make room for them. These must be the guys from the chopper, and Charlie was happy to catch a glimpse of them. Know your enemy, that’s what he’d always said. And the Lord, he felt sure, would have no quarrel with common sense. That was where a lot of people went wrong, in his view; they thought the Lord wanted you to act like some Simple Simon, to go around expecting the best of everybody and trusting them like some dumb dog. What a load. The Lord wanted you to use your God-given wits to aid Him in His cause—and Charlie had never come up short in that department.

But speaking of which … the Right Reverend Wallach, a worthless milquetoast who couldn’t stir a bowl of Cheerios much less a congregation, ascended to the pulpit with a Bible in one hand and in the other a white life preserver from the
Neptune II
, which he hung from a hook attached to the lectern. It was not the first time the hook had been used for that purpose, nor would it be the last. The Bering Sea wasn’t getting any kinder.

“We are gathered here today,” the reverend said, “in remembrance
of the good men who lost their lives doing what they did so well, and with such joy.”

Ten seconds in, and Charlie had already nearly guffawed. Anybody who thought crabbers did it for the fun of it was out of his mind. It was just about the worst work in the world. He’d done it for years, before the first
Neptune
went down, and hadn’t missed it for a single minute since. Extending his ministry was what he lived for now, and to that end he would do whatever he had to. Or, more to the point, whatever Harley, and his pals Eddie and Russell, had to do. Before the service, he’d spotted those other two losers smoking a joint outside.

Harley had already broached the subject of the job to them, so Charlie wasn’t going to have to waste a lot of time on persuasion. Getting onto St. Peter’s Island, and digging up graves that might still be sealed in the permafrost, was going to require a lot of hard work. What bothered Charlie was that he’d let this potential gold mine sit there, right under his nose, his whole life. Was it Providence that had finally opened his eyes? If there was more treasure where that emerald-embossed cross had come from, he was finally going to have the resources to do whatever he wanted. He’d be able to flood the whole planet with the holy word. Jesus might have put the stash in his way for that very reason.

And who knew how much of it there might be?

Ever since he’d found the cross in Harley’s anorak, he’d been digging through Internet sites, ordering books and downloading monographs, even posing as a professor at the University of Alaska in order to call up a couple of experts on Russian history and grill them. And everything he’d learned—like the fact that the colony was founded by a batch of fanatical Siberians who had settled on the island between 1910 and 1918—only whetted his appetite more.

“We are going to hear today from members of the lost men’s families,” the reverend was droning on. “And also from the captain of the unfortunate vessel capsized on that fateful night, for he alone lived to tell the tale.”

And a tale it would be, Charlie thought.

“Let us begin,” the reverend said, “with Mr. Muller, the father of the youngest crewman, Lucas.”

As Muller, who ran a hardware supply store, stepped solemnly to the pulpit, Charlie tapped his fingers impatiently on his knees. He was still pondering his latest findings. Turns out, these Siberians had been followers of the mad monk, Rasputin, the one who had bewitched the last Tsar and Tsaritsa of Russia. The Romanovs. Some of this stuff had come back to him from school—you couldn’t grow up in Alaska and know nothing about the Russians who lived right across the strait—but what he hadn’t known about was the Romanov jewels. He hadn’t known that the Tsar and his family had owned one of the most astonishing collections of jewelry the world had ever seen.

And that a lot of it was still missing to this day.

“My boy never failed at anything he put his mind to,” Mr. Muller was saying. “He was smart as a whip and worked as hard as any man I ever knew.”

Charlie knew that the blame for the shipwreck had been attributed to Lucas’s piloting of the boat, and he guessed that this was the father’s way of redeeming his son’s reputation. He hoped that Harley wouldn’t decide to ad-lib and rub any salt in that wound.

As Muller yielded the pulpit to the Samoan sailor’s mother, Charlie went over the list in his mind again—the endless array of tiaras and necklaces, earrings and bracelets, gilded crosses and enameled eggs—eggs, made by some jeweler named Fabergé—that had comprised the royal collection. The Tsaritsa, infatuated with her holy man from the steppes, had given him lavish presents, and there were even rumors that she had become his mistress. But who would ever know, or give a damn, about that now? All that mattered to Charlie was the obvious value of the cross—and the fact that it had been found on the island. If the cross was there, the rest of the missing Romanov jewels might be there, too.

The Samoan’s mother had given way to Farrell’s sister, and then to an engineering buddy of Old Man Richter, and it was finally time for
Harley, who slouched to the pulpit like a man about to be hanged. Charlie wanted to holler at him to straighten up, but he was relieved to see him take out the comments Charlie had written for him and start reading.

Rebekah nodded approvingly, and glanced over at Charlie with her beady, hard eyes. Bathsheba had put down whatever trashy book she’d brought and was actually paying some attention.

“Mankind is forever caught in the crosshairs of God’s grace,” Harley was saying—a line Charlie was particularly fond of. “Belief is the path that we all must take. That path will lead us through the trials and tribulations of life, and protect us from the many evils and the countless plagues that assail us. Even as I clung to the lid of that coffin, I trusted in God to deliver me to shore.”

Charlie knew that God was probably the last thing on Harley’s mind that night, but it sure sounded good. Harley then read Charlie’s account of all the other deeply religious revelations he’d had as he fought his way through the freezing sea—full of doubts and fears—before landing on the shore, where his faith had finally deposited him.

“I only wish that I had been able to save my fellow crew members who had shared in that awful voyage with me,” he concluded. “But I do know now that they are all resting, safe and dry, in God’s loving hands.”

When he wrapped up, Charlie wanted to applaud, or maybe even proclaim in some way that those were his words, but he just didn’t see how to do it gracefully. The mayor got up next—big surprise—and made some remarks that she probably thought would help get her elected again (as if anybody in his right mind would want the job, anyway) before the Reverend Wallach recited the Lord’s Prayer, and announced that hot drinks and refreshments were now being served in the annex.

“I do okay?” Harley shuffled over to ask his brother. He stuffed the paper into the back pocket of his jeans.

“You mumbled some of the lines, but yeah, it was fine.”

“You’re supposed to make eye contact,” Rebekah put in.

“I didn’t ask you.”

“Well, if you’d been smart, you would have.”

There was no love lost, Charlie knew, between his brother and Rebekah. Until the sisters had shown up, Harley had lived in the old family homestead, too, but once the women had taken over, Harley, and his pet snake, had been none too subtly eased out the door.

“I thought you did good,” Bathsheba said shyly.

“Where are the idiots?” Charlie asked, and Harley, knowing exactly who he was referring to, looked around the emptying church. “Over in the annex, I guess.”

“Get them and meet me out at the van.”

Rebekah wheeled him back outside, then went to join her sister at the refreshment tables. Charlie knew the two sisters would be about as welcome there as ants at a picnic.

A few minutes later, Harley showed up with Eddie and Russell. Their hands were so filled with donuts and bagels and cardboard cups of coffee they didn’t know how to get the van’s doors opened. Finally, Harley put his own cup on the hood of the car and slid open the side door. Charlie wondered to himself how these three would ever be able to accomplish anything more complicated.

But it was his job to make sure they did.

“What’s the word?” he asked as they settled into the backseats. “Have you got a boat?”

The three of them exchanged baffled looks before Eddie volunteered that he could probably make off with his uncle’s boat for a few days. “But I might have to throw him a few bucks if he finds out.”

“Throw him a six-pack and he’ll never find out anything,” Russell said.

“You boys have got to get onto that island by tomorrow,” Charlie said.

“And do what?” Russell asked, crumbs spilling from his mouth. He had the look, Charlie thought, of a cow chewing its cud.

“Get the jewels before these government guys get there.”

“Who says they’re even going there?” Eddie asked.

Charlie took a second to calm himself, then said, “They don’t do surveillance runs over places they don’t plan to go. And they don’t
give my brother, Harley, here grief about that coffin lid if they’re not planning to look for the rest of it themselves.”

“But they’re gonna have all this equipment and shit,” Eddie said.

“That’s why you’re going to get there first, and land on the leeward side of the island,” Charlie explained. “As far from the beach as you can get.”

“There’s nowhere else to put in,” Eddie replied.

“A big boat, no, but your uncle’s trawler draws under six feet. You can get it into a cove. And of course you’ll have to wait until dark.” These days, darkness was falling sooner and sooner in the afternoon. “You can’t light any fires, either. When the feds do come, you don’t want them smelling your smoke or spotting the campsite. A cave would be good. Find a cave.”

“For how long?” Eddie whined.

“As long as it takes,” Charlie replied. “And bring some guns.”

“Guns?” Russell said, finding his voice again. “I’m not shooting it out with a bunch of Coast Guardsmen. Two years at Spring Creek was plenty for me.”

“Wolves,” Charlie said. “The island’s got wolves, in case you haven’t heard.”

“Oh.”

Some of the townspeople were filtering out of the annex now, pulling on hats and gloves. Geordie Ayakuk, eating a hot dog, had on neither. These natives had natural blubber, Charlie thought—another sign of God’s mysterious handiwork.

The two sisters appeared in the throng, coming toward the van, and it was as if Harley and his cronies had seen a ghost.

“Okay then,” Eddie said, hastily unlatching the side door and sliding it open. “I better get going.”

“Me, too,” Russell said, spilling out after him.

Harley remained in the front passenger seat. With a dubious expression, he said, “How long do you really think this is going to take?”

“It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On how fast you can dig.”

Rebekah was now standing by the car door, plainly waiting for Harley to give up the front seat to her.

“I’ll drop you off at your trailer,” Charlie said, “and you can get started on the packing.”

But Harley took one look at Bathsheba—eager to share a ride in the backseat with him—and said, “Forget it—I’ll walk.”

As the van pulled away, Harley put up the collar on his parka and trudged down Front Street in a biting wind. It was only midday, but the clouds were thick and the light was already fading from the sky. Everything around him—the smattering of storefronts, the crooked totem pole, the rusted-out trucks with the monster tires—was bathed in a dull pewter-colored glow, like it was all contained under some overturned bowl. What would it be like, he wondered, to see hot sunlight on palm trees and walk around in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts?

And what would Angie Dobbs look like with a real tan, not that lobstery color she sometimes got when she’d been to the tanning parlor in Nome?

Both the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe and the lumberyard were closed because of the funeral service, and apart from the violet glow from the snake tank filtering through the slats of his blind, his trailer, too, lay dark and silent at the end of the alleyway between them. The Rottweiler in the gun shop barked ferociously as he passed by, and threw itself against the chicken-wire screen in the window.

“Shut the fuck up,” Harley said, as he went to the storage shed behind the lumberyard. There was a padlock on the door, but Harley
knew that the owner had lost the keys so many times he didn’t bother to lock the damn thing anymore. Besides, what was there to steal, apart from the few shovels and picks that were precisely what Harley was after? They probably wouldn’t even be missed before he was back from the island with what he hoped would be the jewels in hand.

The jewels that would buy him his first-class ticket to Miami Beach.

Cracking the metal doors open just enough to slink inside, Harley groped for the string attached to the lightbulb in the ceiling. The whole fixture swayed, throwing shadows over the already gloomy interior. There were piles of rotting boards, a couple of broken-down lathes, sagging sawhorses littered with tools. Toward the back, leaning up against the wall like a bunch of drunks, he saw the shovels and spades and iron pickaxes that they’d need to dig up the graves and crack open the coffins. Just looking at them made his arms ache, and he reminded himself to make sure that Eddie and Russell did most of the hard labor. He was the foreman on this job, and the foreman’s job was to oversee things. He could already anticipate the shit he was going to get from the other two.