The Romanov Cross: A Novel (31 page)

Not to mention the fact that as the duly appointed tribal representative and mayor of the closest town, she could shut him down if she really wanted to.

Poking his head into the flap of her tent, he found her typing furiously on her laptop. She was compiling field notes, he knew, for an anthropological report she hoped to write, and Slater had not yet found the heart to tell her that none of what was happening on St. Peter’s Island was likely to see the light of day, much less in some academic journal. The only official report that would ever be written would be his own, and if experience was any indication, it would be restricted to a very small cadre of AFIP scientists and directors to review.

“The digging is done?” she said expectantly.

“It should be by the time we get there and suit up.”

Twirling around on her camp stool, she grabbed a worn and faded leather jerkin that was lying on her cot and slipped it over her head. It had a long fringe that hung below her waist, and red and black stitches depicting bears and eagles and otters all over it.

“When I said suit up, I meant a hazmat suit.”

“That’s fine,” she said, winding her long black hair into a glossy ponytail and flipping it over the collar of the jerkin. “But as the tribal
rep, I’ve got to wear the sacred garment.” Pulling on a parka over everything else, she added, “And I’ll need a minute to say some words over any grave you open.”

“But they’ll be Russian graves, not Inuit,” Slater said, and Nika just shrugged as she slipped past him and onto the rubber-matted pathway outside. Her boots squelched in the icy slush.

“It’s our land, our rules,” she said with a smile. “The home-field advantage.” Slater wasn’t sure what advantage it might confer, but he did know that from here on in the rules would be his own. At the colony gates, he and Nika hooked up with Lantos and the professor, and the four of them, bundled up in coats and hats and gloves against the chill ocean wind, trooped down the pathway toward the trees. Sergeant Groves and his crew had cleared a trail through the woods, but the brush had already begun to impinge again; snow-laden branches drooped down overhead and sharp twigs plucked at the puffy sleeves of his down-filled parka. It was a far cry from his usual postings, where the worst impediments were sunstroke and scorpion bites.

Even though it was technically early afternoon, the sun was so dim that the light stanchions, positioned every few yards along the pathway, were all switched on, providing an eerie glow. As Slater approached the cemetery gateposts, scrawled with their anonymous plea to “Forgive me,” he glanced over toward the promontory where he could see Groves and a Coast Guardsman, cloaked in their own hazmat suits, repositioning a jackhammer to loosen whatever frozen soil still remained at the parameters previously demarcated by Kozak. The strips of wet sod that had already been removed had been laid, according to Slater’s instructions, neatly to one side on top of a canvas ground cover. When the exhumation was finished, the grave was to be returned to a state as close to its previous condition as possible—and the canvas cover incinerated.

Meanwhile, the dressing tent had been set up just to the left of the entrance, and as Groves let loose with one more loud volley from the jackhammer, Slater guided his team into the chamber. The aluminum floor rumbled from the weight of their boots. A rack had been set up,
and an assortment of white Tyvek hazmat coveralls and thermal jumpsuits were hanging from the hooks, with visored helmets on a shelf just above them and a row of white boot covers lined up below.

Although he knew that Lantos and Kozak would be familiar with the routine, he advised everyone to doff their overcoats, put on a jumpsuit over the rest, then zip themselves into one of the white coveralls.

As he expected, Kozak was already huffing and puffing to get himself into everything, and Lantos was helping Nika to get properly attired; the leather jerkin wasn’t making it any easier, especially as Slater pointed out that it had to go inside, rather than outside, the hazmat gear.

“Otherwise, it’ll have to be disposed of afterward,” he said.

“No way,” Nika said, struggling to get the zipper all the way up and over it. “This has been in my tribe for at least two hundred years.”

Once she was in, Lantos pulled on her own outfit, and Slater, similarly encased in his jumpsuit, made sure that the elastic bands at Nika’s wrist and ankles were tightly drawn. Then he helped her on with her white booties. Plucking at her sleeve, Nika said, “I think I prefer natural fabrics. What’s this made of, anyway?”

“High-density polyethylene,” Slater replied, “and it’s virtually indestructible. But it’ll protect you from any bloodborne pathogens, or dry particles as small as half a micron.”

“But aren’t we going to cook inside them?”

“Not as much as you would think,” Lantos interjected. “Even though they keep out water and other liquid molecules, they’ll still allow heat and sweat vapors to escape. Which isn’t to say,” she added, passing her the headgear that Nika studied skeptically, “you’re going to be comfortable out there.”

“Okay, helmets, too, now,” Slater said, and they all took one last breath of unimpeded air before putting on the visored hoods, the bottoms of which hung down onto their shoulders. With all four of them in the tent at once, and bundled up like sausages, it was getting hard to budge without bumping into each other. Lantos tucked a surgical kit under her arm, and with Slater holding the tent flaps, they exited
with a certain amount of nervous laughter, looking like a bunch of beekeepers heading out to work in the apiary.

But the mood changed the moment they got outside and the first blast of wind rippled the jumpsuits. As they trudged through the cemetery in single file, with Kozak carefully leading the way along the path he had already marked with little flags and Slater bringing up the rear, the full import of what they were about to do was brought home. Sergeant Groves and the Coast Guardsman were waiting by the gravesite, standing next to a high-intensity lamp they had set up. Slater relieved them of their duty now that the exhumation work was about to begin. They’d been working for hours and deserved a break. Groves saluted by touching two fingers to the little plastic visor of his helmet, and, toting his jackhammer, headed back to the dressing shed.

The tombstone, adorned with two doors carved into its upper corners, had been laid to one side, incongruously enough next to a stretcher. And even though the name on the marker had long since been worn away, Slater could see that at its very bottom, where the frozen earth had afforded it some protection from the elements, something like a crescent had been carved.

“What’s that mean?” he said, pointing it out to the professor. “I’ve seen it on the posts to the cemetery and on some of the other headstones.”

“Some people say it is the symbol of Islam, and it is always at the bottom to show the victory of Christ over the unbelievers.”

“It sounds like you don’t agree with them.”

“I don’t. I believe it is meant to be an anchor. In the Russian faith, that is the symbol of the hope for salvation. The hope that the church provides.” He scratched at the side of his helmet, as if it were his head. “The two doors, though, those are unusual.”

While salvation, Slater thought, might be uncertain, in this particular case, resurrection—at least in the corporeal sense—was painfully imminent. Looking into the open grave, he could see, beneath the thin scrim of dirt and gravel, the pale gleam of wood bleached white by its decades in the soil. He could even detect a couple of deep cracks in the lid of the coffin.

“Just as I predicted,” Kozak put in, “the frost heaval has done some damage to the casket.”

Lantos and Nika were standing on the other side of the grave, Lantos surveying the site with a professional eye, and Nika, her head tilted down, apparently reciting some native prayer or blessing. Although Slater wondered what she made of the grim spectacle on display, in deference to her work he nudged Kozak and they both kept silent for the next minute or two. All he could hear from under her helmet was a murmured chant, but he detected a slight rocking on her heels, as if she were moving to some ancient rhythm only she could discern. He became conscious of the
bilikin
that he was wearing under his shirt, and for some reason he wished that she knew he had it on.

When she had finished, Slater glanced over at Lantos, got a nod in return, then, like a diver going over the side, he slipped down into the grave itself. It would not have been easy under any circumstances, but the bulky clothing made him uncharacteristically clumsy. With an arm that wasn’t as steady as he would have liked—
damn those drugs
—he balanced himself on the rectangular coffin, then crouched to peek through the largest crack. His visor, though it was clean as a whistle, presented yet one more obstacle.

“Vassily,” he said, “could you move the lamp to the left? My own shadow’s getting in the way.”

Kozak repositioned the light, and said, in a voice muffled by his hood, “Better?”

“We’ll see,” Slater replied, before bending down to peer through the crack again.

He was greeted by the sight of someone staring back at him.

A blue eye, like a clouded marble, gazed upward from under a film of ice, and he reared back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nika said with concern.

“Yes,” Kozak said, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Slater said. “I was just startled. I thought I was at the foot of the coffin.”

“You’re not?” Kozak said.

“No. The head’s at this end.”

“So it’s facing west?”

“Yes. What’s the difference?”

“That would mean he had been a deacon, or maybe a priest.”

“I don’t follow,” Nika said.

“Unlike his parishioners,” Kozak explained, “a church leader is buried facing his congregation.”

“Whichever way he’s facing,” Dr. Lantos said, handing Slater a hammer with a clawed end, “you’re going to need this. Try not to leave splinters.”

Slater didn’t look back through the crack but applied himself to removing the rusty nails from the four corners of the box. They crumbled at the first touch of the hammer. Leaning to one side in the narrow grave, he pried up the lid, which rose halfway before splitting down the middle.

“So much for splinters,” Lantos said, as Slater passed up one half of the lid to her, and Kozak reached down to collect the other.

With the lid cleared away, the corpse was on full display, and Slater had nowhere to stand but a very narrow trough along one side. Kozak’s surmise, however, was right—the man was dressed in a long black cassock that glistened like ebony beneath a sheen of ice; the sleeves were rolled back to reveal a hint of scarlet lining. His hands were clenched tight, and in one he held a tightly rolled piece of paper. In the other, he clutched a copper icon, the size and shape of an index card, with its picture side down. Slater glanced up at the professor for any further elaboration.

“The paper is the prayer of absolution,” Kozak volunteered. “Traditionally, it was placed in the corpse’s hand after it had been read aloud by a priest. As for the icon, that must be what showed up on the GPR. I kept getting hits of metal or hard mineral deposits.”

Slater looked back at the body, whose face was as arresting in death as it must have been in life. He had hypnotic blue-gray eyes, even now, and blond hair—nearly white—that must have once hung down to his shoulders. His face was clean-shaven, and his mouth had fallen open, as if he were just about to speak; his lips were flecked with dark splotches of blood. His expression was one of surprise.

“I would say, from his youth and the fact that he has no beard,” Kozak said, “he was a deacon.”

“Deacon or priest or whatever,” Lantos said, “I think if you can cut away some of that fabric before taking the samples, we’d be better off. The drill could get snagged.”

Slater knew she was right, but it was as if her voice were coming from a mile away. It was more than the muffling of the helmets. He was struggling to maintain his composure and presence of mind, a problem that someone in his line of work should long ago have conquered. He put it down to the effect of all the antiviral drugs he’d been taking, but whatever the cause, he knew that now was no time to lose control.

“You’re right,” he said. “Give me the surgical scissors.”

Anticipating him perfectly, she had them ready. But to put them to use, he would first have to get into the correct position, and there was only one way to do that. Straddling the corpse, he slowly sat down on it, like a rider in a saddle. He could hear the crackling of the ice that coated the body, and it reminded him of the sound of stepping out on a frozen pond. The corpse itself was as stiff and hard as an iron anvil. With the butt end of the scissors, he chipped at the ice on the deacon’s chest until a spot a few inches around had been cleared. Shards of ice had flown up into the corpse’s face, and he brushed them away with his gloved fingertips.

“I don’t think he’ll mind,” Lantos said.

Turning the scissors, he carefully nudged the tip beneath the black cloth, just enough to separate it from the frozen flesh, then snipped until he could pull a piece of the fabric free. He handed it up to Lantos for safekeeping, then, on the opposite side of the breastbone, he did the same. The exposed skin was the color of old ivory, but with a fine sheen, as if Vaseline had been spread on it.

“The cadaver mat,” Lantos said, before he could ask for it.

She handed him a green-rubber sheath the size of a bath towel, which had short vertical and horizontal incisions in it. He draped it across the upper torso, then poked a finger through one hole to loosen it up. In autopsy work like this, the cadaver mat was used
not only as a sign of respect but to keep airborne particles to a minimum.

“Okay,” he said, “I can start taking the samples now.”

Lantos, like a nurse in an ER, slapped into his hand a small, low-speed aerosol drill the size of a screwdriver. After making sure that he had located the spot directly above the left lung, he braced himself with one hand, while with the other he pressed the tip of the drill through the hole. With a soft whirring sound, the blade bored into the corpse, then suctioned up a minuscule sliver of lung tissue, which Lantos immediately placed in a vial already marked for that purpose.