The Romanov Cross: A Novel (40 page)

But Nika fumbled across the table in an attempt to snag the other hand—a breach of protocol that a trained nurse would have known not to do—and before either one of them knew how it had happened, Nika flinched and said, “Ouch,” as the tip of the suturing needle pierced the palm of her glove. For a split second that seemed like an eternity, the needle stayed there, before Slater yanked it out, and
looked through his visor at Nika. She was studying the tiny puncture in her glove, from which a dot of her own blood was now oozing, and then she looked up at him, her dark eyes full of disbelief … and questions.

Exactly as he feared were his own.

Sergei was pushing a wheelbarrow back toward the Ipatiev house when he heard the sound of gunshots. For days, there had been the rumble of distant artillery, but this was small-arms fire, and much closer to home.

It sounded like a string of firecrackers.

The wheelbarrow was filled with several gas cans. Commandant Yurovsky had sent him into town with orders to siphon the fuel out of every vehicle he could find, and if anybody asked any questions, to refer them to the Kremlin. This was not the sort of duty the Bolsheviks had promised him when they came to his village and dragooned him the previous spring.

The shots were coming one at a time now, and Sergei stopped in the middle of the dark road, fear gripping at his heart. Who was doing all this shooting, in the dead of night, and why?

Pushing the wheelbarrow as fast as he could over the bumps and ruts in the dirt road, he arrived at the sharp-staked palisade surrounding the house, and when the sentry called out who was there, he said, “It’s Comrade Sergei Ilyinsky. With the gasoline.”

“Bring it around back.”

In the courtyard, Sergei found a truck waiting, and the stench of
gunpowder in the air … and blood. His eyes shot to the iron grille covering the basement window, but it was dark inside and he couldn’t see a thing.

Yurovsky, stepping out of the house, saw the gas canisters and said, “That’s all?”

“There aren’t many tractors in Ekaterinburg,” Sergei said, careful to keep any emotion out of his voice.

“Go upstairs and get the sheets and blankets.”

Sergei mounted the back steps and found the house in commotion. Other guards were trooping up and down the stairs, their arms filled with linens, their mouths crammed with food, a couple swigging vodka from a jug. By the time he got to the room Anastasia shared with her sisters, the four cots had already been stripped bare. Books and diaries, combs and shoes, were scattered around the floor. Arkady, one of the Latvian guards who had recently been brought to the house, was stripping some curtains from the whitewashed windows.

“What’s going on?” Sergei said. “Where are they?”

Arkady looked at him quizzically, and said, “In Hell, if you ask me.” Then, tossing the curtains to Sergei, he said, “Take these to the basement.”

His arms clutching the curtains, Sergei stumbled down the stairs, his mind refusing to accept the awful reality of what must have just happened, then across the courtyard and down to the cellar. The acrid smell of smoke and death grew stronger with every step he took, and Sergei’s heart grew as heavy as a stone. At the bottom, Yurovsky, in his long coat, was holding a lantern and directing the operation.

The floor was so awash in blood that the soldiers trying to roll the bodies up in the sheets and drapery kept slipping and sliding.

“Just get them out of here!” Yurovsky was barking. “The truck’s right outside.”

Sergei scanned the carnage; he saw Dr. Botkin’s gold eyeglasses gleaming on his bloody face, he saw Demidova with a bayonet still stuck in her chest. He saw the Tsar’s worn old boots sticking out of a sheet, and his young son Alexei—one side of his face obliterated by a close gunshot to the ear—being wrapped in a tablecloth, like a shroud.

But where was Anastasia?

“Don’t just stand there!” Yurovsky said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Get to work.”

Sergei stepped into the morass, searching for Ana, and found her beneath the corpse of her sister Tatiana, soaked in blood, her little dog crushed beneath her. Her hair was caked with blood, her clothes were ripped to shreds, her hands were clutching something under her bodice.

Sergei felt the anger and the bile rise in his throat, and if he could have done it, he’d have killed Yurovsky and every other guard in the house on the spot. The House of Special Purpose—that’s what the Ipatiev mansion had been officially called, and Sergei had always taken it to mean imprisonment.

Now he knew that it meant murder.

He laid the curtains on the floor—they were the color of cream, and imprinted with little blue seahorses—and gently rolled Ana’s body onto them. He looked at her face, smeared with blood and ash and tears, then closed the ends of the curtains over her as if he were wrapping a precious gift.

“Move along,” Yurovsky shouted, “all of you!”

Sergei could hear the truck engine idling in the courtyard. The Latvians were throwing the remaining bodies over their shoulders like carpets, and carting them out. Sergei picked up Anastasia in his arms, as if carrying a child to bed, and leaving the cellar he heard Yurovsky joke, “Careful not to wake her.”

Sergei was numb with shock and grief, and when the guards told him to toss the body into the back of the truck with all the rest, Sergei simply climbed inside instead, and slumped against the side wall with the body between his knees.

“You always were sweet on that one,” a guard cracked. “That’s why the commandant sent you into town tonight.” He slammed the half panel at the back of the vehicle shut. “Now you can help bury her.”

He banged on the side of the truck, and the engine was put into gear. With a jolt, the truck lumbered across the courtyard, out through the palisade, and onto the Koptyaki road. The pile of corpses—Sergei
counted ten others in all—gently swayed and rocked, as if it were all a single creature, at every bump and pothole in the road. The Tsar and his valet, the Tsaritsa and her maid, their daughters, the heir to the throne, the cook, the doctor … all tangled together in an indiscriminate mound of blood-soaked linens.

Sergei wondered where the truck was headed … and what he would do when he got there.

An old car, crammed with shovels, gasoline, and Latvians was jouncing along behind them.

For at least an hour, they forged through the forest on old rutted mining roads. Sergei could hear tree branches on either side scratching at the sides of the truck and the tires squelching in the mud.

And then—unless his mind was playing tricks on him—he heard something else, too.

He bent his head.

It came again.

A moan.

He pulled the cream-colored curtain away.

“Ana,” he whispered, “are you alive?”

Her eyes were closed, and her face twitched like someone still caught in a nightmare.

“Ana, be still!”

Her face was wrenched in agony, her lips parted, and she started to cry out.

Sergei pressed his palm to her mouth, and said, “Ana, don’t make a sound. Do you hear me? It’s Sergei. Don’t move.”

She tried to scream again, and again he flattened his hand on her lips.

“If they know you’re alive, they’ll kill us both.”

Her eyes opened, filled with panic, and he leaned even closer so that she could see him better. Despite all that had passed between them, in looks and words and flowers, the bounds of propriety had never been crossed. Until this night, Sergei would no sooner have dreamed of holding a grand duchess of Russia than he would have imagined himself becoming the Tsar.

Even as his heart soared—the love of his life was cradled in his arms!—Sergei’s mind raced. How had she survived the slaughter? Was the blood covering her body her own—or her sister’s?

And how could he ever spirit her away from this caravan of death?

The truck was going up a hill, the gears grinding, when he heard the thundering of hoofbeats and wild shouts coming through the forest. The brakes squealed, and even as the truck stopped, Yurovsky was leaping like a demon from the car behind, cursing and brandishing a long-muzzled Mauser.

Was Anastasia going to be rescued after all? Were these the White cavalry officers, loyal to the Tsar, that Ana and her family had long prayed for? Or could they be renegade Czech soldiers who abhorred the revolutionaries? Sergei didn’t care, just so long as there were enough of them to overpower the Red Guards. He’d take his own chances.

“Keep still,” he said to Anastasia, smoothing her befouled hair with his hand.

He could hear horses snorting, and the creak of wagon wheels.

“We were promised we’d get them!” someone was shouting. “All of them—alive!”

“Well, you’re too late for that now,” Yurovsky replied. “But this truck can’t make it any farther. We’ll need those carts to get the bodies to the Four Brothers.”

Sergei knew that the four brothers referred to the stumps of four towering pine trees that had once stood where nothing but coal pits and peat bogs now lay. Was this how Yurovsky had planned to dispose of the bodies? By throwing them down the abandoned coal shafts?

“I promised my men that they’d have some fun with the duchesses,” the man complained. “And I planned to have the Tsaritsa myself.”

“Shut your trap, Ermakov, and do what I tell you.” Yurovsky was struggling to remain in command of the rowdy horsemen; that much Sergei could tell from the strained pitch of his voice. “Unload the bodies, and the first man I see stealing anything, I’ll shoot.”

What would they steal, Sergei thought? The rings on their fingers?
But even as he heard a few of the men dismounting, and the Latvians clambering out of the car, he knew that this might be his only opportunity to save Ana. As soon as the back panel was dropped flat again, and he saw the faces of the peasants leering in at the bloody cargo, he stood up, teetering a little as if he were drunk, and said, “Take them away, comrades.”

A few dirty hands reached in, grabbed the dangling arms and legs of the dead and dragged them out of the truck. Sheets were pulled aside, and one man called out, “I’ve got a duchess, but I’m damned if I know which one.”

There was laughter, topped only when another man shouted, “And I’ve got the queen bitch herself!”

Picking up the body of Anastasia, and handling it with deliberate carelessness, Sergei stepped over the corpses of the maid and the cook and hopped down onto the ground. The road was illuminated by the headlights of the car, but the forest was thick on both sides, and as the hay carts were brought around back, Sergei carried his bundle past one wagon, and then another, and when a cry went up at the discovery of the Tsar—“Who wants to spit in the face of Nikolashka himself!” Ermakov exulted—Sergei pretended to drunkenly stumble off the rutted path and into a pile of brambles.

But no one called out after him, and no one noticed. Everyone was so intent on defiling the corpse of the Tsar that they didn’t see him disappear, and hoisting the girl over his shoulder like a sack of grain—and how many times had he done that very thing in the fields of Pokrovskoe?—he trotted into the dense and pitch-black woods. Ana groaned, and all he could say was, “Hush, Ana, hush.” She was heavier than he thought she would be, and her body was harder and stiffer, but in all the hubbub and confusion, the Reds might not even notice that one of the duchesses was missing until they assembled all the bodies at the Four Brothers. By then Sergei planned to be miles away, hidden in the one place he knew would provide a safe refuge for the lone survivor of the imperial family.

Harley had just spent the worst night of his entire life, and he was not about to go through another one like it. He’d broken into Russell’s remaining stores of beer and drifted off into sleep for half an hour here and there, but every time he did, he’d awakened again with a start, expecting to see that old lady from the cliffs, or Eddie, bruised and bloodied, cursing him out for cutting the rope.

Or that mangled guy on the autopsy table in the tent.

As far as he was concerned, St. Peter’s Island was even worse than all the stories and legends he’d ever heard about it. It was one big haunted house, fit for nothing but the dead and anyone else who felt ready to join them. He needed to get off of it while there was still time.

If
there was still time.

As soon as the storm abated enough to let a little daylight shine, he’d ventured out of the cave to see if the trawler
Kodiak
had been freed by the surging tides.

Freed wasn’t the word. Scuttled was more like it. The boat had settled deeper into the cove, and he could see pieces of it drifting away on each icy wave. The groaning he had heard the night before was its
hull being scraped on the rocks, its cabin flooding, its masts and doors and gangways being rent by the pounding surf.

As for the skiff—not that he could ever have made it back to Port Orlov in that flimsy thing, anyway—it had been dragged down by the tide and reduced to a pile of splinters and sawdust.

There was really only one option left to him—the RHI that he’d spotted down on the beach below the cemetery, where the Coast Guard must have left it for an emergency evacuation.

Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, then what the hell was?

Trekking over that way again was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do—that black dude with the rifle was never far from his thoughts—but he just didn’t see any way around it. He also knew that if he debated it much longer, he’d lose the few hours of daylight he had left. Earlier, he had emptied his coat pockets—vials, icon, and all—willy-nilly into his backpack, and now he threw in some Power-Bars, a bottled water, and the handgun Russell had been kind enough to leave behind. He’d have liked to take more, but he wanted to be sure he was traveling light. He wasn’t feeling up to par and wouldn’t have been surprised if he was running a bit of a fever. By the time he got back to his trailer, he’d probably be sporting a full-blown cold.

Walking back toward the beach and the stone steps leading down to the inflatable boat, he saw that his tracks from the day before had already been obliterated. Alaska had a way of doing that. Every sign of human life was soon wiped away by nature, and the stuff that lasted at all—like the colony—just wound up being a reminder of how empty, short, and hollow life really was. Sometimes, like right now, Harley thought it might have been a good idea to go and live someplace else, after all. He should have done it the day Charlie had moved his two crazy women into the old house.