Yurovsky faced the group. “Citizen Nicholas Romanov, your relatives and followers have tried to rescue you but they have failed. And now we must shoot you.”
“What—!” Nicholas began, but that was the last word he would speak.
Yurovsky quickly raised his revolver, aimed, and fired. Anastasia screamed as her papa crumbled to the ground, a bloody wound in his head. But she had no time to even feel her grief, for that single shot was a signal to the other guards who instantly raised their weapons, mostly handguns, and began firing into the group. From the corner of her eye, Anastasia saw her mama cross herself before slumping over in her chair. That was too much for the seventeen-year-old girl. She swooned into a faint, hearing, as unconsciousness engulfed her, the terrified yelping of little Jimmy as he scurried from her arms, mingled with the screams of her sisters and the others as they were massacred.
The tiny room was so filled with gunsmoke the shooters could hardly see their targets any longer, but still they fired at anything that moved. They had not planned on this horrible chaos. Each man had been assigned a target, and thus it should have been a simple matter. They simply had not thought the thing through. They had not considered missed shots and those bullets ricocheting off the stone walls, nor the screaming and frantic flailing of the targets. The bullets actually seemed to bounce off the female targets. It was unnerving.
Nicholas, who had died instantly from the first shot, received at least two dozen more shots. When the killers saw that Anastasia had only fainted, they finished her off with another volley of shots. When the tsarevich quivered in the throws of death, Yurovsky fired two shots into the boy’s head. The maid was the last to die. The box of jewels in her pillow had repelled several bullets. She ran around the death-filled room screaming until she was brought down with a bayonet.
Yurovsky could not take a step in the room without encountering blood. He nearly slipped once as he supervised the wrapping of the bodies in sheets.
At first, Talia mistook the sounds as the distant artillery she had been hearing for days. The racing engine of the two four-ton military trucks had also obscured the sounds. Then she realized that the shots were much too close at hand. In fact, as she oriented herself, she could tell they were indeed coming from across the street at the Ipatiev House itself.
“Dear God! Don’t let it be. . . .”
But there could be no other explanation.
After a while—it seemed to go on forever—the firing ceased. But the silence was nearly as unnerving as the horrible noise.
Talia’s legs were so shaky she had to lean against the tree she had been hiding behind. If only her legs could carry her, she wanted more than anything to run away. But before she could tell anyone about what she was nearly certain had just transpired, she had to be certain. Willing herself to be steady, she crept from the cover of the tree, crossing the road to the perimeter of the house. She then inched along the outside of the fence to the back of the house until she had a view of the courtyard. She knew she was taking a terrible risk. If caught she might be able to plead that she had forgotten something at the house, yet even if they believed her, they might still shoot her to eliminate any possible witness.
She noted the two trucks she had watched earlier pull into the courtyard. She waited, still praying, still hoping that the shots she had heard were nothing but the guards target-shooting. Then came the procession of guards carrying bundles wrapped in sheets. Even in the gloaming she could see stains on the sheets. She felt sick inside. Yet she swallowed back the waves of nausea, for she was close enough to be heard should she lose control.
Only when the trucks with their grim cargo drove away did she turn away from the “House of Special Purpose” in order to seek the only person she could go to for comfort. How desperately she wished that person could be Andrei, but he was out of her reach, so she would have to find Bruce.
As she turned, she gasped at what she beheld. A guard was approaching, with his rifle aimed directly at her.
“What’re you up to?” he asked gruffly.
“I . . . I . . .” But she was so startled she could not think of an answer.
“Poking your head where it doesn’t belong can get you killed.”
“I . . . work here.”
“I know that.”
“I forgot—”
“I don’t care. You’ve had it now. Yurovsky isn’t gonna like this.” Prodding her with the barrel of the rifle, he added, “Get moving.”
45
Stephan Kaminsky, though he did not take part in the shooting itself, verified the body count as each corpse was loaded into one of the vehicles. There was blood everywhere. In the basement room where the shooting had taken place, there was so much blood it had leaked through the floorboards to the ground below. Before leaving he set some men to the gruesome task of cleanup, but it would take days to do a thorough job. No doubt only a thick coat of paint would even begin to hide what had occurred there that night.
He sent the trucks away as dawn began to tinge the sky, satisfied that the job had been properly completed. Earlier the previous day Stephan and Yurovsky had scouted out a “burial” site for the bodies, an abandoned mine shaft at what had once been called the Four Brothers’ Mine. It was about twelve miles north of Ekaterinburg.
Stephan was going to return to the jail and finish the business there, but he needed a drink first—even his strong stomach had found the task that night difficult. In one of the taverns the guards frequented, he ordered a vodka. The glass was barely set before him when he began to hear disturbing talk.
“I tell you it’s done. The bloodsucker is dead,” said a man Stephan recognized as one of the outside guards at the Ipatiev House.
“You saw this?”
“I heard the shots with my own ears. The bodies are being carried even now to the Four Brothers’ Mine.”
Stephan jumped up, strode to the guard, grabbed him by the front of his coat, and fairly shoved him from the tavern. Outside, he threw him up against the wall.
“Has no one taught you how to keep your mouth shut?” he railed at the guard.
“I . . . I . . . didn’t Comrade Kaminsky.”
“You fool! Go back in there and say you are drunk and don’t know what you are saying. And if I hear you have talked more about this, I will have you shot.”
Unable to trust the security of their plans, Stephan had to get to the mine and have the bodies moved. He spoke with some of the leaders of the local Soviet and learned of another mine that would serve his purposes.
He quickly comandeered a truck and raced as fast as the poor roads would allow to the Four Brothers’ Mine. He might as well not have been in such haste, for he got stuck several times and it was late in the evening before he arrived.
There, he learned that Yurovsky was having troubles of his own. His group had also had problems getting stuck on the rutted roads, and they had gotten lost once as well. Finally, they broke an axle and had to haul their cargo the rest of the way to the mine in carts. Then there had been the difficulty of keeping curious locals away. Needless to say, they were not happy about having to fish the bodies from the mine and relocate them. But the need was obvious even to Yurovsky, for this place was no longer much of a secret.
Yurovsky was also having problems among the guards with stealing. Once the bodies were stripped, the fortune in jewels was discovered—thirty pounds or so, by his estimation! This and other trinkets found among the dead proved a huge temptation to the men.
More than a whole day had passed since the murders by the time they were ready to move to the new location. They also learned from some passing Bolsheviks that the White Army was getting closer. Stephan urged the driver to go faster and faster. Twice they had to spend time pushing the truck out of ruts. Finally, when the driver took a curve too quickly, the truck veered off the road into a deep, muddy hole from which there was no way to free it.
They decided to dispose of the bodies right there.
; “I have some sulfuric acid,” offered Yurovsky. “At least we can blot out the identities.”
“It would take too long to burn them,” said Stephan. “Start digging. We’ll bury nine of them. Set aside the boy and the old woman, and we’ll burn them so that if the grave is discovered it can’t be connected with the prisoners.”
A few minutes later, Yurovsky took Stephan aside. “We have a problem. There are only ten corpses.”
“What?”
“I counted them myself. One of the females is missing. I think one of the girls, but it is hard to tell which one because they have already doused them with acid.”
“You must have left one behind at the mine.”
“I was certain—”
“Obviously, not certain enough!” Stephan made his own count and came up with only ten. “Curse you, Yurovsky! How are we going to explain this?”
“Continue with the original plan. Burn the boy—but the official report will read that two bodies were burned.”
Stephan could think of no better plan and gave the orders, but it irked him that things had gone so poorly. That’s what came of dealing with provincials. No doubt he would be taken to task by Moscow for usurping as large a role in the executions as he had. But there had been no choice in the matter. He would just make sure no official reports mentioned his name. He had been careful to make it appear as if Yurovsky had been in complete command.
Later, after they had managed to free the truck and were on their way back to town, it did continue to bother Stephan about the missing body. He debated returning to the Four Brothers’ Mine to search, but he was anxious to be done with this job and return to Moscow. And he still had to deal with his other prisoner, the young Andrei Christinin.
46
Andrei sat in his cell, in no way believing that no news was good news. He did not know what had become of Daniel. It had been twenty-four hours since his arrest and a good ten hours since he had last seen Stephan. Anything could have happened in that time.
He first began to believe his prayers were being answered when a new guard brought his breakfast to him.
“Yevgeny, what are you doing here?” he asked the young guard who slipped the tray of food through the cubby hole designed for that purpose. They talked to each other through the small barred window in the thick wooden cell door.
“They didn’t need me anymore at the House, so I was sent here. I expect this is temporary until they need me for the defense of the town. What happened to you, Andrei? I heard you had been arrested but no one would say why.”
“I suppose it was because I didn’t see eye to eye with my superiors on how they were running things at the House.” Andrei had nothing to lose now in telling the truth. And he might just be able to use Yevgeny’s obvious sympathy to his benefit.
“What do you mean?”
“Like you, comrade, I don’t want to see harm come to the family. I don’t care what they have done. They don’t deserve to die.”
“Then you don’t know?”
“What?”
“They were executed.”
“Dear God, no! That can’t be!” Andrei’s knees suddenly felt weak. He grasped a hand around a window bar to steady himself.
“I was not there at the time, but I spoke with a guard who was there and saw the bodies carried from the house. I’m not ashamed to admit that I wept when I heard. Even the children, Andrei! What kind of animals would do that? I didn’t become a Bolshevik for this! And the hypocrites also killed good proletarians, too. It is so senseless.”
“What do you mean, proletarians?”
“Several servants were killed also—”
“Servants! What servants?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the kitchen girl? Talia? You know who I mean.”
“I just don’t know. But they weren’t going to leave witnesses, that is for sure.”
“Did you see her?”
“She was there in the evening when I left—the evening of the, you know, murders. You and she . . . was there something?”
“Yevgeny, I must know if she is all right.”
“But how—”
“Let me out, Yevgeny! You can do it. You can get a key—”
“I’d be shot.”
Andrei grabbed the bars with both hands and shook mightily, though the effort did nothing. In frustration he kicked the tray of food that still sat untouched on the floor.
“I have to find her. I have to make sure she is all right,” Andrei said, but mostly to himself, for he had already lost hope that the young guard would help him. And why should he take such a risk? He would be shot for helping a prisoner escape.
“If they have hurt her . . .” Yevgeny said. “But they couldn’t have. She was completely innocent—”
“They murdered children!” Andrei cried. “Do you think a kitchen girl would matter to them?”
Slowly, as if it hurt physically to make the admission, Yevgeny replied, “You are right, of course . . .”
Hope returning, Andrei begged—he would have dropped to his knees if the window hadn’t been so high—”Please, help me, Yevgeny! Please!”
There was only silence in response and Andrei despaired again. Finally he crumbled to the floor, his head drooped in his hands. There seemed no logical reason why Talia should have been harmed, but he knew better than anyone that the Reds often made little sense in what they did. Yurovsky might kill her just for the pleasure of watching her die—
But the thought caused a stab of pain to shoot through him. Suddenly he remembered that he was learning a way not to bear his pain alone.
“Dear God, please protect Talia. Don’t let the horrors of these times touch her. I would gladly give my own life to spare her if that is what it must take.”
Then he heard the sound of metal against metal. He glanced toward the door as it opened a crack.
“Hurry!” came Yevgeny’s voice.
Without another thought, Andrei jumped up. When he was in the corridor, Yevgeny relocked the cell door and motioned Andrei to follow him. He replaced the key in an attempt to delay discovery of the escape, then led Andrei to a back door.
Outside, Yevgeny said, “I’d go with you, but you’d probably do better on your own.”
“Thank you, Yevgeny. You did the right thing. But what will you do now?”
“Maybe I’ll join the Whites. I can no longer be associated with this new regime.”
Andrei was about to turn when he realized he had forgotten all about Daniel. “Yevgeny, I can’t leave without the American prisoner.”
“If you go back inside you are sure to be caught. But the foreigner is gone anyway. They took him away by guard a few hours ago. I think they are going to deport him if they can get him past the Whites.”
Trusting Daniel into God’s hands, Andrei raced away to search for Talia.
First, he went to the Palais Hotel. He had some difficulty getting past the clerk—the same one he’d encountered before. Slipping upstairs, he found a maid and, after giving her a small bribe, learned that the “mute” fur trader had checked out of the hotel.
What could have happened? Had Bruce been discovered and deported also? And still he was no closer to finding Talia. He went to the boardinghouse where Talia had been staying, but she was not there either. He was told she had not been back in quite some time. Next, he went to the trade union hall, but again, no luck. Same with the deserted barn.
Frantic now, and perhaps not thinking clearly, he went to the only other place he could think of. The Ipatiev House. It was a foolish move. Talia would not be there, but perhaps he could find some clue as to her whereabouts. He also needed to see for himself if Yevgeny’s news about the Romanovs was true.
The last time he had been there, a full contingent of guards had circled the grounds. Now it was ominously deserted. Heart pounding, he strode up to the front gate, hardly aware of the risk he was taking. The gate was locked, so he went around toward the back where h
e knew of an opening in the fence. Slipping through the breech, he found the yard, too, was deserted.
He ran into the house, looking through all the rooms. It all had the disordered appearance of a hasty departure. On the upper floor where the Romanovs had dwelt, many personal items still lay about. Andrei’s foot stumbled over something and, bending down, he picked up a hairbrush that bore the engraved initials, A.F. Alexandra Fedorovna?
He raced down the stairs.
“Talia, where can you be?”
Back in the courtyard, he noticed for the first time the dark splotches on the ground. These he followed to the semi-basement that had been used for supplies. Hand trembling, he opened the door and descended the handful of steps. The splotches were worse now and his stomach began to churn.
In utter horror, Andrei stepped into his worst nightmare. How he managed to last as long as he did, he could not say. The room reeked with the stench of blood and death. Some attempt had been made to clean it, but it would take much more to scrub away the stains. It was still so fresh he could almost hear the screams of the victims echo off the wall of the tiny room.
As he viewed more blood than anyone could have tolerated, he began to sway on his feet, his own blood draining from his head.
“Dear God, not now! Please, not now!”
His legs could barely hold him, but there was nothing to grasp for support. Then his foot slipped and, looking down, realized he had stepped in a splotch of blood that had not yet dried.
His stomach lurched as he fled from the room, barely making it to the courtyard before it emptied of its contents. In complete despair, he sank to the ground, and paralyzed with nausea and fear, he wept. A sense of failure stronger than he had ever felt before overwhelmed him. Not only were all hopes of rescuing the royal family now obliterated, but had he failed Talia as well? Was her blood also mingled with those stains in that room?
He had to know. He had to find her.
The Russians Collection Page 266