Archive 17

by Sam Eastland

  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.

  Pekkala walked over to the table where the Tsar was sipping tea in the shade of a large umbrella. He had been out on his horse and still wore tan riding breeches, along with brown knee-length leather boots. The Tsar had taken off his riding coat, revealing maroon suspenders that stretched over the shoulders of his white, collarless shirt. He seemed completely untroubled by the heat.

  “Majesty,” said Pekkala, and bowed his head in greeting.

  “Good afternoon, Pekkala. I would offer you something to drink, but you seem to have taken care of that all by yourself.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Pekkala heard the faint tap-tapping of water as it dripped from his sleeves and splashed on the yellowish-white stone of the balcony. The droplets sank into the stone, as if even the rock was thirsty in this heat.

  “What brings you back from Spala, Majesty?”

  The Tsar smiled mischievously. “Lena has brought me back.”

  Pekkala had never heard of anyone named Lena before, at least in connection with the Tsar. As far as he knew, the only woman besides his wife for whom the Tsar harbored any affection was the prima ballerina of the Imperial Russian Ballet, Mathilde Kschessinska. “I look forward to meeting her, Majesty.”

  The Tsar, who had been sipping his tea, burst out laughing. The delicate porcelain cup slipped from his fingers, fell to the ground and shattered musically on the stones. “Lena is not a woman!” said the Tsar. He glanced at the broken cup and seemed to be contemplating whether or not to bend down and pick it up.

  Pekkala knew that the smashed cup would be swept up by the palace staff and deposited on a garbage heap near the gardener’s compost pile, close by the palace but hidden from view by a line of tall juniper bushes. No matter how slight the chip or blemish, any piece of imperfect crockery from the royal household was immediately taken out of circulation and could never be used again, by the Romanovs or anyone else. It was one of the quirks of the Tsarina that such a policy had gone into effect. To Pekkala it seemed wasteful, but even if he had been offered any of these slightly damaged saucers, bowls, or plates, he would not have wanted them, preferring wooden bowls and metal enamelware cups.

  The same was not true of Mr. Gibbs, the English tutor of the Romanov children, who had been discovered one night, sitting in the middle of the crockery pile and hunting for pieces he could use.

  “If Lena is not a woman …” began Pekkala.

  “Lena is a place!” explained the Tsar, rising to his feet. “Come with me and I will show you.”

  Mystified, Pekkala followed the Tsar down the long central hallway of the palace.

  One of the housekeepers stuck her head out of the doorway of the kitchen, stared at the wet footprints on the polished wooden floor, then glared, beady-eyed, at Pekkala.

  Arriving at the door to his gun room, the Tsar fished out a key and unlocked it. Unlike the other rooms in the palace, the gun room door was double-thick and reinforced with metal panels.

  Inside, the walls were covered with rifles held in place by velvet-padded racks. Some of the guns dated back to the sixteenth century, while others were modern hunting rifles equipped with telescopic sights. The room had no windows, only a table in the center, covered with green felt, where the Tsar laid out and inspected his weapons before putting them to use on hunting trips or in clay pigeon tournaments.

  The Tsar closed the door behind them, locked it from the inside, then turned and winked at Pekkala. “Almost there,” he said. Advancing to the center of the room, he grasped one corner of the table and motioned with his chin for Pekkala to pick up the other end. Together, they moved the table aside.

  Then the Tsar rolled up the carpet which lay beneath the table, revealing a trapdoor in the floor.

  “Lena is down there?” asked Pekkala.

  “No,” replied the Tsar, “but what is down there came from Lena.”

  Then, suddenly, Pekkala understood. The Tsar was talking about the Lena mine. It was one of the richest sources of gold in the country, and notorious for the harsh conditions under which the miners worked. In 1912 the workers had gone on strike, demanding better conditions. Rather than give in to their demands, the Tsar had sent in a regiment of Cossacks. By the time the strike was finally called off, hundreds of miners had been cut down by the Cossacks’ swords.

  Pul
ling on a brass ring set flush into the floor, the Tsar opened the trapdoor and led Pekkala down a tightly spiraled stone staircase, lit by small electric bulbs. The air was cool and damp and hard to breathe. At last, deep underground, they arrived at an unpainted metal door set straight into the rock.

  There was no lock on this last door, only a metal bolt, which the Tsar slid back with a dull clank. Then he pushed the door open, revealing a chamber of darkness so complete it felt to Pekkala like a patch of blindness in his eye. The Tsar gestured for Pekkala to enter. “After you,” he said.

  Pekkala froze. He could not bear confined spaces, especially when they were unlit.

  “Go on!” urged the Tsar.

  Hesitantly, Pekkala stepped into the black. His breathing became shallow. It felt to him as if the floor was crumbling away beneath his feet.

  At that moment, the Tsar flipped a switch and the room was suddenly flooded in light.

  Pekkala found himself in a chamber ten paces wide by twenty paces long. The ceiling was so low that he could touch it easily by raising his hand above his head. The floor was dirt and the walls themselves were chipped out of the bedrock on which the palace had been built. Of this space, only a small fraction remained empty. The rest, from floor to ceiling, was completely filled with gold. Reflected in the glow of lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, the air itself seemed filled with a trembling fire.

  The gold had been molded into large ingots, each one roughly the length of a man’s forearm. The only variation was in the finish of the metal. Some were polished smooth and brilliant, while others looked as if they had been wrapped in yellow velvet. All of the ingots were stamped with the double-headed Romanov eagle, in addition to weight and purity marks and the letter L in a circle, denoting its source as the Lena goldfields.

  Pekkala noticed that each stack of gold contained exactly the same number of ingots and that the ingots themselves had been placed, one on top of the other, with a precision that reminded him of pictures he had seen of ancient Peruvian stonework, fitted together so closely that not even a sheet of paper could be slid between them.

  “Another shipment arrived today,” the Tsar told him. “That’s why I came back from Spala. I needed to be here to meet it.”

  Pekkala turned and looked at him. The sight of this immense fortune, scraped from the darkness of the earth by slaves and returned to that same darkness by an emperor, filled him with profound uneasiness.

  “Few people have set eyes on this treasure,” the Tsar confided. “Few people ever will.”

  Pekkala spread his arms, taking in the contents of the room. “But, Excellency, how much gold does one man really need? What do you intend to do with it?”

  “Do with it?” This question caught the Tsar by surprise. “I possess it. That is what you do with treasure.” Seeing the lack of comprehension in Pekkala’s face, he tried a different tack. “Think of it as my insurance against a world of instability. Say something were to happen to this country, a disaster of biblical proportions. This gold would help to see me through. And my family. And you, of course.” He smiled and added hastily, “What would I do without my Emerald Eye?”

  “And the people of Russia?” Pekkala pressed. “What are they to do when this disaster hits?”

  The Tsar rested his hand upon the shelf of gold. The feel of the metal seemed to comfort him. “As my wife is fond of saying: On the day of judgment, only the chosen will be saved.”

  LISTENING TO THE COMITATI speak of their deliverance, Pekkala began to think Commandant Klenovkin might have been right. The years in prison had worn through the fabric of their collective sanity. And even if the gold was real, Pekkala felt sure these men would never live to see it.

  He thought of a prophet named Wovoka, a Paiute Indian of the American West who, faced with the annihilation of his way of life, began to speak of a day when all the whites would disappear and the Indians’ shattered civilization would be made whole again if only they would take part in the Ghost Dance. The prophecy spread swiftly from tribe to tribe. Wearing buckskin clothes decorated with the most powerful symbols of their tribe, the dancers assured themselves that even bullets could not penetrate their sacred ghost shirts. But when, in the winter of 1899, soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry unleashed their Gatling guns upon the Navajo at a place called Wounded Knee, the dead fell in heaps upon the frozen ground.

  Pekkala wondered if Kolchak had become, for the last remaining men he had abandoned in this camp, an illusion which would lead them to their deaths, as it had already done, Pekkala now felt certain, for the murdered Captain Ryabov.

  THE NEXT DAY, at noon, Pekkala made his way across the compound, struggling under the weight of soup rations as he carried them up to the mine.

  Arriving at the entrance, he called into the dark and waited.

  A cold and musty breeze blew past him from the gullet of the mine. It stank of metal, dirt, and sweat.

  Eventually, he heard footsteps. Then a man appeared out of the shadows, a pickax slung on his shoulder. It was Lavrenov.

  “Put down those buckets,” he said, “and follow me.”

  “In there?” Pekkala hesitated. “Why?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, Inspector—too many, as far as I’m concerned. Now some of them are going to be answered.”

  With his eyes on the huge, arcing blade of the pickax, and certain by now that Lavrenov was unwilling to take no for an answer, Pekkala placed the soup cans beside the wall of the tunnel and followed him into the darkness. He felt like an insect which had strayed into a spider’s lair.

  The entrance to the mine was lit by kerosene lamps, but farther in, the light source came from bulbs strung like Christmas lights along a sagging electrical cable.

  The deeper they traveled into the mine, the narrower the tunnel became. The dirt floor angled downwards into the earth, spliced with puddles and tiny streams which glimmered eerily when their footsteps broke the surface.

  Pekkala struggled to understand why the Comitati would bring him to this place. What strange rituals, he wondered, do these men perform down in the bowels of the earth?

  In spite of the cold, Pekkala began to sweat. His breathing grew shallow and fast. He thought of the mountain of rock above him. Unable to shake from his head the thought of it all collapsing on top of him, he stopped and lurched against the wall, as if the ground had suddenly shifted.

  Lavrenov went on a few paces, then halted. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Give me a second.” Claustrophobia swirled inside Pekkala’s brain. He felt as if he were choking. “Keep going,” ordered Lavrenov.

  They passed intersections in the tunnel system from which new passageways branched off at angles, some climbing and some descending. Handcarts filled with chalky slabs of radium ore stood parked against the walls. In the distance Pekkala could hear the sound of rusty wheels turning and the clink of metal on stone. Now and then he caught a glimpse of silhouettes, as men moved about in the shadows.

  They reached a place where the tunnel was blocked by wooden pallets and metal-reinforced buttresses which propped up the ceiling.

  Lavrenov twisted his body around the barricade of pallets and slithered into the darkness. “This way!” his voice hissed out of the black.

  “Why is the passage blocked?”

  “Last month this tunnel caved in. It leads to the part of the mine where they dig out Siberian Red.”

  “What’s to stop the tunnel from caving in again?”

  “Nothing.”

  Forcing himself onward, Pekkala angled past the crooked beams.

  Just ahead the tunnel turned sharply to the right. As soon as they rounded the corner, Pekkala noticed a faint glow, which seemed to be coming out of the wall.

  Suddenly, Pekkala realized why Lavrenov had brought him here. They must have dug a way out, he told himself. Even if it took years, these men are stubborn enough to have done it.

  Lavrenov came to a halt and Pekkala found himself opposite a small o
pening which led into a naturally formed cave. The space inside was large, more than twice the height of a man, and filled with ancient pillars formed out of sediment drips coming down from the ceiling. Pillowed hummocks of stone bristled with crystals of Siberian Red. Some were short and sharp, like barnacles on the hull of a shipwreck. Others resembled bouquets of glass flowers. All of them were tinted the color of fresh blood. The space served as a storage room for handcarts which had broken down. Inside, a few of the wrecked contraptions stood against the wall. Scattered on the ground lay the shattered tusks of stalactites and stalagmites which had been broken to make room for them. Against the far side of this strange temple, perched upon a tongue of stone as pale as alabaster, a battered miner’s lamp illuminated the chamber.

  Now another possibility occurred to Pekkala. Perhaps the prisoners had not dug their way out, after all. Maybe they didn’t need to. Is it possible, he wondered, that in their years of toiling in the bowels of the earth, the Comitati had discovered some naturally occurring cave network which provided them with an exit into the forest, somewhere outside the walls of Borodok? Pekkala remembered stories he had heard about the caves of Altamira in northern Spain where, in 1879, a girl walking her dog had stumbled upon the entrance to a system of connecting caverns that stretched deep beneath the ground. In the largest of these caves, she’d found paintings of animals—bison and ibex—which, like those who painted them, had vanished from that countryside millennia before.

  Lavrenov gestured into the cave. “After you, Inspector.”

  Ducking his head, Pekkala stepped into the room. The lamplight shuddered. The air smelled rank. Shadows writhed like snakes across the floor.

  Turning back, he saw that Lavrenov was not behind him.

  His heart slammed into his throat.

  In that moment, he heard a voice whisper his name.