The Romanov Conspiracy

by Glenn Meade

  “Nina and Sergey. And the last time I saw them. Nina was hanging some washing, and Sergey was tugging at her skirt. It broke my heart that there was nothing I could do to comfort my son. It made me feel so helpless.”

  She stopped kneading his shoulders. He turned to face her. The look in his eyes said it all—his grief and anguish were still there, she saw that—but something else, too, a kind of longing that she understood all too well.

  Not sexual, but something far more urgent: a heartbreaking need to simply connect with another human being.

  There seemed no need to speak, no need to say a word, for she knew that he was as vulnerable as she.

  She pulled him toward her, embracing him, her arms going around his neck as she kissed him, gently at first, then more fiercely as he clung desperately to her.

  93

  Andrev came awake with a kind of convulsion, a cry on his lips.

  “Are you all right?” Lydia lay beside him, her head in the crook of his neck.

  “Just a bad dream, that’s all.” He rubbed his eyes and checked his pocket watch in his jacket by the bed. Almost four hours had passed. He’d been exhausted. It was bright outside, shafts of sunlight filtering through the shutters.

  She asked sleepily, “Did I make a terrible fool of myself?”

  “If you did, that makes two of us.” He touched her face gently with his hand. “How are you feeling?”

  She sat up and smoothed her skirt, her face suddenly flushed. “I’m not sure. What … what happened between us, it’s made me think.”

  “About what?”

  “How would it have been if we met before now?”

  Andrev looked into her eyes. “Before we did? I think we should go mad thinking about that.”

  Lydia changed the subject. “Do you think Yakov might have some tea for that samovar of his?”

  “Let me look.” He climbed out of bed and immediately sensed something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.

  Lydia said, alarmed, “What’s the matter?”

  And then Andrev realized: almost imperceptibly, the train’s speed was decreasing.

  “The engine’s slowing. Get your clothes on quickly. There might be trouble.” He dragged on his clothes and grabbed his revolver.

  Lydia dressed, and he moved to the door leading to the engine. “No, wait, I’m coming with you.”

  He clambered over the coal wagon, Lydia following.

  Thick forest lay all around, as far as the eye could see, the Urals towering above them, snowcapped in places. Behind them he thought he glimpsed wooden buildings, the outline of a scattered village.

  They reached the engine. The driver and his son were gone.

  He slapped his hand against the cabin wall in frustration. “Just what we need. The fools must have slowed and jumped ship.” He examined the steam indicator. “The pressure’s running low. Who knows how long we’ve been abandoned? If this keeps up we’ll come to a grinding halt.”

  He grabbed the driver’s thick leather gauntlet left discarded on the floor, slipped it on, and yanked open the furnace door. A wave of heat blasted out, the furnace a sea of yellow and bloodred coals.

  “It’s down to sheer, brutal donkey work, I’m afraid.” He grabbed a pair of shovels from a rack behind him, handed one to Lydia, and dug the other into a coal pan behind them. “Start shoveling as fast as you can.”

  Sweat dripped from Andrev’s face as he adjusted the valves, and the engine speed began to pick up. He wiped a patina of sweat from his brow. After thirty solid minutes of shoveling the steam pressure was constant.

  Lydia felt fatigued. “Have you any idea where we are?”

  “Absolutely none.” He peered out at the snowcapped Urals, then studied the route map he took from his pocket. “I’ll make a guess we’re at least three or four hours from Ekaterinburg.”

  An hour later they chugged past a small town, a few gaunt-looking peasants lining the tracks, scrawny children waving at them from an abandoned station hut. Andrev checked the station name on the route map.

  “We’re making better time than I thought. If this keeps up, we ought to be nearing Ekaterinburg in another couple of hours.”

  “Then what? We can’t just arrive in the city station. It’ll be crawling with Reds.”

  “According to the map there should be a siding about five miles from Ekaterinburg. We’ll shunt the train there and make our way in on foot.” He put the map away. “We better take turns cleaning ourselves up. You first, I’ll keep the furnace stoked. And try and gather any food and spare clothes you can find in the carriage. We may need them.”

  Two hours later the train entered a broad valley. In the far distance, they could make out a dramatic collection of domes and spires, mingled with the tall brick chimneys of factories and smelting works, the telltale signs of Ekaterinburg, in the shadow of the snow-topped Urals.

  Andrev reduced their speed and when they approached the siding, he slowed to a snail’s pace before stopping. He jumped down, taking with him the point-change bar, and when they shunted the train onto the siding, he went back and repositioned the points, then climbed aboard again, joining Lydia.

  They drove the train for a quarter mile along the siding, coming to a halt in a cloud of steam. Andrev shoveled more coal into the furnace.

  “We’ve stopped—why more fuel?”

  “In case Yakov has a welcoming committee waiting for us in Ekaterinburg and we have to beat a hasty retreat.”

  When he finished shoveling they gathered their belongings and climbed down from the engine.

  Andrev stared back at the vast Ural forests they’d left behind them, a shadow crossing his face.

  “You don’t look happy.” Lydia touched his arm.

  “That bad dream I had. It gave me this awful feeling something terrible happened to Nina and Sergey.”

  “You know you Russians. You’re always quick to make a drama out of nothing.”

  “I hope that’s all it is.”

  94

  “It’s done, Leonid. We felled a dozen trees and blockaded the rail line.”

  Yakov checked his pocket watch—2 a.m.—then snapped it shut. “And the guards?”

  Zoba said, “They’re stationed on the main track at five hundred paces. If a train appears, they’ll wave it down with lanterns. The blockade will make sure it halts.”

  “It better, or we’ll both be facing a firing squad.” Yakov looked dismal as he peered out the open window, the Siberian night air balmy, fragrant with pine. His men were huddled in groups along the tracks, fires lit, brewing tea and eating their rations—hard biscuits and the tins of corned beef. “What about the scouts?”

  “Half a dozen men are on their way along each end of the track. We’ll try to reach the nearest town and find a telegraph. How is she?”

  “Desolate. The medic’s going to give her a little ether to sedate her. I had the child’s body moved to the next compartment. We had to pry it from her embrace. She clung to the boy as if her life depended on it.”

  “You’re going to talk to her?”

  Yakov looked sober as he opened the door. “For what it’s worth. But I have a feeling I’m the last person in the world she wants to talk with.”

  Yakov let himself into the compartment, where a guard patrolled the passageway.

  The child’s body lay on the bottom bunk, covered with a worn cotton sheet. Yakov knelt and grimly lifted the sheet.

  Sergey’s eyes were closed, the lids almost translucent.

  He so often witnessed death in the trenches that he was almost immune to it. But the loss of a child still wrenched his heart. His stomach churned, as he imagined Katerina lying there.

  A heavy sigh passed his lips as he replaced the sheet. Then he stood and left the compartment, silently closing the door.

  He knocked before he went in.

  Her eyes looked scalded from crying. She was seated by the window, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she was weep
ing, deep, uncontrollable sobs that shook her body.

  A lamp was lit, and in its sulfur-yellow glow Nina looked inconsolable. She didn’t speak when he stepped in, just stared out at the darkness beyond the glass.

  Yakov cleared his throat. “Nina … I don’t know what to say.”

  “Get out of my sight.”

  He touched her arm. “No, please, hear me out—”

  “Leave me.” She stood, her tears welling. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you near me.”

  Yakov sighed and went to sit on the lower bunk, his hands clasped together. “Nina, you must listen to what I say. It’s important.”

  “Nothing’s important. Nothing, not anymore. I want you to go.” She spoke with such ferocity, her eyes blazing, and then she turned away, putting her handkerchief to her mouth.

  Yakov closed his eyes tightly, opened them again, touched his clasped fingers to his lips. “I promise I will. Once I say what must.”

  She didn’t turn back, or speak.

  Yakov said quietly, “First, you have to understand something. It’s not just about Stanislas. The reason I have to hunt Uri down—it’s him or me. His life or mine, and Katerina’s. That’s what I’m faced with.”

  She turned and looked at him through wet eyes.

  Yakov said, “It’s that bleak. Do you understand? I can’t allow him to succeed. Those above me won’t allow me to fail.”

  “Why does that not surprise me? The kind of people you consort with, they’re a ruthless pack of animals.”

  “Had Uri never come back, had he never involved himself in this, you and your son would still be in Moscow, and Sergey might still be alive.”

  She stared at him accusingly, and her tone was savage. “You say that. You—the man who intends to take us to a camp? I pity you, Leonid Yakov. I pity you and your kind.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No one killed Sergey but you and your Bolshevik friends. You’ve drenched this country in blood.”

  Yakov said nothing, simply stared back at her.

  She turned on him now, force in her voice. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not afraid to speak the truth anymore. I’m not afraid of you. How could I be, after losing Sergey? How can I ever live without him? How?”

  Her voice sounded like a strangled, pitiful whisper. She broke down again, harsh sobs racking her body, and she sagged as if she was going to collapse.

  Yakov took hold of her arms, pulled her to him, and she allowed herself to cling to him, if only because she needed to cling to someone, but the moment she regained control she pushed herself away and wiped her eyes.

  “Do you know what else is pitiful? Your hatred of Uri. It has little to do with justice, but everything to do with envy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  It all came flowing out of her in a sudden burst. “You envied him all your life, but you’d never admit it. Envied everything he ever represented: the respect he earned, the kind of honorable man he is that others look up to, the kind of father he had. He had everything you craved, even the woman you couldn’t have. That’s the real source of your hatred, isn’t it, Leonid? Isn’t it? You called him a brother yet part of you always despised him.”

  He didn’t reply.

  Nina met his gaze. “I see now what it was I sensed in you the first moment we met, all those years ago—sensed but didn’t understand until now. Always in your heart there’s a sense of injustice and outrage. That you’ve been wrongly done by, and mostly by people like Uri and his class.”

  Yakov was pale, his voice hoarse. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t I? You blamed Uri because in your heart you wanted to blame him, you wanted to destroy him.”

  Yakov answered bitterly, “You’ll never convince me he isn’t guilty.”

  Hostility braided her words. “Let me tell you something. Stanislas didn’t kill him, no more than you did.”

  Outside the carriage, Yakov glimpsed a bustle of activity.

  His men were running up and down the track, calling out to one another, waving storm lamps. He thought he heard a train whistle.

  He ignored the distraction and said fiercely, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You weren’t there. How could you know? He was on the run, a desperate man, capable of anything.”

  “But not that. Not to kill a boy like that. Will I tell you why? Because they’re two sides of the same coin.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “When Uri’s father died, we sat with him until the end. Uri and I, we heard his confession, his sad little secret, and he made us both promise him we’d never divulge it to anyone. Especially to you, because it might dishonor the memory of your mother, but I’ll divulge it to you now. I know he’d understand. Because someone needs to tell you. Someone needs to put you to rights.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s time you knew, Leonid. It’s time you knew the whole pitiful truth.”

  95

  When Boyle entered the convent church that afternoon from the annex, he saw Novice Maria get up from one of the benches.

  She wore a scarf around her head, and with her deeply sunken eyes she seemed absurdly young.

  Boyle said, “I was told to meet you here.”

  “Sister Agnes could not come herself; she’s busy in the hospital surgery. But she said there’s something you must see.”

  Boyle said, “You speak excellent English.”

  “My father’s a merchant. I had an English governess.” The novice’s footsteps echoed hollowly as she led him down the aisle to the entrance.

  She pulled back one of the oak doors and pointed.

  Boyle saw the chalk mark of a reverse swastika. “How long has it been there?”

  “No more than an hour. Sister said to be careful, that it could be a trap. And to give you this.”

  She handed him a piece of chalk, which he took, a spark in his eyes now as if he seemed to come alive. “Spasibo. Run along, I’ll take care of it from here.”

  He waited until the novice’s footsteps faded, and then Boyle chalked another reverse swastika beside the first before he went to sit on one of the benches, one hand inside his jacket pocket, ready on the butt of his Colt pistol.

  It didn’t take long until he heard the footsteps.

  A figure stepped into the doorway, followed by another. Strong sunlight filtered through the stained glass, and for a moment Boyle couldn’t make out their faces, but then he saw one of the figures pull back the doors.

  He recognized Andrev and Lydia, looking the worse for wear, their clothes shabby and blackened.

  He stood and approached them. “So, you made it at last.”

  “We’ll dispense with the formalities if you don’t mind, Boyle,” Andrev said. “We’re here, and lucky to be alive.”

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “No, I made certain.”

  Boyle kept his hand on the Colt as he looked past the door, making sure. Satisfied, he relaxed. “You two look like you’ve been through the wars.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Boyle,” said Lydia.

  He smiled. “Does anything in life ever run smoothly? Let’s get you cleaned up and you can tell me everything.”

  Sorg drifted awake, a stench of ammonia smelling salts filling his nostrils.

  A terrible feeling of nausea swept over him, the vapors so powerful that they hurt his lungs. To make matters worse, his jaw felt as if it had been struck by a hammer.

  He remembered being hit in the jaw by Kazan, a powerful blow that caused him to black out.

  He blinked, looked around him.

  A single light blazed overhead, the white intensity forcing him to shield his brow with his hand. He was lying on a table of some sort in a small airless room, the windows barred, rain beating against the glass.

  There was no sign of Kazan. Instead, a small man with an unshaven face and his b
reath reeking of cigarette smoke stood over him, the elbows of his jacket crudely patched. He held a brown medicine bottle in his hand.

  Sorg tried to sit up. He immediately felt dizzy. “Where—where am I?”

  The man put a hand on his chest, gently pushed him back down. “Relax. For now just take slow, deep breaths.”

  96

  “He’s being held here, in the Amerika Hotel.” Boyle used a pencil to mark a circle on the city map that was spread out on a wooden table.

  “It’s being used as the local Cheka headquarters, and sister here thinks we’d be insane to try to gain entry. But time’s running out fast and we’re desperate. With the Czech divisions so close, the city’s in disarray. Rumor says the Reds will evacuate within days.”

  They were in Markov’s huge, white-tiled mortuary. The air was pungent with the chemical smell of embalming fluid. Several corpses lay on the floor in a corner, wrapped in white cotton sheets. Adult and adolescent forms alike, at least a dozen bodies in all.

  Around the table with Boyle were Sister Agnes and Markov, and Andrev and Lydia, who had washed and changed into fresh clothes.

  Andrev said, “Is that why you think the executions will happen soon?”

  Boyle tossed down his pencil and said to a solemn-looking Agnes, “Tell him, Sister.”

  “My two novices were turned away from the Ipatiev House this morning. They went to deliver fresh milk, bread, and dozens of eggs—more than usual—and extra rolls of sewing thread.”

  “Why thread?”

  The nun explained, “The girls sew gems into their clothes, to be used in case of their escape. The komendant seized most of their jewelry but he strongly suspects more are hidden. He’s fanatical about finding any remaining valuables.”

  “Go on, Sister.”

  “When the novices arrived, the komendant took the provisions but wouldn’t allow them to see the family.”

  “Has that happened before?”

  “Seldom. The guards are always happy to take their cut of the food we bring. So I called there myself to see what I could find out. The komendant refused to talk to me. As I left, one of the guards sniggered, ‘We won’t be having any more visits from you nuns soon enough.’”