Eye of the Red Tsar

by Sam Eastland

  Mozart had been one of the Tsarina’s favorite composers. Pekkala remembered the way she tilted her head while she listened. She would hold the thumb and index finger of her right hand joined in an O, tracing seagulls in the air as if conducting the music herself.

  “I carried my equipment down to the basement,” continued Katamidze. “Then I brought down some chairs from the dining room. I set up my light and the tripod. I was just checking the film in the camera when I heard a noise behind me and a woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs. It was the Princess Maria. I recognized her right away from pictures I had seen. I didn’t know what to do, so I got down on my knees! Then she laughed at me and said I should get to my feet. She said she had been told about the portrait and wanted to know if everything was ready. I told her it was. I said they should come right away. Then she went back up the stairs.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “What did I do? I checked the camera about twenty times to make sure it was working, and then I heard them coming down the stairs. Soft as mice. They filed into the room, and I bowed to each one and they nodded their heads at me. I thought my heart was going to stop!

  “I arranged the Tsar and the Tsarina in the two middle chairs, then the two youngest, Anastasia and Alexei, on either side. Behind them stood the three eldest daughters.”

  “How did they seem to you?” asked Pekkala. “Did they look nervous?”

  “Not nervous. No. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Did they speak to you?”

  Katamidze shook his head. “Only to ask if I wanted them to move or if the way they were standing was acceptable. I could barely answer them, I was so nervous.”

  “Go on,” said Pekkala. “What happened then?”

  “I had just taken the first picture. I was planning on several. Then I heard someone knocking on the front door of the house, the same one I’d used to come in. The guards opened the door. There was some sort of conversation. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then there was shouting. That’s the first time I saw the Tsar looking nervous. And the next thing I heard was a gun going off! Once! Twice! I lost count. There was a regular battle going on upstairs. One of the princesses screamed. I don’t know which one. I heard the Tsarevich Alexei ask his father if they were going to be rescued. The Tsar told them all to be quiet. He got out of the chair and walked past me to the door and closed it. I was frozen to the spot. He turned to me and asked if I knew what was happening. I couldn’t even speak. He must have known that I had no idea. The Tsar said to me—‘Do not let them see you are afraid.’”

  “And then?”

  “Footsteps. Coming down the stairs. Somebody stopped outside the closed door. Then the door flew open. Another Cheka guard came into the room.”

  “A different one?”

  “Yes. I hadn’t seen this man before. At first, I thought he had come to tell us that we were safe.”

  “Just the one man? Can you describe him?”

  Katamidze screwed up his face, trying to recall. “He was neither tall nor short. He had a thin chest. Narrow shoulders.”

  “What about his face?”

  “He had one of those caps which the officers wear, the kind where the brim comes down over their eyes. I couldn’t see him very well. He was holding a revolver in each hand.”

  Pekkala nodded. “And then?”

  “The Tsar told the man to let me go,” continued Katamidze. “At first, I didn’t think he would, but then the man just told me to get out. As I stumbled from the room, I heard the man talking to the Tsar.”

  “What were they speaking about?”

  “I couldn’t hear. Their voices were muffled.”

  “Did you hear the Tsar call him by name?”

  Katamidze stared up at the lightbulb in the ceiling, teeth gritting with the exertion of remembering. “The Tsar called out a word when the man first entered the room. It could have been a name. I remembered it for a while, but then it went out of my head.”

  “Try, Katamidze. Try to remember it now.”

  The prisoner laughed. “After so long trying to forget …” He shook his head. “No. I don’t recall. The next thing I remember is that the Tsar and the guard began to argue. Then the guns went off. There was screaming. The room filled with smoke.”

  “Why didn’t you run?” asked Pekkala.

  “I was so petrified I couldn’t get my legs to take me up the stairs. I just stood there and watched. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “The shooting stopped suddenly. The door was half open. I could see the guard reloading the guns. Bodies were writhing on the floor. I heard groaning. A woman’s arm reached out through the smoke. I could see Alexei. He was still sitting in his chair. He had his hands held up by his chest. He was just staring straight ahead. When the guns were loaded again, the guard moved from one person to the next.” He fell silent, his jaw locked open, unable to find the words.

  “Did you see him shoot Alexei?”

  “I saw him shoot the Tsarina,” whispered Katamidze.

  Pekkala flinched, as if the sound of that blast had just ripped through the air. “But what about Alexei? What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone could have survived. Finally, I came to my senses and ran. Up the stairs. Out the front door. As I left the house I nearly fell over the two guards who had let me in. They’d both been shot and were lying on the floor. There was a lot of blood. I assumed they were dead. I didn’t stop to check. I don’t understand it. If the Cheka were supposed to be guarding the Romanovs, why would one of them have murdered the Tsar and even some of his own people?”

  “What happened next, Katamidze?”

  “I ran out into the dark,” the man replied, “and I just kept running. First I went home, but then I realized it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for me, either the gunman or people who thought I’d committed the murders. So I left. I ran away. In the woods outside of town I have a little cabin, the kind they call a Zemlyanka.”

  Pekkala thought of his own cabin, deep in the forest of Krasnagolyana, now only a silhouette of ash and rusted nails.

  “I knew I’d be safe there,” continued Katamidze, “for a while at least. I had been on the move for about an hour when I passed by the old mine at the edge of town. It is a bad place. In the old language, it is called Tunug Koriak. It means ‘the place where the birds have stopped singing.’ The locals stay away from there. The people who worked in that mine had to be brought in from somewhere else. They all got sick. Most of them died.”

  “What was mined there?”

  “Radium. The stuff they use on watches and on compasses. It glows in the dark. The dust is poisonous.”

  “What did you see at the mine?”

  “One of the Cheka trucks. The same man who killed the Romanovs. He had unloaded the bodies next to the mine shaft. He was throwing them down one by one.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  Katamidze nodded. “The headlights of the truck were on. When he passed in front of the beam, I knew it was him.”

  “But are you sure he threw in all of the bodies?”

  “By the time I arrived, the truck was already there. I don’t know how many bodies he threw down.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No. It was dark. I hid behind the old buildings where the mine workers lived. I waited until he climbed back in the truck and drove off. Then I started running. When I got to my cabin, I stayed there for a while. But I didn’t feel safe. I moved again. And again. Somewhere along the way, I read in the paper that the Romanovs had been executed on orders from Moscow. All nice and official. But that’s not what it looked like to me. After I read that, I realized I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know. Who can you trust after that? I kept moving, until I ended up in Vodovenko.”

  “How did you end up here, Katamidze?”

  “I was living on the streets in Mos
cow, in the sewers. Some tunnel workers found me. I don’t know how long I had been down there. It was the only place where I thought I might be safe. Do you know what that feels like, Inspector? Never feeling safe, no matter where you are?”

  “Yes,” replied Pekkala. “I do.”

  On the 2nd of March 1917, with riots in the streets of Petrograd and soldiers at the front in open mutiny against their officers, the Tsar gave up his power as absolute ruler of Russia.

  One week later, with negotiations under way to have the Romanovs exiled to Britain, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest at the Tsarskoye Selo estate.

  General Kornilov, the Revolutionary Commander of the Petrograd district, informed the staff at Tsarskoye Selo that they had twenty-four hours to leave. Any who chose to remain behind would be placed under the same conditions of arrest as the royal family.

  Most of the staff departed immediately.

  Pekkala chose to stay.

  The Tsar had given him the use of a small cottage on the outskirts of the estate, not far from the horse enclosure known as the Pensioner’s Stables. It was here that Pekkala waited, with a growing sense of helplessness, for events to unfold. The confusion outside the palace gates was made worse by the fact that within the imperial household, no one seemed to have any sense of direction.

  Pekkala’s only instructions, which he had received on the same day the Tsar had abdicated, had been to stand by for more orders. In this time of uncertainty, what Pekkala found most difficult was the ordinary, everyday tasks which he had once carried out so fluidly that he never gave them any thought. Things like boiling water for tea, or making his bed, or washing his clothes became suddenly monumental in their complexity. With nothing else to do, anticipation gnawed at him as he tried to imagine what events were taking place beyond the confines of his rapidly shrinking world.

  Pekkala did not hear from the Tsar. Instead, he picked up fragments of gossip when he went each day to pick up rations from the kitchen.

  He learned that negotiations had begun to move the Romanov family into exile in Britain. They were to sail, under armed Royal Navy escort, from the arctic port of Murmansk. At first, the Tsar had been reluctant to travel, since his children were recovering from measles. The Tsarina, fearing a long sea journey, had requested that they sail only as far as Denmark.

  With crowds of armed factory workers arriving daily to jeer at the Romanovs through the gates of the Royal Estate, Pekkala knew that if the Romanovs were to escape, they would have to be smuggled out. Since no news of this plan had reached Pekkala, he came to the conclusion that he was being left behind to fend for himself.

  Soon afterwards, however, he learned that the British had withdrawn their offer of asylum. From then on, until the Revolutionary Committee figured out what to do with them, the Romanovs were trapped inside their own estate.

  For the sake of the children, the Tsar and Tsarina were trying to carry on as normal an existence as they could. Alexei’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard—known to the Romanovs as Zhilik—who had also chosen to remain behind, taught his daily classes in the study of French. The Tsar himself taught history and geography.

  Pekkala always found the kitchen filled with off-duty guards warming up after their foot patrols around the estate. They knew who he was, and Pekkala could not help being surprised at their lack of hostility towards him. Unlike the teachers and personal servants who had stayed behind, they considered him separate from the Romanovs. His decision to remain at Tsarskoye Selo baffled them. Privately, they encouraged him to leave and even offered to help him slip out through the perimeter of guards.

  The guards themselves seemed to have no clear orders about how to treat the royal family. One day, they confiscated Alexei’s toy gun. Then they gave it back. Another day, they banned the Romanovs from swimming in the Lamski Pond. Then that order was rescinded. Without clear direction, their hostility towards the Romanovs grew more open. Once, as the Tsar was bicycling around the estate, one guard jammed a bayonet into the spokes and sent the Tsar sprawling in the dust.

  When he heard about that, Pekkala realized it was only a matter of time before the lives of the Romanovs would be at risk. Soon, the family would not be any safer within the confines of the estate than they were on the outside. If they didn’t leave soon, they would never leave at all, and his own life would be swallowed up along with theirs.

  “I HAVE ONE LAST QUESTION FOR YOU,” PEKKALA SAID.

  Katamidze raised his eyebrows.

  “Why speak up now? After all these years?”

  “For a while,” said Katamidze, “I knew that the only way for me to stay alive was for people to think I was crazy. So no one would believe a word I said. The trouble is, Inspector, you stay here long enough, and you really do go crazy. I wanted to tell what happened, before even I stopped believing it.”

  “Are you not afraid that the man who killed the Tsar might track you down?”

  “I want him to find me,” Katamidze said softly. “I am tired of living in fear.”

  IT WAS LATE WHEN THEY REACHED SVERDLOVSK.

  The tires of the Emka popped and rumbled over the cobblestones which paved the main street running through the town. With the night mist glistening on them, the road looked like the cast-off skin of some giant snake.

  Neatly planted trees formed a barrier between the part of the street intended for horses and cars and the part set aside for people going on foot. Beyond the pedestrian walkway stood large, well-maintained houses, with gardens closed off by white picket fences and shutters bolted for the night.

  Anton’s orders were to present his papers to the local police chief as soon as they arrived, but the station had closed. They decided to wait until morning.

  Only the tavern was open, a low-roofed place with benches set out in front of whitewashed walls. A line of old and bearded men sat with backs slumped against the wall. Large copper mugs, each with two handles, were being passed from one man to the next. Some of the men smoked pipes, cobras of smoke rising from the pipe bowls, their faces lit by the glow. They watched the Emka drive past, eyes sharpened with suspicion.

  Following Anton’s directions, Kirov steered the car into a courtyard at the back of a large two-story house. High stone walls surrounded the courtyard, obscuring any view from the outside. Pekkala could tell at a glance that no one lived here now. Paint around the window frames had flaked away; weeds grew from the gutters. The courtyard walls had once been covered with mortar and painted, but chunks had fallen, revealing the bare stones beneath. The structure seemed to radiate a hostile emptiness.

  “Where are we?” asked Kirov, as he climbed out of the car.

  “The Ipatiev place,” replied Anton. “What we called the House of Special Purpose.”

  With a key which he took from his pocket, Anton opened the kitchen door and the three men went inside. He found a switch for electric lights and flipped it on, but the dust-covered light fixtures above him stayed dark. Hanging from nails by the door were several storm lanterns, which Kirov filled from a can of kerosene they carried in the Emka. Each man carried a lantern as they passed through the kitchen avoiding a few rickety chairs tipped over on the floor. They emerged into a hallway, with narrow-planked wooden floors and a tall ceiling, from which hung the remains of a crystal chandelier. Their shadows loomed across the walls. Ahead of them was the front door, leading out into the street, and to the left, a staircase to the second floor, its bannister thick with dust. On the right, a stone fireplace dominated the front room.

  Pekkala breathed the stagnant air. “Why isn’t anyone living here now?”

  “The house was closed down as soon as the Romanovs disappeared. Nikolai Ipatiev, the man who owned it, left for Vienna and never came back.”

  “Look.” Kirov pointed to bullet gashes in the wallpaper. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to the hotel.”

  “What hotel?” asked Anton.

  Kirov blinked at him. “The one where we are staying while we cond
uct the investigation.”

  “We’re staying here,” replied Anton.

  Kirov’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. Not here.”

  Anton shrugged.

  “But this place is empty!” protested Kirov.

  “It won’t be when we’re in it.”

  “I mean there’s no furniture!” Kirov pointed into the front room. “Look!”

  Along one wall of the empty room, tall windows looked out into the street. Curtains made of heavy dark green velvet had not only been closed, they had also been stitched together so that there was no way to open them.

  Kirov pleaded with them. “There’s got to be a hotel in town, one with a decent bed.”

  “There is,” said Anton, “but it’s not in the budget.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kirov demanded. “Can’t you just wave those orders around and get us whatever we want?”

  “The orders say that this is where we are to make our headquarters.”

  “Maybe there are beds on the second floor,” suggested Pekkala.

  “Yes,” said Kirov. “I’ll check.” He raced up the stairs, the lantern swinging in his hand, long shadows trailing after him like snakes.

  “There are no beds,” muttered Anton.

  “What happened to them?” Pekkala asked.

  “Stolen,” Anton replied, “along with everything else. When the Ipatiev family moved out, they were allowed to bring some of their possessions—pictures and so on. By the time the Romanovs arrived, only the essentials remained. When we left town, the good people of Sverdlovsk came in before the Whites arrived and stripped the place bare. By the time they got here, there was probably nothing left worth stealing.”

  Kirov stomped around upstairs. As he moved from room to room, the floorboards creaked under his weight. His curses echoed through the house.