Eye of the Red Tsar

by Sam Eastland

  Finally, a door opened.

  A wiry man, his pocked face covered by an unkempt white beard, asked Pekkala if he’d come to buy some blood.

  “Blood?” asked Pekkala.

  “From the pig,” replied the man.

  Now Pekkala could hear a gurgling squeal, coming from somewhere behind the house. It rose and fell like breathing.

  “You have to cut their throats,” the man explained. “They have to bleed to death or the meat doesn’t taste right. Sometimes it takes a while. I drain the blood into buckets. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  Pekkala explained why he was there.

  The man didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d come looking for the truth sooner or later.”

  “What truth is that?”

  “That the Romanovs weren’t all killed the way the papers said they were. I saw one of them the night after they were supposed to have been executed.”

  “Who did you see?” Pekkala felt a tightness in his chest, hoping this might lead him to Alexei.

  “One of the daughters,” the man answered.

  Pekkala felt his heart sink. Like Mayakovsky, this old man had convinced himself of something Pekkala knew to be false. He could not understand it.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” asked the man.

  “I don’t think you are lying,” said Pekkala.

  “It’s all right. The Whites didn’t believe me, either. One of their officers came to my house, right after they chased the Reds out of town. I told him what I’d seen and he said straight up that I must have been dreaming. He told me not to mention it to anyone, unless I wanted to end up in trouble. And when I heard him threaten me like that, I was more certain than ever that I’d seen one of the daughters after all.”

  “Where was she when you saw her?” asked Pekkala.

  “Down at the railroad yard in Perm. That’s the next stop after Sverdlovsk on the Trans-Siberian. I used to be a coupler down there.”

  “A coupler?”

  The man made two fists and fitted his knuckles together. “A coupler makes sure the right cars are joined to the right engines. Otherwise a load of goods which has come all the way from Moscow will find itself going back the way it came instead of heading out to Vladivostok. The night after the Romanovs disappeared, I was coupling up carriages on a train bound for the east. We were trying to clear out the railyard before the Whites arrived. Trains were coming through at all hours, not on the usual schedule. Night trains are mostly all freight, but this one had a passenger car—the only one on the train. There were black curtains pulled across the windows and the carriage had a guard at each end with a rifle and a bayonet. That’s where I saw her.”

  “You went inside the train?”

  “Are you kidding? Those bastards with the long knives would have skewered me!”

  “But you said there were curtains over the windows. How did you see her?”

  “I was walking down on the tracks beside the carriage, checking the wheels like we’re supposed to do, and one of the guards jumps down into the gravel. He points his gun at me and asks me what I’m doing. So I tell him I’m a coupler, and he yells at me to get lost. He didn’t know what a coupler was either, so I says to him, ‘Fine, I’ll get lost and when the engine pulls out, you’ll be left standing here on the siding. If you want to leave when the rest of the train does,’ I tell him, ‘you’d better let me do my job.’”

  “And did he?”

  “He got right back on the train and then I hear him yelling at somebody else who’d come to ask what all the fuss was about. You see, whoever was in that carriage, they didn’t want anybody getting off and they didn’t want anybody getting on. But as I was walking back to couple up the car, one of the curtains moved aside”—he made the motion of parting the curtain—“and I saw the face of a woman looking down at me.”

  “And you recognized her?”

  “Of course I did! It was Olga, the eldest daughter. All scowly like she is in the pictures. And she looks me right in the eye and then the curtain closes up again.”

  “You are sure about it being Olga?”

  “Oh, yes.” The man nodded. “There could be no mistake.”

  A woman walked around the side of the house, holding a long knife in one hand and a bucket of blood in the other. Behind her came a child wearing a dandelion yellow dress and no shoes. With her tiny chin, big inquisitive eyes, and nose no bigger than the knuckle of Pekkala’s little finger, the child looked more doll than human. The woman set the bucket down. “Here it is,” she said. Steam was rising off the blood.

  “He hasn’t come for that,” said the man.

  The woman grunted. “I carried that all the way around.”

  “Now you can carry it all the way back,” the man told her.

  “Are you sure you don’t want it?” insisted the woman. “It’s very nutritious. Look at my daughter here. She’s the picture of health and she drinks it.”

  The child smiled up at Pekkala, one hand knotted in her mother’s dress.

  “No, thank you,” said Pekkala. He looked at the blood, rocking from side to side in the bucket.

  “He came to hear my story,” said the man. “About the princess on the train.”

  “There’s more to that,” the woman said. “Did you tell him about the young girl they found in the woods?”

  “I didn’t tell him,” said the man, irritated that his wife was trying to upstage him, “because I didn’t see it for myself.”

  The woman paid no attention to her husband. She laid the knife on top of the bucket. Blood had dried black on the blade. “There was a girl seen wandering in the forest, over by Chelyabinsk. She was hurt. She had a bandage on her head. Like this.” With fingers trailing like weeds in a stream, she traced a path across her mouse-gray hair.

  “How old was she? What did she look like?”

  “Well, she wasn’t a child. But she wasn’t an adult, either. She had brown hair. Some foresters tried to talk to her, but she ran away. Then she went to the house of some people, but they handed that girl right over to the Cheka. That’s the last anyone saw of her. It was one of the middle daughters. Tatiana. Maybe Maria. She had escaped from the Reds, but they caught up with her again. She was almost free. It’s so sad. So terribly sad.”

  There was a look in her face which Pekkala had seen many times before. The woman’s eyes grew bright as she spoke of the tragedy. As she repeated the words “terribly sad,” her cheeks flushed with a pleasure that seemed almost sexual.

  “How did you learn about this?”

  “A woman from Chelyabinsk. She used to buy from us. She fell in love with an officer of the Whites. When the Whites left, so did she. Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” The woman pointed once more at the bucket.

  As Pekkala walked away, he turned once and looked back.

  The parents were gone, but the child in the yellow dress remained standing on the doorstep.

  Pekkala waved.

  The child waved back, then giggled and ran behind the house.

  In that moment, some half-formed menace spread like wings behind Pekkala’s eyes, as if that child was not really a child. As if something was trying to warn him in a language empty of words.

  THE CONVENT WAS AN AUSTERE WHITE BUILDING AT THE TOP OF A steep hill on the outskirts of town. Lining the road, poplar trees rustled their leaves in a breeze he could not feel. As he climbed the hill, he shed his heavy black coat and carried it under his arm. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his shirt. His heart thumped angrily against his ribs.

  Tall black iron railings ringed the convent. In the courtyard, pale, sand-colored gravel simmered in the afternoon sun. Outside the front steps, a crew was loading crates into a truck.

  The gates were open and Pekkala walked through, his feet crunching over the gravel. Climbing the convent steps, he had to stand aside as two men carried out a small piano.

  More boxes filled the front hall.<
br />
  It looked as if the entire building was being emptied.

  Pekkala wondered if he had arrived too late. He paused, sweat cooling on his face.

  “Have you come for the piano?” asked a woman’s voice.

  Pekkala looked around. At first he could not see anyone.

  The woman cleared her throat.

  Pekkala glanced up. He saw a nun, wearing a blue and white habit, standing on the balcony which overlooked the hall. The nun’s face was picture-framed in the starched white cloth of her bonnet.

  “You have arrived too late,” she told him. “The piano just left.” She spoke of it as if the piano had walked out on its own.

  “No.” Pekkala shook his head. “I am not here for the piano.”

  “Ah.” The nun made her way down the staircase. “Then what is it you’ve come to steal from us today?”

  While Pekkala assured her that he had not come to rob the convent, the nun busied herself with inspecting the splintery crates, rapping on them with her knuckles as if to test the soundness of the wood. At first, he obtained nothing more than her name, Sister Ania; even this she seemed to grudge him. She picked up a checklist, stared at it, and put it down again. Then she wandered away, leaving Pekkala to follow her while he continued with his explanation.

  “Pekkala,” repeated Sister Ania. “What kind of name is that?”

  “I am from Finland, but I have been gone a long time.”

  “I have never been to Finland, but that name sounds familiar to me.”

  “There was another name by which I was a little better known.”

  The nun, who had gone into a small sitting room and was in the process of shutting the door in Pekkala’s face, suddenly paused. “So you have changed your name. I hear it’s all the rage these days. Taking after Comrade Stalin, I see.”

  “Or you, perhaps, Sister Ania.”

  “And what is this other name of yours?” she asked.

  Pekkala turned up his lapel. “The Emerald Eye,” he said.

  Slowly, the door opened again. The harshness had vanished from her face. “Well,” she said, “it is a comfort to know that in this day and age, one’s prayers are sometimes answered after all.”

  PEKKALA AND THE NUN SAT ON FLIMSY CHAIRS IN A ROOM BARE except for some framed photographs on the walls. All were portraits of nuns. The pictures had been colored in by hand, and the cheeks of the nuns were balls of pink, their lips clumsily traced. Only the blue of the habits had been correctly drawn. The artist had attempted to fill in the eyes, but instead of adding life to the picture, he had succeeded only in making them look afraid.

  “We are being temporarily shut down,” explained Sister Ania.

  “Temporarily?”

  “Our beliefs, at this moment in time, are no longer in accord with the governing body, according to the Central Office of the Ural Soviet. The surprise is not that they are doing this to us, Inspector. What astonishes me is that it took them this long to get round to it.” Sister Ania sat straight-backed in her chair, her hands in her lap. She looked poised but uncomfortable. “The other sisters have all been dismissed. I am to stay on as caretaker of this empty building. Most of our belongings are to be placed in storage. Where, I don’t know. How long, I don’t know. And why, I don’t know either. Either we should be shut down or we should not be shut down. Instead, we are being held in a kind of suspended animation, like insects trapped in amber. But something tells me you have not come to investigate this particular injustice.”

  “I regret that I have not.”

  “Then I am guessing this has something to do with the Romanovs.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Of course it is. After all, what else would bring you to this backwater?”

  “To tell you the truth, I am compelled by circumstance—”

  “We are all compelled by circumstance,” interrupted Sister Ania. “I believe I can save you the trouble of wearing me down with your interrogation techniques.”

  “Sister Ania, that is not what I …”

  Her hand rose from her lap, then settled slowly back again. “I have waited a long time to tell what I know to someone I feel I can trust. He spoke of you, you know, in those few moments when we were able to talk. ‘If only the Emerald Eye were here,’ he would say.”

  Pekkala felt a weight settle on him, like chains draped around his neck. “Did he really believe I could have helped him, under arrest and surrounded by armed guards?”

  “Oh, no,” replied Sister Ania. “But I think his world just made more sense when you were in it.”

  “I should have stayed,” muttered Pekkala, more to himself than to the nun.

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “He ordered me to leave.”

  “Then you should have no regrets.”

  Pekkala nodded, the chains so heavy on his shoulders that he could barely draw breath into his lungs.

  “When the Tsar spoke of you, I realized that he had created in the Emerald Eye an image of himself as he would have wished to be but never could.”

  “And how is that?” asked Pekkala.

  “A man who had no need of things which he himself had found he could not live without.”

  “Yes,” agreed Pekkala. “I believe there is some truth to that.”

  Sister Ania sighed heavily. “Anyway, what does it matter now, except to old believers like ourselves? He is gone now, and you will hear many stories in this town about the night the Romanovs disappeared.”

  “I have heard some of them already.”

  “There are almost as many versions as there are people in Sverdlovsk. I cannot vouch for all of them, but what I can tell you is that the Romanovs had reason to believe they would be rescued.”

  “Rescued? Do you mean by the Whites?”

  “No. The Tsar knew that if the Whites came close enough to this town, the Reds would simply execute him and his family. This rescue was to take place before then. A plan had been worked out.”

  “May I ask how you knew about it?”

  “I brought them messages.”

  “And you had written them?”

  “Oh, no. I only delivered the messages.”

  “Then who did they come from?”

  “A former officer in the army of the Tsar asked me if I could get a message through to the Romanovs. This was in the early days of their captivity at the Ipatiev house, when the militia were still guarding them. The officer told me that a group of loyal soldiers were prepared to storm the house and transport the whole family to safety.”

  “And you agreed?”

  She nodded sharply. “I did.”

  “So I can assume that your loyalties were also with the Tsar.”

  “Let us say that this eviction notice from the Ural Soviet does not come as a complete surprise. I offered to deliver the messages myself, so that no one else in the convent need know about them.”

  “How were they delivered?”

  “Rolled up and hidden inside corks which were used to plug bottles of milk.”

  “How did the Tsar reply?” asked Pekkala. “Were his messages also hidden in corks?”

  “No, it was not possible to remove the messages without damaging the corks. The Tsar came up with his own method. It was quite ingenious. He used books. They were given to me as gifts, but I passed them along to the officer.”

  “And these books contained messages?”

  “None that the militia guards could find. I wasn’t even sure myself how the messages were getting through. There were no pieces of paper tucked inside or notes written into the margins. It was only after the Romanovs disappeared that the officer explained how the messages had been hidden.”

  “And how was it done?”

  “The Tsar used a pin”—she pinched the air in front of her—“making tiny holes beneath letters to spell out words. He always began on page ten.”

  “And did the officer ever speak to you about these messages?”

  “Oh, yes. He even
offered to take me away with him when the Romanovs were rescued. But he never got the chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “At first, the Tsar wrote back that he was willing to be rescued, but only if the whole family could be brought away. Alexei was ill. The Tsar worried that the boy might be too weak to make an extended journey. He was anxious to avoid any bloodshed, even among the militia who were guarding him.”

  “What happened to change his mind?”

  “Shortly after the local militia were replaced by the Cheka security detachment, the Tsar sent a message ordering the officer not to attempt a rescue.”

  “Why would the Tsar do that,” asked Pekkala, “when it was his only chance of escape?”

  “That I cannot tell you,” Sister Ania said. “The officer said it would be too dangerous for me to know, since he could no longer guarantee my safety.”

  “Did you ever see this officer again?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied. “We are still friends, he and I.”

  “Sister Ania, it is important that I speak to this man, whoever he is.”

  She looked at him carefully. “If that officer were here beside me now, he would say I had already told you too much.”

  “I am not here to find a man who tried to save the Tsar,” said Pekkala. “I am here to find the one who put a bullet in his chest.”

  Her lips twitched. “So it is true what the papers said.” It was not a question.

  “Yes,” said Pekkala. “The Tsar is dead.”

  She sighed heavily. “There are many who believed that he survived.”

  “It is possible, however, that one of the children has survived.”

  Sister Ania’s eyes widened. “Possible? What does that mean? Please, Inspector—is one of them alive or not?”

  “That is what I am investigating, Sister Ania. It is why I am speaking to you now.”

  “Which one?” she insisted. “Which child?”

  “Alexei.”

  She struggled to remain composed. “That poor boy … He had already endured so much.”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly she leaned towards him. “And what do you believe, Inspector Pekkala?”

  “My investigation is not yet complete.”