The Romanov Cross: A Novel

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The Romanov Cross: A Novel Page 6

by Robert Masello

Her brother’s cries split the night, echoing down the long marble corridors and sweeping staircases of the palace. Anastasia—or Ana, for short—sat up in her bed. Her sister Olga was already awake under her own pile of blankets. This had happened so many times before.

  “Poor Alexei,” Ana said. “It’s getting worse again.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Olga said. “There’s nothing any of us can do.”

  “Dr. Botkin is here.”

  “There’s nothing Dr. Botkin can do, either,” Olga said, wearily. “Go back to sleep.”

  Olga lifted one of her plump pillows and stuck her head under it, but Ana could not fall asleep again. Alexei screamed, there were slippered footsteps running in the hall outside, and Ana had to go and see for herself. She got out of bed, put on a padded robe of Chinese silk—a gift from the always generous Emir of Bokhara—and crept out into the hall. When her little brown spaniel, Jemmy, tried to follow, she nudged her back into the bedroom with her foot.

  Several doors down, she could see light spilling from the Tsarevitch’s suite of rooms, and she could hear voices in urgent consultation. As the heir to the throne of Russia, Alexei—or Alexis, as he was known outside the family—was the most precious thing in the whole empire, more valuable than Anastasia and her three sisters combined (a point that none of them disputed; it was just a fact of life). But he was also the only one of the five children afflicted with a mortal disease. Hemophilia.

  The family had all come to the royal compound only a week before, hoping for some relief from the pressures and public demands of life in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Just fifteen miles from the capital, and reached by a private railway line, Tsarskoe Selo—or, “the tsar’s village”—was comprised of eight hundred immaculately groomed and guarded acres, where peacocks strutted with their brilliant tail feathers fanning out and a pack of tame deer roamed free. Cossacks on horseback, with sabers at their sides, rode the iron-fenced perimeters at all hours, and from every window of the two hundred rooms in the palace a strutting sentry could be seen. An additional garrison of five thousand troops was stationed in the nearest village.

  Inside the palace, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, every room was adorned with crystal chandeliers and richly colored Oriental carpets; huge, porcelain stoves warmed the chambers and scented the air. Fresh flowers, from as close as the greenhouses on the grounds, or as far away as the imperial gardens in the Crimea, bloomed in vases everywhere. Scores of liveried footmen, in dozens of different uniforms, silently performed every function from opening doors to carrying bowls of smoking incense from one chamber to another; it was the duty of four in particular—Ethiopians whose skin, Ana thought, glowed as hard and bright as ebony—to precede the Emperor Nicholas, or the Empress Alexandra, into any room. The mere sight of one of these fearsome black servants, in his bejeweled turban, brocade vest, and shining scimitar, alerted everyone within that one of Russia’s imperial majesties was about to enter.

  Two of these guards were standing now on either side of Alexei’s door, but gave no notice of the fourteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia as she scurried into the anteroom. A couple of the young Tsarevitch’s consulting physicians were huddled in thought by the fireplace, stroking their chins nervously, while the inner chamber was dimly lighted by electric lamps with heavy, hooded shades. The Empress sat on the bed, her reddish-gold hair piled in a hasty knot atop her head, her long fingers smoothing her son’s brow; Dr. Botkin, a stout man who had never once been seen in anything but his black frock coat (he had even worn it on the beach at Livadia, to everyone’s amusement), stood beside her, holding a thermometer to the light. He did not look pleased, and when he spoke, Alexandra simply nodded.

  Inching into the room, Ana finally could see her younger brother nestled down deep in the bed, with pillows piled up under his head and others raising his swollen leg. The day before, he had taken a spill off a swing—the kind of fall Ana and her sisters would have walked away from with no more than a scraped knee—but for Alexei any such accident could prove fatal. Growing up, Ana and her sisters had been warned a thousand times not to so much as jostle their frail brother. A cut or scratch that looked harmless on the surface could be causing deep and irreparable damage beneath the skin, as the blood—unable to clot—relentlessly hemorrhaged into the joints or muscles. His left leg was swollen now to twice its size, tightly swaddled in gauze that was changed every hour or two as the pooling blood seeped through the pores of his skin. His eyes, normally so bright and mischievous, were sunk deep in his head, surrounded by circles as black as soot.

  Their father was in Poland on a diplomatic call, but Ana assumed that, as always, he had received a telegram by now and was hurrying back as fast as the trains and carriages could take him.

  The question, each time something like this occurred, was, Would the young heir survive this latest attack?

  Ana could not imagine such a terrible day. It would be as if the sky itself had fallen. She did not know how her parents—her mother, in particular—would be able to endure such an event. It was unthinkable … and so she tried, very hard, never to think about it.

  “What are you doing up?” her mother said, suddenly taking note of her. “You should be asleep.”

  “Will Alexei be all right?”

  “Alexei will be all right,” Dr. Botkin put in. “We will see him through. You should go back to bed. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  Her mother smiled faintly, but unconvincingly, and Ana took a step closer to the bed. Her brother saw her and tried to smile, but a sudden paroxysm of pain arched his back, set his eyes back even farther in his head, and caused him to scream in agony. The Empress clapped her hands over her ears, and then, as if ashamed at her reaction, quickly drew them away and reached for her son’s sweaty hands.

  The gong on the grandfather clock rang twelve times, and as the last peal faded away there was the sound of sentries’ voices, then the clatter of hooves in the courtyard outside. Ana ran to the window and yanked back the heavy drapes, expecting to see her father the Tsar leaping from his carriage, but instead she saw a burly man in a black cassock, dismounting from a swaybacked mare.

  It was Grigori Rasputin, the starets, or holy man, from Siberia.

  Her mother, standing beside her and gripping the curtain with white knuckles, said, “Thanks be to God.”

  And even Ana offered up a prayer. If anyone could save her brother, it was this monk with the long black beard and the broad hands and the pockmarked face. She had seen him do it before.

  Minutes later, he strode into the room, and everyone else in it, even the Tsaritsa, seemed to recede into the shadows. Although his name alone—which meant “dissolute”—should have served as a warning, he was instead treated with civility, and even deference (which was common, as long as Alexandra, his most ardent supporter and friend, was present). His robes were secured by a frayed leather belt, his boots were covered with mud, and he gave off the aroma of a barnyard stall, but it was his eyes that commanded attention. Ana had never seen such eyes as Rasputin possessed—as blue as the Baltic and as penetrating as a dagger. When he presided over the evening prayers of herself and her sisters, she felt that there was nothing he did not know, nothing in her heart he could not see, nothing in her soul he could not forgive. And though he was roughly affectionate with all of the siblings, Ana had always felt that there was a unique bond between the two of them.

  “You are the youngest sister,” he had once confided to her, “but it is you to whom a special destiny is granted. Even your name—Anastasia—means ‘the breaker of chains.’ Did you know that, my child?”

  So she had heard; in her honor, her father had freed some youthful political prisoners on the day of her birth.

  But as for what chains she herself would ever break, the monk had never said, and she had never had the courage to ask.

  Her mother was drawing the starets toward the bed, and Dr. Botkin diplomaticall
y stepped away. Ana knew that there was no love lost between the doctor and Rasputin, but she also knew that her mother had placed her ultimate faith in the holy man and not the physician. Everyone else knew it, too.

  Most of all, Rasputin.

  The monk stood at the foot of the bed, towering over the ailing Tsarevitch, and with his eyes raised to heaven, began to murmur a prayer. In one hand, he clutched a heavy pectoral cross—emerald-encrusted and hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Ana had once seen it in the cabinets of her mother’s mauve boudoir, along with the rest of the renowned Romanov jewels.

  His beard jutted out like a stiff black beehive, and his words rumbled like the echo of a distant train. Low, and constant, and though Ana could barely make out what he was saying, the sound alone was strangely comforting. She could see her brother’s tortured eyes turning toward Rasputin, and after a minute or two, his moaning ceased, and his breathing appeared to become more regular. It was a transformation she had seen before though neither she, nor anyone else, seemed to know what caused it. Her mother ascribed it to the power of God—“the Lord speaks through Father Grigori”—but the court physicians remained baffled.

  Rasputin came around to the side of the bed and clasped the boy’s hands between his own rough paws. “The bleeding will stop,” he said, “the pain will go away.” He stroked the Tsarevitch’s hands, as the Tsaritsa looked on through a flood of her own tears. He repeated these words, again and again, before saying, “You will rest, Alexei. You will rest. And when you wake, you will be better. Your leg will not be so swollen, you will not feel the pain.” He leaned forward, his beard covering the boy’s face and the emerald cross dangling into the bedclothes, to kiss him lightly on his forehead. “And you will sing out for your oatmeal with honey and jam.” He smiled, a smile as crooked as the part that ran down the center of his matted hair, and uttered another prayer under his breath. As he stepped back from the bed, his muddy boots left a puddle on the carpet.

  But Alexei wasn’t writhing in pain. He was, miraculously, asleep, and with a silent wave of his arms, Rasputin—as if he were the Tsar himself—ushered them all into the next room.

  “You, too, little Ana,” he whispered, draping a hand on the shoulder of her blue silk robe, before closing the doors to the bedchamber behind him. The emerald cross, swinging against his cassock, winked in the glow from the hearth, and on a sudden impulse, she kissed it.

  Rasputin said, “Ah, Christ speaks to you, doesn’t he, little one?”

  Ana did not know the answer to that, any more than she knew why she had just done what she just did.

  But Father Grigori smiled through his broken teeth as if he knew full well.

  Chapter 7

  Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she’d meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours. Normally, it was the kind of thing that would have taken weeks, if not months—not only to be put together but to be vetted by everyone else in the chain of command. But again, Dr. Levinson had made it plain that this project would have the highest-priority clearance not only from AFIP, but from the Army, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, all of which would have to be involved at one stage or another. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had also offered their full cooperation and support. “But I don’t want them meddling,” Levinson had said. “They take a month to make a cup of coffee.”

  Dr. Slater had returned to his offices, rolled up his sleeves, and started making out the ideal roster to assist him. He would need a team of people who were as dedicated as they were skilled, and as competent as they were fearless. They would be performing some of the most sensitive and dangerous work imaginable, and under what were sure to be very tricky and adverse conditions. It was one thing to do an autopsy in a state-of-the-art lab; it was altogether another to take organ core samples in an open graveyard, on a freezing island, where the ground beneath your feet could give way at any time. He would have to choose his people very carefully.

  First of all, the logistics would be crucial. There would be tons of gear—quite literally—that would have to be brought to the island site. Everything from decontamination tents to jackhammers, generators to refrigerators (even in Alaska). For a job this big and complicated, there was only one man he trusted—Sergeant Jerome Groves, who was due to be redeployed to some hot zone in the Middle East at the end of the week. All things considered, he might be glad to get the call.

  Slater put his name at the top of the list.

  The next thing he’d need would be that geologist he’d been thinking about earlier. Before Slater and his team put even one shovel into the earth, they would need to use ground-penetrating radar to assess what lay beneath the soil, and to make sure—before doing irreversible damage—that the coffins, and the bodies inside, had not shifted or become separated from each other over the past century. During a typhoid outbreak in Croatia, he had once worked with a Russian who had read the underground water tables as easily as if he were reading a menu in a restaurant. He was attached at the time to the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but Slater had no idea what he was doing now. Still, Professor Vassily Kozak was the man he wanted, and he added his name to the list.

  As for the virology and autopsy work, Slater could take care of most of that himself. But he would still need another pair of hands, and another set of eyes, to assist him in the cemetery, and to help him run the lab. It took him only a few seconds to come up with Dr. Eva Lantos, a virologist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and a mind like a steel trap. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d been living in Boston with her latest girlfriend, and working on the mole-rat genome, but if anybody was up for an adventure, it would be Eva.

  Slater made a few calls, left a few messages that were, because of the top secret nature of the mission, a lot more cryptic than he’d have liked, and started burrowing through the accompanying paperwork the AFIP had gathered for him. By the time he had written a preliminary request list and sent the memo back to Dr. Levinson’s office, he glanced out the window and saw that it was already dark out; he’d forgotten to have lunch and had somehow powered himself through the day with nothing but black coffee and a packet of trail mix he’d found in his desk. As a doctor—particularly one who suffered from recurring bouts of malaria—he knew perfectly well that he needed to keep to a healthy and well-regulated diet, and do whatever he could to lower his stress levels. But that was a laugh, of course. He had no sooner escaped spending five years in the brig than he’d been posted to an Arctic island on a Level-3 mission. Fishing his pill case out of his pocket, he swallowed a couple of Chloriquine tablets, flicked off the desk lamp, and went down to get something to eat.

  Because of the erratic schedules of scientists and researchers, the cafeteria was kept open around the clock, so he grabbed a quick sandwich and a Snapple. A couple of people said hi, and “Weren’t you overseas somewhere?” and he realized, with relief, that the news of his assault on a commanding officer and his subsequent court-martial hadn’t received much play here. The civilians on staff had no idea of its gravity—all they knew about military discipline was what they’d seen on episodes of JAG—and the army personnel were so involved in their own projects and plans, they weren’t concerned with anyone else’s.

  He ate alone, and after tossing the sandwich wrapper and the empty bottle into the trash, he considered heading home, but then he thought, to what? An empty apartment? He could always go to the gym and work out, but there was something so forlorn about the gym at night. The fluorescent lights, the acrid odor of sweat that had been building up all day, the weary attendant mopping the locker-room floor. Not to mention all the other guys who, like him, had n
owhere better to go.

  And even if his body was flagging, his mind was still percolating just fine right now. That was both his blessing and his curse. It always had been. If his brain were equipped with an on/off switch, he had yet to find it. Nights were the worst. His thoughts could take him anywhere and everywhere; it was like a wild ride at an amusement park that never stopped. And right now the roller-coaster car was hurtling him along toward one destination in particular—the AFIP Tissue Repository, housed next door in the archives of the old Army Medical Museum. It had been founded, with his typical foresight and wisdom, by Abraham Lincoln himself—and it hadn’t changed all that much ever since.

  The most comprehensive collection of tissue samples in the world, the Repository contained over 3 million specimens—among them pieces of lung tissue from a private at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, the first American soldier who had succumbed to the 1918 flu. Before setting out for the wilds of Alaska, Dr. Slater wanted to see the slides himself and get a look at this ancient enemy he was about to confront.

  But when he tried his security card on the main concourse leading to the museum, he found there was a glitch in his clearance—no doubt another problem arising from his military discharge. And though he knew he could get it fixed the next day, that didn’t help him now. He passed the laminated card, which he wore on a chain around his neck, under the scanner one more time, just for luck, and watched as the lights stayed red. A third try he suspected would set off an internal alarm. He waited around in the corridor for a minute or two, hoping to piggyback on someone else going his way, but at this time of night the offices were largely deserted and no one else was around, much less heading over to the gloomy confines of the old museum.

  Still, there was another route, and though it was a lot more circuitous, it would allow him to circumvent the particular security system obstructing him now. Going back toward his office, he took a sharp right through the environmental and toxicology wing, descended the fire stairs to the garage level, then walked briskly across the unheated, and nearly empty, garage. Not briskly enough, he thought, as he felt a sudden chill. He picked up the pace, scurrying down a flight of crumbling stairs that opened into a subbasement corridor, originally designed for the discreet unloading of cadavers by horse-drawn carriages in the years following the Civil War.

 

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