The Romanov Cross: A Novel

by Robert Masello

  Groves blew out a breath and looked up as two new fighters feinted and jabbed.

  “Why now? Why this time of year?”

  “Why not?” Slater said, “It’s the holiday season—where would you rather be than the Arctic?”

  “It’s dark there. Almost all the time. Anybody think of that?”

  “Yes, of course we have,” Slater replied. Indeed, artificial illumination was one of the first things he had entered into the budget proposal—klieg lamps, ramp lights, and backup generators to make sure they never went down. When dealing with viral material, inert or not, a lighting malfunction could be as dangerous as a refrigeration failure. “But the job can’t wait.”

  One of the fighters in the ring landed a low blow, and the other one complained loudly.

  “Walk it off!” Groves shouted.

  The match resumed, and Slater waited. In spite of all the sergeant’s objections, Slater knew his man. The call to duty in Afghanistan would be strong, but the plea from his old major would be stronger. Groves’s sense of loyalty wouldn’t allow him to let Slater go off on his own, much less after such a personal appeal.

  “I’ve already got my orders,” Groves finally said without taking his eyes from the ring. The two fighters were in a clinch, heads butting like rams. “Who’s gonna get my deployment changed?”

  “Don’t sweat it. Everything will be taken care of.” Slater put out his hand and said, “Don’t forget to pack warm.”

  “Yeah,” the sergeant replied, taking his hand resignedly, “I’ll do that.”

  All in all, Slater thought, it had been a successful day. What he needed now was a good, solid night’s rest. Looking down the suburban street, he saw a door open, a dog come out and lift its leg on a tree, then scamper back inside. Still feeling drowsy from the drugs, he heated up the car, then closed his eyes, for what he planned would be a ten-minute nap before driving the rest of the way home. But when he awoke, stiff and sore in his seat, he heard a light tapping on his window. When he opened his eyes, Martha was standing there in a jogging suit, a key in her hand.

  Slater, suitably mortified, touched the button and the window rolled down.

  “Please don’t tell me you’ve been here all night,” she said.

  Slater glanced at his watch. It was five thirty in the morning. A gray dawn was breaking. Christ, he wondered, was he becoming narcoleptic from all the drug interactions?

  “Don’t tell me you jog at this hour,” he said, hoping to strike a tone that would mask his embarrassment.

  Martha shook her head ruefully. “You want to come in and warm up?”

  “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”

  “No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”

  There was an awkward moment before Martha said, “I’m glad the court-martial went as well as it did.”

  “All things considered,” he said, “I got lucky.”

  “So, are you posted here in the States again?”

  “Not for long.”

  “Where are you going next?”

  “It’s classified,” he said, and they both smiled. They had had almost this identical conversation so many times in the past that to be having it again now—on a chilly suburban street, with Martha in her jogging suit and Slater slumped in his car—struck them both as absurd.

  For a moment, they held each other’s gaze, with a thousand things to say but all of them said before. For Slater, it was like looking at a vision of what might have been, the life he could have led—and right now, with his back feeling like a plank and his legs half-asleep and his brain in a muddle—it didn’t look so bad. He had to keep himself from lifting one cold hand through the window simply to caress her cheek for a moment. As part of the annual exam for field epidemiologists deployed on high-stress missions, an Army psychiatrist had recently told him there was a notable lack of intimacy in his life. “You can’t run from it forever,” he’d said. “Given what you face on the job, you’re going to need some human anchor, some safe harbor, in your life.” After a pause, the shrink had added, “Or else you can find yourself drifting off the emotional map and into uncharted waters.”

  Slater knew he was right, because look where he had just washed up. “Well, okay then,” he said, as if he and his ex had just concluded the most casual confab. Turning the key in the ignition, he said, “It’s been great catching up.”

  “Yeah,” she said, playfully batting at his window as he raised it, “don’t be a stranger.” She had a bittersweet smile on her face, and for a second or two he wondered if she, too, had been running through that same little might-have-been scenario.

  He lifted a hand in farewell as he pulled the car away from the curb, and then he slowed down to watch in his rearview mirror as she set off down the street, an ever-diminishing figure in a blue jogging suit. She turned the corner without looking back and, like so much in his life, was gone.

  Chapter 10

  Port Orlov wasn’t always called that. Originally, it was a little Inuit village, built to take advantage of a natural harbor. For hundreds of years, the natives had lived in rough but sturdy dwellings made of caribou hides and sealskins, each family’s totem pole raised beside the door. Their slender kayaks, in which they had chased down bowhead whales migrating through the Bering Strait, had lined the shore.

  But in the late 1700s, one of the many Russian trading vessels that ventured into these waters in search of furs, skins, and walrus tusks had discovered the village, and there the Russians had enacted the same play—the same grim tragedy—as they had all over the Aleutian islands and along the coast of what the natives themselves called Al-ak-shak, or “Great Land.” First, the visitors came in peace, offering to buy all the sea-otter pelts and ivory and bearskins that the Inuits had on hand. Then they traded rum and guns for as much as the native hunters could go out and capture. Then, when the Inuits began to offer some resistance—arguing that to kill so many of the creatures, and in such a wanton manner, was not only wrong, but ultimately threatening to the natives’ way of life—the Russians savagely beat them into submission, enslaving and slaughtering them by the thousands. By the time Captain Orlov and his like were done, less than a hundred years later, the Inuits, who had numbered over eighteen thousand on their arrival, had been winnowed down to a precious few, and the otters, cormorants, and sea lions that they had once relied upon for their own survival had been hunted to the brink of extinction.

  The old totem pole in town had the faces of some of these creatures carved into it—the otters and wolves playing an especially prominent role—but nowadays the pole was leaning at a crazy angle, and nobody had gotten around to righting it. A fresh coat of paint wouldn’t have been amiss, either.

  Harley Vane, the hood of his coat pulled up over his head and his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his parka, kicked some gravel at it as he passed—he wasn’t into any of that native shit. He was headed for the town bar, the Yardarm, to do a little business. It was only four thirty in the afternoon, but the daily ration of sunlight was already long gone. From now on, the days would only get shorter and shorter—comprising at best an hour or two of light at midday—before the hazy sun sank below the horizon again and the stars filled the sky. The street, inordinately wide to allow for the occasional, sixteen-wheel big rig, was rutted and cracked. And, apart from the snowplow rumbling past, deserted.

  In front of the Yardarm, Harley saw the usual array of rusty pickups and dented vans, including—just as he expected—Eddie Pavlik’s plumbing truck. Eddie did more business selling grass out of the back of that truck than he ever did rooting out clogged pipes.

  Harley stepped into the noisy bar and threw his hood back. The sudden rush of the warm air made his hair frizz out, and he quickly smoothed it down before Angie Dobbs could catch sight of him. He spotted her now, in her waitress apron, delivering a pizza to some clowns sitting near the pool tables. Eddie was racking up the balls for Russell Wright.

  Harley must have walked throug
h this room, crammed with wooden tables and chairs, sawdust on the floor, maybe a thousand times, but ever since the night of the accident at sea he felt like things were different, like people were looking at him. At first, he was convinced they were all impressed—his picture had been in the papers, and the story he’d told was pretty amazing. Nobody else had made it out alive. But now, he got a different vibe.

  Sometimes he felt like they were snickering at him behind his back.

  “Hey,” he said as Russell squinted down the length of his pool cue. Eddie was leaning against the wall nursing a beer. Harley wondered if Angie had noticed him yet.

  “Hey,” they both replied, but Russell, the quiet one, started methodically putting away the balls, while Eddie went off on one of his typical tears. “You see that California is going to legalize pot? You see where it’s going to be on the ballot and everything? Shit, I don’t know whether to go down there and plant a hundred acres of the shit, or get one of those medical dispensary licenses—they’ve got those in a lot of states now—where you’re allowed to sell the stuff and use it with no hassles. I mean, you tell me why the government gets to tell me what I can, and cannot, put in my own body. Where is that in the Constitution?”

  With Eddie, most things eventually came back to the Constitution, which Harley was one hundred percent certain he had never read. Neither had Harley, of course, so for all he knew, it really did include a whole long list of things you could and could not put in your body. But right now, it seemed like a very good idea to put a beer in.

  Angie was still handing out bottles and glasses. Her blond hair was all frizzed out, too, but it just made her look hot. She had a silver ring through her lower lip and a tattoo on her shoulder that said mick—the name of a guy she’d had a baby with when she was sixteen. Sometimes Harley would see the kid around town with his grandmother, who was raising him.

  “You get in any more newspapers?” Eddie asked. “I swear, you should call up some of those TV shows, like Deadliest Catch.”

  “Yeah,” Russell said, having just scratched on the cue ball, “you could reenact the shipwreck—”

  “And maybe you could even get somebody to make a movie of it. You could buy yourself a new boat with the money.”

  “And a new crew,” Russell said, “while you’re at it.”

  Eddie laughed and clapped his hands together. “Yeah, man, and good luck with that!” He bent over double, laughing, and that’s when Harley realized how drunk he was. “They’ll be fighting for that gig.” Then he tried to line up his own shot and missed it altogether.

  But this was exactly what Harley meant about the weird new vibe he got in town. At first it was all like, thank God the sea had spared even one, but then it started to be something else. People who knew him—and who didn’t in a town the size of Port Orlov?—looked at him sideways. Harley started to think that they didn’t believe him—at least not entirely. And when Lucas Muller’s dad had bumped into him at the lumberyard, he’d stared him down. Harley figured it was because he’d laid the blame on Lucas for the shipwreck. Harley had tried to stare back just as hard, but he lost. Then Muller handed him a leaflet that said there would be a memorial service for all the lost crewmen on the coming Sunday, at the town church.

  “I expect they’ll want you to say a few words,” Muller said. “You think you can do that?”

  He sounded like he didn’t think so, which was why Harley said, “Sure. No problem.”

  The only reason the service had been put off so long was they were waiting to see how many bodies they could recover first. They’d found three—Lucas, Farrell, and that Samoan. Two others, Kubelik and Old Man Richter, were still missing.

  Harley spotted Angie coming their way. She had a bowl of unshelled peanuts and three beers on the tray.

  “Bring ’em on!” Eddie said, snaring two bottles and putting one of them aside for Russell, who was now back to shooting.

  Angie handed the last one to Harley and said, “I hear you’re talking at the church next Sunday.”

  “Yeah,” Harley said, “everybody’s been asking me to.” He threw ten bucks onto her tray.

  “I’m getting off tonight at nine.”

  “That right?” he stammered.

  “Uh-huh. And my mom’s got little Mick.”

  Why she’d named the baby after that creep, who hadn’t even stuck around long enough to see it get born, never failed to baffle Harley.

  “I could come over,” she said.

  “Sure,” Harley said, trying not to sound too eager. “I think I’ll be around.”

  “Hey, Angie!” one of her customers called, waving an empty bottle. “We’re dry over here!” It was Geordie Ayakuk, who worked at the Inuit Community Affairs Center. Harley had never liked him, and liked him even less for breaking up his moment.

  But once Angie was gone, and Eddie and Russell had tired of playing pool—with no money left to wager, they got bored fast—Harley was able to work his way around to what he’d come to talk to them about. At a table jammed between the jukebox and the men’s room door, they huddled over their beers and a bowl of unshelled peanuts while Harley did his best to pitch them his—or, more accurately, his brother Charlie’s—idea.

  “I saw it myself, with my own eyes,” Harley said, as the two men listened closely. Eddie’s work shirt smelled like he hadn’t changed it since his last plumbing job, and Russell’s sleeves were rolled up to show the tattoo he’d given himself when he was in solitary at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility. It was supposed to be an eagle, but it had come out looking more like a bat.

  “If you saw jewels, why didn’t you take them right then?” Russell said. “Before the ship went down?”

  “Because I didn’t know that the ship was going to go down,” Harley explained, for the second time. “Obviously, if I’d known that, I’d have taken the damn thing then and there.” He did not consider it wise to let on that he’d actually snagged the cross; if he did, he’d have Eddie and Russell trying to rob him next.

  “And you say it was what?” Eddie asked. “A necklace with emeralds in it?”

  “Maybe. But like I said, it was hard to get a good look ’cause the crack in the lid wasn’t very big.”

  “Maybe that was all that there is,” Russell said, cracking open another peanut. “What makes you think there’s more out there?”

  “I don’t know,” Harley said. “I’m not making any promises. But if there’s other coffins popping out of the ground like this one did, then who knows what they’ve got inside?”

  While Russell remained dubious, Eddie, Harley could see, was starting to get excited. “Didn’t you guys ever hear the stories?” Eddie said. “My uncle used to tell me about how there were these crazy Russians, a long time ago, who’d escaped from Siberia and settled out on the island because nobody could ever get to them there. They had a secret religion and lived there without any contact with the mainland.”

  “How’d they get away with that?” Russell said. “That’s American territory.”

  “Actually, it belonged by treaty to the fuckin’ natives around here,” Harley explained, “who saw enough wampum and said you can have it. And nobody’s gone there since because it’s got such a bad rep.”

  “You mean because they all died out there?”

  “Yeah,” Harley said. “And those black wolves don’t help any, either.” He could still see that alpha wolf, leaping up at his foot as the Coast Guard chopper hauled his frozen ass up off the beach. “Even the Inuit don’t go there because they say the place is haunted.”

  “What a load of shit,” Russell said.

  “Exactly,” Harley said, as convincingly as he could. “Exactly.” That yellow light could have been a total illusion. “It’s all bullshit. The real reason nobody goes out there is because it’s a bitch and a half just to find any way onto the island. Those rocks have fucked me up once already, and I do not mean to get fucked again.”

  “You guys need another round?” An
gie said, stopping at their table with a fresh bowl of peanuts. “I’m going off duty in an hour,” she added, throwing a significant look at Harley.

  “Yeah, sure,” Harley said, “I’m buying.”

  “Be right back.”

  “I hear she’s got a ring through her nipple, too,” Eddie observed, “just like the one through her lip.” Harley could hardly wait to find out.

  “How much do we get again?” Russell asked.

  “Because it’s my idea, I’m taking seventy-five percent of whatever we find,” Harley said. Half of that, he knew, he would have to give to Charlie. “The rest of it you two can split.”

  Russell was plainly mulling it over while Eddie was already counting his money. “I bet we can use the Kodiak,” he said, referring to his uncle’s runty old trawler. “Half the time he’s too drunk to go out fishing anyway.”

  “And we’ll need some shovels, maybe a hacksaw and a blowtorch, too,” Harley said. “Even if the coffins are only a foot or two down, it’s going to be a nightmare getting through the permafrost.”

  Angie plunked the beers down, and Harley paid again. He had half a mind to take the bar bill out of their cut.

  They fell silent until Geordie Ayakuk had finished lumbering past their table to the men’s room, then Harley said in a low voice, “So, do you want to do this thing or not?”

  “Definitely,” Eddie said, slapping his palm on the table and scattering peanut shells everywhere.

  Russell still looked dubious.

  “What’s bothering you?” Harley asked.

  Russell stirred in his seat and rubbed the tat on his forearm. “We’re diggin’ people up. Dead people, in their graves. That’s not right.”

  “We’re not going to take them out, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie expostulated. “Two minutes and they’re all covered up again, just like always.”

  Geordie came out of the men’s room, and as he passed Harley he chortled, “You been on Dancing with the Stars yet?”