Chapter 48
Sergei had never had any trouble going to ground. You could not grow up on the steppes of Siberia and not know how to live off the land and stay out of sight; it was bred into the bones of anyone whose ancestors had ever had to flee a Mongol horde, or hide from a rampaging pack of Cossacks.
But these days it was especially tricky. After he had safely delivered Anastasia into the hands of Sister Leonida, he had hovered around the town of Ekaterinburg, where great changes were under way—particularly at the House of Special Purpose. He had watched from the shadows as all signs and vestiges of the royal family were removed and burned in a bonfire in the courtyard. He could see the Red Guards overseeing local workers as they scraped the whitewash from the windows, scrubbed the obscene graffiti from the outhouse, brought in mops and brooms and buckets to clean out the charnel house in the cellar. And he had managed to forage through the trash in town and find a soiled copy of a local broadsheet, the text of which had no doubt been approved, if not written, by Lenin himself. The headline read, DECISION OF THE PRESIDIUM OF THE DIVISIONAL COUNCIL OF DEPUTIES OF WORKMEN, PEASANTS, AND RED GUARDS OF THE URALS, and the article contained the official party declaration: “In view of the fact that Czechoslovak bands are threatening the Red capital of the Urals, Ekaterinburg; that the crowned executioner may escape from the tribunal of the people (a White Guard plot to carry off the whole imperial family has just been discovered), the Presidium of the Divisional Committee in pursuance of the will of the people has decided that the ex-Tsar Nicholas Romanov, guilty before the people of innumerable bloody crimes, shall be shot.
“The decision was carried into execution on the night of July 16–17. Romanov’s family has been transferred from Ekaterinburg to a place of greater safety.”
A place of greater safety, he scoffed, crumpling the sheet in his hands. The bottom of a coal pit at a desolate spot called the Four Brothers.
But the paper was right about one thing—the Czechs and White Guards were indeed infiltrating, and overrunning, the area. Eight days after the massacre, Yurovsky and his Latvian comrades had had to make a run for it, and now that most of them were gone, Sergei had risked returning to Novo-Tikhvin late that same night.
“She is much better,” Sister Leonida said, ushering him through a back gate, “though, as you would expect, she is sorely troubled.”
“Can she be moved?”
“Why move her? She is safe here, lost among the many sisters.”
But Sergei knew better than that; he knew that the tides were always turning in war and that Ekaterinburg was destined to fall back into Red hands eventually. When it did, the monastery itself would probably be destroyed; Lenin had no love for religion.
Furthermore, for all he knew, Commandant Yurovsky—no fool—had figured out that he’d been cheated, that the youngest duchess might still be alive somewhere. No, there was only one place on earth where she would be truly secure, and Sergei was determined to take her there.
The nun led him into the bakery, unoccupied now but still warm and aromatic from the day’s baking, and silently pointed to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Then she discreetly left him to his own devices. Stepping atop a barrel of flour, he pulled the door down cautiously, unfolded its steps, and after climbing to the top saw Anastasia sitting at a small table in the corner of the attic, writing in a journal by the light of a kerosene lamp. Dressed in a black cassock with elaborate silver embroidery, and humming some melancholy tune under her breath, she didn’t hear him, but continued to scrawl across the pages of the notebook, her head down, her light brown curls grazing her shoulders. Despite everything that they had been through together, he was still shy—a rural farm boy, who felt himself nothing but elbows and knees and cowlicks when he was in her company.
But if it ever came to it, he would risk his life again to save her.
“Ana,” he said, and her head came up slightly, as if she had heard a ghost in the rafters. “Ana.”
And then she turned from the table, her gray eyes, once so filled with mischief and joy, now brimming with an ineffable sadness. She was not yet eighteen, but her expression betrayed the grief and fear of someone who had seen horrors no one should see and lived through nightmares no one should ever have had to endure. Her cheeks, once plump and rosy, were drawn and hollow, and her lips were thin and downcast.
“I prayed you would come back.” Even her voice was subdued, burdened.
Sergei closed the trapdoor behind him and went to kneel beside her at the table. She stroked his head as if she were the older woman—and here he was, twenty, just last month—but when he looked up at her, he could see how pleased she was to see him. “I was so afraid I would never be able to thank you.”
The back of her hand brushed the side of his face, and his skin tingled at her touch.
“Sister Leonida tells me you are recovering well.”
“They have been very good to me here.”
On the table he saw that there was a bud vase with several blue cornflowers in it, and he smiled. “Remember the day you gave me one of those?” He did not tell her that he had it still.
Ana smiled, too, and for several minutes they reminisced about only insignificant things—the flowers in the summer fields as the train had made its way into Siberia, the way Jemmy had loved to jump off the caboose and run in circles whenever they had stopped for coal, Dr. Botkin’s passion for chess (and how frustrated he was whenever young Alexei had brought him to a draw). Like so many of the Russian peasants, Sergei had been filled with a native reverence for the Tsar and his family—a reverence that the Reds had worked tirelessly to undermine and destroy. The bloody toll of the war had sealed the Bolsheviks’ argument.
But once Sergei had been exposed to the family itself, once he had seen the heir to the throne writhing in pain from a minor injury, or the Tsaritsa ceaselessly fretting over him, once he had heard the laughter of the four grand duchesses and watched the melancholy Tsar pace the length of the palisade at the Ipatiev house, he had changed his mind again. Now they were not just iconic figures to him, the bloody puppets that Lenin had made them out to be, but real people … people that the starets of his village, at one time the most famous man in all of Russia, had befriended.
Was Sergei going to listen to a prophet from his own town—a man of God, touched with holy fire—or Lenin, an exiled politician that the Germans had smuggled back into the country in a secret train, purely to foment rebellion?
“How have you stayed safe?” Anastasia asked, and Sergei told her how and where he had been hiding out in the surrounding countryside. In July, it could be done; later in the year, it would not have been so easy.
“And does the world know …” she said, faltering, “about what happened to my family?”
He told her what he’d read in the broadsheet, including its bold lie about the safety of the family, and a flush of fury rose in her cheeks.
“Murderers!” she exclaimed. “And cowards, too—afraid to admit to their crimes!”
Sergei wondered if that was what she had been writing about in her journal.
“I will tell the world! I will shout it from the rooftops, and I will see those murderers hang!”
Sergei was hushing her when he heard what sounded like a broomstick banging on the bottom of the trapdoor. Sister Leonida must have been keeping guard in the kitchen down below.
“Someday,” he said, trying to calm her, “you will do that, and I will help you. But that day is still far off. You have enemies, and you have already seen what they can do. Now is not the time for that, Ana.”
Breathing hard, she subsided. “What is it the time for then? Hiding in this attic like a little mouse?”
“No, not that, either.” This was as good an opportunity as he was likely to get to broach the subject he had been meaning to introduce. “Now is the time to leave, with me, for the place Father Grigori himself prepared as a refuge. It was part of the vision he had before his death.”
Ana rem
embered well many of Rasputin’s predictions … all of which had so far come true—even, to her sorrow, the most dire.
“It is a colony on an island, and many of the faithful are already there. I remember the day they left Pokrovskoe, led by the Deacon Stefan. You won’t be safe until you are out of the country and hidden in a place where no one can find you.”
She did not appear persuaded, but she was still listening. “Where is this secret place?”
“A long way east of here, across the steppes.”
“And how do you propose we get there?”
Sergei had spent many hours mapping it out in his head, figuring out where they could board, under assumed names, the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway, and how far they could take it eastward. When it detoured to the south, they would have to disembark and find a way to continue northward. At some point, they would have to find a pilot, with a plane, willing to take them across the Bering Strait. The right price, he had learned, made anything possible, and payment was the one thing he knew would not be an obstacle. Even as he had carried Ana’s limp body through the woods, he had glimpsed the cache of precious jewels sewn into her corset. A bauble or two from that tattered lining and he was confident that he could secure whatever transportation they might need. But instead of outlining the plan in any detail for her now—there would be many weeks to do that—he simply gestured at the emerald cross around her neck and said, “I have read the inscription on the back.”
Anastasia blushed, as if he’d caught her stepping out of the bath.
“His blessing has protected you so far,” Sergei said. “Why would it end now?”
Chapter 49
The police siren was coming closer, and Charlie just had time to close the doors to his meeting room—where Harley was laid out cold on the couch—before a pair of headlights swept his front windows and he heard tires crunching on the ice and gravel.
Rebekah, still mad as a hen about Harley’s throwing up on the rug, stormed toward the door, but Charlie wheeled into the foyer, cutting her off and ordering her back into the kitchen. “And tell your sister to stay there, too!”
Rebekah said, “What? I can’t answer my own door now?”
“No, and it’s not your damn door anyway. It’s mine.”
There was the sound of boots stamping off snow on the porch.
“Now scat,” he whispered, “and not a word to anyone about Harley.”
The knocking came a second later—loud and hard—and Charlie heard the sheriff’s voice saying, “Open up, Charlie! It’s Ray Blaine.”
Charlie took his time about undoing the locks, making sure Rebekah was out of sight, before opening the door. The police cruiser was parked in the drive, the crossbar on its roof flashing blue, but more surprising than that was the gauze face mask covering the sheriff’s mouth and nose, the rubber gloves on his hands, and the fact that he stepped back a few feet.
“Hey, Ray,” Charlie said. “What brings you out on a night like this?”
“You seen Harley?”
“No. Why? Please don’t tell me he’s gotten into some trouble again,” Charlie said, shaking his head like a parent whose child was forever caught pulling pranks.
“How about Eddie Pavlik?”
“Nope, him neither. Say, what’s with the mask? You sick, or is it Halloween already?”
“Don’t you be lying to me, Charlie,” Ray said, craning his neck to get a look inside. “If you see either one of them, you call me, you got that? And if I were you, I wouldn’t let ’em get too close.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Charlie said, just as the walkie-talkie went off on the sheriff’s belt.
Ray answered the call and, turning a few feet down the porch, said, “Yes, sir, I’m there now.” He listened, then said, “We’re setting up the roadblocks just as fast as we can.”
Roadblocks?
The sheriff shut it off, brushed the snow from his shoulders, and said, “Don’t plan on going anywhere tonight.”
“Are you telling me I’m under arrest?” Charlie said, feigning more indignation than he felt. “What for?”
“I’m telling you the roads are closed.”
And that was all Charlie needed to hear. As soon as the sheriff had climbed back into his patrol car, Charlie did a wheelie and shouted to Rebekah to pack some food and coffee. “And none of that decaf chicory shit! Make it the real stuff we serve on meeting nights.”
Then he threw open the pocket doors and hollered at Harley to wake up. “We’re leaving!”
Harley mumbled something but didn’t move until Charlie poked his arm and repeated himself.
“Man, I was so fast asleep,” Harley said. “Why’re we leaving?”
“Maybe that’s something that you can tell me, while we drive.”
Although Charlie might now be a man of God, he’d been a man of the world for a whole lot longer than that, and at times like this he reverted to form. He knew that if the law came calling, and they were setting up roadblocks and looking high and low for Harley, it must be serious. Even if it was just about those damned jewels—the emerald cross and that icon with the diamonds in it—it was better to get to Voynovich’s place on the double, fence them for whatever he could get, then hole up in the ice-fishing cabin for a while … or at least until he could figure out just what kind of shit was going down.
Harley was pulling on his wet boots and complaining about some pain in his leg, but Charlie didn’t want to hear it.
“Go get in the van,” he said, as he stuck the cross and icon in his pockets. In the kitchen, he grabbed the provisions that Rebekah had stuffed in a plastic sack, then wheeled out the back door and onto the ramp to the garage.
Bathsheba, lingering in the doorway, timidly asked if Harley was okay. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
Charlie had to laugh. “When isn’t he?” he said, without even looking back.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted the hand controls, he got a strong whiff of his brother and wished to hell he’d made him shower first. He looked as bad as he smelled—his eyes with a mad gleam, his skin kind of sweaty. Scratching his thigh. What the hell did someone even as dumb as Bathsheba see in him?
Charlie backed the van down the sloping, icy drive, all the while plotting his route. He’d have to avoid the one and only main road that connected Port Orlov to civilization—if you could call Nome civilization—since the sheriff would be patrolling the local stretch, and Charlie didn’t know exactly where this checkpoint would be set up. He’d have to get around it, but once he’d managed that, he’d probably have clear sailing the rest of the way.
At the first turn, he steered the old Ford van across a field, through a couple of rusty barbed-wire fences, and onto an old logging road. The van bounced up and down on the rutted track and Harley said, “Why’d you do that? You’re gonna break an axle.”
“I’ll break it over your head if you don’t tell me why you’ve got every cop in Alaska out looking for you.”
“They are?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Harley—did you kill Eddie? Or Russell?”
“Of course not, I told you, Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell—”
“—got eaten by wolves. Yeah, yeah. I know what you told me, but I also know nobody ever went to this much trouble just to catch a thief.” Glancing away from the narrow dirt track for a second, he took in Harley’s disheveled appearance and said, “What’s wrong with you, anyway? Why’s the sheriff wearing a mask?”
“What mask?” Harley said, scratching at his thigh again.
“And what the fuck is wrong with your leg?”
“I got cut, on all that crap Eddie stuck in my pocket. A lot of it broke.”
Charlie’d been cut, too, when he’d poked around in Harley’s backpack. “Show me your leg.”
“What?” Harley protested. “I’m not gonna drop my pants for you.”
Charlie stuck out one hand and grabbed his brother by the throat. �
�Show … me … your … leg.” Ever since the accident, Charlie’s arms had only gotten that much stronger, but he still needed both hands to steer the van and manipulate the levers. He had to let go, as Harley unbuckled the seat belt and worked his jeans down to his knees. Charlie stopped the van, flicked on the cabin light, and saw a small cut, maybe an inch or two long, on Harley’s pale skin. It wasn’t much in itself, but radiating from the wound were raised, ropy lines, like red licorice strips.
He remembered the sheriff warning him not to let his brother get too close. “How long have those lines been there?”
“I don’t know,” Harley said, as if they really weren’t his problem. “They look longer now.” Suddenly doubling over, Harley coughed and a droplet of blood splatted on the dashboard. “Sorry about that,” he mumbled, wiping it off with the sleeve of his coat. “I know how you are about this car.”
“How long has that been happening?”
“Maybe a few hours. I think I got sick sailing that damn boat over here.” He pulled his pants back up and buckled the belt. “I oughta get a medal just for being able to do it.”
Something was going on here—something bad—but Charlie didn’t know what. And sitting in the woods wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Harley needed a doctor, and if anybody would know of a doctor who could keep his mouth shut—for the right price—it was Voynovich. Charlie put the van into gear, and jounced along the logging trail, the wind battering the chassis and snow piling up on the windshield, until he reached the top of a barren crest, where he doused his lights and stopped. Down below on the road, he could see a half dozen guys in National Guard fatigues, setting up highway flares and laying a spike strip across the two lanes.
The Romanov Cross: A Novel Page 35