Nicholas Marten 01 - The Exile

by Folsom, Allan

  Once, when she was seven, they received a short handwritten note from him that he’d somehow managed to have smuggled out. He did not mention their letters to him, but he told them he loved them dearly and was bearing up and counting the days until his release. He also confessed that he’d killed a man, another prisoner, in a fight because the man had stolen his comb and he had tried to get it back. No one cared about prisoners’ lives, so nothing happened to him. Outside the gulag a battle to the death over a hair comb seemed insane, but inside the story was entirely different. Combs, all but impossible to come by, were greatly treasured because to be able to keep one’s hair and beard neat was the one thing that allowed a prisoner to keep what little self-respect he still had, and inside the gulag self-respect was everything because that was all there was left. So for dignity a man had stolen her father’s comb. And for dignity her father had killed him.

  The note was short but terribly moving because it was the first communication they had had from him since he had been taken away. Yet for all the force and emotion of it, there was a single part that struck the Baroness more profoundly than anything else in her entire life because she loved him so terribly and because she felt as if he were talking to her directly, sharing some very deep part of himself and giving her a guideline for her own life.

  My dearest loved ones, he wrote, never let anyone take away your dignity. Never, for any reason. It is the one thing that in the darkest night keeps alive the fire of the soul. Our own and Russia’s. Protect it with every breath you have and strike back with purpose if you can. Make them never able to touch you again.

  His words touched her to the quick, and she read them over and over for months until they were locked in her heart. Then one day she suddenly stopped midparagraph and calculated that she would be exactly fifteen years and sixty-one days old when he was freed. Far off as it was, it gave her hope and a rush of joy because she knew there would be a day when at last he would stand beside her and she could take his hand and look up at him and tell him how much she loved him.

  It was a day that would never come. Two weeks after her ninth birthday they were informed by a telegram forwarded by mail from relatives still inside the Soviet Union that he had frozen to death in the most horrid labor camp of all, Kolyma in northeastern Siberia. Later they learned he had died still filled with fierce anger toward the soviet system and love for his wife and daughter and for the soul of the Russia that had been. They knew that because a guard, a good man under terrible circumstances, had, at his own peril, sent them a letter telling them so.

  “God chose your father to help keep the sacred voice of the Motherland alive. It was his destiny from birth,” her mother told her steadfastly. “Now that same destiny has been passed to us.”

  Even at this moment, sitting at the dinner table in Neuchâtel as Alexander conversed with Gerard Rothfels and Rebecca chatted with his wife, she could hear the echo of her mother’s words and see her father smile and blow her a kiss as he was being led to the train that would take him to his death in the gulag.

  The things that were inherently his—the fiery defiance, the ferocious pride, the strength and courage and conviction, the command that they protect their own dignity and that of the revered soul of Russia with everything they had—she had taken as her own. It was why, even as a teenager, she had done what she had to her attacker those many years ago in Naples, so cruelly and finally and with such cold dispassion. Her father’s words were woven deeply into the fabric of her psyche. Make them never able to touch you again.

  It was his spirit she had instilled in Alexander from the beginning and had nurtured through every day of his life since. It was what had enabled them to deal with Peter Kitner as they had before. And as they were still doing now.

  69

  8:20 P.M.

  The car was a white, unmarked Mercedes ML500 SUV, and it carried Kovalenko and Marten slowly but surefootedly out of Paris in what the French were already calling the blizzard of the century.

  “I used to smoke cigarettes. I wish I still did.” Kovalenko eased up on the gas and let the Mercedes bump over a fresh berm made by a snowplow. “This would be a good trip for smoking. Of course I might be dead soon after we got there.”

  Marten heard Kovalenko’s chatter distantly, his thoughts still on the moments before they left. Lenard had brought them the car himself, as quickly as he’d promised, and stood there in the cold and whirling snow outside the Hôtel Saint Orange while Kovalenko gave him Halliday’s appointment book and loaded his small, bulky suitcase, which held, among his personal belongings, Dan Ford’s accordion file, into the backseat. All the while Lenard had done little more than stare at Marten, his look speaking volumes. If it had not been for the urgent bravado of Kovalenko’s manner, his anxiousness to get to Zurich as quickly as possible, his insistence that Marten go with him, and, as he said, the politics of it, there was little doubt Lenard would have taken him into custody on the spot. On the other hand, he had Halliday’s book and was getting rid of an overly aggressive Russian and an irksome American he neither liked nor trusted but whom he had no real cause to hold. In the end he’d simply told Kovalenko he was looking forward to his report from Zurich and warned him to drive carefully in the storm and not to wreck the car. It was brand-new and the only SUV they had.

  The ML was an SUV Kovalenko liked and increasingly trusted. Pleased by the way it held the road in the snow, he began to pick up speed as they crossed the Seine at Maisons-Alfort and took the deserted N19 motorway, heading south and then east toward the Swiss border.

  For a time neither man spoke. Instead they listened to the howl of the storm and the steady beat of the windshield wipers as they battled the snow. Finally Marten pulled against his seat belt and looked at Kovalenko. “Politics or no politics, you could have turned me over to Lenard. Why didn’t you?”

  “It is a long drive, Mr. Marten,” Kovalenko said, keeping his eyes on the roadway, “and I am beginning to enjoy your company. Besides, being here is better than being in a French jail. Yes?”

  “That’s hardly an answer.”

  “No, it is a truth.” Kovalenko looked at Marten and then back to the highway.

  Again, silence took over and Marten relaxed, watching the SUV’s headlights cut a stark beam through what seemed little more than a gray-white, endless tunnel of falling snow interrupted every once in a while by the vague form of a lighted highway sign.

  Seconds passed, then minutes, and Marten looked over to study Kovalenko—his bearded face lighted by the glow from the instrument panel, the bulk of his figure, the bulge under his jacket where his automatic was. He was a career cop with a wife and children in Moscow. He was like Halliday had been, and Roosevelt Lee and Marty Valparaiso and Polchak and Red, professional policemen with families to support. And like them, he worked homicide.

  Yet, as Marten had felt before, there was something different about him. It was his other agenda. When he’d asked him if Kitner had the influence to cast the winning vote for the Tsar and therefore increase his business in Russia, he’d said he was a cop and that power and politics were not his domain. But then he’d said Lenard would not arrest him because of the politics of it. So politics of some sort were his domain.

  “Russian business,” he had said when Marten asked if he had photographs of Cabrera before his hunting accident. His answer had been no, and the reason was that it hadn’t been important then. What was important now? What had changed? What “Russian business”? Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it, but in bringing him along Kovalenko had made the “Russian business” Marten’s business, too.

  “Why are you keeping Lenard in the dark?” Marten suddenly broke the silence. “Why did you say nothing about Cabrera or the fingerprints? Or about Raymond or Kitner?”

  Kovalenko said nothing, just kept his attention on the road in front of them.

  “Let me guess why.” Marten pushed harder. “It’s because somewhere inside you’re afraid Alexander Cabrera and R
aymond Thorne are one and the same person and you don’t want anyone else to find out. That’s why you made me take out the disk and the pages with any reference to Argentina. You left Halliday’s book because you had to, and you hope Lenard never finds out the rest. That’s why you brought me with you, so Lenard couldn’t start asking me questions. You and I are the only ones who know, and you want to keep it that way.”

  “You would make a good psychoanalyst, or”—Kovalenko glanced over at Marten—“a detective, Mr. Marten.” He turned back to the road and gripped the wheel more tightly as the snow came down harder. “But you are not a detective, are you? You are a graduate student at Manchester University. I checked up on you. It’s how we managed to find Lady Clementine Simpson.”

  We or you? Marten wanted to ask, but he didn’t because he already knew the answer. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed away from her,” he said coldly. That Kovalenko and Lenard had done what they had done with Clem still rankled him strongly.

  Kovalenko grinned in response. “An attractive young woman is not the point, Mr. Marten. The question is, you are a graduate student, where did you do your undergraduate work? Was it Manchester as well?”

  For a moment Marten kept still. Kovalenko was smart and he had done his homework, and if Marten wasn’t careful he was going to get caught. When he had applied to Manchester he had simply called UCLA as John Barron and asked for a copy of his transcripts. When he got them he had the pages scanned onto a disk, loaded it into his computer, then changed the name from John Barron to Nicholas Marten, printed them out, and sent them in. No one had ever questioned the pages, and until now the subject hadn’t come up.

  “UCLA,” he said. “That was when I hung out with Dan Ford and met Halliday.”

  “UCLA, that would be the University of California at Los Angeles.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t mention it before.”

  “It didn’t seem important.”

  Kovalenko’s eyes went to Marten’s and held there for the briefest instant, probing. But Marten gave him nothing and he looked back to the road.

  “I will trade you one truth for another, Mr. Marten. It has to do with Peter Kitner. Perhaps afterward you will understand what you perceive as my concern about Alexander Cabrera and why it would not have been wise for me to leave you with Inspector Lenard.”

  70

  PARIS, THE HOUSE AT 151 AVENUE GEORGES V, SAME TIME.

  Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna touched her hair and smiled confidently as she waited for the official photographer to compose his shot. On her left arm was her son, Grand Duke Sergei; on her right, the silver-haired, mustachioed, and very regal seventy-seven-year-old Prince Dimitrii Vladimir Romanov, in whose grand home this night was being celebrated and who was the primary rival for the crown.

  Behind the young photographer she could see her mother, Grand Duchess Maria Kurakina, and beyond her the faces of the other Romanovs gathered in Prince Dimitrii’s high-ceilinged living room—thirty-three aging, elegantly dressed, defiantly proud men and women from a dozen different countries and representing all four branches of the family. None had let the weather interfere with their travel, nor would she have expected them to. They were preeminent in the imperial family and Russian to their souls; strong, noble, and steadfastly loyal to their God-given heritage as the true guardians of the Motherland.

  After nearly a century, and spread across the globe in exile, they or the generation before them had watched as the Communists ruled under the hammer and sickle of Lenin and the iron fist of Stalin; seen the horrors of World War II as invading Nazi armies trampled their land and slaughtered millions of their countrymen; watched in fear and dismay in the decades following as a nuclear-arsenal-driven cold war became entangled with brutal KGB reprisals at home and in Eastern Europe; and then watched in total astonishment as almost overnight the Soviet Union crumbled and then vanished, leaving in its wake little more than a corrupt, chaotic, and deeply depressed nation.

  Yet now, finally, mercifully, and after everything, a new day was dawning and a democratic Russian government was graciously, properly, and wisely—knowing that the real purpose of monarchies is to provide a sense of continuity and a rock of loyalty on which a nation can be built and sustained—inviting the imperial family’s return, giving back three hundred years of Romanov rule to the people. To those present the significance was overwhelming. It was as if the history of Russia had been taken away, held hostage, and now was being given back.

  Because of it, the members of the four houses of Romanov gathered there had fully accepted that the long battle of competitors for and pretenders to the throne was over. It had simply been reduced to the two men who stood on either arm of Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna—her son, the young, eager Grand Duke Sergei Petrovich Romanov, and the family’s regal elder statesman, Prince Dimitrii Vladimir Romanov. Which of them would assume the throne would be decided by an open show of hands in a vote that would immediately follow dinner. Or in Catherine’s terms, it was now down to one hour, two at best.

  Suddenly the photographer’s strobe light fired a series of blinding flashes. With them came the loud clawing sound of film advancing through the motorized camera as the photographer took a dozen pictures or more. Then it was over and the photographer stepped back. The Grand Duchess Catherine relaxed her pose and squeezed her son’s hand with assurance.

  “May I escort you to dinner, Grand Duchess?” Prince Dimitrii’s baritone voice resonated beside her. Instead of turning away after the photographs were taken and leaving his competitor to his mother, the elder Romanov had remained by her side.

  “Of course, Your Imperial Highness.” Catherine smiled graciously in return, well aware of her audience and purposely demonstrating that she could be every bit as congenial and charming as the opposition.

  Regally she took his arm, and in step they crossed to the marble-floored central hallway and turned down it toward gilded doors at the far end, where white-tied and white-gloved servants waited.

  Grand Duke Sergei and Catherine’s mother, Grand Duchess Maria, followed, and after them came the thirty-three other Romanovs.

  As they reached the end of the hallway, the servants pulled open the doors, and they entered a large, ornate dining room with rich, hand-carved paneling that rose upward twenty feet to the ceiling. A long and highly polished antique table ran down the room’s center in front of them, while high-backed chairs upholstered in red and gold silk lined either side of it. The place settings were of gold and silver, with crystal glassware and bone-white china and white lace napkins in between. More white-tied servers waited to one side.

  It was all formal and flamboyant and theatrical, and exceedingly impressive, yet there was one final piece that overshone everything. Mounted on the wall at the far end of the room was a massive twelve-foot-high golden double eagle, its wingspread nearly as wide as its height. One great talon grasped the imperial scepter, while the other held the imperial orb. High above the eagle’s twin heads, at the apex of a great arch above them, sat a majestic, jeweled imperial crown. What they gazed upon was the great Romanov crest, and to a person they gasped as they saw it. Some clearly bowed their heads before it. Few were able to take their eyes off it even after they were seated.

  Grand Duchess Catherine was no less moved by it until she drew closer and saw something else. Four chairs had been placed on a raised dais just beneath the crest at the far end of the dining table, yet everyone present was already seated. In that moment a deep disquiet swept over her.

  A dais and four chairs.

  What were they for?

  And for whom?

  71

  Kovalenko slowed the Mercedes behind a train of snowplows working to keep the N19 open. Dropping back, he held his speed as blowing snow and wind rocked the car. All around it was night, the only illumination the SUV’s powerful headlights and the red-glowing taillamps of the snowplows.

  “You have heard the story of Anastasia, Mr. M
arten.”

  “It was a movie, a play, I’m not sure. What are you getting at?”

  “Anastasia was the youngest of Tsar Nicholas’s daughters put in front of the firing squad with the rest of the family in the Ipatiev house.” Kovalenko slowed the ML, his eyes on the increasingly treacherous road in front of them.

  “Eleven people were taken down into a small room in the cellar by a revolutionary named Yurovsky—Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, his daughters, Tatiana, Olga, Marie, and Anastasia, and his son, a hemophiliac named Alexei, the Tsarevich, next in line for the imperial throne. The others were the family doctor and Nicholas’s valet, a cook, and a maid.

  “They thought they were being taken there for their own safety because of the revolution and because there was shooting in the streets. Eleven other men followed them into the little room. Yurovsky looked at the Tsar and said something like ‘The shooting is because your royal relatives are trying to find you and free you, therefore the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies has decided to execute you.’

  “At that moment the Tsar yelled, ‘What?’ and quickly turned to face his son, Alexei, perhaps in order to protect him. At that same moment, Yurovsky shot Tsar Nicholas and killed him. In the next instant hell broke loose as the eleven other men began shooting, carrying out the execution of the family. The trouble was, it was a very small room with eleven to be executed and twelve men shooting and behind them another five to seven guards who were armed but not part of the firing squad. The sound of the guns and the confusion of screaming people and falling bodies were bad enough, but in 1918 a lot of those guns were using black powder cartridges. Seconds after the shooting began, seeing anything was almost impossible.

  “I told you before that after the shootings the bodies were loaded on a truck and driven over rutted roads into the forest to a prechosen burial site.”