The Exile

by Allan Folsom

  If Rebecca saw it, she would be horrified enough to go crashing back into the vegetative state she had been in in Los Angeles. And God only knew how the wholly unbalanced Alexander would react to that.

  “May God be kind to you.”

  He’d tried to bluff his way out and they’d called him on it. Now he was sealed in the back of a truck, bound and blindfolded, an animal on his way to slaughter. And like an animal, there was absolutely nothing he could do to change it.

  By Marten’s guess it was nearly an hour before they slowed and stopped. A moment later the driver turned sharply right and drove perhaps another mile, then turned right again and then suddenly left. Another fifty yards and the truck stopped. He heard voices and the sound of the doors opening. Wherever they had taken him, they were there. He braced himself as the rear doors were thrown open and he heard two men climb up. Then hands grabbed him and he was rushed forward and hustled to the ground.

  “May God be kind to you,” an unfamiliar voice said close to him. This was their mantra, he knew, and he had the sense they were going to kill him right there. His only thought was please make it quick.

  Then he heard a distinct click and waited for the cold steel of a pistol to be put against his head. Again he prayed that they would do it quickly. An instant later he felt something stuffed into his jacket pocket. Then the bonds tying his hands were cut. Abruptly came the scramble of feet and the sound of truck doors being slammed. Next came the rev of its motor and then the sound of it roaring away.

  Marten ripped off the blindfold. It was night. He was alone on a darkened city street. The truck’s taillights disappeared around a corner.

  For a moment he stood frozen in sheer disbelief. Then ever so slowly a monstrous grin crossed his face. “Oh, my God,” he said out loud. “Oh, my God!”

  He’d been set free.

  24

  Marten turned and ran.

  Fifty yards, a hundred. Ahead he saw a brightly lighted street. He heard music. Loud music, the kind that came from bars and nightclubs. He glanced over his shoulder. The street behind him was empty. Another thirty seconds and he turned onto a street alive with nighttime traffic. Pedestrians crowded the sidewalks, and he joined them, trying to blend in, in case, for some reason, his captors suddenly had a change of heart and came back looking for him.

  Where he was, what city he was in, he didn’t know. The snippets of passing conversation he heard were mostly German. The television channel he’d watched during his confinement had broadcast in German, the voices he’d heard on the street outside had spoken German, and so he’d assumed he was being held somewhere in that country. Now the chatter of the people around him seemed to confirm it. He had been in Germany and most likely was still in Germany. Or in a city that bordered it.

  Now he saw a large digital clock in a shop window that read 1:22. A street sign at the end of the next block read REEPERBAHN. Then he saw a large lighted billboard. It advertised the Hotel Hamburg International. At the same time a bus passed; on it he saw a transit ad for the Hamburger Golf Club. Wherever he had been, he was all but certain that now he was in Hamburg.

  He kept walking, trying to get his bearings, unsure of exactly what to do next.

  The street he was on seemed to consist of one nightclub after another. Music blasted from every doorway. There was everything. Rock, hip-hop, jazz, even country and western.

  He was almost to the end of the block when the traffic light changed and the pedestrians around him stopped. He stopped with them and took a deep breath of the nighttime air. Absently he reached up and touched his growth of beard, then glanced down at the threadbare tuxedo he had all but lived in since Davos.

  The traffic light changed, and he and the others moved off. Suddenly he remembered his captors stuffing something into the pocket of his jacket just before his bonds had been cut. He touched the pocket and felt a bulge, then reached in and took out a small brown paper bag. He had no idea what it was and stepped from the crowd to stop in the light of a shop window to open it. Inside he found his wallet and a palm-sized plastic packet. To his complete surprise everything that had been in his wallet still was, though clearly waterlogged and then dried out from his trip down the river—his English driver’s license, his Manchester University student ID, the two credit cards, the roughly three hundred dollars in euros, and the photograph he had taken of Rebecca at the lakeside at Jura. For some reason he turned it over. Scrawled in a heavy hand in pencil on the back was a single word—Tsarina.

  Once again the grin of before crept over him. This time it was not only from the sense that he had been freed but from triumph. Whoever his captors had been, they had taken his warning seriously, done some quick homework, and decided the last thing they needed was to be confronted by the FSO or the Russian secret police. After weeks of confinement, Marten had suddenly become a bastard child they wanted no part of, and they had literally dumped him out on the street, using the truck ride to ensure he could not lead anyone back to where he had been. Their “May God be kind to you” may have been a mantra, but it had been no death sentence. Instead it had been a salute to send him on his journey and, with returning his personal possessions intact, a prayer that he would “be kind to them” if one day they came face-to-face and their positions were reversed.

  Laughter from a group of passing teenagers made Marten realize he was standing conspicuously alone, and he moved on. As he did, he put the wallet in his pocket and opened the plastic envelope. Inside he found a large coinlike engraving of the Romanov family crest, which was obviously meant to be a keepsake of the Davos occasion. With it was another memento, the thing his interrogator had been referring to—a now washed-out five-by-seven-inch cream-colored envelope. Inside would be the formal announcement of reinstatement of the Russian monarchy, naming Alexander as the new Tsar. Marten opened the envelope and slid out a simple but elegantly printed card that, like the envelope and the contents of his wallet, showed the beating it had taken from his time in the water.

  Suddenly he felt the breath go out of him and he stopped cold in the middle of the sidewalk. People swore and shoved to get around him. He paid them no mind; his full concentration was on the card in his hand. Washed out or not, what was printed on the card was clearly legible. Printed in gold across the top were the words:

  Villa Enkratzer

  Davos, Switzerland

  17 January

  Beneath it was the rest.

  Commemorative Menu upon the Announcement of the Reinstatement of the Imperial Family Romanov to the Throne of Russia and the Appointing of Alexander Nikolaevich Romanov as Tsarevich of All Russia.

  Marten shivered as he realized that what he held in his hand was not only a commemorative souvenir announcing the reinstatement of the monarchy, it was the thing he and Kovalenko had been searching for. It was the second menu!

  MOSCOW, GORKY PARK. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2. 6:20 A.M.

  The park was not open to the public until ten but available to a policeman wanting to lose weight and get in shape. And that was what Kovalenko was doing in the crisp early spring morning, running, passing the great Ferris wheel for the third time in an hour, working out. He was tired of his belly and the double chin under the beard. He was drinking less and eating better and getting up early. And running and running. Why, he wasn’t sure, except maybe he was buying time, trying to stay ahead of middle age. Or maybe he was trying to forget the thing that had taken over every corner of the public consciousness—the incredible craze for Alexander and Rebecca, shamelessly exploited by the media and magnified by a feverish day-by-day countdown to their wedding and the coronation.

  The warble of his cell phone inside the pocket of his warm-up jacket broke his concentration. It never rang at this hour. His had become a life of paperwork, not intrigue, and he only had the rarest contact with his chief inspector anymore, so it wasn’t police business. The caller had to be his wife, or one of his children.

  “Da,” he said breathlessly, huffing and puffing
as he clicked on.

  “The murder weapon was a knife,” a familiar voice said.

  “Shto?” What? Kovalenko stopped in his tracks.

  “The knife. Your big Spanish switchblade, the one taken from Fabien Curtay’s safe.”

  “Marten?”

  “Yes, Marten.”

  “Mother of Christ, you are dead!”

  “Is that what they think?”

  Kovalenko glanced around, stepping aside as a park service truck passed. “How? What happened?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a bar, in Hamburg. Can you meet me?”

  “I don’t know. I will try.”

  “When?” Marten pressed him.

  “Call me in an hour.”

  25

  FUHLSBÜTTEL AIRPORT, HAMBURG, GERMANY. SAME DAY,

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2. 5:30 P.M.

  Marten saw Kovalenko exit the Lufthansa gate in a crowd of passengers and start down the corridor toward the coffee bar where he waited. He could see the Russian looking for him as he came, but he knew Kovalenko wouldn’t recognize him. Not only was he bearded like Kovalenko, he had lost nearly thirty pounds and was bone thin. Moreover, in the hours he’d had to wait, he’d spent a hundred and sixty of his euros and shed his worn tuxedo for an inexpensive brown corduroy suit, tattersal shirt, and navy sweater. He looked the way Kovalenko did, like a professor. Academics meeting in an airport coffee bar, nothing unusual in that.

  Kovalenko reached the bar and entered. He bought a cup of coffee at the counter and then sat down at a table near the back and took out a newspaper. A moment later Marten slid into a chair beside him.

  “Tovarich,” Marten said. Comrade.

  “Tovarich.” Kovalenko studied him carefully, as if to make sure it was really him. “How … ?” he said finally. “How did you survive? And how did you come to be here and so many weeks later?” Within ten minutes they were on the Airport-City-Bus to Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof, its main train station. Fifteen minutes after that Kovalenko had guided them up Ernst-Merckstrasse to the restaurant Peter Lembcke. By the time they had finished their second glass of beer, the eel soup came and Kovalenko had the answer to his “How?”—at least as much of it as Marten could remember. The young girl finding him in the snow, the fugitive family, the “hauler,” Rotterdam, the truck ride rolled up in a carpet, the captivity in dark rooms, the dreaded interrogations by people he never saw—and he still did not know who they were or where he had been held. The seemingly endless television. Seeing Rebecca and Alexander—with her birth parents in Denmark, with the Queen of England and the President of the United States. Seeing the wreckage of the car in which Peter Kitner had been killed. It was then Marten pulled out the envelope his captors had given him and handed it to Kovalenko.

  “Open it,” he said, and Kovalenko did, sliding from it the washed-out elegantly printed card that began:

  Villa Enkratzer

  Davos, Switzerland,

  17 January

  Marten watched him as he studied it, saw his reaction as he realized what it was, saw him suddenly look up.

  “The second menu,” Marten said.

  “Turn it over and look carefully at the bottom right-hand corner.”

  Kovalenko did, and Marten heard him grunt when he saw what was there. In miniscule print almost too small to be seen were the words H. Lossberg, master printer. Zurich.

  “Lossberg’s wife said her husband always kept a copy of what he printed.” Marten was looking directly at Kovalenko. “But when she went to look for it she couldn’t find it. She also said exactly two hundred menus were to be printed, no more, no less, and afterward the proofs were to be destroyed and the type disassembled. Lossberg and the sales rep Jean-Luc Vabres were close friends. This was big news. What if Lossberg gave his only copy of the menu to Vabres and in turn Vabres was going to pass it on to Dan Ford? Alexander couldn’t have had it known that he was to become Tsar until after Kitner had been presented to the Romanov family and then, as Tsarevich, Kitner had abdicated to him.”

  “And somehow, through his connection in Zurich,” Kovalenko picked up the reasoning, “he found out what Lossberg had done. He had Vabres followed, or his phone tapped, or both, and then when Vabres went to meet Dan Ford to give him the menu he was already there and waiting.”

  Marten leaned forward. “I have to get Rebecca away from him.”

  “Do you know what’s happened? In weeks, how large a personality he has become?”

  “Yes, I do know.”

  “I don’t think you understand the scope of it. In Russia he is a star, a king, nearly a god. So is she.”

  Marten repeated slowly, “I have to get Rebecca away from him.”

  “He is surrounded by the FSO. Murzin has become his personal bodyguard. It would be like trying to take away the wife of the president of the United States.”

  “She is not his wife. Not yet.”

  Kovalenko put his hand on Marten’s. “Tovarich, who knows if she would leave him, even if you asked her to. Things have changed immeasurably.”

  “She would if I went to her and told her who he was.”

  “Go to her? You couldn’t get within a mile of her without being caught. Never mind you are here and not in Moscow.”

  “That’s why I need your help.”

  “What do you want me to do? I am barely employed anymore, let alone have access on that level.”

  “Get me a cell phone, a passport, and a visa of some kind that will let me travel to and inside Russia. Use my name if you have to. I know it’s dangerous, but that way you can simply have my U.S. passport renewed. It would be easier and faster.”

  “You are dead.”

  “That makes it even better. There has to be more than one Nicholas Marten in this world. Say I am a visiting landscape design professor at Manchester who wished to study formal gardens throughout Russia. If anyone checks, they will find nothing but confusion at the other end. Confusion we might be able to use. I’m dead. I’m someone else. I’m a professor, not a student. No one will know for sure. The university is a sprawling bureaucracy. People come and go all the time. It could take days, weeks to find out. Even then they might not know for sure.” Marten looked at Kovalenko directly. “Can you do it?”

  “I—” Kovalenko hesitated.

  “Yuri—as a boy he killed his brother, and as a man he killed his father.”

  “The bombing of Sir Peter’s car?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think Alexander was responsible.”

  “It doesn’t take much imagination.”

  Kovalenko stared at Marten, glancing up only as a waiter came near their table. “No, it doesn’t.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “There were sophisticated explosives used, and the timing device was Russian. The investigation is quietly ongoing. But it still doesn’t mean Alexander did it or had it done.”

  “If you had seen his eyes on the bridge above the villa when he tried to kill me, if you had seen the knife and the way he used it, you would understand. He’s losing any control he might have had. It’s what we thought when we saw Dan’s body come out of the river. When we saw what he did to Vabres. It was the same with Lossberg in Zurich.”

  “And you are afraid that at some point he will unleash that same madness on your sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, tovarich, you are right, we must do something.”

  26

  PETER AND PAUL CATHEDRAL, THE CRYPT OF ST. CATHERINE CHAPEL, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA. THURSDAY, APRIL 3. 11:00 A.M.

  Lighted funeral candles held solemnly in their hands, Alexander and Rebecca stood alongside President Gitinov and King Juan Carlos of Spain as Gregor II, the Most Holy Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, led the solemn funeral requiem. To their left in the ornate, marbled room were Peter Kitner’s three grown daughters and their husbands. Aside from several priests attending the Patriarch, and the Baroness, dressed in black with a veil c
overing her face, that was all. The service was that private.

  Before them rested three closed coffins bearing the remains of Peter Kitner, his son Michael, and his wife Luisa, Juan Carlos’s cousin.

  “Even in death, O Lord, Peter Mikhail Romanov returns greatness to the soul and the soil of All Russia.” Gregor II’s words echoed off the gold-crested columns and the great stone floors of the crypt where the remains of Alexander’s great-grandfather, the murdered Tsar Nicholas, his wife, and three of his children were interred. The same grand and mournful chamber had been the final resting place of all Russian monarchs since the reign of Peter the Great, and here, by consent of the Russian parliament, Peter Mikhail Romanov Kitner and his family would be laid to rest, even though he had never taken the throne.

  “Even in death, O Lord, his spirit endures.”

  Even in death—the Baroness smiled thinly behind her veil. Even in death you give power and credibility to Alexander; more, perhaps, than you ever could have in life. Your death has made you beloved, even martyred, but you have made Alexander the last true male Romanov successor to the throne.

  Even in death—

  The same words resonated through Alexander, his mind not on the funeral but on the unceasing beat of the metronome inside him that became stronger and more unsettling with every passing hour. He glanced at Rebecca and saw calmness on her face and in her eyes. Her serenity, even here in the crypt with proof of the finality of death only feet away in the coffins before them, was maddening, and served only to increase the growing certainty inside him that Nicholas Marten was not dead. Not dead at all. He was somewhere out there, coming toward him like a tide.