The Romanov Cross: A Novel (29 page)

Rebekah waited a second, scowling, then went on. “The only medicine for it—”

“The serum.”

“Was in Anchorage.” She lay in wait for another correction, and when it didn’t come, she continued. “So teams of dogsleds had to be organized in relays, and the serum was carried hundreds and hundreds of miles, through terrible storms and ice and snow, to get to the children of Nome before the disease did.”

“And did it?”

“It did—in only five or six days. And there was a famous dog who
was the first one to run right up this street, pulling the sled across the finish line.”

“Balto,” Charlie said, “his name was Balto. But the real hero was a different dog, one named Togo. Togo and his musher were the ones who took the serum through the hardest and the longest part of the route.” There wasn’t a kid in Alaska who didn’t know the story behind the present-day Iditarod, named after the trail so much of it took place on. But it had always bugged Charlie that the credit didn’t go where it really belonged. Once, many years ago, before the Merchant Marine had drummed him out, he’d had a shore leave in New York City and seen a statue there, in Central Park, of Balto. He’d wanted to scrawl Togo on it instead.

“Can we watch the race sometime?” Bathsheba asked.

Rebekah looked over at Charlie. “When is it, anyway?”

“March,” he said. “I’ll be sure to get us front-row seats.” He wondered why it still bothered him, about Togo. Maybe, he thought, it was because he hated stories where the ones who should be recognized for their greatness were somehow overlooked, and somebody else was able to swoop in at the end and get all the glory.

At the corner of Main Street, they passed the famous signpost with a dozen different placards showing the distances from there to everywhere else. Los Angeles was 2,871 miles away, the Arctic Circle a mere 141 miles. A couple of tourists were posing for pictures underneath it. Bathsheba craned her neck to get a better look.

“Get me Harley on the horn,” he said, as the van pulled out of the town proper. The lights of Nome hadn’t been much, but the night enveloped them the moment they left. Rebekah called up his brother on the car’s speakerphone, and Charlie heard the ring tone just before he got a burst of static, followed by dead air. Same as he’d been getting for the past couple of days.

“Goddammit!” he said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel.

“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”

“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.

“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”

Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too—it was just in his nature to be contrary—and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan—a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil—and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.

And this was sure as hell not summer.

In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation—growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra—left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.

“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse—a prefab structure on pylons—perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.

“You coming in?” Rebekah asked, but they both knew Charlie wouldn’t want to have to climb in and out of the van again. Pulling up onto the gravel, he parked and said, “Bring me a sandwich and get the thermos filled with tea. Peppermint if they’ve got it. And don’t take forever.”

The sisters got out of the car, buried under their long coats, and scurried up the ramp. Since he’d had no luck reaching Harley’s cell phone, he tried calling Eddie’s number, then Russell’s, but they weren’t working, either. What was happening on St. Peter’s Island? Had they
found a safe harbor for the
Kodiak
, and a secluded cave to hide out in? More important, had they started digging and found anything yet? Charlie had high hopes, but not a lot of confidence; he hadn’t exactly dispatched the A-Team and he knew it.

Waves were crashing on the breakwater out beyond the roadhouse. After the gold had been discovered on the beach—in such quantities that 2 million dollars’ worth was gathered in the summer of 1899 alone—steamships from San Francisco and Seattle had carried so many eager prospectors to Nome that a tent city had soon stretched thirty miles along the shore, all the way to Cape Rodney. Charlie had seen pictures of it hanging on the walls of the Nugget Inn in town. Mile after mile of canvas and stretched hides, shacks and lean-tos, all packed with desperate men and women struggling to make their fortunes. He felt the weight of the cross in his pocket and wondered how much had really changed since then? Alaska was still the Wild West in many ways—probably the last of it that was left—where loners and free spirits, people down on their luck or looking to find it in the first place, could come and make a fresh start.

While he waited in the warm car, he kneaded the tops of his dead legs. He couldn’t feel anything below the groin, but he knew that it was a good idea to keep the circulation going and the muscles from atrophying. Everything happened for a reason, that’s what he’d had to keep telling himself every day since the accident, and if this was God’s way of bringing him back into the fold, then so be it.

The sisters, coming out of the roadhouse, with their white faces and wisps of black hair blowing free from the buns at the back of their heads, reminded him of a couple of strutting crows. Bathsheba was carrying the thermos and Rebekah had the sandwich in a paper bag. Salmon salad on whole wheat toast, as it turned out. At least she got that sort of thing right. He ate it while playing a CD of a biblical sermon—sometimes he got ideas for his own broadcasts this way—and then backed the car out of the lot.

They could have spent the night in Nome, but Charlie hated to waste money, and besides, he liked to be back in his own place, with the ramps and everything else he needed to be comfortable. Not to
mention the fact that the chances of hearing any news out of nearby St. Pete’s were going to be better there than in distant Nome. This first part of the road was blissfully asphalt, with a white line down the center and shoulders on either side, but he knew the rest of the way back wasn’t going to be that smooth. At least the van was equipped for it, with two spare cans of gas (a necessity when traveling in the wilderness regions of Alaska), plastic headlight covers to ward off the flying gravel, and, in case he collided with anything big, a wire mesh screen in front to protect the radiator and the paint job. If you hit a moose head-on, it could be curtains for more than the moose.

He hadn’t gone twenty miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Bathsheba had slumped over in the backseat, fast asleep. Rebekah noticed it, too, and in a low voice, said, “So, how much did you get from Voynovich?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you talking about?” She glanced into the backseat again to make sure her sister was out. Some things they kept from her, for fear she could blurt out a piece of news she wasn’t supposed to know.

“I hung on to it,” he said, patting his breast pocket.

Rebekah folded her arms across her breast and, barely containing herself, said, “You want to tell me why?”

“Because he offered me a grand up front.”

Now she really looked puzzled.

“And if it was worth that much to him just to keep me from walking out of the store with it, it must be worth a helluva lot more. If Harley and his idiot friends manage to find any more stuff like it on the island, I’m going to go on down to Tacoma and fence it all myself.”

In a mollified tone, she asked, “Did he at least tell you what it said on the back?”

“Yeah, but it’s just an endearment. Nothing that says Romanov about it.” Or at least so far as he knew. When he got home, and wasn’t online ministering to Vane’s Holy Writ flock, he planned to be doing whatever research he could. Dollars to donuts, Voynovich was already doing exactly the same thing.

He drove on into the night, sipping the tea, and watching as, first, the center white line disappeared, then as the breakdown lane evaporated; the road became a narrow, serpentine trail, wending its way through snowy hills and along frozen streambeds. There were old wooden bridges, reinforced and supported on cement blocks, stretching across frozen gullies, and highway signs warning of wildlife crossings. Moose, bear, elk, caribou, fox, Dall sheep. At the right times of year, if you had a mind to, you could survive off the roadkill alone in these parts.

Rebekah, too, soon fell asleep, her head leaning against her doorjamb, and Charlie tried to stay awake by paying attention to the biblical sermon on the CD. The preacher was an old man called the Right Reverend Abercrombie, and he spoke in a lulling, monotonous tone.

“And when we read, in Exodus 7–12, about the ten plagues that descended upon the Egyptians, what are we to make of them?” the reverend said. “What was God’s purpose?”

To kick Egyptian ass
, Charlie thought,
and to kick it hard
.

“The purpose of the Lord was twofold,” the reverend continued. “Of course he wanted to persuade the Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But he also had a second reason—and that was to show just how strong the God of Israel was in comparison to the gods of Egypt. It was a point he wanted to make not only to the Egyptians, but to the Israelites themselves.”

While the Reverend Abercrombie went through his analysis of the ten plagues, one by one, and expounded on what each of them meant, Charlie kept his eyes peeled for trouble up ahead, looking out for the little red flags that were commonly posted along the roadside wherever there were loose gravel breaks, or where the pavement had cracked from frost heaval.

“ ‘If you do not let my people go,’ ” Abercrombie recited from the Old Testament, “ ‘I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses.’ ”

What had always troubled Charlie about the ten plagues was that Yahweh seemed so willing to go another round all the time, whether it was with flies, or gnats, or frogs, or pestilence. For the Lord God
Almighty, He didn’t know how to lower the boom, once and for all. No wonder Pharaoh kept agreeing to set the Israelites free before going back on his word every time.

An oil tanker, horn blaring as it came round a bend, barreled past him in the opposite direction, the wind from its passage buffeting the van.

But both of the sisters slept on.

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt—darkness that can be felt,’ ” the reverend quoted.

Darkness that can be felt
. The first time Charlie had read that, he remembered thinking that it was as if the book were describing Alaska. The darkness in the woods at night, or on a lonely road, when a storm was concealing the moon and stars, could be as thick and palpable as a beaver pelt. He had known men to die, frozen to death, on their own land, unable to see or find their way to their houses. And soon, as winter continued to descend, the night would fasten its grip even more tightly, extinguishing the sun altogether.

In his headlights, the only signs of human activity he could see, for mile after mile after mile, were the junk heaps abandoned on the sides of the road. Broken-down old trucks half-buried in the snow, motorcycle frames riddled with bullet holes, a decrepit Winnebago resting on its axles. In Alaska, it was easy to abandon things, but nothing went unscavenged. All of these wrecks had been carefully stripped of any useful parts, like an animal stripped of its fur, its meat, its antlers.

As he approached the wide turn that he knew led to the Heron River Bridge, the road began to washboard, huge ripples in the asphalt making the van buck and swerve. Miraculously, Rebekah only moved her head away from the door and let her chin slump in the other direction, while Bathsheba slept on in the backseat. Behind her, in the rear of the van, he could hear the gas sloshing in the cans.

The ground gradually rose through snow-covered hills, with battered and dented signs along the road warning of oncoming traffic, avalanche dangers, animal crossings, possible strong wind conditions, icy road hazards, you name it. Using the hand levers, Charlie slowed
down. Fortunately, he had no one behind him, and nothing, so far, approaching from the other direction. The bridge—a two-lane, steel span—was one of the biggest in the region, even though the Heron River itself didn’t amount to much. It lay far below, at the bottom of a granite canyon, and half the time it was frozen solid. At other times, however, when the snowpack melted in the spring, or the rains came, it could become a raging torrent overnight.

Charlie shifted in his seat, and as he switched gears, the silver cross nudged him again in the ribs. It was kind of uncomfortable keeping it there. With Bathsheba asleep anyway, he saw no harm in taking it out and laying it flat, still concealed in the rag, on the console beside the thermos. The road had turned to compacted gravel here to offer better traction, and as he steered past a pair of icy boulders, each one slick with ice and the size of a house, he slowed down again.