The Romanov Cross: A Novel (32 page)

Slater was vaguely aware of a commotion up above. “What is it?” he said, trying to maintain his focus.

“It’s nothing,” Lantos said. “Keep going.”

“It’s Nika,” Kozak said. “She’s not feeling very well.”

Slater looked up but saw no sign of her.

Kozak simply said, “Go on,” and weakly waved one hand.

Slater nodded—this was grisly work, he recognized that, and nothing could really prepare you for it—but the sooner he collected the
in situ
specimens, the sooner they could all leave the graveyard … and that meant the deacon, too. Once these utterly uncompromised specimens had been taken, the whole body would be hoisted out of the shattered coffin and taken back to the autopsy chamber in the colony, there to be thawed out and more thoroughly dissected. He was counting on Kozak to carry the other end of the stretcher.

“Heart next,” Lantos asked, “or brain?”

Somewhere in the woods a wolf howled.

“Trachea,” Slater said, and the next time he handed the specimen up to Dr. Lantos, he noticed that Kozak, too, was missing from the lip of the grave. He didn’t have to say a word before Lantos chuckled and said, “Yep, one more down. Looks like it’s just us chickens from now on.”

Apart from a sliver of one small pane, all the windows in the big, brick house had been whitewashed. That way, none of the Romanov prisoners could see outside or be seen in turn by anyone passing by.

Not that the peasants or shopkeepers in the tiny, Siberian backwater of Ekaterinburg would even have dared to look toward the house. Any suspicion that you were a Tsarist sympathizer, and your life wasn’t worth a ruble.

The Bolsheviks had evicted the rightful owner—a merchant named Ipatiev—and installed Anastasia and her family, along with a few of their remaining servants and friends, in five rooms on the upper story. The ground floor was reserved for the commissars, most of whom had been angry, disgruntled workers at the local Zlokazovsky and Syseretsky factories before the revolution. A five-foot-tall fence had been built around the perimeter of the house and its interior courtyard, and it was constantly patrolled.

But Anastasia knew when it was time for Sergei to make his rounds, and she always stationed herself at that small slice of window—left clear so that the Romanovs could consult a thermometer attached to the wall outside—when he was due. Even then, she was afraid to wave, and he was afraid to do anything more than cast a furtive glance
in her direction. If they were caught, the rest of the window would be promptly whitewashed, and Sergei would be shot as a possible accomplice to the imperial family.

“So, is he there?” her sister Tatiana whispered as she bent her head over her sewing. She was opening a hem in a dress and secreting there a handful of the diamonds the Romanovs had so far successfully smuggled on their long odyssey. They were sewn into every garment, under every button, into the brim of every cap and the stays of every corset.

“Not yet,” Anastasia said, “but sometimes he is delayed if the other guard wants to stop and have a smoke with him.”

Smiling ruefully, Tatiana shook her head and said, “You know, don’t you, that you were supposed to marry a German prince and cement the alliance? Not fall for some revolutionary guard.”

“And so were you,” Anastasia replied.

“No, I was destined for the Bulgarian.”

“I thought Maria was to marry the Bulgarian.”

“Maria was going to marry an Austrian duke. I forget which one.”

How far they had come from all that, Anastasia thought. Royal weddings, international alliances, princes and palaces and languorous vacations at Livadia, their seaside retreat in the Crimea. Now, here they were, the whole family, confined to a few hot and stuffy rooms, with no locks on the doors and guards who enjoyed nothing more than barging in at any moment to catch them unawares. As a precaution, Olga was keeping watch in the next room; at least the soldiers’ boots made a lot of noise as they came tromping down the wooden hallway.

“There he is,” Anastasia murmured, as the gangly Sergei sauntered into view outside. He was holding his rifle over his shoulder, as a sentry was supposed to do, but he looked no more comfortable with it than before. In stolen moments together, Anastasia had learned that he had been the youngest son of a farmer, whose wheat fields adjoined those of Rasputin’s family; they had all lived in the village of Pokrovskoe from time immemorial, and though Sergei had been conscripted into the Red Guard, his sympathies lay still with the
holy man whose healing powers had once saved him from a deathly illness.

And if Father Grigori was a true and loyal friend to the Romanovs, then so, too, would Sergei be. He did not trust, or even much like, his comrades in arms; Ana had seen that right off. But it had taken some time before she put her faith in him—and even then it was only over the warnings of her family. Ever since, however, he had proved to be a reliable confidant, and a necessary conduit of news from the outside.

He stopped now, knowing he was in plain view of the unpainted window, and without looking up at all held his cigarette between two fingers upraised in a V.

“He has a message for us!” Anastasia said, seeing the signal.

“Are you sure?” Tatiana said, stopping her stitching so abruptly a loose diamond rolled off her lap.

“Yes, yes!”

For weeks now, there had been rumors of a rescue plan—three hundred officers, loyal to the monarchy, were to ride into the town and liberate the Tsar and his family. From what little the Romanovs knew, civil war had broken out all across Mother Russia, and on many of the long Siberian nights, when the dusk lingered until almost midnight, they could hear the distant rumble of artillery and were left to wonder whose guns they were. Could they be the White army advancing on the Red Guard strongholds, determined to overturn the Revolution and save the captives in the Ipatiev house? Last night the cannons had sounded closer than ever before, and as Anastasia had tossed and turned in her metal cot, she had barely been able to constrain her hopes.

And now Sergei had another message from the outside world, which—if their luck held—he would smuggle in with their daily provisions.

Olga coughed violently in the next room, patting her chest operatically, and Anastasia flew away from the window and Tatiana buried her needlework under her wide skirt, then snatched up the volume of Pushkin by her side.

The new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, a sinister creature with a thick mane of black hair, a black goatee, and a gratingly insincere manner about him, burst in, apologizing for the intrusion at the same time that his cold gray eyes scanned the room for contraband or mischief of any kind. “I expect you heard the barrage last night.”

“We did,” the Tsar—now simply referred to as Nicholas—said, as he entered from the adjoining study. He was wearing his customary military tunic—with its epaulettes ripped off by the Red Guards—and a pair of threadbare jodhpurs.

“I trust it did not interfere with your sleep.”

Anastasia knew, as did everyone, that his concern was a joke, but it was a joke that they all had to play along with. She could see a faint fire blaze up in her father’s eyes, but as usual he suppressed it and simply assured the commandant that they had all slept soundly.

“Further precautions may have to be taken to ensure your safety,” Yurovsky said, and seeing the Tsaritsa—called merely Alexandra now—inching into the room with one hand pressed to the small of her aching back, added, “A hot compress, with powdered sage, will do much to alleviate the pain of sciatica.” He said it with the same bland authority he always assumed. Anastasia had the impression that he wished to be taken for a physician, though Dr. Botkin had assured her privately that the man was a complete fraud.

“Thank you,” Alexandra replied, in the same even tone her husband adopted. “If you would be so kind as to provide some sage, I will try it.”

Anastasia knew Yurovsky would never send the sage, and even if he did, her mother would never use it. It was all a grand pantomime in which her whole family, and their ruthless captors, continued to engage. The Bolsheviks pretended to be protecting the imperial family from harm, the Romanovs pretended to believe it, and everyone walked on pins and needles, afraid of provoking the situation into an explosion of some kind.

“How is the boy?” Yurovsky asked. “Walking yet?”

Alexei, bored out of his wits at the confinement, had played a stupid
trick, riding his sled down some stairs, and the injuries ever since had laid him up. Dr. Botkin, with limited means at his disposal, did everything he could, but the pain was excruciating, and the former heir to the Russian throne was stuck in his bed, his legs raised, and much of the time delirious from fever.

“No, not yet,” Nicholas said. “If he could once again receive the electrical stimulation treatments provided by the doctor in town, it might help.”

Yurovsky nodded thoughtfully, and said, “I shall look into that.”

Ana knew what that meant. Nothing.

“Will we be receiving some rations today?” Alexandra asked, and to this Yurovsky said, “As soon as the soldiers and my staff are taken care of, I’ll see what’s left.”

Oh, how he must have relished the opportunity to put the Tsaritsa in her place like that. Ana thought she even saw her father’s right hand clench into a fist for a second, before he slipped it behind his back. She wished that just once her father would let fly, hang the consequences.

After Yurovsky had completed a brief inspection of the premises—lifting Alexei’s blanket to be sure his leg still looked purple and swollen, studying her mother’s many icons just so he could sully them with his touch, licentiously fingering her sister’s nightgowns neatly folded at the foot of their cots—he strolled out, and everyone at last breathed a temporary sigh of relief.

It was then that Ana shared the news that Sergei had another message for them. Several times over the past few weeks, he had brought messages from an anonymous White officer who was planning a daring rescue mission, and perhaps this would be the one announcing that the attempt was imminent.

An hour or two later, when she heard the cook, Kharitonov, outside in the courtyard, she was able to peer through the window and see that Sergei was indeed carrying brown eggs and black bread, curd tarts and a bottle of fresh milk, in a wicker basket. The food was provided by the sisters in the nearby monastery of Novo-Tikhvin, and without it Ana wondered how her family would have survived at all. Yurovsky let the
baskets pass because he first helped himself liberally to every one of them that arrived. (The tarts seldom made it past him.)

With her family’s silent encouragement, Ana scurried downstairs to the kitchen, with her dog, Jemmy, panting close behind. How she wished she could move as gracefully as her sisters, or that she wasn’t quite so chubby. (Her mother always insisted that she was just short-waisted.) But Sergei didn’t seem to mind, and even though Ana knew as well as everyone else that this was just a silly fancy, there was so little happiness in her family’s life right now—and so little help available to them from any quarter—that no one saw any reason to interfere. Fate, the Romanovs had learned, could be as bitter as it was unpredictable. Be grateful, her father told her one day when they saw a blue jay preening on a tree branch, for every beautiful thing, no matter how small, that the Lord provided.

When she came in, the cook was exclaiming over the provisions he was laying out on the kitchen table. “Look!” he said to Ana. “Flour! White flour. And raisins.” She could see he was already debating how best to use them; Kharitonov was a master at making something from nothing.

But Sergei sidled closer to Anastasia, and in a voice that even she could barely hear, he said, “Be ready.”

“For what?” she whispered. The cook was showing off his bounty to her mother’s maid, Anna Demidova, who had come in to see what all the commotion was about. Anastasia saw her surreptitiously pop a raisin into her mouth as Jemmy scoured the floor for anything that might have fallen.

“I don’t know, but telegrams have been coming and going from Yurovsky’s office all morning.”

“Are we going to be rescued?”

“And a truck has been hired in the village.”

Ana had no idea what to make of that, but she prayed it would have something to do with their liberation. Perhaps the commandant was planning to steal whatever he could from the Ipatiev house—there were still some nice sticks of furniture downstairs—and clear out before the Tsar’s loyal troops arrived.

“Thank you,” Ana said, “for being our friend,” and as she spoke she let the sleeve of her blouse brush up against his arm. Just as she expected, he blushed furiously, and she took a delight in that. She, and her sisters, had all led such a sheltered and protected life in many ways. Oh, at the beginning of this war, and before the Revolution of course, they had been allowed to assist wounded soldiers in the Army hospitals—indeed, their mother had made their duties there compulsory—but of romance Ana had known almost nothing. She had briefly nursed crushes on their music teacher or French tutor or riding instructor, but then, for want of any alternatives, so had her three sisters. Sergei, though just a common boy, was at least all her own.

“It is my honor,” he said, “to serve you,” but his voice was full of greater meaning than the words alone conveyed.

Before she could answer, another guard, a burly fellow with broken teeth, staggered in, and the maid Demidova made a quick exit. Taking one look at the food, he ripped the loaf of black bread in two and stuffed half of it into his mouth, almost all at once. When the crumbs fell and Jemmy went for them, he kicked the dog to one side with the toe of his muddy boot.

“How dare you!” Ana said, snatching up her dog.

“I’d do the same to you,” he said, bits of bread flying from his lips. Glancing at Sergei, he said, “Shouldn’t you be out on patrol, comrade?”

Sergei wavered, just as she had seen her father do with the commandant, before deciding that discretion was the better part of valor. Turning on his heel, he picked up the empty basket and went out the kitchen door to the courtyard.