The Romanov Cross: A Novel (42 page)

“Looks like a pile of junk to me.”

“Look behind the junk,” Kozak said, finally lifting the mask back into place over his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The junk has been put here to hide the screen that shielded the altar.”

“There’s an altar back there?”

“Yes, there has to be, and the screen is called the iconostasis. You will find it in all the Russian Orthodox churches. It protects the holy of holies, the sanctuary. In a big church, like the one I went to in Moscow when I was a boy, there were several doors through the iconostasis. Only certain monks or priests could use each one. There were many rules. But in a smaller church, one like this, there was sometimes just a single door—the door of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr.”

“The what?” Slater had never been one for religion. In his experience, it was just another reason for people to kill each other with conviction and impunity.

“Saint Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church,” Kozak said, with a touch of exasperation. “Have you never sung the song about good king Wencelas, on the feast of Stephen?” Kozak started humming the tune, but Slater was already nodding in recognition and he stopped. “Saint Stephen was put on trial by the Sanhedrin,” Kozak said, resuming his explanation, “and then he was stoned to death.”

“For what?”

“Preaching that Christ was divine.”

There you go again, Slater thought. One more entry for his inventory of religious slaughter.

Lifting his digital camera to take a picture of the jumble, Kozak said, “I am going to write a paper about this church, I think.”

“Not while you’re supposed to be on duty watching Eva.”

“She has been sleeping. I have listened to the monitor,” Kozak assured him, before adding gravely, “but she should be in a hospital by now, yes?”

“Yes, and she will be soon. A chopper’s on the way.”

“Ah, so you got through to someone, after all.”

“I had to call the head of the AFIP, in D.C. If she can’t get them to jump, no one can.”

Kozak slipped the camera back into his pocket. “I suspect she was not happy to hear this news,” Kozak sympathized.

“No, she wasn’t.” Now that Slater was aware of it, he could see that there was indeed some sort of screen erected behind all the camouflage. He could even detect the glint of gold paint on a faded mural.

Kozak nodded, looking down. “The bureaucrats, they never understand. The situation on the ground is never the same as the situation in their plans. They think it should always be easy, the way it looks on paper.”

You can say that again
, Slater thought. He was trying not to dwell on the fallout from his conversation with Dr. Levinson. The rest of his life loomed before him like a great empty plain, and it was almost a relief when his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a low, but anguished, murmuring from the quarantine tent.

“Eva’s awake again,” he said, as her voice crackled over the audio monitor.

“But she sounds like she is in pain.”

He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.

A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.

The breaker of chains
.

When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.

The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.

“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”

He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.

But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.

By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing
his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.

The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.

As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.

“The little one”—
malenkaya
—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.

As in Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed holy man revered by the Romanovs and reviled by the nation.

What Charlie was holding was not only a piece of history, but an object of absolutely unimaginable value. The days of soliciting measly contributions to Vane’s Holy Writ website were over forever! He could bring his message—personal liberation through total subjugation, in all things, to the holy will!—to millions of people at once. Not incidentally, he could become even richer and more famous in the process, though that, too, was no doubt part of the heavenly plan for him.

He had barely had time to savor his triumph, and imagine the bidding war that would ensue among the world’s wealthiest collectors and museums, when the motion-detector lights went on outside the house, bathing the driveway in their cold white glare. Pushing his wheelchair back on the piled-up rugs, he glanced outside, and while he expected to see a moose ambling by, or maybe a couple of foxes scampering across the snow, he saw his brother Harley, looking like he was on his last legs, staggering toward the front steps.

“Rebekah!” he shouted. “Go open the front door!”

“Why?” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m baking.” The smell of charred, sourdough bread had filled the house for hours.

There was a hammering on the front door, and Harley was crying, “Open up! For Christ’s sake, open up!”

Charlie was maneuvering his chair toward the front hall when he heard Bathsheba skip down the stairs and eagerly say, “I’ll get it! It’s Harley.” She had a thing for his younger brother; she’d once said that he looked like he could be one of those young vampires in her books.

But when she opened the door, Harley virtually slumped inside, slammed the door closed behind him, and threw the bolt. He leaned back against it, his eyes wild, his brown hair sticking out in icy spikes. His boots were dripping onto the carpets that covered the old, uneven floorboards, and his skin was even whiter than Bathsheba’s, which was saying something.

“They won’t stop!” he cried. “They won’t stop!”

“Who won’t stop?” Charlie said, the wheel of his chair snagging on the edge of a rug.

“Eddie and Russell!”

“What are you talking about? Are they here, too?”

“No, man—they’re gone!”

Gone?
Whatever he really meant by that, Charlie knew that he had some very serious trouble on his hands. Bathsheba shrank back toward the staircase. “Okay, Harley, why don’t you just calm down? Come on inside and tell me what’s going on. Bathsheba, go and tell your sister to bring us some of her hot tea and that bread she’s been burning all afternoon.”

It took Harley several seconds to pry himself away from the door, and as Charlie led him back into the meeting room where he worked, he heard the clink of what sounded like glass and metal from the backpack slung over Harley’s shoulder. Was that a good sign, he wondered? It had been days since he’d heard any news from St. Peter’s Island, and while he was relieved to see that Harley was alive, it was plain as could be that he was off his rocker.

“You’re okay now,” Charlie said. “You can just sit down and relax.”

Harley went to the window first and stayed there, staring outside until the motion detectors finally turned off and the driveway went black. He yanked the curtains closed and whirled around in a panic as Rebekah came in carrying the tea and toast. Bathsheba peered in, half-concealed, from the doorway.

“Just put the tray down,” Charlie said, “and leave us alone.”

Rebekah did as she was told, but let it bang on the desktop and the tea slosh over the rims of the mugs in protest at such brusque treatment.

“That bread’s not from any store,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise, then slammed the pocket doors together behind her as she left.

“Drink this,” Charlie said, handing his brother a mug. “Tastes like shit, but it’s good for you.”

Harley took it, his hands shaking, and slurped some of it down. He let the backpack slip onto the floor, between his feet. Then he wolfed a couple of slabs of the toast down, too, without even bothering to slather on any of the homemade jam. Charlie studied him as if he were one of the crazy people who occasionally showed up—online or in person—at his ministry. They usually claimed that there were voices in their heads, or that they were being followed. One of the local Inuit had shown up, screaming that he was being tracked, and it turned out that he was right—he had escaped from a mental ward all the way over in Dillingham and the social workers were hot on his trail.

Harley looked just as bad, but Charlie just let him sit and sip the home-brewed tea—no complaints out of him this time—until he seemed to calm down.
Just what had happened on that island? And what did he mean when he said that Eddie and Russell were
gone
?

“You know, you can take off your coat and stay awhile,” Charlie said.

But Harley looked like he was still too cold to take it off, and Charlie knew enough not to rush him. And it was the backpack, anyway—not the coat—that he was dying to get into.

“While you were gone, I took a little trip myself,” Charlie said by way of distraction. “To Nome.”

Apart from nervously rubbing his thigh, Harley didn’t react in any way.

“I went to see that thief Voynovich.”

Harley’s eyes flicked up from the rim of the mug.

“He told me a few things about the cross. And I’ve done some digging on my own.”

Harley was starting to focus again.

“Seems like it might be worth a helluva lot more than we thought.”

Harley snorted, like none of this mattered much anymore, and Charlie took offense.

“In case you care,” Charlie said, “it belonged to Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar. And it was a gift to her from a guy named Rasputin. I figured all of that out by myself, sitting in this very room.” He waited for the news to sink in. “How about that?”

“If you ask me, you should throw the fucking thing in the ocean.”

That was not exactly the reaction that Charlie was expecting. A puddle was forming on the rug around his brother’s boots, soaking the bottom of the backpack.

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t know what you’re on, or what the hell happened to you, but I’m already sick of this routine. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on? Where are Eddie and Russell?”

Harley, finally, cracked a smile, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that would gladden any heart. To Charlie, it made him look as demented as that guy from Dillingham.

“Eddie and Russell are dead.”

“Dead?”
Holy Hell, what sort of trouble had these cretins gotten themselves into?

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell got eaten by wolves.”

Charlie blew out a breath, then said, “That sounds plenty dead to me.”

Harley actually chuckled. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Charlie, not overly endowed with patience to begin with, was now fresh out. For all he knew, Eddie and Russell were down at the Yardarm right now, just as stoned and out of it as his brother was. Who knew what they were ingesting? Eddie’s mom was known for cooking up some pretty wicked shit. “Pick up that damn backpack,” he said, “and give it to me.”

Harley tossed the damp backpack onto Charlie’s lap.

As Charlie started to root around inside, Harley said, “I’d be careful if I were you,” but it was already too late. Charlie had pierced a finger, and pulling it out, stuck it in his mouth to stanch the bleeding.

“What have you got in here?” Charlie said, turning the satchel over and shaking it out on the rug. A hail of broken tubes and stoppers fell out, some of them bloody or smeared with melting flesh. Charlie recoiled at the mess. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’d you get all this crap?”

“The colony.”

“What for?”

“Just keep shaking.”

Charlie shook it again, and this time the icon fell right into his lap. The Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus … adorned with three sparkling diamonds. Charlie’s mood changed in an instant. “Holy Mother of God.”

“Damn straight.”

Charlie angled his chair to catch the light from the desk lamp better, and to see the diamonds shine.

“This is from one of the graves?”

Harley nodded.

“And there’s more where this came from?”

“I suppose so.”

What kind of answer was that? Charlie was caught between exultation and frustration. Between the emerald cross and this icon, they had struck the mother lode, but how much more had his idiot brother left in the ground? “Then we’ll have to go back.”

“Not me.”

God, give me strength
, Charlie thought.
If it weren’t for this wheelchair
 … He was searching for the right tack and trying to keep his temper, when Harley bent over double, calmly vomiting the tea and toast onto the carpets.

Oh, Christ, Rebekah was going to have a fit
.