Eye of the Red Tsar (33 page)

“But that’s the old mine over there,” said Alexei. “That’s where the bodies were dumped.”

Pekkala left the car. “Come with me,” he said.

Alexei got out and slammed the Emka’s door. “This is no joke, Pekkala! You promised me that gold.”

Pekkala walked to the edge of the mine shaft and stared down into the darkness. “The treasure is not gold.”

“What?” Alexei stood back from the mouth of the pit, unwilling to get near the edge.

“It’s diamonds,” said Pekkala, “and rubies and pearls. The Tsar had them sewn into specially made clothes. I couldn’t tell from the message how much there is or who was wearing them. Probably your parents and your elder sisters. Obviously, with your sickness, he would not have expected you to carry such an extra weight, and the less you knew about it, the safer you would be. I am telling you this now, Alexei, because I did not want to upset you. The bodies are still here. That is where we’ll find the treasure.”

“Gems?” Alexei appeared to be in shock.

“Yes,” replied Pekkala, “more than most people could even imagine.”

Alexei nodded. “All right, Pekkala, I believe you. But I’m afraid to go down in that mine.”

“I understand,” said Pekkala. “I’ll go by myself.” He brought out the towing rope, and fastened one end to the bumper of the Emka. Then he threw the heavy coil into the darkness. The rope shushed through the air as it uncoiled. Far below, there was a slap as it struck the ground. Then he fetched Anton’s flashlight from the glove compartment and the leather satchel he had brought with him from the forest of Krasnagolyana. “I’ll put the treasure in here,” he explained. “I may need to send parts of it up to you separately. I’m not sure I can climb this rope and carry it all at the same time.” He turned on the flashlight, unsure if it would even work. As light splashed down into the mine shaft, Pekkala sighed with relief that Kirov had remembered to replace the batteries.

Standing at the edge of the pit, Pekkala hesitated. Fear spread like wings inside his chest. He closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Alexei.

“You’ll need to lift the rope from the ground. Otherwise, it will drag against the edge of the mine shaft and I won’t be able to get a grip on it as I go over the side. Once I’m on the way down, I can handle it myself.”

Alexei took up the rope. “Like this?” he asked.

“The rope is still too low.”

Alexei closed the gap between them, his hands tight on the rough brown hemp, lifting it as he moved.

“You’ll have to come closer,” said Pekkala, “just until I can get my feet against the wall of the mine shaft. Then I’ll be fine.”

Now they were only an arm’s length apart, their hands almost touching.

Pekkala glanced into Alexei’s face. “Almost there,” he said.

Alexei smiled. His face had turned red from the effort of lifting the heavy rope. “I won’t forget this,” he promised.

Just as Pekkala was ready to lower himself over the side, he noticed the jagged white line of an old scar on Alexei’s forehead. He stared at it in confusion. A wound like that would probably have killed a hemophiliac. And then, like a ghostly image sliding over the features of Alexei, Pekkala glimpsed a different person. He was transported back many years, to a frigid day in Petrograd. He was on a bridge, overlooking the Neva River. Standing before him was Grodek, his face filled with terror at the thought of jumping from the bridge. As Grodek tried to dash past, Pekkala brought the barrel of the Webley down on his head. Grodek sprawled on the slush-covered ground, his forehead gashed by the front sight of the pistol. It was that same wound, the purple centipede crawling up into his hairline, which he had refused to cover up with bandages throughout the trial. The scar had faded so that it was almost invisible. Only now, as the skin around it flushed from exertion, did the old wound reappear.

“Grodek,” whispered Pekkala.

“It’s too late, Pekkala. You should have listened to your friends. But you wanted too much to believe.”

“What have you done with him?” stammered Pekkala. “What have you done with Alexei?”

“The same thing I did to the others,” Grodek replied. Then he let go of the rope.

Still attached to the bumper, the hemp cord snapped down. The shock almost tore it from Pekkala’s hands. He staggered backwards, desperate to keep his balance. But he was already too far out over the mine shaft. He toppled backwards. With the rope still in his grasp, he slid down, palms burning, kicking with his feet at the walls of the mine shaft, air rushing past him. Then his foot caught against a lip of stone. He clenched his hands around the rope. The skin of his palms had torn open, cauterized by the heat of holding on, but his grip held. With a jarring twist of his spine, everything stopped. Pekkala swung out and then back, his body slamming against the stone. He struggled to catch his breath. Wheezing, he lifted his knee, trying to gain a secure foothold. Just when he thought he had done this, his shoe came off. As he began to fall again, the weight of his body tore into his shoulder blades. He cried out in pain. His hands felt as if they had been held against a flame. This time he let go of the rope. He tumbled into the darkness, legs kicking. Then the blackness took shape, rushing up to meet him. He landed heavily, the wind knocked out of his lungs. Unable to breathe, he rolled, hands clawing in the dirt, mouth open and gasping for the air that would not come. As his consciousness faded, he curled over, forehead touching the ground, and in that arching of his body, his lungs released. He sucked in a mouthful of air filled with the stench of decay.

Grodek’s face appeared over the mouth of the pit. “Are you there, Pekkala?”

Pekkala groaned. He took another breath.

“Pekkala!”

“Where is Alexei?”

“Long gone,” Grodek answered. “Don’t worry, Pekkala. There is nothing you could have done. I kept him alive in case I needed a hostage. When I was dumping the bodies, he got out of the truck and tried to run away. I warned him to stop or I’d fire, but Alexei kept running. That’s why I had to shoot. He died the same night as the rest of his family. He is buried at the edge of this field. I had no choice.”

“No choice?” shouted Pekkala. “None of them deserved to die!”

“Neither did Maria Balka,” answered Grodek. “But I do not blame you, Pekkala. I have never considered you my enemy. From that day on the bridge to this, you and I have been on paths which were not of our own making. Whether we chose them or not, our paths have now converged. You have your brother to thank for that. He is the one who contacted me after that lunatic photographer decided to speak up. I would never have allowed him to live except the Tsar insisted upon it. And when Stalin chose to put you on the case, I thought we’d have a chance of locating that gold after all. If I’d only known it wasn’t gold we were looking for, I might have found it sooner.”

“You won’t get what you came for,” said Pekkala. “I know you’re too afraid to come down here.”

“You’re right,” Grodek said. “Instead, you will gather up the gems, put them in that leather bag, and tie it to the end of the rope. Then all I have to do is haul them up.”

“Why would I do that for you?”

“Because if you do, I will get in that car and drive away and you will never see me again. But if you don’t, I will go back into town and finish off the job I started on your brother. I’ll take care of that Commissar as well. I don’t want to do it, Pekkala. I know you think the blood of the Romanovs is on your hands, but the truth is that they brought it on themselves. It is the same with your brother. He has brought this on himself. Even so, he does not deserve to die. He believed you when you told him that you could not find the Tsar’s treasure. But I knew you’d get your hands on it eventually, and I was right. In the meantime, I had to keep threatening him. When he came back from the tavern black and blue, it was because I’d been knocking his head against the wall. When I came up with the idea of impersonating Alexei, he told me he couldn’t go through with it. I said I’d kill you if he mentioned my name. He knew I’d do it, too, so he kept his mouth shut. When you found out for yourself that I was here, he was going to warn you. That’s why I had to shut him up. He saved your life, Pekkala. The least you can do is save his.”

“If I gave you the jewels,” shouted Pekkala, “then what? You would leave me here to rot?”

“They’ll find you. When we’re not back in an hour, that Commissar will go looking for that message in the book. He’ll have you out of here before nightfall, but only if you hurry. Five minutes, Pekkala. That is all I’m giving you. If I don’t have those gems by then, I will leave you here to die among the bodies of your masters. With your brother and Kirov dead, there’ll be no one in Sverdlovsk to find you. By the time they figure it out, you’ll be just another body in the dark.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“You don’t,” replied Grodek, “but if you hand me those jewels, I will have what I came for and I won’t hang around here any longer than necessary. Now hurry! Time is running out.”

Pekkala knew he had no choice except to follow Grodek’s instructions.

After groping around on the floor, he eventually found his satchel. He opened the flap, brought out his flashlight, and turned it on.

The mummified and broken faces of the Romanovs loomed out of the dark. They lay as he had left them. Among their rotted clothing, buttons of metal and bone reflected the light.

On his knees before the corpse of the Tsar, Pekkala grabbed the dead man’s tunic in his hands and pulled apart the cloth. It tore easily, sending up a faint cloud of dust as the threads ripped away. Beneath the tunic, Pekkala found a waistcoat made of heavy white cotton, like sailcloth. It looked to him like the kind of protective vest worn by fencers. It was ridged with many rows of stitching. The vest had been fastened with string ties instead of buttons. The knots were tightly done, so he pulled at the strings until they broke. Then, as gently as he could, he laid the Tsar facedown, tore away the tunic, and removed the vest, sliding it up over the skeletal arms. The vest was heavy. He threw it to one side.

“Three minutes, Pekkala!” Grodek called down.

As quickly as he could, Pekkala removed the other vests. They were all of the same construction, each one tailor-made to fit the body of the one who wore it. When the last of them had been removed, Pekkala turned away from the half-naked corpses, their papery flesh shrunk tight across the bones and framed by shreds of decayed clothing.

“One minute, Pekkala!”

He stuffed the vests into the satchel, but only half of them would fit. “You’ll have to throw the satchel down again. There’s more than I can send up in one bag.”

“Tie it to the rope!”

Soon the leather satchel lifted jerkily into the air, scraping against the walls as it rose to the surface.

He heard Grodek laughing.

A moment later, the empty satchel slapped into the dirt, trailing the snake of hemp rope.

Pekkala packed in the remainder of the vests and they were also lifted to the surface.

Far in the distance he heard a gunshot, the sound like a dry twig snapping. It was coming from above ground. Then someone shouted. Anton was calling his name.

Pekkala struggled to his feet.

Now he could hear Grodek’s voice, and Kirov’s too, their shouting interspersed with blasts of gunfire. He squinted up into the patch of light which marked the entrance to the tunnel. There was a scream, and suddenly the light flickered. Pekkala saw what looked like a huge black bird. It was a man, falling. He barely had time to step back before the body slammed into the ground.

Pekkala rushed to where the man lay on his face. He could not tell who it was. Turning over the body, he realized it was Anton. His body had been horribly broken by the fall. Anton’s eyes blinked open. He coughed up blood and gasped. Then he raised one hand and took hold of Pekkala’s arm. Pekkala held on to him, while Anton’s grip became weaker. In those last moments, as his brother’s life unspooled into darkness, Pekkala’s thoughts drifted back to when he and Anton were children, sledding on the woodcutter’s hill. It seemed to Pekkala that he could even hear their laughter, and the whispering of the sleds as they raced over the frozen ground. Finally, Anton’s breath trailed out in a sigh. His fingers slipped away. And the image which had been so clear in Pekkala’s mind only a moment before dissolved into particles of gray, spreading farther and farther apart until finally the picture was lost and he knew that his brother was dead.

Pekkala’s whole body went numb. The pain in his rope-burned hands and from his knees and his shoulders and his back all merged into a ringing emptiness inside him. His heart seemed to be slowing down, like a pendulum swinging to a stop. He felt his whole life circle back towards its source, to that intersecting point at which a person either dies or must begin again. He closed his eyes and, in the blind man’s black, Pekkala felt death spread its arms around him.

Then he heard a whispering in the air. The rope slapped down beside him. “Hold on,” Kirov called to him. “I’ll get you out.”

Once more, Pekkala closed his hands around the gritty hemp. The pain returned, but he forced himself to ignore it. Above, he heard an engine fire up and then he felt himself lifted off the ground. As his feet left the earth, he glanced down at his brother, laid out beside the bodies of the Romanovs, as if he had been with them all along. Then the black walls of the mine shaft closed over them.

A minute later, Kirov dragged him onto level ground.

The first thing Pekkala saw was Grodek. He lay on his stomach, hands cuffed behind his back, the fingers curled like the claws of a dead bird. Blood soaked through the cloth of his shirt.

“You have to stop him,” gasped Grodek. “He says he’s going to kill me.”

Across the field, half buried in the tall grass, stood another car. Its windshield had been shattered by bullets. Steam billowed from the punctured radiator, and the shiny black sides showed silver scabs where bullets had gone through the metal.

Kirov set his foot on Grodek’s back and ground his heel into the bullet wound in his shoulder.