The Romanov Cross: A Novel (34 page)

“Do you want to wait a while,” Lantos asked, “or start removing the clothes?”

Slater squeezed the deacon’s shoulder, pressed the abdomen, flexed a booted foot, and said, “We can go ahead. The clothing may be stiffer than the skin.”

“Then pail and scalpels it is.”

Everything they would need for the autopsy was already in the room, from surgical instruments to disposal bins, and in the small freezer in the corner they had already stored the
in situ
specimens from the graveyard; these would remain the cleanest and purest samples of all, transported back to the AFIP untouched.

“You’ll have to be careful with that paper,” Lantos said, touching the prayer of absolution that the corpse still held in one hand. “It could disintegrate.”

Slater knew she was right, and when he separated the scroll from the dead flesh that held it, he gently laid it aside on one of the metal trays arrayed on the counter behind him. As if it were a living creature, hiding from a predator, the paper curled even more tightly in on itself.

Lantos went about removing the icon clutched in the deacon’s other hand, but even that was dicey. “He doesn’t seem to want to let go,” she said, giving it another tug and finally freeing it. Glancing at it through her goggles, she said, “And now I can see why.”

She turned it over for Slater to see. It was a picture of the Virgin and Child, preserved enough to show a faint red in her veil and pale blue in the gown she wore. It was Byzantine in appearance, the two figures lacking all perspective, but on the forehead and shoulders of the Virgin there were three diamonds sparkling in the light of the overhead lamp. “We’re rich,” Lantos joked as Slater admired the brilliance of the stones.

“Wait’ll Kozak sees this,” he remarked, placing it beside the paper. “I’m sure he’ll be able to tell us all about it.”

But Lantos, like a busy tailor, was already snipping away at the black cassock, cutting long strips down the length of the body, then peeling them off like Band-Aids. As each strip was removed, she used the foot pedal to open the refuse bin and drop it in. When the fabric was all gone, she and Slater together pulled the boots off the deacon’s feet and dropped them in the bin, too. They landed with a clunk.

The body, completely naked now, lay on the table, its arms still stiffly in place, crossed just below the chest. There were puncture wounds where the aerosol drill had suctioned up the initial specimens, and Slater could not but be reminded of the wounds on the body of Christ, especially as the young deacon was otherwise almost beatific. His long blond locks had thawed sufficiently to brush his shoulders again, and his skin, nearly hairless, was a marmoreal white, like the Pietà. His blue eyes were wide open.

Taking the digital camera from the counter behind him, Slater took several shots of the body, first, full-figure, then close-ups of the face and other areas where the first incisions had been made. Next, he checked the weight as it registered on the table scale, and noted it down by speaking aloud: a voice-activated recorder was running in the room. When he was done, Lantos held up the body block, a wedge of firm foam rubber, and said, “Okay, how about you do the heavy lifting, and I’ll put it under?”

As Slater raised the upper half of the body from the table, the deacon’s eyes seemed to bore into his own, questioning these terrible liberties being taken with him. Lantos jammed the block under the small of the cadaver’s back. When Slater eased the body down again, its head and arms now fell backwards, while its chest was stretched and lifted up for easier dissection. Lantos brushed her hands together, as if to say that’s that.

“What’s your choice?” she said to Slater. “Y or T or straight down the middle?”

There were several standard methods of opening a corpse, but for Slater’s purposes in this instance, he had already decided that the first choice was the best. “We’ll do a Y,” he said, “so we can get the maximum exposure of the neck and respiratory tract.”

Lantos nodded, her mop of frizzy hair looking positively electrified under the high-intensity lamp. Handing Slater the shears, she waited patiently while he made two large and deep incisions starting at the top of each of the deacon’s shoulders and running down the front of the chest, all the way to the sternum where they met. Once there, he continued cutting straight down the rest of the body, deviating just enough to the left to pass around the navel, and stopping only when he bumped up to the pubic bone. Because the body had not completely thawed, the skin crackled as the blades did their work.

Slater wished he had remembered to put on some music. It helped with focus.

“Very neatly done,” Lantos said, her voice muffled by her face mask.

And it was. Even Slater would concede as much; the firmness of
the flesh made the cutting more precise. And though autopsies always involved less blood than might be expected—with no cardiac activity, it was only gravity that affected the pressure and flow—he was still surprised at just how little fluid was present. The blood remaining must have crystallized, he thought, or maybe evaporated … but that was before he put the shears away and, with Lantos pulling from the other side, split open the torso like cracking a pumpkin. Then he could see why.

It looked like a blowtorch had been applied to the deacon’s entrails. Beneath the rib cage, everything appeared blackened and engorged. It reminded Slater of a fire victim he had autopsied years ago, during a stint in Sierra Leone.

“This was not an easy death,” Lantos said, in a more somber tone. “This poor guy died in agony.”

Slater had no doubt about that, either. Taking the bone saw, he cut through the ribs on both sides of the chest, then, with Lantos helping, lifted the sternum and the ribs, still attached, free of the cavity, and placed the whole section in a shallow silver tray.

For the benefit of the audio record, he announced what he had just done.

Then he turned around to survey the unobstructed viscera of the young deacon.

It was as if the man had swallowed a ball of hot tar. The protective cells and cilia lining the bronchial tubes had been razed as if by a prairie fire, and the lungs looked like eggplants, bruised a deep and livid purple. The pericardial sac enclosing the heart resembled a sheet of torn, black crepe paper, and the heart itself, visible through the holes, was as gnarled and dark as a hand grenade.

“Major necrotic damage apparent to nearly all major organ systems. Evidence of both viral and bacteriological pathogenesis.”

“It looks like a bomb went off inside him,” Lantos observed, readying a syringe to draw one of many blood samples to come.

“Not a bomb,” Slater said, “but a storm. A cytokine storm.” The Spanish flu was a diabolical machine, one that hijacked the victim’s own immunological response and turned it against him. Under normal
circumstances, the cytokines—soluble, hormonelike proteins—acted as messengers among the cells of the immune system, helping to target microbial infections like viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi, and directing the antibodies and killer cells to attack them. But with the Spanish flu, the whole system went into overdrive, the cytokines targeting everything in sight, the antibodies sticking like glue to anything they came into contact with, the killer cells blasting everything in range. It was like a wild shoot ’em up, devastating every cell in the body, compromising every defense mechanism, until the victim ultimately drowned in an overwhelming tide of his own mucus and virus-choked blood.

“And such a young man,” Lantos said, slicing through the heart sac with the tip of her scalpel. Speaking up for the recorder, she added, “Drawing blood samples from the pulmonary veins and inferior vena cava, although what’s left is barely liquid. Thawing is incomplete. Also checking the pulmonary artery, where,” she said, leaning close for a better look, “there appears to have been no clotting.”

Youth, Slater reflected, had been a detriment when it came to the Spanish flu; for that matter, so was a healthy constitution. The stronger the subject, the more powerful his or her immunological response would have been to the disease—and the more powerful the response, the more lethal it was, in turn, when the disease sent the protective mechanisms spinning out of control. As a result, the Spanish flu was most devastating to the young, able-bodied soldiers shipping off to France in 1918, then to the young doctors and nurses who came to their aid. The first responders, as it were. Infants and the elderly, the already infirm, were, ironically, less likely to die from the disease than those in the vigorous prime of life.

Slater was inevitably reminded, as he went about his grisly work, of his night in the medical archives, when he had first studied the slides of the Spanish flu taken from the young doughboy. The soldier’s body had been ravaged just as this one had been, his agonizing death had been the same as the Russian deacon’s. The flu had made no distinctions as it cut its swath through the peoples of the globe.

Gradually, the vials and test tubes and specimen jars began to fill
with the samples taken from the lungs and heart, the trachea and spleen, the liver and pancreas and stomach. And when that was done, Lantos reached under the corpse and pulled out the foam block. The body settled back, with an audible expulsion of air, as if relieved.

But only for a minute or two.

As Slater lifted the head, the long blond hair hanging in tendrils over his glove, Lantos put the block under the back of the neck. With his bloody scalpel, Slater made an incision behind one ear, and traced a path over the crown of the head, ending at a point just behind the other ear. Using the hair as a handle, he pulled the scalp away from the skull in two nearly equal flaps, one draping itself over the front of the face, the other hanging down in back. The sound reminded him of the Velcro being ripped apart in the tent flaps.

“You getting tired?” Lantos asked. “We could take a break.”

But Slater wanted to press on. His stamina was not what it was, and he feared that he could have a malarial chill at any moment; better to keep at it while his hand was reasonably steady and take a break only if he had to. “I’ll take the Stryker saw,” he said, and Lantos handed it to him. The air behind his face mask was warm and uncomfortably moist.

As she made sure that the skin and stray hairs stayed clear of the blade, Slater methodically sawed a circular cap, the size of a beret, from the very top of the skull. Once the cut was complete, he put the saw down and jiggled the section he had cut. In a couple of spots, it still held firm to the rest of the head, and he had to go back with his scalpel and pry the connective tissue or bone loose. If he were back in med school, he’d have just earned a C.

Then, as Lantos held a clean basin under the back of the head, he lifted the cap free and she put it out of the way.

The brain was now completely exposed; the
dura mater
, normally white, was the color of strong tea. Slater picked up a pair of forceps, his wet fingers almost letting them slip, as Eva took the lid off a container of formalin—a 15-percent solution of formaldehyde gas in buffered water that would be used to preserve the brain samples long enough to get them back to the labs in Washington—and held it out.

Suddenly, the overhead light waned, then brightened, then waned again.

Slater’s gaze met Lantos’s.

The light flickered.

It was the generator, he thought. It couldn’t be anything else.

The light went out, then on, then out again.

The backup generator was kicking in, sensing a break in the current, and coming online. His eyes flew to the freezer vault on the floor of the chamber—the one containing the first specimens taken in the open grave. But then he noticed Lantos looking through the plastic barriers of the chamber and out at the tent walls, which appeared to be undulating in the wind … but undulating
in color
.

What the hell?

The flaps of the main lab area flew open, and through the distortion of the plastic sheathing, Slater could make out a figure—moving small and fast—toward the autopsy chamber. Nika.

“It’s okay!” she hollered, even as Slater shouted, “Don’t come in here!” The biohazard warning insignia—an orange triangle—should have been enough, but Nika was the kind of woman who might race right through it.

“What’s going on?” Slater said.

“It’s the northern lights!”

“I mean what’s happening to the power!”

“The northern lights!” she repeated, impatiently waiting just outside the chamber. “The aurora borealis! It screws up the electrical fields every time.”

The walls of the tent were glowing a faint gold.

“You go,” Lantos said, “I’ll finish up in here.”

“Absolutely not,” Slater replied, but Lantos held firm.

“We’ve done all we can do in one session, anyway,” she said.

“We’ve got the brainpan to excavate.”

“It can wait,” she replied. “To be honest, Frank, your hand isn’t as steady as it needs to be. I was wondering when to tell you. You need to take a rest.”

Slater was surprised that she would say so, but he was willing to concede that she might be right. He’d been pushing it, and any minute he might have made a terrible mistake. He’d made the right choice in recruiting her for this mission.

“Thanks,” he said. “Point taken.”

After warning Nika to wait for him outside the tent, he stripped off the hazmat suit and protective gear, depositing them all in the safety bin. Then, after a quick scrubdown in the lab, he grabbed his coat off the hook by the entrance and joined her in the fresh air.

The sky was still swarming with strange shapes and colors. Taking his hand like an enthusiastic kid at the zoo, Nika tried to drag him down toward the colony gates, but first Slater had to make a detour to the generator shed, the snow and ice crunching under his boots, to make sure the machinery was still functioning. Rudy the Coast Guardsman was already inside, keeping a close watch on the twin turbines and their myriad gauges.

“Has the current been uninterrupted?” Slater asked urgently.

“Except for a couple of hiccups, and for no more than a second or two each time,” Rudy replied, “it’s been okay.”