the Romanov Prophecy (2004) (10 page)

“Rasputin was such an enigma,” Lord said. “A Siberian peasant who could directly influence the Tsar of All Russia. A charlatan with imperial power.”

“Many would debate that he was a charlatan. A large number of his prophecies came true. He said the tsarevich would not die of hemophilia, and he didn’t. He foretold that the Empress Alexandra would see his birthplace in Siberia, and she did—on the way to Tobolsk as a prisoner. He also said that if a member of the royal family killed him, the tsar’s family would not survive two years. Yussoupov married a royal niece, murdered the
starets
in December 1916, and the Romanov family was slaughtered nineteen months later. Not bad for a charlatan.”

Lord was not impressed by holy men with a supposed conduit to God. His father had claimed to be one. Thousands had flocked to revivals to hear him shout the word and heal the sick. Of course, all that was forgotten hours later when one of the choir women arrived at his room. He’d read a lot about Rasputin and how he had seduced women the same way.

He flushed the thoughts of his father away and said, “It’s never been proven that any of Rasputin’s predictions were memorialized while he was alive. Most came later from his daughter, who seemed to believe it was her life’s destiny to vindicate her father’s image. I’ve read her book.”

“That may be true, until today.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alexandra’s note talks about the royal family dying within two years. The sheet was dated in her own hand, October 28, 1916. That was two months
before
Rasputin was murdered. Apparently, he told her something. A prophecy, she said. And she memorialized it. So you have a historically important document in your possession, Mr. Lord.”

He’d not considered the full implications of his discovery, but the professor was right.

“Do you intend to go to St. Petersburg?” Pashenko asked.

“I didn’t before. But I think I will now.”

“A good decision. Your credentials can gain you access to parts of the archives none of us have been able to see. Maybe there will be more to find, especially since now you know what to look for.”

“That’s the whole problem, Professor. I really don’t know what I’m looking for.”

The academician seemed unconcerned. “Not to worry. I have a feeling you will do just fine.”

THIRTEEN

ST. PETERSBURG
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14
12:30 PM

Lord settled into the archive, located on the fourth floor of a post-revolutionary building that faced busy Nevsky Prospekt. He’d managed to book two seats on a nine
AM
Aeroflot shuttle from Moscow. The flight, though smooth, was nerve-racking, budget cuts and a lack of trained personnel taking their toll on the Russian national airline. But he was in a hurry and didn’t have time to drive or take the train for the eight-hundred-mile round trip.

Ilya Zivon had been waiting in the Volkhov’s lobby at seven
AM
as promised, ready for another day of escorting. The Russian had been surprised when Lord told him to drive to the airport and had wanted to call Taylor Hayes for instructions. But Lord informed him that Hayes was out of town and had left no telephone number. Unfortunately, the return flight for the afternoon was full, so he’d reserved two tickets on the overnight train from St. Petersburg back to Moscow.

Whereas Moscow projected an air of reality, with dirty streets and unimaginative structures, St. Petersburg was a fairy-tale city of baroque palaces, cathedrals, and canals. While the rest of the nation slept under a dull gray sameness, here pink granite and yellow and green stucco facades thrilled the eyes. He recalled how the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol had described the city:
Everything in it breathed falsehood.
Then and now the city seemed busy with itself, its great architects all Italian, the layout reflecting a distinctive European air. It had served as the capital until the communists took over in 1917, and there was serious discussion of moving the center of power back once the new tsar was coronated.

The traffic from the airport south of town had been light for a weekday morning in a city of five million. His commission credentials had at first been questioned, but a call to Moscow had verified his identity, and he was given access to the archive’s entire collection, including the Protective Papers.

The St. Petersburg depository, though small, contained a wealth of firsthand writings from Nicholas, Alexandra, and Lenin. And just as Semyon Pashenko had said, the tsar and tsarina’s diaries and letters were all there, taken from Tsarskoe Selo and Yekaterinburg after the royal family was murdered.

What sprang from the pages was a portrait of two people clearly in love. Alexandra wrote with the flair of a romantic poet, her writings strewn with expressions of physical passion. Lord spent two hours thumbing through boxes of her correspondence, more to get a feel as to how this complex and intense woman composed her thoughts than to find anything.

It was midafternoon when he came across a set of diaries from 1916. The bound volumes were stuffed into a musty cardboard container labeled
N & A
. He was always amazed at how Russians stored records. So meticulous about their creation, yet so careless in their preservation. The diaries were stacked in chronological order, inscriptions in the front of each clothbound book revealing most to be gifts from Alexandra’s daughters. A few had swastikas embroidered on the cover. A little strange to see the image, but he knew that before Hitler adopted the design it was an ancient mark of well-being that Alexandra used liberally.

He thumbed through several volumes and found nothing beyond the usual rants of two love-torn mates. Then he came upon two stacks of correspondence. From his briefcase he obtained the photocopy of Alexandra’s letter to Nicholas dated October 28, 1916. Comparing the copy to the originals, he discovered that the handwriting, along with the frilly border of flowers and leaves, was identical.

Why had this one letter had been secreted away in Moscow?

Perhaps more of the Soviet purge of tsarist history, he assumed. Or simple paranoia. But what made this single letter so important that it was sealed in a pouch with instructions not to open for twenty-five years? One thing was certain. Semyon Pashenko was right. He clearly possessed a historically important document.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon reviewing what he could find on Lenin. It was nearly four o’clock when he first noticed the man. He was short and thin, his anxious eyes watery. He was dressed in a baggy beige suit and, for some reason, Lord more than once thought the stranger’s gaze lingered longer than it should. But Zenov sat nearby, on guard, and he chalked his suspicions up to paranoia and told himself to calm down.

Near five o’clock he finally found something, again in Lenin’s own hand. Ordinarily it would mean nothing, but Yussoupov’s name drew his attention, his mind cross-referencing with the Moscow note.

Felix Yussoupov lives on the rue Gutenburg near Bois de Boulogne. He associates with the large population of Russian aristocracy that has invaded Paris. The fools think the Revolution will die and that they will shortly return to their position and wealth. I am told that one former dowager keeps a suitcase packed and ready, thinking she will be leaving soon for home. My agents report reading correspondence between Yussoupov and Kolya Maks. At least three letters. This is a concern. I realize now the mistake we made relying on the Ural Soviet to handle the executions. The developing reports are becoming troublesome. We already have one woman under arrest who claims to be Anastasia. She came to our attention because of her constant letters to King George V, pleading for his help in escaping. The Ural Committee reports that two of the tsar’s daughters are being hidden in a remote village. They have identified them as Maria and Anastasia. I have dispatched agents to check. Another woman has appeared in Berlin and conclusively asserts that she is Anastasia. Informants report that she bears a striking resemblance to the daughter.

This is all troubling. If not for the fear I harbor about what happened at Yekaterinburg, I would dismiss these reports as nonsense. But I am afraid there is more to it. We should have killed Yussoupov with the rest of the bourgeoisie. That arrogant ass is at the center of something. He openly hates our government. His wife has Romanov blood and some have talked of a restoration with him as tsar. That is foolish dreaming by foolish men. The Motherland is gone to them, this much they should clearly understand.

He finished the rest of the page but there was no further reference to Felix Yussoupov. Certainly Lenin was concerned that Yurovsky, the man in charge of the Romanovs’ execution at Yekaterinburg, had filed a false report about what had happened.

Were eleven people murdered in that cellar, or only nine?

Or perhaps eight?

Who knew?

Lord thought about the royal pretenders who’d surfaced by 1920. Lenin referred to a woman from Berlin. She came to be known as Anna Anderson and was the most celebrated of all the subsequent pretenders. Movies and books detailed her story, and for decades she basked in a celebrity limelight, steadfastly maintaining, until her death in 1984, that she was the tsar’s youngest daughter. But DNA testing on tissue that survived her death conclusively proved that she was not related to the Romanovs in any way.

There was also a persuasive account circulated through Europe in the 1920s that Alexandra and her daughters were actually not murdered at Yekaterinburg, but instead had been spirited away before Nicholas and Alexie were shot. The women were supposedly held in Perm, a provincial town not far from Yekaterinburg. Lord remembered a book,
The File on the Tsar,
which went into great detail trying to prove that assertion. But later documents that the authors had no access to—not to mention the subsequent location of the royal bones—demonstrated conclusively that Alexandra and at least three of her daughters had died at Yekaterinburg.

It was all so confusing, hard to ever know what was real and what had been concocted. He agreed with Churchill.
Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

From his briefcase he retrieved another copy he’d made in the Moscow archive. It was attached to a note written in longhand by Lenin. He’d not shown this to either Hayes or Semyon Pashenko because it really wasn’t material. Until now.

It was a typed excerpt from an affidavit given by one of the Yekaterinburg guards, dated October 1918, three months after the Romanov murders.

What had he stumbled upon? And why had no one found any of this before? But he kept reminding himself that only in the past few years had access to the archives been opened. The Protective Papers were still closed to the vast majority of researchers, and the sheer chaos of Russian record keeping made finding anything a matter of luck.

He needed to get back to Moscow and report to Taylor Hayes. It was possible that Stefan Baklanov’s claim could be brought into question. There might be a pretender out there, someone with a bloodline closer to Nicholas II than Baklanov’s. Sensationalist journalism and popular fiction had long proclaimed a pretender’s existence. One movie studio had even released to millions of children a full-length animated feature on Anastasia that postulated her survival. But just as with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa, the record was heavy on speculation and devoid of conclusive evidence.

Or was it?

Hayes hung up the phone and tried to control his temper. He’d traveled from Moscow to Green Glade for both business and relaxation. He’d left word for Lord at the hotel that he’d been called out of town and that he should continue in the archives, promising to get in touch with Lord by midafternoon. Intentionally, he did not include any means of location. But Ilya Zivon had been ordered to keep a close eye on Lord and to report everything.

“That was Zivon,” he said. “Lord spent the day in St. Petersburg going through the archives.”

“You were unaware of this?” Lenin asked.