Minutes later, he unclasped his arms and laid his father
back down on the bed, closing the sky-blue eyelids. He kissed Filipp’s
lips and crossed his hands over his chest. Then he went to his father’s
bureau, removed the Grand Duchesses’ letters from the false-bottomed drawer,
and tucked them inside his jacket. He scooped up the contents of his father’s
shrine and placed them in a burlap rucksack. This was all he would take
with him out into the world, into the bombs and bayonets of the approaching
North Korean army.
July 2012
San Francisco, California
The noise of a jet engine screaming overhead woke her.
Natalie gasped and sat up straight. The unfamiliar room lay swathed in
darkness, light-blocking curtains overlapped across the only window.
Her bedside clock read 9:35 p.m. She couldn’t remember
when they’d gone to sleep, but it was far more than an hour ago. As her
eyes adjusted to the darkness, she recognized the forms of the two men:
Constantine in the other bed and Viktor, snoring, slumped in the chair.
First
watch, my ass
, she thought.
She lay back down, angry at Viktor for falling asleep on the
job. Constantine needed the rest, undoubtedly, but Viktor had no excuse
for not waking her to take a second watch if he felt himself drifting
off.
Belial snickered.
He doesn’t trust you, little one.
Are you surprised?
No
, she thought.
I don’t trust me, either. I
talk to you, after all.
She pulled the covers over her head but sleep wouldn’t
return—not as long as that box remained hidden beneath the bed. She had
never been this close to something so important. Other kids traded comic
books and pretended to be X-Men; she carried a beat-up copy of Robert K.
Massie’s
Nicholas and Alexandra
and superimposed their world over her
own. Before Belial and the death camp, there had been St. Petersburg and
the Winter Palace.
If the letters in that box were genuine, it was the find of
the decade. If they were genuine and contained the password, it was the
find of the century. She didn’t care at all about the money. All
the rubles in Russia couldn’t evict Belial from her head. What mattered
was the truth. The ghosts of the Romanov girls had been her childhood
companions, better than anyone real or invented. If they had done
something as shocking as betray their father’s secret, she had to know and she
had to know now.
Natalie flung back the covers and leaned over the side of
the bed, reaching for the box. Her fingers grasped the edge of the cold
metal and pulled. It slid across the floor easily and she lifted it up,
placing it in her lap.
The cold metal felt like snow in her lap. She gripped
the lid and it forced it off, flaking thousands of rust particles onto the
sheets.
Dried blood
, she thought. She blinked twice to clear
the image and glanced across the room—Viktor had heard nothing; his shoulders
remained slack, his breathing constant.
She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of old paper
wafting from the open box. It worked on her like the incense in a censer
swung by a Catholic priest—she felt drunk, transported, part of something
bigger than the four walls that surrounded her. “Belial, this is it,” she
whispered.
On top of the paper lay a velvet bag. She opened the
drawstring and poured the contents into her hand: a belt buckle, a
jeweled hair pin, earrings, a brooch. They emanated waves of light, like
the halos of Byzantine saints.
It was the light that interested Belial.
What have
you got there, little one?
He stretched and peeked out through her
orbital sockets. What he saw made him jump, slamming his head against her
skull.
Where did those come from?
“From the box, you son of a bitch,” she gasped. “Are
they real?”
Yes
.
My brother’s hand has been upon
them. I can feel it.
“Your brother?”
Lucifer.
The angel shuddered and Natalie fought the wave of nausea
rising from her belly. She shoved the trinkets back in their velvet pouch
and pulled the drawstring shut.
Next, she reached for the stack of papers resting below the
pouch. On top there were dozens of postcards: thick sepia-toned
stock printed with photos of the imperial children. They felt raw beneath
her fingertips, jagged and torn like flesh carved by a dull bayonet. A
few receipts lay between the cards, handwritten on napkins and other scraps.
A name, an item or service received, an amount dispensed, a signature.
She couldn’t read the Cyrillic text, but the numbers were clear and the
signature was the same on each one.
Finally, at the bottom of the stack, she found the two
letters she’d glimpsed earlier that day. She opened them gently and
stared at the handwriting.
Olga
, she thought, running her hand
over the first piece of yellowed paper. The Grand Duchess had signed her
name in English, even though the rest of the letter was written in
Russian. Her eyes devoured the unclosed top loop of the “g,” the wide
space between the two last letters of her name, and the period after it—exactly
how she signed letters to her family.
She couldn’t read the Cyrillic words in the body of the
letter—all she could do was decipher the name in the salutation:
Павел. There was only one Pavel to whom
Olga would have written during the last days of her life: the man she loved, a
sailor named Pavel Voronov. Separated by rank, her mother’s disapproval,
and Pavel’s hastily arranged marriage, Olga never fell out of love with
him. She’d loved him enough to bestow her last written words on
him.
No one else in the whole world knows this
, she
thought. Her heart ached for the girl. A realist susceptible to
black fits of depression, Olga understood better than the rest of the girls
what would happen to them. A letter to a married man, a deeply unsuitable
match for a Tsar’s daughter, meant only one thing: Olga knew the end was near.
She had nothing left to lose and nothing else to give.
Such lovely girls
, Belial sobbed.
Why did he
have to kill them?
Natalie blinked away her own tears and reached for the
second letter, clearly written in Marie’s hand. Natalie recognized her
flamboyant signature, with multiple lines criss-crossing beneath her
name. She had signed in Russian, unlike her sister. Marie was the
family’s romantic, the one who dreamed of nothing more than a husband,
children, and family to call her own. Her letter was addressed to
Иван.
Ivan Skorokhodov
, she thought. The guard Marie
fell in love with, the one whose granddaughter swore to a priest that the Grand
Duchess intended to send their family the password.
It’s all true
,
she thought. In grasping at her last chance for happiness, she alienated
her entire family. What, Natalie wondered, had brought Olga and Marie
together to write and smuggle these letters from the Ipatiev House? How
did they even broach the topic of releasing the family fortune between them?
She stared at the indecipherable Cyrillic scrawled on each
page. Which word was the password? Did they specify a bank or a
city? How would the men know where to begin looking for the money?
Would it be a race to see who claimed the cache first, or were there different
passwords for different accounts? Maybe, she thought, each of the girls
had their own account, to dispose of as they pleased. If so, did anyone
know the passwords to the other accounts…Anastasia’s or Tatiana’s?
Her fingers began tracing the edges of Olga’s letter.
At the top left hand corner, they felt a glob of something that was once
gelatinous—a small dab of brown binder’s glue that clung to the paper.
Belial raised his tear-streaked face.
What’s that
on your finger?
“Glue,” she whispered. A nervous tickle ran up and
down her spine.
There wasn’t supposed to be any glue.
By 1918, the family had used up the paper they brought with
them into captivity and resorted to re-using scraps or tearing unused pages
from old diaries and stitching them together to make new blank notebooks, which
they cheerfully presented to each other as Christmas and birthday gifts.
Both Nicholas’s diary and Alexis’s diary for 1917 had hand-sewn pages. It
was possible the girls had ripped pages from a book they brought with them from
Tsarskoe Selo, but those volumes would have been high quality, bound with
vellum and also stitched by hand.
“Fuck,” she swore.
That rat bastard Yuri had lied about everything.
September 1977
San Francisco, California
The boys built the ramp themselves. Grigori knew they
were proud of it—he had supplied the wood and the tools, watching as Yuri and
his friends occupied the backyard shed until nightfall. In constant use
since its completion, the ramp had given rise to the street’s most popular
Saturday activity: watching the boys pedal like mad and fly off the ramp,
saying a prayer they would land safely.
Grigori knew it was never supposed to have happened like
this. Yuri should have been in the capable care of Julia, his mother, and
Alexander, his father. But Grigori’s wife, son, and daughter-in-law had
all been taken away in a single day. One last-minute trip to Stinson
Beach, one misjudged turn on a dark road, and one intoxicated driver hurtling
up the road toward them. Everything vanished in a ball of fire and a
twisted wreck of metal.
Grigori peeled back the curtain of the living room window
and looked for his grandson. He spotted the bright blue bike as it flew up
the curve of the ramp, over…
no, it can’t be
. Grigori squinted to
make the image clearer. There was a small boy huddled on the ground
beside the ramp, shaking with fear.
Yuri’s bike sailed over the cowering child and landed in the
middle of the street. He skidded to a stop in front of three neighborhood
boys who clapped and whistled their approval. Yuri slapped their raised
hands and whooped in triumph. Then he held out his hand.
All three boys reached into their pockets and pressed a bill
into his grandson’s palm. They ignored the sobbing child beside the
ramp. “Want me to go again?” Yuri asked.
Grigori couldn’t watch any more. He jogged out of the
house and knelt beside the crying boy. “Hush,
malchik moy
, it’s
all right. How old are you?” The boy reached out to Grigori,
clasping the older man’s leathery fingers with his baby-soft ones.
“Th—three,” the boy sobbed.
Grigori recognized him, a stepbrother of Yuri’s friend
Bobby. Bobby’s father had remarried that summer, bringing his new wife
and her two small children into his home. “These boys won’t bother you
again,” Grigori said. “Run along home now, son.”
“Yes, sir.” The child scrambled to his feet and
hurried down the sidewalk. Grigori strode into the street and picked up
the ramp, tossing it onto the lawn. He’d get the axe and chop it up as
soon as he dealt with his fifteen-year-old grandson.
“Hey,” one of the other boys called. “Isn’t that your
grandpa?”
Yuri turned, saw Grigori, and spat into the street.
“What the hell do
you
want?”
Grigori fixed Yuri with the stare his own father Filipp had
used whenever he failed to lock the chicken coop at night. “Give me that
money,” Grigori said.
Yuri scowled. “What money?”
“The money you just put in your pocket. You’re not to
terrorize that poor child anymore, do you understand? All of you.”
The other boys exchanged a wary look and began to back
away. “You’re busted,” one of them hissed, picking up his bike and
pedaling for home. The two others followed.
“Don’t go with them,” Grigori said.
“I’ll do what I want,” Yuri snapped. He pivoted his
bike and put a foot on the pedal. “You’re not my father.”
Grigori gripped Yuri’s arm with all his strength, white
knuckles holding the boy in place. “Have I not taught you to protect
those younger and weaker than us?”
“Great job,” Yuri said, nodding his head at Grigori’s tight
grip. “Now let go.”
“Our family is different. You know this, Yuri.”
Yuri bit his ruddy lip and then shook his head. “God
damn it, old man, enough with the sacred-mission bullshit. No one
cares. I know I don’t.”
“You don’t mean that,” Grigori said. He set his jaw
but on the inside, his heart fell like a stone hurled into a pond. His
grandson still pretended to know nothing of war, death, and the Soviet
menace. How had he failed to make Yuri understand? “You know about
the letters, Yuri, but you do not know what they mean. When I tell you
what happened, you will care. You will see we have avoided death only by
following the path laid out for us.”
“What about my dad? Did the letters kill him, too?”
“No,” Grigori said softly. “Your father did not know
the truth yet. It was a car accident, nothing more.”
Yuri’s lower lip quivered. “He always said you were
crazy. You didn’t know that, did you? Every time he came back from
your house, he’d shake his head and tell us how batshit crazy his old man was.”
Grigori lowered his head. “Your father and I did not
see eye to eye. But he understood our purpose. He was ready to
accept it.”
“Well, I’m not! I just want to ride bikes with my
friends! None of your stupid shit matters anymore. Just leave me
alone!”
Grigori held on, squeezing his grandson’s arm like a ripe
fruit. “The day will come when you must decide where you stand.
With the evil, or against it.”
“Fuck off, old man.”