“Go with God,” she whispered, placing the letters between
the layers of cloth folded in the nuns’ basket. “May He have mercy on our
souls.”
June 2012
Daly City, California
The old man rolled his head to the side and looked longingly
at the carafe of water on his nightstand. He had spoken for nearly an
hour and it still hadn’t been enough to make his grandson understand what he
must do. If only he hadn’t waited until he was so tired…he should have
known his breath would fail him when he needed it most.
“Yuri,” he said, lifting a withered arm and reaching for the
carafe. His grandson came around the side of the bed. Grigori
watched him fill the glass to the rim, something the nurses never did.
They knew, as Yuri did not, that a full glass of water was too heavy for many
patients to lift.
“
Dedushka
,” Yuri said softly. “Who else knows
about this?”
Grigori ignored the question, reaching for the glass and
holding it to his lips. Was it too late, he wondered, to take back what
he had just said? He thought of the quick flash he’d seen in Yuri’s eyes
and knew he had just made a terrible mistake.
Grigori cradled the empty cup against his chest. “No
one.”
“Are you sure it’s still there?”
“I have told you all I know,” he lied.
A hard lump formed at the back of his throat. He still
did not understand why their family had been chosen to carry this burden.
His father, Filipp, said the Tsar’s daughter had touched his hand. The
Tsar was God’s representative on earth, holy and anointed and divine.
Surely anything his daughter touched would become holy, too. He believed
that when he saw his father in Heaven, Filipp’s right hand would glow with the
same golden halo painted around the heads of Orthodox saints.
“All this time,” Yuri breathed, moving from the bed to the
window. He pinched open the blinds and flickered his eyes across the
terraced hills, stacked with low-slung houses in faded yellow and green.
“It’s been there waiting for me.”
“No,” Grigori said. “It is not yours.”
“It will be,” Yuri snapped, lower lip jutting out like it
had when he was a boy, refused a foil-wrapped sweet before dinner.
“My father…he should never have kept it.”
“But he did,” Yuri said, “and now they’re all dead.
Why shouldn’t I have what they left behind?”
It is as I feared
, Grigori thought.
He will
sell the soul of an entire country and destroy what ninety years of revolution
and war could not.
“Yuri, do you not see? The gulags, the partnership
with England during the war, the incursion into Korea…what do you think the
Soviets were looking for? Your great-grandfather and I only survived
because we did
not
reveal their secret. Death has followed them
everywhere. If you break our silence, it will come for you, too.”
His grandson turned from the blinds with a half-moon
smile. “You always believed that horseshit, didn’t you?”
Grigori released the muscles in his neck, allowing his head
to sag onto the pillow. He could not bear to watch the greed devour his
grandson before his very eyes.
The names may change
, he thought,
but
evil never dies
. “I am afraid for you, Yuri.”
“Don’t be,” Yuri said. “I’ll take care of
everything.”
Dim fog light filtered through the plastic blinds, washing
the sterile room in lifeless gray. Grigori closed his eyes to block it
out.
Forgive me
, he prayed to the soul of his father,
for what
I have just unleashed upon the world.
July 2012
San Francisco, California
Natalie Brandon pulled the flask out of her jacket pocket
and looked for a place to pour the contents. Her sister’s office was
devoid of any useful drinkware, so she emptied the pencil cup over the trash
and filled it with a generous helping of bourbon. She looked down into
the cup, where wooden shavings and broken pencil tips floated like bits of
shipwreck in an amber sea. “Ahoy, matey,” she said.
The sour mash swirled over her tongue and she held it there,
letting the alcohol soak into the skin of her mouth—it worked faster that
way. When she swallowed, she looked up at the clock. Beth was
late.
She slapped a bundle of index cards onto the desk, next to a
framed photo of two little girls in sundresses. The taller girl, a
blonde, smiled brightly to reveal an enormous gap where her two front teeth
used to be. The smaller girl, a brunette, held her hand up to the camera
with a face vacant of all expression. On her palm sat a fat, furry spider
with one leg raised in greeting. “Medusa,” Natalie whispered.
She stared at the pale smear meant to represent her
face. Her eyes never photographed well; they were too light, without
enough contrast against her skin. Combined with her long, dark hair, they
made her look like a ghost.
In the photo, she wore a pink Strawberry Shortcake
dress. The photographer had cut her off at the waist, but she knew
exactly what else she’d worn that day: red tights and Buster Brown
shoes. She could still remember the Kix she’d eaten that morning, the cream
cheese sandwiches her mother served for lunch, and every word of dialogue from
that night’s episode of
The Muppet Show
.
It seemed so harmless at first—a little girl who could
recite Shakespeare from memory and calculate the grocery bill to the penny
before the cart reached a register. But everything changed in fourth
grade. One minute she was standing at the chalkboard in Mrs. Bradley’s
class, diagramming a sentence. The next, a searing pain ripped through
her brain. She felt something moving beneath her skull, something with a
human form and enormous, feather-covered wings.
The creature struggled to unfold itself, pressing its wings
against her occipital lobe until she thought it would split open. When
the creature realized her skull was the obstacle, it raised its head and looked
at her from behind her own face. “I have things I need to show you, but I
have to open my wings to do it. Will you let me?”
She nodded. Her body fell in a faint at the chalkboard
and the next thing she knew, she and the creature floated side by side above
it. “My name is Belial,” he said. “I live inside you now.”
“Are you an angel?” she asked.
“Look around you and then tell me what you think I
am.” He waved his arm and suddenly they were in a place where strange
gray snow fell from the sky. A chimney spewed black smoke and men trudged
past her wearing their pajamas. They were tired and they asked to stop,
but another man in black whipped them until they moved again. One of them
fell down and the man in black whipped him until the pajamas fell away and
something red came out of his mouth. Then the man in black turned around
and looked straight at her. She screamed in terror and woke up in a
hospital bed, choking on the taste of flesh and ashes.
The doctors couldn’t explain it. They told her parents
that her heart rate had fallen to 29 beats per minute, resulting in a
coma. They didn’t say anything about Belial. True to his word, the
angel had taken up residence in her head. He perched in the space between
her brain tissue and her skull. It hurt when he moved and every time he
shifted his wings, the tips of his feathers pricked her brain like
needles. When she tried to explain this to the doctor, he shook his head
and said it was impossible. She told him to look for Belial on an X-ray,
but he found the wrong thing—all he wanted to talk about was something called
the limbic system.
Her parents shuffled her between psychiatrists,
psychologists, and neurologists but none of them could find Belial either, so
she gave up and stopped talking altogether. She simply sat,
uncommunicative, until they let her go. Some diagnosed her as autistic;
others said she was an early-onset paranoid delusional schizophrenic.
They pumped her full of olanzapine and sent her home, leaving her embarrassed
parents full of apologies for their daughter’s refusal to “get well.”
When she was fourteen, her parents died in a car
accident. Natalie missed the funeral because she set the alarm clock for
p.m. instead of a.m. Black-clad Beth barged in afterward and demanded
that Natalie recite the list of Plantagenet kings in sequential order.
When Natalie mixed up Henry III and Edward III, Beth flushed every pill in the
house and moved back home.
The three of them—she, Beth and Belial—eventually developed
a comfortable working relationship. Belial dispensed angelic wisdom and
acute physical pain in equal measure. Beth dosed her with cognitive
therapy, and she herself had learned that alcohol was by far the most effective
means of making it all just go away. There had been several occasions
when alcohol failed her, but only one that had convinced Beth to take out a
life insurance policy for each of them. The puffy white lines on her
forearm still itched sometimes, as if the skin beneath them fit too tightly.
Natalie looked at the clock again. It was after two,
which meant Beth’s lunch date had gone well. She refilled the pencil cup
and sipped as slowly as she could until the familiar clomp of Beth’s shoes
echoed in the hallway.
Tall, thin, and blonde, Beth Brandon swept into the room on
a breeze of Dolce & Gabbana perfume. “That’s it,” she said, tossing
her tote bag into a chair. “No more blind dates with guys in the computer
science department.”
“What happened?”
“He ate sushi with his hands.” She stopped, staring at
the
Yale, Class of ‘95
mug in Natalie’s hands. “Nat, what are you
doing?”
“Drinking whiskey.”
“Out of my pencil cup? That’s disgusting. Why
didn’t you drink it from the flask?”
“Whiskey needs to breathe, Beth.”
“So does your liver.”
Natalie shrugged. “Sometimes I eat sushi with my
hands.”
“You’re different.”
She’d heard those words all her life, even from Beth, who
should have had the guts to tell her to just use the goddamn chopsticks.
She raised the cup and drained it in a single gulp.
Beth sighed. “I’m sorry, babe, I didn’t mean it.
Just put down the booze. How are my talking points coming?”
Natalie tapped the bundle of index cards on the desk.
As Beth’s research assistant, it was her job to track down the information Beth
needed for her books, speeches, and lecture notes. Rosemont University
paid her just enough to stay afloat, and having Beth as a boss kept her from
having to explain Belial to a real employer. “You’re covered,” Natalie
said. “You’re boring, but you’re covered.”
“Boring will pay for Seth’s next year of school. The
chancellor said he’d put me on the top pay grade if this book performs.”
“The chancellor’s an asshole. He’s going to pass you
up for department chair.”
Beth shrugged. “He thinks I’m too young.”
“Change his mind.”
“Nat, please. This is my career. Let me handle
it my own way.”
“Your way sucks,” Natalie said, slamming the cup onto Beth’s
desk. “If you want the chancellor’s attention, you know how to get it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“Come on, Nat, we talked about this before I wrote the
book. It’s not the right time. Not this book. Not now.”
“I told you it exists. Why won’t you believe me?”
Beth blinked twice. “I do believe you.”
“You only blink when you’re bullshitting people.”
“Jesus, Nat, are we back to this again? No one has
ever found any evidence that there’s money out there with the tsar’s name on
it. If there were, someone would have talked by now. We would have
found a paper trail. Entire books have been written about this.”
“Book,” Natalie corrected. “And he followed the wrong
trail.”
“I’m a not a treasure hunter. This book is about Nicholas
II, not his money.”
“But Clarke, Lovell, Fallows, Holtzmann…they were all
looking for an account with the tsar’s name on it, something with deposits made
before the abdication. Belial said that’s not how it happened.”
“How did it happen, then? Did he tell you that?”
“No,” Natalie grumbled, looking down at her untied
shoes. “I don’t think he knows.”
Don’t I?
Belial snickered. He flicked his wings
and the movement sent bolts of lightning shooting through her skull. She
sucked in her breath and gritted her teeth.
“Listen, kiddo,” Beth said, “I’d love for you to be right,
but I can’t risk my reputation on something you don’t know. The book is
written…this is the press conference announcing its release, for God’s sake!”
Beth sank into a folding chair next to the desk and Natalie stared at her
until she relented. “Don’t look at me like that. You know as well
as I do that Stalin tore that country apart looking for extra money. If
there were any tsarist accounts left, he would have found them.”
“Are you saying Stalin is smarter than we are?”
“I’m saying you need to get a grip and admit how improbable
it is.”
Natalie held out her wrists. “As improbable as this?”
Beth shivered. “There’s only so much I can take on
faith, Nat.”
“Belial said there’s a password. Do you remember that
confession I found? The one that said Marie planned to give the password
away to the guard she’d fallen in love with?”
Beth slipped off her jacket and hung it over the back of a
chair. “I thought we went over this. There isn’t one shred of
evidence to prove Marie went through with it. It’s not mentioned in any
of the Romanov diaries, in statements from the guards, or the Sokolov
report.”
“That guard might not have talked, but his granddaughter
did. On her deathbed, she swore to a priest that Grand Duchess Marie told
her grandfather how to retrieve Nicholas’s money. There was a password,
she said, that Marie had sent him in a letter.”