The Wolf's Hour (8 page)

TWO – The White Palace

1

“Mikhail!” the woman called, across time and distance. “Mikhail, where are you?” In another moment Elana Gallatinov saw the kite, and then her green-eyed gaze found her son, standing out at the far edge of the field almost to the deep woods. On this day, the twenty-first of May in the year 1918, the breeze blew from the east, and brought with it a faint smell of gunpowder.

“Come home!” she told the little boy, and watched as he waved and began to reel the kite’s line in. The kite dipped like a white fish. Behind the tall, black-haired woman whose skin was the shade of porcelain stood the Gallatinov manor, a two-storied house of brown Russian stones with a red, sharply angled roof and chimneys. Large sunflowers grew around the house, and there was a gravel driveway that went from the house through the iron gates and connected with the dirt road to the nearest village, Moroc, six miles to the south. The closest town of any size was Minsk, over fifty miles north on bad roads.

Russia was a huge country, and the house of General Fyodor Gallatinov was a mote of dust on the head of a pin. But the fourteen acres of meadow and woods was the Gallatinov world, and had been so since Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne on March 2, 1917. And with the Czar’s final words in his signed statement of abdication-“May the Lord God help Russia!”-the motherland had turned into a killer of her children.

But the young Mikhail knew nothing of politics, of Red Russians fighting White Russians and cold-minded men named Lenin and Trotsky. He knew nothing, mercifully, of whole villages razed to the ground by rival factions less than a hundred miles from where he stood reeling in a silken kite; he knew nothing of famine, and women and children twitching as they were hanged from trees, and pistol barrels splattered with brains. He knew his father was a hero in a war, that his mother was beautiful, that his sister sometimes pinched his cheeks and called him a ragamuffin, and that today was the day of a long-anticipated picnic. He got the kite down, wrestling with the wind, and then he clasped it gently in his arms and ran across the field toward his mother.

Elana, though, knew the things that her son did not. She was thirty-seven years old, wearing a long white dress of springtime linen, and gray had begun to creep back from her forehead and at her temples. Lines had etched deeply around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth; not age lines, but the lines of constant inner turmoil. Fyodor had been away at war too long, and gravely wounded at a marshy slaughter hole called Kowel. Gone were the operas and brightly lit festivals of St. Petersburg; gone were the noisy street markets of Moscow; gone were the banquets and royal garden parties of Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra, and left in their shadows were the skeletons of the future.

“I flew it, Mother!” Mikhail shouted when he got closer. “Did you see how high?”

“Oh, that was your kite?” she asked, with feigned surprise. “I thought it was a cloud tied to a string!”

He saw she was teasing him. “It was my kite!” he insisted, and she took his hand and said, “You’d better come down to earth now, my little cloud. We have a picnic to go on.” She squeezed his hand-he was as excited as a candle flame-and led him toward the house. In the driveway the hired man Dimitri had brought the carriage and two horses from the barn, and twelve-year-old Alizia was carrying one of the wicker baskets for their picnic from the front door. The maid and Elana’s sewing companion Sophie brought the other basket out, and helped Alizia pack them into the back of the carriage.

And then Fyodor emerged from the house, carrying a brown blanket rolled up under one arm and the other hand steadying himself on his eagle-crested cane. His right leg, mauled by machine-gun bullets, was stiff and noticeably thinner than the left leg; but he had learned to move with grace, and as he brought the blanket to the rear of the carriage he lifted his gray-bearded face to the sun.

Elana, after all these years, could still feel her heartbeat quicken as she looked at him. He was tall and lean, with the figure of a swordsman, and though he was forty-six years old and his body bore the scars of rapier and bullet wounds, he yet had a youthful quality, a curiosity and power of life that sometimes made her feel ancient. His face, with its long slender nose, square jaw, and deep-set brown eyes, used to be hard and bitter, the face of a man who has crashed into the ceiling of his limitations. Now, though, it had softened with the reality of his situation: he was retired from the service of the motherland, and would live out the rest of his years here, on this plot of land far from the center of tumult. His forced retirement, after the abdication of the czar, had not been an easy pill to swallow, but now that it was dissolved he felt numb, like an amputated relic.

“What a beautiful day,” he said, and watched the wind blowing through the trees. He wore his brown, carefully ironed uniform with its chestful of medals and ribbons, and on his head was his black-visored cap, still bearing the seal of Czar Nicholas II.

“I flew the kite!” Mikhail said eagerly to his father. “I it got up almost to the sky!”

“Good for you,” Gallatinov answered, and reached out to Alizia. “My golden angel. Help me inside, will you?”

Elana watched as Alizia helped her father into the carriage while Mikhail stood with his kite in his arms. She touched her son’s shoulder. “Come on, Mikhail. Let’s make sure everything’s packed.”

They put the kite into the back of the carriage, too, and Dimitri closed and latched the trunk’s lid. Then Elana and Mikhail sat across from Fyodor and Alizia in the red velvet interior, and they waved goodbye to Sophie as Dimitri popped the reins and the two chestnut horses began their journey.

Mikhail looked out the oval window as Alizia drew a picture and their mother and father talked about things that he barely remembered: the spring festival in St. Petersburg, the estate where they’d lived when he was born, people whose names were familiar only because he’d heard them before. He watched the gently rolling land give way to forests of towering oaks and evergreens, listened to the creak of the wheels and the crisp jingling of the horses’ traces. The sweet scent of wildflowers drifted into the carriage as they passed a blossoming meadow, and Alizia perked up from her drawing when Mikhail sighted a herd of deer on the edge of the woods. He’d been cooped up in the house from the middle of October until the end of April, patiently doing the schoolwork lessons that Magda, his and Alizia’s tutor, taught him. Now, Mikhail’s senses rioted under the heady onslaught of springtime. Winter’s pewter had been banished from the land, for a time at least, and Mikhail’s world wore fine green robes.

Their May picnic was an annual excursion, a ritual that connected them to their lives in St. Petersburg. This year Dimitri had found a good place for them, on the shore of a lake about an hour’s leisurely drive from the Gallatinov house.

The lake was blue and wind-rippled, and as Dimitri pulled the carriage into a meadow Mikhail heard the cawing of crows atop a huge, gnarled oak. Forest circled the lake, the emerald wilderness unbroken by village or habitation for a hundred miles to the north, south and west. Dimitri stopped the carriage and chocked the wheels, then let the horses drink lake water as the Gallatinovs unloaded their picnic baskets and spread the blanket down overlooking the blue pool.

They ate their meal of baked ham, fried potatoes, dark wheat bread, and ginger cake with sugar frosting. One of the horses nickered and jumped around nervously for a moment, but Dimitri got the mare settled down and Fyodor sat facing the woods. “She smells something wild,” he told Elana as he poured them both a glass of red wine. “Children!” he warned. “Don’t stray too far from us!”

“Yes, Father,” Alizia said, but she was already taking off her shoes and lifting up the hem of her pink dress to go wading.

Mikhail went down to the lake with her and hunted for pretty stones while she walked in the shallows. Dimitri stayed nearby, sitting on a fallen tree and watching the clouds glide past, a rifle at his side.

The enchanted afternoon moved on. His pockets full of stones, Mikhail reclined in the sunny meadow and watched his father and mother sit together on the picnic blanket and talk. Alizia lay beside her father, sleeping, and every so often his hand would move out to touch her arm or shoulder. Mikhail realized, quite suddenly, that his father’s hand had never touched him. He didn’t know why, nor did he understand why his father’s eyes took on a January chill when they met his own. Sometimes he felt like a small thing that lived beneath a rock, and other times he didn’t care, but there was no time when there wasn’t a hurting deep in his heart.

After a while, his mother laid her head on his father’s shoulder, and they slept in the sun. Mikhail watched a raven circling overhead, the light glinting blue black off its wings, and then he stood up and walked to the carriage to get his kite. He ran back and forth, letting the string unwind from his fingers, and a breeze caught the silk, expanded it, and the kite sailed smoothly up into the air.

He started to shout to his parents, but they were both asleep. Alizia was sleeping as well, her back pressed against their father’s side. Dimitri sat on his fallen tree, deep in thought, the rifle resting across his knees.

The kite floated higher. The string continued to unreel. Mikhail shifted his fingers to get a better grip. The breeze was fierce beyond the treetops. It grasped the kite, hurled it right and left and made the string thrum like a mandolin. Still the kite ascended-too high, he decided momentarily. He started to reel it back. And then the wind hit the kite from a strange angle, lifted it and turned it at the same time, and the string tightened, strained, and snapped about six feet below the balsawood crossbar.

Oh no! he almost cried out. The kite had been a present from his mother on his eighth birthday, the seventh of March. And now it was flying away at the mercy of the wind, going over the treetops toward the deep woods. Oh no! He looked at Dimitri and started to shout for help. But Dimitri had his hands pressed to his face, as if in some private agony. The rest of his family slumbered on, and Mikhail thought of how his father hated to be awakened from a nap. In another moment the kite would be over the forest, and the decision had to be made now whether to stand here and watch it go or follow and hope it would fall when the breeze slackened.

Children! he remembered his father saying. Don’t stray too far from us!

But this was his kite, and if it were lost, his mother’s heart would be broken. He glanced again at Dimitri; the man hadn’t moved. Precious seconds were ticking past.

Mikhail decided. He ran across the meadow, and into the woods.

Looking up, he could see the kite through the green leaves and tangle of branches. As he followed its erratic progress, he dug a handful of smooth stones from his pocket and dropped them at his feet to mark a trail back. The kite went on, and so did the boy.

Less than two minutes after Mikhail had left the meadow, three men on horseback came down to the lake from the main road. They all wore dark, patched peasant clothing. One of them carried a rifle slung around his shoulder, and the other two were armed with pistols in cartridge belts. They continued to where the Gallatinov family slept in the sun, and as one of the horses snorted and whinnied Dimitri looked around and stood up, pinpricks of sweat sparkling on his face.

2

Fyodor Gallatinov awakened as three shadows fell across him. He blinked, saw the horses and riders, and as he sat up Elana awakened, too. Alizia looked up, rubbing her eyes.

“Good afternoon, General Gallatinov,” the lead rider, a man with a long thin face and bushy red eyebrows, said. “I haven’t seen you since Kowel.”

“Kowel? Who… who are you?”

“I was Lieutenant Sergei Schedrin. The Guards Army. You may not remember me, but surely you remember Kowel.”

“Of course I do. Every day of my life.” Gallatinov struggled to his feet, balancing on his cane. His face had become mottled with angry red. “What’s the meaning of this, Lieutenant Schedrin?”

“Oh, no.” The other man extended a finger and wagged it back and forth. “I’m simply Comrade Schedrin now. My friends Anton and Danalov were also at Kowel.” Gallatinov’s gaze flickered to the two faces; Anton’s was broad and heavy-jowled, and Danalov’s bore a bayonet scar from his left eyebrow up to his hairline. Their eyes were cold and only slightly curious, as if they were examining an insect under a magnifying glass. “We’ve brought the rest of our company with us as well,” Schedrin said.

“The rest of your company?” Gallatinov shook his head, not comprehending.

“Listen!” Schedrin cocked his head as the breeze keened through the woods. “There they are, whispering. Listen to what they say: ‘Justice. Justice.’ Do you hear them, General?”

“We’re having a picnic,” Gallatinov said firmly. “I’d like for you gentlemen to leave.”

“Yes,” Schedrin said. “I’m sure you would. What a lovely family you have.”

“Dimitri!” the general shouted. “Dimitri, fire a warning shot above their-” He turned toward Dimitri, and what he saw closed an iron claw around his heart.

Dimitri stood about fifteen yards away, and hadn’t even cocked the rifle or lifted it to a firing position. He stared at the ground, his shoulders stooped. “Dimitri!” Gallatinov shouted again, but he knew he would not be answered. His throat was dry, and he grasped Elana’s chilly hand.

“Thank you for bringing them here, Comrade Dimitri,” Schedrin told him. “Your service will be noted and rewarded.”

Mikhail, moving swiftly through the forest in pursuit of his kite, thought he heard his father shouting. His heart hammered; his father had probably awakened and was calling for him. There was going to be a switching in Mikhail’s immediate future. But the kite was falling now, the string snagging in the top of an oak tree. Then the wind kicked it loose, and the kite rose again. Mikhail pushed through dense brush, soft spongy masses of dead leaves and moss, and kept following. Ten more feet; twenty more; thirty more. Thorns grabbed his hair; he pulled free, ducked his head under the thorn branches, and dropped another stone to the ground to mark his way back.

The kite dipped, fell into the arms of an evergreen, and teasingly floated free once more. Then it was rising sharply into the blue sky, and as Mikhail watched it go his face was dappled with sun and shadow.

Something moved in the underbrush, less than a dozen feet to Mikhail’s left.

He stood very still as the kite picked up speed and floated away. Whatever had moved was silent now. Waiting.

There was another movement, to the boy’s right. The soft crackle of weight settling on dry leaves.

Mikhail swallowed. He started to call for his mother, but she was too far away to hear him, and he wanted no loud noises.

Silence, but for the wind hissing in the trees.

Mikhail smelled the aroma of an animal: a rank, bestial smell, the odor of a creature that had decayed meat on its breath. He felt something-two somethings-watching him from opposite sides, and he thought that if he ran they would leap on him from behind. His impulse was to scream and turn and flee headlong through the woods, but he struck it down; he could not get away by running. No, no. A Gallatinov never runs, his father had once told him. Mikhail felt a droplet of sweat trickling down the center of his back. The beasts were waiting for his decision, and they were very close.

He turned, his legs trembling, and began to walk slowly back, following the trail of lakeshore stones.

A Gallatinov never runs, Fyodor thought. His gaze swept the meadow. Mikhail. Where was Mikhail?

“Our company was slaughtered at Kowel.” Schedrin leaned forward, hands clenching the saddle horn. “Slaughtered,” he repeated. “We were commanded to run headlong across a swamp into a nest of barbed wire and machine guns. Of course you remember that.”

“I remember a war,” Gallatinov answered. “I remember one tragedy tripping on the heels of another.”

“For you, tragedy. For us, slaughter. Of course we obeyed orders. We were good soldiers of the czar. How could we not obey?”

“We all obeyed the same orders that day.”

“Yes, we did,” Schedrin agreed. “But some obeyed them with the blood of innocent men. Your hands are still red, General. I can see the blood dripping off them.”

“Look closer.” Gallatinov stepped defiantly toward the man, though Elana tried to hold him back. “My own blood is on there, too!”

“Ah.” Schedrin nodded. “So it is. But not enough, I think.”

Elana gasped. Anton had withdrawn his pistol from his holster and cocked it. “Make them go away!” Alizia said, tears in her eyes. “Please make them go away!” Danalov pulled his pistol out and eased the hammer back.

Gallatinov stepped in front of his wife and daughter, his eyes black with fury. “How dare you raise a gun to me and my family!” He lifted his cane. “Damn you to hell. Put down those pistols!”

“We have a proclamation to read,” Schedrin said, undaunted. He removed a rolled-up piece of paper from his saddlebag and opened it. “To General Fyodor Gallatinov, in service to Czar Nicholas the Second, hero”-he smiled thinly-“of Kowel and commander of the Guards Army. From the survivors of the Guards Army, who suffered and were slaughtered by the ineptitude of Czar Nicholas and his imperial court. Since we cannot have the czar, we will have you. And so the case will be closed to our satisfaction.”

An execution squad, Gallatinov realized. God only knew how long they’d been tracking him. He glanced quickly around; no way out. Mikhail. Where was the boy? His heart was beating hard, and his palms were sweating. Alizia began to sob, but Elana was silent. Gallatinov looked at the guns and the eyes of the men who aimed them. There was no way out. “You’ll let my family go,” he demanded.

“No Gallatinov will leave this place alive,” Schedrin replied. “We understand the importance of a task well done, Comrade. Consider this… your private Kowel.” He unstrapped his rifle and pulled back the bolt to chamber a shell.

“You goddamned dogs!” General Gallatinov said, and stepped forward to strike the man’s face with his cane.

Anton shot him in the chest before the cane was swung. The pistol’s crack made Elana and her daughter jump, and the noise echoed across the meadow like strange thunder. A brooding of ravens leaped from a treetop and winged for safety.

Gallatinov was hurled backward by the force of the bullet, and fell to his knees in the grass. Crimson was spreading across the front of his uniform. He gasped, could not find the strength to stand. Elana screamed and fell down beside her husband, her arms around him as if she could protect him from the next bullet. Alizia turned, began to run toward the lake, and Danalov shot her twice in the back before she’d gotten ten feet away. She tumbled, a sack of bloody flesh and broken bones.

“No!” Gallatinov said, and got his good leg under him. Blood was creeping from his mouth, and his eyes glinted with terror. He started to rise, Elana still clinging to him.

Schedrin pulled the rifle’s trigger, and the bullet hit Gallatinov in the face. Bits of bone and brain splattered over Elana’s dress. The jittering body fell backward, carrying Elana with it, and they fell over the picnic baskets, bottles of wine and crumb-flecked platters. Danalov shot Gallatinov in the stomach, and Anton fired two more bullets into the man’s head as Elana continued to shriek.

“Oh dear God,” Dimitri said, choking, and he ran down to the lake’s edge to be violently sick.

Mikhail heard a series of high cracking noises, followed by a scream. He stopped, and the beasts that were tracking him also halted. His mother’s voice, he realized. His face tightened with fear, and he began to run through the forest heedless of the danger at his back.

Vines gripped his shirt and tried to trip him. He followed the trail of stones through the underbrush, his boots slipping on moss-covered rocks and sinking into ankle-deep pools of dead leaves. And then he burst out of the forest into the meadow and saw three men on horseback and bodies lying sprawled. Red gleamed on green grass. His stomach knotted, his knees seized up, and he saw one of the men pull back the bolt of his rifle and aim at his…

“Mother!” he shouted, his voice echoing horror across the meadow.

Anton and Danalov looked toward the boy. Elana Gallatinov, on her knees with her white dress dripping blood, saw him standing there, and she screamed, “Run, Mikhail! Ru-”

The rifle bullet hit her below the hairline. Mikhail saw his mother’s head explode.

“Get the boy!” Schedrin commanded, and Anton lifted his smoking pistol.

He stared, transfixed, at the black eye of the gun barrel. A Gallatinov never runs, he thought. He saw the man’s finger twitch on the trigger. A gout of fire leaped from the black-eyed barrel, and he heard a waspish whine and felt heat on his left cheek. A branch snapped beyond his shoulder.

“Kill him, damn it!” Schedrin yelled as he chambered another bullet into his rifle and wheeled his horse around. Danalov was taking aim at Mikhail, and Anton was about to squeeze off a second shot.

A Gallatinov ran.

He twisted around, his mother’s scream ringing in his mind, and fled into the forest as a bullet thunked into a tree to his right and showered his hair with splinters. He tripped over a vine, staggered, and almost fell. There was the hoarser crack of a rifle shot, and the bullet passed over Mikhail’s skull as he struggled for balance.

Then he was picking up speed, tearing into the underbrush, sliding on dead leaves, and fighting through tangles of thorns. He toppled into a gulley, got up, and scrambled out, heading deeper into the wilderness.

“Come on!” Schedrin told the others. “We can’t let the little bastard get away!” He dug his heels into his mount’s flanks and entered the forest with Anton and Danalov riding just behind him.

Mikhail heard the thunder of hooves. He clambered up a rocky hillside and half ran, half slid down the descending side. “Over there!” he heard one of the men shout. “I saw him! This way!”

Thorns whipped Mikhail in the face and tore across his shirt. He blinked back tears, his legs pumping. A shot rang out, and hit a tree trunk five feet away. “Save your bullets, idiot!” Schedrin commanded, getting a quick glimpse of the boy’s back before the branches covered his flight.

Mikhail ran on, his shoulders hunched against the expected impact of a lead slug. His lungs were burning, his heart hammering through his chest. He dared to glance back. The horses and men raced after him, dead leaves flying up in their wake. He looked ahead again, angled to the left, and ran into thick green undergrowth laced with creepers.

Anton’s horse stepped into a gopher hole. The animal bellowed and fell, and Anton’s right knee burst open like an overripe fruit as he landed on a sharp-edged rock. He screamed in agony, the horse writhing and trying to get up, but both Schedrin and Danalov kept up their pursuit.

Mikhail fought through the undergrowth, slanting down into a valley cloaked with green. He knew full well what would happen if the killers caught him, and fear gave him wings. His feet slipped out from beneath him on a bed of pine needles, and he slid through a place where the shadows had grown crimson mushrooms. Then he was up and running again, and behind him he heard a horse’s whinny and a man shouting, “He’s over here! Going downhill!”

Ahead was dense forest, close-packed evergreens and thick coils of thorn bushes and stands of wild red berries. He headed for the thickest of it, hoping to leap into the coils and fight his way to the bottom, to a place where the horsemen couldn’t follow. He reached out, parted the emerald growth with bleeding hands-and came face to muzzle with the beast.

It was a wolf, with dark brown eyes and sleek russet fur. Mikhail fell backward, his mouth open but the scream shocked out of him.

The wolf leaped.

Its jaws opened, and the teeth gouged furrows across Mikhail’s left shoulder as it slammed him to the earth. The breath was knocked out of him, as was all sense. The wolf’s teeth clamped on his shoulder, about to tear through the I flesh and crush the bones; and then the horse bearing Sergei Schedrin burst through the brush and reared, its eyes flaring with terror. Schedrin lost his rifle, and he cried out, clinging I to the horse’s neck as he saw the wolf beneath his boots.

The animal released Mikhail’s shoulder, spun around in a smooth, graceful motion, and bit deeply into the horse’s stomach. The horse made a strangled moan, kicked wildly, and fell onto its side, trapping Schedrin’s legs beneath.

“Holy Jesus!” Danalov shouted, reining in his horse on the hillside. Two seconds after he’d spoken, the large gray wolf that had been tracking him leaped onto the horse’s flank, clawed up over it into the saddle, and clamped its fangs into the back of Danalov’s neck. It shook Danalov like a rag doll, snapping his spine and driving him out of the saddle to the ground. The horse thrashed and tumbled, rolling down the hillside in a flurry of dead leaves and pine needles.