Eye of the Red Tsar (4 page)

The sun had already set. Icicles as long as a man’s leg hung from the station house roof. Wind blew down the tracks, stirring up whirlwinds of snow. At each end of the platform, guards with rifles on their backs stood around oil barrels in which fires had been lit. Sparks flitted into the air, illuminating their faces
.

Late in the night the train finally arrived. Two guards stood beside each open wagon door. As Pekkala climbed aboard, he happened to glance back at the station house. There, in the light of an oil drum fire, a soldier held his rosy-tinted hands over the flames
.

Their eyes met
.

Pekkala had only an instant to recognize that it was Anton before one of the guards shoved him into the darkness of the frost-encrusted wagon
.

PEKKALA HELD THE cut-throat razor poised beside his beard-covered cheek, wondering how to begin.

It used to be that he shaved once a month, but the old razor he had nursed finally snapped in half one day as he stropped it against the inside of his belt. And that was years ago.

Since then he’d sometimes taken a knife to his hair, sawing it off in clumps while he sat naked in the freezing water of the stream below his cabin. But now, as he stood in the dirty bathroom of the police station, a pair of scissors in one hand and the razor blade in the other, the task before him seemed impossible.

For almost an hour, he hacked and scraped, gritting his teeth with the pain and rubbing his face with a gritty bar of laundry soap he had been loaned along with the razor. He tried not to breathe in the sharp stench of poorly aimed urine, the smoke of old tobacco sunk into the grout between the pale blue tiles, and the medicinal reek of government-issue toilet paper.

Slowly, a face Pekkala barely recognized began to appear in the mirror. When at last the beard had all been cut away, blood was streaming from his chin and upper lip and just beneath his ears. He pulled some cobwebs from a dusty corner of the room and packed them into the wounds to stanch the bleeding.

Emerging from the bathroom, he saw that his old paint-spattered gear had been removed. In its place he found a different set of clothes and was amazed to see that they were the same garments he’d been wearing when he was first arrested. Even these things had been saved. He dressed in the gray collarless shirt, the heavy black moleskin trousers, and a black wool four-pocket vest. Underneath the chair were his heavy ankle-high boots with
portyanki
foot wrappings neatly rolled inside each one.

Lifting the gun belt over his shoulder, he buckled the strap around his middle. He adjusted it until the butt of the gun rested just beneath the left side of his rib cage so that he could draw the Webley and fire it without breaking the fluidity of motion—a method which had saved his life more than once.

The last piece of clothing was a close-fitting coat made of the same black wool as the vest. Its flap extended to the left side of his chest, in the manner of a double-breasted jacket, except that it fastened with concealed buttons, so that none showed on the coat when it was worn. The coat extended one hand’s length below his knees and its collar was short, unlike the sprawling lapel of a standard Russian army greatcoat. Finally, Pekkala attached the emerald eye under the collar of his jacket.

Again he looked at his face in the mirror. Carefully, he touched the rough pads of his fingertips against the windburned skin beneath his eyes, as if unsure of who was looking back at him.

Then he made his way back to the office. The door was closed. He knocked.

“Enter!” came the sharp reply.

With his heels up on the desk, Anton was smoking a cigarette. The ashtray was almost full. Several of the butts were still smoldering. A cloud of blue smoke hung in the room.

There was no chair except the one in which his brother sat, so Pekkala remained standing.

“Better,” said Anton, settling his feet back on the floor. “But not much.” He folded his hands and laid them on the desk. “You know who has sent for you.”

“Comrade Stalin,” said Pekkala.

Anton nodded.

“Is it true,” asked Pekkala, “that people call him the Red Tsar?”

“Not to his face,” Anton answered, “if they want to go on living.”

“If he is the reason I’m here,” persisted Pekkala, “then let me speak to him.”

Anton laughed. “You do not ask to speak to Comrade Stalin! You wait until he asks to speak to you, and if that ever happens, you will have your conversation. In the meantime, there is work to be done.”

“You know what happened to me, back in the Butyrka prison.”

“Yes.”

“Stalin is responsible for that. Personally responsible.”

“Since then he has done great things for this country.”

“You,” Pekkala replied, “are also responsible.”

Anton’s folded hands clenched into a knot of flesh and bone. “There are different ways of seeing this.”

“You mean the difference between who is tortured and who is doing the torturing.”

Anton cleared his throat as he attempted to remain calm. “What I mean is that we have been on different paths, you and I. Mine has brought me to this side of the desk.” He rapped the wood for emphasis. “And yours has led you to be standing there. I am now an officer in the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“What do you people want from me?”

Anton got up and closed the door. “We want you to investigate a crime.”

“Has the country run out of detectives?”

“You are the one we need for this.”

“Is it a murder?” Pekkala asked. “A missing person?”

“Possibly,” replied Anton, still facing the door, his voice lowered. “Possibly not.”

“Do I have to solve your riddles before I solve your case?”

Now Anton turned to face him. “I am talking about the Romanovs. The Tsar. His wife. His children. All of them.”

At the mention of their names, old nightmares reared up in Pekkala’s head. “But they were executed,” he said. “That case was closed years ago. The Revolutionary Government even took credit for killing them!”

Anton returned to the desk. “It is true that we claimed to have carried out the executions. But, as you are perhaps aware, no corpses were produced as evidence.”

A breeze blew in through the open window, carrying the musty smell of approaching rain.

“You mean you don’t know where the bodies are?”

Anton nodded. “That is correct.”

“So it is a missing persons case?” asked Pekkala. “Are you telling me the Tsar might still be alive?” The guilt of having abandoned the Romanovs to their fate had lodged like a bullet in his chest. In spite of what he’d heard about the executions, Pekkala’s doubts had never completely gone away. But to hear it now, from the mouth of a Red Army soldier, was something he’d never expected.

Anton looked nervously around the room, as if to see some listener materialize out of the smoke-tinted air. He got up and walked to the window, peering out into the alley which ran by the side of the building. Then he closed the shutters. A purpling darkness descended like twilight upon the room. “The Tsar and his family had been moved to the town of Ekaterinburg—which is now known as Sverdlovsk.”

“That is only a few days’ drive from here.”

“Yes. Sverdlovsk was chosen because of its remoteness. There’d be no chance of anyone trying to rescue them. At least, that’s what we thought. When the family arrived, they were quartered at the house of a local merchant named Ipatiev.”

“What did you plan to do with them?”

“It wasn’t clear what should be done with them. From the moment the Romanov family were arrested in Petrograd, they became a liability. As long as the Tsar lived, he provided a focus for those who were fighting against the Revolution. On the other hand, if we simply got rid of him, world opinion might have turned against us. It was decided that the Romanovs should be kept alive until the new government was firmly established. Then the Tsar was to be put on trial. Judges would be brought in from Moscow. The whole thing would be as public as possible. Newspapers would cover the proceedings. In every rural area, district Commissars would be on hand to explain the legal process.”

“And the Tsar would be found guilty.”

Anton flipped his hand in the air, brushing aside the idea. “Of course, but a trial would give legitimacy to the proceedings.”

“Then what were you planning to do with the Tsar?”

“Shoot him, probably. Or we could have hanged him. The details hadn’t been decided.”

“And his wife? His four daughters? His son? Would you have hanged them, too?”

“No! If we had wanted to kill them, we would never have gone to the trouble of bringing the Romanovs all the way to Sverdlovsk. The last thing we wanted to do was make martyrs of children. The whole point was to prove that the Revolution was not being run by barbarians.”

“So what were you planning to do with the rest of the family?”

“They were to be handed over to the British, in exchange for their official support of the new government.”

To Lenin, it must have seemed a simple plan. But those are always the ones that go wrong, thought Pekkala. “What happened instead?”

Anton let his breath trail out. “We aren’t sure exactly. An entire division of soldiers known as the Czechoslovakian Legion had mutinied back in May of 1918, when the new government ordered them to lay down their arms. Many of these Czechs and Slovaks had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army in the early stages of the war. For years, these soldiers had been fighting for the Tsar. They weren’t about to throw away their guns and join the Red Army. Instead, they formed a separate force.”

“The Whites,” said Pekkala. In the years after the Revolution, thousands of former White Army officers had flooded into the Gulag camps. They were always singled out for the worst treatment. Few of them survived their first winter.

“Since these men were deserters,” continued Anton, “they couldn’t go back to their own countries. Instead they decided to follow the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the entire length of Russia. They were heavily armed. Their military discipline had stayed intact. There was nothing we could do to stop them. In every town they came to as they headed east along the railroad, the Red Army garrisons either melted away or were torn to shreds.”

“The railroad passes just south of Sverdlovsk,” said Pekkala. Now he began to see where the plan had gone wrong.

“Yes,” replied Anton. “The Whites were bound to capture the town. The Romanovs would have been freed.”

“So Lenin ordered them to be killed?”

“He could have, but he didn’t.” Anton looked overwhelmed by the events he was describing. Even to know such secrets put a person’s life at risk. To speak them out loud was suicidal. “There were so many false alarms—Red Army units mistaken for Whites, herds of cows mistaken for cavalry, thunder mistaken for cannon fire. Lenin was afraid that if an execution order was in place, the men guarding the Romanovs would panic. They’d shoot the Tsar and his family whether the Czechs tried to rescue them or not.” Anton pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”

“What happened?” asked Pekkala.

It was raining now, droplets tapping on the shutters.

“A call came in to the house where the Romanovs were staying. A man identifying himself as a Red Army officer said that the Whites were approaching the outskirts of the town. He gave orders for the guards to set up a roadblock and to leave behind two armed men to guard the house. They had no reason to question the orders. Everyone knew the Whites were close by. So they set up a roadblock on the outskirts of the town, just as they’d been ordered. But the Whites didn’t show up. The call had been a fake. When the Red Army soldiers returned to the Ipatiev house, they discovered that the Romanovs were gone. The two guards who had remained behind were found in the basement, shot to death.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded Pekkala. “How do you know that this is not just another fantasy to throw the world off the track?”

“Because I was
there!”
replied Anton, his voice exasperated, as if this was one secret he had hoped to keep. “I had joined the Internal Police two years before.”

The Cheka, thought Pekkala. Formed at the outset of the Revolution under the command of a Polish assassin named Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka quickly became known as a death squad, responsible for murders, torture, and disappearances. Since then, like Lenin and Stalin themselves, the Cheka had changed its name, first to the GPU, then OGPU, but its bloody purpose had remained the same. Many of the Cheka’s original members had themselves been swallowed up in the subterranean chambers where the torturers did their work.

“Two months before the Romanovs vanished,” continued Anton, “I received orders to accompany an officer named Yurovsky to Sverdlovsk. There, a group of us took over from the local militia unit who had been guarding the Romanovs. From then on, we were in charge of the Tsar and his family. The night they disappeared, I was off duty. I was at the tavern when I heard that the call had come in. I went straight to where the roadblock had been set up. By the time we returned to the Ipatiev house, the Romanovs were already gone and the two guards who stayed behind had been killed.”

“Did you conduct an investigation?”

“There was no time. The Whites were advancing on the town. We had to get out. When the White Army marched in two days later, they conducted their own inquiry. But they never found the Romanovs, alive or dead. When the Whites had moved on and we finally regained control of Sverdlovsk, the trail had gone cold. The Tsar’s whole family had simply vanished.”

“So rather than admit that the Romanovs had escaped, Lenin chose to report that they had been killed.”

Anton nodded wearily. “But then the rumors began—sightings were reported all over the world, particularly of the children. Every time a story surfaced, no matter how incredible it seemed, we sent an agent to investigate. Do you realize we even sent a man to Tahiti because a sea captain swore he saw someone there who looked exactly like Princess Maria? But all of those rumors turned out to be false. So we waited. Every day, we expected news that the Romanovs had surfaced in China, or Paris, or London. It seemed only a matter of time. But then years went by. There were fewer sightings. No new rumors. We began to think that maybe we had heard the last of the Romanovs. Then, two weeks ago, I was summoned by the Bureau of Special Operations. They informed me that a man had recently come forward, claiming that the bodies of the Romanovs had been thrown down an abandoned mine shaft not far from Sverdlovsk. He said that he witnessed it himself.”