The Romanov Conspiracy (12 page)

Not a day passed when he didn’t recall when it was taken. He was home on leave one summer and he and Nina took Sergey on the train to Neva beach, outside St. Petersburg. Sergey was a year old and fascinated by the sound of the train’s whistle, and every time Andrev mimicked the noise his infant son broke into a fit of giggling.

It was the same day Sergey took his first faltering steps in the sand and collapsed on his bottom, a huge smile of triumph on his face. Nina was so overjoyed that the three of them danced together in the sand. Later on the promenade, they bought ice cream and some stuck on Sergey’s nose, which made him laugh, and they had a beach photographer take their snapshot.

It was a happy time.

He and Nina had married a year after he completed his cadetship in the St. Petersburg Military Academy. For him, marrying Nina seemed a natural progression after knowing her since childhood. She always seemed to him like a child in a woman’s body. He couldn’t help but feel protective of her.

Once he was promoted to first lieutenant he became entitled to a small but comfortable redbrick house in the officers’ quarters of his barracks. After two miscarriages, Nina gave birth to Sergey three years later.

A blond-haired boy who had his mother’s good looks, he came two months premature. For a time it didn’t seem as if he would live, his lungs underdeveloped, but by some miracle he managed to cling to life and thrive.

Fatherhood came easy to Andrev and often while Sergey slept he would stand over his cot and watch him breathing, awed by the powerful bond nature forged between him and his son. But within a month the war came. It was followed by revolution, and the world was turned upside down. The tsar abdicated, the Reds seized power, and Russia was thrown into a bloody turmoil.

The war against Germany had gone badly and hundreds of thousands of Russia’s best young men were slaughtered by better-equipped German forces.

The tsar’s army split almost down the middle, one half supporting the Whites loyal to the former tsar, the other half siding with the various socialist splinter groups that sprouted all over Russia. One of those minority parties, the Bolsheviks—or Reds—led by Lenin, cunningly chose their moment to seize power and Russia became locked in a civil war. Lenin held Moscow but the rest of the country dissolved into chaos as the White armies and the Reds embarked on a savage guerrilla war.

Andrev felt his emotions rise now and touched the photograph of his wife and son as if it were fragile. Nina’s merchant father indulged his only daughter’s almost every whim, and her world collapsed once the Reds grasped power and her husband was captured.

Andrev knew that his imprisonment, and not knowing if she would see him alive again, took its toll. He was not even allowed to write to his wife. But the cracks began to show in their marriage soon after he joined his unit.

It was clear Nina wanted a husband, not a soldier who spent more time with his men than he did with his wife. Their intimacy waned; their arguments grew more frequent. Whatever love once existed faded to a ritual that owed more to friendship than passion.

Worse, since the Reds grasped power they seized every White barracks and forced army families out onto the streets.

The last Andrev knew—in a letter he received from Nina before his imprisonment—she and Sergey were living in a cramped one-room flat with damp walls and a communal toilet in a slum building in St. Petersburg. She eked out a living on what little money her father could afford to give her.

It broke his heart not to be with his family. But he wasn’t alone. Anyone who opposed Lenin—men, women, entire families—were either executed or sentenced to hard labor in the frozen wastes of Siberia’s penal camps.

The average survival rate for camp prisoners was eight months. Many lasted fewer than four, their health broken by grueling work chopping timber, tunneling into dangerous ore mines, or slowly starving to death on a miserable diet of watery soup made from rotten vegetables and gristle. The irony was that the same penal system Lenin once so vehemently denounced, he now used to crush his enemies.

Andrev stared at the image of Nina and Sergey. The question that never left his head returned to haunt him:
What is to become of us?

He was a long way from the simple, happy life he once knew in St. Petersburg.

When he could bear the pain no longer he tucked the photograph inside his shabby uniform. Somewhere off in the distance he heard the whistle of one of the trans-Siberian trains that passed the camp most days.

It made him think of that summer’s afternoon when he and Nina took Sergey to Neva beach, when the ice cream stuck on Sergey’s nose and made him giggle, and the simple joy in their hearts as they danced with their infant son in their arms.

The sick bay door burst open and snapped Andrev out of his trance. Two men came in wearing ragged military uniforms. Captain Mikhail Vilsk was a lanky infantry officer, his uniform threadbare, his lips a mass of encrusted cold sores. His left leg had been shattered below the knee by a German bullet and he walked with the aid of a cane.

His companion, Corporal Abraham Tarku, a former jeweler in civilian life, was a battle-hardened soldier from Kiev, who wore wire-rimmed glasses, one of the lenses cracked into a few shards but still in place. A couple of his fingertips were missing, the stumps bearing the blackened telltale signs of frostbite.

Vilsk hobbled over to the bed, taking in Andrev’s bandaged wounds. “We thought you’d be nailed into a box by now, Uri. Instead
we hear that the guard who wounded you was shot by a Cheka officer. Is it true? How are you?”

Andrev nodded. “I could be a lot worse. And yes, it’s true.”

Corporal Tarku stepped over to the window, rubbed the fogged glass with the blackened stump of a fingertip. He squinted out through the snow flurries. “The Cheka officer is Leonid Yakov, isn’t he, sir? I’d recognize him anywhere.”

“Yes, it’s Yakov.”

“I saw him step down off his train when it pulled into the camp siding, before they took you off on a stretcher.”

Vilsk raised an eyebrow. “It seems you’ve found yourself a guardian angel, Uri. How do you know him?”

Andrev got up from the bed and moved to the window, ignoring his pain. “Yakov served in our unit. He was my sergeant, and a good one.”

Corporal Tarku spat on the floor and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “That was before he went over to the Reds. I heard he’s a commissar now. Travels all around the country in that armored train of his, on Lenin’s orders, slaughtering our men or sending them to the camps.”

Vilsk frowned at Andrev. “Why did Yakov intervene to spare you?”

Tarku added, “He and the captain were once close friends, almost like brothers, isn’t that true, sir?”

Andrev rubbed his jaw and thought furiously, snow still falling out on the camp. “That’s not important right now. I have dire news and I want your solemn promise you’ll keep it a secret for now. You’ll understand why when I tell you.”

Both men gave their word and when Andrev explained, gloom darkened their faces. Vilsk rummaged in his pocket and found a cigarette butt he had been saving all day. “So, we’re all marked for death, aren’t we, Uri?”

“It seems that way.”

“What about the deal Yakov offered?” Vilsk used a birch twig to light the cigarette from the woodstove, and stuck it between his blistered lips.

“I can’t leave my men to die,” Andrev replied.

“Yakov’s turned out to be a right swine,” Tarku said bitterly. “He’d
sell his soul for Lenin. And he holds a grudge. The Cossack officer who gave the order to shoot into the crowd storming the Winter Palace when Yakov’s wife was killed, he paid the price.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They say Yakov hunted him down and killed him with his own sabre.”

Andrev peered beyond the snow flurries and could make out Yakov’s black train parked in a siding beyond the main gate. “If we could reach Perm and alert our troops, we could lead them back here and storm the camp before dawn, surprising Yakov and the guards.”

Vilsk said, “Are you out of your mind, Uri? How do we get to Perm in this weather, let alone escape? It’s thirty miles away.”

Andrev used a finger to draw a rough map on a fogged pane of glass. “What have we got to lose? The train from Omsk ought to pass here shortly after midnight, weather permitting. It slows as it comes near the camp because of the track’s curve. If we could climb on board it would take us within a five-mile walk to our lines in less than an hour.”

Vilsk said, “Getting on board the train’s impossible. Guards are always posted where it passes near the camp’s west gate.”

Andrev said, “Leave that to me. I’ve got a diversion in mind. Just the three of us, though. We don’t want a mass breakout alerting the guards.”

Tarku said fiercely, “If we can turn the tables and make contact with our troops, we’ll hang that swine Yakov.”

Andrev said, “Leave him to me.”

Vilsk tapped his knee with his cane. “Better go without me, Uri, I’d only be a hindrance.”

“Tarku?”

“I’m with you, sir, if you’re sure you can hold up.”

Andrev came away from the window. “So long as we can get on board the train, a five-mile hike won’t kill me. Try and find extra clothes to keep us warm. And weapons of some sort, a knife or cudgel. See what you can find.”

“When do we go?”

“Before midnight, when the guard changes. Then we’ll take our chances.”

10

TSARSKOYE SELO

In his long black overcoat, and with his bald head and black hat, even a glance from Inspector Viktor Kazan could make a man feel guilty.

His left eye was milky white—he’d lost sight in the eye to an anarchist’s bomb—which gave him a frightening stare, but his good eye missed nothing as it swept over the fire scene like a searchlight.

In his right hand he clutched and unclutched a heavy brass knuckle-duster.

Kazan’s nostrils flared, overpowered by the stench of burnt human flesh as he covered his fleshy jowls with a handkerchief. Wearing a high shirt collar and thin black tie, he picked his way toward the burnt-out kitchen, a mess of debris.

In the growing darkness, the inferno’s dying embers smoldered orange. The horse-drawn fire-tenders finished their work and now the blaze was replaced by just a few black plumes of lazy smoke.

A young police captain in a pale blue uniform and dark blue overcoat accompanied Kazan and said, “The gas engineers have turned off the supply at the mains and made everything safe, Inspector.”

Kazan stared at the charcoal-blackened corpse. It appeared the body was slammed against a kitchen wall with the force of the blast. It lay on its side, partly fused to the wall and the concrete floor, which was drenched with water from the fire hoses.

Kazan nudged the corpse with the tip of his boot and flakes of charcoal broke away. “Do you know the victim’s identity?”

“We think it may be the property’s landlord, a retired naval officer named Ravich. Two of his neighbors last saw him shoveling show outside here about noon today.”

Kazan wrinkled his nose at the horrible stench, the body unrecognizable, not a shred of flesh uncooked. “Who rented the house?”

“One of Ravich’s neighbors said he’d told him that the tenant was a foreign businessman. He arrived about six weeks ago.”

“Age?”

“Mid-twenties. The neighbor didn’t know his nationality. And there are no signs of other remains within the ruins. In fact, he seems to be something of a phantom, this man.”

“A phantom?”

“He kept to himself. No one saw him apart from Ravich and the neighbor.”

“Do you have his name?”

“No, Inspector, but we can try to find out.”

Kazan removed his hat and wiped his brow with a handkerchief, his pale bald head smooth and shiny. “Trying isn’t good enough. I want a name and I want a description.” He scanned the nearby Alexander Palace, like a predator trying to pick up a scent, his right hand busily toying with the knuckle-duster. “So, you think it was all a dreadful accident, Captain?”

The captain recalled that Kazan, a former secret policeman with the tsar’s Ochrana who now worked for the Bolshevik Cheka, had a brutal reputation. Kazan was savage in his pursuit and known to beat obstinate prisoners to death. Hundreds if not thousands of the tsar’s former secret policemen were retired, fired, or killed by revengeful mobs. But not Kazan.