The Romanov Conspiracy (8 page)

At the end of a broad avenue Sorg spotted the pièce de résistance—the grand Alexander Palace, the tsar’s summer residence, sixteen miles from St. Petersburg, with its magnificent wedding-cake colonnades.

So close, so very close.

He clutched his worn leather Gladstone bag, climbed down from the cab, and handed the driver a silver coin. “Thank you, comrade.”

The driver took it, kissed the silver, and grinned as he tucked it in his pocket. “Thank
you
, and good day, sir.” He snapped his reins, turned his carriage round, and the horses’
clip-clop
faded in the mushy snow.

Sorg began to perspire with a rush of adrenaline.

He was slim, of average height, with quick brown eyes and a well-trimmed beard. The one imperfection to his neat figure was his left leg. It was an inch shorter than the right. Sorg suffered the usual cruel childhood jibes:
Rabbit, Jumpy, Clubfoot
.

But he remembered the day when he was four years old that his father, a music hall musician and a practical-minded man, employed a remedy: seated at the kitchen table, with a sharp knife and a block of leather, his dada shaped an inch-thick sole and nailed it to his son’s left shoe. It moderated his limp but ironically made the physical imperfection appear more like a swagger, because Sorg’s hip had shifted to counter his deformity. Still, it was a trait Sorg came to gratefully prefer.

“How does that feel, Philip?”

“Much better, Dada. I feel like a real boy now.”

Years later, Sorg was certain he deciphered the watery reaction in his father’s eyes that day: love and pride, and pity that all he could do to ease his son’s affliction was add an inch of leather to his shoe.

Sorg adored his father.

Another childhood memory haunted Sorg.

He was ten. One winter’s evening a group of men in dark uniforms smashed down the door to his parents’ one-room apartment. They were led by a sinister-looking thug with a milky stare in his left eye and a shiny bald head, his skin so pale that it looked bleached white. He wore a long black overcoat and seemed to enjoy inflicting punishment. In his right hand he gripped a brutish-looking brass knuckle-duster.

To this day, Sorg remembered the sneer on the man’s hate-filled face after he kicked in their door and flashed his identity card. “Kazan—secret police, the Ochrana. Keep your hands where I can see them, you Jewish socialist muck. We’ll teach you to raise trouble.”

Forever after, Kazan’s face lived vividly in Sorg’s nightmares.

His expression was a study in pure evil, and he laughed as he savagely beat Sorg’s father with the knuckle-duster, then dragged him away despite his mother’s desperate pleas. Sorg’s mother was beaten, too. Her pregnant stomach kicked, her body pummeled with blows.

Sorg never saw his father again.

Ahead of him now was a broad avenue with wrought-iron gaslights that led up to Alexander Palace, a brisk ten-minute stroll away. His lodging house was less than that. Carrying his bag, Sorg began to walk.

It was hard to believe that the Romanovs—the tsar, his wife, young son, and four princess daughters, including Princess Anastasia—were prisoners here. But Sorg was about to change all that, and the irony wasn’t lost on him.

He was going to help rescue the tsar, the very man his father despised.

As Sorg walked east, the elegance of the graceful streets faded and he came to a deserted, cobbled courtyard of wood-and-brick townhouses.

The homes were once occupied by minor court officials. Here and there they bore the bullet-mark scars of civil war. Some were in ruin and boarded up.

He saw a big, fleshy-looking man with hunched shoulders shoveling snow from the footpath of one of the townhouses. He wore a fur-collared coat and gloves, and he slinked over. “Mr. Carlson, you’re back. Keeping busy, I hope?”

“I’m trying to. And you, Mr. Ravich?”

The landlord grinned crookedly. “It’s hard to get help these days, Mr. Carlson. My groundsman left me to join the Reds. By the way, the council may turn off the water supply for a time to carry out repairs.”

“I’ll remember that.”

The landlord had bad teeth, a long, thin nose, and crafty eyes. He had once been an officer in the tsar’s navy, or so he told Sorg, and boasted that he owned four of the townhouses along with valuable commercial property in St. Petersburg. Sorg was his last remaining tenant in the crescent and the landlord seemed fearful the Reds would seize his property.

Sorg didn’t trust him, was convinced that he was some kind of degenerate. “I better catch up on work,” Sorg suggested.

“Of course, Mr. Carlson. Back to the salt mines for me also. Any problems, let me know.” The landlord returned to shoveling snow.

Sorg climbed half a dozen steps to one of the townhouses, took a key chain from his pocket, and opened the two locks on the solid oak door. He stepped into a cold, sparse hallway.

The two-room apartment with threadbare lace curtains comprised a front room that doubled as a bedroom, and a grimy kitchen. The dwelling was shabbily furnished, lacked a woman’s touch, and the air’s damp smell suggested it hadn’t been lived in much. It was perfect for Sorg’s needs.

The landlord believed that he was a Swedish antiques dealer who traveled for most of the week. In fact, much of the time Sorg was a guest in one of St. Petersburg’s few remaining decent hotels, the Crimea.

He stepped into the kitchen, put down the Gladstone on a rickety old table. He turned on the water faucet and let it run before filling the kettle—at least the pipes hadn’t frozen. He struck a match and ignited the gas cooker. While the kettle boiled, he undid his Gladstone bag and removed a screwdriver.

He turned and opened a green-painted cupboard door. His eyes settled on a wood panel at the back of the cupboard. Using the screwdriver, he removed four screws and pried out the panel. Behind was a cubbyhole. He slipped both his hands inside and hefted out two canvas waterproof bags.

He undid the slim ropes that bound one of the bags—inside were stacks of banknotes, Russian rubles, English sterling, Swiss francs, and American dollars. His stash looked intact. He retied the bag and replaced it in the cubbyhole.

He carried the second canvas bag into the front room, laid it carefully on the table, and untied the rope. Nestled in a gray blanket was a complete brass Kriegsmarine spyglass—the Germans made the best telescopes. The spyglass was at least thirty years old but a perfect piece of workmanship. Sorg screwed together the tripod legs and attached the spyglass on top.

He heard the kettle boil. He returned to the kitchen, made a pot of tea, and poured steaming amber into a glass, using a spoon to stop it from cracking, and then moved back to the front room. Pulling up a chair beside the tripod, he opened his overcoat and sat, placing a packet of cigarettes and a cheap metal ashtray on the floor beside him.

Beneath his coat he wore a dark wool suit, his high stiff collar and slim tie covered by a thick wool scarf that didn’t stop him from shivering. He rubbed his hands, then gently parted the window’s lace curtains no wider than his palm.

The striking scene that spread before him was the reason Sorg had chosen this lodging. The room had a clear view of the Alexander Palace. He lined up the telescope to face the palace’s rear gardens. Adjusting the focus, he saw bare birch trees, the grounds deserted apart from a few armed guards idly strolling the snowed paths.

Sorg took a leather-bound notebook from his pocket and laid it on the floor. He always used his own coded shorthand, so if anyone else read the pages they would read gibberish. A sharpened lead pencil was ready in his top pocket alongside a black fountain pen. He removed the pen, balanced it in his palm.

The six-inch fountain pen was a remarkable device—the nib made of Toledo steel, sharp as a scalpel, a covert weapon supplied by the State Department. Remove the cap and you had a lethal edged blade that could write exquisitely just as easily as it could slit a man’s throat.

Sorg tapped the blade against a silver band he wore on the second last finger of his left hand. The ring flashed in the light: a small symbol was inscribed on the bottom of the band.

A reverse swastika—an ancient Tibetan mark of good fortune. But the simple piece of jewelry symbolized so much more.

Sorg replaced the pen and checked his pocket watch: 11:45 a.m. Soon he could begin his work. He felt anxious.

As he put away his watch he felt the bulge in his pocket.

He rummaged and removed a small brown pharmacy bottle with a glass stopper. Laudanum tincture. A blend of nine parts alcohol to one part cocaine, commonly sold in pharmacies without prescription. It was becoming harder to find in Russia these days, along with everything else.

It would be tempting to take a few drops to settle his nerves but he resisted. He needed to conserve his supply. Tea and cigarettes would have to do. He replaced the bottle in his pocket.

He lit a cigarette, sipped his tea, and settled down to wait.

And his mind turned to the first time he visited another Romanov palace and encountered the most spirited young woman he had ever met …

5

Sorg would never forget the gala evening at the Peterhof Palace.

The ballroom was full of so many desirable, beautiful women, and they looked stunning in their jewels and fine silks. He found so much beauty almost intimidating, and clutching a glass of Burgundy and dressed in his formal evening suit with tails, he left behind the sound of Strauss waltzes and wandered through gilded palace rooms.

Chandeliers sparkled from a thousand reflections, and centuries-old Bokhara rugs and oil paintings adorned the walls.

Tall negro servants, wearing colorful turbans and robes, came and went carrying silver trays of food along richly carpeted corridors.

It struck Sorg as an obscene irony—streets away in St. Petersburg existed the most deprived slums. Huge tenement blocks where families paid a third of their wages to landlords. Where factory workers lived ten to a room. Men who worked twelve-hour days, with only Sunday afternoons to rest.

Sorg wandered along a corridor dripping with chandeliers. After he’d spent a month in the capital, his palace invite was arranged with the help of the American ambassador. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise as much as a way of introducing Sorg’s face to St. Petersburg society.