The Romanov Cross: A Novel (22 page)

More to the point, neither of them would be missed for a few days.

But the
Kodiak
was getting perilously close to shore now, and Harley figured he could no longer leave Eddie at the wheel—not if he wanted to keep the boat in one piece.

Sweeping the searchlight back and forth across the cliffs, he saw flocks of kittiwakes startled into flight, and steep, impregnable walls slick with ice. A ripple of white foam indicated an underwater reef off the port side. The boat was halfway around the island from the Russian colony, and there was no sign of another beach. An inlet or cove was the best he could hope for; they’d have to drop anchor and use the
Kodiak
’s skiff to go ashore.

Fixing the searchlight in place, he went back up to the bridge, and the minute he came through the door, the wind howling at his back, Eddie and Russell, looking vaguely guilty, stopped laughing.

“What was so funny?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said.

Harley figured that the joke had been at his expense. Eddie stifled another laugh, and now Harley knew for sure—and he saw red.

“Lighten up,” Russell said, a bit blearily. “Have a beer.” He held out a can and Harley smacked it out of his hand so hard that the can hit the binnacle and cracked the anemometer screen.

“Fuck,” Eddie shouted. “My uncle’s going to see that!”

Russell’s shoulders hunched, and his fists clenched. Eddie saw it, too, and leapt between them, his arms outstretched.

“Hey, guys, chill out. Come on now, come on. We’re all friends here.”

“Are we?” Harley said, glaring first at one, then the other. “Because if we’re such good friends, we’re gonna have to get something straight. This is my gig, and I don’t want a couple of drunken stoners fucking it up.”

The beer can was rolling around the floor of the wheelhouse,
spraying foam through a dent. The wheel, unattended, was turning slowly.

“Who said I’m drunk?” Russell challenged him, weaving on his feet.

Harley smiled, acting like it was all okay now, then spun around, throwing out one leg in a classic martial-arts move that caught Russell behind his knees and dumped his ass on the floor. He landed with a thump that jolted the whole cabin, then he lay there, propped up against the chart table, stunned.

“What the fuck?” Eddie said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“And you,” Harley said, “get out on deck and keep watch.” Harley moved to take control of the wheel, but Eddie grabbed it again, refusing to budge.

“It’s my uncle’s boat.”

Harley shoved him, and Eddie stumbled into Russell, who was just getting to his feet. They both went down, and Harley whipped around, the gun out of his belt now. Eddie put out both of his hands, and said, “Whoa there, pardner! Put that away before somebody gets hurt.”

Harley waited a few seconds, just to make sure Russell wasn’t planning on anything further.

Russell opened his own hands, as if to show he had no weapon and no bad intentions. “Jesus, Harley. Get a grip.”

Harley was just putting the gun back in his belt when the boat lurched, and they heard a grinding noise like a tin can scraping on cement. Harley turned and saw that the loose wheel had spun again, and through the window of the bridge he saw that the bow was pointing straight toward the cliffs, no more than forty yards away. But the boat wasn’t moving, and unless he was sorely mistaken, they had just run aground on one of the many reefs he might have seen coming if he hadn’t been so distracted.

“Goddamn!” Eddie shouted, leaping to his feet and going for the throttle. Before Harley could stop him, he had thrown the boat into reverse, and the grinding had come again, even louder this time … but the
Kodiak
still didn’t move.

“Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!” Eddie hollered, stamping his
feet as he went in circles around the cramped space in the bridge. The boat was jammed on a reef, teetering this way and that like a car perched atop a snowbank. “You
are
bad luck!” he shouted, pointing a finger at Harley. “You are such bad luck, man!”

Even Harley was temporarily at a loss.
Was
he bad luck?

Eddie was just about to try the throttle again when Harley stopped him. “You’ll rip its guts out,” he said.

“What else can we do?”

“We can wait,” Harley said. “Maybe the tide will give us a boost. Russell, go below and see if we’re taking on water.”

For once, Russell took an order and stumbled down to the hold.

Eddie, fuming, glared at Harley, who turned around and stared at the small portion of the island illuminated by the bow light. At water level, he saw a bunch of tide pools, frothing white, then disappearing, and above them a jumble of rocks, piled halfway up the side of the cliff. That much was a lucky break. The rocks looked climbable, and the remaining slope was pockmarked with caves and crevices and ledges.

“They told me not to do this,” Eddie muttered, shaking his head. “They told me not to go to sea with a Vane.”

“Who told you what? You were supposed to keep your mouth shut about this. Who did you tell?”

“Nobody,” Eddie said, retreating. “I didn’t tell anybody. It’s just something everybody says, down at the docks.”

Harley couldn’t be too surprised. His family had lost two boats already, Charlie was in a wheelchair, and for all he knew they’d just beached a third.

Russell, panting, appeared in the hatchway. “It’s not too bad. The hull’s holding.”

“For how long?” Eddie said in a panic.

“Your uncle always said she could be swamped for twelve hours without sinking,” Harley said.

“Swamped? Didn’t you hear what Russell just said? She’s holding. Man, don’t put your family curse on it. Let’s just get out of here.”

“That’s exactly what we’re
not
going to do,” Harley said. “We’re
going to drop anchor, with enough slack to let the boat drift off the rocks with the next tide.”

“And do what until then?” Eddie shot back. “Sit here and wait?”

“No. We’re going onto the island, and get started. How else are you gonna buy your uncle a new anemometer?” Zipping up his coat, Harley said, “Get your gear together, both of you. I’ll get the skiff ready.”

Out on deck, he walked the length of the ship but didn’t see much damage except to the paint. Provided she didn’t spring a leak, she would stay where she was until the currents, and some clever engine maneuvers, freed her again. He dropped anchor and watched as the chain played out for no more than a few seconds. Stepping to the bow, he maneuvered the light around, picking out the best route through the rocks and tide pools. It wasn’t going to be easy to get the skiff through unscathed, but he could do it, even with the deadweight of Russell and Eddie on board. It was only as he flicked off the searchlight, in order to see the wet walls of the cliff without the reflection glaring off them, that he glimpsed on the ridgeline what looked like a yellow light, gently swinging. He blinked, thinking it was just an aftereffect of the bright bow light going off, like a strobe, but when he looked again, the yellow glow, more like a lantern suspended in midair, was still there.

On the morning that Rasputin’s body was to be buried, Anastasia and the other members of the royal family bundled into two long black touring cars and drove from St. Petersburg to the imperial park at Tsarskoe Selo. There, a grave had been dug near the site where a church was later to be erected in his honor.

Anastasia had never seen her mother so bereaved. At the news of Father Grigori’s murder, she had utterly broken down, fearing that her son Alexei had lost his most potent protector. And when she learned that the deed had been done by Prince Yussoupov and, worse yet, Grand Duke Dmitri, a Romanov relation, she had almost lost her wits altogether. Anastasia and her three older sisters had taken turns watching over their mother.

Looking out the window now, Ana saw endless, snow-covered fields, lined by white birches and punctuated, like print on a white page, by scribbles of crows. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun so bright and a sky so blue Fabergé himself might have enameled the scene. Icicles hanging from the eaves of the occasional farmhouse glistened like diamonds. Under her own blouse, Ana wore the emerald cross the monk had given her at the Christmas ball. That was the
last time she had seen him alive, and she had not taken off the cross ever since.

The body itself had not remained hidden for long. In their haste, the conspirators had left one of Rasputin’s boots lying out on the ice of the frozen Neva. The corpse had floated not far off, and when another hole was cut through the ice to retrieve it, the
starets
was found to have been alive even after being submerged in the river. One of his arms had wriggled free of the ropes and was frozen stiff as if raised in a benediction, and his lungs were filled with water. For all the poison in his bloodstream, the bullets in his body, and the bruises from the beating, the monk had died in the end by drowning.

Once the cars had entered the park, and the Cossack guards had closed the gates and resumed their endless patrols again, Anastasia saw that wooden walkways had been built across a frozen field. The cars stopped, and Tsar Nicholas himself stepped out of the first one, his wife leaning heavily on the arm of her close friend, Madame Vyrubova. The Tsaritsa Alexandra was dressed entirely in black, as were they all, but carried in her arms a bouquet of white roses plucked that morning from the greenhouse at the Winter Palace.

In the distance, a motor van was parked by an open grave, its engine still running, a plume of gray smoke rising from its exhaust. As Anastasia drew closer, picking her way carefully over the freshly placed boards, she saw the foot of a coffin—a simple one, made of white oak—resting in the back of the van. Her mother went straight to it and asked one of the attendants to open it.

Looking uncertain, the attendant glanced at the Tsar, who nodded.

The lid was lifted, and though Ana was standing far back with her sisters, she caught a glimpse of the holy man’s black beard, stiffly brushed … and a ragged hole in his head, above his left eye, as if someone had drilled his skull with an augur. His broad hands, once so full of power and expression, were folded meekly against the shoulders of his black cassock.

All in all, it was the most shocking sight Ana had ever seen … but she did not quail, even as her sister Tatiana let out a whimper and
Olga consoled her. In Ana’s head, all she could hear were the words Rasputin had spoken to her in the chapel.

“If any relation to your family takes my life, then woe to the dynasty. The Russian people will rise against you with murder in their hearts.”

And not only had Grand Duke Dmitri participated in the murder, he had bragged about it the next day.

“The blood of your family is poisoned,”
the monk had said.
“But this curse you carry in your veins will be your own salvation one day. A plague shall overwhelm the world, but you shall be proof against it.”

Ana still had no idea what these last words betokened. But she wore the emerald cross he had given her, with its secret inscription on the back, nonetheless.

Her mother handed the white roses to her friend and placed two objects on Rasputin’s breast. One was an icon that everyone in the imperial family had inscribed, and the other was a letter that she had dictated to Anastasia because her own hand was too unsteady. “My dear martyr,” it had read, “give me thy blessing that it may follow me always on the sad and dreary path I have yet to follow here below. And remember us from on high in your holy prayers.” Ana had held the letter for her mother to sign. Lifting herself from the divan, where the pain from her sciatica had once again relegated her, her mother had written “Alexandra” with her usual flourish, before pressing the page first to her heart, then to her lips.

Now, the letter, too, was lying on Father Grigori’s breast. The attendants closed and sealed the coffin, and it was lowered into the grave. A chaplain read the funeral service, but Ana was listening only to the sound of the winter wind as it rustled through the creaky scaffolding of the church being built close by. She looked at her family, standing silent and still in their black coats and boots and hats, all in a row, and it was as if she were looking at a photograph. A grim photograph that made her think of the monk’s dire prophecy again.

“Here,” Madame Vyrubova said, softly, “take this.” She handed Ana some of the white roses. And then, after her mother and father and sisters had cast their own into the open grave, Ana dropped hers,
too, watching the petals flutter like snowflakes onto the lid of the coffin.

“I am no longer among the living,”
Rasputin had said on that Christmas night.

But even now, even here, some part of Anastasia did not believe it.

Lying in his sleeping bag on the floor of the cave, Harley checked the time on his cell phone. The phone reception was for shit—what would you expect from a cave on an island in the middle of nowhere?—but the clock told him it was 8
A.M.

And that meant it was high time to get this damn show on the road.

After they’d run the
Kodiak
aground the night before, Harley and his two next-to-useless assistants had off-loaded their supplies onto the skiff and laboriously toted them up the side of the sloping cliff and into the first cave that looked relatively safe and dry. They had left an LED light burning atop a crate all night, and looking around now, Harley saw the ration boxes and knapsacks stacked against the craggy stone walls, along with the shovels, spades, and, leave it to Russell, three cases of beer. Judging from the sound of his snoring, Russell was still sleeping off the cold ones he’d already drunk. Harley crawled out of his sleeping bag, kicked Eddie to wake him up, then, bending to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling, went to the mouth of the cave; they’d stretched a tarp between two crates to keep out the wind. Batting the tarp aside, he looked out on the cold, dark morning and the seawater frothing in the tide pools at the foot of the cliff. The
boat was still marooned on the rocks, advertising their presence on the island, but at least it was stranded as far from the old Russian colony as it could get. Harley would have liked to find a hideout farther from the boat, just in case the Coast Guard ever came along and spotted it, but he knew that if he’d asked Eddie and Russell to hump the supplies any deeper into the woods, he’d have had a mutiny on his hands.