The Romanov Cross: A Novel (26 page)

It was
her
job, as she saw it, to remain open and attuned to it all—the seen and the unseen, the facts and the faith. She had grown up among the legends and the folklore of her people. Her first memories were of fantastic natural phenomena—the swirling lights of the aurora borealis, the barking of a chorus of seals draped like mermaids on the ice floes, the sun that set for months at a time. You could not grow up on the coast of Alaska, one shallow breath below the Arctic Circle, and not feel both your remoteness from the rest of the world and your oneness with the vast and timeless elements—the impenetrable mountain ranges, the impassable seas—that surrounded you. Instilled within her was a sense of wonder—wonder at humanity’s place in the great scheme of things—and an innate respect for any people’s attempt to create a belief system able to encompass it all.

When they arrived at the church steps, she expected Slater to stop, like a boy dropping off his date at her home, but he started up the stairs instead.

“Wait,” she said, and he turned to look down at her. One of the two doors had fallen off its hinges and left a narrow opening.

“Don’t go in,” she said.

“Why not? The whole place is tilting already—let’s see if it’s safe.”

“I’ll be careful,” she said. What she didn’t say was that she didn’t want his presence to disturb the vibe inside, whatever it might be—and she knew that if she so much as hinted at that, he’d think she’d completely lost her mind. She was surprised herself at how much she already valued his good opinion of her; it wasn’t something she’d experienced in a long time. The dating pool in Port Orlov was meager, to put it kindly.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, grabbing up her bedroll and backpack and sidling past him.

He looked unpersuaded.

“Here,” she said, taking the
bilikin
from around her neck and dropping it down over his head. “Now you can keep an eye on things even in the dark of night.”

“You’re going to need it more than I do,” he said, glancing toward the church doors.

“It’s the leader of the hunt who’s supposed to wear it.”

For that split second it took her to put the necklace on him, their faces had been very close, and she had felt his warm breath on her cheek. She had seen the stubble on his chin, and a faint scar along his jawline. Where, she wondered, had he come by that? And why did she have such an urge to run her finger gently along its length?

“See you in the morning,” she said, to break the mood. “Put me down for French toast.”

But he still appeared dubious as she slipped between the doors, then flattened herself for a moment against the back of one, with her eyes closed. It was only when she heard his footsteps descend the stairs outside that she opened them again, to a scene of such desolation that she was sorely temped to change her plans.

By the time Harley and Eddie had found their way back to the cave again, stumbling through the forest with their flashlights and their tools, night had fallen, and the wind had been blowing in their faces the whole time. Even with the black wool balaclava pulled all the way down over his head, Harley’s face stung like it been slapped a thousand times.

Eddie, similarly attired, had done nothing but bitch all the way back.

Especially because their haul had been so disappointing.

The moment they staggered into the cave—about the tenth one they’d tried—Russell had been up on his feet and shouting, “What the fuck? You left me here?”

Harley, trying to get the tarp back in place, had told him to shut up, but Russell was just getting going.

“Where the fuck have you been? I wake up, and I’m ready to go, and you two assholes are nowhere around! Where did you go? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Because you got so damn drunk last night,” Harley said, gesturing at a few of the beer cans glittering in the glow of the Coleman lamp, “we didn’t have time for you to sober up.”

“You didn’t have time, or you didn’t want to share whatever you got? You went digging, right?” His eyes went to the shovel and pickaxe they had dropped by the mouth of the cave. “What’d you find? You holding out on me already?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, slumping in a weary heap against the wall. “We’re holding out on you.”

Harley tossed his backpack down, reached inside it and threw a string of crystal rosary beads on the ground. “That’s what we found.”

Russell picked it up, looked at the beads—apparently even he could tell they were pretty worthless—and tossed them away. “What else?”

“What else what?” Eddie said. “It took us hours just to dig up that piece of shit.”

“I don’t believe you,” Russell said, grabbing Harley’s backpack and shaking it out. A cascade of PowerBars, Tic Tacs, Chapstick, Trojans, and the like spilled out.

Harley felt his temper start to rise—this day had been bad enough already—and he was about to demand that Russell put it all back in the bag when he stopped himself. He could tell that Russell was on the verge of losing it altogether, and maybe a little drunk even now. He also knew what was really wigging him out—and it wasn’t the idea that he’d been cheated. It was having to spend the day alone, cooped up in this cave, wondering what was going on and whether or not he and Eddie were even planning to come back at all. Russell would never admit it—Harley knew that damn well—but he was having a panic attack.

After two years at Spring Creek—and several stays in solitary confinement there—Russell had lost his talent for solitude, or confinement.

“So what’s the plan then?” Russell said, looming over him but still having to stoop beneath the low roof of the cave. “Do we leave?”

“On what?” Eddie said. “Last I checked, the
Kodiak
’s on the rocks.”

“The skiff then.”

“In these seas?” Eddie sneered.

“Well what then? Are we gonna dig again tomorrow?”

That was the million-dollar question that Harley had been puzzling
over all the way back. As he and Eddie had skirted the colony on their return, he had seen the propeller blades of the Sikorsky rising behind the stockade wall, and he had glimpsed the stark white light of electric bulbs. That guy Slater and his Coast Guard crew were settling in … but for what? If they moved into the graveyard, all he’d be able to do was wait them out.

Or, and this had occurred to him halfway back, he could wait to see if they unearthed anything of value, then steal it from them once they had. It wasn’t as if the Coast Guard thought there was anyone else on the island. Maybe, as a result, they wouldn’t take the normal security precautions. You never could tell.

“What are we eating?” Eddie said, rummaging around in the supplies. “Let’s make something good and hot.”

“Sure,” Harley said, “and while we’re at it, why don’t we hang out a sign that says we’re here? Why don’t we make a big fire, and some smoke, and maybe even attract some animals to the smell?”

Eddie, stymied, rubbed his mittened hands together and waited.

Harley crawled over to the box of canned rations, and tossed them each a couple. The ones he grabbed for himself said
BEEF STROGANOFF
.

Grumbling, the other two settled into their corners and dug in.

Harley was hungry, too, and after everything he’d been through, even the shit in the can tasted great. That must be how the Army got away with it. Drop a guy into some desert foxhole, and he’ll eat anything, and be grateful for it.

The rosary was lying over by the wall, and Harley couldn’t help but relive the disappointment he’d felt when they’d finally busted into the coffin. Eddie had been afraid to reach in, so it had fallen to Harley again to take the damn thing out. He’d tried not to look at the face of the corpse this time; the last thing he needed was to be haunted by yet another figment of his imagination, like that guy in the sealskin coat. He’d felt around on the upper body and the face and the neck, checking the fingers too for rings, but this was the only thing he could locate or pry loose. Even the string of beads hadn’t come easy; it was as if the corpse was fighting to hang on to it.

When they were done, Harley had shoved the shards of the coffin back into the grave, then covered up the hole with dirt and snow again. He hoped it would snow some more during the night to further conceal his tracks.

Russell belched and popped the top on another beer. Harley was starting to think that the three cases might not last long enough, after all.

Of course it was an open question how long Russell himself would last. The guy was like a ticking bomb ever since he’d come back from the penitentiary, and Harley just wanted to make sure that he was well out of range of the explosion when it happened.

Standing with her back to the door, Nika fished out her flashlight and played the beam around the interior of the abandoned church. The place was so dark that the light could only penetrate a few small feet of the space at a time. Making things worse, everything was at a slight angle, so that she felt as if she were on a boat listing to one side at sea.

Testing the floor carefully, she advanced a few feet toward some wooden pews. Between them, there was a narrow stretch where the boards weren’t too badly warped and the pews might afford some protection from drafts. For a second, she reconsidered going back to the mess tent, but the thought of giving up on her mission, not to mention listening to Kozak snore all night (and there was no way he wasn’t a snorer) stiffened her resolve. She took off her boots and wrapped her fur coat around them to make a pillow, then unrolled her sleeping bag and slithered down into it.

Even for someone long accustomed to acting as the mayor, tribal elder, Zamboni driver, and general factotum for a whole town, it had been a particularly hard day, and although she couldn’t have predicted that she’d be sleeping in the ruins of an old Orthodox church that night, it wasn’t the first time she’d wound up bunking down under
strange conditions. As an anthropologist specializing in the native peoples of the Arctic climes, she had slept in igloos she’d carved herself, in shelters made from walrus gut and caribou hides, in long-abandoned iron mines that had once been blasted from the frozen soil. This was hardly the worst spot she’d ever been in.

But it might have been the eeriest. In fact, she still had that uneasy sensation she’d had ever since setting foot on the island. At first, she’d attributed it to the awkwardness of the situation between Dr. Slater and herself; he’d resisted her coming along, but now that she was there, he seemed to feel that he had some special duty to watch over her. The last thing she’d wanted was to add to his burden—the expedition alone was plenty of responsibility for one man—but she also had to admit that a part of her rather liked it. She was so used to taking care of things herself, whether it was a fishing dispute down at the dock or a municipal shortfall, that she’d forgotten what it was like to have someone else looking out for her. She’d been a lone wolf so long, it was nice to come across another of the breed.

No, her discomfort was from something else, something that clung to the island itself, like kelp to a rock. Nika had always been attuned to such things—her grandmother, who had raised her, had said she’d make a good shaman. Supposedly, her father had had such talents, but Nika hardly knew him, as he had gone missing when she was an infant, and her mother, working the late shift at the oil refinery, had been run off the road by a drunk driver and killed on the spot. For this part of Alaska, the story was not that unusual, and Nika had been determined to change her part in it before it was too late.

Instead of sticking around town and getting pregnant at seventeen by some fisherman, she’d hit the books, hard, and won a scholarship to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks; after that, she’d entered the doctoral program at Berkeley. Her old boyfriend Ben had been planning for the two of them to move to Florida, where he’d just received a job offer—tenure track yet—at the University of Miami. She’d even flown there with him for a week to look around at the campus and check out some apartments, but every palm tree was like a needle in
her heart. And for someone who’d seen seals skinned and elk field-dressed, it was alarming how grossed out she’d been by the sight of palmetto bugs scurrying across a kitchen counter.

To Ben’s surprise, if not her own, Nika had returned to the place she’d been determined to escape. Now that she’d made her point and earned her degrees, she decided to come back to Port Orlov, where she could do more for her people than write ethnographic monographs published in scholarly journals that no one would ever read. She could so something concrete. Maybe it was what priests meant when they talked about their calling.

Down toward the nave of the church, she heard a faint rustling sound, and she held her breath. Rats. That would be all she needed. Her hand slipped out of her sleeping bag and made sure her flashlight was within easy reach.

Slater, she thought, showed that same missionary zeal. Although she’d never have admitted it, she’d done a thorough Internet search on him and what she’d read had been very impressive—impeccable academic credentials, an illustrious Army career in the Medical Corps, a number of published papers on epidemiological issues, all of them based on firsthand reports from war zones and trouble spots. But this man who had once been an Army major was now a civilian again, and reading between the lines on the Web, where she could almost see the fingertips of government censors, it looked to her like something had abruptly gone awry. Had he been drummed out of the service? What could he have possibly done? In her estimation, Slater seemed like efficiency incarnate, a model of rectitude, the oldest Boy Scout she’d ever known … but with a world-weary edge to him. And something else, too—a pallor to his skin, a glassy sheen in his eye now and then. It occurred to her that he might have been sick lately. Maybe he still was. But with what?

The sound came again, but this time it was more like little feet pattering across the wood, then something being shifted. Dragged. She wanted to reach down and unzip her bag, but she was afraid the noise would give her away. Damn, why hadn’t she inspected the place more
thoroughly before bedding down? Or better yet, just slept in the mess tent?