The Romanov Cross: A Novel (59 page)

He was in the nave, a few yards in front of the iconostasis.

Ducking again, he squeezed his field pack through the hole and hacked at the neighboring plank until he was able to loosen it enough to push it aside. With considerable effort, he was able to haul himself up into the church, but only barely. Kozak would need more room, and so, before he signaled him to follow, he chopped at a third board until the hole was as wide as a manhole cover. Then, he sat back and took a deep breath, rubbing his rib cage.

From below, he heard Kozak’s voice echoing along the tunnel. “Is it clear? Are you in?”

Slater bent to the hole and whistled through the sawdust on his lips. He could hear a muffled huffing and puffing as Kozak, big but strong, hauled himself along the frozen ground. He imagined this must be what a bear sounded like as it prepared its den for a winter’s hibernation. When he saw his flashlight beam growing bright, Slater slipped his head down into the hole and saw Kozak’s eyeglasses glinting in the darkness. Slater put his hand down, and Kozak grabbed it with his leather glove. Slater pulled, his ribs giving him a jolt, and the professor eventually emerged from the tunnel, scraped, sputtering, and covered with dirt and ice and bits of wood.

“Next time,” he said, “a bigger hole, please.”

Slater smiled.

But as Kozak, his legs still dangling underground, gazed around the church, illuminated only by the feeble glow of the flashlights and
the moonlight filtering in through the cracks in the roof beams and the holes in the dome, he looked like a kid at a carnival. “It’s all ours!” he whispered.

“Not for long,” Slater replied. “Let’s go find that sacristy.”

Kozak got to his feet and lumbered across the sloping floor toward the jumble of wreckage concealing the iconostasis screen. “You look at that end, and I’ll look at this,” Kozak said, stepping close to the pile of broken furniture and twisted andirons.

“And what exactly am I looking for?”

“You are at the south end, so you will be looking for the entrance—a door with a picture of St. Michael, the Defender of the Faith.”

“How will I know it’s him?”

“He’ll probably be carrying a sword. I’ll be looking for the exit door, which should show the Archangel Gabriel, the Messenger of God.”

“Which one do we want?”

“Whichever one happens to be open.”

Slater pressed his face toward the screen, trying to peer through the debris. His flashlight picked up flecks of paint—in red and gold and blue—on old whitewashed boards. Here and there, he could even see the outlines of angels and saints and, in one place, what looked like it might have been a painting of Noah’s Ark.

“In grand cathedrals,” Kozak said, while inspecting his own end, “these screens were ornately decorated and went all the way to the ceiling.”

This one went nearly that high, and in its own day Slater imagined that it, too, had been beautiful in its own simple fashion.

“I have found Gabriel,” Kozak exulted, “and he is blowing his horn.”

“To welcome us in?”

“No, the door is nailed shut and boarded over. Very unusual.”

Kozak came down toward Slater’s end. “Maybe we will have better luck with St. Michael.”

Pulling aside the broken refectory tables and cracked barrels, they scoured the wall with their flashlight beams until Slater could dimly
make out the frame of a doorway—narrow and arched at the top, with the barest outline remaining of a golden-haired saint wielding a silver sword. On this door, there was a rusted chain, hanging loose, and no boards secured across it.

No words needed to be exchanged. With each of them taking hold of one end of an upended pew, they inched it away from the iconostasis. Then, Slater cleared away some other debris, like cutting tumbleweed away from a fence, until he could get to the door itself. If there had ever been a handle, it had long since fallen off and was probably rolling around in the darkness beneath their feet.

“Let me,” Kozak said, elbowing past him and putting his shoulder against the wood. “If there’s a curse, it should fall on me.”

He pressed his burly shoulder against the door and Slater heard its antique hinges squeak, but hold.

“Russians do good work,” Kozak muttered, putting his head down and pressing harder. After a few seconds, there was a popping sound, as first one hinge, then the other, gave way. The door, its bottom scraping the floor, creaked open.

Kozak stood to one side, and with a sweep of his arm gestured for Slater to enter first. “I do not care what they say in Washington,” he declared. “You are still the head of this mission.”

Slater appreciated the vote of confidence and slid through the open space, pushing the door wider as he went. Cobwebs clung to his head, and the air inside was as cold and still and stifling as a meat locker. He had the uneasy sense of intruding upon something sacred and long inviolate. He swept his flashlight beam around the room, but the rays seemed to be swallowed up by the inky blackness. Here, there were no holes in the roof or cracks in the timbered walls to let in the moonlight, and even the floor, when he turned the light on it, gave off the dull gleam of tar. This sacristy had been sealed like a tomb.

“I would give a great deal for a lamp right now,” Kozak said.

So would Slater. The flashlight only gave him glimpses of what lay all around him—a wooden altar, covered with one red cloth and one white. A few ecclesiastical vessels—chalices and bowls and salvers. Everything thick with dust.

But a candelabra, too—with the nubs of candles still in it.

“Have you got some matches on you?” Slater asked, and Kozak, patting his pipe pocket, said, “Always.”

Slater left his flashlight beam trained on the candelabra, and the professor struck one match after another, trying to find and light the wicks. Eventually, out of six or seven candles, he got four of them lighted, providing a flickering but more diffused light to penetrate the room.

The first thing he noticed was a door, no more than four feet tall, cut flush with the logs in the wall and secured by a crossbar. When he pointed it out to Kozak, he said, jokingly, “I wish we’d known about that in advance.”

“Huh,” Kozak said, running his fingers over his beard. “A bishop’s door. You find such a thing in the great churches of places like Moscow—places where a bishop might actually wish to make a miraculous appearance. But I would never have expected to find one here.” He rattled the crossbar in its grooves and it moved easily. “And they could hardly have expected a bishop to come to this church.”

“What about a grand duchess?” Slater was beginning to believe what Kozak had translated from the sexton’s ledger.

But Kozak shook his head. “I don’t think even she knew she would end her days here.”

“Who was it built for then?”

“If I had to make a guess,” the professor said, “I would say it was her protector and confessor. The man these settlers came here to venerate. Rasputin.”

Slater glanced again at the rough-hewn door, fitted so skillfully into the wall that it would hardly be noticed if it were not for the bar. They had missed its existence entirely from the outside.

Against the opposite wall, a mirrored cabinet stood open, with two cassocks hanging from its hooks. Kozak reverently stroked the sleeve of the white cassock, saying, “This one was used only for Pascha. Easter.” The other was black, with a scarlet lining, and when he brushed it to one side, he reached into the back of the cabinet, felt the rim of a basin—no doubt the sacrarium used to wash the holy linens
after a service—and started to lift it out. There was the sound of pebbles sloshing around in a bowl.

“Frank.” Kozak’s voice was filled with awe. “Frank.”

The professor moved to the altar, holding the bowl in front of him as carefully as if it were the host itself. When he put it down, Slater trained his own beam on it, and it was like he was looking at a kaleidoscope.

The basin itself was made of white porcelain, with a gold rim, but inside it, as if they were a heap of marbles, lay a dazzling mound of gems—bright white diamonds, fiery rubies, sapphires as blue as the crevices in a glacier, emeralds as green as a cat’s eyes. There were rings, too—of gold and silver—and bracelets and broaches—ivory and onyx—and ropes of pearls, coiled and tangled, that had faded to a pale yellow. Kozak dipped his hands in, as if he were tossing a salad, and let the jewels sift back into the bowl between his fingers. They clinked and clattered as they fell, the sound echoing around the sacristy.

“Talk about a king’s ransom,” Slater said.

“No,” Kozak said. “A Tsar’s ransom.”

It was more than Slater had ever imagined finding. He had gone along with the professor’s scheme more out of curiosity than conviction—not to mention the pleasure of defying Colonel Waggoner’s orders—and now they had stumbled upon a long-lost and legendary treasure. They had found what remained of the Romanov jewels.

The candles guttered on the altar, and one threw a spark that drifted, glowing, toward the back of the room. Slater followed it first with his eyes, and then, as he thought he discerned something in the shadows, with the beam of his flashlight.

Kozak was still absorbed in the gems, but Slater took a step or two toward the rear of the chamber.

A chair—no, it was more like a throne—had been placed in the darkest recess, atop a sort of dais. It had huge, clawed feet that protruded from under a long, gossamer-thin canopy draped from the
roof. It was so grand that it made its own small enclosure. Had this, too, been designed in anticipation of Rasputin’s arrival?

It was only as he got closer that he thought he saw the tip of a small boot poking out from under the cloth. It couldn’t be. He took hold of the canopy and lifted it a few inches—enough to see that the boot was heavy and black, laced high and built with a thick heel, as if it had been molded to a deformed foot. Lifting the faded cloth higher, he saw the ragged hem of a long skirt—dark blue wool, homespun.

“Vassily,” he said, “come here.”

“Can’t you see I am busy?” Kozak joked.

“I mean it.”

Kozak ambled over, his broad back temporarily obscuring the candlelight, and upon seeing the canopied chair, said, “And that is called a Bishop’s Throne. They must have been expecting Rasputin, after all.”

Slater directed his gaze to the boot and skirt, and the professor immediately grew still. “My God,” he breathed.

Slater drew the canopy to one side, gently, but even so it began to shred and tumble from its hooks, releasing a cloud of dust that made them both turn away, coughing and closing their eyes. When the dust had settled and Slater turned back again, what he saw stunned him. His first thought was of the mummies found in the high Andes.

The old woman in the chair was sitting as erect as a queen, her eyes closed, her long gray hair knotted into a single long plait that hung over one shoulder of her cloak. Under it, she was wearing several layers of clothing—he saw the collar of a worn blouse, a jacket made of some hide, even the bottom of a richly embroidered corset.

But it was her skin that was the most entrancing. Her face looked like an old, withered apple, lined with a thousand creases, and her hands, which lay on the armrests of the chair, were brown with age; her fingers looked as brittle as twigs. One hand cradled the base of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.

“Do you think …” Slater said, but before he could finish, Kozak had said, “Yes. Even the boot confirms it. Anastasia’s left foot was malformed.”

For at least a minute, they both stood in respectful silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Slater was already wondering how he would broach these discoveries to the colonel, who had strictly confined him to quarters. Waggoner could rant all he wanted, but confronted with the proof itself—a bowl full of gems and a frozen corpse—he would have no choice but to alert the higher authorities in the Coast Guard, the AFIP, and Lord knows how many other agencies.

“What do we do now?” the professor finally said, and Slater switched himself back into the scientific mode. If it weren’t for the astounding, even unbelievable, nature of what they had just discovered, he asked himself, what would he have normally done? Under more logical circumstances, what would the next order of business be?

Evidence, and the systematic gathering of it. On any epidemiological mission, the first objective was to collect all the available data and evidence at the site, and that’s what he needed to do here and now—even before notifying the colonel. Once Waggoner was apprised of the situation, Slater was not at all confident that he would be given any further access. In all likelihood, he would be put under guard and whisked off the island as fast as the first chopper could take him—and in handcuffs, if the colonel had his way. No, this, he recognized, might well be his only chance to do any science at all.

Slater took off his field kit and opened it, planning out the task ahead. Unlike all the others on the island, Anastasia plainly had not died of the flu—she was immune, as was he, after weathering the storm at the hospital in Nome. But he did not forget that it was she who had carried it here, nearly a century ago. As a result, it was critical that he still observe the necessary and standard precautions—especially in regard to the bystander Kozak.

Digging out a gauze face mask, he told the professor to put it on and to stand back by the altar.

“Why?” Kozak said. “What are you planning to do?”

Donning another mask himself, Slater said, “Provide your friends at the Trofimuk Institute with a little DNA evidence, if all goes well.”

“Yes, thank you,” Kozak said, slipping the elastic bands behind his ears. “I think they would rather have that than the royal jewels.”

Slater lifted the lantern off the arm of the chair and placed it on the dais beside her boot. Puzzlingly, there was moisture there, and even the hem of her long skirt looked damp; he assumed he must have been dripping melted snow from his coat.

Then he surveyed the corpse, deciding on the best area from which to draw the sample. The hair could provide some DNA, especially if he made sure to capture the follicle, too—the shaft would provide only mitochondrial evidence—but it was terribly degraded and might not do the job. Her bony wrist, on the other hand, lay perfectly exposed, and if he could suction up some petrified skin and blood cells from a vein, he would get the richest and most viable sample possible.