The Romanov Legacy (4 page)

July 2012

Cusco, Peru

The alpaca fur lay soft as clouds beneath his palm. 
Constantine Dashkov tousled the thick white strands and turned the blanket over
to inspect the construction.  The vendor asked 300 nuevo soles and he
would have paid twice that, but haggling was the custom and he would only
insult the shopkeeper by handing over the money.  “
Doscientos
,” he
said. 

The man shook his head.  “
Trescientos, por favor
.”

Constantine fingered the mottled leather on the blanket’s
underside, pretending to find flaws in the tanning.  “She usually prefers
vicuña,” he lied. 

“You will find no vicuña for this price.”

“I did at Señor Fernandez’s shop.”  He didn’t tell the
man that Señor Fernandez also offered coca leaves at an exorbitant price and
threw in a vicuña coat or blanket as a complimentary gift with purchase.

“Fernandez is a fool,” the vendor said, curling his lip to
reveal squat teeth the color of bean curd.  “He dyes goat hair and tells
tourists it is vicuña.”

“Is that so?”  Constantine rocked back on his heels and
tried to look thoughtful.  Behind the shopkeeper’s hut, the Andes rose
like sleeping giants, waiting to be woken.  “
Doscientos cincuenta y no
mas
.”

“
Bueno
.”  The shopkeeper snatched the blanket
from him and scuttled behind his workbench to wrap it, leather side out, in
thinly woven burlap. 

“
Gracias
.” Constantine stepped out of the shop and
took a deep breath that did not fill his lungs.  The filament-thin air
stretched over the jagged peaks like a piece of plastic wrap forced to cover an
entire banquet table.  Russian air was the opposite: thick, solid, with
weight that could fill you or crush you, depending on the season. 
I am
done with this place
, he thought. 
No more flat tires, no more
insects the size of small children.  I am going home.

The vibration of his cell phone interrupted him.  He
pulled it from his pocket, glancing at the number.  “Vadim,” he
said.  “What is it?”

“Greetings, my boy,” the bureau chief said, his tired
baritone crackling over the air.  “How is Peru?”

“Suffocating,” he answered.  Behind him, the shopkeeper
tied up his purchase with long strands of twine.  “But I’m on my way home
now.”

“About that…there has been a change of plan.”

He clenched his fingers around the narrow phone. 
“Don’t do this to me, Vadim.”

“There is no choice, I’m afraid.  Let me
explain.”  Constantine’s gut churned as he listened to the ludicrous story
spill out of Vadim’s mouth:  the blackmailer in San Francisco, his
professor accomplice, and the favor Vadim could do nothing but repay.  “I
wouldn’t ask this of you unless it were for him,” the older man finished
weakly.   

“Goddamn it, Vadim.”  Constantine suppressed the urge
to hit something.  He imagined slamming his fist into another man’s face
just to feel the satisfying crunch of cartilage.  This was the fifth time
he’d been promised leave, and the fifth time it had been revoked.  He
hadn’t seen his family in one year, ten months and thirteen days. 
Hurry
,
his father’s email had said. 
We’re losing her.
  “Get someone
else,” he said.  “I can’t do it.”  

“This is not a request, my boy.  It must be handled
quickly and quietly, before it comes to the Prime Minister’s attention.”

“Not this time, Vadim.  She’s waiting for me.”

“I’m very sorry, my boy, but you leave in an hour.  The
file is on the plane.”

He opened his mouth to protest but the line was already
dead.  Behind him, the shopkeeper held out the wrapped package. 
Constantine shook his head.  “
Lo siento, senor
.  I’m not going
home after all.”

*

The Global Express XRS sat fueled and ready when he arrived
at Velazco Astete.  The bureau fielded a fleet of private jets, keeping
its agents out of public terminals and off traceable passenger manifests. 
Each jet had radar scramblers, missile defense, a private stateroom, and a
freezer full of Russian Standard.  The flight crews consisted solely of
retired Soviet Air Defense Force pilots.  Sometimes they would open the
door to the flight deck and tell their passengers stories about shooting down
Korean planes by accident. 

Constantine saluted his pilot and co-pilot as he stepped
into the cabin and grabbed a bottle from the freezer.  He’d emailed his
father from the cab, informing him of the delay. 
Tell Lana to hang on
,
he wrote. 
One more stop and I’ll be home
. 

His eyes drifted down to the file on the seat next to
him.  It bore the bureau’s seal—a double eagle clutching a scroll in one
talon and a saber in the other.  He slit the sealing tape and sifted
through the contents: a summary of the Romanov murder, snippets of an old case
file with a Soviet locator number, and dossiers on two people, Professor
Elizabeth Brandon and the letter writer, Yuri Voloshin. 

The information on Voloshin came from the Russian consul in
San Francisco, a man named Kadyrov.  Voloshin had apparently contacted the
consul that morning; on Vadim’s instructions, the consul set up a meeting for
tomorrow.  Yuri Voloshin’s background check read like a petty crime
novel.  His father died when he was eight, after which he lived with his
immigrant grandfather.  Since the age of 19, he’d been in and out of
prison for theft and drug charges, with no steady jobs, education, wife, or
kids.  Aside from his minor connections within the
vory zakone
,
there was nothing to mark his presence on earth. 

Professor Elizabeth Brandon proved slightly more compelling
as a subject.  A tenured professor at a liberal arts university, she had
an impressive public record—six books, two Pulitzer nominations and occasional
editorials in
The New York Times
.  She was divorced with one child,
and the legal guardian of a younger sister who was a hair’s breadth away from
being institutionalized.  He grunted, feeling an unwilling kinship with
his victim.  Svetlana’s doctors had done nothing but shake their heads and
give her more pills.  All he realized was that they didn’t understand a
goddamn thing about what was going on in Lana’s mind.  How could anything
like that be fixed by a pill?

He flipped to the summary of the Romanov murder.  All
seven members of the deposed imperial family were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg
from April to July of 1918: Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, his son Alexei and
four daughters named Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia.  As the
politicians in Moscow tried to decide what to do with the inconvenient family,
a counter-revolutionary force—the White Army—advanced on Ekaterinburg. 

The Ural Soviet decided it couldn’t risk the former Tsar
falling into enemy hands.  They telegraphed Moscow, informing Lenin of
their decision to kill the captives; no response came back.  The men of
the Ural Soviet interpreted silence as acquiescence and killed the entire
family, with their servants, on the night of July 16/17.  They
dismembered, disfigured, burned, and buried the corpses in the Koptyaki
Forest. 

For months after the murder, Lenin’s government fed conflicting
stories to the press, some stating the whole family had been killed, some that
only Nicholas and Alexei had been killed.  Lenin used the dead family’s
survival as a bargaining chip to keep channels of communication open with other
interested parties, namely Germany and England.  Because no one found the
bodies until decades later, Lenin’s ruse worked.  Escape rumors abounded
and for the first year or two after the murder, very few people had any idea
what really happened.

Constantine saved the most interesting part of the dossier
for last—the old Soviet file, begun in 1931 by an agent named Rumkowski. 
Stalin had tasked Rumkowski with finding Tsarist funds in foreign banks and
securing them for Soviet coffers.  When Rumkowski asked how Stalin knew
the money was there to be found, the dictator answered, “Lenin.”  He never
revealed to Rumkowski how Lenin knew the money existed. 

Rumkowski’s preliminary inquiries to major banks—Barclays,
Crédit Lyonnais, Mendelsohn’s—all came back negative, so he decided to play
dirty.  He sent agents into Europe posed as bankers, notaries, and even a
Polish nobleman to get close to various relatives of the Tsar and the pretender
Anna Anderson.  What they reported confirmed the suspicion that the money
was out there, most likely in an open and unclaimed account in the Bank of
England.

Later, Rumkowski hit on the idea of questioning the men who
had guarded and murdered the Tsar, hoping one of them might have heard
something in the family’s last days.  But by the time he got around to it,
just before World War II, many of the men were dead and buried
themselves. 

However, one guard named Ivan Skorokhodov left a
granddaughter who confessed to a local priest that her grandfather had been in
love with Marie Romanov.  The pair planned to escape together, she said,
and claim the Tsar’s fortune, which was held in the Bank of England.  Her
grandfather, who died in 1921 of influenza, said Marie spoke of a
password.  Anyone with the password could access the Tsar’s money. Marie had
promised to relay the password to him in writing, so that if anything happened
to her during her escape attempt, at least her beloved could live a financially
secure life.  That password never came, and eventually the guard learned
that Marie and her family had been murdered. 

The guard told his daughter this story while he lay dying,
and that daughter told
her
daughter, who later confessed the sin of
greed to her priest.  The priest published his memoirs in the late 1940s,
including this story.  Only fifty volumes were printed, and the file noted
that 34 of them had been destroyed by the KGB to keep the story from spreading.

For whatever reason, Rumkowski believed this tale to be
true.  He searched the Ipatiev house timber by timber, looking for the password
Marie might have left for Skorokhodov.  He found nothing.  In the
early 1970s, when he was ready to retire, he passed his information on to Boris
Yeltsin, who managed to get the necessary permits to raze the Ipatiev House in
1977.  Still, no password was found.

Over the years, other sources pointed to England as a
potential source of hidden Tsarist money, from pretenders such as Anna Anderson
to former servants and companions like the Tsarina’s friend Lili Dehn. 
The Bank of England issued countless statements denying the existence of a
secret account.  Rumkowski believed they were all lying, under a blanket
order originating with King George V.  He believed they had hopes of
confiscating the money themselves. 

Over time, Rumkowski’s leads thinned out as people who
remembered the Tsar died or succumbed to dementia.  No one ever confirmed
Ivan Skorokhodov’s story, and the file remained open but dormant, a nuisance
that nagged at Soviet premiers desperate for money to fund the space race,
Olympic athletic programs, and the war in Afghanistan. 

Constantine set the file down.  Somewhere deep behind
his eyes, a headache was forming.  The rhythmic throb reminded him of a
derrick, pulling black gold out of the Baku oil fields.  This assignment
was ridiculous.  If Stalin himself couldn’t find the Tsar’s money, how was
anyone else supposed to?

The intercom buzzed to life.  “Excuse the interruption,
Mr. Dashkov.  We have reached our cruising altitude of 43,000 feet. 
Our expected landing time in San Francisco is 9:30 p.m. local time.  The
flight should be smooth, if you want to get some sleep.”

Constantine waved acceptance; the cabin camera displayed in
the cockpit would let the pilot know he understood.  He opened the small
bottle of vodka and drank all of it, settling down into a restless sleep. 

July 1918

Ekaterinburg, Russia

Olga sat alone in the upstairs drawing room, pretending to
read her Bible.  It lay open on her lap but she hadn’t turned a page in
more than an hour.  The words of Jesus failed to comfort her because she
could only think of the horrible end that awaited him.  No matter how kind
he was, the people he sought to help always betrayed him.  How had it
felt, she wondered, at the moment of death?  Was it a relief to put down
the burden of suffering?  Was it a struggle not to curse the soldier who
had thrown the spear?  What did it all matter, since two thousand years
later, the same terrible crimes were still being perpetrated?

Her eyes drifted to the empty basket on the side
table.  Any moment now, the delivery boy would come to fetch it and bring
it back to the nunnery.  The guard who had struck her, bribed with one of
Marie’s bracelets, would escort the boy upstairs while Marie kept the rest of
the family away. 

Olga moved her jaw from side to side, still feeling soreness
throb in her gums.  It wasn’t the first time she’d been hit—it happened to
all the girls at one time or another in the past few months.  Only Alexei
and the Tsarina escaped, Alexei because of his hemophilia and the Tsarina
because, truthfully, the men were all afraid of her.  Her mother’s posture
and bearing were still that of an empress, even if her beauty had long faded.

Olga knew she would not be able to see the boy approach
because the soldiers had painted all the windows over.  Instead, she
closed her eyes and listened until she heard the sound of the outer gate and a
guard’s voice giving the go-ahead.  Raucous laughter followed the poor boy
as he trudged up the steps and knocked on the front door.  The downstairs
guard opened it and Olga held her breath until she heard a single pair of
footsteps trudge up the stairs.

The boy emerged from the stairwell and looked at the floor
instead of at her.  “
Dobryi dyehn
,” he said softly.