The Romanov Cross: A Novel (10 page)

Harley said hi, but Rebekah, in her usual long dress with its buttoned-up collar, just nodded. On her way out, she said to Charlie, “We’re almost out of fuel oil.” She had a thick New England accent—she was from some hick town not much bigger than Port Orlov—where she’d been living in a so-called Christian commune that had been broken up by the state. Still, Harley often wondered what had made her, and her sister, do something so stupid as to come all this way to Alaska.

Charlie grunted and, once she was gone, picked up where he’d left off. “Maybe you oughta let me handle the press from now on.”

“There’s not much left of it. Nobody’s called me today, except the Coast Guard. They want to know more about that coffin top that came up in the nets.”

“What’d they say, exactly?”

Harley knew that his brother would be intrigued by that. “They want to be sure that’s all that came up.”

“That’s what you told ’em, right?”

“What do you think?” Harley said, looking steadily into his brother’s dark eyes. “Of course I did.” He sipped the hot tea, which tasted like it was made from boiled leather.

Charlie met his gaze and didn’t blink.

Screw it
, Harley thought;
it was now or never
. “You came to the hospital,” he said, pointedly, “and you left with my anorak.”

“What about it? You want your coat back, it’s in the hall closet.”

Harley put the cup down on a stack of old newspapers, went out into the hall, and came back with his coat. He sat down and began rummaging through the various zipped pockets, and apart from a packet of throat lozenges, came up empty-handed. “Okay,” he said, “where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Charlie answered, but with that malicious glint in his eye that told Harley he knew perfectly well what he was talking about. It was like they were kids again, and Charlie was holding out on him.

“You know what. The cross that was in the inside pocket.”

Charlie’s face slowly creased into a grin, revealing a row of crooked gray teeth. “What cross?”

Harley put out his hand and said, “Give it to me, Charlie.”

“Or what? Are you gonna beat up your own brother—your own crippled brother?”

Nobody ever milked a wheelchair the way his brother did. “If I have to, I’ll turn this whole goddamned house upside down.”

“Oh, I don’t think Rebekah and Bathsheba would let that happen,” Charlie said, and Harley knew he was right. The two sisters might be bony as skeletons, but they were tough and, though he hated to admit it, scary as hell. Their eyes were black as little pebbles, set in dead-white, pockmarked faces, and he’d once seen Rebekah wring a fox’s neck without even looking down at it. Even scarier, he had the impression Bathsheba kind of had a crush on him. It was one more reason he’d had to move out.

Before the stalemate went on much longer, Charlie seemed to have tired of the joke, and gesturing at the gun rack below the window, he said, “It’s in the ammo drawer.”

For a split second, Harley wondered if the ammo drawer was booby-trapped, but then opened it and found the cross, wrapped in a clean rag. It looked like Charlie had shined it up a bit, and the stones—
emeralds, for sure
—glistened in the light from the computer screens.

“Lucky you didn’t shoot your mouth off about that,” Charlie said.

Harley turned it over in his hands, marveling at the weight of it, wondering if the silver sheen was real, wondering what the gems would be worth, wondering what the Russian words inscribed on the back meant. There was a fence named Gus Voynovich in Nome—he and Charlie had used him now and then in the past—and if anybody knew what it was really worth, he’d be the one. The guy was a crook, of course, but he knew his business.

“So I figure it’s a fifty-fifty deal,” Charlie said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to fence it at the Gold Mine, right?” The Gold Mine was Voynovich’s pawnshop in Nome. “Well, you owe me half of whatever Voynovich gives us for it.”

“That’s bullshit. I found it. I nearly
died
getting it.”

“And if I hadn’t picked up your coat, the Coast Guard, or some fucking orderly, would have it by now. And then how much of a share do you think you’d have gotten?”

“I’ll give you ten percent.”

“I’m not arguing about this with you, Harley. I could just as soon have taken a gun out of that rack and told you to get the hell off of church property.” Vane’s Holy Writ was headquartered in the old house, and as a result, Charlie paid no property taxes. He also drew a tidy disability benefits check every month. “Now, there’s really only one question left for us to discuss.”

“What the hell is that?”

“How much else is there?”

“How much of what else? The coffin’s gone, it sank, same as the boat. Don’t you read the papers?”

“The coffin came from somewhere. And that somewhere would be St. Peter’s Island. It’s one of those old Russians who lived there. Who knows what else is buried in the other graves?”

Harley sat very still, the cross growing heavier in his hand by the second. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, we’ve got to go back out there, before somebody else does, and do some digging.”

“You want me to dig up graves?” Harley said, feeling exactly the same way he did when Charlie had told him to climb through the skylight of the liquor store on Front Street.

“Listen to me,” Charlie said, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you remember the stories?”

“Sure I do. The damn place is haunted.” He didn’t add anything about the black wolves … or that yellow light he thought he’d seen on the cliffs.

“Now you don’t really believe that stuff, do you? If you ask me, the Russians made up all that crap years ago, just to keep everybody off the island.”

“There was never any reason to go
on
the island.”

“No, there wasn’t,” Charlie agreed. “Back then.” Everyone knew there was nothing on St. Peter’s but the remains of the old Russian village, its wooden cabins no doubt fallen to pieces by now, and guarded, supposedly, by an old lady with a lantern, who walked the cliffs at night, luring mariners to their death. “But there is a reason now.”

Harley didn’t know what to say, or how to counter what his brother was saying. That’s how it had always been. Charlie had always won the arguments—sometimes all at once, and sometimes just by waiting Harley out.

“What other options have you got?” Charlie taunted him. “You think you’re ever gonna get another boat? Or a crew? Your fishing days are over, bro, in case you didn’t know it already.” He smiled broadly and smoothed his hands on the front of his flannel shirt. “This cross is what I’d call heaven-sent … and one thing I do know is that God doesn’t knock twice.”

Harley wasn’t so sure it was God knocking at the door at all.

But nodding at the Russian artifact, Charlie added, “And you might want to leave that here for safekeeping. That tin-can trailer you live in isn’t exactly burglarproof, now is it?”

Slater wasn’t proud of what he was doing—sitting in his car, in the dark, parked outside his ex-wife’s house—but he hadn’t really intended to find himself here.

At most, he’d intended to cruise slowly past the house and take a look on his way home from the AFIP, but then a wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he’d had to pull over under the umbrella of a big elm tree. In preparation for the exhumation work in Alaska, he’d put himself on an antiviral regimen that he knew could have some debilitating effects, and the coffee he’d picked up at Starbucks apparently wasn’t doing much to counteract it.

Once he’d parked, he’d turned off his lights, reclined his seat, and looked out his window at the stately Tudor house, with its white walls and its neat brown trim, its gabled roof and trim hedges. Even the driveway didn’t have a leaf on it. It was like a picture from a magazine. The first floor was dark, except for the porch light, but the windows upstairs were lighted, and once in a while he could see someone moving behind the mullioned glass. Martha and her husband had two kids, a boy and a girl.

The whole thing, he thought, couldn’t be more perfect. And it could have been his … if he’d wanted it.

He’d met Martha when they were both in medical school at Johns Hopkins. She was paying her own way, while his was being bankrolled by the Army. When he went off to Georgetown to pursue his studies in epidemiology, she had followed him there, working on her specialty in dermatology. After they got married, he knew what she was hoping for—she wanted him to hold down a nice safe Army post on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she built up her private practice in the Washington suburbs. And for a time, he tried. He did the whole office and administrative thing, shuffling paper, attending meetings, giving lectures, but over time he felt more and more restless. It got especially bad when he received reports from the field, detailed accounts of what was being done on the front lines to save lives and eradicate disease. That was what he had trained for, that was what he wanted to be doing—not sitting in an air-conditioned office, evaluating programs and rubber-stamping reports. He had put in for overseas duty, and Martha had reluctantly agreed to let him try it.

But if she hoped he would get it out of his system, she was wrong. The more he did it, the more he wanted to do. After a year or two, he no longer felt out of place in some godforsaken jungle; he felt out of place at a cocktail party in Chevy Chase. And much as he and Martha loved each other, they both recognized that they were going in separate directions. The night she dropped him off at the base for his morning flight to an Army camp in the Dominican Republic, where there’d been an outbreak of dengue fever, she said good-bye and take good care of yourself, but they’d both known it was more than that. When he came back nine weeks later, he opened the door to their condo with a sense of foreboding in his heart; the letter he found waiting for him on the kitchen counter said everything he’d expected, but he’d still had to read it several times just to absorb every word. To this day, if he’d had to, he could recite it line for line.

Slater took a sip of his coffee, cold now, and watched as an upstairs window was cranked open a few inches and a curtain drawn. He thought he caught a snatch of conversation on the wind, a boy’s voice
saying something about homework, and a woman’s laugh. Martha’s laugh. A few seconds later, the light went out.

Slater put his seat back even farther and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. It was cold out, but he still had his coat on, and it wasn’t bad inside the car. And it had been such a long day. Long, but productive. At least the mission was chugging along, and his dream team was coming together nicely. Dr. Eva Lantos had jumped at the chance to get out of her lab in Boston—“I will be so glad to give the mole-rat genome a rest!”—and Vassily Kozak had been tracked down to an industrial waste dump on the outskirts of Irkutsk, where he was completing a study of the chemical pollutants in the soil.

“I have recommended,” he said in his heavily accented English, “they should shut the city of Irkutsk, but they do not like this idea.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Not me either.”

Slater had told him, in strictest confidence, what he wanted him for in Alaska. Vassily had listened carefully as Slater continued to outline the task ahead, finally interrupting only to ask, “This Spanish flu—it killed many Russians?”

“Ten or twelve million, by the best estimates,” Slater replied.

“Do you think that it is still infectious?”

Slater knew that Vassily was asking him an honest question, and all he could do was give him the straightest answer he could. “No, I don’t believe it is,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anything.”

Russians, even now, knew something about death—the twentieth-century toll, from warfare and disease, had been extraordinary by any measure. Other nationalities sometimes forgot their own past disasters, but for Russians a dreadful knowledge was bred in their bones, and Slater respected the caution it inspired to this day. “If you come, I’ll want you to start on an antiviral regimen right now, the same one everyone else on the team will be on—myself included.”

“And you will send me the names of these drugs?”

“I’ll do better. I’ll have them hand-delivered to you in Irkutsk.”

Vassily grunted, still thinking things over, as Slater explained some
of the clearances that Vassily would have to get both from the Academy of Sciences on the Russian end, and the National Security Council, the AFIP, and maybe even the FBI on the other. And when he was done, he said, “I rest my case,” and waited for the verdict.

“I think maybe,” the professor said, “I have done enough in Irkutsk.”

Slater smiled and clenched his fist in triumph.

“And it would be a good thing, yes, to work with you again. Maybe we can make some history.”

Although history was the one thing Slater hoped they would
not
be making—his most fervent wish was that the mission would prove in the end to have been utterly unnecessary—he would take his victories any way he got them.

Now, only one big piece of the team was still lacking, and that afternoon Slater had driven over to the base at Fort McNair. The adjutant told him where to find Sergeant Groves, and he’d entered the gym as inconspicuously as possible. He hung out by the back, watching the bout, and even though Groves and his opponent were wearing padded gloves and helmets, every blow echoed with a thud.

The other soldiers had abruptly curtailed their workouts, dropping their jump ropes, giving the punching bags a rest, holding the dumbbells down by their sides. This was simply too good a match to ignore.

For somebody built like a bulldog, Groves was surprisingly nimble on his feet, bobbing and weaving his way around the ring. The other fighter was a white guy with a longer reach, though, and a couple of inches on him. A few times he let loose with a long, looping punch that caught the sergeant on his shoulder or the side of his head. Once, Groves was even rocked back on his heels by a powerful shot to the ribs.

But each time he was hit, he put his head down lower and came in again, like Mike Tyson minus the Maori tattoos.