Rasputin's Revenge (32 page)

I knew that Auguste, at least, was well on his way to recovery as he finished his third apple. Deadpan, he looked at me witheringly. “Thank you for the food, Doctor”—his eyes twinkled behind the frown—“but you might at least have ordered some beer.”

Through the window the aurora borealis played against the night sky as the four of us sipped at the last of the tea. The conversation had faltered, and I was beginning to think it was time to get some sleep, when Sherlock Holmes addressed his son.

“You really ought to get it settled, you know.”

“Of course.”

It was as though they had been having a long talk. “Unless you think we should leave it and try to get out of Russia.”

Auguste shook his head. “The job isn’t done.”

“Well, if that’s the case, I must tell you that we won’t get anywhere with both of you so at odds.” Holmes looked at the Frenchman. “We might as well have it out, Monsieur Giraud. What’s troubling you?”

Before he could answer, Auguste spoke. “Elena Ripley.”

In a few words, as his companion nodded in agreement, Auguste outlined the case as it had developed up to that point. “But,” he concluded, “Jules corroborated her alibi at the trial. It’s left me without an answer.”

“The answer is Sukhomlinov,” Giraud said firmly. Where before he had been coldly polite, which I had attributed to Gallic reserve, I saw now that Holmes had noticed the truth—there was enmity between these two men.

“No, Jules,” Lupa responded, “the answer is Elena Ripley. Pohl’s death proved that to me. Our general was with Dubniev planning my arrest when Pohl was killed.”

“Isn’t it possible he did shoot himself?”

“I like to think all things are possible, Jules, but in this case, I would say no. Miss Ripley eliminated him because you and I made her believe that he was a threat.”

“But Elena was with me when Kapov was killed.”

Auguste sighed. “I know, Jules. They are major stumbling blocks, and yet my theory is the only one that is plausible. We must get around them.”

Giraud’s patience was wearing thin. “
Merde!
”

Sherlock Holmes stepped into the breach. “Monsieur Giraud, when all other possibilities have been exhausted, whichever remains, no matter how remote, must be the solution.”

“I’ll agree to that, but Elena was with me.”

“The entire night?”

Clearly the subject embarrassed him, but to his credit he spoke up. “She was in my room when I went to bed, and she woke me in the morning.”

Auguste nearly dropped his teacup as he pounced. “Good Lord, Jules, she didn’t sleep with you? Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

The Frenchman replied dryly, “I wanted to save it for the right moment.” Then, more seriously, “No. I am certain she was with me the entire night. And besides, Auguste, if you remember, the whole thing only came out at the trial.”

Auguste was silent for a moment. “Yes, of course I remember, but clarify something for me. Were you asleep or not? If you were, how could you know she stayed with you? If not, then my theory is no good, but you seem unclear about it yourself.”

Giraud furrowed his patrician brow. “Twice I recall being awakened by her during the night. Or she said it was the middle of the night …” He paused, and Auguste let him wrestle with it. “But why would she have made a point of telling me the time on both occasions?”

“She did that?”

Giraud nodded. “And it was dark.”

“Jules, as you well know, it doesn’t get light here until nearly nine. Is it possible, just possible, mind you, that she returned to your room in the early morning, say seven or eight, contrived to awake you and somehow implant in your mind that it was still the middle of the night? Is that possible?”

The Frenchman’s discomfort was difficult to watch. And yet, even if Auguste’s hypothesis were true, I couldn’t blame Giraud for not thinking of it. It was nearly Byzantine in its complexity. If Elena Ripley had done as Auguste suggested, she was a formidable enemy indeed.

Finally Giraud conceded morosely that it could have happened. Auguste, though, was on the scent, and wasn’t about to let it get away. “I don’t mean to offend you by pressing this, Jules, but do you realize how essential that one fact is? Would you mind going over the events of that entire night?”

In the next twenty minutes, we learned quite a lot that was new, and most of it was potentially damning for Elena Ripley. Giraud told us that she had come to his apartment after a party at Rasputin’s that had been attended by “most of the court,” and Auguste drew the assumption that that could very well have included Ivan Kapov, which would have given the woman the opportunity to arrange to visit, perhaps seduce, and finally poison the young nobleman.

When Giraud told how Miss Ripley had appeared with drinks for them both at his chambers, Auguste seized that moment, pointing out that she could have done to Giraud what he surmised she did to Kapov. Where had the vodka originally come from? Giraud didn’t know. How did she know it was there? Didn’t Giraud admit that he passed out after the drinks, and wasn’t it possible he had been drugged? We all saw the doubt begin to grow in Giraud’s mind.

In all, it was a far cry from the night-long seduction Auguste had envisioned. And Giraud was apparently ready to admit the possibility that Miss Ripley might not be so innocent as she appeared.

“Remember, Jules,” Lupa said, “the woman is a trained actress. If you couple her skills with any insight at all into how you might be feeling—alone, disoriented, excited by the attentions of an attractive woman—you create a stage upon which she can excel.”

“But I don’t understand,” Giraud began, then stopped. “You still don’t have a motive.”

“Yes, but a half hour ago we thought Miss Ripley had been with you the entire night. Now it’s entirely plausible that she wasn’t. She could easily have left you, gone back to Rasputin’s, returned with Kapov to the Palace and killed him, and finally returned to your room to sleep on your sofa.”

Sherlock Holmes had been listening in silence, his briar burning steadily. Finally, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and addressed his son. “I don’t see that we have much choice except to assume your logic is sound. So we need a motive for the woman, Ripley. Are there any other untied knots?”

Giraud sat up as though he’d been stung. “Rasputin’s revenge,” he said.

“What is that?” Holmes asked, and Auguste explained the strange visits of the holy man to his prison cell.

“He actually used the word ‘
rache
‘?” Holmes asked. “That’s very singular.” But for the moment, he chose to file rather than pursue that fact. “Jules, how does Miss Ripley feel about Rasputin?”

Giraud, looking beaten and exhausted, raised his head. “She acts like she despises him, but I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

My friend stood up and crossed over to his son’s companion. Resting a hand on his shoulder, he spoke quietly. “Hold out for a little longer. This is better than waiting to be shot.”

Those words, so simple and so true, seemed to galvanize the man. His back visibly straightened, his gaze hardened. “Much better,” he agreed.

At that moment there was a knock on the door. As it was the middle of the night and no one was supposed to know of our presence, we were all suddenly very much on our guard. I pulled out my revolver, although I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it if it was, for example, the police looking for fugitives.

As I started to go to the door, Sherlock Holmes handed me his pipe. The gesture spoke volumes. No one but myself was in the room.

I pushed the door open a crack. It was an agitated young man. As soon as he saw me, he muttered something in Russian, glanced again at the door number, bowed apologetically, and moved on down the hallway.

Back in the room, Auguste spoke. “If that was someone knocking at the wrong door, we are very fortunate. If anyone saw us come up here and informed the police …”

Holmes nodded. “Auguste is right. We’re in danger here.”

Giraud spoke up. “I know where we can go.”

We might have been in danger at the Astoria, but the next hour was truly terrifying. Using the back entrance, we made our escape from the hotel and followed Giraud as he led us through the black streets back toward the river.

Coming out of the shadows, we stopped across a square from one of the sides of the Winter Palace. The streets we had traversed had been packed and sanded, but even so, there was no escaping the severity of such a winter as St. Petersburg was experiencing. Snow and ice covered the sidewalks and boulevards—some of the back streets were impassable.

Now we faced the massive bulk of the Winter Palace, guarded and seemingly as impregnable as the prison across the way. I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Now that we’re here, how do we get inside?”

Giraud shrugged. “By the roof,” he said, and started across the square. There was nothing to do but follow him, though as we came closer, the task loomed more and more formidable—the forbidding walls seemed to rise as high as the sky itself as we entered the building’s shadow.

But Giraud was undaunted. He turned to Auguste and whispered, “The view from the prison wasn’t completely wasted.” So saying, and keeping to the edge of the square, he brought us up to where the river crossed behind the Palace. There, a mountain of ice led nearly to the gables of the roof.

“They piled the barricades here,” Giraud explained. “I watched from the prison as the snow drifted and accumulated. I think we ought to be able to climb it.”

It was not easy, especially the harrowing last push out over the lip of the roof. The wind had picked up and howled with a particular vengeance, throwing grains of old snow and ice into our faces as we clawed our way to safety, if it could be called such when any slip meant a fall to the courtyard below, and certain death.

The night seemed to go on forever. By my watch, it was closing on four o’clock, but the sky hadn’t changed since I’d originally left the Astoria just after dinner, my heart in my throat, to see if Holmes could pull off the escape from prison.

Now that we were on the roof, a new uncertainty confronted us. Away from the shelter of the building, the wind chilled us even through our greatcoats, and over the vast expanse that covered the Winter Palace, in the dim moonlight we saw only a meadow of snow, seemingly unbroken until at the roof’s edge it fell to nothingness.

We had to move—more, we had to get inside—or we would freeze, but there was no indication of where to go. Giraud, holding on to both Holmes and Auguste, ventured to rise and try to recognize something, and it was almost his last action as the crust of ice broke under him, dropping an avalanche into the courtyard and nearly taking him with it.

I give him credit for bravery. Barely hesitating, he pressed on, motioning that we follow him. Slowly, often crawling, our small party inched its way over and through the snow on the roof which in some places had drifted to over a meter in depth.

For what seemed an hour—though it must have been a quarter of that time—we pushed on. Then, suddenly, Giraud pointed to an impression in the snow ahead, and a moment later we all were standing in a cleared area, like a bunker, in the middle of the drifts.

“I knew it,” Giraud gasped, out of breath. “I knew Alexis would clear this spot on the first clear day.”

He went to the door and began knocking, pounding loudly. We were still at great risk, I felt, and I wasn’t alone. Next to me, Holmes had drawn the pistol he’d taken from the prison guard. It was well for Giraud to believe in the young prince, but even if he was an ally, anyone else might come to the door in response to Giraud’s racket. If that were the case, it would be wise to be prepared.

As the latch on the door sounded, Holmes and I squatted down under the line of the roof. Auguste stationed himself behind the door, to slam it back shut if the need arose. A crack of light appeared from within and I cocked my revolver.

A young boy’s face appeared in the light.

“Alyosha!”

The face broke into a smile. “Monsieur Giraud,
comment allezvous?
”

“Alive, and living. And you?”

It seemed a strange moment for games, but no one else said a word. The boy became aware of the rest of us, and his eyes widened. “The other escapees?”

Giraud nodded. “So you’ve heard already. May I present Doctor Watson, Auguste Lupa, and Sherlock Holmes. The Czarevitch Alexis Nicholaevitch Romanov.”

The boy pushed open the door. “Won’t you come in?” he said. “You must be freezing.”

We sat by the samovar drinking cups of hot tea, but it still took us nearly an hour to warm up once we’d come inside. Alexis ushered us into a small sitting suite decorated with pictures of naval ships and aeroplanes. The furniture was of a kind often seen in guesthouses in England—the chair Holmes immediately picked was, in fact, a duplicate of the old one he used to favor at Baker Street.

In other circumstances, it would have been amusing to see Holmes, pipe in mouth, lounging in front of a small coal fire in his familiar chair. As a younger boy, his son, about whom I’ve never written because Holmes had forbidden it, often would sit at his father’s knee, soaking up the techniques and method for which my friend is so justly famous, and in several instances outdoing the Master.