The Romanov Conspiracy (13 page)

He made sure his cunning and expertise were useful to the Bolsheviks.

The captain said cautiously, “Well … yes, Inspector, it really does look that way. It wouldn’t be the first gas explosion in cold weather. However, my colonel thought it wise to inform you of the blast in case there was more to it, especially as the property is near the palace.”

“How very wise of your colonel.” Kazan slipped the knuckle-duster into his pocket. He knelt and examined a congealed tarry substance that coated the concrete floor near where the corpse was slammed into the wall.

He took a pinch of the black substance and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. It was brittle and flaky. He sniffed a morsel, licked it with his tongue. He dusted his hands and stood. “The black mess is blood.”

“How do you tell, Inspector?”

“Thirty years of experience.” Kazan scanned the floor, kicking away burnt debris, before he made a steeple of his gloved fingers, touched them to his lips. “The victim may have committed suicide, but I doubt it with this much blood
and
a gas explosion. It’s more likely that a killer may be trying to cover his tracks.”

The captain thought,
Dear God, help the criminal if Kazan picks up his scent
.

Kazan studied the Alexander’s vast, snow-covered lawns. “Did Ravich’s neighbors notice any strangers in the area?”

“No, we asked them.”

“But the tenant is missing.”

“The explosion occurred only four hours ago. He may turn up yet.”

Kazan snorted. “And he may not. Intuition tells me there’s more to this, happening so close to the palace. There are royalist spies who’d like nothing better than to rescue the tsar, so let’s not take any chances.”

The captain thought,
That’s rich
. Kazan didn’t take long to change allegiance.

Kazan spotted something in the ashes, bent down, and picked up a small brown glass bottle with ribbed sides. It was covered in ash and the rubber screw-stopper had melted. Kazan cleaned off the ash and sniffed around the top of the bottle.

“You found something,” the officer asked.

Kazan’s nose wrinkled at the bitter smell. “Laudanum.”

“Pardon?”

“A narcotic used to treat many ills. Pain, anxiety—the list is long.”

Kazan slipped the bottle in his coat pocket. “Check with the local cabbies and lodgings. Find out if any strangers arrived recently. Watch the railway stations and the roads leading out of town. Circulate the tenant’s description.”

The exasperated captain said, “But, Inspector, my men are busy …”

Kazan’s good eye drilled into the captain’s face as the milky one stared into nothing. “You’ll do as I say. If our phantom’s out there, I’m going to find him.”

“Can you halt a few minutes?” Sorg asked the cabbie. “Nature calls.”

They were on the outskirts of Tsarskoye Selo, on a slight rise covered in thick pine woods, a frozen stream snaking through the trees.

The cabbie reined in the two sturdy horses, their breaths snorting in the freezing air. “Certainly, citizen. Take your time.”

Sorg pulled the blanket off his legs, climbed down, and moved into the woods, taking his Gladstone bag with him.

The snow hadn’t penetrated under the pines, the needles soft and damp, his journey silent, and soon he came out on the far side of the woods. A view of Tsarskoye Selo spread out before him.

Sorg took the spyglass from his Gladstone and leaned the muzzle against a bare birch tree, its bark the color of tarnished silver. It wasn’t difficult to spot the house. The smoke plume was blacker and thicker than any other rising into the winter air.

Sorg focused on the horse-drawn fire carriage, painted red and blue, figures standing around as smoke curled from the ruins.

He noticed two men talking. One wore a long dark coat and a broad-rimmed black hat. When he removed it to wipe his brow, a bone-white bald head was revealed.

Sorg turned ashen. He felt as if someone had frozen his heart. A surge of fear coursed though him. Sixteen years had passed, but the man was still frighteningly familiar.

Kazan.

He looked older, fleshier, but Sorg never forgot the image of the man who had dragged his father away.
What’s Kazan doing here?

The Ochrana was disbanded. Was the Cheka making use of his brutal talents? It made a warped kind of sense.

Sorg shivered, as if someone had walked over his grave. Then he began to sweat. He rummaged in his pockets for the Laudanum tincture, thinking a few drops would calm his anxiety.

The bottle was gone. He must have lost it in the struggle.

He swore.

Snapping shut the spyglass, he pushed it into the Gladstone. Then he walked back through the woods and climbed into the carriage. He pulled the blanket over his legs, shaking now.

The cabbie smiled. “Your business is done?”

Sorg thought,
I have a feeling it’s just begun
.

11

At eight that evening Yakov was seated behind his oak desk, looking through some papers, when he heard a sharp knock on his carriage door. “Come in.”

Zoba entered, the Georgian rubbing his hands together, stamping his boots, his face frozen and the wind whistling. “It’s as cold as an Eskimo’s kiss outside. My feet are like ice blocks.”

Yakov stood up from his desk and took a tin cigarette case from his pocket. “Throw another log in the stove and get some heat into you.”

Zoba crossed to a tiled woodstove in a corner, opened it, and was greeted by a blazing furnace of heat. As he threw in a log someone banged on the door.

This time a soldier entered and a gust of icy wind raged in before he managed to shut the door. He snapped off a salute. “Duty Officer Malenkov reporting. A night to keep warm, Commissar. A bad storm’s brewing, I’d say.”

“Isn’t it always in this godforsaken place?” Yakov saw the duty officer’s eyes dart about the luxury carriage. A half-dozen comfortable seats were upholstered in bright red velvet and a nickeled samovar bubbled in a corner, a whiff of charcoal scenting the air. Nearby stood a side table with a bottle of vodka and some glasses. “You look impressed,” Yakov said to the man.

“We don’t see much luxury in these parts, comrade.” The duty officer peered past an open door and saw a private bedroom in another part of the carriage. It looked more sparse, with a soldier’s simple metal cot.

Yakov struck a match, lit a cigarette, and blew out smoke as he crossed the polished walnut floor to the stove blazing in the corner. “Tell him, Zoba.”

“You’re standing in the former private carriage of the Grand Duke Andrew, which now rightfully belongs to the Soviet people. We carry a hundred and fifty troops on board, and two special carriage stables to transport a dozen of the finest cavalry horses for our mounted scouts.”

Zoba rapped his knuckles against one of the steel-hinged plates hanging by each of the windows, gun ports cut into the metal. “We’ve added steel shutters and machine-gun turrets for extra protection. When Comrade Lenin travels with us, he calls our train his ‘Kremlin on wheels.’ It has its own kitchens, troop sleeping quarters, and plentiful stores of arms and munitions.”

Yakov said to the duty officer, “Well, what do you want?”

“I picked the firing squad. They’ll be ready to carry out the execution at dawn. The remaining hundred and sixty prisoners will be force-marched to the Soborsk camp.”

Yakov inhaled on his cigarette and sighed. “Hopefully the captain’s execution won’t be necessary.”

“Comrade?”

“Not your business. How has Captain Andrev been since he arrived here?”

The duty officer shrugged. “He’s a resourceful man. The last time he broke out he reached a village thirty miles from here before we caught up with him. Sergeant Mersk beat the captain to within an inch of his life for that. How he lived I’ll never know.”

Yakov tapped his cigarette in an ashtray. “Because Andrev is a born survivor, that’s why. The kind this revolution needs.”

“Now it seems his luck’s run out.”

“We’ll see. I take it he hasn’t asked to see me yet?”

“No, he’s still in the sick bay.”

Yakov stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “You may go. Find my brother, Stanislas, and send him here.”

“Yes, comrade.”

The man left and Zoba said, “Good luck convincing the captain. Something tells me you’re going to need it.”

Yakov’s face was solemn as he opened a desk drawer and removed a wooden frame containing an old photograph. It was an image he
always cherished: of his mother and Stanislas, Uri, and his father, all of them together, taken in a St. Petersburg studio. He showed Zoba.

“The day it was taken, my mother was growing steadily worse with TB. Uri’s father took us all by carriage to a fair in St. Petersburg. I think he thought it would cheer up my mother and give Stanislas and me a happy memory with her. He had our photograph taken—so we’d always have it to cherish. Uri’s father was that sort. A good and thoughtful man.”

Zoba rubbed his hands together as he prepared to step out into the cold night. “I hope his son makes the right decision, Leonid.” He left.

Yakov consulted his pocket watch: 8:05. He opened the top button of his uniform tunic, poured a vodka into a shot glass, knocked it back in one swallow, and slapped the glass on his desk.

He looked again at the images in the photograph. “Come on, Uri, get sense. You don’t need to be a martyr.”

It was bitterly cold outside, a blustery gale tossing snow flurries against the windows. The snow fell thicker and thicker. Yakov stood staring out at the swirling flakes as if hypnotized. It was on a cold winter’s night like this that he and Uri Andrev first met. A night of birth and near-death, in which their lives were forever intertwined.

Yakov closed his eyes tightly. How could he ever forget the slums of the Black Quarter, the anguished screams and drunken cries that echoed like church bells in his mind? He recalled the despair of his childhood, the filthy stench of poverty that never left his nostrils. And in an instant his memories flooded back …

12

With its glorious Winter Palace, broad boulevards, and leafy parks, St. Petersburg was one of the most beautiful cities on earth, the Paris of the north.

But there was another St. Petersburg, a squalid capital of filthy backstreets, crime, and poverty, where hundreds of thousands of working families were crammed into crumbling tenements owned by rich landlords.

It was into this world that Leonid Yakov was born, in the harsh, dangerous district known as the Black Quarter. His father worked as a deckhand out of St. Petersburg docks, a cruel, bearded man whose breath always stank of alcohol.

Yakov loved his mother. She was a proud, strikingly handsome woman who found work as a cleaner in the houses and gentlemen’s clubs of St. Petersburg’s wealthy. It was backbreaking labor that often lasted from dawn until dusk and paid a pittance, and then she came home to kneel and scrub their own lodgings, determined to keep her family scrupulously clean despite the squalor all around them.

Every night she would read to Leonid, from a children’s book or from the newspaper. She always kept books by her bedside: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, even Karl Marx. Big, thick, well-thumbed books and a worn dictionary that she studied every day. Yakov never forgot that.