The Romanov Cross: A Novel (7 page)

“This shot was taken a few days ago, outside a town called Port Orlov.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“No one has. It’s a tiny fishing village, on the northwest tip of the Seward Peninsula. This shot was taken there, too,” she said, tapping again, and bringing up a picture of an A-frame house that had slipped off its foundation.

“And here’s the Inuit totem pole that has stood in the center of town since 1867, to commemorate the Russian sale of the Alaska territory.” Miraculously, the old wooden column, with faded paint on the faces of eagles and otters, was still standing, but at an angle that reminded Slater of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Plainly, the ground was shifting, but that was a problem for the geologists, was it not?

“Earthquake activity?” he asked, and Dr. Levinson shook her head.

“We’ve checked all the seismological data, and no, that’s not it.”

She tapped again, and a series of shots came up, of mailboxes that had fallen over, of concrete steps that had cracked, of wharves that had buckled.

“It’s climate change,” she said. “The average air temperature’s rising, the offshore currents are getting warmer … and the permafrost is starting to thaw.”

Okay, that sounded like a perfectly reasonable conclusion. But he still didn’t see how any of it fell into his bailiwick.

As if she could guess what he was thinking, Dr. Levinson clicked on the next slide. “And then this turned up,” she said.

At first he thought it was just an old dark door, or maybe an antique dining table, but then he looked more closely and saw that its
surface was elaborately carved and depicted a classical figure, maybe a saint, in a flowing robe, and holding a set of keys on a ring. A long crack ran down one side of the wood.

“I assume it’s the top of a coffin,” Slater said, and when she didn’t correct him, he added, “but who’s that on top?”

“St. Peter, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The Coast Guard retrieved it. A fishing boat had pulled it up in the nets, and when the boat hit some rocks and went under, one of the crew was able to hang on to it long enough to get to shore.”

“He sounds like Ishmael.”

“His name’s Harley Vane, and from what I’ve read in the initial reports, he’s a piece of work. He’s claimed the lid as salvage, and he still has it.”

That seemed a bit strange to Slater, but maybe if he’d had occasion to hitch a ride on a coffin lid, he’d feel attached to it, too. “Where’s it from?”

“Our best guess is that it came from the cemetery on a place called St. Peter’s Island, a few miles west of Port Orlov.”

Another slide came up. An aerial shot of a hulking black island, with a bank of fog clinging to its shores.

“The island is nearly impregnable, but a sect of religious zealots, most of them from Siberia, did manage to settle there around 1912.”

“Don’t tell me anyone’s still there,” Slater said, though one look at the forbidding island was enough to make him wonder how anyone could ever have chosen to call it home in the first place.

“No one alive,” Levinson said, and now she leaned forward on the table, her arms folded and her expression grave. She looked at him over the top of her bifocals. “They all died, in the space of a week or two. In 1918.”

The date was a dead giveaway, and now he could see where this had all been going. “The Spanish flu?”

Levinson nodded.

It was all coming together. “So the same disturbances to the ground in Port Orlov are showing up on the island, too.”

She remained silent while he worked it out.

“And as the permafrost thaws, things that were buried are coming to the surface. Things like old caskets.”

“The graveyard was built on a cliff, away from the settlement itself,” she said, filling in another piece. “But now the cliff is giving way.”

And shedding coffins … coffins filled with victims of the flu. “Is the concern,” he said, thinking aloud, “that the Spanish flu virus might still be viable in the frozen corpses?”

“It’s a remote possibility,” she conceded, “but it’s a possibility that we have to deal with, nonetheless.”

As an epidemiologist, Slater did not need to be told what could happen if the Spanish flu was ever released again into the world. In a few short years, the Spanish flu pandemic had swept the globe, and although there were still disputes about the final death toll, the figure of 50 million was well accepted. In his own view, Slater had always thought that the casualty count on the Indian subcontinent had been vastly understated. What was not in dispute was that the Spanish flu had been the most devastating plague ever to hit the human race, and that to this day no one had ever completely figured it out, or discovered a way to combat it. Its victims died the most excruciating of deaths, literally drowning in a froth of their own blood and secretions, and although some of the most thorough research into mapping its genetic structure had been done right here, at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the scientific community was still no closer to a cure.

“And this man Harley Vane,” Slater said, continuing his train of thought. “Was he ever exposed to a body from that coffin?”

“He says no,” Dr. Levinson replied. “He says the lid alone came up in the nets.” She said it as if she wasn’t sure if she believed it. “And all the other crew members died at sea.”

A slab of wood, even one that had been part of a coffin a hundred years ago, was not going to carry any contagion; Slater was certain of that. But he was also certain of what Dr. Levinson uttered for the both of them next.

“We need to secure the cemetery,” she declared, “before any more
caskets pop up, and we need to do it as expeditiously, and with as little hoopla, as possible. That kind of quick and thorough work is your specialty, Dr. Slater.”

He accepted the compliment without comment. It was a fact.

“And then we will need to exhume one or more of the bodies, take all the usual core samples, and have them meticulously examined and analyzed, under Biohazard 3 protocols.” She pursed her lips, and waited. The only sound was the low hum of the air-filtration system that serviced every inch of the institute’s offices and laboratories. Her words hung in the air, awaiting a response, but there was only one that Slater could give.

“When do I leave?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

T
SARSKOE
S
ELO
, 1916

Her brother’s cries split the night, echoing down the long marble corridors and sweeping staircases of the palace. Anastasia—or Ana, for short—sat up in her bed. Her sister Olga was already awake under her own pile of blankets. This had happened so many times before.

“Poor Alexei,” Ana said. “It’s getting worse again.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Olga said. “There’s nothing any of us can do.”

“Dr. Botkin is here.”

“There’s nothing Dr. Botkin can do, either,” Olga said, wearily. “Go back to sleep.”

Olga lifted one of her plump pillows and stuck her head under it, but Ana could not fall asleep again. Alexei screamed, there were slippered footsteps running in the hall outside, and Ana had to go and see for herself. She got out of bed, put on a padded robe of Chinese silk—a gift from the always generous Emir of Bokhara—and crept out into the hall. When her little brown spaniel, Jemmy, tried to follow, she nudged her back into the bedroom with her foot.

Several doors down, she could see light spilling from the Tsarevitch’s
suite of rooms, and she could hear voices in urgent consultation. As the heir to the throne of Russia, Alexei—or Alexis, as he was known outside the family—was the most precious thing in the whole empire, more valuable than Anastasia and her three sisters combined (a point that none of them disputed; it was just a fact of life). But he was also the only one of the five children afflicted with a mortal disease. Hemophilia.

The family had all come to the royal compound only a week before, hoping for some relief from the pressures and public demands of life in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Just fifteen miles from the capital, and reached by a private railway line, Tsarskoe Selo—or, “the tsar’s village”—was comprised of eight hundred immaculately groomed and guarded acres, where peacocks strutted with their brilliant tail feathers fanning out and a pack of tame deer roamed free. Cossacks on horseback, with sabers at their sides, rode the iron-fenced perimeters at all hours, and from every window of the two hundred rooms in the palace a strutting sentry could be seen. An additional garrison of five thousand troops was stationed in the nearest village.

Inside the palace, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, every room was adorned with crystal chandeliers and richly colored Oriental carpets; huge, porcelain stoves warmed the chambers and scented the air. Fresh flowers, from as close as the greenhouses on the grounds, or as far away as the imperial gardens in the Crimea, bloomed in vases everywhere. Scores of liveried footmen, in dozens of different uniforms, silently performed every function from opening doors to carrying bowls of smoking incense from one chamber to another; it was the duty of four in particular—Ethiopians whose skin, Ana thought, glowed as hard and bright as ebony—to precede the Emperor Nicholas, or the Empress Alexandra, into any room. The mere sight of one of these fearsome black servants, in his bejeweled turban, brocade vest, and shining scimitar, alerted everyone within that one of Russia’s imperial majesties was about to enter.

Two of these guards were standing now on either side of Alexei’s door, but gave no notice of the fourteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia as she scurried into the anteroom. A couple of the young Tsarevitch’s
consulting physicians were huddled in thought by the fireplace, stroking their chins nervously, while the inner chamber was dimly lighted by electric lamps with heavy, hooded shades. The Empress sat on the bed, her reddish-gold hair piled in a hasty knot atop her head, her long fingers smoothing her son’s brow; Dr. Botkin, a stout man who had never once been seen in anything but his black frock coat (he had even worn it on the beach at Livadia, to everyone’s amusement), stood beside her, holding a thermometer to the light. He did not look pleased, and when he spoke, Alexandra simply nodded.

Inching into the room, Ana finally could see her younger brother nestled down deep in the bed, with pillows piled up under his head and others raising his swollen leg. The day before, he had taken a spill off a swing—the kind of fall Ana and her sisters would have walked away from with no more than a scraped knee—but for Alexei any such accident could prove fatal. Growing up, Ana and her sisters had been warned a thousand times not to so much as jostle their frail brother. A cut or scratch that looked harmless on the surface could be causing deep and irreparable damage beneath the skin, as the blood—unable to clot—relentlessly hemorrhaged into the joints or muscles. His left leg was swollen now to twice its size, tightly swaddled in gauze that was changed every hour or two as the pooling blood seeped through the pores of his skin. His eyes, normally so bright and mischievous, were sunk deep in his head, surrounded by circles as black as soot.

Their father was in Poland on a diplomatic call, but Ana assumed that, as always, he had received a telegram by now and was hurrying back as fast as the trains and carriages could take him.

The question, each time something like this occurred, was,
Would the young heir survive this latest attack?

Ana could not imagine such a terrible day. It would be as if the sky itself had fallen. She did not know how her parents—her mother, in particular—would be able to endure such an event. It was unthinkable … and so she tried, very hard, never to think about it.

“What are you doing up?” her mother said, suddenly taking note of her. “You should be asleep.”

“Will Alexei be all right?”

“Alexei will be all right,” Dr. Botkin put in. “We will see him through. You should go back to bed. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

Her mother smiled faintly, but unconvincingly, and Ana took a step closer to the bed. Her brother saw her and tried to smile, but a sudden paroxysm of pain arched his back, set his eyes back even farther in his head, and caused him to scream in agony. The Empress clapped her hands over her ears, and then, as if ashamed at her reaction, quickly drew them away and reached for her son’s sweaty hands.

The gong on the grandfather clock rang twelve times, and as the last peal faded away there was the sound of sentries’ voices, then the clatter of hooves in the courtyard outside. Ana ran to the window and yanked back the heavy drapes, expecting to see her father the Tsar leaping from his carriage, but instead she saw a burly man in a black cassock, dismounting from a swaybacked mare.

It was Grigori Rasputin, the
starets
, or holy man, from Siberia.

Her mother, standing beside her and gripping the curtain with white knuckles, said, “Thanks be to God.”

And even Ana offered up a prayer. If anyone could save her brother, it was this monk with the long black beard and the broad hands and the pockmarked face. She had seen him do it before.

Minutes later, he strode into the room, and everyone else in it, even the Tsaritsa, seemed to recede into the shadows. Although his name alone—which meant “dissolute”—should have served as a warning, he was instead treated with civility, and even deference (which was common, as long as Alexandra, his most ardent supporter and friend, was present). His robes were secured by a frayed leather belt, his boots were covered with mud, and he gave off the aroma of a barnyard stall, but it was his eyes that commanded attention. Ana had never seen such eyes as Rasputin possessed—as blue as the Baltic and as penetrating as a dagger. When he presided over the evening prayers of herself and her sisters, she felt that there was nothing he did not know, nothing in her heart he could not see, nothing in her soul he could not forgive. And though he was roughly affectionate with all of the siblings,
Ana had always felt that there was a unique bond between the two of them.

“You are the youngest sister,” he had once confided to her, “but it is you to whom a special destiny is granted. Even your name—Anastasia—means ‘the breaker of chains.’ Did you know that, my child?”