Paul Christopher - Red Templar

“Those men who came after us didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Holliday. He could feel an itch between his shoulder blades as hypothetical crosshairs targeted him.

“They were watching Brother Dimitrov.”

“And if they interrogate him?”

“He will tell them nothing, Colonel.”

“Everybody talks eventually,” answered Holliday.

“He is a man, like his grandfather. He would die first and take at least one of his interrogators with him.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am a very small cog in the vast wheel of Mr. Putin’s Russia. He cannot see me turning, at least not yet.”

“What exactly are you the curator of at the Hermitage?” Holliday inquired. It was a simple enough question, but this was the first time he’d thought to ask it.

Genrikhovich smiled. “I am senior curator of the Hermitage archives.” He took a slurp from his straw. “You might say I am a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, Colonel Holliday. The Hermitage archives contain a collection of letters, notes, purchase orders, provenance material and any other document or paper pertaining to the work of the Hermitage itself, going back to its origins with Catherine the Great in the mid-seventeen hundreds, as well as her purchase of several collections. I sometimes call myself the Keeper of the Filing Cabinets, the Troll of the Hermitage Basements, but it is a job not without interest.”

“I can imagine,” said Holliday. Genrikhovich was the museum’s chief file clerk. On the other hand, as a historian Holliday was well aware of the value of old bits of paper and forgotten documents. The Rosetta stone was nothing more than a decree about the revoking of several tax laws for priests by King Ptolemy, and the attendant festivals and temples to be organized. The famous stone had been written in Demotic Egyptian, hieroglyphs and Greek as a way of ensuring that all officials, priests and the ordinary people could read it, but the trilingual document effectively provided a translation for a language that had confounded historians for the previous eight hundred years.

They reached the Moika Canal, and Genrikhovich paused, looking to the south. “Down there is the Yusupov Palace,” he said, pointing down the winding narrow canal. There were barges and floating homes moored along the stone banks, but the buildings on either side were immense, huge mansions long since turned into government buildings and apartments. “It was from there that Rasputin came,” said Genrikhovich, his voice somber. “He ran along the ice, with Yusupov and his British companions following the trail of blood and vomit he was leaving. Most assume he was heading for the stairs at the Fonarny Bridge, but I don’t think he knew where he was going. I have seen the police photographs taken after he was pulled from the water. One eye was closed and there was a deep gash over the other. I think he must have been almost blind when Rayner caught up with him. According to Rayner’s letter he said nothing before he died, but I’m not sure I believe that. What it did say was that their mission had been accomplished.”

“Rayner wrote about the assassination?”

“Yes, in his report to the ambassador, which eventually was given to both King George and Czar Nicholas. He also sent a private letter to Stephen Alley, Prince Yusupov’s ‘special friend’ at the palace.”

Holliday glanced over his shoulder. Eddie was staring blankly into a store window a few hundred feet away. Holliday caught his eye and Eddie shook his head slightly. The Russian had been right about surveillance; they weren’t being followed. Genrikhovich began walking again, and Holliday caught up with him, continuing their conversation.

“What do you mean, ‘special friend’?” Holliday asked.

“He was. . pedik? ”

“Gay?” Holliday offered.

“Yes, gay, homosexual. They were lovers.” He shrugged. “It made it easier for Alley.”

“Made what easier?”

“Alley was a double agent. He worked for MI6 and also for the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police.”

“A tangled web.” Holliday grunted. “You got this all from the Hermitage archives?”

“One thing leads to another. Assemble enough pieces and the picture suddenly becomes clear.”

The two men walked on silently for a few moments, threading their way through the moving throng on the sidewalk. “Why would he say that they had accomplished their mission in his letter?” Holliday asked finally. “According to you this Stephen Alley and Prince Yusupov were there; they saw him fire the fatal shot.”

“Ah, you are very quick, Colonel. It took me a little time to see the importance of that simple statement.”

“What exactly is the importance?” Holliday asked.

Before he answered Genrikhovich drained the last of his coffee and tossed the empty cup into a waste bin. An old man dressed in Soviet camouflage fatigues instantly darted forward and retrieved the cup. He tilted it up to his mouth, trying to get a last few drops.

“If you read the autopsy report on Rasputin it is easy to see that he would have died of the wounds he received at the palace. He could not have survived for more than a few minutes on the ice. They didn’t follow him to see that he died-they followed him to retrieve the key.”

“The key to the location of this document? Simon Magus’s declaration?”

The Russian paused, then spoke again, his voice ponderous and theatrical. “In a way, Colonel, but the key that Rasputin had stolen was very real. It was solid gold and exactly two and a half inches long. Rasputin had the key in his coat pocket. Rayner shot him in the forehead and retrieved the key before the madman slipped into the waters of the canal, his life gone.”

“What did the lock open?” Holliday asked, playing his part in Genrikhovich’s little drama.

“No lock at all,” the old man responded. “It was the key to the music box in the base of the Kremlin Egg given to Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova by her husband, Czar Nicholas the Second.”

The Russian State Hermitage Museum is a half-mile-long complex of German neoclassical buildings that stands on the eastern embankment of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad during the Soviet era and still stubbornly called that by some older survivors of those bleak and sometimes desperate years.

The buildings, including the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the immense Winter Palace, once home to the czars, were formally established in 1851 and held in excess of three million items from prehistoric and medieval times up to the present day.

During World War II, with Leningrad under siege, each and every item in the collections was cataloged, packed and moved on a series of freight trains to Sverdlovsk, deep in the heart of Russia on the east side of the Ural Mountains and a thousand miles from the fighting.

During this period the remaining Hermitage staff lived in the basements of the enormous museum, which, according to Genrikhovich, was where he was born during one of the artillery bombardments of the city in December of 1943.

By then some of Leningrad’s citizens had been reduced to eating the dead frozen flesh of their companions, but in the end the Russian winter defeated Hitler just as it had defeated Napoleon long before him. Spring came, the city survived, and so did the Hermitage.

Oddly, the man who would eventually order the deaths of millions of his countrymen was first educated as a priest. Yet despite his training in the spiritual realm, Stalin, the peasant son of a Georgian cobbler in the village of Gori, had no real interest in art at all. He was no friend to the Hermitage, having sold off a huge part of their collection in the early 1930s to raise foreign currency. His appreciation of fine art ran to paintings of muscular men and busty women breaking the chains of their capitalist oppressors, fuming factory chimneys in the background. The women invariably wore kerchiefs around their heads and the men always seemed to have wrenches in their hands. His taste in music ran to old Georgian folk songs, his enjoyment of theater was distinctly lowbrow, and he ignored anything of a legitimate cultural or intellectual nature.