Sam Eastland - Eye of the Red Tsar A Novel of Suspense

“That sort of thing mattered to my father. Even though nobody else ever came to the oven, as far as he knew anyway, he needed the place to be orderly and dignified.

“Almost as soon as we arrived, my brother wanted to go back. He was sure our father would figure out that we’d been here.

“That was when I suggested that one of us should go inside the oven, just to see what it was like.

“At first my brother refused.

“I called him a coward. I said we would draw straws for it. I told him if I was willing to do it, he should be willing, too.

“Eventually, I got him to agree.”

“And Pekkala drew the short straw?” asked Kirov.

“He thought he did,” replied Anton. “The truth is, after I saw that he had drawn the long straw, I squeezed it so hard between my fingers that it broke in half, so what he drew was only half the proper length.

“I told him he couldn’t back down or else he’d spend the rest of his life knowing that he’d proved himself to be a coward.

“He crawled into the oven. I made him go headfirst. And then I closed the door on him.”

“You did what?”

“It was only going to be for a second. Just to give him a scare. But there was a spring lock on the door and I couldn’t get it open. I tried. I honestly did. But I wasn’t strong enough.

“I could hear him shouting and banging on the door. He was trying to get out. I panicked. I ran home. It was getting dark. I arrived home just as my mother was putting supper on the table.

“At the supper table, when my parents asked me where my brother was I said I didn’t know.

“My father was looking at me. He must have known I was hiding something.

“Hold out your hands, he said, and when I held them out he grasped them hard and stared at them. I remember he even lowered his face to my fingertips and smelled them. Then he ran out of the house.

“I watched the lantern he was carrying disappear down the trail towards the oven.

“An hour later he was back with my brother.”

“What happened to you then?” asked Kirov.

“Nothing,” replied Anton. “My brother said he had shut the door on himself. Of course, it wasn’t even possible to lock that door from the inside. My father must have known it, but he pretended to believe my brother. All he did was make us swear never to go back to the oven.”

“And your brother? He never took revenge for what you’d done?”

“Revenge?” Anton laughed. “His whole life since he joined the Finnish Regiment has been vengeance for what happened between us.”

“I would have killed you,” said Kirov.

Anton turned to look at him. His face was layered in shadow. “That would have been less cruel than what my brother did to me.”

HALFWAY DOWN THE MINE SHAFT, PEKKALA CLUNG TO THE ROPE.

It was cold down there and damp and musty-smelling, but the sweat was coursing off his face. The walls appeared to spin around him, like a whirlpool made of stone. Memories of being in the oven swirled inside his head. He remembered reaching out into the darkness, his fingers brushing against the blunt teeth of the burner nozzles which hung from the ceiling of the oven. He had pressed his hands against them, as if to stop the flames from shooting out. At first, he had tried not to breathe the smell in, as if his lungs might filter out those particles of dust. But it was no use. He had to breathe, and as the air grew thin inside that metal cylinder, Pekkala had to fill his lungs as deeply as he could, and all the while that smell poured into him, sifting through his blood like drops of ink in water.

Pekkala looked up. The mouth of the mine shaft was a disk of pale blue surrounded by the blackness of the tunnel walls. For minutes, he fought against the urge to climb out again. Waves of panic traveled through him, and he hung there until they subsided. Then he lowered himself down to the mine floor.

His feet touched the ground, sinking into decades of accumulated dust. Pieces of rotting wooden support beams, toothed with nails, littered the floor.

Pekkala let go of the rope and kneaded the blood back into his hands. Then he took hold of the flashlight and shone it into the darkness.

The first thing he saw was a section of ladder which had fallen to the ground. It stood propped against the wall, the rusted metal glistening black and orange.

The space was wide here, but the way into the belly of the mine soon narrowed to a point where the tunnel split into two and pairs of rusty iron rails curved into blackness. Both of the tunnel entrances were blocked by walls of rock. Pekkala knew that mines were sometimes closed before they had been completely dug out. The miners had probably collapsed the tunnels on purpose, to protect whatever minerals remained in the ground in case they ever returned. The wagons which had run along these rails were parked in an alcove. Their sides showed dents from hard use, the metal smeared with whitish-yellow powder. Pekkala felt a tremor of pity for the men who had worked in these tunnels, starved of daylight, the weight of the earth poised above their crooked backs.

Pekkala played the flashlight around this stone chamber, wondering where these bodies were. It occurred to him that perhaps his brother had been wrong. Perhaps the madman had worked in this mine years before and had invented the whole story, simply to get attention. This train of thought was still unraveling in his head, when he turned, sweeping the beam into the darkness, and realized he was standing right beside them.

They lay as they had fallen, piled in a grotesque heap of bones and cloth and shoes and hair. There were multiple corpses. In such a jumble of decay, he could not tell how many.

He had come down on one side of the mine opening. The bodies must have landed on the other side.

As the flashlight’s beam wavered, like a candle flame boxed by the wind, Pekkala’s instincts screamed at him to get out of this place. But he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet, even with fear sucking the breath out of his lungs.

Pekkala forced himself to hold his ground, reminding himself that he had seen many bodies in the past, plenty of them in worse condition than these. But those corpses had been anonymous to him, in death as they had been in life. If this sad tangle of limbs did indeed belong to the Romanovs, then this was unlike anything he’d witnessed before.

A sound startled him, echoing off the stone walls. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that it was his brother’s voice, calling down from above.

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes,” he called up.

There was a long pause.

“And?” his brother’s voice came down.

“I don’t know yet.”

Silence from above.

Pekkala turned back to the bodies. Down here in the mine, the process of decomposition had been slowed. The clothing was largely intact and there were no flies or other insects, whose larvae would have eaten the corpses down to the bone if the bodies had been left above ground. Neither was there any evidence of rats or mice having gnawed upon the dead. The depth of the mine and the vertical entrance had prevented them from reaching the bodies. He did not know what had been mined here. Whatever it was might also have had a preserving effect.

The victims appeared to be partially mummified. Their skin had turned a greenish brown, nearly translucent, drawn tight over the bones and filmed with mold. He had seen corpses like this before-people frozen in ice or buried in soil with a high acid content, like peat bogs. Pekkala also recalled a case in which a killer stuffed a body up a factory chimney. Over the years in which the victim remained hidden, the body became smoked to the consistency of shoe leather. It was remarkably well preserved, but as soon as police removed it, the corpse decayed at an astonishing rate.