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

The guard handed Pekkala a piece of bread, then shut the door.

Pekkala took a bite of the bread and spat it out again. The bread gets worse and worse, he thought.

Then water started spraying out of a hole in the wall.

Pekkala screamed, dropped to the floor, and curled up in a ball.

The water kept spraying.

It was warm.

After a while, he raised his head. All he could see was the water spraying down on him. The piece of bread bubbled in his hand, and then he realized it was soap. He rubbed it all over his face.

Water sluiced over his body and ran away black with dirt, down a hole in the corner of the room. Pekkala climbed to his knees and stayed under the stream of water, chin against his chest, hands resting on his thighs. The falling water thundered in his ears.

Eventually, there was a squeaking sound and the water shut off.

Dressed in his soaked pajamas, Pekkala stumbled into the hall. In spite of the shower, dried blood crusted around his nostrils. Its metallic taste lingered in the back of his mouth.

“Hands behind your back,” the guard told him.

“Step to the left, step to the right,” said Pekkala.

“Shut up,” said the guard.

Pekkala and the two guards walked down a corridor until they came to a heavy iron door studded with rivets. The door was opened. A smell of damp air wafted into Pekkala’s face. Then the two guards hauled him down a long spiral staircase lit by bulbs in metal cages.

The basement, thought Pekkala. They are taking me down to the basement. Now they are going to shoot me. He felt glad that he would not have to go back into the chimney. His soul had all but vanished now. His body felt like a small and leaky boat, almost sunk beneath the waves.

“ARE YOU SURE?” KIROV ASKED, AS HE STEERED THE EMKA THROUGH the gates of Vodovenko.

“They are calling it a suicide,” said Pekkala. “But that’s not what it was.”

“We should get out of Sverdlovsk,” Anton warned. “We should leave now. We shouldn’t even go back to collect our stuff.”

“No,” replied Pekkala. “We will proceed with the investigation. We are getting closer now. The killer can’t be far away.”

“But shouldn’t we at least find a more secure location than the Ipatiev house?” asked Kirov.

“We need him to think we are vulnerable,” Pekkala answered. “If whoever killed the Romanovs knows we are closing in on him, then he knows he can no longer hide. It will be only a matter of time before he comes looking for us.”

IT WAS MORNING.

Pekkala sat by the water pump on an upturned bucket, the Webley resting by his foot. A hand-sized mirror, made of polished steel, was propped in the crook of the pump handle. Pekkala was shaving, a dingy froth of soap upon his face and the blade rustling faintly as it carved across the contours of his chin.

He’d slept only a couple of hours. After their return from Vodovenko, the three men had agreed to stand watch in turns throughout the night and every night from then on until the investigation was complete.

Suddenly, a face peeked around the corner of the courtyard wall.

Pekkala reached for the gun.

The face ducked out of sight. “It’s only me!” called a voice from behind the wall. “Your old friend, Mayakovsky.”

Pekkala set the gun back down. “What do you want?” he asked.

Cautiously, Mayakovsky stepped back into the courtyard. In his arms, the old man carried a basket made from woven bulrush stalks. “I bring gifts! These are some things which Kirov has requested.” Mayakovsky looked at the gun. “You are a little jumpy today, Inspector Pekkala.”

“I have reason to be jumpy.”

“Shaving, I see. Yes. Good for the nerves. Yes.” Mayakovsky gave a nervous laugh. “Occam would be pleased.”

“What?” asked Pekkala.

“Occam’s razor.” He pointed at the blade in Pekkala’s hand. “The simplest explanation that fits the facts…”

“… is usually right,” said Pekkala. He wondered where Mayakovsky had bartered for that piece of knowledge. “What brings you here?”

“Ah, well, you might say it is Occam who brings me here, Inspector Pekkala.”

Pekkala scraped the razor down the length of his throat, then whipped the soap off the blade and pressed the cutting edge to his skin.

Mayakovsky placed the basket on the doorstep and sat down beside it. “My father was a handyman for the Ipatiev family. I used to wait here for him when I was a child, as he finished up his work for the day. I swore that someday I would buy this place. In the end, of course, the house could not be bought. And who would have wanted it anyway, after the things that happened here?”

“The house you have seems big enough,” said Pekkala.

“Oh, yes!” answered Mayakovsky. “I have a different bedroom for every day of the week. But it is not this house.” He patted the stone on which he sat. “Not the one I swore I would own.”

“Then the only thing driving you is greed.”

“Do you think I would have been happier if I had bought the Ipatiev house?”

“No. Greed does not rest until it has been satisfied, and greed is never satisfied.”

Mayakovsky nodded. “Precisely.”

Pekkala glanced up from his shaving mirror. “All right, Mayakovsky, what are you driving at?”

“Since I do not own this house,” explained the old man, “the dream of owning it persists. I have come to realize that the dream of owning it is now worth more to me than the house itself. I tried to pretend otherwise. How can a man admit that his whole life has been spent searching for something he does not actually want?”

Slowly, Pekkala lowered the razor from his face. “He can admit it, if he faces the truth.”

“Yes,” agreed Mayakovsky, “if, like Occam’s razor, he can understand where the facts are pointing him.”

“I pity you, Mayakovsky.”

“Save some pity for yourself, Inspector.” Mayakovsky’s forged smile flickered on and off, as if it were attached to some faulty electrical current. “You also seem to be in search of a thing you do not really want.”

“And what is it you think I’m looking for?” asked Pekkala.

“The Tsar’s treasure!” spat Mayakovsky. Until now, the old man had been choosing his words carefully, but now they sounded like an accusation.

“What do you know about that?” Pekkala wiped the soap from his blade onto a dish towel laid across his knee.

“I know that the Tsar had hidden it so well that no one could find it. Not that they didn’t try. I saw them. The carriage shed in this courtyard was filled with the trunks the Romanovs brought with them. Beautiful trunks. The kind with curved wooden railings and brass locks, each trunk numbered and named. Well, the militia searched them and stole a few things, but they didn’t really know what they were looking for-just a bunch of books and fancy clothes. Those Cheka boys must have figured out that even if the valuables themselves weren’t in the trunks, they might discover a clue as to where they could find them. Every night, those Cheka guards sneaked out and searched those trunks, but they never found anything.”

“What makes you think that, Mayakovsky?”

“Because if they had found it, Inspector Pekkala, they would have no use for you. Why else would they have kept you alive?”

“Mayakovsky,” said Pekkala, “I am here to investigate the possibility that the execution of the Romanovs was not fully carried out.”

Mayakovsky nodded sarcastically. “More than a decade after they vanished. Do the wheels of bureaucracy in Moscow really turn as slowly as that? The Romanovs are a footnote in history. Whether they are alive or dead no longer matters.”