“IF YOU COULD JUST BRING US TO IT,” ANTON INSISTED. “WE wouldn’t have to take it all.”
“Enough,” said Pekkala.
“ Kirov doesn’t even need to know about it.”
“Enough!” he said again.
Anton fell silent.
Their shadows tilted with the movements of the lantern flame.
“For the last time, Anton, I don’t know where it is.”
Anton wheeled and started walking up the stairs.
“Anton!”
But his brother did not stop.
Knowing it was useless to pursue him, Pekkala returned to the dusty cartridges in the palm of his hand. Each one was 7.62 mm. They belonged to an M1895 Nagant. The revolver had a flimsy-looking barrel, a handle like a banana, and a large hammer like a thumb bent back on itself. In spite of its ungainly appearance, however, the Nagant was a work of art; its beauty emerged only when it was put to use. It fitted perfectly in the hand, the balance was precise, and for a handgun it was extremely accurate.
It was the unique shape of the cartridges Pekkala had found which betrayed the Nagant’s identity. In most types of ammunition, the bullet extended from the end of the cartridge, but in a Nagant’s cartridge the bullet nestled inside the brass tube. The reason for this was to form a gas seal which would provide more power when the gun fired. This gave the Nagant the added advantage of being adaptable for use with a silencer. Guns equipped with silencers had quickly become the weapon of choice for murderers: Pekkala had often encountered Nagants at crime scenes, the large cigar-like silencers screwed onto the ends of their barrels, abandoned near the bodies of shooting victims.
The sound of gunfire in an enclosed space like this must have been deafening, Pekkala thought. He tried to imagine the room as it would have been when the shooting finally stopped. The smoke and shattered plaster. Blood soaking into the dust. “A slaughterhouse,” he whispered to himself.
More bullet marks gashed the walls on the staircase, showing that the guards had not given up without a fight. On the second floor, where the Romanovs had lived, there were four bedrooms, two large and two small, as well as two studies. One room, its walls papered in dark green with fitted wooden shelves, had obviously belonged to a man. The other, whose walls were peach-colored, held a cushioned bench, upon which the woman of the house could have sat and looked out at people passing by on the road. The bench still lay in the room, tipped over on its side. One of its legs had been torn off by the impact of a bullet. An oval mirror hung crookedly on the wall, one shark’s tooth of glass remaining in the frame while the rest of it had fallen to the ground. Cobwebs hung on the light fixture above him. Traces of whitewash were still visible on the windowpanes. The Whites must have cleaned it off when they occupied the house, thought Pekkala.
He stood on the landing, his eye following the mercury-bright line of the polished bannister down to the ground floor. He tried to imagine the Tsar standing in this same spot. He remembered how the Tsar would sometimes pause in the middle of a sentence or when striding down one of the long hallways of the Winter Palace. He would remain motionless, like a man who heard music in the distance and was trying to pick up the tune. Now, as Pekkala made his way downstairs, he remembered times in the forest when he had watched stags, with antlers like forked branches of lightning emerging from their skulls, pause in just that way, waiting for some danger to reveal itself.