THE THREE MEN SPREAD OUT THROUGH THE TOWN.
Kirov took the houses on the main street. He made sure he had pages in his notebook. He sharpened two pencils. He combed his hair and even brushed his teeth.
Anton caught up with him as he was shaving, using the mirror of the Emka so that he could see what he was doing.
“Where are you going?” asked Kirov.
“To the tavern,” replied Anton. “That’s where people tell their secrets. Why dig them out of their houses when they can come to me there?”
Pekkala decided to follow up on Nekrasov’s story about the militia stealing from the baskets of food delivered by the sisters of the Sverdlovsk convent. He wondered if the nuns had actually seen the Romanovs during their captivity. Perhaps they’d even spoken to the family. If that was true, they would have been the only people outside the militia or the Cheka to do so.
His route to the convent took him around the edge of town. Determined to question as many people as he could along the way, he stopped at several houses. No one came to the door. The owners were home. They simply refused to answer. He could see one old couple, sitting in chairs in a darkened room, blinking at each other while the sound of his fist on their door echoed about the house. The old couple did not move. Their brittle fingers, draped over the armrests of their chairs, hung down like pale creeper vines.
Finally, a door opened.
A wiry man, his pocked face covered by an unkempt white beard, asked Pekkala if he’d come to buy some blood.
“Blood?” asked Pekkala.
“From the pig,” replied the man.
Now Pekkala could hear a gurgling squeal, coming from somewhere behind the house. It rose and fell like breathing.
“You have to cut their throats,” the man explained. “They have to bleed to death or the meat doesn’t taste right. Sometimes it takes a while. I drain the blood into buckets. I thought that’s what you wanted.”
Pekkala explained why he was there.
The man didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d come looking for the truth sooner or later.”
“What truth is that?”
“That the Romanovs weren’t all killed the way the papers said they were. I saw one of them the night after they were supposed to have been executed.”
“Who did you see?” Pekkala felt a tightness in his chest, hoping this might lead him to Alexei.
“One of the daughters,” the man answered.
Pekkala felt his heart sink. Like Mayakovsky, this old man had convinced himself of something Pekkala knew to be false. He could not understand it.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked the man.
“I don’t think you are lying,” said Pekkala.
“It’s all right. The Whites didn’t believe me, either. One of their officers came to my house, right after they chased the Reds out of town. I told him what I’d seen and he said straight up that I must have been dreaming. He told me not to mention it to anyone, unless I wanted to end up in trouble. And when I heard him threaten me like that, I was more certain than ever that I’d seen one of the daughters after all.”
“Where was she when you saw her?” asked Pekkala.
“Down at the railroad yard in Perm. That’s the next stop after Sverdlovsk on the Trans-Siberian. I used to be a coupler down there.”
“A coupler?”
The man made two fists and fitted his knuckles together. “A coupler makes sure the right cars are joined to the right engines. Otherwise a load of goods which has come all the way from Moscow will find itself going back the way it came instead of heading out to Vladivostok. The night after the Romanovs disappeared, I was coupling up carriages on a train bound for the east. We were trying to clear out the railyard before the Whites arrived. Trains were coming through at all hours, not on the usual schedule. Night trains are mostly all freight, but this one had a passenger car-the only one on the train. There were black curtains pulled across the windows and the carriage had a guard at each end with a rifle and a bayonet. That’s where I saw her.”
“You went inside the train?”
“Are you kidding? Those bastards with the long knives would have skewered me!”
“But you said there were curtains over the windows. How did you see her?”
“I was walking down on the tracks beside the carriage, checking the wheels like we’re supposed to do, and one of the guards jumps down into the gravel. He points his gun at me and asks me what I’m doing. So I tell him I’m a coupler, and he yells at me to get lost. He didn’t know what a coupler was either, so I says to him, ‘Fine, I’ll get lost and when the engine pulls out, you’ll be left standing here on the siding. If you want to leave when the rest of the train does,’ I tell him, ‘you’d better let me do my job.’”
“And did he?”
“He got right back on the train and then I hear him yelling at somebody else who’d come to ask what all the fuss was about. You see, whoever was in that carriage, they didn’t want anybody getting off and they didn’t want anybody getting on. But as I was walking back to couple up the car, one of the curtains moved aside”-he made the motion of parting the curtain-“and I saw the face of a woman looking down at me.”
“And you recognized her?”
“Of course I did! It was Olga, the eldest daughter. All scowly like she is in the pictures. And she looks me right in the eye and then the curtain closes up again.”
“You are sure about it being Olga?”
“Oh, yes.” The man nodded. “There could be no mistake.”
A woman walked around the side of the house, holding a long knife in one hand and a bucket of blood in the other. Behind her came a child wearing a dandelion yellow dress and no shoes. With her tiny chin, big inquisitive eyes, and nose no bigger than the knuckle of Pekkala’s little finger, the child looked more doll than human. The woman set the bucket down. “Here it is,” she said. Steam was rising off the blood.
“He hasn’t come for that,” said the man.
The woman grunted. “I carried that all the way around.”
“Now you can carry it all the way back,” the man told her.
“Are you sure you don’t want it?” insisted the woman. “It’s very nutritious. Look at my daughter here. She’s the picture of health and she drinks it.”
The child smiled up at Pekkala, one hand knotted in her mother’s dress.
“No, thank you,” said Pekkala. He looked at the blood, rocking from side to side in the bucket.
“He came to hear my story,” said the man. “About the princess on the train.”
“There’s more to that,” the woman said. “Did you tell him about the young girl they found in the woods?”
“I didn’t tell him,” said the man, irritated that his wife was trying to upstage him, “because I didn’t see it for myself.”
The woman paid no attention to her husband. She laid the knife on top of the bucket. Blood had dried black on the blade. “There was a girl seen wandering in the forest, over by Chelyabinsk. She was hurt. She had a bandage on her head. Like this.” With fingers trailing like weeds in a stream, she traced a path across her mouse-gray hair.
“How old was she? What did she look like?”
“Well, she wasn’t a child. But she wasn’t an adult, either. She had brown hair. Some foresters tried to talk to her, but she ran away. Then she went to the house of some people, but they handed that girl right over to the Cheka. That’s the last anyone saw of her. It was one of the middle daughters. Tatiana. Maybe Maria. She had escaped from the Reds, but they caught up with her again. She was almost free. It’s so sad. So terribly sad.”
There was a look in her face which Pekkala had seen many times before. The woman’s eyes grew bright as she spoke of the tragedy. As she repeated the words “terribly sad,” her cheeks flushed with a pleasure that seemed almost sexual.
“How did you learn about this?”
“A woman from Chelyabinsk. She used to buy from us. She fell in love with an officer of the Whites. When the Whites left, so did she. Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” The woman pointed once more at the bucket.
As Pekkala walked away, he turned once and looked back.
The parents were gone, but the child in the yellow dress remained standing on the doorstep.
Pekkala waved.
The child waved back, then giggled and ran behind the house.
In that moment, some half-formed menace spread like wings behind Pekkala’s eyes, as if that child was not really a child. As if something was trying to warn him in a language empty of words.