The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller
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it. Giustiniani stuck his finger in the box and felt beneath the curls. ‘Just hair,’ he said.
‘Hmmph,’ Nametkin said, and returned to his papers. Strilchuk closed the lid on the box and placed it on an end table.
‘”…the Latvians opened fire…”’ Nametkin read. ‘It says that the Latvians immediately opened fire on the family, and at the end of it when they checked the pulses Anastasia was still alive –’
‘In here?’ Ryzhkov said. Nothing of the kind had ever happened in that dining room, he could see. He looked over at Strilchuk who shook his head.
‘– so they beat her with their rifles –’
‘No, they didn’t. Not in here,’ Ryzhkov said.
‘– “stabbed her thirty-two times”.’
‘Not in here,’ Ryzhkov repeated.
‘What, did he stand there and count?’ Strilchuk said.
‘The other story is that this Yurovsky took them down the back staircase –’ Giustiniani put in.
‘And took them into the basement room,’ Nametkin said. Strilchuk walked out into the corridor, already looking for the exit from the dining area.
‘Into a side basement room,’ Nametkin said. ‘Let’s go and find that. The house slopes…’
‘It’s down here, I think.’ Strilchuk led them down the narrow back staircase. At the foot of the stairs there was a portico and a set of four stairs down to wide doors, locked with a hasp and padlock.
‘Christ,’ Giustiniani said. He and Strilchuk went around to the guardhouse to see if anyone had the keys to the room.
Ryzhkov and Nametkin looked around the back of the house. There was a woodshed and a sauna bath, built downhill in the dried-out gardens. There was a smaller area to which the Imperial Family must have been recently confined, the grass worn away to dust, a series of chairs and a table made from a tree stump which still held a soggy newspaper and an oyster-shell ash tray.
‘You know Conte Giustiniani was appointed to make sure we come up with the right answers to this whole enterprise.’ Nametkin said to him.
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. General Golitsyn has his deputy, Major de Heuzy, watch Giustiniani, who watches me, and in turn I watch him. It’s all politics, eh?’ Nametkin said. He stood at the end of a little porch that had been built at the end of the bathhouse and looked around at the property. ‘Old Ipatiev. It looks like he put together a pretty nice place for himself.’
‘Yes, it looks like it would have been very peaceful at one time,’ Ryzhkov said, imagining a garden full of grand duchesses running about. At the corner of the stockade was a large gate topped with new barbed wire. ‘The trucks would have been brought in through there,’ he said. The two of them headed up the hill; indeed, the entrance was chewed up, muddy from motor traffic in and out.
Giustiniani walked up with a ring of keys in his hand. ‘He’s just a boy, he can’t read, he can’t find the register, he just gives me the keys because I yell at him a little.’ He fumbled through the keys.
‘Look at this,’ Nametkin said, pointing to the sheen of a cartridge case in the mud outside. Ryzhkov bent to pick it up; much stepped on, clotted with mud and sand. The brass case from a pistol cartridge; he put it in his pocket and stepped back to better appreciate the side wall of the house. There was a short stairway down to the basement doors, a single window looking out from what was supposed to be a storeroom, or perhaps it had once been a bedroom for a servant that had been added on.
Giustiniani had trouble with the lock and Ryzhkov stepped in to help; the old key to the door turned the opposite way. The door creaked open and they hung there on the threshold of the dark room, blinded a little because of the sunshine outside. They pushed the doors open wider to reveal a completely bare space.
And then he saw the bullet holes.
Obviously the shots had come from where they were now standing, their impacts clustered in the wall directly opposite the doorway. There were single holes and then a flurry of others. A lot into the floor as well – too many to count. There should have been blood but there wasn’t, so Ryzhkov walked over to the corner and got down on his knees.
‘It’s been cleaned, I think, yes?’ Strilchuk asked, sniffing.
‘It’s all very tidy,’ Nametkin said. Ryzhkov patted his pockets, and then asked if either of them had a knife. Strilchuk reached into his pocket and came out with a blade.
Ryzhkov used it to winkle a strip of moulding off the floor, a long piece that had come awry, shattered at one end by a bullet. It broke away and he picked it up and carried it to the sunlit doorway.
‘Yes, all cleaned up,’ he said, showing the dark band of blood to Nametkin.
‘I suppose we don’t want to take it apart just yet, eh?’ Strilchuk said, looking around at the room.
‘No, we can wait, but it should be sealed, eh?’ Ryzhkov said.
‘I wouldn’t trust these people to seal a stamp,’ Giustiniani said.
‘How much blood is it, do you think?’ Nametkin asked him.
‘It’s impossible to say. It’s been well cleaned. When you get in the corner you can really smell it. Vinegar too, but there’s the other smell. In this weather you can’t get rid of that. And from the number of bullet holes, it’s more than one person for sure,’ Ryzhkov said.
‘He says eleven,’ Nametkin said, waving the paper at him. ‘He says everybody.’
‘Good God.’ Ryzhkov turned and looked at the room, trying to imagine the press of eleven people gathered in there to be killed – the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the boy, the four girls. Eleven?
‘Who were the others?’ Strilchuk asked.
‘Their servants. Loyal retainers,’ Giustiniani said in a voice that dripped cynicism.
Ryzhkov tried to imagine the scene. Eleven people, then. Plus, jammed in at the doorway there would have had to be the firing squad. A tightly packed little room. Maybe they’d been done in smaller groups. It would have been easier that way. He started to ask Nametkin about the other victims, but the prosecutor had turned and gone back outside.
Ryzhkov stood there for a few more moments, looking around the storeroom, the crazy splattering of bullet holes, the faint swirls where they’d mopped the floor with vinegar and sand, a sliver of broken threshold – the wood clean and yellow-brown. All of it lit by single barred, dirty window, and the flare of sunshine from the open door.
A collection of rosy shadows across the cheap wallpaper, the faint whiff of cleaning fluid and death.
The end of an empire.
The rest of the day was taken up with a parade of witnesses, a whirl of testimony and common police work. From birth it seemed to be a stuttering, confused murder investigation, pulled administratively between the Czech military under General Golitsyn, and Nametkin’s bosses, the civilian ‘government’ – Kolchak’s dictatorship with its green and white flag. Giustiniani added to the confusion by ratifying everything with a wave of his hand, keeping absolutely no paper record, and referring to Ryzhkov variously as ‘investigator’, ’secretary’ and ‘aide’. In practice Ryzhkov did whatever was required and additionally tried to provide anything Nametkin needed.
Besides Strilchuk, the ‘investigators’ were combined from what was left of the Yekaterinburg police, a sub-standard force of malcontents and traitors who’d found protection by banding together, and augmented by a detachment of soldiers.
Ryzhkov kept his eye on Strilchuk, who went about his work with a set jaw and a stare that never wavered. Giustiniani had also noticed his hard edge. By the afternoon Strilchuk had been moved to