“I think you’ve preached enough for one night, Grigori.”
Rasputin smiled lazily. “Good night, Pekkala.” Then he waved at Ilya, as if she were standing in the distance and not just on the other side of the room. As he moved his hand back and forth, a bracelet gleamed on his wrist. It was made of platinum and engraved with the royal crest: another gift from the Tsarina. “And good night, beautiful lady whose name I have forgotten.”
“Ilya,” she said, more with pity than with indignation.
“Then good night, beautiful Ilya.” Rasputin spread his arms and bowed extravagantly, his greasy hair falling in a curtain over his face.
“You can’t go out there now,” Pekkala told him. “The storm has not let up.”
“But I must,” replied Rasputin. “I have another party to attend. Prince Yusupov invited me. He promised cakes and wine.”
Then he was gone, leaving a stench of sweat and pickled onions hanging in the air.
Ilya stepped into the front room, her bare feet avoiding the slushy puddles which had oozed out of Rasputin’s boots. “Every time I’ve seen that man, he has been drunk,” she said, wrapping her arms around Pekkala.
“But he’s never as drunk as he appears,” replied Pekkala.
Two days later, Pekkala arrived in Petrograd just in time to see Rasputin’s body fished out of the Malaya Neva River, near a place called Krestovsky Island. His corpse had been rolled in a carpet and shoved beneath the ice.
Soon after, Pekkala arrested Prince Yusupov, who readily confessed to murdering Rasputin. In the company of an army doctor named Lazovert and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Tsar, Yusupov had attempted to murder Rasputin with cakes laced with arsenic. Each cake contained enough poison to finish off half a dozen men, but Rasputin ate three of them and appeared to suffer no ill effects. Then Yusupov poured arsenic into a glass of Hungarian wine and served that to Rasputin. Rasputin drank it and then asked for another glass. At that point Yusupov panicked. He took the Browning revolver belonging to the Grand Duke and shot Rasputin in the back. No sooner had Dr. Lazovert declared Rasputin dead than Rasputin sat up and grabbed Yusupov by the throat. Yusupov, by now hysterical, fled to the second floor of his palace, followed by Rasputin, who crawled after him up the stairs. Eventually, after shooting Rasputin several more times, the murderers rolled him in the carpet, tied it with rope, and dumped him in the trunk of Dr. Lazovert’s car. They drove to the Petrovsky Bridge and threw his body into the Neva. An autopsy showed that, even with everything that had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.
In spite of Pekkala’s work on the case, and the proven guilt of the participants, none of his investigation was ever made public and none of the killers ever went to prison.
When Pekkala thought back on that night when Rasputin had appeared out of the storm, he wished he’d shown more kindness to a man so clearly marked for death.
UNDER THE GLARE OF AN ELECTRIC LIGHT POWERED BY A RATTLING portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit where Nagorski’s body was found. At first the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists, but with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disk at the other. In the center of the stem, an oblong box held the batteries, volume control, and dials for the various settings.
After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.
Slowly, Pekkala moved the disk of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.
The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.
On hands and knees, Kirov sifted his fingers through the mud. “Why wouldn’t the killer have held on to the gun?”
“He might have,” replied Pekkala, “assuming it’s a ‘he.’ More likely, he threw it away as soon as he could, in case he was caught and searched. Without a gun, he might have been able to talk his way out of it. But with a gun on him, there’d be no chance of that.”
“And he wouldn’t be expecting us to search through all this mud,” said Kirov, his lips turned drowned-man blue, “because that would be insane, wouldn’t it?”
“Precisely!” said Pekkala.
Just then they heard a beep—very faint and only one.
“What was that?” asked Kirov.
“I don’t know,” replied Pekkala. “I’ve never used one of these things before.”
Kirov flapped his arm at the detector. “Well, do it again!”
“I’m trying!” replied Pekkala, swinging the disk back and forth over the ground.
“Slowly!” shouted Kirov. As he climbed up off his knees, mud sucked at his waterlogged boots. “Let me try.”
Pekkala gave him the detector. His half-frozen hands remained curled around the memory of the handle.
Kirov skimmed the disk just above the surface of the mud.
Nothing.
Kirov swore. “This ridiculous contraption isn’t even—”
Then the sound came again.
“There!” shouted Pekkala.
Carefully, Kirov moved the disk back over the spot.
The detector beeped once more, and then again, and finally, as Kirov held it over the place, the sound became a constant drone.
Pekkala dropped to his knees and began to dig, squeezing through handfuls of mud as if he were a baker kneading dough. “It’s not here,” he muttered. “There’s no gun.”
“I told you this thing didn’t work,” complained Kirov.
Just then, Pekkala’s fist closed on something hard. A stone, he thought. He nearly tossed it aside, but then, in the glare of the generator light, he caught a glimpse of metal. As he worked his fingers through the mud, they snagged on what he now realized was a bullet cartridge. Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he held it up to Kirov and smiled as if he were a gold digger who had found the nugget that would set him up for life. Pekkala rubbed away the dirt at the end of the casing until he could see the markings stamped into the brass. “7.62 mm,” he said.
“It could be a Nagent.”
“No. The cartridge is too short. This did not come from a Russian gun.”
After hunting for another hour and finding nothing, Pekkala called an end to the search. The two men clambered out of the pit, switched off the generator, and stumbled back through the dark towards the buildings.
The guard hut was closed and the guards were nowhere in sight.
By that time, both Pekkala and Kirov were shuddering uncontrollably from the cold. They needed to warm up before driving back to the city.
They tried to get into the other buildings, but all of them were locked.
In desperation, the two men heaped up broken wooden pallets which they found stacked behind the Iron House. Using a spare fuel can from their car, they soon had the pallets burning.
Like sleepwalkers, they reached their hands towards the blaze. Sitting down upon the ground, they removed their boots and emptied out thin streams of dirty water. Then they held their pasty feet against the flames until their flesh began to steam. Darkness swirled around them, as if what lay beneath the ground had risen in a tide and drowned the world.