“You have also become a symbol,” replied the Tsar, “which I suspect was what you wanted all along. And as for your noble reasons for attempting to shoot me in the back, they are nothing but lies. But I did not come here to gloat over your current situation. I came here because, in a few moments, my son will decide what is to be done with you.”
Alexei turned to look at his father, as confused and frightened as the young man behind the bars.
“But I am to be executed,” said Grodek. “The guards tell me that every day.”
“And that may still happen,” replied the Tsar. “If my son decrees it.”
“I don’t want to kill that man,” said Alexei.
The Tsar patted his son on the shoulder. “You will not kill anyone, Alexei. That is not your task in life.”
“But you are asking me to say if he should die!” protested the boy.
“Yes,” replied the Tsar.
Grodek dropped to his knees, his hands resting palms up on the floor. “Excellency.” He addressed the Tsarevich. “You and I are not so different. In another time and place, we might even have been friends. What separates us is only these bars and the things we have seen in this world.”
“Are you innocent?” Alexei asked. “Did you try to kill my father?”
Grodek was silent.
Water dripped somewhere in the shadows. Pekkala heard waves break against the fortress walls, like thunder in the distance.
“Yes, I did,” said Grodek.
“And what would you do now,” asked the Tsarevich, “if I opened this door and let you out?”
“I would go far away from here,” Grodek promised. “You would never hear from me again.”
Already, the damp of this dungeon had worked its way into Pekkala’s skin. Now he shuddered as it coiled around his bones.
Alexei turned to his father. “Do not execute this man. Keep him here in this cell for the rest of his life.”
“Please, Excellency,” Grodek begged. “I never see the sun. The food they give me is not fit even for a dog. Let me leave! Let me go away. I’ll disappear. I’d rather die than stay any longer in this cell.”
Turning again, Alexei fixed Grodek with a stare. “Then find a way to kill yourself,” he replied. The fear had gone from his eyes.
The Tsar brought his face close to the bars. “How dare you say you are the same as him. You are nothing like my son. Remember this: Alexei will rule my country when I’m gone, and if you live to see that day, it will be because he is merciful to animals like you.”
Heading back across the water, Pekkala stood beside the Tsar. He breathed greedily, filling his lungs with the cold salt air and chasing the stench of that prison from his lungs.
“You think me cruel, Pekkala?” The Tsar faced straight ahead, eyes on the shore.
“I don’t know what to think,” he replied.
“He needs to learn the burden of command.”
“And why bring me to see it, Majesty?”
“One day he will rely on you, Pekkala, as I am relying on you now. You must know his strengths and weaknesses better than he knows them himself. Above all, his weaknesses.”
“What do you mean, Majesty?”
The Tsar glanced at him and looked away again. A layer of frost had formed where his breath touched the lapels of his coat. “When I was young, my father brought me to that island. He took me to the dungeon and showed me a man who had conspired to murder him. I had to make the same choice as Alexei.”
“And what did you do, Majesty?”
“I shot the man myself.” The Tsar paused. “My son has a gentle heart, Pekkala, and you and I both know that in this world all gentleness is crushed eventually.”
Less than five years later, having been released by Revolutionary Guards from the prison of St. Peter and St. Paul, Grodek caught up with the Romanovs in the town of Ekaterinburg in western Siberia. It was there, in the basement of a house belonging to a merchant named Ipatiev, that Grodek shot the young Tsarevich, and all the other members of his family.
PEKKALA AND KONSTANTIN MADE THEIR WAY ALONG THE DARK ROAD, headed towards the facility.
As they walked, Pekkala tried to fathom what must have been going on in Konstantin’s mind in that moment when he picked up the gun to shoot his father. There were some crimes Pekkala understood. Even the motives for murder made sense to him sometimes. Unchecked fear or greed or jealousy could push anyone to the brink of their own sanity. What happened beyond that point even the murderers themselves could not predict.
Pekkala remembered the last time he had seen his own father—that day on the train as it pulled out of the station. But now the image seemed strangely reversed. He stood not on the train but on the platform, seeing through the eyes of his father. Almost out of sight, he glimpsed the young man he had been, arm raised in farewell as he leaned from the window of the carriage, bound for Petrograd and the ranks of the Tsar’s Finnish Regiment.
Then the train was gone and he found himself alone. Sadness wrapped around his heart as he turned and walked out of the station. In that moment, Pekkala grasped something he had never understood before—that his father must have known they would not meet again. And if, in the end, the old man had not forgiven him for leaving, it was only because there had been nothing to forgive.
As the image stuttered into emptiness, like a reel of film clattering off its spool, Pekkala’s thoughts returned to the present. And he wondered if Nagorski might also have forgiven his son, if he could have found the breath to do so.
By the time they arrived at the facility, the sky was already beginning to lighten.
Pekkala rapped on the door of the Iron House and stood back.
Konstantin waited beside him, resigned to whatever happened next.
The door opened. A waft of stuffy air blew past them, smelling of old tobacco and gun oil. Gorenko filled up the doorway. He had pulled on his dingy lab coat and was fastening its black metal buttons, like a man welcoming guests to his home. “Inspector,” he said. “I thought you had gone back to Moscow for the night.” Then he caught sight of Konstantin and smiled. “Hello, young man! What brings you here so early in the morning?”
“Hello, Professor.” Konstantin could not return the smile. Instead, his whole face just seemed to crumple.
“I need you to watch him,” Pekkala told Gorenko. “I regret he will need to be handcuffed.”
“Handcuffs?” Gorenko’s eyes grew wide with astonishment. “He’s the colonel’s son. I can’t do that!”
“This is not a request,” said Pekkala.
“Inspector,” said Konstantin, “I give you my word I will not try to run away.”
“I know,” Pekkala answered quietly. “Believe me, I do, Konstantin, but from now on, there are procedures we must follow.”
“I don’t have any handcuffs!” protested Gorenko.
Pekkala reached into his pocket and brought out a set. A key was clipped onto the chain. He handed them to Gorenko. “Now you do.”
Gorenko stared at the cuffs. “But for how long?”