“Exactly,” continued Marina. “One of the executioners, a Hungarian, backed out, saying he couldn’t shoot women and children. This was just an hour or two before the Romanovs were led to the cellar, and Volodya, drunk on ideology and desperate to prove himself not only a true man but a real revolutionary, volunteered. At first they said no, he was too young, but soon Yurovsky relented, for there was no one else at so late an hour. They just needed someone to pull a trigger.” The old woman shook her head. “Before this, Volodya had never killed… and I know in my heart of hearts that he repented every day since.”
No, he suffered, thought Kate. Every day of every week since then, he suffered. And as if some horrible bandage had been yanked away, there it was, now exposed, the festering wound in her grandfather’s soul, the very one he had never permitted to heal. With all her being, Kate didn’t want to believe this – her grandfather capable of murder? – yet at the same time she couldn’t help but know in her heart of hearts that it was in fact the truth. It just made too much unbelievable sense. Kate’s mind whooshed through it all, but unlike Tsaritsa Aleksandra, who had always found hope in the face of such undeniably dark logic, Kate saw it plainly before her. Here at last was the source, at last she had found it: the Artesian well of her grandfather’s self-hatred.
“Who was he assigned to kill?” asked Kate, her voice trembling.
“Why, Grand Duchess Maria, of course. His orders were to aim for the heart so as to make the kill quick and clean. When it all began, however, he panicked. He panicked but he did as ordered: he aimed and fired through the foul smoke at the young princess. But there was so much chaos. Truth be told, only God knows whose bullet struck whom in that mayhem. In any case, when your young grandfather wiped the smoke from his eyes, he saw Maria lying on the floor, completely still, completely dead.”
“Dear God…”
So he was there. So he’d killed. And so, thought Kate, recalling her grandfather’s thick gold watch, he’d looted.
“What happened?” pressed Kate, still unable to make sense of it all. “How did…”
“Just listen…” continued Marina. “About an hour later the truck loaded with the bodies set off with three men seated up front – a driver, a guard, and Yurovsky himself. Since there was no more room in the cab, Volodya – that is, your Dyedushka Misha – was ordered to the back, where he stood guard over the dead ones as the vehicle slowly made its way out of town on the road to the village of Koptyaki and the Four Brothers Mine. Later he told me that if he’d had a bullet he would have killed himself right then and there. Regardless, it was only when the truck passed the racetrack on the edge of town that they encountered the first of many problems. All month there had been heavy rain, and when one of the wheels sank into a muddy hole, the truck became stuck for the first time that night, and Volodya jumped off the back, he jumped onto the ground.”
And looking at the wheel he immediately saw the problem, and shouted to his tovarishi in the cab up front, “It’s not so bad, comrades. Let me give a push!”
The driver, Lyukhanov, put the lorry in reverse, rolled it back a bit, then jabbed it into first gear. Volodya leaned into the rear bumper and pushed with all his strength. In one great heave the vehicle rolled up and out and raced ahead. A few short moments later, however, the left rear tire struck a rock and the entire lorry bounced up. The force of the jolt in turn caused something to be thrown off the back and onto the dirt road. He couldn’t believe his eyes – one of the bodies! Terrified, he froze. Finally Volodya rushed to it, discovering the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich. He was dead, half his head blown away. Volodya looked up and was about to call out to his comrades when suddenly another body fell to the ground. Hurrying to that one, he discovered that it was the body of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, the very one he’d been assigned to kill! Then as if she were a ghost come back to haunt him, she suddenly moved, rolling her head to the side and looking up at him.
“Help…” she gasped. “Please help me!”
From the truck Lyukhanov leaned his head half out the window, and called, “You okay back there, Volodya? You still with us?”
He stared at the young woman bleeding so horribly on the ground. He’d held the fate of her life in his aim once before… and here he held it once again.
“The Lord Almighty had seen to a miracle,” gushed Marina. “He was giving Volodya a second chance. A mere hour or so earlier he’d been this young woman’s murderer… and suddenly he had the chance to redeem himself – he could be her savior!”
Kate looked up. “You mean-”
“In the split of a second, actually…”
… actually without even thinking, he looked after the lorry, which was slowly motoring away, and called, “I’m still with you… just keep going!”
He made his decision just like that, just that quickly.
“I’ve got to hide you away!” he whispered to Maria.
She nodded but couldn’t get up, for she was so badly wounded and had lost far too much blood. And so he dragged her off into the wood, leaning her against a pine. He brought her brother too, lying him nearby.
“If I don’t go with them,” Volodya said, “they’ll come back for us both. Just wait here and stay calm – I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
And knowing that he had no other choice, he left her.
“Yes,” said Marina, “that’s exactly how it happened. So as to keep the truck from turning around and discovering what had happened, your grandfather ran through the night and rejoined his comrades – his tovarischi. He jumped on the back of the truck and stayed with them all the way to the Four Brothers Mine too. When Yurovsky finally discovered that two of the bodies were missing, it was this Volodya who quickly volunteered to take a horse and ride back to town to see what had happened. Instead the guard Volodya Subottin disappeared for all of time.”
“He rode directly to the Grand Duchess Maria and her brother?” Kate half-begged.
“Absolutely. He went straight to them. And once he had moved them to a better place of safety – in a hole beneath the roots of a fallen tree – he secretly made his way back into town, where he fetched Sister Antonina and me.”
The story that Misha had told her, realized Kate, had been so very close to the truth. In many ways it had been the truth, just deviously shaded and twisted here and there so as to deceive in the most subtle but ultimately profound ways.
“So the two of you went back and treated Maria, right?” asked Kate. “You cleaned and bandaged her wounds. But did Sister Antonina later return to town?”
“Yes,” confirmed May. “She went back for more medicine, for more bandages so that we could keep the girl’s wounds clean.”
“And there she ran into horrible trouble?”
“Horrible, horrible trouble. Unfortunately the Reds caught her, questioned and tortured her, and-”
“Drowned her?”
“Exactly.” Marina took a deep breath. “Furthermore, the Grand Duchess soon came down with a horrid fever. Her wounds had become infected and there was nothing we could do. Volodya and I were with her the entire time. Actually, Volodya rarely left her side except to fetch fresh water or scurry off in search of food. There was not much we could do for her, not really, just make sure that she was comfortable. We needed to get her to a hospital, we needed to feed her medicaments, but all we could do was pray for a miracle, and the two of us knelt by her side.”