He could increase the drip, even give her an injection, but there was only so much he could do under these conditions. And as he hurried back to help her, he heard an even worse sound.
A spasm of coughing. Harsh and wet. And flulike.
Chapter 44
The breaker of chains.
When Charlie Vane read those four words on the computer screen, he felt as if he had just broken into the vault at Fort Knox.
The silver cross was sitting on a yellow legal pad, its emeralds glinting in the buttery glow of the banker’s lamp. Like a lottery winner who needed to study his lucky ticket one more time, Charlie picked it up and turned it over. The inscription was in Russian, but he had written the translation Voynovich had given him on the pad.
“To my little one. No one can break the chains of divine love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.”
He had been reading it all wrong. Misinterpreting what it said.
But now he knew better. It was as if, with that one simple phrase, he’d just been given the key to a secret code. Now he knew the story. All his Internet research had finally paid off.
By the year 1901, Nicholas II, the reigning Romanov Tsar, had long been praying for a son. He and his wife, Alexandra, had had three daughters already, and to ensure the survival of his dynasty, Nicholas needed a male heir to be born. But on the night of June 18, the Tsaritsa gave birth to a fourth daughter, and to keep his wife from seeing his disappointment, Nicholas took a long walk to compose himself before going into the royal chamber. On that walk, he must have given himself a stern talking-to, because he resolved to make the best of it and honor the birth of this new daughter by freeing several students who had been imprisoned for rioting in Moscow and St. Petersburg the previous winter.
The name he chose for her was Anastasia, which meant the breaker of chains.
As Charlie studied the cross again, he saw how everything now fell right into place.
“The little one”—malenkaya—to whom it was addressed was a commonly used nickname for the mischievous young grand duchess, Anastasia. And the “loving father” was not her dad, but a priest. A father named Grigori.
As in Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed holy man revered by the Romanovs and reviled by the nation.
What Charlie was holding was not only a piece of history, but an object of absolutely unimaginable value. The days of soliciting measly contributions to Vane’s Holy Writ website were over forever! He could bring his message — personal liberation through total subjugation, in all things, to the holy will! — to millions of people at once. Not incidentally, he could become even richer and more famous in the process, though that, too, was no doubt part of the heavenly plan for him.
He had barely had time to savor his triumph, and imagine the bidding war that would ensue among the world’s wealthiest collectors and museums, when the motion-detector lights went on outside the house, bathing the driveway in their cold white glare. Pushing his wheelchair back on the piled-up rugs, he glanced outside, and while he expected to see a moose ambling by, or maybe a couple of foxes scampering across the snow, he saw his brother Harley, looking like he was on his last legs, staggering toward the front steps.
“Rebekah!” he shouted. “Go open the front door!”
“Why?” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m baking.” The smell of charred, sourdough bread had filled the house for hours.
There was a hammering on the front door, and Harley was crying, “Open up! For Christ’s sake, open up!”
Charlie was maneuvering his chair toward the front hall when he heard Bathsheba skip down the stairs and eagerly say, “I’ll get it! It’s Harley.” She had a thing for his younger brother; she’d once said that he looked like he could be one of those young vampires in her books.
But when she opened the door, Harley virtually slumped inside, slammed the door closed behind him, and threw the bolt. He leaned back against it, his eyes wild, his brown hair sticking out in icy spikes. His boots were dripping onto the carpets that covered the old, uneven floorboards, and his skin was even whiter than Bathsheba’s, which was saying something.
“They won’t stop!” he cried. “They won’t stop!”
“Who won’t stop?” Charlie said, the wheel of his chair snagging on the edge of a rug.
“Eddie and Russell!”
“What are you talking about? Are they here, too?”
“No, man — they’re gone!”
Gone? Whatever he really meant by that, Charlie knew that he had some very serious trouble on his hands. Bathsheba shrank back toward the staircase. “Okay, Harley, why don’t you just calm down? Come on inside and tell me what’s going on. Bathsheba, go and tell your sister to bring us some of her hot tea and that bread she’s been burning all afternoon.”
It took Harley several seconds to pry himself away from the door, and as Charlie led him back into the meeting room where he worked, he heard the clink of what sounded like glass and metal from the backpack slung over Harley’s shoulder. Was that a good sign, he wondered? It had been days since he’d heard any news from St. Peter’s Island, and while he was relieved to see that Harley was alive, it was plain as could be that he was off his rocker.
“You’re okay now,” Charlie said. “You can just sit down and relax.”
Harley went to the window first and stayed there, staring outside until the motion detectors finally turned off and the driveway went black. He yanked the curtains closed and whirled around in a panic as Rebekah came in carrying the tea and toast. Bathsheba peered in, half-concealed, from the doorway.
“Just put the tray down,” Charlie said, “and leave us alone.”
Rebekah did as she was told, but let it bang on the desktop and the tea slosh over the rims of the mugs in protest at such brusque treatment.
“That bread’s not from any store,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise, then slammed the pocket doors together behind her as she left.
“Drink this,” Charlie said, handing his brother a mug. “Tastes like shit, but it’s good for you.”
Harley took it, his hands shaking, and slurped some of it down. He let the backpack slip onto the floor, between his feet. Then he wolfed a couple of slabs of the toast down, too, without even bothering to slather on any of the homemade jam. Charlie studied him as if he were one of the crazy people who occasionally showed up — online or in person — at his ministry. They usually claimed that there were voices in their heads, or that they were being followed. One of the local Inuit had shown up, screaming that he was being tracked, and it turned out that he was right — he had escaped from a mental ward all the way over in Dillingham and the social workers were hot on his trail.
Harley looked just as bad, but Charlie just let him sit and sip the home-brewed tea — no complaints out of him this time — until he seemed to calm down. Just what had happened on that island? And what did he mean when he said that Eddie and Russell were gone?
“You know, you can take off your coat and stay awhile,” Charlie said.
But Harley looked like he was still too cold to take it off, and Charlie knew enough not to rush him. And it was the backpack, anyway — not the coat — that he was dying to get into.
“While you were gone, I took a little trip myself,” Charlie said by way of distraction. “To Nome.”
Apart from nervously rubbing his thigh, Harley didn’t react in any way.
“I went to see that thief Voynovich.”
Harley’s eyes flicked up from the rim of the mug.
“He told me a few things about the cross. And I’ve done some digging on my own.”