thinking this was easy money, Nina thought along with them. Only a fool would have agreed to do that job in the first place.
Holding up the appraisal, Jaime Sandoval started on the medal. Alex acknowledged the facts. The appraiser had assigned a value of at least five thousand dollars. He had discovered the medal was created of precious materials and seemed to be the correct age for an original, first-class war medal. He suggested it might have been privately commissioned as a memento or honorarium by someone of wealth for a courageous member of his staff or family.
The D.A. showed Zhukovsky a photo of the familiar white embellished cross with the blue stone at its center, and the tiny image of Saint George slaying the dragon. Zhukovsky barely looked. “My sister and I saw it many times in my father’s study when we were growing up. We thought it was a toy, a replica. We had no idea how he came to own such a thing. As far as I know, he never fought in a war.”
The medal and appraisal were introduced into evidence. The prosecutor had to explain why Stefan would steal Alex’s father’s body after killing his sister, and the medal seemed to be the only motivation he could come up with.
Yes, Zhukovsky reported, after identifying the other body in the grave as his sister’s, he had been taken to Natividad Hospital in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 13. He let loose with indubitable facts: his sister’s eyes bulged. Her tongue stuck out of her mouth. Her neck had blue marks. He had fainted and his head had hit the steel wheel of a cart, and had required stitches.
He was shown photos of his sister’s dead body. “That is my sister, Christina,” he said, only his voice betraying hints of his extreme dismay.
Nina watched as Alex wiped his forehead again. Were this witness’s reactions entirely within the realm of normal for a grieving brother? Naturally, these very personal, gruesome images were upsetting.
Zhukovsky went on. “I gave the key to my sister’s apartment to a woman detective because I couldn’t accompany the police to her apartment. I-couldn’t.”
The judge called a recess.
Klaus had barely moved throughout Zhukovsky’s testimony. His face showed nothing of his thoughts, but Nina felt his scrutiny of this witness as rigorous, piercing.
Questioning resumed. Jaime Sandoval wanted to know about Christina’s last days. Zhukovsky told some things about the conference, about her mood. He identified personal items of hers-her appointment book, her purse. He told them he missed his older sister.
The D.A. finally stood. He buttoned his coat, preparing himself. Nina could see how Jaime wanted to signify this moment, the heart of Alex’s testimony. Alex swallowed as if preparing to live up to the prosecutor’s hopes.
“Do you know Mr. Wyatt, the defendant over there?” Jaime asked.
Rustling and muttering burst forth from Stefan’s table. Stefan wanted to speak, but Klaus put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“No.”
“Did your sister ever mention the names Stef Wyatt or Stefan Wyatt to you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hire the defendant to dig up your father’s grave?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you pay him the sum of five hundred dollars in cash at any time for any purpose?”
“No, sir.”
Nina let her breath out. He had stuck to his story.
Before the trial, when they went over Zhukovsky’s statements, Jaime Sandoval had seemed certain Stefan Wyatt was responsible for killing Christina Zhukovsky. Now her brother had given the jury no reason to believe otherwise.
“Did you have any reason to wish her dead?” Jaime asked.
“My own sister? Of course not,” Alex said.
After the break, Paul stood at the counsel table. “You have plenty to attack him with,” he said. “Blow him off the stand.”
She put her lips together and blew toward the witness box. “Shoot,” she whispered. “He’s still there.”
“Yeah, well, he’s no pushover.”
Nina stood. Jaime Sandoval, the prosecutor, noticed, then turned his eyes toward the papers spread out on the table in front of him, mad. He had obviously hoped for Klaus.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Zhukovsky,” she said. “My name is Nina Reilly and I represent the defendant, Stefan Wyatt.”
“Good afternoon,” he replied coolly.
She asked him questions about the identification of his father’s bones and his sister’s body, fairly rapid-fire, but with a logical progression that she hoped made it easy to follow. She cleared up points about how he had offered a key to the police to let them into Christina’s apartment. She tried to lull him with a pleasant manner, a singsong voice, a tone that said, And we all know what’s coming next, so no worries. She watched for the tension in his shoulders to leave him. She listened for even, unsuspecting breaths.
He answered her quick questions more and more quickly, with less and less premeditation.
And she dropped a bomb upon a dumbly grazing sheep.
“Your father, Constantin Zhukovsky, claimed he was a page to the last tsar of Russia, did he not?”
Alex Zhukovsky’s pale, professorial skin whitened.
“Would you like the question repeated?” The clerk read it back. The reporters, aroused, whipped out pens, poising them like arrows.
“He told stories,” Zhukovsky finally croaked out.
“When was the first time you heard him tell you that one?”
“I was a little boy. But you know, my father wasn’t reliable. I never knew if any of that talk about his early life was true. Here in America, he was a baker, a pastry shop owner. That’s the man I knew.”
“And he told you he was a page to the tsar of Russia, did he not?” Nina said, worrying him like a ferret worries a rat.
An alarmed Sandoval said, “Objection, relevance.” He hadn’t seen this coming.
Nina left Alex Zhukovsky to sit like one of Nabokov’s moths, pinned to his seat, and approached the bench.
“Objection overruled,” said the judge.
“He told you he was a page…” Nina prompted.
“To tsar Nicholas the Second, yes,” Zhukovsky admitted. “Yes. But you have to understand. He was full of stories, like fairy tales.” He was glaring at Paul, apparently having recognized Paul as the source of his present discomfort.
“Did he tell you about how he taught the
“A pony?”
“A pony.”
A pause. “Yes.”
“Being a page to the tsar would have made your father an important man historically, wouldn’t it?”
“Not really. A page was a servant, a drudge. There’s no glory in that. Anyway, there were several pages.”
“But he would have been there near the end, before the tsar’s family was taken away to Ekaterinburg to be executed. It’s one of the most important historical events of the twentieth century in Russian history, surely something that would interest a professor of Russian. Didn’t he ever mention that?”
“The family was first exiled to Tobolsk, to the Governor’s House.”
“Professor, I stand corrected.” She smiled. She had him now, down a path he could not escape. “But of course he told you he was there as the events of the Russian Revolution unfolded in 1917 and right up to the time the tsar’s family was arrested and eventually taken to Ekaterinburg?”
Jaime, nettled into pinching his brows together until they almost touched each other, objected again as to relevance. The lawyers returned to the judge’s dais to huddle and whisper. Nina won again. The judge told Zhukovsky to answer the question.
“I was told that he was present, yes,” he said. “I have no way of actually knowing.”
“Did your father’s medal, the one our client stands accused of stealing from the grave, come from those days?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t such a medal ordinarily come directly from the hand of the tsar?”
“Objection. Relevance?” This time Sandoval won.
“Did your father retain any other memorabilia from his youth in Russia?” Nina asked Zhukovsky.
“I imagine if there was anything it would have been something small that was sold when the estate was liquidated after his death. His family had fled Russia during the revolution. They spent any savings, I imagine. They traveled to Estonia, then Sweden, then Canada. After all these travels and the deaths of his parents, he had just a few mementoes of his childhood. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. I simply don’t know more.”
“Did he ask to be buried with his medal?”
“Yes.”
“You could have sold it for at least five thousand dollars and possibly much more, did you know that at the time?”
“I didn’t know it was valuable. I did as he asked.”
“Ever regret that?” she asked.
Sandoval decided to object, and his objection was sustained.
“Didn’t you subsequently decide to dig up your father’s grave in order to obtain that medal and sell it?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“Didn’t you hire Stefan Wyatt to dig up that grave for you for that purpose?”
“Not at all.”
“Come on, Mr. Zhukovsky. How would Stefan Wyatt know about the medal, except from you?”
“Anyone who attended my father’s funeral in 1978 might have seen the medal,” he said.
“Was Stefan Wyatt there? He would have been only three years old that year.”
“What’s this got to do with my sister-
“How did Stefan Wyatt find out the location of your father’s grave?”
