“I might say that you just didn’t feel like killing him,” Paul said.
Krilov laughed and coughed. “True. I thought, after him, there’s the next brother, and then the kid who just spent months in prison. It just seemed like needless butchering, like the Bolsheviks shooting and stabbing the little daughters. The rest of them are harmless. I think Christina was-unique. What a shame she defected over to Father Giorgi’s faction, a bunch of radical religionists. We wanted to make her a tsar, or at the very least, give her a beautiful power. Make her famous. Get her picture in magazines around the world.”
“You wanted a masthead for a phony monarchy you would run from behind the scenes. When Christina figured that out, she dropped you. At least Giorgi might have helped her do some social good.”
“She was an experiment that failed.”
“That sounds damn cold, from what I know of your relationship. You were lovers, weren’t you?”
Krilov shrugged. He didn’t seem to care about anything anymore.
“What happens when you go back to Russia?” Paul asked him.
“Oh, I won’t go there again. My death would be slow. I think maybe Cuba.”
Paul nodded.
“What will they do with the bones?”
“Cremate them.” Paul would have a little talk with Gabe, convince him.
“Fine.” Sergey dropped his cigarette butt into a cup, where it sizzled. “We’re all victims of tradition, even in America,” he said. “Bury the dead, all that kind of thing. Death.”
“Closure,” Paul said.
“Do we have any other business?”
“I’m afraid so.” Paul pointed his weapon through his pants pocket at Krilov. “It’s a Glock,” he said. “My beautiful power.”
“You’re going to turn me in? They’ll never prove anything. Giorgi won’t talk.”
“They’ll deport you back to Russia,” Paul said. Krilov jumped up and ran at him, low, dangerous because he was willing to take a shot, but Paul’s big hand with the gun came down hard on his neck.
30
STEFAN COULDN’T BELIEVE, COULD NOT BELIEVE, THAT HE HAD agreed to return to the cemetery, but here he was, going, dressing in one of the suits he had worn daily to court, which seemed appropriate, given the occasion.
At the door, he said good-bye to Erin, but she wouldn’t let him go right away. She took him by the shoulder, forcing him to admire the ring on her finger, the chip of a diamond, really, no more than another promise, but one that he would keep.
The weekend after they let him out of jail, on a windy Saturday, he had invited her to a picnic at Carmel River beach. They walked down toward the ocean and found a place on the sandy slope where they could watch the clouds fly over the water. They talked for hours. He apologized. He begged her to forgive him; then, when the sun had gone down, and Erin was shivering, he had bent down on one knee and proposed. She cried, and then she took the ring. “I’ll be able to get a bigger one eventually,” he had told her. But she swore she loved it, and she loved him. He didn’t deserve her, he knew that.
“One more kiss,” Erin said, holding onto him. “I never knew one heart could hold so much happiness,” she whispered in his ear.
What luck! He drove back to El Cementerio Encinal, music up loud, this time in blazing sunlight, same scrungy Honda Civic, but without a broken taillight, and nothing in the back seat to make a bored beat cop say what the hell.
When Alex had called to ask him to come, Stefan spent most of the conversation thinking about how guilty Gabe must feel, and how mad he was at his brother, and how sorry he was about the whole damn mess. If it wasn’t for Gabe’s consult with that lawyer, Christina might not be dead.
But Alex had told him Gabe wasn’t responsible. “Christina and Alan Turk were infected by the same sickness. They placed an inflated importance on anachronisms, nobility, royalty, divine destiny. Alan killed to claim his personal piece of royal history, and Christina died because she wanted to claim hers. You know what’s sad? The newspapers won’t let this story drop. She got the fame she craved so much, but she had to die to get it.”
Today, taking in the salty wind, Stefan would say hello to a brother he had never known and good-bye to a sister and a father he had never known. Erin accused him of being too sentimental lately, but in jail he had squeezed back so many feelings, he now welcomed tears when they came. Singing to himself, feeling alive, smelling the sea air and loving the warm sun on his left arm, he turned into the narrow gate of the cemetery, open this time, and went straight for the Russian headstones.
Alex Zhukovsky and Gabe had already arrived. They stood talking quietly beside a small, fresh mound of earth below the double cross with its slanty wooden stake planted awkwardly below. Stefan parked behind another car, trying to get off the pavement a little in case someone wanted to get by him, but unwilling to intrude too much on those unfortunate dead with positions too near the edge.
“Hey, Stefan,” Gabe said. “Meet your big brother, Alex.”
Alex held out a hand. “Hey, Stefan,” he also said, smiling, getting the accent wrong on Stef’s name, saying it like a foreigner.
Stefan took his hand, thinking about how Alex had looked in court, so hunted, and how today, he looked relaxed, maybe even a little happy. “I brought bouquets,” Stefan said, showing them. “Erin made them.”
His brothers nodded. Even though Alex was shorter, older, with much less hair than Gabe, the two men looked remarkably similar.
Stefan looked down at their father’s grave, the full force of their history bearing down on him. He and Erin had been reading about the last tsar. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“Oh, come on,” Gabe said. “We know. Where’d the egg come from, and the stories? Not from some flunky baker or page. Let’s stake our claim. Say it out loud just this once. Our father was tsarevitch Alexis Nicholaevich Romanov, who lived a quiet life in a small place, right here in Monterey.”
“But say it only today,” Alex said. “Like I told that crazy Russian who kidnapped and almost murdered me, this is a final burial. We don’t want to be haunted by this part of our past any longer. We don’t need crazies coming after us. We don’t want anyone messing with our father’s remains or our bones for that matter, not if it means death threats and assholes who want to kill us coming around.”
“We abdicate,” Gabe said, and Stefan, smiling, nodded.
“I don’t know if Gabe has told you yet,” Alex said, taking one of Erin’s bouquets and laying it on the fresh dirt mound. “We sold the Faberge egg to the Russian who bought the Forbes collection, and along with the settlement we’ve agreed on, we’ll be splitting the proceeds three ways.” He stood close to Gabe, and as he spoke, put an arm around him in a careless way, as if he knew him, as if they had grown up together. Gabe, prickly old Gabe, grinned. “Did Gabe tell you he quit his job?”
“You did?” Stefan asked.
Gabe nodded.
“What’ll you do? Travel?” Buy a castle and play lord of the manor? Stefan thought, but didn’t say.
But this brother he thought he knew inside out had some surprises in him still. “He’s been working with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society for a long time,” Alex said. “He quit to work there full- time.”
“One thing I’m good at,” Gabe said. “Squeezing money out of people. I don’t want any more kids to die and never live to see a day like today.” He picked up a rock and threw it toward a tree. “And I’ll have more for you rich boys on that topic later, when our ship comes in.”
“Gabe, wow. Count me in.” Stef forgave him everything in that instant, every bad thing he ever did. So what if Mom liked him best? Maybe he deserved it.
“Papa would be so proud,” Alex said.
“I sometimes think I remember. His mustache tickled,” Stefan said, rubbing a finger along the letters on his father’s headstone.
“I remember his growl,” Gabe said.
“I’m sure he was happy to have two more sons,” Alex said, “but Christina exerted such influence over everyone, including Papa. She never listened to anyone except him, and he listened to her, and was her hero.” He sighed. “I regret you’ll never know them, and maybe come to forgive them both.”
“What was Christina-our sister-like?” Stefan asked.
And Alex, unleashed, filled them with stories about their childhood, stories that showed a younger brother’s admiration for his smart, dreamy older sister. “She loved the story of the snow maiden. I often think it was because she felt an affinity for this character who went all the way, in spite of the danger she certainly saw coming, who wore that mark of being special, and who died because she couldn’t settle down and accept a smaller, happy life.”
They threw dirt on their father’s final resting place. They had cremated the last bones, and burned the DNA results. Only ashes lay in the grave now.
Christina’s grave was next to her father’s and mother’s. Stefan left her a bundle of bright fall leaves and flowers. Gabe contributed irises. Alex put down one yellow rose.
“Our big sister.” Gabe ran the sounds around in his mouth. “Well, she would appreciate a good toast. I know she could throw a glass.” He reached behind himself, bent, and brought out a bottle of vodka and three small glasses. “To our Christina,” he said, “almost tsar of all the Russias.”
31
