Red Templar

Genrikhovich and Holliday walked west along the wide sidewalk of the Nevsky Prospekt with Eddie a full minute behind, watching for any close surveillance. It would be a hard call; even in October, St. Petersburg was full of strolling locals, tourists and other pedestrians window-shopping, stepping in and out of stores, appearing and disappearing in and out of metro stops, even walking dogs.

The broad avenue itself was crowded with cars and trolleybuses, their connectors crackling and flashing overhead as they passed. Nevsky Prospekt had been designed in the seventeenth century by Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, otherwise known as Peter the Great. Planned as the beginning of the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the avenue had always served as the city’s main street, but its grandeur had become tarnished over the centuries by war, Soviet rule, overhead wires, thousands of streetlamps and the near-Vegas glitz of countless neon signs on storefronts from Gucci and Tiffany to Pizza Hut and McDonald’s.

“Your friend is wasting his time,” said Genrikhovich, happily sipping a Starbucks Frappuccino.

Holliday himself held a plain black coffee. “You don’t think you might be under surveillance?”

“It is very doubtful. Not yet, at least. The discovery I made almost a month ago was accidental; the material was not classified.”

“You came across the border with us.”

“You give the Bulgarians far too much credit, Colonel Holliday. As far as bureaucracies are concerned things have changed little since the old days. If anything it is worse. In Bulgaria as in Russia we are still ruled by mediocrity, I can assure you.”

“Those men who came after us didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Holliday. He could feel an itch between his shoulder blades as hypothetical crosshairs targeted him.

“They were watching Brother Dimitrov.”

“And if they interrogate him?”

“He will tell them nothing, Colonel.”

“Everybody talks eventually,” answered Holliday.

“He is a man, like his grandfather. He would die first and take at least one of his interrogators with him.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am a very small cog in the vast wheel of Mr. Putin’s Russia. He cannot see me turning, at least not yet.”

“What exactly are you the curator of at the Hermitage?” Holliday inquired. It was a simple enough question, but this was the first time he’d thought to ask it.

Genrikhovich smiled. “I am senior curator of the Hermitage archives.” He took a slurp from his straw. “You might say I am a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, Colonel Holliday. The Hermitage archives contain a collection of letters, notes, purchase orders, provenance material and any other document or paper pertaining to the work of the Hermitage itself, going back to its origins with Catherine the Great in the mid-seventeen hundreds, as well as her purchase of several collections. I sometimes call myself the Keeper of the Filing Cabinets, the Troll of the Hermitage Basements, but it is a job not without interest.”

“I can imagine,” said Holliday. Genrikhovich was the museum’s chief file clerk. On the other hand, as a historian Holliday was well aware of the value of old bits of paper and forgotten documents. The Rosetta stone was nothing more than a decree about the revoking of several tax laws for priests by King Ptolemy, and the attendant festivals and temples to be organized. The famous stone had been written in Demotic Egyptian, hieroglyphs and Greek as a way of ensuring that all officials, priests and the ordinary people could read it, but the trilingual document effectively provided a translation for a language that had confounded historians for the previous eight hundred years.

They reached the Moika Canal, and Genrikhovich paused, looking to the south. “Down there is the Yusupov Palace,” he said, pointing down the winding narrow canal. There were barges and floating homes moored along the stone banks, but the buildings on either side were immense, huge mansions long since turned into government buildings and apartments. “It was from there that Rasputin came,” said Genrikhovich, his voice somber. “He ran along the ice, with Yusupov and his British companions following the trail of blood and vomit he was leaving. Most assume he was heading for the stairs at the Fonarny Bridge, but I don’t think he knew where he was going. I have seen the police photographs taken after he was pulled from the water. One eye was closed and there was a deep gash over the other. I think he must have been almost blind when Rayner caught up with him. According to Rayner’s letter he said nothing before he died, but I’m not sure I believe that. What it did say was that their mission had been accomplished.”

“Rayner wrote about the assassination?”

“Yes, in his report to the ambassador, which eventually was given to both King George and Czar Nicholas. He also sent a private letter to Stephen Alley, Prince Yusupov’s ‘special friend’ at the palace.”

Holliday glanced over his shoulder. Eddie was staring blankly into a store window a few hundred feet away. Holliday caught his eye and Eddie shook his head slightly. The Russian had been right about surveillance; they weren’t being followed. Genrikhovich began walking again, and Holliday caught up with him, continuing their conversation.

“What do you mean, ‘special friend’?” Holliday asked.

“He was. . pedik?”

“Gay?” Holliday offered.

“Yes, gay, homosexual. They were lovers.” He shrugged. “It made it easier for Alley.”

“Made what easier?”

“Alley was a double agent. He worked for MI6 and also for the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police.”

“A tangled web.” Holliday grunted. “You got this all from the Hermitage archives?”

“One thing leads to another. Assemble enough pieces and the picture suddenly becomes clear.”

The two men walked on silently for a few moments, threading their way through the moving throng on the sidewalk. “Why would he say that they had accomplished their mission in his letter?” Holliday asked finally. “According to you this Stephen Alley and Prince Yusupov were there; they saw him fire the fatal shot.”

“Ah, you are very quick, Colonel. It took me a little time to see the importance of that simple statement.”

“What exactly is the importance?” Holliday asked.

Before he answered Genrikhovich drained the last of his coffee and tossed the empty cup into a waste bin. An old man dressed in Soviet camouflage fatigues instantly darted forward and retrieved the cup. He tilted it up to his mouth, trying to get a last few drops.

“If you read the autopsy report on Rasputin it is easy to see that he would have died of the wounds he received at the palace. He could not have survived for more than a few minutes on the ice. They didn’t follow him to see that he died-they followed him to retrieve the key.”

“The key to the location of this document? Simon Magus’s declaration?”

The Russian paused, then spoke again, his voice ponderous and theatrical. “In a way, Colonel, but the key that Rasputin had stolen was very real. It was solid gold and exactly two and a half inches long. Rasputin had the key in his coat pocket. Rayner shot him in the forehead and retrieved the key before the madman slipped into the waters of the canal, his life gone.”

“What did the lock open?” Holliday asked, playing his part in Genrikhovich’s little drama.

“No lock at all,” the old man responded. “It was the key to the music box in the base of the Kremlin Egg given to Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova by her husband, Czar Nicholas the Second.”

11

The Russian State Hermitage Museum is a half-mile-long complex of German neoclassical buildings that stands on the eastern embankment of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad during the Soviet era and still stubbornly called that by some older survivors of those bleak and sometimes desperate years.

The buildings, including the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the immense