Red Templar

Winter Palace, once home to the czars, were formally established in 1851 and held in excess of three million items from prehistoric and medieval times up to the present day.

During World War II, with Leningrad under siege, each and every item in the collections was cataloged, packed and moved on a series of freight trains to Sverdlovsk, deep in the heart of Russia on the east side of the Ural Mountains and a thousand miles from the fighting.

During this period the remaining Hermitage staff lived in the basements of the enormous museum, which, according to Genrikhovich, was where he was born during one of the artillery bombardments of the city in December of 1943.

By then some of Leningrad’s citizens had been reduced to eating the dead frozen flesh of their companions, but in the end the Russian winter defeated Hitler just as it had defeated Napoleon long before him. Spring came, the city survived, and so did the Hermitage.

Oddly, the man who would eventually order the deaths of millions of his countrymen was first educated as a priest. Yet despite his training in the spiritual realm, Stalin, the peasant son of a Georgian cobbler in the village of Gori, had no real interest in art at all. He was no friend to the Hermitage, having sold off a huge part of their collection in the early 1930s to raise foreign currency. His appreciation of fine art ran to paintings of muscular men and busty women breaking the chains of their capitalist oppressors, fuming factory chimneys in the background. The women invariably wore kerchiefs around their heads and the men always seemed to have wrenches in their hands. His taste in music ran to old Georgian folk songs, his enjoyment of theater was distinctly lowbrow, and he ignored anything of a legitimate cultural or intellectual nature.

Genrikhovich, nine years old at the time, could still distinctly remember the party that was held in the basement of the Hermitage on March 5, 1953-the day Stalin died.

Holliday and Genrikhovich finally reached the vast expanse of Palace Square, with the breathtaking, red granite spear of the Alexander Column stretching one hundred and fifty-six feet upward into the icy, cloudless blue of the autumn sky. To the left, far across the rhomboid-shaped plaza, was the long curving arc of the Admiralty. To the right was the white-and-azure Winter Palace, once home of the czars, the place where the 1917 revolution began that changed Russia and the rest of the world, and which was now the largest building of the Hermitage complex.

The two men waited at the base of the Alexander Column and Holliday watched as the Cuban approached. The six-foot-six bald-headed black man was drawing stares from the pale tourists. As Holliday watched, four boys in their late teens converged on Eddie. Three of the four had shaved heads, the other a Mohawk. All four looked scrawny in cheap black leather jackets, skintight jeans and whatever passed for Doc Marten shit-kickers in Russia these days.

Eddie stopped and let the four teenagers come closer. One of them pulled something out of his back pocket and waved it in the Cuban’s face. A switchblade, most likely. Holliday watched as Eddie bent his head forward as though he were listening to something the kid with the knife was saying. Eddie’s legs told a different story. He’d eased one in front of the other and stiffened the rear leg, putting most of his weight on it. Holliday smiled thinly.

“Shouldn’t we help him?” Genrikhovich whispered. “They are dangerous. Shkoora- galava. Bad people.”

“He doesn’t need any help,” answered Holliday, watching the little drama unfold.

Eddie said something and the boy with the knife jabbed it toward the Cuban’s belly. Eddie grabbed the boy’s wrist and bent it back, the sound of the wrist bone snapping audible from a hundred feet away. The boy with the knife let loose a pitiful, high-pitched, screeching shriek.

The teenager on the Cuban’s left stepped forward, arms flailing. Eddie bent the knife wielder’s wrist even farther back and half turned, his forward leg snapping outward, catching the second skinhead in the crotch. The kicked boy dropped to the ground, screaming, hands between his legs.

Eddie cocked his left arm and gave the boy with the knife a hard fist to the throat. The boy turned blue, gagged and fell to the hard pavement, landing on his face and nose, gurgling, then passing out from the pain. The other two skinheads, eyes wide, stepped back. One of them turned his head and vomited.

Eddie dropped to one knee, took the switchblade from the now unconscious teenager’s hand and snapped the blade off between two of the interlocking paving stones. He patted the cheek of the boy he’d kicked in the crotch, stood and stepped over the unconscious teenager and continued his interrupted stroll to the Alexander Column.

The boy who’d been kicked struggled to his feet and, still bent over, began screaming for the police at the top of his lungs. Not far from where Holliday was standing two gorodovye-junior police officers in dark green military uniforms complete with absurdly large peaked caps-were smoking cigarettes and studiously ignoring the screaming teenager. As Eddie passed the two cops the one closest to him grinned and gave him a discreet thumbs-up.

“Horoshuyu rabotu,” the cop called out. Good work.

“Blagodaryu tebya, moi’ droog.” Eddie nodded. Thank you, my friend. The cop’s smile grew even wider at the sound of the Cuban’s fluent Russian.

“So what was that all about?” Holliday asked as Eddie joined them.

“The one with the knife wanted all my money and called me a ‘negr huesos,’ which is a very unpleasant thing to say in Russian, believe me. I told him his mother was a Georgian goat and that he had been born through her. . ojete? In Russian the word is zhopa.”

Genrikhovich snickered.

“I think I get it.” Holliday smiled.

Eddie shrugged. “He became very angry and he try to stab me with his knife, so I broke his wrist and kicked the other one in his huevos minusculos.”

“We must not draw attention to ourselves,” chided Genrikhovich, clearing his throat. “It could be very dangerous.”

“Should I have allowed the boy to stab me with his knife?” Eddie asked. “It looked as though he had not cleaned it in a very long time. The boy looked as though he had not been cleaned in a long time as well. I could have been given an infection.”

Genrikhovich grumbled something under his breath and turned away, heading for the Palace Bridge and the small patch of green between it and the Winter Palace.

“Anybody on our tail?” Holliday asked Eddie as they followed the Russian across the plaza. To the south the immense golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral gleamed in the clear, crisp air.

“No one,” said Eddie, shaking his head. “Nobody I could see, mi amigo.” He shrugged. “But these days, who knows? Maybe there was a satellite looking down on us, or one of your drones.”

They caught up with Genrikhovich as he reached the far side of the square and stepped into the park beside the Winter Palace. “You have a lot of skinheads in St. Petersburg?” Holliday asked as they walked beneath the trees.

“Shkoora-galava? Yes, they are a problem all over Russia, especially in the cities. They hate anyone who is not Russian and white. The worst kind of fascists. They could easily be my country’s future, I’m afraid.” The older man shook his head. “They call themselves patriots.”

“‘Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,’” said Eddie, the English flawless. It was clearly a quotation.

“Who said that?” Holliday asked. “Fidel?”

“George Washington,” said Eddie. “We learned this in school.”

Holliday laughed. “You don’t have skinheads in Cuba?”

“In Cuba? No, it would not be allowed by El Comandante,” said Eddie, smiling broadly, rubbing the top of his smoothly shaved head. “And also the young men in my country are much too vanidoso. . conceited about their hair. We only have la cartelera de cocaina and purse snatchers, and, of course, like everyone else in Cuba they are university educated.”

Genrikhovich took them across the park to a narrow set of stone steps that led down to a heavy wooden door below ground level. A bored-looking soldier in camouflage fatigues was sitting on a stool beside the door, smoking a