Red Templar

“Reki Rossii diaryei,” corrected Eddie. A river of Russian diarrhea.

Holliday grimaced at the revolting image and swallowed hard. “I’m lost,” he said. “Which way do we go, left or right?”

Eddie spoke up immediately. “The flow of the mierda is from west to east, if that is any help. Perhaps un poco mas al nordeste as well.”

“You’re sure?” Holliday asked.

“Yes.” Eddie nodded firmly. “I have a thing. . una brujula, in my head,” explained the Cuban. Holliday frowned. Eddie turned to Genrikhovich. “Kompas?” he asked in Russian.

“A compass?” Holliday said.

“Si, companero, a compass. It never fails me.”

“If this is true we should go east,” Genrikhovich suggested. “West is the Neva. East is the center of the city. Perhaps we could find a way to the metro.”

“All right.” Holliday nodded. “Stay close and watch your step.” He ducked down and headed upstream along the slime-covered bank of the swirling river of sludge.

Within minutes of entering the sewer tunnel all three men were filthy as they were forced to reach out and steady themselves against the walls, their clothing scraping the slime-covered bricks and their shoes caking with ancient excrement. As they continued down the passage, each at various times would slip and tumble into the stream of sewage. Finally, covered in filth, they gave up all attempts to keep themselves even partially free of the stinking, oozing effluent and walked along knee-deep in the stream, the footing more solid under them and with far more clearance for their heads. More than once Holliday had felt some strange sort of abnormal movement within the flow they pushed against, and he could have sworn something unthinkable had brushed against his sodden pants legs. Something swimming.

After what seemed to be an eternity they reached some sort of two-story hub with sewers on the upper levels sending putrid waterfalls of effluent slopping down into a large pool, the pool itself having several even larger outlets.

Holliday shook his head in amazement and disgust. Catwalks encrusted with filth and mold stretched over the pool-obviously people were actually meant to come to this horrible cathedral, complete with a cathedral organ of accreted matter that ran down the curved brick wall in pipelike stalactites.

On the far side of the pool, reached by one of the catwalks, they found a small concrete chamber that was probably used as a rest stop by sewer workers. Eddie found it excruciatingly funny that the room came with its own toilet cubicle, and for a time he couldn’t stop laughing and muttering under his breath in Spanish. There was also a set of lockers in the room, which held complete sets of protective clothing, along with hard hats, oxygen tanks and masks.

“We change,” said Holliday. “We can’t go back to the real world covered in crap. At least these will make us look official.”

“We are above the metro station at Pushkinskaya,” said Genrikhovich.

“How do you know that?” Holliday asked.

Genrikhovich pointed to a metal sign half-obscured with old sludge.

“We’re above the station?”

“St. Petersburg metro lines had to be dug very deep to reach bedrock. The whole city is built on the Neva and the Fontanka estuaries.”

“And if we go up?”

“It is the Vitebsky railway station.”

“Where do trains go from there?”

“Mostly to Western Europe. Also to Kaliningrad and Smolensk, if I remember correctly.”

Eddie shook his head. “They will have eyes at the train stations, even if they are only electronic.”

“How far are we from the Hermitage?”

“A mile. Perhaps a little more than that.”

Eddie frowned. “It is not far enough, mis compadres. They will have a security cordon at least that far out by now.”

Genrikhovich spoke up. “My sister Marina and I have a dacha in Novoye Devyatkino. It is the last stop on the number one metro line.”

“I very much doubt your sister would appreciate a couple of fugitives as houseguests,” said Holliday.

“Marina is rarely there. She works at the United Nations in New York. I am there more than she is.”

“We need to get as far as we can, mi coronel.” Eddie shrugged. “I would like to have a wash of my body, too, I think.”

“All right.” Holliday nodded. “The end of the line it is.”

17

Marina and Victor Genrikhovich’s dacha, or summer place, in Novoye Devyatkino looked like Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house in the middle of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing development. Once upon a time, Novoye Devyatkino had been pleasant countryside with scattered farms and the summer homes of the wealthy, set on the banks of streams and rivers, or the shores of the several lakes dotting the area.

Large woodlots of ash and alder, birch and pine covered the landscape, interspersed with rolling hills and meadows bright with wildflowers. In the fifties, following Stalin’s brutal purges, Leningrad had seen something of a ghastly architectural renaissance, and a new kind of forest had grown in Novoye Devyatkino, a forest of blank-faced concrete apartment buildings that looked more like gray high-rise gulags than places for families to live.

The quality of workmanship had been uniformly terrible, the landscaping and services nonexistent, and the day-to-day existence of people forced to live there simply to justify the terminus of the metro main line had been bleak. By the seventies the whole area was a semislum; by the fall of the Soviet Union it had become dangerous.

With the disappearance of Communism, Novoye Devyatkino went through yet another transformation. The old high-rises were knocked down-at least most of them-and new apartment buildings were erected, these with elevators that actually worked, enough square footage to be livable, and enough schools, shopping, restaurants and recreational services to make the revived suburb an attractive, modern alternative to St. Petersburg’s enormous nineteenth-century apartment blocks, with their clanking plumbing, leaking faucets and drafty windows, not to mention their exorbitant rents.

Through it all a few of the original family cottages had remained. The Genrikhovich dacha was a two-bedroom two-story with a board-and-batten second floor with brick facing and fieldstone below. The little house had a steeply sloping roof covered in split cedar shingles and trimmed in rustic gingerbread. There was a makeshift carport tacked onto one side with an old UAZ Buhanka parked beneath it. The Buhanka, or “loaf” in Russian, was a knockoff of the old VW bus. This one was covered in patches of primer paint and looked almost as old as Genrikhovich.

The big living room had a large stone fireplace with a dining room and country kitchen in the rear. There was a floor-to-ceiling brick-and-board bookcase in the living room crammed with what turned out to be English-language crime novels going back to the nineteenth century.

Marina had squeezed in a powder room where there had once been a pantry, and large windows in the dining room had been replaced with French doors leading out to a small deck. There were two bedrooms and a full bathroom separating them on the second floor.

The furniture was old and mostly Victorian, with braided rag rugs and a few willow-twig armchairs that looked extremely uncomfortable and had probably come with the house.

“It was part of my great-grandmother’s dowry when she married my great-grandfather,” said Genrikhovich. “She was the daughter of an admiral and he was a professor at the old Naval Guards Academy. He taught celestial