Red Templar

front, was surprised at being addressed by a black man in fluent Russian, but then he beamed, showing off a gleaming set of Stalin-era steel teeth. “Tourist, yes?” he asked in English. “I am Ivan Chaplitzky, owner of Tsentral’nyi ’otel, of course.” He poured coffee into their thick pottery cups from a sterling-silver pot that appeared to be at least a hundred years old. Something buried in a backyard before the revolution and dug up after the revolution failed seventy-four years later, thought Holliday. “You are, of course, tourists, I am sure.”

“Yes,” answered Holliday. “I’m American and my friend is Cuban.”

“Viva Fidel, okay?” Ivan chuckled. “Your friend has very good Russian.”

“Spasiba,” said Eddie.

“Priglashaem Vas,” said Ivan the waiter. “You say that you wish to get to Yekaterinburg, of course?”

“Yes.” Holliday nodded.

“I take you,” said Ivan. “I have taxi, of course. One thousand rubles. Pay U.S. I take you for fifty dollars.”

“All right,” said Holliday.

“Each way,” said Ivan.

“We’re only going one way,” said Holliday.

“But I must come back, of course.” Ivan shrugged.

“Of course,” said Holliday.

Ivan’s taxi turned out to be a mid-fifties ZiL 111 hearse that looked a lot like a 1955 Chevy Bel Air, which he’d borrowed from his undertaker brother Dimitri. Ivan stuck a magnetized plastic sign on the door and another one with suction cups on the roof, switched the license plates and they were off. Forty-five minutes later he dropped them in front of the glass-and-steel arch of the Hyatt Yekaterinburg in the middle of a bustling city of a million and a half people. The sleepy little town on the edge of the Urals had come a long way since the czar and his family had been assassinated there in 1917. So had the czar, for that matter. After lying in the bottom of a coal mine in a swamp for the better part of a hundred years, Nicholas had been elevated to sainthood in the Greek Orthodox Church, with a cathedral built on the site of the very spot where he’d been gunned down.

Holliday and Eddie booked a suite using their phony passports, praying that news of their exploits hadn’t reached this far, this soon. Once in the suite they cracked open the minibar and settled down in the front room with a couple of tall bottles of Stary Melnik Gold.

The two men, both exhausted by their day, sat silently for what seemed to be a very long time. When the silence was broken it was Eddie who spoke. “Ahora el tango, el bolero siguiente.”

“Translation?” asked Holliday sleepily, stretched out on the couch.

“Something my grandmother said when I told her I was tired.” The Cuban smiled. “Now the tango, then the bolero.”

“In other words, we’re not finished yet. You mean Genrikhovich?” said Holliday.

“Si.”

“Was he snatched or did he leave the train on his own?”

“It is the question, mi coronel.”

“The only reason we’re here is because of his suggestion. I’m not sure whether I believe him now.”

“I do not trust him, either,” said Eddie, taking a long swallow of beer.

“So what would your grandmother say?”

“La discrecion es la mejor parte del valor,” answered the Cuban.

“Good advice.”

“It worked for her, mi compadre; she lived to be a hundred and ten years old.”

“So what would Granny do in this situation?”

“I think Genrikhovich mentioned a name, no?”

“Anton Zukov.” Holliday nodded.

“If Genrikhovich has set us up for some kind of trap, it will be in the museum at the church, where Gospodin Zukov works.”

“Ergo, we don’t go to the church; we find out where Mr. Zukov lives and pay him a visit at home.”

Eddie shrugged. “It is what my grandmother would have done.” The Cuban smiled. “But first she would have had a siesta, I think.”

“Truly, Eddie, your grandmother was very wise. I’ll take the couch; you can have the bed.”

By the time they woke up night had fallen. They ordered room service dinners and then they got down to work. There were seven A. Zukovs listed in the book, and Eddie began phoning them all. He told them he was a reporter for Moskovsky Komsomolets, the national newspaper, doing a story on the Hermitage during the Great Patriotic War, and understood Gospodin Zukov’s father had come to Yekaterinburg with the treasures. Four of the people who answered said he had a wrong number and hung up. The fifth didn’t. Eddie and the man talked for a few moments before the Cuban set down the telephone.

“He thinks it is a little strange to do interviews so late in the evening, but he agreed. One hour.”

Anton Zukov lived on Vokzal’naya Ulitsa, about three blocks from the railway station. The apartment building was a Constructionist-era monstrosity that looked like a tin can cut in half. It was reddish stucco over concrete, with a garden area between the curving, crumbling arms of the structure. Once upon a time the garden was probably supposed to be a communal effort tended to by the building’s occupants, but by the state of the shrubbery it looked as though the plot had died along with the Soviet Union. The lobby had suffered in the same way. There was nobody at the reception desk, and two elevators, one of which had its door gaping open and cables dangling from the ceiling. It was obviously under repair, but it looked as though it had been that way for a very long time. Zukov lived on the ninth floor, and after a ten-minute wait the elevator arrived and took them ponderously upward with enough rattling and pausing that Eddie and Holliday agreed that it was the stairs on the way down.

Zukov answered the door. He had an egg-shaped head with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, developing jowls, a small mole to the left of his wide, downturned mouth, gold wire glasses and a tweed jacket. He looked like an English professor from a Midwestern university. He took one look at Eddie and smiled thinly.

“Vy ne iz gazety Vy?”You are not from the newspaper, are you?

“Nyet,” said Eddie.

Holliday took the black Serdyukov automatic out of his pocket and held his arm loosely at his side. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

“An American with a gun and a black man who speaks Russian. How intriguing.” He stood aside. “Do come in. Make yourself comfortable.”

“After you,” answered Holliday.

“As you wish.” Zukov nodded. He led them down a narrow hallway. On Holliday’s left a pair of large urns flanked what appeared to be a dark, brooding self-portrait of the French artist Nicholas Poussin. The interior of the apartment was even more surprising-contemporary white leather furniture in a conversation square looking toward a wood-burning fireplace, more art on the whiter walls and good rugs covering a dark cherry hardwood floor.

They sat down across from one another on the white leather couches. Zukov pulled out a blue-and-yellow pack of cheap Belomorkanal cigarettes and lit one with a giant agate lighter on the glass coffee table in front of him.

“Tell us about the Kremlin Egg,” said Holliday.

Zukov’s braying laugh caught both Holliday and Eddie by surprise. The Russian man began choking on his cigarette smoke and coughing. Finally he sat back against the leather cushions, perched his glasses up on his forehead and wiped his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

“What’s so funny?” Holliday asked.

“You’ve been talking to Genrikhovich, haven’t you?” Zukov asked, grinning broadly.

“You know this man?” Eddie asked.

“Of course I know him. I know him just like you know a scab on your knee you want to pick off.”

“The egg,” reminded Holliday, the automatic pistol in his lap.

“Genrikhovich believes the Kremlin Egg holds some kind of secret that Rasputin took with him to his grave and which the Leningrad Four discovered.”