“You crashed your car,” said Pekkala, shaking his head at the thought of that beautiful machine smashed to pieces.
“I set out on foot for the Palace, but I got lost. Then I saw your place and here I am, Pekkala. At your mercy. A poor man begging for a drink.”
“Someone else has already granted your request. Several times.”
Rasputin was no longer listening. He had discovered one of the salmon eggs in his beard. He plucked it out and popped it in his mouth. His lips puckered as he chased the egg around the inside of his cheek. Then suddenly his face brightened. “Ah! I see you already have company. Good evening, teacher lady.”
Pekkala turned to see Ilya standing at the doorway to the bedroom. She was wearing one of his dark gray shirts, the kind he wore when he was on duty. Her arms were folded across her chest. The sleeves, without their cuff links, trailed down over her hands.
“Such a beauty!” sighed Rasputin. “If your students could only see you now.”
“My students are six years old,” Ilya replied.
He waggled his fingers, then let them subside onto the arms of the chair, like the tentacles of some pale ocean creature. “They are never too young to learn the ways of the world.”
“Every time I feel like defending you in public,” said Ilya, “you go and say something like that.”
Rasputin sighed again. “Let the rumors fly.”
“Have you really crashed your car, Grigori?” she asked.
“My car crashed by itself,” replied Rasputin.
“How,” asked Ilya, “do you manage to stay drunk so much of the time?”
“It helps me to understand the world. It helps the world to understand me as well. Some people make sense when they’re sober. Some people make sense when they’re not.”
“Always speaking in riddles.” Ilya smiled at him.
“Not riddles, beautiful lady. Merely the unfortunate truth.” His eyelids fluttered. He was falling asleep.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Pekkala. He grasped the chair and jerked it around so the two men were facing each other.
Rasputin gasped, his eyes shut tight.
“What’s this I hear,” asked Pekkala, “about you advising the Tsarina to get rid of me?”
“What?” Rasputin opened one eye.
“You heard me.”
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind who told me.”
“It is the Tsarina who wants you dismissed,” said Rasputin, and suddenly the drunkenness had peeled away from him. “I like you, Pekkala, but there is nothing I can do.”
“And why not?”
“Here is how it works,” explained Rasputin. “The Tsarina asks me a question. And I can tell from the way she asks it whether she wants me to say yes or no. And when I tell her what she wants to hear, it makes her happy. And then this idea of hers becomes my idea, and she runs off to the Tsar, or to her friend Vyrubova, or to whomever she pleases, and she tells them I have said this thing. But what she never says, Pekkala, is that it was her idea to begin with. You see, Pekkala, the reason I am loved by the Tsarina is that I am exactly what she needs me to be, in the same way that you are needed by the Tsar. She needs me to make her feel she is right, and he needs you to make him feel safe. Sadly, both of those things are illusions. And there are many others like us, each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all. So if you have been told that I wish you to be sent away, then yes. It is true.” He climbed unsteadily out of the chair and stood weaving in front of Pekkala. “But it is only true because the Tsarina desired it first.”
“I think you’ve preached enough for one night, Grigori.”
Rasputin smiled lazily. “Good night, Pekkala.” Then he waved at Ilya, as if she were standing in the distance and not just on the other side of the room. As he moved his hand back and forth, a bracelet gleamed on his wrist. It was made of platinum and engraved with the royal crest: another gift from the Tsarina. “And good night, beautiful lady whose name I have forgotten.”
“Ilya,” she said, more with pity than with indignation.
“Then good night, beautiful Ilya.” Rasputin spread his arms and bowed extravagantly, his greasy hair falling in a curtain over his face.
“You can’t go out there now,” Pekkala told him. “The storm has not let up.”
“But I must,” replied Rasputin. “I have another party to attend. Prince Yusupov invited me. He promised cakes and wine.”
Then he was gone, leaving a stench of sweat and pickled onions hanging in the air.
Ilya stepped into the front room, her bare feet avoiding the slushy puddles which had oozed out of Rasputin’s boots. “Every time I’ve seen that man, he has been drunk,” she said, wrapping her arms around Pekkala.
“But he’s never as drunk as he appears,” replied Pekkala.
Two days later, Pekkala arrived in Petrograd just in time to see Rasputin’s body fished out of the Malaya Neva River, near a place called Krestovsky Island. His corpse had been rolled in a carpet and shoved beneath the ice.
Soon after, Pekkala arrested Prince Yusupov, who readily confessed to murdering Rasputin. In the company of an army doctor named Lazovert and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch, first cousin of the Tsar, Yusupov had attempted to murder Rasputin with cakes laced with arsenic. Each cake contained enough poison to finish off half a dozen men, but Rasputin ate three of them and appeared to suffer no ill effects. Then Yusupov poured arsenic into a glass of Hungarian wine and served that to Rasputin. Rasputin drank it and then asked for another glass. At that point Yusupov panicked. He took the Browning revolver belonging to the Grand Duke and shot Rasputin in the back. No sooner had Dr. Lazovert declared Rasputin dead than Rasputin sat up and grabbed Yusupov by the throat. Yusupov, by now hysterical, fled to the second floor of his palace, followed by Rasputin, who crawled after him up the stairs. Eventually, after shooting Rasputin several more times, the murderers rolled him in the carpet, tied it with rope, and dumped him in the trunk of Dr. Lazovert’s car. They drove to the Petrovsky Bridge and threw his body into the Neva. An autopsy showed that, even with everything that had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.
In spite of Pekkala’s work on the case, and the proven guilt of the participants, none of his investigation was ever made public and none of the killers ever went to prison.
When Pekkala thought back on that night when Rasputin had appeared out of the storm, he wished he’d shown more kindness to a man so clearly marked for death.
UNDER THE GLARE OF AN ELECTRIC LIGHT POWERED BY A RATTLING portable generator, Pekkala and Kirov stood in the pit where Nagorski’s body was found. At first the freezing, muddy water had come up to their waists, but with the help of buckets, they had managed to bail out most of it. Now they used a mine detector to search for the missing gun. The detector consisted of a long metal stem, bent into a handle at one end, with a plate-shaped disk at the other. In the center of the stem, an oblong box held the batteries, volume control, and dials for the various settings.
After being shown Pekkala’s Shadow Pass, the NKVD guards had supplied them with everything they needed. They had even helped to wheel the generator out across the proving ground.
Slowly, Pekkala moved the disk of the mine detector back and forth over the ground, listening for the sound that would indicate the presence of metal. His hands had grown so numb that he could barely feel the metal handle of the detector.
The generator droned and clattered, filling the air with exhaust fumes.
