Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  The professor’s long, thin nose rose an inch or so into the air. “I have acquired something of a reputation in that regard. And, yes, indeed, some icons in times past had various mystical, even magical, properties attached to them.”

  Zoe took the sealskin pouch out of her satchel, deliberately letting Kuzmin get a look at her Glock while she did so, and Ry thought, Smart girl. But whatever the professor thought about her having a gun, he didn’t let it show on his face, and Ry relished the cool, solid feel of his own Glock in the small of his back. He wasn’t getting good vibes off this guy.

  Zoe propped the icon up on her lap. The professor didn’t gasp aloud the way Anthony Lovely had done, but Ry saw the corners of his mouth go white, and the hand that held his glass started to shake.

  “Dear God, it’s the—” He cut himself off, and Ry saw a vivid, almost gluttonous eagerness flash over his face.

  He brought himself back with a jerk, downed a healthy swig of the Unicum, then asked, too casually, “Did your grandmother say how she acquired this particular piece?”

  Ry could feel Zoe practically humming on the sofa beside him, and he knew just how she was feeling. His own toes and fingertips were tingling with excitement. What had Kuzmin been about to say about the icon? That it’s the Lady? And if he knew about the icon, did he also know about the altar of bones?

  “It’s been in our family a long time,” Zoe said, “passed down from mother to daughter. Grandmother likes to say we are blessed girl children, from a proud long line and none of us can be the last.”

  Ry got the sense that Katya Orlova had really said those words. Not to Zoe, for they’d never spoken, but to someone else. Anna Larina?

  Kuzmin leaned forward, looking hard at Zoe now, as if he could use his pale eyes like lasers to dig into her mind.

  “You are the Keeper,” he said, and Ry felt Zoe go utterly still.

  The professor sat back in his chair, obviously pleased with the reaction he’d gotten. “You wonder, how do I know this? Because I am not a fool. I see the Lady, I see your face.”

  Zoe cast a quick look at Ry, and he knew that she, too, was thinking again of that line in her grandmother’s letter. Look to the Lady …

  “Perhaps,” said Professor Kuzmin, “I should start at the beginning. With my father and an event that occurred in the spring of 1936.”

  40

  AT THE time, my father was serving in the GUGB, as the Soviet secret police called itself in those days. That makes him sound more formidable than he was—a file clerk assigned to one Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Popov, adjutant to the commissar of the Main Directorate for State Security in Leningrad. What today we once again call St. Petersburg.”

  He paused, and his eyes grew moist. Was he remembering the father who’d deserted him when he was only a boy of eleven, feeling the pain of it still?

  “My father …,” he said softly, then shook himself, sat up straighter in his chair. “On this day I speak of, in the spring of 1936, my father is busy shuffling papers when Senior Lieutenant Popov suddenly bursts into the office, grabs him by the arm, and says they’ve an urgent mission, a matter of vital importance to the security of the state. A secret cache has been discovered in the attic walls of the Municipal Courts building on the Neva embankment. Fontanka 16. You’ve heard of this?”

  Ry said, “It’s the address for what was once the headquarters of the tsarist secret police. The Okhrana.”

  “Yes, a place to strike fear in the hearts of all Russians even on that particular day, nineteen years after the Bolshevik Revolution. Certainly my father is afraid, for it feels to him as if the very walls have absorbed so much misery and terror and pain. But the walls hold something else as well, for a small fire in the attic caused by faulty wiring has exposed a hidden closet about the size of a phone booth. Within the closet are two wooden filing cabinets filled with musty old dossiers.”

  He stopped to pour himself more Unicum, then got to his feet and went to stand before the Stalin poster. “Tell me, Mrs. Carpenter. Do you know what an agent provocateur is?”

  “I have a general idea,” Zoe said, “but why don’t you tell me anyway. You lecture so well.”

  He turned back to her, blinking in confusion, not sure if he’d been complimented or insulted, and Ry hid a smile. Then the professor shrugged it off, said, “An agent provocateur is a spy who infiltrates revolutionary groups and tries to stir them up into doing things that end up getting them arrested.”

  Kuzmin left the poster and came to stand with his back to the fire. “During the time of my story, whispers are circulating that in the early months of the Bolshevik struggle Joseph Stalin himself had once secretly served the Okhrana as an agent provocateur. Not out of ideological principles, you understand, but rather as a means of eliminating his rivals.”

  Kuzmin stopped to toss back a healthy swig of the cough-medicine booze, shuddering a little as it went down. “So when Popov points to one of the cabinets in the secret closet and orders Father to search through it for any documents bearing the words Steel Badger, he suspects the mission might have something to do with this, that perhaps this Steel Badger was the Okhrana’s code name for Stalin in his capacity as the agent provocateur.”

  “Not a very healthy suspicion for your father to have had in that place and time,” Ry said.

  Kuzmin’s smile showed a flash of his yellow teeth. “Which is why he betrays nothing of what he is thinking to the senior lieutenant. My father believed always the way to survive was to know nothing, see nothing.”

  Kuzmin lifted his glass to his mouth, saw it was empty, and filled it again. “So, Popov sets to work sorting through one cabinet, while my father tackles the other, praying all the while his eyes never fall on anything to do with a badger of any sort. One dossier does catch his attention, though, because of a strange rendition he finds inside—a crude, hand-drawn sketch of an altar made out of human bones.”

  Ry heard Zoe draw in a sharp breath and thought his own heart might also have skipped a beat. But Denis Kuzmin, lost in his story, didn’t seem to notice.

  “It is such a macabre thing, the sketch, that it intrigues my father to look further, and beneath it he finds a report of a conversation that took place in a tavern in the fall of 1916, between an Okhrana spy and an extremely drunk Grigori Rasputin.”

  “The Mad Monk,” Zoe said.

  Kuzmin raised his glass in a mock toast toward the photograph on his mantel. “Mad? Perhaps he was. We do know that he was born in a small village in Siberia, where even from his earliest years he was known as a mystic and faith healer. He was also … well, to put it delicately, a man of considerable sexual magnetism.”

  Kuzmin flushed, then smiled weakly and went on, “Rasputin’s power over the imperial family did not come through seduction, however, at least not seduction of a sexual nature. But rather through his ability to bring relief to their son, who suffered from hemophilia. Every time the boy Alexei had an injury which caused him to bleed, the tsaritsa would plead with Rasputin to come save her son, and save the boy he would. Now, how did he do this? Who knows? Some say he hypnotized the boy, some say he used leeches, while others believed it was through magic or prayer.”

  Kuzmin stopped to stare at the photograph, then looked up at the print of Ivan the Terrible murdering his son, as if the two men who’d lived centuries apart were connected in some way, Ry thought. The mad monk, the mad tsar.

  “Which brings us back to the conversation in the tavern,” Kuzmin said. “Rasputin told the Okhrana spy that as a young man, while wandering as a pilgrim across the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia, he met and seduced a woman who was a member of a nomadic tribe called the toapotror. The magic people.”

  Ry looked at Zoe. He wanted to know what she was thinking, but her face was closed off now, even to him. She sat so utterly still, he thought he could count her every breath.

  “One night after they made love,” Kuzmin went on, “Rasputin’s lover told him a dark secret. That she was the pr
otector—the Keeper, she called herself—of a magic altar. An altar of bones. And that if he were to drink from this altar, it would make him immortal.”

  Okay, now we’ve gone off into woo-woo land here. The altar of bones was a fountain of youth, and if you drank from it, you would live forever? Ry thought he should be laughing, but the hairs on his arms were standing straight up, and a chill was curling up and down his spine. Zoe’s face, he saw, had gone bloodless.

  “You look skeptical, Mr. Carpenter,” Kuzmin said, clearly pleased with the reaction he’d gotten. “Immortality? Eternal life? Impossible, you say. But Rasputin described in lurid detail how he worked his wiles on the woman, until one arctic night she led him to a cave whose entrance was hidden behind a waterfall on the shores of a forgotten lake, and inside the cave was an altar made of human bones. Rasputin claimed he drank from the altar that night. And he, at the least, believed himself to be immortal.

  “What is more, he brought away with him a small vial of the elixir, or whatever you choose to call it. He said he had to be careful, though, because if it was exposed to sunlight, its magical properties would be destroyed. This was what he was using on the boy Alexei to cure his hemophilia.”

  “And yet both of them, the boy and the Mad Monk, were to end up dead within a couple of years of that night in the tavern,” Ry said. “So much for the bone juice and living forever.”

  Kuzmin held up a finger, amusement creasing his long, thin face. “Ah, but you see that is the thing. It very nearly did make Rasputin immortal. Not long after that night in the tavern, a group of nobles, fed up with his influence over the tsaritsa, set out to kill him. They fed him cupcakes laced with cyanide, and when that seemed to have no effect, they emptied a revolver in his back, and when that failed to do the job, they clubbed him over the head, wrapped his body in a sheet, and threw him in an icy river. Four days later his body was recovered with his hands frozen like claws, as if he had tried to tear his way out from under the ice. An autopsy revealed the cause of death was not downing, or gunshot, or poisoning, but simple hypothermia.”

  “Dead is still dead,” Zoe said, and Ry heard the anger and disappointment in her voice. He felt it, too. They’d thought they were on the verge of getting to the truth at last, and instead they’d been given a fairy tale.

  “Somebody’s pulling somebody’s leg here,” she said, “and since I’m a guest in your house, I’ll be polite and assume it was the Mad Monk, pulling off a fast one on a gullible tsarist spy. Back in the States, Professor, we call that getting punked.”

  Kuzmin laughed. “You may be right, Mrs. Carpenter. Perhaps the spy was ‘punked,’ as you say. But the Okhrana took it seriously enough that they sent other agents to Siberia. They didn’t find the lake or the cave, but they found instead a tribe called the toapotror, who told them a tale, about how there once was a shaman with talents so potent he could raise the dead. But one terrible day, the shaman was murdered. It was winter, and so his daughters took his body to a cave to await burial in the spring. But when they laid him down, his blood spilled onto the stone floor and turned into a fountain with magical properties.

  “The daughters built a shrine over the fountain, and they called it the altar of bones. A folktale, certainly. But with some truth at its core, perhaps. For the toapotror claimed to know of people who drank from the altar and became immortal. But it also drove them mad.”

  A wry smile pulled at the professor’s mouth. “I see by your faces that my credibility is now shot. Another quaint American expression, yes? But the magic people described in quite specific detail the symptoms of the madness they observed in those who dared to drink from the altar. Today, we call it megalomania. An obsession with power, the desire to dominate others, and the delusion that you can bend others to your will and change the world.”

  “All very interesting, and typical of many folktales,” Ry said. “The Faustian bargain. You get your heart’s desire, but only at a price. Your soul, or in this case, your sanity.”

  “Yes, yes, you scoff, but the Okhrana had in their possession secret documents going back hundreds of years, and they culled through them looking for any other mention of a Keeper and an altar made of human bones. There were many such stories, but my father only had time to read the one. From the time of Ivan the Terrible.”

  Ry looked up at the print over the mantel, he couldn’t help himself. And he couldn’t keep the hairs from rising up on his arms again. This was nuts, he didn’t want to believe. And yet …

  “It seems that a Keeper was also one of Ivan’s lovers,” Kuzmin said. “She loved him madly, or at least madly enough to break with her vows and give him some of the elixir. Supposedly all it takes is one small drop.”

  Ry saw the starkness come over Zoe’s face again, and he knew she was thinking of her grandmother. Of Katya Orlova, loving and trusting in a man who turned out to be an assassin and a double agent. Giving the altar to her friend Marilyn, a woman she loved like a sister, but a woman who could be childlike at times, and achingly insecure. A terrible crime was committed because I betrayed the altar’s secrets….

  Nikolai Popov and his father, killing Marilyn with an enema full of chloral hydrate. His father, standing behind the fence on the grassy knoll, a rifle in his hands, ready to murder the president because the KGB believed he had drunk from the altar of bones.

  Ry shook his head, not wanting to accept any of this. It wasn’t possible that Kennedy had been murdered because of a moldy, forgotten dossier and a Russian fairy tale.

  Zoe started to wrap the icon back up in the sealskin pouch. “It’s been fascinating, Professor, and you’ve been so generous with your time. But it’s getting late—”

  “No, wait,” Kuzmin cried, coming half out of his chair, and Ry tensed, his hand starting to go for the gun at his back.

  But then the professor eased back down again. His hand shook as he smoothed his thinning, red-gray hair. He drew in a deep breath.

  “Forgive me, I became sidetracked and forgot to tell you the most important thing. What you came for, the story behind your icon. In his description of the cave and what took place that night, Rasputin spoke about seeing a jeweled icon sitting on top of the altar made of human bones. He said his lover called it ‘the Lady,’ and it was of the Virgin, holding not the Christ child in her lap, but a drinking vessel carved out of a human skull. And the face of the Virgin was the face of his lover. The Keeper.”

  Kuzmin leaned forward and Ry saw the desperation in his eyes, the hunger. “The Okhrana had the Mad Monk draw a sketch of the Lady’s face. My father saw it in the dossier. There can be no doubt that the icon you are holding is the very one Rasputin’s eyes gazed at inside the cave with the altar of bones.”

  “Maybe,” Zoe said. She had, Ry noticed, never taken her hand out of the satchel after she’d put the icon away, and he knew she had it wrapped around the butt of her Glock.

  “So what happened to your father, Professor?” Ry asked. “After that day at Fontanka 16.”

  “What? Oh, there were more papers within the dossier, but my father never got the chance to read them, for Popov suddenly slammed the door to his cabinet shut, stuffed a thin file folder inside his uniform tunic, and said, ‘We’re done here.’ Then he saw my father was trying to hide something from him, and he said, ‘What have you got? Give it over.’ “

  Kuzmin contemplated his empty glass, then said, “My father gave it over, of course. What other choice did he have? And so Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Popov left Fontanka 16 with two dossiers that day, and one of them had to do with an altar made of human bones.”

  Fat lot of good it did him, Ry thought. All those years he spent searching for the thing, killing for it.

  “Did they never speak about it again?” Zoe asked. “Popov and your father?”

  The professor snorted a bitter laugh. “Not hardly. Two days later, Senior Lieutenant Popov became Captain Popov, and Father was transferred out of the GUGB and into a regular army unit. One that was sure t
o be sent to the front lines during the war everyone feared was one day coming. He was lucky that was the worst that was done to him—”

  Kuzmin snapped his fingers as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him. “My father drew from memory a copy of the two sketches he saw that day. Would you care to see them?”

  He didn’t wait for a response, but got up and went to a cabinet at the base of one of the bookcases. He dug a key ring from his pocket, opened the cabinet, and rummaged around with his back to them, then straightened and turned. He had a small, snub-nosed revolver in his hand.

  He surprised Ry by laughing out loud when he saw the two Glocks pointed at his heart.

  “Ours are bigger,” Ry said.

  “And there are two of them,” Zoe said.

  Kuzmin laughed again, then shrugged. “Well, I had to try, didn’t I? I don’t suppose you’d be willing to sell the icon? … No, I didn’t think so. Perhaps your grandmother—”

  “She’s dead,” Zoe said.

  “Ah, yes, of course. For how else would you have become the Keeper? Yet I think she died without telling you much at all. I think you came here knowing even less than I do. And I have told you some, but not all.”

  He started to take a step toward them, but Ry stopped him with a look.

  “We could become partners,” Kuzmin said, his eyes shining, wet and pale like spit. “We could go together to Siberia. We could find the magic people, and they will know just by looking at you that you are the Keeper. They will lead us to the lake, to the secret cave. My God, a fountain of youth! Think of what we could do with it. Not only will we be immortal ourselves, we’ll become rich beyond our wildest dreams by selling it to those who—”

  A staccato of gunfire suddenly tore through the room from the garden. Flowerpots burst, the French doors erupted into splinters and shards of glass. Three red blossoms burst on Kuzmin’s ratty old sweater, and a thin red mist sprayed the air as the bullets tore through his chest.