Red Templar

by Paul Christopher

  “People keep on telling me that.”

  “It is a very simple truth, I’m afraid, Colonel.”

  “All right.” Holliday sighed. “Where do we start?”

  “At the Hermitage,” said Genrikhovich, pride in his voice. “The largest single museum in the entire world.”

  10

  Genrikhovich and Holliday walked west along the wide sidewalk of the Nevsky Prospekt with Eddie a full minute behind, watching for any close surveillance. It would be a hard call; even in October, St. Petersburg was full of strolling locals, tourists and other pedestrians window-shopping, stepping in and out of stores, appearing and disappearing in and out of metro stops, even walking dogs.

  The broad avenue itself was crowded with cars and trolleybuses, their connectors crackling and flashing overhead as they passed. Nevsky Prospekt had been designed in the seventeenth century by Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, otherwise known as Peter the Great. Planned as the beginning of the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the avenue had always served as the city’s main street, but its grandeur had become tarnished over the centuries by war, Soviet rule, overhead wires, thousands of streetlamps and the near-Vegas glitz of countless neon signs on storefronts from Gucci and Tiffany to Pizza Hut and McDonald’s.

  “Your friend is wasting his time,” said Genrikhovich, happily sipping a Starbucks Frappuccino.

  Holliday himself held a plain black coffee. “You don’t think you might be under surveillance?”

  “It is very doubtful. Not yet, at least. The discovery I made almost a month ago was accidental; the material was not classified.”

  “You came across the border with us.”

  “You give the Bulgarians far too much credit, Colonel Holliday. As far as bureaucracies are concerned things have changed little since the old days. If anything it is worse. In Bulgaria as in Russia we are still ruled by mediocrity, I can assure you.”

  “Those men who came after us didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Holliday. He could feel an itch between his shoulder blades as hypothetical crosshairs targeted him.

  “They were watching Brother Dimitrov.”

  “And if they interrogate him?”

  “He will tell them nothing, Colonel.”

  “Everybody talks eventually,” answered Holliday.

  “He is a man, like his grandfather. He would die first and take at least one of his interrogators with him.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  “I am a very small cog in the vast wheel of Mr. Putin’s Russia. He cannot see me turning, at least not yet.”

  “What exactly are you the curator of at the Hermitage?” Holliday inquired. It was a simple enough question, but this was the first time he’d thought to ask it.

  Genrikhovich smiled. “I am senior curator of the Hermitage archives.” He took a slurp from his straw. “You might say I am a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, Colonel Holliday. The Hermitage archives contain a collection of letters, notes, purchase orders, provenance material and any other document or paper pertaining to the work of the Hermitage itself, going back to its origins with Catherine the Great in the mid-seventeen hundreds, as well as her purchase of several collections. I sometimes call myself the Keeper of the Filing Cabinets, the Troll of the Hermitage Basements, but it is a job not without interest.”

  “I can imagine,” said Holliday. Genrikhovich was the museum’s chief file clerk. On the other hand, as a historian Holliday was well aware of the value of old bits of paper and forgotten documents. The Rosetta stone was nothing more than a decree about the revoking of several tax laws for priests by King Ptolemy, and the attendant festivals and temples to be organized. The famous stone had been written in Demotic Egyptian, hieroglyphs and Greek as a way of ensuring that all officials, priests and the ordinary people could read it, but the trilingual document effectively provided a translation for a language that had confounded historians for the previous eight hundred years.

  They reached the Moika Canal, and Genrikhovich paused, looking to the south. “Down there is the Yusupov Palace,” he said, pointing down the winding narrow canal. There were barges and floating homes moored along the stone banks, but the buildings on either side were immense, huge mansions long since turned into government buildings and apartments. “It was from there that Rasputin came,” said Genrikhovich, his voice somber. “He ran along the ice, with Yusupov and his British companions following the trail of blood and vomit he was leaving. Most assume he was heading for the stairs at the Fonarny Bridge, but I don’t think he knew where he was going. I have seen the police photographs taken after he was pulled from the water. One eye was closed and there was a deep gash over the other. I think he must have been almost blind when Rayner caught up with him. According to Rayner’s letter he said nothing before he died, but I’m not sure I believe that. What it did say was that their mission had been accomplished.”

  “Rayner wrote about the assassination?”

  “Yes, in his report to the ambassador, which eventually was given to both King George and Czar Nicholas. He also sent a private letter to Stephen Alley, Prince Yusupov’s ‘special friend’ at the palace.”

  Holliday glanced over his shoulder. Eddie was staring blankly into a store window a few hundred feet away. Holliday caught his eye and Eddie shook his head slightly. The Russian had been right about surveillance; they weren’t being followed. Genrikhovich began walking again, and Holliday caught up with him, continuing their conversation.

  “What do you mean, ‘special friend’?” Holliday asked.

  “He was. . pedik?”

  “Gay?” Holliday offered.

  “Yes, gay, homosexual. They were lovers.” He shrugged. “It made it easier for Alley.”

  “Made what easier?”

  “Alley was a double agent. He worked for MI6 and also for the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police.”

  “A tangled web.” Holliday grunted. “You got this all from the Hermitage archives?”

  “One thing leads to another. Assemble enough pieces and the picture suddenly becomes clear.”

  The two men walked on silently for a few moments, threading their way through the moving throng on the sidewalk. “Why would he say that they had accomplished their mission in his letter?” Holliday asked finally. “According to you this Stephen Alley and Prince Yusupov were there; they saw him fire the fatal shot.”

  “Ah, you are very quick, Colonel. It took me a little time to see the importance of that simple statement.”

  “What exactly is the importance?” Holliday asked.

  Before he answered Genrikhovich drained the last of his coffee and tossed the empty cup into a waste bin. An old man dressed in Soviet camouflage fatigues instantly darted forward and retrieved the cup. He tilted it up to his mouth, trying to get a last few drops.

  “If you read the autopsy report on Rasputin it is easy to see that he would have died of the wounds he received at the palace. He could not have survived for more than a few minutes on the ice. They didn’t follow him to see that he died-they followed him to retrieve the key.”

  “The key to the location of this document? Simon Magus’s declaration?”

  The Russian paused, then spoke again, his voice ponderous and theatrical. “In a way, Colonel, but the key that Rasputin had stolen was very real. It was solid gold and exactly two and a half inches long. Rasputin had the key in his coat pocket. Rayner shot him in the forehead and retrieved the key before the madman slipped into the waters of the canal, his life gone.”

  “What did the lock open?” Holliday asked, playing his part in Genrikhovich’s little drama.

  “No lock at all,” the old man responded. “It was the key to the music box in the base of the Kremlin Egg given to Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova by her husband, Czar Nicholas the Second.”

  11

  The Russian State Hermitage Museum is a half-mile-long complex of German neoclassical buildings that stands on the eastern embankment of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, known
as Leningrad during the Soviet era and still stubbornly called that by some older survivors of those bleak and sometimes desperate years.

  The buildings, including the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, and the immense 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 snatc
hers, 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 cigarette and reading a copy of Tvoi Den, Your Day, the Russian equivalent of the New York Post.

  “Apaznaneya,” the guard said, looking up from the tabloid, his expression bored.

  Genrikhovich dug around under his ancient cloth overcoat and found a pale blue plastic identification case. He snapped it open for the guard, who examined it, dull eyed. The guard nodded, then gestured toward the door. “Prayakets, professora.”

  Genrikhovich bowed slightly, then motioned for Holliday and Eddie to follow him. The Russian dragged open the door and the three men went through into a short, dimly lit vestibule inside. The walls were green and white and the floor was cracked battleship linoleum. At the far end of the gloomy little room there was a metal circular staircase.

  There was a desk to the left of the door with another guard seated behind it. This one had his nose buried in a copy of the Russian edition of Maxim. He was much older than the man outside, his nose bulbous and brick red. He smelled distinctly of alcohol.

  The man looked up at Genrikhovich with the same bored expression as the first guard, and once again Genrikhovich showed his ID folder. This time the guard reached into a wooden box on the desk and handed Genrikhovich two plastic-coated pin-on cards that said "ПОСЕТИТЕЛЬ" which presumably meant “visitor.” The Hermitage curator pinned the cards onto Holliday and Eddie, then headed for the stairs.