The Romanov Stone

by Robert C. Yeager

  To some extent, Kate could understand their silence. Bolshevik assassins might seem a relic of the past, but the lust for treasure never would be. Obviously someone, probably more than one someone, had known about the fabulous gift Nicholas bestowed on his lover and their daughter. Perhaps they—or rather their descendants—still searched for it now. Yet at least so far as Anya and Irina knew, no one had ever found the Romanov Stone or tried to claim the Bank of England account.

  Kate’s raw emotions rippled like muscles, contracting with each doubt, expanding with a growing sense of anticipation and excitement. After all, even if Anya and Irina had deceived her, they’d also presented her with two precious gifts any competitor could only relish: a great challenge and an equally great opportunity.

  Usually, Kate’s Zen-like athletic concentration would blot out such globally extraneous thoughts. Today, however, mixed with anger and pain at her mother’s death, she felt a surge of energy at the prospect of taking a fresh path, unlike any she’d traveled before. This was not a new lesson plan or an abstract economic theory. It was a chance to restore her family’s place in history and with it, perhaps, her own soul. It was also a chance to make things right with Irina who, God surely knew, she’d put through hell. Standing on the board, Kate drummed her fingers against her belly, feeling the taut bundle of muscles just beneath the skin. A slight aroma of chlorine tinged the air.

  Girl, you’ve still got the power, an inner voice whispered.

  The diver nodded to herself. She’d always been proud of her strength. Pound-for-pound, Professor Gavrill was arguably the best-conditioned member of her faculty.

  Indeed, at Kate’s age, few women would dare wear her ancient, single-piece swimsuit. She loved it for its comfort. Despite its high neck and conservative leg-cut, however, when wet the material traced the lines of her body like a second skin, revealing every rise and hollow.

  If she knew in advance she’d be seen, Kate usually donned a newer, neck-to-knee body suit. Its black stretch fabric, while equally form-fitting, tended to compress and therefore mask anatomical details.

  Go, girl! Again, the inner voice prodded her to action. Kate took four long steps and powered off her right leg, springing into the air. Thump! She landed back on the platform with both feet, then launched herself from the end of the board. Still in an ascending arc, her body folded, fingers meeting toes. Twenty feet above the water, Kate turned on her own horizontal axis, rolling into a forward somersault. She kicked out, looking directly at the pool below. In an instant, she would drop through the surface.

  At the last moment, however, her body rotated awkwardly. Rather than dropping as straight and vertically as a falling spear, her splaying feet made a soft splash.

  What was that? Where was your concentration? What happened to your spotting?

  The pointed questions probed Kate’s major weakness as a diver. Eleven years before, poor spotting had prevented her from adding a third somersault to her repertoire and moving on and up from All-Ivy diver to All-American and Olympic Medalist. Poor spotting had led to the worst mistake of her life: the affair with Jack Nars, her married diving coach, with whom she’d fallen in love at twenty. Poor spotting led Jack to Dr. Borschel and, eventually, damaged both their lives. And with all that, with the huge price she and Jack had paid, spotting remained the one athletic challenge she’d never fully mastered, not even with the help of Dr. Borshel’s “medication.”

  The odd thing was she had mastered spotting as a ballet dancer, or at least she had mastered the elements of the technique that confront a beginning dancer. But spotting in ballet took place while the dancer’s body remained in a level plane, her neck whipping from the spot and around again as she whirled in a pirouette.

  In diving, spotting—as in dance a single visual reference point—happens while the body is tumbling in its own futile defiance of gravity. Spotting told Kate her exact position at any moment during a dive. The spot could be a reflection in the water or a mark or number on the pool itself, even a ceiling rafter. Great divers so honed this skill they could shift their gaze to different focus points during each spin or somersault—all without moving their heads. As undeniably skilled and gifted a diver as she’d become, Kate had never mastered holding that focus point—her spot—beyond a second body rotation.

  In smooth, even strokes, Kate swam toward the edge of the pool.

  She rested her forearms on the side, trailing her legs. She closed her eyes, flushing water from her lashes.

  * * *

  The arm that circled her shoulders came attached to a well-muscled, if stocky, masculine body. Its head contained square-cut, even features and dark blue eyes that could squint fiercely if you weren’t giving everything you had; they’d soften just as quickly if their owner sensed you were. Somehow this man balanced a demanding yet protective nature better than anyone she’d ever met.

  Jack Nars had been named Princeton women’s diving coach two months before the start of her junior year. Almost instantly 20-year-old honors student Kate Gavrill fell under his spell. Fifteen years her senior, Jack became her mentor, guiding Kate to her first major successes as a diver.

  It was late afternoon, long after the other girls had finished practice. Kate had just completed a series of disappointing dives.

  “Keep at it,” said Nars, his lips inches from her ear. “The spotting will come. It always does.”

  She’d learned the truth when a local sports show recorded her dives on videotape. “Let’s look at this again, Kate,” Jack had said. Leaning toward the screen, her coach slowed the tape, and zoomed-in on her face. Seen in grainy close-up, the two gray spheres above her cheekbones melted into her skin. By the time Kate hit the water, they’d vanished completely.

  “My God, how could I miss it,” Jack had exclaimed. “After the second spin, you’re closing your eyes!” He shot the tape forward, and again pressed play. “Look, you’re doing it on every dive!”

  Nars tried to help, unsuccessfully. Dr. Borshel—Stefan Borshel, the sports psychologist Jack had taken her to—tested Kate for weeks at the University of Pennsylvania. The results were inconclusive. “It’s clearly a concentration issue,” Dr. Borshel reported, “but so far at least, we can’t put our finger on why.” For hours, Kate practiced holding her eyes open without blinking. She even stuck waterproof tape to her eyelids before her dives. Nothing worked.

  Now Kate leaned in discouragment against his stolid frame. Seven dives, not one on the money. “I’ll help you beat this, Kate,” Nars assured her, hugging her closer. “We’ll beat it together.” His comforting arm seemed like a bulwark against her inadequacy.

  Suddenly—she would never remember exactly how—she was vanishing into him, surrounded by his strong limbs.

  “Oh my God,” Kate gasped, “We can’t do this.” But do it they did. An embrace that became a long kiss became his hands touching her. Then, feeling his arousal. Flimsy swimsuits sliding from wet flesh, puddling at the side of the pool. Their bodies sagging to the damp concrete. Moans, their moans, echoing in the cavernous plunge like some erotic Gregorian chant.

  It was the first time Kate had made love.

  Afterwards, they would be more discrete. Their subsequent couplings were furtive and brief, usually occurring in Jack’s office after practice. Their affair had begun and it would play out, chapter-by-chapter, ultimately following the only tortuous course that it could, to the end of love, mutual loathing, betrayal and ruin.

  * * *

  “Miss Gavrill? Can we talk?” A different voice, booming in a different empty pool building, drew her back to the present.

  Kate lifted her head to see Lt. MacMahon looking down at her intently.

  He frowned. “Sorry to interrupt your workout, but the case has gotten more complicated. I needed to talk to you again. The man at the main gate said that you come here to exercise.”

  “Well, you f
ound me,” Kate said. Talking to MacMahon was the last thing she wanted to do but, hey, if nothing else, he deserved an “I” for intrepid. “Give me a few minutes to change. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

  MacMahon nodded silently, then stood awkwardly a few feet away. Kate climbed from the pool, turning her body away from the tall policeman’s gaze as she reached for her towel. His blush told her he’d gotten an eyeful.

  Moments later, in a freshly starched shirt and designer jeans, Kate caught up with the officer, leaning against his state police car. She sensed he was a man who could appear infinitely relaxed one moment, then uncoil in fury the next. I wouldn’t want to be a bad guy around Donald MacMahon, Kate thought. She reached in her purse and pulled out a legal-size envelope.

  “Here’s the financial stuff you wanted. Except for a savings account, my mother didn’t have much beyond a couple of insurance policies. She has—had—no partners or even any real business anymore.” Kate wasn’t about to reveal the fortune Irina had described, at least not now. “Christ, she was just crossing the street, a dance instructor who never bothered anybody.” Kate started to choke up.

  MacMahon squeezed the end of his nose, looked down at his shoes and shook his head from side to side. He raised his head and smiled ruefully. A dimple creased the plane between his cheekbone and his jaw.

  “Miss Gavrill,” MacMahon said, “how close were you to your mother?” His eyes seemed to have a permanent squint, or perhaps that was just how they trained cops to look at people they were questioning.

  Kate stared back at him. It didn’t seem appropriate or necessary to go into what had happened in college and her strained relationship with Irina. “She was my mother. We had our ups and downs. Like anybody else.”

  MacMahon pulled at his nose again. “Well, there are a number of unusual factors in your mother’s case. I’m just trying to look at all the angles.”

  “What do you mean ‘unusual’? What ‘angles’?”

  He seemed to choose his words carefully, pausing for an instant between each sentence. “My investigation isn’t complete, of course. But her accident doesn’t appear unintentional. It looks as if either your mother wanted to be hit or somebody wanted to hit her.”

  “That’s ridiculous—she wanted to be hit—how can you say that?”

  “Miss Gavrill, this isn’t my theory. We have at least one witness who says your mother appeared to be hurrying to meet somebody, and wasn’t paying any attention to the truck, which was plainly visible, when she walked into the street. And all the witnesses agree there was no way the driver could have avoided seeing her.”

  “She could have just been distracted, by any of a thousand things.” Calling me on her cell phone, for one. Kate’s voice caught, remembering Irina’s bruised face against the hospital pillow. “If you’re suggesting my mother had some sort of, of death wish, that’s absurd.”

  “That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. I’m just trying to give you a sense of what we’re hearing when we talk to people who were there. It’s all over the map.” He stepped closer, spreading his arms to emphasize the scale of their inquiry.

  “The fact is we’re proceeding on the assumption of deliberate intent.”

  “Who’d want to hurt my mother?” How many times had Kate asked the same question of herself? She still had no answer, even with the knowledge she’d gleaned in the last 24 hours. Kate’s eyes began to fill, and her body shook, as much in anger as in fear. “You can’t let them get away with this!”

  “Miss, we’re doing our best.” MacMahon closed the short distance between them. He placed his hands lightly on her shoulders. Suddenly Kate sensed a quality she didn’t often associate with police officers: compassion.

  “I’m sorry. It was just everything coming down at once,” she said. She daubed her nose. “What have you found out?”

  “Well, take the truck that hit her. Witnesses say the engine sounded like some modern race car. Not the sort of vehicle you’d expect to be driven by local farmers. And then there’s the two men in the truck.”

  “What about them?”

  “They were middle-aged, dressed in traditional Amish clothing.”

  “So?”

  “When it’s accidental, people who commit this type of crime are usually young, drugged or drunk—often all three. The Amish are known to be abstainers, law-abiding. They’re also deeply devout Christians. Why didn’t they stop their truck and come back to help?”

  “That’s easy,” Kate responded. “They weren’t really Amish at all; they were just in costume for the fair. They might even have been wearing stage makeup to look older. Lots of participants do.”

  “I thought of that,” MacMahon replied. “People said they were smoking and using a cell phone—one even said she heard them swear.” He squinted at the ground again. “But even if you’re right, it just raises more questions. Anyhow, thanks for the financial data.” He opened his car door and slid behind the wheel. He lowered the driver’s window and pushed an elbow over the sill.

  Kate touched his arm. “Sorry about before, about brushing you off.”

  “No need to apologize,” he said. “You’d just learned your mom was dead.” He switched on the ignition. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Kate waved and turned, heading to her Saab. She heard the sound of brakes and realized MacMahon was pulling up alongside her. He stopped and looked at her, shading his eyes with his free hand.

  “One more thing,” he said. “There’s the direction of the truck.”

  Kate frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “After they struck your mother, they spun that old truck around like it was a Ferrari. Made a full u-turn into the other lane. Then they headed back the same way they’d come.”

  Kate stared at him, still uncomprehending.

  “Twenty years I’ve been doing this and I’ve never seen that. Arsonists sometimes stay to watch the flames. Amateur killers—and psychopaths—return to the scene of their murders. But… at least when it’s accidental… hit and runners always do the same thing.”

  “What?”

  “They keep going.”

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  A week after Irina’s funeral, Kate boarded a bus to Philadelphia on her way to New York. Pennslyvania’s sweltering hills, burned to the color of Russian pakhlava by the summer sun, rolled by her bus window.

  So far, this is what Kate knew: Just as he had for his other children, Nicholas II established a Bank of England trust account for Lydia, his child with Anya. In this instance, however, he’d stipulated that no claimant could take legal possession of the bank funds without first presenting the original documents of deposit, the Romanov alexandrite, and its container, a miniature Faberge carriage.

  According to Irina’s tape, Sir Edward Peacock, the Bank of England’s director, was fully aware of the account’s discrete nature. He was dealing, after all, with a matter of utmost delicacy involving a close relative of the Royal Family. Prudence dictated complete privacy. Thus, at least to the best of Irina’s and Anya’s knowledge and that of their attorneys, the account had never been touched. Year after year it continued to accrue interest, sometimes at high rates.

  Ironically, only a few days earlier Kate had been boxing some of her mother’s bank records. They included decades of deposit books. Some of the early entries had been surprisingly small—literally five or ten dollars. Yet at the time of her death the power of compounding had boosted Irina’s single savings account to more than six figures. Kate could only imagine the size of an account, now nearly a century old, that began life worth five million British pounds.

  In her checking accounts, Irina’s careful notations included drafts for everything from cheese and flour to bills for household repairs. One check stub, to fix a swinging door between their kitchen and dining room, triggered a long-forgotten memory. Because the
door was temporarily removed, Kate had overheard a conversation—meaningless at the time—that now seemed ripe with portent.

  She’d been sitting in the living room, sketching an imaginary princess and daydreaming like any 10-year-old.

  “Granmama,” Irina was asking Anya, “have you ever wondered if things could have been different in Kiev?” The two women were in the kitchen, engaged in idle conversation while they washed the dishes. In the door’s absence, Kate could clearly discern their words from her seat on the sofa.

  “Of course,” Anya replied, “Many times. But it is what it is—or was what it was. I gave everything to the archbishop,” Anya said. “He was an old Romanov family friend from Irkutsk, in southern Siberia.”

  At the time, Kate had no idea what her great grandmother meant by “everything.” Nor could she recall ever having heard of the archbishop from Irkutsk. But she knew the conversation was important, and she kept listening.

  “The archbishop had a network of loyalists in Mongolia and Kazakhstan,” Anya continued. “He sewed the stone into his robes, and hid the bank papers and egg in a church satchel. We got as far as the Ukraine, using his clerical status as cover.

  “He went to pray at Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, and I never saw him again.”

  Kate shook her head and looked back out the bus window. Miles of going-brown cornfields stretched to a putty-gray horizon.

  As Kate now knew from Irina’s tape recording, the archbishop hadn’t simply disappeared. He’d been killed by pagan cultists allied with the Bolsheviks. The animals cut off the prelate’s head and carried it around a chapel altar, trailing a circle of blood on the floor.

  Soon after, Anya and Lydia reached Paris, settling on the Left Bank for the next sixteen years. In l928, Lydia—Kate’s grandmother—married Sergey Karpov, a refugee Russian aristocrat, banker and the tsar’s former financial representative in London. Five years later, Trotskyites intent on wiping out any vestiges of the tsar brutally murdered the couple.