The Romanov Cross: A Novel

by Robert Masello

  The hallways here were made of red brick, faded with age, and the lights in the ceiling, each one in a little wire nest, were incandescent bulbs, and low-wattage at that. The doors he passed bore frosted-glass panes, with gold hand lettering and labels that read HISTOLOGY, WAR WOUND RECORDS, or DEPARTMENT OF PALEOPATHOLOGY. It was hard to believe that this warren was still occupied, but Slater knew that the whole Walter Reed complex had long since outgrown its campus, and no nook or cranny was allowed to lie fallow for long.

  As he turned the corner toward the Tissue Repository, he came upon the old display cases that had once been part of the public exhibitions. Although they were no longer part of any organized tours, the cabinets exhibited, on dusty shelves behind thick glass, a collection of formaldehyde-filled jars. Some of them dated back to the midnineteenth century, and held specimens of gross physical anomalies—twins conjoined at the torso, or fetuses born with the fused legs and feet of sirenomella victims. Because of their fishlike tails and amphibious eyes, they were named after the mythical sirens, or mermaids, and had seldom survived their birth by more than a day. Now, many decades later, they still floated, silently, intact, and unchanged, in the limbo of their murky jars.

  Just inside the doors to the Repository, a night clerk in a crisply pressed tan uniform, his head down and earbuds in place, was typing away on his computer keyboard. He looked up in surprise when Slater entered, quickly yanked the buds, straightened in his chair, and slid a clipboard across the desk for Slater to sign in.

  “I’ll need your ID, too,” he said. Slater held out his security card, while the clerk jotted down the number, then checked it online against the name on the register. Slater prayed that a problem wouldn’t crop up, but the clerk nodded, and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

  Slater explained what he was after, but as the clerk started to get up from his chair, he said, “You can stay put. I know my way around in here, and I can get it myself.”

  “You sure?” the clerk said, sounding like he’d love to get back to what he’d been doing. Slater caught a glimpse on the computer of some video war game.

  “Yes. It won’t take me long.”

  And then, inexplicably, the clerk pulled some Kleenex from a box and handed a wad to Slater.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Pardon my saying so, sir, but you’re sweating.” He gestured at his forehead, and when Slater dabbed at his skin, the tissues did indeed come away damp.

  “Thanks,” Slater said, “I guess I was in too big a hurry to get here.”

  The clerk shrugged and, surveying the spooky vault, said, “That’ll be a first, sir.”

  The Repository was huge, with several chambers interconnecting under brick archways, all of them retrofitted with rows of bright track lights mounted above microscope-equipped workstations. Long aisles were lined with endless rows of metal cabinets, each of them divided into drawers, no deeper than a deck of cards, containing the tissue and bone samples. Organized first by the pathology, then by the organic or anatomical origin, and then again by era, the samples had been gathered and sent to the archives from barracks and battlefields all over the world, and unless size was an issue, the oldest ones in any category were usually deposited in the bottom drawers of each section. It took Slater, who hadn’t been down in these archives for several years, a half hour just to find his way into the right corner of the right room. It was the last chamber in the chain, and like all the others he had passed through, no one else was in it.

  Crouching down, he pulled out one drawer, checked the samples, closed it, and opened another. Here, he found what he was looking for. The last remains of Private Roscoe Vaughan, an artillery trainee at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918 … and the first known Army casualty of what had been dubbed, however inaccurately, the Spanish flu. Forty-three thousand others would follow him to the grave. Though it was little known, during the Great War, more of the doughboys had died from the flu than in combat.

  All that was left of the private now was a block of paraffin, no bigger than a crouton, in which the Army surgeon, Captain K. P. Hedgeforth, had embedded slices of lung tissue he had taken from the dead soldier. Preserved in formaldehyde, the block had been dispatched to Washington and kept there in a little brown box on a shelf for nearly eighty years before its deadly secrets had been explored by AFIP scientists.

  Slater took the cube, now in a glassine envelope, and several of the slides that had been prepared from its contents back at Camp Jackson, to the examining table at the far end of the room. All of this material had been declared utterly inert, and was used now solely for teaching and historical research purposes. But samples taken from it in 1996, then put through the polymerase chain reaction, had yielded enough information to enable the institute’s pathologists to reconstruct the entire genetic structure of the virus. Unlike this dead source material, the results of those molecular tests were now lodged, under the strictest security precautions, in little vials in a deep freeze in an undisclosed location nearly impossible to access, especially for someone with Dr. Slater’s compromised credentials. For him to get in touch with the origins of the epidemic whose victims’ graves he was about to desecrate, this musty archival material would be the closest he could come.

  But something in his gut had told him that he needed to do it. Although epidemiology was often thought to be a cold-blooded discipline, one where its practitioners exercised objectivity and disinterested judgment in the face of appalling realities, Slater had never approached the job that way. He was a fighter, and in order to fully engage in battle, he needed some visceral sense of his enemy.

  Though the electricians had done their best, the lighting at this spot was dicey; the brick ceiling was curved like a barrel, and the illumination from the lights mounted overhead was too bright in some spots and too weak in others. Slater found that he had to pull his stool first this way then that in order to keep the shadows from impinging on his work surface. Behind the walls, he could hear the muffled clanging of old pipes.

  Private Vaughan had been a “well-nourished” young man, according to one of the documents he’d read that afternoon; another had called him “chubby.” He stood about five feet ten inches, and was, like most of the other infantrymen, eager to get to France before the fighting stopped. He had been trained, in the scrubby dunes around the camp, to maintain and deploy field artillery. But on the morning of September 19, 1918, instead of joining his platoon, he reported to sick bay, complaining of chills and fever. He was suffering from a dry cough, a dull headache, and his face was flushed. Although his heartbeat was regular, his throat was congested, and he said he was having trouble catching his breath. The doctor, who’d seen the flu before, consigned him to a cot.

  But this was not like any flu the world had ever encountered.

  Over the next few days, Private Vaughan got progressively worse. His fever rose, leaving him delirious much of the time and shivering under a pile of blankets that could never get high enough. His face took on a purplish tinge and his feet turned black. A secondary infection, pneumonia, set in, and his lungs began to fill with mucus. When he tried to speak, bubbles of blood broke on his lips, and while the doctors and nurses looked on in helpless horror, Private Vaughan slowly drowned in his own fluids. At 6:30 A.M. on September 26, he was declared dead.

  Private Vaughan was the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

  The Spanish flu, so named because it had cut a devastating path through Spain on its way to the New World, would eventually claim the lives of 675,000 American civilians. The body counts in other countries would be immensely higher. And before it had burned itself out, the fate of nations—and the planet itself—would be drastically altered. For those who thought the carnage of the First World War was the worst calamity humanity could endure, the Spanish flu proved them hopelessly mistaken.

  Slater looked at the little cube of tissue-impregnated paraffin—once a chunk cut from a candle—and marveled at the devastation that it repre
sented. Powering up the microscope, he slid one of the original slides, prepared by Dr. Hedgeforth, into view; the glass was so much thicker than current slides that he had to lift the eyepiece and do a bit of juggling to make it feasible.

  He bent his head, made a few adjustments to the magnification, and observed a pale yellow background—a thin sliver of the paraffin—and in its center a dark smudge, like a crumb of burned toast on a pat of butter.

  That smudge was a tiny piece of the private’s left lung, which had been so sodden and engorged with blood that Dr. Hedgeforth had said it looked like a slab of liver.

  Even after all these years, the slides and candle wax gave off a whiff of formaldehyde, and the scent took Slater back to dissection labs and all-nighters in med school. As he studied the slides, and adjusted the magnification, he was able to bring out, in one of the last, a clearer view not only of the amorphous cells, faintly lavender and forever fixed in their positions, but fragments of the deadly virus that resembled bits of barbed wire. It was, he thought, like looking at an ancient battlefield—a place of death and destruction. You were looking back in time to something that had ended long ago but whose impression was even now unaltered. It was news from a world that had ceased to exist … news conveyed, in this instance, by a young soldier whose very essence had returned to the stars.

  How long Slater stayed at it, he hardly knew. He lost himself in his research and his thoughts, the silence around him broken only by the occasional, distant clang of the heating pipes behind the old brick walls. In his own way, he was girding himself for combat. The enemy was right here, safely vanquished and preserved beneath the glass slide, but it was the same foe he would soon confront in the Arctic … though there, all bets would be off.

  His thoughts had become cloudy—and he might even have dozed off on his stool for a few seconds—when he became aware that there was someone in the archway behind him. He slowly turned his head. One of the track lights hit him square in the eyes, and he had to raise one hand to shield his gaze from the glare.

  For a split second, it was as if he was looking at the dead doughboy whose tissues he had been studying … but then the young man in the uniform spoke.

  “We’re closing up, sir,” the night clerk said. “The archives open again at eight A.M.”

  Slater nodded, then removed the last slide from the microscope, put the paraffin cube back into its glassine envelope, and slipped off his stool. He wobbled for a moment, but he ascribed that to having sat in one position for too long, and a precarious position to boot. He just needed to get the sample and the slides back in the drawer, go home, and get a good night’s rest.

  Even the empty apartment seemed beckoning now.

  Making his way under the archways, he felt an unexpected draft at his back and had to control the impulse to shiver as he passed the clerk, standing at the door with a set of keys dangling in one hand. It was only when he had rounded the corner and was safely out of the clerk’s sight that Slater dared to take his pill case from his pocket and, while leaning up against the redbrick wall of the corridor outside, quickly down a couple of the antimalarial pills dry.

  Physician, he thought, with his eyes closed and his head spinning, heal thyself.

  But when he opened his eyes again, his gaze was met by the silent stare of the siren baby, forever swimming in its formaldehyde jar. Would the Russian corpses, he wondered, be so well and safely preserved?

  Chapter 8

  Harley Vane had been telling his story for days, but he was fast running out of new people to tell it to. By now, everyone had heard about how he had been out on deck overseeing the retrieval of the old casket, while Lucas Muller, that college boy, had altered the course of the boat to carry it too close to the rocks off St. Peter’s Island.

  “I never should have left him alone at the wheel,” Harley had mused aloud to a reporter for the Barrow Gazette, “but I always liked to give a kid a chance.”

  He’d also recounted how, after the boat had hit the rocks, he had single-handedly carted Richter the engineer up from the hold—“the old man was drowning in a sea of crabs”—and tried to get him into the lifeboat, only to find that the crew had already launched it. Shaking his head, he had told the local reporter, “If they’d just waited, I could have gotten them all out of there alive.”

  It was only when he had assured himself that no one else was still aboard, and the Neptune II was lost, that he had reluctantly plunged into the churning sea and taken his miraculous trip to shore atop the carved coffin lid. “Sometimes, I wish I’d just let myself go down with the ship and my crew,” he’d mused, while the Gazette’s photographer had taken a shot of him gazing soulfully out to sea.

  Not that many of the locals believed it, however. Port Orlov was a tiny town, and the Vane boys had lived there their whole lives. Their mother had absconded back when they were kids—“bewitched,” their father had said, “by a local shaman”—and the boys had grown up wild and, as they got older, downright dangerous. Charlie, the older one, had led the way, breaking and entering other folks’ cabins when they were off on hunting trips, fouling another boat’s halibut with gasoline to raise the price of his own, and finally wrecking the first Neptune by falling asleep, drunk and stoned, at the wheel. The boat had run out of fuel at sea, gotten caught up in some ice, and crumpled like a tin can. After that, nobody would sail with Charlie Vane at the helm. Now, with the Neptune II at the bottom of the sea, it looked like nobody was likely to join a crew if Harley was in command, either.

  “Hail the conquering hero,” Charlie said, dryly, when Harley showed up at the family homestead. It was a rambling old structure with a lighted cross mounted on the roof like an antenna. The whole house was raised a few feet off the ground on cement pylons, and so ill conceived and built that every room felt like it had been an add-on. The floors sloped, the ceilings were either too low or too high, and ramps had been placed anywhere that Charlie’s wheelchair would have trouble going. After sinking the boat, Charlie had tried to operate a nautical sales franchise, but a couple of months in, he’d tried to run the rapids at Heron River Gorge, at the full height of the spring runoff, and when his canoe cratered on the rocks, he’d emerged a paraplegic. The burglary rate around town had dropped precipitously in the immediate aftermath of the accident. “Come on into the meeting room,” he said, turning the chair down a wooden ramp.

  What Charlie called the meeting room was a big raw space with a timbered ceiling and a dozen old rugs thrown on the floor to keep the cold from coming through. A stack of folding chairs leaned against one wall, in case he ever got more than a few people to attend one of his Sunday prayer meetings. In the two years since his accident, he’d claimed to have found God, and to spread the word he’d started an online ministry called Vane’s Holy Writ, which was a strange brew of evangelism, antigovernment polemics, and conspiracy theory. Harley, who had glanced at the site once or twice and even attended a couple of the prayer meetings, was never entirely sure if his brother actually believed the crazy shit he was saying or was just pulling another con. Once he’d even asked him, point-blank, if he was serious, and Charlie had indignantly ordered him out of the house.

  But that could have been part of the con, too.

  “You want some tea?” he asked, and Harley, who was frozen stiff from the long walk to the house, said okay, even though the tea in Charlie’s house was all but undrinkable.

  “Tea!” Charlie shouted, propelling his chair over a knotty patch where the rugs overlapped. On the trestle table he used as a desk, he had two computers—one for what he called his research, and the other permanently displaying his website and its logo: a timber wolf, fangs bared, defending a wooden cross.

  Harley flopped down on a dilapidated armchair that smelled like a wet dog.

  “So,” Charlie said, rubbing his stubbly chin with one hand, “I’ve been reading about your adventures. You’re a hero. What’s it feel like?”

  “It’s all right,” Harley said.
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br />   “Just all right?” Charlie scoffed. “I’d have thought you’d be on top of the world by now—or at least on top of Angie Dobbs.”

  That was just the kind of remark that got Harley so confused. On the one hand, his brother went around claiming to be a man of God, all pure and everything, and on the other he was exactly the same mocking asshole he’d always been—at least when nobody else was around to hear him.

  “You make any money off of it yet?” Charlie asked. “I saw that article in the Barrow Gazette, and I bet you gave ’em the interview for free. You did, didn’t you?”

  “You don’t charge to be in the paper.”

  “That’s what they tell you, but you think movie stars and singers and baseball players don’t get paid every time they open their mouths?”

  “I’m not a movie star.”

  “No,” Charlie said, “that’s for damn sure.”

  Rebekah, Charlie’s wife, came in with a tray of tea and some muffins that would probably taste just as bad. Harley had never been asked to any wedding, and he strongly doubted there’d been one, but then his brother had probably claimed to have channeled the Holy Spirit directly. Rebekah was a scrawny woman, and his brother had found her on the Internet, when she responded to his online ad for a “helpmeet.” She’d brought her younger sister Bathsheba along, too. She poured out the tea, made from tree bark or anything else that contained no caffeine—all stimulants were against his brother’s religion now—and served up the muffins that were sure to contain no sugar or spice of any kind. Harley figured she made them from sawdust left lying around the wood chipper out back.