The clouds of death parted, revealing Yurovsky as he walked above the dead. Waving his hand back and forth in front of his face, the komendant peered down through the dimmest of light at the young Heir. It was then that I saw Aleksei, still moving, still treading life, still moaning and writhing as he clutched his father by the sleeve. Lowering his gun, Yurovsky placed the barrel on Aleksei’s temple and blasted, once, twice. He and the guards, who had fetched rifles from the hallway, moved on through the room, discovering that even after all the shooting three of the sisters and Botkin were still alive, convulsing as they choked on their own blood. Approaching Tatyana, a dark-bearded guard raised his rifle and bayonet over her and plunged at her heart. Despite all his brutal virility, however, the dull blade bounced off her, and the young princess twisted and contorted in semiconscious pain. Confused and dismayed, the guard straddled her, clutched his rifle in both hands, and plunged again. And again met with no success. Unable to puncture her chest and clearly terrified by her immortality, the man whipped out a knife and quickly slit her throat, finally finding proof positive in her butchered neck that she was not the daughter of a demigod.

Suddenly a woman’s voice screamed out, “Thank God!” It was Demidova. “God has saved me!”

I caught sight of the Tsaritsa’s maid, who’d apparently only fainted and was now pushing herself from the floor, smeared with the blood of her masters. No sooner had she risen back to life, however, than a herd of men were upon her, and she fell once again and for all, screaming, screaming, screaming so horribly as she grabbed at the dull, rusty bayonets that punctured her full round body no less than thirty times.

For a brief moment there was silence and peace, which in turn was broken by a pathetic whimper and an animal-like cry. One of the guards went over to Anastasiya and plunged her throat with his bayonet. Miraculously, however, the cry grew but louder until suddenly the girl’s tiny pet wiggled and squirmed from beneath the child’s carved body. Seeing the little dog, now soaking crimson, try to scramble away, its back legs broken, the guard raised one of his heavy boots… and smashed little Jimmy’s head.

All in all, it took twenty minutes before silence graced the basement chamber of The House of Special Purpose.

18

Hidden in the bushes, I stared off at the black sky, seeing nothing, neither star nor moon, but seeing again that which I had just witnessed: those twenty minutes. Hearing them too. Da, da, da, hearing their screams. Ever since, for eight decades now, I have daily seen this cinema of horror in my mind’s eye, and I watch it from this angle, from that, and nearly go insane.

I find myself so angry. Angry at all the tsars of my Rossiya for driving my homeland down the dead-end path of autocracy. Angry at the Bolsheviki for not realizing that kommunizm is naught but a gorgeous dream that can never be. Angry at Aleksandra for being a supreme mother not to her country but her invalid son. Angry at Nikolai for not signing that one piece of paper that would have averted all. Sure, Russia in its own clumsy, inevitable way was stumbling toward a constitutional monarchy, and because Nikolai could not see this, because he could not sign a simple paper granting a ministry appointed not by him but by his parliament, he and his family as well as about forty million others were slaughtered.

The thick, acrid smoke had yet to clear before the henchmen were upon their victims, Red vultures picking at the Imperial Family as if they were carrion. While Yurovsky was going from body to body, verifying pulses and the sort, two of the guards were in the hall, still vomiting not because of the gore but because of the foul smoke from those old-fashioned bullets. The rest of the guards forgot every bit of their ideology and searched pockets and wrists and necks for trinkets and treasures. Greed was their strongest urge, and these henchmen fed furiously upon their victims. They wanted more for themselves, and so they feasted upon those they had killed for possessing too much. Only Yurovsky stood as the pillar of the ideal revolutionary, and he flushed with disdain upon seeing the joyful looting.

He shouted, “You are to take nothing! Nothing! Now I want half of you to go upstairs and gather all the sheets you can, and I want the other half to go out to the shed and gather the shafts from the troikas.” When he saw hesitation among them, Yurovsky raised his gun. “Go!”

For a long moment, none of the guards left. Realizing he was losing control, Yurovsky took aim at one of the men.

“Leave!”

One by one, the assassins departed. Shaken by the disobedience, Yurovsky stood there, pistol raised as he guarded his royal kill. And because of this challenge, he never finished verifying the dead, specifically Anastasiya, Kharitonov, and Maria. Minutes later his men returned, and according to Yurovsky’s directions the sheets were suspended between the harnessing shafts and the bodies loaded up. With the noisy engine of the motor lorry masking the commotion, the Romanovs and their small retinue were then carted out one by one and heaved into the back of the vehicle.

The entire time I sat there, hidden in the darkness, watching, seeing with my own two eyes, and yet not believing. Not a tear did I shed, not even then. Not a whimper did I cry. Somehow fear steeled me, protected me, for had I started crying I would have been pulled from my hiding place and killed as well.

Once the last of the bodies was heaped upon the pile in the back of the truck, the biggest of the guards pulled himself onto the truck. He scrambled over the dead, pawed at them like a mad dog, and laughing, reached into a pile of Romanovs. He threw aside an arm, tugged at a bloody dress, and seized upon a fleshy prize. A moment later he leapt up and held out his cupped hand as if it were full of gold.

“Now that I have touched the Empress’s pussy I can die in peace!” he laughed and shrieked.

His joy was a call to chaos, and his comrades hooted with fiendish delight. All at once the lot of them climbed and clambered aboard, once again pulling at boots and necklaces, eyeglasses and especially watches, which Russians have always sought as a souvenir of death. Though they failed to discover the fortune of diamonds hidden in the royal corsets, the guards clambered over the carcasses of their history, desperately pawing for riches of any kind.

Suddenly Yurovsky charged out of the house, cocked his gun, and shouted, “The next man who takes anything gets a bullet in the head! Drop everything you’ve taken and get back inside – now!”

The frenzy came to an immediate but uncomfortable pause, followed by grumbling and some reluctant movement.

“I’ll be checking each and every one of you, and should I find that you’ve taken anything – anything! – you’ll be executed immediately!”

All of a sudden things began to fall. A bracelet. An amulet. Dr. Botkin’s glasses. One of the traveling pillows. The guards dropped them back onto the bodies, and these things landed with soft plops upon the still-warm flesh. From where I hid, I sensed the bodies shifting as the guards clambered over them. The next moment I saw an arm slip out from beneath the canvas top, the gold watch on that arm sparkling in the night.

The guards did as they were told. All it took was terror to whip them into control, of course, and this team of executioners leaped to the ground and hurried inside. Thereupon big buckets of sawdust were carted into the cellar room. Brooms too. And mops. They had to obliterate all signs of the crime. The Whites would take the city any day, and the Reds couldn’t leave any trace of the bodies or even the murders; all along the greatest danger to their cause had not been the possibility of Nikolai being restored to the throne – neither Red nor White wanted that – but the very real possibility of the Whites seizing the dead Tsar and his family and resurrecting them as martyrs to their cause. But of course there could be no martyrs if there were no bodies.