Incomparable treasures, all of them. Collecting and guarding them had occupied nearly his entire life, and now that he had succeeded in his duties he felt, surprisingly, a sense of pride. He had pledged to bury these things away not only until the fall of communism, but until his Nikolai and Aleksandra received a proper Orthodox burial. And now that these both had happened – what miracles! – he could rest with a degree of peace. His beloved Kate would have to oversee the final step, returning all of this to Russia, and he had every confidence that she would execute the transfer in a timely manner.
This room held the climax of his story and his life, thought Misha. Everything he recorded on that tape was to prepare his granddaughter for this room and its priceless contents. How much was all this worth, three, four, five hundred million dollars? A billion? Certainly somewhere in that range. And that was his reason for telling Kate his version of the final days of the Tsar – simply so that she could and would understand the meaning, the purpose, and the true value of all these jewels in this room. Misha was laying at Kate’s feet not unfathomable wealth, but overwhelming, mind-boggling responsibility, and he had to make sure she understood every ramification.
As much as he wanted to go through every box and admire every gem, there just wasn’t time. It had taken years for May and him to catalog it all, examining and weighing every stone, describing every objet, and then recording it all in a jewel book. May even insisted on drawing a facsimile of every piece, which she carefully did, and that log was there, right over there on the shelf. Oi, so many memories, mused Misha as he closed the boxes one after the other.
He even started laughing.
Turning, he looked at the rack of old clothes and chuckled aloud. May and he had been so very afraid, not just in the twenties and thirties, but especially right after World War II and into the fifties. Accordingly, they had taken every precaution, and Misha reached for his raincoat, finding it oddly heavy. Squishing the material between his fingertips, he sensed a band of small, hard objects running all the way around the neck. Stones. And not mere stones, but diamonds. Similarly, May’s dress over there held an entire panel of secret brillianty and the hem a great circle of them. Scattered through these clothes were some ten pounds of gems, hidden away like this in case May and he had suddenly needed to flee. In a separate codicil to his will he’d left note of this too, so Kate wouldn’t simply throw these clothes in a bag and drop them at the Goodwill.
But enough of this. He had to be going, his end was imminent. There were but two things Misha wanted from this room, and he reached for a bankers’ box on the floor and pushed aside its cardboard lid. Inside, carefully wrapped in cotton towels, he found a small red tin box, a bit rusty at the edges, its cover embossed with the imperial double-headed eagle and lettering that read TOVARISCHESTVO A. I. ABRIKOSOVA V MOSKVYE – The Goods of the A. I. Abrikosova Company, Moscow. Opening the old candy box, Misha gazed down upon its contents – some bits of wire, a tiny chain, two small rocks, a flattened coin, and some rusty nails – and his eyes blistered with tears. It had been terribly stupid of him back then, but he hadn’t been able to flee Yekaterinburg without these things, so priceless were they to him. Odd, mused Misha, how all of that seemed just like yesterday. He so clearly remembered sneaking late one night into The House of Special Purpose – then deserted by the Reds – and snatching this bric-a-brac, the treasures of a little boy, from its hiding place behind the mopboard.
He closed up the old candy box, bent slowly over, and reached for something else. This time his gnarled fingers wrapped around a dark brown glass vial, small and corked tightly, and he carefully held it and the tin box as he closed up the vault. What a job, what a task, he mused as he glanced about the room one last time. Now there was just one more thing he had to do: commit a fantastically great sin, the greatest of all.
Moving with determination, Misha flicked off the single light and swung shut the vault door and secured it tight. He then stepped into his office and pushed the bookcase back in place. Once it was locked, once he’d positioned the books so that they covered the lock, he slipped the brass key back in his trousers.
If only he could whisk through time and return to that night. If only he could reverse the flow of time and make the right choices, the right decisions, then perhaps he could change the outcome of it all. Like a mad river, however, time rushed in only one direction, and there was no turning back to the dark events of July 16-17, 1918, just as there was no turning back his decision now. No, thought Misha. He knew what he had to do, what must be done. He’d felt so guilty, so awful ever since that heinous night, but eighty years of suffering were not enough. He was not ready yet for forgiveness, for holy deliverance. He must sin again so that he would suffer not just in this life, but in the life hereafter and forevermore.
Misha, feeling every creak in his weary body, sat back down at his desk. He placed the old red candy box before him, opened it once again and admired the bits of bent and rusty things. Picking out a flattened coin, he was instantly transported – “Just look at what Papa’s locomotive did to this kopek!” – and instantly saw that bed, that room. But it was like torture, this memory of his. He could remember it all, see it all like a movie, but he couldn’t return and participate in the actual events.
He had so long ago decided just what must be done and how, and for so many years had been so determined, that his actions now were nearly automatic. The time had finally come. May had died. And he’d fulfilled a pledge he’d made long ago in a Siberian wood. Da, da, da, he’d accomplished everything that he possibly could, including, of course, telling a thousand truths just so he could get away with one singular, gross lie. Sure, that was exactly what the audiotape was: one enormous lie. From now and hopefully forevermore his Kate would believe that he, Misha, had been none other than the young Leonid Sednyov, when in fact nothing could have been further from the truth. Of course he’d been there, but not as the little kitchen boy. It was May herself who’d come up with the idea of supplanting one lie with another, of crafting a story so close to the truth that no one would ever doubt that it was in fact the truth. And Misha had told the tale perfectly, doled it out so convincingly that neither his granddaughter nor the world would ever know what really happened on that awful, awful night. Now there was nothing left for him here in this life except, perhaps, forgiveness, which is the last thing he desired or felt he deserved.
With that, Misha uncorked the small vial of cyanide. He swirled it a bit, then poured its contents into his glass of water, and saw the life and death therein whirl into eternity, his own.
“Please, Father,” he muttered in near silent prayer, “do not forgive my sins.”
Not wasting another second, Misha lifted the glass to his lips and drank it down in two bitter gulps. Almost instantly he was blinded by an atomic-like flash of blazing red light and his weary body slumped forward onto his desk.