“Oh, my child…” she muttered, now gazing at the floor, staring at nothing. “Please, I beg you, please… if your grandfather didn’t tell you, then don’t ask me.”

“I mean it, I won’t give up.”

“I worry that the truth will be poison to your soul.”

“Tell me!”

“So be it…” quietly said Marina, reaching out with a gnarled, bony hand and touching Kate on the arm. “However, please do not harshly judge your grandfather, for he repented. Agreed?”

Kate blurted an expedient, “Agreed.”

“Well, then…” The old woman hesitated one last time, finally spitting it out like bitter medicine. “Your grandfather was one of them, one of the guards. He was barely a man back then, and his name was Volodya.” She nodded. “I can still picture him, still see him quite clearly – young, cute Volodya with the blond hair.”

Dear God, thought Kate, her stomach clenching horribly. Her grandfather was that devilishly clever to have so twisted the story? To make her see him as he was not? And yet… yet in an instant she understood it could be no other way. Yes, Kate was surprisingly sure of it. Her dear grandfather had been one of them, one of the Reds. The next moment everything came flooding in, finally making such perfect sense, and Kate saw it all in her mind’s eye, not just the truth, but an image of her grandfather back then, back there…

Afraid of what she was asking but unable to stop herself, she said, “A beard… did he have a beard?”

“Why, yes.”

“A blond beard?”

“Exactly,” reluctantly confirmed Marina. “He had blond hair and a thin blond beard and was the youngest of them all, a lad of barely twenty, if that. Maybe only eighteen or nineteen, I don’t know. Everyone lied about everything back then – particularly boys whose fathers had died in war – but this Volodya was one of the original interior guards. And the Tsar and Tsaritsa so trusted his innocent face – why, from time to time your grandfather even entertained the Heir, even played chess with him – which was why the Bolsheviki used him.”

“What do you mean, used him?”

“The rescue letters – they were all fakes. In an attempt to trick the Romanovs into an escape attempt, the Bolsheviki wrote the notes themselves. They then used your grandfather to smuggle the notes in and out of The House of Special Purpose.”

“Oh, God.” Remembering what her grandfather had revealed in his tape recording, Kate said, “And that night… the night the Romanovs were murdered… he…”

“Exactly,” continued Marina. “One of the executioners, a Hungarian, backed out, saying he couldn’t shoot women and children. This was just an hour or two before the Romanovs were led to the cellar, and Volodya, drunk on ideology and desperate to prove himself not only a true man but a real revolutionary, volunteered. At first they said no, he was too young, but soon Yurovsky relented, for there was no one else at so late an hour. They just needed someone to pull a trigger.” The old woman shook her head. “Before this, Volodya had never killed… and I know in my heart of hearts that he repented every day since.”

No, he suffered, thought Kate. Every day of every week since then, he suffered. And as if some horrible bandage had been yanked away, there it was, now exposed, the festering wound in her grandfather’s soul, the very one he had never permitted to heal. With all her being, Kate didn’t want to believe this – her grandfather capable of murder? – yet at the same time she couldn’t help but know in her heart of hearts that it was in fact the truth. It just made too much unbelievable sense. Kate’s mind whooshed through it all, but unlike Tsaritsa Aleksandra, who had always found hope in the face of such undeniably dark logic, Kate saw it plainly before her. Here at last was the source, at last she had found it: the Artesian well of her grandfather’s self-hatred.

“Who was he assigned to kill?” asked Kate, her voice trembling.

“Why, Grand Duchess Maria, of course. His orders were to aim for the heart so as to make the kill quick and clean. When it all began, however, he panicked. He panicked but he did as ordered: he aimed and fired through the foul smoke at the young princess. But there was so much chaos. Truth be told, only God knows whose bullet struck whom in that mayhem. In any case, when your young grandfather wiped the smoke from his eyes, he saw Maria lying on the floor, completely still, completely dead.”

“Dear God…”

So he was there. So he’d killed. And so, thought Kate, recalling her grandfather’s thick gold watch, he’d looted.

“What happened?” pressed Kate, still unable to make sense of it all. “How did…”

“Just listen…” continued Marina. “About an hour later the truck loaded with the bodies set off with three men seated up front – a driver, a guard, and Yurovsky himself. Since there was no more room in the cab, Volodya – that is, your Dyedushka Misha – was ordered to the back, where he stood guard over the dead ones as the vehicle slowly made its way out of town on the road to the village of Koptyaki and the Four Brothers Mine. Later he told me that if he’d had a bullet he would have killed himself right then and there. Regardless, it was only when the truck passed the racetrack on the edge of town that they encountered the first of many problems. All month there had been heavy rain, and when one of the wheels sank into a muddy hole, the truck became stuck for the first time that night, and Volodya jumped off the back, he jumped onto the ground.”

And looking at the wheel he immediately saw the problem, and shouted to his tovarishi in the cab up front, “It’s not so bad, comrades. Let me give a push!”

The driver, Lyukhanov, put the lorry in reverse, rolled it back a bit, then jabbed it into first gear. Volodya leaned into the rear bumper and pushed with all his strength. In one great heave the vehicle rolled up and out and raced ahead. A few short moments later, however, the left rear tire struck a rock and the entire lorry bounced up. The force of the jolt in turn caused something to be thrown off the back and onto the dirt road. He couldn’t believe his eyes – one of the bodies! Terrified, he froze. Finally Volodya rushed to it, discovering the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich. He was dead, half his head blown away. Volodya looked up and was about to call out to his comrades when suddenly another body fell to the ground. Hurrying to that one, he discovered that it was the body of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, the very one he’d been assigned to kill! Then as if she were a ghost come back to haunt him, she suddenly moved, rolling her head to the side and looking up at him.

“Help…” she gasped. “Please help me!”

From the truck Lyukhanov leaned his head half out the window, and called, “You okay back there, Volodya? You still with us?”

He stared at the young woman bleeding so horribly on the ground. He’d held the fate of her life in his aim once before… and here he held it once again.

“The Lord Almighty had seen to a miracle,” gushed Marina. “He was giving Volodya a second chance. A mere hour or so earlier he’d been this young woman’s murderer… and suddenly he had the chance to redeem himself – he could be her savior!”

Kate looked up. “You mean-”

“In the split of a second, actually…”

… actually without even thinking, he looked after the lorry, which was slowly motoring away, and called, “I’m still with you… just keep going!”

He made his decision just like that, just that quickly.

“I’ve got to hide you away!” he whispered to Maria.

She nodded but couldn’t get up, for she was so badly wounded and had lost far too much blood. And so he dragged her off into the wood, leaning her against a pine. He brought her brother too, lying him nearby.