Anton nodded.

“Is it true,” asked Pekkala, “that people call him the Red Tsar?”

“Not to his face,” Anton answered, “if they want to go on living.”

“If he is the reason I’m here,” persisted Pekkala, “then let me speak to him.”

Anton laughed. “You do not ask to speak to Comrade Stalin! You wait until he asks to speak to you, and if that ever happens, you will have your conversation. In the meantime, there is work to be done.”

“You know what happened to me, back in the Butyrka prison.”

“Yes.”

“Stalin is responsible for that. Personally responsible.”

“Since then he has done great things for this country.”

“You,” Pekkala replied, “are also responsible.”

Anton’s folded hands clenched into a knot of flesh and bone. “There are different ways of seeing this.”

“You mean the difference between who is tortured and who is doing the torturing.”

Anton cleared his throat as he attempted to remain calm. “What I mean is that we have been on different paths, you and I. Mine has brought me to this side of the desk.” He rapped the wood for emphasis. “And yours has led you to be standing there. I am now an officer in the Bureau of Special Operations.”

“What do you people want from me?”

Anton got up and closed the door. “We want you to investigate a crime.”

“Has the country run out of detectives?”

“You are the one we need for this.”

“Is it a murder?” Pekkala asked. “A missing person?”

“Possibly,” replied Anton, still facing the door, his voice lowered. “Possibly not.”

“Do I have to solve your riddles before I solve your case?”

Now Anton turned to face him. “I am talking about the Romanovs. The Tsar. His wife. His children. All of them.”

At the mention of their names, old nightmares reared up in Pekkala’s head. “But they were executed,” he said. “That case was closed years ago. The Revolutionary Government even took credit for killing them!”

Anton returned to the desk. “It is true that we claimed to have carried out the executions. But, as you are perhaps aware, no corpses were produced as evidence.”

A breeze blew in through the open window, carrying the musty smell of approaching rain.

“You mean you don’t know where the bodies are?”

Anton nodded. “That is correct.”

“So it is a missing persons case?” asked Pekkala. “Are you telling me the Tsar might still be alive?” The guilt of having abandoned the Romanovs to their fate had lodged like a bullet in his chest. In spite of what he’d heard about the executions, Pekkala’s doubts had never completely gone away. But to hear it now, from the mouth of a Red Army soldier, was something he’d never expected.

Anton looked nervously around the room, as if to see some listener materialize out of the smoke-tinted air. He got up and walked to the window, peering out into the alley which ran by the side of the building. Then he closed the shutters. A purpling darkness descended like twilight upon the room. “The Tsar and his family had been moved to the town of Ekaterinburg -which is now known as Sverdlovsk.”

“That is only a few days’ drive from here.”

“Yes. Sverdlovsk was chosen because of its remoteness. There’d be no chance of anyone trying to rescue them. At least, that’s what we thought. When the family arrived, they were quartered at the house of a local merchant named Ipatiev.”

“What did you plan to do with them?”

“It wasn’t clear what should be done with them. From the moment the Romanov family were arrested in Petrograd, they became a liability. As long as the Tsar lived, he provided a focus for those who were fighting against the Revolution. On the other hand, if we simply got rid of him, world opinion might have turned against us. It was decided that the Romanovs should be kept alive until the new government was firmly established. Then the Tsar was to be put on trial. Judges would be brought in from Moscow. The whole thing would be as public as possible. Newspapers would cover the proceedings. In every rural area, district Commissars would be on hand to explain the legal process.”

“And the Tsar would be found guilty.”

Anton flipped his hand in the air, brushing aside the idea. “Of course, but a trial would give legitimacy to the proceedings.”

“Then what were you planning to do with the Tsar?”

“Shoot him, probably. Or we could have hanged him. The details hadn’t been decided.”

“And his wife? His four daughters? His son? Would you have hanged them, too?”

“No! If we had wanted to kill them, we would never have gone to the trouble of bringing the Romanovs all the way to Sverdlovsk. The last thing we wanted to do was make martyrs of children. The whole point was to prove that the Revolution was not being run by barbarians.”

“So what were you planning to do with the rest of the family?”

“They were to be handed over to the British, in exchange for their official support of the new government.”

To Lenin, it must have seemed a simple plan. But those are always the ones that go wrong, thought Pekkala. “What happened instead?”

Anton let his breath trail out. “We aren’t sure exactly. An entire division of soldiers known as the Czechoslovakian Legion had mutinied back in May of 1918, when the new government ordered them to lay down their arms. Many of these Czechs and Slovaks had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army in the early stages of the war. For years, these soldiers had been fighting for the Tsar. They weren’t about to throw away their guns and join the Red Army. Instead, they formed a separate force.”

“The Whites,” said Pekkala. In the years after the Revolution, thousands of former White Army officers had flooded into the Gulag camps. They were always singled out for the worst treatment. Few of them survived their first winter.

“Since these men were deserters,” continued Anton, “they couldn’t go back to their own countries. Instead they decided to follow the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the entire length of Russia. They were heavily armed. Their military discipline had stayed intact. There was nothing we could do to stop them. In every town they came to as they headed east along the railroad, the Red Army garrisons either melted away or were torn to shreds.”

“The railroad passes just south of Sverdlovsk,” said Pekkala. Now he began to see where the plan had gone wrong.

“Yes,” replied Anton. “The Whites were bound to capture the town. The Romanovs would have been freed.”

“So Lenin ordered them to be killed?”

“He could have, but he didn’t.” Anton looked overwhelmed by the events he was describing. Even to know such secrets put a person’s life at risk. To speak them out loud was suicidal. “There were so many false alarms-Red Army units mistaken for Whites, herds of cows mistaken for cavalry, thunder mistaken for cannon fire. Lenin was afraid that if an execution order was in place, the men guarding the Romanovs would panic. They’d shoot the Tsar and his family whether the Czechs tried to rescue them or not.” Anton pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”

“What happened?” asked Pekkala.

It was raining now, droplets tapping on the shutters.

“A call came in to the house where the Romanovs were staying. A man identifying himself as a Red Army officer said that the Whites were approaching the outskirts of the town. He gave orders for the guards to set up a roadblock and to leave behind two armed men to guard the house. They had no reason to question the orders. Everyone knew the Whites were close by. So they set up a roadblock on the outskirts of the town, just as they’d been ordered. But the Whites didn’t show up. The call had been a fake. When the Red Army soldiers returned to the Ipatiev house, they discovered that the Romanovs were gone. The two guards who had remained behind were found in the basement, shot to death.”