The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller

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      With the changes the Romanovs gained some privileges while others were taken away. Father Storozhev and his nuns were forbidden from bringing their extra daily rations of eggs and milk. This lasted until one of the doctors protested that the heir suffered from malnutrition, and Yurovsky relented.

      ‘But then it all changed, you see?’ Matok said, his voice taking on tones of helplessness.

      ‘Changed? How so?’ Giustiniani prodded.

      ‘With the Czechs, Excellency,’ Matok said, reflexively bowing to the men standing there over him. Starting in the middle of July there was a sudden clampdown on anyone approaching the Special House. The Czechs were pressing their encirclement of Yekaterinburg, and when Yurovsky wasn’t supervising the additional fortifications to the Special House he spent his time in the telegrapher’s kiosk at the American Hotel asking Moscow for orders, Matok claimed.

      ‘He was worried about being overun?’

      ‘Yes, Excellency. We all were worried,’ Matok said, giving a little laugh and another bow.

      Then, he said, only a few days later he’d heard the Romanovs had been executed in the night.

      ‘Heard? Heard from whom? Were you here?’

      ‘No, Excellency. I had been given leave. I would have been here, because when you were here you got extra food, and you know…I am always hungry,’ he said. Matok looked up at them with big eyes. He didn’t know if he’d told them enough to save his life, and from Giustiniani’s expression the odds weren’t good.

      ‘So it was all Yurovsky’s doing?’

      ‘Yes, Excellency. All because of Comrade Yurovsky.’

      Nametkin looked to Giustiniani, who sniffed. ‘Take him back,’ he said, and the guard pulled him up out of his chair and took him down the staircase. ‘Well, to me it sounds like a fifth-hand story. “He wasn’t here, he heard from someone else,” you know…all these people come out of the wood-work,’ Giustiniani said with a laugh. ‘For instance, the Tsar is in Harbin – that’s what it says in this morning’s newspaper,’ Giustiniani said, unscrewing a flask and holding it out to Ryzhkov.

      ‘You want some other wild tales? There was a mysterious telegram received, there was a special armoured train provided by the British that arrived in the middle of the night, there is a secret tunnel connecting with the British consulate, there are mysterious strangers, black aeroplanes that land on the main street and then take off again a few moments later…and so on and so forth.’

      Ryzhkov took a short sharp swig of what turned out to be brandy. Excellent brandy, he thought. He offered the flask to Strilchuk, who just looked at him blankly and didn’t even move, then passed it to Nametkin.

      Nametkin was searching his pockets. He came out with two pages and unfolded them. ‘This is what we know…’ Nametkin cleared his throat.

      ‘This is from Gorskov, another of these guards,’ Giustiniani said to Ryzhkov and Strilchuk.

      ‘We will go by his notes,’ Nametkin said, adjusting his spectacles. ‘“On the night of the 16th last, Yurovsky came up here with several members of the guard, and the Imperial Family were summoned to the dining area…There were trucks placed outside…”’ Nametkin recited.

      ‘Trucks so they could move them?’ Ryzhkov said. Strilchuk looked over at him. Nametkin shrugged and waved the papers. ‘…“the Romanov women took a certain amount of time, but when they were dressed…” and so on. Some time later –’

      ‘Didn’t he say “forty-five minutes”?’ Giustiniani’s voice was one note above boredom.

      ‘Yes, forty-five minutes later they were ready and then they were told that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute them. “They were immediately fired upon…“’ Nametkin read, backing away, and turning to the dining room as if it were going to respond. For a moment they all looked around at the open cupboards and tins spilled out onto the floor.

      ‘This is a box of hair,’ Strilchuk said. He had found a cigar box and was hefting it as if to determine the weight. The box was stuffed with long curls of at least three different colours of women’s hair. They all gathered around it. Giustiniani stuck his finger in the box and felt beneath the curls. ‘Just hair,’ he said.

      ‘Hmmph,’ Nametkin said, and returned to his papers. Strilchuk closed the lid on the box and placed it on an end table.

      ‘”…the Latvians opened fire…”’ Nametkin read. ‘It says that the Latvians immediately opened fire on the family, and at the end of it when they checked the pulses Anastasia was still alive –’

      ‘In here?’ Ryzhkov said. Nothing of the kind had ever happened in that dining room, he could see. He looked over at Strilchuk who shook his head.

      ‘– so they beat her with their rifles –’

      ‘No, they didn’t. Not in here,’ Ryzhkov said.

      ‘– “stabbed her thirty-two times”.’

      ‘Not in here,’ Ryzhkov repeated.

      ‘What, did he stand there and count?’ Strilchuk said.

      ‘The other story is that this Yurovsky took them down the back staircase –’ Giustiniani put in.

      ‘And took them into the basement room,’ Nametkin said. Strilchuk walked out into the corridor, already looking for the exit from the dining area.

      ‘Into a side basement room,’ Nametkin said. ‘Let’s go and find that. The house slopes…’

      ‘It’s down here, I think.’ Strilchuk led them down the narrow back staircase. At the foot of the stairs there was a portico and a set of four stairs down to wide doors, locked with a hasp and padlock.

      ‘Christ,’ Giustiniani said. He and Strilchuk went around to the guardhouse to see if anyone had the keys to the room.

      Ryzhkov and Nametkin looked around the back of the house. There was a woodshed and a sauna bath, built downhill in the dried-out gardens. There was a smaller area to which the Imperial Family must have been recently confined, the grass worn away to dust, a series of chairs and a table made from a tree stump which still held a soggy newspaper and an oyster-shell ash tray.

      ‘You know Conte Giustiniani was appointed to make sure we come up with the right answers to this whole enterprise.’ Nametkin said to him.

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Oh, yes. General Golitsyn has his deputy, Major de Heuzy, watch Giustiniani, who watches me, and in turn I watch him. It’s all politics, eh?’ Nametkin said. He stood at the end of a little porch that had been built at the end of the bathhouse and looked around at the property. ‘Old Ipatiev. It looks like he put together a pretty nice place for himself.’

      ‘Yes, it looks like it would have been very peaceful at one time,’ Ryzhkov said, imagining a garden full of grand duchesses running about. At the corner of the stockade was a large gate topped with new barbed wire. ‘The trucks would have been brought in through there,’ he said. The two of them headed up the hill; indeed, the entrance was chewed up, muddy from СКАЧАТЬ