When Boris died, his son took over the business with sons of Sujnesk. The revolution came to Ekaterinburg but business continued, prospered. Hundreds died when the famine came. Stalin’s fist pounded on Siberia. The town became a city of exiles who poured in by train, hungering for work, willing to kill for bread.
The son of Boris Antonovich Dermanski kept records faithfully and secretly, and when his wife bore him a daughter and no son, he gave her the golden box with the ancient letter and told her where to hide it and what records she should keep.
She did so faithfully, and when her father died he passed the gift to her. When she too had a daughter and the Mafia had risen and taken over the underworld, she had turned the gift over to her daughter, who dutifully maintained the family tradition.
It was only when the husband of the great-granddaughter of Boris Antonovich died that the young woman living now as a clerk for an electrician contacted one of the few members of the Mafia she felt she could trust, a man whose loyalty was purchased uncertainly for several nights of passionless sex and the gift of the gold box passed down to her by her father. The Mafia member had risked his life and eventually lost it by contacting a cousin in Moscow.
Two months later, the great-granddaughter of Boris Antonovich Dermanski had lost the precious, carefully compiled-contents of her package to the man with the limp, and escaped with the gift of her own life.
Now she sat as the winter wind hummed down the street outside the building where she shared a room with a friend. She looked out the frosted window and saw snow dancing madly in thin waves down the street.
She watched for hours, finally falling asleep in her chair, covered by a blanket. She dreamed of her father and mother, of the limping man at the train station, of her dead husband, and of a dark formless mass streaming toward her from under the door.
She awoke with a gasp to the sound of the Trans-Siberian Express roaring to a stop at the train station less than a mile away. She awoke to the sound and a warm light.
Outside the window, the sun was shining brightly.