He needed to toughen up too.
He’d done it before. He needed to draw on those instincts again and make the impossible happen.
He’d brought this calamity upon himself. All of it. Right from the start. Right from the day when, as a curious fourteen-year-old, he’d made that fateful discovery in the cellar of his ancestral home.
The day that set everything else in motion.
IT WASN’T A GRAND HOME. There was no such thing in Soviet Russia, not unless you were part of the ruling Politburo. Sokolov’s family wasn’t anything like that. He had grown up in a farming lodge on a small plot of land in Karovo, eight miles away from the nearest village and a hundred miles south of Moscow.
His grandfather had lived and died in that same cottage. Sokolov knew all about their family history. At least, he thought he did, until that day.
His father had told him how Sokolov’s grandfather Misha had arrived there shortly after the 1917 revolution. He’d settled there after a harrowing journey from St. Petersburg across a country ravaged by civil war. He’d found a haven in its idyllic landscape of birch forests, bluffs, and lush flood meadows that hugged the meandering Oka River. In better days, Karovo had been an estate comprised of a manor house, six villages, and good land. There was a gravity pump to bring water up from the spring; a steam mill where rye, barley, and buckwheat were ground; and a distillery where spirits were produced from potatoes. Then the Bolsheviks had taken over. The landowner was kicked out and his estate was turned into a kolkhoz-a collective farm. The manor house was turned into a teachers’ training institute and, after World War II, it became an orphanage for the hordes of children who had been left homeless by the war. By the time Sokolov was a young boy, it had become a run-down weekend rest house for the workers of the giant turbine plant at Kaluga, some forty kilometers to the west, a far cry from its former glory.
Misha had worked the fields. He’d married a laundress, a former employee of the estate’s owner. They’d had seven children, more able bodies to toil the land and feed the masses. Two of them had died during the hardships of Stalin’s Great Purge, and the second world war almost finished off the rest. Four of Sokolov’s uncles had died in various battles. His father, though, had survived, and he’d managed to return safely to Karovo, where he resumed working the fields, like his father. Men were in short supply after the war, and he’d had his pick of the town’s prettiest girls. He’d ended up marrying the daughter of a schoolteacher, Alina, who had given him four children, all boys. The youngest of them was Sokolov, who was born in 1951.
As in the rest of Soviet Russia, life in Karovo was hard. Sokolov’s parents worked long hours for little pay. He and his brothers had to work hard too, from a young age. Life under Soviet rule offered few treats, and there was little comfort to be had. The soil was tough and difficult to work. The huge wood-burning stoves were hard to keep alive. Drinking water needed to be brought over in buckets from a distant well. And at the cottage, the outhouse was mired in ankle-deep mud for most of the year. Food was scarce, the collective farm inefficient and badly run. The village shop was almost always bare. Frost-bitten potatoes, beets, cabbage, and onions were often the only nourishment available to stave off starvation.
Stuck in this harsh reality, Sokolov escaped into a fantasy life whenever he could. His mother, in particular, had been a wonderful storyteller. She was a font of knowledge, and while his father would drink himself to sleep every night, she would regale Sokolov and his brothers with all kinds of stories and folktales. In the centralized Marxist-Leninist education system Sokolov grew up in, the collective took precedence over the interests of the individual, and creativity and imagination were frowned upon. Sokolov’s mother quietly disagreed and encouraged his whimsy and his ravenous curiosity. Sokolov’s imagination was his escape from the dire conditions of his daily life, especially after the untimely death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was twelve.
One of the stories his mother had told them was about a grisly discovery at the Yusupov Palace, the former home of one of Russia’s wealthiest families and once the home of Felix Yusupov, one of the self-confessed murderers of Grigory Rasputin. The discovery had taken place after the revolution, when the Bolsheviks had taken power and sent the Yusupovs, along with the rest of the aristocracy, off to rot in prison or face the firing squads. A secret room had been discovered in the apartment of Felix’s great-grandmother, who had been reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe. In the room, they found a coffin containing the rotting bones of a man who turned out to be a lover of hers, a revolutionary she had helped escape from prison. She’d kept him hidden in her palace for years, even after his death. Sokolov had heard stories about how secret chambers filled with chests of jewelry and all kinds of valuables were discovered in the homes and palaces of the aristocracy after the revolution, chambers they had hastily covered up with plaster and paint before fleeing the uprising. He would often sneak into the old manor house and look for such secret rooms, imagining what it would be like to find a hidden treasure of his own.
As it happened, what he found wasn’t a treasure, and neither was it in the manor house.
It was in a small, hidden alcove buried deep in the cellar of his family’s cottage. An alcove that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in decades. He’d stumbled upon it by accident while hiding from his brothers, and at first it didn’t seem like much: not gold, silver, or anything like that. Just three rotting old journals, each bound in soft leather, the bundle wrapped tightly with a piece of string.
Sokolov had no idea that what he’d found would be far more valuable-and far-reaching-than any treasure.
He didn’t share his discovery with anyone. Had his mother still been alive, he would have told her about it, without a doubt. But she was long gone, and his drunkard, cynical father wasn’t worthy of it. He didn’t tell his brothers about it either. Not until he knew what it was. It was his secret, and Sokolov knew he had something very special when, on the second page, a notorious name jumped out at him:
Rasputin.
He couldn’t read it fast enough.
9
Hey.”
It was, I don’t know, three or four in the morning. Really late, in any case. I was lying in, with Tess next to me, asleep, or so I thought, her head still buried in her pillow, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Why are you still up?” Her tone was all warm and dreamy.
I didn’t say anything. I just leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder.
“You worried about something?” she asked.
I gave her another kiss, softly. “Go back to sleep.”
She moaned, equally softly. “I can’t. Not if I know you’re awake.” She sat up a little, propping herself on one elbow. “You thinking about Alex?”
I didn’t answer.
She sighed. “He’s doing better, Sean. But it’s like Stacey says. It’s going to take time.”
I shrugged. “More time since we don’t know what they did exactly.” I turned to face her. “He only gets one childhood. He shouldn’t have to have it ruined like this.”
“It’s not ruined. He’s got you now. And me. And Kim. He’s settling in well at school. He’s going to be fine.” She reached out and stroked my cheek. “I hate seeing you like this. Every week, it’s like our visits to Stacey just bring it all out in you again. You’ve done all you can.”
I just nodded. The plan was still creeping around in my head, feeding on ideas. Growing.