“You think those deeper lines in the floor could signify such a thing?” Genrikhovich asked.
“Positive.” Holliday turned to Eddie. “Give me the shovel.”
Eddie handed him the entrenching tool, and Holliday walked forward until he stood just outside the large crimson center ring. He knelt down, raised the shovel above his head, then brought it down hard. There was a cracking noise, the rusty groan of old hinges, and then the gallows thump of two semicircular doors six feet across dropping downward. Holliday edged forward and looked into the pit. It was twenty feet down, and the stakes were made of what appeared to be the pointed blades of upended broadswords. The entire bottom of the pit was covered with a piled litter of bones. One of the sword stakes had slid between the old sepia-colored bones of an intact rib cage. Holliday counted at least twenty human skulls.
“Looks like your friend Ivan had a few practice runs,” said Holliday.
Genrikhovich came cautiously forward and looked down into the pit, keeping one eye on Holliday and Eddie. He stepped back quickly, his lip curled in distaste. “No doubt he had the workmen and artisans who worked here killed to keep his secret.”
“No doubt,” said Holliday dryly. There was a heavy metallic sound from somewhere under the floor, and the trap snapped shut again, ready for its next victim. “What about the two other gates?”
“Simple,” said Genrikhovich. “The czar had many enemies and was a great believer in secrets and escape routes. The stairs and the passageways we used to get here led from the dungeons. That was almost surely how the czar had his treasures from Byzantium carried here.” He paused and nodded toward the gate with the mosaic of the saint over it. For the first time Holliday noticed that the vestments the saint was wearing were covered with large red crosses, the same eight pointed crosses that were used by the Templars on their shields and even by Columbus on the sails of his three famous ships. “The saint over the gateway is Saint Basil, or Vasily in Russian. When the czar went to Saint Basil’s Cathedral a hundred yards away in what is now called Red Square, he would use that passageway to reach his treasure house unharmed. The other passage leads to the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin itself. The cathedral is consecrated to the Virgin Mary. As you may know, the Cathedral of the Assumption is also known as the Uspenski Cathedral.”
“The Faberge Kremlin Egg,” said Holliday.
“The pieces of the puzzle begin to come together at last.” The Russian smiled.
“What about the Templar crosses on Saint Basil’s robes?”
“Equally simple,” said Genrikhovich. “You may not be aware of this, but Saint Basil’s lies at the exact geographical center of Moscow. The tenth church of Saint Basil’s was known as the Jerusalem church by its priests, since it was by definition the very center of holy life in the great city; they have worn the crosses for almost a thousand years to honor the knights who guarded Jerusalem the way the priests guarded the church. It is why, in the end, the Sword of the South, Octanis, came here with the rest of Ivan’s treasures.”
“I don’t see it,” said Holliday, trying to get the Russian’s goat and get him off guard. It didn’t work.
“The last secret,” said Genrikhovich calmly. “Go to the altar, please,” he said, waving the gun a little, but standing aside. “Your friend as well.”
Holliday and Eddie did as they were told. Approaching the altar, Holliday saw that it was etched with yet another pentacle, and at the symbol’s center was what appeared to be a keyhole.
Genrikhovich put the big lantern on the floor, then reached under his shirt and pulled out a large gold key on a well-worn and sweat-stained leather strip. He slipped it over his head and dangled it in his free hand. “The final key,” he said, his face suffused with a glowing brightness that might have been religious passion, or perhaps nothing but consuming greed. “The key taken from Rasputin’s pocket by my grandfather that night on the cracking ice of the Moika Canal.”
“The key to the Kremlin Egg,” said Holliday. “And the fake made by the Finnish jeweler?”
“A copy commissioned by Czar Nicholas himself to cover up the loss of the original,” Genrikhovich said. With that he inserted the key into the center of the pentangle on the golden altar and twisted it to the left. Like the groaning of the hinges on the tiger trap behind them, there was the distant dull screeching of gears and the harsh whirring of some massive clockwork mechanism hidden somewhere in the walls. Suddenly the sound of ringing bells could be heard, and Holliday realized that it was the same as the hymn that Genrikhovich had been humming in the corridor. The Russian turned toward Holliday, the faint smile back on his face. The smile of a madman. “The Hymn of the Cherubim, a favorite of Czar Nicholas, and the hymn played at the consecration of Saint Basil’s attended by Ivan the Terrible. The hymn that plays on the Kremlin Egg music box.”
The music stopped, the sound of the bells fading slowly away to faint echoes. There was the grinding of more hidden gears within the walls. Directly in front of them a section of wall five feet wide began to rumble slowly into the floor until it disappeared. Genrikhovich picked up the lantern and shone it through the newly created gap in the wall.
“Gentlemen,” said the Russian ponderously, “I give you the lost treasures of Ivan the Terrible!”
One after another the three men stepped across the threshold and entered the room beyond.
36
Genrikhovich stepped into the treasure house, set the big lantern down and turned it up to its fullest light, revealing a room born from the sweat and blood and hearts and hands of ten thousand toiling artisans from the mountains of the Himalayas to the great Horn of Africa. It was large and domed, and surrounded with Palladian columns, steps of granite leading down to a floor that Plato might have debated on, or where the great Sophocles might have set his Oedipus Rex, or his Antigone.
But the floor was covered knee-deep in treasures, goblets, coins, bars and bolts of cloth so old they had rotted away to rich dust, and the steps had been turned into shelves full of coins and bullion, silver and gold jewelry crusted with gems of all kinds, from ropes of huge pearls to diamonds the size of ice cubes and emeralds the size of green apples.
There were carved ivory elephant tusks, a life-size pair of black onyx leopards being held in check by golden chains grasped in the fist of a carved Nubian slave that might have come from some ancient Egyptian tomb. On one side a stuffed crocodile with amethyst eyes was in full-scale combat with a full-size Russian bear. On the other side turquoise hummingbirds hung from the silver branches of a plum tree blossoming with pale Ceylonese sapphires.
On the cases set along the walls between the high pillars were scrolls wrapped in gold and capped with chased silver. There were manuscripts bound in inlaid horn and every form of precious metal. There were enormous tomes, their leather spines as worked and carved as the backs of ancient dinosaurs, and some volumes slim enough to be held in a child’s hand and bound in the thin, translucent mottled shells of unborn tortoises. This was Ivan the Terrible’s great library, saved from the vandal pillaging of Constantinople almost six hundred years ago, marking the end of an empire that had lasted since the time of Christ.
Holliday shivered, hearing the last words of the big, sad-eyed monk Helder Rodrigues as he lay dying in the rain under a dark, troubled sky: Too many secrets. Too many secrets.
“Poryodok zhar-ptitsa,” whispered Genrikhovich, staring across the high-domed room. He began to walk like a man hypnotized, humming softly under his breath.