“I would give a great deal for a lamp right now,” Kozak said.
So would Slater. The flashlight only gave him glimpses of what lay all around him — a wooden altar, covered with one red cloth and one white. A few ecclesiastical vessels — chalices and bowls and salvers. Everything thick with dust.
But a candelabra, too — with the nubs of candles still in it.
“Have you got some matches on you?” Slater asked, and Kozak, patting his pipe pocket, said, “Always.”
Slater left his flashlight beam trained on the candelabra, and the professor struck one match after another, trying to find and light the wicks. Eventually, out of six or seven candles, he got four of them lighted, providing a flickering but more diffused light to penetrate the room.
The first thing he noticed was a door, no more than four feet tall, cut flush with the logs in the wall and secured by a crossbar. When he pointed it out to Kozak, he said, jokingly, “I wish we’d known about that in advance.”
“Huh,” Kozak said, running his fingers over his beard. “A bishop’s door. You find such a thing in the great churches of places like Moscow — places where a bishop might actually wish to make a miraculous appearance. But I would never have expected to find one here.” He rattled the crossbar in its grooves and it moved easily. “And they could hardly have expected a bishop to come to this church.”
“What about a grand duchess?” Slater was beginning to believe what Kozak had translated from the sexton’s ledger.
But Kozak shook his head. “I don’t think even she knew she would end her days here.”
“Who was it built for then?”
“If I had to make a guess,” the professor said, “I would say it was her protector and confessor. The man these settlers came here to venerate. Rasputin.”
Slater glanced again at the rough-hewn door, fitted so skillfully into the wall that it would hardly be noticed if it were not for the bar. They had missed its existence entirely from the outside.
Against the opposite wall, a mirrored cabinet stood open, with two cassocks hanging from its hooks. Kozak reverently stroked the sleeve of the white cassock, saying, “This one was used only for Pascha. Easter.” The other was black, with a scarlet lining, and when he brushed it to one side, he reached into the back of the cabinet, felt the rim of a basin — no doubt the sacrarium used to wash the holy linens after a service — and started to lift it out. There was the sound of pebbles sloshing around in a bowl.
“Frank.” Kozak’s voice was filled with awe. “Frank.”
The professor moved to the altar, holding the bowl in front of him as carefully as if it were the host itself. When he put it down, Slater trained his own beam on it, and it was like he was looking at a kaleidoscope.
The basin itself was made of white porcelain, with a gold rim, but inside it, as if they were a heap of marbles, lay a dazzling mound of gems — bright white diamonds, fiery rubies, sapphires as blue as the crevices in a glacier, emeralds as green as a cat’s eyes. There were rings, too — of gold and silver — and bracelets and broaches — ivory and onyx — and ropes of pearls, coiled and tangled, that had faded to a pale yellow. Kozak dipped his hands in, as if he were tossing a salad, and let the jewels sift back into the bowl between his fingers. They clinked and clattered as they fell, the sound echoing around the sacristy.
“Talk about a king’s ransom,” Slater said.
“No,” Kozak said. “A Tsar’s ransom.”
It was more than Slater had ever imagined finding. He had gone along with the professor’s scheme more out of curiosity than conviction — not to mention the pleasure of defying Colonel Waggoner’s orders — and now they had stumbled upon a long-lost and legendary treasure. They had found what remained of the Romanov jewels.
The candles guttered on the altar, and one threw a spark that drifted, glowing, toward the back of the room. Slater followed it first with his eyes, and then, as he thought he discerned something in the shadows, with the beam of his flashlight.
Kozak was still absorbed in the gems, but Slater took a step or two toward the rear of the chamber.
A chair — no, it was more like a throne — had been placed in the darkest recess, atop a sort of dais. It had huge, clawed feet that protruded from under a long, gossamer-thin canopy draped from the roof. It was so grand that it made its own small enclosure. Had this, too, been designed in anticipation of Rasputin’s arrival?
It was only as he got closer that he thought he saw the tip of a small boot poking out from under the cloth. It couldn’t be. He took hold of the canopy and lifted it a few inches — enough to see that the boot was heavy and black, laced high and built with a thick heel, as if it had been molded to a deformed foot. Lifting the faded cloth higher, he saw the ragged hem of a long skirt — dark blue wool, homespun.
“Vassily,” he said, “come here.”
“Can’t you see I am busy?” Kozak joked.
“I mean it.”
Kozak ambled over, his broad back temporarily obscuring the candlelight, and upon seeing the canopied chair, said, “And that is called a Bishop’s Throne. They must have been expecting Rasputin, after all.”
Slater directed his gaze to the boot and skirt, and the professor immediately grew still. “My God,” he breathed.
Slater drew the canopy to one side, gently, but even so it began to shred and tumble from its hooks, releasing a cloud of dust that made them both turn away, coughing and closing their eyes. When the dust had settled and Slater turned back again, what he saw stunned him. His first thought was of the mummies found in the high Andes.
The old woman in the chair was sitting as erect as a queen, her eyes closed, her long gray hair knotted into a single long plait that hung over one shoulder of her cloak. Under it, she was wearing several layers of clothing — he saw the collar of a worn blouse, a jacket made of some hide, even the bottom of a richly embroidered corset.
But it was her skin that was the most entrancing. Her face looked like an old, withered apple, lined with a thousand creases, and her hands, which lay on the armrests of the chair, were brown with age; her fingers looked as brittle as twigs. One hand cradled the base of an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.
“Do you think …” Slater said, but before he could finish, Kozak had said, “Yes. Even the boot confirms it. Anastasia’s left foot was malformed.”
For at least a minute, they both stood in respectful silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Slater was already wondering how he would broach these discoveries to the colonel, who had strictly confined him to quarters. Waggoner could rant all he wanted, but confronted with the proof itself — a bowl full of gems and a frozen corpse — he would have no choice but to alert the higher authorities in the Coast Guard, the AFIP, and Lord knows how many other agencies.
“What do we do now?” the professor finally said, and Slater switched himself back into the scientific mode. If it weren’t for the astounding, even unbelievable, nature of what they had just discovered, he asked himself, what would he have normally done? Under more logical circumstances, what would the next order of business be?
Evidence, and the systematic gathering of it. On any epidemiological mission, the first objective was to collect all the available data and evidence at the site, and that’s what he needed to do here and now — even before notifying the colonel. Once Waggoner was apprised of the situation, Slater was not at all confident that he would be given any further access. In all likelihood, he would be put under guard and whisked off the island as fast as the first chopper could take him — and in handcuffs, if the colonel had his way. No, this, he recognized, might well be his only chance to do any science at all.