Chapter 41
Sergei was pushing a wheelbarrow back toward the Ipatiev house when he heard the sound of gunshots. For days, there had been the rumble of distant artillery, but this was small-arms fire, and much closer to home.
It sounded like a string of firecrackers.
The wheelbarrow was filled with several gas cans. Commandant Yurovsky had sent him into town with orders to siphon the fuel out of every vehicle he could find, and if anybody asked any questions, to refer them to the Kremlin. This was not the sort of duty the Bolsheviks had promised him when they came to his village and dragooned him the previous spring.
The shots were coming one at a time now, and Sergei stopped in the middle of the dark road, fear gripping at his heart. Who was doing all this shooting, in the dead of night, and why?
Pushing the wheelbarrow as fast as he could over the bumps and ruts in the dirt road, he arrived at the sharp-staked palisade surrounding the house, and when the sentry called out who was there, he said, “It’s Comrade Sergei Ilyinsky. With the gasoline.”
“Bring it around back.”
In the courtyard, Sergei found a truck waiting, and the stench of gunpowder in the air … and blood. His eyes shot to the iron grille covering the basement window, but it was dark inside and he couldn’t see a thing.
Yurovsky, stepping out of the house, saw the gas canisters and said, “That’s all?”
“There aren’t many tractors in Ekaterinburg,” Sergei said, careful to keep any emotion out of his voice.
“Go upstairs and get the sheets and blankets.”
Sergei mounted the back steps and found the house in commotion. Other guards were trooping up and down the stairs, their arms filled with linens, their mouths crammed with food, a couple swigging vodka from a jug. By the time he got to the room Anastasia shared with her sisters, the four cots had already been stripped bare. Books and diaries, combs and shoes, were scattered around the floor. Arkady, one of the Latvian guards who had recently been brought to the house, was stripping some curtains from the whitewashed windows.
“What’s going on?” Sergei said. “Where are they?”
Arkady looked at him quizzically, and said, “In Hell, if you ask me.” Then, tossing the curtains to Sergei, he said, “Take these to the basement.”
His arms clutching the curtains, Sergei stumbled down the stairs, his mind refusing to accept the awful reality of what must have just happened, then across the courtyard and down to the cellar. The acrid smell of smoke and death grew stronger with every step he took, and Sergei’s heart grew as heavy as a stone. At the bottom, Yurovsky, in his long coat, was holding a lantern and directing the operation.
The floor was so awash in blood that the soldiers trying to roll the bodies up in the sheets and drapery kept slipping and sliding.
“Just get them out of here!” Yurovsky was barking. “The truck’s right outside.”
Sergei scanned the carnage; he saw Dr. Botkin’s gold eyeglasses gleaming on his bloody face, he saw Demidova with a bayonet still stuck in her chest. He saw the Tsar’s worn old boots sticking out of a sheet, and his young son Alexei—one side of his face obliterated by a close gunshot to the ear—being wrapped in a tablecloth, like a shroud.
But where was Anastasia?
“Don’t just stand there!” Yurovsky said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Get to work.”
Sergei stepped into the morass, searching for Ana, and found her beneath the corpse of her sister Tatiana, soaked in blood, her little dog crushed beneath her. Her hair was caked with blood, her clothes were ripped to shreds, her hands were clutching something under her bodice.
Sergei felt the anger and the bile rise in his throat, and if he could have done it, he’d have killed Yurovsky and every other guard in the house on the spot. The House of Special Purpose—that’s what the Ipatiev mansion had been officially called, and Sergei had always taken it to mean imprisonment.
Now he knew that it meant murder.
He laid the curtains on the floor—they were the color of cream, and imprinted with little blue seahorses—and gently rolled Ana’s body onto them. He looked at her face, smeared with blood and ash and tears, then closed the ends of the curtains over her as if he were wrapping a precious gift.
“Move along,” Yurovsky shouted, “all of you!”
Sergei could hear the truck engine idling in the courtyard. The Latvians were throwing the remaining bodies over their shoulders like carpets, and carting them out. Sergei picked up Anastasia in his arms, as if carrying a child to bed, and leaving the cellar he heard Yurovsky joke, “Careful not to wake her.”