“And only after you show me that you actually have it,” Nevsky said, pointedly looking Sergei up and down. The sealskin coat was weathered, his tunic was soiled, his boots were worn. Nevsky appeared dubious.
Sergei turned slightly toward Ana, and she pulled from under her full skirts a drawstring pouch. Sergei took it into his own lap, and with his hands concealed beneath the scarred tabletop removed two white diamonds the size of teardrops. He held them in his palm as Nevsky craned his neck to look under the table and see.
“One of them now,” Nevsky said, “as the down payment.”
Sergei gave it to him, and after looking around the room to see that no one was watching, Nevsky took a good long look at it and rolled it between his fingers. Satisfied, he wrapped it in his red handkerchief and stuck it in the pocket of his shirt. Then, leaning back in his chair with a skeptical expression, he said, “But where would someone like you have come by something like this?”
It was a question Sergei and Ana had been asked before.
“The Winter Palace,” Sergei confided, as if ashamed of his own actions.
“The Tsar’s treasures belonged to the people,” Nevsky said, feigning indignation and coughing into the back of his hand. “When the Winter Palace was stormed, that loot belonged to the proletariat.”
“I am part of the proletariat,” Sergei replied, and at this Nevsky laughed.
“An enterprising one, I’ll say that for you.” Then, leaning close, he explained that Sergei and Ana were to meet him at the airfield as soon as it was light out. “Keep behind the hangars, and for God’s sake, don’t call any attention to yourselves. Don’t bring anything heavier than a handful of straw. The plane won’t carry any more weight.”
That night, in return for an exorbitant charge to the innkeeper, Sergei and Ana bedded down between the beer barrels in the cellar of the tavern and waited anxiously for the dawn. Ana had never been in an airplane before, and she was quite sure Sergei had never been, either. She didn’t ask him because she knew he liked to pretend to be more worldly and experienced than he was, although, in her eyes, he was just a boy—a gangly creature with loose limbs and a cowlick and a long face that reminded her of her favorite pony. And she loved him.
Not only because he had saved her life—though wouldn’t that have been enough?—but because his heart had remained pure and righteous. She loved him for his innocence, for his devotion … and because he loved her in turn. Ana had lived a life of extravagant luxury and immense privilege, but she had also been cloistered and cosseted and confined, and it was only in the past year, when all of that had been stripped away, that she felt she had learned so much of what life was really like. Father Grigori had always told her she had a special destiny—the emerald cross beneath her blouse attested to the unbreakable bond between them—but only now did she feel she might be moving toward such a thing, whatever it might turn out to be. And without Sergei, she would never have escaped the makeshift graveyard at the Four Brothers, where everyone else in her family lay.
It sickened her that the official Soviet press still claimed that only her father had been shot and the rest of the family was safely sequestered somewhere. Once she made it to freedom, even if that freedom was only an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, she would find a way to expose these butchers for what they were.
It wasn’t yet dawn when Sergei nudged her. She doubted that he had been able to sleep any more than she had. They gathered their few things together in a bundle and crept up the stairs from the cellar. The innkeeper in a nightshirt was lighting a fire in the grate and pretended not to see them. Outside, the air was frigid, but the sky was lightening enough that she could see there wasn’t even a wisp of a cloud in any direction. Surely this would be good weather for the flight to St. Peter’s Island. The thought of being in a place, no matter how barren and remote, where she could openly be herself, where she did not have to fear every encounter and dodge every stranger, where she would be embraced by friends and followers of Father Grigori, promised such relief that it eradicated any fear she might have had of boarding the plane.
By the time they got to the hangars, the plane, with a red star freshly painted on its nose, was already on the runway. Nevsky, a leather cap clinging to his bald head and tinted goggles hanging down around his neck, was circling it, checking the tires and the struts and the wings. There were two wings, a wider one above the tiny cabin and a shorter one below, connected by a latticework of wires, and a long tail that reminded her of a dragonfly. It looked to her almost as flimsy as a dragonfly, too, and she could hardly imagine it carrying them for miles over an icy sea. Sergei had stopped where he stood, and was staring at it with slack-jawed wonder and evident dread, when Nevsky noticed them and, taking a quick look around the empty field, waved them over.