‘Up here the guards occupied the area beside the stairs, and the family lived behind these doors,’ Nametkin said and waited for them to catch up. Giustiniani came up last, looking over his shoulders.
Nametkin threw open the double doors and Ryzhkov walked into the Romanovs’ apartments.
He could see the rooms had been taken apart. Every piece of furniture had been moved about and repositioned, the cupboards opened, drawers tipped out and anything of value taken away. It looked like a building that had been repossessed by a series of particularly angry landlords and then abandoned. Underneath it all there was an elusive perfume that still lingered in the dust, in the fabric of the chairs and the bedding. It might be soap or something rotting just from being closed up in the summer.
Nametkin waved his finger at the mess. ‘You and Strilchuk should get a list of all these possessions.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Strilchuk said. Whatever he said it always had that edge in his voice.
‘It’s part of the estate, I suppose,’ Giustiniani murmured. He was standing at the windows. Ryzhkov saw they had been painted over with whitewash from the outside and then the sash had been nailed closed.
‘Well…’ Nametkin made a face. ‘The Romanov estate? Until we have some evidence, I guess it must be assumed…’
Under a chair Ryzhkov saw a book. He stooped and picked it up: Les Bienfaits de la Vièrge. Inside was an inscription to Tatiana –
For my darling…
He slid it back onto the floor.
Around the room, nothing broken, no shards of glass. No blood. Just disarray and petty theft as the Bolsheviks had retreated.
‘Ah, here’s our friend,’ said Nametkin. A guard walked out with a man whose hands were cuffed in front of him. They put him in a chair and Ryzhkov told him to tell his story while Strilchuk wrote it all down.
The witness was one Petr Matok, and he claimed to have been one the guards at the Ipatiev house. In Matok’s version the Imperial Family had been brought to Yekaterinburg in two contingents: the Tsar, Alexandra and their daughter Maria came in April, then about a month later the remaining grand duchesses and the heir Alexei arrived and were taken to the Special House.
In the first week of July the Ural Soviet replaced the commandant of the guard with a Cheka officer named Yakov Yurovsky.
‘Why did they do that?’ Giustiniani asked them man.
‘He was the man from Moscow,’ Matok said, as if that explained everything.
‘So it was orders from the very top, then, eh?’ Nametkin said. Matok only shrugged.
‘Go on,’ Ryzhkov told him.
According to Matok, Yurovsky had grown up in Yekaterinburg and was an experienced revolutionary. He’d been educated, been a photographer, and had acquired sufficient medical experience to act as a doctor for Alexei on one occasion. Things changed with Yurovsky’s arrival: ‘Tthe broom sweeps clean,’ Matok said. He was smiling a little now. No one was beating him up and he wanted to say the right things and keep it that way.
Yurovsky replaced almost all of the guards, dividing them into two groups with no connection to each other: an outer guard of local volunteers to police the approaches to the Ipatiev house where Matok worked, and a strictly isolated inner guard made up of imported Latvian riflemen whom he’d brought with him. The Latvians came with a reputation as reliable enforcers: only a year earlier they’d been the guns that secured the infant Bolshevik revolution.
With the changes the Romanovs gained some privileges while others were taken away. Father Storozhev and his nuns were forbidden from bringing their extra daily rations of eggs and milk. This lasted until one of the doctors protested that the heir suffered from malnutrition, and Yurovsky relented.
‘But then it all changed, you see?’ Matok said, his voice taking on tones of helplessness.
‘Changed? How so?’ Giustiniani prodded.
‘With the Czechs, Excellency,’ Matok said, reflexively bowing to the men standing there over him. Starting in the middle of July there was a sudden clampdown on anyone approaching the Special House. The Czechs were pressing their encirclement of Yekaterinburg, and when Yurovsky wasn’t supervising the additional fortifications to the Special House he spent his time in the telegrapher’s kiosk at the American Hotel asking Moscow for orders, Matok claimed.
‘He was worried about being overun?’
‘Yes, Excellency. We all were worried,’ Matok said, giving a little laugh and another bow.
Then, he said, only a few days later he’d heard the Romanovs had been executed in the night.
‘Heard? Heard from whom? Were you here?’
‘No, Excellency. I had been given leave. I would have been here, because when you were here you got extra food, and you know…I am always hungry,’ he said. Matok looked up at them with big eyes. He didn’t know if he’d told them enough to save his life, and from Giustiniani’s expression the odds weren’t good.
‘So it was all Yurovsky’s doing?’
‘Yes, Excellency. All because of Comrade Yurovsky.’
Nametkin looked to Giustiniani, who sniffed. ‘Take him back,’ he said, and the guard pulled him up out of his chair and took him down the staircase. ‘Well, to me it sounds like a fifth-hand story. “He wasn’t here, he heard from someone else,” you know…all these people come out of the wood-work,’ Giustiniani said with a laugh. ‘For instance, the Tsar is in Harbin – that’s what it says in this morning’s newspaper,’ Giustiniani said, unscrewing a flask and holding it out to Ryzhkov.
‘You want some other wild tales? There was a mysterious telegram received, there was a special armoured train provided by the British that arrived in the middle of the night, there is a secret tunnel connecting with the British consulate, there are mysterious strangers, black aeroplanes that land on the main street and then take off again a few moments later…and so on and so forth.’
Ryzhkov took a short sharp swig of what turned out to be brandy. Excellent brandy, he thought. He offered the flask to Strilchuk, who just looked at him blankly and didn’t even move, then passed it to Nametkin.
Nametkin was searching his pockets. He came out with two pages and unfolded them. ‘This is what we know…’ Nametkin cleared his throat.
‘This is from Gorskov, another of these guards,’ Giustiniani said to Ryzhkov and Strilchuk.
‘We will go by his notes,’ Nametkin said, adjusting his spectacles. ‘“On the night of the 16th last, Yurovsky came up here with several members of the guard, and the Imperial Family were summoned to the dining area…There were trucks placed outside…”’ Nametkin recited.
‘Trucks so they could move them?’ Ryzhkov said. Strilchuk looked over at him. Nametkin shrugged and waved the papers. ‘…“the Romanov women took a certain amount of time, but when they were dressed…” and so on. Some time later –’
‘Didn’t he say “forty-five minutes”?’ Giustiniani’s voice was one note above boredom.
‘Yes, forty-five minutes later they were ready and then they were told that the Ural Soviet had decided to execute them. “They were immediately fired upon…“’ Nametkin read, backing away, and turning to the dining room as if it were going to respond. For a moment they all looked around at the open cupboards and tins spilled out onto the floor.
‘This