Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

Epilogue

Siberia: 1912

Boris Antonovich Dermanski adjusted the straps on the pack he carried on his back and tried to get his bearings. It had been nineteen years since he had been here. The train tracks were there, two sets of them now, but there was no train at rest to tell him which way to go.

He knew that the rock where he had hidden the package was north of the tracks and no more than a few hundred yards from them. That reduced the search area to several million acres. He also knew that the rock was somewhere between Beloyarskly and Sverdlovsk-Pass.

Boris had survived the search and killing two decades earlier. He had been tortured, lost a small finger, but played the fool and survived. Lieutenant Smolkov had not been so lucky. Boris had continued to work on the tracks, had hidden the package deep Into his thoughts, covered it with a gentle fog, waited, fearing that there might be those who still watched, still combed the area where the box might be hidden.

He had left the railroad and with the little money he had saved opened a small shoe-repair shop on Gogol Street in Ekaterinburg with the thought that someday, a day when he was absolutely certain it would be safe, he would return for the package he had hidden. Boris had married, had a son, survived with food on the table, just short of prospering.

When fifteen years had passed he had taken up hiking, always alone, staying out in the forest for days at a time, professing a love of nature which he did not feel. He had walked along the tracks, marking off the areas, probing into the forest through the aspen and birch, once-fighting off a pack of six wolves, once getting lost for almost a week.

What he searched for was some sign, some landmark he might recognize, but it all looked the same.

This day, however, was different. There was something familiar about the woods to his right and the mountains far beyond. He had felt this before, had been wrong, but this time felt different. It was a visual memory brought back from the protective fog.

He plunged into the forest. It did not feel the same as it had when he and the others had come in to drop the dead, and yet he was almost certain that he was right. He had gone more than a hundred yards farther than he was sure the rocks had been. He turned around, moved to his left about twenty-five yards, and started back. His plan was to continue this pattern, back and forth, till he found the rocks or was certain that he had to move on.

It was not the rocks he spotted first. It was the bones, and he almost missed them. A single bone stuck up from the earth, pointing toward the sun. Boris almost tripped over it because his eyes were scanning the trees before him in search of the rock.

It was a human bone, probably from an arm. He got on his hands and knees and clawed at the tundra with his calloused hands and fingers. In half an hour he had found a skull, probably the remains of one of the dead he had helped carry and whose remains had been dragged here and eaten. He threw the skull away and began to circle, using the skull and bone as his center point. Just as the sun was going down he saw.the rocks.

His heart was beating fast, too fast. He ran through the trees toward the rocks and when he reached them was surprised that they seemed so much smaller than he had remembered. His wife’s reading aloud of the Bible had colored his memory. He had been searching for a large altar, a rock worthy of Abraham’s planned sacrifice of his son Isaac.

Instead he had found a grouping of small rocks, gray and black, covered in green patches of moss, unworthy of the dreams he had hidden from his wife and son.

The niche was there, just as it had been, but what of the package? Almost twenty years.

It was there, the leather peeling, the cord still tied. He had not been told by the long-dead lieutenant what the package had contained, but he knew it had to be valuable.

He looked around the forest for signs, feeling watched. The sun was almost down now but he opened the package and found a metal box, a gold box. Inside the box, which opened easily, Boris found the ruby, huge, bright red, catching the last beams of the sun through the branches of the nearby birch trees. He clutched the ruby in his right hand, clutched it so tightly that his palm began to bleed.

There was a sheet of paper inside the box with handwriting. Boris could not read. He cared nothing about pieces of paper. He put paper and ruby back in the gold box and stuffed them in his backpack.

He should stay here for the night. He knew that, but he felt the presence of ghosts, perhaps the men whose corpses they had dropped. More likely it was his imagination. But he did not remain there. Moving to the south with the last of the twilight, he went to the tracks and began to follow them toward Ekaterinburg.

Back in town four days later, Boris hid the leather pouch and gold box with the letter inside them. He carefully approached the town’s most successful and corrupt government official, Arvidis Sujnesk, who had been a customer in Boris’s shoe-repair shop for a decade.

When he was confident of the level of Sujnesk’s corruptibility, he entered into a partnership. The details had to be worked out carefully to protect Boris, but Boris had spent almost twenty years perfecting his plan for this very event.

It took more than a year to find the right intermediary to handle the sale of the ruby. Sujnesk and Boris not only shared the considerable wealth, they used their money carefully, covertly, to corrupt and infiltrate the government and the managers of the nearby mines.

Within two years, the men had successfully established a criminal operation that made them powerful and wealthy. Boris was in his office when the news of the revolution came. The day the czar and his family were brought to Ekaterinburg on the train line Boris had helped to build, Boris and his son were on the road in their carriage heading for their dacha. The truck carrying the last of the Romanovs drove past them. They watched the royal family ramble down a country road in an open-backed truck. One of the princesses looked out at Boris and met his eyes.

There was a history of sorrow and resignation in that look that Boris never forgot. He instructed his son to keep a record of everyone their organization dealt with, to keep evidence that might be used in case someone came to take his family away in an open-backed truck.

When Boris died, his son took over the business with sons of Sujnesk. The revolution came to Ekaterinburg but business continued, prospered. Hundreds died when the famine came. Stalin’s fist pounded on Siberia. The town became a city of exiles who poured in by train, hungering for work, willing to kill for bread.

The son of Boris Antonovich Dermanski kept records faithfully and secretly, and when his wife bore him a daughter and no son, he gave her the golden box with the ancient letter and told her where to hide it and what records she should keep.

She did so faithfully, and when her father died he passed the gift to her. When she too had a daughter and the Mafia had risen and taken over the underworld, she had turned the gift over to her daughter, who dutifully maintained the family tradition.

It was only when the husband of the great-granddaughter of Boris Antonovich died that the young woman living now as a clerk for an electrician contacted one of the few members of the Mafia she felt she could trust, a man whose loyalty was purchased uncertainly for several nights of passionless sex and the gift of the gold box passed down to her by her father. The Mafia member had risked his life and eventually lost it by contacting a cousin in Moscow.

Two months later, the great-granddaughter of Boris Antonovich Dermanski had lost the precious, carefully compiled-contents of her package to the man with the limp, and escaped with the gift of her own life.

Now she sat as the winter wind hummed down the street outside the building where she shared a room with a friend. She looked out the frosted window and saw snow dancing madly in thin waves down the street.

She watched for hours, finally falling asleep in her chair, covered by a blanket. She dreamed of her father and mother, of the limping man at the train station, of her dead husband, and of a dark formless mass streaming toward her from under the door.

She awoke with a gasp to the sound of the Trans-Siberian Express roaring to a stop at the train station less than a mile away. She awoke to the sound and a warm light.

Outside the window, the sun was shining brightly.