Raiders of the Lost Corset by Ellen Byerrum Read Free Book Online Page A

in Normandy where Magda believed it was hidden, a letter of introduction Magda had written for her “just in case,” and her own extensive notes. She had been documenting her conversations with Magda from the beginning, and the old woman had encouraged her to write everything down. Maybe she had a premonition , Lacey thought.
    After the search for the corset had either born fruit or come up empty-handed, Magda had wanted to see an old friend of hers in Paris, the fashion center of the world. Paris was the icing on the cake for Lacey, whether the newspaper would pay for it or not.
    Leafing through the contents, she found the plane tickets and Magda’s own English translation of part of a diary written in Latvian by her grandfather, Juris Akmentins. Magda had learned Latvian from her grandparents as a child, and using dictionaries, she had painstakingly translated the diary into French for her own reference. She had written out an English translation of the relevant pages for Lacey, who had only this English version in her file.
    “Oh, my God, the diary!” Lacey said out loud. Nobody bothered to look at her. Reporters regularly talked to themselves and read their stories aloud. At the newspaper, it didn’t indicate mental illness, it was just part of the writing process.
    The diary recounted the days surrounding the Romanovs’ execution by the Bolsheviks, and Akmentins’ own part in the whole gruesome affair. It was written as a memoir decades after he had allegedly taken the corset, decades after he took the surname “Akmentins.” He had deliberately lost his original name somewhere along the way. Lacey had seen the slim brown leather volume only once.
    Magda had assured her repeatedly that the original diary and the French translation were in a safe place, but Lacey realized they were probably just as safe as the keys to Magda’s apartment, the keys that were kept dangling in plain sight above the sewing machine. Were they still in Magda’s apartment now — or had her killer taken them?
    Why hadn’t her grandfather rid himself of the corset or sold the gems on some black market? Lacey wondered, and it bothered her.
    He had tried to sell it once, Magda said, but he failed and had nearly been caught by the Soviet authorities. He took that as a sign that there was no safe way to get rid of it and realize the wealth he had dreamed of. He had lived the life of a tailor in near-poverty with a hidden fortune in gems, a fortune too dangerous to try to make any use of.
    Juris Akmentins’ diary stated that he had no objection to shooting the Czar or the Empress, but he and the other Latvians had no stomach for killing the children. They were already frail from their captivity and illness, and would no doubt die soon anyway. No matter what crimes the Czar was guilty of, his children were innocent. But ultimately Akmentins’ stand changed nothing — it didn’t stop the others from slaughtering the entire family. As punishment for his reluctance, he was ordered to help strip the clothes from the battered and bloodied bodies after the execution.
    Lacey skimmed through the English translation again at her desk. She could imagine the awful chaos of the scene that Akmentins described. After the first rounds of gunfire directed at the family, the Bolshevik executioners were amazed to find the Romanov princesses still alive in that smoke-filled hell of a basement. Their corsets, filled with layers of imperial jewels, had virtually become bulletproof vests. The jewels protected them from the first onslaught of bullets, but this brief respite from death simply ensured that more brutal means were employed to finish them off: bayonets, rifle butts, pistol shots to the head. Later, after it was done and the bodies were stripped, the drunken soldiers became obsessed with touching the bodies of the dead imperial family, perhaps to convince themselves they were really dead. They pocketed small souvenirs of their blood-soaked task. The