The Romanov Conspiracy by Glenn Meade Read Free Book Online Page B

and good day, sir.” He snapped his reins, turned his carriage round, and the horses’ clip-clop faded in the mushy snow.

    Sorg began to perspire with a rush of adrenaline.
    He was slim, of average height, with quick brown eyes and a well-trimmed beard. The one imperfection to his neat figure was his left leg. It was an inch shorter than the right. Sorg suffered the usual cruel childhood jibes: Rabbit, Jumpy, Clubfoot .
    But he remembered the day when he was four years old that his father, a music hall musician and a practical-minded man, employed a remedy: seated at the kitchen table, with a sharp knife and a block of leather, his dada shaped an inch-thick sole and nailed it to his son’s left shoe. It moderated his limp but ironically made the physical imperfection appear more like a swagger, because Sorg’s hip had shifted to counter his deformity. Still, it was a trait Sorg came to gratefully prefer.
    “How does that feel, Philip?”
    “Much better, Dada. I feel like a real boy now.”
    Years later, Sorg was certain he deciphered the watery reaction in his father’s eyes that day: love and pride, and pity that all he could do to ease his son’s affliction was add an inch of leather to his shoe.
    Sorg adored his father.
    Another childhood memory haunted Sorg.
    He was ten. One winter’s evening a group of men in dark uniforms smashed down the door to his parents’ one-room apartment. They were led by a sinister-looking thug with a milky stare in his left eye and a shiny bald head, his skin so pale that it looked bleached white. He wore a long black overcoat and seemed to enjoy inflicting punishment. In his right hand he gripped a brutish-looking brass knuckle-duster.
    To this day, Sorg remembered the sneer on the man’s hate-filled face after he kicked in their door and flashed his identity card. “Kazan—secret police, the Ochrana. Keep your hands where I can see them, you Jewish socialist muck. We’ll teach you to raise trouble.”
    Forever after, Kazan’s face lived vividly in Sorg’s nightmares.
    His expression was a study in pure evil, and he laughed as he savagely beat Sorg’s father with the knuckle-duster, then dragged him away despite his mother’s desperate pleas. Sorg’s mother was beaten, too. Her pregnant stomach kicked, her body pummeled with blows.
    Sorg never saw his father again.
    Ahead of him now was a broad avenue with wrought-iron gaslights that led up to Alexander Palace, a brisk ten-minute stroll away. His lodging house was less than that. Carrying his bag, Sorg began to walk.
    It was hard to believe that the Romanovs—the tsar, his wife, young son, and four princess daughters, including Princess Anastasia—were prisoners here. But Sorg was about to change all that, and the irony wasn’t lost on him.
    He was going to help rescue the tsar, the very man his father despised.

    As Sorg walked east, the elegance of the graceful streets faded and he came to a deserted, cobbled courtyard of wood-and-brick townhouses.
    The homes were once occupied by minor court officials. Here and there they bore the bullet-mark scars of civil war. Some were in ruin and boarded up.
    He saw a big, fleshy-looking man with hunched shoulders shoveling snow from the footpath of one of the townhouses. He wore a fur-collared coat and gloves, and he slinked over. “Mr. Carlson, you’re back. Keeping busy, I hope?”
    “I’m trying to. And you, Mr. Ravich?”
    The landlord grinned crookedly. “It’s hard to get help these days, Mr. Carlson. My groundsman left me to join the Reds. By the way, the council may turn off the water supply for a time to carry out repairs.”
    “I’ll remember that.”
    The landlord had bad teeth, a long, thin nose, and crafty eyes. He had once been an officer in the tsar’s navy, or so he told Sorg, and boasted that he owned four of the townhouses along with valuable commercial property in St. Petersburg. Sorg was his last remaining tenant in the crescent and the landlord