One reason for this method was that executioners did not have to look into the faces of their victims. But whoever killed this woman had stood directly in front of her. Pekkala knew that such a method required a particular coldness of blood.

Already, in his mind, he began to draw a portrait of the killers, assuming there had been more than one. They were almost certainly male. Women were not usually employed in execution teams, although there were exceptions to this. The Reds had made use of women in their death squads, and these particular women had proven to be more bloodthirsty than any of their male counterparts. He recalled the Bolshevik assassin Rosa Schwartz, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of former Tsarist officers. After her killing spree, she was declared a national hero and toured the country as “Red Rosa,” carrying a bunch of roses and wearing a white dress, like a virgin on her wedding day. Another detail which pointed towards these killers being men was the fact that the skulls all bore exit marks, indicating the use of a large-caliber pistol. Women, even those in death squads, tended to use guns of small caliber.

Now Pekkala examined the clothing, bringing the flashlight close to the woman’s body so that he could examine the material of her clothes. The first thing which caught his eyes was the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on her dress, which must once have been red but now appeared as a blotchy pink. His heart sank. These were the garments of wealthy people. Otherwise those buttons would have been made of bone or wood. Long, clumped strands of hair draped over the clothing.

On the bared arms, he could see where fat deposits had turned into adipocere, the soapy, grayish-yellow substance known as grave wax.

He saw shoes, the leather crimped and twisted, the tiny nails which had once held them together jutting now like little teeth from the soles. Again he felt the weight of growing certainty. This was not the footwear of a laborer, not the type that one would find out in the countryside and far too elegant for the wilds of Siberia.

At that moment, the flashlight shuddered and died.

The darkness that enveloped him was so complete it seemed to him that he had suddenly gone blind. Pekkala’s breathing grew rapid and shallow. He fought against the panic which swirled around him like a living thing.

Swearing, he shook the flashlight and the light popped back on again.

Wiping the sweat from his face, Pekkala returned to his work.

Having examined all he could without disturbing the scene, he now reached out and touched what lay before him.

The tips of his fingers were shaking.

He tried to maintain emotional distance from the corpses, as Dr. Bandelayev had taught him. “Think of them as puzzles, not as people,” the doctor had said.

Working his hands in under the back of the woman, fingers inching between the layers of damp and moldy cloth which separated the corpses, he lifted her body. The weight of it was still significant, unlike the corpse he’d pulled from the chimney, which had felt so light it reminded him of a Japanese lantern.

As he shifted the body to the floor, so that he could lay the corpses side by side, the woman’s skull snapped off the spine. It rolled off the other side of the pile and cracked against the stone floor with a sound like a dropped earthenware pot. He walked around the side of the pile and retrieved the skull, lifting it gently from the ground. It was there, in the beam of the flashlight, that he saw the sleeve of a man’s garment, a shriveled hand hanging from it like the claw of a bird.

He was not able to immediately identify the woman who lay at the top of the heap. Her corpse bore no distinguishing marks. But as he stared at the hand, he felt a shudder of certainty. Pekkala had learned to trust his instinct, even if it had not yet been tested against the checklist of rational thought.

Pekkala placed the skull of the woman with the rest of her body and moved on to the next one.

Over the next half hour, he untangled the bodies of three more women from the pile and laid them out. All had been shot in the face.

By now, there was little doubt in his mind that these were the Romanov sisters-Olga, Maria, Anastasia, and Tatiana.

Beneath lay a fifth woman, undoubtedly the Tsarina, due to the size of her body and the more mature cut of her clothes, who had also been shot in the head. Unlike the others, however, she had been shot from behind. The exiting bullet had blown away the forehead, exposing a massive cavity in the skull. She had died this way, he reasoned, as she sought to shield one of her children from the killer’s gun.

For all of them, Pekkala knew, death would have been instantaneous. He tried to draw some comfort from that fact.

Pekkala noted the obvious lack of resistance by the women. The shots had all been carefully aimed, which would not have been possible if the victims had put up a fight.

Then Pekkala came to the last body.

By then, the batteries of his flashlight were beginning to die. The light through the bubble-eyed crystal had gone from a blinding white to a dull brass yellow. The thought that it might die altogether, leaving him sightless among these corpses, filled his brain with mutterings of dread.

The last body was that of a man, lying on its side. His bones had been partially crushed by the weight of the other corpses which had been thrown down upon it. The rib cage and collarbone had collapsed. Beneath him, and spreading out in a pool on either side, the ground was black and oily.

The whole body was covered with a layer of dry, yellowy-brown mold. The coat buttons protruded like little mushrooms from the cloth. Pekkala reached out and brushed his thumb over the dust which covered the buttons, revealing the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs.

The man’s left arm was broken, probably by the fall. The right arm lay across his face. Pekkala wondered if the man had survived the fall and tried to protect himself from the bodies which were thrown down after him.

In addition to riding breeches and tall boots, the dead man wore a tunic in the gymnastyrka style. The tunic had been modified to open down the front and the stand collar was decorated with two thick bands of silver brocade. The color of the tunic had originally been a pale greenish brown, the front and hem trimmed with the same silver brocade as the collar. Now it was the color of a rotten apple. He had seen this tunic before.

Now there was no doubt in Pekkala’s mind that this was indeed the body of the Tsar. The Tsar had owned dozens of different uniforms, each representing different branches of service of the Russian military. This particular uniform, which the Tsar put on when reviewing his regiments of Guards, had been one of the most comfortable to wear. Because of that, it was also one of his favorites.

Four bullet wounds were clearly visible in the chest of the tunic. Pekkala studied the faded stains of blood that radiated from the wounds. Powder burns revealed that the shots had come from extremely close range. Gently, Pekkala moved the arm, to better see the dead man’s face. He fully expected the skull to have been shattered like the rest, but was surprised: it was still intact. No bullet had penetrated the dura oblongata. He stared in confusion at the remains of the neatly trimmed beard, the hollow where the nose had been, the shriveled lips pulled back around a set of strong, straight teeth.

Pekkala stood back, gasping in a breath not filled with the dust of decay. He glanced upwards, to where a velvet disk of night sky showed the mouth of the mine shaft. At that moment, as if jolted from the scaffolding of his own body, Pekkala found himself looking through the eyes of the Tsar as those last seconds of his life played out on the floor of the mine. From far above, spears of light stabbed down towards him. They glinted off a tunnel of wet stone. Illuminated raindrops flickered like jewels all around. Then he saw silhouettes of the Tsar’s wife and children come tumbling down towards him, fingers spread like wing tips, the dresses of the women thrumming with the speed of their descent. Pekkala felt them pass right through him, trailing the night behind them like black comets, and he heard their bones shatter like glass.