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It turns out that, upon his arrival in Ekaterinburg, Dolgorukov was imprisoned by the Chekists, not shot. In prison the loyal Valya (Dolgorukov) was in constant distress over the tsarist money the “commissars” had confiscated from him. Actually, he did not remain distressed for very long; soon he was “sent to Moscow”—shot, in fact, in an open field by one of the characters in our book, Chekist Grigory Nikulin.

In prison, too, Prince Lvov saw the prison commissar Kabanov, brother to yet another character—former tsarist Guardsman and later Chekist Alexei Kabanov, who so distinguished himself on the Ipatiev night.

Here is the testimony of that notorious exposer of provocateurs in the revolutionary movement, V. L. Burtsev, who described one very important character in our book:

“Lenin is a ‘cynic of the spirit’ in the full sense. It is something more than ‘Jesuitry.’ He has decided once and for all that all means are good and everything is permitted.”

Here is another description of a very different character in our story: “At a depth of seven and a half sazhens [52.5 feet] a woman’s corpse was found clothed in a gray rubber cloak, a gray dress, a white cotton bodice, a black shawl on her head, and a cypress and copper cross around her neck….

“Her head and body were covered with many bruises from blows by a blunt instrument, as well as the result of injuries from her fall into the mine shaft.”

This was the beautiful Ella, Alix’s sister. This was how she looked when they excavated the mine shaft at Alapaevsk.

My guest called again.

As always, he started in without preliminaries. And, of course, about the alleged tsarist grave outside Ekaterinburg:

“I forgot to tell you one awful detail. After the grave was opened, the tsarist remains were kept for a time at the Upper Isetsk police Station, in the building where the policemen took target practice.… So that once again the Romanovs were lying against a wall strewn with bullets.… They showed me a photograph of the tsarist bones and among them was a black cat that had happened to wander onto the firing range.”

Then he added with his familiar chuckle, “Well, as for the two missing corpses, those remains have yet to be found.” He was silent for a moment and then changed topics. “I heard you’ve been out of the country for a long time. I hope you’re up to date on the experts’ latest accomplishments. They really are accomplishments. Computer comparison of skulls and photographs has already established with 90 percent accuracy that two skulls belong to the tsar and tsaritsa. Well, for 100 percent certainty, ‘fragments of the remains,’ or in plain words, pieces of bone from the skeletons, were sent to the English. They have a Center for Criminal Investigations there at the British Ministry for Internal Affairs.” A chuckle. “You’re a frequent visitor abroad now, so you’ll be interested in the results. They’re going to extract DNA from the bones. They want to compare it with the genetic code of one of the presently thriving representatives of the English royal house, who, as you know, are the Romanovs’ closest relatives. They’ve agreed to help out. Well, they didn’t help them when they were alive, so they’ll help out now that they’re dead. It looks like the question of just who is in the grave is going to be decided once and for all very soon.” Again he jumped to a different topic “By the way, you would be interested in two more finds: some of Nicholas’s hair was found in Moscow; and in Ekaterinburg, in the archives of the former KGB, they declassified a very interesting file on the tsarist diamonds. I’ve always said that the jewels were one of the reasons the tsar’s family was executed. As it turned out, though, even after the death of their unlucky owners the stones continued to kill people.”

I had known all this. I had known that the remains had been sent to the country where the family had been so happy at the end of the last century. I was well informed about the work of the Moscow team of experts and had even