The Company

by Robert Littell

  “We have been given orders and we are obliged to follow them,” the young officer in the turret tried to explain, but he was shouted down.

  “How can you carry out orders to shoot at your own people?” pleaded a young woman balancing an infant on her hip.

  “Answer if you can,” an old woman challenged.

  “Yes, Yes, answer!” others cried in chorus.

  An old man shook his cane at the tanks. “Shame on you, shame on the parents who raised you,” he called hoarsely.

  “Pozor! Pozor!” the crowd chanted.

  “Shame! Shame on anyone who shoots Russian bullets at Russian citizens,” someone else shrieked.

  “We are shooting at no one,” declared the officer, visibly shaken.

  Tessa circled the crowd, snapping pictures of the officer in the turret and the students shaking their fists at the tank. She reloaded her camera and, tugging at her father’s elbow, headed in the direction of the Kremlin walls. At another intersection soldiers had formed a circle around two trucks and a Jeep, their Kalashnikovs slung under their arms. Three young girls wearing short summer skirts that swirled around their bare thighs spiked the stems of roses into the barrels of the rifles, to the cheers of the bystanders. At the Kremlin tower, a soldier could be seen hauling down the Russian tricolor from a flagpole and raising the red hammer-and-sickle standard in its place. A bearded man in a wheelchair watched with tears streaming down his cheeks. “We thought we’d seen the last of the Communists,” he complained to everyone within earshot. A teenage boy on roller skates balanced a portable radio on a fire hydrant and turned up the volume. People clustered around. The distinctive voice of Boris Yeltsin’s filled the air. “…soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against them. The days of the conspirators are numbered. The elected government is alive and well and functioning in the White House. Our long-suffering masses will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.”

  Leo pulled his daughter to one side and said breathlessly, “Yeltsin didn’t run away to Sverdlovsk! He’s broadcasting from the White House. There still may be a shred of hope.”

  “What is the White House, Daddy?”

  “The Russian parliament building on the Moscow River.”

  “Then that’s where we ought to go.”

  Around them others were beginning to get the same idea. “To the White House,” a girl with pigtails cried excitedly. As if drawn by a magnet, dozens drifted in the direction of the Arbat, the broad artery that led to the Kalinin Bridge and the Moscow River. With rivulets of Russians streaming into the Arbat, the march to the river thickened to hundreds. By the time the massive white Parliament building at the end of the Arbat came into view, the crowd had swelled to thousands. Leo, bobbing in currents of people, had the sensation of being caught up in a maelstrom; his feet didn’t seem to touch the ground as he was carried along with the horde. All of a sudden protecting Yeltsin and the last bastion of democratization, the White House, seemed like a sacred mission, one that would vindicate his life-long allegiance to the Soviet Union.

  At the White House, Afghan veterans wearing bits of their old uniforms and armed with anything that came to hand—kitchen knives, socks filled with sand, occasionally a pistol—were directing the students in the construction of barricades. Some were overturning automobiles and a city bus, others were felling trees or dragging over bathtubs stolen from a nearby building site, still others were prying up cobblestones with crowbars. The crewmen of the ten Taman Guard tanks drawn up in a semicircle around the White House sat on their vehicles, smoking and watching but not intervening. Minutes after bells in the city pealed the noon hour, a cheer rose from the hot asphalt and gradually grew louder until it appeared as if the ground itself was erupting. “Look,” Leo yelled, pointing to the front doors of the Parliament building. The bulky figure of a tall man with a shock of gray hair could be seen standing on the top step, his arms thrust high over his head, his fingers splayed into V-for-victory signs. “It’s Yeltsin,” Leo shouted into his daughter’s ear.

  Scrambling onto the hood of a car, Tessa took several photographs, then elbowed her way through the crowd to get a closer look. Leo trailed after her. At the White House, Yeltsin descended the steps and clambered onto a T-72 with the number 110 stenciled on the side of the turret. The crowd grew silent. Journalists held out microphones to capture what he said. “Citizens of Russia,” he bellowed, his voice booming over the heads of the demonstrators, “they are attempting to remove the legally elected president of the country from power. We are dealing with a right-wing anti-constitutional coup d’etat. Accordingly we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this State Committee to be illegal.”

  Yeltsin’s short speech was greeted with wild applause. He climbed down from the tank and chatted for a moment with one of the Taman Guard officers. Surprisingly, the officer snapped off a smart salute. Beaming, Yeltsin made his way up the steps, through supporters who thumped him on the back or pumped his hand, and disappeared into the building.

  The motors on the ten Taman Guard tanks revved and black fumes belched from their exhausts. And to everyone’s utter astonishment, the gunners in the tanks swiveled their cannons away from the Parliament building. A raw cry of pure joy rose from the masses as people realized that the Taman tankers, moved by Yeltsin’s speech, had decided to defend the White House, not attack it.

  As the afternoon wore on, thousands more spilled into the plaza around the Parliament building. Estimates picked up from bulletins on portable radios put the crowd at fifteen thousand, then twenty thousand, then twenty-five thousand. The Taman officers and the Afghan veterans began to impose order on what many were calling the counterrevolution. The barricades grew higher and thicker and sturdier. Students on motorcycles were sent out to reconnoiter the city and report back with news of troop movements. Girls, some of them prostitutes who worked the underground passages near the Kremlin, hauled cartons of food and drink and distributed them to the demonstrators blocking the approaches to the White House with their bodies.

  At one point Tessa noticed antennas on the roof of the building. “Do you think the phones are still working?” she asked.

  Leo looked up at the antennas. “The ones that work off satellites probably are.”

  “If I could get to a phone, I might be able to call Washington and give my editors a first-hand account of what’s happening here. It could help turn world opinion against the coup.”

  Leo immediately saw the advantages in what she was suggesting. “It’s worth a try.”

  Pushing through the crowd, the two of them went around to entrance number twenty-two at the side of the building. The doors were guarded by some tough-looking Afghan veterans armed with two machine guns and a handful of pistols. One of the veterans was peering through binoculars at the hotel across the street. “Stay alert—there are snipers taking up positions in the upper windows,” he called. Leo quickly explained in Russian that the young woman with him was an American journalist. One of the guards glanced at Tessa’s press card, which he was unable to read, and waved them through.

  Inside, couriers scurried through the corridors delivering messages attached to clipboards. Secretaries pushed carts loaded with Molotov cocktails or sheets ripped into strips to make bandages. Young guards from private security companies were teaching university students how to load and fire Kalashnikovs. In one room on the third floor, down the hall from Yeltsin’s command bunker, they found a woman faxing Yeltsin’s denunciation of the putsch to Party organizations and factories and local governments around the country. Leo explained that the American journalist with him needed a telephone to call out the story of the counterrevolution. The woman stopped what she was doing and took them into a sm
aller office with a phone on a table. “This one works off a satellite,” she told Tessa in careful English. “If you get through to America keep the line open. When we are attacked, you must lock yourself in and let the world know what is happening.”

  The woman turned to stare out a window, a faraway look in her eyes. “I have always disliked summers,” she remarked in Russian. “This one is no exception.” She looked back at Leo. “What is your name?”

  “Kritzky,” he replied. “She is my daughter.”

  “Mine is Azalia Isanova Lebowitz. An assault could come at any moment. We are short of guards for Yeltsin’s office. Will you volunteer?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Leo left Tessa dialing a number and went down the corridor to the double door leading to Yeltsin’s command bunker. From inside, phones could be heard ringing insistently. From time to time Yeltsin’s booming voice echoed through the rooms. “The Ukrainian KGB chief, Golushko, phoned to say he didn’t support the coup,” he cried. In the hallway, Leo helped himself to a Kalashnikov and several clips of ammunition from a carton on the floor and joined a heavy man standing sentry duty at the door, an AK-47 in his strong hands.

  “Do you know how to work that thing?” the man inquired in Russian.

  “Not really,” Leo answered.

  “Here, I’ll show you. It’s not very complicated. You drive home the clip until you hear a solid click. If you intend to shoot you must work the first round into the barrel. Then there is nothing left but to aim and squeeze the trigger. I’ll put it on single action firing so the gun won’t climb up on you, which is what happens when you shoot in bursts. Do you think you have it?”

  “Work the first round into the barrel, aim, squeeze the trigger.”

  The man smiled warmly. “Pity the counterrevolution that relies on the likes of us to defend it.” He held out his hand. “Rostropovich, Mstislav,” he said, bowing slightly as he introduced himself.

  Leo took the hand of the world-famous Russian cellist. “Kritzky, Leo,” he said.

  “It all comes down to this moment in this place—the struggle to change Russia,” Rostropovich remarked.

  Leo nodded in fervent agreement. The two of them turned and, planting their backs against the wall, surveyed the traffic in the corridor.

  Wedged into a folding aluminum garden chair in the rooftop solarium, one empty and one full bottle of Scotch within arm’s reach on the deck, Harvey Torriti enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of the events unfolding in the streets around the White House, across the river from the Hotel Ukraine. He had swapped his Swatch for a pair of Red Army binoculars before taking the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor late in the afternoon and hauling his carcass up the last staircase, an exertion that left him vowing to start smoking again since he couldn’t see what stopping had done for his respiration. Moscow had cooled down once the sun dipped below the industrial haze on the horizon and the lights of the city had flickered on peacefully enough. It was only when the Sorcerer peered through the binoculars that the scene began to look more ominous. The concierge at the desk in the lobby had been vague about what was going on outside. There was some sort of military exercise under way, he guessed. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about. Russia, after all, was a civilized country where the rule of law prevailed. What about the mob at that white building on the other side of the river? Torriti had asked. Pensioners, the concierge had explained with a contemptuous wave of his hand, bitching about inflation.

  The pensioners bitching about inflation, some fifty thousand strong if you believed the British journalists in the lobby, had settled down for the night around the white building. Through the binoculars Torriti could make out clusters of them huddled around dozens of campfires. The light from the flames illuminated shadowy figures who were laboring to pile desks and park benches and potbellied stoves onto the already towering barricades.

  Torriti uncapped the last bottle of Scotch and treated himself to one for the road even though he had no intention of hitting the road. It was a crying shame—a few more days and his gnomelike friend Rappaport, surrounded by Uighur guardian angels, might have been able to fulfill the contracts that Torriti had put out on ten of the leaders of the uprising. No plotters, no putsch. The Sorcerer wondered what had pushed them to advance D-day. He’d probably never know. Well, what the hell—you win some, you lose some, in the end it pretty much evened out.

  He brought the binoculars back up to his red-rimmed eyes. Near the Kremlin, on the Lenin Hills, along several of the wider boulevards visible from the Ukraine’s roof, long lines of hooded headlights could be seen snaking in one direction or another. “Tanks,” the Sorcerer muttered to himself. He wondered where Leo Kritzky was at this moment. Probably locked himself in his apartment until the tempest passed. It crossed the Sorcerer’s mind that he might not be safe here on the roof—he remembered Ebbitt telling him once how Soviet tanks invading Budapest in ’56 had shot out the lower floors of buildings to bring the upper floors crashing down on them. Torriti had gotten off to a sour start in Berlin with Ebbitt—Jesus, that was a lifetime ago!—but he’d turned out to be a good brick after all. And when it came to Russian tanks, Ebbitt knew what he was talking about—he’d witnessed the Budapest fiasco with his own eyes. Still, if the tanks attacked, it wouldn’t be the Hotel Ukraine with all the foreigners inside. It would be the white building across the street. But to get close enough to shoot out the bottom floors the tanks would have to crush a lot of warm bodies blocking the streets.

  Would the generals and the KGB conspirators lose their nerve when it came down to shedding Russian blood? Would the demonstrators in the streets break and run, if and when the kettle boiled over?

  From far below, an indistinct cry rose from the gutters around the white building. Heaving himself out of the chair, Torriti shambled over to the guardrail and angled his ear in the direction of the sound. Words seemed to impregnate the currents of cool air drifting in from the river. Ross-something. Rossiya! That was it. Rossiya! Rossiya! It spread through the streets and came back again like an echo. Rossiya! Rossiya! Rossiya!

  Torriti scratched at his ass with a fat knuckle. He had frittered away the best years of his life locked in combat with this Rossiya. And here he was, boozing it up on a Moscow rooftop and rooting for it to survive.

  Go figure!

  Azalia Isanova was running on raw nerves and nervous energy. Aside from an occasional catnap on a sofa, she spent most of her waking hours keeping the fax machines humming with Yeltsin’s ringing proclamations declaring the putsch not only illegal but downright evil. The barrage of faxes dispatched to the far corners of the immense Soviet empire was starting to bear fruit. Pledges of loyalty to the elected central government trickled in from local Party organizations. Collective farms in the Caucuses, regional dumas in Central Asia, veteran groups as far away as the Kamchaka Peninsula telexed their support. Yeltsin himself was jubilant when Aza brought word that 100,000 people had rallied in Sverdlovsk’s main square to denounce the putschists. Now, on the second night of the coup d’état, as the war of nerves dragged on, rumors became rampant. Such-and-such a tank unit was said to have been ordered to come down from the Lenin Hills and clear the approaches to the White House. Elite KGB troops had been spotted boarding helicopters at an airbase near Moscow. The KGB chairman, Kryuchkov, was reported to have assembled his lieutenants in a Lubyanka conference room and given them an ultimatum: Crush the counterrevolution within twenty-four hours.

  During a lull on the second night of the putsch, Aza abandoned her bank of fax machines for a few minutes and wandered over to an open window for a breath of fresh air. Three floors below, demonstrators were breaking up enough furniture to feed the campfires for another long night. On a makeshift stage, middle-level government officials loyal to Yeltsin were taking turns at a microphone, boosting morale of the counterrevolutionists as best they could. Then Yevgeny Yevtushenko could be seen striding up to the microphone. His piercing poet’s voice, familiar to every Russi
an, reverberated through the plaza from speakers fixed to lampposts. “Nyet!” he cried.

  Russia will not fall again

  on her knees for interminable years.

  With us are Pushkin, Tolstoy.

  With us stands the whole awakened people.

  And the Russian Parliament,

  like a wounded marble swan of freedom,

  defended by the people,

  swims into immortality.

  The cheers were still ringing in Aza’s ears when the telephone she kept in a drawer of her desk buzzed. She bolted over, yanked open the drawer and plucked the phone from its cradle. “Of course it’s me,” she breathed. “I am the only one to answer this phone…For me it is the same. Every time you call my heart leaps with an elation that defies description. I only worry that someone will catch you calling…When this is over, dear heart…Yes, yes, with all my soul and all my body, yes…When is this to happen?…You are sure it is only a probing action, not the advance guard for a full-blown attack?…And they suspect nothing?…I pray to heaven it is true. Only be careful. Call when you have news but not more often. Protect yourself…If only it turns out that way. Hang up, I beg you…Then I will do it for you. Goodbye for now.”

  Aza forced herself to cut the line. She stood for a long moment listening to the dial tone. Then, sighing deeply, she went down the hall to Yeltsin’s command center. Boris Nikolayevich, his hair unkempt, his eyes rimmed with red from sleeplessness and anxiety, prowled back and forth in an inner office dictating yet another proclamation to an exhausted secretary. He stopped in mid-phrase when he noticed Aza. She took him aside and quickly told him what she had learned from her source. Yeltsin summoned one of the Afghan veterans and passed the information on to him. The officer hurried down to the second-floor canteen that had been transformed into a dormitory; people who served as guards at the White House doors or inside the building slept in shifts on blankets folded on the floor. The officer buttonholed the group just coming off duty and explained the situation. Three T-72s had been ordered to probe a barricade on the Garden Ring Road and test the will of the defenders. It was vital that the Yeltsin loyalists put up a strong show of force, because conclusions about the counterrevolution’s will to resist would obviously be drawn by the putschists. The Afghan officer called for volunteers. Seven students and six veterans, as well as an older man who had been standing shifts outside the command center, raised their hands.