Death of a Tyrant

by Christopher Nicole

  “Oh, Mom will be interested,” Alexei said. “No doubt about that. What interests me is why Gregory has turned up.”

  “You don’t believe he is meaning to emigrate?”

  “Gregory? Can you think of a more dedicated and loyal Communist amongst all the people we served with? Except Tattie herself.”

  “Circumstances change. He may have become fed up with the system.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But you think there’s another reason? Do you think he’s a spy?”

  “I very much doubt it. He’s not bright enough to be a spy. He was a schoolboy at the start of the War, got cut off in the Pripet, wound up serving under Tattie. He’s a professional soldier. A professional killer, if you like.”

  Elaine took a quick breath. “You’re not supposing…”

  “No, I’m not,” Alexei said. “There’d be no point.”

  “I was thinking of Joe. He escaped from the gulags before the War, he wrote all those articles condemning the Soviet system…”

  “And he went back to Russia in 1942, at the Soviet’s invitation, and stayed there for the rest of the War. If they’d meant to bump him off, they could have done it then, and no questions asked: he spent enough time at the front.”

  “And was wounded at the front. In Stalingrad. Has he ever talked to you about that? He was shot in the back, in a battle,” Elaine said. “Can you imagine Joe ever turning his back on an enemy?”

  Alexei stared at the road unwinding in front of them.

  *

  “Andrew Morgan!” Jennie Ligachevna said. “You look just like your father!”

  And you look just like every photograph I have been able to unearth of the Bolugayevskas, Andrew thought. Except of course, for Priscilla and Tatiana. The Princess was clearly a member of the family, but in her the big, bold, handsome features had been chiselled, thanks to her American blood, into that peculiarly breath-taking beauty which set her apart from other women. Similarly, Tatiana’s features had been tempered by her father, the classic Bolugayevski looks seeming to be slightly encapsulated, which had made her the more attractive. Jennie was simply an extremely handsome middle-aged woman, her auburn hair almost entirely grey, her body, which must once have been big and strong and compelling, sunk into overweight rolls of flesh, not enhanced by the shapeless dress she was wearing.

  But she seemed pleased to see him. She held his hands and drew him into the apartment, which he took in with a quick, practised glance. It looked surprisingly affluent, for a widow whose daughter worked as an Intourist guide. But then, both this woman’s husbands had been senior Party officials, and she was supposed to be on intimate terms with Stalin himself. “This is my friend, Galina Schermetska.”

  Andrew had been so absorbed by the Bolugayevska woman that he had not noticed the other. Galina Schermetska was a solidly built, dark woman, perhaps a few years older than Jennie. Her somewhat heavy face was a strange mixture of peace and sorrow.

  “Galina has the flat above,” Jennifer explained. “Our daughters fought together in the Pripet, during the Great Patriotic War.”

  “Mine died in the marshes,” Galina Schermetska said, squeezing his hand.

  “I’m most terribly sorry…”

  “I have another,” Galina said.

  “And now we are widows together, sharing our old ages,” Jennifer said.

  How the hell was he going to get out of this emotional impasse? “I have a letter from Mrs Cromb,” he ventured.

  “The Princess, you mean. It seems strange to hear her called Mrs Cromb.” Jennie took the envelope, laid it on the table. “She wrote me a few weeks ago, saying that you were coming, and that I must help you in any way possible. Have you an hotel?”

  “I am at the Berlin.”

  “Oh, yes. You will be comfortable there. And you wish to go down to Bolugayen? There is nothing left, you know, of the old home.”

  “I would still like to see it, Mrs Ligachevna. It’s where my father died.”

  “I know,” Jennie said, sympathetically. “Dear old Morgan.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Oh, yes. He was my father’s valet, butler and general factotum. As my father wasn’t very well, from time to time, I suppose your father was just about in loco parentis to me, a lot of the time, when I was a girl. Of course, Mother was there then, too, but… Mother was so often doing other things.”

  “Would you talk to me of those days?” Andrew ventured.

  “If you do not think it would bore you. But where are my manners? Here we are, standing in the middle of the room…sit down, Andrew. You do not mind if I call you Andrew?”

  “I should be flattered.”

  “And you must call me Jennie. Now, vodka! Would you like some vodka?”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Jennie poured three liberal portions. “Here is to old comrades!”

  They drank, then Jennifer cocked her head. “My daughter is home.”

  The footsteps were clearly audible beyond the thin door. Andrew stood up as it opened, and Tatiana stepped inside. He gaped at her. She had discarded the utilitarian pants and blouse of the train and was wearing a western-style taffeta dress with a flowered pattern, very fashionable in its flared, ankle-length skirt. While on those ankles…he was certain he was looking at silk stockings. He had not supposed there could be a more beautiful sight in the world than Tatiana Gosykinya naked in bed. But Tatiana Gosykinya dressed like a woman and smiling was a pretty close second.

  From the stifled comment beside him, he gathered that Galina was as surprised by this apparition from a fashion magazine as himself.

  “Tatiana!” Jennie said. “This is Mr Andrew Morgan, the gentleman I spoke of, who has come to Russia looking for traces of his poor dead father. Our family servant.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Comrade,” Tatiana said.

  *

  Joseph and Priscilla listened to what Alexei and Elaine had to say on the drive back home to Boston. “I suppose you think it’s pretty far-fetched,” Alexei said, defensively.

  “Nothing that happens inside Russia, or that comes out of it, can be far-fetched,” Joseph said. “But it is always governed by a kind of logic, however insane the logic might be to our way of thinking. I agree with you, that this man Asimov certainly has not come to America to emigrate: he wouldn’t have a hope in hell of doing that anyway, with his history. How he ever got a visitor’s visa is beyond me; someone must have falsified his background. But I don’t altogether agree that he cannot be a spy, simply because you remember him as a common, if somewhat bloodthirsty, soldier. The war in Europe ended more than two years ago. We know he was decorated by Stalin at the same time Tatiana was. It is quite possible that in the interim he has been given some concentrated training. I am not presuming that he would be any good rushing around with a mini-camera photographing secret documents. But there are a hundred and one ways of spying, of acting as your country’s agent. Stirring up labour problems is one, and we have some of those already.”

  “Then you think we should report him to the FBI?” Elaine asked.

  They all looked at Priscilla, who had up to now taken no part in the conversation. “I would like to meet him,” Priscilla said. “I think you are all being a little paranoid. We are agreed that to suppose he has come here to harm Joe is just not logical, even by Russian logic. Now you say that he has come to stir up labour trouble. To do that he has to become a blue-collar worker, and join a union, illegally. He says he wants to be a gardener. Is there a gardener’s union?”

  “Well…” Joseph scratched his head.

  “But he is certainly an enemy,” Priscilla went on. “I would like to meet him. I always like to look my enemies in the face. After that, we can decide what to do with him.”

  “And you don’t think meeting him might be dangerous?” Elaine asked. “This man is a trained killer, Mom. Alexei and I have seen him at work.”

  “Just as he saw you at work,�
�� Priscilla pointed out. Elaine flushed. She had never told her mother-in-law all the things they had had to do in the Marshes, fighting for survival. Or all the things that had been done to them, her in particular, when she had been taken prisoner by the SS. But she had an idea Priscilla, who had undergone a fair amount of physical suffering in her own life, could guess. “Anyway,” Priscilla went on. “What harm can it do? You have filled us in about this man. You will bring him to meet me. Joseph has a gun. You’ll carry it, Joe. I assume you own a gun, Alexei? You will carry it. And I also have a gun,” Priscilla said. “Which I shall carry. What about you, Elaine?”

  “Guns are not really my scene,” Elaine said. “I still think it would be best to turn the whole thing over to the cops.”

  “We are Bolugayevskis,” Priscilla reminded her. “We wash our own dirty linen, in private. I am quite excited at the prospect of meeting this old comrade of yours.” Alexei and Elaine exchanged glances. They knew Priscilla was excited, because she craved excitement. After the life she had led, the idea of gently slipping into a boring old age terrified her. But as with everything in their family, she was the boss.

  *

  “Well?” Beria asked.

  Tatiana stood to attention before his desk. “As yet he has revealed nothing more than what he pretends to be, a journalist looking for the remains of his father.”

  “He will reveal more when you start travelling. Are you enjoying his company?”

  “Very much. He is very…refined.”

  “And I am sure he is enjoying your company.”

  “I think he is, Comrade Commissar.”

  “But you will not, I hope, forget that he is an enemy of the Motherland,” Beria said. “Are you looking forward to interrogating him?”

  Tatiana’s nostrils flared as she inhaled. “Am I to do that, too?”

  “Would you not like to? I think that would be rather amusing. The ultimate in psychological destruction. First you make him fall in love with you, then you gratify his every desire regarding you, and then you destroy him, physically. After which, or perhaps at the same time, you destroy him mentally. I shall look forward to seeing you do that.” Tatiana’s tongue showed between her teeth, for just a moment, and was then withdrawn. “I can tell that you find it an attractive prospect,” Beria said. “But you will remember that you just string him along until I say so. I am going down to Astrakhan for a few days. When are you leaving for Bolugayen?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Good. You can report to me on what you have discovered when I return.”

  Tatiana hesitated. “May I ask a question, Comrade Commissar? Is there news of Comrade Asimov?” Beria raised his eyebrows. Tatiana flushed. “I know it is incorrect to inquire after fellow agents, Comrade Commissar. But Comrade Asimov has not been seen for some time…”

  “What do you know of him?”

  “He fought beneath me in the Pripet.”

  “Ah,” Beria said. So she does have a lover, he thought. Well, well. “No, Comrade Gosykinya, I have no news of him. He is on an important mission, overseas. I will inform you when he returns.”

  ***

  Sonia Bolugayevska walked in the marshes of the delta, picking wild flowers. She was allowed this liberty, because it was not actually liberty: she was accompanied by two armed guards. They kept their distances, one to either side, and did not interfere with her in any way. They knew she could not escape them, and they were prepared to terminate her walk the moment any outside party appeared, if that should ever happen. But she could pretend she was free, and enjoy the warm sunshine, and even allow herself to be happy. Because, as she understood, this was as much freedom as she had ever been allowed, by Fate.

  Being born a Jew in Tsarist Russia meant that you were born unfree. One was not a slave, but one was surrounded by so many rules and restrictions, so many imminent catastrophes, that one might as well have lived within a barbed-wire fence. Being arrested for sedition, being charged with treason, had seemed an almost inevitable consequence of her situation. Being tortured by the Okhrana into saying things that were not true but which had to be said at least to alleviate the pain had been equally inevitable, looked at in the light of cold logic. That she had survived, and had not forgotten how to smile and even how to laugh, had been because her companion in distress had been the Countess Patricia Bolugayevska, the ultimate patrician.

  Sonia had never been certain in her mind, for all the mental and physical intimacy the two of them had been forced to share for so long, whether Patricia had become involved in the plot against the Tsar because she genuinely believed in the Revolution, because she had not had any clear idea of where her political dabbling was taking her, or because she had simply become bored with the meaningless life of an effete aristocrat! But Sonia was certain that she was alive today because of Patricia. The Tsar, poor, weak, wife-dominated man, had not been able to bring himself to execute the daughter of one of the oldest of Russian princely families. And if he could not execute her, then in all justice he could not execute her accomplice either. Thus Siberia, and a long lesson in how to hate. But how to love, also. Certainly for Patricia and her Jewish lover.

  But no freedom. When they had escaped from Irkutsk, with Vladimir Ulianov, who would later call himself Lenin, and his wife Krupskaya, it had been in search of freedom or death. They had found neither. How much more free could a woman be, it had seemed, than to be swept off her tortured, blistered feet by the dashing, handsome, Prince Alexei of Bolugayen? Sonia had no doubt that in the first instance Alexei had cared for her simply because he was also caring for his sister. But he had fallen in love with her. Princess of Bolugayen! But that too had been a prison, of position and privilege, that had been ended so abruptly when the Jewish lawyer, Mordka Bogrov, had shot and fatally wounded the then prime minister, Peter Stolypin. That act of senseless vengeance — struck for what, she had often wondered? — had launched one of the greatest pogroms in Russian history. As Princess of Bolugayen, she had been immune from the catastrophe that had overtaken so many of her people. But she had very rapidly discovered that it was no longer possible for her to remain Princess of Bolugayen. At the time she had even considered her divorce as a release. But she had merely plunged into another prison, that of the professional revolutionary, of eternal midnight trysts and sudden, frightening doorbells.

  Out of which had come the imprisonment of being Trotsky’s mistress. She knew now that she had never loved Trotsky. She could have. The power of his personality was all-pervading, and all protecting, up to a point. But even as she had succumbed to his undoubted charms she had been repelled by his savage intensity, his ruthless determination to take the party to success, sparing neither man, woman nor child on the way. Living with Trotsky had been as brutal a prison as she had ever known. But she had never attempted to flee him. He had fled her, unintentionally, lying dead at her feet after the assassin Mercador had attacked him with her own ice-pick. Then, for a few months, she had actually been free. For the first time in her life. Perhaps it had been too strange for her. She had sought to regain contact with her family by marriage, with the woman who had replaced her as Mistress of Bolugayen, and who had, in such strange, such terrible circumstances, become her friend. As she had anticipated, she had been welcomed by the Bolugayevski-Crombs. Thus she had been unable to resist the temptation to return to Russia with Priscilla, assuming she had been under the aegis of that all-embracing personality. But there had been no aegis, and thus she had again been plunged into prison. And from this prison there would be no escape.

  She knew that she had been condemned to death by Stalin personally. She knew that as far as the dictator was concerned, that sentence had been carried out. She had disappeared from the face of the earth. Only half-a-dozen people knew that she was still alive. Equally she knew that her captor intended her to die, when she could do so most usefully — for him. He reckoned that her reappearance, on a carefully calculated occasion, might just tip the ageing megalomaniac who he
ld the lives of all Russians in his hand over the edge.

  Not that she supposed Beria intended to leave it merely to her reappearance. Her new master had intended that his coup should be sprung some years before. He had supposed that Stalin could not survive the savage losses and defeats being inflicted upon the Russian armies by the Nazis. He had been mistaken. Stalin’s stature amongst the Russian people, and indeed on the world stage, had risen to unprecedented heights, as the Germans had first been held, and then repelled, and then defeated. But Beria was a patient man. Stalin was old and ill. Beria still waited, and watched, and planned.

  The odd thing was that she bore him no hatred, any longer. She did not even fear him, or what he intended, which involved her fate. Her husband was dead. Her lover was dead. Her children were dead. Only vengeance was left to her. That she would die when Stalin died left her perfectly content. And for the time being, in her latest prison, she lived in as much comfort as ever before in her life. She only wished it would happen, soon.

  “We must return, Comrade,” called one of her guards. Sonia gathered her flowers into her basket, straightened, and walked back along the path. The guard moved closer. “Comrade Beria has come,” he explained. “We saw the plane, some time ago.”

  Sonia had not noticed the plane. Presumably it was their business to notice such things. She was pleasantly excited. Whenever Beria came to Astrakhan, it promised something. What an odd thing, to feel that an event which guaranteed her death should be exciting.