Red Wheels Turning

by Ashton, Hugh

  Lenin, who himself often produced this effect on others, nodded. “No name for this one either?”

  “No, he told me he was called Brian Finch-Malloy. He claims that he knew you when you lived in London. You taught him how to play chess, he told me.”

  The Bolshevik leader’s fingers rasped through his beard. “I remember the lad. Good player for his age when I knew him. What the devil is he doing in Petrograd?”

  “He’s in the English Army. An officer. Working with the Russian Army.” Michelov hesitated. “He told me Kolinski had killed his best friend and he had sworn to avenge him.”

  “So he killed Kolinski after they’d squeezed him dry?”

  Michelov shook his head. “Not at all. Kolinski is dead, though, I was told, but he died of shock and weakness. Apparently he’d been through a lot on his way to Kubinka and he was weak from hunger and exhaustion when he was captured. This Englishman gave me this package. It contains a photograph of Kolinski’s body in its coffin, he told me. There’s also a letter for you explaining what they had learned from Kolinski, including the details of his journey from here. But even if he hadn’t died the way that he did, they would have hanged him. He’d killed enough people on his journey to have him executed several times over, even if he hadn’t been a Party member.”

  “And then?”

  “He gave me this package. And the colonel gave me a safe-conduct pass and tickets to reach here through France. They told me that they could pick up my family at any time and send them off to Siberia, so I wasn’t to think of running away anywhere else. Not that I ever would,” he added hurriedly. “So here I am. I told Comrade Zinoviev about the details of my own journey here.”

  Lenin held out his hand in silence, and beckoned for the package with the other. He accepted it without a word, and gazed at his name written on the brown paper.

  “Get out,” he said to Michelov after a minute or so. There was no expression in his voice. Michelov looked at Zinoviev, who jerked his head towards the door. Michelov backed away from Lenin, who remained looking at the package, and opened the door, fumbling behind him, before slipping out and closing the door silently.

  Zinoviev coughed.

  “Yes?” snapped Lenin, who hadn’t lifted his eyes from the package.

  “What shall we give Michelov for his trouble? He’s been through a lot.”

  “A bullet in the back of the neck,” growled Lenin. “He’s been turned. You heard him say it himself. They have his family as hostages. He’s an Okhrana agent.”

  “You have no proof, Comrade,” protested Zinoviev.

  “And you have no proof otherwise,” countered Lenin. “Dispose of him as soon as possible.” Zinoviev turned to leave. “Not this minute, idiot. Open this package for me.” He thrust the package into Zinoviev’s hands, and Zinoviev started to unwrap it carefully.

  “A black chess piece – a knight,” said Zinoviev, laying it on the side of the desk. “A photograph – yes, it’s almost certainly Kolinski, but he looks exhausted and hungry. Look – the bastards put a crucifix in the coffin with him. Can you believe it?” He snorted. “Another photograph. This is unbelievable, Comrade. This is the machine that we asked Kolinski to find for us. Look at it.”

  Lenin took the photograph and examined the picture of the massive machine, with three men posed proudly on it, standing in a clearing against the backdrop of a birch forest. “It’s a machine,” he sneered. “Only a machine. Revolutions are won with the will of the people, not machines. What else is in there?”

  “A letter, Comrade. Presumably the one from the Englishman. Written in Russian, but not by a Russian, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Give me that letter!” Lenin snatched it out of Zinoviev’s hands. He read in silence, punctuated by outbursts of “a load of shit”, “the devil take them all” and other choice phrases. Finally he came to a stop.

  “It passes all belief, Grigory Yevseevich. Listen to this. This is how he ends his message to me.” He read out, “ ‘…and so, Vladimir Ilyich, I wish to conclude this message by reminding you of a lesson you taught me when we played chess together. You said I should never display my full strength to my opponent at one time. I have told you in this letter of some of the things I have learned about you and about your organisation. I have not told you of some of the others. These are things you will have to discover for yourself when we next meet, an event to which I keenly look forward. Of course, it may be that your ignorance of my knowledge means that you may be prevented from meeting me. Accidents will happen, and even in the most trusted of circles, there are those who will clamour for their thirty pieces of silver. With regards, your former chess partner, Brian Finch-Malloy.’ You see, I was right about Michelov. Dispose of him immediately. And what do you make of the rest of this shit?”

  “This has set back our chance of revolution by several years.”

  “At the least,” exploded Lenin. “We are going to have to develop a completely new strategy. If I understand what he is saying, it appears that Kolinski knew too damned much about what was going on, and has told them everything he knows. It seems that all our comrades in Russia will soon be in Siberia. This damned Englishman has set back the whole revolution and made us start again from the beginning. Get out and deal with Michelov before it’s too late, damn you!” Zinoviev quickly hastened to obey.

  Lenin sat at his desk, still holding the letter. He read through the last page again, his lips moving silently. He stopped reading, flung down the paper, rose to his feet abruptly, and swept out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The black chess piece teetered on the edge of his desk before falling to the floor.

  -oOo-

  Afterword

  I hope you have enjoyed reading Red Wheels Turning. As well as this book and Beneath Gray Skies, more books featuring Brian Finch-Malloy will be coming out soon. The next one in the series (provisionally called Gold on the Tracks) will also be set in an alternative history Russia, with psychotic warlords, complex shifts in the political scenery, wealth beyond measure, and Brian attempting to save the day. Here is a short extract:

  -oOo-

  “Come in and sit down,” said a thin, delicate voice. “I think we need to talk. You, I understand, are Fanny Kaplan, alias Fanya Kaplan, alias Dora Kaplan?” She nodded. “Not your real name, of course, but then how many of us use our real names these days?”

  She groped for a chair and sat facing the direction from which the voice came. “Excuse me?” she asked. There was only a slight tremor in her voice.

  “Oh, pardon me. I am, as you might already have guessed, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage—the Cheka. Some tea?”

  She nodded, hardly able to believe what was happening. She had had no doubt that by this time she would have been beaten nearly senseless, trying desperately not to name comrades and colleagues as the blackjacks thudded on her body. Instead, she was sitting in a comfortable chair, being invited to drink tea with the feared and hated head of Lenin’s arm of terror. This needed even more courage for her to accept than the blackjacks would have done. Her headache pounded in her skull. The samovar bubbled and the tea glasses clinked. There must be a third person in the room, she realized. A cup was pressed into her hand.

  Dzerzhinsky’s voice, but not addressed to her. “You may leave us.” A click of heels and after a few seconds, the sound of the door opening and closing.

  Dzerzhinsky’s voice again, sounding as though he were smiling. “Comrade Lenin is dead. Twenty minutes ago.”

  She gasped. “Did I … ?”

  A chuckle. His face was just starting to come into focus, and she could make out a rather delicate face with a high forehead and a heavy moustache, together with a wisp of beard. The face of a somewhat demonic saint. Or a saintly demon. “No, my dear. You did not. We know that you didn’t. You know that you didn’t. With all due respect, my dear Miss Kaplan, with your eyesight and lack of experience with a pistol,
I wouldn’t expect you to be able to hit an elephant at five meters, let alone a middle-aged politician at fifteen.”

  “You don’t sound very upset about his death,” said Fanny. Funnily enough, she had little fear of the feared head Chekist now that the conversation had started.

  “Oh, really, please. Let’s be realistic. Lenin’s death is the best possible thing that could have happened to the Revolution.”

  Fanny stared at him. “I thought…”

  An improbable giggle. “Never mind what you thought, my dear. Things are not always what they seem. Shall we simply say that the leadership of the Bolshevik Party is not always the united monolithic front that our late beloved Vladimir Ilyich would have had us believe.” His tone was mocking.

  “But you’re not a Menshevik? Or an SR?”

  “Oh no, certainly not. Of course, there are those who were close to VI who were not always Bolsheviks. I need hardly mention names, I think, to someone of your sophistication and intelligence. But please don’t misunderstand me. I personally, as a good Bolshevik, would never dream of espousing whatever principles moved you to take that fatal shot.”

  “But you said I didn’t kill him?” She was confused.

  “Of course you didn’t. That’s why you will be executed. So that no-one knows that you didn’t kill him.” His cheery good nature remained. “Not now, three days from now. The Council of People’s Commissars will be informed at regular intervals of the progress of your interrogations.” He seemed to be waiting for a sign of fear, and she steeled herself once again not to display anything in front of this monster of terror. A silence. “Well?”

  “What do you want me to say? Do you want me to betray all my comrades now? Or would you rather I waited till the Chekists start to break my body and rape me?”

  Dzerzhinsky’s seeming good humour didn’t seem to have evaporated in the least. “Please, you misunderstand me. You have no need to betray your comrades. We know who they are.” He pulled out his watch. “And in some cases, by now, who they were,” he added meaningfully. “We have no need to interrogate you. All we require you to do is to stay peacefully in your cell, eat the three good meals that will be provided for you each day, and at the end of three days, walk quietly out into the yard at the back of this building. Before that time, we expect you to write your confession of how you plotted Lenin’s death. If I may make a suggestion, I would suggest that you write that you acted alone, and you have no knowledge of any other parties to the plot. Of course, we could write all this confession ourselves, but I think it will sound better coming from you.” He paused. “You have no questions?”

  She sat silently, considering what she had just been told and working out the implications. So Bronstein, or Trotsky as he now called himself, had engineered Lenin’s death, with the help of the comrades she had trusted. She really couldn’t have expected anything else from any of the Bolsheviks, whose treachery towards anyone who trusted them, whether friend or foe, was legendary. “May I ask you just one question?”

  “Of course.”

  “My comrades. Did they know of your involvement and that of Trotsky in Lenin’s death?” She held her head high, forcing her unfocussing eyes to stare into his face, though the light made her head throb.

  He shook his head. “No, they believed they were working for your beloved anti-Bolsheviks. Congratulations, by the way, on your keen intelligence as it relates to the inner workings of the Council. My agent in your little circle, who is now dead, and you will never know his or her name, I am afraid, had no wish to shatter all your illusions. Please do not imagine that any one of your true comrades betrayed you. You must look higher than that for your Judas. Any more questions?” He sounded more like a kindly college professor helping a student with problems than he did the head of the secret police. “No? Then I must bid you goodnight. It’s been a pleasure to have met you. I won’t be seeing you again—alive, that is—so it’s good-bye, rather than au revoir.” He must have pressed a hidden buzzer, as the door opened behind her without any audible command having been given.

  “Take her back,” Dzerzhinsky said. “And treat her well. Proper food, and she must have access to paper and pen. Good-bye, my dear,” as she was led out of the room. “Sleep well.”

  -oOo-

  I am @hughashton on Twitter and you may also find me and my books easily on Facebook as well as on the Web:

  http://BeneathGraySki.es– alternative history, set in the 1920s Confederacy

  http://RedWheelsTurning.com – this book

  http://www.AtTheSharpeEnd.com– a thriller set in 2008 Tokyo

  All available through major e-book distribution channels and also as paper copies through Amazon, etc.