Now, raising his face from the sheets of paper that contained the working draft of the speech he intended to deliver to the Praesidium in twelve hours’ time at the Palace of Congresses, he capped his fountain-pen and looked at the figure of General Olsky, who sat facing him.
“This speech, Stefan, which may be the most audacious I’ve made,” – and here the General Secretary tapped the papers with his pen – “is going to be called incautious by some, bold by others, and heresy by all the rest. The hardline Marxists are going to say I’m soft on Western capitalism, which is anathema to Communism. The so-called democrats among us are going to say I’ve bent over backwards to appease the Marxists and leftover Stalinists who got our economy into a mess in the first place. I want to make unemployment a fact of Soviet life, for example. A bad worker should be fired. Others should compete for his job. Isn’t that perfectly natural? And the old men will nag me and say there can be no official unemployment in a socialist society. And the military – I see apoplectic generals when I announce my intention to cut military spending by twenty per cent over two years. I take a little from some, give a little to others, and hope it balances in the end.”
The General Secretary took off his glasses. It was two a.m. and he was weary. He surveyed the banks of telephones on his desk. Directly below his office was the main auditorium of the Palace where Communist Party Congresses had been held ever since 1961, when the Palace had been constructed. It was an impressive building, containing eight hundred rooms and a banqueting hall that could seat a couple of thousand people, but it wasn’t the General Secretary’s favourite building at the Kremlin by any means. He much preferred the sumptuous halls that housed the possessions of the Royal Family – the Regalia Hall with its extraordinary thrones and crowns, or the Hall of Russian Gold and Silver where there were elaborate candlesticks, goblets, rings, earrings and likenesses of saints. These displays stimulated a quiet yearning for Russia’s past that most people might have found strange in a progressive General Secretary, but he’d read widely in Russian history, and perceived his own roots in these readings, as well as his own designs for the future. This great sluggish bear that was Russia, bogged down in its own muddy past, had to be set free to survive.
Olsky, always awed in the presence of the General Secretary, gazed across the massive desk. Socially, he was comfortable with the Secretary when they met for drinks, or once in a great while to play cards, but when it was a matter of official business he could never bring himself to feel easy.
The General Secretary said, “About an hour ago, I spoke with Nikolai Bragin. At his insistence, let me add. He was most anxious.” He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out some photocopied sheets of paper, which he slid toward Olsky, who read them slowly, once, twice, three times. He tried to keep his hand from shaking.
“I’m obliged to show them to you, Stefan.”
“They’re forgeries, of course,” Olsky said calmly. “Where did you get them?”
“Would it surprise you to know they came from Greshko, who tried to interest Bragin in a story of scandal and corruption inside the Politburo?”
Olsky sighed. “I’m not surprised.”
“According to Greshko, there’s some kind of plot against the State going on. He told Bragin there are Baltic factions involved and he claims …” And here the General Secretary paused, searching for the right phrase. “He claims that you’re part of the whole thing, Stefan. He also claims that a certain KGB Colonel, Viktor Epishev, has been sent abroad under your express orders to participate in the scheme.”
“Do I have to answer these ridiculous charges against me?”
The General Secretary smiled. It was one of the most famous, most frequently-photographed smiles in the world. “I’m not satisfied there’s any need for official action, Stefan. Do you know the exact nature of the so-called plot?”
“Not yet. But I’m close to knowing.”
The General Secretary picked up the documents and arranged them in one neat pile. “Greshko’s like a wild boar. Insane when wounded,” he said. “I’ve always had a grudging admiration for the old fellow. I suppose that’s a terrible admission to make, but he used to tell some entertaining stories.”
“A dinosaur’s charm,” Olsky said.
The General Secretary made his chair swivel. “I wonder about his life these days. I wonder what it’s like to be completely stripped of power and sent out to pasture.”
Olsky said, “His mind wanders. He can’t tell reality from fantasy. The old Greshko wouldn’t have done anything as ludicrous as running to the press with forgeries. He’s slipping.”
“Slipping or not, he claims to have copies of these documents, Stefan. What worries me is the idea that he may have distributed them to people less scrupulous and more gullible than Bragin. A foreign journalist, for instance. Somebody in a foreign embassy, perhaps. You might make inquiries.”
The General Secretary was quiet for a second. “I don’t like the idea of Greshko shooting his mouth off to people about these documents, whether they’re forgeries or not. My whole administration has advocated exposure of corruption. How does it look if articles appear in foreign newspapers about the Chairman of the KGB dabbling in capitalist money markets? The fact that the stories are false is irrelevant. People believe what they read, Stefan. And then the news comes back into this country over the Voice of America, or through Scandinavian radio, and before you know it we’re discredited in front of our own people by rumours. It goes well beyond malice on Greshko’s part, Stefan. It affects us all. It affects our standing in this country, all the way up from the smallest workers’ soviet to the Central Committee itself – and we need all the support we can get these days. Any kind of weakness, any suggestion of corruption from within – I don’t have to spell out the possible damage to us.”
Olsky didn’t know what to say. He’d underestimated Greshko, but he wasn’t the first man ever to do that. He’d been humiliated by the old man, and his position placed in jeopardy. He felt a quickening of anger, a warm flush spreading across his face. The idea that his reputation had been attacked, and in the most questionable way, enraged him. But he maintained the appearance of control, if only because a display of emotion in front of the General Secretary would have been unseemly.
He said, “His physicians expected him to die months ago. I read their reports. Nobody expected him to live this long.”
“He was bred into a tough generation,” the General Secretary said. “The fact remains, he’s still alive and doing damage. The problem for you, Stefan, is to make sure the damage isn’t fatal.”
“And how do I achieve that?”
The General Secretary took the cap from his fountain-pen and began to edit his speech. It was as if Olsky had ceased to exist in the room. After a moment, the General Secretary stopped writing, and looked across the desk at the Chairman of the KGB.
“You have to deal with it as you think fit, Stefan.”
Olsky wasn’t quite sure what the General Secretary was saying to him.
“There are a great many people in this country, Stefan, who want to hurt us. Greshko happens to be in the vanguard of our enemies. They are also the enemies of progress. Therefore, they are acting against the Party’s interests. But you’re the Chairman of the KGB. Why ask me for advice?”
Olsky stood up. He turned his cap around between his hands. As he moved his face, he was struck directly by one of the concealed spotlights. He blinked.
“And this alleged plot?” the General Secretary asked. “Can the Chairman of the KGB deal with that also?”
Olsky moved out of the light and stood in shadow. Was there something quietly mocking now in the General Secretary’s voice? He wasn’t altogether sure.
“I can deal with Greshko and his damned plot,” Olsky said, sounding all the more angry for the fact that he didn’t raise his voice.
“Spirit!” the General Secretary said. “That’s why you got this job in the first place, Stefan. Spirit.�
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Olsky moved toward the door. He understood he’d just discovered a use for Lieutenant Volovich. Yes, and it was appropriate, something the wretched Volovich was schooled to do. It pleased Olsky on one level, even as it dismayed him to think he’d reduced himself to the level of his predecessor, but it was a game of cunning now, and survival, and all the rules of decency were suspended.
“A question, Stefan.”
Olsky stopped, turned around, listened.
“They are forgeries, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Olsky said.
The General Secretary looked at the photocopied documents. “Clever ones, though,” he remarked.
17
Near Tallinn, Estonia
Somewhere in the hours of darkness the girl called Erma came into the small room Marcus occupied at the top of the house and slid inside his sleeping-bag and put her arms round him, teasing him gently out of a sleep that hadn’t been deep to begin with, a dreamless state, a dark floating. She curled her fingertips beneath his testicles and touched him, feeling him stir. She enjoyed the ease of her own power.
Marcus woke. He’d been expecting the girl to come to him for some time, and so he wasn’t altogether surprised to find her beside him. He touched her breasts, which were soft, weightless, adolescent. He ran the palm of one hand – his skin was rough and this shamed him because he felt the girl flinch very slightly – down her flat hard belly to her groin, where the pubic hair grew light and shapeless. He moved a finger softly back and forth until she’d become very moist. She straddled him, rocking above him, invisible in the complete dark of the room. Blind like this, Marcus was conscious of how his other senses were extended – the slight milky smell of the girl, the unbearable softness of her flesh beneath his fingertips. It had been a long time since Marcus had been with a woman, and the girl could tell. He came quickly and she with him, shuddering, biting her lip to be silent because other people slept in this house, and she felt his sperm explode through the dark spaces of her body, thinking of it as a series of coloured lights popping deep inside her.
Then she rolled off him and lay beside him, holding his hand. She said, “I’m scared, Marcus. If you want the truth, I’m terrified.”
“We’re all scared,” Marcus whispered. “We all pretend we’re not because we have to. But deep down … You’ll find you’re no different from the others.”
“Are we going to die?” she asked.
Marcus was quiet, listening to the dark, the sound of insects, the occasional flutter of a bird in a nearby tree, the light wind that blew from time to time upon the old shutters. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was almost two a.m. This was the day, and he didn’t want it to be, he wanted to stall for another day, perhaps find time to enjoy this girl a little longer. But there was no changing the calendar of events. Here in Estonia, and in Lithuania, in Latvia, in Moscow – this was the day they’d planned and worked for, through years of secrecy and fear, through euphoria and gloom, trust and paranoia. He listened to the tick of his old watch, then turned the dial away so that the sharp green light wouldn’t annoy him. He put his hand around the girl’s shoulder. She trembled.
He gazed at the window and saw a thin moon sailing behind a garland of clouds. Tonight he was more tense than usual. But so were all the others who occupied this old house. Erma, the young man who called himself Anarhist, and the old fellow named Bruno, who occupied the attic and snored deliriously in his sleep and who’d been fighting the Russians one way or another since 1945 – they were all anxious in this damp, silent place.
What made Marcus more uneasy than the others was the fact that he’d gone to Tallinn earlier in the day for some food, and he’d sensed it at once in the streets, a change, a poisoned atmosphere – and then he’d seen the number of KGB cars in the city centre, and the officers who moved through side-streets and alleyways, and it became apparent to him that the KGB was conducting one of its periodic assaults on the city, ferreting out names on one of its notorious lists of ‘hooligans’ and suspected criminals. They moved on this occasion with unusual stealth, Marcus had thought, and he saw nobody handcuffed, nobody harried or pressed unwillingly inside automobiles – almost as if the order had come down from Moscow to do things quietly and with the least possible fuss. But the timing was bad for him. A concentration of KGB officers in the city was the very last thing he needed, and he couldn’t help wondering if their presence had anything to do with the plan.
Fear, Marcus thought. And he listened to the night, to the sounds that grew in the dark.
“I want to fight, but I don’t want to die,” the girl said.
“Nobody wants to die.” He could see her small face by moonlight and thought how beautiful it was in silver and how tragic the world was that this young girl, brutalised by the Russians, was ready to take up arms – when in another reality she might have been falling peacefully in love. An ordinary existence, a husband, children. “Listen to me. You could leave now. Nobody would think badly of you. You’ve got a long life ahead of you.”
“What kind of life, Marcus?”
It was a good question, and Marcus had no answer. A life of repression, a life of careful utterances, of never knowing who was watching you, who was saying things behind your back – he might have mentioned all this but he didn’t. He slid out of the sleeping bag and went to the window and looked down into the courtyard.
“Not much of one,” she said, answering her own question. “If I could keep my big mouth shut, and go about my business and notice nothing – but that would be like death.”
Marcus gazed at the outbuilding where the vehicles were parked. He saw it then, or thought he did, the cold hard disc of a flashlight, something that burned brief and yellow in the dark before vanishing, something alien that shouldn’t have been there. He turned to the girl and said Ssshhh, then he dressed very quickly and told her to do the same thing. After that she should go wake the others immediately and tell them to move around with no noise. Armed, he said. They must be armed.
“What did you see?” she asked.
Marcus picked up his automatic rifle, his Uzi, and made a gesture with his hand, a swift, chopping motion that meant the girl was to hurry. She scampered quietly out of the room and Marcus went back to the window, where he looked out cautiously, seeing once again the glow of a flashlight and hearing the noise of the tarpaulin that covered the vehicles being moved slowly aside. Now there were shapes that came to him in the thin moonlight – three men, maybe four, but he couldn’t see clearly. He heard the attic floor creak, then the noise of Bruno on the narrow staircase, followed by the sharp sound of the boy’s voice as he was awakened from sleep by the girl. What? he asked, but the girl must have silenced him then.
Marcus turned when the old man came in the room. He had a pistol in one hand and a Browning Magnum rifle in the other, and he carried himself with his chest thrust forward, his shoulders back, the stance of an old fighter ready to renew hostilities with an eternal enemy.
“In the yard,” Marcus whispered. “Three, maybe four. I can’t tell.”
Bruno approached the window, peered down. He was licking his lips nervously, dehydrated by the possibility of gunplay. Marcus studied the darkness, seeing a figure emerge from the outbuilding with a flashlight, and immediately behind him two others, both illuminated briefly by the moon, young men, boys, dressed in KGB uniforms.
“Do we fire from here?” Marcus asked. He could smell liniment from the old man, which he habitually rubbed into his muscles every night, believing it kept him young and supple.
“Mida rutem seda parem,” Bruno said. The sooner the better.
The three figures below were coming towards the front door of the house now. They would knock first, Marcus knew, but only once, and then they’d force their way in. They had grounds for forced entry, even though they needed none. Four vehicles concealed under tarpaulin, highly unusual, even suspicious. It was enough.
Erma and the young man came into
the bedroom. Anarhist had his M-16 strapped to his shoulder, the barrel slung forward. Erma carried a Uzi pistol, which seemed too large for her to hold. Tucked in the waistband of her pants was her other weapon, the Colt automatic. She looked fierce suddenly, no longer the scared girl who’d made love to Marcus moments before. Anarhist looked down from the window and Marcus could sense it in the young man, the urgency to fire his gun, the desire that drove him.
“Not yet,” Marcus whispered. “There might be others in the vicinity. We need to be sure.”
“Wait? Screw it.” Anarhist raised the barrel of his rifle and Marcus gripped it with his hand. The angle was narrow now, because the men below were clustered around the front door and the boy would need to hang from the window to get a decent aim, and then he’d be exposed.
“Go to the top of the stairs,” Marcus said. “When they come in, fire. You’ll have a better chance.”
The boy went out of the room, followed by Bruno, whose anxiety was as sharp as the young man’s. Marcus stayed at the window, watching, thinking that sounds of gunfire would bring others to the scene – if there were others nearby. And if they came, they’d enter this courtyard, and he could fire down on them. He smiled at the girl, who crossed the room and stood at his side.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Marcus touched the side of her face. It came to this moment, he thought, all the years of longing, the years of hatred, they came to a point in time when they couldn’t be contained any longer. He seemed not to exist, or if he did it was in some form he couldn’t recognise, shapeless, out of his body, an entity floating in the scant light. He held his breath, heard the sound of something hard on the door below, perhaps the barrel of a weapon – and then the door was forced open and the intruders were inside the house.
Marcus heard the gunfire, the terrible roar of it, and he saw through the open bedroom doorway the boy and the old man firing down into the entranceway, and the old man was saying Kaunis! Kaunis!, meaning, beautiful, beautiful. The fire was returned from below in a brief outburst, and Marcus saw the boy hit in the skull and thrown backwards against the wall. And then somebody was running from the house. Marcus, standing in the window, fired into the courtyard and the running figure stumbled, ran a few more paces, fell, crawled, and Marcus fired again.
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