“I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said.
“You need Our Savior’s forgiveness, not mine.”
“Plus some tons of platinum,” Castillo said, chuckling. “Not to mention a lot of cash.”
Pevsner, his tone making it clear that he didn’t appreciate contributions from others while he was explaining things, then went on:
“As I was saying. When Vladimir Vladimirovich was faced with the problem of not wanting to turn over the SVR’s assets to the new democratic government, he turned to me. Nicolai and me. He correctly suspected that we would know how to get these assets out of Russia to places where they would be safe from the clutching hands of the new government.
“At about this time, Nicolai and I realized there were some aspects of capitalism we had not previously understood. As Ayn Rand so wisely put it—she was Russian, I presume you know—‘No man is entitled to the fruits of another man’s labor.’
“So Nicolai and I told Vladimir Vladimirovich we would be happy to accommodate him for a small fee. Five percent of the value of what we placed safely outside the former Soviet Union.”
“Jake,” Castillo said, “you’ve always been good at doing math in your head. Try this: In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, gold was about $375 an ounce. How much is five percent of two thousand pounds of gold, there being sixteen ounces of gold in each pound?”
“My Go— goodness,” Torine said.
“‘Goodness’ being a euphemism for God,” the archbishop said, “there are those, myself included, who consider the phrase blasphemous.”
“Again, I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said, then looked at Castillo. “And you said ‘tons of gold’? Plural?”
“So now you know,” Castillo said, “where ol’ Aleksandr got the money to buy Karin Hall, and all those cruise ships, and the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, et cetera, et cetera.”
“We started out with a couple of old transports from surplus Air Force stock,” Pevsner said. “We flew surplus Soviet arms out of Russia, and luxury goods—Mercedes-Benz automobiles, Louis Vuitton luggage, that sort of thing—in.
“Mingled with the arms on the flights out of Moscow were fifty-five-gallon barrels of fuel. You would be surprised how much gold one can get into a fifty-five-gallon drum. That, unfortunately, is how I earned the reputation of being an arms dealer; but regretfully that was necessary as a cover. No one was going to believe I prospered so quickly providing antique samovars and Black Sea caviar to the world market.
“But turning to Vladimir Vladimirovich, who is really the subject of this meeting…”
“I’m so glad you remembered, my son,” the archbishop said.
“As long as I have known Vladimir Vladimirovich, which has been for all of our lives, I always suspected—probably because of his father; the apple never falls far from the tree—that he was more of a Communist than a Christian, which means that he was far more interested in lining his pockets than promoting the general welfare of the Oprichnina.”
“That characterization, I would suggest,” the archbishop said, “qualifies as a rare exception to the scriptural admonition to ‘judge not,’ et cetera.”
“I gather you are a Christian, Mr. Pevsner?” Naylor asked.
“Of course I’m a Christian,” Pevsner said indignantly. “I’m surprised our Charley didn’t make that quite clear to you.”
“It must have slipped his mind,” Naylor said.
“Where was I?” Pevsner asked.
“You were saying that Mr. Putin was very much like his father,” D’Alessandro said.
“He is.”
“The story I’ve always heard is that his father was a foreman in a locomotive factory who became Stalin’s cook.”
“That’s what the official biographies say. Actually, he was Stalin’s cook as much as Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was a tortured prisoner of the Czar until he was twenty-six. Vladimir Putin the elder was a general in the KGB, who served, among other such duties, as political commissar during the siege of Stalingrad.”
Pevsner paused long enough to let that sink in, then said, “With the gracious permission of His Eminence, I will continue.”
“Keep it short, my son,” the archbishop said.
“Where to begin?” Pevsner asked rhetorically, and then answered his own question. “At the beginning…
“During the revolution of 1917, a substantial portion of Third Section, the Czar’s secret police, was co-opted by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and renamed the Cheka—”
“‘A substantial portion’?” D’Alessandro interrupted.
“If they had taken it over completely, Vic,” Pevsner said, “none of us would be here today, and there would be no Oprichnina.”
“And with no Oprichnina, God alone knows what would have been the fate of the church,” the archbishop added.
“Who didn’t get co-opted?” D’Alessandro asked.
“My family, obviously, and the Alekseev family, and perhaps fifty or sixty others,” Pevsner said. “May I continue?”
“Alek,” Castillo said, “all Vic is trying to do is make sure he and everybody else understands what you’re trying to tell them.”
“Be that as it may, friend Charley, if I am continually interrupted, I’ll never finish.”
“Sorry, Alek,” D’Alessandro said.
“The Cheka,” Pevsner went on, “arrested the Imperial Family—Czar Nicholas the Second, Czarina Alexandra, their five children—Czarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—and a half dozen of the intimate friends and servants and took them to Yekaterinburg, which is some nine hundred miles east of Moscow.
“There, on July seventeenth, 1918, at the personal order of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they were murdered and their bodies buried in unmarked graves in a forest.
“The Bolsheviks then turned to destroying the church.”
“Their greatest mistake, in my humble judgment,” the archbishop said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Father Boris?”
“Absolutely, Your Eminence,” the archimandrite said.
“They murdered clergy, confiscated church property, burned seminaries, turned churches and cathedrals into warehouses… that sort of thing. Shipped millions of Christian people to Siberia. But the church was stronger than they thought it would be.”
“In large part because of the faithful within the Oprichnina, it must be admitted,” the archbishop furnished.
His face showing that while he appreciated the archbishop’s kind words, he still didn’t appreciate being interrupted, Pevsner picked up his history lesson.
“One of the first things to happen was the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia—ROCOR.”
“The archimandrite and I have the honor of humbly serving the ROCOR,” the archbishop said.
“And it is my honor to humbly serve His Eminence, who heads ROCOR,” the archimandrite said.
“ROCOR remained part of the Russian Orthodox Church,” the archbishop went on, “that is to say, under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, until 1927—”
“I was about to get to that, Your Eminence,” Pevsner said.
His face showing that he disliked being interrupted, His Eminence continued: “. . . when the godless Bolsheviks finally broke the will of Metropolitan Sergius, who headed the church. They had had him in a Moscow prison cell for about five years at the time, which probably had a good deal to do with what he did: He pledged loyalty to the Communist regime.
“That was too much for one of my predecessors, who informed Sergius that while we still regarded Sergius as an archbishop, we no longer could consider ourselves under the patriarchal authority of someone who had pledged loyalty to the Communists.”
He paused and then said, “You may continue, Aleksand
r, my son.”
“In 1991, the year the Soviet Union imploded,” Pevsner went on, “it was announced that the unmarked graves of the Royal Family had been found. Since Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was involved, I suspected that he had known all along where they were.
“So, what was he up to? The answer was simple: He wanted to replace Stalin. And—no one has ever suggested that Vladimir Vladimirovich is not a very clever man—he knew the way to become the new Czar of all the Russias was to follow the philosophy of Ivan the Terrible—get the church on his side—rather than the failed philosophy of Lenin and Stalin to destroy the church.
“He was also smart enough to know that he couldn’t do this the way Ivan did, by throwing money at the church. For one thing, he flatly denied knowing anything about the assets of the SVR.
“Nicolai and I, I should point out, had already moved many of these assets to the Cayman Islands, Macao, and, of course, here to Argentina. If Vladimir Vladimirovich had started to give the church money, the Patriarch in Moscow was certain to have asked where he’d gotten it.
“So, what he needed to do was prove his devotion to the church. First, he found the long-lost unmarked graves of the Royal Family, hired DNA experts to determine they were indeed the royal bones, and then decided that the martyred Czar and his family should have the Christian burial those terrible Communists had so long denied them.
“This took place—with Vladimir Vladimirovich playing a significant and very visible role in the ceremonies—on July eighteenth, 1998, sixty years to the day from their murder in Yekaterinburg.
“The reinterment of the mortal remains of the Royal Family,” the archimandrite chimed in, “was in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral inside the Saints Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg, which the Communist authorities had renamed during their reign as Leningrad.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Pevsner said with as much sincerity as he could muster, and then went on much more pleasantly as he suddenly remembered something about that. “It was well known within the Oprichnina that Vladimir Vladimirovich had been one of the more strident voices demanding of the new government of Russia that they change Leningrad back into Saint Petersburg to reflect its Christian heritage.”
“There is some good in even the worst of sinners,” His Eminence pronounced.
“After the funeral, Vladimir Vladimirovich’s reputation was that of a staunch and faithful supporter of the church,” Pevsner went on. “And about that time, he began to start inviting Nicolai and me back to the motherland for conferences. I wasn’t suspicious of this until one time when I told him I could fit it into my schedule, but Nicolai was tied up. He said he’d rather wait until we could come together.
“After that, neither Nicolai nor I could ever seem to find a time to travel to the motherland either together or alone.”
“But we did get word to Dmitri and Svetlana,” Nicolai furnished, “that it might be a good idea for them to visit us—”
“Together,” Pevsner interrupted.
“. . . for an extended period.”
“That was after Vladimir Vladimirovich sent word to us that he’d thought it over and come to the conclusion that five percent was excessive for the service we had rendered.”
“But that we could make things right,” Nicolai furnished, “if we deposited half of what we had earned to an account of the SVR in a bank in Johannesburg, South Africa.”
“Well, when Vladimir Vladimirovich realized that Nicolai and I were neither going to accept his kind invitation to visit the motherland, or—having become capitalists, where a deal is a deal—send half of what we had honestly earned to Joburg, he decided to demonstrate that the SVR was something still to be feared.”
“You don’t know that, Alek,” Nicolai interrupted.
“I also don’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow morning, but based on what’s happened in the past, I’ll bet it does.”
“What do you suspect Vladimir Vladimirovich of doing, Aleksandr, my son?” His Eminence asked, just a little impatiently.
“There were several people around the world who had, in one way or another, gotten in the SVR’s way,” Pevsner explained. “Vladimir Vladimirovich decided that eliminating them all, at the same time, would send the message ‘Fear the SVR’ or ‘Fear Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’ both around the world and within Russia.
“One of those he eliminated, for example, was Kurt Kuhl, who owned several pastry shops—called the Kuhlhaus—in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. Vladimir Vladimirovich had good reason to believe that Herr Kuhl was a CIA asset who over the years had facilitated the defection of a number of SVR personnel, and agents controlled by the SVR.
“The bodies of Herr Kuhl and his wife were found behind the Johann Strauss statue in the Stadtpark in Vienna. They had been murdered with metal garrotes of the type the former Hungarian secret police, the Államvédelmi Hatóság, were fond of using. It isn’t much of a secret that those members of the Államvédelmi Hatóság who hadn’t been hung by their countrymen when Hungary severed its connection with the Soviet Union often found employment with the SVR, so Vladimir Vladimirovich could send that message, too, to other CIA assets. ‘We know about you, and are going to eliminate you.’
“Another problem for Vladimir Vladimirovich was right here,” Pevsner continued, gesturing toward Liam Duffy. “The SVR had a very profitable business going shipping cocaine and heroin from Paraguay and elsewhere through Argentina to Europe and the United States. The profits were used to fund SVR operations all over South America. When, rarely, the movements were detected, palms were greased, the drugs went back into the pipeline, and the shippers either never went to trial, or if they did were either freed or slapped on the wrist.
“Then my friend Liam was assigned the duty—the Gendarmería Nacional was—and things changed. Liam is a devout Roman Catholic who took his oath of office seriously. When his people intercepted a drug shipment, they burned the drugs and ran the shippers before courts which were not for sale.
“Worse than that, so far as Vladimir Vladimirovich was concerned, was that Liam began to hold—what’s that charming phrase?—drumhead courts-martial at the arrest scene, which saved the government the cost of trials and the expense of feeding the drug people during long periods of incarceration.”
“Holy Scripture teaches us,” the archbishop said disapprovingly, to ‘judge not, lest thee be judged.’”
“I considered that prayerfully, Your Eminence,” Duffy said, “and decided I could successfully argue my case before Saint Peter.”
“Vladimir Vladimirovich sent people to eliminate my friend Liam,” Pevsner continued, “and his family, and the attempt was made on Christmas Eve. All of the assassinations, or attempted assassinations, took place on Christmas Eve. In Liam’s case, the attempt failed.
“And finally, there was a reporter, Günther Freidler, who worked for Charley’s Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.”
“Excuse me?” the archbishop asked, and then parroted, “‘Charley’s newspaper chain’?”
“My brother Charley has two personas, Your Eminence,” Pevsner explained. “One of them is Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired, and the other is Herr Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, who is by far the principal stockholder of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, which owns, among other things, the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.” He paused, and then added, “If Your Eminence was concerned that my brother Charley’s interest in marrying my cousin Svetlana is based on her affluence, I respectfully suggest it is not a factor.”
“I don’t understand,” the archbishop said.
“I’m a bastard, Your Eminence,” Castillo said. “Born out of wedlock to an eighteen-year-old German girl, following her seventy-two-hour dalliance with an eighteen-year-old American chopper jockey.”
“‘Chopper jockey’?” the archbishop parr
oted.
“Helicopter pilot,” Castillo clarified. “Whom she never saw or heard from again.”
“There are men like that, unfortunately,” His Eminence said. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive him.”
“I have managed to convince myself, Your Eminence, that my father never knew he had… left my mother in the family way.”
“I can’t let that ride, Charley,” Naylor said.
Castillo shrugged.
The archbishop made a go on gesture to Naylor.
“Charley’s mother didn’t know what had happened to Charley’s father until she was literally on her deathbed,” Naylor said.
“How do you know that?” the archbishop said.
“I was there,” Naylor said. “My father was deeply involved. What happened was that Charley’s mother, knowing she was about to die and Charley would be an orphan—his grandfather and uncle had died in a car accident on the autobahn the year before; she thought he was really going to be alone—asked my father to find Charley’s father.”
“Asked your father?” the archbishop said.
“Yes, sir. My father was an officer in the 14th Armored Cavalry, then patrolling the border between East and West Germany. The border line had cut Charley’s family’s property just about in half. Charley’s mother and my mom were friends.
“So my father started looking for Charley’s father. He wasn’t hard to find. He was buried in the National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas. A representation of the Medal of Honor was chiseled into his headstone.
“Once the Army learned that the twelve-year-old German boy about to be an orphan was the son of an American officer who had posthumously received our nation’s highest award for valor—at nineteen—the Army instantly shifted into high gear to take care of him. They knew that when his mother died, he would inherit just about all of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and were concerned that Charley’s inheritance would fall into the hands of Charley’s father’s family and be squandered.
“While a platoon of senior Army lawyers began looking into trust funds and anything else that would protect him, my father was sent to San Antonio to see if he could find Charley’s family, and to see what problems they were going to pose for Charley.
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