There was a perceptible pause before Charley replied.
“I have a good idea, Your Eminence.”
“And whom do you suspect?”
“That’s none of your business, sir,” Castillo said.
“Charley,” Pevsner said warningly, “you can’t talk—”
“To put a point on it, did you order the murder of this man?” the archbishop interrupted.
“Weren’t you listening when I just told you I don’t know much about it?” Castillo said, now visibly angry, and then the anger took over. “What would you like me to do, Your Eminence, lay my hand on a Bible and swear that I did not order the execution of Demidov?
“It has been my sad experience,” Castillo snapped, “that the worst of liars are willing to utter the most outrageous untruths with one hand on the Holy Bible and the other on their mother’s tombstone or the heads of their children.”
Castillo stood up.
“Go fuck yourself, Your Eminence,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this whole affair, the history lesson, telling you a hell of a lot that’s none of your business, and especially you, you self-righteous sonofabitch. I thought I was willing to do damned near anything to get you to give Sweaty permission to marry me. But you just stepped over that legendary line drawn in the sand and that no longer seems to be the case.
“Let’s go, guys. This session of the Russian Inquisition is over.”
The archbishop laughed heartily, which was the last reaction Castillo — or anyone else — expected of him.
“I now understand why Svetlana was swept off her feet by you, my son,” he said. “Aleksandr, would you ask the ladies to join us?”
“Excuse me?” Pevsner said, his utter confusion evident in his voice and demeanor.
“Go out into the foyer, Aleksandr, and bring the women in here,” the archbishop ordered.
Pevsner did so.
“Svetlana, my child,” the archbishop then said. “If you will stand there”—he pointed—“and Carlos, my son, if you will stand beside her, and if the other ladies will find places at the table, we can deal with the situation before us.”
“Svetlana,” he ordered, “place your hand in Carlos’s hand.”
He stood up, put his hand on the gold crucifix hanging around his neck, and held it out in front of him at shoulder height.
“Let us pray,” he boomed. “May God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bestow his manifold blessings on the union of Svetlana and Carlos in the holy state of matrimony in which they are soon to enter. Amen.”
He lowered the crucifix and let it fall against his chest.
“The archimandrite and I would be honored to officiate at the ceremony, if that is your desire,” the archbishop said. “And now I suggest we have our dinner. No, first I think champagne is called for. And then dinner. During which Archimandrite Boris will continue his history lecture — Oprichnina 101—during which I’m sure he will satisfy Carlos’s questions why I felt it necessary to conduct the Russian Inquisition.”
[TWO]
“Oh, my Charley,” Svetlana whispered in Castillo’s ear. “I was so afraid you were going to do something to offend His Eminence, show a lack of respect, or get into an argument with him, or say something at which he would take offense.”
“By now, sweetheart, you should know me better than that.”
“If you two can spare the time for him…” His Eminence said.
Just a little thickly, Charley decided. He’s about half plastered. First all that wine, and then the champagne, and now more of the grape….
“… the Archimandrite Boris will continue with Oprichnina 101.”
“I beg Your Eminence’s pardon,” Charley said.
“Not at all,” the archbishop said.
* * *
The archimandrite stood up and, as he collected his thoughts, took a healthy swallow from his wineglass. He swayed just perceptibly as he did so.
I guess the protocol here, Castillo thought, perhaps a bit cynically, is that if the archimandrite falls down during his lecture, the rest of us will pretend not to notice.
“As I touched on briefly before,” the archimandrite began, “the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov’ Zagranitsey, sometimes known as the Orthodox Church outside Russia, acronym ROCOR, is a semiautonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church.
“ROCOR was formed soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the anti-Christian policy of the Bolsheviks became painfully evident. It separated itself from the Russian Patriarchate in 1927, when the Moscow Metropolitan — in effect the Pope — offered its loyalty to the Bolsheviks.
“His Eminence serves Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov’ Zagranitsey as its spiritual head, and I humbly serve His Eminence.
“His Eminence is the spiritual leader of thirteen hierarchs — each headed by a bishop; what the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans would call dioceses — and controls our monasteries and nunneries in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and South America.
“Metropolitan Alexy of Leningrad ascended the patriarchal throne of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 as Alexius the Second, after the Soviet Union imploded. Became the Russian Orthodox Pope, if you like.
“There were calls after that from the faithful for ROCOR to place itself under the new Patriarch. While, on its face, this was a splendid idea, there were those opposed to it.”
“Including,” Nicolai Tarasov said, “the Tarasovs, the Pevsners, the Berezovskys, and our cousin Svetlana.”
“Why?” Jake Torine asked.
“They felt there was too much SVR influence on the Patriarch,” the archbishop said. “I decided that it was my Christian duty to give the Patriarch the benefit of the doubt, and last month…”
“On May twenty-seventh, a day which, like Pearl Harbor, will live in infamy,” Tarasov said, “you signed the ‘Act of Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate.’”
“Nicolai,” Laura Berezovsky said to her uncle, “you can’t talk like that to His Eminence!”
“Why not? Svetlana’s Charley called him a ‘self-righteous sonofabitch.’”
“He did what?” Svetlana demanded incredulously.
She glared at Castillo. “Did you?”
“That was after Charley told him to go fuck himself,” Vic D’Alessandro confirmed, wonderingly. “I never thought I’d hear anyone tell an archbishop to go fuck himself, not even a Russian one.”
Castillo, stonefaced, shrugged.
“Children, children,” the archbishop said placatingly. “We all make small mistakes from time to time. Mine was in not listening to Aleksandr and Nicolai when they told me of their suspicions about SVR influence on the throne of the Moscow Patriarch.
“And then I immediately compounded the error by what I thought at the time was an offering of, so to speak, an ecumenical olive branch. I notified His Holiness the Metropolitan that, barring any objections from him, it was my intention to authorize the marriage of one of his flock now living outside Russia. I speak, of course, of Svetlana.”
“And what did this guy say?” D’Alessandro asked.
If behavior in the past is any key to the future, Charley thought, one more glass of wine and Vic will start singing “O sole mio” and then, weeping, confess to breaking his mother’s heart when he joined the Army instead of becoming a priest.
“Not ‘this guy,’ my son,” the archbishop said, “but His Eminence, the Patriarch of Moscow.”
“Got it,” Vic replied. “So what did he say?”
“Boris, my son,” the archbishop said, “will you tell our friends how the Church feels about marriage and divorce?”
“The Church,” the archimandrite began, “disapproves of divorce. Divorced individuals are usually allowed to remarry only after they have satisfied a severe penance imposed on them by their bishop. Second-marriage wedding ceremonies are more penitential than joyful. On the other hand, widows are permitted to remarry
and their second marriage is considered just as valid as the first.”
“It was on the basis of this,” His Eminence broke in, “that I could see no reason to deny Svetlana permission to remarry as a widow. Her intended, Aleksandr told me, and she confirmed, was un-churched, canonically speaking a heathen, but that could be dealt with. Aleksandr, Dmitri, and Nicolai were all willing to serve as Charley’s godfathers.
“I informed His Holiness the Patriarch of my reasoning. He immediately replied that I apparently wasn’t aware of all the facts, in particular that the reason Svetlana was a widow was because she had either arranged for the murder of her husband, the late Polkovnik Evgeny Alekseev, or killed him herself. His Holiness also said that Svetlana’s intended, one Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, had a well-deserved reputation as one of the CIA’s best assassins and had most recently shown his skill at that by garroting a fine Christian KSB officer, one Podpolkovnik Kirill Demidov, and leaving his body in a taxi outside the American embassy in Vienna.”
Vic D’Alessandro said: “So that’s why you were pushing Charley so hard about what he knew about Demidov getting whacked. The… what do you call him? The Patriarch was accusing him of being the whacker.”
“I would suggest, my son, that the Patriarch made that accusation because someone had told him that vile accusation. I recall your comment that you couldn’t lie to a priest. Neither should anyone professing to adhere to our faith.”
Jake Torine said, quoting, “‘It has been my sad experience that the worst of liars are willing to utter the most outrageous untruths with one hand on the Holy Bible and the other on their mother’s tombstone or the heads of their children.’”
The archbishop nodded.
“Carlos, my son, I understand why you thought I was making reference to you when I said that, but I really wasn’t.”
“I deeply apologize for what I said, Your Eminence,” Castillo said.
“What exactly did you say?” Sweaty demanded. “I can’t believe that you actually called His Eminence a sonofabitch and told him to go—”
“I’m sure, my child, I would remember if Carlos said anything like that to me,” the archbishop said, and changed the subject. “So when I heard from the Patriarch about what terrible people you and your Carlos were, Archimandrite Boris and I came down here to see what Aleksandr, Nicolai, and you had to say. And to speak to Carlos, and, if I could find them, to any friends of his.
“And then those friends, without warning, suddenly appeared,” the archbishop said. “And here we are, with the problem solved.”
The archbishop helped himself to a little more wine, and then said, “What I’m curious about now is your mission here, Colonel Torine. While we eat, could you tell me about that, or does Carlos think that’s none of my business?”
“I’d like to hear that, too,” Svetlana said.
“Go ahead, Jake,” Castillo said. “You’re going to have to tell Sweaty sooner or later, and with His Eminence here, you’re probably safe from her otxokee mecto nanara.”
* * *
About three minutes into his explanation, Jake looked at the archbishop and stopped.
The archbishop’s head was bent over. His eyes were closed, and he was snoring softly.
“What do I do?” Torine asked.
“Eat your dinner, my son,” the archimandrite said. “If His Eminence wakes, resume. If he doesn’t, you can tell us at breakfast.”
The archbishop was still soundly asleep in his chair when the dessert — strawberries in a cream and cognac sauce — was served and consumed.
After that, everyone but Archimandrite Boris quietly left the room and went to bed.
PART IV
[ONE]
La Casa en el Bosque
San Carlos de Bariloche
Río Negro Province, Argentina
0600 7 June 2007
Sweaty woke up, sat up, and shook Charley’s shoulder.
When he looked up at her, she ordered, “You better go, and quietly, down the corridor to your room.”
“Like a thief in the night?” Charley responded.
“I don’t want His Eminence to suspect we’re sleeping together,” she said.
“His Eminence either suspects we have been sharing this prenuptial couch for some time or is about to proclaim ‘Hallelujah! A second immaculate conception.’”
“God will punish you for your blasphemy,” Sweaty announced, and, when that triggered something else on her mind, went on: “And don’t try to tell me you didn’t tell His Eminence to go fu—”
“You heard what he said, my love,” Charley argued.
“His Eminence said he ‘would remember if you said something like that.’ Not that you didn’t say it. He remembers it all right!”
“Try to remember that you’re a bride-to-be and an expectant mother, and no longer an SVR podpolkovnik, my love.”
At that point, Sweaty literally kicked him out of the bed.
Then, with Max, his 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres, trailing along after him, he went down the corridor to “his room.”
Charley had “his room” in La Casa en el Bosque from his first visit, which was to say long before Sweaty. Originally, it had then been “the Blue Room,” the one from which he had just been expelled. After Sweaty, in consideration of “what the girls”—Alek’s and Dmitri’s daughters — would think of illicit cohabitation, the Blue Room had become Svetlana’s room, and the not-nearly-as-nice room he walked into now, his.
“The trouble with getting kicked out of bed at oh-six-hundred, Max,” Charley said as the dog met his eyes and turned his head, “is that I can never get back to sleep. Is it that way with you?”
There was no question in Charley’s mind that Max understood everything he said to him.
Without realizing that he was doing so, he had spoken in Hungarian. Max had been born and raised in Budapest, where he had lived with Eric Kocian, publisher of the Budapest edition of the Tages Zeitung.
Max cocked his head the other way, and then moved it again in what might well have been a nod, signaling that he, too, had trouble getting back to sleep after having been kicked out of bed.
Eric Kocian had been an eighteen-year-old unteroffizier—corporal — in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Wounded, he had sought shelter in the basement of a ruined building, where he found a seriously wounded oberst—colonel — who he knew would die unless he immediately received medical attention.
At considerable risk to his own life, Kocian had carried the officer, Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, through heavy fire to an aid station. While doing so, he was again wounded.
At the aid station, doctors decided that the Herr Oberst be loaded onto a Junkers JU-88 for shipment out of Stalingrad. And done so immediately, as the Russians were about to take the airfield, after which there would be no more evacuation flights.
At the airstrip, Oberst von und zu Gossinger refused to allow himself to be loaded aboard “the Aunty Ju” unless Unteroffizier Kocian was allowed to go with him. There was literally no time to argue, and the young unteroffizier, dripping blood from his last wound, was hoisted aboard.
The aircraft — the last to leave Stalingrad — took off.
Surprising the medics, Oberst von und zu Gossinger lived and had recovered to the point where he was on active duty when the surrender came. Having found his name on an SS “Exterminate” list, his American captors quickly released him from the POW camp in which he and Kocian — now his orderly — were confined.
The oberst returned to the rubble of his home and business in Fulda, and Kocian went to Vienna, where he learned his family had been killed in an air raid. Kocian then went to Fulda.
It became a legend within the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., organization that the type for the first postwar edition of any of the Tages Zeitung newspapers had been set on a Mergenthaler Linotype machine “the Colonel” and “Billy Kocian” had themselves assembled from parts salvaged from machines destroyed in the
war.
Billy Kocian began to resurrect other Tages Zeitung newspapers — starting in Vienna — as the Colonel gave his attention to resurrecting the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire in other areas.
After deciding he had all the Viennese gemütlichkeit he could stomach, Kocian moved to Budapest as soon as the Communists were gone, where he devoted his time to needling the Soviet Union and bureaucrats of all stripes on the pages of the Budapester Tages Zeitung,holding the editors of the seven other Tages Zeitung newspapers to his own high standards, and playing with his Bouvier des Flandres dog, Max.
Max was really Max IV, the fourth of his line. Billy had acquired Max I after checking into — and finding credible — the legend that a Bouvier des Flandres had bitten off one of Adolf Hitler’s testicles while Der Führer was serving in Belgium during the First World War.
Max II and Max III had appeared when their predecessors had, for one reason or another, gone to that great fireplug in the sky. Max IV was something special. It was quickly said that Billy Kocian was so enamored of Max IV that the animal could have anything it wanted.
What Max IV wanted became painfully obvious when the dog scandalized the guests of the luxurious and very proper Danubius Hotel Gellért — where he and Billy lived in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Danube — by pursuing a German shepherd bitch through the dining room, the lobby, and down into the Roman baths below the hotel, where he worked his lustful way on her for more than two hours.
As soon as he could, Billy procured suitable female companionship for Max. She was a ninety-something-pound Bouvier, one he named Madchen.
The Max — Madchen honeymoon lasted until Madchen realized she was in the family way and sensed that Max IV was responsible. Thereafter, she made her desire to painfully terminate his life by castration quite clear whenever Max IV came within twenty feet of her.
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