On the other side of the River Neva, Trotsky was to speak for the first time since the assassination attempt on his life. Now the workers streamed in their hundreds across the bridge, heading for the hall where the great orator would deliver his speech. Inside the hall, there were hundreds of others, awaiting Trotsky’s appearance in noisy expectation.
There was no heat in the great hall. The stifling heat of unwashed stale bodies muffled in heavy clothing, packed together in tight rows, sufficed, however, to keep the place warm. Heavy blue smoke from the black tobacco that most of them smoked hung in a heavy cloud beneath the roof. Others were drinking from little flat bottles of vodka. Every now and again an official with a red armband would appear on the stage and plead with the ‘comrades’ not to smoke or drink. But no one took any notice. They continued the two little pleasures which were the only things that made their miserable lives worthwhile.
In the end the bearded chairman rang his bell for order and slowly the great assembly obliged as Trotsky bustled onto the stage in a great hurry as he always appeared to be. Reilly nudged the boy. ‘That’s him,’ he whispered.
The boy nodded, but he didn’t need to be told that this was Trotsky. He had seen him often enough in the flickering newsreels they had shown on Sunday in the village’s ‘House of Culture’, the building from which the party bosses had tried to indoctrinate the reluctant peasants.
Trotsky paused. He surveyed their sweating, undernourished faces with that quizzing, half-contemptuous look of his, which spoke of limitless, conscious superiority. Trotsky pushed his pince-nez more firmly up his nose with his unwounded arm, tilted his head upwards, twisting around at the same time to push forwards his right shoulder – his favourite pose when giving a speech – and began, ‘Comrades, we are in a state of great danger. Our beloved leader Comrade Lenin is dying, we all know that. What will happen when he goes? What will be his political testament? Will the Whites and reactionaries again attempt to seize power? What will the West do?’ He rained the questions down upon his increasingly excited audience like hammer blows. ‘What is the position of the bourgeoisie?’
‘Doloie boorjoie!’ the working-men audience thundered back in an angry base. ‘Down with the bourgeoisie!’
‘After Lenin’s death, we Soviets do not want another war. What would the Soviet state gain from it?’ Trotsky went on, the sweat standing out on his high forehead like opaque pearls. ‘It is the bloodsucking plutocratic capitalists and their lackeys, those powdered effete diplomats, who want war. They are the ones who profit from it with their armament factories and chateaux. They get rich. The working man gets killed.’
His audience loved it. They rose to their feet, clapping their hands above their heads and crying, ‘Death to the bloodsuckers and their jackals!’
Reilly stood and clapped with the rest. But already he had forgotten Trotsky and his rabble-rousing speech. His mind was racing electrically on other matters.
He sat down with the rest, wondering if he could really bring it off, one obscure man, born a Jewish bastard in Odessa, against the power of a nation over one hundred million strong. What if the English failed to back him once the deed had been done? He fingered the lock of Napoleon’s hair, which was his talisman, in the pocket of his overcoat. Suddenly he grunted, angry at his own doubts. Nothing would go wrong… Trotsky would be assassinated, Stalin would be given the blame and then the time would be ripe for the Russian people to search for a new non-Communist leader. He gazed at the boy from the comer of his eye. He was strong and handsome with those firm blue eyes of his. The people would idolise him.
He ran over the plan in his mind once more. He told himself that Napoleon had been an obscure lieutenant of artillery when he had started his bid for power. Why, he hadn’t even been a Frenchman, but an Italian born in Corsica. He had virtually conquered the whole of Europe, with his motto of ‘L’audace, encore l’audace, toujours I’audace’.Of course his own boldness would succeed. It always had done throughout the history of the world.
‘But in the near future,’ Trotsky was saying, his fist clenched dramatically, ‘if there is to be a conflict and if you have to suffer, even die, you will do so for your own kind. It will be a workers’ war, not for the pluto-capitalists. Comrades, you will be fighting for your state – the soldiers’ and peasants’ Soviet. For yourselves!’ he bellowed, his voice hoarse with strain.
Again the audience rose as one and bellowed back the cry Trotsky loved. ‘All power to the people!’ The rallying cry echoed and re-echoed around the great hall.
Standing in the shadows at the far end, Cheka cap pulled well down over his face, Aronson smiled cynically to himself. If it came to a fight for the succession, which was Trotsky’s real message, he, Trotsky, wouldn’t be doing the fighting and dying, he damn well knew that. Trotsky would probably die warm and safe in bed of old age, like all these so-called great leaders had done throughout the ages.
But it must not come to another armed conflict, Aronson told himself. The question of Lenin’s successor must be solved by peaceful means. Russia couldn’t stand another civil war, with millions of its citizens dying in the process.
His handsome face hardened. Trotsky had to be protected from Stalin, that was his first priority. But the Commissar had also to be protected against the reactionaries like the Black Hundred. He gazed around the mob in the great hall. There were potential killers everywhere, he told himself. They could even be here at this very moment. And then there was the business of Reilly, the arch spy, and this supposed Romanov child.
He had realised immediately that the message to the German consul in clear text was a German plant. But at the same time it was also genuine. The Fritzes wanted him to take up the hunt after they had probably failed to get those two damned elusive Englishmen. So they were on their way to Finland where they would await Reilly and the Romanov, who presumably they would then transport back to that damned remote island of theirs.
His frown deepened. Reilly was pretty old now, he told himself. For thirty years he had worked underground in Russia for the English, spying and shaping policy. Would he miss this last chance of trying to change Russia’s destiny?
But Aronson had no answer for that particular question.
‘And what do these reactionaries want?’ Trotsky was shouting, face glazed with sweat as if it had been smeared with oil. ‘I shall tell you, comrades’ – Trotsky leaned forwards aggressively and stabbed the smoke-filled air with his forefinger – ‘they want to bring back the Tsar! They want to bring back the Okhrana secret police! They want to bring back the Cossacks and their damned whips! They want to bring back those thrice-damned chains in which we were bound and shipped off to that Siberian hell. Reaction and terror – that is what the reactionaries and their dastardly renegade backers in Western Europe want!’ He gasped for breath as if he had just run a great race.
‘Never!’ the crowd shrieked hysterically, knocking over their chairs as they stumbled to their feet, unwashed faces twisted with hate. ‘Never!’
Reilly smiled to himself. Trotsky would soon learn what the reactionaries could do. Where that silly aristocratic girl had failed, under his direction her comrades of the Black Hundred wouldn’t.
‘Serge,’ he said, as the crowd began to sit down again, ‘it is time to go.’
He took the boy’s hand and together they pushed their way through the stinking, sweating mob to the door. A blast of icy air hit them, but Reilly didn’t notice. His mind was too intent on carrying out the first step of his great plan. For a moment or two he stood there staring at the yellow darkness. The street outside the hall was virtually deserted. There were a couple of what appeared to be drunks from the vodka stall at the end of the road and there was Trotsky’s big car parked opposite, with the driver huddled behind the wheel trying to keep warm, the windows misted up with his own breath.
With apparent casualness, Reilly, holding the boy by the hand, walked towards the big black car. It was a pre-war Rolls Royce, he noted. The workers’ leaders, he told himself cynically, liked to indulge themselves. As he passed the two apparent drunks in the doorway, he nodded. Immediately they detached themselves from the shadows and began to follow him at five metres’ distance, as they had agreed upon.
Reilly and the boy stopped. Again he checked the street furtively. There were still just the four of them and the car. Reilly nodded his approval. He took out the half-litre flat bottle of vodka and as he came level with the driver, he stopped again and took a hefty swig, making appreciative noises as he swilled the fiery liquid down. Now the two men were just behind the car.
Inside, the driver licked his lips and suddenly wound the side window down. He looked up at Reilly’s hook-nosed face under the fur hat and told himself here was another kike just like his boss. Still the man had some vodka and he was freezing. ‘Comrade,’ he growled, ‘can I buy a hundred grams of vodka from you? I’m frozen to the bone.’
Reilly gave the burly driver and bodyguard a fake smile. ‘I should be honoured if Comrade Trotsky’s driver would take what’s left for nothing.’ He tapped his pocket. ‘I have another one here. Please.’
Typical Jew, the driver told himself: always fawning, bowing and scraping. All the same he took the bottle, said a quick thank you and wound up the window hurriedly to keep out the freezingly cold air. Thus he didn’t hear the slight click to the rear of the Rolls Royce.
Reilly and the boy walked on, more hastily now, while the two others had vanished down an alley. Behind, the driver gurgled at the bottle happily, telling himself that they should have killed off all the Jews before the war, then Russia wouldn’t be in the mess it was now.
Reilly stopped under a streetlight and took out his pocket watch. He looked at its dial under the yellow flickering light of the gas jet.
‘Why do you want to know the time now, Mr Reilly?’ Serge asked.
Reilly looked down at him. ‘Because soon – in ten minutes, to be exact – something will happen which will change Russia, perhaps make you a great leader. We will see. Come on, Serge, my boy.’ He gripped the boy’s hand more firmly. ‘We have things to do yet.’
‘So, comrades, I conclude,’ Trotsky said, feeling his shirt sticking to him unpleasantly with sweat, ‘with this. There are hard times ahead of us. But we shall overcome them. But how shall we overcome them?’ He paused rhetorically.
In the dark aisle, Aronson glanced at his watch. Trotsky was due to finish in five minutes precisely. Then he, Aronson, had to see him back safely to his headquarters at the Smolny Institute on the other side of Petrograd.
‘I shall tell you,’ Trotsky answered his own question. ‘By solidarity. By being ever-vigilant. By being constantly ready to take up the challenge from wherever it may come to our Soviet state—’
‘Kleba!’ a drunken voice broke into the flow of rhetoric. ‘The workers must have bread, Comrade Trotsky!’
Trotsky was taken by surprise. ‘Did you say – bread?’ he stuttered.
‘Da, Tvaorivitch. Kleba,’ the drunk, who looked as if he might be some sort of dockworker, yelled doggedly.
‘How can we fight the reactionaries and all the rest if we don’t get enough to eat?’ the drunk persisted as the Cheka men started to work their way through the mob to get to him and take him away.
Aronson looked at his watch. Trotsky was overrunning. He wished him to get down from the stage. But he knew the Commissar; he could never refuse a challenge like this from the audience. He’d have to bring the rabble, who looked as if they were now beginning to agree with the drunk, round to his way of thinking. He had to leave the meeting with the mob cheering him. ‘Well, let me say this to you, comrade. Under the new Five Year Plan—’ Trotsky never finished his attempt to explain how much wheat was being harvested under the Plan.
From outside there came the boom of a tremendous explosion. The door blew open. A hot wave of blast burst through it. And then Aronson was running, automatic already in his hand.
On the stage Trotsky was yelling urgently, ‘Reactionaries… assassins!’ But nobody was listening to Trotsky now. They were all too busy trying to save their own skins; and even as he ran through the door into the smoke-filled street outside, followed by the panicked mob, Aronson told himself the people he was trying to save were a spineless bunch. Then he stopped dead, with him the first of the mob.