As Walter Stilton stepped into the street Sergeant Troy was awoken by a telephone call from his father, a man who would never accept that his son did not ‘do’ mornings unless duty required. As a boy he had known his father to bumble into his bedroom in the pitchdarkness of pre-dawn with some philosophical conundrum on his lips. Today was a day just like those old days. Troy had long since learnt to move from sleep to waking without transition – one second sound asleep the next wide awake and firing on all cylinders.
‘What was it Berdyaev used to say about Russia?’ Alex said without greeting, without so much as a syllable from Troy.
Lately – the last ten years or so – his father had tended to treat Troy as an extension of his memory. A substitute for his own failing powers. He had made Troy read so much as a child – all those prolonged, sickly weeks off school – that his education was warped by the old man – he knew things no one of his generation or education might ordinarily be expected to know. Alex would ask Troy things he could not ask Rod. It depressed Troy to think that his father was still grinding away at his Russian piece. If he hadn’t finished it by now? And what had become of his collaboration with Wells?
‘What exactly about Russia? He banged on about so many things.’
‘It’s in The Soul of Russia – or at least I thought it was. I cannot find it. Books without indexes should be banned.’
‘That’s probably what first narked Hitler.’
Alex ignored this. ‘He was, as you put it, banging on about the Russian Mission.’
‘Oh,’ said Troy, ‘that. The Light from the East. It’s not Berdyaev – well, not just him, it’s most of the old ones. It’s in Dostoevsky. Perhaps even in Tolstoy, and you might recall your dad had more than a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the Holy Russian Mission.’
‘Holy?’ said Alex as though the word meant nothing to him, one atheist talking to another.
‘The Great Civilising Mission westward, how Russia as the keeper of the flame of Orthodoxy, the original true faith of Christ, would ultimately be the salvation of the decadent West, by which they meant anything west of Lvov. Of course they were right, in a way.’
‘What way?’ said his dad.
‘There was indeed a Russian mission west – it just wasn’t anything to do with Christ or Orthodoxy or Holy Mother Russia. It was born in 1917 and it died at the end of Frank Jacson’s icepick about nine months ago.’
‘Permanent Revolution,’ said Alex. ‘The earth-shattering theory of the late Comrade Trotsky. How very cynical of you, my boy.’
He rang off. Troy wondered if he’d pushed the old man too far. He was fed up with things Russian, but Trotsky’s murder had run a shudder through the Troy household. If, his mother had protested, the arm of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin reached all the way to Mexico, then who in Europe was safe? Troy’s father had remained unruffled. He was, he pointed out, no threat to Stalin, no renegade Red and, better still, no exiled White. Stalin would not bother with him. Rod had strongly urged him to seek official protection, to talk to Churchill, and the old man had firmly and impolitely refused.
Troy looked at the clock and felt lazy. He could go back to sleep for another hour, perhaps two. He was on the late shift and would not see his bed again before midnight. Besides, Kitty had not been round for a day or two – it would be just like her to turn up tonight; so he decided to sleep while he could.