In the Most High and Palmy State of Rome

A porter admitted the former commissar for Foreign Affairs into the Leningrad Theological Institute, a drab, depressing building, ill lit and poorly heated. The aristocratic Georgiy Vasilyevich Chicherin, who spoke numerous European languages and a few Asian ones, had been asked by the current minister for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, to handle a delicate matter. Although feeling unwell, Chicherin had come to the institute personally to inform Gregori Lipnoskii that a “catacomb priest” had denounced him as a secret adherent of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The autumnal crispness that day in 1935 lingered in the hallway that led to Gregori’s room, an austere, windowless cell with a table, a single wicker chair, a narrow bed, and two wall hangings: a photograph of Stalin, exhibiting his fatherly all-knowing look, and a bad pencil drawing of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Chicherin said nothing about the open Bible and the religious literature resting on the table. He also noticed a Maxim Gorky novel, Bystander. Without being asked, he sat on the chair. Gregori paced.

“Our informant has told us that you attended Orthodox services late at night in forest caves. We even know the secret codes and ciphers you and the catacomb priests use.” As Gregori opened his mouth to speak, Chicherin held up one finger to indicate that he hadn’t finished. “We have apprehended couriers you employed to convey messages and confiscated false identification cards made out in the names of deceased persons.”

Gregori stood and said magisterially, “Lies! All lies! I am a Renovationist Church member faithful to the Soviet government.”

The erstwhile minister leaned back, folded his arms, and seemed to take great pleasure in agreeing. “You are absolutely right! All lies. But in a court of law, you’ll be convicted. If you wish to save yourself from exile, and to spare your denouncer, whom I want you to meet, you will confess to being a catacombist.”

“Comrade Chicherin, your reputation for subtlety is well known. Surely, you have in mind more than my simple confession.”

“Your brother Dimitri rightly described you as a clever fellow. Yes, we have an assignment for you: to work secretly for the Department of Religious Affairs to help us suppress nationalistic sentiment against the government.” He opened the Bible. “In the minds of believers, as you well know, religion and nationalism become hopelessly tangled. The pope has undercover agents in the country attempting to rouse nationalistic sentiment against the government, particularly in those Slavic and Ukrainian areas that used to follow the Roman Church. As your brother has already explained, many people still, sadly, believe in the western rites and recognize the pope.”

Gregori, ambivalent about the Roman Church, though not about Greek Catholicism, tried to take the measure of this well-known man. Comrade Chicherin, a distant relative of Pushkin, loved classical music and particularly Wagner. He also exhibited a fondness for Gregorian chants, like the ones he heard upon entering the putative seminary. The simplicity of the musical line reinforced his own tastes. Although illness had caused him to leave office a few years before, he took on special assignments for Litvinov in religious matters. Having negotiated successfully in the 1920s with the Vatican, he had the temperament and diplomatic skills to deal with Roman machinations. A handsome man, with a mustache and meticulously trimmed pointed beard, he had a high forehead, soft eyes, thinning hair, and a somewhat bulbous nose. His dress always included a white detachable Fremont collar, a starched shirt, a vest, and a suit. Thoroughly westernized, he had used family wealth to help the revolutionary cause in the belief that modernization in Russia would not take place until the old regime had been replaced.

Without animation, Gregori said, “You and Dimitri want me to work as an agent for Rome.”

“Precisely! But first you will have to confess your crime.”

“That,” replied Gregori emphatically, “I cannot do. Deceit may suit the government, but not my Christian principles.”

“As I said, I want you to meet your denouncer. His name is Peter Filatov. Years ago, he taught theology in a Moscow monastery. He now works on behalf of the proletariat.” He paused. “Lovely Bible.”

Gregori’s first impulse was to say that he had no stomach for consorting with Christian denouncers, but waited to hear Chicherin’s final words on the subject.

“The best way to serve the Renovationist cause,” he said, closing the Bible, “is to keep it from Roman designs: bringing back the old ways and expelling the new. I would remind you what the Russian archbishop called Renovationists: ‘A sewer of the Orthodox Church.’”

* * *

The Nevsky Monastery, converted in 1932 into a Museum of City Sculpture, also housed offices, institutes, a warehouse, and a small room set aside for secret police meetings. Gregori Lipnoskii and Peter Filatov arrived at virtually the same time. The room, wired to record even whispered conversations, also held a hidden camera in case the participants, wary of being bugged, wrote notes. But Peter Filatov, after their initial introduction, spoke candidly. His tall, skeletal appearance looked, quite accurately, as if it were incapable of hiding a secret. Where, among the skin and bones, would he hide it?

“My own confession was untrue in every word. They said that if I did not confess to helping the Roman Church, my family and I would disappear. After I agreed to sign, they said they wanted the names of others involved in the so-called plot. ‘Others?’ I asked. ‘Make them up if you have to,’ they yelled. So I gave them names, including yours, even though I knew you were innocent of conspiring with Rome.”

“Why mine?”

“They suggested it.”

“They?”

“The Office of Religious Affairs. Two men interrogated me.” He buried his head in his hands. “They said that if an Orthodox priest admitted to having entered into secret relations with Rome and signed a statement, it would pass unnoticed. The danger to the nation would appear greater if the state-supported church, the Renovationists, were conspiring with the Vatican. Then no one, not even the favored, could be trusted.”

Gregori had lent himself to the Renovationist movement to preserve the Russian Church and to try to discover those Orthodox priests who pretended to resist the government while actually reporting to them, a practice dating back to the Tsars. Under Nicholas II and his predecessors, priests were agents of the state, a condition they swore to in their ordination oath. Even though church law banned disclosing what passed in the confessional booth between parishioner and priest, the church often reported draft dodgers, prospective recruits for the armed forces, and any antistate information. Gregori may have shown fealty to Stalin for endorsing the Renovationist Church, but he showed a greater fealty to his Lord in matters of conscience, truth, and Orthodoxy.

“What will happen,” he asked Peter, “if I refuse to sign?”

“They will shoot me and my family.”

“But the regime is terrified of creating religious martyrs. Your death would undermine their efforts to sway believers.”

“Aren’t you forgetting one thing?” said Peter, as Gregori studied him. “I don’t want to die, nor does my family.”

Public confession of political or religious wrongdoing, Gregori knew, served an indispensable purpose. When individuals declared themselves guilty, the state had no need to stamp them as social pariahs and run the risk of martyring them.

“Peter, if I admit guilt, I help the state crush opposition, political and religious, and undermine our church’s efforts to attract the faithful.”

Peter sighed, “Yes, but abstractions are not reality.”

“What we know to be real,” replied Gregori, “is that when people confess to plots against the state, the organizations they belong to are often exterminated. If I sign a statement conceding that your charges are true, the only way to save my own life is to agree to spy for the Soviets.”

“The Vatican would protect you as a man denounced for his true beliefs. Who will protect me, if not you?”

To save Peter’s life, Gregori agreed to become a Soviet agent. While espousing Latin rites, he would try to insinuate himself into the Russicum and spy on Rome, transmitting to Moscow the names of underground priests.

Before Peter Filatov was led off to prepare himself for his next “official” assignment, he hugged Gregori and, in whispered words, begged his forgiveness. Gregori returned to the institute and waited, using the time to school himself in the writings of Catholic hagiography. It took a few months before the Department of Religious Affairs could fabricate and circulate the story of Gregori Lipnoskii, ostensible Renovationist, who deviously belonged to the Catacomb Church, while furtively promoting nationalism among Ukrainians and Slavs to promote the Roman cause.

Chicherin had told Comrade Dimitri Lipnoskii it was a “dastardly business” before sending him to Leningrad to tell his brother that the fate of the family hung in the balance. The brothers had never been close, though both ironically had found work that required absolute obedience to a higher authority. As soon as Dimitri came into Gregori’s presence, he could detect Gregori’s unease.

“You are not yourself, Gregori. Is it the idea of spying that troubles you or something else?”

“I had hoped to take orders and enter the priesthood.”

“For our purposes, all the better.”

“But I also want someday to marry. And you know the rule. A married man can become a priest, but a priest can’t marry.”

“A widower can do both. We will arrange your files to read that you were once married and that your wife died.” He studied the room, which seemed to him as cold as his brother’s religion. “You will have to learn Italian. And the Fascists . . . well, it won’t be easy.”

“As a priest, I can inure myself to any test. Let us forget the subject. Please tell me about our dear mother.”

* * *

When Anna picked up her copy of Pravda downstairs, she saw on the front page, in large print, the headline: “Traitorous Priest Flees the Motherland.” The first sentence of the accompanying article identified the priest as “Gregori Lipnoskii.” With her heart wildly beating, she flew to the elevator, burst into her apartment, cried out for Razan, and threw herself on the couch, declaring, “Our days are numbered.” He reached for the paper and studied the article. His own legs grew wobbly. As Anna’s eyes closed, he sat down on the floor next to the couch, rubbing her hands and her head. When she showed no response, Razan thought she had either suffered a seizure or a heart attack. From the liquor cabinet, he took a bottle of brandy and poured some of the liquid into her mouth.

Slowly she revived. Wanly smiling, she advised that they should be prepared for a visit from the secret police, who in fact came that same afternoon. Driven away in a black Packard, they entered the grounds of Lubyanka Prison and quickly found themselves sitting in a room reeking of cigarettes. An interrogator, with nicotine stained hands and teeth, had been assigned to their case.

“You know why you’re here,” said the man, “so let us not pretend. What do you know about your son’s escape and when did you know it?”

Razan hoped that Anna’s steely nerves would eclipse his fears.

“We know nothing,” said Anna. “I confess: My heart cries. Our son is as dead to us as he is to you.”

“Dead,” mocked the man, as he extinguished one cigarette and lit another. “Dead! He can cause us more harm than a bomb-throwing terrorist. In fact, he is a saboteur on a grand scale. With what he knows about religious conditions in our country, he can cause a schism as great as the one in 1054 that divided the church.”

Neither of them had any idea of what the date 1054 meant, but they both intended to find out, since it seemed to bode a great ill.

“The Vatican is never happier than when it is stirring up the Roman Catholics in Soviet territories. Your son merely feeds that fire. He will undoubtedly be quoted in L’Osservatore, the Vatican newspaper, spewing slander about our beloved Mother Russia.”

Had the interrogator not said “Mother Russia,” he would have completely cowed Anna. But the phrase gave him away. She could see that he was overacting, and that for some reason this whole scene, which lacked any of the usual violent props that Lubyanka survivors often mentioned—clubs, whips, chains, brass knuckles—was a sham.

“If Gregori contacts us, we will tell you immediately. We are faithful citizens of the country and love our Supreme Leader. Please don’t exile us to a camp. Siberia would be the death of us.”

She wanted to withdraw that last statement, feeling that she too was now overacting. But the man seemed not to notice and suddenly grew sympathetic, assuring them that their lives were in no danger, just so long as they continued to cooperate with the secret police.

Days passed, and then weeks. Anna comforted Razan with her belief that they would not be questioned again. Although he had his doubts and at low moments could feel the cold of Asiatic Siberia, her words held true. Little did they know that the Soviet government had arranged the priestly ordination, the escape, the newspaper article, and the benign interrogation.

Leaving by train from the Levashovo Station, Gregori was met at the Finnish border by smugglers, in the employ of the Soviets, who spirited him to the Baltic, put him aboard a fishing boat, and three weeks later landed him at a safe haven on the Sicilian mainland. To make his defection look real, Gregori arrived without papers, made his way slowly toward Rome on back roads and hay wagons, and stopped at prearranged houses. Apprehended at one of them and taken to the capital, Gregori told the Italian secret service his rehearsed story. The Fascists quickly unearthed the Pravda article and called in a Vatican emissary, Monsignor Schiaffone, who interviewed Father Lipnoskii, declared him perfetto for service in the Catholic Church, and, at Gregori’s suggestion, offered him a position tutoring prospective priests at the Russicum, an institute that schooled young men in the Russian language, the Eastern Orthodox rites, and the machinations of spying. The Russicum graduates were then smuggled into the Soviet Union to exploit the nationalistic and Roman Catholic sympathies of Poles, White Russians, Armenians, Georgians, and others. They would also report to Rome on the state of religion in Russia. This practice, far from being new, had been in place for many years, with the loss of numerous lives. When the Soviets discovered a Russicum priest, they shot him without a trial.

Gregori’s Roman contact, to whom he reported Russicum activities, was an Italian Communist, aptly code named Carlo Cospirato. A short, round-faced, pudgy fellow, who could not pass a coffee bar without stopping for a cappuccino—“heavy on the milk”—he was, by day, an automobile mechanic and, by night, a Marxist, distributing leaflets, attending party meetings, and ferrying secret information to the Russians. To make their contacts seem perfectly natural, Carlo continued Gregori’s Italian lessons and put at his disposal a used Fiat, a Topolino. Once Carlo had taught Gregori to drive the little mouse-car, the latter could not only traverse the Holy City, but also see the beautiful Roman countryside, where he discovered the Benedictine abbey of Farfa and its splendid library and prestigious scriptorium dating back to the eleventh century.

One Saturday afternoon, he motored over the Sabine Hills to visit the abbey. In the village of Farfa, adjacent to the monastery, hammers and saws could be heard. Under the direction of the Fascist government, workers were repairing the old houses and restoring the porches and slab fronts on which medieval merchants had displayed their wares. Here he lodged, sans his clerical garb. On Sunday morning, he entered the huge Romanesque gate, with its magnificent floral friezes, and walked between incensed candles down the middle nave to hear Mass. He passed through the two rows of ionic columns, and under the coffered ceiling with the Orsini emblem that bathed him in bronze. Presenting himself as a Russian scholar in the employ of the Russicum, he endeared himself to the resident monks by praising the worth of their library. The abbot of Farfa, the cardinal bishop of Sabina, a suburbicarian bishop, had delegated the responsibilities of the abbey to a priest, Father Maurizio, who immediately befriended Gregori. The two men conversed, to their delight, in Latin, which both men knew well. Invited to return the next week to take a meal and celebrate Vespers, Gregori eagerly accepted in fond anticipation of the silver light of the tapers, the perfume, the songs, the service. Like so many worshippers, he loved the ceremonies that he believed gave meaning to the mysteries of life. Before long, Farfa Abbey felt like his spiritual home—the library, the friendship of the monks, the smells, the sounds, the gardens—and he often returned.

After several visits to Farfa, Gregori began to wonder if his mind and soul weren’t being tempted to receive nourishment from Roman Catholicism. But he knew that the canon law that prohibited Catholic priests from marrying would ultimately keep him from embracing that faith. In fact, his wish to marry and his gentle courtesies made him a good catch for Signora and Signore Credulo. They owned the Farfa Inn, where he lodged when he stayed overnight, and were the parents of Angelina, with whom he was smitten. Although her persistent frothy cough had dissuaded her last suitor, Mario Fori, from seriously considering marriage, her smile gladdened others and her sensuous lips cried out to be kissed.

Angelina, of an age when a young girl should wed, had given Gregori numerous encouraging signs and had even strolled with him unchaperoned. In the evening, they took coffee in the piazza, walked through the village, greeting families whose ancestors dated back hundreds of years, and followed a path that led up the hillside behind the town to a beautiful vantage point. Here they would sit and remark on the picturesque scene below. Bathed in the silver moonlight, she always felt alluring and desired, and made every smiling effort to bring Gregori into her loving orbit. The rustics she had known had never exhibited the learning of this man; they had never behaved like proper suitors, but rather wanted to hurry into some adjacent hayloft. The local boys had even made sport of her gifted artwork, mugging and dropping their drawers with rude cries, such as “Why not draw my ass?” What did they know of Italy’s great artists; what did they know of Giotto, Cimabue, and Rafaello, names that came as readily to Gregori’s lips as breath?

Had she been asked whether she loved the Russian priest, she could have said in perfect honesty that she really had no experience with love. Admittedly, Mario had often kissed her and run his hand beneath her dress, and, although she tingled at his touch and could feel her face flush, she knew better than to say that love was a hot pang. She wanted, like heroines of old, the permanence of position. Affection would grow from her happy station in life. At least, her sagacious grandmother had said as much when she counseled her to “treasure rank and reputation more than rapture.” She had no fear of different languages or customs; her only fear was that she would die for want of strength before she could marry or exhibit her paintings.

She went so far as to suggest to Gregori that, on her next trip to Rome to buy oils and canvases from the merchants in the Via della Rotonda, they meet at Gregori’s room. When he explained that his hostel, across the river and adjacent to the Vatican, housed only priests, she proposed they meet at the Pantheon, but not before teasing him that he ought to find his own quarters, where he could entertain friends. What did she mean, he mused, by the word “entertain”? Rather than ask, he would just keep their appointment.

On a Friday, Venerdi, Venus’s day, they spent at least an hour in the Pantheon as she explained how the tombs and the sunken panels (coffers), reduced the weight of the structure and made it possible for the walls to support the enormous dome. Angelina had just purchased a new sketchbook and insisted on capturing Gregori’s likeness with the light from the open dome striking his face. The rather good sketch pleased Gregori, and he asked if he could own it.

“Only if you take me to the Café Magi to see the magician, Signore Calvo. I understand he can turn catnip to Chianti,” she said between coughs, “and his admirers are innumerable. Friends of mine who have seen him can’t stop raving.”

The café, next door to a Fascist recruiting office, attracted all classes of people, from rowdy young men to old women, from workers to intellectuals. This night, they had to wait for a table. The stage was virtually bare, except for a blackboard behind the magician, a raised thronelike chair, a wooden box, and a baton that he used to direct the café-goers. Like a prophet, Calvo told his audience that Italy, inspired by a single idea—the collective will—could reimpose its rule on the Levant, and re-create the ancient civilization that was Rome. He said that what seemed like magic was, in fact, reality, and insisted that the magic and power of ideas engendered creation.

“First from his mind and then from his brush, Michelangelo brought forth the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Never underestimate the power of an idea to change the world. Roman glory can once again be ours—by translating words into action.”

As they waited, Angelina and Gregori amiably chatted with the portiere, who eventually seated them next to the stage and handed Calvo a note. The magician almost immediately began to play to the attractive Signorina Credulo, smiling, winking, and tipping his cap. Dressed in a black silk shirt and riding boots, he used the baton magically to orchestrate her response.

“Raise your right arm.”

Her arm shot up as if spring loaded.

“Mario Fori, a former boyfriend, still thinks of you fondly.” Angelina coughed fiercely into her handkerchief. “But then we all have secret lives.” He strutted around the stage, stopped, and said, “I know that you believe in the inspirational power of faith and myth.” He swung his baton. “Swear your allegiance to the higher power that will restore Italy to the center of European civilization.”

Her mouth, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, opened mechanically. “I have faith. I will obey and fight for the glory of Catholic Italy.”

The audience cheered.

“At this moment, you are thinking: How can I act in this manner? Surely, I can resist this man’s powers of suggestion. But you cannot. Why? Because I have your number.”

He then took a stubby pencil and scribbled on a piece of paper, which he put in his breast pocket. He then asked Angelina and Gregori to take the stage.

The men and women watched raptly. Stepping back, Calvo admired Angelina’s long skirt. “Such beautiful flowered Japanese cloth . . . such flair.” Circling Gregori, he remarked, “He looks like Lenin in London.” The audience shredded the silence with their laughter.

“Signorina,” said Calvo, “write a number on the blackboard.” Taking the chalk from the ledge, she paused and then wrote 9610. Calvo chuckled and shook his head, as if to say: “Just as I expected.” Turning to Gregori, he asked the “signore” to remove the piece of paper from the magician’s pocket. “Please read what I wrote.”

Staring at the paper, a shocked Gregori could barely reply. First, he looked at the blackboard and then at Angelina, as if she had colluded with the maestro. Finally, facing the audience, Gregori said, “The number is exactly the same, 9610. But how . . . ?”

Ignoring the question, Calvo added, “I can also tell our audience that you are a priest, though you’re not wearing clerical garb.”

Gregori wanted to ask the magician, “Which church?” but felt that his accent gave him away. Without irony, Gregori thought that Calvo was a man the Soviets could use. His ability to divine a citizen’s background could save the secret police money and time.

Back at their table, Gregori kept mumbling that he had to know Calvo’s secret. Angelina, with her eyes riveted on the stage, hardly heard him. Gregori prompted, “Perhaps if you ask him, he’ll explain. He seems much taken with you.”

“Shh,” objected Angelina. “I want to hear what he’s saying.”

The magician was talking about the power of words. “Not just any words, but words imbued with fire.” Holding up a Bible, he observed, “This single book had the power—and still does—to convert pagans, erect churches, inspire crusades, and provide the subject matter for innumerable artistic masterworks. Today, we have before us a new religion, a new faith, which can make Italy the greatest nation on earth.” He held aloft a sheaf of wheat. “One fascio can be toppled by the wind. Thousands of sheaves can support an army.”

The play on words elicited a loud cheer from the audience, who raised their arms, saluting Calvo’s magic. Holding up his baton for silence, Calvo waited a second and then, with a flourish, brought it down, eliciting a thunderous cheer, “Me ne frego! Me ne frego!” the familiar chant of the government faithful, “I don’t give a damn.”

“Permit me to ask our couple to return to the stage,” said Calvo. The audience clapped in agreement. “Although the young woman briefly hesitated at the blackboard, she could not escape my will or yours, which in fact are one and the same. That is why she had to remain true to her original choice.” Addressing Angelina, the magician said, “Now, signorina, you know that you are just a part of a larger idea, one that unites ancient Rome and modern, an idea that is self-evident to the cittadini. The number 9610 itself hardly matters . . . merely a vaudeville trick.” Taking her hand, Calvo told the audience, “Chance favors the prepared mind. A magician, like a general or a leader of the people, must never fail to see the little clues found in a word, a phrase, an unusual facial expression. Even a dropped vowel or slurred consonant may tell him what he needs to know to accomplish his ends.” With the baton he pointed to the portiere. “He,” said Calvo, “is the source of my information. Having overheard our couple’s conversation as they waited for a table, he jotted down several interesting facts he thought I could use in the act. One, names: Angelina and Gregori. Two, the woman is an artist.” As an aside, he held his hand to his cheek and, with a stage whisper, told the crowd, “I must arrange for her to meet Margherita Sarfatti, the head of Italian culture, and one of our leading art patrons.” Flourishing his baton, he encouraged the audience to agree.

They chanted, “Margherita, si; Margherita, si!”

“A third fact I learned was that Angelina was born on the ninth of June 1910: 9610. She shared that information with her gentleman friend; she also mentioned a Mario Fori. Gregori, for his part, talked about his work at the Russicum and his living quarters at the Vatican hostel. Any fool would know he is a priest. In fact, I would hazard that, given his accent, he is an Orthodox one.” Holding up his baton, Calvo asked Gregori, “Am I right?”

“Yes. On every point you have, as you say, our number.”

“Not quite,” said Calvo. “Not until I endow you with second sight can I make that claim.” Calvo reached into the wooden chest and removed a miniature bundle of sticks, with an axe bound to it, the premier symbol of the current government. “The fasces indicates the people’s power over life and death,” the magician declared. “It even appears on the seal of the United States Senate and on a wall of the House of Representatives, as well as on the coat of arms of France. Take it as a gift from me,” said Calvo offering Gregori the miniature fasces.

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“I am devoted and loyal to a different host, a transcendent one.”

“Are you referring to Angelina here?” Calvo asked ironically.

Gregori blushed. “No, but I do admit that she is a lovely young woman, and she comes from a good family, a pious one.”

“Our beloved pope,” said Calvo, “has blessed this symbol. He and it are as one, just as the people and the pope share one spiritual body. We are all part of the same will.” Putting his face close to Gregori’s, Calvo said, “You will accept this gift.” The magician’s eyes glowed with a jaundiced yellow tint, holding Gregori in his gaze. “Who partakes of our body will enter into the mystical union with Rome that began with the Caesars and will last until the end of time.”

With this grand pronouncement, Calvo held up the fasces, as a priest might raise a crucifix in a religious procession, and, facing Gregori, slowly backed toward the stage steps. Gregori followed, seemingly mesmerized. Someone screamed. Still the two men continued their twinned dance; descending the steps, they moved down the aisle toward the back of the café, where the door stood open.

“Stop!” yelled a young man who rose to his feet, while a pretty curly headed waitress, with whom he’d been flirting, tried to force him back into his seat. “Don’t!” cried the man, persevering in his resistance. “Look what is happening to Italy!”

This last statement earned him a rough expulsion from the café at the hands of the Me-ne-frego crowd of ruffians. But the tumult at the door prevented Calvo and Gregori from exiting the café, at which point Calvo thrust the fasces into Gregori’s hands and led him back to the stage. Gregori, who had exhibited an ethereal lack of resistance throughout the ordeal, metamorphosed when he reached the stage. While Calvo retreated to his chair, the Orthodox-Renovationist priest and double agent held up the fasces and in a mesmeric voice that seemed to issue from his soul, shouted to the audience, “Me ne frego!”

Mayhem ensued, as the patrons stood on chairs and tables, sang the patriotic anthem “Giovinezza,” waved flags that mysteriously materialized, and formed a line that marched around the café and out the door, to the dismay of the café owner, who ran after the revelers, yelling at those who had failed to pay for their drinks. In the sudden quiet of the café, the three people remained onstage. Then the owner turned off the lights, except for a single spot. An emotionally exhausted Angelina and Gregori sat at the feet of Calvo, bathed in the light cast on his throne, forming a Trinitarian tableau.

* * *

As promised, Calvo arranged for Angelina and Gregori to attend an evening salon at Margherita Sarfatti’s apartment. Observing the Roman preference for early weekday hours, the invitations said that the conversazione would take place Wednesday, between eight and ten.

La Sarfatti, as she was known, had spent the afternoon at an exhibition of paintings by Achille Funi and Mario Sironi, two of her favorites. She arrived in the small piazza, where she maintained an apartment, in a black Lancia limousine that was so long that to turn the corner, it had to jump the curb. The cool spring weather had given her an excuse to wear a fur piece over her black dress. A string of pearls graced her neck, now thickening from age. In her youth, she had been quite a beauty, with her tall, full body, deep gray-green eyes, reddish-blond curly hair, and stylish dresses, invariably designed in Paris by Schiaparelli and adorned with tasteful and expensive jewelry. Her Venetian family, the Grassini, issued from Jewish roots, and although some members had, for mercantile reasons, defected to the church, she was secretly proud of being born an ebrea and of moving easily in Italian high society.

The Grassini wealth had made it possible for her to receive a first-rate education and meet courtiers, cardinals, and bishops. Her father and her lawyer husband, from whom she took the name “Sarfatti,” had always indulged her expensive tastes. Not for La Sarfatti the drab, masculine clothing of the socialist women’s brigades whom she had supported before the Great War. She likewise disapproved of Fascist fashions, except for their favoring the color black. A warm and witty lady, she was famously known as “Il Duce’s other woman,” in short, his mistress, one of many, though easily the most cultured.

Angelina could barely contain her excitement, skipping up to every fountain they passed and, like a schoolgirl, splashing drops of water on Gregori’s untonsured head. He pretended to enjoy the sport, but, in fact, he found her behavior fatuous.

“Why all this fuss about La Sarfatti?” he asked, clearly annoyed.

“She tutored Il Duce himself! Everyone says so. They say Benito was a boorish boy until she made him over.”

Gregori ironically replied, “I can just imagine how much he appreciated his tutor being a woman.”

Angelina coughed. “You’re right. Italian men resent accomplished women.” Then she dismissed the idea with a toss of her head and again tripped down the walk toward La Sarfatti’s apartment, carrying a small painting of her own, a gift for the grande dame.

Margherita’s apartment occupied an entire upper floor, with marvelous city views. A portiere answered the door and nodded his head approvingly when Angelina flashed her invitation to partake of drinks and cultured discussion. The chairs in Sarfatti’s drawing room had been arranged in a conversational circle. Gregori and Angelina peeked into her study and saw a confusion of manuscripts, proof sheets, and books. On the apartment walls hung hundreds of paintings, arranged from floor to ceiling. But pride of place was given to a stunning white-marble bust by Adolfo Wildt, titled Margherita Sarfatti. And indeed, she held sway in all cultural matters, from painting to pottery. Her taste, which ran to the colorful and bizarre, could be seen in the artistic movement that she now spearheaded, the Novecento, known for its insane colors and its cadaver-like heads. Some of these works hung on her walls. Her collection also included ugly pieces of sculpture, for example, the head of a boxer by Romanelli that eerily resembled the head of Il Duce. But, since she preferred painting to sculpture, the room smelled of oils and resins and not marble. And of all her paintings, those of Achille Funi predominated. The shelves of one room, in fact, bore the inscription, the “Funi Library,” with numerous small cards or brass labels identifying every painting and book. Gregori felt as though he were in a suffocating museum or an airtight bell jar, not in the apartment of a person who cooked and ate and slept and used a bathroom.

When the guests finally took their seats and turned their attention to La Sarfatti at the head of the circle, she immediately introduced the subject of art, and the importance of order.

“The Cubists are mad, simply insane,” she pontificated, waving her arms. “They represent analysis run amok.”

A twitchy thin-faced, balding fellow, lipping a drooping unlit cigarette, tugged at the red scarf around his neck and remarked, “Artists must be free to represent the world as they view it, whether crooked or straight. Both views are defensible. Greatness resides not in the subject matter per se but in the execution.”

Margherita would hear none of it. “Art should reflect the moral and cultural values of our society. It should be an expression not only of a country’s values but of those it wishes to inculcate.”

Angelina chose this moment to hand her small painting to La Sarfatti, whom she pressed to comment.

In that instant, Gregori became memory’s silent pawn. He remembered his mother hanging a reproduction of The Volga Boatmen, a painting by Ilya Repin, bought from a tinker. As Gregori watched, his mother hammered a nail in the wall over the couch. While she was leaning to hang the wired frame, Pyotr entered, eyed her vulnerable position, and came up behind her. Fully clothed, he gave her a great hump that sent her sprawling on the couch. Whether he had intended the action to be affectionate or hostile, Gregori couldn’t tell, but she tumbled on top of the picture causing it to rip. Anna, who had never shed a tear during all the years of Pyotr’s beatings, who had never let the children view her pain and humiliation, cried over the painting. Her response left Pyotr stunned. He could understand a whipped person wailing, but someone blubbering because of a cheap reproduction? In his incomprehension, he resorted to the only behavior he knew: abuse. Although Gregori was present, Pyotr dropped his pants and tried to remove Anna’s skirt to enter her from behind. Roaring, “Cry, will you? I’ll give you reason to cry,” he failed owing to his drunken state, which had left him limp.

Margherita removed the brown wrapping paper and stared at the painting dolefully. Angelina’s heart sunk, and she began to cough. But then the mistress of the salon smiled and said, “Here is an example of a quadro, a painting, that returns to the purest traditions of Giotto and Masaccio, and yet she does not renounce the uniqueness of our modern times.” The guests clapped, and Angelina bowed her head as if she had just received a state medal. The painting, a scene of the Farfa countryside, was passed among the guests, as Sarfatti continued, “Italian art must once again become method, order, and discipline. It must give rise to definite bodily forms that are analogous to the ancients, and yet different from them. It must be independent of foreign fads and mercantile considerations.”

Gregori had only an imperfect idea of what she meant. But he recognized a similarity to what Stalin called “Socialist Realism.” In fact, the Supreme Leader had said, “How can we judge the art of an age if not as the expression of its moral habits?”

“Thus,” La Sarfatti continued, “an orderly society produces orderly art, while, at the same time, encouraging a respect for discipline and control.” Insisting that art had to be a mutual enterprise, she exhorted her guests to insist that artists abandon their individual “arbitrary” styles and work toward a “collective synthesis of concreteness and simplicity.”

Yes, indeed, Margherita and Stalin were cut from the same cloth. This discovery led Gregori to the idea that all “isms” found validation in conformity, and that the “isms” closest to one another had to exaggerate their differences to maintain their separate identities. Here at last was an explanation for why those sects closest in belief, like the Catholics, hated each other so fiercely. The endless sectarian wars in the Caucasus suddenly made sense. His musing came to an end when Margherita stood to thank her guests for attending and bowed out of the room. The front door opened and the faithful cascaded down the steps and spilled into the street.

* * *

Weekdays Gregori spent at the Russicum under the watchful eye of a priest from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; weekends he drove to Farfa to see Angelina, though he had reservations about the seriousness of her commitments, whether to art, politics, or religion. He began to regard her as a dabbler, a dilettante. Even her frivolity seemed at times artificial. When he tried to broach the subject of dedication to a cause, she dismissed him with feigned gaiety. His students behaved in the opposite manner. They were dedicated warriors in the service of the Vatican. Perched on wooden benches, they hunched over communal tables, scribbled in their notebooks, and haltingly repeated the soft and hard glottal sounds of the Russian language. Gregori taught them the principles of the Orthodox faith, with its insistence that the Holy Spirit came not from the Son but from God alone, and its rejection of any rigid hierarchy, namely, the pope, cardinals, and bishops. He explained that in many Orthodox churches, the clergy shared the responsibility of leading the congregation with the laity. In some cases, the laity even elected their clergy, a practice that the novice spies felt led to anarchy.

When his handler, Carlo Cospirato, asked him how he liked the work, he lied, “I’d rather be in the Soviet Union, helping in the struggle to create a new society.”

“That’s what you’re doing now,” replied Carlo, a true believer. “You are helping the cause by rooting out the enemies of Bolshevism.”

In fact, Gregori relished conspiracies, whether in Moscow or Rome, and especially papal machinations. Every restaurant and café seemed to have its whisperers and secret agents. One day, he approvingly told the Russicum priest from the Congregation of the Faith, “You and I with Him conspire.” The priest’s grin suggested that he understood “Him” to stand for God. But what did Gregori intend: Christ? The staunchly anti-Communist pope, Pius XI? The Soviet government? Or was it the abstract idea of a higher cause, which had become for him a vague feeling that he associated with the armor of righteousness? Although exalted causes produced high emotions, they also implied obedience. Awash in a sea of theology, Gregori argued with himself about the virtues and defects of submission and its attendant certitude.

The Russicum students liked Gregori and, in turn, their respect brought out the natural teacher in him. As students and teacher grew closer, Gregori felt responsible for the fate of these young men. They had, through his tutorials, become his “children.” If he gave Carlo their names, as planned, they would likely be caught and shot. Given that he wanted to build a better world—didn’t the old medieval metaphor portray God as an architect?—he would have to play God and fashion his own future instead of following the plan of some other designer. Perhaps he would even stay in Rome and devote himself to teaching others. But teaching what? Catechistic instruction was boring. One could continue for only so long training spies to undermine the Soviet regime. To make the teaching more challenging, he introduced lessons in history. He told his students how religious ideas and institutions had evolved, and gave numerous examples to prove supernatural truths and God’s miracles. Deploring the split between Greek and Roman churches, he argued that doctrinal Orthodoxy and sectarian arguments came not from the Bible but from church councils, where political power, not scripture, was at issue.

After a day of such exhilarating exposition, he would retire to his dormitory, sip a glass of wine, nibble on pane and some pecorino, his favorite cheese, and try to sort out his growing unease over competing theories. In the blue-black darkness of night, he would fall to his knees before a cheap icon that he had purchased from a stand outside of the Vatican—the gold paint was already chipping—and engage in a timeless ritual, a catechism.

Question: Which is the true church? Answer: The Orthodox.

Question: Do you believe in Stalin? Answer: Yes, but . . .

Question: Do you believe in celibacy? Answer: No.

Question: Do you achieve holiness through good deeds, a theocracy, or penance? Answer: Prayer. Reply: Answer the question.

When he shared these ideas with his students, word reached the Office of the Faith, and his overseer gently suggested that he should leave political philosophy to the Catholic fathers and get on with the labor of schooling his students in Orthodox doctrines.

“We count on you,” said the priest, “to instruct our people in the liturgy, to illuminate for them the role of icons and the symbolic importance of priestly garments. How else can they get close to the people and bring them to the true faith?”

One evening, after he and Angelina dined in a cellar restaurant a few steps from the Piazza dei Fiori, they walked past the statue of Giordano Bruno and made their way to Capitoline Hill. Below, people were gathering in the Piazza Venezia. “Of course!” said Angelina, as they descended the Michelangelo steps. “Mussolini is speaking tonight from his balcony.”

The couple joined the swelling crowd. Although Il Duce would not appear for another thirty minutes, Gregori could hear in the voices of the faithful a religious reverence, an ecstasy. For them, Benito was a religious experience. Gregori had read about the spellbinding leader, had seen numerous photographs of him in the newspapers, and had heard him on the radio. But what he experienced now was unlike any spiritual awakening he had ever known. Yes, it was comparable to a religious conversion. The man looked strikingly like Calvo. The magician was everywhere, supplanting God with his mesmerizing powers and magical plans for a new Roman empire that would engulf the Levant and much of East Africa.

When the curtains parted and Mussolini appeared on the balcony, holding up his immense jaw to the sky as if challenging the Almighty, the street subsided into obedient silence. “Although we wish to re-create the glory that was Rome, we are not passatisti, those captive to the past.” To punctuate each point, he punched the air with his fist. “We also want a New Italy, the Italy of tomorrow, one that throbs with massive engines of production, commerce, and travel. One in which aircraft fill the skies with the thunder of their motors, and automobiles speed along ribbons of highway, and steamships, like sharpened steel, slice across the oceans. I envision great factories with tall smokestacks reaching the clouds, and electricity sparking life into every human endeavor. I see buildings that dwarf the Coliseum and rival the Pantheon, train stations that resemble artworks, marble statues in every courtyard, and all of us sharing in the beauty that was and is to come.”

He spoke of the poverty and humiliation visited upon the country after the Great War; and he said that for the nation to enter into the ranks of the richest and most powerful nations, Italy must express its national interests through any viable means. How else could they escape the current worldwide economic depression?

“We will do whatever it takes to maximize the interests of the people. If the evidence argues that the nation prospers most under monarchy, Fascists will become monarchists. If the evidence shows that monarchy is unworkable, then Fascists will become republicans. If Venezia can do what we can’t, then we will all become Venetians.” Urging communalism, Mussolini cried, “Only in the development of the nation-state will individuals and classes find their own fulfillment. Fascism places the nation before all else. The group counts more than the individual, the nation more than the group. Think of the fascio,” he said, holding up a flag exhibiting the familiar symbol.

Tumultuous applause shook the piazza. From the overflow crowd in adjoining streets came cheers as loud as those in the Piazza Venezia. The Italians were embracing Ignatius Loyola’s teaching that individuals are most free when they merge their identities with the group and give their leaders the decision-making powers. Benito claimed that he was merely an agent of the people, the vehicle through which the collective will spoke. At that instant, Gregori was uncomfortably reminded that he, too, was subject to the will of a greater force, in fact, two forces, the pull of religion and the push of the Soviets. The first was freighted with sectarianism. Should one choose the Orthodox or Roman rites? The second, with its so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, was just another form of Fascism. So why prefer Stalin to Mussolini, or Mussolini to Stalin? The answer to that question would determine Gregori’s future course of action.

* * *

Several days later, Gregori found himself asking: Do I want to linger in the lifeless antiquity of either the Orthodox or the Catholic Church? He felt that Mussolini’s speech had baptized him in beauty, and that to join the Fasci di Combattimento, not as a soldier, but as a spiritual fellow traveler appealed to him. His immediate problem was to find a trustworthy person with ties to the Fascists who could secretly insinuate him into the movement. He could not speak to Carlo Cospirato or to anyone at the Russicum, and he could hardly walk into a recruiting office. Given his church connections, he would be suspected immediately, even though the Fascists and the Vatican had made common cause in the Lateran Pacts of 1929.

So he sought out Margherita Sarfatti, and she in turn arranged for him to meet Galeazzo Ciano, married to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. As minister of propaganda, Ciano was involved in the black work of disinformation. A week later, Gregori was standing in an ornate room, on a Turkish rug, before an enormous table, crafted by some Renaissance artist. A handsome young man with dark hair and lively eyes, Ciano would squint when focusing on a person whom he thought worth his attention. Rumor said that he distrusted Hitler. Gregori spoke with undisguised passion. “I agree with Mussolini that we must distinguish between the act, what a person does, and what a person thinks, the ideological commitment. Not to recognize the difference between behavior and belief is to falsify reality.” He thumped his chest. “From within me, I hear a ringing voice that is at odds with my priestly calling. It says never rest, go forward. Where? Not toward some distant heavenly goal, but toward myself, the ideal self that I ought to be. The voice, as I understand it, is a moral admonition: Sii uomo, Be Man!”

Ciano wryly observed that the priest had only the Russicum to recommend him, a Catholic organization, and, at this moment, Gregori wished to leave that assignment for one with the Fascists. Gregori said, “Surely you have contacts in the Soviet Union who can report back to you on my loyalty.”

“True, but tell me: What avenues, what conduits do you have access to that will allow you to tell Christians in Russia that Mussolini will guarantee freedom of religious belief?”

“I have access to the Catacomb Church. I am a leader in the Renovationist movement. The Russicum will put me in touch with Roman Catholics in European Russia, Ukraine, and the other Slavic countries. I even have contacts among some of the Protestant churches.”

Playing with a wooden letter opener in the shape of a crocodile, Ciano tapped the point, the tail, on his blotter. He seemed to be calculating the advantages and risks of using Gregori Lipnoskii to spread information sympathetic to Mussolini and useful to the Fascists. Russia was fertile ground, given its size, its discontented minorities, its forced collectivization, and its antireligious laws. Every executed priest had a family, and that family had friends, and those friends had families. The chain was virtually endless. And what Gregori had said was absolutely true. The Italian government had well-placed spies who could report back on the loyalty—or treachery—of Gregori Lipnoskii, Renovationist priest.

“You will have to be trained,” said Ciano, unscrewing the letter opener to reveal a pen and scribbling some notes on a pad. “Let us toast your new life.” He removed from a drawer a bottle of wine and some biscotti and declared, “You have been born again!”

* * *

Resigning from the Russicum for reasons of health, Gregori underwent special training on the grounds of an army base outside of Rome, near the airport. Schooled in the crafts of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, he soon felt at ease with his assignment, and his tutors found him a quick study. On Sundays, the only day of the week he could see Angelina, he took her to Orthodox services and slowly inducted her into the Russian rites for the sole purpose of marriage. He had decided that her carefree behavior actually masked a profound sadness, but of what, he knew not. By the time he found out, it was too late.

Before leaving Rome, the couple married in Rome’s Greek Orthodox Church of San Teodoro Megalomartire. The Credulo family attended; and Gregori’s family, thinking him lost, was of course absent. During the service, Angelina held a handkerchief to her mouth to muffle her coughs, but read from the Bible with authority, as if God had cured her cough when she stepped up to repeat Holy Writ.

To prevent the Soviets from suspecting him of treachery, the Italian secret service took a leaf from Pravda’s notebook and ran stories in the local press declaring that Gregori Lipnoskii had been unmasked as a double agent, and that the government had ordered him expelled from Italy immediately. Spared the cruelty of having to expose his students as spies, he wished them good luck sowing discontent among Roman Catholics in Russia. A few days later, an Italian military plane landed near the German-Russian border, where a car met Gregori and Angelina and sped them back to the Soviet Union.

Litvinov, of course, wanted to know how Gregori was discovered. Basely blaming Carlo Cospirato, Gregori declared that the man worked for the Italian secret service. Days later, unbeknownst to the priest, the man who had been his friend and given him a Topolino was found dead on the outskirts of Rome. A bullet to the back of the head led the police to think that he had been a member of the Mafia because he was executed gangland style.

When Gregori explained to Angelina the service that he had agreed to render the Italian government, she seemed pleased. Though not herself a member of the Fascist Party, she greatly admired Il Duce; and never having traveled outside of Italy, she found the prospect of living in the Soviet Union exciting. But their arrival in 1937, at the start of the Great Purges, was met with suspicion. Anyone who had been residing outside the country was tainted. In addition, Stalin regarded all foreigners as unreliable, even wives, so Angelina’s Italian roots put her in danger. At first, Gregori’s excuses kept the police from his flat. He had been working for Litvinov; he had been betrayed; he was prepared to tell the NKVD the little he knew. Then late one night, while lying in bed, he heard the elevator. He knew the rumors about such sounds. They were the heralds of a visitation. And indeed, the inevitable knock on the door followed.

His interrogation took place at NKVD headquarters, Four Liteiny Prospekt. From adjoining rooms, he could hear the cries of prisoners presumably being tortured. But he knew from Dimitri that the NKVD scared their victims by piping into the interrogating room the taped screams of actors. His inquisitor, a bespectacled former professor of biology, introduced himself as Foma Sharok, a Muscovite. Impassive and soft spoken, he had no stomach for torture, which he assigned to the criminals in his employ. The only light in the room came from Foma’s arc lamp. Gregori sat in front of his desk. Training the light in the eyes of the priest, Foma made it virtually impossible for Gregori to see him, though Gregori could hear, in the dark, Comrade Sharok shuffling papers, a favorite trick interrogators used to make their victims think that they possessed large files of incriminating evidence. Foma began, not with an accusation, but with an assembly of facts that he hoped would slowly erode Gregori’s confidence.

“Mr. Lipnoskii, or should I say Father Lipnoskii, you were initially recruited by Georgiy Vasilyevich Chicherin. His gentle methods, I should point out, have been replaced by more forceful ones. If we are to root out the enemies of the people, pruning is not the way to proceed, but uprooting the whole plant.”

“What am I accused of? Nobody has told me.”

“You are all the same—protesting your ignorance of the crimes you’ve committed.”

“What crimes? I worked for the secret police at the Russicum in Rome and passed along my information to one Carlo Cospirato, a garage mechanic, who taught me Italian and gave me a car to use.”

“I find it incredible that while at the Russicum, you never uncovered one spy. Although your own students hadn’t yet graduated, certainly you must have been privy to some in the field.” He paused and said kindly, “The Roman Church is far more clever, Gregori, than you might think. All spies use aliases, so it should come as no surprise that the Russicum had assigned these men code names.”

Was Foma, Gregori worried, trying to trap him by providing him with an excuse? “Whatever I learned, I turned over to Carlo.”

“You spent time at Farfa Abbey with monks who hate the Soviets.”

Gregori shifted in his chair. How had Comrade Sharok found out about the abbey? “I worshipped there. The political opinions of the monks were never made known to me.”

“Do you know a Father Maurizio?”

“Yes, quite well. We became rather friendly at the abbey.”

“He works for us.”

Having no way of knowing whether Foma was telling the truth, Gregori took the safe path to avoid a possible trap. “Our discussions were always of a theological nature. At no time that I can remember did we talk about politics. In fact, we both agreed that churches, of any denomination, ought to stick to spiritual matters.”

“Ah, then you did discuss the church’s role in society?”

“In society, yes, but we agreed that it had no place in politics.”

Foma said nothing—to let Gregori reconsider. But the priest remained calm. Foma knew that these priests, with their spiritual pretensions, were difficult to break. They always put their trust in a higher cause. Men who spied for money were easier to deal with.

“So you are telling me that Maurizio is a liar? That the money we give him is wasted?”

“I know nothing about the Soviet government’s relationship to Father Maurizio and Farfa Abbey. It all comes as a surprise to me.”

More papers rustled. “What if we brought Father Maurizio here and he confronted you with the truth.”

“I would be delighted to see him.”

Foma had taken a wrong turn. He decided to try another approach. “Your wife is Italian, and her family fancies Mussolini.”

What Foma had said was true.

“My wife, Angelina, has never voted in an election. Her passion is for painting, not politics.”

“We have been eavesdropping on your conversations. Now what do you have to say?”

Gregori saw yet another trap being laid. Whatever he said could be used against him. For good reason, his brother had told him never to volunteer any information. “We have nothing to hide.”

“Your wife says she misses Rome.”

“True.”

“Anyone who doesn’t appreciate the Soviet paradise is either mad or an enemy of the people.”

“As a matter of fact, Comrade Sharok, she is ill, but not mentally. She has been coughing blood. We are seeing a specialist.”

Foma decided to terminate the investigation. This priest, as far as he could determine, was harmless. If information should turn up later . . . well, the case could always be reopened.

After months of spitting blood, Angelina was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium outside of Leningrad. Gregori sat at her bedside, his distress and hers made all the more acute by the fact that she was in the early stages of a pregnancy.

“Why didn’t you tell me in Italy that you suspected your cough was from consumption?”

“I didn’t want to believe it.”

“That’s why you often feigned gaiety.”

“Yes, even though I knew you thought my behavior peculiar. My lungs were a constant source of worry. I felt that my life would soon end. My mother used to say we are born, and we die, and in between, we dance. Soon, I shall slip off my dancing shoes, which of late haven’t fit very well. When I laughed and teased, I was dancing on my own grave. But now the constant coughing, the blood clots, the stained handkerchiefs are heralds of death.”

“But if I had known sooner, perhaps we could have arrested it.”

“I didn’t want to lose you. You have no idea how many Italian men leave their wives over an illness, a lost breast, gray hair . . .”

“Did you think I was like those men?”

“No, but I was afraid to take the chance.”

He squeezed her hand and said, “You won’t die! The doctors will cure you. They won’t let you get away.”

But she did die, and with her the fetus. Gregori mourned deeply, though his family, whom he had never contacted, knew nothing. He had feared that if his stepfather ever fell out of favor with Stalin, only distance could save him, the parched priest with an ecstatic thirst, and his wife. But death, which daily enters a thousand unsuspecting homes, rendered Gregori’s precautions meaningless. In fact, the conjunction of Angelina’s passing and Stalin’s purges enabled the secret police to discover Gregori’s treachery.

Shortly before Angelina had been sent to the sanitarium, Gregori had asked a catacomb priest about the efficacy of miracles. Told that a healer, Father Orlov, could cure consumption, Gregori had taken Angelina hundreds of miles to Totma, where the fatidic healer lived in a cave, with a pipe above ground to expel the fetidness. On the side of a hill stood the entrance, covered by an old rug. Angelina could hardly stand the odor of the pestiferous cell issuing not just from bodily waste and garbage, but from the old man himself, who had not bathed, according to rumor, for years. In the recess of one mud wall was a crucifix, several icons, candles, and a flat rock, covered with a red cloth, that supported a Bible. A kneeling mat lay before the stone. Here was where the mystic said his orisons and prayed for the recovery of the sick, but not before he laid his oily hands on the sufferer and anointed the ailing person’s head. Deus vobiscum.

After the exorcism and healing rituals, Gregori carried Angelina through a driving rain to the horse wagon that had carried them from the train station. Her health declined noticeably on their return, and shortly, she was admitted to the sanitarium, where she inadvertently told one of the doctors about her experience in Totma, a disclosure that led the authorities to suspect Gregori, not of Fascist subversion, but of forbidden religious rites.

During their investigations, the secret police learned from Gregori’s neighbors that he frequently entertained Ukrainian-speaking guests. The news confounded the NKVD. On further delving, they discovered that Gregori’s visitors were all former Roman priests, and that some of them were rumored to still practice their faith in private. The agent in charge of the investigation reported to Comrade Sharok, who wanted to know how these Ukrainians could afford to travel to Leningrad, stay at hostels, pay for their meals, and yet have no visible means of support. “Find out more,” he ordered.

Picking up Dominik Boretski, one of the Ukrainians, a frail and wizened man, the police confined him to an unheated cell, fed him greasy soup, and beat him with metal rods until he confessed.

When the NKVD showed Gregori the instruments of torture and the broken Boretski, Gregori told the secret police that he worked for the Italian secret service, in particular, the Propaganda Department, which supplied him with money and propaganda that came through the Serbian embassy. Comrade Sharok, pleased to have uncovered a traitor, was displeased to learn that his judgment of the man had proved wrong. An error of this magnitude could cost him his life. He was therefore inclined to have Gregori taken to Butovo or the killing fields at the Rzhevsky shooting range near Toksov; but after further thought, he decided a work camp would be crueler.

A month after Angelina’s death, one year after his return to the USSR, Gregori found himself on a train for Arkhangelsk. From there the NKVD transported him to the fifteenth-century Solovki Monastery, in the Solovki Archipelago, just outside the Arctic Circle in the White Sea. The monastery’s cathedrals, churches, and houses had been converted into a camp for prisoners. It was part of the infamous Gulag. Stalin, who had not forgotten his beatings from insensitive clerics during his seminary training in Georgia, thought it fitting that priests and others of a higher calling should be imprisoned in a former religious residence that passed most of the year in ice.