16

Manhattan

Gary Iverson stood in the empty apartment in the vicinity of Fordham University, conscious of starkness, white-painted empty rooms and high bright ceilings. The lack of furniture caused a lack of shadow, hence of texture, and he always had the feeling in this place that he was about to be prepped for surgery. He could hear the sound of the other man’s voice coming from one of the rooms at the back, and then the voice was silent, and a door opened at the end of the hallway.

Iverson looked at the man who came along the hallway to the living-room. He had an uninteresting face, if somewhat kindly, but it wasn’t in any way memorable. Had anyone asked Iverson to close his eyes there and then and describe his companion, he would have found the task difficult.

“Did you get through?” Iverson asked politely.

“Terrible connection. Impossible to hear anything.”

“Too bad.” Iverson stepped inside the open-plan kitchen, looked in the refrigerator, found a couple of bottles of ginger beer. A recipe on the label informed him that this soda was an ingredient in something called a Moscow Mule – highly appropriate. He took out two bottles and gave one to his companion.

“I wish we had something stronger, Colonel,” Iverson said.

Epishev opened the bottle, swallowed, made a face. Then he wandered to the large window that looked out across the river, which had a strange lemon tint in the early evening sun. He had been in the United States on two previous occasions – once to provide security at the Soviet Mission, the second time to investigate the activities of the Soviet Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, a man suspected of being soft on the West, and therefore a possible security risk. Epishev liked the country, or the little he’d seen of it. He understood he wasn’t going to see a great deal of it this time either.

Iverson chugged his ginger beer. Then he said, “Welcome to America,” and smiled in an artificially charming way. It was also a slightly strained expression because this apartment never failed to make Iverson a touch uneasy – he was forever conscious of Galbraith, ensconced in his basement in Fredericksburg, listening to everything that was said in these rooms. And today he was more than usually sensitive because he knew that Galbraith, having heard of the death of Sundbach at the hands of the unpredictable Andres Kiss, was bound to be wrathful. And when the fat man was angry, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

V. G. Epishev turned from the window. He was still dislocated from the trip, the suddenness of it, his own lack of preparation and insight. He’d known about US involvement in the plan all along, of course – where else was an American plane going to come from if not from the Americans? – but it was only when Malik had introduced him in London to the man known as Gunther that he became aware of the extent of American interest, how it reached inside the US Embassy and spread, if Malik was to be believed, into the upper reaches of American military circles and God knows where else. There’s more to all this than you and I have ever been told, Victor, Malik had said. US involvement doesn’t begin and end with an Assistant Ambassador at the US Embassy. It goes higher, and it goes deeper, and some of the most influential men in America are involved…

What was painfully obvious to Epishev was how Greshko had kept a certain amount of information from him, but that fact shouldn’t have surprised or irritated him. Greshko had done what he always did so very well. He’d concealed information, and juggled it, doling a little out to one person, some to another, so that the total picture was known only to himself. Devious Greshko, master of deception and legerdemain, creator of his own myth, saviour of Russia. Love and hatred, Epishev thought. Greshko inspired extreme responses in other people, as if any form of relationship with the old man took place on a moving pendulum.

Epishev, who always imagined he occupied a special place in the old man’s affections, felt resentful of Greshko just then. The old man had excluded him. Yet – and here lay the hold Greshko had, the true nature of the loyalty Epishev felt – he was no less anxious to please Greshko than before. It was a kind of magic, Epishev thought, a sorcery. At a distance of four thousand miles, Greshko’s grip was as strong as it had been at a mere six feet.

He stared at Iverson and said, “Why is there no furniture in this apartment?”

“We keep it for meetings,” Iverson said. “Nobody lives here.”

Epishev said, “In the Soviet Union, this kind of apartment would be occupied by two families.”

Iverson shrugged and drained his ginger beer. He wasn’t sure what to say to this. He had a script written for him by Galbraith and he had no desire to deviate from it. He put his empty bottle down on the kitchen counter and said, “Let’s talk about Frank Pagan, Colonel.”

“And the girl,” Epishev said.

“Of course.” Iverson walked across the room, putting a little distance between himself and the microphone he knew was planted in the vent above the kitchen stove. It would pick up his voice anyhow, but he enjoyed the idea of Galbraith straining to listen. What he didn’t know, but on one level of awareness suspected, was that the entire apartment was one enormous eavesdropping device. The walls had been specially treated with a chemical that amplified any sound and relayed it to a series of hypersensitive pick-ups lodged in the ceiling. A sigh, a whisper, the touch of a handkerchief to a lip, a quiet fart – Galbraith heard it all in Fredericksburg.

Iverson leaned against the wall, arms folded. He had no way of knowing how much he had in common with Viktor Epishev of the KGB, how they both served masters given to authoritarian whim, strong-willed men who guarded their dominions jealously, who resented intrusions and meddlesome outsiders, and who found trust difficult. Iverson and Epishev – both obedient and yet at times capable of some mild straining at the leashes that held them in place, both loyal, both patriots, both pedestrians in the hall of bevelled mirrors that was international political ambition and intrigue.

Iverson said, “According to our information, Pagan and the girl are staying at the Warwick Hotel here in Manhattan. Pagan – presumably because of information given to him by the girl, and because he’s come to some understanding of the coded meaning in Romanenko’s message – has started to drift very dose to the Brotherhood. Only this afternoon we were forced to intervene in a situation …” In a situation I might have foreseen but didn’t, he thought.

Gary Iverson, turning the word ‘coded’ around in his mind, admiring Galbraith’s cunning, glanced at his wristwatch and went on, “I don’t have to tell you how disastrous it would be at this stage if Pagan and Kristina Vaska interfered with things. There’s a third person in the picture as well, a New York policeman called Max Klein, who’s been assisting Pagan. It’s a sensitive situation, as you can well understand.”

Epishev said, “But the solution is very simple, Iverson.”

Iverson hesitated. “As you say, Colonel, it’s very simple.”

“Then what’s holding you back?”

Iverson paced the floor, stopping at a place where sunlight slicing through the windows. struck his face and made him blink his eyes. “We need your help, Colonel Epishev.”

Epishev was hardly surprised by the request. He hadn’t been issued a quick visa and flown first-class to the United States on the first available plane just to play tourist. He’d known his help was needed from the start, from the moment when Gunther had stamped his passport in his offices in the US Embassy and told him that Pagan and the girl were now in New York City – ‘pursuing investigations’ was how Gunther had phrased it, his face rather mysterious, as if there were more he wanted to say but didn’t have the authority to say. Epishev knew what the Americans wanted of him. He wanted the same thing for himself.

“You need to keep your own hands clean,” Epishev said.

“The situation’s delicate,” Iverson replied.

Epishev gazed back out over the river. A tugboat came in view, a small dirty vessel spewing out dark smoke.

Iverson went on, “Killing a New York policeman – to say nothing of a man from Scotland Yard – isn’t something we do with great enthusiasm. You, on the other hand, don’t have …” Iverson let his sentence hang unfinished.

“Killing isn’t anything I relish myself,” Epishev said quietly.

“Nobody relishes it,” Iverson said.

Epishev smiled. “And your superiors have qualms.”

“Qualms, sure,” Iverson remarked. “But it’s more than that. They’re afraid of unwanted complications. They don’t like the idea of this triple elimination coming back on them, sullying their good name, if you understand what I’m saying.”

“They’re afraid of ghosts,” Epishev said, a slight scoffing note in his voice.

“You might say. Congressional ghosts. Journalistic ghosts. We’re a country of inquisitive spectres, Colonel. It’s part of the price we pay for freedom and democracy, you see.” Scoring a point, Iverson thought, and why the hell not? He hated Communism. He hated Communists. He didn’t like this character Epishev coming to the USA with such ease, and he was unhappy with the idea of any collusion between America and the Soviet Union. But he wasn’t the scriptwriter, Galbraith was the creator when it came to situations and scenes, Iverson was merely an actor in the drama. At least he had the advantage of knowing how this particular drama was going to end, and it pleased him to think of the small aircraft floating in darkness with all the density of the Adirondacks lying mysteriously below … He derailed this train of thought. Anticipation might be amusing and enjoyable, but as Galbraith was constantly saying, The future is the province of soothsayers, Gary. We mere mortals have to make do with the moment.

Epishev said, “Your superiors don’t have much power, if the killing of three insignificant people causes them such worry.”

“Oh, they have power, Colonel. But they also believe that discretion is one sure way of holding on to it.”

“Why do dirty work if they can get somebody else to do it for them?”

Iverson nodded. “You were given an order from your own superior, Colonel. As far as I understand it, your mandate was to eliminate any threat to the plan. That’s all you’ve come to America to do. Your duty. Plain and simple. Everything you need will be supplied to you. Immediately after the success of your undertaking, you’ll be flown from New York to Germany. You’ll re-enter Russia, your orders will have been carried out, people will be pleased on both sides. You’ll have all the help we can place at your disposal. You can even have the use of our personnel – up to a point.”

“And what point is that?”

“The point where their culpability might be established.”

“By the ghosts you fear so much?”

“Exactly,” Iverson said.

Epishev watched the old tug boat vanish from his sight. Then the yellowy river was empty and the sun hung behind factory stacks on the opposite bank. Greshko’s face floated up before him, the smell of the sick-room, the aroma of death that clung to the walls with the certainty of dampness.

“I have guarantees?” he asked.

“Cast-iron,” Iverson replied. “Remember. If General Greshko trusted us enough to enter into this partnership, well…”

Epishev considered this. If Greshko had trusted these people, then Epishev had no reason to feel otherwise. Greshko’s trust, as he well knew, was given only sparingly, and then never completely – but if he’d made an important compact with the Americans, then it was because the advantages in it for him were too attractive to refuse. There was a long silence in the room, broken finally by Iverson, who looked solemn as he said, “You can count on our backing all the way.”

“You have Pagan and the girl under surveillance?” Epishev asked.

“Constantly,” Iverson answered. “We never sleep.”

Moscow

“Tea, General?” Volovich asked, but his tongue was heavy in his mouth. He watched Stefan Olsky cross the floor to one of the armchairs, where he sat, crossing his legs and removing his cap.

“I don’t think so,” Olsky said.

“It’s no trouble –”

Olsky held one hand up, palm outward. “I said no, Dimitri.”

Volovich hovered in the doorway to the kitchen. Pain throbbed behind his eyes.

Olsky said, “I like this apartment. I imagine you’re fond of it too. Convenient location. Pleasant rooms.”

“It’s comfortable, General.”

Stefan Olsky was quiet a moment. “You were going somewhere when I arrived.”

Volovich, whose mind suddenly had the texture of an ice-skating rink, a thing of slippery surfaces and frozen depths, nodded his head imperceptibly. “A stroll, a late-night stroll,” he forced himself to say.

Olsky said nothing for a moment. “You took a call from Viktor Epishev a few minutes ago. The call was patched here through a KGB switchboard in East Berlin. It originated in the United States. My listeners are located in the basement of this building – does that surprise you?”

A tapped telephone. It was a nightmare and Volovich was hurled into it and, as in all nightmares, no immediate escape was apparent, no relief forthcoming.

Olsky said, “Viktor Epishev mentioned a threat to the plan, Dimitri. What is the nature of the plan?”

“Plan?”

“Don’t play games with me. I hate games.”

Volovich shook his head. Being stubborn would finally prove futile, but there were old loyalties and they would sustain him, if only briefly. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, General.”

“I know you and Epishev visited Greshko last Saturday. I know Epishev left the country the next day. I know you’re all involved in some kind of Baltic conspiracy – don’t waste my time or insult my intelligence, Lieutenant.”

“I have nothing to say.”

Stefan Olsky stood up and strolled around the apartment. “You have a comfortable life here, Dimitri. A good apartment, a car, a job that isn’t terribly taxing. And yet you risk throwing it all away – for what? Why do you feel you have to protect Greshko and Epishev? Do you imagine they’d protect you if the situation were reversed?”

Volovich, who saw the logic of the question, didn’t answer it. He looked down at the floor like a scolded schoolboy. He heard General Olsky move around the apartment, but he didn’t look. Once, Olsky passed just behind him, so close Volovich could feel the General’s breath on the back of his neck and smell his sweet aftershave lotion.

“I admire your loyalty, Dimitri. I understand your need to protect your superiors.”

Volovich still didn’t speak.

“But sometimes old loyalties have to give way to new ones, Dimitri. Just as old systems have to yield to new ones, if there’s going to be progress.” Olsky was quiet a moment. “I don’t approve of some of the methods used by my predecessor. I admit they got quick results, but the cellars of Lubianka are damp and they don’t feel quite right to me any more. Too medieval. Too crude. This is the late 20th century and Greshko’s barbarism is outmoded. I much prefer the idea of solving this business between us in a civilised way …”

Stefan Olsky sat down again. He looked at the darkness upon the window, the slight light cast there by a streetlamp. A faint wind rustled the thin young trees outside. He turned his eyes back to the wretched Volovich. He felt an odd little sense of pity for the man.

“Tell me the nature of this plot.”

“I don’t know,” Volovich said, raising his face to look at the General.

“Nobody told you, Dimitri? Am I to believe that?”

“Nobody told me. Correct.”

Olsky said, “I understand you have a mother, Dimitri.”

“Yes.”

“You were able to use your influence to have her admitted to a KGB-operated rest home on the Black Sea.”

“I only did what a great many people do.”

“I’m not quibbling with that. But you used your influence in the wrong way, didn’t you? Some people might construe it as misuse of privilege. Even a form of bribery.”

“Bribery?”

“In which case your mother would be obliged to move.”

“She’s sick, General.”

“There are hospitals.”

“If she were in a hospital, she’d be dead now.”

Volovich glanced inside the kitchen where a kettle had begun to boil. He pictured his mother, who suffered from incurable emphysema, being moved from her light, airy room in the sanitarium and taken to some dreary state hospital in a small drab suburban town, where care would be minimal and medication unavailable and nurses rude.

“Make your tea, Dimitri. You need it.”

With hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, Dimitri brewed tea, then stood inside the living-room and sipped it. He was quiet for a very long time, struggling with himself, seeing the sheer hopelessness of his situation. He said, “I don’t want her moved, General. She’s comfortable where she is.”

“I imagine she is,” Olsky said.

Volovich swallowed hard. He might have had a pebble in his throat. “I’d tell you if I knew, General. But I don’t know. They kept me in the dark.”

“You must have some knowledge.”

“I understood Romanenko was delivering a message to a contact in Britain. Then Romanenko was shot, the delivery didn’t happen and Epishev was sent to make sure nothing else would go wrong.”

Olsky felt a little flicker of fatigue go through him. All afternoon long and throughout the evening, he’d been dispatching KGB agents to the major cities in the Baltic countries, to Riga, and Vilnius, and Tallinn, hundreds of agents, under strict orders to act with stealth and the appropriate discretion in their inquiries. Dissidents, refuseniks, political deviants – these had been rounded up quietly and taken from their homes and questioned, then returned as swiftly as possible. Apartments were ransacked, files removed, documents studied. The operation brought forth a number of unexpected prizes, although none of them was related to the Baltic plot. A musician in Vilnius had an illegal mimeograph machine, a Jewish writer in Tallinn was in possession of a large amount of foreign currency, a cache of heroin had been discovered in the apartment of a physician in Riga, and in the Latvian city of Valmiera a professor of physics had a collection of several hundred precious icons. At any other time, Olsky would have been pleased with these results, but not now. They brought him no closer to the truth he really wanted.

“You must have gathered some impressions, Lieutenant.”

Greshko and Epishev, who sometimes seemed to share a common language Volovich couldn’t penetrate, had never really made him an intimate part of the plan. “A few,” Volovich said. “The truth is, I really didn’t want to know.”

“A conspiracy against your country, and you didn’t want to know?”

“I worked with Colonel Epishev for twenty years –”

“And you’re close friends –”

“Yes, we are –”

“And you couldn’t let him down –”

“Correct, General.”

Olsky sighed. “Tell me your impressions.”

Volovich put his tea-cup down. “I understood the plot’s aim was an act of terrorist aggression inside the Soviet Union.”

“But not in the Baltic republics?”

“I don’t think so, General.”

Olsky asked, “Where in the Soviet Union? And when?”

“I don’t know.”

“Moscow? Leningrad? Kiev?”

“I swear I don’t know –”

“And what kind of terrorism? Bombs? Assassinations?”

“My impression is that there’s a plane involved. The attack will come from the air – but I’m guessing now.”

“From the air?”

“Yes, General.”

“But that’s impossible,” Olsky said, just a little too quickly. Ever since a foolish West German teenager had contrived to fly a small aeroplane directly into Red Square two years ago – to the general humiliation of the authorities – defences had been strengthened. It was boasted now that they were impregnable, even if Olsky knew that ‘impregnable’ was one of those illusory words of which the military was so fond.

“One would have thought so,” Volovich said. “I just wish I knew more.”

Volovich lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. General Olsky walked around the room, examining books and phonograph records. He picked up a copy of Trud from the table and flipped through the pages. He believed Volovich because he understood that a minion like Dimitri would not be made privy to essential information. He’d drive cars, and carry messages, and act as liaison, and he’d pick up information here and there, but his role would never be very significant. Greshko, even more possessive in old age than he’d ever been, more like a sharp-clawed cat than before, would have seen to that.

“What happens to me, General?” Volovich asked.

“Until I decide, you’re under house arrest. You’ll answer your telephone as you usually do, and if anybody calls from your office you’ll say you’re sick with cold, whatever. Apart from having this very severe chill, you’ll sound otherwise perfectly normal.”

“And when my cold is cured?”

Olsky didn’t answer the question. He stepped out of the apartment and stood on the landing. He looked down the stairwell, seeing through pale lamps the shadow of Colonel Chebrikov waiting in the foyer. Olsky descended, nagged by the realisation that he’d been looking for the sources of this Baltic business in all the wrong places. Common dissidents, writers, dreamers, Jews, applicants for exit visas – he had reached into the predictable areas for suspects, when he should have been looking elsewhere. An aeroplane. What kind of people were in a position to help an aeroplane carry out an act of aggression, an act of terrorism, against the Soviet Union? The answer was obvious, and yet painful because it involved powerful men who were sensitive when it came to their domain, which was nothing less than the air defences of the country.

He crossed the lobby to where Chebrikov was standing. The young Colonel, who stood at attention whenever Olsky was within his line of vision, said, “There was a call for you on the car radio, General. From the Kremlin. The General Secretary wants to see you. Urgently, sir.”

Manhattan

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had company, Frank,” Max Klein said when he stepped inside the hotel room and heard the sound of Kristina singing in the bathroom. He fidgeted with his bow-tie, a polka-dot affair that drooped, then sat down in one of the two easy-chairs in the place. He had a way of entering rooms, softly on sandals, that suggested the movements of a retired cat-burglar a little embarrassed by his habitual stealth. Even his feathery hair seemed stealthy on his skull, as though it would whisper secretively were a breeze to blow through it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Pagan said. He didn’t have time for explanations of Kristina. He might have told a narrative of Soviet repression, the story of a man whose family had been destroyed years ago, and how Norbert Vaska was imprisoned in Siberia, but Pagan had no real urge to familiarise Klein with all this background, nor with how Kristina Vaska had swept into his world. The sound of the shower stopped, but Kristina didn’t emerge and there was only silence from the bathroom for a long time.

Klein stared at the bathroom door a moment, then took some papers out of his jacket. Like everything else that found its way into his pockets, the papers were crumpled and creased, and he had to spread them on the table and smooth them before they were manageable. “Do you know how easy it is to set up a corporation in this country, Frank?” he asked. “It doesn’t take much, I’ll tell you. A lawyer draws up articles of incorporation, you pay the guy his fee – anything from three hundred to a thousand dollars – and you file the articles with the Corporation Commission, and that’s it. Unless you’re a known felon, you’re the President of your own company within a matter of moments. A piece of cake.”

Pagan leaned across the table to look at the papers Klein had spread out. Klein said, “These documents represent a triumph of corporate maze-making, Frank,” and he pushed some photostat sheets toward Pagan, who was hoping only to hear a bottom line, not a digression on the illusory nature of corporate structures.

“Carl Sundbach operated a company called Rikkad Inc.”

“Then he was responsible for hiring the Jaguar?”

“Not quite,” Klein said. “He turned ownership of Rikkad over to another company named Piper Industries – they make belts for vacuum cleaners – but he stayed on as Chairman of the Rikkad board. Rikkad, incidentally, supply paper products to hotels. Not only was he Chairman of Rikkad, he was also CEO of Piper, so he’d sold his company to himself. High finance baffles me, so don’t ask questions about tax strategies, because I don’t have answers.”

“Where is this going, Max?”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there.” Klein turned over some more sheets of paper. “Look at this. Piper Industries, in turn, is a subsidiary of something called – drum rolls, please – Sundbach Enterprises, which was sold five years ago to none other than Rikkad Inc. The snake swallows its own tail and Carl was lying when he said he’d sold his company to another outfit. When you look at the names of the corporate officers in each case, only two names reappear. Carl’s, and somebody called Mikhail Kiss, who is apparently the financial VP of all three companies.”

“But who the hell leased the bloody Jaguar?” Pagan asked.

“To find the answer to that baby, we have to ask Kiss, don’t we? If he’s financial Vice President, he’s got to have some kind of information about what flows in and out. And since it costs approximately eight grand a year to lease a Jag with insurance from the company on Long Island – I checked it, Frank – it’s the kind of expense he’s not exactly going to overlook.”

Corporate mazes, funny paperwork, networks that swallowed themselves. Pagan gazed at the papers just as Kristina stepped out of the bathroom. Affected by slight awkwardness, Pagan made the introduction. Kristina, with a social charm he hadn’t noticed about her before, shook Klein’s hand and showered him with attention, as if he were suddenly the most important thing in her world – it was quite a knack and the small man looked as if he’d had an encounter with an angel. Pagan marvelled at the easy way she made small talk with Max Klein, then the grace with which she apologised for interrupting. She drifted to the window, turned her back on the two men, saying she hadn’t meant to disrupt them. Max Klein protested – her kind of interruption, hey, he could stand that any day of the week.

Pagan watched her, saw the way her shirt tapered into the narrow belt of her blue cotton pants, and how her damp hair glistened in the fading sunlight. He was struck by wonder at the way she commanded his attention, by her grace and quiet elegance, and how the sunlight made a soft outline of her at the window.

“I’ve got an address for Kiss,” Klein answered. He opened his notebook and found the page he needed. He showed it to Pagan, to whom the address meant absolutely nothing.

“He lives in Glen Cove, on the Island,” Klein said. “The phone’s unlisted. I could get it if you needed it.”

“I don’t,” Pagan said. “I’d rather go in person.”

“Now?” Klein asked.

“Why not?”

Kristina moved directly behind Pagan, one hand laid on his shoulder with a proprietary intimacy he enjoyed. She said, “I’ll wait for you here if you like, Frank.”

Pagan stood up. He looked directly into the woman’s dark eyes, seeing sympathy in them, and insight, and he realised nobody had looked at him in quite that way since Roxanne. He was moving in other dimensions here, and enjoying them, even if he wasn’t sure where they were ultimately taking him. She kissed him lightly on the side of his face.

“Take care,” she said.

Moscow

The office of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was located in the Palace of Congresses at the Kremlin. It was painted in shades of brown and lit by concealed spotlights, each of which played quietly and artfully on the man’s large desk, creating the impression that the Secretary was on a stage, the central player in an unfolding drama. The room, though vast, was stark in its furnishings. Thick brown curtains hung day and night at the window and the outer edges of the room were forever in gloomy shadow, and impenetrable. The General Secretary was middle-aged, the youngest leader of the Soviet Union since the Revolution, and wore no medals upon his chest in the fashion favoured by his bombastic predecessors. His style of governing was relaxed, at least in public, and low-key, and he enjoyed the rapport he’d established with the ordinary people. He took frequently to the streets, plunging among the workers, shaking hands until his flesh was bruised, listening to complaints and disappointments and promising to put things right. His was a new Russia, a different kind of Soviet society which, while forging ahead into unmapped regions, had to take pains not to offend and isolate the old – a difficult and rather delicate balancing-act, and a conundrum whose solution would take many years.

But the General Secretary was a determined man, and steely, and he’d been playing Party games for most of his adult life and so knew how to bend Party opinion in his direction, at least much of the time. He knew how to use patience to work the older members, those quietly sullen men who remembered Lenin and had survived the ravages of Stalin’s ways. He knew how to use charm when he encountered stubbornness, and when charm failed him he knew the best way to be rid of the ‘ideologically backward’ was to send them to distant oblasti where they assumed grand titles and exercised absolutely no power. He knew how to use persuasion when it came to slowing down those of his own followers who wanted to hurry everything, men of excess and unbounded impatience, whose qualities of dedication were needed but whose temperaments were not.

Now, raising his face from the sheets of paper that contained the working draft of the speech he intended to deliver to the Praesidium in twelve hours’ time at the Palace of Congresses, he capped his fountain-pen and looked at the figure of General Olsky, who sat facing him.

“This speech, Stefan, which may be the most audacious I’ve made,” – and here the General Secretary tapped the papers with his pen – “is going to be called incautious by some, bold by others, and heresy by all the rest. The hardline Marxists are going to say I’m soft on Western capitalism, which is anathema to Communism. The so-called democrats among us are going to say I’ve bent over backwards to appease the Marxists and leftover Stalinists who got our economy into a mess in the first place. I want to make unemployment a fact of Soviet life, for example. A bad worker should be fired. Others should compete for his job. Isn’t that perfectly natural? And the old men will nag me and say there can be no official unemployment in a socialist society. And the military – I see apoplectic generals when I announce my intention to cut military spending by twenty per cent over two years. I take a little from some, give a little to others, and hope it balances in the end.”

The General Secretary took off his glasses. It was two a.m. and he was weary. He surveyed the banks of telephones on his desk. Directly below his office was the main auditorium of the Palace where Communist Party Congresses had been held ever since 1961, when the Palace had been constructed. It was an impressive building, containing eight hundred rooms and a banqueting hall that could seat a couple of thousand people, but it wasn’t the General Secretary’s favourite building at the Kremlin by any means. He much preferred the sumptuous halls that housed the possessions of the Royal Family – the Regalia Hall with its extraordinary thrones and crowns, or the Hall of Russian Gold and Silver where there were elaborate candlesticks, goblets, rings, earrings and likenesses of saints. These displays stimulated a quiet yearning for Russia’s past that most people might have found strange in a progressive General Secretary, but he’d read widely in Russian history, and perceived his own roots in these readings, as well as his own designs for the future. This great sluggish bear that was Russia, bogged down in its own muddy past, had to be set free to survive.

Olsky, always awed in the presence of the General Secretary, gazed across the massive desk. Socially, he was comfortable with the Secretary when they met for drinks, or once in a great while to play cards, but when it was a matter of official business he could never bring himself to feel easy.

The General Secretary said, “About an hour ago, I spoke with Nikolai Bragin. At his insistence, let me add. He was most anxious.” He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out some photocopied sheets of paper, which he slid toward Olsky, who read them slowly, once, twice, three times. He tried to keep his hand from shaking.

“I’m obliged to show them to you, Stefan.”

“They’re forgeries, of course,” Olsky said calmly. “Where did you get them?”

“Would it surprise you to know they came from Greshko, who tried to interest Bragin in a story of scandal and corruption inside the Politburo?”

Olsky sighed. “I’m not surprised.”

“According to Greshko, there’s some kind of plot against the State going on. He told Bragin there are Baltic factions involved and he claims …” And here the General Secretary paused, searching for the right phrase. “He claims that you’re part of the whole thing, Stefan. He also claims that a certain KGB Colonel, Viktor Epishev, has been sent abroad under your express orders to participate in the scheme.”

“Do I have to answer these ridiculous charges against me?”

The General Secretary smiled. It was one of the most famous, most frequently-photographed smiles in the world. “I’m not satisfied there’s any need for official action, Stefan. Do you know the exact nature of the so-called plot?”

“Not yet. But I’m close to knowing.”

The General Secretary picked up the documents and arranged them in one neat pile. “Greshko’s like a wild boar. Insane when wounded,” he said. “I’ve always had a grudging admiration for the old fellow. I suppose that’s a terrible admission to make, but he used to tell some entertaining stories.”

“A dinosaur’s charm,” Olsky said.

The General Secretary made his chair swivel. “I wonder about his life these days. I wonder what it’s like to be completely stripped of power and sent out to pasture.”

Olsky said, “His mind wanders. He can’t tell reality from fantasy. The old Greshko wouldn’t have done anything as ludicrous as running to the press with forgeries. He’s slipping.”

“Slipping or not, he claims to have copies of these documents, Stefan. What worries me is the idea that he may have distributed them to people less scrupulous and more gullible than Bragin. A foreign journalist, for instance. Somebody in a foreign embassy, perhaps. You might make inquiries.”

The General Secretary was quiet for a second. “I don’t like the idea of Greshko shooting his mouth off to people about these documents, whether they’re forgeries or not. My whole administration has advocated exposure of corruption. How does it look if articles appear in foreign newspapers about the Chairman of the KGB dabbling in capitalist money markets? The fact that the stories are false is irrelevant. People believe what they read, Stefan. And then the news comes back into this country over the Voice of America, or through Scandinavian radio, and before you know it we’re discredited in front of our own people by rumours. It goes well beyond malice on Greshko’s part, Stefan. It affects us all. It affects our standing in this country, all the way up from the smallest workers’ soviet to the Central Committee itself – and we need all the support we can get these days. Any kind of weakness, any suggestion of corruption from within – I don’t have to spell out the possible damage to us.”

Olsky didn’t know what to say. He’d underestimated Greshko, but he wasn’t the first man ever to do that. He’d been humiliated by the old man, and his position placed in jeopardy. He felt a quickening of anger, a warm flush spreading across his face. The idea that his reputation had been attacked, and in the most questionable way, enraged him. But he maintained the appearance of control, if only because a display of emotion in front of the General Secretary would have been unseemly.

He said, “His physicians expected him to die months ago. I read their reports. Nobody expected him to live this long.”

“He was bred into a tough generation,” the General Secretary said. “The fact remains, he’s still alive and doing damage. The problem for you, Stefan, is to make sure the damage isn’t fatal.”

“And how do I achieve that?”

The General Secretary took the cap from his fountain-pen and began to edit his speech. It was as if Olsky had ceased to exist in the room. After a moment, the General Secretary stopped writing, and looked across the desk at the Chairman of the KGB.

“You have to deal with it as you think fit, Stefan.”

Olsky wasn’t quite sure what the General Secretary was saying to him.

“There are a great many people in this country, Stefan, who want to hurt us. Greshko happens to be in the vanguard of our enemies. They are also the enemies of progress. Therefore, they are acting against the Party’s interests. But you’re the Chairman of the KGB. Why ask me for advice?”

Olsky stood up. He turned his cap around between his hands. As he moved his face, he was struck directly by one of the concealed spotlights. He blinked.

“And this alleged plot?” the General Secretary asked. “Can the Chairman of the KGB deal with that also?”

Olsky moved out of the light and stood in shadow. Was there something quietly mocking now in the General Secretary’s voice? He wasn’t altogether sure.

“I can deal with Greshko and his damned plot,” Olsky said, sounding all the more angry for the fact that he didn’t raise his voice.

“Spirit!” the General Secretary said. “That’s why you got this job in the first place, Stefan. Spirit.”

Olsky moved toward the door. He understood he’d just discovered a use for Lieutenant Volovich. Yes, and it was appropriate, something the wretched Volovich was schooled to do. It pleased Olsky on one level, even as it dismayed him to think he’d reduced himself to the level of his predecessor, but it was a game of cunning now, and survival, and all the rules of decency were suspended.

“A question, Stefan.”

Olsky stopped, turned around, listened.

“They are forgeries, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Olsky said.

The General Secretary looked at the photocopied documents. “Clever ones, though,” he remarked.