Saturday Night

It began late on Saturday night, the fifteenth of April as two men, one of them driving, headed toward Moscow State University in a black; Soviet-built Zil limousine.

The weather for the previous five days all across east central Russia had been filthy. Miserable even for an April. It had rained—never pouring, only misting—and the temperature had gone up and down like a roller coaster between a damp fifty degrees Fahrenheit and a damned cold two above.

That evening it was even colder. The temperature hovered around the zero mark, and patches of slick ice had formed here and there in the streets so that the big automobile coming around a corner slewed to the left and then came back on track. The passenger, a solidly built but nondescript-looking man, swore sharply in Russian.

The driver glanced his way, grim-faced, but said nothing as they continued along Kaluzhskaya Street, Lenin Park between them and the Moscow River.

Moscow, the home of the Bolshoi Ballet, proclaimed the brochures put out by the Ministry for Tourism.

Moscow, city of 125 square miles, population approaching seven million, the atlases recorded.

A town plagued with the pollution and filth of any large Western city, with few or none of their redeeming graces.

Moscow, the largest industrial center in the Soviet Union: manufacturing and trade center for steel, machinery, precision instruments, automobiles, aircraft, rolling stock, chemicals, and textiles, the trade atlases listed.

The home of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnost’i—the KGB—with its offices at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square in town and its new modern building of glass and steel just outside of Moscow on the Circumferential Highway. The new building was copied after the American Central Intelligence Agency’s new headquarters outside of Washington, D.C.

Moscow, home of dozens of universities and schools, including the Lomonosov University founded in 1775, the much newer Moscow State University, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and numerous technical institutes, the world educational almanacs recorded.

Pockets of happiness here and there in apartments and clubs despite the lack of adequate housing, the lack of consumer goods, the lack of hope in the Western sense of the word, and over all of it the low-keyed fear: the constant turning over the shoulder to see who was behind.

Past the Donskoy Museum the limousine turned east on Vorobyevskoye Road, then speeded up. There was no traffic here at that time of the night, and both men would have been surprised if they had encountered any.

Moscow was a city of darkness. Despite its size, the Soviet capital was unlike New York or Paris or Amsterdam where lights shined twenty-four hours a day, where traffic never really ceased, where the ever constant press of humanity was highly evident.

That evening the city seemed particularly dark and brooding.

Moscow first became a gathering place in 1147. By 1271 the city has been made headquarters for Daniel, the son of the Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky of Vladimir-Suzdal.

When the Dukes of Vladimir took the title of Grand Duke of Muscovy in the fourteenth century, Moscow had become a very important trade center. A short time later the city’s place in world events was assured when Ivan III made the town the capital of a new, centralized Russia.

The limousine slowed down as it approached the broad avenue that turned left into the Moscow State University complex. The passenger instinctively stiffened and sat forward in his seat as they came around the corner and halted at the gate. Across the wide avenue from them was the embassy of the People’s Republic of China, dark like the rest of the city.

A uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse, and the driver cranked the window down. Instantly the car was filled with a damp wind that drove before it the filthy, penetrating mist.

“Your papers, please,” the guard said, his AK-7 automatic slung casually over his shoulder, the barrel pointing down out of the rain.

The driver handed over his identification card, which the guard instantly recognized and handed back.

“Yes sir,” the guard snapped. He saluted, then marched smartly back to the gatehouse. A moment later the heavy iron gates, closed at night, swung open. The limousine driver cranked the window back up, and the car proceeded along the avenue toward the huge, gray, central building.

Moscow was burned twice by invading Tartars: once in 1381 and again in 1572. The Poles conquered the city and held it briefly until a volunteer army under Prince Pozharsky freed it in 1612. Two hundred years later, in September of 1812, Napoleon entered the city, but he had even less luck than the Poles. The city burned to the ground a few days after Napoleon had conquered it, forcing the French into a retreat that meant disaster for them because the Russian winter was fast approaching.

The capital city of Russia was moved to St. Petersburg in 1713 where it remained until 1922, five years after the Communist Revolution. Since that time Moscow had grown steadily not only in size but in importance. Worldwide.

The limousine pulled around to the east side of the main building, and the driver parked it in front of the glass doors of the physical sciences wing.

He and the passenger got out, pulled up their coat collars against the wind and hurried into the building.

Just inside the front entrance two uniformed guards were seated at a table, an open magazine spread out in front of them. They looked up as the two men came in, and one of them started to get up, but then sat back down saying nothing.

The two men strode purposefully down the long, deserted corridor, their heels clattering hollowly on the parquet floor.

Light shone from under only one door off the corridor; the two men paused briefly by it, then went in.

An old man was seated behind a desk in the small, book-lined office. He was already dressed in a shabby topcoat and dark hat pulled low, and in front of him on the desk was a fat briefcase. When the two from the limousine came in, the old man rose.

“I am ready,” he said timorously, but he stumbled as he tried to come around the desk, so that the passenger had to take his arm and help him out into the corridor.

Then the two men, one on either side of the older man, the driver carrying the briefcase, retraced their steps down the corridor.

Again the two guards at the door said nothing, in fact did not even look up from the magazine they were reading, and the three men left the building, got into the limousine and departed.

The weather seemed to close in after that as a heavy fog began forming from the birch forests to the west. The city seemed to be a sleeping giant; fitful and restless with its nightmares past, present, and future.