The Devil's Alternative

So that was it. Not a vote of no confidence in him, thought Rudin. That would come later if he lost this round. The faction fight was out in the open now. He had not had the feeling so clearly in years that he was fighting for his life. If he lost, there would be no graceful retirement, no retaining the villas and the privileges as Mikoyan had done. It would be ruin, exile, perhaps the bullet in the nape of the neck. But he kept his composure. He put his own motion first. One by one, the hands went up.

  Rykov, Ivanenko, Petrov—all voted for him and the negotiation policy. There was hesitancy down the table. Who had Vishnayev got to? What had he promised them?

  Stepanov and Shushkin raised their hands. Last, slowly, came Chavadze the Georgian. Rudin put the countermotion, for war in the spring. Vishnayev and Kerensky, of course, were for it. Komarov of Agriculture joined them. Bastard, thought Rudin, it was your bloody ministry that got us into this mess. Vishnayev must have persuaded the man that Rudin was going to ruin him in any case, so he thought he had nothing to lose. You’re wrong, my friend, thought Rudin, face impassive, I’m going to have your entrails for this. Petryanov raised his hand. He’s been promised the prime ministership, thought Rudin. Vitautas the Balt and Mukhamed the Tajik also went with Vishnayev for war. The Tajik would know that if nuclear war came, the Orientals would rule over the ruins. The Lithuanian had been bought.

  “Six for each proposal,” he said quietly. “And my own vote for the negotiations.”

  Too close, he thought. Much too close.

  It was sundown when the meeting dissolved. But the faction fight, all knew, would now go on until it was resolved; no one could back away now, no one could stay neutral anymore.

  It was not until the fifth day of the tour that the party arrived in Lvov and stayed at the Intourist Hotel. Up to this point, Drake had gone with all the guided tours on the itinerary, but this time he made an excuse that he had a headache and wished to stay in his room. As soon as the party left by motor coach for St. Nicholas Church, he changed into more casual clothes and slipped out of the hotel.

  Kaminsky had told him the sort of clothes that would pass without attracting attention: socks with sandals over them, light trousers, not too smart, and an open-necked shirt of the cheaper variety. With a street map he set off on foot for the seedy, poor, working-class suburb of Levandivka. He had not the slightest doubt that the two men he sought would treat him with the profoundest suspicion, once he found them. And this was hardly surprising when one considered the family backgrounds and circumstances that had forged them. He recalled what Miroslav Kaminsky, lying in his Turkish hospital bed, had told him.

  On September 29, 1966, near Kiev, at the gorge of Babi Yar, where over fifty thousand Jews had been slaughtered by the SS in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941-42, the Ukraine’s foremost contemporary poet, Ivan Dzyuba, gave an address that was remarkable inasmuch as a Ukrainian Catholic was speaking out powerfully against anti-Semitism.

  Anti-Semitism has always flourished in the Ukraine, and successive rulers—tsars, Stalinists, Nazis, Stalinists again, and their successors—have vigorously encouraged it to flourish.

  Dzyuba’s long speech began as a seeming plea for remembrance of the slaughtered Jews of Babi Yar, a straight condemnation of Nazism and fascism. But as it developed, his theme began to encompass all those despotisms which, despite their technological triumphs, brutalize the human spirit and seek to persuade even the brutalized that this is normal.

  “We should therefore judge each society,” he said, “not by its external technical achievements but by the position and meaning it gives to man, by the value it puts on human dignity and human conscience.”

  By the time he reached this point, the Chekisti who had infiltrated the silent crowd had realized the poet was not talking about Hitler’s Germany at all; he was talking about the Politburo’s Soviet Union. Shortly after the speech, he was arrested.

  In the cellars of the local KGB barracks, the chief interrogator, the man who had at his beck and call the two hulks in the corners of the room, the ones gripping the heavy, three-foot-long rubber hoses, was a fast-rising young colonel of the Second Chief Directorate, sent in from Moscow. His name was Yuri Ivanenko.

  But at the address at Babi Yar there had been, in the front row, standing next to their fathers, two small boys, age ten. They did not know each other then, and would meet and become firm friends only six years later on a building site. One was Lev Mishkin; the other was David Lazareff.

  The presence of both the fathers of Mishkin and Lazareff at the meeting had also been noted, and when, years later, they applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, both were accused of anti-Soviet activities and drew long sentences in labor camps.

  Their families lost their apartments, the sons any hope of attending a university. Though highly intelligent, they were destined for pick-and-shovel work. Now both twenty-six, these were the young men Drake sought among the hot and dusty byways of Levandivka.

  It was at the second address that he found David Lazareff, who, after Drake had introduced himself, treated him with extreme suspicion. But he agreed to bring his friend Lev Mishkin to a rendezvous since Drake knew both their names, anyway.

  That evening Drake met Mishkin, and the pair regarded him with something close to hostility. He told them the whole story of the escape and rescue of Miroslav Kaminsky, and his own background. The only proof he could produce was the photograph of himself and Kaminsky together, taken in the hospital room at Trabzon with a Polaroid camera by a nursing orderly. Held up in front of them was that day’s edition of the local Turkish newspaper. Drake had brought the same newspaper as suitcase lining and showed it to them as proof of his story.

  “Look,” he said finally, “if Miroslav had been washed up in Soviet territory and been taken by the KGB, if he had talked and revealed your names, and if I were from the KGB, I’d hardly be asking for your help.”

  The two Jewish workers agreed to consider his request overnight. Unknown to Drake, both Mishkin and Lazareff had long shared an ideal close to his own—that of striking one single, powerful blow of revenge against the Kremlin hierarchy in their midst. But they were near to giving up, weighed down by the hopelessness of trying to do anything without outside help.

  Impelled by their desire for an ally beyond the borders of the USSR, the two shook hands in the small hours of the morning and agreed to take the Anglo-Ukrainian into their confidence. The second meeting was that afternoon, Drake having skipped another guided tour. For safety they strolled through wide, unpaved lanes near the outskirts of the city, talking quietly in Ukrainian. They told Drake of their desire also to strike at Moscow in a single, deadly act.

  “The question is—what?” said Drake. Lazareff, who was the more silent and more dominant of the pair, spoke.

  “Ivanenko,” he said. “The most hated man in the Ukraine.”

  “What about him?” asked Drake.

  “Kill him.”

  Drake stopped in his tracks and stared at the dark-haired, intense young man.

  “You’d never get near him,” he said finally.

  “Last year,” said Lazareff, “I was working on a job here in Lvov. I’m a house painter, right? We were redecorating the apartment of a Party bigwig. There was a little old woman staying with them. From Kiev. After she’d gone, the Party man’s wife mentioned who she was. Later I saw a letter postmarked Kiev in the letter box. I took it, and it was from the old woman. It had her address on it.”

  “So who was she?” asked Drake.

  “His mother.”

  Drake considered the information. “You wouldn’t think people like that had mothers,” he said. “But you’d have to watch her flat for a long time before he might come to visit her.”

  Lazareff shook his head. “She’s the bait,” he said, and outlined his idea. Drake considered the magnitude of it.

  Before coming to the Ukraine, he had envisaged the great single blow he had dreamed of delivering against the might of the Kremlin in many terms,
but never this. To assassinate the head of the KGB would be to strike into the very center of the Politburo, to send hairline cracks running through every corner of the power structure.

  “It might work,” he conceded.

  If it did, he thought, it would be hushed up at once. But if the news ever got out, the effect on popular opinion, especially in the Ukraine, would be traumatic.

  “It could trigger the biggest uprising there has ever been here,” he said.

  Lazareff nodded. Alone with his partner Mishkin, far away from outside help, he had evidently given the project a lot of thought.

  “True,” he said.

  “What equipment would you need?” asked Drake.

  Lazareff told him. Drake nodded.

  “It can all be acquired in the West,” he said. “But how to get it in?”

  “Odessa,” cut in Mishkin. “I worked on the docks there for a while. The place is completely corrupt. The black market is thriving. Every Western ship brings seamen who do a vigorous illegal trade in Turkish leather jackets, suede coats, and denim jeans. We would meet you there. It is inside the Ukraine; we would not need internal passports.”

  Before they parted, they agreed to the plan. Drake would acquire the equipment and bring it to Odessa by sea. He would alert Mishkin and Lazareff by a letter, posted inside the Soviet Union, well in advance of his own arrival. The wording would be innocent. The rendezvous in Odessa was to be a café that Mishkin knew from his days as a teenage laborer there.

  “Two more things,” said Drake. “When it is over, the publicity for it, the worldwide announcement that it has been done, is vital—almost as important as the act itself. And that means that you personally must tell the world. Only you will have the details to convince the world of the truth. But that means you must escape from here to the West.”

  “It goes without saying,” murmured Lazareff. “We are both Refuseniks. Like our fathers before us, we have tried to emigrate to Israel and have been refused. This time we will go, with or without permission. When this is over, we have to get to Israel. It is the only place we will ever be safe, ever again. Once there, we will tell the world what we have done and leave those bastards in the Kremlin and the KGB discredited in the eyes of their own people.”

  “The other point follows from the first,” said Drake. “When it is done, you must let me know by coded letter or postcard. In case anything goes wrong with the escape. So that I can try to help get the news to the world.”

  They agreed that an innocently worded postcard would be sent from Lvov to a poste restante address in London. With the last details memorized, they parted, and Drake rejoined his tour group.

  Two days later Drake was back in London. The first thing he did was buy the world’s most comprehensive book on small arms. The second was to send a telegram to a friend in Canada, one of the best of that elite private list he had built up over the years of émigrés who thought as he did of carrying their hatred to the enemy. The third was to begin preparations for a long-dormant plan to raise the needed funds by robbing a bank.

  At the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt on the southeastern outskirts of Moscow, a driver pulling to the right off the main boulevard onto the Rublevo Road will come twenty kilometers later to the little village of Uspenskoye, in the heart of the weekend-villa country. In the great pine and birch forests around Uspenskoye lie such hamlets as Usovo and Zhukovka, where stand the country mansions of the Soviet elite. Just beyond Uspenskoye Bridge over the Moscow River is a beach where in summer the lesser-privileged but nevertheless very well off (they have their own cars) come from Moscow to bathe from the sandy beach.

  The Western diplomats come here, too, and it is one of the rare places where a Westerner can be cheek by jowl with ordinary Muscovite families. Even the routine KGB tailing of Western diplomats seems to let up on Sunday afternoons in high summer.

  Adam Munro came here with a party of British Embassy staffers that Sunday afternoon, July 11, 1982. Some of them were married couples, some single and younger than he. Shortly before three, the whole party of them left their towels and picnic baskets among the trees, ran down the low bluff toward the sandy beach, and swam. When he came back, Munro picked up his rolled towel and began to dry himself. Something fell out of it.

  He stooped to pick it up. It was a small pasteboard card, half the size of a postcard, white on both sides. On one side was typed, in Russian, the words: “Three kilometers north of here is an abandoned chapel in the woods. Meet me there in thirty minutes. Please. It is urgent.”

  He maintained his smile as one of the embassy secretaries came over, laughing, to ask for a cigarette. While he lit it for her, his mind was working out all the angles he could think of. A dissident wanting to pass over the underground literature? A load of trouble, that. A religious group wanting asylum in the embassy? The Americans had had that in 1978, and it had caused untold problems. A trap set by the KGB to identify the SIS man inside the embassy? Always possible. No ordinary commercial secretary would accept such an invitation, slipped into a rolled towel by someone who had evidently tailed him and watched from the surrounding woods. And yet it was too crude for the KGB. They would have set up a pretended defector in central Moscow with information to pass, arranged for secret photographs at the handover point. So who was the secret writer?

  He dressed quickly, still undecided.

  Finally he pulled on his shoes and made up his mind. If it was a trap, then he had received no message and was simply walking in the forest. To the disappointment of his hopeful secretary he set off alone. After a hundred yards he paused, took out his lighter and burned the card, grinding the ash into the carpet of pine needles.

  The sun and his watch gave him due north, away from the riverbank, which faced south. After ten minutes he emerged on the side of a slope and saw the onion-shaped dome of a chapel two kilometers farther on across the valley. Seconds later he was back in the trees.

  The forests around Moscow have dozens of such small chapels, once the worshiping places of the villagers, now mainly derelict, boarded up, deserted. The one he was approaching stood in its own clearing among the trees, beside a derelict cemetery. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and surveyed the tiny church. He could see no one. Carefully he advanced into the open. He was a few yards from the sealed front door when he saw the figure standing in deep shadow under an archway. He stopped, and for minutes on end the two stared at each other.

  There was really nothing to say, so he just said her name. “Valentina.”

  She moved out of the shadow and replied, “Adam.”

  Twenty-one years, he thought in wonderment She must be turned forty. She looked like thirty, still raven-haired, beautiful, and ineffably sad.

  They sat on one of the tombstones and talked quietly of the old times. She told him she had returned from Berlin to Moscow a few months after their parting, and had continued to be a stenographer for the Party machine. At twenty-three she had married a young Army officer with good prospects. After seven years there had been a baby, and they had been happy, all three of them. Her husband’s career had flourished, for he had an uncle high in the Red Army, and patronage is no different in the Soviet Union from anywhere else. The boy was now ten.

  Five years before, her husband, having reached the rank of colonel at a young age, had been killed in a helicopter crash while surveying Red Chinese troop deployments along the Ussuri River in the Far East. To kill the grief she had gone back to work. Her husband’s uncle had used his influence to secure her good, highly placed work, bringing with it privileges in the form of special food shops, special restaurants, a better apartment, a private car—all the things that go with high rank in the Party machine.

  Finally, two years before, after special clearance, she had been offered a post in the tiny, closed group of stenographers and typists, a subsection of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, that is called the Politburo Secretariat.

  Munro breathed deeply. That was high,
very high, and very trusted.

  “Who,” he asked, “is the uncle of your late husband?”

  “Kerensky,” she murmured.

  “Marshal Kerensky?” he asked. She nodded. Munro exhaled slowly. Kerensky, the ultrahawk. When he looked again at her face, the eyes were wet. She was blinking rapidly, on the verge of tears. On an impulse he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. He smelled her hair, the same sweet odor that had made him feel both tender and excited two decades ago, in his youth.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked gently.

  “Oh, Adam, I’m so unhappy.”

  “In God’s name, why? In your society you have everything.”

  She shook her head slowly, then pulled away from him. She avoided his eye, gazing across the clearing into the woods.

  “Adam, all my life, since I was a small girl, I believed. I truly believed. Even when we loved, I believed in the goodness, the lightness, of socialism. Even in the hard times, the times of deprivation in my country, when the West had all the consumer riches and we had none, I believed in the justice of the Communist ideal that we in Russia would one day bring to the world. It was an ideal that would give us all a world without fascism, without money-lust, without exploitation, without war.

  “I was taught it, and I really believed it. It was more important than you, than our love, than my husband and child. It meant as much to me as this country, Russia, which is part of my soul.”

  Munro knew about the patriotism of the Russians toward their country, a fierce flame that would make them endure any suffering, any privation, any sacrifice, and which, when manipulated, would make them obey their Kremlin overlords without demur.

  “What happened?” he asked quietly.

  “They have betrayed it Are betraying it. My ideal, my people, and my country.”

  “They?” he asked.

  She was twisting her fingers until they looked as if they would come off.

  “The Party chiefs,” she said bitterly. She spat out the Russian slang word meaning “fat cats”: “The nachalstvo.”