A different pair of men drove Khristo Stoianev back to Arbat Street and the Brotherhood Front of 1934. They too wore watches, conspicuously checking them now and again. But they drove slowly and carefully, and took a long, winding route through the city, which had now struggled to life amid the great snowdrifts. Black bundles—you could not determine the age or sex—shuffled head down, single file, along shoveled paths. The sky was dark and thick, the air still. It had long since stopped snowing. Khristo stared out the side window. They were watching him in the rearview mirror—in the same mirror he could see their eyes shift—and he hid his privacy by looking away.
He felt, had chosen to feel, absolutely nothing. A door had closed inside him. Marike joined Nikko on the other side of it. But he remembered the old story of the man who returns home one day to find his house occupied by demons. He hides in the basement. Each day, the demons put one brick on the trap door that is his only access to freedom. How many days shall he wait to confront them? Khristo would wait a day, many days, he hoped. He had not loved her—never would she have permitted such a thing to happen. Sentimentalism was to be fought at all costs. On her part, making love was only a trick you did for the sake of health or, perhaps, as an appreciative gesture toward a fellow worker. She was, he remembered, demonstratively unaffectionate, as though tenderness in the dance of lovers would betray the honest barnyard essence of their desire. Perhaps, he now thought, this had been her method of deception and had nothing to do with playing the part of worker. He had been naive, he realized, had simply not considered that deception could occur in such matters. Very well. It would happen no more. And, if it did—now that he knew of Sascha's existence and others like him—it would surely be the last time. Unless you could turn over and fuck in your grave. In this place you could not make a mistake. That was the lesson he had learned in the morning; God only knew what he might be taught in the afternoon. He watched the black figures on the street, their white breaths hanging in the air. What was this place? Who were these people?
The car turned into Arbat Street. In front of his building there was a Stolypin car, puffing black exhaust on the snow as it idled. No one moved to open his door, so he simply sat and waited. Two men in overcoats came quickly out of the building, holding the arms of a man running between them. It was Ozunov. He was barefoot, wearing blue silk pajamas. He stumbled a little, the two men jerked him upright and his glasses went askew. They stopped at the back of the Stolypin car, and one of the men let him go in order to open the door. Instinctively, he adjusted his glasses. Turned his head. For a bare instant, he stared at Khristo. His face appeared to have somehow shrunk, and his eyes looked enormous. Then the two men hoisted him into the back, as Khristo caught a brief glimpse of other people inside the trucklike compartment. One of the men slammed the door and dropped the steel bar into its bracket. The whole street could hear the clang.
Just at that moment, the door on Khristo's side of the car was swung open by the man from the passenger seat. He nodded toward the building entry. He was apparently forbidden to speak, but the look on his face, a smile without mirth or pleasure, made it clear that they had wanted him to witness this event. The winding trip home had been simply a matter of timing.
Khristo, his arms wide for balance, the peaked cap still pulled down on his head, tip-toed carefully across the ice into the building. Irina Akhimova awaited him just inside. She took him to the small parlor off the dining area, sat him down at a table, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Very slowly, he took off the hat, unwound the scarf. Set them on a chair beside him. Stared vacantly at the wall. It was unpleasantly silent in the room; he could hear himself breathing. He desperately wanted to fall asleep, and he swayed in the chair and bit his lip when his eyelids drooped.
“None of that,” Irina Akhimova said from the doorway. He came to with a snap. “Soldiers must not sleep at the post.” But the words were somehow tender and there was kindness in her tiny eyes. She beckoned him, led him into the kitchen.
In an iron pot, she was making pelmeni, ground pork and onions wrapped in dough and boiled. The air in the kitchen was fragrant; there was a glass of thin, freshly made sour cream set by a plate, he could smell the vinegar in it. Akhimova's enormous back was bent studiously over the pot as she prodded and poked the floating pelmeni with a long wooden spoon.
She served him. Filled his plate at the stove, then tilted it over the pot to let the steaming water run off. Placed it before him. Moved the sour cream closer, filled a tall glass with strong tea.
“Will you not join me, comrade Lieutenant?” he asked.
She made a dismissive noise, just the way the older women in his own town did, meaning that it was his moment for grand food, not hers.
It was his victory they were celebrating.
The pelmeni were delicious, garlic laid on with a broad lick, the way he liked it. He resisted a powerful urge to gobble, took his time, was spartan with the sour cream until, smiling broadly, she waved him on. He felt the meal bring his soul back to life. Despite the world, despite Marike and Ozunov, despite himself. His body, his heart as well, took the food to itself, became warm and grateful.
And, since the day was meant to be an exemplar, a homily on life as they wished him to perceive it, there was yet one more lesson in store.
“News from home,” she said solemnly when he had eaten as much as he could. She laid a sheet of cheap brownish paper in front of him. He stared at it, perplexed. Nobody in Vidin could have the faintest idea where he was. “Brought by friends,” she added in explanation.
He recognized his father's schoolboy letters, each one labored over with a stub of pencil:
My Son,
I greet you. I am happy to hear that you are with friends. Mama and I are well. Last Sunday, at the St. Ignatius church, your sister Helena took wedding vows with Teodor Veiko, the son of Omar Veiko the landlord. I know you will join us in wishing them prosperity and long life. It was a fortunate match. Life here will now go on more smoothly. It is my hope that you are studying your lessons and obeying your teachers, making something of yourself, and that the time will come when you may come home to us.
That my blessings find you in good health,
He had signed it “Nicolai Stoianev” with ceremony, a man who had written very few letters in his life. To Khristo, the message between the lines was quite thoroughly clear. Nikko's affront to authority and his own flight eastward had placed his remaining family in grave danger, and Helena had determined to sacrifice her happiness on behalf of her parents' lives. No Vidin child of his acquaintance would have done any less. He knew of Teodor Veiko, an older man, child of Veiko's youth. A drunkard, a violent man. But Helena was clever, would wind him around her thumb. The rest of the message was this: you cannot come home. That it should arrive on the day when his thoughts might well be expected to turn in that direction was no coincidence and he knew it.
“The news is good?” Akhimova asked.
“Yes, comrade Lieutenant, as good as can be expected.”
She leaned over his shoulder, he felt her bulk near him, and pretended to read the letter for the first time. She squeezed the tender place between his shoulder and his neck. “Be brave, Khristo Nicolaievich,” she said softly. “Be a good soldier.”
They had him.
The first step was to comprehend it. The second was to form, in the privacy of his mind, the words themselves—a reading of the sentence. He was held by a system based on the portcullis, a medieval security tactic no less effective for its age. A system of two gates. A visitor entered through the first gate—no questions asked. It locked behind him. He was now confronted by a second gate, held a virtual prisoner in a small space. Above his head, the walls were honeycombed with arrow slits and fighting ports. For the moment, only questions came from above. If the answers were found to be good, they opened the second gate. If the answers—or the stars, or the cast of the dice—were found to be not good, they did not open the second gate. After that, the disposition of the prisoner was more a matter of whim than tactics. The portcullis was a system based on the medieval assumption of evil in all men—again, a notion no less effective for its age—and the certain knowledge that any visitor carried your destruction in his hand, intentionally or not, a spy's gold or the Black Death.
Thus they had him and he knew it.
He could not go home. He could only move in the direction they pointed out—pray God you understood where they were pointing, pray God you did not make a misstep along the path. The lesson of The Mistake had been sharply staged for him in the departure of Ozunov. The major had permitted a spy to flourish in his house. Perhaps he was a witting accomplice, perhaps not. But, they said, we have no time to find out. No wish, either. The New Science is ingenious in that way: motive is unimportant. Why does not matter, only that. And the New Science is economical. An arrest, if properly managed, is also a lesson. Thus we make what we have go further, thus we spend wisely.
But they—the masters, the unseen—had incorporated a tiny flaw in their structure. It was endemic, they could do nothing about it. As Oriental rugs are woven with a single imperfect strand—that the weaver not be seen to compete with Allah, who is the only perfection—their system had one defect. It was not perfectly dark. Some light got in. For the more they trained Khristo in their methods, the more he understood their logic. It was a problem they couldn't overcome, but they knew it existed and they watched closely, and watching was their greatest skill.
Thus they had him but he knew it.
The way home was closed. They had let him know that with the letter. He realized also that Antipin had operated openly in Vidin on purpose, that secrecy had not been his intention. If the fascists were after you, to whom could you turn? To the East, of course. Now, let us provoke the fascists: they will drive the sheep, we shall have the wool.
That winter, Khristo Stoianev learned to bear weight.
He understood the system in that way: a great heavy mass that pressed down upon you, that kept you struggling and gasping to remain, in any sense at all, upright. It crushed the mind because it demanded every resource, every tag end of memory and cognition, simply to stay afloat. Imagination withered, fantasy collapsed; only some of the strong would survive. There were special rules, special interpretations of the rules, regulations to be adamantly obeyed, regulations to be adamantly ignored, tests—obvious tests and subtle tests and obvious tests that hid subtle tests—provocations to be silently withstood, provocations to be instantly reported, papers to be kept on the person, papers to be written and handed in, papers to be punched at regular intervals, papers to be returned by a certain date, special passes, special permissions, “open” conversations, guided conversations. If there were a way to hammer a nail into a thought, they would have found it and done it.
To this weight add the weight of the winter. Which bore them all down, Bolshevist and cellar priest alike. A sky that turned black, then gray, then brown, then white, then black again. “The sun?” Goldman said in an unguarded moment. “I hear they've shot it.” If they had, it bled snow. The unrelieved whiteness became blinding over time, made a world without feature, a terrible empty blankness where, at last, the concept of nothingness—ПOΛHAЯПYOTOTA—became brutally real. And, finally, at the center of it all, was the cold. A cold that shrank you up inside yourself, a cold that collapsed every face to a frown or a snarl, a cold that blew in the wind like a whip or hung motionless in the air like dead smoke. Even to wash was agony, and all stank together. The sex shriveled back into the body, only alcohol could move the blood, and, with enough alcohol, the cold found new ways to feed itself. An old woman sat on a bench to rest for a moment. You came upon her, thinly glazed with ice, the following morning.
Khristo bore the winter cold as best he could and found ways to bear the other kind of chill as well. Would they, he reasoned, teach you French and English unless they intended to send you someplace where such languages were spoken? They would not. So he bent his back to it. It did not come easily, it did not come quickly, but he simply would not let go until he had a deathgrip understanding of it.
“Good morning, Mr. Stoianev. How is the weather today?”
“Good is the weather. Maybe snows little.”
“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”
“The weather is good. Maybe it will snow a little.”
“Not leetle, little, lit-tul.”
“Lit-tul.”
“Faster!”
“Little.”
By the hour, by the day, by the week. In February he was twenty years old. Goldman and Voluta and Semmers chipped in and bought him a cream cake. The cream was off. He ate it anyway and showed pleasure, licking his lips enthusiastically and humming with pleasure. Later, in bed, he curled around his stomach and fell into a sleep of exhaustion despite the cramps.
It was comradeship, he came to realize, that brought them through the winter agonies of 1934 and 1935. While the blizzards and the system swirled around them and the purges beat like a drum in the background, they held on to each other and rode out the storms. Perhaps, Khristo thought privately, we are the truest communists in Moscow this winter. We share our pain. We share our food.
The idea had been simple enough: send out an army of Antipins across the mountains and river valleys of Eastern Europe, recruit—never mind how—the young and vigorous. Look for stealth, raw courage, a gift for lies or seduction—you know what we want. Bring them back here. Teach them what they need to know. Make them—one way will work as well as the next—our own. Marxists, patriots, criminals, outcasts, adventurers. Mix it up, boys, you never know what you'll need. They will be ours. Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croats—our brothers and sisters to the west. War is surely coming, and these seeds will make a harvest in future famines.
It was equally logical to run them through in batches, keep them in a group, for one always wanted to be sure where everyone was. In a country of two hundred million souls that covered eleven time zones, you could misplace the damnedest things: entire trains, whole battalions. Sometimes you never did find them. The country had a way of swallowing up what most normal persons would hold to be entirely indigestible objects, it drove some technicians quite literally mad.
Thus convenience for the accountants of the system made for the salvation of its inventory—survival could only be managed if they took care of each other. They learned that everyone in the group had something to offer. They learned who the stool pigeons were and fed them on small sins to maintain their credibility so that new, and unknown, informers would not be introduced. Thus together they learned their lessons.
March, no sign of a thaw, winter giving every sign of an encore, it was their turn to occupy the village of Belov on the river Oka.
An outing! A half-day ride in a rattly wooden railcar, chugging past bare birch groves and black-green forests of fir with snow-weighted boughs. Real countryside: woodcutters' huts, the occasional farm field in a peculiar shape. The Russians, to everyone's amazement, farmed in oddly configured patches of land, nothing square, perhaps the result of endless divisions of the versts among sons over the centuries. But all they saw was new, and that was what mattered. It made their blood run fast after the shut-in winter months in claustrophobic Moscow. They yelled and capered and carried on like kids. Kerenyi managed to free the upper half of one of the windows. Painted—a horrid Soviet institutional green—shut for years, it shrieked as it opened, borne down by Kerenyi's great strength. At last, delicious cold air seasoned with railroad soot came rushing into the car. Hooray! Reaching up through the window, Kerenyi returned with a handful of snow from the roof. A rapid shaping in red hands, then a fat snowball sailed out the open window toward a hut. A near miss! They threw themselves on the other windows, and soon enough they were shelling the scenery amid shouts of triumph and exasperation. Well, you know how it is. It would have to be Iovescu, that appalling snitch, who would get it in the back of the head. Fat-faced goody-goody from the Banat. With vengeful eye he searched the crowd who, as one, raised their shoulders in shrugs of angelic innocence. Finally—wouldn't you know it—he picked on Ilya Goldman, one of the smallest, and chucked a fistful of loose snow at him. There was only one answer to that. The ensuing volley hit Iovescu and everybody else, producing squeals of fury as snow worked under the odd collar. Mayhem followed. In the melee, Karina Olowa, a little blond thing from Wilno, journeyed stealthily to the platform between cars and returned with a colossal snowbomb which, launched upward, splattered against the ceiling and rained down on various heads. A huge cry arose and that, at last, brought Lieutenant Akhimova and the other officers on the run. Order was restored. They'd used up most of the roof snow anyhow.
In the little village of Belov they took over various thatch-roofed huts—where the Belovians themselves had got to, nobody could say—with wood bunks covered by mothholed blankets. They built coal fires in the stoves, trooped down to the church for dinner, where iron pots of soup were boiling and misshapen loaves of rye-flour bread were set out on long tables. After a winter of potatoes and cabbage and fish-bone soup, the smell of food was thrilling. There may even have been a few private thoughts of home. They built a bonfire that night and sang songs, then trooped off to their respective houses—just like real townspeople—and slept the sleep of city dwellers on their first night in the country.
The next morning, after tea and bread, they went to work.
They were divided into fourteen teams of four—each team designated by a number and given numbered strips of material to pin to their collars. Khristo, Goldman and Voluta were a team, joined by a tall Yugoslavian named Drazen Kulic who, in his late twenties, was rather older than most of the others. Kulic seemed to have lived his life away from the sun—his hair, eyes and skin were almost without color. Yet he did not fade into the background; his presence was physical, hard, and there was something in the set of his face that was watchful and unforgiving.
The four were designated Unit Eight.
In the first exercise of the day, half the units entered Belov as security police, the other half were given blank-loaded Tokarev pistols, wooden boxes supposedly containing explosives, a notebook labeled List of Partisan Units, and signaling flares—contraband to hide in their huts. As counterinsurgency officers, Unit Eight was assigned to search houses at the southern end of the village.
On the edge of town, waiting for the whistle that would begin the exercise, Unit Eight held a meeting. Khristo would be the captain, would have final say in all things, though all would participate in planning and executing operations. Ilya Goldman was appointed intelligence officer and freed from all other obligations. He immediately undertook to make lists of the units they would oppose and cooperate with during the exercises. Goldman, a lover of detail, set himself to annotate these lists—in his own code—with observations on personalities, strengths and weaknesses in each unit.
The first argument began right there. Now that Goldman was intelligence officer, he wanted a staff. Typical! Give him an inch and he took a mile! Goldman waited for the other three to calm down, then explained patiently. Lists took time, and observation. Operational efficiency could be sacrificed, for a day or two, in favor of acquiring data that (A) would be useful in defeating opposing units and (B) could be marketed to other units in exchange for cooperation—thereby increasing the data files and making the potential for trading even more productive.
Khristo was impressed and promptly ordered Goldman to choose a staff. He selected Kulic. Khristo calmly pointed out that Kulic was physically strong, and if there were to be only two of them operating as security police that quality was important, principally for purposes of intimidation but who knew what it might come to—future assignments could well be affected by the outcome of the Belov games, and everybody wanted to do well. Fistfights were not out of the question. Goldman accepted Voluta as his assistant, and the two of them immediately went off and whispered in a corner.
Therefore, when the whistle blew and the designated counterinsurgency units fanned out across the village, Unit Eight was represented only by Khristo and Kulic. Belov had been a reasonably prosperous little place: a small church with a dome, a town hall—police station, and a few small shops—really open market stalls—on the main street, which was surfaced in frozen mud. The sun had come out, beads of morning frost glistened in the roof thatch. Khristo, blank-loaded holstered pistol riding his waist, strode along the main street and saw life anew from a policeman's perspective. A curious sensation, to go anywhere he wanted, to say what he liked to whomever he pleased. There was, he hated to admit it, some distinct comfort in such power.
As other units commenced the exercise, Khristo and Kulic could see that they had adopted the time-honored forms. The hard-handed banging on the door. Shouts of “Open up! Security search!” When the doors were opened, they could see people who had recently been self-confident students transformed by circumstance into groups of huddled peasants.
They found their assigned target, the hut of Unit Five, and briefly discussed their strategy. Kulic disappeared around the back, Khristo tapped lightly on a board below the window. The unit captain appeared at the window and gestured toward the door.
“I needn't come in,” Khristo said.
The captain looked puzzled.
“They sent me to tell you that you're in the wrong hut. This one here is supposed to be storage—Unit Five belongs next door.”
The captain nodded and disappeared from the window. Khristo waited, pleased to have the warming sun on his back. It stood to reason that when they moved, their contraband would have to move with them. The captain reappeared at the window and chopped the edge of his right hand into the bent elbow of his left arm, adding, for emphasis, an extended middle finger on the left hand. The universal sign language informed Khristo that his suggestion had been staunchly rejected, so he went and knocked on the door.
The captain opened the door. “Nice try,” he said acidly.
“Keep a civil tongue when you talk to us,” Khristo said, “or you're in the stockade for the day.”
No stockade had been mentioned in the rules, but one could never be certain. The man stared at him for a moment, then grunted and stood back. Khristo let Kulic in the back door.
“Lieutenant Kulic will conduct the search,” Khristo announced, folding his arms and leaning back against a wall.
“Where are the rest of you?” one of the “peasants” asked.
“You'll find out,” Khristo answered, putting as much menace in his voice as he dared.
“All stand up!” Kulic shouted as loud as he could. Unit Five stood, slightly sullen at being addressed so harshly.
“All strip!”
They stood with their mouths open.
“Hurry up. Down to the skin,” he yelled.
“Against the rules.” Her name was Malya. She was tall and sallow and won all the prizes for codes and ciphers. She stood with her arms folded and glowered at them. “You are state security,” she added, “not dirty-minded boys.” Her eyes glittered with contempt.
As Kulic took a fast step toward her, Khristo's hand shot out and grabbed his elbow. Kulic shook him off but stayed where he was.
“I'll be back,” Khristo said. He ran out the door and down the street to the town hall, where the officers had constituted themselves a committee of the rules.
He addressed Irina Akhimova. “Comrade Lieutenant!” He stood at attention.
“Yes, comrade student?”
“We require the search of a female person.”
The officers, five or six of them smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, passed an eyes-to-heaven look among themselves. Here we go again, it said. Another year at Belov and already they are at it.
Akhimova climbed to her feet, affecting weariness, brushed Khristo ahead of her with hand motions. “Yes, yes, comrade Security Officer. Lead the way.”
They arrived at the hut to find Kulic and Unit Five locked in a staring contest. Kulic's hand rested on the butt of his holstered gun. Akhimova took Malya out the back door toward the privy behind the hut. In a moment they reappeared. Malya's face was angry, her cheeks well colored. “Donkey,” she said to the unit captain. Akhimova handed Khristo a thickly folded wad of paper.
“One current map of the Ukraine, six towns circled,” she said, “tied to the upper left leg with string.” She took a notebook from the side pocket of her uniform jacket. “Ten points subtracted from Unit Five. Ten points awarded to Unit Eight. Continue the exercise.” As she walked out, only Khristo could see her face. She winked at him. He glanced out the window. Goldman went scurrying by like a ferret.
So, for a week, it went. They battled among themselves, shadowing each other to clandestine meetings, plotting to suborn their opponents, bending every rule until the judging committee stomped about in a red-faced fury. They ran, in their eshpionets kindergarten, every classical operation in the repertoire. Given the preponderance of males, there did seem to be a particular obsession with the honey trap—seduction for the purposes of leverage, the country air had stimulated more than one appetite—but no conquests for intelligence purposes were recorded. They planted compromising evidence on each other—Khristo found a curiously whittled wooden dowel in the bunched-up blanket he used for a pillow. Even Goldman, their chief Machiavelli, declined to offer a theory on its intention. They buried it beside the hut and waited. That night Unit Five, led by the Hungarian captain, an officer-judge in tow, kicked the door open and accused Khristo of secreting an ampule of morphine. The following day, Voluta planted it on somebody else, but he too discovered and removed it before the group was raided.
The classical operations, it turned out to everyone's irritation, often had classical results. Which is to say, no results. They were accustomed, in all their games, to winning and losing, and the frequency of no decision calls first puzzled, then annoyed them. They had stumbled on the dispiriting truth about spycraft, which was that few disciplines had a lower incidence of clear victories. “I bent my brain to get this right!” Goldman whined after some particular piece of treachery had fizzled before his eyes. They shared his frustration. Their coup of the first day had given them an inflated opinion of their abilities. They were now treated to the chilly reality of initial success diluted by subsequent failure. No matter how hard they went at it, a second Great Triumph eluded them. They won points, they lost points, but most of their efforts earned a “no decision.”
There were serious undertones to this competition. Most of them had been in Moscow for six months or more, and they had discovered that in this egalitarian society some were decidedly more equal than others. Elusive and shadowy it was, but privilege did exist. Being out and about in the city, you'd catch a glimpse, a scent of it. Clearly it was based on rank, one's position in the scheme of things, and their success in the competition, and generally in the school, would ultimately determine that position. But, try as they might, the members of Unit Eight could not work their way into first place on the list posted daily on the door of the church. They fluttered between second and third. That, it seemed, was the way it was destined to work out. Unit Two, a cadre of teacher's pets captained by the infamous brownnose Iovescu, sat firmly atop the heap.
The final exercise was witnessed by the god Petenko himself, driven out that morning in an open staff car, a picnic hamper riding next to the officer who acted as chauffeur. This Petenko was a fabled personage—his telephone calls produced ashen-faced terror in subordinates—who sported one of those battering-ram titles in which the words deputy, assistant, minister, interior, state and security all appeared. The tolling of a frightful bell. The sort of high but not too high job where the incumbent could snip your balls off without signing for them. Beside the point, perhaps, that he had seven months to live, or that some of his former castrati were waiting for him when it was his turn to go to the Lubianka—that day he was the czar.
The assignment: assassinate General X as he enters the captured city. Citizens line the streets. Security is rife. This is a triumphal entry. Citizens and security were composed of the other thirteen units—one unit had to do the job. General Petenko deigned to take the role of General X. His flunkies were enacted (in every possible way) by three members of the judging committee. The part of the car was played by his car.
Unit Eight stayed up till dawn, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They had been screwed, somehow, placed last on the schedule. By then, every other unit would have had its try, every possible variation, every deceit, trick, diversion and ruse would have been seen and identified. They pounded their heads to come up with something completely new. What made it worse was that their officers, the judging committee in the car and others in the street, were arrayed against them along with all the other units and they, of course, were looking forward to it, popping away at their students with blank 7.62 rounds, symbolically slaughtering the incompetent.
For the nineteenth time Captain Khristo asked Intelligence Officer Goldman what assets they had and for the nineteenth time was shown the two pistols Kulic had managed to weasel away from other units. He was, for such a heavy-shouldered brute, a surprisingly subtle thief. In addition, Goldman could make overtures to certain weak links, in other units, in search of covert assistance, but—who could know, they might well be delivering themselves into the nets of somebody's counterintelligence scheme. They themselves had played the traitor too often, in order to discern someone else's intentions, not to know that the prank could just as easily be played back on them.
“It's getting light,” Voluta said. “What can we do with two extra pistols and a few weak links? Or, really, five extra pistols, we'll only need one to shoot the bastard.”
“Weak links cannot be trusted.” Khristo spoke the axiom automatically.
Kulic agreed, nodding sadly. Completed the worn joke: “Trust the strong even less.”
When, at long last, it came their turn to try the assassination, weak was the word for their effort. It was getting on dusk, there were rumors of a splendid supper on their last night. Everybody was tired and cold and hungry—thirteen foiled assassinations made for a long day. Some units had come close, a few points awarded, but nobody had managed a clean kill.
General X rode into town in stately fashion, waving at the assembled multitude from the front seat of the open car. Irina Akhimova, hands choking the steering wheel, drove the car slowly, her face frozen in rigid concentration. Never mind murder, her expression seemed to say, just don't scratch the bodywork. Poor Goldman was caught flat-footed on the roof of the church (by Unit Two guards, of course!—points to them), his “bomb,” a sock full of white flour, still hanging down the front of his shirt. Kulic, absurdly disguised with a home-cut eyepatch, was pounced on a moment later. Voluta, attempting to hide in an open doorway, simply raised his hands. Why get your shirt torn on the last day? At the end of the street, two security guards stepped out of the crowd with Khristo held between them. Truly, a disappointing try, especially from the everingenious Unit Eight. Bomb-from-the-church-roof had already failed, and failed quite miserably, twice that day.
General X stood up in the front seat, became General Petenko, raised his hand for silence. The crowd gathered round for a blessing.
“On behalf of the security workers of this progressive nation,” he trumpeted, “I wish to bestow on you and your dedicated instructors compliments and congratulations. What I have seen here today is an inspiration to me, to all the proletariat everywhere. Perhaps not an inspiration of craft—for you are beginners, there is still great effort ahead of you—but an inspiration of effort, seriousness, and …”
Inspired, then, to silence.
Mouth frozen open.
Leaping backward as the electricity of fright jolted his heart. Crossing his hands in front of his closed eyes, turning his head away. A perfect statue of a man in the last instant of life.
Not real death.
Not real bullets.
But the move was so sudden, so blurred, he had no time to sort it out. There was an animal lying along the length of the hood. It had sprung like an animal, without warning or hesitation, and it had landed like an animal, crouched, coiled to spring again. Then it had flung itself flat, both fists spewing flame.
For Khristo, the realization was explosive. He really thinks he is being shot. He could see Petenko in exquisite focus—glossy jowls, drooping chin—and the man's terror opened a door in him. What burst through was a bright fountain of rage. This fat Russian bag of piss and vodka. Khristo ground his teeth and moaned in his throat and then heard hammers clacking on empty chambers.
There was rather a long interval.
Akhimova, her face a mask, stood up in the driver's seat for no apparent reason. Petenko lowered his arms, came out of hiding. His voice was high and thin the first time he screamed.
“Lieutenant!”
Dropped an octave on the second try.
“Lieutenant!”
Khristo heard Akhimova exhale a long breath.
“Yes, comrade General?”
“This man …” He pointed. Khristo could see his finger shaking. Petenko blinked, slowly lowered his hand. This man could not be forced to his knees and shot then and there. This man was a student, of a sort, reciting his lesson, of a sort.
Petenko cleared his throat. Students in the street murmured to each other. The urgent need to return to normalcy was everywhere. Khristo, careful of the paint, slithered cautiously backward until he stood before the car.
Petenko turned his head a little to one side. “What is your name, young man?”
“Khristo Stoianev, comrade General.”
“You are Bulgarian?”
“Yes, comrade General.”
“They are proud people,” Petenko said. There was proper admiration in his voice. The working classes needed no national boundaries, they were as one race. The concept had been clearly set down.
His eyes, of course, told a very different story, but only Khristo could see what burned there and he was meant to see it.