The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  “You’re not really in much of a position to refuse me,” Stone said softly. “For your daughter’s sake.”

  Lehman’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Please don’t resort to threats.”

  “I don’t want to have to say anything to anybody that might disturb your arrangement.”

  Lehman barely hesitated before saying, “I think you’re the one whose position is untenable.”

  “Charlotte and I want safe passage out of Moscow. You have the connections and the visibility to make the necessary arrangements.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think you have the connections?”

  “I don’t think, Charlie, that you’ll leave Moscow alive.”

  Stone paused. He could not help admiring the old man’s finesse, even at such a difficult moment. “Will you?” he said, half-smiling.

  Lehman returned the smile. “Very good.” His eyes were watery, and he seemed enormously amused. “You don’t like me, do you?” His voice was reedy, yet powerful, with the mellow tones of an oboe.

  Stone said nothing.

  “Things are seldom what they seem,” Lehman said archly.

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 495

  Stone watched the old man, pensively. “Did you set my father up? In 1953, I mean.”

  “I did what I could to help him.” He coughed violently, the sort of cough that can easily become a retch. “Is that why you’re here, Stone? History lesson? Is this what you wanted to know?”

  “In part. He was innocent, wasn’t he?”

  “Of course he was,” Lehman said derisively. “Jesus Christ, Stone, what do you think? You’re his son. A son’s got to have faith in his father.”

  Stone was nodding. “You allowed his career to be destroyed, didn’t you?”

  Lehman shook his head slowly. His mouth opened and closed a few times wordlessly. “I didn’t think—”

  “You know, once upon a time I was proud to know you,” Stone said. He knew that the room was bugged, but it was too late now to make any difference.

  Lehman, who could not stop shaking his head, was lost in some dark and private corner of his mind.

  “Now, let me see,” Stone said. “They’ve had your daughter for all of her life, yes? And you have something.”

  “It’s very late. …”

  “A number of papers, am I right? An old woman who was once Lenin’s secretary told me about a ‘Lenin Testament’ that the world never knew about. Something that might have destablized the Kremlin a few decades ago—”

  “Very old news—”

  “—but more. Other bits of evidence. Proof that Beria tried to pull off a coup, with Western help.”

  “Decades ago. Please don’t waste my time now. I don’t have much of it. And neither, I’m afraid, do you.”

  “But that, too, is old news, as you put it. No, not entirely.”

  Lehman’s attention seemed to be drifting.

  “Not entirely,” Stone resumed, “because in those papers were names. Names of Beria’s aides. Young men who would later make illustrious careers for themselves, and who would scarcely want to have

  496 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  anyone know that they once conspired against the Kremlin. At least one person, yes?”

  “Get out of my room—” Lehman said, but he was cut short by a rattling cough.

  “So, you have proof that the new chairman of state security is an enemy of the state. Well, now, of course you have something on him.” He gave Lehman a fierce, blazing stare. “So why did you have to come to Moscow?”

  “Anyone who knows …” Lehman began.

  “Anyone who knows about Pavlichenko.”

  “I know too much. …” Again his mind appeared to wander.

  “But you just walked right into Pavlichenko’s trap!”

  “No, damn you!” Lehman spoke with a sudden anger. “I’ve known the Soviets for almost all my life. Obviously I have papers in the hands of my attorneys in New York, detailing Pavlichenko’s past, our relations with him, our help in creating his career. The release of which would … If—if I should die before my Sonya was freed, I’ve left instructions that upon my death my attorneys would be required to make public certain papers unless my daughter Sonya were allowed to leave Russia.”

  “And now? What about now?”

  “I know Pavlichenko won’t allow me to leave. He can’t. I’m the witness. But I provided for that, too. My attorneys have received instructions from me that all my papers on Pavlichenko are to be made public on November 10 unless their release is stopped by either me or Sonya.” He had summoned up the energy to speak with great emphasis, and his expression was triumphant, though his words had become slurred. “And Pavlichenko knows this. He knows. It’s my failsafe. Only Sonya will be able to stop the release of this damaging information. So Pavlichenko will have to free my daughter. Only Sonya can stop the release of information he won’t want out.”

  He doesn’t know, Stone suddenly realized. He doesn’t know the enormity of Pavlichenko’s plan. He doesn’t know that information made public by some white-shoe law firm in New York can have no effect on a man who has seized power the way Pavlichenko is about to. Lehman doesn’t know!

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 497

  But Stone only said, “What do you mean, only Sonya?”

  Lehman coughed again. A gut-wrenching cough.

  “I’m dying. Stone.”

  “But even if you only live for a few more years …”

  “I’m dying now, Stone. Right now, before your very eyes.”

  And so he was. His face was ghostly white; he had begun to fade. But it was strange: he spoke with such pride.

  “They call this a ‘mercy cocktail.’ You’re too young to think about such things. They’ve used them in England for over a hundred years.” He smiled. “Liquid morphine and liquid codeine. Some other things— sugar and water and a bit of gin. The way my father died. Instead of subjecting us to a long decline. I packed the vial before I left. I knew this would happen.”

  Stone only stared in amazement, speechless.

  “I swallowed it shortly before you arrived. I knew when I came here I’d never leave. And with the legal mechanism already set up, as long as I didn’t allow them to take me hostage—they could do that, you know—and killed myself instead, I knew I could save Sonya. They have to let her gof’ He was almost shouting now, and his eyes were afire with triumph. “For years, I couldn’t help my dear Sonya. And now … now …“He smiled, broadly, again.

  Stone didn’t have the heart to tell the dying old man about what would happen, in a matter of hours, in Red Square. He couldn’t tell him that the materials in the safekeeping of his lawyers in New York were of little importance now to Pavlichenko. How could he tell the man that his dying gesture—the greatest, most unselfish gesture of his life—would be a failure?

  “Lenin was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  “All true,” Lehman repeated. “So he was. You know about Reilly, Sidney Reilly?”

  Reilly, the British superspy who tried to overthrow the Soviet government in 1918. What did he have to do with anything? “Yes.”

  “Then you know that a year after the Russian Revolution the Allies were furious at the Bolsheviks. For signing a separate peace with Germany. Decided they had to topple the Bolsheviks. Strangle the Bolshevik infant. Only way. They saw the beginnings of a Lenin cult,

  498 ■ JOSEPH FINDER

  and they zeroed in on the only way to destroy the leadership. Eliminate the charismatic leader. The Brits sent in Reilly to assassinate Lenin, but the plot failed.”

  “And you?” But Lehman ignored him.

  “Warren Harding and Churchill and a whole lot of other people thought if Lenin was gotten out of the way the Bolsheviks would fall.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Stone said aloud, to himself.

  Lehman heard this. “Don’t believe it.” He laughed dryly. “Harding and Churchill thought, I said—they didn�
��t do. Stalin did. Sonya was born into this world a little, lovely hostage, and Stalin was able to secure the cooperation of the only foreigner Lenin trusted. Otherwise my daughter would die. That sort of thing happened often then— people would just disappear. …”

  “Foreigner?” Stone said, not understanding.

  “Embalming didn’t take. Not in someone whose body was loaded with poison. Body was cremated. They made a wax dummy out of a life mask Lenin had had made for a sculpture. Stalin knew. He wanted Lenin out of the way as soon as possible—he saw the Soviet state paralyzed, and it was his chance to seize the throne. He knew that I was one of the very few people Lenin would see, even when he was terribly ill,” Lehman gasped. “Lenin saw me. Served me tea, both of us. Lenin—Lenin drank his tea extremely sweet. Stalin gave me lumps of sugar treated with a sophisticated, fast-acting poison. All I had to do was switch sugar lumps.”

  ”You?”

  “Krupskaya wouldn’t let her husband see Stalin. I was the only way. I knew Lenin was dying anyway, after his stroke, and to hasten it would mean nothing. And Stalin would protect me—he had to, because I had his little secret: he provided the poison. So, without planning to, I facilitated the rise of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrant. He made me do it—he threatened all manner of reprisals, and I was too young to face up to him. But once you’re in with thieves, you’re in, and he always had a hold on me. Honor among thieves. For the rest of his life, and even after.”

  Lehman was rambling again, his eyes almost closed. “Your father brought the papers to Sonya. The Lenin Testament and the other

  THE MOSCOW CLUB ■ 499

  things. Lenin Testament … an attack on the Soviet state … by its creator … meaningless today, but probably a collector’s item … w orth a lot of money. That, and a few pieces of paper that implicated Stalin … Beria … Pavlichenko, the whole lot. Folded and sealed and … dry-mounted right in behind the picture of Lenin. Then your father found out. He would have ruined everything. If I died, I wanted her to have life insurance. Had to be secret, or else Sonya would be harmed. I couldn’t let your father destroy my Sonya’s life insurance. My Sonya … Now they’ll let her go.”

  “So—so you have nothing with you. No documents.” “Sonya has them. The trade—the trade is—Sonya—for me.” Stone got to his feet, and pulled from the pocket of his coat the Nagra recorder. The thing was still working, amazingly, even after the truck nightmare. It had been recording, and he clicked it off. Lehman stared at the machine as if he didn’t understand that their entire conversation had just been taped.

  But then his eyes flickered open. “Keep your machine on,” he said. “I have one more thing to tell you.”

  And for the next ten minutes, Lehman spoke; and by the time Lehman had closed his eyes for the last time, Stone had sunk deep into his chair, speechless, overwhelmed by the confirmation of something he had for so long suspected. For a very long time, Stone sat, unable to cry, unable to think clearly, unable to move.

  At a phone outside the National, Stone dialed Charlotte’s home number once again.

  “Hello?”

  ”Charlotte! Oh, thank God. I’d thought—”

  “Things took longer than I thought they would, but I found what you wanted. You’re not going to believe this. The head of the … network.”

  The head of the Old Believers network, she meant. The tension was making her indiscreet; she was speaking on the phone too freely.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Valery Chavadze.”

  75

  3:10 a.m.

  Driving a rust)’ white stolen Volga, which he had hot-wired near Manezhnaya Square, Stone left Moscow’s city limits and headed southwest, in the direction of Vnukovo. He recognized the area’s name: it was where many of the Soviet elite had their dachas. He left the highway and entered a dark, densely wooded area, poorly lit, and then pulled into a narrow road that had been cut into a deep forest, a winding road beside a ravine. The Soviet elite’s dachas were in some of the most rugged, unspoiled terrain in the Soviet Union.

  That Valery Chavadze was the head of an antigovernment network boggled the mind. He was one of the old guard, a bulwark of the old order. Even until the 1980s, this old Stalinist holdover had still been attending Politburo meetings. There were unsubstantiated rumors that he had been influential in ousting Khrushchev.

  Thai w<3s what he wanted the world to think.

  The world considered Valery Chavadze the very essence of the long-lived, recalcitrant Soviet leadership. But could it be that at the same time this man was a secret traitor to his own government, a dissident within the inner sanctum?

  And would Chavadze have the power to block whatever it was that was surely about to happen in—what was it?—maybe eight hours?

  He thought again, as he had done constantly in the last few hours, about what Lehman had told him, and he did his best to banish it.

  He thought, too, of what he could not tell Lehman. The old man, dying by his own hand, would not want to hear the ultimate irony: that, after decades of careful preparation, he would not free

  his daughter. Pavlichenko’s final masterstroke was a cruel and devious one.

  He remembered Yakov Kramer’s enormous fear.

  “We need to talk, you and I,” Yakov Kramer said. “You spoke of the terrorism. The bombs — the conspiracy, you called it. I — we — must speak very openly with you. Can we trust you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Stone said edgily. “What about?”

  “I want to tell you about some terrorists,” Yakov began. W/zen he had finished. Stone could barely speak, so filled was he with rage.

  “Do you understand why?” Stone said, almost shouted. “Do you understand the perverted logic of this whole thing? With Sonya’s connection to Winthrop Lehman, everything is in place. It will look like an American plot orchestrated by a very powerful member of the American establishment. I must talk to Sonya. I know her father has arrived in town, and I need to talk to him. I need your help.”

  Yakov sat in his armchair, cradling his scarred face in his hands.

  “Now!” Stone shouted.

  The night was cold and dark, illuminated faintly by a crescent moon. He downshifted, and headed along the ravine, the headlights piercing the gloom, the tall pines grotesque in relief against the dark forest to one side. He drove as fast as he dared; the unguarded ravine on his right made any real speed dangerous. But there was no time.

  When the pair of headlights of the oncoming car momentarily blinded him, at first he thought nothing of it, lost in frenzied thought as he was. And then he was grabbed by fear just as the windshield exploded, shattered by a bullet from the fast-approaching car.

  Stone spun the wheel, turning in the direction of the other car. He could hear the oncoming car’s brakes squeal loudly. He jabbed his fist downward at the door handle, flung it open, and dove out against the brush.

  The white Volga spun wildly out of control, finally slamming into a birch tree and coming to a halt on the very edge of the ravine. The other car, Stone now recognized, was also a Volga, but a black one—an official car, he knew at once.

  No. They had come for him. He had no protection, no bulletproof vest, nothing but the gun.

  There was a moment’s silence, but only a moment’s, for then suddenly came a volley of shots, which slammed into the pine tree against which he had landed. He was behind it now, using the narrow tree trunk for protection, and he pulled out the Clock and fired once, twice, a third time.

  Amid the staccato bursts of gunfire, Stone heard a human cry, a roar of pain cut short. One of the attackers was either dead or seriously disabled. Stone thought, his heart hammering.

  His whirling mind allowed only the briefest coherent thoughts: This was a setup, his mind shouted. Chavadze — maybe even Du-nayev — had set me up for a trap I just walked into like a forest animal.

  There was the metallic click-c//c^ of an automatic pistol being reloaded, and then another series of
shots slammed into the ground, mere inches away.

  Only one of them was left now, but he was a professional. Stone was sure, and Stone didn’t stand a chance.

  He had to conserve his shots. There were how many left? Thirteen? Thirteen shots to fire in the darkness against an invisible foe who was undoubtedly far more skilled than he.

  Stone grew cold when he heard the powerful engine of another vehicle speeding up the narrow road from the direction Stone had come.

  This was it. Reinforcements. There was simply no way he could withstand several more. He looked around wildly at the wood behind him and saw that it was impassable, the brush and trees were so dense. He would have to leap out into the road and find another exit. He would have to run.

  “Viktor!” the new arrival shouted, greeting the first attacker. Only one reinforcement. Good. “Where is he?”

  “Over there!” the first shouted. “Hurry!”

  “I’ll take care of this,” the new arrival said.

  “My orders said—”

  “Your orders,” the new one said, and there was a gunshot, followed by a gagging sound. He had shot the first one, Stone saw, not comprehending.

  “You!” the new arrival shouted up toward Stone. “Staroo-briadets!”

  Old Believer.

  “Please, this way.”

  The chauffeur, a gray-haired man in his early sixties with the florid complexion of a hard drinker, led Stone into the brightly lit house, which was luxuriously appointed: low, dark furniture and Oriental rugs on the floors, prayer rugs on the walls. In the entrance hall was a large grandfather clock, and seated beside it was a frail old man in a neat, dark-gray suit.

  Chavadze himself.

  He rose unsteadily and gave Stone a dry handclasp. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “One of my people told me you had met with the old spy in Paris, Dunayev.” He spoke in Russian, with a guttural Georgian accent, the sort of accent Stone had once heard in an old documentary film on Stalin. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, and most of all I’m sorry it took my man so long to get to you. Almost too long.”