Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

Walter stood up. “I must leave you now. Good-bye, and good luck.”

  Lenin stared at the suitcase on the floor and did not reply.

  Walter left the compartment and got off the train.

  He turned and looked back at the window of Lenin’s compartment. He half-expected the window to open and the suitcase to come flying out.

  There was another whistle and a hoot. The carriages jerked and moved, and slowly the train steamed out of the station, with Lenin, the other Russian exiles, and the money on board.

  Walter took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat and wiped his forehead. Despite the cold, he was sweating.

  { V }

  Walter walked from the railway station along the waterfront to the Grand Hotel. It was dark, and a cold east wind blew off the Baltic. He should have been rejoicing: he had bribed Lenin! But he felt a sense of anticlimax. And he was more depressed than he should have been over the silence from Maud. There were a dozen possible reasons why she had not sent him a letter. He should not assume the worst. But he had come dangerously close to falling for Monika, so why should Maud not do something similar? He could not help feeling she must have forgotten him.

  He decided he would get drunk tonight.

  At the front desk he was given a typewritten note: “Please call at suite 201 where someone has a message for you.” He guessed it was an official from the Foreign Office. Perhaps they had changed their minds about supporting Lenin. If so, they were too late.

  He walked up the stairs and tapped on the door of 201. From inside a muffled voice said in German: “Yes?”

  “Walter von Ulrich.”

  “Come in, it’s open.”

  He stepped inside and closed the door. The suite was lit by candles. “Someone has a message for me?” he said, peering into the gloom. A figure rose from a chair. It was a woman, and she had her back to him, but something about her made his heart skip. She turned to face him.

  It was Maud.

  His mouth fell open and he stood paralyzed.

  She said: “Hello, Walter.”

  Then her self-control broke and she threw herself into his arms.

  The familiar smell of her filled his nostrils. He kissed her hair and stroked her back. He could not speak for fear he might cry. He crushed her body to his own, hardly able to believe that this was really her, he was really holding her and touching her, something he had longed for so painfully for almost three years. She looked up at him, her eyes full of tears, and he stared at her face, drinking it in. She was the same but different: thinner, with the faintest of lines under her eyes where there had been none before, yet with that familiar piercingly intelligent gaze.

  She said in English: “‘He falls to such perusal of my face, as he would draw it.’”

  He smiled. “We’re not Hamlet and Ophelia, so please don’t go to a nunnery.”

  “Dear God, I’ve missed you.”

  “And I you. I was hoping for a letter—but this! How did you manage it?”

  “I told the passport office I planned to interview Scandinavian politicians about votes for women. Then I met the home secretary at a party and had a word in his ear.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “There are still passenger steamers.”

  “But it’s so dangerous—our submarines are sinking everything.”

  “I know. I took the risk. I was desperate.” She began to cry again.

  “Come and sit down.” With his arm still around her waist, he walked her across the room to the couch.

  “No,” she said when they were about to sit. “We waited too long, before the war.” She took his hand and led him through an inner door to a bedroom. Logs crackled in the fireplace. “Let’s not waste any more time. Come to bed.”

  { VI }

  Grigori and Konstantin were part of the delegation from the Petrograd soviet that went to the Finland Station late in the evening of Monday, April 16, to welcome Lenin home.

  Most of them had never seen Lenin, who had been in exile for all but a few months of the last seventeen years. Grigori had been eleven years old when Lenin left. Nevertheless he knew him by reputation, and so, it seemed, did thousands more people, who gathered at the station to greet him. Why so many? Grigori wondered. Perhaps they, like him, were dissatisfied with the provisional government, suspicious of its middle-class ministers, and angry that the war had not ended.

  The Finland Station was in the Vyborg district, close to the textile mills and the barracks of the First Machine Gun Regiment. There was a crowd in the square. Grigori did not expect treachery, but he had told Isaak to bring a couple of platoons and several armored cars to stand guard just in case. There was a searchlight on the station roof, and someone was playing it over the mass of people waiting in the dark.

  Inside, the station was full of workers and soldiers, all carrying red flags and banners. A military band played. Twenty minutes before midnight, two sailors’ units formed up on the platform as a guard of honor. The delegation from the soviet loitered in the grand waiting room formerly reserved for the tsar and the royal family, but Grigori went out onto the platform with the crowd.

  It was about midnight when Konstantin pointed up the line and Grigori, following his finger, saw the distant lights of a train. A rumble of anticipation rose from those waiting. The train steamed into the station, puffing smoke, and hissed to a halt. It had the number 293 painted on its front.

  After a pause a short, stocky man got off the train wearing a double-breasted wool coat and a Homburg hat. Grigori thought this could not be Lenin—surely he would not be wearing the clothes of the boss class? A young woman stepped forward and handed him a bouquet, which he accepted with an ungracious frown. This was Lenin.

  Behind him was Lev Kamenev, who had been sent by the Bolshevik Central Committee to meet Lenin at the border in case of problems—though in fact Lenin had been admitted without trouble. Now Kamenev indicated with a gesture that they should go to the royal waiting room.

  Lenin rather rudely turned his back on Kamenev and addressed the sailors. “Comrades!” he shouted. “You have been deceived! You have made a revolution—and its fruits have been stolen from you by the traitors of the provisional government!”

  Kamenev went white. It was the policy of almost everyone on the left to support the provisional government, at least temporarily.

  Grigori was delighted, however. He did not believe in bourgeois democracy. The parliament allowed by the tsar in 1905 had been a trick, disempowered when the unrest came to an end and everyone went back to work. This provisional government was headed the same way.

  And now at last someone had the guts to say so.

  Grigori and Konstantin followed Lenin and Kamenev into the reception room. The crowd squeezed in after them until the room was crammed. The chairman of the Petrograd soviet, the balding, rat-faced Nikolai Chkeidze, stepped forward. He shook Lenin’s hand and said: “In the name of the Petrograd soviet and the revolution, we hail your arrival in Russia. But . . . ”

  Grigori raised his eyebrows at Konstantin. This “but” seemed inappropriately early in a speech of welcome. Konstantin shrugged his bony shoulders.

  “But we believe that the main task of revolutionary democracy consists now of defending our revolution against all attacks . . . ” Chkeidze paused, then said with emphasis: “ . . . whether internal or external.”

  Konstantin murmured: “This is not a welcome, it’s a warning.”

  “We believe that to accomplish this, not disunity but unity is necessary on the part of all revolutionists. We hope that, in agreement with us, you will pursue these aims.”

  There was polite applause from some of the delegation.

  Lenin paused before replying. He looked at the faces around him and at the lavishly decorated ceiling. Then, in a gesture that seemed a deliberate insult, he turned his back on Chkeidze and spoke to the crowd.

  “Comrades, soldiers, sailors, and workers!” he said, pointedly excluding middle-
class parliamentarians. “I salute you as the vanguard of the world proletarian army. Today, or perhaps tomorrow, all of European imperialism may collapse. The revolution you have made has opened up a new epoch. Long live the world socialist revolution!”

  They cheered. Grigori was startled. They had only just achieved a revolution in Petrograd—and the results of that were still in doubt. How could they think about a world revolution? But the idea thrilled him all the same. Lenin was right: all people should turn on the masters who had sent so many men to die in this pointless world war.

  Lenin marched away from the delegation and out into the square.

  A roar went up from the waiting crowd. Isaak’s troops lifted Lenin onto the reinforced roof of an armored car. The searchlight was trained on him. He took off his hat.

  His voice was a monotonous bark, but his words were electric. “The provisional government has betrayed the revolution!” he shouted.

  They cheered. Grigori was surprised: he had not known how many people thought the way he did.

  “The war is a predatory imperialist war. We want no part in this shameful imperialist slaughter of men. With the overthrow of the capital we can conclude a democratic peace!”

  That got a bigger roar.

  “We do not want the lies or frauds of a bourgeois parliament! The only possible form of government is a soviet of workers’ deputies. All banks must be taken over and brought under the control of the soviet. All private land must be confiscated. And all army officers must be elected!”

  That was exactly what Grigori thought, and he cheered and waved along with almost everyone else in the crowd.

  “Long live the revolution!”

  The crowd went wild.

  Lenin clambered off the roof and got into the armored car. It drove off at a walking pace. The crowd surrounded and followed it, waving red flags. The military band joined in the procession, playing a march.

  Grigori said: “This is the man for me!”

  Konstantin said: “Me, too.”

  They followed the procession.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  May and June 1917

  The Monte Carlo nightclub in Buffalo looked dreadful by daylight, but Lev Peshkov loved it just the same. The woodwork was scratched, the paint was chipped, the upholstery was stained, and there were cigarette butts all over the carpet; yet Lev thought it was paradise. As he walked in he kissed the hat-check girl, gave the doorman a cigar, and told the barman to be careful lifting a crate.

  The job of nightclub manager was ideal for him. His main responsibility was to make sure no one was stealing. As a thief himself, he knew how to do that. Otherwise he just had to see that there was enough drink behind the bar and a decent band onstage. As well as his salary, he had free cigarettes and all the booze he could take without falling down. He always wore formal evening dress, which made him feel like a prince. Josef Vyalov left him alone to run the place. As long as the profits were coming in, his father-in-law had no other interest in the club, except to turn up occasionally with his cronies and watch the show.

  Lev had only one problem: his wife.

  Olga had changed. For a few weeks, back in the summer of 1915, she had been a sexpot, always hungry for his body. But that had been uncharacteristic, he now knew. Since they got married, everything he did displeased her. She wanted him to bathe every day and use a toothbrush and stop farting. She did not like dancing or drinking and she asked him not to smoke. She never came to the club. They slept in separate beds. She called him low-class. “I am low-class,” he had said to her one day. “That’s why I was the chauffeur.” She continued dissatisfied.

  So he had hired Marga.

  His old flame was onstage now, rehearsing a new number with the band, while two black women in head scarves wiped the tables and swept the floor. Marga wore a tight dress and red lipstick. Lev had given her a job as a dancer, having no idea whether she was good. She had turned out to be not just good but a star. Now she was belting out a suggestive number about waiting all night for her man to come.

  Though I suffer from frustrations

  The anticipation’s

  A boost to our relations

  When he comes

  Lev knew exactly what she meant.

  He watched her until she was done. She came offstage and kissed his cheek. He got two bottles of beer and followed her to her dressing room. “That’s a great number,” he said as he went in.

  “Thanks.” She put the bottle in her mouth and tilted it. Lev watched her red lips on the neck. She took a long drink. She caught him watching her, swallowed, and grinned. “That remind you of something?”

  “You bet it does.” He embraced her and ran his hands over her body. After a couple of minutes she knelt down, unbuttoned his pants, and took him into her mouth. She was good at this, the best he had ever known. Either she really liked it, or she was the greatest actor in America. He closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure.

  The door opened and Josef Vyalov came in.

  “So it’s true!” he said furiously.

  Two of his thugs, Ilya and Theo, followed him in.

  Lev was scared half to death. He hastily tried to button his pants and apologize at the same time.

  Marga stood up quickly and wiped her mouth. “You’re in my dressing room!” she protested.

  Vyalov said: “And you’re in my nightclub. But not for much longer. You’re fired.” He turned to Lev. “When you’re married to my daughter, you don’t screw the help!”

  Marga said defiantly: “He wasn’t screwing me, Vyalov, didn’t you notice that?”

  Vyalov punched her in the mouth. She cried out and fell back, her lip bleeding. “You’ve been fired,” he said to her. “Fuck off.”

  She picked up her bag and left.

  Vyalov looked at Lev. “You asshole,” he said. “Haven’t I done enough for you?”

  Lev said: “I’m sorry, Pa.” He was terrified of his father-in-law. Vyalov would do anything: people who displeased him might be flogged, tortured, maimed, or murdered. He had no mercy and no fear of the law. In his way he was as powerful as the tsar.

  “Don’t tell me it’s the first time, either,” said Vyalov. “I been hearing these rumors ever since I put you in charge here.”

  Lev said nothing. The rumors were true. There had been others, although not since Marga was hired.

  “I’m moving you,” Vyalov said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m taking you out of the club. Too many goddamn girls here.”

  Lev’s heart sank. He loved the Monte Carlo. “But what would I do?”

  “I own a foundry down by the harbor. There are no women employees. The manager got sick, he’s in the hospital. You can keep an eye on it for me.”

  “A foundry?” Lev was incredulous. “Me?”

  “You worked at the Putilov factory.”

  “In the stables!”

  “And in a coal mine.”

  “Same thing.”

  “So, you know the environment.”

  “And I hate it!”

  “Did I ask you what you like? Jesus Christ, I just caught you with your pants down. You’re lucky not to get worse.”

  Lev shut up.

  “Go outside and get in the goddamn car,” said Vyalov.

  Lev left the dressing room and walked through the club, with Vyalov following. He could hardly believe he was leaving for good. The barman and the hat-check girl stared, sensing something wrong. Vyalov said to the barman: “You’re in charge tonight, Ivan.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Vyalov’s Packard Twin Six was waiting at the curb. A new chauffeur stood proudly beside it, a kid from Kiev. The commissionaire hurried to open the rear door for Lev. At least I’m still riding in the back, Lev thought.

  He was living like a Russian nobleman, if not better, he reminded himself for consolation. He and Olga had the nursery wing of the spacious prairie house. Rich Americans did not keep as many servants as the Russ
ians, but their houses were cleaner and brighter than Petrograd palaces. They had modern bathrooms, iceboxes and vacuum cleaners, and central heating. The food was good. Vyalov did not share the Russian aristocracy’s love of champagne, but there was always whisky on the sideboard. And Lev had six suits.

  Whenever he felt oppressed by his bullying father-in-law he cast his mind back to the old days in Petrograd: the single room he shared with Grigori, the cheap vodka, the coarse black bread, and the turnip stew. He remembered thinking what a luxury it would be to ride the streetcars instead of walking everywhere. Stretching out his legs in the back of Vyalov’s limousine, he looked at his silk socks and shiny black shoes, and told himself to be grateful.

  Vyalov got in after him and they drove to the waterfront. Vyalov’s foundry was a small version of the Putilov works: same dilapidated buildings with broken windows, same tall chimneys and black smoke, same drab workers with dirty faces. Lev’s heart sank.

  “It’s called the Buffalo Metal Works, but it makes only one thing,” Vyalov said. “Fans.” The car drove through the narrow gateway. “Before the war it was losing money. I bought it and cut the men’s pay to keep it going. Lately business has picked up. We’ve got a long list of orders for airplane and ship propellers and fans for armored car engines. They want a pay raise now, but I need to get back some of what I’ve spent before I start giving money away.”

  Lev was dreading working here, but his fear of Vyalov was stronger, and he did not want to fail. He resolved that he would not be the one to give the men a raise.

  Vyalov showed him around the factory. Lev wished he were not wearing his tuxedo. But the place was not like the Putilov works inside. It was a lot cleaner. There were no children running around. Apart from the furnaces, everything worked by electric power. Where the Russians would get twelve men hauling on a rope to lift a locomotive boiler, here a mighty ship’s propeller was raised by an electric hoist.

  Vyalov pointed to a bald man wearing a collar and tie under his overalls. “That’s your enemy,” he said. “Brian Hall, secretary of the local union branch.”