“God is most great,” the Arab breathed. “Soon, magnificent khan, I vow, many teachers will come from Damascus to instruct you and your people fully in all details of the faith, though what you and your nobles have proclaimed will suffice for your souls until such time as theulama -those learned in religion-may arrive.”
“It is very well,” Telerikh said. Then he seemed to remember that Theodore, Niketas, and Paul were still standing close by him, suddenly alone in a chamber full of the enemies of their faith. He turned to them. “Go back to your Pope in peace, Christian priests. I could not choose your religion, not with heaven as you say it is-and not with the caliph’s armies all along my southern border. Perhaps if Constantinople had not fallen so long ago, my folk would in the end have become Christian. Who can say? But in this world, as it is now, Muslims we must be, and Muslims we shall be.”
“I will pray for you, excellent khan, and for God’s forgiveness of the mistake you made this day,” Paul said gently. Theodore, on the other hand, looked as if he were consigning Telerikh to the hottest pits of hell.
Niketas caught Jalal ad-Din’s eye. The Arab nodded slightly to his defeated foe. More than anyone else in the chamber, the two of them understood how much bigger than Bulgaria was the issue decided here today. Islam would grow and grow, Christendom continue to shrink. Jalal ad-Din had heard that Ethiopia, far to the south of Egypt, had Christian rulers yet. What of it? Ethiopia was so far from the center of affairs as hardly to matter. And the same fate would now befall the isolated Christian countries in the far northwest of the world.
Let them be islands in the Muslim sea, he thought, if that was what their stubbornness dictated. One day,inshallah, that sea would wash over every island, and they would read theQu’ran in Rome itself.
He had done his share and more to make that dream real, as a youth helping to capture Constantinople and now in his old age by bringing Bulgaria the true faith. He could return once more to his peaceful retirement in Damascus.
He wondered if Telerikh would let him take along that fair-skinned pleasure girl. He turned to the khan. It couldn’t hurt to ask.
<
* * * *
Lenin in Odessa
George Zebrowski
“Lenin is a rotten little incessant intriguer . . . He just wants power. He ought to be killed by some moral sanitary authority.”
- H. G. Wells, in a letter dated July 1918,
sent to the New York Weekly Review
1
In 1918, Sidney Reilly, who had worked as a British agent against the Germans and Japanese, returned to our newly formed Soviet Russia. He was again working for England and her allies, but this time he was also out for himself, intending to assassinate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and bring himself to power at the head of the regime that he imagined his homeland deserved.
Jew though he was, Reilly saw himself as a Russian coming home to make good. It angered him that another expatriate, Lenin, had got there first - with German help, and with what Reilly considered suspect motives. Reilly was convinced that his own vision was the proper response to the problems of life in Russia, which, as Sigmund Rosenblum, a bastard born in Odessa, he had escaped in his youth. He believed that the right man could, with sufficient thought and preparation, make of history his own handiwork.
It was obvious to me that Reilly’s thinking was a curious patchwork of ideas, daring and naive at the same time, but lacking the systematic approach of a genuine scientific philosophy. His distaste for the bourgeois society that had oppressed him in his childhood was real, but he had developed a taste for its pleasures.
Of course, Reilly knew that he was sent in as a tool of the British and their allies, who opposed Bolshevism from the outset, and he let them continue to think that they could count on him, for at least as long as his aims would not conflict with theirs. Lenin himself had been eased back into Russia by the Germans, who hoped that he would take Russia out of the war in Europe. No German agent could have done that job better. Reilly was determined to remove or kill Lenin, as the prelude to a new Russia. What that Russia would be was not clear. The best that I could say about Reilly’s intentions was that he was not a Czarist.
There was an undeniable effectiveness in Reilly, of which he was keenly aware. He was not a mere power seeker, even though he took pride in his physical prowess and craft as a secret agent; to see him as out for personal gain would be to underestimate the danger that he posed to those of us who understand power more fully than he did.
Reilly compared himself to Lenin. They had both been exiles from their homeland, dreaming of return, but Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov had gone home on German hopes and seized power. Russia would be remade according to a heretical Marxism, in Reilly’s view. Lenin’s combination of revisionist ideology and good fortune was intolerable to Reilly; it wounded his craftsman’s ego, which saw chance as a minor player in history. He ignored the evidence of Lenin’s organizational skills, by which a spontaneous revolution had been shaped into one with purpose.
Reilly viewed himself and his hopes for Russia with romantic agony and a sense of personal responsibility that were at odds with his practical intellect and shrewdness, both of which should have told him that he could not succeed. But Reilly’s cleverness delighted in craft and planning. His actions against the Germans and Japanese were all but inconceivable to the common man. Even military strategists doubted that one man could have carried out Reilly’s decisive schemes. His greatest joy was in doing what others believed to be impossible.
Another clue to Reilly’s personality lay in his love of technology, especially naval aviation. He was an accomplished flyer who looked to the future of transport. He was fascinated, for example, by the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the aether wind, which was predicted on the idea of the Earth’s motion through a stationary medium. When this detection failed, Reilly wrote a letter to a scientific journal (supplied to me by one of my intellectual operatives in London) insisting that the aether was too subtle a substance to register on current instruments. One day, he claimed, aether ships would move between the worlds.
Reilly’s mind worried a problem until he found an imaginative solution; then his practical bent would find a way to accomplish the task. As a child he was able to remain invisible to his family simply by staying one step ahead of their house search for him. As a spy he once eluded his pursuers by joining them in the search for him. However rigorous and distasteful the means might be, Reilly would see what was possible and not flinch. With Lenin he understood that a single mind could change the world with thought and daring; but, unlike Vladimir Ilyich, Reilly’s mind lacked the direction of historical truth. He was capable of bringing into being new things, but they were only short-lived sports, chimeras of an exceptional but misguided will. His self-imposed exile from his homeland had left divisions as incongruous as his Irish pseudonym.
Sidney Reilly sought escape from the triviality of his life, in which his skills had been used to prop up imperialism. He had been paid in money and women. By the time he returned to Russia, I already sensed that he would be useful to me. It seemed possible, on the basis of his revolutionary leanings, that I might win him to our cause.
* * * *
2
“Comrade Stalin,” Vladimir Ilyich said to me one gloomy summer morning, “tell me who is plotting against us this week?” He was sitting in the middle of a large red sofa, under a bare spot on the wall where a Czarist portrait had hung. He seemed very small as he sank into the dusty cushions.
“Only the ones I told you about last week. Not one of them is practical enough to succeed.”
He stared at me for a moment, as if disbelieving, but I knew he was only tired. In a moment he closed his eyes and was dozing. I wondered if his bourgeois conscience would balk at the measures he would soon have to take to keep power. It seemed to me that he had put me on the Bolshevik Central Committee to do the things for which he had no stomach. Too many opportunists were ready to step
into our shoes if we stumbled. Telling foe from ally was impossible; given the chance, anyone might turn on us.
Reilly was already in Moscow. I learned later that he had come by the usual northern route and had taken a cheap hotel room. On the following morning, he had abandoned that room, leaving behind an old suitcase with some work clothes in it. He had gone to a safe house, where he met a woman of middle years who knew how to use a handgun.
She was not an imposing figure - an impression she knew how to create; but there was no doubt in Reilly’s mind that she would pull the trigger with no care for what happened to her afterward.
Lenin’s death was crucial to Reilly’s plot, even though he knew that it might make Vladimir Ilyich a Bolshevik martyr. Reilly was also depending on our other weaknesses to work for him. While Trotsky was feverishly organizing the Red Army, we were dependent on small forces - our original Red Guard, made up of factory workers and sailors, a few thousand Chinese railway workers, and the Latvian regiments, who acted as our Praetorian Guard. The Red Guard was loyal but militarily incompetent. The Chinese served in return for food. The Latvians hated the Germans for overrunning their country, but had to be paid. Reilly knew that he could bribe the Latvians and Chinese to turn against us, making it possible for the Czarist officers in hiding to unite and finish the job. With Lenin and myself either arrested or dead, he could then turn south and isolate Trotsky, who had taken Odessa back from the European allies and was busy shipping in supplies by sea. His position there would become impossible if the British brought in warships. If we failed in the north, we would be vulnerable from two sides.
Lenin’s death would alter expectations in everyone. Reilly’s cohorts would seize vital centers throughout Moscow. Our Czarist officers would go over to Reilly, taking their men with them. The opportunists among us would desert. Reilly’s leaflets had already planted doubts in their minds. Lenin’s death would be their weathervane. Even the martyrdom of Vladimir Ilyich, I realized, might not be enough to help us.
As I gazed at Lenin’s sleeping face, I imagined him already dead and forgotten. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, came into the room and covered him with a blanket. She did not look at where I sat behind the large library desk as she left.
* * * *
3
“Comrade Lenin has been shot!” the messenger cried as he burst into the conference room.
I looked up from the table. “Is he dead?”
The young cadet was flushed from the cold. His teeth chattered as he shook his head in denial. “No - the doctors have him.”
“Where?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You’re to come with me, Comrade Stalin, for your own safety.”
“What else do you know?” I demanded.
“Several of our units, including Cheka, are not responding to orders.”
“They’ve gone over,” I said, glancing down at the lists of names I had been studying.
The cadet was silent as I got up and went to the window. The grey courtyard below was deserted. There was no sign of the Latvian guards, and the dead horse I had seen earlier was gone. I turned my head slightly and saw the cadet in the window glass.
He was fumbling with his pistol holster. I reached under my long coat and grasped the revolver in my shoulder harness, then turned and pointed it at him under my coat. He had not drawn his pistol.
“No, Comrade Stalin!” he cried. “I was only unsnapping the case. It sticks.”
I looked into his eyes. He was only a boy, and his fear was convincing.
“We must leave here immediately, Comrade Stalin,” he added quickly. “We may be arrested at any moment.”
I slipped my gun back into its sheath. “Lead the way.”
“We’ll go out the back,” he said, his voice shaking with relief.
“Did it happen at the factory?” I asked.
“Just as he finished his speech, a woman shot him,” he replied.
I tried to imagine what Reilly was doing at this very moment.
The cadet led me down the back stairs of the old office block. The iron railing was rusting, and the stairwell smelled of urine. On the first landing the cadet turned around and found his courage.
“You are under arrest, Comrade Stalin,” he said with a nervous smile.
My boot caught him under the chin. I felt his neck break as he fired the pistol into the railing, scattering rust into my face. He fell backward onto the landing. I hurried down and wrenched the gun from his stiffening fingers, then went back up to the office.
There was a hiding place behind the toilet, but I would use it only if I had to. I came into the room and paused, listening, but there was only the sound of wind rattling the windows. Was it possible that they had sent only one person for me? Something had gone wrong, or the cadet had come for me on his own initiative, hoping to ingratiate himself with the other side. All of which meant I could expect another visit at any moment.
I hurried down the front stairs to the lobby, went out cautiously through the main doors, and spotted a motorcycle nearby - probably the cadet’s. I rushed to it, got on, and started it on the first kick. I gripped the handlebars, gunned the engine into a roar, then turned the bike around with a screech and rolled into the street, expecting to see them coming for me.
But there was no one on the street. Something had gone wrong. The Latvians had been removed to leave me exposed, but the next step, my arrest and execution, had somehow been delayed. Only the cadet had shown up.
I tried to think. Where would they have taken Vladimir Ilyich? It had to be the old safe house outside of Moscow, just south of the city. That would be the only place now. I wondered if I had enough petrol to reach it.
* * * *
4
Lenin was at the country house. He was not mortally wounded. His assassin was there also, having been taken prisoner by the Cheka guards who had gone with Lenin to the factory.
“Comrade Stalin!” Vladimir Ilyich exclaimed as I sat down by his cot in the book-lined study. “You are safe, but our situation is desperate.”
“What has happened?” I asked, still unsteady from the long motorcycle ride.
“Moscow has fallen. Our Latvian regiments have deserted, along with our Chinese workers. Most of the Red Guard have been imprisoned. The Social Revolutionaries have joined the counter-revolution. My assassin is one of them. I suspect that killing me was to have been their token of good faith. There’s no word from Trotsky’s southern volunteers. There doesn’t seem to be much we can do. We might even have to flee the country.”
“Never,” I replied.
He raised his hand to his massive forehead.
“Don’t shout, I’m in terrible pain. The bullet struck my shoulder, but I have a headache that won’t stop.”
I looked around for Nadezhda, but she was not in the room. I saw several haggard, unfamiliar faces and realized that no one of great importance had escaped with Lenin from Moscow. By now they were in Reilly’s hands, dead or about to be executed. He would not wait long. I had underestimated the Bastard of Odessa.
“What shall we do?” I asked.
Vladimir Ilyich sighed and closed his eyes. “I would like your suggestions.”
“We must go where they won’t find us easily,” I replied. “I know several places in Georgia.”
His eyes opened and fixed on me. “As long as you don’t want to return to robbing banks.”
His words irritated me, but I didn’t show it.
“We needed the money,” I said calmly, remembering that he had once described me as crude and vulgar. Living among émigré Russians in Europe had affected his practical sense.
“Of course, of course,” he replied with a feeble wave of his hand. “You are a dedicated and useful man.”
There was a muffled shot from outside. It seemed to relax Vladimir Ilyich. Dora Kaplan, his assassin, had been executed.
* * * *
5
Just before leaving the safe house, we learned that Leni
n’s wife had been executed. Vladimir Ilyich began to rave as we led him out to the truck, insisting to me that Reilly could not have killed Nadezhda, and that the report had to be false. I said nothing; to me her death had been inevitable. As Lenin’s lifelong partner, and a theoretician herself, she would have posed a threat in his absence. Reilly’s swiftness in removing her impressed me. Lenin’s reaction to her death was unworthy of a Bolshevik; suddenly his wife was only an unimportant woman. Nadezhda Krupskaya had not been an innocent.
We fled south, heading for a railway station that was still in our hands, just south of Moscow, where a special train was waiting to take us to Odessa. If the situation in that city turned out to be intractable, we would attempt to reach a hiding place in my native Georgia.
The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology] Page 47
