Two for the Devil

by Allen Hoffman

  Stimulated and flattered by Svetkov’s appeal—he had never known him to be so respectful for so long—Grisha sat up straighter to receive the particulars. Svetkov, however, said no more. He simply sat back and nodded very soberly, as if he had already delivered all the details.

  “How long has the case been under investigation?” Grisha asked.

  “A few days. It was entrusted directly to me, and I am giving it straight to you to handle,” Svetkov answered and again fell back into his chair.

  “Perhaps we should start with the file,” Grisha suggested.

  “There isn’t any,” Svetkov answered.

  Although Svetkov remained silent, Grisha looked at him for an explanation.

  “It is that delicate,” Svetkov explained.

  “Then how do I proceed?”

  “The prisoner himself will explain everything.” Svetkov seemed nervous and frightened by the case, but Grisha felt the thrill of a formidable challenge.

  “When do we start?”

  “In a few minutes he will be brought here,” Svetkov answered.

  “Here?”

  “This demands the strictest secrecy. You will use my office with all its resources at your disposal. Needless to say, you will be relieved of all other duties until this business is completed.”

  Svetkov rose from his chair and made a few haphazard attempts to stuff his billowing shirttails into his pants. These unsuccessful thrusts merely flattened the dirty garment against his body. Removing the tunic that he had been wrinkling with his own bulk from the back of his chair, he put it on. Svetkov even made an effort to brush his hair with his hand.

  Grisha wondered what prisoner could elicit such respect from Svetkov.

  “Sit here behind the desk. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise,” he suggested.

  Grisha rose and took the seat of Svetkov, chief of the Lubyanka. As he passed his nominal superior, he was surprised to find that the man was sweating.

  “Whatever you need, Tatiana will get for you. She is a good girl. Thoroughly reliable. She has been briefed as to the investigation, but she knows nothing of the case itself. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Grisha answered.

  “Then have her send him in.”

  Grisha picked up the phone and heard the severe, efficient “Yes?” of the new NKVD secretary.

  “Send him in,” Grisha commanded crisply.

  Svetkov crossed the large office as if on his way to escape. For a moment, the insane thought crossed Grisha’s mind that they were going to assassinate him seated at the desk of the chief of investigations. Instead the door opened and a guard entered, followed by a man sandwiched between him and another guard. Svetkov nodded. The first guard stopped, permitting the prisoner to enter. A look of loathing on his exaggerated features, Svetkov let the man walk by him and quickly exited, as if he were escaping a foul odor. The guard stood at attention to Svetkov, then quickly followed him out, closing the door.

  Grisha sat up straight, focusing intently on the man who had just been deposited in front of him. After staring several moments to be certain, he was indeed surprised.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN GRISHA TOOK SVETKOV’S SEAT BEHIND THE DRAB, massive desk, he felt a resurgence of the revolutionary enthusiasm that had once pulsed routinely through his Chekist veins. More importantly, he felt a purity of purpose that he had not experienced for several long, disappointing years. He smoothed his tunic as if it were a priestly vestment and he the priest who must assure the sanctity of the service. So much wasn’t right, but now that the Communist party had chosen him to protect its inner core, there was hope. From this bleak office in the Lubyanka would radiate a new vigilance that would cut away the smothering calcification and expose the life-generating marrow. Mankind’s confidence in the Great October Revolution would be justified!

  Grisha sat in the seat of power with a revolutionary confidence that he represented the forces of progress. Historical necessity tickled him like a feather, and he wanted to laugh aloud. Yes, and he had not arrived a moment too soon. Careerists, opportunists, apparatchiks, were trampling the revolutionary flame into the dust; fear of his own arrest was sufficient proof that things were in a terrible state! But the pure spark that had ignited the revolution had survived and would be fanned into flame anew, igniting, illuminating, warning, tempering, and spreading.

  Grisha’s inspired mind leaped to the battlements of the Kremlin for a historical perspective. Only an old Chekist could retrieve the Great October Revolution. “What’s to Be Done?” Lenin had heralded, and Grisha knew. The party had to retrace its steps to that point where it had taken the wrong path and from there proceed along the proper way with Bolshevik confidence. The revolution had gone wrong with Trotsky. Exiling the traitor had not solved the problem, but miraculously, that moment could be recaptured. If not the moment, then the man himself; and through the man, things could be set right. Perhaps Trotsky had returned to Russia on his own to help solve the problems he had caused, but Grisha doubted it. An arrogance such as that could not admit error.

  No, Trotsky must have been captured and spirited back to Russia. Stalin himself must have understood, for only the general secretary had the authority to give such an order. It would be Grisha’s job to see that the prisoner cooperated. If he did, then the real counterrevolutionaries could be rooted out. As to the personal future of the prisoner, Stalin no doubt would want him shot. There was certainly something to be said for that, especially if it meant that others wouldn’t be shot, but even that might be unnecessary if he confessed properly. After all those years of promising prisoners that if they told the truth, they would have nothing to fear, such might really be the case!

  The thought stimulated Grisha; it would justify so much that had happened; so much that he had done to so many. That the “old man” could become the “new man” excited him further. Thus freed from his havoc-wreaking attempts to create a new man, Comrade Stalin could return to building the country, the job he was suited for. But Grisha restrained his enthusiasm; all of this was in the future. First he had to gain the cooperation of the party’s most brilliant theoretician and most dangerous enemy. A man who had created and commanded the Red Army. Whose case could be more delicate than this, a case so delicate that as yet no file existed?

  After Svetkov and the guard had departed, Grisha gazed steadily at the prisoner. He was, indeed, surprised.

  “Lev Davidovich?” Grisha called softly across the large chamber, using Trotsky’s first name and patronymic, informal name, in faint hope that his disappointment was premature.

  Accepting Grisha’s gentle, indistinct query as an invitation, the prisoner stepped humbly forward to be able to hear better. Although he said nothing, his pale meek face silently drew itself into an apology. “Yes?” it seemed to ask in reluctant embarrassment.

  This pained, vulnerable attitude momentarily disarmed Grisha.

  “You’re not Leon Trotsky?” Grisha uttered disconsolately.

  “No.” The prisoner responded so softly that Grisha couldn’t hear him, but he could see the man shaking his head in humiliation that he had disappointed once again.

  The prisoner’s extraordinary humility saved Grisha from the collapse of his own exuberant expectations of interrogating Trotsky. Grisha experienced surprise and disappointment, but almost no embarrassment before this new prisoner, who seemed to lack any defiance or mistrust. The man even seemed somewhat relieved to find himself standing across from the NKVD director of investigations.

  “Sit down,” Grisha said, not uncharitably, and the man responded quickly but with slow, careful movements. The effect was strange and further aroused Grisha’s interest. The man seemed to be in good health. There were no signs that he had been beaten. He wore his belt and shoelaces. Obviously, he had not been processed as a formal prisoner. Grisha assumed that he was being held in one of the special cells where accommodations and diet were more like those of a comfortable hotel than a prison.

&nbs
p; And yet, as frightened as the man was, he didn’t seem afraid so much of Grisha as of himself. He seemed to look to the NKVD officer for help, but without the usual righteous indignation of the innocent. The man had an aura of self-professed guilt about him. His strange eyes trumpeted it. They were preternaturally large and filled with both shame and innocence. Where had Grisha seen something like this—the pale, wide eyes, the slow movements, the innocent fear and complete vulnerability? He was reminded of the small, furry creatures of the night, who lived in the treetops and relied on their large eyes and inaccessible habitat to survive. Once an adversary discovered them, they were helpless. At the zoo, Grisha had liked them at once. And only them. Tigers, snakes, crocodiles, he had recognized them all as enemies of the revolution. On battlefronts and in interrogation rooms he had struggled against their counterrevolutionary claws, poison, sharp teeth, and voracious jaws. At the zoological garden, Grisha was fascinated but tense. He knew them all from the cages of the Lubyanka—beasts whose very nature was to prey upon the Great October Revolution. He always insisted that his cadets spend time in serious study at the zoo. The grasping, scampering monkeys, shameless profiteers and speculators. The kulak birds sang so beautifully but were the first to steal grain from another’s harvest. And the ugly nonparty owls, sleeping by day and screeching by night. A comrade could learn a lot from the brutal world of nature, all right. But one creature always drew him to its cage in wonderment. He had seen them all before in the Lubyanka except for the large-eyed, slow-moving, nocturnal lemur. Fearful and trusting, an investigator’s dream.

  “You are?” Grisha inquired imperiously.

  “Dmitri Cherbyshev,” the man answered meekly.

  “Would you like to tell me in your own words why you’re here?” Grisha asked. Stressing “in your own words” suggested clearly that the NKVD interrogator most certainly knew all and was merely being kind.

  The prisoner’s large eyes filled with a fright and a horror that threatened to paralyze him. Although the eyes did not close in the least, they no longer focused on the questioner. The effect was as if out of embarrassment the prisoner had looked away or lowered his glance. Had he done so, Grisha would have been offended and doggedly pursued the prisoner. This strange inward retreat, however, did not offend Soviet justice. Grisha was reminded of Svetkov’s term “delicate.” Here was an extremely delicate prisoner. Sensitive to the man’s plight, Grisha sat up attentively.

  “It’s difficult, isn’t it?” Grisha suggested sympathetically.

  The prisoner looked at his NKVD interrogator and nodded. Although Grisha didn’t think the man would burst into tears—the wide eyes seemed beyond tears—Grisha was concerned that the man might sink within their wet white surface as if into a moist fog.

  “I understand,” Grisha said with studied sincerity. “Perhaps I was a little too sudden. I can see that you want to tell the truth, don’t you?”

  Dmitri glanced at Grisha and nodded.

  “Sometimes it’s not easy. We understand that, but it’s always the best way. It’s the only way. After all, we’re here to help you. Maybe we should get to know one another. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself. Dmitri, where do you work?”

  Dmitri’s eyes focused. “At the Lenin Library,” he said.

  “That’s a wonderful place to work. A wonderful name, too. Of course, with my activities here, I just don’t have the time to visit it the way I would like to. It’s one of the world’s largest collections, isn’t it?”

  The prisoner merely nodded.

  “What do you do there?” Grisha asked buoyantly.

  “I am in charge of some of the foreign collections,” Dmitri answered.

  “What foreign languages do you know?” Grisha inquired.

  “Polish, English, French, German—all rather well, and I read several others,” the prisoner answered simply.

  “You’re obviously very talented,” Grisha commented respectfully. “Do you enjoy your work, Dmitri?”

  Dmitri squirmed uncomfortably in the large leather armchair without being able to formulate an answer.

  “You don’t enjoy your work?” Grisha suggested.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?” Grisha asked politely.

  Dmitri looked at Grisha. “Since I’ve had these difficulties, I just don’t know.”

  The man put his hand to his forehead in desperation and shook his head. Grisha was sure now that he was about to cry.

  “Would you like a drink of water?” he suggested.

  The man removed his hand from his head and fell back into the deep upholstered leather chair, gripping the armrests. Grisha picked up the phone and heard the new secretary’s crisp “Yes?”

  “May we have a pitcher of water, please?” The voice responded, “Immediately,” and Grisha regretted not having been more imperious in his order. She probably would have respected him more if he hadn’t said please. That’s not the way things used to be.

  “Where do you live?”

  “In the Arbat. Close to the library,” he answered.

  Grisha nodded. “Married?”

  The prisoner shook his head. Grisha thought he detected a telltale sign of guilt.

  “Have you been married?” he asked casually.

  Again Dmitri shook his head with the same telltale signs.

  “Engaged?”

  A third time the prisoner shook his head. The fact was that this timid Dmitri didn’t look like a ladies’ man, but the Cheka had been fooled often enough on that score. Even after the revolution, sex remained a mystery. Somewhere in Moscow there must be a woman who would thrill to Dmitri Cherbyshev’s wide, frightened eyes and clutch him close. Not that much would happen between them with the man’s debilitating fear, but then, Grisha thought, who knows; there seem to be enough of those frightened furry little lemurs to populate the jungle and the zoos, too.

  A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. He buzzed Tatiana in. She entered with a tray containing a large, heavy cut-glass pitcher and two heavy glasses. Grisha had seen them before in this office, but he wondered anew whether they weren’t left from tsarist times. Still, he couldn’t imagine that glassware could survive so long anywhere in Bolshevik Russia, especially in the Lubyanka, where things were destined to be broken. Imperiously he raised his arm and silently pointed to the portion of the desk directly in front of the prisoner. Tatiana primly put the tray down and turned to leave.

  Grisha watched her mannish walk, all shoulders and arms, no hips at all. Who would find anything like that attractive? Maya Kirsanova came to mind. She had Bolshevik steel in her heart, but she had hips and human needs, too. If Grisha had had a revolutionary love, she was it. Should he have divorced and married her? There was no great romantic love, but politically Maya was aware, a trusted party member, and there was grace in their relationship. The Cossacks had chided him about it, but with respectful affection. He had envied the natural way they sat on their horses, and they had envied him. They were right, too. He and Maya had “ridden” with a natural physical dignity that made them both proud and grateful to have one another. But this stern, short-haired NKVD secretary— who could ride her with any joy? What would the Cossacks have thought of her? They most probably would have compared her to a mule instead of a graceful, thin-faced mare or a strong, supple Maya Kirsanova.

  My heavens, he had let her go! And why was he thinking of her now? Since Kirov had been shot, no one seemed to be screwing in Russia anymore. If they were, the NKVD would know about it, and the NKVD didn’t know about it, so it must not be happening. In the purges one-fourth of Leningrad had disappeared. Who could make love waiting for a knock on the door? Grisha couldn’t; he knew that. So what difference did it make if Chekist women no longer existed? Neither did the Cheka, and neither did sex. Why was he sitting at Svetkov’s desk and in his leather chair with such thoughts and such tense discomfort?

  “Dmitri, it’s a little warm in here. Why don’t you have a drink?” Grish
a suggested. Welcoming the chance to get up from the chair, he poured the man a glass of water.

  Dmitri, relieved at the opportunity to do something with his trembling hand, took it. Grisha watched the water roll about in frenzy as Dmitri’s spasmodic anxiety entered the liquid. A quick darting wave roiled forward and leaped over the rim, running down onto Dmitri’s hand. He leaned forward, licking at his thumbs with the same slow grace that had marked his entry, and then, surprisingly, his hands ceased to shake. He sipped from the glass and rested it on the desk.

  “Thank you,” he said with cringing sincerity.

  Eager to begin, Grisha returned to Svetkov’s seat.

  “Dmitri, take another drink,” he suggested.

  Obsequiously, Dmitri obeyed.

  “You know we’re here to tell the truth. Sometimes what we have to say is difficult or painful. Sometimes we are ashamed of the things we have done, but there is nothing better for us than the truth. Often we imagine that some things are frightening to tell, but they generally reveal themselves as not half so bad as we imagine. And you’ll feel better for having told the truth, too. I can see that you aren’t very comfortable now. Am I right, Dmitri?”

  Dmitri nodded.

  “Remember, we’re all here in this building to protect you, because when we protect the revolution, we are protecting all of us, aren’t we?”

  Again Dmitri nodded, but this time in a curt, perfunctory manner.

  “So why don’t we just start at the beginning,” Grisha coaxed.

  Dmitri nodded and then reached to drink from his glass. Instead of the usual timid sip, he took two long gulps that almost drained the large tumbler. He grasped the glass tightly, his fingers blanching white, and his great fearful eyes swam in frenzy as if they were drowning in the copious fluid he had swallowed. Suddenly his lips began moving. Staring at the floor, he spoke so softly that at first Grisha wasn’t aware that he was talking. After several sentences he stopped. Although Grisha had not heard a word, he thought it best to be encouraging.