Two for the Devil

by Allen Hoffman

  “You’re new,” Grisha commented.

  “Corporal Orlov at your service, Citizen Colonel,” the driver answered in forceful introduction.

  Grisha was continually astonished at their effrontery. These days a raw corporal in the Lubyanka deigned to greet a full colonel. Under the corporal’s hat, his black hair shaded to an even, bristly line before fading on the nape of his neck. Grisha wondered whether there was an NKVD barber he didn’t know about who performed this tonsorial splendor on the new men. It was very impressive. Grisha’s own hair had always been slightly ratty in back. What about Svetkov’s? He couldn’t remember. Svetkov was a mess; how long could he last with these automatons? In their heartless efficiency, they would tear him into neat little pieces—if Svetkov could be made neat, they were his only chance! It was almost enough to make Grisha feel sorry for his buffoonish superior.

  Corporal Orlov started the motor, which responded with a counterrevolutionary sputter before faltering altogether. After two more anti-Soviet misfires, the obstructionist engine turned over and succumbed to the organs’ demands. The old Fiat was fortunate that it was merely a machine. Foreign Communists who proved more amenable to serving Stalin had already been liquidated. The old, worn black car was familiar; the driver was not. Again, Grisha had to give the devil his due; the new man was in better shape than the old automobile.

  Corporal Orlov deftly put the automobile into gear, and they began to emerge from the dirty, cavernous prison walls. They crawled across the cobblestones toward the arch where the great steel barricade separated the Lubyanka from the streets of Moscow. The formidable gate swung open, and the shadow-black automobile slid through the fortress walls.

  Grisha’s sense of relief was minimal as they rolled alongside the NKVD headquarters.

  “How do you know where I am going?” he asked in a gentle, patronizing voice, amazed at the driver’s temerity; he hadn’t asked his destination nor, at the very least, confirmed it.

  “Your secretary said to take you to your home, Citizen Colonel,” the driver answered succinctly, with no hint of apology. If anything, rather the opposite.

  “You know where that is?” the colonel asked.

  “We have been thoroughly briefed,” the driver assured him with the condescending efficiency that made Grisha feel very old, almost a relic. He glanced at the familiar walls of the ancient Lubyanka. Compared to the harsh, impersonal, impudent exterior of the back of the driver’s head, the modeled neo-Renaissance facade with its short, fluted columns and soaring sculpted ones topped by protruding capitals, balustrades, and pedimented windows seemed soft and almost personal.

  Orlov’s dark expanse of hair over his narrow strip of pale neck was a perverse anthropomorphic inversion of the Lubyanka, Grisha reflected, with the dark, rough-cut orthogonal stones at the base and the lighter Renaissance decorations above. Since Grisha was between the back of the driver’s head and the wall of the Lubyanka, it seemed to him that the image was inverted as it passed through him. He found the corporal’s neatly barbered scalp much more repulsive. Grisha imagined the back of Maya Kirsanova’s head, with the delicious long blond hairs straying with sensual allure down over her supple neck, his tongue chasing them in sudden pursuit. Before he captured them, images inverted again, and he saw Dmitri Cherbyshev upside down, timidly crawling down the wall of the Lubyanka. Grisha rubbed his eyes.

  “Where do you get your hair cut?” Grisha asked.

  “What?” Corporal Orlov stammered. The unexpected question had caught him off guard.

  “Your hair. Where did you get it cut?” Grisha repeated, as if it were the most routine question an NKVD colonel might ask.

  “At home,” the driver answered without any of his cockiness. Slightly embarrassed, he flushed pink on his bare neck. Grisha thought he saw him squirm uncomfortably. He imagined the man to be gripping the wheel. Apparently he hadn’t been trained to answer this particular question.

  “At home,” Grisha repeated, to prolong the man’s discomfort.

  “My wife does it,” the driver explained apologetically.

  Grisha had not imagined Corporal Orlov as married. The new breed seemed so passionless and so dedicated, almost wedded to Stalin. What kind of marriage could they have? Whose hand ran the sharp scissors over his head? Might even Tatiana the mule be married? The thought that such sterile people should successfully marry distressed him. Perhaps they merely shared apartments, and when they found themselves in the same room, they silently cut each other’s hair. Their hair seemed to be growing shorter and shorter.

  “Does your wife work for us, too?” Grisha inquired.

  “No, she is at the Bureau of Electricity.”

  “Very important, electricity,” Grisha mused. Corporal Orlov nodded.

  “Do you cut her hair?” Grisha asked.

  The driver was surprised by the question. “No, her friend does it.”

  “I see,” Grisha said, but he really didn’t. Not the corporal’s wife’s haircut, anyway. What he did see was the elevated embankment of the Karl Marx Prospekt sliding by on his left. Somewhere behind him would be the statue of Ivan Fyodorov, who printed the first Russian book. But that had been years ago, under the stars. How many? Three, four, five hundred years ago? Grisha made a mental note that he should check the date on the base of the statue. Did it have a date? He didn’t know. He gradually became aware that the driver was saying something. Corporal Orlov no longer seemed quite so self-conscious.

  Grisha commanded his subordinate to repeat his words.

  “I said Colonel Svetkov told me to deliver a package to you, sir. He said it’s a gift,” the driver repeated bloodlessly.

  “What package?”

  “The one next to you,” the driver answered.

  Looking down on the seat next to him, Grisha discovered an unobtrusive cloth shopping bag that was almost the same color as the dark faded leather of the old Fiat upholstery.

  “From Svetkov?” he asked.

  “Yes, from the colonel,” the driver replied.

  Grisha lifted the soft cloth bag. He felt something hard and cylindrical inside. Later, he thought that he should have guessed what the buffoonish Svetkov had deposited in his lap, but initially he had no idea. He innocently opened the floppy cloth mouth to discover the bottle of kosher wine. Although the bottle lacked any label and was refitted with an old cap, Grisha had no doubt as to its contents. Filled almost to the top of its thin, protrusive neck, it seemed to come to life in his hand, trilling its bubble-filled air space back and forth in response to the Fiat’s encounter with Karl Marx Prospekt. When the aerated bubbles leaped toward him, he could detect a faint purplish tint that quickly descended into the brackish darkness of the bag. He closed the bag and calmly placed it on the seat next to him, as if he had picked it up by mistake.

  Grisha sensed that his life depended on ignoring the nondescript object that he had stumbled across, the way a resting woodsman realizes that he is sharing his log with a poisonous serpent. He felt as if he were cradling blood on his lap. Had he already been bitten? He forced himself to remain calm, but he could feel his temples pulsing, and he had a nearly overwhelming desire to scream. A constricted feeling gripped him, as if he were imprisoned in the automobile. Feverishly, he stared at the world outside.

  The old official Fiat seemed to be crawling along the bottom of some deep ocean canyon. The soaring neoclassical columns of the Bolshoi Theater dwarfed the other buildings and accentuated Grisha’s insignificance, as if he were a captive of a small black Fiat bug that had crawled out of the dark nest of the Lubyanka. Where was it taking him?

  The black bug dragged Grisha through the bright sterile void toward a narrow slit where Karl Marx Prospekt squeezed itself between the old Grand Hotel and the Trade Union House. Grisha recoiled as if his heart were contracting in mortal fear. The small, stately Trade Union House on his right flashed the image of death. Once a nobleman’s club, it had retained its noble purpose if not its class orientation.
Grisha had heard Lenin speak there, and twelve years earlier he had filed past when the Father of Revolution lay in state. Amidst the jumble of funereal memories, perhaps stimulated by them, Grisha imagined that he was being driven to his own “final resting place.” Lenin lying waxen on his trade union bier suddenly appeared as a very frightening precursor of Grisha’s fate.

  He knew—you lost your grip, the carousel turned; dizzy, you flew toward the crash from which you never arose. He shuddered at the still corpse of Lenin. Lenin, who had so much energy; Lenin, who possessed so much life—Lenin, whose little finger could command the attention of millions—lay so grotesquely still. Grisha shuddered, but even in his fear he experienced a sense of relief as they approached the broad open expanse of Manege Square. His dark insect captor paused at the intersection of Karl Marx Prospekt and Gorky Street to permit a bus that was pulling away from the Moscow Hotel to cross.

  But as the intersection cleared, Grisha knew his reprieve to be temporary. After several moments upon the open floor of Manege Square, the automated insect—human compared to its mechanized driver—would drag Grisha off into the narrow, suffocating lanes of the Arbat district. Where would it deposit him? The bug couldn’t possibly take him home. Not to his home, anyway. The NKVD drone might very well drag him back to an NKVD cranny—if not the mother hive of the Lubyanka—and there sting Grisha to death so the whole colony could feed off him, or more accurately, off his murder; from some the NKVD wanted their bodies, from others their blood, and from yet others, both. Since they—who were “they”?—wanted his blood, his category seemed the worst of all.

  “Stop!” Colonel Hershel Shwartzman commanded with crisp, almost fierce authority.

  The car slowed.

  “Right here!” the colonel demanded in a tone that didn’t permit argument.

  Corporal Orlov stopped the automobile and turned toward his passenger for an explanation. Instead, brown shopping bag in hand, Grisha leaped out of the limousine into the street. Before the driver could inquire as to further instructions, his passenger was already crossing the sidewalk and striding briskly toward the entrance of the National Hotel.

  Without looking back, Grisha entered the hotel. The doorman deferentially greeted the NKVD colonel by quickly opening the door. Grisha entered the lobby and slowed down. He walked toward the desk, looked around the lobby as if futilely searching for someone, glanced impatiently at his watch. Then he turned to leave, waving away the clerk who was hurrying over to assist him.

  “May I help you, Citizen Colonel?” the man called from a respectful distance.

  “Have you seen Orlov?” Grisha demanded.

  “I don’t think I know Orlov,” the man stammered.

  “Then you certainly can’t help me,” Grisha answered as he turned toward the door.

  “Does he work here?” the clerk asked fearfully.

  Curious to see if Orlov had followed him into the hotel, Grisha continued toward the door. He left the National Hotel and was pleased to discover that Corporal Orlov and the black Fiat were nowhere in sight. Assuming that the corporal would not abandon the automobile unless he had some very specific mission, Grisha had fled with Svetkov’s diabolical gift. Corporal Orlov would have pursued him on foot through all of Moscow to execute Svetkov’s order, but now the driver would most probably return to the Lubyanka and report Grisha’s escape. No doubt he had not been given instructions as to what he should do in such an eventuality. Why should he have? Where could Grisha go?

  What did it matter? There was no escape. Whatever fate “they” had prepared for him this afternoon would still be there tomorrow. Grisha knew the game; he had played it often enough. A car pulls up to the curb, and two gentlemen politely invite the victim to come with them to clarify some routine matter. How can one refuse such a reasonable, insistent request? It won’t take very long to clarify such a humdrum detail. It is even true: for the NKVD it is a routine matter. As for clarification, he is under arrest. What could be clearer? And it doesn’t take long once he enters the car. Astonished, outraged, protesting his innocence—there must be some mistake—the victim refuses to accept the quick, painless clarity of Soviet justice.

  Sergei Gasparov must have been like that; fuming with indignation and demanding to know on whose authority they were acting. Grisha enjoyed the idea of a bewildered Menshevik, but his pleasure was short-lived. No, the hard, fearless Gasparov was never bewildered. He must have made even his first investigating officer’s life uncomfortable. He had certainly made Grisha uncomfortable. For that matter, so had Dmitri Cherbyshev, but Grisha felt a wave of revulsion at the thought of those unnaturally large, shame-filled eyes. He couldn’t think about him. The misty eyes made him uneasy, and Dmitri Cherbyshev didn’t really fit into either category—and that made Grisha even more uncomfortable. One thing that the NKVD offered was categories; Article 58 of the Criminal Code was a perfect example.

  No, with Grisha they were playing the other game, cat and mouse. Grisha had executed it well himself when the occasion had called for it, but he had never really liked it. Grisha preferred a quick, clean arrest. No doubt Svetkov thrived on the other. Once you have someone in your clutches, you let him turn every which way but loose. Orlov the driver might be disciplined for losing his captive, but Svetkov wouldn’t be upset. Svetkov’s sewerlike mouth would fall open, and he would guffaw in arrogant conceit when he heard that Grisha had taken the cursed wine.

  The chance that the NKVD driver might be circling the area in search of him inspired Grisha to start walking. He looked down the street toward the great columned exhibition hall, the Manege, where the tsar had once trained his horses, then he turned back to cross the exceptionally broad street where Karl Marx Prospekt met Manege Square. With the brown cloth bag clutched firmly under his arm—he could hear the miserable Jewish wine gurgling inside as if it were praying—he walked toward the Kremlin, as if drawn toward the heart of all Russia itself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GRISHA TRUDGED ACROSS THE STARK OPEN SPACE, picking his way among the sparse vehicular traffic toward the rich, deep green of the splendid Alexandrovsky Gardens that nestled at the base of the Kremlin wall. The solid brick wall basked ancient in the September sun, glowing with an earthen redness that seemed, for all its solidity, softer and more personal than the heavy stone and cement masonry of the more modern city. Even if it now guarded the riddle of communism and protected Stalin himself, the Kremlin for centuries had hidden more arcane secrets, had protected more splendid tyrants, for so long and so well that it had become part of the enigma itself: no one entered then, no one entered now.

  On occasion, armed with a special pass, feeling alien, Colonel Hershel Shwartzman had crossed its timeless threshold. Now he had no desire to do so. What business could he have with Stalin? The image of the mustachioed Genius of World Revolution danced somewhere in the Kremlin. With trembling fingers, Grisha felt the stiff folds of Dmitri Cherbyshev’s confession; the Kremlin’s massive base, brick upon brick, seemed barely thick enough to blot out the catlike grin. Beneath the arsenal tower, Grisha hurried into the surrounding garden and plunged into the cool emerald shade. Not wanting to linger by the entrance, he did not pause to acknowledge or to savor the vernal greeting, but continued down the walk.

  At the first open space, where his attention was caught by the tall sentry of a monumental obelisk, he burst into laughter. Not a peal of mad hilarity, but an earnest laugh at the joke that stood so erectly before him, the Monument to Revolutionary Thinkers, whose names were incised into the stone—Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Lasalle, Bebel, Campanella, Moore, Saint-Simon, Bakunin, and others. What revolutionary thinker could possibly have dreamed up what was going on right now in Stalin’s Moscow? Only a Russian; Bakunin’s Russian name caught Grisha’s eye. Bakunin was mad to start with, wasn’t he? That only reinforced the humor of it all. Scanning the monument for other Russian names, he suddenly stopped and laughed more maniacally, for this monument had been erected in 1913 to celebrate
the tercentenary of the House of Romanov. After the revolution, in 1918, it had been reconstructed as a monument to revolutionary thinkers, with Lenin himself choosing the names. The Romanovs had been erased, in life as well as in stone, but of any name that had been or was on the tetrahedron, it was Romanov, the murdered Nicholas himself, who might have predicted the Red Terror. And he would have been right! A real revolutionary thinker, the last tsar!

  Still chuckling, Grisha sat down on the nearest bench. Suddenly his laughter was interrupted by a slight thump on his leg, and he turned away from the monument to find a small boy, perhaps five or six years old, staring up at him in perplexed curiosity. Rather anxiously, the child glanced at Grisha’s feet. Grisha followed the child’s gaze to discover the light hoop that had obviously been the source of the mild bump he had experienced. The little boy held the stick with which he had been rolling the hoop. Grisha bent to pick up the toy.

  “Is this yours?” he asked.

  The boy nodded, but hesitated to come closer.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  Again the child nodded, knitting his eyebrows together. Something serious and spirited in the gesture attracted Grisha. Especially the seriousness; Grisha had never been very much at ease with children, nor they with him.

  “Well, then take it,” Grisha ordered good-naturedly.

  “Yes, go ahead and take it,” a pleasant voice interjected.

  Grisha turned to find a handsome, gray-haired woman; she wore her threadbare clothing with a sense of style that suggested nonproletarian origins. These people were still to be found everywhere. Normally irritated by them, Grisha now smiled at her. As he was admiring her, he felt the hoop slip out of his hand.

  “And say ‘thank-you,’ Pyotr,” she insisted.

  “Thank you,” the child mouthed almost inaudibly.