Blood of the Czars

by Kilian, Michael;

  “Iovashchenko. It was my grandmother’s name. She married a man named Hoops. My mother, Chloe, married a man named Bobby Shaw. Not very Russian, that. Would I be called Tatiana Bobbyevna?”

  He smiled, patting her knee as he reached to pour her and himself more vodka. “I think perhaps here he would be called Boris. So, Tatiana Borisevna Iovashchenko, except you are Hoops and Shaw. How are you then called Chase? Husband?”

  “No. My father was killed and my mother married a very nice man named Chase. I’m divorced. When I was married, my name was Dewey.”

  “Tatiana Dewey. No, it does not go.”

  “It certainly didn’t.” Eyes wide open, she stared over the rim of her glass at the fire. “You are named Valeri Jakovich, Mr. Chairman. Your father was Jakov?”

  “Da. Yakov Petrovich.”

  “Griuchinov.”

  “No. I say this to you in discretion, Miss Chase, yes? Well, my mother and father never married. They would have, but he was killed in Civil War. Very turbulent times.”

  “And he was Jakov Sverdlov.”

  “What? Oh no.” He laughed. “If he was Jakov Sverdlov I would have so many fewer troubles in my young life. No, my father was Yakov Petrovich Nikulin, close not to Lenin like Sverdlov but to the unfortunate Trotsky. My mother’s name was Griuchinov, but I was known as son of Trotsky’s favorite general nevertheless. It was not easy for me until Khrushchev came to power. Much better then for all Russians, though not so good as now. Our premier is very brilliant man.”

  She took some caviar on a piece of bread, licked her lips clean afterward, then sat back, taking the chairman’s warm, strong hand. It was indeed a farmer’s hand. It became more than warm in the grasp of hers. He would be off balance now, more disposed to candor.

  “I like your hand,” she said.

  “Miss Chase, I am so pleased that you feel comfortable here.”

  With a quick motion of her free hand, she both pulled open the jacket of her suit and the top button of her red blouse, exposing both the czarist pin and the curve of her breast.

  “I am comfortable here,” she said.

  The basso Ivan Rebroff was now singing “Kalinka,” much more robustly than the band had played it that night in the Metropole. Poor Jack; how disgusted he’d be to see her now.

  “The other evening,” she said. “We were talking about your being in Southeast Asia.”

  He laughed. “No, Miss Chase. We were talking about not talking about my being in Southeast Asia. Very public place, yes? But I was there, yes. During unhappy times there for our two countries.”

  “My father was there.”

  “Yes?”

  She bit down hard on her lip. She had to do this. Something was wrong.

  “He was a pilot. For our air force.”

  “Yes? My son was pilot with Soviet air forces, with Fighter Aviation of the Air Defense Forces of the Homeland. He is now with Aeroflot. You have flown Aeroflot, yes? Very nice?”

  “My father was killed flying in Southeast Asia, in Laos, after he was shot down.”

  He frowned and squeezed her hand sympathetically. “Miss Chase, I am so sorry to hear. This is terrible thing about war; so many fatherless children. I know so well.”

  “You were not involved in the war there, Mr. Chairman?”

  He shook his head. “No. I was involved only with rice. And manure. Rice paddies are fertilized very primitively in Vietnam. I tried to teach them less primitive methods, but they are a very insular, stubborn people. Oh. I say undiplomatic thing.”

  She turned abruptly and looked up into his eyes.

  “You were strictly an agronomist? You were never involved with the military, say, with prisoner-of-war camps?”

  His eyes answered her before his words did. “I am a farmer, Miss Chase. Please, let us talk of other things.”

  As an actress, she knew acting, and there was none of it in his eyes. There was only truth.

  “For your sake, Mr. Chairman. And I mean this very sincerely, for I think I like you. For your sake, I think I had better leave here at once. Something is very wrong. I’ve been misinformed.”

  “Miss Chase …?”

  Sergeant Lev the servant entered, unsummoned. He came toward the table as though to remove the zakuski, though they were far from done with it. Instead, he reached inside his tunic, pulled forth a small pistol, and shot Griuchinov in the face, a spray of blood bursting from the back of the chairman’s head. Griuchinov, hands raised, eyes bulging, rose from the sofa, but did so as a dead man, falling forward onto the table, his face in the zakuski, his blood running into the bed of ice.

  Lev set down the pistol on the table. It was the one she had had in her bag, the one Meadows had given her, the same blue-gray finish, the same mother-of-pearl on the grip.

  Sergeant Lev was wearing white gloves. He had been from the first.

  He went to Griuchinov’s body and pulled down the chairman’s trousers until his buttocks and genitals were exposed. Then he stood straight, looking at Tatty with all the impassivity of an alien being.

  “You have shot Chairman,” he said, loudly, as though for a microphone. “You resisted his advances by murdering him. I am now calling authorities. Stay where you are.”

  10

  Tatty sat transfixed, watching the ice fill with blood.

  Sergeant Lev had gone to the telephone. There were armed militiamen all over the building. She had passed two at the entrance. Yet the man was telephoning. That meant something. What it meant she would decide later. At this instant, she knew only that, if she was to survive, to escape, to live, he could not be allowed to complete his call. He was dialing.

  He had set her pistol on the table. That was a mistake. She picked it up and got to her feet. There were moral questions about what she was to do, but she hadn’t time to consider them. There was the possibility that she might threaten him away from the telephone with the gun, that she might overpower him in some way, find something with which to knock him out. But there were no longer even seconds left. He had stopped dialing.

  Aiming the pistol with both hands, she fired twice. The first shot hit him in the small of the back, causing paralysis and pain. The second, the trigger pulled as the gun rose in recoil, struck the back of his head, splashing blood against the wall. She should run now, but where? To the embassy. But Meadows was at the embassy, and Meadows had given her the gun. Meadows was Ramsey’s man. There might be many of Ramsey’s people at the embassy. Where then, with so little time to think? No time, so she must make her own call. She had no one else, nothing else. It was crazy, but everything else was crazier. She had to know what to do. Stepping over Lev’s body, fighting back images of another man’s dead body lying atop her own in France, she frantically began to dial. There was no answer at the first number. She dialed the second. Spencer answered on the fourth ring. She could not understand why police were not crashing through the door.

  “Jack, thank God.”

  “Czarina. I should have thought you’d be making merry with the good chairman right about now.”

  “Jack, Griuchinov’s dead! He’s been shot, murdered! I killed the man who did it. I don’t know what to do!”

  Spencer paused a second or two, then swore. “Where are you?”

  “In the Kremlin.”

  “The Kremlin? For God’s sake, Tatty!”

  “It just happened, Jack. What do I do?”

  He paused again, then said, “Get drunk, Tatty. Grab a bottle of vodka and go to as good a place to get drunk in as there is in Moscow. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No. Yes! You mean—”

  “Be quiet! Gather up everything you have there, everything that could be identified with you. Then go where I said. Go now. Hurry. Run, Tatty! Run!”

  She found her coat and hat in a front closet and pulled them on hastily. Throwing the pistol into her purse and snatching up a bottle of Stolichnaya, she searched through the rooms of the apartment until she found the kitchen, a pantry beyond
that, and a rear door leading to a dark, gloomy set of service stairs. As she fled down them, she heard a pounding at the front door of the flat. There was a passageway at the bottom, leading outside, but Tatty could see the outline of a militiaman and his rifle at the end. Another door led to an interior corridor illuminated by old-fashioned lamps along the wall. The door at its end was locked, but there was a passageway leading off to the right. She followed it until she came to a door that did open, revealing an ornate auditorium, the chambers of the Council of Ministers. It looked deserted. Staying close to the walls, Tatty moved through it, passing by the great double doors she presumed to be the main entrance, instead slipping out a side exit further along. This put her in a wide hall. It was empty, but she could hear voices around the corner, which she took to be those of militiamen at the building’s entrance. Darting across the hall, she entered a doorway opposite, finding herself in a small conference room, dark but for faint light from the exterior windows.

  Were they exterior? The building had interior courtyards. She could be climbing down into a trap, an animal pit, into death. But she must keep moving. She must run. The windows were locked only with latches. She undid one and slowly raised the sash, opening it wide. She peered outside. It was a courtyard, a deadly dead end. In brightly lit windows opposite, she could see militiamen, drinking something from cups.

  Closing the window quickly, she almost panicked, almost began to cry. But not yet. There were other rooms and other windows. Returning to the hall, hurrying in the opposite direction from the building entrance, she found one at the very end. There was nothing but dark wall to be seen out its windows. It was no dead end. It was the Kremlin wall.

  The drop was even greater. She guessed ten feet. Stuffing the bottle of vodka into a coat pocket, she looked out, seeing no one in either direction. But she could hear loud voices, and distant sirens. She lowered herself from the window ledge, painfully scraping a knee, then let go, falling too heavily. Her right ankle gave way and she landed with a jarring thud on her backside, some vodka sloshing over her coat. She rose quickly. She could stand. There was no time for pain.

  Down the wall, at the far corner of the building to her left was the Nikolsky Tower gate through which she had come. To her right was another tower she did not know. She walked toward it, limping, keeping to the building wall. Reaching the corner, her cheek pressed to the abrasive masonry, she moved her head slowly forward until she could see around it. At the next corner down were some military vehicles, with lights on and engines running, and some men standing around them—soldiers, not militia. The tower gate itself was closed, militia or soldiers visible through its steel bars at the other end, stark silhouettes against the lights of Red Square.

  Directly opposite her was another building, the one Raya had so proudly pointed out to her as the center of the world, the building of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Streaming past on the other side were people—not soldiers or police, but ordinary people. Raya had said the nearby Palace of Congresses was used at night for theatrical productions, the ballet, and balalaika orchestras. They were theatergoers, heading home.

  Crossing the bright space between the two buildings, she walked very stiffly and erect, in hopes she might be taken at such distance for a soldier on some duty. Reaching the shadows once more, she ran, her heels sharp and clattering against the pavement; ran with mad, frantic, lurching steps, but she ran very fast. Never in all her beach mornings at the Hamptons had she run with such passion and abandon. Run, Tatty, run. Her boots rang out the cadence, the sound urging her on. She glanced just once over her shoulder, seeing no one. Nearing the crowd, caution slowed her. Finally, she stumbled to a halt and fell back against the building wall, catching her breath.

  The theater seated two or three thousand people. They were still coming. Calming herself, buttoning her long coat about her and smoothing its skirts, adopting the smile of someone who had been wonderfully entertained for an evening, she swept to the side of the procession, sidling quickly into its midst. Though she detected two groups of American tourists, each led by their indomitable Intourist guide, most of the people were Russian, with the Russian people’s propensity for crushing together in a great human clot. As they flowed on toward the pedestrian tunnel by Spassky Tower that led out to Red Square, as she heard more sirens, motor traffic, and military shouting behind her, she felt strangely secure.

  But it could last only until they emerged upon the square. Then the people would disperse and leave her nakedly alone; a beautiful blond woman in a bright red coat, alone in the middle of Red Square—with all of Soviet security searching for her.

  She had seen the two young men as she swept into the crowd. They were now much ahead of her in the crowded tunnel, but she began to fight her way forward. The pressure eased as they surged out onto the square, and she raced up between them, bottle of vodka in hand. With her free hand, she took the arm of the young man on her left. He was dark. The one on her right was fair, and more merry, though both seemed in good spirits. She was in surprisingly good spirits herself, as elated as she had been stealing liquor from that beach party with Captain Paget, in much the same way. She had escaped the Kremlin. All that stood in her way now was the city of Moscow and all the reaches of the Soviet Empire.

  “Za vashe zdorovoye!” she said, raising the bottle in a toast and drinking. She handed it to the merry one, who drank generously. The dark one shook his head in refusal.

  “Myetro?” she asked, deliberately pointing the wrong way to the subway, comporting herself as drunkenly as possible.

  “No,” said the blond one in Russian, “is this way.”

  “Pokazhitye mnye, pozhaluista?”

  “Yes. We show you. Come.”

  The dark one hung back, but stayed with them, which was well. Alone, the blond one would have doubtless followed her into the subway. With only him at her side, she would be even more noticeable, and there were now more military trucks and jeeps pulling into the square.

  Many in the theater crowd were also heading for the metro, and she hurried the two young men to keep up with them. At the subway entrance, she kissed the blond one on the cheek, said “Spasibo” cheerily, then dashed way, burrowing into a jam up of short, burly Russians trying to get onto the down escalator. With some resentment they made way for her, and at last she was on the moving stairs, descending. Pausing a moment to catch her breath, she began pushing her way forward again, New York style, though her effort seemed to little diminish the eternity it took to reach the cavernous depths of the platform below. Ignoring the gleaming statuary and other socialist wonders Raya had pointed out so smugly, she stopped only to quickly consult the wall map and glance back at the escalator. Her pulse jumped as though with a jolt of current. There were no policemen—none she could recognize as such—but the blond man was there, scarcely twenty feet from the platform.

  Remembering as best she could, trying to follow the Russian signs, she darted through an archway and along a short tunnel, eventually emerging on another platform she hoped was the correct one and leaping onto a train she prayed was going in the right direction. As the door closed behind her, she closed her eyes in silent thanks. She had now escaped Red Square, for the price of only a swallow of vodka and five kopecks. That so many of her fellow passengers were staring at her did not matter. She was only going one stop.

  She had picked the right train. As she emerged from the up escalator and the metro exit, she saw there were many lights on in the building of narrow windows, though not so many as must be on in the basement. She stood a moment in somber contemplation. She had not escaped if she had only reached Dzerzhinsky Square. Her earlier elation was now abandoning her. Cold, increasingly unhappy, she had a fleeting impulse to walk up to the building and surrender, to state her case and submit to the surrealities of Soviet justice, to spare herself what she realized was going to be a painful and probably pointless ordeal of flight. But it would be madness.

  Perhaps because of the increasing
bitterness of the cold, there were few in the street of drunks. Glad of the darkness that hid the expensiveness of her clothing, she stumbled to a doorway distant from the others and sat with her arms hugging her knees, drinking what remained of the vodka against the falling temperature.

  A better warmth was provided by the quiet fury that came when she put her mind to the subject of Ramsey Saylor. Silently, she called him every vile name she could think of, but none sufficed. That cold, scheming, amoral, passionless, cruel, rotten son of a bitch had planned this with such wonderful perfection. His marvelous, intricate, perverted mind had not overlooked a single subtlety. Working for the CIA, she had killed a KGB operative in France, because he had tried to rape her. It would now be shown that, working for the CIA, she had killed a Soviet official in the heart of the Kremlin, because he was trying to rape her, her chronic drunkenness the reason for such bizarre, irrational behavior. When had Ramsey devised this? When had he chosen her as his unwitting instrument, decided he could exploit her person and her weaknesses so cleverly? So foully?

  A better question was why? To what end would an official of the Central Intelligence Agency attempt to implicate the agency in the murder of one of the highest-ranking Soviet leaders, especially at a time when the Soviet Union was still suffering universal scorn for its plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II and its murder of the passengers and crew of a civilian jet? Why do such a thing to the United States? Why kill the one Kremlin figure who had shown any apparent friendliness toward policies benefiting American interests? Ramsey was a patriot, a conservative intellectual.

  She thought of the expensive furnishings in Ramsey’s expensive Georgetown house, of the John Singer Sargent painting that, upon reflection, probably cost several hundred thousand dollars. Harvard or no, Ramsey was the son of a gun salesman.

  A sick feeling came into her stomach.

  One of the dark figures along the street, a man, rose and stood looking at her. What had once repelled Chairman Griuchinov would not repel the denizens of this wretched place. He started toward her with a shuffling step. Her nerves were so numbed she doubted if she could make herself vomit and doubted if even that would dissuade him. She began to cry, unpleasantly, insanely—working in little growls and tiny shrieks, shaking her head frantically. He paused. “Smyert!” she cried. “Death!” He hurried back to his place. A moment later, he left the street. She drank.