Death Is My Comrade (18 page)

I felt the weight of Leonid's automatic tucked into my belt, hidden by my jacket. I followed the monk into Zagorsk's Monastery of St. Sergius.

He padlocked the gate behind me.

The building he led me to was terra-cotta brick with a green tile roof. We went up a flight of stairs and along a corridor where the smell of incense was strong. Some where nearby I heard chanting. A second flight of stairs led to a stout wooden door. The monk unlocked it with one of a ring of large keys hanging at his belt. I walked into a small room with three whitewashed walls and a fourth wall of bookshelves. The only furniture was a table with a bowl of fruit and a vase of peonies on it and two stiff-backed wooden chairs. The monk remained outside. He shut the door. I heard his footsteps padding away, then absolute silence. A shaft of sunlight entered the small room through its single window. I went to the window and looked out and down on a cloister with covered walks on all four sides and a fountain in the middle.

The door opened behind me suddenly. A frail old man wearing a black cassock came in. His face was as puckered as a walnut shell. He had a long gray beard which almost hid the gold cross hanging on a chain around his neck. He walked in a half-crouch. He looked tired and old and abused. Eighty if he's a day, I thought. But his eyes were a bright pale blue, and when he smiled it took twenty years off his face.

“I am Father Alexi,” he said in English. His voice was soft and melodious. “The gatekeeper tells me it is about Vasili Rodzianko that you have come.”

“That's right, Father.”

His sandals whispered across the stone floor. “Sit down, please. Who are you?”

“My name's Drum. I'm an American.”

“The gatekeeper guessed your nationality, Mr. Drum.” Father Alexi's voice was hardly more than a whisper as he added: “And after last night I could have guessed it, at any rate.”

“Last night?”

“Last night an American claiming to be Vasili Rodzianko's brother came to St. Sergius.”

“Is he still here? Is he safe, Father?”

“Safe, but not here,” Father Alexi said, and asked gently: ”How do you intend getting Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia?”

I didn't say anything right away.

“Mr. Drum, may I point out to you that we of the Orthodox Church are in an awkward position here in Russia? St. Sergius is one of the few monasteries left. The government preaches atheism. We are—barely—tolerated. I do not say we can help you, not until I hear what you have to say, but unless you are completely frank with me we cannot help you at all.”

“Does Rodzianko want to leave? Has he seen his brother?”

“They have met, yes.” Father Alexi licked his thin, dry lips. “Vasili believes that this man is his brother.”

“And you, Father?”

“I believe that Vasili would know his own brother.”

“But does he want to leave?”

“How can any man pay the price his brother is asking him to pay? They meet again after—what is it, thirty years?—and Vasili's brother tells him, you go, I will stay in your place, I will die here so that you may be free.”

“His brother is dying. He has an incurable cancer. He wouldn't last more than six months, here or anywhere else.”

“Death can be most unpleasant—in the hands of the Secret Police.”

“And death from cancer?”

“In addition,” Father Alexi pointed out, “we must consider the children. What would happen to Galina and Mikhail if their father leaves Russia?”

“I don't know.”

“So I ask you again, Mr. Drum: how do you intend getting Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia?”

“We were supposed to fly out on a regularly scheduled plane. Rodzianko's brother, under the cover name of Williams, was to withdraw from Ugolok Ameriki due to illness. But I've had some trouble myself with the Secret Police. I'd never pass through customs at the airport with Rodzianko masquerading as his brother and carrying his brother's passport, not unless his English is as good as yours. Is it?”

“If not better.” Father Alexi waved that consideration aside with a frail hand. “There are those of us who believe Vasili ought to leave Russia because he has an important message for the world, but I can tell you this: he won't go if his children have to remain behind to suffer the consequences. Or his brother, even if he is as sick as you say.”

“Does his brother know this?”

Father Alexi shook his head. “They met briefly last night in this room. We have had to hide the brother in a farmhouse near here. It is good that we did. The police came to search the monastery this morning. Mr. Drum, what if you were told there is another way to get Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia? With his brother. With the children.”

Father Alexi sighed. “Young Mikhail will give you no trouble, this I know. But Galina—Galina is another matter. A beautiful girl, and temperamental. With the prospects of a brilliant career.” Father Alexi leaned toward me across the table. Those pale blue eyes never left my face. “If there were another way out, would you take it?”

“My job's to get Rodzianko out, Father. I'm listening.”

Father Alexi's chair scraped back. We both stood up. He walked to the door. “I am an old man,” he said. “I have my own troubles with the government, and St. Sergius and the work of God to concern me. The less I know about it, the better.” He opened the door. “Wait here a few moments, Mr. Drum. Someone else will explain. And whatever you decide, may God go with you.”

He went out. I ate an apple from the bowl on the table, smoked a cigarette and stared at the wood planks of the door. After a while I heard footsteps—not the whispering on stone of a monk's sandals, but a firm, solid tread.

The door opened.

I was looking at Semyon Laschenko.

Chapter Twenty-two

L
aschenko sucked at his moustache and gave me a bleak look. A sling supported the weight of his right arm. I wondered how far I would get if I shoved past him and along the corridor and downstairs. Not far, I decided. He probably had a squad of Secret Police waiting outside St. Sergius' white walls.

He didn't greet me. He didn't say his Oxford-accent equivalent of “the jig's up.” What he did say, musingly and sadly, was:

“They expose us to the culture of a world they want to conquer. They must. We are diplomats. They also expose us to a great deal of dialectic reasoning in which we are told the end justifies the means and history's verdict is the important one, and that is supposed to make the difference. For some of us it does. For some of us.” He laughed. It was a sound without mirth.

He went back to the door and shut it. “May I have a cigarette, please?” Gone was the hail-fellow-well-met attitude, gone the booming voice. The big, shaggy man slouched slowly and wearily across the room. I gave him a cigarette. His big hand shook as he cupped the flame I offered. “For some of us dialectic reasoning makes the difference,” he said. “Even in Vasili Rodzianko's profession. It makes the difference for Ehrenberg. And even, when the chips were down, it made the difference for Pasternak. When all is said and done, the paramount fact in the affair Pasternak, insofar as the uncommitted peoples of the world are concerned, is that Pasternak chose to stay here in Russia. But what he fails to see is that in distant eyes a mystic love of motherland does not negate forty years of tyranny. Vasili Rodzianko understands this. You see the difference?”

“I see Semyon Laschenko,” I said. “I see a man who stopped at nothing to keep Rodzianko's message from the world. Not murder, and not even kidnaping. Mind telling me just what the hell you're talking about?”

“I am Vasili Rodzianko's friend. I want to help him leave Russia.”

“You have a funny way of showing it. Was shooting Ilya Alluliev one of the ways you used to help Rodzianko take a powder?”

“I didn't shoot Alluliev.”

“Was kidnaping the Baker twins?”

Laschenko rubbed a big hand across his eyes. “I didn't come here to discuss that. I can't discuss it. Not with you. Not with anyone. I want to help Rodzianko. Now. Now is what I'm talking about.”

“And what happens to you—after you help him?”

“I was a young Communist during the purges of the thirties, Drum. Men I had respected and admired all my life because. I'd been trained to respect and admire them, were led down the final flight of stairs at Lubianka Street Like so many others, I survived and even justified that. History will have the answer, I said. For history we are doing this. For the millenium on earth. The Nazi-Soviet pact was the same. A cynical means to a glorious end; what did it matter? Then the wartime rape of Poland, the postwar rape of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Hungary, and Mao snorting fire, a Red dragon in the East.”

It was quite a speech. When no more words were coming, I repeated: “What happens to you?”

“I can help you get out, then go to—one of the Scandinavian countries, perhaps.”

“Not the States?”

“I could not return to America.”

“Why not? Because you wouldn't have diplomatic immunity then? Because you'd have to stand trial for the murder of Ilya Alluliev? For kidnaping?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Not those?”

“I have my reasons.”

“How do you expect anybody in his right mind to trust you?”

“Have you any choice other than to trust me? Do you think Klementi Plekhanov would let you leave Vnukovo Airport with Rodzianko? Or do you believe for a moment Vasili would leave without his children?”

I snapped a question right back at him: “What about your family? You expect me to believe you came here knowing what you were going to do, and brought them with you?”

“I did not know. I wasn't sure. I have been fighting this inside myself for twenty years. I have finally decided.”

“That's convenient.”

“Mr. Drum, do you accuse me of being an
agent provocateur
for the Secret Police? You think perhaps they need one?”

“No, damn it,” I admitted. “I know they don't. But if you wanted to break with your Red bosses, why bother coming back at all? Why take a brand-new wife with you? It's a hell of a, honeymoon, Laschenko.”

“I have not come here to have you pass moral judgment on me.”

“
I
came here to get Vasili Rodzianko out of Russia. All right, you know that. But throwing in with you doesn't look like the way to do it.”

“And how do you suppose I know of your mission? I know because Vasili told me.”

“Then that's his mistake.”

“And you're not about to double it in spades?” Laschenko asked dryly. “That is a pity, because we need you. You are a man of action, Mr. Drum. There will be seven of us, not counting you. Vasili Rodzianko and his children. The brother, since Rodzianko won't leave without him. Myself. My wife Lucienne and my stepdaughter Eugenie. Seven of us,” he said again. “The escape route may be perilous. We can use your help.” He sucked at his graying moustache. “Three aging men, one of them dying. One young man, Mikhail. Two women and a girl. We could use the help of a man of action.”

“If I say no?”

“We go without you, of course.”

“If I take Rodzianko out my way?”

“You'd fail. And he wouldn't let you try.”

I shook my head slowly. “It's going to take more than pretty speeches, Laschenko. A few days ago you resorted to kidnaping to keep Rodzianko's message from the world. Now you're willing to throw up everything, and jeopardize your family in the bargain, to get him out. It's going to take more than pretty speeches to make me believe that. If you want my help, start talking sense.”

He dropped the cigarette butt on the floor, stepped on it. Just then the St. Sergius bell in its tall belfry tolled four times. Four o'clock. Once for Ilya Alluliev, I thought. Once for the twins. Once for Mike Rodin, who had come to Russia to die for his brother's freedom. I lit a cigarette of my own.

Once for Semyon Laschenko? But why? It didn't make sense.

Once for me?

Laschenko sighed. He sat down and leaned an elbow on the wood-plank table, supporting his jaw with the palm of his hand. He spoke slowly and softly, without self-pity but with regret.

He said, “When a man my age marries for the first time, it is not for moonlight and roses and the spine tingle of juvenile passion. I am fifty-one, Mr. Drum. I think, now, that what first attracted me to Lucienne Duhamel was what she stood for. She has money, and money has very little value in the Soviet Union. She is a party giver on the grand scale, and party-giving is not a private affair in the Soviet Union. So perhaps my attraction to her was an early symptom of my disaffection with the regime.”

“Meaning what?”

Again Laschenko sighed. “Meaning that it is a classic case of irony. Lucienne married me to come to the Soviet-Union as the wife of a high-level Communist Party functionary.”

My sharp private-eye dialogue dwindled to one syllable. Which was: “Huh?”

“For many years, even predating her divorce from Mike Rodin, Lucienne was a member of a Communist cell in the United States. Another classic irony: each of the two men in Lucienne Duhamel's life is here to rescue Vasili Rodzianko. Each of the—”

He was wandering, a middle-aged Lothario lost in the sticky regret of a marriage going on the rocks before the honeymoon was over. I said: “Lucienne. Tell me about her.”

“Is it so strange? An astute French political critic has observed—without surprise, Mr. Drum—that the appeal of Communism for the less politically sophisticated nations of the world increases in direct relation to the increased distance from Moscow. Can this not be the same for individuals? Lucienne was married to a financier, Lucienne fell out of love with her financier, Lucienne drifted into Communism, on the rebound as it were. I can name two American industrialists who—”