A couple of vehicles apart, the two cars slipped into the evening traffic. Bogdanov fiddled with the radio, searching for something to fit his mood, but the bad-tempered station wasn’t playing. Kirov hummed the tune to ‘Moscow Nights’, the way they played it in the hard-currency bars to remind the foreigners that they were taking part in a mystery. Neither man speculated where Bakradze was heading. Follow the traffic. Let it play out. Let the thread unravel through the darkening streets. Register the fact dumbly when the other car drove into Sadovo-Sukharevskaya, where the MVD Fraud Squad ran its operations away from the other CID base in Petrovka.
The lawyer parked outside the old mansion. He showed his ID to the militia guard and went inside. Five minutes later he reappeared with Antipov and the two of them talked on the pavement for a while. When they were finished the detective went back into the building and Bakradze returned to his car and set off again. More roads seen through the enveloping evening. Trucks with the name of the enterprise stencilled on the side; official limousines with the curtains drawn; Volga saloons used as taxis; convoys of Army wagons with soldiers hanging over the tailboards whistling at the girls. Bakradze was heading for Lyublino.
The lawyer began to weave among the streets between the factories and the apartment blocks. For a moment Bogdanov thought that he had been spotted, but quickly realised that Bakradze was simply lost: the industrial sections of the city were bandit country to him. Then he seemed to find his bearings and this time moved directly, cruising past the facade of a large public hall. He stopped a couple of streets further on, parked and removed the wiper-blades from his vehicle.
Kirov ordered Bogdanov to halt the car. Bakradze was on the opposite pavement retracing his route towards the public hall where a queue trailed out of the entrance and into the street.
‘Do you know this place?’ Bogdanov asked.
‘Komsomol use it,’ Kirov said. He had noted the kids in the queue and guessed at a concert, though that didn’t explain why Bakradze was there. The lawyer had some sort of deal at the door; he went to the head of the line to the catcalls of the crowd.
‘It’s a Pamyat meeting.’ Bogdanov pointed out a sign, a handmade poster. He looked about and spotted a posse of militia loitering by a Black Raven in the next street. ‘There’s your proof — and there.’ The MVD men in official plain clothes stood out in the line. ‘Do they look like conservationists to you?’
They filed in with the crowd and found a place standing at the back of the hall with the latecomers and the MVD snatch squad who felt they could handle trouble better if they kept in a bunch and on their feet. The hall was laid out with benches and stacker chairs and packed all the way to the dais. Bakradze was at the front, showing no interest in the audience. On the dais someone was fixing a screen and a slide projector and testing the microphone.
After ten minutes the hall doors closed and the audience settled in a detectable mood of expectation. The sound system gave a quick blast of Tchaikovsky. Three men trooped onto the stage to vigorous applause from the crowd including the MVD watchers. The chairman, a small character in a cardigan and a hairy suit, took the microphone and delivered a quick eulogy of the guest speaker. He praised the speaker’s contribution to conservation, to culture, to the maintenance of Russia’s traditions, and, not least, to Pamyat. He invited the audience to give a warm welcome to the poet and sage, Feodor Nikitich Valentinov.
Kirov had seen Valentinov once before — at Yelena Akhmerova’s party, where the poet had mixed easily with the film crowd but had insisted on speaking Russian. His appearance had not changed. He still wore soft leather boots and a belted peasant blouse. He still glowered at the world through an Old Believer beard. Above all, his face expressed the same inspired ferocity. As he spoke now, his piping voice had a seductive quality. He was a speaker who made love to his audience.
He began slowly, speaking without notes, reciting with nostalgia and satisfaction Pamyat’s history of successes. He caressed his listeners with the warm assurance that they were the ones who had accomplished these achievements, and that not he but Russia through all its countless generations was grateful. Through them the ancient churches of Russia were saved; through them the vandalism of Moscow was prevented; through them a halt had been called to the hideous Victory monument, which would otherwise have violated the beauty of the Poklonnaya hills. Yes, Russia was grateful. Applaud! Applaud yourselves!
But what was Russia? he asked; and, not too seriously, he praised the democracy and prosperity which Marxism-Leninism had brought to the land. He adopted a tone that caused a frisson of seditious delight to trouble those who understood. Russia — ah Russia! — he told them, letting his tongue fill the word with emotion, Russia was more than a society, an economy, a political territory bounded by frontiers. Russia was the first repository of the transcendent values of humanity, the successor to Rome and Byzantium, the home of spiritual truth, of an Orthodoxy that went beyond any narrow church creed or mere doctrine. Love, loyalty, fidelity to friends, discipline, honest obedience, more, more, list the qualities that we treasure, for look around and here in Russia they are all visible, because Russia in every real sense is humanity.
But!
Valentinov trembled at that fateful But, and his face, which had been a vision of triumph, turned to sadness — not an ordinary sadness but one of deep compassion and wisdom that chilled and silenced his audience with a sense that they were sharing in that pain though they did not understand its cause, nor did their sharing help him because he had taken the burden of suffering from them. So they could remain only mute and awestricken as the speaker changed from Valentinov to something ineffable, something truth-drenched, truth-imbued, truthful beyond the merest contemplation of doubt. And they knew that he was going to explain to them why that paradise which we — yes, you, me, we all — deserve is so clearly not in existence though we are aware of our own truth, virtue and beauty.
What is it that frustrates their expression? Can it be that there is — let us say it and not hide it — a counter-truth, a sham of virtue, a beauty which consists of meretricious ornament? Yes! And their names are Cosmopolitanism and Liberalism. Cosmopolitanism is a mongrel culture, a mishmash of borrowings without history or integrity, driven forward by the forces of capitalism, freemasonry and Zionism. Its ideology is Liberalism, an attempt to seduce humanity from its roots with nigger-art, a cacophony of sound masquerading as music, and the relentless pursuit of novelty. Whereas true humanity longs for stability leavened by a process of organic growth tapped to our well-spring of being, humanity’s counterfeits, the henchmen of Liberalism, are in the thrall of change.
And so on. Valentinov drenched his audience in words, elevated them, angered them, soothed them. With his hands he conjured them out of their seats. By a wave he conducted their applause. With a sideways gesture, palms down, he dismissed them to their places.
Kirov heard the MVD man next to him say, ‘He’s right. It’s the truth.’
‘What is?’ asked his colleague.
‘It’s all the fault of the Jews.’
In the climax of clapping and hooting that terminated Valentinov’s speech Kirov saw Bakradze slip away. He ordered Bogdanov urgently to bring the car to the rear of the hall then looked back to the stage where the air was dense with sweat and smoke and Valentinov was standing with his arms open to receive his supporters and his face bathed in glory. By Kirov’s side the MVD men were becoming twitchy and nervously alert for any sign of trouble. Kirov brushed past them into the aisle between the rows of seating, which were now filling with people stamping and whistling their approval. Where was Bakradze?