By the time the executioner fired a single round into the back of his head half an hour later, Nikita Khrushchev had forgotten all about her.
Natalya found her father in a remarkably good mood for a change. She could not tell him, for to voice her fears would be horribly unpatriotic, but she had been very worried about him. He had lost so much weight in the months after the Nazis invaded that sometimes, coming upon him by surprise in their bare, small four-room apartment, she didn't recognize him for a second. Not until his haunted, sunken eyes lit upon her. Then they lost that hooded darkness and became the same kind, honey-gold color that she remembered from so many happy days at the dacha, or friendly meals here in their modest apartment.
Papochka was teasing her again, flicking orange peels into her soup bowl, laughing as she squealed in delight. It was a game he often played, one she remembered from the earliest days of her life. He was wont to flick whole scoops of ice cream at her sometimes, even when her friends were at dinner. If fact, especially when her friends visited. He seemed to revel in the embarrassment his childish behavior caused her. But even blushing furiously and wishing he would not tease poor Martha so, she could not help but love him. The same way she adored his hugs and kisses, even though his mustache bristle scratched her skin, and he always smelled of foul tobacco.
He had been so kind since mother died. As she grew into her teenage years, Natalya came to understand how hard that time must have been for him, with so many responsibilities to take him away from the family.
"Papochka, will we have a holiday this year?" she asked.
Her father waved over their housekeeper, Valechka, to clear away the dishes. "You do not like it here?" he mocked his daughter gently. "You would have me send you away again?"
"No, but we have not been on holiday since the war started. And you have sent all of my books away. The apartment is very dark, and it always feels so empty. Can't we go to the seaside, like we used to? The fascists have gone, haven't they?"
"Da, my little sparrow," he said, suddenly looking tired again. "They have gone, but they will come back again. And you would want your papochka to be ready for that, wouldn't you? We must all be ready for them."
Natalya was reaching the age when she would soon be able to fight, just like her brother-well, hopefully better than her brother, who was a hopeless lout and a drunk, from all she'd heard. But she knew better than to broach that subject with her father. Since the news of the miracles, he swung between periods of black depression and unrestrained bouts of fevered joy. She worried that it was another symptom of his weariness with the war. He had even turned his legendary temper on her once, storming into the apartment one evening, slapping the homework from her hands, and shaking her violently, shouting, "What were you thinking? What were you thinking, you stupid little girl?"
She had no idea what he was talking about, but the outburst terrified her. So many of their friends and relatives had disappeared that she feared she may have said something irresponsible or ill-considered, something that might have been overheard by a zealous informer. Her father's rage seemed tainted with a fear that she had never known before, and like the little girl she had once been, she found her parent's terror infectious. Within minutes, she was shaking and blubbering and begging him to tell her what she'd done. The fire had gone out of his eyes immediately, and he'd collapsed into a chair, awkwardly pulling her down with him, onto his lap, where she had sat for so many hours as a child. He'd held her tightly to him, wiping her hot tears away.
They had never spoken of the incident again.
Her father's eyes clouded over now as he spoke about the Germans, and she wished she hadn't mentioned them. He held a piece of black bread in his hands, which he had probably been meaning to throw into her soup. Now it seemed forgotten.
"I received a very good mark for my essay on The Lower Depths," she ventured, but his mind was gone from the room.
A phone rang, and was answered by Valechka. She said a few words and hung up. "They have called for you," the housekeeper reported.
Natalya's father nodded, and the change came over him. He stood up, patted her on the head, and apologized for leaving before dinner was over. "I have important work," he explained, and he shrugged.
"I know, Papochka," she said. "Do not worry about me. I shall help clean up, and then I shall study my Gorky some more."
Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, pushed back his chair and smiled absently. "I sometimes miss Gorky," he said. "He was a great loss. Study hard, Natalya. You will have to make your way alone in this world when I am gone."
He shrugged on a heavy trench coat and walked out of the apartment.
The office was located in the same building as Stalin's apartment, in the old Senate building, sometimes called the Yellow Palace. In the time line from which the Multinational Force had arrived, it remained the center of Russian power. The Cabinet still met there, where the Politburo had reigned. Presidents Putin and Dery had both governed from the same building; Putin's chief of staff and Dery's national security adviser actually working at the same desk in the same converted corridor that had once housed Stalin.
Beria was privy to all this information. As were Malenkov, Poskrebyshev, and, of course, Stalin himself. The researchers who had compiled the data from the Vanguard's computers also knew, of course. Or rather, they had known. They were all dead now.
As Beria waited in the anteroom, he wondered idly at his own fate. The air between him and Malenkov, who sat in another armchair as far away as possible, was frozen with malice. It was a fact that Malenkov would betray him, conspiring with Khrushchev and Molotov to charge him with anti-state activities. Beria would have been executed in 1953.
Well, Khrushchev was no longer an issue, and before long, Malenkov and Molotov would join him. Just as soon as Beria could convince the Vozhd to lift his halt on the great purges that had consumed the state since the discovery of the British vessel. It was like 1937 all over again. No, it was worse. Because now there was real evidence. And all that evidence pointed to a great tumor of fear and paranoia feeding on itself. It seemed sometimes, from the electronic files they'd found, that apart from maybe half a dozen stalwarts, there was nobody in this damned traitors' nest of a country who wouldn't turn on them, given half a chance.
Even Stalin's closest family.
Beria's face was a cast-iron mask, but his gut burned with acid at the memory of that discovery. What a dark day that had been, discovering Natalya's "memoirs." What an ocean of blood had been spilled to cover them over.
Malenkov, he noted with bleak satisfaction, appeared to be no more comfortable than he. The fat faggot looked even more like a weeping wheel of cheese than normal. Like an old woman with her rosaries, he fingered that stupid little notebook that was labeled Comrade Stalin's Instructions. Beria cracked open an icy smile for him, and was rewarded amply when Malenkov blanched.
It was getting late, which meant that Stalin would soon arrive at the Little Corner to begin work. He lived nocturnally, and had done so for years. It didn't bother Beria. As a secret policeman, he preferred the darkness. He considered opening his flexipad and doing some file work, but neither he nor Malenkov had moved since they'd arrived, and it seemed as if to do so now would be to give away an important advantage. So Lavrenty Beria sat in the funereal waiting room, with its shoulder-high dark wood panels, its polished floors and dreary drapes, its worn red and green carpets and, of course, its guardian, the unchanging Poskrebyshev, sitting at his immaculate desk, scratching at papers with his fountain pen.