“At about this time, Nicolai and I realized there were some aspects of capitalism we had not previously understood. As Ayn Rand so wisely put it — she was Russian, I presume you know—‘No man is entitled to the fruits of another man’s labor.’
“So Nicolai and I told Vladimir Vladimirovich we would be happy to accommodate him for a small fee. Five percent of the value of what we placed safely outside the former Soviet Union.”
“Jake,” Castillo said, “you’ve always been good at doing math in your head. Try this: In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, gold was about $375 an ounce. How much is five percent of two thousand pounds of gold, there being sixteen ounces of gold in each pound?”
“My Go— goodness,” Torine said.
“‘Goodness’ being a euphemism for God,” the archbishop said, “there are those, myself included, who consider the phrase blasphemous.”
“Again, I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” Torine said, then looked at Castillo. “And you said ‘tons of gold’? Plural?”
“So now you know,” Castillo said, “where ol’ Aleksandr got the money to buy Karin Hall, and all those cruise ships, and the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, et cetera, et cetera.”
“We started out with a couple of old transports from surplus Air Force stock,” Pevsner said. “We flew surplus Soviet arms out of Russia, and luxury goods — Mercedes-Benz automobiles, Louis Vuitton luggage, that sort of thing — in.
“Mingled with the arms on the flights out of Moscow were fifty-five-gallon barrels of fuel. You would be surprised how much gold one can get into a fifty-five-gallon drum. That, unfortunately, is how I earned the reputation of being an arms dealer; but regretfully that was necessary as a cover. No one was going to believe I prospered so quickly providing antique samovars and Black Sea caviar to the world market.
“But turning to Vladimir Vladimirovich, who is really the subject of this meeting…”
“I’m so glad you remembered, my son,” the archbishop said.
“As long as I have known Vladimir Vladimirovich, which has been for all of our lives, I always suspected — probably because of his father; the apple never falls far from the tree — that he was more of a Communist than a Christian, which means that he was far more interested in lining his pockets than promoting the general welfare of the Oprichnina.”
“That characterization, I would suggest,” the archbishop said, “qualifies as a rare exception to the scriptural admonition to ‘judge not,’ et cetera.”
“I gather you are a Christian, Mr. Pevsner?” Naylor asked.
“Of course I’m a Christian,” Pevsner said indignantly. “I’m surprised our Charley didn’t make that quite clear to you.”
“It must have slipped his mind,” Naylor said.
“Where was I?” Pevsner asked.
“You were saying that Mr. Putin was very much like his father,” D’Alessandro said.
“He is.”
“The story I’ve always heard is that his father was a foreman in a locomotive factory who became Stalin’s cook.”
“That’s what the official biographies say. Actually, he was Stalin’s cook as much as Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was a tortured prisoner of the Czar until he was twenty-six. Vladimir Putin the elder was a general in the KGB, who served, among other such duties, as political commissar during the siege of Stalingrad.”
Pevsner paused long enough to let that sink in, then said, “With the gracious permission of His Eminence, I will continue.”
“Keep it short, my son,” the archbishop said.
“Where to begin?” Pevsner asked rhetorically, and then answered his own question. “At the beginning…
“During the revolution of 1917, a substantial portion of Third Section, the Czar’s secret police, was co-opted by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and renamed the Cheka—”
“‘A substantial portion’?” D’Alessandro interrupted.
“If they had taken it over completely, Vic,” Pevsner said, “none of us would be here today, and there would be no Oprichnina.”
“And with no Oprichnina, God alone knows what would have been the fate of the church,” the archbishop added.
“Who didn’t get co-opted?” D’Alessandro asked.
“My family, obviously, and the Alekseev family, and perhaps fifty or sixty others,” Pevsner said. “May I continue?”
“Alek,” Castillo said, “all Vic is trying to do is make sure he and everybody else understands what you’re trying to tell them.”
“Be that as it may, friend Charley, if I am continually interrupted, I’ll never finish.”
“Sorry, Alek,” D’Alessandro said.
“The Cheka,” Pevsner went on, “arrested the Imperial Family — Czar Nicholas the Second, Czarina Alexandra, their five children — Czarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — and a half dozen of the intimate friends and servants and took them to Yekaterinburg, which is some nine hundred miles east of Moscow.
“There, on July seventeenth, 1918, at the personal order of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they were murdered and their bodies buried in unmarked graves in a forest.
“The Bolsheviks then turned to destroying the church.”
“Their greatest mistake, in my humble judgment,” the archbishop said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Father Boris?”
“Absolutely, Your Eminence,” the archimandrite said.
“They murdered clergy, confiscated church property, burned seminaries, turned churches and cathedrals into warehouses… that sort of thing. Shipped millions of Christian people to Siberia. But the church was stronger than they thought it would be.”
“In large part because of the faithful within the Oprichnina, it must be admitted,” the archbishop furnished.
His face showing that while he appreciated the archbishop’s kind words, he still didn’t appreciate being interrupted, Pevsner picked up his history lesson.
“One of the first things to happen was the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia — ROCOR.”
“The archimandrite and I have the honor of humbly serving the ROCOR,” the archbishop said.
“And it is my honor to humbly serve His Eminence, who heads ROCOR,” the archimandrite said.
“ROCOR remained part of the Russian Orthodox Church,” the archbishop went on, “that is to say, under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, until 1927—”
“I was about to get to that, Your Eminence,” Pevsner said.
His face showing that he disliked being interrupted, His Eminence continued: “… when the godless Bolsheviks finally broke the will of Metropolitan Sergius, who headed the church. They had had him in a Moscow prison cell for about five years at the time, which probably had a good deal to do with what he did: He pledged loyalty to the Communist regime.
“That was too much for one of my predecessors, who informed Sergius that while we still regarded Sergius as an archbishop, we no longer could consider ourselves under the patriarchal authority of someone who had pledged loyalty to the Communists.”
He paused and then said, “You may continue, Aleksandr, my son.”
“In 1991, the year the Soviet Union imploded,” Pevsner went on, “it was announced that the unmarked graves of the Royal Family had been found. Since Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was involved, I suspected that he had known all along where they were.
“So, what was he up to? The answer was simple: He wanted to replace Stalin. And — no one has ever suggested that Vladimir Vladimirovich is not a very clever man — he knew the way to become the new Czar of all the Russias was to follow the philosophy of Ivan the Terrible — get the church on his side — rather than the failed philosophy of Lenin and Stalin to destroy the church.