Here I am abandoned, an orphan, with no one to look after me…
Only the nightingale…
Benya lay down beside her again and stroked her gleaming white back, his fingers exploring between her thighs, but she flicked his hand away and lit the article with her lighter, holding it as it flamed and fell.
“Do you despise me?” Her bumble-bee voice was breaking up.
He sighed, again. “‘The Soviet Proletarian Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery’ reveals that this is the adulteress’s most commonly asked question. No, actually I think all the better of you…”
Craving him, she rolled him on top of her, dreaming of spending a night with him, of singing with him at the piano, and of waking up together.
16
Lavrenti Beria knew he did not suit the full blue and red uniform of Commissar-General, first degree, of State Security. His legs were too short for the pleated trousers and boots, his shoulders too broad, his neck too thick, but he had to wear the ridiculous rig sometimes. His black Buick with the darkened windows drove him through the Spassky Gates into the Kremlin, turned into Trinity Square, and halted with a skid at the Sovnarkom Building. Security in the Little Corner, as Stalin’s office was known, was very tight. The Guards Section answered only to Stalin himself, so that even the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs needed to show his pass and surrender his sidearm.
Beria had been in Moscow for only ten months, so he was still new enough to enjoy his position—but keenly aware that he had to fight to keep it. He was confident that he could handle any degree of responsibility—he was indefatigable, he could work without sleep.
Holding his leather satchel, Beria passed through the first security barrier into the office of Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief of staff. Here he surrendered his Mauser. A bald dwarf with the face of a baboon and livid, almost burned skin, Poskrebyshev recorded his arrival in the Master’s appointment book. He greeted Beria respectfully, a sign of Stalin’s favor.
“Go right in! The Master’s ready—and in a thoughtful mood.” Poskrebyshev offered this service to important visitors: a forecast of Stalin’s state of mind.
The first door opened and a group of military commanders and intellectual types came out, holding drawing boards. Beria thought he saw tanks and guns on these. The soldiers and designers glanced at him and Beria saw them blanch: yes, he was the pitiless sword of the Revolution. They had to fear him. If they didn’t, he was not doing his job.
When they were gone, Beria passed through the last security checkpoint. The young men in blue saluted.
The room was empty. Beria knew that the Master was now thinking about the European situation. Madrid, the capital of the Spanish Republic, had just fallen—and that removed any obstacle to dialogue with the Hitlerite Germans. Britain and France had caved in to Hitler at Munich, and momentous changes were now on the Master’s mind. That was the reason for the case against the former diplomats at the Foreign Commissariat—it was a signal to Berlin that Soviet policy was changing.
Poskrebyshev shut the door behind him.
Beria waited by the door of a large, high rectangular office with many windows. A huge table covered in green baize stood in the center. Portraits of Lenin and Marx hung on one side, and (an addition that anticipated the coming war) those of Field Marshals Kutuzov and Suvorov on the other. Lenin’s death mask was illuminated by a green-shaded lamp to remind visitors that this was the holy of holies.
At the far end, behind a large empty desk, a small door, almost invisible in the wood paneling, opened and Stalin came in, carrying a steaming glass in a silver holder. Beria was always impressed with the Master’s mixture of animal grace, peasant swagger and thoughtful intellect. A great statesman required all three.
“Lavrenti, gamajoba!” said Stalin in Georgian. Alone, they could talk Georgian. When Russians were present, Stalin did not like to talk in his native tongue because he was a Russian leader and Georgia was a minor province of the Russian Empire; “a parochial marsh,” he had once called it. But when they were alone together, it was fine.
Stalin gave Beria his tigerish smile. “Ah, the new uniform. Not bad, not bad at all. Sit down. How’s Nina?”
“Very well, thank you, Comrade Stalin. She sends her regards.” Beria knew that Stalin liked his blond wife, Nina.
“And your son, little Sergo?”
“Settling into school. He still remembers when you tucked him up in bed when he was very small.”
“I read him his bedtime story too. Svetlana’s very happy he’s now in Moscow. Does Nina like that nobleman’s house I chose for you? Did she get the Georgian jams I sent over? You’re a specially trusted responsible worker, you need some space. You need special conditions.”
“Thank you and the Central Committee for your trust, the house and the dacha. Nina’s delighted!”
“But she can thank me for the jam herself!” They laughed.
“Believe me, Josef Vissarionovich,” Beria respectfully used Stalin’s name and patronymic, “she’s writing you a letter.”
“No need. Sit down.”
Beria sat at the green baize table and unzipped his case, pulling out papers. Stalin sat at the head of the table, stirring his tea. He squeezed a slice of lemon into it.
“Right, what have you got for me?”
“We’ve a lot to get through, Comrade Stalin. The case at the Foreign Commissariat is progressing well and there are German, Polish, French and Japanese spies among the old diplomats.”
“Who’s working it?”
“Kobylov and Palitsyn.”
“We know Kobylov. He’s a bull in a china shop but a good operative. He takes his silk gloves off. Palitsyn’s a good worker?”
“Very,” replied Beria, though he had inherited Palitsyn, not chosen him. “Here are some of the confessions already signed by the prisoners. Comrade Stalin, you asked about the former person Baron Zeitlin, father of Palitsyn’s wife and brother of the journalist Gideon Zeitlin.”
“Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn is a decent Soviet woman,” said Stalin.
Beria noted the Master was not in the mood for jokes about sex, a subject never absent from his own mind for long. Today he could see that Stalin’s mind was in the fraught borderlands of Mitteleuropa. He watched the Master sip his tea and pull a new pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes from his shabby yellow tunic. Opening it, he lit one and started to fiddle with the pencils on his desk.
“Did she and Palitsyn ever contact him?” Stalin asked.
“No.”
“They put the Party first,” said Stalin, sharp eyes on Beria. “You see? A decent Soviet girl who has ‘reforged’ herself—despite her class and connections. I remember seeing her typing in Lenin’s office. Don’t forget Lenin himself was a nobleman and grew up on a country estate, eating strawberries and rolling in the hay with peasant girls.”
Beria knew this trick of the Master: only Stalin could criticize Lenin in the way that one god may mock another. Beria delivered the required look of shock and the old tiger’s eyes gleamed. Stalin was the Lenin of today.
Beria laid out some papers. “You asked about Zeitlin’s whereabouts. It took a bit of time to find out his fate. On March twenty-fifth, 1937, he was arrested on my orders in Tiflis, where, since his dismissal in 1930, he had been living quietly in exile with his English wife. He was interrogated…”
“Silk gloves, or gloves off?” Beria saw that Stalin was sketching a wolf’s head with a green crayon on the pad of writing paper headed J. V. Stalin. He scrawled the words Zeitlin and then glove.