But now his mind was filled with doubts. He won’t go, thought Poskrebychev. It would never occur to Kirov that I might know anything of value except those scraps of information which Stalin permits me to overhear from his office, like breadcrumbs swept from a table for a dog to lick up after a meal.
But this time it was different.
In spite of the risk, Poskrebychev did not regret what he had done, nor would he have taken such a risk for anyone except the Emerald Eye.
The reason for this was that he and the great Inspector shared a secret of their own which, if Pekkala had ever divulged it, would undoubtedly have cost Poskrebychev his life. But Poskrebychev knew without a shadow of doubt that his secret would be safe with Pekkala. The very fact that Pekkala had never used this knowledge as leverage against him, nor even mentioned it in passing, was what now compelled Poskrebychev to do whatever he could on behalf of the Emerald Eye.
It all had to do with a joke. Several jokes, in fact, all of them conjured by Stalin and unleashed upon his secretary. They amounted to three or four each year, and ranged from sawing the legs off Poskrebychev’s desk to dismantling it entirely so that it collapsed on top of him when he opened the main drawer. There had been others, less inspired, such as the day Stalin’s bodyguard, Pauker, threw him in a duck pond on Stalin’s orders, after Poskrebychev had admitted that he could not swim.
When Poskrebychev described these events to the few friends he possessed, he was astonished and frustrated to discover that none of them actually believed him. Comrade Stalin would not engage in such behaviour, they told him. The Boss is too serious a man to be amused by acts of mere frivolity.
What their shuttered minds so stubbornly failed to comprehend was that these jokes, and the cruelty which lay at their core, revealed more about Stalin’s true nature than anything which they might ever wring out of the pages of Izvestia.
If they could only have witnessed Pauker, describing to Stalin how, at the trial of Nikolai Bukharin, one of Stalin’s most loyal followers, the accused man had begged the court to notify the Boss as he was led away to be shot, little realising that it was Stalin himself who had ordered the execution. With ape-like gestures Pauker acted out the scene, clawing at the walls and promising to make amends for crimes he had never committed.
Stalin enjoyed it so much that he ordered Pauker to tell the story twice. Each time Stalin wept with laughter, gasping for breath until finally he had waved everyone out of his office. For the rest of the day, fits of giggling exploded from the room as Stalin replayed Pauker’s antics in his head.
But there was no laughter when, soon afterwards, Stalin ordered Pauker himself to be shot against the wall of Lubyanka.
After Poskrebychev’s desk collapsed, and Stalin’s crow-like cackling reached him through the scratchy intercom, something snapped inside him. Poskrebychev did something he had thought he’d never do. He took revenge.
Knowing the fastidiousness with which Stalin monitored his surroundings, Poskrebychev waited until Stalin left for a meeting, then crept into his master’s office and began to rearrange the objects in the room. The chair. The clock. The curtains. The ashtray. He moved them only fractions of centimetres, so that the displacement of each object by itself would have gone unnoticed. But cumulatively, the effect was exactly as Poskrebychev had intended. When Stalin arrived at his office, he was driven almost to distraction by some nameless anxiety whose source he could not comprehend. After the Boss had left, Poskrebychev replaced everything exactly as it had been before, which only added to Stalin’s consternation when he showed up the following day.
For a brief moment, Poskrebychev believed he had committed the perfect act of revenge. Then Pekkala emerged from a meeting in Stalin’s office and, stopping at Poskrebychev’s desk, very carefully moved the black box of the intercom a hair’s breadth to one side. No words passed between them. There was no need. In that moment, Poskrebychev knew he’d been discovered by the only person, he now realised, who could possibly have figured it out.
This was the secret they shared, the value of it measured not only by the fact that it was safe, but that someone aside from Poskrebychev had enjoyed a laugh at the expense of Joseph Stalin. And survived.
(Postmark: none.)
Letter hand delivered to American Embassy, Spano House, Mokhovaya St, Moscow.
Date: July 2nd, 1937
Dear Ambassador Davies,
My name is Betty Jean Vasko and I am a citizen of the United States of America. I came here to see you in person, but the secretary here told me you are away on a sailing trip and will not be back for some time. I asked him to forward this letter to you and he said he would see what he could do.
I am writing to you about my husband, William H. Vasko, who is a foreman at the Ford Motor Car Plant in Nizhni Novgorod.
We came to Russia last year so that my husband could look for work. He had been laid off from his job where we lived in Newark, New Jersey, and we had no prospects there at the time. We brought our two children with us because we didn’t know how long we would be gone and we considered the possibility that we might settle here in Russia for good.
When we arrived, my husband quickly found work at the Ford plant and, for a while, things were pretty good. My husband was promoted to foreman of the welding section. We had a house, thanks to the company. We had food and we had a school for our children. Truly, Ambassador, the closest I have come to living the American Dream was right here in the Soviet Union.
But things have taken a turn for the worse and that is why I am writing to you now. Last week, Bill was arrested by Russian police at our home, just as we were sitting down to dinner. I do not know why this happened and the police did not give us a reason. They put him into the back of a car and drove away and I have not seen him since. And Mr Ambassador, that car was one of the same Fords my husband helped to make!
I went to the police station in Nizhni-Novgorod but they told me he wasn’t being held there. They told me to go home and wait for a call, which I did. I waited three days, then four then five and finally I decided I would have to come to you to ask for help.
Ambassador Davies, please help me to find out what has happened to my husband and to secure his release because whatever they are saying he did, I swear he is innocent. As a citizen of the United States, I’m sure he must be entitled to representation by our government.
Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. Please hurry. I do not have a job as I have been home with the kids. I have no means of support except my husband’s salary and do not know how much longer the factory will continue to allow us to remain in the housing they provide.
Yours sincerely,
Betty Jean Vasko
Immediately after departing from Linsky’s shop, Kirov drove straight to NKVD Headquarters in Lubyanka Square. But instead of heading up to the fourth floor to visit Elizaveta, as he usually did, this time he made his way down to the basement to consult with Lazarev, the armourer.
Lazarev was a legendary figure at Lubyanka. From his workshop in the basement, he managed the supply and repair of all weapons issued to Moscow NKVD. He had been there from the beginning, personally appointed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, who commandeered what had once been the offices of the All-Russian Insurance Company and converted it into the Centre of the Extraordinary Commission. From then on, the imposing yellow-stone building served as an administrative complex, prison and place of execution. The Cheka had changed its name several times since then, from OGPU to GPU to NKVD, transforming under various directors into its current incarnation. Throughout these gruelling and sometimes bloody metamorphoses, which emptied, reoccupied and emptied once again the desks of countless servants of the State, Lazarev had remained at his post, until only he remained of those who had set the great machine of Internal State Security in motion. This was not due to luck or skill in navigating the minefield of the purges, but rather to the fact that, no matter who did the killing and who did the dying above ground, a gunsmith was always needed to make sure the weapons kept working.