Seated in place in the red-draped timber stand which had been constructed the length of the east side of the square, Carole Yates had the curious impression that she was about to watch some northern bullfight. Beside her Jack Bennerman obviously had a similar idea. He leaned toward her.
“You want to see the program,” he said. “We open with the polar bear fight. You, as the prettiest woman here, get the right to give the thumbs down to the loser.”
“What comes next?”
“After the bears we have a one-to-one gladiatorial combat — Bureau Chairman Semyon Kuba with trident and net against Party Secretary Roginova with short sword and back-stabbing knife. That should be a winner.”
“For whom, the world asks anxiously.”
He groaned. “Must you always remind me of work, light of my life?”
She settled back, wondering whether or not to smoke. On her left her husband Tom was talking intently to Harriet Bennerman. He certainly would not approve of her smoking here.
“I want a cigarette,” she whispered to Jack Bennerman.
“Then have a cigarette,” he said. She leaned forward. Nobody else along the lines of heavily muffled guests was smoking. She shrugged and took out her cigarettes. There was still a half-hour to go. The great square between them and the crenellated Kremlin wall with the enormous block of red porphyry which was the Lenin monument was empty except for the women sweepers. As the snow scampered across the open space, they wheeled and turned in line, like a parade themselves, sweeping the errant flakes toward the blackened piles of snow against the great wall.
“Don’t you think it’s about time those old ladies were given a rest?” Carole said, as the long line of bundled, head-scarved figures began yet another drive across the square.
“They can’t let up,” Bennerman said.
“Why not?”
“Have you never seen a May Day Parade on TV?”
“Sure.”
“Have you never wondered how the hell columns of marching men, sometimes twenty abreast, maintain precise position?”
“No.”
“Well, Carole, you’re an unmilitary dumb broad.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
“Because that sort of formation marching is impossible without marked lines.”
“Is that so?”
“That is so.” He pointed. “See those very faint parallel lines, one pace apart across the parade route?”
She saw for the first time a faint yellow grid painted on the cobbles down the center of the square.
“I see them.”
“Right. So those old ladies have to keep sweeping right up to the last moment or the Soviet Army’s reputation falls straight on its ass.”
“That could be the healthiest outcome of the whole damn day.”
He grunted.
She turned toward her husband and felt a surge of guilt as she thought of Letsukov and the meeting she had agreed to. Guilt not because she was secretly meeting another man, but because what she was doing involved Tom’s career. Why didn’t she tell him now, before it was too late?
“Carole,” he said, “you shouldn’t be smoking here, you know.”
The moment passed. She crushed out the cigarette on the planking underfoot. No, she had not believed Alex Letsukov capable of murder in Paris. She didn’t believe it now. She would meet him as he asked.
On the Ulitza Razina, opposite the Rossiya Hotel, Zoya joined the thickening crowd. It had been decided at the student meeting that they would operate in pairs, neither knowing the identity of the other. Zoya’s comrade was a tall, bespectacled boy named Andrei. When the pairs had been chosen from the hat she had watched with misgiving this lanky, clearly nervous Muscovite smiling shyly across the room at her. He had crossed and sat down on the floor next to her, offering a long-fingered clammy hand. But at least he was a Muscovite and would know the back streets they would have to take when they made their getaway.
There were eight of us in the room [Zoya wrote later] and four grenades. You do understand they were only percussion grenades, not intended and I was assured incapable, of hurting anyone. But we were determined, and it was of course the object of my being in Moscow, not to let the hearse pass into Red Square without showing what we students thought of the so-called achievements of the past few years and of the man who had been responsible for them.
Our leader was a young MGU student named Volodya. He had worked out the positions of the four groups so that by whichever route the hearse entered Red Square there would be at least two loud, ugly explosions to see the body on its way. And there were so many foreigners in the stands along the Kremlin wall and opposite, backing onto the GUM store, that the incident was bound to be widely reported in the West.
Don’t ask me now what good it would all do. We were fervent, but we were still young…
Andrei, Zoya’s companion, had pointed out the exact spot on Razina Street which Volodya, the student leader, had selected for their team. Somewhere opposite, another pair of students were threading their way toward the front of the crowd. Between the Alarm Tower and the Kremlin Embankment two more pairs were moving into position.
On Razina Street the crowd shoved and shouldered with that lack of good humor for which the public face of the people of Moscow is all too well known. Laboriously, with Andrei apace behind her, she worked her way forward to the front. The contents of her pocket weighed like lead, seemingly impossible to conceal as she eased her way between the close-packed Muscovite crowd.
On Parade Marshal Berisov’s radioed order the bands of the Soviet Air Force, drumming a slow, funereal pace on their black-clad drums, had led off from the forming-up point in the Plevna Gardens. Behind them came five squadrons of cossack cavalry, the men in black fur caps and long dark-gray riding coats sitting imperiously on their small, shaggy-maned horses. As the bridles jingled and the hooves clattered into Nogina Square they were followed by a broad column of marching civilians.
In the parade an honored place had been awarded to the old comrades of the leader. Not, of course, his senior colleagues who had grown with him through the Party, but those dull pedestrian murderers who had done his bidding as they had earlier done that of Stalin and Beria. “An assemblage of infamy unknown since the SS was wiped from the face of the earth,” one young Russian described them.
And of course he was right. These old men in their bemedaled civilian topcoats, their fur caps pulled down over their ears, had been the shock troops of socialism in the starving thirties and war-torn forties, the whipguards of the Gulags in the fifties and the servile committeemen of the sixties. Now they buried their old comrades with vodka and honors and lived on the well-earned privileges of a dutiful past. They are the men any nation must learn to do without, the men all nations have in abundant and plentiful supply.
Behind the old comrades a gap of about 80 yards had been allowed before the next contingents entered the square, a KGB battalion in light BMP troop carriers, followed by broad columns of marching infantry, their rifles taut across their chests, their red flags lowered to brush the icy surface of the road. Then a contingent of children — girls in black dresses and small, unsmiling boys in black breeches — resembling nothing so much as the massed progeny of a Czarist past. Then columns of workers, militia, sportsmen and culturalists moving forward at the slow, deliberate pace of the funeral drums. And behind them again, bringing up the rear of this vast column, the armored units of the border guards, the internal symbol of Soviet power.
Along Razina Street the crowds were thickly sown. The tea and coffee hawkers, banned from Red Square itself, sold five kopecks’ worth of stained hot water in a leaking funnel of grease-proof paper. At the slow crash of boots on cobbles, at the somber muffled beat of the drums, at the thin slogan-chanting voices of the children, the crowds stood watching silently.