The podium was so immense that the centrally-placed Cathedral took up only a quarter of its area, at least forty meters separating its walls from any of the podium’s edges. That was why the church felt distant as Constantine entered the podium’s ground level. Like a flower that had broken through concrete, the new Cathedral was flawed and sickly, its roots planted firmly in the bedrock of the evil past, but Constantine knew that cared for and nurtured, it would blossom again, as it had centuries ago, filling with true faith.
Inside, Constantine found the souvenir store amid the myriad facilities. It offered products ranging from icons and books to multimedia discs and stickers, but he didn’t come here for the merchandise. His eyes searched for a single object, his throat becoming parched as he found it. It was a plain-looking donation box, its sign urging to help children suffering from cancer. However, the charitable effort was not made on behalf of the Orhodox Church, and the box also served a second purpose. The name of the fundraising organization was stenciled in small print.
Free Action.
It was his pre-arranged dead drop.
Constantine inserted a folded banknote through the slit in the box. Inside the banknote he had hidden a scrap of paper with a handwritten message for his contacts at Free Action. Constantine was asking to arrange a meeting with Metropolitan Ilia.
As soon as he had completed the procedure, Constantine returned to the embankment, and another riverbus took him in the reverse direction, back to the Ukraina Hotel. Back to safety, and comfort, and sleep. If only all three could last a few hours.
4
The box was taken off at regular intervals, its contents examined.
Constantine’s note, together with other bills and coins, genuine donations, was picked out minutes after the dead-drop, and placed in a sealed envelope. A courier carried the envelope several blocks away from the Cathedral, up the Marx prospekt, past the Kremlin, the State Duma, and the Bolshoi Theatre, to Lubyanskaya Square.
The note’s ultimate destination was the desk of FSB Director Frolov.
Reading the note, Frolov allowed a rare smile to crease his lips.
Free Action, his own creation, had fulfilled its role. A fictitious organization — mysterious, evasive, backed by truth built solidly around fundamental lies to support the conviction of its authenticity. The perfect conduit to bring the documents to his possession.
5
Lightweight, the clouds passed through the sky in nebulous wisps, stretching, swirling… Stars twinkled like jewels on a satin blanket of dark blue. Below the shimmering yellow moon disc, amid the blue-tinted hills, the tiled roofs stood. He marched towards the hamlet, as gentle drafts of wind fanned his hair together with the ethereal clouds.
He looked at the sky again, breathing it in, letting the night air carry him across the Rhine, to the tiny Principality huddled at the base of the forest-lined summits. Suddenly, his eyes locked on a single house. The large wooden front door opened, and two figures emerged, Maxim Malinin and Frau Hasler, their clothes dripping blood.
The two dead bodies chased him. He crashed on his back. The sky, sparkling blue, plaintive and serene, exploded with fat blotches of crimson red. He got up, his legs struggling to obey, always too slow, and ran to the bridge. The Rhine was black, decaying.
And above, streaks of blood crisscrossed the sky, filling it, booming with last gasps of the dying, threatening to wash over him, and there was blood gushing from his ears, and he clamped his hands over his head, running, trying to escape the blood-red world he was under, but there was no escaping the red sky, and his mind dissolved in a scream — endless and frantic, eyes shut… running… blood sprouting through his hands…
Screaming, Constantine bolted upright in his bed, waking from the nightmare. He was panting, heart drumming in his throat, forehead clammy with sweat. It took him several moments to realize that he was in a bedroom… Strangely, it wasn’t Frau Hasler’s.
In France there were nights when he would dream of coming home, taking the elevator to his apartment, opening the door, and as he woke up, finding to his horror that none of it was real. And now, when he was back in Russia, his mind found other horrors to fill his nights with.
He got off the bed and approached the window. Moscow was aglow with lights from neon signs, huge buildings, and entire streets, and the traffic that never thinned. Across the shimmering river, the white house stared right at him. Backlit with a faint blue, it was more beautiful than ever. Constantine felt his eyes moisten.
Sleep was unattainable. It was three in the morning. Midsummer nights in Moscow were fleeting passes of twilight and daybreak; sunrise was already approaching. He could not allow himself to brood in the empty time before his nine p.m. meeting with the Metropolitan.
He had to prepare himself for the meeting. Retrieving the Samsonite, he decided it was too bulky to carry to the rendezvous site. He would leave it there with the money inside while he was away. The disc was miniature, easy to conceal in a pocket. The papers he would tuck under his shirt.
The papers… Constantine’s fingers flipped through the yellow pages. They smelled of age. And death.
He went back to his bed, carrying the final testament of Lazar Kaganovich, written a quarter of a century ago. Constantine held the sheets as Kaganovich had held them, felt the paper in his hands as he had felt it, and the words, made alive as Kaganovich had written them, were about to become alive again as Constantine would read them.
The historian in Constantine was riveted by professional curiosity, and his cultured Russianness demanded to look in the murderer’s eye. Whichever side was stronger, it urged to learn more about Lazar Kaganovich. And about the man’s Master.
Stalin.
6
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was born in a poor Jewish family outside Kiev in 1893. Like Stalin, he had no formal education. Like Stalin’s father, he barely made a living repairing shoes. Lazar’s life took a fateful turn in 1911 when he first attended a Communist meeting in Kiev. The performance of one Marxist theorist at that assembly inspired the 18-year-old shoemaker to become a Party member. The fiery, passionate star spokesman of the Revolution was Leo Trotsky.
A local activist during the October Revolution of 1917, Kaganovich was noted for his decisiveness by Molotov who transferred him to Moscow. In the following years, Kaganovich climbed up the pile of corpses towards the summit of the Politburo Olympus, his thick boots crushing the skulls of friends and foes alike — even his own brother.
Trotsky and Kaganovich. One man’s dizzying ascension timed with the other’s downfall. The man Trotsky had unwittingly introduced to power would see to his demise. With Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky, the heir apparent, was ousted by Stalin from the top flight of Bolshevik hierarchy. In the same year, Kaganovich became a member of the Central Committee.
After his fall from grace, Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin could not last long. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, and deported from the country a year later.
The rest of Lazar’s biography read like a list of crimes, and the early thirties marked the zenith of his career. Minister of Petroleum, Minister of Industry, Minister of Construction, Minister of Transport, Secretary of the Central Committee, Deputy of the Comintern.
Like any other of Stalin’s men — Molotov, Beria, Malenkov — he functioned as filler for government posts. Only one man wielded all the power in the country, the man who had replaced God in a godless country. The Politburo was a stack of faceless cardboard cutouts that Stalin used through — and for — terror. Each of them knew that when they acquired actions of their own, voices of their own, and their own thoughts—their own deaths would follow instantly.