The Black Maria comes to a stop. The dacha’s gate is closed.
“Vy chto, karaul, rebyata,” asks the guard at the gate. What are you, guards?
“I wish,” says Levinson. “They feed you well here.”
“What do you have?” (“Kogo vezyote?”)
“Negroes for Iosif Vissarionovich,” says Levinson, showing the guard the mandate from Stalin. (“Negrv dlya Iosif-Vissarionycha.”)
“I hope you understand that my goal is to get away with this,” says Kogan as the gate opens. “Yoske should die. Why should we?”
“Now, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, how do you expect to kill Stalin and stay alive?” asks Lewis.
“Things will get chaotic. They’ll start blaming each other. They’ll start shooting each other. And they will forget to look. If we kill him, we could well survive.”
“In this kind of operation, success is determined by the ineptitude of the enemy,” agrees Levinson. “Overestimation is a tactical error. I give the enemy his due. No more, no less.”
Looking through the narrow, barred windows of the Black Maria, Lewis sees a forest of firs, and outlines of two tanks and a pillbox.
The place looks thoroughly prepared for an invasion or a civil war.
No, Lewis hasn’t come here looking for death. He has the skill to sense its presence. He has smelled it many a time since 1919, when his mother hid him and both his sisters in a cellar while gangs of white men roamed the city streets and Omaha’s courthouse burned. His father was a club car waiter on a Chicago run.
Lewis is, on balance, a cautious man, determined to take risks but to survive as well. He didn’t ask to join this band. The choice was made for him the moment his foot came up against that corpse on Levinson’s floor. That was his only chance to run, yet he did not.
* * *
At 4:27 a.m., the Black Maria stops by a hulking two-story structure. An actor in a madman’s play, Lewis sits and wonders why he is alive this deep into the raid.
Kogan instantly diagnoses what went wrong with the structure.
He can see the rectangular shapes that set back the windows, straight lines that clearly identify homage to the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style period.
He can see by the seams that the original structure would have been light on the landscape, and — yes — it would have wanted to be white, rising from Russia’s glaciar-evened landscape rather than disrupting it. There is a fountain in front, but not like the garish fountains with sculptures that mar Moscow’s parks. This is a small affair, devoid of a colossus. In the summer, it would be as light and lovely as a lily pond.
As designed, the Nearby Dacha would have been the kind of place Anton Pavlovich Chekhov would have found even more comfortable than the country houses he immortalized.
Kogan recognizes exactly how this Usonian vision of a white country mansion was desecrated by the addition of an Ussrian second floor. This superimposition makes the place look like a tuberculosis sanitarium. The color of the structure is an even greater abomination: a heinous swamp-water green. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov would have been appalled, and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan feels appalled in his stead.
3
Historians trawl with broken nets. How would they know that, from childhood, specters and visions guided Stalin’s life, determining its course?
His visions pulsed with power. He feared them as a child, and in a misguided effort to quell them, he enrolled in a seminary as a youth.
Stalin’s father, a drunken cobbler, showed up every now and then to mock him. Often he saw the people he had killed, directly, with his hands, as a bank robber. Those whose deaths he ordered didn’t bother him. Some specters threatened him, some mocked him, but he had no cause for fear. What weapons does a specter have?
The old man has no need for sleep. He sits up at his desk, his head upon his hands. He waits for his children, the ones that guide him into his greatest feat, a public execution of killer doctors and all the events that will ensue. Great pent-up power will spill into the streets.
It’s 4:32 a.m. He is awake, alert, awaiting the children, yet they stubbornly remain on the walls, bound to paper. Their turn has not yet come. A vision comes instead: a burst of sunlight, changing from yellow to red, then deeper, thicker, richer, like blood that spurts out of throats while hearts still pump.
A panorama broadens on his wall, like a big map. The sun is no longer whole. Streams flow from it. Rivers form. Red waters pulse like veins.
A specter enters next, projecting on a wall, like a film on a screen. He looks familiar: a dead Jew, a blasphemer of his plans, a voice that shouldn’t be. What is his name?
“Yefim!” he hears a roar within his skull. And what is this? A sword?
“Go away, Yefim,” thinks Stalin, for specters hear thoughts. You speak to them without uttering a word.
Yefim is Zeitlin, a minor commissar, a fighter armed with dreams that cannot cut.
“How many divisions do you have?” the old man mocks. “Dissolve, Yefim, dissolve.”
The thought of power over visions amuses him.
Yefim dissolves, as does his sword. Left alone, Stalin waits to hear purring beneath the floor. He waits for the children to step from their pictures on the walls and start their gentle play, like cheerful circus dwarves. They’ll gather flowers on the carpet, fly paper planes, and draw. They’ll dance as well, but they’ll step softly.
He sees them every night, which means they will come again. His head slips down onto the leather surface of his writing desk. That’s how it has to be, for slumber presages their arrival. Same ritual. Same children. Month after month.
* * *
The Russian historian and playwright Edvard Radzinsky comes closest to offering an accurate account of the events at Stalin’s dacha in the early morning of March 1, 1953.
According to Radzinsky, a security man with the last name Khrustalev (first name unknown) instructed the guards who stood at the doors of Stalin’s private quarters to go to bed.
Instructions of this sort were unheard of at the Nearby Dacha through its thirty-year history. It was commonplace for the tipsy czar to come within a centimeter of sleepy guards, drill them with his lupine eyes, and taunt them. “Chto, spat’ khochesh?” Sleepy, huh?
Though Radzinsky’s account is accurate, he is missing some crucial details.
* * *
“Kogo vezyote, rebyata?” asks Major Khrustalev, coming up to the curb. Whom are you bringing, boys?
“Negrov vezyom,” answers a tall man who seems too old to be a lieutenant.
Khrustalev is a muscular man with a round face, blue eyes, and a brooding soul. This does not distinguish him from other men in his position, but this is all that’s known. It’s late, and Khrustalev isn’t in any shape to click his heels and salute.
His gray State Security cap is somewhere in his office, probably on his desk. He threw it there after loading four singing drunks — Politburo members Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin — into a Moscow-bound limousine. They had more than two bottles of juice each. Juice, in the lexicon of the Nearby Dacha, is a wicked young Georgian wine. You drink it by the bucket. It benefits the liver. Khrustalev knows that to be the case. That night, two bottles failed to complete the journey from the cellar to the Big Dining Room. As Khrustalev stands alongside the Black Maria, his happy liver is soaked in purloined juice.
Khrustalev has heard from a checkpoint that an MGB vehicle is heading toward the dacha with Negro prisoners and a written mandate from the old man. Of course, it would be prudent to check whether the mandate is genuine, but there is no way to do it short of asking the old man himself. This is dangerous even when the old man is sober. Perhaps it’s one of Beria’s tricks. There has to be a reason, but it is something from above, and Khrustalev is determined not to get ground up in this.