“Who are you?” Elena demanded. “Hiding me from the NKVD-you’re not Russians!”
The driver turned his head around to look at her, and she quailed. Under a wool cap his hairless face was pure Cossack, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes. “We are the oldest Russians,” he said harshly in barbarous French, before turning back to the street ahead. “Our organization was old before Lenin returned to Petrograd from his Swiss exile in 1917,” he went on, “and Lenin blessed us and committed into our hands the protection of Russia.”
“The secret protection,” agreed her escort. “Stalin and his NKVD hate the measures we take, and so we protect the motherland while hiding in foxes’ earths that are secret even to the secret service, true to the old covenant. Andre Marty noted you, in Spain, and would have killed you as soon as he didn’t need your wireless telegraphy skills any longer, if we hadn’t used the GRU to summon you out of Madrid. Marty wrote a report to the NKVD, in which he said you were particularly dangerous-you were baptized but nevertheless sensitive to the most-secret world, and you were nearly virgin, still, in ’36.” The word he used was vierge, a term often used in speaking of unexposed photographic film.
“I was a virgin then!” protested Elena; and a moment later she could feel herself blushing.
“A virgin in the sense of not having killed anyone,” her escort explained. “Marty said you had shot a Nationalist soldier, but it was before you had reached puberty, and we think you have probably killed no one else since, and never anyone up close. A soul’s first few bloody murders have a sacramental power that must not be spent promiscuously.”
“We were at war,” said Elena now. “It was not a murder!”
The man shrugged impatiently. “Killing, execution, riposte, establishment of truth. We don’t want you wasting any more of your baptized sanctity until you can spend it effectively.” He looked away from her, out the window at the old women sweeping snow from the sidewalks. “And not in Berlin.”
These are Russians, she told herself; and they apparently want me to perform an assassination. She remembered her sleepless night after shooting the Nationalist soldier at the Sierra de Guadalarrama pass, but she took a deep breath and said, “I am at the command of the Party.”
“The Politburo consigns you to us with her left hand,” dryly said the man she had danced with. “Our headquarters is in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on the Kuznetsky Bridge, where we still operate out of the Spets Otdel, the Special Department, of the NKVD. They don’t quite know who we are, and our very presence in so secret an institution forbids them to inquire.”
Elena never saw her flat on the Izvoznia Ulitza again-she was quartered now in a single-story log cabin in one of the “Alsatias” down at the southwestern bend of the Moskva River, by the Lenin Stadium. The Alsatias were rookeries dating from before the Revolution, tangles of old streets and open sewers that had been slated for leveling and reconstruction before the war had intervened. The Alsatias were a perfect sanctuary for “hooligans”-criminals and deserters-and in fact a fugitive division of Azerbaijan troops had lately taken up residence in Elena’s neighborhood, and frequently could be heard firing their Army-issue rifles at the cavalry patrols who enforced the midnight-to-five curfew. Elena’s roommates were Betsy, an American-Armenian woman who, lured by the promise of a farm of her own in a new Armenia, had moved from New Jersey to Moscow in 1935 and irretrievably surrendered her American passport, and Pavel, a Roman Catholic priest who was generally too drunk to speak. Elena gathered that they were all working for the same unnamed agency, but it was never discussed.
The man who had danced with her at the Metropol told her his name was Utechin, and he led her with cheery confidence through the mazes of the Soviet secret world. As his secretary, she went with him to the offices of various commissars and ministers, always having to pass through two sets of padded-leather doors with brass plates over the keyholes, to discuss everything from weapon shipments to the selection of operas to be performed at the Bolshoi. Once she watched him preside over the disposition of a shipment of American Lend-Lease leather-the Army wanted it all for boots, and the Minister of Health wanted some of it for the construction of artificial limbs, while the Minister of Trade wanted enough to make a lot of industrial belting; Utechin later prepared conflicting reports to make each of them imagine that he had got what he had wanted, while in fact a full third of the leather was diverted to partisan groups in Astrakhan and Baku on the Caspian Sea coast, for the construction of assault-coracles-boats powered by outboard motors, each with a.50-caliber machine gun mounted at the stern. “The hulls have to be animal-stuff,” Utechin told her merrily, “for our allies there to be able to distinguish our boats from the Germans’.”
And he took her on tours of graveyards. In the Vagankov and Danilovskoye cemeteries they shoveled away the drifted snow to note the patterns of little holes punched upward out of fresh graves, and Utechin pointed out that the graves of the affluent dead had more such punctures than those of the poor. “The rich can afford gold teeth and jewelry,” he told Elena once as they made a picnic of vodka and hard-boiled eggs and bloodwurst on a snow-covered grave mound. “It’s only right that they should be called to give them up at the end. There is too much gold anyway, in our country-teeth from the dead, plating from the old church domes. If our angel wants our gold, so be it.”
“Nichevo,” Elena had agreed bewilderedly, reaching for the vodka bottle.
He nodded. “Drink more,” he told her. “A fledgling agent should live more in drunkenness than in sobriety, in order to achieve distance from the deformity which is bourgeois conscience.”
The preserved body of Lenin had been moved to Kuibyshev when the Nazis had begun their advance toward Moscow, but Utechin took her to the empty mausoleum, right across the broad expanse of Red Square from the palatial GUM department store. Utechin showed a pass to the guards at the tall portal, and he and Elena walked into the mausoleum and followed a counterclockwise route to a set of descending stairs, then turned right several times to get to the crypt room. Net zero, Elena thought.
Though it was empty, the glass coffin in the middle of the floor was brightly lit by electric lights. “If the Politburo has any sense,” whispered Utechin as he ran his hand over the glass, apparently feeling for pits or scratches, “they will leave him in Kuibyshev. Why tease her with this?”
Elena was afraid she knew who Utechin referred to-and her suspicion was confirmed only a day or two later, when she received her ideological confirmation at the Spets-Otdel office on the Kuznetsky Bridge.
Utechin fed her six glasses of vodka before sitting her down in a chair across the desk from him. “You are elevated? Out of the twitching, gag-reflexing body? Good. Listen to me, girl-Mother Russia has a guardian angel, a very literal one. She can take a number of physical forms-you met her in one form, on the Sadovaya ring. In her remote youth she was known as Zat al-Dawahi, which is Arabic for Mistress of Misfortunes, but we call her Machikha Nash, Our Stepmother…”
And so, in the uncritical credulity of drunkenness, Elena had learned about the supernatural creature who had been captured on Mount Ararat after the earthquake of 1883 had knocked down the old confining drogue stones; and she learned that the guardian angel demanded deaths in return for her protection of the Soviet empire-such a constant cascade of deaths that Utechin’s agency had been forced to assist and even encourage the NKVD in its insane wholesale purges. Elena was told that the great famine in the Ukraine during the winter of 1932 and 1933 had not been an accidental consequence of collectivizing agriculture and relocation of the land-owning farmers, the despised kulaks; the famine had been deliberately set into motion, and the Ukraine had been cut off from the rest of the world by heavily armed OGPU detachments at the Kiev and Ukrainian-Russian borders. “Machikha Nash demanded sacramental cannibalism,” Utechin said blandly, “and the starving Ukrainians provided it for her, in the interval before they became her food in turn.”