"The second grave, the one beside myfather's-it had the same unmarked headstone. Whom does the grave belongto?"

Something passed across her face then, alook like sadness, and she said, "Someone very brave. Someone quiteremarkable indeed."

"Who?"

She looked out at the view of the city,toward the red walls of the Kremlin, as if she seemed to be trying to make upher mind, and then she finally turned back to look at me. She seemed to softensuddenly, and she looked down briefly at the flowers on the table.

"You know you look very much likeyour father? He was a good man, a very good man. And everything you've said istrue." She paused. "You're right. All that pain and silence deservesan explanation. And that's why I'm here. Tell me, what do you know about JosephStalin, Mr. Massey?"

The unexpectedness of her question threwme and I looked at her for several moments. I shrugged. "No more thanmost. He was a god to some, I guess. The Devil to others. Depends on which sideof the fence you sat on. But certainly one of the great despots of thiscentury. They say he was responsible for as many if not more deaths thanHitler. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage eight years after the war."

Anna Khorev shook her head fiercely."Twenty-three million deaths. Not including those who died in the last warbecause of his stupidity. Twenty-three million of his own people whom hemurdered. Men, women, children. Slaughtered. Shot or sent to die in camps worsethan the Nazis ever imagined, by one of the cruelest men this world has everknown."

I sat back, surprised by the suddenferocity in her voice. "I don't understand. What has this got to do withwhat we're discussing?"

"it has everything to do with it.Stalin died, certainly, but not in the way the history books record."

I sat there stunned for several moments.Anna Khorev's face looked deadly serious. Finally she said, "I guess thestory I'm going to tell you goes back a long time, to when it first began in Switzerland."

She smiled suddenly. "And do youknow something? You're the first person I've spoken to about it in over fortyyears."

Lucerne, Switzerland. December 11th, 1952

All over Europe that year the news seemedto have consisted of nothing but bad.

In Germany, the past was to resurface atNuremberg where a tribunal began its hearing into the Katyn Forest massacre of1940. Four thousand bodies had been unearthed outside a small Polish town, allbound and shot with small-caliber pistols, the grisly remains of what had oncebeen the cream of the Polish Army.

It was the year that also saw the Frenchface an all-out offensive by the Viet Minh, a bloody war was raging in Korea,and in Europe the Iron Curtain was lowered between West Berlin and thesurrounding Soviet Zone, the ultimate gesture by the Kremlin that a postwarpeace was not to be.

Otherwise, wartime rationing was still inforce in Britain, Eva Peren died, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat hisDemocratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, in the US presidential election, and inHollywood, one of the few bright moments in a dull year was the debutappearance of a stunning blond starlet named Marilyn Monroe.

To Manfred Kass, stalking through thewoods outside the old Swiss city of Lucerne that cold December morning, suchthings hardly mattered. And although he could not have known it, that day wasto mark a beginning, and also an ending.

It was growing light when Kass parked hisancient black Opel on the road in front of the entrance to the woods. Heremoved the single-barrel shotgun from beneath the blanket on the backseat ofthe car. It was a Mansten twelve-gauge, getting a little old now, but stillreliable. He climbed out and locked the doors before slipping a cartridge intothe breech but leaving the gun broken. He shoveled a boxful of cartridges intothe pockets of his shooting jacket, then he started to walk into the woods.

At thirty-two, Kass was a tall, awkwardman. He walked clumsily and with a slight limp. The clumsiness had been withhim since childhood, but the limp had been an unwanted memento from the Battleof Kiev eleven years before. Though he had been born in Germany, beingconscripted into Hitler's army had not been one of Kass's ambitions in life. Hehad intended emigrating to Lucerne before the war, where his wife's uncle ranthe bakery business, but he had left it too late, the way he had left manythings in his life too late.

"Trust me, Hilda," he had toldhis wife when the winds of war had started to whisper and she suggested theybeat a hasty retreat to Switzerland and her family. "There won't be a war,liebchen."

Two days later Hitler had invaded Poland.

Kass had been proved wrong on many otheroccasions. Like volunteering for the front at the start of the Russiancampaign. He reckoned that because the German army was rolling across thesteppes of the Ukraine with such ease, and because the Russkis were dirty andstupid peasants, the war against them would be a piece of cake.

He had been right about one thing. TheRussians he had met were generally dirty, stupid peasants. But they were alsofierce fighters. And the fiercest enemy of all had been the Russian winter. Socold that your own piss froze and you had to snap it off when it turned tosolid ice. So razor-sharp were the freezing Baltic and Siberian winds thatswept over the steppes that within minutes of defecating, your shit wasfreeze-blasted as hard as cement.

Kass had laughed the first time he sawhis own frozen turd. But it was nothing to laugh at really. Prodding thephenomenon with his bayonet, he had been hit by a sniper's bullet. A clear shotfrom two hundred meters, into the right flank of his bare ass.

Manfred Kass was used to making mistakes.

But the mistake he was about to make thatDecember morning in the woods outside Lucerne was to be the biggest of hislife. He knew the forest reasonably well. Which paths led where, and thelocations of the best rabbit grounds. The rabbits made tasty stew to accompanythe fresh, floury bread he helped bake six nights a week. And the thought offood made him hungry as he stalked through the forest, snapping the breech ofthe shotgun closed as he came closer to the clearing in the woods.

The light was reasonably good and gettingbetter. A faint watery mist lingering on the low ground, Not perfect light, butgood enough for him to get a clear shot.

As he stepped carefully toward theclearing, he heard the voices. He halted and rubbed his stubbly jaw. He hadnever met anyone in the woods that early and the sound of voices made himcurious. it occurred to him that he might have come across a courting couple,still out after a late Friday-night dance in Lucerne, who had come to make lovein the woods. It sometimes happened, he supposed. But he had not seen any carparked on the road, nor any bicycle tracks in the forest.

As Kass moved through the trees to theedge of the clearing, his eyes snapped open, and he halted, riveted to thespot.

A man wearing a dark winter overcoat andhat stood in the center of the forest clearing. He held a revolver in his hand.But what shocked Kass, stunned him, was that it was aimed at a man and a younggirl kneeling in the wet grass, their faces deathly white, their hands and feetbound with rope.

As Kass stumbled back, his belly churnedand his body broke out into a cold sweat. The kneeling man was crying inpitiful sobs. He was middle-aged, his face painfully thin and sickly gray, andKass noticed the dark bruises under his eyes and the cuts on his handsindicating he had been savagely beaten.

The child was crying too, but there was awhite cloth gagging her mouth and tied behind her long dark hair. She was nomore than ten, Kass guessed, and when he saw the frightened, pitiful look onher face, her body trembling with fear, it made him want to vomit.