slouched on creaking leather chairs, ice cubes clanking as they sipped their drinks. Upon Stalin’s death it had been discovered that the liquor cabinet contained bottles filled with imitation alcohol, weak tea instead of scotch, water for vodka, so that Stalin might remain sober while his ministers lost control of their tongues. No longer needed, the imitation alcohol had been poured away. Times had changed.
Having eaten sparingly from a five-course meal, picking at three types of bloody meat, ignoring three wines, Frol’s social duties were finished for the night. He climbed the stairs, listening to the heavy rain. Loosening his shirt, he entered his suite. His young sons were in the room next door, put to bed by a maid. His wife was getting undressed, having excused herself from the end of the meal, as was expected of the wives, enabling husbands to talk of weighty matters, an excruciating routine since most were drunk with nothing to say. Entering the living room and, shutting the door, he felt relief. The evening was over. He hated coming here, particularly with his children. To his mind the dacha was a place where people lost their lives. No matter how many children now played in the grounds, no matter how loudly they laughed — those ghosts remained.
Frol turned off the living room lights, heading toward the bedroom and calling out to his wife:
— Nina?
Nina was on the edge of the bed. Seated beside her was Leo. Soaked by rain, his trousers were mud-stained, his hand was bandaged and the bandages were soaked too. Dirty water seeping from his clothes had formed a circular stain on the bedsheets. In Leo’s face Frol observed stillness belying an enormous kinetic force inside, tremendous anger bubbling under a thin sheet of glass.
Frol calculated quickly:
— Why don’t I sit beside you, Leo, instead of my wife?
Without waiting for a reply, Frol gestured for Nina to approach. She tentatively stood up, moving slowly. Leo didn’t stop her. She whispered to Frol:
— What is going on?
Frol replied, making sure Leo could also hear:
— You have to understand that Leo has experienced a terrible shock. He’s grief-stricken and not thinking straight. To break into a dacha could result in his execution. I’m going to work very hard to see that doesn’t happen.
He paused, addressing Leo directly:
— May my wife check on my children?
Leo’s eyes sparked:
— Your children are safe. You have some nerve asking me that.
— You’re right, Leo, I apologize.
— Your wife stays here.
— Very well.
Nina sat on a chair in the corner. Frol continued:
— This is concerning Elena, I take it? You could have come to my office, made an appointment, I would’ve arranged for her release. I had nothing to do with her admission to hospital. I was appalled to hear about it. Completely unnecessary, the doctor was acting on his own authority. He believed he was doing the right thing.
Frol paused:
— Why don’t we call for some drinks?
Leo emptied his pockets:
— I pose no threat to you. I haven’t brought a gun. If you called for your guards, they’d arrest me.
Nina stood up, about to shout for help. Frol indicated that she remain silent. He asked:
— Tell me then, Leo, what do you want?
— Was Fraera working for you?
— No.
Frol sat down beside him:
— We were working together.
* * * LEO HAD EXPECTED FROL PANIN to deny it. But there was no reason for him to lie. Powerless, Leo could do as little with the truth as he could do with a denial. Panin stood up, taking off his suit jacket, unbuttoning some of his shirt buttons:
— Fraera came to me. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t have any knowledge of vory in Moscow. They’d always been an irrelevance. She broke into my apartment and was waiting for me. She knew everything about you. Not only that, she knew about the struggle between the traditionalists in the Party and the reformists. She proposed that we work together and claimed that our aims overlapped. She would be granted the freedom needed to take revenge on those involved in her arrest. In exchange, we could exploit that series of murders, using it for our own purposes, creating a sense of fear.
— She never cared about Lazar?
Panin shook his head:
— She saw Lazar as someone from her former life, nothing more. He was a pretext. She wanted you to go to the Gulag as a punishment, to force you to see the world you sent so many people to. From our point of view, we needed you out of the way. The homicide department was the only independent investigative force. Fraera required a free hand. Once you and Timur were gone, she could kill as she pleased.
— The KGB never looked for her?
— We made sure they never got close.
— The officers you appointed to run the homicide department in my absence?
— Were our men, they did as they were told. Leo, you almost managed to stop the murder of the patriarch. That murder was a vital part of our plan. His death shocked the entire regime. Had you remained in the city Fraera would have been forced to kill you. For her own reasons, she didn’t want to. She preferred to send you away, to stretch out your punishment into something altogether more awful.
— And you agreed?
Panin seemed puzzled by that statement of the obvious:
— Yes. I agreed. I removed Major Grachev and positioned myself as your closest advisor in order to help you make the right decisions, the decisions we wanted you to make. I arranged the paperwork that enabled you to break into Gulag 57.
— You and Fraera planned this?
— We were waiting for the right moment. When I heard Khrushchev’s speech, I knew it was time. We had to act. The changes were going too far.
Leo stood up, walking toward Nina. Concerned, Panin also stood up, tense. Leo put his hand on her shoulder:
— Isn’t this how we used to interrogate our suspects? A loved one present, the implications clear, if the suspect failed to give the correct answer, the loved one would be punished?
— I’m answering your questions, Leo.
— You authorized the murder of men and women who served the State?
— Many of them were murderers themselves. In my position, they would have done the same thing.
— What position is that?
— Leo, these hasty reforms, more than Stalin’s crimes, more even than the West, pose the greatest threat to our nation. Fraera’s murders were an illustration of the future. The millions we as a ruling party have wronged would revolt, just as the prisoners on board the Stary Bolshevik rose up, just as they did in that Gulag. Those scenes would be repeated in every city in every province. You haven’t noticed, Leo, but we are engaged in a silent battle for our nation’s survival. It has nothing to do with whether or not Stalin went too far. He did. Of course he did. But we cannot change the past. And our authority is based on the past. We must behave as we have always behaved: with an iron rule. We cannot admit mistakes and hope our citizens will love us all the same. It is unlikely we will ever be loved, so we must be feared.
