“We’ve a lot to get through, Comrade Stalin. The case at the Foreign Commissariat is progressing well and there are German, Polish, French and Japanese spies among the old diplomats.”
“Who’s working it?”
“Kobylov and Palitsyn.”
“We know Kobylov. He’s a bull in a china shop but a good operative. He takes his silk gloves off. Palitsyn’s a good worker?”
“Very,” replied Beria, though he had inherited Palitsyn, not chosen him. “Here are some of the confessions already signed by the prisoners. Comrade Stalin, you asked about the former person Baron Zeitlin, father of Palitsyn’s wife and brother of the journalist Gideon Zeitlin.”
“Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn is a decent Soviet woman,” said Stalin.
Beria noted the Master was not in the mood for jokes about sex, a subject never absent from his own mind for long. Today he could see that Stalin’s mind was in the fraught borderlands of Mitteleuropa. He watched the Master sip his tea and pull a new pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes from his shabby yellow tunic. Opening it, he lit one and started to fiddle with the pencils on his desk.
“Did she and Palitsyn ever contact him?” Stalin asked.
“No.”
“They put the Party first,” said Stalin, sharp eyes on Beria. “You see? A decent Soviet girl who has ‘reforged’ herself—despite her class and connections. I remember seeing her typing in Lenin’s office. Don’t forget Lenin himself was a nobleman and grew up on a country estate, eating strawberries and rolling in the hay with peasant girls.”
Beria knew this trick of the Master: only Stalin could criticize Lenin in the way that one god may mock another. Beria delivered the required look of shock and the old tiger’s eyes gleamed. Stalin was the Lenin of today.
Beria laid out some papers. “You asked about Zeitlin’s whereabouts. It took a bit of time to find out his fate. On March twenty-fifth, 1937, he was arrested on my orders in Tiflis, where, since his dismissal in 1930, he had been living quietly in exile with his English wife. He was interrogated…”
“Silk gloves, or gloves off?” Beria saw that Stalin was sketching a wolf’s head with a green crayon on the pad of writing paper headed
“Roughly enough. We weren’t running a hotel! But he confessed nothing.”
“What? That broken reed survived Kobylov’s workout?”
“If I hadn’t supervised, Kobylov would have ground him into dust. The Bull can go too far.”
“The Revolution requires we all do some dirty work.”
“My boys and I don’t wear silk gloves. Zeitlin was sentenced under Article Fifty-eight to the Vishka”—this was the nickname among the leaders for execution, the Highest Measure of Punishment—“as a Trotskyite terrorist who had conspired to assassinate Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and myself.”
“Even you? You are modest!” said Stalin with a slight smirk but then he sighed a little sadly. “We make mistakes sometimes. We have too many yes-men in this country.”
Beria was used to these inquiries. Stalin’s memory was extraordinarily detailed but even he could not remember all the names on the death lists. After all, he had personally signed death lists accompanied by “albums”—brief biographies and photographs of those listed—for 38,000 Enemies. Around a million had been executed since 1937 and more had died en route to, or in, the Gulag camps. Beria was curious why the Master was interested in a forgotten antique like Zeitlin—unless Stalin was attracted to Sashenka, and in that he couldn’t fault his taste. The Master was deeply secretive about his private life but Beria had learned that he had had many affairs in the past. Another possibility occurred to Beria. Zeitlin had once had interests in Baku and Tiflis. Did Stalin know Zeitlin personally?
No matter; sometimes Stalin expressed regret for such executions. “So Zeitlin’s gone?” he asked, shading in his wolf’s head.
“No, he was in the album of seven hundred and forty-three names prepared for you and the Politburo by the Narkom NKVD on April fifteenth, 1937. You confirmed all the Vishka sentences but placed a dash next to the name of Zeitlin.”
“One of my dashes?” murmured Stalin.
Beria knew that a tiny signal from the Master—a mere stroke of punctuation on a piece of paper, or a tone of voice, or a raised eyebrow—could change a fate.
“Yes. Zeitlin was not executed but was sent to Vorkuta, where he’s now in the camp hospital with pneumonia, angina and dysentery. He got a job as an accountant in the camp store.”
“Those bourgeois are still pulling their tricks, I see,” said Stalin.
“He’s been constantly ill.”
“A creaky gate’s often strongest.”
“He may not survive.”
Stalin shrugged and exhaled smoke.
“Lavrenti Pavlovich, do we really think former person Zeitlin poses much of a threat anymore? Come to Kuntsevo for dinner tonight. Chareuli the film director and some disreputable Georgian actors are coming. I know you’re busy—only if you have time.”
Stalin pushed the file across the desk and Beria knew it was a sign that he should take his leave. The meeting was over.
17
When Sashenka’s uncle, Gideon Zeitlin, finished his usual lunch—borscht soup, salted herring and veal cutlets—at his usual table at the Writers’ Club in Moscow, he donned his fedora and walked out into the balmy streets. He had eaten with his cronies: the “Red Count,” the supple, worldly and fat Alexei Tolstoy, one of Stalin’s favorite writers; Fadeyev, the drunken secretary of the Writers’ Union; Ilya Ehrenburg, the raffish novelist; and Gideon’s own comely daughter Mouche, now an actress who was starting to earn big parts in the movies. These literary lions enjoyed their privileges—the food, the wine, the dachas in Peredelkino, the holidays in Sochi—because they had survived the terrible years of ’37 and ’38.
Afterward, Gideon, a giant with his prickly beard, ox-like jaw and playful black eyes, walked in the streets with Mouche. It was early summer. Girls were promenading.
“Mouche, did you notice that, until recently, everyone dressed like prissy nuns?” announced Gideon. “Thank God that’s over! Skirts are getting shorter, slits getting higher. I adore summertime!”
“Stop looking, Papa
“You’re right. I am too old, but I’m slightly soused and I can still look. And I can still do!”
“You’re a disgrace.”
“But you love me, don’t you, Mouche?” Gideon held Mouche’s hand. His daughter was now in her thirties, married with children, and dramatically good-looking, with black eyes, thick black hair, strong cheekbones—and almost famous in her own right. Gideon was a grandfather but damn that! The girls were out in force in Moscow that May, and the old connoisseur relished the legs, the bare shoulders, the new look of permed hair—oh, he could taste their skin, their thighs. He decided to call on his new mistress, Masha, the girl he’d brought along to Sashenka’s party. Masha, he mused, was one of those placid, easygoing girls who would be boring were it not for their almost insane appetite for sex in all its varieties. He was just playing the scene in his mind when he realized Mouche was pulling on his arm.
“Papa! Papa!”
A white Emka car had stopped right next to them. The driver was waving at Gideon, and his passenger, a young man in a baggy brown suit, round intellectual’s spectacles and a pompadour hairstyle, jumped out and opened the car’s back door.
“Gideon Moiseievich, any chance of a chat? It won’t take long.”
