The Devil's Alternative

their towels and picnic baskets among the trees, ran down the low bluff toward the sandy beach, and swam. When he came back, Munro picked up his rolled towel and began to dry himself. Something fell out of it.

He stooped to pick it up. It was a small pasteboard card, half the size of a postcard, white on both sides. On one side was typed, in Russian, the words: “Three kilometers north of here is an abandoned chapel in the woods. Meet me there in thirty minutes. Please. It is urgent.”

He maintained his smile as one of the embassy secretaries came over, laughing, to ask for a cigarette. While he lit it for her, his mind was working out all the angles he could think of. A dissident wanting to pass over the underground litera­ture? A load of trouble, that. A religious group wanting asylum in the embassy? The Americans had had that in 1978, and it had caused untold problems. A trap set by the KGB to identify the SIS man inside the embassy? Always possible. No ordinary commercial secretary would accept such an invita­tion, slipped into a rolled towel by someone who had evi­dently tailed him and watched from the surrounding woods. And yet it was too crude for the KGB. They would have set up a pretended defector in central Moscow with information to pass, arranged for secret photographs at the handover point. So who was the secret writer?

He dressed quickly, still undecided.

Finally he pulled on his shoes and made up his mind. If it was a trap, then he had received no message and was simply walking in the forest. To the disappointment of his hopeful secretary he set off alone. After a hundred yards he paused, took out his lighter and burned the card, grinding the ash into the carpet of pine needles.

The sun and his watch gave him due north, away from the riverbank, which faced south. After ten minutes he emerged on the side of a slope and saw the onion-shaped dome of a chapel two kilometers farther on across the valley. Seconds later he was back in the trees.

The forests around Moscow have dozens of such small chapels, once the worshiping places of the villagers, now mainly derelict, boarded up, deserted. The one he was ap­proaching stood in its own clearing among the trees, beside a derelict cemetery. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and surveyed the tiny church. He could see no one. Carefully he advanced into the open. He was a few yards from the sealed front door when he saw the figure standing in deep shadow under an archway. He stopped, and for minutes on end the two stared at each other.

There was really nothing to say, so he just said her name. “Valentina.”

She moved out of the shadow and replied, “Adam.”

Twenty-one years, he thought in wonderment She must be turned forty. She looked like thirty, still raven- haired, beauti­ful, and ineffably sad.

They sat on one of the tombstones and talked quietly of the old times. She told him she had returned from Berlin to Moscow a few months after their parting, and had continued to be a stenographer for the Party machine. At twenty-three she had married a young Army officer with good prospects. After seven years there had been a baby, and they had been happy, all three of them. Her husband’s career had flour­ished, for he had an uncle high in the Red Army, and patron­age is no different in the Soviet Union from anywhere else. The boy was now ten.

Five years before, her husband, having reached the rank of colonel at a young age, had been killed in a helicopter crash while surveying Red Chinese troop deployments along the Ussuri River in the Far East. To kill the grief she had gone back to work. Her husband’s uncle had used his influence to secure her good, highly placed work, bringing with it privi­leges in the form of special food shops, special restaurants, a better apartment, a private car —all the things that go with high rank in the Party machine.

Finally, two years before, after special clearance, she had been offered a post in the tiny, closed group of stenographers and typists, a subsection of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, that is called the Politburo Secretariat.

Munro breathed deeply. That was high, very high, and very trusted.

“Who,” he asked, “is the uncle of your late husband?”

“Kerensky,” she murmured.

“Marshal Kerensky?” he asked. She nodded. Munro exhaled slowly. Kerensky, the ultrahawk. When he looked again at her face, the eyes were wet. She was blinking rapidly, on the verge of tears. On an impulse he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. He smelled her hair, the same sweet odor that had made him feel both tender and excited two decades ago, in his youth.

“What’s the matter?” he asked gently.

“Oh, Adam, I’m so unhappy.”

“In God’s name, why? In your society you have every­thing.”

She shook her head slowly, then pulled away from him. She avoided his eye, gazing across the clearing into the woods.

“Adam, all my life, since I was a small girl, I believed. I truly believed. Even when we loved, I believed in the good­ness, the lightness, of socialism. Even in the hard times, the times of deprivation in my country, when the West had all the consumer riches and we had none, I believed in the jus­tice of the Communist ideal that we in Russia would one day bring to the world. It was an ideal that would give us all a world without fascism, without money-lust, without exploita­tion, without war.

“I was taught it, and I really believed it. It was more im­portant than you, than our love, than my husband and child. It meant as much to me as this country, Russia, which is part of my soul.”

Munro knew about the patriotism of the Russians toward their country, a fierce flame that would make them endure any suffering, any privation, any sacrifice, and which, when manipulated, would make them obey their Kremlin overlords without demur.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

“They have betrayed it Are betraying it. My ideal, my people, and my country.”

“They?” he asked.

She was twisting her fingers until they looked as if they would come off.

“The Party chiefs,” she said bitterly. She spat out the Rus­sian slang word meaning “fat cats”: “The nachalstvo.”

Munro had twice witnessed a recantation. When a true be­liever loses the faith, the reversed fanaticism goes to strange extremes.

“I worshiped them, Adam. I respected them. I revered them. Now, for years, I have lived close to them all. I have lived in their shadow, taken their gifts, been showered with their privileges. I have seen them close up, in private; heard them talk about the people, whom they despise. They are rot­ten, Adam, corrupt and cruel. Everything they touch they turn to ashes.”

Munro swung one leg across the tombstone so he could face her, and took her in his arms. She was crying softly.

“I can’t go on, Adam, I can’t go on,” she murmured into his shoulder.

“All right, my darling, do you want me to try to get you out?”

He knew it would cost him his career, but this time he was not going to let her go. It would be worth it; everything would be worth it.

She pulled away, her face tear-streaked.

“I cannot. I cannot leave. I have Sasha to think about.”

He held her quietly for a while longer. His mind was rac­ing.

“How did you know I was in Moscow?” he asked care­fully.

She gave no hint of surprise at the question. It was in any case natural enough for him to ask it.

“Last month,” she said between sniffs, “I was taken to the ballet by a colleague from the office. We were in a box. When the lights were low, I thought I must be mistaken. But when they went up at intermission, I knew it was really you. I could not stay after that. I pleaded a headache and left quickly.”

She dabbed her eyes, the crying spell over.

“Adam,” she asked eventually, “did you marry?”

“Yes,” he said. “Long after Berlin. It didn’t work. We were divorced years ago.”

She managed a little smile. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad there is no one else. That is not very logical, is it?”

He grinned back at her.

“No,” he said. “It is not. But it is nice to hear. Can we see each other? In the future?”

Her smile faded; there was a hunted look in her eyes. She shook her dark head.

“No, not very often, Adam,” she said. “I am trusted, privi­leged, but if a foreigner came to my apartment, it