Snow Falcon

me?' He got up, as if obeying a summons, and paced back and forth on his side of the table. 'How many times did I bring you here — how many times? Didn't you listen to anything I said?'

He was a pedagogue, and Vorontsyev had shrunk in his own perspective. He had seen imitations, pale substitutes, for this anger before in Gorochenko. He had never been patient with weakness, with intellectual failure, '1917! It was all for nothing! Stalin was something from the Middle Ages, with a savage dog he let off a chain. Beria. Even now I can smell that man and what he did; like a stench in my nose! Do you know that, eh? A stench! Everything came to nothing. One prison, from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. A bloody, dark, infested prison!'

He paused. Vorontsyev saw him venting the rage he had never expressed, not as wildly. All the years of silence, of compromise, of acceptance, had burst like a boil.

'And I'm a policeman!' Vorontsyev said. 'You made me belong to something you hated so much. Why?'

Gorochenko was calmer, passing from fire to ice in a moment, it seemed.

'I have explained that to you already. Didn't you understand? I never sought political sophistication in you, Alexei. But I never expected stupidity.' The tone was hard-edged, gleaming like a blade. The very exercise of contempt seemed to calm Gorochenko. An anodyne drawn from his own superiority. Vorontsyev saw the cold, aloof ego of the man, and he understood that he had always feared Gorochenko in some way. Perhaps this was why. Some secret sense of the qualities in him that had made him into Kutuzov. 'Never mind. It doesn't matter — not that part. But, you wanted to start a war I' 'I agree,' Gorochenko said frostily.

'Right was on your side, of course?'

'Naturally.' Vorontsyev searched the face as if seeking some other, deeper confirmation. As if his gaze was a blow, he saw the face crumple into softer outlines. The deep lines at the side of the mouth, habitually cast in an ironic frame, became shallower.

'Just listen to me, Alexei.' His hands were flat on the table, as if in declaration. 'I — became Kutuzov. All the years I worked for it, using my standing with the Army, with old friends who had risen high — I knew what the price would be.' Again the rasp of certainty. 'And I was prepared to pay the price of a change of leadership. I knew that the Army wanted, needed, a limited war in Europe. Scandinavia was their prize for assisting me.'

'And it would end there?'

Gorochenko shook his head.

'Of course not! Nor should it. Stalin is the one who decided the revolution should end at the borders of Russia!' Again the contempt for political ignorance or incertitude.

'How can I be here, debating with you?'

'Because you have to know why I am the man you have searched for, why I have done the things I have done.'

'Is that all?'

'Of course. You will not stop me.'

'I — have to…' Vorontsyev, as if threatened, let his hand move from the table.

Gorochenko smiled. 'No you won't, Alexei.' His eyes hardened their gaze. 'Look at yourself. You have spent the last ten years working your way up in an organisation you have not questioned, whose nature you have largely ignored. That, and being an emotional spendthrift at the expense of a tart. You have no capacity to stop me — because you have no perception of any concerns larger than me. You came to save me. Admit it. Perhaps from my own foolishness, perhaps from your organisation. The one thing about which you are certain is that I must go on living…'

It was the experience of being told of your contemptibility by a beloved, the revelation of despite where he thought there was love. Like Natalia's flaunted lovers. Perhaps deeper.

He flinched away from it. Get back to the debate. He said, 'You are beaten, Mihail Pyotravich. Praporovich and Dolohov have been eliminated. How can you do anything?'

Gorochenko looked at the telephone, the only object, other than his big hands, on the table. He said, 'There is all the power I need. One telephone call — and the change of leadership occurs today, the conquest of Scandinavia is only a matter of time.'

'You mean to go on, then?' Vorontsyev was appalled, despite the fact that he knew Gorochenko was unyielding, determined.

'Of course. As I said — it is a simple matter of a telephone call.'

'I won't let you make it!'

'How will you stop me, Alexei? You have no moral or political reason for doing so. Have you? What is it? Loyalty to the state? To the KGB?'

'Perhaps.'

'Foolish. You have no loyalties. Your work has been an anodyne, an escape from your personal life. You are just a bureaucrat disguised as a policeman. A clerk.'

'Are you so certain?' He was pleading. Gorochenko despised him, and he could not bear it.

'Yes, Alexei. I love you, you are my son. But you are not a man of vision or faith. Which is why you cannot stop me. You have nothing to outweigh the love you have for me, the debt you owe me. I don't say this in contempt, but in understanding.' He reached his hand forward across the table, but Vorontsyev snatched his own hand away from the gesture like a sulking child, shaking his head as he did so. He was near to tears, and hated the truths he had been told, the hollowness his own father had exposed; hated the way in which his ego had been assaulted, and the superiority his father had displayed. He could not admit all those things, could not.

'Why are you doing it — why?'

It was a distraction, and he saw that Gorochenko knew it.

'I believe. Do you understand that? I believe in the old dream of revolution. That is why.'

'You want power — that's all. Just greedy for power they never gave you!'

'Stupid,' Gorochenko murmured, but two spots of colour appeared on his cheeks. 'You do not understand. To have been alive in the twenties, and to see the whole country turned into a shit-pile by Stalin and Beria and the NKVD! Terror as the normal experience for millions 1 Can't you see any of it} 43'

Alexei?' He half-rose, then sat down heavily, as if winded. But his voice was dear as he went on. 'I swore, every time I saw an empty chair at a Politburo meeting — every time I heard of another purge, every time a new, subservient face appeared on a committee or in the Secretariat — I swore I would survive, and I swore I would do what I could, when I could. I have waited a very long time. But now it will be done, for all those who died.' He clenched his fist. 'The people were at his throat when the Fascists invaded Russia! He was almost finished!' His voice cracked, then, more calmly: 'It has taken me another thirty years. A long time.'

'Stalin died thirty years ago.'

'What he did to weaken the Soviet Union did not die, Alexei. Now we have detente, another way of dying slowly.'

Vorontsyev was appalled. He seemed unable to absorb the successive shocks of his father's obsessive determination. None of the previous revelations immunised him against those which followed. It was a drill breaking through to the living nerve each time.

'You're mad.' Gorochenko smiled. Vorontsyev felt rage boil in him at the continuing superiority that smile symbolised. He drew his gun, and it lay heavy and black on the edge of the table. Gorochenko looked at it unflinchingly. 'I'm going to stop you. I'm arresting you.' Then he added, lashing out like a child: 'And you're not my father!'

Gorochenko rubbed at his cheek, as if the blow had been a physical one. He looked at his watch.

'I have only a little time left to wait. And you are not going to arrest me.' He seemed so certain, of everything.

'I am! I am! You're a traitor! My father — my real father — would have hated you for this!'

Gorochenko groaned, and passed a hand across his face. But it was as if he was afraid of something in