mind that they were going to assassinate him seated at the desk of the chief of investigations. Instead the door opened and a guard entered, followed by a man sandwiched between him and another guard. Svetkov nodded. The first guard stopped, permitting the prisoner to enter. A look of loathing on his exaggerated features, Svetkov let the man walk by him and quickly exited, as if he were escaping a foul odor. The guard stood at attention to Svetkov, then quickly followed him out, closing the door.
Grisha sat up straight, focusing intently on the man who had just been deposited in front of him. After staring several moments to be certain, he was indeed surprised.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN GRISHA TOOK SVETKOV’S SEAT BEHIND THE DRAB, massive desk, he felt a resurgence of the revolutionary enthusiasm that had once pulsed routinely through his Chekist veins. More importantly, he felt a purity of purpose that he had not experienced for several long, disappointing years. He smoothed his tunic as if it were a priestly vestment and he the priest who must assure the sanctity of the service. So much wasn’t right, but now that the Communist party had chosen him to protect its inner core, there was hope. From this bleak office in the Lubyanka would radiate a new vigilance that would cut away the smothering calcification and expose the life-generating marrow. Mankind’s confidence in the Great October Revolution would be justified!
Grisha sat in the seat of power with a revolutionary confidence that he represented the forces of progress. Historical necessity tickled him like a feather, and he wanted to laugh aloud. Yes, and he had not arrived a moment too soon. Careerists, opportunists, apparatchiks, were trampling the revolutionary flame into the dust; fear of his own arrest was sufficient proof that things were in a terrible state! But the pure spark that had ignited the revolution had survived and would be fanned into flame anew, igniting, illuminating, warning, tempering, and spreading.
Grisha’s inspired mind leaped to the battlements of the Kremlin for a historical perspective. Only an old Chekist could retrieve the Great October Revolution. “What’s to Be Done?” Lenin had heralded, and Grisha knew. The party had to retrace its steps to that point where it had taken the wrong path and from there proceed along the proper way with Bolshevik confidence. The revolution had gone wrong with Trotsky. Exiling the traitor had not solved the problem, but miraculously, that moment could be recaptured. If not the moment, then the man himself; and through the man, things could be set right. Perhaps Trotsky had returned to Russia on his own to help solve the problems he had caused, but Grisha doubted it. An arrogance such as that could not admit error.
No, Trotsky must have been captured and spirited back to Russia. Stalin himself must have understood, for only the general secretary had the authority to give such an order. It would be Grisha’s job to see that the prisoner cooperated. If he did, then the real counterrevolutionaries could be rooted out. As to the personal future of the prisoner, Stalin no doubt would want him shot. There was certainly something to be said for that, especially if it meant that others wouldn’t be shot, but even that might be unnecessary if he confessed properly. After all those years of promising prisoners that if they told the truth, they would have nothing to fear, such might really be the case!
The thought stimulated Grisha; it would justify so much that had happened; so much that he had done to so many. That the “old man” could become the “new man” excited him further. Thus freed from his havoc-wreaking attempts to create a new man, Comrade Stalin could return to building the country, the job he was suited for. But Grisha restrained his enthusiasm; all of this was in the future. First he had to gain the cooperation of the party’s most brilliant theoretician and most dangerous enemy. A man who had created and commanded the Red Army. Whose case could be more delicate than this, a case so delicate that as yet no file existed?
After Svetkov and the guard had departed, Grisha gazed steadily at the prisoner. He was, indeed, surprised.
“Lev Davidovich?” Grisha called softly across the large chamber, using Trotsky’s first name and patronymic, informal name, in faint hope that his disappointment was premature.
Accepting Grisha’s gentle, indistinct query as an invitation, the prisoner stepped humbly forward to be able to hear better. Although he said nothing, his pale meek face silently drew itself into an apology. “Yes?” it seemed to ask in reluctant embarrassment.
This pained, vulnerable attitude momentarily disarmed Grisha.
“You’re not Leon Trotsky?” Grisha uttered disconsolately.
“No.” The prisoner responded so softly that Grisha couldn’t hear him, but he could see the man shaking his head in humiliation that he had disappointed once again.
The prisoner’s extraordinary humility saved Grisha from the collapse of his own exuberant expectations of interrogating Trotsky. Grisha experienced surprise and disappointment, but almost no embarrassment before this new prisoner, who seemed to lack any defiance or mistrust. The man even seemed somewhat relieved to find himself standing across from the NKVD director of investigations.
“Sit down,” Grisha said, not uncharitably, and the man responded quickly but with slow, careful movements. The effect was strange and further aroused Grisha’s interest. The man seemed to be in good health. There were no signs that he had been beaten. He wore his belt and shoelaces. Obviously, he had not been processed as a formal prisoner. Grisha assumed that he was being held in one of the special cells where accommodations and diet were more like those of a comfortable hotel than a prison.
And yet, as frightened as the man was, he didn’t seem afraid so much of Grisha as of himself. He seemed to look to the NKVD officer for help, but without the usual righteous indignation of the innocent. The man had an aura of self-professed guilt about him. His strange eyes trumpeted it. They were preternaturally large and filled with both shame and innocence. Where had Grisha seen something like this—the pale, wide eyes, the slow movements, the innocent fear and complete vulnerability? He was reminded of the small, furry creatures of the night, who lived in the treetops and relied on their large eyes and inaccessible habitat to survive. Once an adversary discovered them, they were helpless. At the zoo, Grisha had liked them at once. And only them. Tigers, snakes, crocodiles, he had recognized them all as enemies of the revolution. On battlefronts and in interrogation rooms he had struggled against their counterrevolutionary claws, poison, sharp teeth, and voracious jaws. At the zoological garden, Grisha was fascinated but tense. He knew them all from the cages of the Lubyanka—beasts whose very nature was to prey upon the Great October Revolution. He always insisted that his cadets spend time in serious study at the zoo. The grasping, scampering monkeys, shameless profiteers and speculators. The kulak birds sang so beautifully but were the first to steal grain from another’s harvest. And the ugly nonparty owls, sleeping by day and screeching by night. A comrade could learn a lot from the brutal world of nature, all right. But one creature always drew him to its cage in wonderment. He had seen them all before in the Lubyanka except for the large-eyed, slow-moving, nocturnal lemur. Fearful and trusting, an investigator’s dream.
“You are?” Grisha inquired imperiously.
“Dmitri Cherbyshev,” the man answered meekly.
“Would you like to tell me in your own words why you’re here?” Grisha asked. Stressing “in your own words” suggested clearly that the NKVD interrogator most certainly knew all and was merely being kind.
The prisoner’s large eyes filled with a fright and a horror that threatened to paralyze him. Although the eyes did not close in the least, they no longer focused on the questioner. The effect was as if out of embarrassment the prisoner had looked away or lowered his glance. Had he done so, Grisha would have been
