ALEXsipped the champagne and dabbed caviar on the toast.
The snow was melting fast in the shiny bucket. The British diplomat and his Australian roommate finally disappeared, still bickering, through the restaurant-carriage door. It was a relief not to have to listen to them. The restaurant was emptying, but the red-haired man still lingered over his tea. Alex was beginning to grow concerned over Anna Petrovna’s absence.
At last she came into the restaurant car. He waved, his heart lurching at the sight of her. She seemed preoccupied, and he felt a stab of longing. He could not bear to believe that she lived a life without him. He rose as she reached him, kissing her on the lips without embarrassment.
Sitting down opposite him, she looked out of the window at the falling snow. He took her hand and found it cold.
“My God, you’re freezing.” He poured her a glass of champagne and refilled his own. “To Siberia,” he said, lifting his glass and clinking hers as she lifted it. Her hands were shaking and she spilled her champagne as she lifted her glass.
“What is it?” he asked. “Would you rather we went back?”
She shook her head, her lips trembling.
“I’m being silly,” she said, throwing her head back, the hair shifting like silk. He sensed that she was terribly upset, but determined to hide it.
“What is it?”
“You must trust me,” she said, the yellow flecks in her eyes clear against the deep blue. She pressed her face against the window and, shielding her eyes from the interior glare, peered into the snow-filled night.
“What can you see?” he asked.
“A white world.”
“Perhaps the train will get stuck,” he said hopefully.
“Never,” she replied, her breath making a puddle of vapor on the window.
Suddenly, Anna Petrovna picked up the champagne glass and tossed off its contents in one gulp. Alex reached into the bucket and filled their glasses again.
“I must not be gloomy,” she said, smiling. She drank the champagne and again he refilled their glasses.
“Are you hungry?” Alex asked, pointing to the caviar.
Anna Petrovna shook her head. He felt her anguish.
“What is it?”
“I want to go back.”
He dared not question her further. Tomorrow the train would arrive in Irkutsk and the spell would be broken. He had vowed to himself not to think about it.
“Give the rest of the champagne to that idiot there,” he told the waitress, pointing to the KGB agent. But when they rose and started back toward their compartment, the red-haired man rose instantly to follow.
“Bastards,” Alex hissed.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said as they walked through the icy vestibule. “It was a lousy celebration,” he said, opening the door of their compartment. He felt the half-digested caviar, a heavy glob bloating his stomach.
Anna Petrovna sat down on the lower bunk. “Perhaps it was because there was nothing to celebrate.”
She began to shake, burying her face in her hands. The size and strength of her body only added to the image of despair; a frail woman could not have looked half so desolate. He sat beside her. As their bodies touched she moved into his arms. Kissing her cheeks, he could taste her tears.
“We are heading to oblivion,” she whispered, sobbing.
Then, after a while, she stood up.
“There will be nothing, not a trace of memories anywhere. Only nothingness.”
She rested her head against the door, then pounded it with her fist.
“Alex, if only I could say—if only I could make you understand.”
He stood up and moved close to her, kissing her hair, whispering in her ear.
“I can understand.”
“Will you forgive me my deceit?”
“Your deceit?” They were the words he had told himself he would never hear.
“You will never forgive me,” she said, moving to the other end of the compartment. She faced him. Behind her he could see the snow smashing against the window.
“You have something to tell me,” he said, his heart racing.
“I have been working for the KGB,” she said quietly, the words a bullet aimed at his brain. He felt his tongue freeze in his mouth and a sudden heaviness in his legs. Of course, he told himself. Had he had any illusions? “I knew,” he wanted to say. But it wasn’t true.
“It is not the first time I have done so,” she said. “But the last time was years ago.”
He must have looked as if he were about to speak.
“Don’t. Let me go on,” she said. “For the love of an ideal you are sometimes willing to suspend what you might call personal integrity. You do it for your country. I do it proudly for mine. We have a viable experiment here. We are trying to provide a better life for everyone, all the people. I live by that concept. Considering man’s greed and selfishness, it is no small achievement that we have gone even this far. There have been abuses, I admit that. But I am not ashamed of having helped to root out our enemies. I was quite prepared to give anything to such a cause.”
She paused, clicked open her handbag and shakily lit a cigarette. For a moment, he thought she might collapse into tears again. Her speech had been ridiculously formal, lines from a bad play. He felt her pain and his own despair. It was all a charade, after all.
“Alex”—she paused—“my darling Alex,” she said softly. He wanted to cry himself. “You have information locked in your head that could have consequences for millions.” Dimitrov had said, “Be careful. They are clever.”
“Dimitrov is planning a nuclear strike against the Chinese,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
He watched the confusion in her face. Her body tightened as if it had been struck. Which of them, in the end, had engaged in the greater deception?
“You knew.?”
“Yes.”
“In his dacha? Then?”
“Yes.”
“And you did nothing?”
“That again.” He paused. “I am not a killer.” Then it occurred to him that Dimitrov could have sent her. If not Dimitrov, then who?
“You must be one of the jackals.” He spit the words through his teeth. “What is it you want from me then?”
“Will he live long enough to do it?”
“Who wants to know? Who hired you to find out?”
“Zeldovich.”
“Zeldovich?” It was less clear than ever. “But he is Dimitrov’s lackey.”
“I know his reputation.”
“He’s the hatchet man. He does the dirty work. Everyone knows that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Our goals are the same.”
“Goals?”
“He is trying to save lives—Chinese and Russian.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes. And you have confirmed what Dimitrov intends.”
“Cross cross and double-cross,” he said in English.
“What does that mean?”
“It means”—he paused, remembering suddenly what they had shared—“it means that we are both cooked geese. It means that we possess information that cannot contribute to our longevity. It means—” A thought intruded, pulling him up short. “But you are getting off at Irkutsk.”
She slumped against the door as if she were about to faint. “No,” she said weakly. “He has asked me to stay.”
“Asked?” Alex shook his head. “With a trainload of troops and that red-haired goon and God knows who else?”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “He is trying to prevent a horror, a crime against humanity. He is acting out of morality.” She was shouting at him now. “There’s one man, at least, with the courage to act.”
“Then why didn’t he put a bullet in Dimitrov’s brain? He was with him every day. He could go back to Moscow right now and do it.”
Anna Petrovna’s upper lip trembled.
Of course, Alex thought, Zeldovich would do it if he could get away with it. But what was Zeldovich without Dimitrov?
“He is trying to save his own skin. He wants to know how much time Dimitrov has so he can chart his own course. If Dimitrov goes on for years, so does Zeldovich. If Dimitrov is to die quickly, so does Zeldovich—unless he finds a way out.”
She was cowering now, all defenses crumbled.
“You are his dupe,” he said gently, thinking about himself and his feelings for her. He wanted to draw her into his arms. “And a marvelous actress,” he said bitterly.
“Alex—” she began, a hint of tenderness in her quivering voice. Then she pulled herself back to the danger.
“I saw him kill Grivetsky. The general from the restaurant car.”
“Zeldovich?”
“Yes. In his compartment. Next to ours.” She pointed to the common wall.
“He knew about us. Of course, he knew.” Alex felt unclean, disgusted.
“Grivetsky was to be Dimitrov’s instrument. He was going to take command of the operation.”
“And he was killed for that reason?”
“What other reason? He would have killed Zeldovich. And me. Nothing, no one was to stand in their way.” Her courage seemed to be returning. “We have delayed the plan. At least for the moment.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“What?”
“You are the witness.” He wanted to hurt her at the same time that he wanted to protect her. “Anna Petrovna,” he said firmly, “if Dimitrov dies, you are Zeldovich’s insurance. He will be able to say he killed Grivetsky to prevent the actions of a madman. It will be his reprieve.”
“And if Dimitrov should live?” The question did not need an answer. If only she meant nothing to him. Was it too late for that? His anger rose as he thought of Dimitrov, the charming monster. Could he bring himself to kill him for Anna Petrovna’s sake when he could not do it to save countless anonymous thousands? Or even to save himself?
“We have both been made fools of,” he said, thinking of how she had betrayed him.
“No.” She was emphatic, her voice rising in protest. The train was slowing for another brief stop. “You must not think of yourself that way,” she said in a whisper.
“It is not important how I think of myself. That’s not the main question.”
“When Dimitrov discovers that Grivetsky is gone,” she said quietly, “he will send someone else. It is all a matter of time.”
“Time again,” Alex thought aloud.
“How long will Dimitrov live?”
Was she thinking now of her own life? he wondered.
“I told you.”
“You gave me possibilities. Nothing definite.”
“What if I can’t be any more definite?”
She shrugged. “You must get word to the Americans, to the President.”
“From here?”
He looked at her, felt her anguish. And his own. He felt no compassion for either the Russians or the Chinese. He was not politicized like Anna Petrovna, or Dimitrov, or the President, or the Secretary of State.
“How long will Dimitrov live?” Anna Petrovna asked, her voice a whisper again.
“If you put a bullet in his brain you would know to within a millisecond. That is much simpler.”
“How long?”
“I told you.”
“Please. Tell me again.”
“Anytime—from now, this minute, or months from now, or years. That is the simple statistic. The odds get better as time goes on. As of four days ago, the disease was in remission. If the cells suddenly multiply again, he will begin to droop like a marshmallow over a fire. The end could be quick or slow, painful or quiet. He is sixty-nine years old. Anything can happen at that age. In any event, if there is a problem, he knows exactly where to find me.”
His voice rose well above the din of the train. The compartment seemed to have shrunk; he felt it caving in on his head. Suddenly it was all too much. He reached for the door handle and escaped into the passageway, walking swiftly in the direction of the hard-class carriages. In the space between the carriages he paused, letting the cold seep into him. He had to get off the train, he told himself. That, above all. This was a claustrophobic nightmare, and he was afraid for his sanity.
Walking through the darkened restaurant, he smelled scoured pots. The little manager was slumped over a table, snoring loudly. At the end of the carriage, in the faint light, Alex squinted at the timetable hanging in the glass frame. He compared it with his watch, which was still running on Moscow time. The train would reach Irkutsk in a few hours. Irkutsk, the name had once brought back the richness of his grandfather’s stories, the feeling that a piece of his life was there to be retrieved. Now it represented a dividing point, a chapter’s end. He had had quite enough of the Trans-Siberian Express, with its illusions of time and space. Looking behind him, he waited for the footsteps of the ubiquitous red-haired man, but he was not there. Alex walked on.
In the passageway of the hard-class carriage he took comfort in the noise and smells of the surrounding community. The never-ending chess marathon was still in progress. He felt the warm breath of the men as they watched intently, the old man still in the same position, all eyes concentrating on the chess board.
“He has won continuously for the past three days,” someone whispered in Alex’s ear.
“He has retrieved his respect,” another said.
Pushing past the crowd, Alex looked into each compartment as he passed. He finally found an empty spot, in an upper bunk near the door of the last car, the one before the troop carriage. Again he looked behind him, searching the passageway for the red-haired man. Then he slipped into the compartment and climbed onto the empty bunk, feeling the hard wooden surface against his spine.
Could he excuse her betrayal? He wanted to forgive her. After all, she too had been betrayed. Pawns in a terrible game. Both of them had been used and humiliated. If only he could stop the flow of his anger. Conversations drifted across his consciousness, bits of reality that could not find understanding in his overheated brain.
“Dimitrov is our man,” the President had stated—the President of the United States—and he, Alex, had accepted the contention as easily as if he had been watching a deodorant commercial on television. “He is committed, apparently, to a more moderate stance toward the Chinese,” the President had said, and that time Alex had heard the hedge—“apparently.” So even the President wasn’t sure, Alex thought, his mind grasping the possibility like a drowning man reaching for flotsam. Could he be convinced, even if Alex could get the word out? More than likely they would think him a raging idiot.
“You don’t believe in this thing we have created, Kuznetsov?” Dimitrov had said. Alex could remember the exact place in the woods near the dacha, the river rushing below them, the winter sun setting as they walked slowly along a gravel path. Dimitrov’s cheeks glowed slightly with the exertion. He is responding, Alex remembered thinking. He was hardly listening to the conversation, his concentration focused on Dimitrov’s physical reactions, the spring of his step, the measure of his energy, his alertness. Only now, as he played the conversation back, did it hold his interest.
“This system we have created—this reorganization of life—this recalibration of man’s aspirations.”
“What recalibration?”
“We’ve reset the dials on man’s greed, the drive to exploit other men. Before Lenin, a few men in every country, more ruthless and talented than the others, would acquire an inordinate share of the world’s resources and with it the ability to manipulate other men for their own personal gain. We have changed all that, Kuznetsov. It had never been done in the history of the world. We did it, in my generation, in my lifetime.”
Alex remembered now that he had thought of responding, but didn’t feel it was worth arguing. You don’t trust your own people, he might have said. What kind of paradise is that?
“Nothing would have been achieved if we had let everyone pull in different directions. We had to impose discipline. Given the circumstances, one might excuse Stalin.” Dimitrov had looked back over his shoulder at Alex. “History will tell us if he was right. All opposition to the central idea had to be rooted out, destroyed.”
“And was it?”
“The struggle will only end when we are all put under one umbrella. Coexistence is a myth. That is the truth of it. Hegemony is the only objective.”
He had walked on quickly, surprisingly energetic. He is growing stronger, Alex had thought at the time, ignoring the actual words spoken.
“It took two thousand years for the weeds to grow. They cannot all be pulled out overnight.” Dimitrov had sighed. “If only there is time.”
“For what?”
“You are not listening, Kuznetsov,” Dimitrov had admonished mildly. He had opened his left hand and made a plucking motion with the fingers of his right.
“There must be time to pull out all the bad weeds. They are persistent. We pull them. They grow. We pull them again. Someday we will pull them out and they will never grow again. But only if we have the will to keep on plucking.” He made plucking motions again and again in his palm.
So Dimitrov didn’t believe a word of this détente business, as the President so blandly assumed.
“And the Chinese?” Alex asked himself the question, recalling still another conversation with Dimitrov. It was another day at the dacha. He was taking Dimitrov’s pulse, feeling the steady beat against his two fingers, counting mentally as he watched the face of his wristwatch, as always only half-listening to the words.
“The Chinks.” Dimitrov would never grant them more than coolie status. The Russian word was guttural, offensive. “They are peasants, simplistic and naive. They must be taught a hard lesson.”
Alex had felt Dimitrov’s pulse surge.
“Stop teaching such hard lessons. It is making your pulse push too fast.”
“You feel it, Kuznetsov? You feel the passion?”
“I don’t know what it is. But I feel it.”
“It is strength you feel, Kuznetsov. Soon they will feel it.”
“Who?” he had asked absently.
“The Chinks.”
“Can’t you say Chinese?”
“Someday maybe. Now they are Chinks.”
“When will they change?
“Soon.”
Clues were everywhere now, rushing to Alex’s mind.
“Do I care what they think?” Dimitrov had said one evening when he had worked for fifteen hours straight and had to be forced to go to bed. The question was meaningless to Alex, since it was the first sentence the Secretary had spoken when Alex had entered his bedroom.
“History will be the vindicator,” Dimitrov had continued, looking into space as Alex removed his slippers. “A leader must have the courage to act.”
“Without rest, you won’t have the strength for the courage.”
Dimitrov smiled, acknowledging for the first time Alex’s presence.
“Do I look like a barbarian, Kuznetsov?”
Alex had hesitated. He is tired, he remembered thinking. He must be humored.
“Of course not.”
“Believe me, Kuznetsov,” he had said. “If there was another way, another path, I would go in that direction. But all roads are closed. They will not bend of their own free will. There can be no sharing.”
Alex had tried to draw up the bed covers, but Dimitrov had resisted.
“You Americans are such children,” he had said.
“Does that mean you’re ready to acknowledge that I am an American, not simply a Russian refugee?”
Dimitrov smiled. “Naive and innocent,” he had whispered, his eyes closing. “We will not need to use our bombs on you.”
The remembered conversations were coming to him like sunlight filtered through a prism in his mind. They had not been conversations at all, he saw now, hardly dialogues. They had been monologues, continuous and consistent, and although he had been a bystander then, he was a participant now. If only he could go back and relive the lost moments, probe the mystery of Dimitrov’s mind with the same zeal that he had probed his blood. It would have been simple then to send Dimitrov to his reward. And now Anna Petrovna stood to be martyred by his passivity. Himself as well.
Perhaps, after all, he deserved to suffer for his lack of action, condemning half a continent to death. How could he possibly live with the knowledge that he might have prevented it? He shivered, bunching himself into the fetal position for warmth. There was no blanket on the bunk. He pushed his cold hands under his body, feeling the pain where the door handle had bruised the skin. He must get off the train, communicate with the outside world. Tell anyone who would listen. And yet, he could not, still, bring himself to forgive Anna Petrovna, not in his mind, although he yearned for her and continued to feel the power of his longing. It annoyed him that he could not shake the feeling. The urge to run to her, to throw himself in her arms seemed overpowering, although he lay still, forcing himself to remain where he was, as if imaginary chains were wrapped around his body.
He might have dozed. He could not tell, except that a change in the rhythm of the train suddenly triggered his alertness. The compartment was dark, but he could sense bodies moving around in it, heard heavy breathing, the sound of energy.
“Irkutsk,” someone said. He sat up quickly, bumping his head against the ceiling. Climbing down from the bunk, he stood for a moment recovering his sense of space. A young man stood beside him buttoning a uniform tunic.
“Nearly home,” he said. “I hope my mother and father will meet me at the station.”
Edging himself out of the compartment, Alex moved into the passageway, crowded with people preparing to depart. Outside, men and women trudged through the snow. He saw horse-drawn sleighs, their drivers bundled snugly. Plumes of smoke moved upward through the chimneys of log cabins. Then, as the train moved slowly forward toward the bright lights of the city, the landscape changed. Huge blocks of apartment houses could be seen, and tan brick smoke stacks belching yellow smoke and showers of red sparks.
He remembered how Anna Petrovna had talked lovingly of Irkutsk. To him, Irkutsk was merely an idea, a sentimental heritage handed down by his grandfather. To Anna Petrovna it was home; her roots were embedded in it. Was it possible that Irkutsk was on the edge of extinction?
The train chugged to a halt. “It is Irkutsk I,” someone said. “Only a five-minute stop on the outskirts.”
Passengers had started to debark when Alex saw through the windows an unusual sight. Running soldiers, their heavy boots crunching in the snow, their machine guns at the ready position, were deploying along the length of the station. As passengers left the train, the soldiers stopped and interrogated them as they stood shivering in the snow. When they had answered satisfactorily, they were allowed to pass through the checkpoints the officers had set up at the edge of the platform.
“KGB troops,” someone whispered behind Alex. A pall of fear had fallen on the crowded hard-class carriage. “Who are they looking for?”
Alex would not let himself dwell on the idea of it.
“How long before the main station of Irkutsk?” he asked someone next to him.
“Twenty minutes,” an old man said with authority, his eyes still leveled at the soldiers. “They must be preventing someone from leaving the train,” he said, loud enough to be heard through the passageway. The fear in the crowd became tangible. Alex felt a brief weakness in his knees. He had decided to dash off the train at the main Irkutsk station and run for a telephone. He wondered if the KGB would repeat their blockade there, and if he was really the target of their vigilance.
The train moved again. Back in the compartment where he had bunked, Alex looked about him in the semidarkness. The only other occupant was a big man, snoring in one of the lower bunks. Moving quietly, listening for any break in the rhythm of the snoring, Alex struggled to open the window. The upper portion was designed to move up and down, but it seemed to be jammed. His fingers shook with strain as he stood on his tiptoes and pushed downward with all his strength. Taking deep breaths, he tried to control his panic. Then he pushed downward again, still listening to be sure the other man was still asleep.
The train picked up speed, moving through what appeared to be a huge railroad yard. Electric lines crisscrossed overhead, layers of white snow weighing them down. The city was just awakening. Truck traffic flowed, and horse-drawn carts moved freely among the motorized vehicles. A slice of icy air cut through Alex as the window moved at last, making a sharp noise. The snoring man gurgled, then resumed his rhythm. Curling his fingers over the top of the window, Alex pulled downward, hanging on with his entire weight, feeling the window give finally and move slowly downward.
Bringing the chair close to the window, he stood on it and stuck his head out, measuring the possibility of moving his body through the opening. The space was wide enough, but as he stood poised, waiting for the train to slow down for Irkutsk, the futility of escape from the train struck him. He was, after all, in the dead center of Siberia, with three thousand miles between him and the Sea of Japan. The irony of it did not escape him. Like his grandfather, he would have to traverse half the great Siberian land mass. It was formidable, impossible. But, like his grandfather, he had to try. Poking his head out again, he could see the lights of what he assumed to be the main Irkutsk railroad station. Lifting himself to the edge of the window, he slid his body halfway out, gripping the window edge with one hand and reaching downward toward the lower ledge, waiting for the train to stop. Until it did, he would be dangerously conspicuous.
The moment the train stopped, he pushed himself out, falling like a rock onto a soft layer of snow. Then he moved, crouching, keeping close to the train, moving past the hard-class carriages, crouching lower as he passed the restaurant car. As he reached the soft-class carriages, he began to feel the physical strain, and he paused to catch his breath. Peering under the train, he could see feet moving, the lower torsos of the soldiers, the butts of their machine guns glistening in the harsh light of the platform.
He felt absurd. Mild-mannered Dr. Alex Cousins, crouching in the snows of Siberia, freezing, moving toward an inexorable fate. It was ludicrous. Then he felt his rage rise, and with it his determination. He was going to get word to the President, no matter what it took to do so.
He moved forward again, reached the windowless baggage car, then moved around the engine, straightening as he looked upward into the single electric eye of the engine’s beam. He walked through a crowd of babushkas who were patiently waiting for the train to pass.
He calculated quickly. It was perhaps twenty yards to the ornate railway station building. Farther down, troops were intercepting the departing passengers as they stepped off the metal stairs. Their drawn guns were ominous. He tried to calculate his route and the timing. Then he started to move casually. He would stay close to the train and make his break for the station when he was parallel to the baggage car. The soldiers were standing with their backs to him, a human corral funneling the debarking passengers to the checkpoint.
Suddenly soldiers were running, calling loudly to each other. Alex froze, then saw that the soldiers had crowded around a man and an old woman who seemed to be carrying a heavy object between them. Alex stepped back into the shadows and listened.
“You must let me through,” the man said. Alex recognized his voice instantly—it was the Jew whose wife had died. It was the body of his wife, then, that they were holding between them, bundled in the train’s blankets and tied with string like an Egyptian mummy.
“You must let me through,” Ginzburg pleaded.
“What’s in there?” one of the soldiers asked, jabbing the bundle with the butt of his machine gun.
The arrogant brutality of the act seemed to Alex perverse and unnecessary. The Jew exploded in a burst of rage, kicking the butt of the gun and lashing out with one free hand while the other still held his end of the bundle. In a moment the soldiers had kicked him to the ground. The attendant dropped her end of the burden and stood dumbly looking about as if she were just a disinterested observer.
“Jew haters,” the man screamed, squirming and kicking as two soldiers lifted him to his feet and pinioned his arms. The soldier whose gun Ginzburg had kicked away from the bundle drove the butt into the Jew’s midsection.
Alex watched, hypnotized by the sheer brutality of it. He stood rooted to the spot, torn between the necessity of reaching the station and the temptation to intervene on Ginzburg’s side.
As Ginzburg retched and gasped, his body limp, his eyes bugging out, the soldier who had hit him knelt down next to the bundle and took out a long knife. He slit the rope and sliced carelessly through the blanket, then parted the edges with his blade.
“A woman,” he said. The knife had sliced into her flesh, leaving a long black line down one side of her face.
Somehow Ginzburg recovered his breath. “Bastards,” he screamed at the top of his lungs.
The soldiers laughed as he screamed and struggled in their viselike grip. The commotion attracted the attention of the major who had been supervising procedures at the checkpoint. He walked directly over to Ginzburg, who was still struggling.
“What is this?” the major asked, looking down at the mutilated body.
“A dead woman,” the soldier said. “They were carrying the body in that direction.” The soldier turned and pointed directly at Alex. The major looked where the soldier was pointing, then turned back to Ginzburg, as if Alex had been invisible. Ginzburg was silent. The major then looked questioningly at the old woman who stood trembling beside them.
“She died.” The old woman shrugged.
“That is quite obvious,” the major responded.
“What were you doing?” he demanded of Ginzburg.
The Jew stopped struggling, his eyes roving from his wife’s lifeless face to that of the major. From where he stood, Alex could see the glare of hate in his eyes.
“Quickly, I have no time.” The major glanced at his watch briefly, then looked back at Ginzburg. For a moment they stood glaring at each other, vapor pouring from their mouths, their faces a few inches apart. In the split second before it happened Alex could see it coming, could forecast its happening. The muscles of Ginzburg’s neck moved and in the next moment he spit into the major’s face. The major struck him one quick open-handed blow across the face, a conditioned reflex. Then he reached into his tunic for a handkerchief.
“You swine,” the major said. He poked at the body with the tip of his boot. “Remove this garbage,” he ordered the soldiers.
Alex stepped forward. “I would suggest you stop this stupidity,” he said. All eyes turned toward him.
“Doctor,” Ginzburg cried, struggling again in the grip of the soldiers.
“Doctor?” the major asked.
“You realize that you are being ridiculous.”
The major watched him curiously, his eyes narrowing.
“We were carrying Vera’s body to the baggage car,” Ginzburg said, surprisingly calm now. “She must be buried in Birobidjan.”
“Is there any harm in that?” Alex asked.
“You are Dr. Cousins?” the major asked coldly.
“Will you please release this man?” Alex said.
The major hesitated, then nodded at the soldiers. Ginzburg dropped to his knees over the body of his wife and quickly brought the ends of the blanket together. He retied the bundle with great gentleness, as if the woman were still alive.
“Now will you allow them to proceed?” Alex asked.
The major hesitated again, then looked into the face of the trembling old woman.
“Make it fast,” he commanded.
Ginzburg lifted one end, the woman the other, and they proceeded toward the baggage car. One of the soldiers ran ahead and opened the carriage door.
Alex turned to the major. “I demand to be taken to a representative of the American Government.”
“There is no one in Irkutsk.”
“Then I demand to be flown back to Moscow immediately.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“Then I demand to communicate directly with General Secretary Dimitrov.”
The idea had come to him suddenly. He would tell Dimitrov about the murder of Grivetsky.
The major seemed startled for a moment. “I can’t allow that.”
“I am his physician.”
“I have my orders.”
“From whom?”
The major did not answer that. “My orders are simply to see that you do not disembark,” he said. “I mean you no disrespect.”
“You have no right,” Alex said. “I am a United States citizen. I am General Secretary Dimitrov’s personal physician. Do not interfere with me in any way.”
Alex started to walk toward the ornate railway station, his body stiff with expectation. The major followed, obviously uncomfortable in his role.
“I cannot allow this.”
“You had better.”
“I have orders.”
“You can tell Zeldovich to piss on a stick.”
The major hesitated, then caught up with Alex again.
“You must come back to the train.”
“Kiss my ass.”
The major darted in front of him, barring his way.
“Let me pass.”
“I have my orders.”
“Fuck your orders.”
The major continued to bar his way. The line of soldiers was watching. Alex had issued his challenge. Now he was waiting for the moment when the major would be forced to act.
“Let me pass,” Alex hissed at the major.
The major called his bluff. “Escort this man back to the train,” he shouted to one of his officers.
Alex was instantly surrounded by tall, grim-looking soldiers, machine guns at the ready, ungloved fingers curved around the triggers. He felt oddly exhilarated. His sudden aggressiveness was as new to him as his feeling for Anna Petrovna, and, in its own way, as exciting. Finally, irrevocably, he felt drawn in at last, a player not a spectator. He was in the game now.
He suddenly pushed with both hands against the midsection of one of the soldiers, feeling the icy barrel of the machine gun.
The soldier struck Alex a glancing blow to the side of his face, making him reel backward into the snow. As he struggled to rise, the major bent over him.
“You must not resist,” he pleaded.
“Go fuck a duck,” Alex said in English.
He got to his feet and started again for the railway station, his feet sliding in the snow. Another soldier stepped in his path, barring the way, and Alex barreled into him.
“Don’t . . .” he heard the major shout. He barely felt the blow, only the sensation of disappearing into an endless void.