‘Depends. If we did it that way, how much would I have to pay?’
‘Let’s say that your 50,000 might be enough.’
‘And what’s in the boxes?’
Ettore changed gear and studied Pierre to see if he had the right to ask the question.
‘Cigarettes,’ he replied finally.
‘Fine. If my brother finds out he’ll kill me, but I’ll think about it, ok?’
The silence that followed was very different from the earlier one. Pierre leaned his elbow on the lowered window, slid forwards on the seat and closed his eyes to concentrate. If he accepted, he would have to do it in such a way that Nicola’s suspicions weren’t aroused. Ever. Otherwise, goodbye Yugoslavia, goodbye money, goodbye everything. A passing train blanked out any further thoughts.
‘Are we taking a drive just to talk, or are we going somewhere?’ he asked when the rails had grown quiet again.
‘I’m taking you to see Ghigo, the guy who’s taking care of the documents. He’ll get you a false passport with an entry stamp for Yugoslavia. He’s a sound bloke, he works in watches.’
‘Watches?’
‘Not your good stuff. Junk.’ He took a drag and threw away his cigarette. Ghigo’s scam was worth relating. ‘He’s the king of junk,’ he went on with a chuckle. ‘Last week he pulled this brilliant trick on a geezer from Vergato.’
Pierre’s attention was hooked already. ‘He stops the mark in the street, right, and he says, “Excuse me, I have a case of very valuable watches here, and they haven’t yet been through all the necessary customs procedures. Do you know where I could fill in the requisite forms?” The man stands there looking stupid, while an accomplice of Ghigo’s comes over and says, “I heard you talking about watches. I need to buy one, can I have a look?” So Ghigo opens the case and shows him, and his friend pretends to be interested, like these are really precious watches. “They’re worth an arm and a leg,”’ says Ghigo. ‘“But because I haven’t paid border tax, I can keep the prices low: 50,000.” The other man acts as though he’s about to pay up immediately, but he hasn’t got enough money. So he turns to the mark: “Can you lend me 30,000 lire? I’ll go to the bank with this guy here, and I’ll be back straight away. As a guarantee I’ll give you this watch, which is worth 50,000. Is that ok?” The fool’s wife tries to stop him, but he says the gentleman is clearly on the level. He lends him the 30,000, the two men go off and don’t come back.’
‘And how much was the watch worth?’ asked Pierre, amused.
‘Not more than a thousand. I think they make them in Bulgaria or somewhere down there.’
Pierre smiled. At the worst, he’d found a way of getting hold of the 50,000.
Chapter 31
Moscow, the Lubyanka, 1 April
General Ivan Alexandrovich Serov tried out the sofa in the big office. The afternoon light came faintly through the window, the Moscow spring trying to defeat the frost: it had been a hard winter.
He still didn’t feel at ease. In particular, he couldn’t see why a single person needed such a capacious office. Elegant surroundings. Too much so, he thought. He would get rid of some of the fripperies. The heavy curtains could be used to warm up the army rather than gathering dust by the window. And the ornaments would go first, he’d always hated them, pointless, cumbersome objects. With all that iron you could forge weapons to defend the revolution, and the wood could be burned in the soldiers’ bivouacs. And the porcelain vases? A better use could be found for the porcelain, too.
Basically that was why he had been put there. To restore order and clean up. He would start with the small things. Ornaments and knick-knacks.
The ‘economic’ vision of things was the strong point of his career and his political training. A sound practical sense at the service of the greatest ideal. If the ideal was the dynamite, the practical sense was the fuse. During his years at the Ministry he had never got used to working behind the scenes.
Having grown up on the battlefields, he knew the cold of Belorussia and Poland, and the lead of the Nazi bullets. He didn’t need frills and furbelows to direct the deportations from the Caucasus, to put down the pockets of White Russian resistance in Poland, coordinate Ministry activities in East Germany.
He studied the paintings on the walls. Lenin stared at a vague point on the horizon. His determined gaze inspired a profound trust in human destinies. He had seen the Little Father only once, when he had marched through Red Square with his regiment at the age of eighteen.
May the 1st 1922: he turned his head towards the stage, along with all his comrades, and he saw him, small, fur hat protecting his bald head, flanked by the traitor Trotsky and Comrade Stalin.
Now Stalin looked down at him from the wall opposite, with an ‘amused’ expression. His moustache hid his mouth, it was impossible to tell whether or not he was smiling, but it seemed to him that he was: the wise, angelic smile of someone who has understood everything. He remembered the day of the funeral, the yelling masses, the women tearing their clothes and striking themselves on the head.
He wept too. The first time in years. He hadn’t even shed a tear in Berlin, in the spring of 1945, at the sight of the red flag hoisted over the Reichstag. And yet he had been moved. The victory crowned years of hard work, hunger and death. He would carry that moment with him, the big flag flapping in the wind, until the end of his days. And Stalin’s funeral. An infinite sense of loss, a vague sense of panic: the Leader was no longer there. That day the question rose up from the back of his mind, the same question being asked by the members of Central Committee: ‘What now?’
‘Now.’ General Serov immediately knew what would happen. Only the strongest survive. And the patient. A lesson he had learned while fighting Hitler: a good general must always know when to retreat, to allow the enemy to advance, to tire themselves out, and then to strike them mercilessly until they are destroyed. That day, as he stared at Stalin’s coffin, he banished his tears and started thinking.
Only a year had passed since then, enough to make some calculations and decide who would be promoted and who would stay where they were.
The struggle for succession had been resolved in a few months. ‘Stalin’s dauphin’, Malenkov, versus ‘Stalin’s best friend’, Beria. He himself had known how to wait and choose his moment. Anyone who had set out to rout his adversaries and win hands down had been dragged into the mud. Same mistake as Hitler: Blitzkrieg. A strategy that doesn’t pay off in the long term. Any self-respecting Russian should know that.
As Minister of the Interior, Beria planned to change everything, trampling over Stalin’s corpse while it was still warm. Bloody lunatic. From the first moment, when he was called in to receive his new instructions (‘No more purges of Jews from the Party, no more trials, we’ve got to start everything over from the beginning’), the general understood that this fool would not get far. He stepped aside, to watch the wolves tear him to pieces. At the head of the pack he found his man, the cleverest one, who would destroy all the rest of them: the future Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. The general didn’t think twice before joining the conspiracy to eliminate Beria and the ‘Caucasian’ clan. It was a matter of survival.
It was easy to imagine Beria’s deputy in the Ministry of the Interior, Sergei Kruglov, being bought for a couple of roubles, just to take the place of his boss. But the general didn’t trust him to stay in the saddle. What was certain was that before going into action, Khrushchev would make sure he had the support of the army. So he sent an explicit signal to Marshal Zhukov, Deputy Defence Minister and an old associate from his Berlin days. So he went in search of conspirators.