“That wasn’t worth cable tolls to New York as a news item if accepted as the truth, but I happened to know something of his previous activities in connection with Moscow, and I suggested in my yam that part of his business here possibly was political.
“My copy might have been rejected by the censor, anyway, but it might also have put the foreign office — and Perez — on guard.
“Instead, I’m going to file a couple of hundred words of innocuous stuff taking him at his word — Vast Opportunity for Latin-American Trade Relations with Russia, and that sort of thing.
“The Soviet foreign office watches closely every bit of copy that goes out of Russia, and if there is any skullduggery on with Perez it will be best to have them think there isn’t any suspected.
“I don’t think any of the other correspondents working here now know about Perez’s past jobs nor have talked with him since he arrived.
“There is so much to keep an eye on in Moscow, and throughout Russia and Siberia, that we have a news-sharing arrangement. This week I am looking after aviation, among other things, and I’ll give the rest of the gang what I am sending out, together with a little story on the American aviator visiting the Moscow terminal of the European airways. Not the whole truth, but a useful grain of it, anyway.”
Reading smiled. “No wonder they made you a news censor when you were in the A. E. F.”
“I wasn’t any too fond of that job,” said Rossiter. “But as a newspaper man I’ve nursed along many a story under cover that premature bean-spilling would have spoiled.”
“I have good reason to know it, Dave,” said Reading.
They were passing the great wooden tomb of Lenin, before the massive walls of the Kremlin, above which floated a large red flag.
A powerful light from within the walls played upon this flag and, aided by a light wind from the northwest, made it a livid flame against the dark sky. Four soldiers of the Red Army guarded the tomb, which was weirdly illuminated by red flood-lights.
They stopped. Whereupon a disreputable droshky also stopped, a few feet away. An even more disreputable-looking and ragged izvostchik offered his services. Rossiter waved him away. The droshky, drawn jerkily over uneven coblestones by an ancient nag of a horse, rattled off.
“Lenin, before he died,” said Rossiter, “had come to realize that undiluted Bolshevism wouldn’t evolve Utopia in Russia.
“If he had lived he would have modified the dictatorship of the proletariat very considerably. He had already made a beginning in that direction and, Marxian fanatic though he was, he saw clearly that Russia could not bring about world revolution without first demonstrating the success of its own.
“He is now venerated as a saint of the Russian people — a veneration he would have scorned and despised. Behind those walls two factions and two second-rate leaders fight to inherit the leadership that was Lenin’s.
“These groups he ruled with an iron hand until he died. One faction — the extremists who still believe in a world revolution — is led by the former East Side New York pamphleteer, Trotzky; the other, the moderationists, is controlled by Stalin, the political boss of the Communist party.
“Just now Stalin seems to have the upper hand, and that is why Washington has been led to believe that it may be possible to deal with Moscow.
“But Stalin does not sufficiently dominate a powerful section of the Communist party that insists upon continued work for a world revolution. The outside world is able only to guess what is going on behind those thirteenth century walls, where Bolshevism is in a state of political siege.”
“About Perez — what is your guess?” asked Reading.
“He is one among dozens who have been working as international agents for Moscow, operating in strategic countries the world over. China, for instance.
“Penfield, our Shanghai man, in confidential dispatches to New York has told us that Soviet Russia’s hand is likely to be shown openly in South China before the end of 1926 — less than six months from now.
“Perez is, of course, a liar, especially on the face of his statement that he will have concluded his business here and be ready to leave in three days.
“No business, except something prearranged, cut-and-dried, could be concluded between Russians and a Latin-American in that space of time.
“You have been south of the Rio Grande, and therefore know something of business methods there. Well, even Honduras is a high-pressure country compared with Russia. If an invading army should ever get inside the Kremlin it would be tripped up and helplessly entangled by red tape.”
Reading was silent as they walked back toward the hotel. He was as far from a plan of action to get definite proof of a Russian plot in the Americas as he had been when he first met Perez on the Leviathan.
Rossiter proceeded to the telegraph office, and Reading returned to his room, where he smoked a cigarette and called it a day.
Through his window came the soft strains of a café balalaika orchestra playing “The Three Guitars,” which he remembered having heard in a restaurant in Second Avenue, which advertised an exiled chef from Moscow.
VI
At the dinner of the Deruluft pilots he found himself among his own kind and enjoyed it. Besides his pilot of the flight from Germany, two or three others spoke a little English.
His French helped him out with the Russian flyers of the Deruluft staff. These aviators a few years ago had fought against one another in the clouds over western Russia and eastern Germany; they now ate and drank together like squadron mates.
Moldenko was present. He indicated two diners at the far end of the table. They were opening a Bottle of vodka. “Do you see the big Russian, Radin, with his arm around the German pilot, Koenig?” They had begun to sing a Russian song, which Radin evidently was teaching Koenig.
“They seem like old friends,” Reading smilingly observed.
“They have been friends,” said Moldenko, “since they met after the war, and Radin recalled Koenig as the pilot who shot him down near Kovno.
“They had a party to celebrate then-reunion under polite circumstances, and the Russian got revenge by drinking Koenig into a forced landing under the table.
“Radin will pilot you and Perez to Germany. There will be no other passengers. Express freight and mail have taken most of the plane’s capacity.”
“What about Radin’s capacity?” asked Reading. “I shouldn’t like to take off with him if we had to leave in the morning.”
“He does not fly to-morrow, and I have never known him to take a drop to drink the night before going on flying duty. As a war pilot he was known as a headlong and a relentlessly vicious foe, but he has proved to be a capable commercial pilot.”
The following day Reading was a guest at Trotzky Field. He was not asked to inspect military machines, but a speedy little sport plane was tuned up and he was invited to fly it. Before taking off he was advised of a rule against flying over the Kremlin.
He delighted the Deruluft pilots and mechanics with an acrobatic exhibition, and was about to come down for a landing when he looked down and saw another plane of the same type taking off.
He rightly guessed that he was being challenged to a sporting dog-fight, a form of exhibition flying which can become almost as dangerous as the real thing if one or the other of the pilots, moved excessively by professional pride, presses his opponent too closely.
The ascending pilot proved to be Radin. Reading earnestly hoped that the Russian’s head had cleared. Pilots regard half an hour’s flying as the best of all hangover cures.