“Naturally,” Leotov answered, “although Guibert isn’t Corsican, so the relationship is strictly business. Certainly he dealt with La Corse during the war.”
“What about the son?” Voroshenin asked.
“Michel?”
Voroshenin sighed. “Yes.”
Again, all appeared to be as it seemed. Leotov laid some grainy photographs on the desk. The son was born in Montpellier but raised in Hong Kong, hence his fluent Cantonese. He had the reputation of a gambler, womanizer, and ne’er-do-well, out of his father’s favor until after the war and the auto accident.
“The what?”
“There was a car crash in” – Leotov checked his notes – “the summer of ‘50, in Monaco. Michel had apparently dropped a bundle at the casino, drowned his sorrows, and crashed the car halfway through a wicked S-curve.”
Apparently it was touch and go for a while, and Guibert fils needed extensive surgery to repair his face. The surgeries seemed to have accomplished a character transplant of a sort – the son emerged a changed, more serious man, eager to take his place in the family business.
“That’s interesting,” Voroshenin said.
Leotov shrugged. He really didn’t see what was so interesting about it.
Voroshenin did. He hadn’t survived the Stalinist purges by being tone deaf, and this auto accident struck a discordant note. Reconstructive facial surgery followed by a moral metamorphosis?
“Where is the father now?” he asked. “Do we know?”
“I suppose in Hong Kong.”
“You suppose? Find out.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“All right, what about Ivanovna?”
“I have a full report.” Leotov started to recite his findings.
“Leave it.”
“But there are -”
“I said to leave it.”
Leotov set the file on the desk and left.
Voroshenin opened the desk drawer. He had a feeling he would need a stiff drink to read this file.
41
THE GREAT WALL certainly is, Nicholai thought.
A monumental, as it were, achievement of architecture and organization. But, like a static Go defense, it never fulfilled its function of keeping out an invader. There is no point building a wall when the gatekeepers can be purchased.
Still, the wall was a marvel to see, as it stretched along the rises and falls of the ridges and hills, flexible as a giant snake, its stones resembling the scales of a reptile. Or a dragon, perhaps, Nicholai thought, in the Chinese zoological cosmology.
No, he decided, the Go analogy is more apt. The wall was like a thin long line of stones, vulnerable by its very length, unsupported by defensive depth.
A lesson to be had there, certainly.
Chen fell asleep on the drive back to Beijing, sparing Nicholai the necessity to make small talk. Instead he began to prepare his mind for the task at hand, and as he thought about it, he realized that he was soon to become a professional assassin.
He had killed three men in his young life – nothing by the standards of his generation, which had endured the slaughters of the war.
His first had been Kishikawa, his father figure, and he had done it to spare his mentor shame. So it was a matter of filial duty, almost as if he had assisted the general in committing seppuku.
The next two had tried to kill him first, so they were acts of self-defense.
But this would be an intentional act of murder for profit. He could rationalize it by thinking that he was reclaiming his own life, and Solange’s, but the fact remained that he was about to take another’s life to benefit his own, and moral evasions were as useful as the towers of the Great Wall.
Yet the monetary compensation from the Americans was almost irrelevant.
This was a matter of honor.
Voroshenin was not just another man, another human life.
Shortly before she died, Nicholai’s mother had told him the story of what happened between her and Yuri Voroshenin.
Petrograd was frozen and fast running out of fuel.
The winter of 1922 was unusually harsh, the small supply of coal had already dwindled, and the Communists were tearing down private homes for firewood. The famed lindens of Taurichesky Gardens had been stripped of the branches for firewood, and the trees looked like execution stakes.
It was a miracle – no, not a miracle but a testament to her iron will – that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna’s family house, occupying half a block on Kirochnaya Street, still stood, although the Soviet Petrograd had forced her to turn most of it into a kpmmunalka, housing several dozen workers’ families.
Well, workers in theory, anyway – the lack of fuel and materials and the hyperinflation brought on by Western financial assaults on the ruble had closed many of Petrograd’s factories. The workers were freezing and starving.
It was on a February afternoon that Yuri Voroshenin, then the head of the Petrograd Cheka, climbed the steps to the huge wooden doors and kicked the snow off his shoes. He entered without knocking.
The enormous foyer was full of people, shuddering in coats and blankets, and yet she had prevented them from chopping up the expensive wooden furniture that filled the house. Voroshenin walked past them onto the sweeping curved staircase and went up to the rooms where she retained her “apartment.”
She was thin, her cheeks a little sunken, her skin pale with hunger. Even the upper classes were hard-pressed to find or pay for food. Nevertheless she regarded him with the haughty look of the ruling class, as if to ask what he was doing disturbing her at such an early hour of the afternoon.
Clearly he was not used to insolence. He wanted her to be afraid, as well she might have been, for this creature was responsible for countless executions and hideous tortures and she was at his mercy. But she showed no fear.
“Good day, Comrade Ivanovna.”
“I am not, nor never will be, your ‘comrade.’ ”
“You know that such an attitude could get you shot.”
She closed the book. “Now? Shall we go? Should I bring a wrap or are you going to shoot me here?”
“I am not amused.”
“Nor amusing.”
She reached to her bed table for a square of colored paper and unwrapped it to reveal a piece of chocolate and then noticed the Bolshevik’s hungry stare. Despite the fact that she had saved this little bit for weeks, she said, “How rude of me. Would you care for a bite?” Snapping the chocolate in half, she held it out to him.
He accepted it. “I haven’t seen chocolate since…”
“I believe ‘since before the Revolution’ is the phrase you’re searching for,” Alexandra said pleasantly. “Yes, St. Petersburg was a city of large and small pleasures then.”
“It’s Petrograd now.”
“As you wish,” she said.
She watched him savor the chocolate, and then he said, “You will be required to move out.”
What was she to do? she asked Nicholai as she told him the story. Her family had all been killed in the war or executed by the Reds. More than death, she was terrified by the thought of being out in the street, without her attachments, her belongings, her things. There were few places to live in Petrograd, fewer still where a notorious “White” would find a welcome. She had seen her peers on the streets carting human waste, selling apples, renting their bodies.
“And where will I go?” she asked.
“That is not my concern.”
Alone and helpless, the only power she retained was the only power a woman had in those days. She looked at him for several moments and then said, “It could be. Your concern, that is.”
“Whatever would make you think that?”
“The way you look at me,” she answered. “But am I wrong? Perhaps I am mistaken.”
“No, you are not wrong.”
Releasing her hand from his grip, she walked over to the huge bed.
She kept her apartments.
He joined her there many afternoons and most nights, his position in the Cheka protecting him, at least for the time being, against the “social contamination” of an affair with a member of the “possessing classes.”