“Damn you,” Monique snarled. She wasn’t sure if she meant Kuhn or Pierre or both at once. Both at once, probably.
She returned to the inscriptions-a forlorn hope, and she knew it. Latin seemed spectacularly meaningless tonight. She almost screamed when the telephone rang again. “Hello, little sister,” Pierre Dutourd said in her ear. “By God, it feels good to be on my own again.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Monique said, sounding anything but glad. “I’m on my own, too, but not the way you mean.”
As Dieter Kuhn had, her brother ignored her. “I had to play both ends against the middle,” he boasted, “but I pulled it off.”
“How lucky for you.” This time, Monique got the last word and hung up. But it did her little good. Thanks to Pierre, she was stuck between the Nazis and the Lizards, too, and the only thing to which she could look forward was getting crushed when they collided.
Vyacheslav Molotov wished for eyes in the back of his head. They might not have done him any good; plotters were generally too subtle to show up under even the most vigilant inspection. But that didn’t mean the plotters weren’t there. On the contrary. He’d found that out, and counted himself lucky to have survived the lesson.
Stalin, now, Stalin had seen plotters everywhere, whether they were really there or not. He’d killed a lot of people on the off chance they were plotters, or in the hope that their deaths would frighten others out of plotting. At the time, Molotov had thought him not just wasteful but more than a little crazy.
Now he wasn’t so sure. Stalin had died in bed, without anyone having seriously tried to overthrow him. That was no mean achievement. Molotov admired it much more now that he’d weathered an attempted coup.
His secretary poked his head into the office. “Comrade General Secretary, Comrade Nussboym is here to see you.”
“Yes, I was expecting him,” Molotov said. “Send him in.”
In came David Nussboym: Jewish, skinny, nondescript-except for the golden star of the Order of Lenin pinned to his breast pocket. He nodded to Molotov. “Good morning, Comrade General Secretary.”
“Good morning, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered. “What can I do for you today? You have asked for so little since the day of the coup, it rather makes me nervous.” From another man, that might have been a joke, or at least sounded like one. From Molotov, it sounded like what it was: a statement of curiosity tinged with suspicion.
“Comrade General Secretary, I can tell you what I want,” Nussboym said. “I want revenge.”
“Ah.” Molotov nodded; Nussboym had picked a motivation he understood. “Revenge against whom? Whoever it is, you shall have it.” He made a sour face, then had to amend his words: “Unless it is Marshal Zhukov. I am also in his debt.” And if I try to move against him, he will move against me, and the outcome of that would be… unfortunate.
“I have nothing against the marshal,” Nussboym said. “He could have quietly disposed of me after we came out of NKVD headquarters, but he didn’t.”
He could have quietly disposed of me, too, Molotov thought. Maybe it is that he is like a German general-too well trained to meddle in politics. In the USSR, that made Zhukov a rarity. “All right, then,” Molotov said. “I asked you once; now I ask you again: revenge against whom?”
He thought he knew what Nussboym would say, and the Polish Jew proved him right: “Against the people who sent me to the Soviet Union against my will twenty years ago.”
“I cannot order the Jews of Warsaw punished, you know, as I could with citizens of the Soviet Union,” Molotov reminded him.
“I understand that, Comrade General Secretary,” Nussboym said. “I have in mind the Jews of Lodz, not Warsaw.”
“That will make it harder stilclass="underline" Lodz is closer to the borders of the Reich than it is to us,” Molotov said. “Had you said Minsk, life would be simple. Infiltrating Minsk is child’s play.”
“I know. I have done it,” David Nussboym replied. “But I come from the western part of Poland, and that is where my enemies live.”
“As you wish. I keep my promises,” Molotov said, conveniently forgetting how many he had broken. “I give you a free hand against your enemies there in Lodz. Whatever resources you require, you have my authorization to utilize. The only thing you may not do is embarrass the Soviet Union’s relations with the Lizards. If you do that, I will throw you to the wolves. Is it agreeable? Do we have a bargain?”
“It is agreeable, and we do have a bargain,” Nussboym said. “Thank you, Comrade General Secretary.” Despite having saved Molotov’s life, he did not presume to address him by first name and patronymic. The USSR was officially a classless society, but that did not change who was on top and who below.
“Good enough, then, David Aronovich,” Molotov said. “So long as you do not embroil us with the Race, do what you will.” He realized he sounded rather like God sending Satan out to afflict Job. The conceit amused him-not enough for him to let it show on the outside, true, but he found very few things that amusing.
Nussboym also knew better than to linger. Having got what he wanted from Molotov, he rose, nodded, and took his leave. After he was gone-but only after he was gone-Molotov nodded approval.
Half an hour till his next appointment. Those thirty minutes might stretch, too; Khrushchev had the time sense of the Ukrainian peasant he’d been born, not of the West. He came and went when he thought it right and fitting, not according to the bidding of any clock. Molotov pulled a report from the pile awaiting his attention, donned his spectacles, and began to read.
He remembered memoranda wondering what the United States was doing with its space station. From the report in his hands, it appeared that the Reich and the Lizards were wondering, too. He scratched his head. Such aggressive work seemed more likely the province of the Reich than of the USA. President Warren had always struck him as a cautious and capable reactionary. He hoped the man would be reelected in 1964.
But what were the Americans doing up there? From the report in front of him, even some of them were wondering-wondering and not finding out. Molotov frowned. Secrecy was unlike the Americans, too, at least for anything less vital than their nuclearexplosives project.
He scribbled a note to spur further investigation. Most of that would have to be on the ground. The Soviet Union had forced itself into space along with the Germans and the Americans, but it was not the player there that the other two independent human powers were.
On the ground… “Damn you, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” Molotov murmured. In the wake of Beria’s failed coup, the NKVD was being purged. That had to happen; the fallen chief’s backers had to go. But Molotov wished they didn’t have to go now. With the NKVD in disarray, he had to rely more on the GRU, the Red Army’s intelligence operation, which-again-made him more dependent on Georgi Zhukov. With two agencies doing the same job, he could play one off against the other. For the time being, he’d lost that option.
Muttering balefully under his breath, he reached out for the next report. It gave him good news: several caravans of arms had crossed the border into Lizard-occupied China and reached the People’s Liberation Army. Mao would keep the Race hopping like fleas on a griddle; Molotov was confident of that.
He worked his way through the whole report instead of contenting himself with the one-page summary stapled to the front. An eyebrow rose-with him, a sign of considerable emotion. Someone had tried to sneak something past him. The report mentioned that a shipment of U.S. arms had reached the People’s Liberation Army despite the best efforts of the Kuomintang, the Lizards, and, ever so secretly, the GRU. The report mentioned that-but the summary didn’t.
In future, he wrote, I expect summaries to conform more closely to the documents they are supposed to summarize. Failure in this regard will not be tolerated. If that didn’t make some apparatchik ’s ulcer twinge, he didn’t know what would.