The rush abated.
“I find the accused guilty as charged,” Kuznetsky said. “Have the straws been drawn?” he asked Morisov.
“Yes.”
Young Maslov walked forward, pulled the accused to his feet, and half dragged him off between two cottages. Why, Kuznetsky wondered, do we still have this need to execute in private? Who was the privacy for — the victim or the executioner?
The shot echoed through the village, silencing the birds for a few seconds. Kuznetsky walked over to the group of villagers.
“You’ll be better off in Vaselivichi,” he told them, but they knew better.
“Poznyakov wasn’t the only one who sowed a clearing,” they told him.
“Stenkin wasn’t a bad man,” one muttered. “He was right; he could have turned in the lot of us.”
Sheslakov arrived early at his Frunze Street office and found the NKVD messenger waiting outside his door with file in hand. He signed for it in triplicate, ordered his usual three cups of coffee from his secretary, and settled himself behind his desk. While he waited he studied the photograph that came with the file. Did the man look American or did he think that only because he knew he was American? Perhaps it was the half-amused expression on the face, not a common feature in NKVD portraiture. He put it to one side as the coffee arrived; faces were Fyedorova’s speciality, not his.
The man’s real name was Jack Patrick Smith; Yakov Kuznetsky was a literal translation of the first and last names. He’d been born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1900 to second-generation Anglo-Irish immigrants. His father had been a cop and his mother a seamstress. There had been no other children.
Jack had joined the U.S. Army in 1918 — “to see the world” he’d told his first Soviet interrogator — and had been posted to one of the battalions used in the American intervention. In August of that year his battalion was guarding the Suchan mines near Vladivostok, the only source of coal for the eastern section of the Trans-Siberian, a footnote helpfully pointed out. For several weeks the Americans and the local population had gotten on well, but when the Revolution reached the area the Americans sided with the Whites and the mining community with the Reds. The Americans occupied the mines. One day one of their officers was shot, and the Americans went out looking for a culprit. Smith and another man, O’Connell, were sent to search the house of a miner who lived some way from the village.
They didn’t come back.
The Americans assumed they’d been captured by Red partisans and offered to exchange two arrested miners. They didn’t believe it when the Reds told them Smith was not a prisoner, so a meeting was arranged between him and the American commander on neutral ground. Smith told him that O’Connell had attacked the Russian miner’s daughter and that he’d shot and killed O’Connell. Smith told his commander he’d joined the Revolution and that was all there was to it.
Sheslakov put down the file, took the handbook of Siberian flora off the second cup of coffee, and watched the steam escape like a smoke signal. An apparently ordinary American boy “joining the Revolution,” just like that. It didn’t bode altogether well. The Mongols had always slaughtered deserters on the grounds that they’d shown they could never be trusted. Still, he mused, the current condition of Mongolia didn’t say much for their judgment.
Sheslakov went back to the file.
After the Revolution, Smith — now Kuznetsky — had been thoroughly investigated. He’d come out clean, and since he’d already proved himself with the partisans, commanding his own group in the Chita area for over a year, he’d been snapped up by the Cheka in Irkutsk. Since then it had been all promotions and special assignments: head of the Chita NKVD 1931–34, commissar attached to special anti-kulak forces in the Saratov area, the West Ukraine, and the Crimea, 1934–37, administrative adviser in Spain 1937–39. He’d been sent back to the Far East in 1939 to a post in the Commissariat attached to Zhukov’s General Staff, had still been there when the Far Eastern divisions were redeployed on the Moscow Front in November 1941. Finally, he’d volunteered for partisan duty and been parachuted into Belorussia in May 1942 as a replacement brigade commissar. For the last six months he’d been commanding the brigade, as the previous commander had been killed and not replaced.
Why, Sheslakov wondered, would a man with Kuznetsky’s glittering record volunteer for partisan duty? The noble-gesture theory didn’t fit with the rest of his career. Had he been trying to recreate his idealistic youth? And why, in twenty years of promotions, had he never gotten himself a position in Moscow? It wouldn’t have been difficult if he’d wanted one. But he hadn’t, and that was unusual.
Sheslakov took the fauna handbook off the third cup and took a sip. In all other respects the man was perfect, and choosing a more difficult life was no indication of disloyalty. The reverse, some would say. He lit his first cigarette of the day, watched the smoke wafting upward, then reached for the telephone.
He was on his third call when Fyedorova arrived. He passed her the photograph without speaking, and she took it across to the window.
Fyedorova was his “administrative assistant,” and had been since the beginning of the war. She was ten years older than Sheslakov, a small, thin woman who had worked for the GRU since its founding. Fyedorova drank to excess, cared nothing for authority, and did next to no work. Her only function, which both she and Sheslakov found self-justifying, was to act as his sounding board. For this she was perfectly equipped. Her intelligence was as purely psychological as his was purely logical; she had a wisdom, an insight into people, which he found as vital as it was irritating.
“First reaction?” he asked as he put down the phone.
“A wild card,” she replied, pinning the photograph to the wall opposite her chair.
“Try this one,” he said, passing across a picture of a young, dark-haired woman.
Fyedorova stared at it for some time. “This one tells me nothing,” she said finally, “and that’s unusual.”
“A good start,” Sheslakov murmured. “Put it up with the other one and I’ll tell you who they are and what I have in mind for them.”
He went through his plan, clarifying his own appreciation of it in the process.
“Ingenious,” she said when he’d finished. “But you know that.”
She looked up again at the two faces, both with the half-smile, as if they were looking at the same thing. “Even the best play…”
“Depends on good acting,” he completed drily.
“And one of our two leading actors has been forced on us by circumstance. Her file is about as useful as the people who wrote it.”
“I’ve got Nikolai trying to trace the man who recommended her recruitment. Luerhsen, Josef. According to her file, he’s in Moscow, but his file’s disappeared.”
She was still staring at the photographs. “Neither of them is Russian,” she said. “Zhdanov won’t like that.”
“Zhdanov will like the alternative even less. Let’s get the script right first, then worry about the actors.”
He picked up the phone again and, after some playful banter with the switchboard girl, whose name he kept forgetting, was put through to Sergei Yanovsky, an old friend and the head of the GRU’s German section.
“I need to talk to you, Sergei Ivanovich.”
“I can’t make it today or tomor—”
“First Priority. How about twenty minutes?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I must remember that for the bread queue,” Fyedorova said. “I assume you want me here.”
“Yes, we have a long day ahead. Yanovsky is only the first.” He picked up the phone again and made three more appointments, two in his office and one at a research institute outside the city. He’d barely put the phone down when Yanovsky arrived. The two men embraced.