[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  “He’s using you,” he said.

  Shelby blushed. “You know, Gene, a simple ‘hello’ would be nice. Do you like the couch?” They had just sat down in the tiny living room of Shelby’s flat.

  “Forget the couch, Shel. I’m telling you, you don’t have any idea what kind of monster you’re involved with.”

  “You’re making this awfully difficult.”

  “Blame it on your Charlie. Your “great man.’ ”

  He was hurting her; he knew it. “Shel—” He reached for her, but she shied away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t just let this happen. This man has … lied his way into our lives all because he wants what my project can give him. It’s power he’s after, Shel—”

  “Oh, Gene, grow up!” She was facing him now. “You’ve been searching for months to drive a wedge between Charlie and me. You couldn’t do it with sweet reason, so now it’s because of your nasty little project.” She was angrier now than Gene had ever seen. “Are you sure that’s what the real problem is?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  Shelby stared at him. “I know more about you than you think I do….”

  Oh, Christ, he thought. No.

  “Gene, I’m not going to judge you. I love you. I know you had a much more difficult time with Daddy than I did. Whom you love is your business—”

  “Shelby, stop this. You sound like some radio mentalist.”

  “Well, you chose not to share this secret with me, so I’m probably going to say this all wrong.” There was a surprising amount of sarcasm in her voice, and for a moment Gene realized that he had underestimated her will. “I don’t know anything about a world in which men go with other men. I can’t even picture it,” she said, no doubt picturing it all too vividly, as Gene had often pictured Shelby with some man. Who was it who said you can’t be intimidated by people once you see them naked and on their knees? “But what I see is that you’re jealous.”

  “This is ridiculous.” It was his turn to recoil from her. He got up from the couch and looked for his jacket.

  “Is it? Then prove it to me. Because until you do, I have to assume that you’re acting like this because you want Charlie for yourself.” Before she finished he was out the door.

  He stayed late in his office that night preparing the document about Holder. It was easier than he thought it would be. His familiarity with the D.C.D. data system allowed him greater access to its personnel files—and those of its captive law firm—than any clerk could achieve. All of it, the résumé, the D.C.D. background search (quite secret; gentlemen did not check up on the claims of gentlemen), evaluations, ancillary materials from a financial institution with ties to D.C.D., all integrated with Gene’s perceptions of Holder’s personality traits, combined in one “character” who could be put through the Deconstruction model.

  The program ran to completion in less than ten minutes and the translation only took another hour, but Gene couldn’t bring himself to read it for much longer than that.

  Just as he suspected. The marriage would go well for a year, until Shelby produced an heir. (If Shelby did not get pregnant, this phase was merely extended by a year or so.) Holder would be a partner by then. He would also have become, again, a patron of the more reputable houses of pleasure, having given them up upon announcement of the engagement. He would dote on the child, boy or girl, and would encourage Shelby’s work in social causes, charities, whatnot, but she would be required to have at least a second child, while Holder would run for his first office—something in the state legislature….

  Within ten years Holder would be governor; within fifteen, senator or higher. He would campaign for contract rights, and, given reasonable assumptions concerning demographics and economic growth, and the lack of major wars, he would be successful—for the male underclass of the Confederacy.

  But what of Shelby? She and women like her would receive none of this largesse. It was too ingrained in the Confederate culture, where archaic antebellum attitudes about women were hardened and set for all time by the forty-year Occupation. It was commonly thought that, for the Confederacy, Lincoln had died too late. Now Gene knew that for the Shelbys of the world—who never had the chance to become real people—Lincoln died too soon.

  It was early the next morning when he found the nerve to call her. “You’ll notice I’m saying ‘hello’ this time.”

  “Hello, Gene.” He could hear the relief in her voice. He tried not to wonder if Holder was by her side. “I—”

  “Don’t say anything,” he told her. “Just meet me at the Atrium at once.”

  He had the data folded and resting by his plate when Shelby came in. She seemed genuinely happy to see him. “I’ve felt so awful because I didn’t thank you for the present!” she said, as if their last discussion had never happened.

  “That’s all right. I was being a beast.”

  They passed a quarter of an hour in small talk. News of Gene, Jr. Plans for the wedding. “I’m glad you mentioned the wedding,” Gene said.

  She grew quiet. “Charlie and me?”

  “You said you wanted proof.” He had his hand on the printout. Shelby stared at it.

  “I suppose that’s it. My future life?”

  “One of your future lives.”

  She held out her hand. He passed the paper to her. She looked at it without unfolding it. “How strange—to hold your life in your hand.”

  “Read it.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Shel—” He cleared his throat. “I guess I was just thinking about … what you could be.”

  She set the paper aside. “I’m sorry for what I said about you and Charlie.”

  “Frankly, my dear, he’s not my type.”

  Shelby blushed in disbelief. Enjoying her embarrassment, Gene leaned back in his chair. His eyes roamed around the Atrium and found one of the busboys, a husky contractee. “I like men,” he found himself saying, amazingly relieved, “from the lower classes. Much darker than Charlie.”

  Shelby glanced at the busboy, then looked at Gene. For a moment they were children again, sharing a secret they could keep from Daddy. “Do you ever want to change? To want women?”

  “I used to. But, you know, Shel, I don’t think I can.” Suddenly she had won. Gene wanted to laugh. This Great Man business was fine for the history books, even those yet unwritten, but what could it possibly mean to someone with a wayward child? An old man dying of cancer? A woman in love? Tell them they can’t change their futures? That they are nothing more than mules in horses’ harness? You might as well kill them.

  “I’m sorry, Shel. I really am. I’ve been a real shit about this. Maybe we can just start over….”

  Her face showed equal parts triumph and terror. She reached for his hand. “Yes.” Then she sat back, crumpled the paper, and tore it in half. “I should go.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  “At Daddy’s next week?”

  “Don’t push your luck, Shel.” Then, with a smile, she was gone. “Would you like me to get rid of that for you?” the waiter said, nodding toward the crumpled printout.

  “Yes,” Gene said. “Throw it away.”

  The waiter scooped it up along with the plates and walked off. Gene remembered that there was a place on Beecher Road where like-minded gentlemen could meet for a bit of excitement. He looked at his watch. The staff meeting wouldn’t take place until four.

  He had plenty of time.

  LENIN IN ODESSA

  George Zebrowski

  “Lenin is a rotten little incessant intriguer … He just wants power. He ought to be killed by some moral sanitary authority.”

  —H.G. WELLS (Letter dated July 1918, sent to the New York Weekly Review)

  1

  In 1918, Sidney Reilly, who had worked as a British agent against the Germans and Japanese, returned to our newly formed Soviet Russia. He was again working for England and her allies, but this
time he was also out for himself, intending to assassinate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and bring himself to power at the head of the regime that he imagined his homeland deserved.

  Jew though he was, Reilly saw himself as a Russian coming home to make good. It angered him that another expatriate, Lenin, had got there first—with German help, and with what Reilly considered suspect motives. Reilly was convinced that his own vision was the proper response to the problems of life in Russia, which, as Sigmund Rosenblum, a bastard born in Odessa, he had escaped in his youth. He believed that the right man could, with sufficient thought and preparation, make of history his own handiwork.

  It was obvious to me that Reilly’s thinking was a curious patchwork of ideas, daring and naive at the same time, but lacking the systematic approach of a genuine scientific philosophy. His distaste for the bourgeois society that had oppressed him in his childhood was real, but he had developed a taste for its pleasures.

  Of course, Reilly knew that he was sent in as a tool of the British and their allies, who opposed Bolshevism from the outset, and he let them continue to think that they could count on him, for at least as long as his aims would not conflict with theirs. Lenin himself had been eased back into Russia by the Germans, who hoped that he would take Russia out of the war in Europe. No German agent could have done that job better. Reilly was determined to remove or kill Lenin, as the prelude to a new Russia. What that Russia would be was not clear. The best that I could say about Reilly’s intentions was that he was not a Czarist.

  There was an undeniable effectiveness in Reilly, of which he was keenly aware. He was not a mere power seeker, even though he took pride in his physical prowess and craft as a secret agent; to see him as out for personal gain would be to underestimate the danger that he posed to those of us who understand power more fully than he did.

  Reilly compared himself to Lenin. They had both been exiles from their homeland, dreaming of return, but Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov had gone home on German hopes and seized power. Russia would be remade according to a heretical Marxism, in Reilly’s view. Lenin’s combination of revisionist ideology and good fortune was intolerable to Reilly; it wounded his craftsman’s ego, which saw chance as a minor player in history. He ignored the evidence of Lenin’s organizational skills, by which a spontaneous revolution had been shaped into one with purpose.

  Reilly viewed himself and his hopes for Russia with romantic agony and a sense of personal responsibility that were at odds with his practical intellect and shrewdness, both of which should have told him that he could not succeed. But Reilly’s cleverness delighted in craft and planning. His actions against the Germans and Japanese were all but inconceivable to the common man. Even military strategists doubted that one man could have carried out Reilly’s decisive schemes. His greatest joy was in doing what others believed to be impossible.

  Another clue to Reilly’s personality lay in his love of technology, especially naval aviation. He was an accomplished flyer who looked to the future of transport. He was fascinated, for example, by the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the aether wind, which was predicted on the idea of the Earth’s motion through a stationary medium. When this detection failed, Reilly wrote a letter to a scientific journal (supplied to me by one of my intellectual operatives in London) insisting that the aether was too subtle a substance to register on current instruments. One day, he claimed, aether ships would move between the worlds.

  Reilly’s mind worried a problem until he found an imaginative solution; then his practical bent would find a way to accomplish the task. As a child he was able to remain invisible to his family simply by staying one step ahead of their house search for him. As a spy he once eluded his pursuers by joining them in the search for him. However rigorous and distasteful the means might be, Reilly would see what was possible and not flinch. With Lenin he understood that a single mind could change the world with thought and daring; but, unlike Vladimir Ilyich, Reilly’s mind lacked the direction of historical truth. He was capable of bringing into being new things, but they were only short-lived sports, chimeras of an exceptional but misguided will. His self-imposed exile from his homeland had left divisions as incongruous as his Irish pseudonym.

  Sidney Reilly sought escape from the triviality of his life, in which his skills had been used to prop up imperialism. He had been paid in money and women. By the time he returned to Russia, I already sensed that he would be useful to me. It seemed possible, on the basis of his revolutionary leanings, that I might win him to our cause.

  2

  “Comrade Stalin,” Vladimir Ilyich said to me one gloomy summer morning, “tell me who is plotting against us this week?” He was sitting in the middle of a large red sofa, under a bare spot on the wall where a Czarist portrait had hung. He seemed very small as he sank into the dusty cushions.

  “Only the ones I told you about last week. Not one of them is practical enough to succeed.”

  He stared at me for a moment, as if disbelieving, but I knew he was only tired. In a moment he closed his eyes and was dozing. I wondered if his bourgeois conscience would balk at the measures he would soon have to take to keep power. It seemed to me that he had put me on the Bolshevik Central Committee to do the things for which he had no stomach. Too many opportunists were ready to step into our shoes if we stumbled. Telling foe from ally was impossible; given the chance, anyone might turn on us.

  Reilly was already in Moscow. I learned later that he had come by the usual northern route and had taken a cheap hotel room. On the following morning, he had abandoned that room, leaving behind an old suitcase with some work clothes in it. He had gone to a safe house, where he met a woman of middle years who knew how to use a handgun.

  She was not an imposing figure—an impression she knew how to create; but there was no doubt in Reilly’s mind that she would pull the trigger with no care for what happened to her afterward.

  Lenin’s death was crucial to Reilly’s plot, even though he knew that it might make Vladimir Ilyich a Bolshevik martyr. Reilly was also depending on our other weaknesses to work for him. While Trotsky was feverishly organizing the Red Army, we were dependent on small forces—our original Red Guard, made up of factory workers and sailors, a few thousand Chinese railway workers, and the Latvian regiments, who acted as our Praetorian Guard. The Red Guard was loyal but militarily incompetent. The Chinese served in return for food. The Latvians hated the Germans for overrunning their country, but had to be paid. Reilly knew that he could bribe the Latvians and Chinese to turn against us, making it possible for the Czarist officers in hiding to unite and finish the job. With Lenin and myself either arrested or dead, he could then turn south and isolate Trotsky, who had taken Odessa back from the European allies and was busy shipping in supplies by sea. His position there would become impossible if the British brought in warships. If we failed in the north, we would be vulnerable from two sides.

  Lenin’s death would alter expectations in everyone. Reilly’s cohorts would seize vital centers throughout Moscow. Our Czarist officers would go over to Reilly, taking their men with them. The opportunists among us would desert. Reilly’s leaflets had already planted doubts in their minds. Lenin’s death would be their weathervane. Even the martyrdom of Vladimir Ilyich, I realized, might not be enough to help us.

  As I gazed at Lenin’s sleeping face, I imagined him already dead and forgotten. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, came into the room and covered him with a blanket. She did not look at where I sat behind the large library desk as she left.

  3

  “Comrade Lenin has been shot!” the messenger cried as he burst into the conference room.

  I looked up from the table. “Is he dead?”

  The young cadet was flushed from the cold. His teeth chattered as he shook his head in denial. “No—the doctors have him.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You’re to come with me, Comrade Stalin, for your own safety.”

  “What else do you know?”
I demanded.

  “Several of our units, including Cheka, are not responding to orders.”

  “They’ve gone over,” I said, glancing down at the lists of names I had been studying.

  The cadet was silent as I got up and went to the window. The grey courtyard below was deserted. There was no sign of the Latvian guards, and the dead horse I had seen earlier was gone. I turned my head slightly and saw the cadet in the window glass. He was fumbling with his pistol holster. I reached under my long coat and grasped the revolver in my shoulder harness, then turned and pointed it at him under my coat. He had not drawn his pistol.

  “No, Comrade Stalin!” he cried. “I was only unsnapping the case. It sticks.”

  I looked into his eyes. He was only a boy, and his fear was convincing.

  “We must leave here immediately, Comrade Stalin,” he added quickly. “We may be arrested at any moment.”

  I slipped my gun back into its sheath. “Lead the way.”

  “We’ll go out the back,” he said, his voice shaking with relief.

  “Did it happen at the factory?” I asked.

  “Just as he finished his speech, a woman shot him,” he replied.

  I tried to imagine what Reilly was doing at this very moment.

  The cadet led me down the back stairs of the old office block. The iron railing was rusting, and the stairwell smelled of urine. On the first landing the cadet turned around and found his courage.

  “You are under arrest, Comrade Stalin,” he said with a nervous smile.

  My boot caught him under the chin. I felt his neck break as he fired the pistol into the railing, scattering rust into my face. He fell backward onto the landing. I hurried down and wrenched the gun from his stiffening fingers, then went back up to the office.

  There was a hiding place behind the toilet, but I would use it only if I had to. I came into the room and paused, listening, but there was only the sound of wind rattling the windows. Was it possible that they had sent only one person for me? Something had gone wrong, or the cadet had come for me on his own initiative, hoping to ingratiate himself with the other side. All of which meant I could expect another visit at any moment.