[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  I hurried down the front stairs to the lobby, went out cautiously through the main doors, and spotted a motorcycle nearby—probably the cadet’s. I rushed to it, got on, and started it on the first kick. I gripped the handlebars, gunned the engine into a roar, then turned the bike around with a screech and rolled into the street, expecting to see them coming for me.

  But there was no one on the street. Something had gone wrong. The Latvians had been removed to leave me exposed, but the next step, my arrest and execution, had somehow been delayed. Only the cadet had shown up.

  I tried to think. Where would they have taken Vladimir Ilyich? It had to be the old safe house outside of Moscow, just south of the city. That would be the only place now. I wondered if I had enough petrol to reach it.

  4

  Lenin was at the country house. He was not mortally wounded. His assassin was there also, having been taken prisoner by the Cheka guards who had gone with Lenin to the factory.

  “Comrade Stalin!” Vladimir Ilyich exclaimed as I sat down by his cot in the book-lined study. “You are safe, but our situation is desperate.”

  “What has happened?” I asked, still unsteady from the long motorcycle ride.

  “Moscow has fallen. Our Latvian regiments have deserted, along with our Chinese workers. Most of the Red Guard have been imprisoned. The Social Revolutionaries have joined the counter-revolution. My assassin is one of them. I suspect that killing me was to have been their token of good faith. There’s no word from Trotsky’s southern volunteers. There doesn’t seem to be much we can do. We might even have to flee the country.”

  “Never,” I replied.

  He raised his hand to his massive forehead.

  “Don’t shout, I’m in terrible pain. The bullet struck my shoulder, but I have a headache that won’t stop.”

  I looked around for Nadezhda, but she was not in the room. I saw several haggard, unfamiliar faces and realized that no one of great importance had escaped with Lenin from Moscow. By now they were in Reilly’s hands, dead or about to be executed. He would not wait long. I had underestimated the Bastard of Odessa.

  “What shall we do?” I asked.

  Vladimir Ilyich sighed and closed his eyes. “I would like your suggestions.”

  “We must go where they won’t find us easily,” I replied. “I know several places in Georgia.”

  His eyes opened and fixed on me. “As long as you don’t want to return to robbing banks.”

  His words irritated me, but I didn’t show it.

  “We needed the money,” I said calmly, remembering that he had once described me as crude and vulgar. Living among émigré Russians in Europe had affected his practical sense.

  “Of course, of course,” he replied with a feeble wave of his hand. “You are a dedicated and useful man.”

  There was a muffled shot from outside. It seemed to relax Vladimir Ilyich. Dora Kaplan, his assassin, had been executed.

  5

  Just before leaving the safe house, we learned that Lenin’s wife had been executed. Vladimir Ilyich began to rave as we led him out to the truck, insisting to me that Reilly could not have killed Nadezhda, and that the report had to be false. I said nothing; to me her death had been inevitable. As Lenin’s lifelong partner, and a theoretician herself, she would have posed a threat in his absence. Reilly’s swiftness in removing her impressed me. Lenin’s reaction to her death was unworthy of a Bolshevik; suddenly his wife was only an unimportant woman. Nadezhda Krupskaya had not been an innocent.

  We fled south, heading for a railway station that was still in our hands, just south of Moscow, where a special train was waiting to take us to Odessa. If the situation in that city turned out to be intractable, we would attempt to reach a hiding place in my native Georgia.

  Three Chekas came with us in the truck—a young lieutenant and two privates, both of whom had abandoned the Czar’s forces for the revolution. I watched the boyish faces of the two privates from time to time, looking for signs of doubt. The lieutenant, who was also a mechanic, drove the old Ford, nursing the truck through the muddy ten kilometers to the station.

  “He could have held her hostage,” Vladimir Ilyich insisted as the truck sputtered and coughed along. “Don’t you think so? Maybe he thought we were dead, and she would be of no use to him as a hostage?”

  For the next hour he asked his own questions and gave his own impossible answers. It depressed me to hear how much of the bourgeois there was still in him. I felt the confusion in the minds of the two Chekas.

  It began to rain as the sun went down. We couldn’t see the road ahead. The lieutenant pulled over and waited. Water seeped in on us through the musty canvas. Vladimir Ilyich began to weep.

  “She was a soldier in our cause,” I said loudly, hating his sentimentality.

  He stared out into the rainy twilight. Lightning flashed as he turned to look at me, and for a moment it seemed that his face had turned to marble. “You’re right,” he said, eyes wild with conviction, “I must remember that.”

  Of course, I had always disliked Nadezhda’s hovering, familiar-like ways. She had been a bony raven at his shoulder, forever whispering asides, but I had always taken great care to be polite to her. Now more than ever I realized what a buttress she had been to Vladimir Ilyich.

  The rain lessened. The lieutenant tried to start the Ford, but it was dead.

  “There’s not much time,” I said. “How much farther?”

  “Less than half a kilometer.”

  “We’ll go on foot,” I said. “There’s no telling who may be behind us.”

  I helped Vladimir Ilyich down from the truck. He managed to stand alone and refused my arm as we began our march on the muddy road. He moved steadily at my side, but his breathing was labored.

  We were within sight of the station when he collapsed.

  “Help!” I called out.

  The lieutenant and one of the privates came back, lifted Vladimir Ilyich onto their shoulders, and hurried ahead with him. It was like a scene from the street rallies, but without the crowds.

  “Is he very ill?” the other private asked me as I caught up.

  I did not answer. Ahead, the train waited in a conflagration of storm lamps and steam.

  6

  Our train consisted of a dining car, a kitchen, one supply car, and the engine. A military evacuation train was being readied on the track next to ours, to carry away those who would be fleeing out of Moscow in the next day or two. I was surprised at this bit of organization. When I asked how it had been accomplished, a sergeant said one word to me: “Trotsky.”

  We sped off into the warm, misty night. Vladimir Ilyich recovered enough to have dinner with me and our three soldiers. The plush luxury of the Czarist interior seemed to brighten his mood.

  “I only hope that Trotsky is in Odessa when we arrive,” he said, sipping his brandy, “and that he can raise a force we can work with. Our foreign venders have been paid, fortunately, but we will have to keep our southern port open to be supplied.”

  He was looking into the large mirror at our right as he spoke. I nodded to his reflection.

  “The troops behind us,” the youthful lieutenant added, “will help ensure that.”

  Vladimir Ilyich put down his glass and looked at me directly. “Do you think, Comrade Stalin, that we hoped for too much?” He sounded lost.

  “No,” I answered. “We have popular support. The people are waiting to hear from you. Reilly’s pamphlets have struck a nerve of longing with promises of foreign help and bourgeois progress, but he is actually depending only on the uncertainty of our followers. His mercenaries won’t count for much when the news that you are alive gets out. Most of his support can be taken from him with that alone, but we will have to follow our victory with a period of terror, to compel loyalty among the doubters.”

  He nodded to me, then looked into the darkness of the window. In that mirror we rode not only in a well-appointed, brightly lit dining room, but in the cave of
all Russia.

  “You must get some sleep,” I said.

  We found blankets and made ourselves comfortable on the leather couches. The lieutenant turned down the lights.

  I tried to sleep, but my thoughts seemed to organize themselves to the clatter of the train wheels. Contempt for my own kind crept into me, especially for the idealists in our party. Too many utopian fools were setting themselves up against their own nature and what was possible. They did not grasp that progress was like the exponent in one of Einstein’s fashionable equations—a small modifying quantity that has an effect only when the big term grew very large. They failed to see that only when the biggest letter of human history, material wealth, became sufficiently large would there be a chance for social progress. Only then would we be able to afford to become humane. My role in this revolution was to remember this fact, and to act when it was neglected…

  7

  Our mood was apprehensive as our train pulled into Odessa. We stepped out into bright sunlight, and a deserted station.

  “We don’t know what may have happened here,” I said.

  “There hasn’t been time,” Vladimir Ilyich replied. His voice was gruff after three days on the train, and he seemed ready to bark at me in his usual way. I felt reassured. This was the Lenin who had taken a spontaneous uprising and interpreted the yearning of the masses so they would know what to do; the Lenin who would make ours a Communist revolution despite Marx. Like Reilly, Lenin was irreplaceable. Without him there would only be a struggle for power, with no vision justifying action.

  Suddenly, a Ford Model T sedan pulled into the station and rattled towards us down the platform. I took Lenin’s arm, ready to shove him out of harm’s way, but the car slowed and stopped.

  “Welcome!” the driver shouted as he threw open the door and got out. When he opened the back door for us, I saw that he was Trotsky’s youngest son, Sergei. I greeted him and smiled, but his eyes worshiped only Lenin, as if I didn’t exist, as we got into the back seat.

  Sergei drove quickly, but the ride was comfortable. With the windows closed, Odessa seemed distant. We climbed a hill and saw the sun glistening on the Black Sea. I remembered the smell of leather in my father’s shoe shop. Warm days gave the shop a keener odour. I pictured myself in the small church library, which was open to sons who might one day be priests. The books had been dusty, the air full of waxy smells from the lamps and candles. I remembered the young girl I had seduced on a sunny afternoon, and for an instant the world’s failings seemed far away. I began to wonder if we were driving into a betrayal.

  A crowd surrounded us as we pulled into the center of the city. They peered inside, saw Lenin, and cheered.

  Trotsky was waiting for us with a company of soldiers on the courthouse steps. We climbed out into a bright paradise of good feeling. Trotsky saluted us, then came down and embraced Vladimir Ilyich, who looked shabby in his brown waistcoat under that silky blue sky.

  The crowd cheered them. As Lenin turned to address the throng, I felt Reilly plotting against us in Moscow, and I knew in that moment what it would take to stop him.

  “Comrades!” Lenin cried, regaining his old self with one word. “A dangerous counter-revolution has seized Moscow! It is supported by the foreign allies, who are not content with defeating Germany. They also want our lands. But we will regroup here, and strike north. With Comrade Trotsky’s Red Army, and your bravery, we shall prevail … ”

  As he spoke, I wondered if anyone in Moscow would believe that he was still alive, short of seeing him there. Open military actions would not defeat Reilly in any reasonable time. It would take years, while the revolution withered, especially if Reilly avoided decisive battles. Reilly had to be killed as quickly and as publicly as possible. Like Lenin he was a leader who needed his followers as much as they needed him. There was no arguing with this fact of human attachment. Without Reilly, the counter-revolution would collapse in a matter of days. His foreign supporters would not easily shift their faith to another figure.

  He had to die in a week, two at the latest, and I knew how it would have to be done. There was no other way.

  “Long live Comrade Lenin!” the crowd chanted—loudly enough, it seemed to me, for Reilly to hear it in his bed in Moscow.

  8

  From the reports I had read about Reilly’s life and activities, I suspected that he was a man who liked to brood. It was a way of searching, of pointing himself towards his hopes. He prayed to himself, beseeching a hidden center, where the future sang of sweet possibilities.

  As head of his government, he would have to act against both Czarists and Bolsheviks. He could count on Czarists joining his regime, but he would never trust a Bolshevik. Czarists would be fairly predictable in their military actions, but Bolsheviks, he knew, would spare no outrage to bring him down.

  He was probably in what remained of the British Embassy in Moscow, sipping brandy in the master bedroom, perhaps playing with the idea that he might have joined us. I knew there had been efforts to recruit him for our intelligence service. He would have disappeared and re-emerged as another man, as he did when he left Odessa for South America in his youth, to escape his adulterous family’s bourgeois pesthole. It would have been simple justice for him to return in the same way, even as a Bolshevik.

  But for the moment, Russia was his to mold. I could almost hear the Jew congratulating himself in that great bed of English oak.

  Within the week there would be a knock on his bedroom door, and a messenger would bring him word that Lenin was in Odessa. Reilly would sit up and lean uncomfortably against the large wooden headboard, where once there had been luxurious pillows (a pity that the mobs had torn them to pieces). He would read the message with a rush of excitement and realize that a British seaplane could get him to Odessa within a day. The entire mission would flash through his mind, as if he were remembering the past.

  He would fly to the Black Sea, then swing north to Odessa, using the night for cover. What feelings would pass through him as he landed on the moonlit water? Here he was, returning to the city of his childhood in order to test himself against his greatest enemies. The years would run back in his mind as he sat in the open doorway of the amphibious aircraft, breathing in the night air and remembering the youth who had startled himself with his superiority to the people around him. He had blackmailed his mother’s lover for the money to escape Odessa. The man had nearly choked when Reilly had called him Father.

  He would know that he was risking his counter-revolution by coming here alone. The Bolsheviks would be able to pull down any of his possible successors. But it was the very implausibility of his coming here alone that would protect him, he would tell himself. Tarnishing Lenin’s name by revealing Germany’s hand in his return was not enough. Lenin had to die before his followers could regroup, before reports of his death were proven false. Only then would the counter-revolution be able to rally the support of disenchanted Czarists, moderate democrats, churchmen, and Mensheviks—all those who still hoped for a regime that would replace monarchy but avoid bolshevism.

  Reilly was a hopeless bourgeois, but more intelligent than most, hence more dangerous, despite his romantic imagination. He sincerely believed that bolshevism would only gain Russia the world’s animosity and ensure our country’s cultural and economic poverty.

  He would come into Odessa one morning, in a small boat, perhaps dressed as a fisherman. Wearing old clothes, following the pattern of all his solo missions, he would savor the irony of his return to the city of his youth. It was a form of rebirth. He trusted it, and so would I.

  9

  The warmer climate of Odessa speeded Lenin’s physical recovery. He would get up with the sun and walk along the street that led to the Great Steps (the site of the 1905 massacre of the townspeople by Czarist Cossacks, which the expatriate homosexual director, Sergei Eisenstein, later filmed in Hollywood). I let the Cheka guards sleep late and kept an eye on Vladimir Ilyich myself.

  One morning,
as I watched him through field glasses from the terrace of our hotel, he stopped and gazed out over city and sea, then sat down on the first step, something he had not done before. His shoulders slumped in defeat. He was probably reminiscing about his bourgeois European life with Krupskaya and regretting their return to Russia. His euphoric recovery during the first week after our arrival had eroded, and he had slowly slipped back into a brooding silence.

  As I watched, a man’s head floated up from the steps below the seated Lenin. The figure of a fisherman came into view, stopped next to Vladimir Ilyich, and tipped his hat to him. I turned my glasses to the sea and searched. Yes! There was something on the horizon—a small boat, or the wings of a seaplane. The reports I had received of engine sounds in the early morning had been correct.

  I whipped back to the two figures. They were conversing amiably. Vladimir Ilyich seemed pleased by the encounter, but then he had always shown a naive faith in simple folk, and sometimes spoke to them as if he were confessing. Krupskaya’s death had made him unobservant, and Reilly was a superb actor.

  Reilly was taking his time out of sheer vanity, it seemed to me. He would not kill his great rival without first talking to him.

  I put down the field glasses, checked my revolver, then slipped it into my shoulder holster and hurried downstairs, wearing only my white shirt and trousers. I ran through the deserted streets, sweating in the warm morning air, expecting at any moment to hear a shot. I reached the row of houses just above the Great Steps, slipped into a doorway, then crept out.

  The blood was pounding in my ears as I peered around the corner. Lenin and the fisherman were sitting on the top step with their back to me. Vladimir Ilyich was gesturing with his right hand. I could almost hear him. The words sounded familiar.

  I waited, thinking that the man was a fisherman, and that I had expected too much of Reilly.