Authors: Stephen Hunter
It was the time of Yeshov—
Yeshovchina
, in the Russian—after Nikolai Yeshov, the dwarfish chairman of state security. But the process of purification represented by this massive wave of arrests surely originated with the general secretary, whom most of the old revolutionaries remembered as Koba. Koba sought to scour the party clean, to make it a precise, scientific instrument, to do
away with the last remnants of bourgeois sentimentality so that the future could be faced with strength and will and resolve. Koba most certainly sought also to make certain
he
was never arrested.
In one Moscow building the arrests were greeted with something beyond even fear and despair, something unique to the city: irony. The building stood on Gorky Street, hard by Pushkin Park, not three-quarters of a downhill mile from the Kremlin itself, in the very center of the city. It was an ornate, Italianate construction, rich in marble and brass, and its upper floors on the western side provided a grand panorama of the Kremlin’s domes. The place bore the name
HOTEL LUX
, on a brass plate untouched since 1917. Once, in the early years after its construction in 1907, Russian and European nobility, American entrepreneurs, German adventurers, Jewish diamond merchants, and exceedingly expensive courtesans had occupied its stately rooms. These days, the Lux appealed to a different clientele.
It had degenerated into a dirty, dingy ruin, its marble pitted and brass unpolished, but the dreams dreamed in its bohemian corridors and cabbage-stinking rooms boasted as much scale and romance as any dreamed by capitalists. For the Lux served as the unofficial headquarters of Comintern, or the Communist International, which, while a direct apparatus of the GRU, was at the same time, since having been decreed into existence in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin, the coordinating organ of the World Revolution.
Its inhabitants now comprised almost a Party congress of famous, infamous, notorious, and violent European leftists, men who had lived their whole lives underground, in the swirl and fog and rat hunt of revolutionary
conspiracy. The revolution achieved, it was seized from them; they became its victims. Thus the nighttime visits of the young policemen—they were frequent at the Lux—had a special bitterness.
And how the old revolutionaries talked of this! Their lives had become almost pure language. They argued endlessly, like old rabbis at yeshiva. It obsessed them. What was Koba doing? What was his vision? By what theoretical underpinnings did he justify the killings? How did
Yeshovchina
fit into the ultimate trajectory toward socialist victory? And who was taken last night?
But one man, in all that noise, said nothing.
He did not complain. He had no theories. He had no grudges or secret fears, or so it seemed. He did not mingle in the lobby or participate in the endless debate. Nor did he care to comment upon the justice of it or the pathology of Koba and his dwarf Yeshov.
Rather, he stayed behind his doors, emerging only for his afternoon constitutional. On those occasions, he strode briskly through the lobby with an aristocratic aloofness upon his face, as if any consideration beyond the ancient lift that would haul him to his rooms was utterly beneath him. He looked neither left nor right and issued no greetings to old comrades, nor, by his iciness, did he expect to receive any. He dressed as if a dandy in the last century, in spats, a velvet smoking jacket, well worn but beautifully fitted, a white silk scarf, and a lustrous mink coat. He acted as if, by special compact to the highest authority, he was invulnerable to the nighttime visits of Koba’s killers.
He had been called many things in his interesting life, but one of them clung even to this day and to this circumstance. He was called, not only by his peers in the Lux
and by his enemies in the Kremlin, but in the capitals of the West, the Devil Himself.
For a legend, he seemed rather vigorous. At fifty-nine, E. I. Levitsky still had a taut, lively face. His mouth retained its unusual thinness. It was a clever, prim mouth, as the eyes above it were also clever. They carried the electricity of conviction. He wore, after Lenin, a little goatee, purely an affectation. His head was glossily balding from the forehead back to the crown, though extravagant with bushy peppercorn hair beneath it, as if the black and gray individuals that comprised this mass were violently divided among themselves as to their ultimate direction and destiny. He had a lanky, surprisingly long body, wiry, and long, pale, exquisite fingers. He looked exceptionally refined, as if he’d spent his life in the higher realms of culture. He also looked hard in a peculiar way: hard, unmalleable, an alloy, not a base metal.
In his hand, he held a pawn. A blunt, smooth little soldier. It expects only death and in this humble aspiration is ever so frequently rewarded. Pawns are made for sacrifice; this is their function; this ennobles them.
As he gripped the ancient chess piece in his hand, a name came to him, a name whispered that afternoon in a hurried but not quite accidental encounter in Pushkin Park, on a bench under the great trees.
“It’s Tchiterine, Emmanuel Ivanovich. Your old comrade. Remember, he saved your life in the war?”
Yes, Levitsky remembered Tchiterine, another noble pawn.
It wasn’t the sort of thing a man forgot: he lay out in the snow, thrown by his treacherous horse, the Maxim bullets clipping away at him. They struck close by with a
stinging spray. He tried to shrink into the snow. All the while Kolchak’s Death Battalion, with the eighteen-inch spike bayonets fixed to their rifles, advanced at the trot from the left, finishing the wounded as they came. No, one doesn’t forget a memory such as that, or the moment when brawny Tchiterine had come slithering through the fire and with one strong hand taken him and pulled him into a ravine and safety.
“The old ones. Koba is taking the old ones. It’s clear now.” The rue in the mysterious comrade’s voice had been almost operatic with passion.
“He can watch out for himself,” Levitsky had said, concentrating on the lacy patterns the snow-heavy limbs formed against the bright blue sky. “He’s no child. He’s in Spain now, isn’t he?”
“He’ll never leave Spain. Koba is reaching into Spain now. Tchiterine has just been arrested in Spain. They say he’ll be shot.”
The comrade sighed. “Tchiterine, he was the best. You even took him to England with you. An inspiration.”
“Yes, England,” said Levitsky, aware that the fellow was well informed.
Then the man said, “Lemontov was the smart one.”
“Lemontov was always smart. That’s why he put a bullet in his head,” Levitsky responded.
“No, haven’t you heard? I just heard today. He’s not dead, like they said he was. He went over. Can you believe it?” He shook his head as if in wonder.
Levitsky said nothing. However, he took a deep breath in acknowledgment that his life and fate had just altered radically. The message had been well delivered. His breath came in quiet, harsh little spurts. He could feel his head begin to throb, as the comrade spoke.
It turned out that it hadn’t been Lemontov’s body, prune wrinkled and pulpy, they’d pulled out of the canal at all. It was a ruse, using some Dutchman’s corpse. They say Lemontov had gone over to the Americans. He was the smart one. He was the only one to beat hungry old Koba. The Americans will give him lots of money and he will live in Hollywood and fuck Greta Garbo all night long.
No, Levitsky thought. He paid
them
. In information. Lemontov. Yes, Lemontov was the smart one.
Levitsky, in his room, set down the pawn. He went swiftly to the bottle, poured himself another brandy. Then, his nerves soothed, he walked back to the table and picked up the pawn again. It was from a German set, which he’d won in Karlsbad in 1901. He fingered the piece, clutching it tightly to his palm.
So soon.
Oh, Lemontov, you clever, treacherous bastard. Of them all, my brave boys whom I taught so well, I should have foreseen it would be you. Tchiterine was hardworking, dull, brave, a zealot. Another was nakedly ambitious, a stupid peasant boy dead set on rising above himself by sheer will. Still another was a coward, a schemer, a weakling. You, Lemontov, you were the brilliant one. A Jew like myself, of course. So smart, so full of ideas, so crackling with insight and enthusiasm.
If Lemontov had fled to the Americans, the Americans knew. And the Americans would tell the British. About the agent code-named Castle. Castle, Levitsky’s lasting legacy to the revolution, the one thing not even a maniac like Koba could steal. His Castle at the center of the British establishment.
This meant the game had begun years earlier than it
ought to have, and on the enemy’s terms, and that, worse, it would have to be improvised in the middle of Koba’s terror, thrown together with madcap dash. Somebody in the GRU saw that the buried Castle had suddenly became vulnerable, and knew that NKVD, crazy with the bloodlust, didn’t care. And somebody knew only the man who had recruited Castle could help. Thus by secret approach, a last mission for the Devil Himself.
Save Castle.
At once an impulse seized him. He rose, strode back across the carpet of his shabby room, and sat at the table before an empty chessboard. No emotion appeared on his studious, ascetic face. He stared at the glossy, checkered surface.
It seemed immense. Its sixty-four squares described a universe of possibility; an illusion, of course. There was, to begin with, a remote mathematical limit on possibility. More to the point, however, possibility was strictly a function of position: you could only go from where you were—that was Levitsky’s first principle of reality, and it was more binding and absolute than any law in physics.
He therefore began to solve his problem by defining the positions.
What, for example, did Lemontov know? Did he know Castle’s name, his identity? No, Levitsky had been exceedingly careful about the mechanism from the start, shielding Castle from his staff; only two men other than Levitsky and Castle himself knew of the arrangement: two high-ranking officers in the GRU, Red Army intelligence, men of unimpeachable honesty and honor, sworn only to reveal the information upon
Levitsky’s death. What Lemontov, therefore, could provide was only a description: a set of credentials and possibilities, a year (1931), a place (Cambridge), which would define perhaps more than several hundred young British men of a certain age and social standing and potential. It would be a British problem, then, to winnow these possibilities down to several specific candidates. And then, from among these, find the right one. Not an easy task, particularly in a democracy, where security services were notoriously hamstrung by sentimental notions of privacy and respect for individual rights.
He stared at the pattern on the board, absorbed. Was there time in the world to save Castle?
From far below on this still, late Moscow night, Levitsky heard the buzz of a motorcar. It pulled up to the hotel and halted. Doors opened, closed with a metallic slam. Men walked toward the hotel, their boots striking crisply on the pavement.
Levitsky looked at the clock on the mantel. It was 4
A.M
., the hour of the NKVD.
He looked back to the board and, with an urgency that bordered on despair, reopened the leather-bound case. The figures were beautifully carved, with an ornate, quite possibly decadent skill that nothing in the Soviet Union could now equal. He plucked the pieces out and arranged them on the board, two white ranks, two red ranks.
From somewhere deep in the building, he heard the clang of the lift gate.
It’s the time of sacrifice, he thought.
His fingers pushed a piece out from its rank. His humble rook’s pawn, the red. Levitsky looked at the dowdy little thing. O hero pawn! Brave, willing to
sacrifice yourself up in the furnace of the game for larger considerations.
Levitsky smiled, hearing the climb of the lift through the building. He remembered 1901. In that year, in the great hall at the Karlsbad Casino, against the best in the world, the humble pawn had been the key to Levitsky’s greatest victory in the single master’s tournament he had allowed himself before disappearing forever in the underground. And in the fortnight, the bespectacled young exile had become the mysterious Devil Himself, vanquisher of all …
He heard the lift stop at his floor. The gate opened. He heard the boots on the tile.
Schlecter, the German, suddenly sat across from him: a dandy, wordless little genius who wore carnations and plaid suits of English cut and had watery eyes and eczema and sported a flowery cologne and fought like a Cossack. Schlecter would not look at him. Schlecter preferred to avoid personalities. To him it was just the movement of pieces on the board.
Levitsky had the opening and pushed his queen’s pawn into the fourth row and Schlecter matched him. Then he swiftly brought his knight into play, moving it to king’s bishop three. Schlecter paused, a bit nonplussed, but not exactly near panic; then responded dramatically by moving his bishop forward to bishop’s four. Strange: even Schlecter himself seemed controlled by some mysterious energy in the air then, as if strange forces, dyb-buks, had been released to ride the currents of the vast space over their heads.
Levitsky was twenty-four; he was young and lean and furiously bright. He was only becoming gradually aware, however, of his gift.
He exploited the seam opening in the center of the board with that lone pawn, advancing him to bishop’s four. Schlecter considered a long time—he was, after all, the drawmaster, more renowned for not losing than for winning—and ultimately shrank from the challenge with the conventional pawn to queen’s bishop three.
Levitsky waited just a second, then reached down and shoved his queen through the gap he’d opened in his own ranks and pushed her out to knight’s three; he heard the gasp and smiled, and felt himself almost blush as the gasp rose to a cheer.
Schlecter, of course, did not look up, as if to meet Levitsky’s eyes would somehow be to submit to his power. He studied the pieces in perfect silence and then almost languidly brushed his blue-veined old hand across the table and yanked his own queen out to knight’s three.