Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (16 page)

“I think the Moscow brass has arrived,”
I said to Knight.
 
He looked at me, with
a strangely intent light blazing in his eyes.
 
Very quietly he answered,

“It will be Gordov.”
 

“Who’s Gordov?”

“A Soviet general—also
one of the top men in the secret police.”
 

“The university student told you?
 
But what difference it makes—”

“A great deal.
 
No one told me who was coming; I don’t think
they knew.
 
You could say this answers a
prayer of mine.
 
If you prefer a more
prosaic explanation, say I’m risking a guess on a good probability.
 
Alex Gordov is one of the half-dozen men the
Politburo was likely to consider for this job.”
 

“You know Gordov, Knight?”

“I did, long ago.
 
I’ve watched him climb to the top, over the
wrecked careers—and sometimes the broken bodies—of his friends.
 
He learned how to develop those traits so
essential to the successful Soviet Man.
 
When I met him, at a hospital in Leningrad, he was a youngster of
sixteen—talented, a brilliant mind, far too sensitive for the Soviet
pattern.
 
He was a lieutenant in the
infantry—at sixteen, badly wounded during the last days of the war.
 
Our penicillin saved his arm from
amputation.
 
Gordov was very much aware
of that, and it disturbed him a great deal because it didn’t jibe with the
American stereotype he had been taught.
 
At the whim of some party functionary, Alex had been ordered to study
English while he was in the hospital.
 
He
talked to me whenever he could—theoretically to improve his skill with the
language—actually, because he was trying to find out what made me tick.”
 

“It must have taken a weird twist of
dialectic,” I suggested, “for him to fit a Quaker into their version of our
society.”
 

“Alex had the intelligence to see reality
beyond the fancy doubletalk of their party propaganda.
 
He knew aggression for what it was, whether
they called it peace or liberation.
 
And
he had an amazing capacity for love—in the abstract, Dr. Roswell:
 
love for his fellow man—always anathema to
the party.
 
It was that, ultimately,
which broke him to the Soviet machine.
 
They did it quite simply.
 
The
usual technique:
 
they had a use for
Gordov, and they took him over in much the same way they did us tonight.
 

“His mother and sister had been arrested
as enemies of the people.
 
The secret
police arranged for Alex to discover the name of the agent who was
responsible.
 
They allowed Gordov to take
his revenge.
 
Then he was arrested.
 
The police showed him their file—enough
evidence to condemn him to the firing squad.
 
They made the usual offer.
 
Gordov
would go free if he agreed to work for them.
 
They threw in freedom for his mother and sister as an added
incentive.
 

“Alex learned his lesson and he learned
it well.
 
Since then he has climbed high,
using the same methods of treachery and betrayal.
 
But locked somewhere in his soul, Dr.
Roswell,
is the boy I knew—his capacity for love; his
clear-eyed vision of the truth.
 
I’m
counting on that tonight.”
 

“But what do you expect to do?
 
What possible influence—”

“I shall be myself—the man Gordov
remembers.
 
I know it won’t be easy.
 
Alex may have to destroy me; as a matter of
fact, I believe he will have no other choice.
 
But, whatever happens, it will awaken the memory of the boy in his soul,
it will arouse an inner conflict of mind that only—”

Just then Dragon waddled into the room,
followed by his two armed guards.
 

“Comrades, I have exciting news,” he
said.
 
“The Comrade General from Moscow
is eager to meet my guests.
 
If you would
be kind enough to come along with me—
”
 
He
paused, frowning and fingering his
lower lip.
 
“But we do want to make a
good impression, now, don’t we?
 
The
Comrade General mustn’t think we have bourgeois notions of class superiority.”
 

He moved toward Knight and ripped off
the Quaker’s tie.
 
When Knight moved back
involuntarily, the guards snapped out their guns.
 
“I expect your complete co-operation,”
Dragen remarked petulantly.
 
“Stand at attention, please, Comrade Knight.”
 

Knight and I were pushed into the
hall.
 
They took us downstairs into the
living room.

Four Soviet soldiers, armed with
submachine guns, lounged against an ornate table.
 
Dragen and his two guards left the room
again.
 
One by one they assembled their
twenty-five prisoners.
 

Dragen was reciting the familiar
Communist cliches when the Soviet General entered from the hall.
 
He was a tall, powerful, swarthy man;
brooding intelligence—the crafty wit of expediency—flashed from his eyes, but
his face was an impassive mask.
 
A single
medal swung from his tunic, the Order of Lenin.
 
He had a bottle of vodka in his hand and from time to time he drank from
it liberally.
 

And this, I thought, was Alex
Gordov?
 
This was the man George Knight
hoped to move by the simple sincerity of his Quaker faith?
 

The General paused at the door, speaking
crisply in good English almost without an accent to someone beyond my line of
vision.
 
“It’s up to you to locate him,”
the General said.
 
“Get him here; we
don’t accept excuses.
 
At noon, I want to
put this circus of intellectuals on the air.”
 

Dragen had broken off his tirade when he
saw the General.
 
He made an ingratiating
gesture and spoke to us in a fawning whisper.
 
“Comrades,
may
I present your commanding
officer—General Anton Zergoff.”
 

I risked a glance in Knight’s
direction.
 
I saw that his face had gone
white; his lips were moving silently.
 

Zergoff took a pull at his bottle.
 
He walked slowly along the lineup of
prisoners.
 
“I’m afraid I disappoint
you—one of you, at least,” he announced in a hoarse, parade ground bark.
 
“Let me set your minds at ease
immediately.
 
General Gordov has been—
”
 
A
slight pause for
effect.
 
“—taken care
of.
 
He expressed a reluctance to
command the occupation when he saw the list of intellectuals we planned to recruit.
 
Before his execution, General Gordov was persuaded
to make a full confession.
 
He has been
an enemy of the people for years—since he was sixteen.
 
One man was responsible, one of you—one man
who had the power to reach into the highest ranks of the people’s government
and force a Soviet General to betray the revolution.”
 

Anton Zergoff turned to face
us,
his feet spread wide, his face savage with rage.
 
“Now it is my privilege to meet this
pig—this stinking agent of capitalism; I shall personally supervise his
re-education.
 
Where is the Quaker who
calls himself George Knight?”

Unhesitatingly Knight moved out of the
rank of prisoners.
 
There was a gentle
smile on his battered face.
 
He said
softly, but in a voice we all could hear,

“So Alex remembered
,
God works His will in strange ways.”
 

VIII.
  
The Ridge—Friday, midnight until dawn.
 
Jerry Bonhill

I HAD an uneasy feeling that Thatcher
wasn’t simply the ordinary old man he pretended.
 
He spoke too well, for one thing; he put his
ideas in words that would not occur to the average man.
 
He had volunteered no information about
himself.
 
I didn’t know how he had come
to meet Mom in the orange grove, or why she felt he needed her help.
 
If anyone were obviously capable of taking
care of himself, that was Pat Thatcher.
 
Perhaps the shoe was on the other foot.
 
Maybe Thatcher attached himself to us because he knew we needed
him.
 

Miles ahead of us, glittering like a
fragment of glass lost in a pool of darkness, I could see Big Bear Lake, at the
heart of a broad valley thickly grown with pines.
 

A highway turnout had been made at
Lakeview Point.
 
Hidden in the shadow we
saw Willie Clapper’s blue Cadillac, lying on its side precariously close to
the edge.
 
It had been overturned by the
blast.
 
Flying debris and soil particles
had scoured off the paint on one side of the car.
 

Thatcher and I put down our cartons and
moved toward the Cadillac cautiously.
 
Thatcher pushed a shell into my rifle and carried it across his
shoulder.
 
We bellowed Clapper’s name but
got no reply.
 
I climbed the frame and
tried to pull open the door.
 
It was
locked and the car was empty.
 

Thatcher scratched his head with the
barrel of the rifle.
 

“If Clapper’s gone, he must have locked
the car from the outside.”
 
There was a
sudden sound in the trees above the turnout.
 
Thatcher whirled, snapping the rifle to his shoulder.
 
The noise wasn’t repeated and warily he
lowered the gun.
 
It had been
nothing.
 

Thatcher looked at the car again.
 
“The way I figure it, Willie Clapper drove
past us like a bat out of hell.
 
Then he
parked the car up here, got
out
and locked it up just
before the bomb went off.
 
It would have
been suicide if he had been farther down the highway—no protection there at
all.
 
But if that’s the way it stacks up,
Clapper knew the bomb was going off—and he knew approximately when.”
 

“How could he?
 
That doesn’t make sense.
 
And where’s Clapper now?”

“That’s an interesting question,
Jerry.
 
Gone with the
big wind—maybe.
 
Your first one’s
easier; he was working with the Reds.”
 

“Willie Clapper?
 
Now I’ve heard everything.”
 

We returned to the highway and picked up
our cartons.
 

We made another quarter mile before Mom
gave out.
 
She dropped on the shoulder
of the road, not quite unconscious but close to it.
 
We improvised a camp close by in a small
clearing sheltered by a V-shaped wall of rock.
 

Thatcher took the first watch.
 
I knew I couldn’t keep awake.
 
My mind was in a daze, where nothing mattered
very much.
 
I had a nagging mistrust of
Thatcher—an uneasy feeling…

When Pat Thatcher shook me awake I felt
as if I hadn’t slept at, all, yet I saw dawn in the eastern sky.
 

“We said we’d change off every few
minutes, Pat!”
 
It seemed entirely
natural to use his first name.
 
The
suspicion I felt suddenly struck me as absurd.
 

“You looked as if you could use the
rest, Jerry,” Pat replied.
 
“I found a
spring about a hundred yards down the road.
 
Go stick your head in it.
 
The
water’s cold as hell, but it’ll do you good.”
 

At least it washed the cotton out of my
head.
 
When I walked back to the camp the
chilly morning wind felt pleasantly cozy.
 
Thatcher threw me the rifle and lay down on the pine bed beside Jim
Riley.
 
I crossed the road and sat on a
boulder, watching the sunrise over the valley.