"The state's coffers are empty-the government is regularly late in paying military salaries and pensions."

"The Soviet Union has, in effect, become ungovernable."

"Soviet armies were humiliated by Gorbachev's decision to retreat from Afghanistan."

"The drastic cuts in the military budget, and the inability to come up with the sums that are budgeted, have left us badly positioned to deal with the Americans after their hundred-hour triumph in the Gulf War."

Kryuchkov searched the faces around the table and said, very solemnly, "The only hope is to declare a state of emergency."

"Gorbachev will never consent to a state of emergency," Paval Uritzky observed.

"In that case," Kryuchkov said, "we will have to consent to a state of emergency for him. I ask those who agree with this a.n.a.lysis to raise a hand." Around the table nineteen hands went up.

From the lake far below came the howling of a teenager whose boat had capsized. The other boats closed in on the boy from all directions and dragged him out of the water. One of the young girls watching from the sh.o.r.eline shouted uphill, "They've got him-he's all right."

"When it comes time to launch our project," remarked Uritzky, "we must not be squeamish about people falling overboard." He arched his brows knowingly. Many around the table chuckled.

Later, when the meeting broke up and the guests began drifting toward the limousines, Kryuchkov took Yevgeny aside. "We have a mutual friend who speaks highly of you," the KGB Chairman said. "Your work in the Centre is known to me, your devotion to our cause is legendary within a closed circle of colleagues."

Yevgeny said, "I did my duty. Comrade Chairman, nothing more." Kryuchkov permitted a humorless smile onto his face. "There are fewer and fewer who use the term Comrade since Gorbachev took power." He steered Yevgeny into the bathroom and turned on the two faucets full blast. "One amongst us-a senior official responsible for the Central Committee finances-has managed over the years to move important sums of foreign currency into Germany and convert them, with the complicity of what the Germans call the Devisenbeschaffer-the currency acquirer-into dollars and gold. If we are to sideline Gorbachev and declare a state of emergency, we will need large amounts of cash to finance our movement. Once we are successful, it will be of paramount importance to immediately stock the shelves of the food and liquor stores in the major cities to demonstrate our capacity to bring order out of Gorbachev's chaos-we'll reduce the prices of staples, and most especially of vodka. We'll also send out back pension checks to retired people who haven't been paid in months. To accomplish this will require an immediate infusion of capital."

Yevgeny nodded. "I am beginning to understand why I was invited-"

"Your Greater Russian Bank of Commerce has a branch in Germany, I am told."

"Two, in fact. One in Berlin, one in Dresden."

"I ask you bluntly-can we count on your help, Comrade?"

Yevgeny nodded vigorously. "I have not fought for Communism my entire life to see it humiliated by a reformer who is manipulated by the Princ.i.p.al Adversary."

Kryuchkov gripped Yevgeny's hand in both of his and, gazing deep into his eyes, held it for a moment. "The Central Committee official responsible for finances is named Izvolsky. Nikolai Izvolsky. Commit his name to memory. He will get in touch with you in the next few days. He will act as an intermediary between you and the German Devisenbeschaffer-together you will organize the repatriation of funds through your bank. When the moment comes you will make these funds available to our cause."

"I am glad to be back in harness," Yevgeny said, "and proud to be working again with like-minded people to protect the Soviet Union from those who would dishonor it."

The day after the meeting in Perkhushovo, Yevgeny stopped off for a drink in the piano bar of the Monolith Club, a private hangout where the new elite met to trade tips on Wall Street stocks and off-sh.o.r.e funds. He was wondering what he had gotten himself into and agonizing over what he should do about it-somehow he had to warn Gorbachev-when an effete man with transparent eyelids and a jaw that looked as if it were made of porcelain turned up at the door. He appeared out of place in his synthetic fiber Soviet-era suit with wide lapels and baggy trousers that dragged on the floor; the regulars who frequented the club favored English flannel cut in the Italian style. Yevgeny wondered how the h.o.m.o Sovieticus, as he immediately dubbed him, had made it past the ex-wrestlers guarding the entrance. The man peered through the swirls of cigar smoke in the dimly lit bar as if he had a rendezvous with someone. When his eyes fixed on Yevgeny, sitting at a small table in a corner, his mouth fell open in recognition. He came straight across the room and said, "It is you, Y. A. Tsipin?"

"That depends on who is asking?"

"I am Izvolsky, Nikolai."

The club's young house photographer caught Yevgeny's eye and held up his sc.r.a.pbook filled with portraits of Sharon Stone and Robert De Niro and Luciano Pavarotti. "Another time, Boris," Yevgeny called, waving him off. He gestured Izvolsky to a seat. "Can I offer you something?" he asked the h.o.m.o Sovieticus.

"I never touch alcohol," Izvolsky announced with a certain smugness; being a teetotaler obviously gave him a feeling of moral superiority. "A gla.s.s of tea, perhaps."

Yevgeny signalled to the waiter and mouthed the word tchai and turned back to his guest. "I was told you worked for the Central Committee-"

"We must be discreet-the walls here are said to be filled with microphones. An individual of some importance in the superstructure directed me to contact you."

A cup of tea and a china bowl filled with cubes of Italian sugar were set in front of Izvolsky. He pocketed a handful of the sugar cubes and leaned forward to blow on his tea. "I was instructed," he went on, lowering his voice, nervously stirring the spoon around in the cup, "to alert you to the existence of a German nationalist who, in the months ahead, will be depositing sizable sums of US dollars in the Dresden branch of your bank. Like many in our coterie, he is a patriot who has devoted his life to battling the great Satan, international Jewry."

"What is his name?"

"You will know him only by the German sobriquet Devisenbeschaffer- the currency acquirer."

"If you can trust me with the money, you can trust me with the ident.i.ty of this Devisenbeschaffer."

"It is not a matter of trust, Comrade Tsipin. It is a matter of security."

Yevgeny accepted this with what he hoped was a professional nod.

Izvolsky retrieved a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket and carefully wrote a Moscow phone number on a c.o.c.ktail napkin. "This is a private number monitored by an answering machine that I interrogate throughout the day. You have only to leave an innocuous message-suggest that I watch a certain program on television, for instance-and I will recognize your voice and contact you. For the present, you are to instruct your Dresden branch to open an account in your name. Communicate to me the number of this account. When we wish to repatriate sums that will be regularly deposited in this account, I will let you know, at which point you will transfer them to the Moscow branch office of your bank."

Izvolsky brought the cup to his lips and delicately tested the temperature of the tea. Deciding it was cool enough, he drank it off in one long swallow, as if he were quenching a thirst. "I thank you for the hospitality, Comrade Tsipin," he said. And without so much as a handshake or a goodbye, the h.o.m.o Sovieticus rose from his chair and headed for the door.

Leo Kritzky listened intently as Yevgeny described the visit to Starik in the clinic; the mention of a coded phrase that would put him in touch with a group organizing an "end game," the meeting of the conspirators in Perkhushovo. "I didn't take Starik seriously," Yevgeny admitted. "I thought he was ranting-all that talk about Jews and purification and starting over again. But I was wrong. He hangs onto life by a thread-in his case an intravenous drip into a catheter planted under the skin of his chest-and devises schemes."

Leo whistled through his teeth. "This is a bombsh.e.l.l of a story that you're telling me."

Yevgeny had phoned Leo's number from a public booth late the previous evening to organize a rendezvous. "I could leave a tic-tac-toe code chalked on your elevator door," he had said with a conspiratorial chuckle, "but it would take too long. I must see you tomorrow. In the morning, if possible."

The mention of the coded tic-tac-toe messages identifying meeting places in the Washington area awakened in Leo enigmatic emotions-it transported him back to what now seemed like a previous incarnation, when the dread of tripping up imparted to everyday activities an adrenalin kick that retirement in Moscow lacked. He had agreed at once to the meeting. Yevgeny had said he would start out from the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Kremlin wall and stroll south, and named an hour. Leo immediately understood the implications of the outdoor meeting: Yevgeny wanted to be sure whatever he had to say wouldn't be recorded.

Now the two men drifted past a bank of outdoor flower stalls and, further along, a group of English sightseers listening to an Intourist guide describe how Czar Ivan IV, known as "The Terrible," had murdered his son and heir, as well as several of his seven wives. "A fun guy!" one of the tourists quipped. "I'm not sure I understand you," the Intourist guide replied in puzzlement.

"So what do you make of it all?" Leo asked when they were alone again.

"The meeting I attended was not a discussion group," Yevgeny said. "Kryuchkov is plotting to take power. He is a meticulous man and is slowly tightening the noose around Gorbachev's neck."

"Your list of plotters reads like a who's who of Gorbachev's inner circle. Defense Minister Yazov, the press baron Uritzky, Interior Minister Pugo, Soviet ground forces chief Varennikov, Lomov from the foreign ministry, Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov, Prime Minister Pavlov."

"Don't forget Yevgeny Tsipin," Yevgeny said with a anxious grin.

"They want to use your bank to bring in enormous sums of money from Germany to finance the putsch-"

"As well as stock the empty shelves in the food and liquor stores and send out pension checks. The plotters are shrewd, Leo. If they can take over quickly, with little or no bloodshed, and buy off the ma.s.ses with cosmetic improvements, they can probably get away with it."

Leo looked at his friend. "Whose side are we on?" he asked, half in jest.

Yevgeny smiled grimly. "We haven't changed sides. We're for the forces that promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit, we're against right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism and those who would obstruct the democratic reforms in Russia. In short, we're on the side of Gorbachev."

"What do you expect me to do?"

Yevgeny tucked his arm under Leo's elbow. "There is a possibility that I may be watched by Kryuchkov's henchmen-Yuri Sukhanov, the boss of the KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate, the division responsible for Gorbachev's security, attended the Perkhushovo meeting. The Ninth Directorate has plenty of warm bodies available. My phone could be tapped. The people I employ may be bought off and report on my activities."

Leo saw where the conversation was going. "All those years you acted as my cutout. Now you want to flip the coin-you want me to act as your cutout."

"You will be freer-"

"They could be watching us right now," Leo said.

"I drove myself into the city and took some tradecraft precautions before I showed up at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

"Okay. Let's a.s.sume I am freer. Freer to do what?"

"For starters, I think you should pa.s.s on what I told you-the account of the secret meeting at Perkhushovo, the list of those who attended-to your former friends at the CIA."

"You could accomplish the same thing with an anonymous letter to the Company station in Moscow-"

"We must work on the a.s.sumption that the KGB has penetrated the station. If the Americans discuss the letter and their comments are picked up by microphones, it could lead, by a process of elimination, back to me. No, someone should take the story directly to the Company bra.s.s in Washington. Logically, that someone has to be you. They'll believe you, Leo. And if they believe you they may be able to convince Gorbachev to clean house, to arrest the conspirators. The CIA has a long arm-they may be able to act behind the scenes to thwart the conspiracy."

Leo scratched at an ear, weighing Yevgeny's suggestion.

"Obviously you can't let them know where your information comes from," Yevgeny added. "Tell them only that you have a mole inside the conspiracy."

"Say I buy your idea. That doesn't exclude your trying to get word to Gorbachev directly-"

"I'm a jump ahead of you, Leo. I know one person I can trust-someone who is close to Yeltsin. I'll see what I can accomplish through her."

The two men stopped walking and stood facing each other for a moment. "I thought the game was over," Leo said.

"It never ends," Yevgeny said.

"Be careful, for G.o.d's sake."

Yevgeny nodded. "It would be too ridiculous to survive America and get knocked off in Russia."

Leo nodded in agreement. "Too ridiculous and too ironic."

The auditorium, a drafty factory hall where workers had once dozed through obligatory lectures on the abiding advantages of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was jam-packed. Students sat cross-legged in the aisles or stood along the walls. On a low stage, under a single overhead spotlight, a tall slender woman, whose no-nonsense short dark hair was tucked behind her ears, spoke earnestly into a microphone. Her melodious voice made her sound younger than her fifty-nine years. And she pulled off the orator's hat trick: she managed to convey emotion by playing with the s.p.a.ces between the words. "When they heard about my index cards," she was saying, "when they discovered that I was collecting the names of Stalin's victims, they hauled me into a overheated room in the Lubyanka and let me know that I was flirting with a prison sentence... or worse. That took place in 1956. Afterward, I learned that I had been branded an SDE. It is a badge I wear with pride-I am, from the point of view of the Communist regime, a Socially Dangerous Element. Why? Because my project of doc.u.menting Stalin's crimes-I now have more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand index cards and I've only scratched the surface-threatened to return history to its proper owners, which is to say, return it to the people. When the Communists lose control of history, their party-to borrow Trotsky's expression-will be swept into the dustbin of history."

There was loud applause from the audience. Many of those sitting on the folding chairs stomped on the floor in unison. When the noise subsided the speaker forged on.

"Mikhail Gorbachev has been a leading force behind the return of history to the people-no easy task considering that we, as a nation, never experienced a Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment. Since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, our television has aired doc.u.mentaries about Stalin's brutal collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s, the ruthless purge trials in the mid-1930s, along with details of the millions who were purged without trials, who were summarily executed with a bullet in the neck or sent off to the Gulag camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta and Kazakhastan."

The speaker paused to take a sip of water. In the auditorium there was dead silence. She set down the gla.s.s and looked up and, surveying the faces in the audience, continued in an even quieter voice. The students leaned forward to catch her words.

"All that is the positive side of Gorbachev's governance. There is a negative side, too. Gorbachev, like many reformers, has no stomach for what Solzhenitsyn termed the work in the final inch; he is afraid to follow where logic and common sense and an impartial examination of history would lead. Gorbachev argues that Stalin was an aberration-a deviation from the Leninist norm. Chepukha!-rubbish! When are we going to admit that it was Lenin who was the genius of state terror. In 1918, when the Bolsheviks lost the election, he shut down the democratically elected Const.i.tutional a.s.sembly. In 1921 he systematically began liquidating the opposition, first outside the party, eventually inside the party. What he created, under the sophism dictatorship of the proletariat, was a party devoted to the eradication of dissent and the physical destruction of the dissenters. It was this Leninist model that Stalin inherited." The woman's voice grew even fainter; in the audience people barely breathed. "It was a system which beat prisoners so badly that they had to be carried on stretchers to the firing squads. It was a system that broke Meyerhold's left arm and then forced him to sign a confession with his right. It was a system that sent Osip Mandelstam to the frozen wastelands of Siberia for the crime of writing, and then reading aloud, a poem about Stalin that fell far short of being an encomium. It was a system that murdered my mother and my father and carted off their bodies, along with the nine hundred and ninety-eight others who were executed that day, to the Donskoi Monastery for cremation. I have been told you could often see dogs in the neighborhood fighting over the human bones that they had scratched out of the fields around the monastery." The speaker looked away to collect herself. "I myself have never gained access to the spetskhran-the special shelves in the Soviet archives where secret dossiers are stored. But I have reason to believe there are somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen million files in the archives dealing with arrests and executions. Solzhenitsyn estimates that sixty million-that is a sixty with six zeroes dragging after it like a crocodile's tail-sixty million people were victims of Stalinism."

The woman managed a valiant smile. "My dear friends, we have our work cut out for us."

There was a moment of silence before the storm of applause broke over the auditorium. The woman shrank back, as if buffeted by the ovation that soon turned into a rhythmic foot-pounding roar of admiration. Eager supporters surrounded her and it was well after eleven before the last few turned to leave. As the speaker collected her notes and slipped them into a tattered plastic briefcase, Yevgeny made his way from the shadows at the back of the auditorium down the center aisle. Expecting more questions, the woman raised her eyes-and froze.

"Please excuse me for turning up suddenly-" Yevgeny swallowed hard and started over again. "If you consent to talk with me you will understand that it might have been dangerous for me, and for you also, if I had phoned you at your home. Which is why I took the liberty-"

"How many years has it been?" she inquired, her voice reduced to a fierce whisper.

"It was yesterday," Yevgeny replied with feeling. "I was catnapping under a tree in the garden of my father's dacha at Peredelkino. You woke me-your voice was as musical yesterday as it is today-with a statement in very precise English: I dislike summer so very much. You asked me what I thought of the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald."

He climbed onto the stage and stepped closer to her. She shrank back, intimidated by the intensity in his eyes. "Once again you take my breath away, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she confessed. "How long have you been back in the country?"

"Six years."

"Why did it take you six years to approach me?"

"The last time we spoke-I called you from a pay phone-you gave me to understand that it would be better, for you at least, if we never met again."

"And what has happened to make you ignore this injunction?"

"I saw articles about you in the newspapers-I saw an interview with you and Academician Sakharov on the television program Vzglyad-I know that you are close to Yeltsin, that you are one of his aides. That is what made me ignore your injunction. I have crucial information that must reach Yeltsin, and through him, Gorbachev."

At the door of the auditorium a janitor called, "Gospodina Lebowitz, I must lock up for the night."

Yevgeny said, with some urgency, "Please. I have an automobile parked down the street. Let me take you someplace where we can talk. I can promise you, you will not regret it. I am not overstating things when I say that the fare of Gorbachev and the democratic reformation could depend on your hearing me out."

Azalia Isanova nodded carefully. "I will go with you."

Midnight came and went but the bull session in the Sparrow, a coffeehouse downhill from Lomonosov University on the Sparrow Hills (lately residents had taken to calling the area, known as Lenin Hills, by its pre-revolutionary name), showed no sign of flagging. "Capitalist systems have been transformed into Socialist systems but not visa versa," argued a serious young man with long sideburns and a suggestion of a beard. "There are no textbooks on the subject, which is why we need to proceed cautiously."

"We're writing the textbook," insisted the girl sitting across from him.

"It's like swimming in a lake," another girl said. "Of course you can go in slowly but the pain lasts longer. The trick is to dive in and get it over with."

"People who dive into icy lakes have been known to die of heart attacks," a boy with thick eyegla.s.ses pointed out.