The revolutionist, p.22
The Revolutionist, page 22
"You've been drinking," Lili said coldly. She started toward the staircase, but Felix darted out to block her path.
"I saw the poster," he whined. "I saw the curve of your breasts under the toga." He reached out to feel her breast, but she shrank back.
"If you touch me," she informed him, "I'll scream for help."
"Scream, if it gives you pleasure." Felix cupped a hand around his mouth and yelled in a high-pitched voice, "Help, help." He tried to laugh, but it came out as a snarl. "So you see, my sister, my shadow, my Lissik, there is nobody here except a boy and an old man who is deaf." He lunged forward and pinned her wrists behind her. His face was inches from hers. He reeked of garlic. "I have come to save you," he announced. "Someday you will thank me. Yes, you will sink to your knees and search for ways to show your appreciation for what I am about to do."
"I don't need saving, Felix."
"There is going to be a revolution," he whispered fiercely. "Everyone is talking about it. Your Lenin snuck back from Finland. He convened a secret meeting of your Central Committee. At first they hesitated. But that Lenin of yours is a fast talker. Glib. A pitchman for elixirs at a country fair. Ttpyer Hi nikagda, he told them. Now or never. He brought them around. One by one. Everyone's talking about it. The Bolsheviks are going to try to take power. If they succeed, they
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will recognize you from the poster and string you up from a lamppost. If they fail, Kerensky's people will string you up with the surviving Bolsheviks. Don't you see it, Lissik, only I can save you."
Lili struggled in his grip, wrenched a hand free, and felt in her shoulder bag for the tiny pistol she always carried. Felix peered past her and nodded. A man stepped forward and pressed a large wad of cotton soaked in ether over her mouth and nose. Felix caught her free hand at the wrist and twisted it to get her to drop the pistol. Lili, her head swimming with dizziness, managed to squeeze the trigger. The crack of the weapon seemed to her to come from another room, another world even.
"Only trust me," Felix breathed into her face as she sagged into the arms of the man holding the cotton.
Zander, his face ashen, appeared suddenly at Tuohy's table in the canteen. Alyosha Zhitkin, the demolition expert, was right behind him. "I need your help, Atticus," Zander said quietly. Tuohy took one look at his expression and realized the matter was urgent. "See you around," he muttered to the comrades at the table, and he stalked off after Zander and Alyosha.
Heading out of Petrograd in the cab of a commandeered coal truck. Zander explained what had happened.
"How can you be sure she was taken by force.^" Tuohy asked.
"Melor heard the shot," Zander said. "He worked up enough nerve to peek down from the landing. He saw Felix and another man dragging her off. He said she looked unconscious."
"Maybe the kid made the whole thing up," Tuohy suggested without conviction.
"We found her shoulder bag on the floor," Alyosha said. "Also a bullet hole in the floor. Also some cotton soaked in ether."
"But why would her own brother kidnap her.^" Tuohy wanted to know.
"Serafima told me he's been pestering her for years," Alyosha explained. "She says he used to show up in the middle of the night, roaring drunk, in that troika of his. Woke the whole neighborhood. He'd bang on the door until she opened it. Then he'd scream at her, and when that didn't work, he would fall on his knees and plead with her."
"What did he want.''" Tuohy asked.
"He was in love with her," Zander said. "He wanted her to move in with him."
Tuohy asked, "Where does he live.'"'
Alyosha said solemnly, "We're taking you there."
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Local legend held that the small gem of a monastery overlooking the Dudergof Lakes, some fifteen miles southwest of Petrograd, was where the False Dmitri had been meticulously groomed as heir to the throne. After the mysterious death of Boris Godunov in 1605, the Boyars had whisked their pretender off to Moscow and crowned him tsar of all the Russias. But his reign didn't last long enough for Dmitri to learn his way around the Kremlin. Aroused as much by his Catholicism as his sins—the False Dmitri had a weakness for group sex—a mob stormed the holy of holies and murdered him, then burned his body, loaded his ashes into a cannon and shot them off toward Poland. The night was alive with that peculiar whiteness of the northern latitudes that made material things appear one dimensional. Zander could see the silhouette of the monastery as he, Alyosha, Tuohy, and the four comrades they had brought with them in the back of the coal truck crossed the flat plain on foot; it looked like a painted backdrop on a silent film set.
Spread out in a skirmish line, they passed a stable full of horses, then an outbuilding that contained several rusty plows and an open Velie Bitwel Six. They ducked around a large open hangar. Inside, three magnificent horses, harnessed to the troika, pawed gently at the ground; Felix kept horses in harness day and night so he could race off into the plains whenever he wanted to let off steam. Crouching at the corner of the hangar, Zander, Alyosha, and Tuohy paused to get their bearings. To the right of the monastery they could make out the shadowy figures of men seated around several campfires. "Probably the deserters he's hired as his private army," whispered Alyosha. "How many do you think there are.'"' "Hard to say. A dozen. Two at the most."
The first floor of the monastery appeared shuttered and dark. Several second floor windows gaped open. From one of them came the tinny notes of a player piano and the vague sound of men laughing. Alyosha settled down inside the hangar to fix the fuses on his sticks of dynamite while Zander crouched at the corner staring at the building. He could feel his heart pumping. Breathing became painful. A ground floor door banged open and a drunken guardsman staggered from the monastery. He opened his fly and stood urinating into the night with his hands on his hips. "Ivan," he yelled at the top of his voice. The guardsman swayed. "Ivan, you prick, come out and hold my cock while I piss."
A figure appeared at a second floor window. "Get one of the whores to help you," a man's voice called down.
"Ivan, darling;' cried the guardsman, pitching his voice high to
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imitate an irritated woman, "you never said no to me before. Have you found someone new tiien?" Laugiiing wildly, the guardsman returned to the monastery,
Alyosha crawled over to Zander and patted his satchel; his sticks of dynamite were ready to go. Zander glanced back toward the monastery. "Here's what we'll do," he said.
Ten minutes later the first stick of dynamite went off as Alyosha and two of the comrades from the back of the coal truck attacked the deserters around the campfires. There was a flurry of rifle fire, and two more explosions, then more rifle fire and yells as Alyosha stampeded the deserters toward the wood line. Tuohy lighted a fuse and arced a stick of dynamite up through a second floor window of the monastery, then raced after Zander, who was pounding up the wide stone staircase, his pistol drawn, two other comrades with rifles at the ready right behind him. Tuohy's dynamite failed to explode, but the sight of it coming through the window sent a half-dozen young Guard officers and three whores, in their corsets, scampering in panic from what had once been the monastery's beamed library. One of the Guard officers, his shirt unbuttoned, his fly open, tugged an enormous sword from its scabbard, leveled it at the attackers, sighted over it, and charged. A rifle shot rang out, then a second, and the Guard officer was fiung back against a wall, blood spurting from a gaping hole in his shoulder. The other officers, dazed, intoxicated, unable to focus clearly, threw up their hands in surrender.
While the two comrades and Tuohy covered the prisoners. Zander raced from room to room, kicking doors open and crying at the top of his voice, "Where are you, Felix.^ If you've hurt a hair on her head, I'll shoot your gut out. Do you hear me, Felix.'' One hair on her head and you're a dead man."
In what must have been Felix's bedroom, judging from the ornate bed in the middle and the half-dozen government posters of Lili tacked to the walls, he found an old man polishing the boots of the young officers. "Where is the prince.^" Zander yelled, cocking his pistol and pointing it at the old man, but he never looked up from his polishing, and so Zander raced on. Kicking absently at the paraphernalia the Guard officers had left scattered around the rooms. Zander made his way back through the empty monastery to the landing. He found Tuohy standing over a kneeling Guard officer, his pistol cocked and pressed to the young man's skull.
"He's taken her to the Winter Palace," the Guard officer was saying. "I swear it on the head of my mother."
One of the whores huddled against the wall whimpered, "Your honors, he's telling the truth. They left this morning. Felix. Two
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of his Guard officer pals. The woman whose picture is on them posters."
Alyosha came running up the stairs, a pistol in one hand, a stick of dynamite in the other, a thin cigar dangling from his lips. "Did you find her.''" he called.
"He's taken her to the Winter Palace," Tuohy replied.
Alyosha looked at Zander. "That's going to be a bit harder to capture than a monastery," he said.
The word spread quickly on the Smolny grapevine. That morning Trotsky had personally passed out pistols to his Central Committee comrades. Even the dullest Bolshevik understood what it meant. Preparations for the uprising were complete. All the military and Red Guard units were at their staging points, waiting only for the signal from Trotsky to march. Trotsky could be seen striding through the long vaulted corridors of Smolny, his face drawn, his collar filthy, his eyes practically closed from exhaustion. Thinking he might have gone blind, people scurried out of his way.
Arishka watched Trotsky disappear down a corridor,
"Have you heard from Zander.''" she asked Tuohy.
"Not a word. He hasn't been back to the Steamboat in days. He's out there somewhere—looking for her."
Arishka nodded toward Trotsky's back. "Why doesn't he give the order to strike.^"
"He is waiting for provocation," Tuohy explained. "When the coup is launched, it must appear to the masses to be an act of self-defense, a reaction against counterrevolution."
That afternoon Smolny was buzzing with excitement.
"Have you heard the latest.-^" Arishka blurted out. "Kerensky's made his move. If Trotsky wanted a provocation, Kerensky's handed it to him on a silver platter."
Kerensky had declared that a "state of insurrection" existed, had denounced Lenin as a criminal and had ordered the arrest of Trotsky and the other members of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Government units had occupied the telephone exchange, the post
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office, and the railway stations. Officer cadets were setting up command posts at the city's main intersections, halting automobiles and searching them for arms. Troops loyal to Kerensky were raising all the main bridges over the Neva.
Room Seventeen at Smolny, Trotsky's command post, was a madhouse. Military commanders argued in front of the enormous map of the city on the wall. Someone screamed into a telephone, "The bridges are to be lowered at all costs!" Trotsky stood next to a window dictating furiously to a secretary. "To all military units in the Petrograd garrison," he intoned, almost as if he could imbue the written word with his oral passion. "Order of the day number one. The Petrograd Soviet is in imminent danger! You are hereby instructed to prepare your regiment for action. Await further orders. All procrastination and hesitation will be regarded as treason to the revolution." Trotsky waited for the secretary to catch up to him. "You have that.'' Dispatch a copy by motorcycle courier to every regiment immediately. More quiet, if you please!'' Trotsky strode over to the map, wringing his hands in anticipation. "Send the Izmailovsky Regiment to the Baltic railroad station. Have the Volinskys and Pavlovskys move on the Troitsky and Liteiny bridges. As for the Grenadiersky and Sampsoniyevsky bridges ..."
Trotsky's voice droned on.
Hollow-eyed, unshaven, Zander turned like a moth around the Winter Palace. He wandered past the Jordan entrance on the Neva embankment, from which the tsars blessed the waters of the Neva every January; past the Millionnaya entrance, guarded by several hundred girls from a women's battalion; past the commander's entrance, guarded by Cossacks and a detachment from the Oranienbaum Military School. He gazed at the palace's endless rows of windows and wondered which one she was behind, and thought about her eyes; it wasn't their largeness he remembered so much as their intensity. She had a way of fixing him with her gaze that left him with the impression she could see into him. If she were to be killed now, just when all their wildest hopes were about to come true . . .
The streets around the palace, both on the Winter Canal side and the square side, teemed with Red Guards and workers and sailors as the Bolsheviks moved into position. There was a stench of garbage in the air; many had been camping in the neighborhood for days. Zander came across several of his Kshesinskaya Mansion comrades in his wanderings. They were dog tired, but elated. The Tauride Palace had been occupied, they said. Post offices, railroad stations, the telephone exchange, had fallen to the Bolsheviks without a shot. Warehouses full
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of food were under Bolshevik control. Everywhere government troops were melting away. Well after midnight Zander noticed the cruiser Aurora dropping anchor in the middle of the Neva, her searchlights probing the Nikolayevsky Bridge and the facade of the Winter Palace.
And still Zander turned around the silent building.
At dawn, in a narrow side street behind Palace Square crowded with Red Guards breaking open crates of rifles, he joined some children and sailors who stood in a semi-circle around a ventriloquist. He was a mutilated war veteran, bearded, lean, with one ear shot away and a leg missing below the knee. His right arm pinned a homemade crutch under his armpit. Over his left hand he had draped a tattered orange bathtub mat with dirty strands of curled wool straggling from its fringes—the kind of thing someone might find on a heap in the gutter after a mob had ransacked some capitalist's house. Which was, in fact, where the ventriloquist had come across it.
"No need to be respectful of him," the ventriloquist advised his audience, casting his beady eyes disdainfully at his dummy. "He's only an ordinary alley cat."
"Attention to what you say about me," warned the cat as the ventriloquist's Adam's apple bobbed.
"You think I was being disrespectful.'*" the ventriloquist asked the cat, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
The cat stood his ground. "It's the way you said 'alley' that rubbed me the wrong way." The fringes over the cat's eyes shook with indignation, and he scratched nervously at a flea.
The ventriloquist seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in teasing the cat. "The description was perfectly accurate. The truth of the matter is that you are an alley cat,"
"Due to circumstances totally beyond my capacity to understand, no less control"—here the sailors snickered in sympathy with the cat—"I happen, for the moment, to spend a great deal of my time in alleys. That part is true. I don't deny it. But the fact that I've fallen on, eh, shall we say difficult times cannot obscure my nobility of spirit."
One of the sailors hooted scornfully. The cat gave him a dirty look and continued. "I come from a long line of pedigreed cats. I trace my roots back four thousand years to ancient Egypt."
"Ancient Egypt, you say.-*" The ventriloquist shook his head at this startling declaration.
"Ancient Egypt, exactly," the cat insisted, his head bobbing unhappily, tears forming where his eyes would have been if he had any. "We earned our ration in those days by keeping the rats out of the granaries. We were so important, the punishment for killing one of us, even by accident, was execution."
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"People were executed for killing cats? You expect us to believe that?"
"Absolutely. Execution by asp bite, if you want to know all the dirty details. The convicted cat-killer was flung into a pit full of asps. What's more, the owner of the cat had to shave off his eyebrows in sign of mourning."
"If we were in ancient Egypt, and you died, Vd be expected to shave my eyebrows?"
"Both of them, exactly."
The sailors and the children, caught up in the dialogue, looked from one to the other as if they were following a tennis match.
"And what makes you think I'd mourn your death," inquired the ventriloquist with exaggerated politeness, "especially now, when cats are more valuable dead than alive?"
The cat jerked back its nose, offended. "More valuable dead?"
"Dead cats," the ventriloquist pointedly reminded the cat, "can be eaten."
"Eaten!" The cat appealed to the audience. "If he's going to talk Hke that, maybe he and I should go our separate ways."
The ventriloquist cocked his only ear as if he hadn't heard correctly. "You go one way, I go another?"
"Yes, exactly," declared the cat proudly, drawing himself up to his full height. "I'm perfectly capable offending for myself. I don't need you."
The ventriloquist flashed a cruel smile. "Idiot! Without me you don't exist."
"Maybe it makes you feel like a whole man to think so."
"You little worm," the ventriloquist exploded. "Die!" And he flung the cat into the gutter.
The children and the sailors closed in to stare down gravely at the carcass. A child burst into tears. The ventriloquist prodded the body with the tip of his crutch. "Hey," he called, "I was only kidding. Get up."
The cat didn't show any sign of life.
"Cat killer, cat killer," chanted the children.
"Why don't we shave oii his eyebrows?" suggested one sailor.
"The cat is only a bathmat," cried the ventriloquist.
But the sailors, nervous at the prospect of attacking the Winter Palace, were in no mood to confront reality. One of them produced a pair of scissors from a wooden box at his hip. Several others pinned the mutilated soldier to the side of the building. As the children cheered and Zander looked on, the sailor with the scissors stepped up and butchered the cat-killer's eyebrows.
