Fall of Giants

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR – November to December 1918

Ethel woke early on the morning after Armistice Day. Shivering in the stone-floored kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil on the old-fashioned range, she made a resolution to be happy. There was a lot to be happy about. The war was over and she was going to have a baby. She had a faithful husband who adored her. Things had not turned out exactly how she wanted, but she would not let that make her miserable. She would paint her kitchen a cheerful yellow, she decided. Bright colors in kitchens were a new fashion.

But first she had to try to mend her marriage. Bernie had been mollified by her surrender, but she had continued to feel bitter, and the atmosphere in the house had remained poisoned. She was angry, but she did not want the rift to be permanent. She wondered if she could make friends.

She took two cups of tea into the bedroom and got back into bed. Lloyd was still asleep in his cot in the corner. “How do you feel?” she said as Bernie sat up and put his glasses on.

“Better, I think.”

“Stay in bed another day, make sure you’ve got rid of it completely.”

“I might do that.” His tone was neutral, neither warm nor hostile.

She sipped hot tea. “What would you like, a boy or a girl?”

He was silent, and at first she thought he was sulkily refusing to answer; but in fact he was just thinking for a few moments, as he often did before answering a question. At last he said: “Well, we’ve got a boy, so it would be nice to have one of each.”

She felt a surge of affection for him. He always talked as if Lloyd was his own child. “We’ve got to make sure this is a good country for them to grow up in,” she said. “Where they can get good schooling and a job and a decent house to bring up their own children in. And no more wars.”

“Lloyd George will call a snap election.”

“Do you think so?”

“He’s the man who won the war. He’ll want to get reelected before that wears off.”

“I think Labour will still do well.”

“We’ve got a chance in places like Aldgate, anyway.”

Ethel hesitated. “Would you like me to manage your campaign?”

Bernie looked doubtful. “I’ve asked Jock Reid to be my agent.”

“Jock can deal with legal documents and finance,” Ethel said. “I’ll organize meetings and so on. I can do it much better.” Suddenly she felt this was about their marriage, not just the campaign.

“Are you sure you want to?”

“Yes. Jock would just send you to make speeches. You’ll have to do that, of course, but it’s not your strong point. You’re better sitting down with a few people, talking over a cup of tea. I’ll get you into factories and warehouses where you can chat to the men informally.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Bernie said.

She finished her tea and put the cup and saucer on the floor beside the bed. “So you’re feeling better?”

“Yes.”

She took his cup and saucer, put them down, then pulled her nightdress over her head. Her breasts were not as perky as they had been before she got pregnant with Lloyd, but they were still firm and round. “How much better?” she said.

He stared. “A lot.”

They had not made love since the evening Jayne McCulley had proposed Ethel as candidate. Ethel was missing it badly. She held her breasts in her hands. The cold air in the room was making her nipples stand up. “Do you know what these are?”

“I believe they’re your bosoms.”

“Some people call them tits.”

“I call them beautiful.” His voice had become a little hoarse.

“Would you like to play with them?”

“All day long.”

“I’m not sure about that,” she said. “But make a start, and we’ll see how we go.”

“All right.”

Ethel sighed happily. Men were so simple.

An hour later she went to work, leaving Lloyd with Bernie. There were not many people on the streets: London had a hangover this morning. She reached the office of the National Union of Garment Workers and sat at her desk. Peace would bring new industrial problems, she realized as she thought about the working day ahead of her. Millions of men leaving the army would be looking for employment, and they would want to elbow aside the women who had been doing their jobs for four years. But those women needed their wages. They did not all have a man coming home from France: a lot of their husbands were buried there. They needed their union, and they needed Ethel.

Whenever the election came, the union would naturally be campaigning for the Labour Party. Ethel spent most of the day in planning meetings.

The evening papers brought surprising news about the election. Lloyd George had decided to continue the coalition government into peacetime. He would not campaign as leader of the Liberals, but as head of the coalition. That morning he had addressed two hundred Liberal M.P.s at Downing Street and won their support. At the same time Bonar Law had persuaded Conservative M.P.s to back the idea.

Ethel was baffled. What were people supposed to vote for?

When she got home she found Bernie furious. “It’s not an election, it’s a bloody coronation,” he said. “King David Lloyd George. What a traitor. He has a chance to bring in a radical left-wing government and what does he do? Sticks with his Conservative pals! He’s a bloody turncoat.”

“Let’s not give up yet,” said Ethel.

Two days later the Labour Party withdrew from the coalition and announced it would campaign against Lloyd George. Four Labour M.P.s who were government ministers refused to resign and were smartly expelled from the party. The date of the election was set for December 14. To give time for soldiers’ ballots to be returned from France and counted, the results would not be announced until after Christmas.

Ethel started drawing up Bernie’s campaigning schedule.

On the day after Armistice Day, Maud wrote to Walter on her brother’s crested writing paper and put the letter in the red pillar-box on the street corner.

She had no idea how long it would take for normal post to be resumed, but when it happened she wanted her envelope to be on top of the pile. Her message was carefully worded, just in case censorship continued: it did not refer to their marriage, but just said she hoped to resume their old relationship now that their countries were at peace. Perhaps the letter was risky all the same. But she was desperate to find out whether Walter was alive and, if he was, to see him.

She feared that the victorious Allies would want to punish the German people, but Lloyd George’s speech to Liberal M.P.s that day was reassuring. According to the evening papers, he said the peace treaty with Germany must be fair and just. “We must not allow any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, or any grasping desire to overrule the fundamental principles of righteousness.” The government would set its face against what he called “a base, sordid, squalid idea of vengeance and avarice.” That cheered her up. Life for the Germans now would be hard enough anyway.

However, she was horrified the following morning when she opened the Daily Mail at breakfast. The leading article was headed THE HUNS MUST PAY. The paper argued that food aid should be sent to Germany-only because “if Germany were starved to death she could not pay what she owes.” The kaiser must be put on trial for war crimes, it added. The paper fanned the flames of revenge by publishing at the top of its letters column a diatribe from Viscountess Templetown headed KEEP OUT THE HUNS. “How long are we all supposed to go on hating one another?” Maud said to Aunt Herm. “A year? Ten years? Forever?”

But Maud should not have been surprised. The Mail had conducted a hate campaign against the thirty thousand Germans who had been living in Britain at the outbreak of war-most of them long-term residents who thought of this country as their home. In consequence families had been broken up and thousands of harmless people had spent years in British concentration camps. It was stupid, but people needed someone to hate, and the newspapers were always ready to supply that need.

Maud knew the proprietor of the Mail, Lord Northcliffe. Like all great press men, he really believed the drivel he published. His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.

She also knew that Lloyd George had recently snubbed Northcliffe personally. The self-important press lord had proposed himself as a member of the British delegation at the upcoming peace conference, and had been offended when the prime minister turned him down.

Maud was worried. In politics, despicable people sometimes had to be pandered to, but Lloyd George seemed to have forgotten that. She wondered anxiously how much effect the Mail’s malevolent propaganda would have on the election.

A few days later she found out.

She went to an election meeting in a municipal hall in the East End of London. Eth Leckwith was in the audience and her husband, Bernie, was on the platform. Maud had not made up her quarrel with Ethel, even though they had been friends and colleagues for years. In fact Maud still trembled with anger when she recalled how Ethel and others had encouraged Parliament to pass a law that kept women at a disadvantage to men in elections. All the same she missed Ethel’s high spirits and ready smile.

The audience sat restlessly through the introductions. They were still mostly men, even though some women could now vote. Maud guessed that most women had not yet got used to the idea that they needed to take an interest in political discussions. But she also felt women would be put off by the tone of political meetings, in which men stood on a platform and ranted while the audience cheered or booed.

Bernie was the first speaker. He was no orator, Maud saw immediately. He spoke about the Labour Party’s new constitution, in particular clause four, calling for public ownership of the means of production. Maud thought this was interesting, for it drew a clear line between Labour and the pro-business Liberals; but she soon realized she was in a minority. The man sitting next to her grew restless and eventually shouted: “Will you chuck the Germans out of this country?”

Bernie was thrown. He mumbled for a few moments, then said: “I would do whatever benefited the workingman.” Maud wondered about the working woman, and guessed that Ethel must be thinking the same. Bernie went on: “But I don’t see that action against Germans in Britain is a high priority.”

That did not go down well; in fact it drew a few scattered boos.

Bernie said: “But to return to more important issues-”

From the other side of the hall, someone shouted: “What about the kaiser?”

Bernie made the mistake of replying to the heckler with a question. “What about the kaiser?” he rejoined. “He has abdicated.”

“Should he be put on trial?”

Bernie said with exasperation: “Don’t you understand that a trial means he will be entitled to defend himself? Do you really want to give the German emperor a platform to proclaim his innocence to the world?”

This was a compelling argument, Maud thought, but it was not what the audience wanted to hear. The booing grew louder, and there were shouts of “Hang the kaiser!”

British voters were ugly when riled, Maud thought; at least, the men were. Few women would ever want to come to meetings like this.

Bernie said: “If we hang our defeated enemies, we are barbarians.”

The man next to Maud shouted again: “Will you make the Hun pay?”

That got the biggest reaction of all. Several people shouted out: “Make the Hun pay!”

“Within reason,” Bernie began, but he got no further.

“Make the Hun pay!” The shout became common, and in a moment they were chanting in unison: “Make the Hun pay! Make the Hun pay!”

Maud got up from her seat and left.

Woodrow Wilson was the first American president ever to leave the country during his term of office.

He sailed from New York on December 4. Nine days later Gus was waiting for him at the quayside in Brest, on the western tip of the Brittany panhandle. At midday the mist cleared and the sun came out, for the first time in days. In the bay, battleships from the French, British, and American navies formed an honor guard through which the president steamed in a U.S. Navy transport ship, the George Washington. Guns thundered a salute, and a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It was a solemn moment for Gus. Wilson had come here to make sure there would never be another war like the one just ended. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and his League of Nations, were intended to change forever the way nations resolved their conflicts. It was a stratospheric ambition. In the history of human civilization, no politician had ever aimed so high. If he succeeded, the world would be made new.

At three in the afternoon the first lady, Edith Wilson, walked down the gangplank on the arm of General Pershing, followed by the president in a top hat.

The town of Brest received Wilson as a conquering hero. Vive Wilson, said the banners, Defenseur du Droit des Peuples; Long Live Wilson, Defender of People’s Rights. Every building flew the Stars and Stripes. Crowds jammed the sidewalks, many of the women wearing the traditional Breton tall lace headdress. The sound of Breton bagpipes was everywhere. Gus could have done without the bagpipes.

The French foreign minister made a speech of welcome. Gus stood with the American journalists. He noticed a small woman wearing a big fur hat. She turned her head, and he saw that her pretty face was marred by one permanently closed eye. He smiled with delight: it was Rosa Hellman. He looked forward to hearing her view of the peace conference.

After the speeches, the entire presidential party boarded the night train for the four-hundred-mile journey to Paris. The president shook Gus’s hand and said: “Glad to have you back on the team, Gus.”

Wilson wanted familiar associates around him for the Paris Peace Conference. His main adviser would be Colonel House, the pale Texan who had been unofficially counseling him on foreign policy for years. Gus would be the junior member of the crew.

Wilson looked weary, and he and Edith retired to their suite. Gus was concerned. He had heard rumors that the president’s health was poor. Back in 1906 a blood vessel had burst behind Wilson’s left eye, causing temporary blindness, and the doctors had diagnosed high blood pressure and advised him to retire. Wilson had cheerfully ignored their advice and gone on to become president, of course-but lately he had been suffering from headaches that might be a new symptom of the same blood pressure problem. The peace conference would be taxing: Gus hoped Wilson could stand it.

Rosa was on the train. Gus sat opposite her on the brocaded upholstery in the dining car. “I wondered whether I might see you,” she said. She seemed pleased they had met.

“I’m on detachment from the army,” said Gus, who was still wearing the uniform of a captain.

“Back home, Wilson has been walloped for his choice of colleagues. Not you, of course-”

“I’m a small fish.”

“But some people say he should not have brought his wife.”

Gus shrugged. It seemed trivial. After the battlefield it was going to be difficult to take seriously some of the stuff people worried about in peacetime.

Rosa said: “More importantly, he hasn’t brought any Republicans.”

“He wants allies on his team, not enemies,” Gus said indignantly.

“He needs allies back home, too,” Rosa said. “He’s lost Congress.”

She had a point, and Gus was reminded how smart she was. The midterm elections had been disastrous for Wilson. The Republicans had gained control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. “How did that happen?” he said. “I’ve been out of touch.”

“Ordinary people are fed up with rationing and high prices, and the end of the war came just a bit too late to help. And liberals hate the Espionage Act. It allowed Wilson to jail people who disagreed with the war. He used it, too-Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years.” Debs had been a presidential candidate for the Socialists. Rosa sounded angry as she said: “You can’t put your opponents in jail and still pretend to believe in freedom.”

Gus remembered how much he enjoyed the cut and thrust of an argument with Rosa. “Freedom sometimes has to be compromised in war,” he said.

“Obviously American voters don’t think so. And there’s another thing: Wilson segregated his Washington offices.”

Gus did not know whether Negroes could ever be raised to the level of white people but, like most liberal Americans, he thought the way to find out was to give them better chances in life and see what happened. However, Wilson and his wife were Southerners, and felt differently. “Edith won’t take her maid to London, for fear the girl will get spoiled,” Gus said. “She says British people are too polite to Negroes.”

“Woodrow Wilson is no longer the darling of the left in America,” Rosa concluded. “Which means he’s going to need Republican support for his League of Nations.”

“I suppose Henry Cabot Lodge feels snubbed.” Lodge was a right-wing Republican.

“You know politicians,” Rosa said. “They’re as sensitive as schoolgirls, and more vengeful. Lodge is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wilson should have brought him to Paris.”

Gus protested: “Lodge is against the whole idea of the League of Nations!”

“The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent-but a president should have it. And bringing Lodge here would have neutralized him. As a member of the team, he couldn’t go home and fight against whatever is agreed in Paris.”

Gus guessed she was right. But Wilson was an idealist who believed that the force of righteousness would overcome all obstacles. He underestimated the need to flatter, cajole, and seduce.

The food was good, in honor of the president. They had fresh sole from the Atlantic in a buttery sauce. Gus had not eaten so well since before the war. He was amused to see Rosa tuck in heartily. She was a petite figure: where did she put it all?

At the end of the meal they were served strong coffee in small cups. Gus found he did not want to leave Rosa and retire to his sleeping compartment. He was much too interested in talking to her. “Wilson will be in a strong position in Paris, anyway,” he said.

Rosa looked skeptical. “How so?”

“Well, first of all we won the war for them.”

She nodded. “Wilson said: ‘At Château-Thierry we saved the world.’”

“Chuck Dixon and I were in that battle.”

“Was that where he died?”

“Direct hit from a shell. First casualty I saw. Not the last, sadly.”

“I’m very sorry, especially for his wife. I’ve known Doris for years-we used to have the same piano teacher.”

“I don’t know if we saved the world, though,” Gus went on. “There are many more French and British and Russians among the dead than Americans. But we tipped the balance. That ought to mean something.”

She shook her head, tossing her dark curls. “I disagree. The war is over, and the Europeans no longer need us.”

“Men such as Lloyd George seem to think that American military power cannot be ignored.”

“Then he’s wrong,” said Rosa. Gus was surprised and intrigued to hear a woman speak so forcefully about such a subject. “Suppose the French and British simply refuse to go along with Wilson,” she said. “Would he use the army to enforce his ideas? No. Even if he wanted to, a Republican Congress wouldn’t let him.”

“We have economic and financial power.”

“It’s certainly true that the Allies owe us huge debts, but I’m not sure how much leverage that gives us. There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.’”

Gus began to see that Wilson’s task might be more difficult than he had imagined. “Well, what about public opinion? You saw the reception Wilson got in Brest. All over Europe, people are looking to him to create a peaceful world.”

“That’s his strongest card. People are sick of slaughter. ‘Never again’ is their cry. I just hope Wilson can deliver what they want.”

They returned to their compartments and said good night. Gus lay awake a long time, thinking about Rosa and what she had said. She really was the smartest woman he had ever met. She was beautiful, too. Somehow you quickly forgot about her eye. At first it seemed a terrible deformity, but after a while Gus stopped noticing it.

She had been pessimistic about the conference, however. And everything she said was true. Wilson had a struggle ahead, Gus now realized. He was overjoyed to be part of the team, and determined to do what he could to turn the president’s ideals into reality.

In the small hours of the morning he looked out of the window as the train steamed eastward across France. Passing through a town, he was startled to see crowds on the station platforms and on the road beside the railway line, watching. It was dark, but they were clearly visible by lamplight. There were thousands of them, men and women and children. There was no cheering: they were quite silent. The men and boys took off their hats, Gus saw, and that gesture of respect moved him almost to tears. They had waited half the night to see the passing of the train that held the hope of the world.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE – December 1918 to February 1919

The votes were counted three days after Christmas. Eth and Bernie Leckwith stood in Aldgate town hall to hear the results, Bernie on the platform in his best suit, Eth in the audience.

Bernie lost.

He was stoical, but Ethel cried. For him it was the end of a dream. Perhaps it had been a foolish dream, but all the same he was hurt, and her heart ached for him.

The Liberal candidate had supported the Lloyd George coalition, so there had been no Conservative candidate. Consequently the Conservatives had voted Liberal, and the combination had been too much for Labour to beat.

Bernie congratulated his winning opponent and came down off the platform. The other Labour Party members had a bottle of Scotch and wanted to hold a wake, but Bernie and Ethel went home.

“I’m not cut out for this, Eth,” Bernie said as she boiled water for cocoa.

“You did a good job,” she said. “We were outwitted by that bloody Lloyd George.”

Bernie shook his head. “I’m not a leader,” he said. “I’m a thinker and a planner. Time and again I tried to talk to people the way you do, and fire them with enthusiasm for our cause, but I never could do it. When you talk to them, they love you. That’s the difference.”

She knew he was right.

Next morning the newspapers showed that the Aldgate result had been mirrored all over the country. The coalition had won 525 of the 707 seats, one of the largest majorities in the history of Parliament. The people had voted for the man who won the war.

Ethel was bitterly disappointed. The old men were still running the country. The politicians who had caused millions of deaths were now celebrating, as if they had done something wonderful. But what had they achieved? Pain and hunger and destruction. Ten million men and boys had been killed to no purpose.

The only glimmer of hope was that the Labour Party had improved its position. They had won sixty seats, up from forty-two.

It was the anti-Lloyd George Liberals who had suffered. They had won only thirty constituencies, and Asquith himself had lost his seat. “This could be the end of the Liberal Party,” said Bernie as he spread dripping on his bread for lunch. “They’ve failed the people, and Labour is the opposition now. That may be our only consolation.”

Just before they left for work, the post arrived. Ethel looked at the letters while Bernie tied the laces of Lloyd’s shoes. There was one from Billy, written in their code. She sat at the kitchen table to decode it.

She underlined the key words with a pencil and wrote them on a pad. As she deciphered the message she became more and more fascinated.

“You know Billy’s in Russia,” she said to Bernie.

“Yes.”

“Well, he says our army is there to fight against the Bolsheviks. The American army is there too.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Yes, but listen, Bern,” she said. “We know the Whites can’t beat the Bolsheviks-but what if foreign armies join in? Anything could happen!”

Bernie looked thoughtful. “They could bring back the monarchy.”

“The people of this country won’t stand for that.”

“The people of this country don’t know what’s going on.”

“Then we’d better tell them,” said Ethel. “I’m going to write an article.”

“Who will publish it?”

“We’ll see. Maybe the Daily Herald.” The Herald was left-wing. “Will you take Lloyd to the child minder?”

“Yes, of course.”

Ethel thought for a minute, then, at the top of a sheet of paper, she wrote:

Hands Off Russia!

Walking around Paris made Maud cry. Along the broad boulevards there were piles of rubble where German shells had fallen. Broken windows in the grand buildings were repaired with boards, reminding her painfully of her handsome brother with his disfigured eye. The avenues of trees were marred by gaps where an ancient chestnut or noble plane had been sacrificed for its timber. Half the women wore black for mourning, and on street corners crippled soldiers begged for change.

She was crying for Walter, too. She had received no reply to her letter. She had inquired about going to Germany, but that was impossible. It had been difficult enough to get permission to come to Paris. She had hoped Walter might come here with the German delegation, but there was no German delegation: the defeated countries were not invited to the peace conference. The victorious Allies intended to thrash out an agreement among themselves, then present the losers with a treaty for signing.

Meanwhile there was a shortage of coal, and all the hotels were freezing cold. She had a suite at the Majestic, where the British delegation was headquartered. To guard against French spies, the British had replaced all the staff with their own people. Consequently the food was dire: porridge for breakfast, overcooked vegetables, and bad coffee.

Wrapped in a prewar fur coat, Maud went to meet Johnny Remarc at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées. “Thank you for arranging for me to travel to Paris,” she said.

“Anything for you, Maud. But why were you so keen to come here?”

She was not going to tell the truth, least of all to someone who loved to gossip. “Shopping,” she said. “I haven’t bought a new dress for four years.”

“Oh, spare me,” he said. “There’s almost nothing to buy, and what there is costs a fortune. Fifteen hundred francs for a gown! Even Fitz might draw the line there. I think you must have a French paramour.”

“I wish I did.” She changed the subject. “I’ve found Fitz’s car. Do you know where I might get petrol?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

They ordered lunch. Maud said: “Do you think we’re really going to make the Germans pay billions in reparations?”

“They’re not in a good position to object,” said Johnny. “After the Franco-Prussian War they made France pay five billion francs-which the French did in three years. And last March, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany made the Bolsheviks promise six billion marks, although of course it won’t be paid now. All the same, the Germans’ righteous indignation has the hollow ring of hypocrisy.”

Maud hated it when people spoke harshly of the Germans. It was as if the fact that they had lost made them beasts. What if we had been the losers, Maud wanted to say-would we have had to say the war was our fault, and pay for it all? “But we’re asking for so much more-twenty-four billion pounds, we say, and the French put it at almost double that.”

“It’s hard to argue with the French,” Johnny said. “They owe us six hundred million pounds, and more to the Americans; but if we deny them German reparations they’ll say they can’t pay us.”

“Can the Germans pay what we’re asking?”

“No. My friend Pozzo Keynes says they could pay about a tenth-two billion pounds-though it may cripple their country.”

“Do you mean John Maynard Keynes, the Cambridge economist?”

“Yes. We call him Pozzo.”

“I didn’t know he was one of… your friends.”

Johnny smiled. “Oh, yes, my dear, very much so.”

Maud suffered a moment of envy for Johnny’s cheerful depravity. She had fiercely suppressed her own need for physical love. It was almost two years since a man had touched her lovingly. She felt like an old nun, wrinkled and dried up.

“What a sad look!” Johnny did not miss much. “I hope you’re not in love with Pozzo.”

She laughed, then turned the conversation back to politics. “If we know the Germans can’t pay, why is Lloyd George insisting?”

“I asked him that question myself. I’ve known him quite well since he was minister for munitions. He says all the belligerents will end up paying their own debts, and no one will get any reparations to speak of.”

“So why this pretense?”

“Because in the end the taxpayers of every country will pay for the war-but the politician who tells them that will never win another election.”

Gus went to the daily meetings of the League of Nations Commission. This group had the job of drafting the covenant that would set up the league. Woodrow Wilson himself chaired the committee, and he was in a hurry.

Wilson had completely dominated the first month of the conference. He had swept aside a French agenda putting German reparations at the top and the league at the bottom, and insisted that the league must be part of any treaty signed by him.

The League Commission met at the luxurious Hotel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. The hydraulic elevators were ancient and slow, and sometimes stopped between floors while the water pressure built up; Gus thought they were very like the European diplomats, who enjoyed nothing more than a leisurely argument, and never came to a decision until forced. He saw with secret amusement that both diplomats and lifts caused the American president to fidget and mutter in furious impatience.

The nineteen commissioners sat around a big table covered with a red cloth, their interpreters behind them whispering in their ears, their aides around the room with files and notebooks. Gus could tell that the Europeans were impressed by his boss’s ability to drive the agenda forward. Some people had said the writing of the covenant would take months, if not years; and others said the nations would never reach agreement. However, to Gus’s delight, after ten days they were close to completing a first draft.

Wilson had to return to the United States on February 14. He would be back soon, but he was determined to have a draft of the covenant to take home.

Unfortunately, the afternoon before he left the French produced a major obstacle. They proposed that the League of Nations should have its own army.

Wilson’s eyes rolled up in despair. “Impossible,” he groaned.

Gus knew why. Congress would not allow American troops to be under someone else’s control.

The French delegate, former prime minister Léon Bourgeois, argued that the league would be ignored if it had no means of enforcing its decisions.

Gus shared Wilson’s frustration. There were other ways for the league to put pressure on rogue nations: diplomacy, economic sanctions, and in the last resort an ad hoc army, to be used for a specific mission, then disbanded when the job was done.

But Bourgeois said none of that would have protected France from Germany. The French could not focus on anything else. Perhaps it was understandable, Gus thought, but it was not the way to create a new world order.

Lord Robert Cecil, who had done a lot of the drafting, raised a bony finger to speak. Wilson nodded: he liked Cecil, who was a strong supporter of the league. Not everyone agreed: Clemenceau, the French prime minister, said that when Cecil smiled he looked like a Chinese dragon. “Forgive me for being blunt,” Cecil said. “The French delegation seems to be saying that because the league may not be as strong as they hoped, they will reject it altogether. May I point out very frankly that in that case there will almost certainly be a bilateral alliance between Great Britain and the United States that would offer nothing to France.”

Gus suppressed a smile. That’s telling ’em, he thought.

Bourgeois looked shocked and withdrew his amendment.

Wilson shot a grateful look across the table at Cecil.

The Japanese delegate, Baron Makino, wanted to speak. Wilson nodded and looked at his watch.

Makino referred to the clause in the covenant, already agreed, that guaranteed religious freedom. He wished to add an amendment to the effect that all members would treat each other’s citizens equally, without racial discrimination.

Wilson’s face froze.

Makino’s speech was eloquent, even in translation. Different races had fought side by side in the war, he pointed out. “A common bond of sympathy and gratitude has been established.” The league would be a great family of nations. Surely they should treat one another as equals?

Gus was worried but not surprised. The Japanese had been talking about this for a week or two. It had already caused consternation among the Australians and the Californians, who wanted to keep the Japanese out of their territories. It had disconcerted Wilson, who did not for one moment think that American Negroes were his equals. Most of all it had upset the British, who ruled undemocratically over hundreds of millions of people of different races and did not want them to think they were as good as their white overlords.

Again it was Cecil who spoke. “Alas, this is a highly controversial matter,” he said, and Gus could almost have believed in his sadness. “The mere suggestion that it might be discussed has already created discord.”

There was a murmur of agreement around the table.

Cecil went on: “Rather than delay the agreement of a draft covenant, perhaps we should postpone discussion of, ah, racial discrimination to a later date.”

The Greek prime minister said: “The whole question of religious liberty is a tricky subject, too. Perhaps we should drop that for the present.”

The Portuguese delegate said: “My government has never yet signed a treaty that did not call on God!”

Cecil, a deeply religious man, said: “Perhaps this time we will all have to take a chance.”

There was a ripple of laughter, and Wilson said with evident relief: “If that’s agreed, let us move on.”

Next day Wilson went to the French foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay and read the draft to a plenary session of the peace conference in the famous Clock Room under the enormous chandeliers that looked like stalactites in an Arctic cave. That evening he left for home. The following day was a Saturday, and in the evening Gus went dancing.

Paris after dark was a party town. Food was still scarce but there seemed to be plenty of booze. Young men left their hotel room doors open so that Red Cross nurses could wander in whenever they needed company. Conventional morality seemed to be put on hold. People did not try to hide their love affairs. Effeminate men cast off the pretense of masculinity. Larue’s became the lesbian restaurant. It was said the coal shortage was a myth put about by the French so that everyone would keep warm at night by sleeping with their friends.

Everything was expensive, but Gus had money. He had other advantages, too: he knew Paris and could speak French. He went to the races at St. Cloud, saw La Bohème at the opera, and went to a risqué musical called Phi Phi. Because he was close to the president, he was invited to every party.

He found himself spending more and more time with Rosa Hellman. He had to be careful, when talking to her, to tell her only things that he would be happy to see printed, but the habit of discretion was automatic with him now. She was one of the smartest people he had ever met. He liked her, but that was as far as it went. She was always ready to go out with him, but what reporter would refuse an invitation from a presidential aide? He could never hold hands with her, or try to kiss her good night, in case she might think he was taking advantage of his position as someone she could not afford to offend.

He met her at the Ritz for cocktails. “What are cocktails?” she said.

“Hard liquor dressed up to be more respectable. I promise you, they’re fashionable.”

Rosa was fashionable, too. Her hair was bobbed. Her cloche hat came down over her ears like a German soldier’s steel helmet. Curves and corsets had gone out of style, and her draped dress fell straight from the shoulders to a startlingly low waistline. By concealing her shape, paradoxically, the dress made Gus think about the body beneath. She wore lipstick and face powder, something European women still considered daring.

They had a martini each, then moved on. They drew a lot of stares as they walked together through the long lobby of the Ritz: the lanky man with the big head and his tiny one-eyed companion, him in white-tie-and-tails and her in silver-blue silk. They got a cab to the Majestic, where the British held Saturday night dances that everyone went to.

The ballroom was packed. Young aides from the delegations, journalists from all over the world, and soldiers freed from the trenches were “jazzing” with nurses and typists. Rosa taught Gus the fox-trot, then she left him and danced with a handsome dark-eyed man from the Greek delegation.

Feeling jealous, Gus drifted around the room chatting to acquaintances until he ran into Lady Maud Fitzherbert in a purple dress and pointed shoes. “Hello!” he said in surprise.

She seemed pleased to see him. “You look well.”

“I was lucky. I’m all in one piece.”

She touched the scar on his cheek. “Almost.”

“A scratch. Shall we dance?”

He took her in his arms. She was thin: he could feel her bones through the dress. They did the hesitation waltz. “How is Fitz?” Gus asked.

“Fine, I think. He’s in Russia. I’m probably not supposed to say that, but it’s an open secret.”

“I notice the British newspapers saying ‘Hands Off Russia.’”

“That campaign is being led by a woman you met at Tŷ Gwyn, Ethel Williams, now Eth Leckwith.”

“I don’t remember her.”

“She was the housekeeper.”

“Good lord!”

“She’s becoming something of a force in British politics.”

“How the world has changed.”

Maud drew him closer and lowered her voice. “I don’t suppose you have any news of Walter?”

Gus recalled the familiar-looking German officer he had seen fall at Château-Thierry, but he was far from certain that had been Walter, so he said: “Nothing, I’m sorry. It must be hard for you.”

“No information is coming out of Germany and no one is allowed to go there!”

“I’m afraid you may have to wait until the peace treaty is signed.”

“And when will that be?”

Gus did not know. “The league covenant is pretty much done, but they’re a long way from agreement over how much Germany should pay in reparations.”

“It’s foolish,” Maud said bitterly. “We need the Germans to be prosperous, so that British factories can sell them cars and stoves and carpet sweepers. If we cripple their economy, Germany will go Bolshevik.”

“People want revenge.”

“Do you remember 1914? Walter didn’t want war. Nor did the majority of Germans. But the country wasn’t a democracy. The kaiser was egged on by the generals. And once the Russians had mobilized, they had no choice.”

“Of course I remember. But most people don’t.”

The dance ended. Rosa Hellman appeared, and Gus introduced the two women. They talked for a minute, but Rosa was uncharacteristically charmless, and Maud moved away.

“That dress cost a fortune,” Rosa said grumpily. “It’s by Jeanne Lanvin.”

Gus was perplexed. “Didn’t you like Maud?”

“You obviously do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were dancing very close.”

Rosa did not know about Walter. All the same, Gus resented being falsely accused of flirting. “She wanted to talk about something rather confidential,” he said with a touch of indignation.

“I bet she did.”

“I don’t know why you’re taking this attitude,” Gus said. “You went off with that oily Greek.”

“He’s very handsome, and not a bit oily. Why shouldn’t I dance with other men? It’s not as if you’re in love with me.”

Gus stared at her. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, dear.” He suddenly felt confused and uncertain.

“What’s the matter now?”

“I’ve just realized something… I think.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“I suppose I must,” he said shakily. He paused.

She waited for him to speak. “Well?” she said impatiently.

“I am in love with you.”

She looked back at him in silence. After a long pause she said: “Do you mean it?”

Although the thought had taken him by surprise, he had no doubt. “Yes. I love you, Rosa.”

She smiled weakly. “Just fancy that.”

“I think perhaps I’ve been in love with you for quite a long time without knowing it.”

She nodded, as if having a suspicion confirmed. The band started a slow tune. She moved closer.

He took her in his arms automatically, but he was too wrought up to dance properly. “I’m not sure I can manage-”

“Don’t worry.” She knew what he was thinking. “Just pretend.”

He shuffled a few steps. His mind was in turmoil. She had not said anything about her own feelings. On the other hand, she had not walked away. Was there any chance she might return his love? She obviously liked him, but that was not the same thing at all. Was she asking herself, at this very minute, how she felt? Or was she thinking up some gentle words of rejection?

She looked up at him, and he thought she was about to give him the answer; then she said: “Take me away from here, please, Gus.”

“Of course.”

She got her coat. The doorman summoned a red Renault taxi. “Maxim’s,” Gus said. It was a short drive, and they rode in silence. Gus longed to know what was in her mind, but he did not rush her. She would have to tell him soon.

The restaurant was packed, the few empty tables reserved for later customers. The headwaiter was désolé. Gus took out his wallet, extracted a hundred-franc note, and said: “A quiet table in a corner.” A card saying Réservée was whipped away and they sat down.

They chose a light supper and Gus ordered a bottle of champagne. “You’ve changed so much,” Rosa said.

He was surprised. “I don’t think so.”

“You were a diffident young man, back in Buffalo. I think you were even shy of me. Now you walk around Paris as if you own it.”

“Oh, dear-that sounds arrogant.”

“No, just confident. After all, you’ve worked for a president and fought a war-those things make a difference.”

The food came but neither of them ate much. Gus was too tense. What was she thinking? Did she love him or not? Surely she must know? He put down his knife and fork, but instead of asking her the question on his mind he said: “You’ve always seemed self-confident.”

She laughed. “Isn’t that amazing?”

“Why?”

“I suppose I was confident until about the age of seven. And then… well, you know what schoolgirls are like. Everyone wants to be friends with the prettiest. I had to play with the fat girls and the ugly ones and those dressed in hand-me-downs. That went on into my teenage years. Even working for the Buffalo Anarchist was kind of an outsider thing to do. But when I became editor I started to get my self-esteem back.” She took a sip of champagne. “You helped.”

“I did?” Gus was surprised.

“It was the way you talked to me, as if I was the smartest and most interesting person in Buffalo.”

“You probably were.”

“Except for Olga Vyalov.”

“Ah.” Gus blushed. Remembering his infatuation with Olga made him feel foolish, but he did not want to say so, for that would be running her down, which was ungentlemanly.

When they had finished their coffee and he called for the bill, he still did not know how Rosa felt about him.

In the taxi he took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She said: “Oh, Gus, you are very dear.” He did not know what she meant by that. However, her face was turned up toward him in a way that almost seemed expectant. Did she want him to…? He screwed up his nerve and kissed her mouth.

There was a frozen moment when she did not respond, and he thought he had done the wrong thing. Then she sighed contentedly and parted her lips.

Oh, he thought happily; so that’s all right, then.

He put his arms around her and they kissed all the way to her hotel. The journey was too short. Suddenly a commissionaire was opening the door of the cab. “Wipe your mouth,” Rosa said as she got out. Gus pulled out a handkerchief and hastily rubbed at his face. The white linen came away red with her lipstick. He folded it carefully and put it back in his pocket.

He walked her to the door. “Can I see you tomorrow?” he said.

“When?”

“Early.”

She laughed. “You never pretend, Gus, do you? I love that about you.”

That was good. I love that about you was not the same as I love you but it was better than nothing. “Early it is,” he said.

“What shall we do?”

“It’s Sunday.” He said the first thing that came into his head. “We could go to church.”

“All right.”

“Let me take you to Notre Dame.”

“Are you Catholic?” she said in surprise.

“No, Episcopalian, if anything. You?”

“The same.”

“It’s all right, we can sit at the back. I’ll find out what time mass is and phone your hotel.”

She held out her hand and they shook like friends. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said formally.

“It was such a pleasure. Good night.”

“Good night,” she said, and she turned away and disappeared into the hotel lobby.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX – March to April 1919

When the snow melted, and the iron-hard Russian earth turned to rich wet mud, the White armies made a mighty effort to rid their country of the curse of Bolshevism. Admiral Kolchak’s force of one hundred thousand, patchily supplied with British uniforms and guns, came storming out of Siberia and attacked the Reds over a front that stretched seven hundred miles from north to south.

Fitz followed a few miles behind the Whites. He was leading the Aberowen Pals, plus some Canadians and a few interpreters. His job was to stiffen Kolchak by supervising communications, intelligence, and supply.

Fitz had high hopes. There might be difficulties, but it was unimaginable that Lenin and Trotsky would be allowed to steal Russia.

At the beginning of March he was in the city of Ufa on the European side of the Ural Mountains, reading a batch of week-old British newspapers. The news from London was mixed. Fitz was delighted that Lloyd George had appointed Winston Churchill as secretary for war. Of all the leading politicians, Winston was the most vigorous supporter of intervention in Russia. But some of the papers took the opposite side. Fitz was not surprised by the Daily Herald and the New Statesman, which in his view were more or less Bolshevik publications anyway. But even the Conservative Daily Express had a headline reading WITHDRAW FROM RUSSIA.

Unfortunately, they also had accurate details of what was going on. They even knew that the British had helped Kolchak with the coup that had abolished the directorate and made him supreme ruler. Where were they getting the information? He looked up from the paper. He was quartered in the city’s commercial college, and his aide-de-camp sat at the opposite desk. “Murray,” he said, “next time there’s a batch of mail from the men to be sent home, bring it to me first.”

This was irregular, and Murray looked dubious. “Sir?”

Fitz thought he had better explain. “I suspect information may be getting back from here. The censor must be asleep at the wheel.”

“Perhaps they think they can slacken off now that the war in Europe has ended.”

“No doubt. Anyway, I want to see whether the leak is in our section of the pipe.”

The back page of the paper had a photograph of the woman leading the “Hands Off Russia” campaign, and Fitz was startled to see that it was Ethel. She had been a housemaid at Tŷ Gwyn but now, the Express said, she was general secretary of the National Garment Workers Union.

He had slept with many women since then-most recently, in Omsk, a stunning Russian blonde, the bored mistress of a fat tsarist general who was too drunk and lazy to fuck her himself. But Ethel shone out in his memory. He wondered what her child was like. Fitz probably had half a dozen bastards around the world, but Ethel’s was the only one he knew of for sure.

And she was the one whipping up protest against intervention in Russia. Now Fitz knew where the information was coming from. Her damn brother was a sergeant in the Aberowen Pals. He had always been a troublemaker, and Fitz had no doubt he was briefing Ethel. Well, Fitz thought, I’ll catch him out, and then there will be hell to pay.

Over the next few weeks the Whites raced ahead, driving before them the surprised Reds, who had thought the Siberian government a spent force. If Kolchak’s armies could link up with their supporters in Archangel, in the north, and with Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south, they would form a semicircular force, a curved eastern scimitar a thousand miles long that would sweep irresistibly to Moscow.

Then, at the end of April, the Reds counterattacked.

By then Fitz was in Buguruslan, a grimly impoverished town in forest country a hundred miles or so east of the Volga River. The few dilapidated stone churches and municipal buildings poked up over the roofs of low-built wooden houses like weeds in a rubbish dump. Fitz sat in a large room in the town hall with the intelligence unit, sifting reports of prisoner interrogations. He did not know anything was wrong until he looked out of the window and saw the ragged soldiers of Kolchak’s army streaming along the main road through the town in the wrong direction. He sent an American interpreter, Lev Peshkov, to question the retreating men.

Peshkov came back with a sorry story. The Reds had attacked in force from the south, striking the overstretched left flank of Kolchak ’s advancing army. To avoid his force being cut in two the local White commander, General Belov, had ordered them to retreat and regroup.

A few minutes later, a Red deserter was brought in for interrogation. He had been a colonel under the tsar. What he had to say dismayed Fitz. The Reds had been surprised by Kolchak’s offensive, he said, but they had quickly regrouped and resupplied. Trotsky had declared that the Red Army must go on the offensive in the east. “Trotsky thinks that if the Reds falter, the Allies will recognize Kolchak as supreme ruler; and once they have done that they will flood Siberia with men and supplies.”

That was exactly what Fitz was hoping for. In his heavily accented Russian he asked: “So what did Trotsky do?”

The reply came fast, and Fitz could not understand what was said until he heard Peshkov’s translation. “Trotsky drew on special levies of recruits from the Bolshevik Party and the trade unions. The response was amazing. Twenty-two provinces sent detachments. The Novgorod Provincial Committee mobilized half its members!”

Fitz tried to imagine Kolchak summoning such a response from his supporters. It would never happen.

He returned to his quarters to pack his kit. He was almost too slow: the Pals got out only just ahead of the Reds, and a handful of men were left behind. By that evening Kolchak’s Western Army was in full retreat and Fitz was on a train going back toward the Ural Mountains.

Two days later he was back in the commercial college at Ufa.

Over those two days, Fitz’s mood turned black. He felt bitter with rage. He had been at war for five years, and he could recognize the turn of the tide-he knew the signs. The Russian civil war was as good as over.

The Whites were just too weak. The revolutionaries were going to win. Nothing short of an Allied invasion could turn the tables-and that was not going to happen: Churchill was in enough trouble for the little he was doing. Billy Williams and Ethel were making sure the needed reinforcements would never be sent.

Murray brought him a sack of mail. “You asked to see the men’s letters home, sir,” he said, with a hint of disapproval in his tone.

Fitz ignored Murray’s scruples and opened the sack. He searched for a letter from Sergeant Williams. Someone, at least, could be punished for this catastrophe.

He found what he was looking for. Sergeant Williams’s letter was addressed to E. Williams, her maiden name: no doubt he feared the use of her married name would call attention to his traitorous letter.

Fitz read it. Billy’s handwriting was large and confident. At first sight the text seemed innocent, if a bit odd. But Fitz had worked in Room 40, and knew about codes. He settled down to crack this one.

Murray said: “On another matter, sir, have you seen the American interpreter, Peshkov, in the last day or two?”

“No,” Fitz said. “What’s happened to him?”

“We seem to have lost him, sir.”

Trotsky was immensely weary, but not discouraged. The lines of strain on his face did not diminish the light of hope in his eyes. Grigori thought admiringly that he was sustained by an unshakable belief in what he was doing. They all had that, Grigori suspected; Lenin and Stalin too. Each felt sure he knew the right thing to do, whatever the problem might be, from land reform to military tactics.

Grigori was not like that. With Trotsky, he tried to work out the best response to the White armies, but he never felt sure they had made the right decision until the results were known. Perhaps that was why Trotsky was world-famous and Grigori was just another commissar.

As he had many times before, Grigori sat in Trotsky’s personal train with a map of Russia on the table. “We hardly need worry about the counterrevolutionaries in the north,” Trotsky said.

Grigori agreed. “According to our intelligence, there are mutinies among the British soldiers and sailors there.”

“And they have lost all hope of linking up with Kolchak. His armies are running as fast as they can back to Siberia. We could chase them over the Urals-but I think we have more important business elsewhere.”

“In the west?”

“That’s bad enough. The Whites are bolstered by reactionary nationalists in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Kolchak has appointed Yudenich commander in chief there, and he’s supported by a British navy flotilla that is keeping our fleet bottled up in Kronstadt. But I’m even more worried about the south.”

“General Denikin.”

“He has about a hundred and fifty thousand men, supported by French and Italian troops, and supplied by the British. We think he’s planning a dash for Moscow.”

“If I may say so, I think the key to defeating him is political, not military.”

Trotsky looked intrigued. “Go on.”

“Everywhere he goes, Denikin makes enemies. His Cossacks rob everyone. Whenever he takes a town, he rounds up all the Jews and just shoots them. If the coal mines fail to meet production targets, he kills one in ten miners. And, of course, he executes all deserters from his army.”

“So do we,” said Trotsky. “And we kill villagers who harbor deserters.”

“And peasants who refuse to give up their grain.” Grigori had had to harden his heart to accept this brutal necessity. “But I know peasants-my father was one. What they care about most is land. A lot of these people gained considerable tracts of land in the revolution, and they want to hold on to it-whatever else happens.”

“So?”

“Kolchak has announced that land reform should be based on the principle of private property.”

“Which means the peasants giving back the fields they have taken from the aristocracy.”

“And everyone knows that. I’d like to print his proclamation and post it outside every church. No matter what our soldiers do, the peasants will prefer us to the Whites.”

“Do it,” said Trotsky.

“One more thing. Announce an amnesty for deserters. For seven days, any who return to the ranks will escape punishment.”

“Another political move.”

“I don’t believe it will encourage desertion, because it’s only for a week; but it might bring men back to us-especially when they find out the Whites want to take their land.”

“Give it a try,” said Trotsky.

An aide came in and saluted. “A strange report, Comrade Peshkov, that I thought you would want to hear.”

“All right.”

“It’s about one of the prisoners we took at Buguruslan. He was with Kolchak’s army, but wearing an American uniform.”

“The Whites have soldiers from all over the world. The capitalist imperialists support the counterrevolution, naturally.”

“It’s not that, sir.”

“What, then?”

“Sir, he says he’s your brother.”

The platform was long, and there was a heavy morning mist, so that Grigori could not see the far end of the train. There was probably some mistake, he thought; a confusion of names or an error of translation. He tried to steel himself for a disappointment, but he was not successful: his heart beat faster and his nerves seemed to tingle. It was almost five years since he had seen his brother. He had often thought Lev must be dead. That could still be the awful truth.

He walked slowly, peering into the swirling haze. If this really was Lev, he would naturally be different. In the last five years Grigori had lost a front tooth and most of one ear, and had probably changed in other ways he was not aware of. How would Lev have altered?

After a few moments two figures emerged from the white mist: a Russian soldier, in ragged uniform and homemade shoes; and, beside him, a man who looked American. Was that Lev? He had a short American haircut and no mustache. He had the round-faced look of the well-fed American soldiers, with meaty shoulders under the smart new uniform. It was an officer’s uniform, Grigori saw with growing incredulity. Could his brother be an American officer?

The prisoner was staring back at him, and as Grigori came close he saw that it was, indeed, his brother. He did look different, and it was not just the general air of sleek prosperity. It was the way he stood, the expression on his face, and most of all the look in his eyes. He had lost his boyish cockiness and acquired an air of caution. He had, in fact, grown up.

As they came within touching distance, Grigori thought of all the ways Lev had let him down, and a host of recriminations sprang to his lips; but he uttered none of them, and instead opened his arms and hugged Lev. They kissed cheeks, slapped each other on the back, and hugged again, and Grigori found that he was weeping.

After a while he led Lev onto the train and took him to the carriage he used as his office. Grigori told his aide to bring tea. They sat in two faded armchairs. “You’re in the army?” Grigori said incredulously.

“They have conscription in America,” Lev said.

That made sense. Lev would never have joined voluntarily. “And you’re an officer!”

“So are you,” said Lev.

Grigori shook his head. “We’ve abolished ranks in the Red Army. I’m a military commissar.”

“But there are still some men who order tea and others who bring it,” Lev said as the aide came in with cups. “Wouldn’t Ma be proud?”

“Fit to bust. But why did you never write to me? I thought you were dead!”

“Aw, hell, I’m sorry,” said Lev. “I felt so bad about taking your ticket that I wanted to write and say I can pay for your passage. I kept putting off the letter until I had more money.”

It was a feeble excuse, but characteristic of Lev. He would not go to a party unless he had a fancy jacket to put on, and he refused to enter a bar if he did not have the money to buy a round of drinks.

Grigori recalled another betrayal. “You didn’t tell me Katerina was pregnant when you left.”

“Pregnant! I didn’t know.”

“Yes, you did. You told her not to tell me.”

“Oh. I guess I forgot.” Lev looked foolish, caught in a lie, but it did not take him long to recover and come up with his own counteraccusation. “That ship you sent me on didn’t even go to New York! It put us all ashore at a dump called Cardiff. I had to work for months to save up for another ticket.”

Grigori even felt guilty for a moment, then recalled how Lev had begged for the ticket. “Maybe I shouldn’t have helped you escape from the police,” he said crisply.

“I suppose you did your best for me,” Lev said reluctantly. Then he gave the warm smile that always caused Grigori to forgive him. “As you always have,” he added. “Ever since Ma died.”

Grigori felt a lump in his throat. “All the same,” he said, concentrating to make his voice steady, “we ought to punish the Vyalov family for cheating us.”

“I got my revenge,” Lev said. “There’s a Josef Vyalov in Buffalo. I fucked his daughter and made her pregnant, and he had to let me marry her.”

“My God! You’re part of the Vyalov family now?”

“He regretted it, which is why he arranged for me to be conscripted. He’s hoping I’ll be killed in battle.”

“Hell, do you still go wherever your dick leads you?”

Lev shrugged. “I guess.”

Grigori had some revelations of his own, and he was nervous about making them. He began by saying carefully: “Katerina had a baby boy, your son. She called him Vladimir.”

Lev looked pleased. “Is that so? I’ve got a son!”

Grigori did not have the courage to say that Vladimir knew nothing of Lev, and called Grigori “Daddy.” Instead he said: “I’ve taken good care of him.”

“I knew you would.”

Grigori felt a familiar stab of indignation at how Lev assumed that others would pick up the responsibilities he dropped. “Lev,” he said, “I married Katerina.” He waited for the outraged reaction.

But Lev remained calm. “I knew you’d do that, too.”

Grigori was astonished. “What?”

Lev nodded. “You were crazy for her, and she needed a solid dependable type to raise the child. It was in the cards.”

“I went through agonies!” Grigori said. Had all that been for nothing? “I was tortured by the thought that I was being disloyal to you.”

“Hell, no. I left her in the lurch. Good luck to you both.”

Grigori was maddened by how casual Lev was about the whole thing. “Did you worry about us at all?” he asked pointedly.

“You know me, Grishka.”

Of course Lev had not worried about them. “You hardly thought about us.”

“Sure I thought about you. Don’t be so holy. You wanted her; you held off for a while, maybe for years; but in the end you fucked her.”

It was the crude truth. Lev had an annoying way of bringing everyone else down to his level. “You’re right,” Grigori said. “Anyway, we have another child now, a daughter, Anna. She’s a year and a half old.”

“Two adults and two children. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got enough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been making money, selling whisky from British army stores to the Cossacks for gold. I’ve accumulated a small fortune.” Lev reached inside his uniform shirt, unfastened a buckle, and pulled out a money belt. “There’s enough here to pay for all four of you to come to America!” He gave the belt to Grigori.

Grigori was astonished and moved. Lev had not forgotten his family after all. He had saved up for a ticket. Naturally the handing over of the money had to be a flamboyant gesture-that was Lev’s character. But he had kept his promise.

What a shame it was all for nothing.

“Thank you,” Grigori said. “I’m proud of you for doing what you said you’d do. But, of course, it’s not necessary now. I can get you released and help you return to normal Russian life.” He handed the money belt back.

Lev took it and held it in his hands, staring at it. “What do you mean?”

Grigori saw that Lev looked hurt, and understood that he was wounded by the refusal of his gift. But there was a greater worry on Grigori’s mind. What would happen when Lev and Katerina were reunited? Would she fall for the more attractive brother all over again? Grigori’s heart was chilled by the thought that he could lose her, after all they had been through together. “We live in Moscow now,” he said. “We have an apartment in the Kremlin, Katerina and Vladimir and Anna and me. I can get an apartment for you easily enough-”

“Wait a minute,” said Lev, and there was a look of incredulity on his face. “You think I want to come back to Russia?”

“You already have,” Grigori said.

“But not to stay!”

“You can’t possibly want to return to America.”

“Of course I do! And you should come with me.”

“But there’s no need! Russia’s not like it used to be. The tsar is gone!”

“I like America,” Lev said. “You’ll like it too, all of you, especially Katerina.”

“But we’re making history here! We’ve invented a new form of government, the soviet. This is the new Russia, the new world. You’re missing everything!”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Lev said. “In America I have my own car. There’s more food than you can eat. All the booze I want, all the cigarettes I can smoke. I have five suits!”

“What’s the point in having five suits?” Grigori said in frustration. “It’s like having five beds. You can only use one at a time!”

“That’s not how I see it.”

What made the conversation so aggravating was that Lev clearly thought Grigori was the one who was missing the point. Grigori did not know what more he could say to change his brother’s mind. “Is that really what you want? Cigarettes and too many clothes and a car?”

“It’s what everyone wants. You Bolsheviks better remember that.”

Grigori was not going to take lessons in politics from Lev. “Russians want bread, peace, and land.”

“Anyway, I have a daughter in America. Her name is Daisy. She’s three.”

Grigori frowned doubtfully.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Lev said. “I didn’t care about Katerina’s child-what’s his name?”

“Vladimir.”

“I didn’t care about him, you think, so why should I care about Daisy? But it’s different. I never met Vladimir. He was just a speck when I left Petrograd. But I love Daisy, and what’s more, she loves me.”

Grigori could at least understand that. He was glad Lev had a good enough heart to feel attached to his daughter. And although he was bewildered by Lev’s preference for America, in his heart he would be hugely relieved if Lev did not come home. For Lev would surely want to get to know Vladimir, and then how long would it be before Vladimir learned that Lev was his real father? And if Katerina decided to leave Grigori for Lev, and take Vladimir with her, what would happen to Anna? Would Grigori lose her too? For himself, he thought guiltily, it was much better if Lev went back to America alone. “I believe you’re making the wrong choice, but I’m not going to force you,” he said.

Lev grinned. “You’re afraid I’ll take Katerina back, aren’t you? I know you too well, brother.”

Grigori winced. “Yes,” he said. “Take her back, then discard her all over again, and leave me to pick up the pieces a second time. I know you, too.”

“But you’ll help me get back to America.”

“No.” Grigori could not help feeling a twitch of gratification at the look of fear that passed across Lev’s face. But he did not prolong the agony. “I’ll help you get back to the White army. They can take you to America.”

“What’ll we do?”

“We’ll drive to the front line, and a little beyond it. Then I’ll release you into no-man’s-land. After that you’re on your own.”

“I might get shot.”

“We both might get shot. It’s a war.”

“I guess I’ll have to take my chances.”

“You’ll be okay, Lev,” said Grigori. “You always are.”

Billy Williams was marched from the Ufa city jail, through the dusty streets of the city, to the commercial college being used as temporary accommodation by the British army.

The court-martial took place in a classroom. Fitz sat at the teacher’s desk, with his aide-de-camp, Captain Murray, beside him. Captain Gwyn Evans was there with a notebook and pencil.

Billy was dirty and unshaven, and he had slept badly with the drunks and prostitutes of the town. Fitz wore a perfectly pressed uniform, as always. Billy knew he was in bad trouble. The verdict was a foregone conclusion: the evidence was clear. He had revealed military secrets in coded letters to his sister. But he was determined not to let his fear show. He was going to give a good account of himself.

Fitz said: “This is a field general court-martial, permitted when the accused is on active service or overseas and it is not possible to hold the more regular general court-martial. Only three officers are required to sit as judges, or two if no more are available. It may try a soldier of any rank on any offense, and has the power to impose the death penalty.”

Billy’s only chance was to influence the sentence. The possible punishments included penal servitude, hard labor, and death. No doubt Fitz would like to put Billy in front of a firing squad, or at least give him several years in prison. Billy’s aim was to plant in the minds of Murray and Evans sufficient doubts about the fairness of the trial to make them plump for a short term in prison.

Now he said: “Where is my lawyer?”

“It is not possible to offer you legal representation,” Fitz said.

“You’re sure of that, are you, sir?”

“Speak when you’re spoken to, Sergeant.”

Billy said: “Let the record show that I was denied access to a lawyer.” He stared at Gwyn Evans, the only one with a notebook. When Evans did nothing, Billy said: “Or will the record of this trial be a lie?” He put heavy emphasis on the word lie, knowing it would offend Fitz. It was part of the code of the English gentleman always to tell the truth.

Fitz nodded to Evans, who made a note.

First point to me, Billy thought, and he cheered up a bit.

Fitz said: “William Williams, you stand accused under part one of the Army Act. The charge is that you knowingly, while on active service, committed an act calculated to imperil the success of His Majesty’s forces. The penalty is death, or such lesser punishment as the court shall impose.”

The repeated emphasis on the death penalty chilled Billy, but he kept his face stiff.

“How do you plead?”

Billy took a deep breath. He spoke in a clear voice, and put into his tone as much scorn and contempt as he could muster. “I plead how dare you,” he said. “How dare you pretend to be an objective judge? How dare you act as if our presence in Russia is a legitimate operation? And how dare you make an accusation of treason against a man who has fought alongside you for three years? That’s how I plead.”

Gwyn Evans said: “Don’t be insolent, Billy boy. You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

Billy was not going to let Evans pretend to be benevolent. He said: “And my advice to you is to leave now and have nothing more to do with this kangaroo court. When the news gets out-and believe you me, this is going to be on the front page of the Daily Mirror-you will find that you’re the one in disgrace, not me.” He looked at Murray. “Every man who had anything to do with this farce is going to be disgraced.”

Evans looked troubled. Clearly he had not thought there might be publicity.

“Enough!” said Fitz loudly and angrily.

Good, Billy thought; I’ve got his goat already.

Fitz went on: “Let’s have the evidence, please, Captain Murray.”

Murray opened a folder and took out a sheet of paper. Billy recognized his own handwriting. It was, as he expected, a letter to Ethel.

Murray showed it to him and said: “Did you write this letter?”

Billy said: “How did it come to your attention, Captain Murray?”

Fitz barked: “Answer the question!”

Billy said. “You went to Eton school, didn’t you, Captain? A gentleman would never read someone else’s mail, or so we’re told. But as I understand it, only the official censor has the right to examine soldiers’ letters. So I assume this was brought to your attention by the censor.” He paused. As he expected, Murray was unwilling to answer. He went on: “Or was the letter obtained illegally?”

Murray repeated: “Did you write this letter?”

“If it was obtained illegally, then it can’t be used in a trial. I think that’s what a lawyer would say. But there are no lawyers here. That’s what makes this a kangaroo court.”

“Did you write this letter?”

“I will answer that question when you have explained how it came into your possession.”

Fitz said: “You can be punished for contempt of court, you know.”

I’m already facing the death penalty, Billy thought; how stupid of Fitz to think he can threaten me! But he said: “I am defending myself by pointing out the irregularity of the court and the illegality of the prosecution. Are you going to forbid that… sir?”

Murray gave up. “The envelope is marked with a return address and the name of Sergeant Billy Williams. If the accused wishes to claim he did not write it, he should say so now.”

Billy said nothing.

“The letter is a coded message,” Murray went on. “It may be decoded by reading every third word, and the initial capital letters of titles of songs and films.” Murray handed the letter to Evans. “When so decoded, it reads as follows.”

Billy’s letter described the incompetence of the Kolchak regime, saying that despite all their gold they had failed to pay the staff of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and so were continuing to have supply and transport problems. It also detailed the help the British army was trying to give. The information had been kept secret from the British public, who were paying for the army and whose sons were risking their lives.

Murray said to Billy: “Do you deny sending this message?”

“I cannot comment on evidence that has been obtained illegally.”

“The addressee, E. Williams, is in fact Mrs. Ethel Leckwith, leader of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, is she not?”

“I cannot comment on evidence that has been obtained illegally.”

“Have you written previous coded letters to her?”

Billy said nothing.

“And she has used the information you gave her to generate hostile newspaper stories bringing discredit on the British army and imperiling the success of our actions here.”

“Certainly not,” said Billy. “The army has been discredited by the men who sent us on a secret and illegal mission without the knowledge or consent of Parliament. The ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign is the necessary first step in returning us to our proper role as the defenders of Great Britain, rather than the private army of a little conspiracy of right-wing generals and politicians.”

Fitz’s chiseled face was red with anger, Billy saw to his great satisfaction. “I think we’ve heard enough,” Fitz said. “The court will now consider its verdict.” Murray murmured something, and Fitz said: “Oh, yes. Does the accused have anything to say?”

Billy stood up. “I call as my first witness Colonel the Earl Fitzherbert.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Fitz.

“Let the record show that the court refused to allow me to question a witness even though he was present at the trial.”

“Get on with it.”

“If I had not been denied my right to call a witness, I would have asked the colonel what was his relationship with my family. Did he not bear a personal grudge against me because of my father’s role as a miners’ leader? What was his relationship with my sister? Did he not employ her as his housekeeper, then mysteriously sack her?” Billy was tempted to say more about Ethel, but it would have been dragging her name through the mud, and besides, the hint was probably enough. “I would ask him about his personal interest in this illegal war against the Bolshevik government. Is his wife a Russian princess? Is his son heir to property here? Is the colonel in fact here to defend his personal financial interest? And are all these matters the real explanation of why he has convened this sham of a court? And does that not completely disqualify him from being a judge in this case?”

Fitz stared stony-faced, but both Murray and Evans looked startled. They had not known all this personal stuff.

Billy said: “I have one more point to make. The German kaiser stands accused of war crimes. It is argued that he declared war, with the encouragement of his generals, against the will of the German people, as clearly expressed by their representatives in the Reichstag, the German parliament. By contrast, it is argued, Britain declared war on Germany only after a debate in the House of Commons.”

Fitz pretended to be bored, but Murray and Evans were attentive.

Billy went on: “Now consider this war in Russia. It has never been debated in the British Parliament. The facts are hidden from the British people on the pretense of operational security-always the excuse for the army’s guilty secrets. We are fighting, but war has never been declared. The British prime minister and his colleagues are in exactly the same position as the kaiser and his generals. They are the ones acting illegally-not me.” Billy sat down.

The two captains went into a huddle with Fitz. Billy wondered if he had gone too far. He had felt the need to be trenchant, but he might have offended the captains instead of winning their support.

However, there seemed to be dissent among the judges. Fitz was speaking emphatically and Evans was shaking his head in negation. Murray looked awkward. That was probably a good sign, Billy thought. All the same he was as scared as he had ever been. When he had faced machine guns at the Somme and experienced an explosion down the pit, he had not been as frightened as he was now, with his life in the hands of malevolent officers.

At last they seemed to reach agreement. Fitz looked at Billy and said: “Stand up.”

Billy stood.

“Sergeant William Williams, this court finds you guilty as charged.” Fitz stared at Billy, as if hoping to see on his face the mortification of defeat. But Billy had been expecting a guilty verdict. It was the sentence he feared.

Fitz said: “You are sentenced to ten years penal servitude.”

Billy could no longer keep his face expressionless. It was not the death penalty-but ten years! When he came out he would be thirty. It would be 1929. Mildred would be thirty-five. Half their lives would be over. His façade of defiance crumbled, and tears came to his eyes.

A look of profound satisfaction came over Fitz’s face. “Dismissed,” he said.

Billy was marched away to begin his prison sentence.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN – May and June 1919

On the first day of May, Walter von Ulrich wrote a letter to Maud and posted it in the town of Versailles.

He did not know whether she was dead or alive. He had heard no news of her since Stockholm. There was still no postal service between Germany and Britain, so this was his first chance of writing to her in two years.

Walter and his father had traveled to France the day before, with 180 politicians, diplomats, and foreign ministry officials, as part of the German delegation to the peace conference. The French railway had slowed their special train to walking pace as they crossed the devastated landscape of northeastern France. “As if we were the only ones who fired shells here,” Otto said angrily. From Paris they had been bused to the small town of Versailles and dropped off at the Hotel des Réservoirs. Their luggage was unloaded in the courtyard and they were rudely told to carry it themselves. Clearly, Walter thought, the French were not going to be magnanimous in victory.

“They didn’t win, that’s their trouble,” said Otto. “They may not have actually lost, not quite, because they were saved by the British and Americans-but that’s not much to boast about. We beat them, and they know it, and it hurts their pumped-up pride.”

The hotel was cold and gloomy, but magnolias and apple trees were in blossom outside. The Germans were allowed to walk in the grounds of the great château and visit the shops. There was always a small crowd outside the hotel. The ordinary people were not as malign as the officials. Sometimes they booed, but mostly they were just curious to look at the enemy.

Walter wrote to Maud on the first day. He did not mention their marriage-he was not yet sure it was safe, and anyway the habit of secrecy was hard to break. He told her where he was, described the hotel and its surroundings, and asked her to write to him by return. He walked into the town, bought a stamp, and posted his letter.

He waited in anxious hope for the reply. If she were alive, did she still love him? He felt almost sure she would. But two years had passed since she had eagerly embraced him in a Stockholm hotel room. The world was full of men who had returned from the war to find that their girlfriends and wives had fallen in love with someone else during the long years of separation.

A few days later the leaders of the delegations were summoned to the Hotel Trianon Palace, across the park, and ceremonially handed printed copies of the peace treaty drafted by the victorious allies. It was in French. Back at the Hotel des Réservoirs, the copies were given to teams of translators. Walter was head of one such team. He divided his part into sections, passed them out, and sat down to read.

It was even worse than he expected.

The French army would occupy the border region of Rhineland for fifteen years. The Saar region of Germany was to become a League of Nations protectorate with the French controlling the coal mines. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France without a plebiscite: the French government was afraid the population would vote to stay German. The new state of Poland was so large it took in the homes of three million Germans and the coalfields of Silesia. Germany was to lose all her colonies: the Allies had shared them out like thieves dividing the swag. And the Germans had to agree to pay reparations of an unspecified amount-in other words, to sign a blank check.

Walter wondered what kind of country they wanted Germany to be. Did they have in mind a giant slave camp where everyone lived on iron rations and toiled only so that the overlords could take the produce? If Walter was to be one such slave, how could he contemplate setting up home with Maud and having children?

But worst of all was the war guilt clause.

Article 231 of the treaty said: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

“It’s a lie,” Walter said angrily. “A stupid, ignorant, wicked, vicious, damned lie.” Germany was not innocent, he knew, and he had argued as much with his father, time and time again. But he had lived through the diplomatic crises of the summer of 1914, he had known about every small step on the road to war, and no single nation was guilty. Leaders on both sides had been mainly concerned to defend their own countries, and none of them had intended to plunge the world into the greatest war in history: not Asquith, nor Poincaré, nor the kaiser, nor the tsar, nor the Austrian emperor. Even Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Sarajevo, had apparently been aghast when he understood what he had started. But even he was not responsible for “all the loss and damage.”

Walter ran into his father shortly after midnight, when they were both taking a break, drinking coffee to stay awake and continue working. “This is outrageous!” Otto stormed. “We agreed to an armistice based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points-but the treaty has nothing to do with the Fourteen Points!”

For once Walter agreed with his father.

By morning the translation had been printed and copies had been dispatched by special messenger to Berlin-a classic exercise in German efficiency, Walter thought, seeing his country’s virtues more clearly when it was being denigrated. Too exhausted to sleep, he decided to walk until he felt relaxed enough to go to bed.

He left the hotel and went into the park. The rhododendrons were in bud. It was a fine morning for France, a grim one for Germany. What effect would the proposals have on Germany’s struggling social-democratic government? Would the people despair and turn to Bolshevism?

He was alone in the great park except for a young woman in a light spring coat sitting on a bench beneath a chestnut tree. Deep in thought, he touched the brim of his trilby hat politely as he passed her.

“Walter,” she said.

His heart stopped. He knew the voice, but it could not be her. He turned and stared.

She stood up. “Oh, Walter,” she said. “Did you not know me?”

It was Maud.

His blood sang in his veins. He took two steps toward her and she threw herself into his arms. He hugged her hard. He buried his face in her neck and inhaled her fragrance, still familiar despite the years. He kissed her forehead and her cheek and then her mouth. He was speaking and kissing at the same time, but neither words nor kisses could say all that was in his heart.

At last she spoke. “Do you still love me?” she said.

“More than ever,” he answered, and he kissed her again.

Maud ran her hands over Walter’s bare chest as they lay on the bed after making love. “You’re so thin,” she said. His belly was concave, and the bones of his hips jutted out. She wanted to fatten him on buttered croissants and foie gras.

They were in a bedroom at an auberge a few miles outside Paris. The window was open, and a mild spring breeze fluttered the primrose-yellow curtains. Maud had found out about this place many years ago when Fitz had been using it for assignations with a married woman, the Comtesse de Cagnes. The establishment, little more than a large house in a small village, did not even have a name. Men made a reservation for lunch and took a room for the afternoon. Perhaps there were such places on the outskirts of London but, somehow, the arrangement seemed very French.

They called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Wooldridge, and Maud wore the wedding ring that had been hidden away for almost five years. No doubt the discreet proprietress assumed they were only pretending to be married. That was all right, as long as she did not suspect Walter was German, which would have caused trouble.

Maud could not keep her hands off him. She was so grateful that he had come back to her with his body intact. She touched the long scar on his shin with her fingertips.

“I got that at Château-Thierry,” he said.

“Gus Dewar was in that battle. I hope it wasn’t he who shot you.”

“I was lucky that it healed well. A lot of men died of gangrene.”

It was three weeks since they had been reunited. During that time Walter had been working around the clock on the German response to the draft treaty, only getting away for half an hour or so each day to walk with her in the park or sit in the back of Fitz’s blue Cadillac while the chauffeur drove them around.

Maud had been as shocked as Walter by the harsh terms offered to the Germans. The object of the Paris conference was to create a just and peaceful new world-not to enable the winners to take revenge on the losers. The new Germany should be democratic and prosperous. She wanted to have children with Walter, and their children would be German. She often thought of the passage in the Book of Ruth that began “Whither thou goest, I will go.” Sooner or later she would have to say that to Walter.

However, she had been comforted to learn that she was not the only person who disapproved of the treaty proposals. Others on the Allied side thought peace was more important than revenge. Twelve members of the American delegation had resigned in protest. In a British by-election, the candidate advocating a nonvengeful peace had won. The archbishop of Canterbury had said publicly that he was “very uncomfortable” and claimed to speak for a silent body of opinion that was not represented in the Hun-hating newspapers.

Yesterday the Germans had submitted their counterproposal-more than a hundred closely argued pages based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. This morning the French press was apoplectic. Bursting with indignation, they called the document a monument of impudence and an odious piece of buffoonery. “They accuse us of arrogance-the French!” said Walter. “What is that phrase about a saucepan?”

“The pot calling the kettle black,” said Maud.

He rolled onto his side and toyed with her pubic hair. It was dark and curly and luxuriant. She had offered to trim it, but he said he liked it the way it was. “What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s romantic to meet in a hotel and go to bed in the afternoon, like illicit lovers, but we cannot do this forever. We have to tell the world we are man and wife.”

Maud agreed. She was also impatient for the time when she could sleep with him every night, though she did not say so: she was a bit embarrassed by how much she liked sex with him. “We could just set up home, and let them draw their own conclusions.”

“I’m not comfortable with that,” he said. “It makes us look ashamed.”

She felt the same. She wanted to trumpet her happiness, not hide it away. She was proud of Walter: he was handsome and brave and extraordinarily clever. “We could have another wedding,” she said. “Get engaged, announce it, have a ceremony, and never tell anyone we’ve been married almost five years. It’s not illegal to marry the same person twice.”

He looked thoughtful. “My father and your brother would fight us. They could not stop us, but they could make things unpleasant-which would spoil the happiness of the event.”

“You’re right,” she said reluctantly. “Fitz would say that some Germans may be jolly good chaps, but all the same you don’t want your sister to marry one.”

“So we must present them with a fait accompli.”

“Let’s tell them, then announce the news in the press,” she said. “We’ll say it’s a symbol of the new world order. An Anglo-German marriage, at the same time as the peace treaty.”

He looked dubious. “How would we manage that?”

“I’ll speak to the editor of the Tatler magazine. They like me-I’ve provided them with lots of material.”

Walter smiled and said: “Lady Maud Fitzherbert is always dressed in the latest fashion.”

“What are you talking about?”

He reached for his billfold on the bedside table and extracted a magazine clipping. “My only picture of you,” he said.

She took it from him. It was soft with age and faded to the color of sand. She studied the photo. “This was taken before the war.”

“And it has been with me ever since. Like me, it survived.”

Tears came to her eyes, blurring the faded image even more.

“Don’t cry,” he said, hugging her.

She pressed her face to his bare chest and wept. Some women cried at the drop of a hat, but she had never been that sort. Now she sobbed helplessly. She was crying for the lost years, and the millions of boys lying dead, and the pointless, stupid waste of it all. She was shedding all the tears stored up in five years of self-control.

When it was over, and her tears were dry, she kissed him hungrily, and they made love again.

Fitz’s blue Cadillac picked Walter up at the hotel on June 16 and drove him into Paris. Maud had decided that the Tatler magazine would want a photograph of the two of them. Walter wore a tweed suit made in London before the war. It was too wide at the waist, but every German was walking around in clothes too big for him.

Walter had set up a small intelligence bureau at the Hotel des Réservoirs, monitoring the French, British, American, and Italian newspapers and collating gossip picked up by the German delegation. He knew that there were bad-tempered arguments between the Allies about the German counterproposals. Lloyd George, a politician who was flexible to a fault, was willing to reconsider the draft treaty. But the French prime minister, Clemenceau, said he had already been generous and fumed with outrage at any suggestion of amendments. Surprisingly, Woodrow Wilson was also obdurate. He believed the draft was a just settlement, and whenever he had made up his mind he became deaf to criticism.

The Allies were also negotiating peace treaties to cover Germany’s partners: Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. They were creating new countries such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and carving up the Middle East into British and French zones. And they were arguing about whether to make peace with Lenin. In every country the people were tired of war, but a few powerful men were still keen to fight against the Bolsheviks. The British Daily Mail had discovered a conspiracy of international Jewish financiers supporting the Moscow regime-one of that newspaper’s more implausible fantasies.

On the German treaty Wilson and Clemenceau overruled Lloyd George, and earlier that day the German team at the Hotel des Réservoirs had received an impatient note giving them three days to accept.

Walter thought gloomily about his country’s future as he sat in the back of Fitz’s car. It would be like an African colony, he thought, the primitive inhabitants working only to enrich their foreign masters. He would not want to raise children in such a place.

Maud was waiting in the photographer’s studio, looking wonderful in a filmy summer dress that, she said, was by Paul Poiret, her favorite couturier.

The photographer had a painted backdrop that showed a garden in full flower, which Maud decided was in bad taste, so they posed in front of his dining room curtains, which were mercifully plain. At first they stood side by side, not touching, like strangers. The photographer proposed that Walter should kneel in front of Maud, but that was too sentimental. In the end they found a position they all liked, with the two of them holding hands and looking at each other rather than the camera.

Copies of the picture would be ready tomorrow, the photographer promised.

They went to their auberge for lunch. “The Allies can’t just order Germany to sign,” Maud said. “That’s not negotiation.”

“It is what they have done.”

“What happens if you refuse?”

“They don’t say.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Some of the delegation are returning to Berlin tonight for consultations with our government.” He sighed. “I’m afraid I have been chosen to go with them.”

“Then this is the time to make our announcement. I’ll go to London tomorrow after I’ve picked up the photographs.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell my mother as soon as I get to Berlin. She’ll be nice about it. Then I’ll tell Father. He won’t.”

“I’ll speak to Aunt Herm and Princess Bea, and write to Fitz in Russia.”

“So this will be the last time we meet for a while.”

“Eat up, then, and let’s go to bed.”

Gus and Rosa met in the Tuileries Gardens. Paris was beginning to get back to normal, Gus thought happily. The sun was shining, the trees were in leaf, and men with carnations in their buttonholes sat smoking cigars and watching the best-dressed women in the world walk by. On one side of the park, the rue de Rivoli was busy with cars, trucks, and horse-drawn carts; on the other, freight barges plied the river Seine. Perhaps the world would recover, after all.

Rosa was ravishing in a red dress of light cotton and a wide-brimmed hat. If I could paint, Gus thought when he saw her, I’d paint her like this.

He had a blue blazer and a fashionable straw boater. When she saw him, she laughed.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing. You look nice.”

“It’s the hat, isn’t it?”

She suppressed another giggle. “You’re adorable.”

“It looks stupid. I can’t help it. Hats do that to me. It’s because I’m shaped like a ball-peen hammer.”

She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You’re the most attractive man in Paris.”

The amazing thing was that she meant it. Gus thought: How did I get so lucky?

He took her arm. “Let’s walk.” They strolled toward the Louvre.

She said: “Have you seen the Tatler?”

“The London magazine? No, why?”

“It seems that your intimate friend Lady Maud is married to a German.”

“Oh!” he said. “How did they find out?”

“You mean you knew about this?”

“I guessed. I saw Walter in Berlin in 1916 and he asked me to carry a letter to Maud. I figured that meant they were either engaged or married.”

“How discreet you are! You never said a word.”

“It was a dangerous secret.”

“It may still be dangerous. The Tatler is nice about them, but other papers may take a different line.”

“Maud has been attacked by the press before now. She’s pretty tough.”

Rosa looked abashed. “I suppose this is what you were talking about that night I saw you tête-à-tête with her.”

“Exactly. She was asking me if I had heard any news about Walter.”

“I feel foolish for suspecting you of flirting.”

“I forgive you, but reserve the right to recall the matter next time you criticize me unreasonably. Can I ask you something?”

“Anything you like, Gus.”

“Three questions, in fact.”

“How ominous. Like a folktale. If I get the answers wrong, will I be banished?”

“Are you still an anarchist?”

“Would it bother you?”

“I guess I’m asking myself if politics might divide us.”

“Anarchism is the belief that no one has the right to rule. All political philosophies, from the divine right of kings to Rousseau’s social contract, try to justify authority. Anarchists believe that all those theories fail, therefore no form of authority is legitimate.”

“Irrefutable, in theory. Impossible to put into practise.”

“You’re quick on the uptake. In effect, all anarchists are antiestablishment, but they differ widely in their vision of how society should work.”

“And what is your vision?”

“I don’t see it as clearly as I used to. Covering the White House has given me a different slant on politics. But I still believe that authority needs to justify itself.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever quarrel about that.”

“Good. Next question?”

“Tell me about your eye.”

“I was born like this. I could have an operation to open it. Behind my eyelid is nothing but a mass of useless tissue, but I could wear a glass eye. However, it would never shut. I figure this is the lesser evil. Does it bother you?”

He stopped walking and turned to face her directly. “May I kiss it?”

She hesitated. “All right.”

He bent down and kissed her closed eyelid. There was nothing unusual about how it felt to his lips. It was just like kissing her cheek. “Thank you,” he said.

She said quietly: “No one has ever done that before.”

He nodded. He had guessed it might be some kind of taboo.

She said: “Why did you want to do it?”

“Because I love everything about you, and I want to make sure you know it.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a minute, in the grip of emotion; but then she grinned and reverted to the flip tone she preferred. “Well, if there’s anything else weird you want to kiss, just let me know.”

He was not sure how to respond to that vaguely exciting offer, so he filed it away for future consideration. “I have one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Four months ago, I told you that I love you.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“But you haven’t said how you feel about me.”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Perhaps, but I’d like you to tell me. Do you love me?”

“Oh, Gus, don’t you understand?” Her face changed and she looked anguished. “I’m not good enough for you. You were the most eligible bachelor in Buffalo, and I was the one-eyed anarchist. You’re supposed to love someone elegant and beautiful and rich. I’m a doctor’s daughter-my mother was a housemaid. I’m not the right person for you to love.”

“Do you love me?” he said with quiet persistence.

She began to cry. “Of course I do, you dope, I love you with all my heart.”

He put his arms around her. “Then that’s all that matters,” he said.

Aunt Herm put down the Tatler. “It was very bad of you to get married secretly,” she said to Maud. Then she smiled conspiratorially. “But so romantic!”

They were in the drawing room of Fitz’s Mayfair house. Bea had redecorated after the end of the war, in the new art deco style, with utilitarian-looking chairs and modernistic silver gewgaws from Asprey. With Maud and Herm were Fitz’s roguish friend Bing Westhampton and Bing’s wife. The London season was in full swing, and they were going to the opera as soon as Bea was ready. She was saying good night to Boy, now three and a half, and Andrew, eighteen months.

Maud picked up the magazine and looked again at the article. The picture did not greatly please her. She had imagined that it would show two people in love. Unfortunately it looked like a scene from a moving picture show. Walter appeared predatory, holding her hand and gazing into her eyes like a wicked Lothario, and she seemed like the ingénue about to fall for his wiles.

However, the text was just what she had hoped for. The writer reminded readers that Lady Maud had been “the fashionable suffragette” before the war, she had started The Soldier’s Wife newspaper to campaign for the rights of the women left at home, and she had gone to jail for her protest on behalf of Jayne McCulley. It said that she and Walter had intended to announce their engagement in the normal way, and had been prevented by the outbreak of war. Their hasty secret marriage was portrayed as a desperate attempt to do the right thing in abnormal circumstances.

Maud had insisted on being quoted exactly, and the magazine had kept its promise. “I know that some British people hate the Germans,” she had said. “But I also know that Walter and many other Germans did all they could to prevent the war. Now that it is over, we must create peace and friendship between the former enemies, and I truly hope people will see our union as a symbol of the new world.”

Maud had learned, in her years of political campaigning, that you could sometimes win support from a publication by giving it a good story exclusively.

Walter had returned to Berlin as planned. The Germans had been jeered by crowds as they drove to the railway station on their way home. A female secretary had been knocked out by a thrown rock. The French comment had been: “Remember what they did to Belgium.” The secretary was still in hospital. Meanwhile, the German people were angrily against signing the treaty.

Bing sat next to Maud on the sofa. For once he was not flirtatious. “I wish your brother were here to advise you about this,” he said with a nod at the magazine.

Maud had written to Fitz to break the news of her marriage, and had enclosed the clipping from the Tatler, to show him that what she had done was being accepted by London society. She had no idea how long it would take for her letter to get to wherever Fitz was, and she did not expect a reply for months. By then it would be too late for Fitz to protest. He would just have to smile and congratulate her.

Now Maud bristled at the implication that she needed a man to tell her what to do. “What could Fitz possibly say?”

“For the foreseeable future, the life of a German wife is going to be hard.”

“I don’t need a man to tell me that.”

“In Fitz’s absence I feel a degree of responsibility.”

“Please don’t.” Maud tried not to be offended. What advice could Bing possibly offer anyone, other than how to gamble and drink in the world’s nightspots?

He lowered his voice. “I hesitate to say this, but… ” He glanced at Aunt Herm, who took the hint and went to pour herself a little more coffee. “If you were able to say that the marriage had never been consummated, then there might be an annulment.”

Maud thought of the room with the primrose-yellow curtains, and had to suppress a happy smile. “But I cannot-”

“Please don’t tell me anything about it. I only want to make sure you understand your options.”

Maud suppressed a growing indignation. “I know this is kindly meant, Bing-”

“There is also the possibility of divorce. There is always a way, you know, for a man to provide a wife with grounds.”

Maud could no longer contain her outrage. “Please drop the subject instantly,” she said in a raised voice. “I have not the slightest wish for either an annulment or a divorce. I love Walter.”

Bing looked sulky. “I was just trying to say what I think Fitz, as the head of your family, might tell you if he were here.” He stood up and spoke to his wife. “We’ll go on, shall we? No need for all of us to be late.”

A few minutes later, Bea came in wearing a new dress of pink silk. “I’m ready,” she said, as if she had been waiting for them rather than the other way around. Her glance went to Maud’s left hand and registered the wedding ring, but she did not comment. When Maud told her the news her response had been carefully neutral. “I hope you will be happy,” she had said without warmth. “And I hope Fitz will be able to accept the fact that you did not get his permission.”

They went out and got into the car. It was the black Cadillac Fitz had bought after his blue one got stranded in France. Everything was provided by Fitz, Maud reflected: the house the three women lived in, the fabulously expensive gowns they were wearing, the car, and the box at the opera. Her bills at the Ritz in Paris had been sent to Albert Solman, Fitz’s man of business here in London, and paid without question. Fitz never complained. Walter would never be able to keep her in such style, she knew. Perhaps Bing was right, and she would find it hard to do without her accustomed luxury. But she would be with the man she loved.

They reached Covent Garden at the last minute, because of Bea’s tardiness. The audience had already taken their seats. The three women hurried up the red-carpeted staircase and made their way to the box. Maud suddenly remembered what she had done to Walter in this box during Don Giovanni. She felt embarrassed: what had possessed her to take such a risk?

Bing Westhampton was already there with his wife, and he stood up and held a chair for Bea. The auditorium was silent: the show was about to begin. People-watching was one of the attractions of the opera, and many heads turned to look as the princess took her seat. Aunt Herm sat in the second row, but Bing held a front-row seat for Maud. A murmur of comment rose from the stalls: most of the crowd would have seen the photograph and read the article in the Tatler. Many of them knew Maud personally: this was London society, the aristocrats and the politicians, the judges and the bishops, the successful artists and the wealthy businessmen-and their wives. Maud stood for a moment to let them get a good look at her, and see how pleased and proud she was.

That was a mistake.

The sound from the audience changed. The murmur became louder. No words could be made out, but all the same the voices took on a note of disapproval, like the change in the buzz of a fly when it encounters a closed window. Maud was taken aback. Then she heard another noise, and it sounded dreadfully like a hiss. Confused and dismayed, she sat down.

That made no difference. Everyone was staring at her now. The hissing spread through the stalls in seconds, then began in the circle, too. “I say,” said Bing in feeble protest.

Maud had never encountered such hatred, even at the height of the suffragette demonstrations. There was a pain in her stomach like a cramp. She wished the music would start, but the conductor, too, was staring at her, his baton held at his side.

She tried to stare proudly back at them all, but tears came to her eyes and blurred her vision. This nightmare would not end of its own accord. She had to do something.

She stood up, and the hissing grew louder.

Tears ran down her face. Almost blind, she turned around. Knocking her chair over, she stumbled toward the door at the back of the box. Aunt Herm got up, saying: “Oh, dear, dear, dear.”

Bing leaped up and opened the door. Maud went out, with Aunt Herm close behind. Bing followed them out. Behind her, Maud heard the hissing die away amid a few ripples of laughter, then, to her horror, the audience began to clap, congratulating themselves on having got rid of her; and their jeering applause followed her along the corridor, down the stairs, and out of the theater.

The drive from the park gate to the Palace of Versailles was a mile long. Today it was lined with hundreds of mounted French cavalrymen in blue uniforms. The summer sun glinted off their steel helmets. They held lances with red and white pennants that rippled in the warm breeze.

Johnny Remarc had been able to get Maud an invitation to the signing of the peace treaty, despite her disgrace at the opera; but she had to travel on the back of an open lorry, packed in with all the female secretaries from the British delegation, like sheep going to market.

At one moment it had looked as if the Germans would refuse to sign. The war hero Field Marshal von Hindenburg had said he would prefer honorable defeat to a disgraceful peace. The entire German cabinet had resigned rather than agree to the treaty. So had the head of their delegation to Paris. At last the National Assembly had voted for signing everything except the notorious war guilt clause. Even that was unacceptable, the Allies had said immediately.

“What will the Allies do if the Germans refuse?” Maud had said to Walter in their auberge, where they were now discreetly living together.

“They say they will invade Germany.”

Maud shook her head. “Our soldiers would not fight.”

“Nor would ours.”

“So it would be a stalemate.”

“Except that the British navy has not lifted the blockade, so Germany still cannot get supplies. The Allies would just wait until food riots broke out in every German city, then they would walk in unopposed.”

“So you have to sign.”

“Sign or starve,” said Walter bitterly.

Today was June 28, five years to the day since the archduke had been killed in Sarajevo.

The lorry took the secretaries into the courtyard, and they got down as gracefully as they could. Maud entered the palace and went up the grand staircase, flanked by more overdressed French soldiers, this time the Garde Républicaine in silver helmets with horsehair plumes.

Finally she entered the Hall of Mirrors. This was one of the most grandiose rooms in the world. It was the size of three tennis courts in a line. Along one side, seventeen long windows overlooked the garden; on the opposite wall, the windows were reflected by seventeen mirrored arches. More importantly, this was the room where in 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the victorious Germans had crowned their first emperor and forced the French to sign away Alsace and Lorraine. Now the Germans were to be humiliated under the same barrel-vaulted ceiling. And no doubt some among them would be dreaming of the time in the future when they in turn would take their revenge. The degradation to which you subject others comes back, sooner or later, to haunt you, Maud thought. Would that reflection occur to men on either side at today’s ceremony? Probably not.

She found her place on one of the red plush benches. There were dozens of reporters and photographers, and a film crew with huge movie cameras to record the event. The bigwigs entered in ones and twos and sat at a long table: Clemenceau relaxed and irreverent, Wilson stiffly formal, Lloyd George like an aging bantam cock. Gus Dewar appeared and spoke in Wilson’s ear, then went over to the press section and spoke to a pretty young reporter with one eye. Maud remembered seeing her before. Gus was in love with her, Maud could tell.

At three o’clock someone called for silence, and a reverent hush fell. Clemenceau said something, a door opened, and the two German signatories came in. Maud knew from Walter that no one in Berlin had wanted to put his name to the treaty, and in the end they had sent the foreign minister and the postal minister. The two men looked pale and ashamed.

Clemenceau made a short speech, then beckoned the Germans forward. Both men took fountain pens from their pockets and signed the paper on the table. A moment later, at a hidden signal, guns boomed outside, telling the world that the peace treaty had been signed.

The other delegates came up to sign, not just from the major powers but from all the countries who were party to the treaty. It took a long time, and conversation broke out among the spectators. The Germans sat stiffly frozen until at last it was over and they were escorted out.

Maud was sick with disgust. We preached a sermon of peace, she thought, but all the time we were plotting revenge. She left the palace. Outside, Wilson and Lloyd George were being mobbed by rejoicing spectators. She skirted the crowd, made her way into the town, and went to the Germans’ hotel.

She hoped Walter was not too cast down: it had been a dreadful day for him.

She found him packing. “We’re going home tonight,” he said. “The whole delegation.”

“So soon!” She had hardly thought about what would happen after the signing. It was an event of such huge dramatic significance that she had been unable to look beyond it.

By contrast, Walter had thought about it, and he had a plan. “Come with me,” he said simply.

“I can’t get permission to go to Germany.”

“Whose permission do you need? I’ve got you a German passport in the name of Frau Maud von Ulrich.”

She felt bewildered. “How did you manage that?” she said, though that was hardly the most important question in her mind.

“It was not difficult. You are the wife of a German citizen. You are entitled to a passport. I used my special influence only to shorten the process to a matter of hours.”

She stared at him. It was so sudden.

“Will you come?” he said.

She saw in his eyes a terrible fear. He thought she might back out at the last minute. His terror of losing her made her want to cry. She felt very fortunate to be loved so passionately. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will come. Of course I will come.”

He was not convinced. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

She nodded. “Do you remember the story of Ruth, in the Bible?”

“Of course. Why…?”

Maud had read it several times in the last few weeks, and now she quoted the words that had so moved her. “Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest… ” She stopped, unable to speak for the constriction in her throat; then, after a moment, she swallowed hard and resumed. “Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.”

He smiled, but there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

“I love you,” she said. “What time is the train?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT – August to October 1919

Gus and Rosa returned to Washington at the same time as the president. In August they contrived to get simultaneous leave and went home to Buffalo. The day after they arrived, Gus brought Rosa to meet his parents.

He was nervous. He desperately wanted his mother to like Rosa. But Mother had an inflated opinion of how attractive her son was to women. She had found fault with every girl he had ever mentioned. No one was good enough, especially socially. If he wanted to marry the daughter of the king of England, she would probably say: “Can’t you find a nice well-bred American girl?”

“The first thing you’ll notice about her, Mother, is that she’s very pretty,” Gus said at breakfast that morning. “Second, you’ll see that she has only one eye. After a few minutes, you’ll realize that she’s very smart. And when you get to know her well, you’ll understand that she’s the most wonderful young woman in the world.”

“I’m sure I shall,” said his mother with her accustomed breathtaking insincerity. “Who are her parents?”

Rosa arrived at midafternoon, when Mother was taking her nap and Father was still downtown. Gus showed her around the house and grounds. She said nervously: “You do know that I come from a more modest background?”

“You’ll get used to it soon enough,” he said. “Anyway, you and I won’t be living in this kind of splendor. But we might buy an elegant small house in Washington.”

They played tennis. It was an uneven match: Gus with his long arms and legs was too good for her, and her judgment of distance was erratic. But she fought back determinedly, going for every ball, and won a few games. And in a white tennis dress with the fashionable midcalf hemline she looked so sexy that Gus had to make a major effort of will to concentrate on his shots.

They went in for tea in a glow of perspiration. “Summon up your reserves of tolerance and goodwill,” Gus said outside the drawing room. “Mother can be an awful snob.”

But Mother was on her best behavior. She kissed Rosa on both cheeks and said: “How wonderfully healthy you both look, all flushed with exercise. Miss Hellman, I’m so glad to meet you, and I hope we’re going to become friends.”

“You’re very kind,” said Rosa. “It would be a privilege to be your friend.”

Mother was pleased by the compliment. She knew she was a grand dame of Buffalo society, and she felt it was appropriate that young women should show her deference. Rosa had divined that in an instant. Clever girl, Gus thought. And generous, too, given that in her heart she hated all authority.

“I know Fritz Hellman, your brother,” Mother said. Fritz played violin in the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra. Mother was on the board. “He has a wonderful talent.”

“Thank you. We are very proud of him.”

Mother made small talk, and Rosa let her take the lead. Gus could not help remembering that once before he had brought home a girl he planned to marry: Olga Vyalov. Mother’s reaction then had been different: she had been courteous and welcoming, but Gus had known her heart was not in it. Today she seemed genuine.

He had asked his mother about the Vyalov family yesterday. Lev Peshkov had been sent to Siberia as an army interpreter. Olga did not go to many social events, and seemed taken up with raising their child. Josef had lobbied Gus’s father, the senator, for more military aid to the Whites. “He seems to think the Bolsheviks will be bad for the Vyalov family business in Petrograd,” Mother had said.

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard about the Bolsheviks,” Gus had replied.

After tea they went off to change. Gus was disturbed by the thought of Rosa showering in the next room. He had never seen her naked. They had spent passionate hours together in her Paris hotel room, but they had not gone as far as sexual intercourse. “I hate to be old-fashioned,” she had said apologetically, “but somehow I feel we should wait.” She was not much of an anarchist really.

Her parents were coming for dinner. Gus put on a short tuxedo jacket and went downstairs. He mixed a Scotch for his father but did not have one himself. He felt he might need his wits about him.

Rosa came down in a black dress and looked stunning. Her parents appeared on the dot of six o’clock. Norman Hellman was wearing white tie and tails, not quite right for family dinner, but perhaps he did not own a tuxedo. He was an elf of a man with a charming grin, and Gus saw immediately that Rosa took after him. He drank two martinis rather quickly, the only sign that he might be tense, but then he refused any more alcohol. Rosa’s mother, Hilda, was a slender beauty with lovely long-fingered hands. It was hard to imagine her as a housemaid. Gus’s father took to her immediately.

As they sat down to eat, Dr. Hellman said: “What are your career plans, Gus?”

He was entitled to ask this, as the father of the woman Gus loved, but Gus did not have much of an answer. “I’ll work for the president as long as he needs me,” he said.

“He’s got a tough job on his hands right now.”

“That’s true. The Senate is making trouble about approving the Versailles peace treaty.” Gus tried not to sound too bitter. “After all Wilson did to persuade the Europeans to set up the League of Nations, I can hardly believe that Americans are turning up their noses at the whole idea.”

“Senator Lodge is a formidable troublemaker.”

Gus thought Senator Lodge was an egocentric son of a bitch. “The president decided not to take Lodge with him to Paris, and now Lodge is getting his revenge.”

Gus’s father, who was an old friend of the president as well as a senator, said: “Woodrow made the League of Nations part of the peace treaty, thinking we could not possibly reject the treaty, therefore we would have to accept the league.” He shrugged. “Lodge told him to go to blazes.”

Dr. Hellman said: “In fairness to Lodge, I think the American people are right to be concerned about article ten. If we join a league that guarantees to protect its members from aggression, we’re committing American forces to unknown conflicts in the future.”

Gus’s reply was quick. “If the league is strong, no one will dare to defy it.”

“I’m not as confident as you about that.”

Gus did not want to have an argument with Rosa’s father, but he felt passionately about the League of Nations. “I don’t say there would never be another war,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “I do think that wars would be fewer and shorter, and aggressors would gain little reward.”

“And I believe you may be right. But many voters say: ‘Never mind the world-I’m interested only in America. Are we in danger of becoming the world’s policeman?’ It’s a reasonable question.”

Gus struggled to hide his anger. The league was the greatest hope for peace that had ever been offered to humankind, and it was in danger of being stillborn because of this kind of narrow-minded quibble. He said: “The council of the league has to make unanimous decisions, so the United States would never find itself fighting a war against its will.”

“Nevertheless, there’s no point in having the league unless it is prepared to fight.”

The enemies of the league were like this: first they complained that it would fight, then they complained it would not. Gus said: “These problems are minor by comparison with the deaths of millions!”

Dr. Hellman shrugged, too polite to press his point against such a passionate opponent. “In any case,” he said, “I believe a foreign treaty requires the support of two-thirds of the Senate.”

“And right now we don’t even have half,” said Gus gloomily.

Rosa, who was reporting on this issue, said: “I count forty in favor, including you, Senator Dewar. Forty-three have reservations, eight are implacably against, and five undecided.”

Her father said to Gus: “So what will the president do?”

“He’s going to reach out to the people over the heads of the politicians. He’s planning a ten-thousand-mile tour of the entire country. He’ll make more than fifty speeches in four weeks.”

“A punishing schedule. He’s sixty-two and has high blood pressure.”

There was a touch of mischief in Dr. Hellman. Everything he said was challenging. Obviously he felt the need to test the mettle of a suitor for his daughter. Gus replied: “But at the end of it, the president will have explained to the people of America that the world needs the League of Nations to make sure we never fight another war like the one just ended.”

“I pray you’re right.”

“If political complexities need to be explained to ordinary people, Wilson is the best.”

Champagne was served with dessert. “Before we begin, I’d like to say something,” Gus said. His parents looked startled: he never made speeches. “Dr. and Mrs. Hellman, you know that I love your daughter, who is the most wonderful girl in the world. It’s old-fashioned, but I want to ask your permission”-he took from his pocket a small red leather box-“your permission to offer her this engagement ring.” He opened the box. It contained a gold ring with a single one-carat diamond. It was not ostentatious, but the diamond was pure white, the most desirable color, in a round brilliant cut, and it looked fabulous.

Rosa gasped.

Dr. Hellman looked at his wife, and they both smiled. “You most certainly have our permission,” he said.

Gus walked around the table and knelt beside Rosa’s chair. “Will you marry me, dear Rosa?” he said.

“Oh, yes, my beloved Gus-tomorrow, if you like!”

He took the ring from the box and slid it onto her finger. “Thank you,” he said.

His mother began to cry.

Gus was aboard the president’s train as it steamed out of Union Station in Washington, D.C., at seven o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, September 3. Wilson was dressed in a blue blazer, white pants, and a straw boater. His wife, Edith, went with him, as did Cary Travers Grayson, his personal physician. Also aboard were twenty-one newspaper reporters including Rosa Hellman.

Gus was confident Wilson could win this battle. He had always enjoyed the direct connection with voters. And he had won the war, hadn’t he?

The train traveled overnight to Columbus, Ohio, where the president made his first speech of the tour. From there he went on-making whistle-stop appearances along the way-to Indianapolis, where he spoke to a crowd of twenty thousand people that evening.

But Gus was disheartened at the end of the first day. Wilson had spoken poorly. His voice was husky. He used notes-he was always better when he managed without them-and, as he got into the technicalities of the treaty that had so absorbed everyone in Paris, he seemed to ramble and lose the audience’s attention. He had a bad headache, Gus knew, so bad that sometimes his vision blurred.

Gus was sick with worry. It was not just that his friend and mentor was ill. There was more at stake. America’s future and the world’s hung on what happened in the next few weeks. Only Wilson’s personal commitment could save the League of Nations from its small-minded opponents.

After dinner Gus went to Rosa’s sleeping compartment. She was the only female reporter on the trip, so she had a room to herself. She was almost as keen on the league as Gus, but she said: “It’s hard to find much positive to say about today.” They lay on her bunk, kissing and cuddling, then they said good night and parted. Their wedding was set for October, after the president’s trip. Gus would have liked it to be even sooner, but the parents wanted time to prepare, and Gus’s mother had muttered darkly about indecent haste, so he had given in.

Wilson worked on improvements to his speech, tapping on his old Underwood typewriter as the endless open plains of the Midwest sped by the windows. His performances got better over the next few days. Gus suggested he try to make the treaty relevant to each city. Wilson told business leaders in St. Louis that the treaty was needed to build up world trade. In Omaha he said the world without the treaty would be like a community with unsettled land titles, all the farmers sitting on fences with shotguns. Instead of long explanations, he rammed home the main points in short statements.

Gus also suggested that Wilson appeal to people’s emotions. This was not just about policy, he said; it touched on their feelings about their country. At Columbus, Wilson spoke of the boys in khaki. In Sioux Falls, he said he wanted to redeem the sacrifices of mothers who had lost their sons on the battlefield. He rarely descended to scurrility, but in Kansas City, home of the vitriolic Senator Reed, he compared his opponents to the Bolsheviks. And he thundered out the message, again and again, that if the League of Nations failed there would be another war.

Gus smoothed relations with the reporters on board and the local men wherever the train stopped. When Wilson spoke without a prepared speech, his stenographer would produce an immediate transcript, which Gus distributed. He also persuaded Wilson to come forward to the club car now and again to chat informally with the press.

It worked. Audiences responded better and better. The press coverage continued mixed, but Wilson’s message was repeated constantly even in papers that opposed him. And reports from Washington suggested that opposition was weakening.

But Gus could see how much the campaign was costing the president. His headaches became almost continuous. He slept badly. He could not digest normal food, and Dr. Grayson fed him liquids. He got a throat infection that developed into something like asthma, and he began to have trouble breathing. He tried to sleep sitting upright.

All of this was kept from the press, even Rosa. Wilson continued to give speeches, although his voice was weak. Thousands cheered him in Salt Lake City, but he looked drawn, and he clenched his hands repeatedly, in an odd gesture that made Gus think of a dying man.

Then, on the night of September 25, there was a commotion. Gus heard Edith calling for Dr. Grayson. He put on a dressing gown and went to the president’s car.

What he saw there horrified and saddened him. Wilson looked dreadful. He could hardly breathe and had developed a facial twitch. Even so, he wanted to carry on; but Grayson was adamant that he call off the remainder of the tour, and in the end Wilson gave in.

Next morning Gus, with a heavy heart, told the press that the president had suffered a severe nervous attack, and the tracks were cleared to speed the 1,700-mile journey back to Washington. All presidential engagements were canceled for two weeks, notably a meeting with pro-treaty senators to plan the fight for confirmation.

That evening, Gus and Rosa sat in her compartment, disconsolately looking out of the window. People gathered at every station to watch the president go by. The sun went down, but still the crowds stood and stared in the twilight. Gus was reminded of the train from Brest to Paris, and the silent multitude that had stood beside the tracks in the middle of the night. It was less than a year ago, but already their hopes had been dashed. “We did our best,” Gus said. “But we failed.”

“Are you sure?”

“When the president was campaigning full-time, it was touch and go. With Wilson sick, the chance of the treaty being ratified by the Senate is zero.”

Rosa took his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For you, for me, for the world.” She paused, then said: “What will you do?”

“I’d like to join a Washington law firm specializing in international law. I’ve got some relevant experience, after all.”

“I should think they’ll be lining up to offer you a job. And perhaps some future president will want your help.”

He smiled. Sometimes she had an unrealistically high opinion of him. “And what about you?”

“I love what I’m doing. I hope I can carry on covering the White House.”

“Would you like to have children?”

“Yes!”

“So would I.” Gus stared meditatively out of the window. “I just hope Wilson is wrong about them.”

“About our children?” She heard the note of solemnity in his tone, and she asked in a frightened voice: “What do you mean?”

“He says they will have to fight another world war.”

“God forbid,” Rosa said fervently.

Outside, night was falling.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE – January 1920

Daisy sat at the table in the dining room of the Vyalov family’s prairie house in Buffalo. She wore a pink dress. The large linen napkin tied around her neck swamped her. She was almost four years old, and Lev adored her.

“I’m going to make the world’s biggest sandwich,” he said, and she giggled. He cut two pieces of toast half an inch square, buttered them carefully, added a tiny portion of the scrambled eggs Daisy did not want to eat, and put the slices together. “It has to have one grain of salt,” he said. He poured salt from the cellar onto his plate, then delicately picked up a single grain on the tip of his finger and put it on the sandwich. “Now I can eat it!” he said.

“I want it,” said Daisy.

“Really? But isn’t it a Daddy-size sandwich?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “It’s a girl-size sandwich!”

“Oh, all right,” he said, and popped it into her mouth. “You don’t want another one, do you?”

“Yes.”

“But that one was so big.”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Okay, I guess I have to make another one.”

Lev was riding high. Things were even better than he had told Grigori ten months ago when they had sat in Trotsky’s train. He was living in great comfort in his father-in-law’s house. He managed three Vyalov nightclubs, getting a good salary plus extras such as kickbacks from suppliers. He had installed Marga in a fancy apartment and he saw her most days. She had got pregnant within a week of his return, and she had just given birth to a boy, whom they had named Gregory. Lev had succeeded in keeping the whole thing secret.

Olga came into the dining room, kissed Daisy, and sat down. Lev loved Daisy, but he had no feelings for Olga. Marga was sexier and more fun. And there were plenty more girls, as he had found out when Marga was heavily pregnant.

“Good morning, Mommy!” Lev said gaily.

Daisy took her cue and repeated his words.

Olga said: “Is Daddy feeding you?”

These days they talked like this, mainly through the child. They had had sex a few times when Lev got back from the war, but they had soon reverted to their normal indifference, and now they had separate bedrooms, telling Olga’s parents it was because of Daisy waking at night, though she rarely did. Olga wore the look of a disappointed woman, and Lev hardly cared.

Josef came in. “Here’s Grandpa!” Lev said.

“Morning,” Josef said curtly.

Daisy said: “Grandpa wants a sandwich.”

“No,” said Lev. “They’re too big for him.”

Daisy was delighted when Lev said things that were obviously wrong. “No, they’re not,” she said. “They’re too small!”

Josef sat down. He had changed a lot, Lev had found on returning from the war. Josef was overweight, and his striped suit was tight. He panted just from the exertion of walking downstairs. Muscle had turned to fat, black hair had gone gray, a pink complexion had become an unhealthy flush.

Polina came in from the kitchen with a pot of coffee and poured a cup for Josef. He opened the Buffalo Advertiser.

Lev said: “How’s business?” It was not an idle question. The Volstead Act had come into force at midnight on January 16, making it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell intoxicating liquor. The Vyalov empire was based on bars, hotels, and liquor wholesaling. Prohibition was the serpent in Lev’s paradise.

“We’re dying,” said Josef with unusual frankness. “I’ve closed five bars in a week, and there’s worse to come.”

Lev nodded. “I’m selling near-beer in the clubs, but nobody wants it.” The act permitted beer that was less than half of one percent alcohol. “You have to drink a gallon to get a buzz.”

“We can sell a little hooch under the counter, but we can’t get enough, and anyway people are scared to buy.”

Olga was shocked. She knew little about the business. “But, Daddy, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Josef.

This was another change. In the old days, Josef would have planned ahead for such a crisis. Yet it was three months since the act had been passed, and in that time Josef had done nothing to prepare for the new situation. Lev had been waiting for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Now he began to see, with dismay, that it was not going to happen.

That was worrying. Lev had a wife, a mistress, and two children, all living off the proceeds of the Vyalov businesses. If the empire was going to collapse, Lev would need to make plans.

Polina called Olga to the phone and she went into the hallway. Lev could hear her speaking. “Hello, Ruby,” she said. “You’re up early.” There was a pause. “What? I don’t believe it.” A long silence followed, then Olga began to cry.

Josef looked up from the newspaper and said: “What the hell…?”

Olga hung up with a crash and came back into the dining room. With her eyes full of tears she pointed at Lev and said: “You bastard.”

“What did I do?” he said, although he feared he knew.

“You-you-fucking bastard.”

Daisy began to bawl.

Josef said: “Olga, honey, what is the matter?”

Olga answered: “She’s had a baby!”

Under his breath, Lev said: “Oh, shit.”

Josef said: “Who’s had a baby?”

“Lev’s whore. The one we saw in the park. Marga.”

Josef reddened. “The singer from the Monte Carlo? She’s had Lev’s baby?”

Olga nodded, sobbing.

Josef turned to Lev. “You son of a bitch.”

Lev said: “Let’s all try to stay calm.”

Josef stood up. “My God, I thought I’d taught you a damned lesson.”

Lev pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He backed away from Josef, holding his arms out defensively. “Just calm the fuck down, Josef,” he said.

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down,” Josef said. With surprising agility he stepped forward and lashed out with a meaty fist. Lev was not quick enough to dodge the blow and it struck him high on his left cheekbone. It hurt like hell and he staggered back.

Olga snatched up the howling Daisy and retreated to the doorway. “Stop it!” she yelled.

Josef lashed out with his left.

It was a long time since Lev had been in a fistfight, but he had grown up in the slums of Petrograd, and the reflexes still operated. He blocked Josef ’s swing, moved in close, and punched his father-in-law’s belly with both fists in turn. The breath whooshed out of Josef ’s chest. Then Lev struck at Josef ’s face with short jabs, hitting the nose and mouth and eyes.

Josef was a strong man and a bully, but people were too scared of him to fight back, and for a long time he had had no practise at defending himself. He staggered back, holding up his arms in a feeble attempt to protect himself from Lev’s blows.

Lev’s street-fighting instincts would not let him stop while his assailant was upright, and he kept after Josef, punching his body and head, until the older man fell backward over a dining chair and hit the carpet.

Olga’s mother, Lena, came rushing into the room, screamed, and knelt beside her husband. Polina and the cook came to the doorway to the kitchen, looking scared. Josef ’s face was battered and bleeding, but he raised himself on his elbow and pushed Lena aside. Then, when he tried to get up, he cried out and fell back.

His skin turned gray and he stopped breathing.

Lev said: “Jesus Christ.”

Lena started to wail: “Josef, oh, my Joe, open your eyes!”

Lev felt Josef ’s chest. There was no heartbeat. He picked up the wrist and could not find a pulse.

I’m in trouble now, he thought.

He stood up. “Polina, call an ambulance.”

She went into the hall and picked up the phone.

Lev stared at the body. He had to make a big decision fast. Stay here, protest innocence, pretend grief, try to wriggle out of it? No. The chances were too slim.

He had to go.

He ran upstairs and stripped off his shirt. He had come home from the war with a lot of gold, accumulated by selling Scotch to the Cossacks. He had converted it to just over five thousand U.S. dollars, stuffed the bills into his money belt, and taped the belt to the back of a drawer. Now he fastened the belt around his waist and put his shirt and jacket back on.

He put on his overcoat. On top of his wardrobe was an old duffel containing his U.S. Army officer’s-issue Colt.45model 1911 semiautomatic pistol. He stuffed the pistol into his coat pocket. He threw a box of ammunition and some underwear into the duffel, then he went downstairs.

In the dining room, Lena had put a cushion under Josef ’s head, but Josef looked deader than ever. Olga was on the phone in the hallway, saying: “Be quick, please, I think he may die!” Too late, baby, Lev thought.

He said: “The ambulance will take too long. I’m going to fetch Dr. Schwarz.” No one asked why he was carrying a bag.

He went to the garage and started Josef ’s Packard Twin Six. He drove out of the property and turned north.

He was not going to fetch Dr. Schwarz.

He headed for Canada.

Lev drove fast. As he left Buffalo’s northern suburbs behind, he tried to figure out how much time he had. The ambulance crew would undoubtedly call the police. As soon as the cops arrived they would find out that Josef had died in a fistfight. Olga would not hesitate to tell them who had knocked her father down: if she had not hated Lev before, she would now. At that point, Lev would be wanted for murder.

There were normally three cars in the Vyalov garage: the Packard, Lev’s Ford Model T, and a blue Hudson used by Josef ’s goons. It would not take the flatfoots very long to deduce that Lev had left in the Packard. In an hour, Lev calculated, the police would be looking for the car.

By then, with luck, he would be out of the country.

He had driven to Canada with Marga several times. It was only a hundred miles to Toronto, three hours in a fast car. They liked to check into a hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Peters and go out on the town, dressed to the nines, without having to worry about being spotted by someone who might tell Josef Vyalov. Lev did not have an American passport, but he knew several crossings where there were no border posts.

He reached Toronto at midday and checked into a quiet hotel.

He ordered a sandwich in the coffee shop and sat for a while contemplating his situation. He was wanted for murder. He had no home and he could not visit either of his two families without risking arrest. He might never see his children again. He had five thousand dollars in a money belt and a stolen car.

He thought back to the boasts he had made to his brother only ten months ago. What would Grigori think now?

He ate his sandwich, then wandered aimlessly around the center of town feeling depressed. He went into a liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka to take back to his room. Maybe he would just get drunk tonight. He noticed that rye whisky was four bucks a bottle. In Buffalo it cost ten, if you could get it at all; in New York City, fifteen or twenty. He knew because he had been trying to buy illicit liquor for the nightclubs.

He returned to the hotel and got some ice. His room was dusty, with faded furniture and a view of the backyards behind a row of cheap stores. As the early northern night fell outside, he felt more depressed than ever in his whole life. He thought of going out and picking up a girl, but he did not have the heart for it. Was he going to flee from every place he ever lived? He had quit Petrograd because of a dead policeman, he had left Aberowen literally one step ahead of people he had cheated at cards; now he had fled Buffalo a fugitive.

He needed to do something about the Packard. The Buffalo police might cable a description to Toronto. He should either change the plates or change the car. But he could not summon the energy.

Olga was probably glad to get rid of him. She would have her inheritance all to herself. However, the Vyalov empire was worth less and less every day.

He wondered if he could bring Marga and baby Gregory to Canada. Would Marga even want to come? America was her dream, as it had been Lev’s. Canada was not the fantasy destination of nightclub singers. She might follow Lev to New York or California, but not to Toronto.

He was going to miss his children. Tears came to his eyes as he thought of Daisy growing up without him. She was not quite four: she might forget him altogether. At best she would have a vague recollection. She would not remember the largest sandwich in the world.

After the third drink it struck him that he was a pitiable victim of injustice. He had not meant to kill his father-in-law. Josef had struck first. Anyway, Lev had not actually killed him: he had died of some kind of seizure or heart attack. It was really just bad luck. But no one was going to believe that. Olga was the only witness and she would want revenge.

He poured another vodka and lay on the bed. To hell with them all, he thought.

As he drifted into a restless alcoholic sleep, he thought of the bottles in the shop window. “Canadian Club, $4.00,” read the sign. There was something important about that, he knew, but for the moment he could not put his finger on it.

When he woke up next morning his mouth was dry and his head ached, but he knew that Canadian Club at four bucks a bottle could be his salvation.

He rinsed his whisky glass and drank the melted ice at the bottom of the pail. By his third glassful he had a plan.

Orange juice, coffee, and aspirins made him feel better. He thought about the dangers ahead. But he had never allowed himself to be deterred by risks. If I did that, he thought, I’d be my brother.

There was one great drawback to his scheme. It depended on reconciliation with Olga.

He drove to a low-rent neighborhood and went into a cheap restaurant that was serving breakfast to workingmen. He sat at a table with a group of what looked like housepainters and said: “I need to trade my car for a truck. Do you know anyone who might be interested?”

One of the men said: “Is it legitimate?”

Lev gave his charming grin. “Give me a break, buddy,” he said. “If it was legit, would I be selling it here?”

He found no takers there or at the next few places he tried, but eventually he ended up at an automobile repair shop run by a father and son. He exchanged the Packard for a two-ton Mack Junior van with two spare wheels in a no-cash, no-papers deal. He knew he was being robbed, but the garageman knew he was desperate.

Late that afternoon he went to a liquor wholesaler whose address he had found in the city directory. “I want a hundred cases of Canadian Club,” he said. “What’s your price?”

“For that quantity, thirty-six bucks a case.”

“It’s a deal.” Lev took out his money. “I’m opening a tavern outside of town, and-”

“No need to explain, pal,” said the wholesaler. He pointed out of the window. On the neighboring vacant lot, a team of building laborers were breaking ground. “My new warehouse, five times the size of this one. Thank God for Prohibition.”

Lev realized he was not the first person to have this bright idea.

He paid the man and they loaded the whisky into the Mack van.

Next day Lev drove back to Buffalo.

Lev parked the van full of whisky on the street outside the Vyalov house. The winter afternoon was turning to dusk. There were no cars on the driveway. He waited a while, tense, expectant, ready to flee, but he saw no activity.

His nerves stretched taut, he got out of the van, walked up to the front door, and let himself in with his own key.

The place was hushed. From upstairs he could hear Daisy’s voice, and the murmured replies of Polina. There was no other sound.

Moving quietly on the thick carpet, he crossed the hall and looked into the drawing room. All the chairs had been pushed to the sides of the room. In the middle was a stand draped in black silk bearing a polished mahogany coffin with gleaming brass handles. In the casket was the corpse of Josef Vyalov. Death had softened the pugnacious lines of the face, and he looked harmless.

Olga sat alone beside the body. She wore a black dress. Her back was to the door.

Lev stepped into the room. “Hello, Olga,” he said quietly.

She opened her mouth to scream, but he put his hand over her face and stopped her.

“Nothing to worry about,” Lev said. “I just want to talk.” Slowly, he eased his grip.

She did not scream.

He relaxed a little. He was over the first hurdle.

“You killed my father!” she said angrily. “What could there be to talk about?”

He took a deep breath. He had to handle this exactly right. Mere charm would not be enough. It would take brains too. “The future,” he said. He spoke in a low, intimate tone. “Yours, mine, and little Daisy’s. I’m in trouble, I know-but so are you.”

She did not want to listen. “I’m not in any trouble.” She turned away and looked at the body.

Lev pulled up a chair and sat close to her. “The business you’ve inherited is shot. It’s falling apart, almost worthless.”

“My father was very wealthy!” she said indignantly.

“He owned bars, hotels, and a liquor wholesaling business. They’re all losing money, and Prohibition has been in force only two weeks. He’s already closed five bars. Soon there will be nothing left.” Lev hesitated, then used the strongest argument he had. “You can’t just consider yourself. You have to think about how you’re going to raise Daisy.”

She looked shaken. “Is the business really going bust?”

“You heard what your father said to me at breakfast the day before yesterday.”

“I don’t really remember.”

“Well, don’t take my word for anything, please. Check it out. Ask Norman Niall, the accountant. Ask anyone.”

She gave him a hard look and decided to take him seriously. “Why have you come to tell me this?”

“Because I’ve figured out how to save the business.”

“How?”

“By importing liquor from Canada.”

“It’s against the law.”

“Yes. But it’s your only hope. Without booze, you have no business.”

She tossed her head. “I can look after myself.”

“Sure,” he said. “You can sell this house for a good sum, invest the proceeds, and move into a little apartment with your mother. Probably you could salvage enough from the estate to keep yourself and Daisy alive for a few years, though you should consider going out to work-”

“I can’t work!” she said. “I’ve never trained for anything. What would I do?”

“Oh, listen, you could be a salesgirl in a department store, you could work in a factory-”

He was not serious and she knew it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.

“Then there’s only one option.” He reached out to touch her.

She flinched away. “Why do you care what happens to me?”

“You’re my wife.”

She gave him a strange look.

He put on his most sincere face. “I know I’ve mistreated you, but we loved each other once.”

She made a scornful noise in her throat.

“And we have a daughter to worry about.”

“But you’re going to jail.”

“Unless you tell the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Olga, you saw what happened. Your father attacked me. Look at my face-I have a black eye to prove it. I had to fight back. He must have had a weak heart. He may have been ill for some time-it would explain why he failed to prepare the business for Prohibition. Anyway, he was killed by the effort of attacking me, not by the few blows I struck in self-defense. All you have to do is tell the police the truth.”

“I’ve already told them you killed him.”

Lev was heartened: he was making progress. “That’s all right,” he reassured her. “You made a statement in the heat of the moment when you were stricken with grief. Now that you’re calmer, you realize that your father’s death was a terrible accident, brought on by his bad health and his angry tantrum.”

“Will they believe me?”

“A jury will. But if I hire a good lawyer there won’t even be a trial. How could there be, if the only witness swears it wasn’t murder?”

“I don’t know.” She changed tack. “How are you going to get the liquor?”

“Easy. Don’t worry about it.”

She turned in her chair to face him directly. “I don’t believe you. You’re saying all this just to make me change my story.”

“Put your coat on and I’ll show you something.”

It was a tense moment. If she went with him, she was his.

After a pause, she stood up.

Lev hid a triumphant smile.

They left the room. Outside on the street, he opened the rear doors of the van.

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said: “Canadian Club?” Her tone had changed, he noted. It was practical. The emotion had faded into the background.

“A hundred cases,” he said. “I bought it for three bucks a bottle. I can get ten here-more if we sell it by the shot.”

“I have to think about this.”

That was a good sign. She was ready to agree, but did not want to rush into anything. “I understand, but there’s no time,” he said. “I’m a wanted man with a truckload of illegal whisky and I have to have your decision right away. I’m sorry to hustle you, but you can see I have no choice.”

She nodded thoughtfully, but did not say anything.

Lev went on: “If you turn me down I’ll sell my booze, take a profit, and disappear. You’ll be on your own, then. I’ll wish you luck and say good-bye forever, with no hard feelings. I would understand.”

“And if I say yes?”

“We’ll go to the police right away.”

There was a long silence.

At last she nodded. “All right.”

Lev looked away to hide his face. You did it, he said to himself. You sat with her in the same room as her father’s dead body, and you won her back.

You dog.

“I have to put on a hat,” said Olga. “And you need a clean shirt. We want to make a favorable impression.”

That was good. She was really on his side.

They went back into the house and got ready. While he was waiting for her he called the Buffalo Advertiser and asked for Peter Hoyle, the editor. A secretary asked him his business. “Tell him I’m the man who’s wanted for the murder of Josef Vyalov.”

A moment later a voice barked. “Hoyle here. Who are you?”

“Lev Peshkov, Vyalov’s son-in-law.”

“Where are you?”

Lev ignored the question. “If you can have a reporter on the steps of police headquarters in half an hour, I’ll have a statement for you.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Mr. Hoyle?”

“Yes?”

“Send a photographer too.” Lev hung up.

With Olga beside him in the open front of the van, he drove first to Josef’s waterfront warehouse. Boxes of stolen cigarettes were stacked around the walls. In the office at the back they found Vyalov’s accountant, Norman Niall, plus the usual group of thugs. Norman was crooked but pernickety, Lev knew. He was sitting in Josef ’s chair, behind Josef ’s desk.

They were all astonished to see Lev and Olga.

Lev said: “Olga has inherited the business. I’ll be running things from now on.”

Norman did not get up out of his chair. “We’ll see about that,” he said.

Lev gave him a hard stare and said nothing.

Norman spoke again with less assurance. “The will has to be proved, and so on.”

Lev shook his head. “If we wait for the formalities there will be no business left.” He pointed at one of the goons. “Ilya, go out in the yard, look in the van, come back here, and tell Norm what you see.”

Ilya went out. Lev moved around the desk to stand next to Norman. They waited in silence until Ilya came back.

“A hundred cases of Canadian Club.” He put a bottle on the table. “We can try it, see if it’s the real thing.”

Lev said: “I’m going to run the business with booze imported from Canada. Prohibition is the greatest business opportunity ever. People will pay anything for liquor. We’re going to make a fortune. Get out of that chair, Norm.”

“I don’t think so, kid,” said Norman.

Lev pulled his gun fast and pistol-whipped Norman on both sides of the face. Norman cried out. Lev held the Colt casually pointed in the direction of the thugs.

To her credit, Olga did not scream.

“You asshole,” Lev said to Norman. “I killed Josef Vyalov-do you think I’m scared of a fucking accountant?”

Norman got up and scurried out of the room, holding a hand to his bleeding mouth.

Lev turned to the other men, still holding the pistol pointing in their general direction, and said: “Anyone else who doesn’t want to work for me can leave now, and no hard feelings.”

No one moved.

“Good,” said Lev. “Because I was lying about no hard feelings.” He pointed at Ilya. “You come with me and Mrs. Peshkov. You can drive. The rest of you, unload the van.”

Ilya drove them downtown in the blue Hudson.

Lev felt he might have made a mistake back there. He should not have said I killed Josef Vyalov in front of Olga. She could yet change her mind. If she mentioned it, he decided he would say he didn’t mean it, but just said it to scare Norm. However, Olga did not raise the matter.

Outside police headquarters, two men in overcoats and hats were waiting beside a big camera on a tripod.

Lev and Olga got out of the car.

Lev said to the reporter: “The death of Josef Vyalov is a tragedy for us, his family, and for this city.” The man scribbled shorthand in a notebook. “I have come to give the police my account of what happened. My wife, Olga, the only other person present when he collapsed, is here to testify that I am innocent. The postmortem will show that my father-in-law died of a heart attack. My wife and I plan to continue to expand the great business Josef Vyalov started here in Buffalo. Thank you.”

“Look at the camera, please?” said the photographer.

Lev put his arm around Olga, pulled her close, and looked at the camera.

The reporter said: “How did you get the shiner, Lev?”

“This?” he said, and pointed to his eye. “Oh, hell, that’s another story.” He smiled his most charming grin, and the photographer’s magnesium flare went off with a blinding flash.

CHAPTER FORTY – February to December 1920

The Aldershot Military Detention Barracks was a grim place, Billy thought, but it was better than Siberia. Aldershot was an army town thirty-five miles southwest of London. The prison was a modern building with galleries of cells on three floors around an atrium. It was brightly lit by a glazed roof that gave the place its nickname of “the Glasshouse.” With heat pipes and gas lighting, it was more comfortable than most of the places where Billy had slept during the past four years.

All the same, he was miserable. The war had been over for more than a year, yet he was still in the army. Most of his friends were out, earning good wages and taking girls to the pictures. He still wore the uniform and saluted, he slept in an army bed, and he ate army food. He worked all day at weaving mats, which was the prison industry. Worst of all, he never saw a woman. Somewhere out there, Mildred was waiting for him-probably. Everyone had a tale to tell of a soldier who had come home to find that his wife or girlfriend had gone off with another man.

He had no communication with Mildred or anyone else outside. Prisoners-or “soldiers under sentence” as they were officially called-could normally send and receive letters, but Billy was a special case. Because he had been convicted of betraying army secrets in letters, his mail was confiscated by the authorities. This was part of the army’s revenge. He no longer had any secrets to betray, of course. What was he going to tell his sister? “The boiled potatoes are always undercooked.”

Did Mam and Da and Gramper even know about the court-martial? The soldier’s next of kin had to be informed, he thought, but he was not sure and no one would answer his questions. Anyway, Tommy Griffiths would almost certainly have told them. He hoped Ethel had explained what he had really been doing.

He received no visitors. He suspected his family did not even know that he was back from Russia. He would have liked to challenge the ban on his receiving mail, but he had no way of contacting a lawyer-and no money to pay one. His only consolation was a vague feeling that this could not go on indefinitely.

His news of the outside world came from the papers. Fitz was back in London, making speeches urging more military aid for the Whites in Russia. Billy wondered if that meant the Aberowen Pals had come home.

Fitz’s speeches were doing no good. Ethel’s “Hands Off Russia” campaign had won support and been endorsed by the Labour Party. Despite colorful anti-Bolshevik speeches by the minister for war, Winston Churchill, Britain had withdrawn its troops from Arctic Russia. In mid-November the Reds had driven Admiral Kolchak out of Omsk. Everything Billy had said about the Whites, and Ethel had repeated in her campaign, turned out to be correct; everything Fitz and Churchill said was wrong. Yet Billy was in jail and Fitz was in the House of Lords.

He had little in common with his fellow inmates. They were not political prisoners. Most had committed real crimes, theft and assault and murder. They were hard men, but so was Billy and he was not afraid of them. They treated him with wary deference, apparently feeling that his offense was a cut above theirs. He talked to them amiably enough but none of them had any interest in politics. They saw nothing wrong with the society that had imprisoned them; they were just determined to beat the system next time.

During the half-hour lunch break he read the newspaper. Most of the others could not read. One day he opened the Daily Herald to see a photograph of a familiar face. After a moment of bewilderment he realized the picture was of him.

He recalled when it had been taken. Mildred had dragged him to a photographer in Aldgate and had him snapped in his uniform. “Every night I’ll touch it to my lips,” she had said. He had often thought of that ambiguous promise while he was away from her.

The headline said: WHY IS SERGEANT WILLIAMS IN JAIL? Billy read on with mounting excitement.

William Williams of the 8th Battalion the Welsh Rifles (the “Aberowen Pals”) is serving ten years in a military prison, convicted of treason. Is this man a traitor? Did he betray his country, desert to the enemy, or run from battle? On the contrary. He fought bravely at the Somme and continued to serve in France for the next two years, winning promotion to sergeant.

Billy was excited. That’s me, he thought, in the papers, and they say I fought bravely!

Then he was sent to Russia. We are not at war with Russia. The British people do not necessarily approve of the Bolshevik regime, but we do not attack every regime of which we disapprove. The Bolsheviks present no threat to our country or our allies. Parliament has never agreed to military action against the government in Moscow. There is a serious question as to whether our mission there is not a breach of international law.

Indeed, for some months the British people were not told that their army was fighting in Russia. The government made misleading statements to the effect that troops there were only protecting our property, organising orderly withdrawal, or on standby. The clear implication was that they were not in action against Red forces.

That this was exposed as a lie is in no small measure thanks to William Williams.

“Hey,” he said to no one in particular. “Look at that. Thanks to William Williams.”

The men at his table crowded around to look over his shoulder. His cellmate, a brute called Cyril Parks, said: “That’s a picture of you! What are you doing in the paper?”

Billy read the rest of it aloud.

His crime was to tell the truth, in letters to his sister that were written in a simple code to evade censorship. The British people owe him a debt of gratitude.

But his action displeased those in the army and in government who were responsible for secretly using British soldiers for their own political ends. Williams was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years.

He is not unique. A large number of servicemen who objected to being made part of the attempted counterrevolution were subjected to highly dubious trials in Russia and given scandalously long sentences.

William Williams and others have been victimised by vengeful men in positions of power. This must be put right. Britain is a country of justice. That, after all, is what we fought for.

“How about that?” said Billy. “They say I’ve been victimized by powerful men.”

“So have I,” said Cyril Parks, who had raped a fourteen-year-old Belgian girl in a barn.

Suddenly the newspaper was snatched out of Billy’s hands. He looked up to see the stupid face of Andrew Jenkins, one of the more unpleasant warders. “You may have friends in high fucking places, Williams,” the man said. “But in here you’re just another fucking con, so get back to fucking work.”

“Right away, Mr. Jenkins,” said Billy.

Fitz was outraged, that summer of 1920, when a Russian trade delegation came to London and was welcomed by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, at number 10 Downing Street. The Bolsheviks were still at war with the newly reconstituted country of Poland, and Fitz thought Britain should be siding with the Poles, but he found little support. London dockers went on strike rather than load ships with rifles for the Polish army, and the Trades Union Congress threatened a general strike if the British army intervened.

Fitz reconciled himself to never taking possession of the late Prince Andrei’s estates. His sons, Boy and Andrew, had lost their Russian birthright, and he had to accept that.

However, he could not keep quiet when he learned what the Russians Kamenev and Krassin were up to as they went around Britain. Room 40 still existed, albeit in a different form, and British intelligence was intercepting and deciphering the telegrams the Russians were sending home. Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the Moscow soviet, was shamelessly putting out revolutionary propaganda.

Fitz was so incensed that he berated Lloyd George, early in August, at one of the last dinner parties of the London season.

It was at Lord Silverman’s house in Belgrave Square. The dinner was not as lavish as those Silverman had thrown before the war. There were fewer courses, with less food sent untasted back to the kitchen, and the table decoration was simpler. The food was served by maids instead of footmen: no one wanted to be a footman these days. Fitz guessed those extravagant Edwardian parties were gone for good. However, Silverman was still able to attract the most powerful men in the land to his house.

Lloyd George asked Fitz about his sister, Maud.

That was another topic that enraged Fitz. “I’m sorry to say that she has married a German and gone to live in Berlin,” he said. He did not say that she had already given birth to her first child, a boy called Eric.

“I heard that,” said Lloyd George. “I just wondered how she was getting on. Delightful young woman.”

The prime minister’s liking for delightful young women was well-known, not to say notorious.

“I’m afraid life in Germany is hard,” said Fitz. Maud had written to him pleading for an allowance, but he had refused point-blank. She had not asked his permission for the marriage, so how could she expect his support?

“Hard?” said Lloyd George. “So it should be, after what they’ve done. All the same, I’m sorry for her.”

“On another subject, Prime Minister,” said Fitz, “this fellow Kamenev is a Jew Bolshevik-you ought to deport him.”

The prime minister was in a mellow mood, with a glass of champagne in his hand. “My dear Fitz,” he said amiably, “the government is not very worried about Russian misinformation, which is crude and violent. Please don’t underestimate the British working class: they know claptrap when they hear it. Believe me, Kamenev’s speeches are doing more to discredit Bolshevism than anything you or I could say.”

Fitz thought this was complacent rubbish. “He’s even given money to the Daily Herald!”

“It is discourteous, I agree, for a foreign government to subsidize one of our newspapers-but, really, are we frightened of the Daily Herald? It’s not as if we Liberals and Conservatives don’t have papers of our own.”

“But he is contacting the most hard-line revolutionary groups in this country-maniacs dedicated to the overthrow of our entire way of life!”

“The more the British get to know about Bolshevism, the less they will like it, you mark my words. It is formidable only when seen at a distance, through impenetrable mists. Bolshevism is almost a safeguard to British society, for it infects all classes with a horror of what may happen if the present organization of society is overturned.”

“I just don’t like it.”

“Besides,” Lloyd George went on, “if we throw them out we may have to explain how we know what they’re up to; and the news that we’re spying on them may inflame working-class opinion against us more effectively than all their turgid speeches.”

Fitz did not like being lectured on political realities, even by the prime minister, but he persisted with his argument because he felt so angry. “But surely we don’t have to trade with the Bolsheviks!”

“If we refused to do business with all those who use their embassies here for propaganda, we wouldn’t have many trading partners left. Come, come, Fitz, we trade with cannibals in the Solomon Islands!”

Fitz was not sure that was true-the cannibals of the Solomon Islands did not have much to offer, after all-but he let it pass. “Are we so badly off that we have to sell to these murderers?”

“I fear we are. I have talked to a good many businessmen, and they have rather frightened me about the next eighteen months. There are no orders coming in. Customers won’t buy. We may be in for the worst period of unemployment that any of us have ever known. But the Russians want to buy-and they pay in gold.”

“I would not take their gold!”

“Ah, but Fitz,” said Lloyd George, “you have so much of your own.”

There was a party in Wellington Row when Billy took his bride home to Aberowen.

It was a summer Saturday, and for once there was no rain. At three o’clock in the afternoon Billy and Mildred arrived at the station with Mildred’s children, Billy’s new stepdaughters, Enid and Lillian, aged eight and seven. By then the miners had come up from the pit, taken their weekly baths, and put on their Sunday suits.

Billy’s parents were waiting at the station. They were older and seemed diminished, no longer dominating those around them. Da shook Billy’s hand and said: “I’m proud of you, son. You stood up to them, just like I taught you to.” Billy was glad, although he did not see himself as just another of Da’s achievements in life.

They had met Mildred once before, at Ethel’s wedding. Da shook Mildred’s hand and Mam kissed her.

Mildred said: “It’s lovely to see you again, Mrs. Williams. Should I call you Mam now?”

It was the best thing she could have said, and Mam was delighted. Billy felt sure Da would come to love her, provided she could keep from swearing.

Persistent questions by M.P.s in the House of Commons-fed with information by Ethel-had forced the government to announce reduced sentences for a number of soldiers and sailors court-martialed in Russia for mutiny and other offenses. Billy’s prison term had been reduced to a year and he had been released and demobilized. He had married Mildred as quickly as possible after that.

Aberowen seemed strange to him. The place had not changed much, but his feelings were different. It was small and drab, and the mountains all around seemed like walls to keep the people in. He was no longer sure this was his home. As when he had put on his prewar suit, he found that, even though it still fit, he no longer felt right in it. Nothing that happened here would change the world, he thought.

They walked up the hill to Wellington Row to find the houses decorated with bunting: the Union Jack, the Welsh dragon, and the red flag. A banner across the street said WELCOME HOME, BILLY TWICE. All the neighbors were out in the street. There were tables with jugs of beer and urns of tea, and plates loaded with pies, cakes, and sandwiches. When they saw Billy they sang “We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides.”

It made Billy cry.

He was handed a pint of beer. A crowd of admiring young men gathered around Mildred. To them she was an exotic creature, with her London clothes and her cockney accent and a hat with a huge brim that she had trimmed herself with silk flowers. Even when she was on her best behavior she could not help saying risqué things like “I had to get it off my chest, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Gramper looked older, and could hardly stand up straight, but mentally he was still all right. He took charge of Enid and Lillian, producing sweets out of his waistcoat pockets and showing them how he could make a penny disappear.

Billy had to talk to all the bereaved families about his dead comrades: Joey Ponti, Prophet Jones, Spotty Llewellyn, and the others. He was reunited with Tommy Griffiths, whom he had last seen in Ufa, Russia. Tommy’s father, Len, the atheist, was gaunt with cancer.

Billy was going to start down the pit again on Monday, and the miners all wanted to explain to him the changes underground since he had left: new roads driven deeper into the workings, more electric lights, better safety precautions.

Tommy stood on a chair and made a speech of welcome, then Billy had to respond. “The war has changed us all,” he said. “I remember when people used to say the rich were put on this earth by God to rule over us lesser people.” That was greeted by scornful laughs. “Many men were cured of that delusion by fighting under the command of upper-class officers who should not have been put in charge of a Sunday school outing.” The other veterans nodded knowingly. “The war was won by men like us, ordinary men, uneducated but not stupid.” They agreed, saying “Aye” and “Hear, hear.”

“We’ve got the vote now-and so have our women, though not all of them yet, as my sister, Eth, will tell you quick enough.” There was a little cheer from the women at that. “This is our country, and we must take control of it, just as the Bolsheviks have taken over in Russia and the Social Democrats in Germany.” The men cheered. “We’ve got a working-class party, the Labour Party, and we’ve got the numbers to put our party in government. Lloyd George pulled a fast one at the last election, but he won’t get away with that again.”

Someone shouted: “No!”

“So here’s what I’ve come home for. Perceval Jones’s days as M.P. for Aberowen are almost over.” There was a cheer. “I want to see a Labour man representing us in the House of Commons!” Billy caught his father’s eye: Da’s face was aglow. “Thank you for your wonderful welcome.” He got down from the chair, and they clapped enthusiastically.

“Nice speech, Billy,” said Tommy Griffiths. “But who’s going to be that Labour M.P.?”

“I tell you what, Tommy boy,” said Billy. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

The philosopher Bertrand Russell visited Russia that year and wrote a short book called The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. In the Leckwith family it almost caused a divorce.

Russell came out strongly against the Bolsheviks. Worse, he did so from a left-wing perspective. Unlike Conservative critics, he did not argue that the Russian people had no right to depose the tsar, share out the lands of the nobility among the peasants, and run their own factories. On the contrary, he approved of all that. He attacked the Bolsheviks not for having the wrong ideals, but for having the right ideals and failing to live up to them. So his conclusions could not be dismissed out of hand as propaganda.

Bernie read it first. He had a librarian’s horror of marking books, but in this case he made an exception, defacing the pages with angry comments, underlining sentences and writing “Rubbish!” or “Invalid argument!” with a pencil in the margins.

Ethel read it while nursing the baby, now just over a year old. She was named Mildred, but they always shortened it to Millie. The older Mildred had moved to Aberowen with Billy and was already pregnant with their first child. Ethel missed her, even though she was glad to have the use of the upstairs rooms in the house. Little Millie had curly hair and, already, a flirtatious twinkle in her eye that reminded everyone of Ethel.

Ethel enjoyed the book. Russell was a witty writer. With aristocratic insouciance, he had asked for an interview with Lenin, and had spent an hour with the great man. They had spoken English. Lenin had said that Lord Northcliffe was his best propagandist: the Daily Mail’s horror stories about Russians despoiling the aristocracy might terrify the bourgeoisie but they would have the opposite effect on the British working class, he thought.

But Russell made it clear that the Bolsheviks were completely undemocratic. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a real dictatorship, he said, but the rulers were middle-class intellectuals such as Lenin and Trotsky, assisted by only such proletarians who agreed with their views. “I think this is very worrying,” said Ethel when she put the book down.

“Bertrand Russell is an aristocrat!” Bernie said angrily. “He’s the third earl!”

“That doesn’t make him wrong.” Millie stopped sucking and went to sleep. Ethel stroked her soft cheek with a fingertip. “Russell is a socialist. His complaint is that the Bolsheviks are not implementing socialism.”

“How can he say such a thing? The nobility has been crushed.”

“But so has the opposition press.”

“A temporary necessity-”

“How temporary? The Russian revolution is three years old!”

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

“He says there are arbitrary arrests and executions, and the secret police are more powerful now than they were under the tsar.”

“But they act against counterrevolutionaries, not against socialists.”

“Socialism means freedom, even for counterrevolutionaries.”

“No it doesn’t!”

“It does to me.”

Their raised voices woke Millie. Sensing the anger in the room, she started to cry.

“There,” said Ethel resentfully. “Now look what you’ve done.”

When Grigori returned home from the civil war he joined Katerina, Vladimir, and Anna in their comfortable apartment within the government enclave in the old fort of the Kremlin. For his taste, it was too comfortable. The entire country was suffering shortages of food and fuel, but in the shops of the Kremlin there was plenty. The compound had three restaurants with French-trained chefs and, to Grigori’s dismay, the waiters clicked their heels to the Bolsheviks as they had to the old nobility. Katerina put the children in the nursery while she visited the hairdresser. In the evening, members of the Central Committee went to the opera in chauffeur-driven cars.

“I hope we are not becoming the new nobility,” he said to Katerina in bed one night.

She laughed scornfully. “If we are, where are my diamonds?”

“But, you know, we do have banquets, and travel first-class on the railway, and so on.”

“The aristocrats never did anything useful. You all work twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. You can’t be expected to scavenge on rubbish tips for bits of wood to burn for warmth, as the poor do.”

“But then, there’s always an excuse for the elite to have their special privileges.”

“Come here,” she said. “I’ll give you a special privilege.”

After they had made love, Grigori lay awake. Despite his misgivings, he could not help feeling a secret satisfaction at seeing his family so well-off. Katerina had put on weight. When he first met her she had been a voluptuous twenty-year-old girl; now she was a plump mother of twenty-six. Vladimir was five and learning to read and write in school with the other children of Russia’s new rulers; Anna, usually called Anya, was a mischievous curly-headed three-year-old. Their home had formerly belonged to one of the tsaritsa’s ladies-in-waiting. It was warm, dry, and spacious, with a second bedroom for the children and a kitchen and living room too-enough accommodation for twenty people in Grigori’s old lodgings in Petrograd. There were curtains at the windows, china cups for tea, a rug in front of the fire, and an oil painting of Lake Baikal over the fireplace.

Grigori eventually fell asleep, to be wakened at six in the morning by a banging on the door. He opened it to a poorly dressed, skeletally thin woman who looked familiar. “I am sorry to bother you so early, Excellency,” she said, using the old style of respectful address.

He recognized her as the wife of Konstantin. “Magda!” he said in astonishment. “You look so different-come in! What’s the matter? Are you living in Moscow now?”

“Yes, we moved here, Excellency.”

“Don’t call me that, for God’s sake. Where is Konstantin?”

“In prison.”

“What? Why?”

“As a counterrevolutionary.”

“Impossible!” said Grigori. “There must have been a terrible mistake.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who arrested him?”

“The Cheka.”

“The secret police. Well, they work for us. I’ll find out about this. I’ll make inquiries immediately after breakfast.”

“Please, Excellency, I beg you, do something now-they are going to shoot him in one hour.”

“Hell,” said Grigori. “Wait while I get dressed.”

He put on his uniform. Although it had no badges of rank, it was of a much better quality than that of an ordinary soldier, and marked him clearly as a commander.

A few minutes later he and Magda left the Kremlin compound. It was snowing. They walked the short distance to Lubyanka Square. The Cheka headquarters was a huge baroque building of yellow brick, formerly the office of an insurance company. The guard at the door saluted Grigori.

He began shouting as soon as he entered the building. “Who is in charge here? Bring me the duty officer this instant! I am Comrade Grigori Peshkov, member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. I wish to see the prisoner Konstantin Vorotsyntsev immediately. What are you waiting for? Get on with it!” He had discovered that this was the quickest way to get things done, even though it reminded him horribly of the petulant behavior of a spoiled nobleman.

The guards ran around in panic for a few minutes, then Grigori suffered a shock. The duty officer was brought to the entrance hall. Grigori knew him. It was Mikhail Pinsky.

Grigori was horrified. Pinsky had been a bully and a brute in the tsarist police: was he now a bully and a brute for the revolution?

Pinsky gave an oily smile. “Comrade Peshkov,” he said. “What an honor.”

“You didn’t say that when I knocked you down for pestering a poor peasant girl,” Grigori said.

“How things have changed, comrade-for all of us.”

“Why have you arrested Konstantin Vorotsyntsev?”

“Counterrevolutionary activities.”

“That’s ridiculous. He was chair of the Bolshevik discussion group at the Putilov works in 1914. He was one of the first deputies to the Petrograd soviet. He’s more Bolshevik than I am!”

“Is that so?” said Pinsky, and there was the hint of a threat in his voice.

Grigori ignored it. “Bring him to me.”

“Right away, comrade.”

A few minutes later Konstantin appeared. He was dirty and unshaven, and he smelled like a pigsty. Magda burst into tears and threw her arms around him.

“I need to talk to the prisoner privately,” Grigori said to Pinsky. “Take us to your office.”

Pinsky shook his head. “My humble room-”

“Don’t argue,” Grigori said. “Your office.” It was a way of emphasizing his power. He needed to keep Pinsky under his thumb.

Pinsky led them to an upstairs room overlooking the inner courtyard. He hastily swept a knuckle-duster off the desk into a drawer.

Looking out of the window, Grigori saw that it was daybreak. “Wait outside,” he said to Pinsky.

They sat down and Grigori said to Konstantin: “What the hell is going on?”

“We came to Moscow when the government moved,” Konstantin explained. “I thought I would become a commissar. But it was a mistake. I have no political support here.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“I’ve gone back to ordinary work. I’m at the Tod factory, making engine parts, cogs and pistons and ball races.”

“But why do the police imagine you’re counterrevolutionary?”

“The factory elects a deputy to the Moscow soviet. One of the engineers announced he would be a Menshevik candidate. He held a meeting, and I went to listen. There were only a dozen people there. I didn’t speak, I left halfway through, and I didn’t vote for him. The Bolshevik candidate won, of course. But, after the election, everyone who attended that Menshevik meeting was fired. Then, last week, we were all arrested.”

“We can’t do this,” Grigori said in despair. “Not even in the name of the revolution. We can’t arrest workers for listening to a different point of view.”

Konstantin looked at him strangely. “Have you been away somewhere?”

“Of course,” said Grigori. “Fighting the counterrevolutionary armies.”

“Then that’s why you don’t know what’s going on.”

“You mean this has happened before?”

“Grishka, it happens every day.”

“I can’t believe it.”

Magda said: “And last night I received a message-from a friend who is married to a policeman-saying Konstantin and the others were all to be shot at eight o’clock this morning.”

Grigori looked at his army-issue wristwatch. It was almost eight. “Pinsky!” he shouted.

The policeman came in.

“Stop this execution.”

“I fear it is too late, comrade.”

“You mean these men have already been shot?”

“Not quite.” Pinsky went to the window.

Grigori did the same. Konstantin and Magda stood beside him.

Down in the snow-covered courtyard, a firing squad had assembled in the clear early light. Opposite the soldiers, a dozen blindfolded men stood shivering in thin indoor clothes. A red flag flew above their heads.

As Grigori looked, the soldiers raised their rifles.

Grigori yelled: “Stop at once! Do not shoot!” But his voice was muffled by the window, and no one heard.

A moment later there was a crash of gunfire.

The condemned men fell to the ground. Grigori stared, aghast.

Around the slumped bodies, bloodstains appeared on the snow, bright red to match the flag flying above.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE – November 11-12, 1923

Maud slept in the day and got up in the middle of the afternoon, when Walter brought the children home from Sunday school. Eric was three and Heike was two, and they looked so sweet in their best clothes that Maud thought her heart would burst with love.

She had never known an emotion like this. Even her mad passion for Walter had not been so overwhelming. The children also made her feel desperately anxious. Would she be able to feed them and keep them warm, and protect them from riot and revolution?

She gave them hot bread-and-milk to warm them, then she began to prepare for the evening. She and Walter were throwing a small family party to celebrate the thirty-eighth birthday of Walter’s cousin Robert von Ulrich.

Robert had not been killed in the war, contrary to Walter’s parents’ fears-or were they hopes? Either way, Walter had not become the Graf von Ulrich. Robert had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. When the Bolsheviks had made peace with Austria, Robert and his wartime comrade, Jörg, had set out to walk, hitchhike, and ride freight trains home. It had taken them a year, but they had made it, and when they returned Walter had found them an apartment in Berlin.

Maud put on her apron. In the tiny kitchen of her little house she made a soup out of cabbage, stale bread, and turnips. She also baked a small cake, although she had to eke out her ingredients with more turnips.

She had learned to cook and much else besides. A kindly neighbor, an older woman, had taken pity on the bewildered aristocrat and taught her how to make a bed, iron a shirt, and clean a bathtub. It had all come as something of a shock.

They lived in a middle-class town house. They had not been able to spend any money on it, nor could they afford the servants Maud had always been used to, and they had a lot of secondhand furniture that Maud secretly thought was dreadfully suburban.

They had looked forward to better times, but in fact things had got worse: Walter’s career in the foreign ministry had been dead-ended by his marriage to an Englishwoman, and he would have moved on to something else, but in the economic chaos he was lucky to have any job at all. And Maud’s early dissatisfactions seemed petty now, four years of poverty later. There was patched upholstery where the children had torn it, broken windows covered with cardboard, and paintwork peeling everywhere.

But Maud had no regrets. Any time she liked she could kiss Walter, slide her tongue into his mouth, unbutton his trousers, and lie with him on the bed or the couch or even the floor, and that made up for everything else.

Walter’s parents came to the party bringing half a ham and two bottles of wine. Otto had lost his family estate, Zumwald, which was now in Poland. His savings had been reduced to nothing by inflation. However, the large garden of his Berlin house produced potatoes, and he still had a lot of prewar wine.

“How did you manage to find ham?” Walter said incredulously. Such things could normally be bought only with American dollars.

“I traded it for a bottle of vintage champagne,” said Otto.

The grandparents put the children to bed. Otto told them a folktale. From what Maud could hear, it was about a queen who had her brother beheaded. She shuddered, but did not interfere. Afterward Susanne sang lullabies in a reedy voice and the children went to sleep, apparently none the worse for their grandfather’s bloodthirsty story.

Robert and Jörg arrived, wearing identical red ties. Otto greeted them warmly. He seemed to have no idea of their relationship, apparently accepting that Jörg was simply Robert’s flatmate. Indeed, that was how the men behaved when they were with older folk. Maud thought that Susanne probably guessed the truth. Women were harder to fool. Fortunately they were more accepting.

Robert and Jörg could be very different in liberal company. At parties in their own home they made no secret of their romantic love. Many of their friends were the same. Maud had been startled at first: she had never seen men kissing, admiring one another’s outfits, and flirting like schoolgirls. But such behavior was no longer taboo, at least in Berlin. And Maud had read Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, which seemed to suggest that this kind of thing had always gone on.

Tonight, however, Robert and Jörg were on their best behavior. Over dinner everyone talked about what was happening in Bavaria. On Thursday an association of paramilitary groups called the Kampf bund had declared a national revolution in a beer hall in Munich.

Maud could hardly bear to read the news these days. Workers went on strike, so right-wing bullyboys beat up the strikers. Housewives marched to protest against the shortage of provisions, and their protests turned into food riots. Everyone in Germany was angry about the Versailles Treaty, yet the Social Democratic government had accepted it in full. People believed reparations were crippling the economy, even though Germany had paid only a fraction of the amount and obviously had no intention of trying to clear the total.

The Munich beer hall putsch had everyone worked up. The war hero Erich Ludendorff was its most prominent supporter. So-called storm troopers in their brown shirts and students from the Officers Infantry School had seized control of key buildings. City councilors had been taken hostage and prominent Jews arrested.

On Friday the legitimate government had counterattacked. Four policemen and sixteen paramilitaries had been killed. Maud was not able to judge, from the news that had reached Berlin so far, whether the insurrection was over or not. If the extremists took control of Bavaria, would the whole country fall to them?

It made Walter angry. “We have a democratically elected government,” he said. “Why can’t people let them get on with the job?”

“Our government has betrayed us,” said his father.

“In your opinion. So what? In America, when the Republicans won the last election, the Democrats didn’t riot!”

“The United States is not being subverted by Bolsheviks and Jews.”

“If you’re worried about the Bolsheviks, tell people not to vote for them. And what is this obsession with Jews?”

“They are a pernicious influence.”

“There are Jews in Britain. Father, don’t you remember how Lord Rothschild in London tried his best to prevent the war? There are Jews in France, in Russia, in America. They’re not conspiring to betray their governments. What makes you think ours are peculiarly evil? Most of them only want to earn enough to feed their families and send their children to school-just the same as everyone else.”

Robert surprised Maud by speaking up. “I agree with Uncle Otto,” he said. “Democracy is enfeebling. Germany needs strong leadership. Jörg and I have joined the National Socialists.”

“Oh, Robert, for God’s sake!” said Walter disgustedly. “How could you?”

Maud stood up. “Would anyone like a piece of birthday cake?” she said brightly.

Maud left the party at nine to go to work. “Where’s your uniform?” said her mother-in-law as she said good-bye. Susanne thought Maud was a night nurse for a wealthy old gentleman.

“I keep it there and change when I arrive,” Maud said. In fact she played the piano in a nightclub called Nachtleben. However, it was true that she kept her uniform at work.

She had to earn money, and she had never been taught to do much except dress up and go to parties. She had had a small inheritance from her father, but she had converted it to marks when she moved to Germany, and now it was worthless. Fitz refused to give her money because he was still angry with her for marrying without his permission. Walter’s salary at the Foreign Office was raised every month, but it never kept pace with inflation. In partial compensation, the rent they paid for their house was now negligible, and the landlord no longer bothered to collect it. But they had to buy food.

Maud got to the club at nine thirty. The place was newly furnished and decorated, and looked good even with the lights up. Waiters were polishing glasses, the barman was chipping ice, and a blind man was tuning the piano. Maud changed into a low-cut evening dress and fake jewelry, and made up her face heavily with powder, eyeliner, and lipstick. She was at the piano when the place opened at ten.

It rapidly filled up with men and women in evening clothes, dancing and smoking. They bought champagne cocktails and discreetly sniffed cocaine. Despite poverty and inflation, Berlin’s nightlife was hot. Money was no problem to these people. Either they had income from abroad, or they had something better than money: stocks of coal, a slaughterhouse, a tobacco warehouse, or, best of all, gold.

Maud was part of an all-female band playing the new music called jazz. Fitz would have been horrified to see it, but she liked the job. She had always rebelled against the restrictions of her upbringing. Doing the same tunes every night could be tedious, but despite that it released something repressed within her. She wiggled on her piano stool and batted her eyelashes at the customers.

At midnight she had a spot of her own, singing and playing songs made popular by Negro singers such as Alberta Hunter, which she learned from American discs played on a gramophone that belonged to Nachtleben’s owner. She was billed as Mississippi Maud.

Between numbers a customer staggered up to the piano and said: “Play ‘Downhearted Blues,’ will you?”

She knew the song, a big hit for Bessie Smith. She started to play blues chords in E flat. “I might,” she said. “What’s it worth?”

He held out a billion-mark note.

Maud laughed. “That won’t buy you the first bar,” she said. “Haven’t you got any foreign currency?”

He handed her a dollar bill.

She took the money, stuffed it into her sleeve, and played “Downhearted Blues.”

Maud was overjoyed to have a dollar, which was worth about a trillion marks. Nevertheless she felt a little down, and her heart was really in the blues. It was quite an achievement for a woman of her background to have learned to hustle tips, but the process was demeaning.

After her spot, the same customer accosted her on her way back to her dressing room. He put his hand on her hip and said: “Would you like to have breakfast with me, sweetheart?”

Most nights she was pawed, although at thirty-three she was one of the oldest women there: many were girls of nineteen and twenty. When this happened the girls were not allowed to make a fuss. They were supposed to smile sweetly, remove the man’s hand gently, and say: “Not tonight, sir.” But this was not always sufficiently discouraging, and the other girls had taught Maud a more effective line. “I’ve got these tiny insects in my cunt hair,” she said. “Do you think it’s anything to worry about?” The man disappeared.

Maud spoke German effortlessly after four years there, and working at the club she had learned all the vulgar words too.

The club closed at four in the morning. Maud took off her makeup and changed back into her street clothes. She went to the kitchen and begged some coffee beans. A cook who liked her gave her a few in a twist of paper.

The musicians were paid in cash every night. All the girls brought large bags in which to carry the bundles of banknotes.

On the way out, Maud picked up a newspaper left behind by a customer. Walter would read it. They could not afford to buy papers.

She left the club and went straight to the bakery. It was dangerous to hold on to money: by evening your wages might not buy a loaf. Several women were already waiting outside the shop in the cold. At half past five the baker opened the door and chalked up his prices on a board. Today a loaf of black bread was 127 billion marks.

Maud bought four loaves. They would not eat it all today, but that did not matter. Stale bread could be used to thicken soup: banknotes could not.

She got home at six. Later she would dress the children and take them to their grandparents’ house for the day, so that she could sleep. Right now she had an hour or so with Walter. It was the best part of the day.

She prepared breakfast and took a tray into the bedroom. “Look,” she said. “New bread, coffee… and a dollar!”

“Clever girl!” He kissed her. “What shall we buy?” He shivered in his pajamas. “We need coal.”

“No rush. We can keep it, if you want. It will be worth just as much next week. If you’re cold, I’ll warm you.”

He grinned. “Come on, then.”

She took off her clothes and got into bed.

They ate the bread, drank the coffee, and made love. Sex was still exciting, even though it did not take as long as it had when first they were together.

Afterward, Walter read the newspaper she had brought home. “The revolution in Munich is over,” he said.

“For good?”

Walter shrugged. “They’ve caught the leader. It’s Adolf Hitler.”

“The head of the party Robert joined?”

“Yes. He’s been charged with high treason. He’s in jail.”

“Good,” said Maud with relief. “Thank God that’s over.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO – December 1923 to January 1924

Earl Fitzherbert got up on a platform outside Aberowen town hall at three o’clock in the afternoon on the day before the general election. He wore formal morning dress and a top hat. There was a burst of cheering from the Conservatives at the front, but most of the crowd booed. Someone threw a crumpled newspaper, and Billy said: “None of that, now, boys, let him speak.”

Low clouds darkened the winter afternoon, and the streetlights were already lit. It was raining, but there was a big crowd, two or three hundred people, mostly miners in their caps, with a few bowler hats at the front and a scatter of women under umbrellas. At the edges of the crowd, children played on the wet cobblestones.

Fitz was campaigning in support of the sitting M.P., Perceval Jones. He began to talk about tariffs. This was fine with Billy. Fitz could speak on this subject all day without touching the hearts of Aberowen people. In theory, it was the big election issue. The Conservatives proposed to end unemployment by raising the duty on imports to protect British manufactures. This had united the Liberals in opposition, for their oldest ideology was free trade. Labour agreed that tariffs were not the answer, and proposed a program of national work to employ the idle, together with extended years of education to prevent ever more youngsters coming into the overcrowded job market.

But the real issue was who was to rule.

“In order to encourage agricultural employment, the Conservative government will give a bounty of one pound per acre to every farmer-provided he is paying his laborers thirty shillings a week or more,” said Fitz.

Billy shook his head, amused and disgusted at the same time. Why give money to farmers? They were not starving. Unemployed factory workers were.

Beside Billy, Da said: “This sort of talk isn’t going to win votes in Aberowen.”

Billy agreed. The constituency had once been dominated by hill farmers, but those days were over. Now that the working class had the vote, the miners would outnumber the farmers. Perceval Jones had held on to his seat, in the confused election of 1922, by a few votes. Surely this time he would be thrown out?

Fitz was winding up. “If you vote Labour, you will be voting for a man whose army record is stained,” he said. The audience did not much like that: they knew Billy’s story, and regarded him as a hero. There was a mutter of dissent, and Da shouted: “Shame on you!”

Fitz plowed on. “A man who betrayed his comrades-in-arms and his officers, a man who was court-martialed for disloyalty and sent to jail. I say to you: do not bring disgrace on Aberowen by electing to Parliament a man such as that.”

Fitz got down to ragged applause and boos. Billy stared at him, but Fitz did not meet his eye.

Billy climbed onto the platform in his turn. “You’re probably expecting me to insult Lord Fitzherbert the way he insulted me,” he said.

In the crowd, Tommy Griffiths shouted: “Give him hell, Billy!”

Billy said: “But this isn’t a pithead punch-up. This election is too important to be decided by cheap jibes.” They became subdued. Billy knew they would not much like this reasonable approach. They enjoyed cheap jibes. But he saw his father nodding approval. Da understood what Billy was trying to do. Of course he understood. He had taught Billy.

“The earl has shown courage, coming here and stating his views to a crowd of coal miners,” Billy went on. “He may be wrong-he is wrong-but he’s no coward. He was like that in the war. Many of our officers were. They were brave, but wrongheaded. They had the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics, their communications were poor, and their thinking was out of date. But they wouldn’t change their ideas until millions of men had been killed.”

The audience had gone quiet. They were interested now. Billy saw Mildred, looking proud, with a baby in each arm-Billy’s two sons, David and Keir, aged one and two. Mildred was not passionate about politics, but she wanted Billy to become an M.P. so that they could go back to London and she could restart her business.

“In the war, no working-class man was ever promoted above the rank of sergeant. And all public schoolboys entered the army as second lieutenants. Every veteran here today had his life needlessly put at risk by half-witted officers, and many of us had our lives saved by an intelligent sergeant.”

There was a loud murmur of agreement.

“I’m here to say those days are over. In the army and in other walks of life, men should be promoted for brains, not birth.” He raised his voice, and heard in his tone the thrill of passion that he knew from his father’s sermons. “This election is about the future, and the kind of country our children will grow up in. We must make sure it’s different from the one we grew up in. The Labour Party doesn’t call for revolution-we’ve seen that in other countries, and it doesn’t work. But we do call for change-serious change, major change, radical change.”

He paused, then raised his voice again for his peroration. “No, I don’t insult Lord Fitzherbert, nor Mr. Perceval Jones,” he said, pointing at the two top hats in the front row. “I simply say to them: gentlemen, you are history.” There was a cheer. Billy looked over the front row to the crowd of miners-strong, brave men who had been born with nothing but had nevertheless made lives for themselves and their families. “Fellow workers,” he said. “We are the future!”

He got down from the platform.

When the votes were counted, he won by a landslide.

So did Ethel.

The Conservatives formed the largest party in the new Parliament, but they did not have an overall majority. Labour came second, with 191 M.P.s, including Eth Leckwith from Aldgate and Billy Williams from Aberowen. The Liberals were third. The Scottish Prohibitionists won one seat. The Communist Party got none.

When the new Parliament assembled, Labour and Liberal members combined to vote the Conservative government out, and the king was obliged to ask the leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, to become prime minister. For the first time, Britain had a Labour government.

Ethel had not been inside the Palace of Westminster since the day in 1916 when she got thrown out for shouting at Lloyd George. Now she sat on the green leather bench in a new coat and hat, listening to the speeches, occasionally glancing up to the public gallery from which she had been ejected more than seven years ago. She went into the lobby and voted with the members of the cabinet, famous socialists she had admired from a distance: Arthur Henderson, Philip Snowden, Sidney Webb, and the prime minister himself. She had her own desk in a little office shared with another female Labour M.P. She browsed in the library, ate buttered toast in the tearoom, and picked up sacks of mail addressed to her. She walked around the vast building, learning its geography, trying to feel she was entitled to be there.

One day at the end of January she took Lloyd with her and showed him around. He was almost nine years old, and he had never been inside a building so large or so luxurious. She tried to explain the principles of democracy to him, but he was a little young.

On a narrow red-carpeted staircase on the border between the Commons and the Lords areas, they ran into Fitz. He, too, had a young guest-his son George, called Boy.

Ethel and Lloyd were going up, Fitz and Boy coming down, and they met on a half landing.

Fitz stared at her as if he expected her to give way.

Fitz’s two sons, Boy and Lloyd, the heir to the title and the unacknowledged bastard, were the same age. They looked at one another with frank interest.

At Tŷ Gwyn, Ethel remembered, whenever she encountered Fitz in the corridor she had had to stand aside, up against the wall, with her eyes cast down as he passed by.

Now she stood in the middle of the landing, holding Lloyd’s hand firmly, and stared at Fitz. “Good morning, Lord Fitzherbert,” she said, and she tilted her chin up defiantly.

He stared back. His face showed angry resentment. At last he said: “Good morning, Mrs. Leckwith.”

She looked at his son. “You must be Viscount Aberowen,” she said. “How do you do?”

“How do you do, ma’am,” the child said politely.

She said to Fitz: “And this is my son, Lloyd.”

Fitz refused to look at him.

Ethel was not going to let Fitz off lightly. She said: “Shake hands with the earl, Lloyd.”

Lloyd stuck out his hand and said: “Pleased to meet you, Earl.”

It would have been undignified to snub a nine-year-old. Fitz was forced to shake.

For the first time, he had touched his son Lloyd.

“And now we’ll bid you good day,” Ethel said dismissively, and she took a step forward.

Fitz’s expression was thunderous. Reluctantly he stood aside, with his son, and they waited, backs to the wall, as Ethel and Lloyd walked past them and on up the stairs.