The Romanov Succession

HITLER ATTACKS RUSSIA

Moscow, June 22, 1941—Germany today invaded Soviet Russia.

Just after midnight this morning, Nazi bombers attacked Soviet defense installations along a 2,000-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Veteran German armies, estimated at over 3,000,000 men, rolled through the “Polish Corridor,” spearheaded by a blitz of German armor and dive-bomber destruction.

Preliminary reports from the field are fragmentary but it appears the Russians have been caught napping, lulled by the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact signed 21 months ago. Resistance to the Nazi invasion is light, disorganized and ineffectual. The invaders are bypassing strongpoints and smashing through the most weakly defended sectors along a wide front.

Informed foreign observers in Moscow are wondering whether Josef Stalin’s vast USSR, the world’s largest nation, can possibly escape the same fate the conquering Nazi war machine has already inflicted on Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Roumania, Hungary, Greece and Crete.

1.

When the light flashed he pushed himself out of the airplane and fell away into the slipstream. He felt it when he hit the end of the tape and it came free; his fist locked on the secondary ripcord to pull the lanyard if the hook-tape failed. But he didn’t need it this time: the pilot chute popped open and dragged the harness from his backpack. He knotted his muscles against the tug of the main chute.

Above him the B-18s wheeled ponderously, vomiting jumpers; the abrasive rumble of their engines disturbed the hot dry air. Alex Danilov’s silk took the air, billowed and brought him up hard. Then he was swaying, swinging, playing his hands through the shroud lines to spill a little air out of the side of the parachute and center himself over the DZ. Above him the soldiers dangled like marionettes.

Six aircraft and each of them disgorged fourteen chutists: eighty-four men and all of them had to touch down inside the marked 100-yard circle. That was the point of the exercise: precision. Yes sir—it would be twice as easy if we doubled the length of the drop zone but we want to get everybody into the smallest possible target area. In terms of Norway say a forest clearing. We want to be sure nobody gets a pine tree up his ass.

Norway, shit. Alex, the United States Army couldn’t mount a successful invasion of Staten Island right now.

He had twenty-eight seconds to hang from the lines between chute-opening and touchdown. Twenty-eight seconds was far too long if there were going to be people on the ground shooting at them. The next step in the training would be to lower the jump altitude. Bring the planes in at fifteen hundred feet, then a thousand, then seven-fifty. It could be done from four hundred but he’d settle for six. But that would rule out any margin for error—no room for a soldier’s last-minute clutch in the door, no room for backup chutes. When the training got down to that fine point they’d start to lose trainees but sooner or later it would have to be done; it was only a question of how soon.

Texas beneath him: no vestige of shade anywhere. Beyond the chalk lines a black Ford waited—a wilted corporal standing by, his faded blouse stained by the sweat that sluiced down his chest; moving back and forth slowly in the heat as if to create a breeze on himself.

The ground loomed too fast; the moment of terror came every time. He bent his knees and when he touched down he tipped right over on one shoulder and rolled to absorb the impact. Then he twisted to his feet and gathered in the shroud lines to collapse the distended chute. Around him the squads were hitting ground; Alex Danilov’s eyes watched them all, watched their touchdowns and watched the chalk line of the circle. Some of them were so close to it that the wind dragged their chutes over the line after they hit the ground but every one of them had touched down inside the deadlines and it pleased him.

He made a bundle of his silks and carried them toward the perimeter. The corporal made a hand signal and waited for him, plucking the wet blouse away from his chest. The Ford had stars on its fenders: the base commanding general’s stars, but the car was empty.

The corporal said, “General Spaight sent me to fetch you back to headquarters, sir.”

The Fort Bliss sun whacked ferociously against the rows of weathered clapboard: temporary barracks erected in 1917. Alex went inside and the G-1 nodded to him from behind the officer-of-the-day desk. Alex strode past the flag standard to the post commander’s door. When he entered the office his head just missed the top of the doorframe.

An aura of stale cigar hung around the dreary hot room: Spaight didn’t smoke but it was that kind of climate, it preserved everything like a sarcophagus.

Spaight was a brigadier; his hair and unkempt eyebrows were pewter grey: he had an easy amiable smile that squinted up the grid of tiny lines on his face. But he looked unnerved. “How was the jump?”

“Good. They’re coming along.” Alex hooked his cap over the prong of the hat rack.

“They weren’t much of a jump team before you took them over.”

“I just bark at them. They hate me so they’ve got to prove they’re harder than I am. Nothing new about it—I imagine the Greeks ran their armies the same way.”

“Pull up a chair, Alex.” Spaight tipped back in his chair and glanced uneasily toward the window where a fly seeking escape kept banging against the screen. Then he tapped a paper on his desk. “I’ve got War Department orders for you.” He looked bleak.

2.

SUBJECT: Danilov, Alexsander I.

Following report was compiled by: Baltimore, Md., District Office. Bibliography of sources attached. The Bureau expresses its appreciation for the cooperation of BN&I, U.S. Army and U.S. Department of State in making dossiers on subject available.

Subject’s vital statistics:

Date and Place of Birth: 27 March 1907, nr. Kiev, Ukraine, Imperial Russian Empire.

Father’s name & occupation: Danilov, Ilya V. (1871-1920), officer in Imperial (“White Russian”) Army, 1889–1920.

Mother’s name (maiden) & occupation if any: Danilova, Anya F., nee Petrovna (1875-1931).

Subject’s physical description. (Attach photos). Height: 6 ft. 2 in. Weight: 180 lbs. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Grey. Distinguishing marks: Scars at throat (see photos). Smallpox vaccination, upper left bicep. 3 in. scar on back of right calf 2 in. below knee. Marital status: Single. Citizenship: U.S.A.

Summary of findings: Request for investigation of Subject was forwarded to this office from U.S. Army BuPers on 12 December 1940, pursuant to Subject’s pending receipt by special arrangement of temporary commission in U.S. Army. Clearance up to Confidential level was requested. Investigation was concluded 17 January 1941. Clearance denied by U.S. Army G-2. Temporary commission granted (Colonel AUS) for purposes of training U.S. combat troops.

Summary of results of investigation: Subject Danilov is naturalized U.S. citizen. Arrived U.S.A. 1924 as White Russian refugee (age 16). Mother became naturalized U.S. citizen 1929; subject achieved naturalized status on 21st birthday (1928). Attended Culver Military Academy (1924-25), Princeton University (B.S. 1929). Attended Sandhurst military college (G.B.—1930–31. Note: Subject’s family resided in England 1929-1934 but retained U.S. citizenship. See Appendix I, Family Affiliations).

Subject’s movements 1931-1935 have been subjected to a general trace but the Bureau recommends a more thorough check. Said movements took place outside the United States and such an investigation would be outside the jurisdiction of the Bureau. General summaries from Department of State files are attached (Appendix II, III, IV). During 1931–35 period, Subject’s activities have been described broadly as “playboy-oriented” (U.S.D.S. Report, Appendix III) with emphasis on social-set activities on the Continent: gambling, polo, yachting.

In 1935 Subject became associate of his stepbrother, Vassily I. Devenko. (See abstract on Devenko from U.S.D.S. files, Appendix V.) Note: Devenko’s private White Russian army has been described as a mercenary force but confidential reports via U.S.D.S. contraindicate such description.

In September 1935 Devenko’s White Russian Brigade enlisted in the service of the Chinese Government to combat Communist risings and Japanese aggrandizement in Manchukuo. Subject Danilov accompanied the Brigade as platoon leader, company commander and ultimately (March 1936) Operations Officer on staff of “General” Devenko. Subject’s combat record unavailable. Combat record of the Devenko Brigade as a whole has been obtained through sources in the Government of China (Appendix VI) and reports forwarded via the headquarters of Gen. Claire Chennault (Appendix VII). Consensus of reports is that the anti-Communist record of the Devenko Brigade is impeccable.

In May 1936 the Chinese Government attempted to reach a compromise with the Communists. As a result the Devenko Brigade left China (evidently at the insistence of followers of Sun Yat-sen). Complete information is lacking; U.S.D.S. reports surmise that the Brigade was disbanded temporarily (Appendix V). In August 1936 Subject Danilov joined Falangist training cadre after outbreak of Civil War in Spain. Records from U.S.D.S. are incomplete. Subject Danilov appears to have been attached to Franco army with liaison with German Condor Legion, but left this employ within nine weeks and departed Spain to rejoin Vassily I. Devenko when the White Russian Brigade was reassembled in Warsaw.

Subject Danilov served as chief-of-staff to General Devenko from October 1936 to February 1940. From 1936 to 1939 the White Russian Brigade served as a training cadre for the Free Polish Army. In July 1939 political pressure from Moscow caused Warsaw to dismiss the Brigade; it then moved, intact, to Helsinki to train Finnish combat troops. When Soviet Russia invaded Finland in November 1939, the Brigade volunteered for combat duty against the Red Army. It held frontline positions and U.S. Army reports indicate its performance was excellent (Appendix VIII).

Reports on Subject Danilov are more thorough regarding the period of the Russo-Finnish War, mainly because of the presence of American observers on the battle fronts. Dispatches from U.S. Army liaison-observers (see Appendix VIII and cable dispatches from Brigadier General John W. Spaight, military attaché-observer, in Appendix IX) indicate Subject Danilov’s performance under fire was exemplary.

In February 1940, during the Russo-Finnish War, General Devenko departed the Brigade on a leave of absence and Subject Danilov assumed temporary command. He remained in command of the unit until the conclusion of the war in March 1940. General Devenko then resumed command. Subject Danilov was wounded in action two days prior to the end of hostilities and was invalided off the duty roster. Subject spent March-May 1940 in Helsinki military hospital, then transferred for convalescence to civilian hospital in Stockholm. In September 1940 Subject Danilov returned to the United States (P. of E. New York City) in order to comply with conditions of naturalized citizenship requiring him to “touch base” on American soil at specified intervals.

On 4 October 1940 Subject Danilov was approached by Brig. Gen. John W. Spaight, U.S. Army, in an attempt to recruit Subject into American training cadre. (Appendix IX indicates the two men had become friendly in Finland.) Brig. Gen. Spaight had been assigned to take command of U.S. Army Paratroop Command Training Center at Fort Bliss, Texas, the appointment to take effect on 1 December 1940. At the same time Brig. Gen. Spaight approached the War Department with a request to make unusual exception to the regulations concerning commissions and promotions. His arguments in favor of granting a special temporary commission to Subject Danilov are recapitulated in Appendix X—principally to the effect that for purposes of training recruits there would be no adequate substitute for recent combat experience of the sort Subject Danilov had undergone.

This request for special instatement led to a requisition by U.S. Army BuPers for a Federal Security Report on Subject Danilov. This District Office’s formal report is attached (Appendix XI). In summary it concludes that while certain background details are lacking, making security clearance unfavorable, nevertheless Subject Danilov’s military background qualifies him uniquely for the requested assignment and that no indications have come to light which might negate Subject’s usefulness as a combat-training instructor for the U.S. Army.

(Note: U.S.D.S. files in Appendix XII indicate State Department ruling on question of citizenship ineligibility. Question was raised because of regulations by which naturalized U.S. citizens may forfeit citizenship as a result of having served in foreign armies. Department was asked to waive this regulation; waiver was refused, but naturalized citizenship was upheld nevertheless on the grounds that the Devenko Brigade was not an army of a foreign government; it was an independent nongovernmental organization leasing its services to various anti-Communist powers. Subject Danilov’s brief service in the employ of the Spanish government was not judged to be military service. Subject retains American citizenship.)

Date of this report: 21 January 1941.

3.

The fly kept banging against the screen and John Spaight watched it angrily but he didn’t stir from his chair. Dust motes hung in the July heat. “You did a hell of a job down here.”

Alex said, “You’re putting that in the past tense.”

“I told you—they’ve cut orders on you.” Spaight dropped his palm flat on the document on his desk. “I’ve got to ask you something Alex. We’ve never talked about it before. You spent eight or nine weeks in Spain training soldiers for Franco. Then you just bugged out without a by-your-leave. Why?”

Spaight was a friend but it looked as if he was trying to bait Alex and until he knew why he wasn’t going to fall into a trap. “A lot of us on both sides were misguided by our own zeal. Sooner or later you began to realize the Fascists were as bad as the Communists.”

“If not worse.”

“They weren’t any worse. Better equipped. I couldn’t see any other difference.”

“The point is, Alex, you got fed up and you just bugged out.”

He began to see it. “I was a mercenary there. Not a Spanish citizen. If that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Take it easy, Alex. There’s a point to all this. Let me put it this way—suppose we find ourselves allied with Russia against Nazi Germany. If we get into this war that’s exactly what may happen. Where does that put you, Alex? What do you do then, hating those Red Russians the way you do? You stick it out and follow orders? Or do you bug out again?”

Alex brooded at him. “John I’m a volunteer. I came down here to train soldiers, not to support political alliances. I’m not a spy, I’m a soldier—I do my job and that’s all I do. If you’re not satisfied with my work then you’d better ask for my resignation.”

“I wish it was that cut and dried.” Spaight lifted the typed page from the desk and handed it to him.

Alex folded the order along its original creases and slid it into his pocket.

Spaight said, “They’re sending in a Canadian to relieve you—veteran of Dunkirk. To teach us how to lose gracefully I suppose.”

“They’ll do all right,” Alex said in a distracted voice.

“Alex, they’re taking you out of here. Marshall’s G-2—that’s the cloak and dagger end. Frankly I’m not sure it’s the right place for you. I’m not sure you belong in this army at all under the circumstances. It was all right as long as you were down here—it gave you a chance to heal up, it gave me the best training officer I’ve ever had. But Washington, the Intelligence branch—that’s something else again.”

“They didn’t consult you about this?”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it. I tried a phone call to Washington this morning but all I got was a runaround. But I’d have to be an ass if I didn’t figure you for one of their Russian desks in the Intelligence office.”

“And you want to know if I can be trusted there.”

“Alex, it’s a hell of a thing to have to—”

“If I can’t do the job with absolute loyalty I’ll resign.”

Spaight gave him a long scrutiny and then the smile-tracks creased around his tired eyes. “Good enough.”

He cleaned out his office desk and had the driver ferry him to the BOQ.

The wall phone was buzzing when he went by it and he lifted the earpiece off its bracket. “BOQ. Colonel Danilov.”

“Oh—Colonel. Base Central. Just tried to get you over to your office. They’s a long-distance call for you. You supposed to call Operator Three in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

“All right. Can you make the call for me?”

“Yes sir. One moment please.”

When the connection went through it was poor. He had to shout through a hiss of static.

“Please hold on, Colonel.”

Then a man’s voice, a little quavery with age, in hard Kharkov Russian:

“Is that you, Alexsander Ilyavitch?”

Alex’s face changed. “Yes General.”

4.

He laid out his second-best uniform for traveling and showered in tepid hard water. Naked at the sink shaving, he caught his dulled scowl in the mirror. There were two puckered scars in his neck, one three inches beyond the other on the right side where a jacketed bullet had gone through—his talisman of luck: an expanding slug of soft lead would have torn his head off. But the scars were ugly and impossible to disguise.

His hair was walnutty brown peppered with grey at the sides and cropped militarily short against the high square skull; he had sun-broiled skin above the pale vee of shirt collars, a long nose and a very large mouth that formed a rectangular bracket around his teeth if he smiled. His torso was long; the cords lay flat along his bones and he was quite thin, with a runner’s wind.

For six months he had lived in this hot close room and done very little that he hadn’t been told to do. He had become a pest, ramrodding the battalion twenty-four hours a day, not giving it or himself any respite. Now they were pulling him out of his safe cocoon and that was what frightened him a little. They were throwing him into some War Department crush and he didn’t know if he’d had time to heal yet.

He thrust himself into his clothes, breaking through the starch; he drank one undersized shot of bourbon and left the bottle on the table for his successor. He had been drinking the stuff for months because it was cheap and available but he still hadn’t learned to like it.

He went back to the telephone in the hall. A G-1 major came through, waggled a hand at him and went into his room. Alex waited until the major’s door was shut.

“Base Control. He’p you?”

“This is Colonel Danilov. See if General Spaight’s still in his office, will you?”

“Yes sir. One moment please.”

Fairly quickly Spaight was on the line. “Alex?”

“I’m not sure which one of us owes the other a favor.”

“No need to keep books on it. What do you need?”

“My orders give me four days TDY to report in. I need to get to New York a lot faster than that. By tomorrow night if I can.”

“New York?” Spaight’s voice indicated his curiosity, “Okay. Where are you right now?”

“BOQ.”

“I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.”

He held the hook down long enough to break the connection. Then he made one more call, kept it brief and went back into his cubicle to make a final check of things he might have forgotten to pack. He hadn’t forgotten anything of course; he never did. But it was a clue to his unease and he deliberately stood to attention and drew several long measured breaths to calm himself.

He answered the phone on the first ring.

“You’re all set. Be at El Paso airport at eleven sharp—twenty-three hundred hours. There’s a half-squadron of brand new bombers ferrying through to Washington. I’ve got you a lift with them. Talk to the lead pilot, a Captain Johnson.”

“Thanks, John.”

“Drop me a postcard now and then.”

“Sure.”

“Good luck, Alex.”

He heard the car draw up, crunching gravel; Carol Ann’s horn blasted cheerfully—shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits. He gathered up his uniform coat and musette bag, glanced finally around the monastic cell and went out.

The dazzling brilliance made his eyes swim. He crossed the yellow-brown patch of lawn and tossed his things in the back seat; he slid in beside the girl and threw his arm across the back of the seat while she put the open Chevy roadster in gear.

“Time’s your train?”

“Ten-fifteen,” he said, compounding the lie. He didn’t want anyone to know about the plane ride. Spaight would keep it under his hat.

“I know a place to fill your belly.” Her long brown eyes flicked toward him. “Unless you’ve got anything else in mind you’d rather do?”

Alex shook his head.

Carol Ann had a shrewd quick way of smiling. “The Way the trains are these days you’d better get yourself around a good’ Southern meal.” She was a self-confident girl, a bit of a cynic and not much of a talker; they had met four weeks ago in a roadhouse bar and in a casual way they had filled needs in each other without talking about it. She didn’t know much about him and didn’t seem to want to.

The setting sun veined the clouds with streaks of marble pink. The hot wind raked his face and Carol Ann took the dips in the road too fast for the springs on the little car.

The Rio Grande was muddy and sluggish on his right. The landmark hills guided them into the dusty outskirts of El Paso—scrubby brush and the occasional billboard for Prince Albert Tobacco and the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous. The car’s passage flushed a covey of quail.

Detour. Through a dry arroyo where flash floods had undercut the road. On the job a half dozen convicts in stripes worked with shovels and rakes and tar buckets, their dull Indian faces aglisten with oil sweat, and two flaccid killer guards with riot shotguns sat horseback. Their heads all turned to watch the girl behind the wheel.

She pulled into the dusty lot beside a stucco café festooned with red-and-white Coca-Cola signs. He held the screen door for her and went inside and let it slap shut on its spring. A deep-fried smell ran along the counter and the radio was twanging, Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman. They were all men at the counter, Mexicans at the back, all of them in Levi’s and high-heel boots and flannel shirts with the backs of their necks creased like old leather.

They took the booth at the front by the window where there was a little air. Fried steak, shucked corn, buttered green beans, a huge dollop of mashed potatoes with a two-spoon crater filled with lumpy gravy. The notice above the counter said We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone and beyond that there was a placard: Discussion of the President Is Prohibited. On the radio now an announcer was talking about Hank Greenberg.

Carol Ann said, “Well then, Coop.” She fancied he resembled Gary Cooper the movie star. “I’m not going to see you again. Am I?”

“Do you want to?”

She was eating, watching him. She made no direct answer to the question. She caught the counterman’s eye: “I’ll have another cup of that coffee if it’s handy.”

Gene Autry was singing Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Carol Ann stirred a lump of sugar into the coffee and fanned herself with the paper napkin. “If you ever get down this way you come and see me, hear?”

She was bony; he could see the tendons in her throat. The thin shirt hung from her shoulders and he felt sadness well up onto the back of his mouth. Her husband was a lieutenant with a construction battalion in Alaska. She lived in a drab quick-built apartment court north of El Paso near the river. She had two little girls, five and two. It was all he knew about her except that she was lonely and she was generous, giving fully of herself when it pleased her. It had been easy and quiet between them: neither of them wanted excitement. He hadn’t realized until now that it had been important enough to make him unhappy to end it.

“Where are they sending you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well you’ll handle it all right, now.”

He wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to fix the rocking chair.”

“It’s all right, Coop.”

He paid the check and she drove him to the station. There was dust on his Oxfords and she insisted on treating him: the shoeshine boy slapped his cloth across Alex’s toes with the sound of distant artillery. Then it was time to tell her to go. He kissed her on the lips, gently. It was something he had never done with her in a public place before.

She said, “I am going to miss you, Coop. You take care of yourself, hear?”

After she left it occurred to him that neither of them had asked the other to write.

He took a taxi to the airfield and waited around the hangars for the Air Corps formation to appear.

5.

There were six planes—the new B-24 Liberator type, long-range and fromidable. They gave him a waist-gunner’s seat in the third plane and showed him how to use the intercom and oxygen apparatus.

Everything he owned of any consequence was in the B-4 bag at his feet and except for the pistols none of it was of moment to him; he did not carry souvenirs of his life. It was one of the things that made him feel apart from the rest of his kind—the White Russian exiles with their passionate covetousness.

It was cold in the night sky. Through the turret perspex he watched the other planes bobbing slightly in the intangible balance of their staggered formation. The drone was hypnotic and soporific; in his mind he ran back over the tense telephone conversation with General Deniken—searching for clues to the things Deniken had left unsaid:

“Alexsander, you have been transferred to Washington. You’ve received your orders?”

“I’ve received orders, yes sir. I’m not permitted to discuss them.”

“I understand. Alexander, there is something you must do for me. I ask this in your brother’s name.”

He bridled slightly. “Yes?”

“You must go immediately to New York and meet with someone. You must do this before you report to Washington.”

“I don’t think there’s time for that, General.”

“Make the time. This is a matter of the utmost importance—it is vital. The Plaza Hotel in New York, do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“You must be there by tomorrow evening.”

“Will you be there, General?”

“No, they’re sending someone from Feodor’s group in Spain. I don’t know which of them it is. It may be your brother. It may well be Prince Leon himself. The matter is that important. I beg of you be there within twenty-four hours. I ask this in Vassily’s name.”

There was no way to refuse the old man. If the exiled shell of White Russia had a savior then A. I. Deniken was that man. He was the greatest White general of the Russian Civil War and he had been the last Supreme Ruler of All the Russias: to the White exiles and even to the surviving Romanov Pretenders like the Grand Duke Feodor he was the next thing to a Czar.

Put by Deniken it could not be refused.

In the early hours they took more than an hour to refuel at Wright Field in Ohio and then they were droning on through a dull summer morning, buffeting in the turbulence of the clouds. At three in the afternoon they came into McGuire Field. Captain Johnson walked back from the leading Liberator, a parachute pack trailing in his fist. “I’ve got to report in but I’m driving over to Philadelphia right away. If you want to hang around I’ll give you a lift to the Trenton station. It’s about an hour and a half on the train to New York.”

Alex waited for him in the PX canteen. Johnson collected him at three forty-five. He had a motor-pool Ford. Alex tossed his bag in the back seat and climbed in.

“My name’s Paul, Colonel. Most of them call me Papp—I’m four years older than the next oldest pilot in the Thirty-fifth”

Alex reached across his lap to shake hands. “I appreciate your trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Always bothers the taxpayer in me when we have to ferry those big jobs empty—seems like a hell of a waste of aviation gasoline.”

Johnson was a stocky man with blunt hands and short reddish hair and a square freckled face. He couldn’t have been much over thirty: “Pappy.” At thirty-four Alex felt old.

Johnson drove as if pursued, flashing along the narrow roads of the New Jersey pine barrens. It was hot under the sullen sky and they kept the windows wide open; Johnson shouted to make himself heard. “They got you aboard damn quick down at El Paso. You mind if I ask where you get your drag?”

“The base commander at Bliss is an old friend. We soldiered together in Finland.”

A sudden sidewise glance; Johnson’s face changed. “Danilov—sure. They had a piece on you in Colliers last year, right? ‘This man goes where the wars are’—something like that. Joined up over here to train ranger commandoes, wasn’t that it? Listen, you’ve seen those German planes in action. How do they really stack up?”

“They’re not as good as Goering and Goebbels want us to think. The Spitfires have been handing it to the Messerschmitts.”

“Weren’t you in China?”

Johnson’s professionalism was total: it was a characteristic of good airmen. Anticipating the question Alex said, “There isn’t a plane in the world that can match the Japanese Zero.”

“I’ll tell you something, Colonel, you give me a B-Seventeen Fort and I’ll take my chances against those peashooters. You ever seen a Fort up close?”

“No.”

“Sweetest airplane a man ever built. We had a flight of prototypes for tryouts last year. You think we’ll be in this war, Colonel? I don’t think it’s going to be decided by Messerschmitts or Zeroes or anybody else’s peashooters. I think it’s going to be dogfaces and carriers and long-range four-engine bombers. That’s the three things that will decide it—the rest is all window dressing. It takes carriers to open the sea-lanes. It takes heavy bombers to flatten the enemy’s communications and supply lines. Takes the infantry to root him out and finish him. That’s the whole story of this war we’re looking at.”

Johnson had the earmarks of a long-distance talker but Alex listened with respect because the pilot was a shrewd man and obviously it was a thing to which he’d given a great deal of thought.

Alex said, “I’d add one thing to that list. I’ve seen panzers in action.”

“I don’t agree. That’s only tactics. You can stop a tank easy if you’re ready for it. They’re sitting ducks. Too many ways you can hit a tank. Let me tell you something—I put my squadron through a little experiment last year. We mocked up twenty tanks on the ground out at Camp Hunter-Liggett in the Mohave Desert and then we took off. We made a regular war game out of it—phony flak, the works.

“We plastered hell out of them. On the scorecard it was Air Corps fifteen, Armor nothing.” Johnson flashed a glance at him. “Low-level precision bombing, Colonel. You’re right on top of your target—hell you can’t miss if your bombardiers know their jobs. You know how good a target a big fat tank makes from fifty feet altitude?”

“What if they’d been real tanks—taking evasive action?”

“Tanks can’t maneuver that fast. They turn like bull elephants—catch them on rough terrain even the best panther tank can’t make better than fifteen, eighteen miles an hour. They’re sitting ducks. But the War Department gave me that same line. Christ I felt like Billy Mitchell. They told me to take my ideas and shove them. Well I guess that’s all right—when the time comes maybe I can talk them into taking out that report of mine and dusting it off. We’re not into the war yet, a lot of things are likely to change.”

Johnson guided the Ford smoothly through the main street of a small town. On the outskirts he put it back up to fifty and went swaying through the bends. Light rain began to bead up on the windshield. Alex said, “You can really pinpoint a target as small as a tank, can you?”

“It takes training, Colonel. I never said it was easy. But one of these days it’s going to help win this war.”

6.

The train was jammed; he had to stand. It was a commuter express with stops at Princeton Junction and New Brunswick and Newark; filled with businessmen in black fedoras and wide snap-brims. There were soldiers on furlough and vacationing college students in ribboned bonnets and white shoes, giggling their way to New York where you could drink liquor at eighteen. The placards advertised Rupert’s Beer and the Radio City Music Hall feature, Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. Ivory Soap was 99.44/100ths% pure and Lucky Strike meant fine tobacco and the 1941 Lincoln Zephyr was the fine car for everyman. On the commuters’ newspapers the headlines bannered F.D.R. TO NATIONALIZE PHILIPPINE ARMY—Moves in Response to Jap Occupation of Indo-China. Mac-Arthur to Command.

Pushing through the crowd he carried his bag through throngs of redcap porters up the stairs and the long Penn Station ramp past the Savarin restaurant where middle-aged women sat in flowered hats watching the big railroad clocks.

Like battling stags two black Fords had locked bumpers in the center of Seventh Avenue and the boulevard was a tangle of hooting cars. He went through the station’s immense stone columns and made his way two blocks uptown to get out of the jam.

It was a five-minute wait and then he was riding uptown in a taxi with his B-4 bag on the seat beside him and his hand in the strap-loop: New York traffic always terrified him. Along Seventh Avenue the menials of the Garment District pushed their heavy clothes-hanger dollies through the tangle of trucks and cars and horsecarts.

The traffic in Times Square was intense and the big illuminated signs flashed at him painfully—I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel; Seagram’s for the Man of Distinction. Leather-throated newsboys hawked the Mirror and the Trib and tourists gawked at the enormous Paramount cinema palace.

The taxi had the peculiar De Soto smell of old leather and cigar ash. It decanted him in the semicircular drive before the Plaza and he hauled his bag into the oak-and-marble lobby. At the mail desk he identified himself and was handed a note on the hotel’s embossed stationery, neatly handwritten in the Cyrillic characters of the Russian alphabet:

He puzzled it momentarily before he pocketed it and moved on to the reception desk. A clerk gave his uniform a glance of utter contempt. “May I help you?”

“Colonel Danilov. There’s a reservation for me, I think.”

“I’m not sure there’s—oh yes, here you are. Room Nine-nineteen.” Not troubling to conceal his disapproval the clerk struck his palm down on the counter-top bell. “Front!”

The bellboy had the red muscular face of an experienced Irish drinker. He regarded Alex’s single soft bag with displeasure, heaved it under his arm and took the key from the clerk. “This way sir if you please.”

On the ninth floor the middle-aged boy led Alex along the deep-carpeted hall to the northeast corner of the building and into a luxuriously spacious chamber that gave him a view of the whole of Central Park and across Fifth Avenue to the lights of the Pierre and the Savoy Plaza and the Sherry Netherland. The bellboy examined Alex’s twenty-five cent piece as if he suspected its worth and backed out of the room with a stiff bow.

Alex took his dop kit into the marble-tiled bathroom; washed and shaved and combed and emerged rereading the note. “I” could be Ivan or Igor or Ilya: there were numerous men with those names among his acquaintances in the White Russian exile organizations and families. It annoyed him a little: the passion for unnecessary conspiratorial secrecy.

A bottle of Polish vodka lay canted in a champagne bucket filled with ice. He lifted it out and brooded at the straw of buffalo grass that lay inside the sealed clear bottle. Someone knew his taste. He poured the two-ounce bartender’s glass full and downed it; replaced the bottle and settled into a chair, and waited. He neither smoked nor drank again; he only waited.

At eight he went out, turned to Room 917 next door in the hall and knocked.

“Yes?” A woman. “Who is it?”

His host had company then. Alex contained his impatience—made his face blank. “Colonel Danilov.”

He heard soft footfalls on a carpet. A key turned in the lock and the door pivoted to disclose a stunning dark-haired woman in red.

His face changed. “Irina.”

Irina Markova smiled. “Come in, Alex, don’t stand there looking like a stunned schoolboy with his hat in his hand.”

He entered the room warily; behind him the door clicked shut and Irina said in her low liquid Russian, “There’s no need to clench your teeth. Vassily’s not with me. We’re alone.”

He turned, feeling odd.

“Just you and I.” She smiled again. “How romantic.”

All the old passions slid back into place entirely against his will. A spiral of heat rose from his stomach: he felt tricked. “What’s this meant to be, Irina?”

“They need you, Alex. It’s supposed to be a seduction.”

7.

There was a sense of mystery about Irina that ramified from her like a spreading fog of intoxicating perfume. She was clearly aware of it; she did nothing to dispel it.

The natural shape of her blue eyes was slightly mournful—Eurasian. Her hair was gypsy-black and long. The fashionably broad shoulders and fitted long taut waist of her red dress made her seem tall although she was not unusually so. Everything seemed to amuse her as if her point of vantage over the human tribe were a bit Olympian; she seemed to have the knack of surviving the shocks of her explosive life without ever being touched by them.

It was a luxurious two-room suite, larger than his own. She moved languidly away from him. “I’ve sherry or vodka.”

“Sherry.” He’d need a clear head. He settled into a chair.

“I’ve ordered dinner sent up at nine.”

“Have you.”

“We’re having a tryst, aren’t we? It wouldn’t look quite right if we went out and mingled.”

Her mouth curved into a posture of wry self-mockery. She brought him a glass of sherry and then slid back into the couch that faced his chair across the low glass coffee table. She smoothed her skirt under her thighs—the gesture had a strong sensuality. “You look awfully drab in that uniform.”

“Why don’t you tell me what game we’re meant to be playing?”

“So matter-of-fact. Where’s your dash?” She tucked one foot up under her on the couch.

“I’d rather you didn’t try to be coquettish. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Oh dear.” She tossed her hair back, full of subtle mischief. “Now you’ve crushed me. Have I quite lost all my charms?” When she sipped the pale sherry her eyes mocked him over the rim of the glass.

“No.” It was an admission.

“I’m sorry—I wasn’t really fishing for that.” But her eyes went on glittering with amusement; then she said in a different voice, “Very well. They want to see you.”

“They?”

“Your brother. My father. Prince Leon. All of them.”

“Do they.”

“Is that all you can say?”

He watched the way her muscles moved when she set her glass down. “What do you want me to say, Irina?”

“I don’t know. I’ve no feverish desire to put words in your mouth. But some reaction—some hint of feeling. What will it take to provoke an emotion in you?”

“The fact that I don’t parade my feelings doesn’t mean that I don’t have them.”

“You used to burst with fires. That great Russian joie de vivre.”

“We were all children, weren’t we? And it was a different world.”

“You got fed up with seeing us all go on living in international luxury as if nothing had changed. The same old servants and horse races and hunts and chemin-de-fer—all our silly aristocratic posturings while Europe is falling down around our ankles. Isn’t that what you told Prince Leon the last time you saw him?”

“Something like that.”

She uttered a bawdy bark of laughter. “Oh really, Alex. Sometimes you act like one of those grim dedicated adolescents who hang on Oleg Zimovoi’s Socialist coattails.”

He had a disoriented sensation because the silent conversation between their eyes was separate and wholly different from the words: their voices spoke in dispute and accusation; their mute colloquy spoke of passions, regrets, remembered love.

“You’re a Russian. You were born in Kiev—you spent your childhood in St. Petersburg.” She spoke with surprising earnestness and heat: “You can’t deny yourself, Alex. You can’t put that behind you.”

“I have.”

“Your father died fighting for your country.” Her eyes challenged him.

“It was a long time ago,”

His father had been a Marquis, a brigadier with Wrangel in the Ukraine in 1919 and the Red artillery had destroyed the bunker with five of them in it. Alex was twelve years old and the news broke him apart.

They were living near Kiev just then, he and his mother in a rented dacha with only four servants.

The day after the news reached them Alex ran away to Kiev and enlisted in a White recruiting office; he claimed he was sixteen. He was in training barracks resplendent in his new uniform when his mother’s emissaries found him and dragged him home.

They found themselves under General Devenko’s protection when the terrible White retreat began after the collapse of Kolchak’s White armies. Ilya Devenko was a high staff officer in Deniken’s headquarters; he kept the mother and son from perishing in the chaotic horde of refugees fleeing south ahead of Trotsky’s relentless Bolshevik advance. Alex had clear recollection of the packed trains, the endless throngs trudging across the frozen mud of the Ukraine.

General Ilya Devenko had been a very tall man with a voice like lumps of coal crashing down a metal chute. Alex had known him as long as he could remember: the General had been a classmate of Alex’s father, a regular if not frenquent visitor at Danilov soirées before the war. The General’s son Vassily was twice Alex’s age in 1920 and at twenty-six was a full colonel of infantry with an outstanding record of gallantry in the field against the First Red Army.

General Devenko’s wife had died of spotted typhus in the Kuban campaigns of 1918 and perhaps it was inevitable that the widower general should marry Alex’s mother who was a general’s widow. The ceremony took place in Sebastopol in 1921, in the Orthodox Cathedral with Alex giving his mother away and Vassily carrying the ring for his father.

It made Vassily a stepbrother to Alex. Immediately after the wedding Vassily returned to the line to hold the Reds back so that the city could be evacuated aboard ships of the French navy. Alex went aboard a transport reluctantly; they spent his mother’s wedding night in the crowded salon listening to the crashing of the guns. She did not see her new husband again until three weeks later when they were reunited in Istanbul: the newlywed Devenkos, General Deniken, Alex and his stepbrother Vassily, the hero of Sebastopol. With a force which at the end numbered fewer than four hundred men Vassily had kept the Bolsheviks back for a vital eighteen hours while tens of thousands of refugees had been hurried on board the French ships and taken away onto the safety of the Black Sea.

Irina said, “It wasn’t so long ago you can have forgotten it.”

“No.” Twenty years but he could still see the horizon lit by the night barrages; he could feel the sucking mud around his feet and taste the brass of terror on his tongue and he could smell the cold sweat of the refugee mobs clawing at the passing trains. The empty-eyed faces of the soldiers slogging back toward the front; the gnash of Renault ambulances and Daimler-Benz staff cars beating through the cobbled streets, scattering pedestrians; the screams of agony, the stink of suppurating death along the rows of old buildings taken over for hospitals; the taste of dog meat and metallic boiled water; the incongruity—he’d never been able to exorcise it from memory—of a piano heard in a rubbled Sebastopol street while dust hung rancid in the city and 75 mm shells rumbled against the quays. He hadn’t been able to hear Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto since then without nausea.

“No—I haven’t forgotten.”

“You’ve an obligation.”

“To a gang of baccarat and croquet players? To a pack of foolish Romanov Pretenders spending their pointless lives at each other’s throats to claim a throne that doesn’t exist any more?”

“To your brother for one.”

“Vassily Ilyavitch is not my brother.”

“There was a time when you were proud to think he was.”

“That’s an empty refrain, isn’t it? The past doesn’t exist now—not for any of us. There’s no St. Petersburg, there’s only Leningrad.”

An obsequious knock: the boy wheeled in the cart, fussed a while, backed his way out.

Irina lifted the steel domes off the dinner plates. He saw chilled grey Beluga caviar in a bowl at the center. Irina said, “They claim it’s beef stroganoff but I shouldn’t expect too much.”

“I’m used to the Bachelor Officers’ mess hall.”

“How awful.”

He drew up two chairs and when he seated her there was an electric contact where her hair brushed his hand. He went around the table and sat—watching her.

She didn’t chatter; she fell upon the meal. She had always been hearty about everything she did.

She was his own age—thirty-four—almost to the month; but you couldn’t know that by looking at her. Her stunning beauty was in the bones more than the complexion and objectively there would be no way to tell whether she was twenty-five or forty-five.

She was the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever known.

She said, “Is there some particular part of my face that fascinates you?”

“All of it.”

“You’re still a devastatingly attractive man yourself. You’ve improved with age. Those sprigs of grey around the ears—très distingué. And you’ve never looked so fit.”

“It must be a product of the spartan life.”

“Now you’re being silly.” She had a rakish look—mischievous. “That American woman was quite right. You put one in mind of Gary Cooper.”

It startled him and she laughed at him. “In one of your letters to Prince Leon. He repeated it to me with great amusement.”

“How is he?”

“I think the leg bothers him more than it used to. He’s not young you know—he’s sixty-four, a year older than the Grand Duke. He hasn’t spoken your name in my presence. He’s taken it for granted you and I didn’t want to be reminded of each other.”

He let it slip by because he wasn’t ready to confront it quite yet. He finished the entrée, hardly having tasted it; he took a breath. “And Vassily? I suppose I should ask.”

She said, “I haven’t seen Vassily in several years. Not since the last time you saw us together.”

He was amazed and did not try to hide it.

Irina said, “Vassily wants a passionate peasant woman—he wants devotion, not questions. I’m far to abrasive for him, I don’t fit his conception of what a soldier’s woman should be.”

She pushed her plate aside. “It wasn’t very good, was it? The stroganoff. I did warn you. The coffee’s still warm—would you like a cup?”

He waited until she had poured; they took their cups back to the stuffed chairs at the coffee table. Then he said, “It’s time you came to the point. You’ve implied you’re acting as an emissary from Vassily and now you tell me you haven’t seen him in years. It’s time you sorted it out.”

“I suppose it is. They want you to come back. They need you—they need your skills. As a soldier.”

“What the devil for?”

“They’re planning a war.”

Finally he said, “You’d better tell me about it.”

“I can’t.” She spread her hands. The half-smile was directed against herself. “I’m only a messenger. They don’t let women into their councils.”

“Then why send you if you can’t explain it to me?”

“I’m only here to ask you to come back to Spain and talk to them—listen to them.”

“They could have asked me that in a letter.”

“Would you have gone?”

“I’m a soldier, Irina. I can’t just pick up and leave my duty post.”

“There, you see? That’s why they sent me. To seduce you into trailing along with me back to Spain. Baron Oleg—you know him well enough. Something convinced him that I need only drop a handkerchief and any man in sight will become my adoring slave.”

“You haven’t dropped a handkerchief, really. Have you?”

“No.”

“Did you tell Oleg you would?”

“I suppose I was evasive. I didn’t promise anything—but he drew his own conclusions when I agreed to come.”

“Why did you?”

“I wanted to see you.” She finished her coffee and put the cup down in the saucer. “Don’t stiffen up. That’s not a handkerchief. I’m being as honest as I’m able. I’m trying not to mislead you.”

“I’m puzzled, Irina. Who is it you’re betraying—Oleg or me?”

“Neither. I’ve brought you his message. I urge you to go to Spain.”

He said, “Oleg’s always tended to be more devious than necessary. He’s been infatuated with you for years.”

“I know.” She said it indifferently. “I’m afraid I don’t feel it puts me under an obligation to him. I’m not responsible for Oleg’s emotional foolishness.”

“But you came.”

“To see you.”

“What’s Vassily’s place in this?”

“They’ve coalesced—the factions. Oleg’s Socialists, the old-line liberal aristocracy, the reactionaries, even the partisans of each of the Pretenders. They’ve formed a consortium. It’s the first time they’ve ever worked together. Even during the Civil War they were always at loggerheads—Prince Leon insists that’s why we lost Russia to the Bolsheviks.”

“What’s that got to do with Vassily?”

“They’re planning something military. Vassily’s been selected to command it.”

“Command what? There’s no White Russian army—only a scattered pack of old-time exiles.”

“I can’t say, Alex. I do know that Vassily’s at the center of it.”

“Whatever their scheme is—is it his idea?”

“No; they brought him into it recently. He’s been in England you know—he’s still got a commission with the Free Poles.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He’s in hiding. There’ve been threats on his life—someone’s tried to kill him.”

His belly churned. After a moment he said. “Why?”

“We’re not sure. Apparently Vassily wants to believe it’s someone from the past—someone with a grudge. It’s plausible, isn’t it? His arrogance must have made him a good many enemies.”

“But you don’t believe it’s that.”

“I’m not certain—Prince Leon thinks it must be someone who’s trying to stop them by assassinating Vassily. He’s the key to it all—he’s the leader they’ve chosen to command it. Without Vassily the rest of them might not know how to proceed.”

He thought of Prince Leon, kindly and craggy, the best of the lot of them.

“Will you come with me?”

“I’ve got orders. I’m not a free agent.”

“It’s been arranged for you.”

He shot her a sharp glance. “You just keep chucking stones in the pond, don’t you? How do you mean that?”

“With your War Department. Don’t look so dubious, Alex. There’s an American colonel at Fort McNair who will arrange everything for you.”

He was working at the puzzle in his mind. “Is it their idea to throw in with Germany against the Bolsheviks?”

“No.”

“You said that very fast.”

Her eyes flickered. “Would Prince Leon have anything to do with the Hitler gang? Would Oleg? Alex, I’ve told you all I can. What have you to lose? I’ve made no conditions.”

Her eyes glinted in the lamplight. She reached for the Du Mauriers on the coffee table and leaned forward to accept a light from his match. She held his glance; he felt ripples of flame. “You’ll come, won’t you?”

But he made no immediate answer. He watched her throw her head back to sigh smoke toward the ceiling: he watched the long curve of her throat. She said, “It’s Vassily of course. You don’t want to have to work with him. What happened between you in Finland?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“No. I only know it cost him his command. He said it was between the two of you. It’s turned him bitter, you know.”

“It was his own fault.”

“What was it?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you—when we trust each other more than we do now.”

“What a sad thing to say.” She squinted in the curling smoke. “We used to trust each other with everything.”

“Yes.”

She sat back; it was a gesture of regretful withdrawal. They had been on the point of intimacy but it was gone. She said, “You’d be under Vassily’s command but you wouldn’t be working closely with him. You’d be continents apart. Does that make a difference?”

“Not particularly. It would still be his orders.”

“You hate him that much.”

“No. But I think they’ve picked the wrong commander.”

“No matter what the scheme is?”

“He’ll make a mistake—the kind you can’t patch up.”

“The others don’t feel that way, Alex. Are you that much wiser than the rest of them?”

“The rest of them weren’t in Finland.”

“It must have been something extraordinary for you to find it so unforgivable.” Then abruptly she said, “If you have that much reason to distrust Vassily don’t you owe it to Prince Leon and the others to warn them? At least give them the facts and let them decide.”

“You can’t destroy their heroes without injuring their self-respect—and God knows they’ve got damn little left as it is.”

“This is too important for that, Alex. You can’t be decided by those considerations when their lives may be at stake.”

“Their lives?”

“All of them. Prince Leon, Oleg, my father, Felix—the whole lot. They’re putting everything on the line. Everything they’ve got—everything.”

“You didn’t say that before.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not sure you are. It was your heaviest shot. You saved it for last.”

“Neatly trapped. Am I so transparent? I surrender, dear. You always were a match for me.” Irina stubbed her cigarette out. “Then it’s settled. Good.” She rose from her seat. “Help me push this ghastly mess out in the hall, would you dear?”

He rolled the tray out through the foyer and when he turned away from it she was in the doorway looking at him in a way he could not mistake.

“Thank you, darling.” It wasn’t clear whether she meant the tray or his capitulation. “There’s a fair Courvoisier.”

“All right.” He had his hand on the room key in his pocket; but her face drew him back into the suite.

She brought the cognac to the couch. The two hotel glasses looked strange in her hand: it was made for crystal goblets. “I feel nervous with you. Isn’t it absurd? But you’re like a caged predator tonight.”

The cognac spread warmth down his throat. He wanted to gather her against him but too many demons stood between them.

Then Irina said, “Felix is racing his motorcar at Estoril this week.”

“He’s still doing that, is he?”

“Cars and airplanes. It’s all he thinks of.” She had another Du Maurier. “It must be wonderful to have life so simply arranged.”

“He’s never grown up.”

“I wish none of us had.” She went suddenly from that to what was really on her mind: “I was infatuated with Vassily—it was his raw power. But even then I began to think of you—I began to wish it was you. But I’d made the mistake and I suppose I was too proud to try to change back—perhaps I didn’t want to face the chance that you’d hate me.”

She bent her shoulders and brooded into the cognac. “Do you see what I’m doing now? It isn’t like me—I’m asking your forgiveness.”

Then she looked up: the light fell across her face in harsh shadows. “Perhaps I am dropping a handkerchief. But it’s not tangled up in this other thing. We had to settle that first.”

He knew it was no good trying to go back to where they’d been long before; clocks didn’t run backward. But that wasn’t what she was asking for. It took a great effort of will for her to express contrition: it was the first time he’d known her to humble herself when it wasn’t contrived. She was an aristocrat, the daughter of a Count—they were a class of people who’d go to war before they’d apologize for anything important. He had a feeling she’d agonized over this; she’d rehearsed it. But that didn’t make it any less genuine—it only emphasized the vital importance it had for her.

“Irina—”

“You don’t need to be gentle.” But she was watching him, ready to close everything down and bleed silently inside.

He touched her nape and she half turned on the couch; her breast trembled against him. Her face came up and she curled obediently into his arms. Then suddenly she was gripping his back with desperate strength and the tears burst from her. “Oh my darling Alex.”

Daylight curled around the drapes. Irina lay across the bed with sprawled abandon.

He waited until the day brought her awake. Her eyes were puzzled for a brief instant and then they softened; it made the planes of her face blur in contentment.

He kissed her and got to his feet. Her lips parted; she followed him with her eyes. She stretched opulently like a cat.

“I’ve got to go to Washington.”

“I know. You’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You could come down with me.”

“I haven’t finished doing Fifth Avenue.” She smiled, watching him knot his tie.

In the dining room, waiting to be led to their table, she wet her lips and contrived to touch his hand with elaborate casualness; at the table she devoured her first cup of coffee greedily and stared at him wide-eyed with her lips peeled back from her teeth: sultry and sensuous. She was the most sophisticated of women and the most primitive. Her appetites were atavistic and without inhibition and when she committed herself she held nothing back.

Walking him out to the portico she drew and held the stares of every pair of eyes in the plush lobby. She’s Garbo and Dietrich in one, young Prince Felix had said in awe after he’d first met Irina.

When the taxi took him away she was standing on the steps shading her eyes.

8.

Colonel Glenn Buckner had an office in an overflow annex not far from the War Department. Alex tried to get his bearings; the lettering in the corridors was baffling. Officers carrying documents hurried through in creased poplin—there was a kind of muted urgency about them. Alex asked directions and reached Buckner’s office ten minutes ahead of his scheduled appointment.

A half-bald sergeant sat at a small desk rattling a typewriter. He stopped long enough to look up.

“Colonel Danilov to see Colonel Buckner.”

“I’m sorry sir, he’s over to the White House. He’ll be here sometime, that’s all I can tell you. You can get coffee in the canteen down the hall.”

Finally at ten minutes before twelve a bulky brisk man in a blue flannel suit came along the hall. “Danilov? I’m Glenn Buckner.”

Buckner was not more than thirty. His hair was cordovan brown and all his bones were big. He had a wide square face and quick blue eyes. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

The sergeant said, “You had a call from Admiral King’s C of S, sir.”

“Later.” Buckner’s handshake was firm but he wasn’t a knuckle-grinder. “Come on in. Don’t mind me being in mufti—people on the Hill get nervous if they see too many uniforms goose-stepping into the White House so a lot of us wear civvies. The President’s idea. Shut the door, will you? Take a seat. Be right with you.”

It was a small room with a metal desk and two telephones; no window. The walls were pale yellow on plain sheetrock—temporary partitions. It had been carved out of a bigger room at some point. Buckner pulled open a wooden file drawer and rummaged; made a throat noise of satisfaction, lifted out a thin folder and carried it to the desk. “Go on—sit down, sit down.” Buckner cocked a hip on the corner of the desk and sat with one ankle dangling.

“I’d better start by establishing credentials. You know who I am?”

“Aide to General Marshall, I gather.”

“In a way. Actually I’m attached to the White House—military advisor on Soviet affairs. I was Military Attache in Moscow until a few months ago.”

Alex shifted mental gears; he hadn’t anticipated this.

Buckner said, “I’m told you hate the Bolsheviks.”

“No.”

Buckner smiled slowly. “Okay, You’d better explain that one.”

“I’m a White Russian, Colonel. We were brought up to hate Bolsheviks but you outgrow that after a while. I’m not crazy about Communists but I don’t hate them.”

“For a man who can’t be bothered to hate them you’ve spent a lot of time shooting at them.”

“That’s something else,” Alex said. “That’s Stalin.”

“Ah. I see now.”

“Stalin’s no more a Communist than Hitler is.”

“Well you’ve got a point there.” Buckner watched him speculatively. “You’re acquainted with General A. I. Deniken, I think.”

“Yes.”

“He commands a good deal of clout in Washington. Secretary Stimson’s known him for years. Your General Deniken was in a position to get the ear of the Secretary. He brought us an idea. Deniken approached Secretary Stimson. The Secretary and I conferred and then we took it to the President. He listened. The idea didn’t originate with Deniken, it came to him from a group of your people in Europe. Principally the group around your Grand Duke Feodor and his cousin, what’s his name, Leo Kirov?”

“Leon. Prince Leon.”

“Ordinarily it wouldn’t have cut any ice. I mean it’s a bunch of exiled leaders who’ve never even bothered to set up a government-in-exile on paper. There are three Grand Dukes all claiming to be the real Pretender to the Czar’s throne—and none of them speak to each other and one of them’s a Nazi. I mean it’s not the kind of situation anybody takes seriously from the outside. That’d be sort of like trying to restore the King of England to the North American throne.

“But Deniken wasn’t talking about restoring the monarchy in Russia. He was talking about winning the war, or losing the war.

“Right now this country’s in the same frame of mind that Chamberlain’s England was in at the time of the Munich pact. We need time to educate the people. Time for the President to convince those blind idiots in Congress that they can fight or they can surrender but they can’t just go on ignoring it. You can’t be an isolationist in the age of the long-range bomber and the aircraft carrier.”

The pencil point broke; Buckner threw it down. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to speechify. I get pissed about it. All right, this proposal your people put forward—the President thinks it may help us buy the time we need.”

“You’re keeping a lot under your hat.”

“I have to. Look, this conversation is not taking place. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to meet President Roosevelt, Colonel. You’re only going to meet me. You understand why?”

“I think so.”

“If you flap your lip in the wrong places it won’t hurt anybody but me. I’ll deny it and you’ll look like an ass. Officially I’m not on the White House staff. There’s nothing on paper that empowers me to speak for the President. That’s the way it’s got to be—we’ve got to cover the President’s ass. Clear enough?”

“Yes.”

“If I’m challenged I’m prepared to testify that you and I are meeting right now to discuss your duties on your new assignment on the Soviet desk at War Department Intelligence. That’s your official roster duty, by the way, until you hand in your resignation.”

“My what?”

“We’ll get to that,” Buckner said. “This is a complex operation they’ve proposed. We’re going to need close liaison at all points. Your name was put forward by Prince Leon and his group—they said you were one of them and one of us at the same time, you’d be the ideal contact man.”

“What about you? What do you think?”

“I go along with them. It’s their operation.”

“From the way you’re talking I’m getting the feeling you’re making it yours. President Roosevelt’s.”

“It’s got to be a Russian operation. Led by Russians and manned by Russians exclusively. There can’t be a single American involved in it. We’ll provide support but it’s got to be invisible. You can understand that.”

“I might if I knew what it was.”

“I have to leave that up to your own people.”

“I’m an officer in the United States Army. You’re my people,”

“Not if you take this job on. You’ll have to resign your commission. That’s what I meant before.” Buckner smiled a bit ruefully; his smile laced crow’s feet around his eyes and gave him an outdoor look. “It won’t be a piece of cake, Colonel, but it could make you a mighty big place in history if that sort of thing impresses you.”

“Tell me this—who’s got the final authority over operational plans?”

“I’d hope we’d be able to take that on the basis of mutual cooperation. But the decision will have to be up to your people, ultimately. Frankly that’s one reason I’m pleased with this meeting. I have a feeling you and I should be able to work together pretty well.”

Buckner riffled the files in the open folder on his desk. “If your people blow the operation it’s their own neck. The United States had nothing to do with it. I hope they all understand that.”

“I’ll make sure they do.” It could affect their decisions; it might even cool them from the plan, if that seemed necessary. He felt handcuffed by ignorance: he had to contain his anger.

Buckner produced a typed letter-order. “You’re officially on thirty-day furlough as of now. Go to Europe, talk to them, get it all settled among you. Then come back and tell me what you’ve decided and we’ll get to work.” He handed it across the desk. “Don’t waste time. The war isn’t standing still for us. I’m going to book you on the diplomatic plane to Lisbon tomorrow afternoon.”

“You’d better make it two seats.”

It caused a momentary freeze. Buckner’s expression inquired of him; then it changed before Alex could speak. “The Countess. Sorry, I forgot.”

It was Irina’s mother who was the Countess but he didn’t take the trouble to set Buckner straight. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

Buckner had an ingratiating grin that showed a great many teeth. “Not when it counts. That’s what the President pays me for.”

Alex found himself liking the American despite his suspicions. Buckner didn’t have the secretive trappings that usually went with positions like his.

Buckner seemed to sense the line of his thinking. “You’re coming into this dead cold, aren’t you? It’s all brand new to you. I gather the Countess couldn’t tell you much about it.”

“No.”

“That’s a hell of a woman.” He was turning pages over; he paused at one. “This is your letter of resignation. You’ll decide whether you want to sign it—it’ll be waiting here when you get back from Europe.”

“You’re pretty confident. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had it typed up.”

“You’ll take the job,” Buckner said. “You’d be crazy not to.”

But Buckner didn’t know Vassily Devenko.