Ivan blushed as he counted the money. He had never imagined that Jack could have amassed so much, much less hand it over to him. He stuffed it into his coat and nodded. “Sure, it’s enough. And then?”
Jack gazed at the wheel marks left by the car as it sped off through the snow. He sucked in air and let out a lungful of breath before looking at Ivan with sadness in his eyes. “Then I’ll need your help, one last time.”
41
Jack sat waiting in a corner near the fireplace at his house. Despite the warmth from the embers, he was trembling like a frightened child, though he wasn’t afraid. His shivering was just the product of nervous energy. He knew his ill-fated journey was coming to an end. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Natasha. Gradually, her face materialized. At first it was vague, pale, languid. Then her eyes came to life, a smile spread across her face, and her white hands stroked his face delicately, as they always did. He felt her love. He smiled.
He rubbed his eyes to fight back his exhaustion. He’d worked through the night to get everything ready. His watch showed ten o’clock. Smirnov would arrive soon. He served himself a glass of vodka, drinking it in one mouthful, and waited patiently. Ten minutes later, Smirnov knocked on the door.
“So, you’ve been hiding in this pigsty? I thought you had more taste.” He gave a cynical smile, brushed Jack aside, and entered the house along with his guards.
Jack followed behind them in silence.
“So?” Smirnov went on. “The message you sent said something about some reports and an account number. Where are they?”
“Somewhere safe,” Jack lied.
“Somewhere safe, of course. And may I ask what you intend to do with them?”
“Nothing special. Just use them to make you release Natasha and confess your crimes.”
“Ha!” As he laughed, Smirnov revealed a row of perfect white teeth. “My crimes . . . You have a lot of nerve for a poor foreigner destined for the cemetery.”
“I can see you still hate the poor. Is that why you got rid of Sergei? So you could enrich yourself at the expense of the Avtozavod? To steal money from the workers?”
“You, wait outside!” he ordered his minions. He drew his revolver and waited for them to obey. When they’d left, he smiled. “Come on, Jack! Have you forgotten that Sergei confessed? It was he who diverted a fortune to Hewitt’s account, and allowed the sabotage to halt production. Luckily, I uncovered him.”
“Would that be the same luck that got you to America under the name Vladimir Mamayev? It’s curious, Viktor, but you were the only man at the Avtozavod who knew enough to cause the defects in the machinery without being detected. The useless Smirnov, who didn’t even know how to tighten a screw.”
“Such a lively imagination! I love it, Jack! I never would have guessed that you were such a marvelous storyteller.” He paced around Jack.
“So, you think I’m making it all up. Fair enough. But then why did you come to my house accompanied by armed men? Stalin’s in Gorky. Don’t you have anything better to do? Wait! Maybe I can suggest something. Perhaps you could be getting rid of any evidence of account 660598865. The account that identifies you as the real issuer of the transfers and the man behind the sabotage at the Avtozavod.”
“Very well. Let’s stop playing games.” He aimed the gun at Jack’s head. “Where are the reports?”
“Tell me, Viktor . . . When did you start hatching this plan? Was it when George McMillan discovered your intentions? Was that why you murdered him?”
“I’m losing my patience!”
“Do you know what? When Sergei recited McMillan’s telephone call during the trial, one thing that struck me was that, at the end of the call, the American hung up without saying good-bye. I thought it must have been an omission from the transcript, but I checked it out, and those transcriptions always include the pauses, the sneezes . . . every last sigh. If Sergei didn’t read McMillan’s good-bye, it was because the person who was spying on the American at that moment ended his life before he could give him away. The same person who accused Wilbur Hewitt in the trial of a crime he himself had committed. Hewitt, an invalid at the time, would have found it impossible to carry his own suitcase, let alone, as you assured us, lift a man weighing more than two hundred pounds and throw him over a balustrade.”
“Jack . . . Jack . . . Are you forgetting that it was Sergei who submitted that evidence?”
“Evidence that you provided to him, right when you learned that Stalin would be coming to Gorky. I don’t know how you made Sergei believe you, but it was an ideal situation for you, wasn’t it? The perfect moment for Sergei, unable to uncover the traitor he’d been pursuing for so long, to receive evidence that until then he knew nothing about. And the perfect time, moments later, to reveal to Stalin that Sergei, head of the OGPU and whose position you coveted, was a corrupt official whose crimes had to be exposed. The perfect moment to put yourself forward as the hero. Was that how you did it? Was that when you altered the accounts again? Was that when you planned to murder him and take everything for yourself?”
“And what if I did?” he yelled. “Sergei believed me when I told him that I’d put off testifying under direct orders from Moscow, and he kept quiet when I threatened to kill his daughter. Sergei was nothing but a pathetic idealist, a self-righteous fool who really believed in equality for all. Equality? For whom? For those miserable peasants who don’t know a screw from a lump of dung? What’s the point of having power and wealth if you can’t enjoy them?”
“And what does that have to do with massacring innocent people, Viktor? Do you really need to exterminate them to achieve your goals?”
“Ha! Those counterrevolutionaries are scum. Soulless scum! Can you imagine the look on their faces if they knew I had funded the sabotage?”
“You?”
“Come on, Jack. I thought you were smarter than this. What better way to discredit Sergei’s work?”
“Sergei responded to the sabotage with an iron fist, sending the perpetrators to labor camps. That was why you decided to implicate him in the misappropriation of funds. To free yourself of him and Hewitt. I imagine that it would have been easy for you as finance commissar to take money from the Avtozavod and invent a bogus company in the name of Mamayev to transfer the money to Hewitt and incriminate Sergei. Once they were out of the picture, you could control the Avtozavod and the millions of rubles in its accounts as you pleased.”
“Very good . . . It seems the imminence of death has sharpened your intellect. It’s just a shame that—”