The colonel, who was rapidly losing his hair and had taken to brushing it straight and severely back, pushed aside the white curtains and looked down at the traffic that swirled
around the thirty-six-foot-high statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in the square below.
Dzerzhinsky had organized the Cheka- the organization that had paved the way for the KGB, "the sword of the Revolution"-for Lenin.
Now the sword of the Revolution was in the hands of the moderates, and they could not even use it to cut cheese. The sword was poised over Colonel Zhenya's head.
The colonel's office was on the top floor, and above him, since it was shortly after five in the morning, he could hear the political prisoners being exercised on the roof, their synchronized steps tramping like sheets of heavy rain.
ONE
In the evening of the very same spring day that Col. Nikolai Zhenya stood at the window of his new office in Lubyanka, three men, two in Moscow and one in Livadia, less than two miles from Yalta, were out walking.
Before the night was over, one of the men would call his wife, another would witness a murder, and the third man would be dead.
In spite of his burden, Yon Mandelstem walked briskly through the small park just beyond the Sokol Metro Station, from which he had just emerged. The case that bounced against his side was worn like a small mail sack over his shoulder.
As an added precaution or to give himself better balance, he also held firmly to the cloth handle of the case.
The clouds above him closed in on the sun, and a faint sound that may have been distant thunder whispered from the west.
Mandelstem, this young, serious-looking, bespectacled man in a dark suit and equally dark tie, looked neither right nor left. He ignored the rusting twenty-foot-tall iron hammer and sickle standing just off the path beyond the trees he was passing. Nor did he even glance at the two boys fishing off the low concrete wall over the pond as he moved on.