The Stolypin carriage carried the name of the Tsarist minister struck down by an assassin seventy years before. The new men of the Kremlin were not above the simplicity of taking a former idea and adapting it to their needs. The walls, the bars, the bolts and the locks remained; only the prisoners of the regime had changed.

They had brought Holly by car from the Lefortovo gaol to the train while Muscovites still slept. He had barely slept after the meeting with the Consul from the Embassy and the escort of men in the khaki uniforms of the Komitet Gosu-darstvennoi Bezopasnosti had taken him still drowsy from the back seat to the train at a far platform. The one who wore on his blue shoulder flash the insignia of major's rank had shaken his hand and grinned a supercilious smile. Into the carriage, the door slammed, the bolt across, the key turned.

Two other men for company. Perhaps they had been loaded on the train many hours before Holly, because they seemed to him to be sleeping when he had first seen them in the darkened carriage. He had not spoken then, they had not spoken since. A barrier existed between them. But they watched him. All through the morning, as they sat on the makeshift bunks, they stared without comment at the kneeling figure who ground away at the rust around the bolt.

The work at the bolt, mindless and persistent, allowed the thoughts of Michael Holly to flow unfettered. The week before had stretched the distance of a lifetime. And the lifetime had ended in a death, and death was the carriage that rolled, shaking and relentless, towards the East.

Where to go back to, where to find the birth? Months, weeks, days – how far to go back? The coin had found the central stem of the bolt, the rust shell was dispersed. The bolt was not strong, arthritic with age and corrosion. How far to go back?

Not the childhood, not the parentage, that was a different story, that was not the work of the last crowded hours.