The Romanov succession

Things stirred in him; he stood up and moved around the little parlor. Finally he said, “Do you know why I took this job?”

“Tell me then.” She cocked her head, smiling as if she’d won a point. “It’s all tied up in what happened between you and Vassily.”

“We were holding a section of the Finnish left. It was cold-my God, the snow. The Reds had no stomach for it. They were surrendering in groups-platoons of them, whole companies. All they wanted was to be put away in a warm place where nobody was shooting at them. We must have had a thousand of them in the prison compound… It’s something you have to know,” he said in a different voice. “I still feel Vassily standing between us.”

Irina lowered her face; the fall of her hair hid it from him. “Poor Alex.”

“Moscow kept throwing new divisions in and we’d give ground for a while-draw them into it, tire them out; then we’d spit them out again and move back to where we’d been before.

“It was the biggest army in the world and we were whipping them. We were feeling reckless and invincible. If you’ve been like that you can understand how the Germans expect to conquer the world.

“We weren’t sure how many people Stalin was willing to sacrifice to prove his point up there. We were all filled with success and the general feeling was that Stalin couldn’t afford to squander too much against a second-rate power like Finland when he had Hitler to think about. We had a few contacts in Russia, we knew pretty much the extent of the purges there and we knew Stalin had wiped out millions of his best fighting men. He still had unlimited manpower to draw on but it was rabble-civilians who didn’t have much stomach for fighting. Vassily kept harping on that. But I kept realizing Stalin still could afford to lose twenty for every one of ours. I was inclined to set up entrapments, make it expensive for them and minimize our own casualties. It didn’t make sense to me to go on the attack. Not in those circumstances.”

“And Vassily wanted to attack, was that it?”

“Well he kept attacking them whenever he had a chance to. I couldn’t prevent that; but that wasn’t what blew it up. A few times he ordered me out to chase a retreating Red column and I argued the point with him. Sometimes he’d win the argument, sometimes he’d let me win it. We had different theories but we worked well enough together-he needed me around to steady him.”

“Then what went wrong?”

He chose his words. “We were on the border-right on the border. We’d pushed them back to it again, I think it was the fourth time in five or six weeks. It was the third time we’d used the same patch of forest for a headquarters. We were on fairly high ground there, we could see right down into Russia. From that corner of Finland it’s about thirty miles to Leningrad.”

He heard the breath catch in her throat. Her eyes were wide with a tension that was almost erotic.

“He wanted to take two of our battalions out of the lines. Dress them in Red prisoners’ uniforms and march right into Leningrad. He wanted to wage guerrilla war there-blow up installations, sabotage industries, wipe out commissars.”

Irina sat back slowly; her hands wrenched at each other. “How like him. How gallant-how adventurous.”

“How stupid,” Alex said. “It would have been suicide. We’d have been hanged for spies. But that wasn’t the point I tried to get across to him.”

“No,” she said. “You’d have been more concerned about the Finns.”

“That was it. As soon as Stalin got wind of what we were up to he’d have had the excuse to commit the Red Air Force and a massive army to the border campaign. He’d have overrun the whole of Finland in a matter of weeks. That was what Vassily wouldn’t see.”

“How did you stop him?”

“I told him if he didn’t give it up I’d inform Helsinki of his plans. They’d have pulled us out of there overnight and he knew it. He never forgave me for that-it made me an informer.”

“You had to do it.”

“I had to do a lot of things over the years to keep Vassily from plunging into one thing or another. Out in China he wanted to turn his back on the Japanese and go after the Chinese Communists in the mountains. He’d have left a thousand square miles wide open to the Japanese. I reasoned him out of it that time. This time I had to threaten him with exposure. He couldn’t stand that.”

“You hated him-didn’t you.”

He drew a breath. “I spent half my life protecting him from his wild impulses. Up there on the Finland border I used up my tolerance and charity.”

“Because you knew you were a better man than Vassily.”

“A better soldier at any rate.”

“And that’s why you’ve taken this job.”

“I’m guilty of the sin of pride.” He stood unmoving, watching her face. “He couldn’t have brought this thing off, Irina. He’d have gone for glory instead of reality-he’d have blown it. I’m going to succeed where Vassily would have failed. All right, I’m an ambitious fool. There it is.”