In his first novel for two decades, a storyteller who has always had a knack with the true history of men and women will touch your heart and thrill your mind with the risks these men and women took with their lives and their families for the ideals they were born to — which some betrayed, and some paid too high a price for in love, even with their lives.
Back at the Smolny, while Dzerzhinsky’s aide went to discover when Trotsky could see them, they went to eat because Nikolai said he did not know when they would eat again. But they were hardly seated when Trotsky himself stormed in. ‘What the devil do you think you are doing, Bibikov, stuffing your face when the Revolution hangs in the balance?’ Trotsky was not a big man but so great was his passion that he fairly jerked Nikolai, at least twice his mass, out of his seat at the end of the bench.
For a moment it seemed as if Nikolai would say something harsh, then he swallowed and gently took Trotsky’s hands from his arm.
Luki reached behind him to squeeze her hand and squeezed her breast instead. She giggled softly in his ear, then cuffed the straying hand hard.
Trotsky’s head turned between them. His eyelids were so swollen from exhaustion that he could no longer move his eyeballs; even the pupils were hardly visible in the slits between the puffed red eyelids. Trotsky was normally a vain dresser, with crisp linen, but now his collar was almost black with the accumulated grime of days without rest or change. ‘Shall I find that my trust in you is misplaced?’ he hissed malevolently.
Trotsky gaped like a fish.
Anna put bread and tea on the table. Luki told her, ‘Bring us three slabs of dough, about this thick and this size.’ He indicated with his hands.
Nikolai nodded. ‘Then we can show you,’ he said.
These are the best of times, Sergei thought, slap in the middle of a revolution, spying for Lenin’s right-hand men, in the same building as Lenin. His grandmother would never believe it. His grandmother thought Lenin was the Devil.
Luki methodically marked the other entrances that did not lead to the government quarters. Then he said, ‘We used this one, the Saltykov, to find the government. It is guarded both on ground level and on each floor at the stairhead but only lightly. It leads directly to the government. The problem is getting our people across the square under the remaining two canon and the machine guns and the guns of the armored cars.’ Luki drew the square in the flour with his forefinger, then marked the positions of the armaments covering it with dents into the dough representing the Winter Palace.
‘We may not have to,’ Nikolai said. ‘Our comrades are inside, agitating among the troops.’ He told of the women’s low morale and the departure of some of the Cossacks. All this was obviously news to the command.
‘By god, this a straightforward, workable plan,’ Lenin said.
Copyright © 2012 André Jute. Published by CoolMain Press.
André Jute is a writer, critic and teacher in fiction, engineering and the arts. His forty-plus books are published in over 300 editions in more than twenty languages. His most recent award winner is the lyrical IDITAROD, a novel of The Greatest Race on Earth , and his current best seller (written with Andrew McCoy) is the controversial literary biography STIEG LARSSON - Man, Myth & Mistress. He lives on a salmon river in Ireland with his wife and son.