She smiled in a manner that suggested he lacked sophistication. "They
never bother any more. They're human, too."
Ilya Simonov wandered off. He was astonished at the extent to which
controls were slipping in a satellite country. There seemed practically no
discipline, in the old sense, at all. He began to see one reason why his
superior had sent him here to Prague. For years, most of his work had been
either in Moscow or in the newly opened industrial areas in Siberia. He
had lost touch with developments in this part of the Soviet Complex.
It came to him that this sort of thing could work like a geometric
progression. Give a man a bit of rope one day, and he expects, and takes,
twice as much the next, and twice that the next. And as with individuals,
so with whole populations.
This was going to have to be stopped soon, or Party control would
disappear. Ilya Simonov felt an edge of uncertainty. Nikita Khrushchev
should never have made those first motions of liberalization following
Stalin's death. Not if they eventually culminated in this sort of thing.
He and Catherina drove to her meeting place that evening after dinner.
She explained as they went that the group was quite informal, usually
meeting at the homes of group members who had fairly large places in the
country. She didn't seem to know how it had originally begun. The meetings
had been going on for a year of more before she arrived in Prague. A Czech
friend had taken her along one night, and she'd been attending ever since.
There were other, similar groups, in town.
"But what's the purpose of the organization?" Simonov asked her.
She was driving her little aircushion Moskvich. They crossed over the
Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them
loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised
immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, "I
wonder if he was insane from the first."
He hadn't understood her change of subject. "How do you mean?" he said.
"Stalin. I wonder how early it was in his career that he went insane."
This was the second time in the past few days that Ilya Simonov had run
into this matter of the former dictator's mental condition. He said now,
"I've heard the opinion before. Where did you pick it up?"
"Oh, it's quite commonly believed in the Western countries."
"But, have you ever been, ah, West?"
[Illustration]
"Oh, from time to time! Berlin, Vienna, Geneva. Even Paris twice, on
vacation, you know, and to various conferences. But that's not what I
mean. In the western magazines and newspapers. You can get them here in
Prague now. But to get back to your question. There is no particular
purpose of the organization."
She turned the car left on Budenská and sped up into the Holesovice
section of town.
* * * * *
The nonchalance of it all was what stopped Ilya Simonov. Here was a Party
member calmly discussing whether or not the greatest Russian of them all,
after Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of
the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a
mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a
man as unbalanced as Czar Peter the Great.
They pulled up before a rather large house that would have been called a
dacha back in Moscow. Evidently, Ilya Simonov decided, whoever was
sponsoring this night's get together, was a man of prominence. He grimaced
inwardly. A lot of high placed heads were going to roll before he was
through.
It turned out that the host was Leos Dvorak, the internationally famed
cinema director and quite an idol of Ilya Simonov in his earlier days when
he'd found more time for entertainment. It was a shock to meet the man
under these circumstances.
Catherina Panova was obviously quite popular among this gathering. Their
host gave her an affectionate squeeze in way of greeting, then shook hands
with Simonov when Catherina introduced him.
"Newly from Moscow, eh?" the film director said, squinting at the security
agent. He had a sharp glance, almost, it seemed to Simonov, as though he
detected the real nature of the newcomer. "It's been several years since
I've been to Moscow. Are things loosening up there?"
"Loosening up?" Simonov said.
Leos Dvorak laughed and said to Catherina, "Probably not. I've always been
of the opinion that the Party's influence would shrivel away first at its
extremities. Membership would fall off abroad, in the neutral countries
and in Common Europe and the Americas. Then in the so-called satellite
countries. Last of all in Russia herself. But, very last, Moscow--the
dullest, stodgiest, most backward intellectually, capital city in the
world." The director laughed again and turned away to greet a new guest.
This was open treason. Ilya Simonov had been lucky. Within the first few
days of being in the Czech capital he'd contacted one of the groups which
he'd been sent to unmask.