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Брайан Гарфилд: The Romanov Succession

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Брайан Гарфилд The Romanov Succession

The Romanov Succession: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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During World War II, a Russian refugee spies for the United States Since the great upheaval of November 1917, Alex Denilov has known nothing but war. In the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, he fought for the old imperial order. When the Reds won out, he fled west, finding work in every war that followed. Now, in 1941, he trains paratroopers in the American Southwest, helping the US Army prepare for the coming war. But Uncle Sam has bigger plans for him. The army transfers Alex to special services, where he is reunited with old colleagues from the civil war. The group shares combat skills, knowledge of the Russian language, and an intense hatred of Communists. Their mission is to assassinate Stalin. But inside this group of killers, a traitor lurks, ready to kill Alex before he attempts to save Russia from itself.

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They found themselves under General Devenko’s protection when the terrible White retreat began after the collapse of Kolchak’s White armies. Ilya Devenko was a high staff officer in Deniken’s headquarters; he kept the mother and son from perishing in the chaotic horde of refugees fleeing south ahead of Trotsky’s relentless Bolshevik advance. Alex had clear recollection of the packed trains, the endless throngs trudging across the frozen mud of the Ukraine.

General Ilya Devenko had been a very tall man with a voice like lumps of coal crashing down a metal chute. Alex had known him as long as he could remember: the General had been a classmate of Alex’s father, a regular if not frenquent visitor at Danilov soirées before the war. The General’s son Vassily was twice Alex’s age in 1920 and at twenty-six was a full colonel of infantry with an outstanding record of gallantry in the field against the First Red Army.

General Devenko’s wife had died of spotted typhus in the Kuban campaigns of 1918 and perhaps it was inevitable that the widower general should marry Alex’s mother who was a general’s widow. The ceremony took place in Sebastopol in 1921, in the Orthodox Cathedral with Alex giving his mother away and Vassily carrying the ring for his father.

It made Vassily a stepbrother to Alex. Immediately after the wedding Vassily returned to the line to hold the Reds back so that the city could be evacuated aboard ships of the French navy. Alex went aboard a transport reluctantly; they spent his mother’s wedding night in the crowded salon listening to the crashing of the guns. She did not see her new husband again until three weeks later when they were reunited in Istanbul: the newlywed Devenkos, General Deniken, Alex and his stepbrother Vassily, the hero of Sebastopol. With a force which at the end numbered fewer than four hundred men Vassily had kept the Bolsheviks back for a vital eighteen hours while tens of thousands of refugees had been hurried on board the French ships and taken away onto the safety of the Black Sea.


Irina said, “It wasn’t so long ago you can have forgotten it.”

“No.” Twenty years but he could still see the horizon lit by the night barrages; he could feel the sucking mud around his feet and taste the brass of terror on his tongue and he could smell the cold sweat of the refugee mobs clawing at the passing trains. The empty-eyed faces of the soldiers slogging back toward the front; the gnash of Renault ambulances and Daimler-Benz staff cars beating through the cobbled streets, scattering pedestrians; the screams of agony, the stink of suppurating death along the rows of old buildings taken over for hospitals; the taste of dog meat and metallic boiled water; the incongruity—he’d never been able to exorcise it from memory—of a piano heard in a rubbled Sebastopol street while dust hung rancid in the city and 75 mm shells rumbled against the quays. He hadn’t been able to hear Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto since then without nausea.

“No—I haven’t forgotten.”

“You’ve an obligation.”

“To a gang of baccarat and croquet players? To a pack of foolish Romanov Pretenders spending their pointless lives at each other’s throats to claim a throne that doesn’t exist any more?”

“To your brother for one.”

“Vassily Ilyavitch is not my brother.”

“There was a time when you were proud to think he was.”

“That’s an empty refrain, isn’t it? The past doesn’t exist now—not for any of us. There’s no St. Petersburg, there’s only Leningrad.”

An obsequious knock: the boy wheeled in the cart, fussed a while, backed his way out.

Irina lifted the steel domes off the dinner plates. He saw chilled grey Beluga caviar in a bowl at the center. Irina said, “They claim it’s beef stroganoff but I shouldn’t expect too much.”

“I’m used to the Bachelor Officers’ mess hall.”

“How awful.”

He drew up two chairs and when he seated her there was an electric contact where her hair brushed his hand. He went around the table and sat—watching her.

She didn’t chatter; she fell upon the meal. She had always been hearty about everything she did.

She was his own age—thirty-four—almost to the month; but you couldn’t know that by looking at her. Her stunning beauty was in the bones more than the complexion and objectively there would be no way to tell whether she was twenty-five or forty-five.

She was the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever known.

She said, “Is there some particular part of my face that fascinates you?”

“All of it.”

“You’re still a devastatingly attractive man yourself. You’ve improved with age. Those sprigs of grey around the ears—très distingué. And you’ve never looked so fit.”

“It must be a product of the spartan life.”

“Now you’re being silly.” She had a rakish look—mischievous. “That American woman was quite right. You put one in mind of Gary Cooper.”

It startled him and she laughed at him. “In one of your letters to Prince Leon. He repeated it to me with great amusement.”

“How is he?”

“I think the leg bothers him more than it used to. He’s not young you know—he’s sixty-four, a year older than the Grand Duke. He hasn’t spoken your name in my presence. He’s taken it for granted you and I didn’t want to be reminded of each other.”

He let it slip by because he wasn’t ready to confront it quite yet. He finished the entrée, hardly having tasted it; he took a breath. “And Vassily? I suppose I should ask.”

She said, “I haven’t seen Vassily in several years. Not since the last time you saw us together.”

He was amazed and did not try to hide it.

Irina said, “Vassily wants a passionate peasant woman—he wants devotion, not questions. I’m far to abrasive for him, I don’t fit his conception of what a soldier’s woman should be.”

She pushed her plate aside. “It wasn’t very good, was it? The stroganoff. I did warn you. The coffee’s still warm—would you like a cup?”

He waited until she had poured; they took their cups back to the stuffed chairs at the coffee table. Then he said, “It’s time you came to the point. You’ve implied you’re acting as an emissary from Vassily and now you tell me you haven’t seen him in years. It’s time you sorted it out.”

“I suppose it is. They want you to come back. They need you—they need your skills. As a soldier.”

“What the devil for?”

“They’re planning a war.”

Finally he said, “You’d better tell me about it.”

“I can’t.” She spread her hands. The half-smile was directed against herself. “I’m only a messenger. They don’t let women into their councils.”

“Then why send you if you can’t explain it to me?”

“I’m only here to ask you to come back to Spain and talk to them—listen to them.”

“They could have asked me that in a letter.”

“Would you have gone?”

“I’m a soldier, Irina. I can’t just pick up and leave my duty post.”

“There, you see? That’s why they sent me. To seduce you into trailing along with me back to Spain. Baron Oleg—you know him well enough. Something convinced him that I need only drop a handkerchief and any man in sight will become my adoring slave.”

“You haven’t dropped a handkerchief, really. Have you?”

“No.”

“Did you tell Oleg you would?”

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