Dark Star by Alan Furst Page A

Farsi-speaking tribe of the north Caucasus from whom Stalin's mother was said to be descended—were red-eyed and a little tender from Saturday-night excesses. Terounian, from the city of Yerevan in Armenia, offered a small burlap sack of ripe pears brought to Moscow by his cousin, a locomotive engineer. These were laid out on the table by Stasia, Agayan's young Russian wife, along with bowls of salted and sugared almonds, pine nuts, and a plate of Smyrna raisins. Agayan's wife also served an endless succession of tiny cups of Turkish coffee, sekerli, the sweetest variety, throughout the meeting. Dershani, a Georgian, the most important among equals, was also the last to arrive. Such traditions were important to the khvost and they observed them scrupulously.
    It was altogether a traditional sort of gathering, as though in a coffeehouse in Baku or Tashkent. They sat in their shirtsleeves and smoked, ate, and drank their coffees and took turns to speak—in Russian, their only common language—with respect for one another and with a sense of ceremony. What was said mattered, that was understood, they would have to stand by it.
    Agayan, squinting in the rising smoke of a cigarette held in the center of his lips, spoke solemnly of comrades disappeared in the purges. The Ukrainian and Polish yidzh, he admitted, were getting much the worst of it, but many Georgians and Armenians and their allies from all over (some yidzh of their own, for that matter) had also vanished into the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. Agayan sighed mournfully when he finished his report, all the eulogy many of them would ever have.
    “One can only wonder …” Dzakhalev said.
    Agayan's shrug was eloquent. “It's what he wants. As for me, Iwas not asked.” The nameless he in these conversations was always Stalin.
    “Still,” Dzakhalev said, “Yassim Ferimovich was a superb officer.”
    “And loyal,” Terounian added. At thirty-five, he was by far the youngest man in the room.
    Agayan lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. “Nonetheless,” he said.
    “You have heard what he said to Yezhov, in the matter of interrogation? ‘Beat and beat and beat.' ” Terounian paused to let the felicity of that phrasing hang in the air, to make sure everyone understood he honored it. “Thus anyone will admit anything, will surely name his own mother.”
    “Yours too,” Ismailov said.
    Dershani raised his right hand a few inches off the table; the gesture meant enough and stopped Ismailov dead in his tracks. Dershani had the face of a hawk—sharp beak, glittering, lifeless eyes—thin lips, high forehead, hair that had gone gray when he was young—some said in a single night when he was sentenced to die. But he'd lived. Changed. Into something not quite a man. A specialist at obtaining confessions, a man whose hand was rumored to have “actually held the pliers.” Ismailov's tone of voice was clearly not to his taste.
    “His thinking is very broad,” Dershani said. “We are not meant to understand it. We are not meant to comment upon it.” He paused for coffee, to permit the atmosphere in the room to rise to his level, then took a few pine nuts. “These are delicious,” he said. “If you look at our history—the history of our service, I mean—his hand may be seen to have grasped the tiller just at the crucial moment. We began with Dzerzhinsky, a Pole of aristocratic background from Vilna. Catholic by birth, he shows, early in life, a great affection for Jews. He comes to speak perfect Yiddish, his first lover is one Julia Goldman, the sister of his best friend. She dies of tuberculosis, in Switzerland, where he had placed her in a sanatorium, and his sorrow is soothed by a love affair with a comrade called Sabina Feinstein. Eventually he marries a Polish Jewess, from theWarsaw intelligentsia, named Sophie Mushkat. His deputy, the man he depends on, is Unshlikht, also a Polish Jew, also an intellectual, from Mlawa.
    “When Dzerzhinsky