“I think he means the son of the last emperor, Czar Nicholas the Second,” Cronley furnished. “If memory serves, Lenin considered him as much of a threat to Communism—the thirteen-year-old and his four sisters—as the czar, so he sent the Cheka to Yekaterinburg . . .”
“He sent the what?” Tiny interrupted.
“. . . where they were being held and on July seventeenth, 1918, blew the whole family away,” Cronley said, and then formed a pistol with his right hand and added, “PowPowPowPow.”
“Why am I not surprised that your memory serves you so well on this point?” Orlovsky asked icily.
“Do that again for me,” Tiny said.
“Lenin sent the Cheka, which is what they called the NKGB in those days, to Yekaterinburg, which is about a thousand miles east of Moscow, and where the Imperial family was being held, and then”—Cronley made a pistol again and pointed it at Orlovsky—“PowPowPow. Blew them all away and dumped the bodies in a well so they couldn’t be found. Have I got that right, Konstantin? You’re a proud member of the NKGB, right? You should know.”
“Go to hell, Captain Cronley,” Orlovsky said.
“I seem to have offended him again,” Cronley said. “So let’s get back to talking about the Boy Scouts. You say, Konstantin, that there is a sort of Boy Scouts in Russia?”
“The Young Pioneers,” Orlovsky said.
“The Young Pioneers? And were you a Young Pioneer?”
“I was.”
“And your son, is he a Young Pioneer?”
“He’s not old eno— God damn you to hell!”
“Sorry. Believe me, I know how painful it is to talk about someone in your family, someone you love, who you will never see again.”
“You sonofabitch!”
“Let’s get back to the Boy Scouts, the Young Pioneers. Do they have an oath, Konstantin?”
Orlovsky stared at him a long moment, then finally said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“An oath. ‘On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.’ Like that. That’s the Boy Scout oath. Do the Young Pioneers have an oath like that?”
“Yes, they do. We do. And a motto much like yours. We say ‘Always Prepared,’ not ‘Be Prepared.’”
“That’s not much difference. Tell me, how do you handle the God part?”
“The God part?”
“‘I will do my best to do my duty to God.’ That part. How is that handled in the atheistic Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers?”
“There is of course no reference to a superior being in the Young Pioneers.”
“Oh, I get it. You say, ‘I will do my best to do my duty to Josef Stalin and the Central Committee’?”
Dunwiddie laughed, earning him an icy look from Orlovsky.
“Isn’t that a little hard on Christians like you?” Dunwiddie pursued. “Or, maybe, you and the wife are raising the kids as good Communist atheists?”
Orlovsky didn’t reply.
“‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray Comrade Stalin my soul to take,’” Dunwiddie went on. “That the sort of prayers you teach your kids, Konstantin?”
After a long pause, Cronley said, “I don’t think Konstantin’s going to answer you, Tiny.”
“Doesn’t look that way, does it?”