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“If it’s all true, then the man’s a shit after all. And what am I supposed to do about it? I’m old, retired these eleven years, past it, over the hill. …”

“They are still out there,” said Monk as he stood up and put the files back in his case. “Millions of them. Veterans. Some served under you, others remember you, most have heard of you. They will still listen if you speak.”

“Look, Mr. American, this land of mine has suffered more than you can ever understand. This Motherland of mine is soaked in the blood of her sons and daughters. Now you tell me there is more to come. I grieve, if it is true, but I can do nothing.”

“And the army, w

hich will be made to do these things? What of the army, your army?”

“It is not my army anymore.”

“It’s as much your army as anyone else’s.”

“It’s a defeated army.”

“No, not defeated. The Communist regime was defeated. Not the soldiers, not your soldiers. They were withdrawn. Now here is a man who wants to rebuild them. But for a new purpose. Aggression, invasion, enslavement, slaughter.”

“Why should I?”

“Do you have a car, General?”

The old man looked up from the fire, startled.

“Of course. A small one. It gets me about.”

“Drive into Moscow. To the Alexandrovsky Gardens. To the big polished red granite stone. By the flame. Ask them what they would want of you. Not me. Them.”

Monk left. By dawn he was back in yet another safe house with his Chechen bodyguards. It was the night the printing presses blew up.

¯

AMONG the many arcane and historic institutions that still exist in Britain, few are more so than the College of Arms, whose existence goes back to the reign of Richard III. The senior officers of the college are the Kings of Arms and Heralds.

In medieval times, as their name implies, the heralds were first used to convey messages between warlords across the battlefield under a flag of truce. Between wars they were given a different job.

In peacetime it was customary for knights and nobles to gather for mock warfare in tournaments and jousts. As the knights were covered in body armor, often with the visor pulled down, the herald whose job it was to announce the next tourney might have a problem identifying the man inside the armor. To solve this problem, nobles carried an emblem or device upon their shields. Thus a herald seeing a shield with the sign of the bear and ragged staff would know that the Earl of Warwick was inside there somewhere.

From this function the heralds became the experts and arbiters of who was who, and more important, who had the right to call himself who. They traced and recorded the bloodlines of aristocracy down the generations.

This was not simply a matter of snobbery. Along with the titles went huge estates, castles, farms, and manors. In modern terms it could be the equivalent of proving legal ownership of the majority stock in General Motors. Great wealth and power were involved.

Nobles tended on their deathbeds to leave behind a gaggle of offspring, some legitimate and many not, so disputes concerning who was the legitimate heir flared up. Wars broke out over rival claims. The heralds, as keepers of the archive, were the final arbiters of true bloodline and of who had the right “to bear arms,” meaning not weapons but a coat of arms describing the ancestry in pictorial terms.

Even today, the college will adjudicate on rival claims, devise a coat of arms for a newly ennobled banker or industrialist, or for a fee trace the genealogical tree of anyone as far back as records go.

Not surprisingly, the heralds are scholars, steeped in their strange science with its arcane Norman-French language and emblems, mastery of which requires many years of study. Some specialize in the ancestry of the noble houses of Europe, linked to the British aristocracy by constant intermarriage. By discreet but sedulous inquiry, Sir Nigel Irvine discovered that one in particular was the world’s leading expert on the Romanov dynasty of Russia. It was said of Dr. Lancelot Probyn that lie had forgotten more about the Romanovs than the Romanovs ever knew. After introducing himself over the phone as a retired diplomat preparing a paper for the Foreign Office on possible monarchic trends in Russia, Sir Nigel asked him for tea at the Ritz.

Dr. Probyn turned out to be a small cuddly man who treated his subject with great good humor and no pomposity. He reminded the old spymaster of the illustrations of Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick.

“I wonder,” said Sir Nigel as the crustless cucumber sandwiches arrived with the Earl Grey, “if we might contemplate the matter of the Romanov succession?”

The post of Clarenceux King of Arms, to give Dr. Probyn his glorious title, is not vastly paid and the rotund little scholar was unaccustomed to tea at the Ritz. He tucked into the sandwiches with eager industry.

“The Romanov line is only my hobby, you know. Not my real job.”

“Nevertheless, I believe you are the author of the definitive work on the subject.”

“Kind of you to say so. How can I help?”