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“As you will have read, Komarov has promised his partners and financial backers, the Dolgoruki mafia, the world and all therein. Soon now, they will be the state. What happens to you?”

“All right. I can hide you. Though for how long even I do not know. Inside our community no one will find you until I say so. But you cannot live here. It is too obvious. I have many safe houses. You will have to pass from one to the other.”

“Safe houses are fine,” said Monk. “To sleep in. To move about, I will need papers. Perfectly forged ones.”

Gunayev shook his head.

“We don’t forge papers here. We buy the real thing.”

“I forgot. Everything is for money.”

“What else do you need?”

“To start with, these.”

Monk wrote several lines on a sheet of paper and handed it over. Gunayev ran his eye down the list. Nothing was a problem. He reached the last item.

“What the hell do you need that for?”

Monk explained.

“You know that I own half the Metropol Hotel,” Gunayev sighed.

“I’ll try and just use the other half.”

The Chechen failed to see the joke.

“How long until Grishin knows you are in town?”

“It depends. About two days, maybe three. When I start to move about, there are bound to be some traces left. People talk.”

“All right. I will give you four men. They will watch your back, move you from place to place. The leader is one you have met. In the front seat of the BMW, Magomed. He’s good. Give a list of what you need to him from time to time. It will be provided. And I still think you are crazy.”

By midnight Monk was back in his room at the Metropol. At the end of the corridor was an open area by the elevators. There were four leather club chairs. Two of them were occupied by silent men who read newspapers and would do so all night. In the small hours of the morning two suitcases were delivered to Monk’s room.

¯

MOST Muscovites and certainly all foreigners presume that the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church lives in a sumptuous suite of apartments deep in the heart of the medieval Daniovsky Monastery, with its white crenellated walls and its complex of abbeys and cathedrals.

This is certainly the impression, and it is a carefully cultivated one. In one of the great office buildings within the monastery guarded by fiercely loyal Cossack soldiers, the Patriarch does indeed keep his offices, and these are the heart and center of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All the Russias. But he does not actually live there.

He lives in a quite modest town house at Number Five Chisti Pereulok, meaning “Clean Passage,” a narrow side street just outside the central district of the city.

Here he is attended by a priestly staff of personal private secretary, valet/butler, two manservants, and three nuns who cook and clean. There is also a driver on call and two Cossack guards. The contrast with the magnificence of the Vatican or the splendor of the palace of the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church could not be greater.

In the winter of 1999 the holder of that office was still His Holiness Alexei II, elected ten years earlier, just before the fall of Communism. Still only in his early fifties then, he became the inheritor of a church demoralized and traduced from within and persecuted and corrupted from without.

From the very earliest days, Lenin, who loathed the priesthood, realized that Communism had only one rival for the hearts and minds of the teeming mass of the Russian peasantry, and he determined to destroy it. Through systematic brutality and corruption he and his successors nearly succeeded.

Even Lenin and Stalin balked at the complete extermination of the priesthood and the church, fearful they might inspire a backlash not even the NKVD could control. So after the first pogroms in which churches were burned, their treasures stolen, and the priests hanged, the Politburo sought to destroy the church by discrediting it.

The measures were numerous. Aspirants of high intelligence were banned from the seminaries, which were controlled by the NKVD and later the KGB. Only plodders from the periphery of the USSR, Moldavia in the west and Siberia in the east, were accepted. The level of education was kept low and the quality of the priesthood degraded.

Most churches were simply closed and allowed to rot. A few remained open, patronized mainly by the elderly and very old, i.e., the harmless. The officiating priests were required to report regularly to the KGB and did so, acting as informers against their own parishioners.

A young person seeking baptism would be reported by the priest he approached. After that he would lose his high school place and a chance at university, and his parents would probably be ousted from their apartment. Virtually nothing went unreported to the KGB. Almost the entire priesthood, even if not involved, became tainted by popular suspicion.

The Communists used the stick-and-carrot technique, a crippling stick and a poisoned carrot.