The Devil's Alternative

Rudin did not approach him or hold out his hand. He stood across the room, just where the tsars had once stood, in the room representing the pinnacle of the Russian Empire, and nodded.

“Then I shall wish you farewell, Mr. Munro.”

He pressed a small onyx bell on a table, and behind Munro the door opened.

“Good-bye, sir,” said Munro. He had half turned to go, when Rudin spoke again.

“Tell me, Mr. Munro, what do you think of our Red Square?”

Munro stopped, puzzled. It was a strange question for a man saying farewell. Munro thought, and answered carefully.

“It is very impressive.”

“Impressive, yes,” said Rudin, as if weighing the word. “Not, perhaps, so elegant as your Berkeley Square, but sometimes, even here, you can hear a Nightingale sing.”

Munro stood motionless as the painted saints on the ceiling above him. His stomach turned over in a wave of nausea. They had got her, and, unable to resist, she had told them all, even the code name and the reference to the old song about the Nightingale in Berkeley Square.

“Will you shoot her?” he asked dully.

Rudin seemed genuinely surprised.

“Shoot her? Why should we shoot her?”

So it would be the labor camps, the living death, for the woman he loved and had been so near to marrying in his native Scotland.

“Then what will you do to her?”

The old Russian raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.

“Do? Nothing. She is a loyal woman, a patriot. She is also very fond of you, young man. Not in love, you understand, but genuinely fond—”

“I don’t understand,” said Munro. “How do you know?”

“She asked me to tell you,” said Rudin. “She will not be a housewife in Edinburgh. She will not be Mrs. Munro. She cannot see you again—ever. But she does not want you to worry for her, to fear for her. She is well, privileged, honored, among her own people. She asked me to tell you not to worry.”

The dawning comprehension was almost as dizzying as the fear. Munro stared at Rudin as the disbelief receded.

“She was yours,” he said quietly. “She was yours all along. From the first contact in the woods, just after Vishnayev made his bid for war in Europe. She was working for you. ...”

The grizzled old Kremlin fox shrugged.

“Mr. Munro,” growled the old Russian, “how else could I get my messages to President Matthews with the absolute certainty that they would be believed?”

The impassive major with the cold eyes drew at his elbow; he was outside the Throne Room, and the door closed behind him. Five minutes later he was shown out, on foot, through a small door in the Savior Gate onto Red Square. The parade marshals were rehearsing their roles for May Day. The clock above his head struck midnight.

He turned left toward the National Hotel to find a taxi. A hundred yards later, as he passed Lenin’s Mausoleum, to the surprise and outrage of a militiaman, he began to laugh.