“I think people get tired of fighting, and for ten years, twenty years, they agree: let’s stop. You have some silk, I have a cow, your daughter marries my nephew, we’ll drink, it’s good, happily ever after, the end. But it’s not the end. It’s always chaos and shouting and homicide in the end.”

Ironside shook his head. “I don’t think that’s right.”

“Why are we fighting now?” Pishkoff presented a well of intelligence behind eyes cobwebbed with despair.

“Honestly? For our lives,” Ironside whispered. He missed Pishkoff.

Unexpectedly, Pishkoff snorted.

“There we are,” Ironside said. “I was worried you’d lost your sense of humor.”

“You know what the peasants believe? They think the devil gave man a sense of humor.”

“Why would he do that?”

“So we laugh at our problems instead of solving them.”

Ironside looked at his schedule. “Would you enjoy an odd assignment? We have a moving picture to watch.”

“I think the peasants might be right.”

“Pishkoff, we’ve inherited an impossible situation. We’re fighting against anarchy. The railroad doesn’t work, industry is shattered, other states can’t have relations with Russia, and the internal life here is completely disrupted. Justice is truculent, human life is losing its value, and the power is in the hands of a small group of people, mostly Jews, who have led the country into full chaos. There isn’t a sane man alive today who would argue against strangling Bolshevism in its crib.”

Pishkoff’s eyes went to Ironside’s desk. He reached out for the letter opener, which he spun on its tip. The opener dragged across the blotter, leaving a divot.

“Watch the moving picture with me. Please.”

“What is it?”

Ironside explained the unlikely situation: the antic comedy, Brooklyn, My Official Wife, 1914, the two minutes of Trotsky hectoring from his stump.

“Wait,” Pishkoff dropped the letter opener. “Show me.”

Ironside handed him the documentation, which Pishkoff glanced over. Then he tossed the sheets of paper to the desk.

“This was made in 1914. Trotsky was in the United States of America two years ago. March 1917.”

Ironside blinked. “Are you sure?”

There was an intake of air on Pishkoff’s side of the desk. It seemed to inflate him to a more formal posture. “Everyone in Russia knows, sir. He was only there once. March 1917.”

“Again, are you sure of that?”

Pishkoff seemed to hold on to the next words, shaking dice until they turned the way he wanted. “Unless, of course, history repeats itself.” He threw a perfect salute, and when Ironside returned it, Pishkoff left the room.

49