Lucky Bastard Read Online Free PDF Page A

of reference stated, yes, Comrade General.”
    Peter asked no more questions. On the rest of the tour he behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said. I thought that my life was over. But instead of ordering my execution, which was in his power, he hired me—simply took me back to Moscow with him in his personal Ilyushin as if he needed no one’s permission, as if there were no such thing as a bureaucracy that had been planning to send me to America to steal more hardware. On the airplane (we rode side by side) he turned to me and said, “This is our best transport plane, and as I’m sure you are aware, it is a copy of the American Lockheed Electra. A very bad copy. Never, Dmitri, speak to anyone else as you spoke to me earlier today. Unless, of course, you wish to order a Lubyanka breakfast.”
    A Lubyanka breakfast was a cigarette and a bullet. I had placed my life in his hands.
    He preserved it because I suited one of his many secret purposes. He was always trolling for promising disciples. He certainly found one in me. Peter gave me something useful to do with my life. I understood, if only dimly in comparison to him, the opportunity that America represented. From the start—even when he was sending me to China as a means of making me useless to the rest of the KGB—he told me that my future was in America. He believed in America’s future, in its potential for unlimited greatness, as fervently as any chairman of Merrill Lynch had ever done. He loved the United States—everything about it, even its defects—as another man might have loved an unattainable woman who could, if only she could be persuaded to yield, make all his dreams come true.
    Wait a minute, you say. We are talking about a lieutenant general of the KGB. Let me explain.
    To Peter, the Russian Revolution and all that had happened because of it was a mistake. This was not because he was not a true Marxist. On the contrary, he was the truest one I have ever known. He believed in the revolution of the proletariat. He believed in the establishment of socialism and its evolution into communism and in the sunlit era of equality, justice, and universal human happiness that would result from this inevitable historical process.
    He was not, however, a Marxist -Leninist. Peter did not believe that the revolution had happened yet. Or, to put it another way, he thought that it had happened in the wrong country at the wrong time. In his opinion there had never been the slightest chance that a primitive state like Russia, which had always been ruled by criminals and, thanks to Peter the Great, had no culture of its own, could ever inspire the world, much less conquer it. The correct country for revolution in 1917 was Germany, an industrialized nation-state with a disciplined people and a great culture that could easily have become the world culture.
    That opportunity had been lost forever, history had passed it by. And created the country of final revolution, America.

2 Peter had read Jack Adams’s file that morning and committed it to memory, as was his way. He was interested in him, far more interested than I had expected him to be. Over gray sole Meunière, accompanied by a fifty-dollar bottle of Montrachet, Peter fired questions at me. Did I trust Arthur’s judgment?
    â€œHe’s new at the work,” I said.
    â€œYou’re not,” Peter replied, drinking Montrachet with his eyes wide open above the rim of the glass. “What’s your opinion?”
    â€œThat this boy may have possibilities, but also many negatives.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œHis extreme youth.”
    â€œHe’s twenty-one. Any older would be too old.”
    â€œHis dementia.”
    â€œAll great men are driven by a fixation.”
    â€œHe’s a boy from Ohio.”
    â€œNapoleon was once a boy from Corsica.”
    â€œPeter,” I said, “he has possibilities. But I think we should go