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world has ever
known."
    I sat back, surprised by the sudden
ferocity in her voice. "I don't understand. What has this got to do with
what we're discussing?"
    "it has everything to do with it.
Stalin died, certainly, but not in the way the history books record."
    I sat there stunned for several moments.
Anna Khorev's face looked deadly serious. Finally she said, "I guess the
story I'm going to tell you goes back a long time, to when it first began in Switzerland."
    She smiled suddenly. "And do you
know something? You're the first person I've spoken to about it in over forty
years."
    Lucerne, Switzerland. December 11th, 1952
    All over Europe that year the news seemed
to have consisted of nothing but bad.
    In Germany, the past was to resurface at
Nuremberg where a tribunal began its hearing into the Katyn Forest massacre of
1940. Four thousand bodies had been unearthed outside a small Polish town, all
bound and shot with small-caliber pistols, the grisly remains of what had once
been the cream of the Polish Army.
    It was the year that also saw the French
face an all-out offensive by the Viet Minh, a bloody war was raging in Korea,
and in Europe the Iron Curtain was lowered between West Berlin and the
surrounding Soviet Zone, the ultimate gesture by the Kremlin that a postwar
peace was not to be.
    Otherwise, wartime rationing was still in
force in Britain, Eva Peren died, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat his
Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, in the US presidential election, and in
Hollywood, one of the few bright moments in a dull year was the debut
appearance of a stunning blond starlet named Marilyn Monroe.
    To Manfred Kass, stalking through the
woods outside the old Swiss city of Lucerne that cold December morning, such
things hardly mattered. And although he could not have known it, that day was
to mark a beginning, and also an ending.
    It was growing light when Kass parked his
ancient black Opel on the road in front of the entrance to the woods. He
removed the single-barrel shotgun from beneath the blanket on the backseat of
the car. It was a Mansten twelve-gauge, getting a little old now, but still
reliable. He climbed out and locked the doors before slipping a cartridge into
the breech but leaving the gun broken. He shoveled a boxful of cartridges into
the pockets of his shooting jacket, then he started to walk into the woods.
    At thirty-two, Kass was a tall, awkward
man. He walked clumsily and with a slight limp. The clumsiness had been with
him since childhood, but the limp had been an unwanted memento from the Battle
of Kiev eleven years before. Though he had been born in Germany, being
conscripted into Hitler's army had not been one of Kass's ambitions in life. He
had intended emigrating to Lucerne before the war, where his wife's uncle ran
the bakery business, but he had left it too late, the way he had left many
things in his life too late.
    "Trust me, Hilda," he had told
his wife when the winds of war had started to whisper and she suggested they
beat a hasty retreat to Switzerland and her family. "There won't be a war,
liebchen."
    Two days later Hitler had invaded Poland.
    Kass had been proved wrong on many other
occasions. Like volunteering for the front at the start of the Russian
campaign. He reckoned that because the German army was rolling across the
steppes of the Ukraine with such ease, and because the Russkis were dirty and
stupid peasants, the war against them would be a piece of cake.
    He had been right about one thing. The
Russians he had met were generally dirty, stupid peasants. But they were also
fierce fighters. And the fiercest enemy of all had been the Russian winter. So
cold that your own piss froze and you had to snap it off when it turned to
solid ice. So razor-sharp were the freezing Baltic and Siberian winds that
swept over the steppes that within minutes of defecating, your shit was
freeze-blasted as hard as cement.
    Kass had laughed the first time he saw
his own frozen turd. But it was