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and exceedingly expensive courtesans had occupied its stately rooms. These days, the Lux appealed to a different clientele.
    It had degenerated into a dirty, dingy ruin, its marble pitted and brass unpolished, but the dreams dreamed in its bohemian corridors and cabbage-stinking rooms boasted as much scale and romance as any dreamed by capitalists. For the Lux served as the unofficial headquarters of Comintern, or the Communist International, which, while a direct apparatus of the GRU, was at the same time, since having been decreed into existence in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin, the coordinating organ of the World Revolution.
    Its inhabitants now comprised almost a Party congress of famous, infamous, notorious, and violent European leftists, men who had lived their whole lives underground, in the swirl and fog and rat hunt of revolutionaryconspiracy. The revolution achieved, it was seized from them; they became its victims. Thus the nighttime visits of the young policemen—they were frequent at the Lux—had a special bitterness.
    And how the old revolutionaries talked of this! Their lives had become almost pure language. They argued endlessly, like old rabbis at yeshiva. It obsessed them. What was Koba doing? What was his vision? By what theoretical underpinnings did he justify the killings? How did
Yeshovchina
fit into the ultimate trajectory toward socialist victory? And who was taken last night?
    But one man, in all that noise, said nothing.
    He did not complain. He had no theories. He had no grudges or secret fears, or so it seemed. He did not mingle in the lobby or participate in the endless debate. Nor did he care to comment upon the justice of it or the pathology of Koba and his dwarf Yeshov.
    Rather, he stayed behind his doors, emerging only for his afternoon constitutional. On those occasions, he strode briskly through the lobby with an aristocratic aloofness upon his face, as if any consideration beyond the ancient lift that would haul him to his rooms was utterly beneath him. He looked neither left nor right and issued no greetings to old comrades, nor, by his iciness, did he expect to receive any. He dressed as if a dandy in the last century, in spats, a velvet smoking jacket, well worn but beautifully fitted, a white silk scarf, and a lustrous mink coat. He acted as if, by special compact to the highest authority, he was invulnerable to the nighttime visits of Koba’s killers.
    He had been called many things in his interesting life, but one of them clung even to this day and to this circumstance. He was called, not only by his peers in the Luxand by his enemies in the Kremlin, but in the capitals of the West, the Devil Himself.
    For a legend, he seemed rather vigorous. At fifty-nine, E. I. Levitsky still had a taut, lively face. His mouth retained its unusual thinness. It was a clever, prim mouth, as the eyes above it were also clever. They carried the electricity of conviction. He wore, after Lenin, a little goatee, purely an affectation. His head was glossily balding from the forehead back to the crown, though extravagant with bushy peppercorn hair beneath it, as if the black and gray individuals that comprised this mass were violently divided among themselves as to their ultimate direction and destiny. He had a lanky, surprisingly long body, wiry, and long, pale, exquisite fingers. He looked exceptionally refined, as if he’d spent his life in the higher realms of culture. He also looked hard in a peculiar way: hard, unmalleable, an alloy, not a base metal.
    In his hand, he held a pawn. A blunt, smooth little soldier. It expects only death and in this humble aspiration is ever so frequently rewarded. Pawns are made for sacrifice; this is their function; this ennobles them.
    As he gripped the ancient chess piece in his hand, a name came to him, a name whispered that afternoon in a hurried but not quite accidental encounter in Pushkin Park, on a bench under the great trees.
    “It’s Tchiterine, Emmanuel