"Sir, we'll know more later today. The Soviet Party Secretary will be speaking at an emergency meeting of the Supreme Soviet, maybe also at the funeral tomorrow."
"Sentimental bastard," Pipes growled.
In front of the office television an hour later, Toland missed having Chuck Lowe around to back up his translation. The Chairman had an annoying tendency to speak rapidly, and Toland's Russian was barely up to it. The speech took forty minutes, three-quarters of which was standard political phraseology. At the end, however, the Chairman announced mobilization of Category-B reserve units to meet the potential German threat.
The House of Unions was unusually crowded, Toland saw. Ordinarily they only buried one hero at a time with such ceremony. Once there had been three dead cosmonauts, but now there were eleven heroes. Eight Young Octobrists from Pskov, three boys and five girls ranging in age from eight to ten, and three clerical employees, all men who worked directly for the Politburo, were laid out in polished birchwood coffins, surrounded by a sea of flowers. Toland examined the screen closely. The caskets were elevated so that the victims were visible, but two of the faces were covered with black silk, a framed photograph atop the coffins to show what the children had looked like in life. It was a piteous, horrible touch for the television cameras to linger on.
The Hall of Columns was draped in red and black, with even the ornate chandeliers masked for this solemn occasion. The families of the victims stood in an even line. Parents without their children, wives and children without fathers. They were dressed in the baggy, ill-cut clothes so characteristic of the Soviet Union. Their faces showed no emotion but shock, as if they were still trying to come to terms with the damage done to their lives, still hoping that they'd awake from this ghastly nightmare to find their loved ones safe in their own beds. And knowing that this would not be.
The Chairman of the Party came somberly down the line, embracing each of the bereaved, a black mourning band on his sleeve to contrast with the gaudy Order of Lenin emblem on his lapel. Toland looked closely at his face. There was real emotion there. One could almost imagine that he was burying members of his own family.
One of the mothers accepted the embrace, then the kiss, and nearly collapsed, falling to her knees and burying her face in her hands. The Chairman dropped down to her side even before her husband did, and pulled her head into his shoulder. A moment later he helped her back to her feet, moving her gently toward the protective arm of her husband, a captain in the Soviet Army whose face was a stone mask of rage.
God almighty, Toland thought. They couldn't have staged that any better with Eisenstein himself directing.
You cold-hearted bastard, Sergetov said to himself. He and the rest of the Politburo stood in another line to the left of the caskets. He kept his face pointed forward, toward the line of coffins, but he averted his eyes, only to see four television cameras recording the ceremony. The whole world was watching them, the TV people had assured them. So exquisitely organized it was. Here was the penultimate act of the maskirovka The honor guard of Red Army soldiers mixed with boys and girls of the Moscow Young Pioneers to watch over the murdered children. The lilting violins. Such a masquerade! Sergetov told himself. See how kind we are to the families of those we have murdered! He had seen many lies in his thirty-five years in the Party. He had told enough of them himself but never anything that came close to this. Just as well, he thought, that I've had nothing to eat today.
