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Walter took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat and wiped his forehead. Despite the cold, he was sweating.
{V}
Walter walked from the railway station along the waterfront to the Grand Hotel. It was dark, and a cold east wind blew off the Baltic. He should have been rejoicing: he had bribed Lenin! But he felt a sense of anticlimax. And he was more depressed than he should have been over the silence from Maud. There were a dozen possible reasons why she had not sent him a letter. He should not assume the worst. But he had come dangerously close to falling for Monika, so why should Maud not do something similar? He could not help feeling she must have forgotten him.
He decided he would get drunk tonight.
At the front desk he was given a typewritten note: "Please call at suite 201 where someone has a message for you. " He guessed it was an official from the Foreign Office. Perhaps they had changed their minds about supporting Lenin. If so, they were too late.
He walked up the stairs and tapped on the door of 201. From inside a muffled voice said in German: "Yes?"
"Walter von Ulrich. "
"Come in, it's open. "
He stepped inside and closed the door. The suite was lit by candles. "Someone has a message for me?" he said, peering into the gloom. A figure rose from a chair. It was a woman, and she had her back to him, but something about her made his heart skip. She turned to face him.
It was Maud.
His mouth fell open and he stood paralyzed.
She said: "Hello, Walter. "
Then her self-control broke and she threw herself into his arms.
The familiar smell of her filled his nostrils. He kissed her hair and stroked her back. He could not speak for fear he might cry. He crushed her body to his own, hardly able to believe that this was really her, he was really holding her and touching her, something he had longed for so painfully for almost three years. She looked up at him, her eyes full of tears, and he stared at her face, drinking it in. She was the same but different: thinner, with the faintest of lines under her eyes where there had been none before, yet with that familiar piercingly intelligent gaze.
She said in English: "'He falls to such perusal of my face, as he would draw it. '"
He smiled. "We're not Hamlet and Ophelia, so please don't go to a nunnery. "
"Dear God, I've missed you. "
"And I you. I was hoping for a letter-but this! How did you manage it?"
"I told the passport office I planned to interview Scandinavian politicians about votes for women. Then I met the home secretary at a party and had a word in his ear. "
"How did you get here?"
"There are still passenger steamers. "
"But it's so dangerous-our submarines are sinking everything. "
"I know. I took the risk. I was desperate. " She began to cry again.
"Come and sit down. " With his arm still around her waist, he walked her across the room to the couch.
"No," she said when they were about to sit. "We waited too long, before the war. " She took his hand and led him through an inner door to a bedroom. Logs crackled in the fireplace. "Let's not waste any more time. Come to bed. "
{VI}
Grigori and Konstantin were part of the delegation from the Petrograd soviet that went to the Finland Station late in the evening of Monday, April 16, to welcome Lenin home.
Most of them had never seen Lenin, who had been in exile for all but a few months of the last seventeen years. Grigori had been eleven years old when Lenin left. Nevertheless he knew him by reputation, and so, it seemed, did thousands more people, who gathered at the station to greet him. Why so many? Grigori wondered. Perhaps they, like him, were dissatisfied with the provisional government, suspicious of its middle-class ministers, and angry that the war had not ended.
The Finland Station was in the Vyborg district, close to the textile mills and the barracks of the First Machine Gun Regiment. There was a crowd in the square. Grigori did not expect treachery, but he had told Isaak to bring a couple of platoons and several armored cars to stand guard just in case. There was a searchlight on the station roof, and someone was playing it over the mass of people waiting in the dark.
Inside, the station was full of workers and soldiers, all carrying red flags and banners. A military band played. Twenty minutes before midnight, two sailors' units formed up on the platform as a guard of honor. The delegation from the soviet loitered in the grand waiting room formerly reserved for the tsar and the royal family, but Grigori went out onto the platform with the crowd.
