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“I already have.”
“What?”
“Why shouldn’t I build an empire of activities on Wall Street? It will finance operations. Guns aren’t cheap. Neither are trucks, cars, boats. Not to mention bribes. Money is influence. Money is access to powerful allies. I have a broker steering excellent investments our way.”
“A broker?”
“To buy stocks. To raise money for the scheme.”
“Your scheme is tangential and slow.”
“I will not be rushed.”
“Worse, you veer from the revolution.”
Marat Zolner stared down at Antipov. “Listen to me very carefully, Yuri. I am established here. You just arrived. I will explain to you what is going on here. The United States of America emerged from the World War as the new leader of international capitalism, did it not?”
Antipov conceded that the old German and British empires were laid waste by war.
“Toppling capitalism’s most powerful industrial empire is too important to rush to defeat.”
“You’re not toppling capitalism. You’re joining it.”
“You forget our defeats. We rushed into battle against the international bourgeoisie in Hungary, and lost. We rushed again into the streets of Germany. And lost. Again. Of all the fights I’d fought, I had never seen anything as hopeless as our insurrection in retreat.”
“After we win the war, who cares if we lost a battle?”
“We had no fortress to run to, nowhere to rest, no hospital to doctor wounds, no armory to reload our empty guns. I stopped to help a poor girl whose jaw was shot away. Freikorps thugs came along, shooting the wounded. I played dead. She moaned. They heard. They killed her. I cowered under her body to save my own skin, and I swore that I would find a better way to fight the international bourgeoisie.”
“Joining them?”
“Beating them at their own game,” Zolner retorted.
“You were sent to make war on the state!” Antipov shouted. “Not play games!”
“Prohibition is America’s Achilles’ heel,” Zolner answered quietly and firmly. “Prohibition—this absurd law that people hate—will rot the state and make bootleggers rich.”
He smiled down at Antipov, far too confident in his scheme to raise his voice.
“I have learned to fight in wars that I’ve lost and in wars that I’ve won. There isn’t a bootlegger in America who can stand up to me. I will be the richest. My ‘profits’ that you disdain will finance the Comintern’s attack on the U.S. government. My profits will subvert officials, corrupt police, and destroy the state.”
Yuri shifted tactics. His voice grew soft. “Comrade Zolner—Marat—you know why Moscow sent me. Do I have to remind you, my friend, of the Red Terror? Do I have to remind you that the Cheka annihilates counter-revolutionaries?”
“I am not a counter-revolutionary.”
“The effect of failure is counter-revolutionary.”
“I will not fail.”
“Moscow decides what is failure.”
“Let Moscow tend to Russia. Let me tend to the United States. I will give America to the Comintern on a silver platter.”
“They would be just as happy to have it on base metal.”
Staring hard at each other, suddenly both men laughed, acknowledging their surprise that Antipov had made a joke.
“And happy to forgive me, too?” Zolner asked.
