Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

. G. Uchitelnitsky came home exhausted from Moscow University. He poured himself a glass of vodka and drank it down. Then, he poured himself another. He did not plan to have a big supper. He would slice some sausage and some cheese, and that would suffice. A half-filled bottle of vodka was on the desk. That evening he had planned to look through the material that belonged to Professor Holtz, and pertained to the Tsar Ivan Library project which Comrade Flobov had brought back from Marburg. There was quite a bit of material: letters, manuscripts, notes. Two brown valises sat on Uchitelnitsky's desk. They were bulging from their contents. He sighed, and drank some vodka. It would be a long night.

Before he had a chance to open one of the valises, the telephone on his desk rang. A Cheka operative was on the other end.

"I thought the following information might be useful to you, Comrade," the operative said. "Housing Commissar V. V. Podly was scheduled to return from a two-week vacation on 2/5/22, two days ago. We have learned that he has not reported for work. It seems his secretary and his house keeper are trying to divert attention from this fact. The secretary took messages for him all day today, but no one has spoken with him."

Uchitelnitsky took another sip of vodka, and then took his timepiece out of his waistcoat pocket to check the hour.

"Send people to his office and to his home now! Find him, or find out exactly where he is. Then call me back. I'll be here all night." Uchitelnitsky hung up the telephone.

He didn't spend much time thinking about Podly. He had only met the Housing Commissar once, when arrangements were made several years ago by the Dean of the Foreign Language Division of the University to have Uchitelnitsky installed in his own apartment in a house on Dmitrova. It was understood at that time that Uchitelnitsky would not be required to share his quarters. The dean was one of the Kings in Podly's hierarchy of chess pieces, and the favor was gladly granted. Uchitelnitsky was only mildly interested in the affairs of the Housing Commissar, a notorious libertine.

Before delving into Professor Holtz's material Uchitelnitsky thought of Zina Dumatskoy, and how much he wanted to see her. He thought of calling her at that moment, but he decided against it. Still, he had to set up a date with her for their next Greek lesson. He wanted to prepare a special lesson for her. He glanced to the left and perused his bookshelf. Two copies of Dante's LaVita Nuova, one in Italian, a language Uchitelnitsky had some knowledge of, and one in Russian answered his silent call. He knew that Zina admired Dante. LaVita Nuova was a perfect choice from which to extract some passages and put them into Greek for Zina's lesson. Part verse and part prose, LaVita Nuova was Dante's homage to and chronicle of a lifelong infatuation with Beatrice Portinari, who the poet met only twice. She died in 1290 at the age of 24.

After a short time leafing through both of his texts, Uchitelnitsky wrote in Greek on a piece of paper:

"Love was Dante's master regarding the blessed Beatrice. And Love held her as she slept in one hand in a blood-colored cloth, and in the other hand, Love held the poet, Dante's heart. Then waking her, Love bid her eat the poet's heart. And that she did."

Uchitelnitsky was pleased with the subtlety of that, and how he and Zina could discuss the passage. The key was possession, the eaten heart, a common theme in Medieval Literature. It symbolized the eternal bond that was formed by the one whose heart was eaten, and the one who ate the heart. All the discussion of love and possession might help to crystallize thoughts and feelings between Uchitelnitsky and Zina. He wasn't even exactly sure how he felt about her at that point.

The following morning before he left for the University and his 10:00 a.m. class on Plato's dialogues, Uchitelnitsky received a telephone call from Petrograd. A Cheka operative was telling Uchitelnitsky that no decision was yet made on the Dumatskoy situation. The word was, that Education Commissar, A. Lunacharsky, seemed to be pondering a dilemma: True, Dumatskoy had disobeyed a direct order from his supervisor, O. B. Shpion, to cease working on the Tsar Ivan Library Project, at the request of Lunacharsky himself. At the hearing Dumatskoy admitted disobeying the direct order, but he denied breaking into Shpion's safe and stealing documents. The Cheka operative found part of a letter from Professor Holtz to Dumatskoy, fastened underneath Dumatskoy's desk in his workspace, which made it clear that Dumatskoy was still working on the project. In addition, there was the controversy over whether Dumatskoy told Shpion about the existence of the Fichte List. Dumatskoy testified that he did. Shpion testified that he did not. Certainly the existence of such a document, if known, would have caused the Education Department to at least rethink the decision to cease the project.

There was submitted into evidence by Dumatskoy, the letter he said he received on 8/31/21 from Holtz in Marburg which mentions the existence of the Fichte list, spurious or authentic, and that Holtz would eventually be copying it and sending it to Dumatskoy in Moscow. Why would Dumatskoy not tell Shpion about the list? Its existence would probably keep the project going, which was what he wanted! Was he planning to proceed independently? But how? With what resources at his disposal? The German government? It would be a tremendous coup for Germany to find the library before Russia. And Professor Holtz was a German citizen, basically a traitor in the eyes of the Soviet Government. Dumatskoy, Holtz and Germany? A possibility! And why would Shpion lie about never seeing the Holtz letter, and not knowing about the list? She would have been the person to reap the benefits from finding the library! It would have been her glory as Department Head in Moscow! Was she in the unthinkable position, from the standpoint of being in such a high-ranking job, of working in consort with Cheka, who was notoriously opposed to spending time and money on Tsarist history? Did she intercept the list and destroy it?

And then there was Holtz. The one man who could possibly shed some light on all those questions. An old scholar, eccentric, who had spent the better portion of his life studying the history of Ivan Grozny. Lunacharsky thought of Holtz as an honorable man, a man devoted to scholarship. Did Holtz ever send the list to Dumatskoy? And the most puzzling question of all: why was the old scholar murdered, strangled? And who was responsible for his death?

So, with all those questions still unanswered, Lunacharsky had postponed his decision. Dumatskoy would remain on suspension. There was a rumor circulating that Dumatskoy and his family would be provided with basic necessities through the auspices of the Education Ministry fund, which could take care of at least rent payments and small stipends for food while the suspension was enforced.

That indecision on Lunacharsky's part angered Uchitelnitsky. If Lunacharsky didn't want to permanently terminate Dumatskoy from his position with the Ministry, Cheka would want to arrest him for breaking and entering, and theft. Fortunately, for Uchitelnitsky's purposes, Shpion had originally contacted Cheka, rather than the Moscow City Police. And, she formally brought charges against Dumastkoy on 1/12/22. Once Cheka became involved in a case, it assumed total control over every aspect. Uchitelnitsky decided to have Dumatskoy arrested and held for trial on the evidence uncovered by Comrade Sprashivali - the plot conceived by Uchitelnitsky himself. He quickly called Cheka Headquarters and made the arrangements for Dumatskoy's arrest.

The taxicab that always came for Uchitelnitsky to take him to his 10:00 a.m. class on Friday arrived at 9:30 a.m. It was 2 1/2 miles to the University from his apartment on Dmitrova. Passing the Donskoy Monastery in the taxicab, he wrote in his notebook:

"Operatives reported last night, 2/7/22, Housing Commissar Podly not at office or at home. Secretary at office claimed that he was there earlier. Housekeeper at home reported he was out. Operative to check again today. If he can't be found - will bring secretary and housekeeper in for questioning."

After conducting four classes on Plato's Dialogues, and preparing for Monday's lectures, Uchitelnitsky's day at the University came to an end. He ate some borsch, black bread, and drank beer at a little cafe on Trediakov in the University Complex. Then, he took a taxicab home. The following day was Saturday. He had no lectures scheduled until 1:00 p.m. He planned to work late that night, continuing to delve into Professor Holtz's material. It was a painstaking process because of the combination of German and Russian with which the scholar was wont to employ. Uchitelnitsky's knowledge of German was somewhat more developed than his Italian. He devoted more time to the German language during the war years. In addition to the material gathered by Comrade Flobov in Marburg, Uchitelnitsky had in his own library three books in German and two in Russian which Holtz had published in recent years.

About 11:00 p.m., Uchitelnitsky decided to take a break from his work. He went into the kitchen and cut himself a piece of poppy seed cake. One of his students had baked it for him the previous day. Just as he finished the last bite and was about to sip some water from a cup, he rushed back into his office as though an alarm had gone off in that room. He found what had been mentally signaling to him from his two days of absorbing Holtz's work on Ivan Grozny - in two separate documents. In one of the books in Russian authored by Holtz, the Professor mentioned several locations throughout Russia which were know as "Country Palaces", places where during his reign, the Tsar would go for months at a time as a retreat from Moscow, but still able to carry on the business of ruling. Six different locations were described relating to how the retreats coincided with the major events during Ivan's reign. The name of one of the sites had special meaning for Uchitelnitsky. He made the connection with something he remembered reading in a letter that one of Holtz's acquaintances at the University of Berlin had written to the Professor. The night before, Uchitelnitsky had tried to catalogue all Holtz's material that Comrade Flobov had obtained in Marburg as to type of source (letter, lecture, note, etc.), and chronology (Holtz dated everything he wrote and received). Uchitelnitsky easily found the letter he was looking for.

The name was Aleksandrov. It was a small town about 45 miles west of Moscow, known primarily for its monastery of St. Aleksandr, and the scholarship of the monks there throughout the centuries. The pertinent letter from Berlin was very recent. It was dated in Holtz's notebook as received by him on 1/8/22. Printed in German by a meticulous hand, it was signed by a Ludwig Edelmann, apparently an instructor at the university there. That letter seemed to be a reply from Edelmann to a previous letter from Holtz in which Holtz must have discussed the theory of the possibility of Aleksandrov being a site where some, if not all, of Tsar Ivan Grozny's library may have been stored. Edelmann's reply concerned information provided to him by a friend of his who was an engineer. That person, Danilov, another Russian ŽmigrŽ, formerly from Odessa on the Black Sea, went to Germany by way of Switzerland in 1921. Danilov, with the engineering firm in which he was employed, had done extensive work in 1914 for Tsar Nikolai II. One of the projects involved assessing the feasibility of building underground safe-havens for the Tsar and his family in the event of political or social insurrection. The failed revolution of 1905 alerted the autocracy to the fact that the mighty giant of Russia was preparing to enter the 20th century with the rest of the world. And its people were beginning to demand the same just economic, political, and social conditions as their European and American contemporaries.

Edelmann reported to Holtz that Danilov's firm at that time, when preparing an estimate of the costs for such a project at the monastery in Aleksandrov, discovered signs that some type of underground facilities already existed. The firm could make a lot of extra money by not reporting that some excavations and fortifications were in place. The firm would not have to do as much work and could charge for it. A bid was submitted and approved, but the work was never done. The escalation of the war with Germany required that the firm's energies be diverted elsewhere. Danilov himself, had directed most of the work at Aleksandrov. He made copies of the calculations and estimates and took them with him when he fled to Switzerland.

It was after 2:00 a.m. when Uchitelnitsky got into bed. He lay there in the darkness, for some time thinking about what he had discovered.

"What if?" he dared to wonder.

"What if, it existed, there in Aleksandrov?. Untold wealth would befall me. Sailing the voyages of Odysseus. Zina. Greece. Wealth. My life's work in Soviet Russia! World Communism. I would be a vulture, picking clean the hideous remains of a corrupt dead civilization! Zina ,do I love her? I must see her. Aleksandrov. What if?