The Red Horseman by Stephen Coonts Page A

railings. Dalworth drove
the car onto the sidewalk, stopped, then got out and
moved the railings. He pulled the car through,
then replaced them.
    The park was young trees and grass, but the grass was
half weeds and hadn’t been mowed. Here and there women
with strollers sat taking the sun. After Dalworth
drove about a hundred yards, he pulled the car to a
stop.
    Just to the left, surrounded on three sides by more
hapazardly placed crowd-control railings, stood
three huge bronze statues amid the dandelions
and grass. A smaller marble statue lay on its
side in front of the others. Behind them half-hidden
by the foliage of the trees one could glimpse rows of
apartments.
    “This is where they dumped some of the statues,”
Dalworth explained. He parked the car and the three
men got out.
    Jake Grafton ran his hands over the marble
defaced with swatches of paint. The lower portion of the
statue was broken off and lying in the grass. He
moved to the head and stared down into the paint-daubed
face of Josef Stalin.
    “Who are these others?”
    The standing bronzes were three or four times life
size.
    “They look to me to be three likenesses
of the same guy, Admiral,” Dalworth said.
“Dzerzhinsky, I think, but I don’t know for
sure. Maybe Lenin with hair. For sure he was
some big Commie mucky-muck that they were tired of
looking at and hearing about. He looks sort of like a
Slavic Thomas Jefferson, doesn’t be?”
    “More like Jefferson Davis,” Jake Grafton
murmured, and looked around.
    “What’s that over there?” He pointed at a huge
gray concrete structure three or four stories
high a hundred yards away, beside the river. The
parking lots were empty, and even from this distance he could
see the building was shabby, the facade crumbling.
    “Some kind of cultural thing. Just beyond it across that
boulevard is the entrance to Gorky Park. See that
huge gate?”
    1.umm.”
    Jake Grafton turned back to Stalin. He
ran his bands over the marble and looked again into the stone
eyes, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and
despair,” was Toad Tarkington said.
    Lieutenant Spiro Dalworth was more
down-to-earth. “Be fun to have one of these out in the
backyard, wouldn’t it?
    To piss on whenever you felt in the mood.
    U.s. Ambassador Owen Lancaster was not a
career diplomat-rather he was one of those political
insiders who had been repeatedly appointed to key
embassies by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. His political affiliation was a
subject that never seemed to get mentioned by anyone,
even the press. In short, he was The Establishment
from fingertips to toenails.
    And he looked it, Jake Grafton concluded.
Tall, lean, Patrician and impeccably turned
out in a tailor-made wool suit and a handmade
silk tie, Owen Lancaster looked exactly like
central casting’s idea of an heir to a
nineteenthcentury Yankee merchant’s fortune, which
he was. it pow seemed as if this room in Spaso
House were designed around him: the lighting, color
scheme, expensive furniture and carpeting-the
room was an exquisite tribute to the interior
designer’s art. God would have a living room like this
if He had the money.
    In a chair to the left of the ambassador sat one
of the career diplomats, a woman in her mid
to late thirties maybe early forties-it was hard
to tell. She wore modest, expensive clothes and
no makeup that Jake could see. Her name
was His. Agatha Hempstead, with the emphasis on
the His. She hadn’t yet opened her mouth but
Jake Grafton already suspected that she was three
or four notches smarter than Old Money
Lancaster.
    On the other side of the ambassador sat Herb
Tenney.
    He was wearing a suit and tie this afternoon and looked
as if he had merely dropped in to pass a few
social moments.
    After he had smiled and nodded pleasantly
to Jake and Toad, he devoted his attention to the
ambassador’s pleasantries.
    I don’t pretend to knowjust what instructions you
have been given in Washington, Admiral,” the
ambassador