To Kill the Duke
Authors: Sam Moffie,Vicki Contavespi
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Historical Fiction
C
OPYRIGHT
© 2011 S
AM
M
OFFIE
A
LL RIGHTS RESERVED
.
ISBN: 1461147069
ISBN-13: 9781461147060
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62111-253-2
The employees and patrons of Bills Place & The Coconut Grove, all of whom make it easy for me to write.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.
— George Bernard Shaw
With special thanks to Juliette DeVreede Hoffman Moffie (my muse) and Devra Bastiaens (preliminary editing and character development).
This book was edited by Vicki Contavespi, who should legally change her name to ‘guru of research.’ For you see, when not editing, she carefully checks and rechecks every fact. Now, in literary fiction I would have had her taken to a remote building by Mr. Zavert if she tried this. Might even have had Johnny Stomp pay her a visit. But, this being historical fiction, it is a must of the first degree. She is an honest, old-fashioned and hard-nosed editor, who has made me a better writer.
Chapter Two: There’s Nothing Like Filming on Location and Being There
OOK
O
NE
O
N THE
S
TREETS OF
M
OSCOW
“Death is the solution to all problems.
No man; No problem.”
— Joseph Stalin
“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.”
— Ayn Rand
“Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt!”
— John Wayne as Thomas Dunston in “Red River”
I
van Viznapu turned up the collar of his jacket. It helped, but still wasn’t enough to keep the cold from attacking his neck and throat. Even though it was late spring, and he was used to bone-chilling temperatures, he still wanted to feel warmer. Turning up the collar on his cloth winter jacket helped.
“Being a citizen in the USSR you learn that you can never beat the cold, just deal with it,” Alex Ganchin, his new direct supervisor always said.
And dealing with something was what Ivan was about to do, because his new direct supervisor – comrade Ganchin – was very sick with the common cold, so Ivan was going to have to replace him this weekend as Uncle Joe’s chief projectionist.
Alex Ganchin was in charge of running the projector during private screenings for the head of the Soviet Union.
Uncle Joe was Joseph Stalin – the head of the Soviet Union.
Ivan, like most citizens in the USSR, was very familiar with the word “common,” but it was Alex who had caught the cold.
Uncle Joe loved movies. So did Ivan and Alex when they could afford the luxury of movie watching. Most of the time they were working while the show was on; either one rarely got interrupted viewing pleasure.
Now, because of the common cold, Alex had had to call off sick, and his handpicked replacement – Ivan Visnapu – was going to be running the projector for one of the most powerful men in the world.
And Ivan was scared. To help him prepare, he went to comrade Ganchin’s home to get some pointers on how to handle the rumored eccentricities of Uncle Joe and his cohorts.
“Because if you don’t…,” Alex had begun to say.
“I go to the Gulag,” Ivan butted in.
“No, they will execute you right there and chop your body up into little bits and pieces and feed what’s left to the piranha.”
“What is a piranha, comrade?” Ivan had asked when they first talked a few days before, when Alex had told Ivan about how sick he was and had picked him to be his replacement.
“Find out and tell me when you come to my flat, before you go to the big house for the bigger show,” replied Alex.
So Ivan spent the better part of his day at work, delivering interoffice mail from cubicle to cubicle in the vast People’s Office of All Records building, wondering what a piranha was. After his shift was over, he headed for the library. As he went to the desk in the center of the room marked “information,” he noted how extremely small the library was – especially when he compared it to the building in which he toiled.
I guess there are more records on people than there are books by people
, he said to himself.
Ivan made his way across the street and pushed his way through the very long line of fellow Communists waiting patiently for toilet paper. Ivan knew it was the line for toilet paper, because on Fridays in Moscow, toilet paper was handed out.
“Because most people don’t have enough time to shit during the week while we work them to death,” a medium-level official had once said to him while Ivan was delivering mail to that medium-level official’s office (who was aching to make small talk with anyone who would listen to him, because after all, medium-level officials don’t have many people around who
have
to listen to them). Now, walking to Alex’s home for some pointers on how to show a film and stay alive, Ivan’s progress to Alex’s was slow, because the line for toilet paper stretched across the entire block where comrade Ganchin lived.
Ivan finally found his way to the doorway of Alex’s flat. He pushed the button under the name that read: A. Ganchin.
Alex’s voice came through the speaker box that was close to the main entrance door.
“Good afternoon, comrade Viznapu. What’s a piranha?”
“A fish with teeth that doesn’t know the meaning of the word stop when it comes to eating other living things,” Ivan replied in a cocksure tone.
“Someone went to the people’s library. But sorry, that isn’t the answer. Please come back tomorrow,” Alex said, as he failed to activate the buzzer for admission.