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“Within a few minutes’ drive. Ready to move.”
“In half an hour then.”
This time, with forewarning, the Cossack guard opened the street door without question and a nervous but intensely curious Father Maxim conducted the two visitors to the Patriarch’s private study. Sir Nigel had taken advantage of the National’s own limousine and asked it to wait at the curb.
Patriarch Alexei was again in a pale gray cassock with a simple pectoral cross on a chain round his neck. He greeted his visitors and bade them be seated.
“Permit me first to apologize that my poor grasp of Russian is so unsatisfactory that I have to converse through an interpreter,” said Sir Nigel.
Vincent translated rapidly. The Patriarch nodded and smiled.
“And, alas, I speak no English,” he replied. “Ah, Father Maxim, please place the coffee on a table. We will serve ourselves. You may go.”
Sir Nigel began by introducing himself, though avoiding specifying that he had once been a very senior intelligence officer combating Russia and all her works. He confined himself to saying that he was a veteran of Britain’s Foreign Service (almost right), now in retirement but recalled for the present task of negotiation.
Without mentioning the Council of Lincoln, he related that the Black Manifesto had been privately shown to men and women of enormous influence, all of whom had been deeply shocked by it.
“As shocked no doubt as yourself, Holiness.”
Alexei nodded somberly as the Russian translation ended.
“I have come, therefore, to suggest to you that the present situation involves us all, people of goodwi
ll inside and outside Russia. We had a poet in England who said: No man is an island. We are all part of the whole. For Russia, one of the greatest countries in the world, to fall under the hand of a cruel dictator again would be a tragedy for us in the West, for the people of Russia, and most of all for the holy church.”
“I do not doubt you,” said the Patriarch, “but the church cannot involve itself in politics.”
“Overtly, no. Yet the church must struggle against evil. The church is always involved in morality, is it not?”
“Of course.”
“And the church has the right to seek to protect itself from destruction, and from those who would seek to destroy her and her mission on earth?”
“Beyond doubt.”
“Then the church may speak to urge the faithful against a course of action that would help evil and hurt the church?”
“If the church speaks out against Igor Komarov, and still he wins the presidency, the church will have accomplished her own destruction,” said Alexei II. “That is how the hundred bishops will see it, and they will vote overwhelmingly to stay silent. I will be overruled.”
“But there is possibly another way,” said Sir Nigel. For several minutes he outlined a constitutional reform that caused the Patriarch’s jaw to drop.
“You cannot be in earnest, Sir Nigel,” he said at length. “Restore the monarchy, bring back the czar? The people would never encompass it.”
“Let us look at the picture before you,” suggested Irvine. “We know that the choice before Russia is more bleak than can be imagined. On the one hand lies continuing chaos, possible disintegration, even civil war in the Yugoslav style. There can be no prosperity without stability. Russia is rocking like a ship in a gale with no anchor and no rudder. Soon she must founder, her timbers split apart, and her people perish.
“Or there is dictatorship, a terrible tyranny to match anything your long-suffering country has ever seen. Which would you choose for your people?”
“I cannot,” said the Patriarch. “Both are too terrible.”
“Then remember that a constitutional monarch is always a bulwark against single-tyrant despotism. The two cannot coexist, one has to go. All nations need a symbol, human or not, to which they can cleave when times are bad, that can unite them across barriers of language and clan. Komarov is building himself into that national symbol, that icon. No one will vote against him and in favor of vacuum. There must be an alternative icon.”
“But to preach for restoration ...” protested the Patriarch.
“Would not be preaching against Komarov, which is what you fear to do,” argued the Englishman. “It would be preaching for a new stability, an icon above politics. Komarov could not accuse you of meddling in politics, of being against him, even though he might privately suspect what is afoot. And there are the other factors. …”
Skillfully Nigel Irvine trailed the temptations before the Patriarch. The union of church and throne, the full restoration of the Orthodox Church in all its panoply, the return of the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias to his palace within the Kremlin walls, the resumption of credits from the West as stability returned.
“What you say has much logic, and it appeals to my heart,” said Alexei II when he had thought it over. “But I have seen the Black Manifesto. I know the worst. My brothers in Christ, the convocation of bishops, have not seen it and would not believe it. Publish it, and half of Russia might even agree with it. ... No, Sir Nigel, I do not overestimate my flock.”