Totally absorbed in blind combat from that day on, Lev Davidovich understood that the Great Leader’s macabre game still demanded his presence because his back had to serve as a springboard in Stalin’s race to the most inaccessible summits of imperial power. At the same time, he had realized that—once his usefulness as the perfect enemy was exhausted, and all the requisite mutilations had been carried out—Stalin would fix the moment of a death that would then arrive with the same certainty with which snow falls in the Siberian winter. A few months before, foreseeing some incidents that could complicate the delicate conditions of his asylum, Lev Davidovich had begun to eliminate anything that the Norwegian authorities could use against him. More than the aggressiveness of Commander Quisling’s pro-Nazi party, he was alarmed by the increasing virulence of the local Stalinists, who had added a disquieting rumor to their attacks: with a pounding insistence they warned that “Trotsky the counterrevolutionary”
