her along one night, and she'd been attending ever since.
There were other, similar groups, in town.

"But what's the purpose of the organization?" Simonov asked her.

She was driving her little aircushion Moskvich. They crossed over the
Vltava River by the Cechuv Bridge and turned right. On the hill above them
loomed the fantastically large statue of Stalin which had been raised
immediately following the Second War. She grimaced at it, muttered, "I
wonder if he was insane from the first."

He hadn't understood her change of subject. "How do you mean?" he said.

"Stalin. I wonder how early it was in his career that he went insane."

This was the second time in the past few days that Ilya Simonov had run
into this matter of the former dictator's mental condition. He said now,
"I've heard the opinion before. Where did you pick it up?"

"Oh, it's quite commonly believed in the Western countries."

"But, have you ever been, ah, West?"

[Illustration]

"Oh, from time to time! Berlin, Vienna, Geneva. Even Paris twice, on
vacation, you know, and to various conferences. But that's not what I
mean. In the western magazines and newspapers. You can get them here in
Prague now. But to get back to your question. There is no particular
purpose of the organization."

She turned the car left on Budenska and sped up into the Holesovice
section of town.

* * * * *

The nonchalance of it all was what stopped Ilya Simonov. Here was a Party
member calmly discussing whether or not the greatest Russian of them all,
after Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of
the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a
mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a
man as unbalanced as Czar Peter the Great.

They pulled up before a rather large house that would have been called a
dacha back in Moscow. Evidently, Ilya Simonov decided, whoever was
sponsoring this night's get together, was a man of prominence. He grimaced
inwardly. A lot of high placed heads were going to roll before he was
through.

It turned out that the host was Leos Dvorak, the internationally famed
cinema director and quite an idol of Ilya Simonov in his earlier days when
he'd found more time for entertainment. It was a shock to meet the man
under these circumstances.

Catherina Panova was obviously quite popular among this gathering. Their
host gave her an aff