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carry out his pleasures. For here he had complete control over pleasure. It came to him from everywhere. Food, sex, booze. And the power of life and death.
    “And the best ones?” Zhabnov asked slyly as they got off the elevator on the second floor of the White House, the antique wooden plankings beneath their feet gleaming with the ancient golden shine of a floor that has lived, has seen the centuries, the feet of the world’s most important men.
    “The best, Excellency, we have of course saved for you,” Gudinov answered conspiratorially, so that Zhabnov broke into an even wider smile. “The three-breasted virgins you love so, Excellency? We managed to trap a band of them out in the wilds of Kansas. Wild ones they were, roaming free. Stark naked, like animals out there. Cost us plenty of troops. The mutants fight like—”
    “Oh don’t worry about the cost,” Zhabnov laughed. “It is a trifle. The important thing is that you carry out your tasks so well. If you have any mansions along the Volga in mind for yourself—they may be closer than you think.”
    “Excellency, I am touched,” Gudinov said, bowing slightly toward the portly man who waddled away down the carpeted floor.
    This particular hall always gave Zhabnov a sort of shiver down his spine. For it was lined with immense oil paintings of the great Presidents of the past. Before the Great War. Before the Russians had moved in and taken over everything lock stock and barrel. And that included the White House and everything that was in it.
    The damned paintings stared down at him. Zhabnov swore they stared. Like those black market pictures he had seen of Christ, whose eyes followed you wherever you went. One had been presented to him once by some slovenly dignitaries from the mountain tribes as a gift. That had amused him—but these were not friendly eyes. Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, their faces so grim and dead. More like zombies than men, like things ready to leap down from their canvasses. Their eyes seemed unusually alive today, almost throbbing with power. It was just the sun—that was all. It was very bright today, the rays streaming through the closed windows of every room in the place, lighting the golden floors, the rugs, the antiques, the tapestries.
    Zhabnov tried to stare the paintings down, turning back and forth nervously at both walls, trying to exert his will over the canvasses, as if over a dog. But the paintings won, after just a few quick angry stares, and he pulled his head straight forward, not daring to look anymore, to fall into those accusing eyes, eyes that said “YOU HAVE STOLEN MY COUNTRY AND I WILL NOT REST UNTIL IT’S RETURNED.” Zhabnov had wanted to have them all taken down, destroyed—or at least painted over with mustaches, scars, ridiculed down to size. But the Premier would have none of that! Years earlier, hearing that just one of the precious paintings had been damaged, he had sent strict orders to Zhabnov not to harm an oily hair on a single one of their painted heads. Or it would be his head. For the Grandfather was a great student of history. He respected the past, the greatness and power of tradition, of faded glory. Soon his picture would be hanging in some Kremlin spire somewhere. All that was left of him after the flesh rotted in the ground. He didn’t wish to have crudities drawn on his image, and not on these images either.
    But if Zhabnov couldn’t touch the “heritage of America,” he could at least add his own favorites. When they reached the Blue Room on the first floor, he relaxed as his pigeony eyes took in his own collection—small children with huge, doelike eyes, so moist and large they were like lakes of overcooked sentimentality into which one could fall and drown in sugary sweetness forever. Keane paintings. Original Keanes. He had been one of the U.S.’s top painters a century and a half ago. Zhabnov had read that the man hadn’t met with great critical acclaim in his own