A matter of honor/The golden cup/Stepping down from the star/A deadly presence [antikvár]

The Kremlin, Moscow May 19; 1966 It's a fake," said the Russian leader, staring down at the small, exquisite painting he held in his hands. "That can't be possible," replied his Politburo colleague. "The czar's icon of Saint George and the dragon has been in the Winter Palace at Leningrad under heavy guard for almost fifty years," "True, Comrade Zaborski," said the older man, "but for fifty years we've been guarding a fake. The czar must have removed the original before the Red Army overran the Winter Palace." The head of the Committee on State Security moved restlessly in his chair as the cat-and-mouse game continued. Yuri Zaborski knew, after years of running the KGB, who had been cast as the mouse the moment his phone had rung at four that morning to say that General Secretary Brezhnev required him to report to the Kremlin office—immediately. "How can you be so sure it's a fake, Leonid Ilyich?" "Because, my dear Zaborski, during the past eighteen months the age of all the treasures in the Winter Palace has been tested by the modem scientific carbon-dating process," said Brezhnev. "And what we have always thought to be one of the nation's masterpieces turns out to have been painted five hundred years after Rublev's original." "But by whom and for what purpose?" asked the chairman of the KGB, his voice incredulous. "The experts tell me it was probably a court painter," replied