Monday, May 21, 2012

First Paragraph

Terror once had a precise home address. It could be found at 2 Malaya Lubyanka Street, a gloomy path behind Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square, as if the Lubyanka Prison were merely some sort of boardinghouse or single-room occupancy hotel, full of "guests" occupying rooms according to the degree of interest aroused in the building's landlord, the KGB. The once elegant square was open to the public, but Muscovites habitually went out of their way to shun it; those waiting for word of the building's prisoners shuffled in silence, "lips blue from the cold," beneath a huge black statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, patron saint of secret policemen.

- From Retreat from the Finland Station by Kenneth Murphy

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