Word: panin
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...These days if you get out of the morgue and into the ground, you are lucky. But to be buried in Moscow is practically impossible. You have to be in the mafia or a major politician for that." --Vladimir I. Panin, chairman of the Kristall funeral company on the rising costs of dying in the now-capitalist Russian Republic, quoted in The New York Times, November...
...always loved. "I knew all the spies in the U.N. organization itself, but they were not up to much," he says. "The big spies are in the various delegations. In any case the book is not based on any particular episode, and there is no real model for Panin...
...intrigue and skullduggery, the book takes assorted sideswipes at the windy futility of the U.N. as well as the trundling bureaucracy of the Vatican. The author concedes that it was an opportunity to get some personal peeves off his chest. Sitting through one especially ineffectual debate, for instance, Panin reflects that "all the great tragedies of our time have been resolved without recourse to the U.N." The book's digs at the Vatican are gentler but nonetheless pointed; in one instance a cardinal complains that priests in the Roman Curia too often forget that "their mission before everything else...
...have had such a relationship myself," says Giovannetti. "Not true. Some of the people are real, with names changed, some are half real, but the girl is one of the inventions." Nevertheless he does note that spy and priest, ironically, have something in common in their abstinence and discipline. "Panin could dream what Righi could not," says the author, "but in the final analysis they were both committed to an austere life...
...avowed anti-Communist who once wrote a pseudonymous indictment of religious persecution in East bloc countries, Giovannetti intended his novel to dramatize the conflict between Marxism and Christianity. Progressively affected by his priestly role, Panin in the end undergoes a spiritual conversion. He defects to the Vatican, and after offering himself in exchange for the real Righi (who has been kept alive by the Soviets for a possible exchange in case Panin was captured) goes to his execution in Moscow's Lubyanka prison...