Hong Kong variety show: The mastermind behind the scenes is emerging.

Poland, Warsaw, Praga district.

The April wind still carried a hint of winter's chill, surging in from the direction of the Vistula River, passing through the war-torn red-brick buildings and the gray apartment buildings rebuilt after the war in the old town, and finally settling on an old Baroque-style theater on a street corner.

The theater is quite old, but it is clear that it is well maintained. The off-white stone facade is clean and tidy, with intricate and exquisite scroll patterns and angel reliefs carved at the four corners. A polished bronze plaque is inlaid on the arched doorway, with an elegant cursive script inscribed on it: "Royal Theatre of the Marbles of Warsaw".

At six o'clock in the morning, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, a row of narrow wooden windows on the second floor of the theater were pushed open in unison.

It was a long, narrow dormitory room with gray-white walls. Iron bunk beds were neatly arranged along both sides of the room, and the bedding was folded into squares.

Several girls, ranging in age from seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen, sat by the window, not fully awake, wearing matching gray cotton nightgowns, stretching and yawning.

They are the organization's reserves, most of whom were adopted, bought, or "picked up" from all over Eastern Europe. They have no parents, no surnames, and in this theater, they have only one identity—future ballet (assassins).

"Get up, all of you get up!" A stocky middle-aged woman stood at the doorway, shouting at the top of her lungs while vigorously shaking the copper bell in her hand.

She was a nun named Jadwiga. In this theater, she was in charge of what seemed like the most insignificant but was actually the most important thing—looking after the children.

"Ten minutes to wash up," she rang the bell again, "then go to the restaurant; latecomers won't get milk today."

A rustling sound came from the dormitory. The girls threw off their blankets and got out of bed, wearing wooden slippers, and went to the bathroom at the end of the corridor to wash up. Then they walked quickly towards the dining room.

The restaurant is located in a side hall on the second floor. It is a circular room with a dome painted with a mural of a light blue sky and floating clouds. Several long wooden tables are arranged radially, with starched white linen tablecloths on them, and enamel bowls and wooden spoons on them.

At the dining table, the boys from the theater were already seated and eating. The girls also quickly took their seats one by one and quietly began to enjoy their breakfast.

Breakfast consisted of oatmeal, fried bacon, rye bread, and a pot of steaming milk.

The old woman stood by the table, adding a spoonful of porridge to a girl's bowl while glancing at the empty seats around the table: "Where's Lina?"

"Grandma, I'm here." A voice came from the direction of the corridor.

A girl with golden-brown hair walked in quickly, her training uniform sleeves not yet buttoned up.

She was about sixteen years old, with a slender figure, but the lines of her shoulders and arms already showed the firmness that comes from long-term training.

The old woman glanced at her, her tone unchanged: "If you're late again next time, your training today will be doubled."

"Yes, Granny." Lina lowered her head and sat down in her seat.

After breakfast, everyone walked down the corridor to their rooms to change into their training clothes, and then went down through an inconspicuous hidden door on the side of the stage into a completely different space.

The training ground is located on the third basement level. It is a square space with a light brown cork mat on the floor, which feels slightly springy when you step on it. Large mirrors hang on the four walls, wooden weapon racks are piled in the corners, and there are several iron rods with wet towels drying on them along the walls.

The girls' morning training is ballet.

A female teacher dressed in a black training uniform stood at the front, holding a thin pointer in her hand, demonstrating each movement in time with the beat.

"Remember, turn your toes outwards, align your knees with your toes, and keep your back straight."

The children lined up in front of the mirror, raised their arms, pointed their toes, and spun, bent over, and stretched their legs to the beat.

"Keep breathing," the female teacher tapped her pointer, "Don't lose your rhythm."

A girl lost her balance and almost fell. The female teacher's pointer lashed out at her calf.

The girl's face turned pale with pain, but she gritted her teeth and didn't utter a sound. She simply stood back in her original position and started over from the first movement.

On the other side, the boys were practicing classical wrestling.

They paired up and rolled, wrestled, and locked throats on the mat... One boy's arm was locked by his opponent, and his face turned red with pain, but he refused to beg for mercy. Instead, he gritted his teeth, lifted his opponent's body, and slammed it down, knocking the opponent unconscious.

"Good!" The wrestling instructor grinned with satisfaction. "That's more like it."

The training inside the room was in full swing, while Director Maggie Corbett stood at the door watching everyone with an expressionless face.

She wore a black turtleneck sweater and dark gray trousers. Her dark brown hair was styled in a bun, revealing her long, clean neck and shoulders. Her features weren't striking, but they were well-defined: high, narrow cheekbones, a straight nose, slightly sunken eye sockets, and a pair of gray-green eyes.

Maggie's gaze lingered briefly on the few newcomers whose postures were not up to par. She offered neither criticism nor praise, but simply turned around and walked up the stairs she had come from, returning to the basement.

Passing through rooms such as the tattoo room and the archives, a heavy oak door appears at the end of the corridor.

There was no keyhole on the door, only a palm-sized bronze badge embedded in the center of the door—a wolf standing sideways, its front paws resting on a dagger, and its back engraved with spiral runes unique to Gypsies.

Maggie stopped in front of the door, placed her right hand on the bronze wolf's head, and with a click, the mechanism activated, the door slid open inward, revealing a spacious room behind it.

This is a space that blends modern intelligence with traditional workshops. The west wall is a blackboard with a complex network diagram drawn in white chalk—names, places, dates, arrows, and dotted lines intertwine like a growing spider web.

Several women dressed in office lady attire, with various Gypsy tattoos on their arms, were typing data at a table. When they saw Maggie enter, they quickly straightened up and stepped aside.

"How's the scheduling going?" Maggie asked as she sat down at the head of the table.

"Director, our business has been booming lately. The 'Dancers' and 'Gladiators' who are out and about are incredibly busy," one of the tattooed women said with a smile.

Maggie nodded and flipped open the thick stack of "collaboration" orders on the table.

The situation in Poland has been volatile recently.

This spring, the Polish United Workers' Party and Solidarity trade union sat down at a roundtable meeting. After months of back-and-forth, the two sides finally reached a historic compromise—the government agreed to restore Solidarity's legal status and decided to hold a semi-free general election.

The news sent shockwaves through Eastern Europe; some rejoiced, some were terrified, and some were restless.

Taking advantage of this massive storm, Rosingerom's underground orders suddenly increased overnight.

Maggie went through the orders one by one.

The first order came from a local Warsaw politician who wanted to "accidentally" withdraw from an election before it started. The promise included a huge reward and even the "friendship" of a political party.

The second document was an intelligence exchange request from Vienna. A former KGB officer stationed in East Berlin wanted to exchange old files in his possession for cash and a route to Western Europe.

Maggie even received a cooperation invitation from the law thieves—those "lawless kings" who had been entrenched in the Soviet underworld for decades also wanted to take advantage of this turmoil to negotiate a bigger deal with Roskarom.

Maggie was very meticulous. She would circle the high-profit collaborations, mark a number in the corner, and then jot down a short note in her notebook.

If the risk is too high or the return is not up to par, she will draw a tiny cross in the corner of the page and then signal to her subordinates to politely decline.

Just as she was tidying up, the door was pushed open, and a young woman in a dark gray uniform walked in, carrying a tray with a cup of black coffee and a small dish of rye biscuits on it.

She placed the tray on the table and added softly, "Director, the latest news from Prague is that the High Table is still not responding and seems to be waiting for instructions from above."

Two days ago, under Maggie's orders, they stole a batch of supplies from the High Table in Prague. They were all prepared to fight back, but the High Table did not make any move for half a day, which was unusually creepy.

"Yes," Maggie said without looking up, "Thank you for your hard work. Contact me if anything comes up."

"Yes." The young woman quietly withdrew.

About twenty minutes later, Maggie handed the sorted orders to the clerk next to her, then got up and took the private elevator back to her office on the third floor.

This office differs from the style of the basement and the stage, featuring dark wooden floors, dark green velvet curtains, and an old oil painting on the wall—a Gypsy woman in a red dress dancing around a campfire, the firelight illuminating her face, her eyes revealing an untamed spirit.

Maggie sat down at her desk, her gaze falling on the painting, her thoughts drifting away.

Maggie Corbett was born into the Gypsy Rom tribe.

From a very young age, Maggie displayed astonishing talent. Her body was incredibly flexible, allowing her to perform various difficult movements without any training; she possessed a natural keen eye for observation and the ability to imitate, easily mimicking anyone she had ever seen.

However, this talent did not bring her happiness and wealth; instead, it pushed her into the abyss at a young age. In the 1950s, at the age of twelve, she was spotted by the KGB and subsequently secretly conscripted into the army.

Over the next seven years, Maggie underwent brutal training in KGB's Ninth Division, where she not only learned top-notch assassination, intelligence gathering, and close combat skills, but was also trained to become an excellent ballet dancer.

According to the KGB, her dance moves are not only her perfect disguise, but also the most elegant blade she can use to pierce the heart of her enemy.

At the age of nineteen, Maggie successfully completed her training and was codenamed "Swallow".

In the decades that followed, Maggie traveled between East Berlin, Vienna, and Paris in various capacities, eliminating countless political enemies and traitors for Red Square.

However, the endless factional infighting and political games within the KGB, along with witnessing the tragic deaths of countless colleagues, gradually made Maggie see the cold-blooded nature of this massive machine.

She wanted to leave, but she also knew that KGB never had a "retirement" system, and she needed to create opportunities for herself.

In 1981, the opportunity came.

At the time, the war in Afghanistan had just begun, and Maggie received a special assassination mission to go to Kabul.

During the mission, Maggie decisively killed her comrade and then staged a horrific explosion. She then used a charred corpse to fake her own death, completely severing all ties with Lubyanka.

From that time on, there were no more KGB "swallows" in the world.

Yes, there was one, a Gypsy woman who had crawled out of hell, covered in blood and scars.

After leaving the KGB, Maggie used her extensive network of contacts, secret funds, and ancient contracts in the underworld related to her Gypsy bloodline to consolidate the scattered Roma forces in Eastern Europe and officially establish Ruska Roma.

Maggie chose the Praga district of Warsaw, Poland, as the core of her organization. In 1984, she bought an old theater that had survived World War II—the Royal Marble Theater in Warsaw—and renovated it before reopening it.

On the surface, this is a private old theater that hosts tours of classic operas, classical ballets and symphonies, and is highly favored by Warsaw's political and business elites; in reality, it is the Rosinger-Rom family's intelligence hub, money laundering channel and ultimate selection arena for next-generation assassins in Eastern Europe.

……

Maggie looked away from the painting, picked up the recently collected intelligence on the table, and turned to the section on Eastern European countries.

As she flipped through the documents, the conclusion in her mind became clearer and clearer—the Warsaw Pact was collapsing, and the great changes in Eastern Europe were on the verge of collapse.

East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania... one after another, these countries under the Iron Curtain teetered on the brink of collapse, and Poland stood right at the center of this vortex.

For ordinary people, this was turmoil and panic; but for Maggie, it was an opportunity she had been waiting for for decades.

She planned to take advantage of the impending political upheaval in Poland to completely sever Roskalom from the shadow of the old Soviet system and preemptively seize all the underground assets, black market arms routes, and the shady dealings of politicians left behind after the KGB's retreat.

At the same time, she intends to use this marble theater as a springboard to extend her family's reach westward, laying the groundwork for the West in order to firmly occupy a core ecological niche in the future new order.

This is why she kept sending people to "make trouble" for the High Table Group.

Her goal was simple: to lead Rothcalom into the highest governing body of the Western underworld, securing a permanent seat for her family and protection for her bloodline.

"Knock knock knock".

Just then, a series of regular knocks on the door interrupted her thoughts.

The young secretary came in again, bowing respectfully: "Director, the high table has replied."

Maggie paused, then looked up at her secretary with her grey-green eyes: "What did they say?"

"One of the leaders on the other side, 'KING,' said—you can join the High Table, but there's only one condition," the female secretary paused, then lowered her voice and said, "you must personally go to West Germany for a face-to-face meeting."

"..."

Maggie didn't speak, but got up and walked to the window, her gaze falling on the old gray brick wall across the street.

It was a wall that had stood in the back alley of the theater since the war. Over the years, the mortar had peeled off, revealing bricks of varying shades underneath.

It's unclear from which year it started, but this wall became a place where young people in the neighborhood secretly graffitied, layer upon layer of paint covering the wall, like an unsigned chronicle that had been repeatedly smeared.

Now, the wall displays are all related to the United Workers' Union, with slogans like "Long live the United Workers' Union!" written in artistic lettering and a huge "Freedom" painted in blue-black spray paint.

The graffiti on the far right is obviously the newest, the handwriting is still fresh, and it says "We are ready" in bright yellow paint. Next to it is the outline of a door being pushed open.

Maggie stared at the wall in silence for a long time. Her grey-green eyes reflected the sunlight streaming through the window and the colorful graffiti, revealing no emotion.

She suddenly smiled.

"It's been seven years since I last went abroad," Maggie said, turning her gaze back to the High Table's reply on the table. Her fingertip traced a light arc along the edge of the paper. "Perfect timing, I'll take this opportunity to get some fresh air."

She paused for a moment, then gestured with her chin towards her secretary: "Inform Xina to come with me."

The secretary paused slightly, but wisely refrained from asking further questions, simply nodding respectfully, "Yes, Director."

She then turned and left, and Maggie leaned back in her chair, her gaze once again falling on the old wall covered in graffiti outside the window.

The April breeze slipped in through the cracks in the window, gently ruffling the corner of the High Table reply on the table. The paper curled up slightly, then fell back down, like a butterfly trying to flap its wings.