Cold Blood (10 page)

“It's something having your own burial chamber,” he said, leaning comfortably against the counter. “The upstarts come and say, This is a fine outlook over the city for when I'm gone, how do I buy a plot? I say, The last one we sold was in 1881, so you don't. They don't like that. Upstarts don't like being buried in the suburbs.”

He remembered Uncle Igor's visits well. I said that I myself
had been in charge of sending up what remained of him after the bomb blast.

“Many more Rykovs to come, are there, sir? Is yours a fecund family, if I may enter the enquiry? You see, sir, I like to keep track of our noble families. In fact, I'm thinking of writing a little book about my years here.”

I told him of Nicholas's death at the Pink House. The last I'd heard of his sons they'd gone to Paris with their mother. “That's it,” I concluded.

“You're the end of them in Russia, sir?”

“The very end. Full stop.”

“No children anywhere, sir?”

“No. My son Daniel is also dead.”

“What date was—”

I turned on him. His sallow quizzy face swam up to me out of a mist. I grabbed at his coat and pulled him close.

“He was never born. He never got that far, the poor little bugger, on account of the teachings of Mr Lenin, who has just taken control of your life and the lives of millions like you.”

My strength was mighty. He hung from my hands like a strip of damp cloth. “ ‘Dan Doig, dead in the womb of his mother, who was born Elizaveta Rykov and is also now dead.' Write that in your book of toadying. You and your sort... I hold you in absolute contempt.”

His cheeks were bulging out, red and shining from the pressure of my grip. “So now you know not to ask about the Rykovs. When I die we are extinct. Extinct—is that plain enough? Done for. Shit in the pit.” So saying, I dropped him.

He began to whimper about who'd pay for the tomb's upkeep and so on. I said he could grind up our bones for fertiliser. Then I grabbed the oil lamp, made as if to cuff him when he tried to speak and went out into the night.

Extinct! Not obsolete or out of fashion or temporarily extinguished like a candle but gone for eternity. The thick salty spunk that produces men of legend had got thinned out. It had been used too frivolously. The Rykovs were to blame, with their passion to be modern and European—lawn tennis, gardeners, all that consumed money. “A little fun”—that had been the cry among my uncles and aunts when I was growing up. They'd
forgotten that sperm and character deteriorate together. You had only to look at my cousin Nicholas: a noble death but a disaster in all other respects. If you want to have successful children, you must get it right at the beginning. What comes out depends on what goes in. Humans forget that when it comes to insemination; they think that the rules apply only to farm animals.

Or was it the fault of the Rykov ovaries? Too encrusted with the fatty consequences of the good life to get the full whack?

However, had Elizaveta lived and carried Daniel to the full term, to the standard length of twenty inches, which could have been a trial for her narrow hips—

I slipped the key into the great iron padlock of the mausoleum. The door grated on its hinges as I pushed it open.

The smell of my family: cold, musty, like a larder that's been empty for a long time. These people were dead in every conceivable sense. For there to be an afterlife, there had to be a God. And had God existed, there would have been some emanation of His presence: a blue pilot light burning above the door, for example. The odour would have been different. There would have been uplift of some nature.

The coffins were neatly racked according to the various branches of the family. Uncle Igor had an ivory label that said simply: “
Count Igor Rykov, born 18 May 1842 and died 6 March 1917
.” He'd lived for seventy-five years. It was long enough.

“Cheerio,” I said. “Cheerio, all of you. Thank you for your gifts. Especially thank you, Papa. None of you thought such a day as this would arrive. You believed in monarchs, the Church and the values of a civilised world. Well, they're all gone. Cheerio again.”

I left the key at the foot of the door and scaled the palisade into the general cemetery. I found a piece of wasteland not yet cleared for graves. In the centre was a patch of wild lilac scrub. It was dry beneath them. I took out my pistol, wrapped my coat snugly round myself and lay down. It was good.

It's only Russians, with our melancholia, who actually gaze at the stars. Some nationalities are happy with a quick glance, others want nothing more than to classify them by size, brightness or their distance from the Earth. No one spends as much
time in conversation with them as we do. This is because our stars are more brilliant than anyone else's. In consequence, a feeling of intimacy can be acquired. They become our friends. As a matter of fact the stars are a vital part of the Orthodox religion and even the clergy acknowledge this.

All our great novelists have found the night skies an irresistible subject. They call on their services whenever the hero is searching for inspiration or forgiveness. They rarely demand that anyone is slain by starlight or, come to that, by the light of the new moon—though both are possible and happen frequently in real life.

Hands behind my head, I looked into their eyes. I said to them, Is it possible for me to sink any lower without being dead? It's not my fault I was born into this dire epoch. I know that tonight history has been smashed. I know that nothing can ever be the same again. Tomorrow will dawn upon a way of doing things of which not one person in mankind has any experience. The question is, will the old behaviour be of any use to me at all? One must suppose not. However, very few people know anything about revolutions. Only very rarely does a man have a chance to practise. I shall try to act honourably, as my father would have. But there is also this: I wish to survive. Maybe only one of these is possible. Do you know which it is?

I picked up my pistol and aimed it at the Great Bear.

No, don't say, I expect I'll find out for myself. Just help me get to the shore. Don't be ungracious. You've favoured many more unpleasant men than myself. Real vipers. That tick Napoleon, for instance...

The stars eyed me comfortingly, bright with their wry humour, not a bit upset about my pistol being pointed at them. As one, they nodded to me, Get Glebov, then you'll find a real difference in your situation.

It was what I wanted to hear. I turned onto my side and worked a hollow for myself in the dead leaves—pulled my hat down over my ears.

Sleep should have come instantly. But it didn't, and the reason was this: had Glebov seen me at Smolny or had he not? That was the point at which we stuck, those stars and I.

T
HE NEXT
event in the Bolshevik Revolution: the arrest of Alexander Alexandrovich Boltikov. He failed even to get to the border with Finland.

On entering Viborg on the Katarinegata—the cobbles slippery beneath a dusting of snow, the red flag hanging limply from the neck of Torkel Knutson, heroic on his plinth, and the town-hall clock on the dot of ten, exactly on schedule for a tiptop lunch at Helsinki's Hotel Societetshus—he'd noticed the unusual number of soldiers lounging around.

Liselotte was on one side of him. His secretary was in front, with the English shuvver. Liselotte had been uncomfortable in Russia. The Revolution had been the last straw. She couldn't get out fast enough. The nearer they got to Finland, the more she quivered. She'd brought some knitting but had several times missed the pickup stitch her hand was so unsteady. A little before Viborg she put her gloves on so that he shouldn't see the whiteness of her knuckles.

It was she who'd understood immediately why a van was waiting up one side street and a cavalry patrol up another. (Boltikov admitted that he'd been thinking about a plate of oysters.)

“Get us out of here,” she screamed at the shuvver, opening the window in the division and stabbing him in the back with her finger.

But it was the secretary who answered. He smiled as he'd never done before. His face lit up like the morning sun and his eyes, previously so dead, danced like gnats on a warm spring day. He'd shopped them.

The leaders of the Viborg Soviet approached wearing suits and overcoats. Behind marched a company of Bolshevik soldiers. The snow started to fall again, making everything quite silent, even the steps of the marching soldiers.

“Oh my Gawd,” said the shuvver, tipping his plastic-visored cap onto the back of his head.

The secretary got out, briskly and joyfully. The leader of the Soviet embraced him. They all did. He made an ironic bow to Boltikov and disappeared.

The door was opened on Liselotte's side. She clung on to Boltikov, screaming, her arm clamped round his neck. It made no difference. Two of the soldiers were ordered to drag her out. They climbed into the Rolls, treading mud and snow into the carpet on which she had so often knelt to pleasure him.

Defiantly, he lit a cigar.

With infinite gentleness, making emollient clucking noises, as if dealing with a recalcitrant child, they unpeeled Liselotte from him, each clutching finger in turn. No brutality, no ripping. They'd been told to get her out in good condition, and they did.

She was led away. Then he, Boltikov, got out of the car.

Jaw cocked, his eyes unholy in their defiance, Alexander Alexandrovich continued: “The Soviet boss took the cigar from my mouth, had a puff, and handed it to an underling. I watched it circulate among these ignorant factory workers who'd only ever smoked
papirosi.
My Ortega Grande was too much for some of them at that hour. It got wetter and wetter. It can have given no pleasure to the last couple of men.”

Their luggage was in the rear compartment. They made him unlock it and lay his nice pigskin cases in the snow. They forced him to undo the straps himself. He had to kneel on the cobbles in the smart trousers he'd put on for his family lunch.

When they'd finished—his silk dressing gown, pomade, razor strop, stud hook, medicines, and God knows what frippery from Liselotte's cases spread out on the suitcase lids and loudly haggled over—the head of the Soviet put his hand on Boltikov's shoulder, turned him round to face St. Petersburg and said, “Walk, comrade. When you get to the city say to your friends, ‘Greetings from the Viborg Soviet! World Friendship to All!' Now go.”

“I'd only gone ten yards when he called me back. ‘That coat of yours is a good one, comrade. It'll give warmth to a night-worker.' When I demurred, he threatened to have me branded on the forehead, M for
millioner.
Think of it, Charlie. Scarred for life, the flesh all livid and puckered. Later it occurred to me that Lenin might have been planning to have all us industrialists branded. If that had happened I'd have gone up to Pabst, whom everyone knows to be the meanest man in Russia, and said, ‘My dear fellow, you hid it from us so well!' But it would have been poor compensation for the pain. A corpse has more sense of humour than Pabst... The fizzle and then the smell. Horrible! Horrible!

“I didn't want to be seen any more in my smart clothes. I wandered round the station area and found a man who was as fat as I am. I offered him one hundred roubles for the clothes on his back. We did the swap in the waiting room—the firstclass one. He was in such a hurry to get the money that he was stripped before I had my shirt off. He wanted my studs and links too, saying they were part of my clothing. I refused. His clothes smelt. Then I wound his scarf round my face as a disguise and stepped aboard a train back to town.”

There, his first thought had been to establish a new identity. He was on a Bolshevik list, a marked man.

He'd gone to his forger and within a day had become a new man. Then he'd set out to collect his funk money, which he'd sprinkled in small amounts among his business friends.

The idea had been that when he turned up and presented an IOU, they'd pay him. But the reality turned out to be far different. Many of these businessmen had already fled. And the others pretended they didn't recognise him when the only papers he could produce were under a name that was totally unknown to them.