Cold Blood (23 page)

From nowhere a woman came running. She had on a white cotton dress and black leather shoes. Behind her, grinning, was a bellhop in the maroon-and-gold livery of the Moderne. She stood at the entrance to the street, shrieking for her dog, which was obviously the King Charles. She reminded me so much of Delicia Benckendorff that I heard this woman shout for Kiki to begin with. In reality it must have been Fifi or Weewee or something. The spaniel, of course unable to move, raised its soft brown eyes to her in an apology.

Boltikov said, “Even the dogs are copying Lenin. Look at how the brutish mastiff has nailed the pretty and helpless aristocrat.”

Blahos said to me casually, “By the way, see that house there with the small window under the eaves? Want new papers or anything in that line and that's where you'll get them. A Jew, of course. You'll pay a Jew's prices. But he's busy. He works late hours.”

Nodding to his guard at the door, he stood aside for us to enter his office. On the walls were large-scale maps of the province and a couple of identification charts of German aeroplanes. A heavy, sweating woman was seated at an upright typewriter, threading a new spool of black and red ribbon. She'd hung its grey oilcloth cover over the back of her chair like a cloak. A corporal was on the telephone. Cradling the receiver, he whispered to Blahos that it was Colonel Zak speaking from Ekaterinburg. “Only a situation report, sir . . . Tell me the number of that regiment again, Colonel?”

I said to Blahos, “You've repaired the telegraph lines a damn sight quicker than anything else seems to happen round here.”

He studied a thermometer which had Celsius in one panel and Réaumur in the other. “It's too hot to make a success of thinking... It's not us who've repaired them, you can be certain of that. It's the Czechs. The General hates having them so close.
He says their energy makes us look like South Sea Islanders . . . Shablin, bring me the exit papers for Doig.”

The woman finished with the spool and rose from her chair. She was solid all the way down. She went into a side room.

Boltikov said to Blahos, “All right, we'll clear off. Now tell us the real reason.”

His face was a study in blandness. There were quicksands all round. At no time since Lenin stood in front of me at Smolny had I been confident that I had truth by its arse hairs. He said, “That's simple, we need every inch of railway track for our troop trains. We've no time for frivolities.”

“Glebov a frivolity?” I exploded. “That murderer?”

Blahos shrugged. “This afternoon we'll be interrogating the Reds captured when we took Ekaterinburg. I invite you to be present. We'll soon discover if they know of anyone named Glebov.”

“Or Prodt, that's another name he uses,” I said. “But that grade of prisoner you're talking about lives in total ignorance of what's happening at the top.”

“As you wish.”

“He may even have a third name. What I know for certain is that he was at Ekaterinburg with the Tsar.”

“You know everything better than we do... Sir, your papers.”

Mrs Shablin raised her skirt to sit down. A gamy flatulence spread through the room. We went out into the heat.

Xenia said in a tired voice, “Nothing is ever as it seems.”

“Being mostly less,” I said curtly.

We couldn't find the street she'd dreamed of for her corset shop and when we got back to the station I learned from Mrs. Davidova that Kobi had succumbed to the reputation of Muraviev as an exciting cavalry officer and had decamped.

I
TORE UP
the permits we'd been given for Uralsk, tore them across and across. “Best thing for them,” grunted Boltikov, sitting opposite. We'd got our hands on some more beer at the Moderne. It was helly hot in that compartment of mine.

“It's the only way to deal with these
chinovniks
—flat-arses,” he said. “It's the clerk class that's brought Russia down. Papers, papers, papers, they stifle a man's desire to do better for himself. Every other clerk should be impaled in public as a lesson to the rest.”

Joseph entered and picked up all the scraps of paper. He read aloud, “ ‘Rail Permit Good for Uralsk,' “ observed that it would be worth money to someone were it pieced together and went out backwards, not disturbing the order of the torn papers, which he'd placed on the flat of a book.

Boltikov went on, “Open another beer for me... That gold, is 690 tons still too much for you to think about?”

A fortnight ago I'd have given him the usual reply: Glebov first. But these doubts I had about ever finding him were growing stronger daily and I said, “We should think about that, you and I.”

And a voice in the doorway said, “Well, 690 tons ain't too much for me.”

It had to be the American, Jones. I gave him a brief look and said to Boltikov, “How's your English?”

“A few business phrases—‘My very last offer.' ‘Twenty per cent minimum.' ‘When dividend last paid?' “

“That about deals with everything important,” the fellow said in English. His voice was so deep and measured that it
could only belong to a really solid citizen. Then he said to Boltikov in Russian, “But I can handle your language. Anything except chess problems.” He said it humorously but slowly, with a strong accent, as if in pain.

He wasn't as tall as I was, but he was well framed, had an open face and brown eyes and hair. He was wearing an army necktie, which made him unusual in Strabinsk.

“Leapforth Jones at your service. Captain attached to Military Intelligence, Section 8. That's the Bureau of Cryptography. The Black Chamber, as we call it back home.”

He looked me over carefully. “I guess you're Charlie Doig. Our friend Blahos has been talking about you.”

He recognised the provenance of our beer, which had on its label the picture of a man in a dark green fedora smirking through a triangular moustache, the sort of expression that showed he was pleased to have made the sale. Jones yelled out of the door, “Hey, Ivan, bring me one of those.” Then he pulled up a chair and said to me, “Anyone who gets fired on by the Reds is a friend of mine. That's what's important to us, to know who's on our side and who isn't. Darned tricky in a place like this. All the coming and going—in these guys' heads, I mean. How to make out what they're actually thinking, where the truth lies—”

Joseph arrived with a bottle. We eyed Jones as he drank from it, trying to divine how much of the sucker was in him. He belched and smiled on us, dazzlingly, teeth like cliffs of chalk. Then, tipping his chair back as a man walked down the corridor, “Hey, Stiffy, I've made us some friends at last.

“Meet my wireless operator, Timothy H. Brown, known by all as Stiffy. My small genius, I call him. Heck no, that came out wrong. My wireless operator who though small is a genius. That's better. Came from your side of the Atlantic once, Charlie.”

Brown wasn't a dwarf but he didn't have to duck for doorways, put it like that. Wide, light blue eyes, and lank, gingery hair that he'd grouped into a few thicker strands raked carefully across his skull.

“Tell our friends about yourself and get it out of the way,” commanded Jones.

Stiffy gave the three of us a vague salute, trying to fit everyone into its scope. Looking at me, “The ‘H' in my name stands for Hardman, sir. So I've been Stiffy from my first day at school, Stiffy on the steamer to the Americas and Stiffy in New York. Now I'm Stiffy in Siberia—sir!” He came to attention and saluted us again.

Jones said, “I meant it when I called him a genius at his wireless. He can read thirty words a minute. If we were sailing across the ocean and saw a pod of whales, Stiffy'd only have to put on his headphones and twiddle a few knobs to tell us what the ninth whale was digesting. Yeah, he's good—the best I know.”

Stiffy said to me: “Sir, it's not difficult. We all speak Morse.”

“Then I put on my thinking cap, that's where I come in,” said Jones. “We do pretty well between us. Well enough to have the President of the United States of America send for us. Himself.”

“So who controls you,” I said. “Uncle Sam or the big White cheese, Kolchak?”

“You bet that's Uncle Sam. The 27th US Infantry'll be landing at Vladi any day now and he controls them as well. Plus he controls Mr Gray, who's our Consul in Omsk, plus another guy down in Samara. Plus a few thousand more here and there in Russia, not wishing to be exact about these confidential matters. To hell with that Kolchak guy.”

Joseph brought Stiffy a beer without being asked. I didn't want to run out of the stuff so I told him to take it back and bring us a samovar. It was my best one, the one I'd brought from the palace, a resplendent, boastful construction from the period of high empire with mahogany handles and a great silver belly on either side that Joseph still polished once a week. In my uncle's time it had always been preceded into the room by a footman to prevent a child knocking against it and being scalded.

“Call me Leapforth, boys,” said Jones, watching Joseph make a space for the samovar. “Christ, that's some urn, a real beauty. Only trouble, Ivan—it doesn't leave much room on the table in case we want to lay out any papers. Just bring us the tea in glasses.”

“Not the same thing at all,” said Boltikov sourly, not having taken to Jones from the start.

“Yeah, I know you Russkis are tied to the old ways, but the tea'll taste the same.”

There wasn't a great deal of room in the compartment, the bed being for me and Xenia and not a fold-up. Boltikov and I sat at the table with our backs to the window, the two Americans opposite.

Jones went on tipping his chair back. It was a good one from the palace. I told him to stop messing it around. Joseph brought the tea and a plate of knish, fried dumplings filled with potato that Mrs. D. had knocked up. When he'd left, Jones leaned back and locked the door.

He took out his pistol, jokingly blew some imaginary smoke from the muzzle and said, “This country's fuller of rats than a bin of wet corn.” He laid it on the table in front of him.

Then, “All the principals being in one place, let's get things clear between us. First, what my good fellow citizens are paying us to do, second, how we do that, and third, how you and us are going to make a cooperation. Yessir, that's how I see it, a multinational effort on behalf of international tranquillity. If you're game, that is, gentlemen. No pressure. Just holler if you want to go your own way... Mr. Boltikov, you say if my use of the lingo isn't clear.”

He took a sugar cube from the top pocket of his tunic and dropped it into his tea. “Now the Tsar's dead, my only remaining commission is to report on the depth of the Bolshevik movement and the balance of strength between the Reds and the Whites. Will Russia become another Balkans? Are there outstanding national leaders either Communist or Tsarist whom our country should be seeking to influence? What are the policies of the Soviet leaders? These are some of the questions to which my government needs an answer.”

He sipped at his tea, grimaced and slipped in another cube of sugar. “I'd rather be paid by Uncle Sam than Uncle Muraviev. Not much sugar at the Moderne... You'll want to know how we can accomplish this. The same way that we know about mostly everything that's happening out here: by keeping our files up to date and our ears open. At the moment our information
comes from the reports that the Red commander in this region files twice a day with HQ. Regimental identification, troop movements, some planning details—you can piece it together quite quickly once you've got the hang of their minds. Mind you, Charlie, they're hot stuff with their ciphers. They used to change them every other day but the trouble with that was that some commanders didn't receive the new one by the due date or were just too plain busy with stuff like fighting. So now they change once a week, that seems to be their routine. At the moment they're using a Variant Beaufort, which is about as low as you can get—”