Cold Blood (39 page)

I looked at him, astonished that I should ever have had the idea of putting a bullet into him. I was out of my skull with nerves, that was all, Glebov being so close. I imagined gripping a colossal lead weight in each hand and letting them pull my shoulders down. I slowly expelled my suspicious breath, taking it up into my nose and then pushing it out all humid over the beginnings of a smile.

Jones said, “It's scary having a weapon so handy, isn't it? If you lose your temper, if you even have a bad thought about a guy, there's the answer, bumping against your hip. A man is to his gun as a pig is to his slumbers, it all happens quite naturally.”

He grinned at me, showing everything in his mouth, like a man really pleased with himself.

There was that sensation back again. Beneath the soles of my feet I felt the lip of the abyss. The updraught was making my trousers flap. It was no good saying to myself that danger had been my companion since I went birding on the cliffs as a boy. That was silly, that was the way one became careless with risk.

I said to him, “When this is over, I'm going to make a trip to Grand Rapids and ask a few people if you got born with that smile. You know, came out of the hole saying, ‘Love me, folks.' Maybe no one'll have heard of you.”

“Make sure you get my name right.”

“I'll take a list. Meanwhile you guard my woman with your life. Hear that gunfire? When it starts to roar like a nest of bees
being poked out, you'll know I'm in action. An hour after that I'll be back for her.”

“Then?”

“Not your business. Whistle up a cab and go find Trotsky, that's what you can do.”

S
TIFFY CALLED
to me from the wireless van. He and Joseph were considering how easy it'd be to remove the wireless from its baseplate, whether in fact it'd be possible.

I asked him if he could still transmit. He said, Had I gone crazy, with the Reds just round the corner? I took him by the nape of his neck, squashed him into his chair and turned the switch to Send.

“LOBACHEVSKY MEETING HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE SO NO MONKEY BUSINESS. Send it and don't argue.”

Stiffy said, “Pardon me, but would a man with Glebov's command of English understand ‘monkey business'?”

“He knows what a monkey is. Just do it. I'm tired of being thwarted.”

When he'd finished, I had him unscrew the armature and give me the sending key. I said that when I came back for the girl, I'd be in a hurry. He and Joseph were to follow me in the van, to stick tight up my arse or they'd get lost and then what would happen to them—“Eh, Stiffy, eh? What'll the Reds do to old ginger-knob from Bristol, which name they know only in connection with the grandest hotels in Europe?”

This I said glaring at him from close range. I was fairly certain that somewhere among all his cardboard boxes and tins of odds and ends would be a spare sending key, that, if he wished, he could be up and running again within seconds. But I wanted absolute radio silence from now on. I was going to enforce obedience one way or another.

He agreed, Joseph being my witness and as a Russian understanding everything about intimidation.

Boltikov came roaring up to the monastery having delivered Shmuley and Mrs. D. Kobi stuck his head out of his turret, laughing, so I knew there'd been fighting. He shouted, “Vaska's had it.” I saw that the machine gun in the right-hand turret was somehow lolling. I thought to myself, That's going to be awkward dragging his corpse out, but thank God, he'd fallen on the field of battle—where Boltikov had also been wounded, in the arm. He was steering with one hand, the armoured car bouncing off the topside bank as if he were drunk.

I shouted to Joseph, “
Zhivo
, tea for them both,” and while this was happening learned that Shmuley and Mrs. D. had been set down close to the river and that the last few barges were being unloaded in the godown. A derrick was hoisting the cases of bullion out of the hold and swaying them straight into the rail wagons alongside. The barges were being taken out of the godown as they were emptied and anchored in the river. There was a whole row of them, Boltikov said, bristling with weapons in case Trotsky's torpedo boats tried anything.

“Christ,” he said, as Joseph handed him his tea, “you can do better than that. Bring me the Vladimir. If the monks haven't got a reserve of it somewhere I'll chew my cock off.”

I said to him, “No sign of that submarine they were talking about in Strabinsk?”

He said, “Not even a Bolshevik dickhead's going to sink the gold. Think of fishing it up again, brick by brick. However... a submarine on the Volga . . . well now . . . we should think about that, Charlie.”

I said, “How many barges still to be unloaded?”

“Three at most. From where I dropped Mrs. D. and Shmuley, I could see through the godown from one end to the other. There are two wharves, each with its own railway line.”

“Only one railway is shown on Jones's map,” I said.

“They become one a few hundred yards from the godown. The reason they have two is so they can load and unload from two wharves at the same time. But they're only using one wharf for the gold.”

“So only one of the lines is being used?”

“Correct.”

“We could capture all three barges?”

“That'd be sixty tons. Enough to die for.”

I said it looked like he almost had, nodding at his arm.

Pinked only, he said, and told me how. They'd met a White patrol—it being no-man's-land down there—and Vaska had forgotten he was in a Red uniform. He'd leaned out of the turret to greet one of the patrol, thinking he recognised his brother. That had been the end of him, just like that. In his death throes he'd jackknifed out of the turret and come slithering down the bonnet. He, Boltikov, had—that selfsame instant, no joking— changed down a gear to get the hell out. Whoosh! had come Vaska's bloody corpse clatter-bang past his head. Instinctively he'd bobbed to one side. It had saved his life. If he hadn't, the shot would have hit him slap in the chest.

“Luck's running along beside me,” he said, and gestured as if patting the head of a dog.

“What are you waiting for, Doig?” shouted Kobi from his turret. “He can fill himself with drink afterwards.” He traversed his machine gun through its full horizontal range of 240 degrees, going “bup-bup-bup-bup” like a child.

I wriggled into Vaska's turret. Boltikov waved Joseph away. He was going to keep the Vladimir bottle with him, keep it under close supervision.

As we rattled down the hill, I bowed my head:

“Father in Heaven, Lord of my life this night, look after me. Preserve me from the bombs, bullets, cannon and bayonets of my enemies, from all their shit. Preserve especially my cock. Allow me to come through it in one good working piece. Bring Glebov into my power. Spare my people. Keep the pigs away from my woman. This is the prayer of Charlie Doig with his eyes shut. He knows he has sinned the full roster.”

Coming out of the monastery gates at the bottom of the hill, I beat on the outside until Boltikov stopped. I'd forgotten to check the dynamite. Yes, he shouted back, the box was under his seat, the Bickford cord all over the place as usual, like clothes line.

What about the signal cartridges for Shmuley and Mrs. D.?

“Do you take me for a child?” he yelled. “Yellow, yellow, white, all lying here in the right order. Have a look for yourself.”

Craning my neck I saw them, cartridges as thick as Bologna sausages. I said, “See you don't get them wet. That paper'll swell if you do and they won't fit in the breach.”

By way of a reply he farted, a tinny blast within that car.

I said, “Lay off the Vladimir. Better still, chuck the bottle out.”

He laughed at me, but he drove down to the docks as I'd instructed, warily, not rushing it, so that it would appear to any onlooker as though we'd conquered the place and were on a tour of inspection.

S
TIFFY HAD
told me the latest: the Whites held the docks and the surrounding warehouses. The Czechs, their allies, held all the southern railway system up to the point where they'd run out of men. The northern section of the railway, where we'd entered Kazan, had been the centre of the thrust by the 3rd and 4th Red Armies. These men were pushing south all the time, palpating the Whites at every point, probing for weak flesh.

“Good luck, sir, that's what I say. Good luck to us all, come to that,” Stiffy had said nervously.

The key to the gold was the railway. Ownership of one was useless without control of the other. And the key to the railway was the position of the locomotive that was to haul out the laden wagons. It had to be waiting there with steam up or what the Whites were doing was pointless.

Wholly in doubt was the disposition of the forces around this locomotive. It was here, I guessed, that the White and Czech command structure would be at its weakest. The Whites had the docks, the Czechs had the railway. So who'd be responsible for the actual point at which the two met— at the locomotive?

There'd be tension. The Whites would be afraid that they'd load up the railway wagons only for the Czechs to make off with the gold. The Czechs would be blaming the Whites for not unshipping the gold quickly enough. On the one side would be men too watchful to function and on the other side men shouting, “Hurry, you bastards!”

Were I Trotsky, that would be the point at which I'd drive in
a wedge and work it round, harassing and worrying this jealous, tender junction. It was the obvious place to attack.

Perhaps he'd be there himself: have donned his trademark greatcoat and wise-owl spectacles, emerged from his personal train with his hair standing on end as per the photos, and gone to gloat. He'd be in the shadows. A spare, vicious figure. Five foot seven, 150 pounds of bitterness and spite. He'd think himself invisible. But his spectacles would be glinting red from the flames, the explosions and the gouts of blood that'd start flying when I got going. I'd recognise him all right, Mr. Shitsky.