The Russia House (2 page)

‘Excuse me, sir. Are you the gentleman from Abercrombie & Blair?’ she asked.

‘Not here, dear,’ said Landau without lifting his head. She had spoken English, so he had spoken English in return, which was the way he played it always.

‘Mr. Barley?’

‘Not Barley, dear. Landau.’

‘But this is Mr. Barley’s stand.’

‘This is not Barley’s stand. This is my stand. Abercrombie & Blair are next door.’

Still without looking up, Landau jabbed his pencil-end to the left, towards the empty stand on the other side of the partition, where a green and gold board proclaimed the ancient publishing house of Abercrombie & Blair of Norfolk Street, Strand.

‘But that stand is empty. No one is there,’ the woman objected. ‘It was empty yesterday also.’

‘Correct. Right on,’ Landau retorted in a tone that was final enough for anybody. Then he ostentatiously lowered himself further into his account book, waiting for the blue blur to remove itself. Which was rude of him, he knew, and her continuing presence made him feel ruder.

‘But where is Scott Blair? Where is the man they call Barley? I must speak to him. It is very urgent.’

Landau was by now hating the woman with unreasoning ferocity.

‘
Mr.
Scott Blair,’ he began as he snapped up his head and stared at her full on, ‘more commonly known to his intimates as Barley, is
awol
, madam. That means absent without leave. His company booked a stand – yes. And Mr. Scott Blair is chairman, president, governor-general and for all I know lifetime dictator of that company. However, he did not occupy his stand –’ but here, having caught her eye, he began to lose his footing. ‘Listen, dear, I happen to be trying to make a living here, right? I am not making it for Mr. Barley Scott Blair, love him as I may.’

Then he stopped, as a chivalrous concern replaced his momentary anger. The woman was trembling. Not only with the hands that held her brown perhaps-bag, but at the neck, for her prim blue dress was finished with a collar of old lace and Landau could see how it shook against her skin and how her skin was actually whiter than the lace. Yet her mouth and jaw were set with determination and her expression commanded him.

‘Please, sir, you must be very kind and help me,’ she said as if there were no choice.

Now Landau prided himself on knowing women. It was another of his irksome boasts but it was not without foundation. ‘Women, they’re my hobby, my life’s study and my consuming passion, Harry,’ he confided to me, and the conviction in his voice was as solemn as a Mason’s pledge. He could no longer tell you how many he had had, but he was pleased to say that the figure ran into the hundreds and there was not one of them who had cause to regret the experience. ‘I play straight, I choose wisely, Harry,’ he assured me, tapping one side of his nose with his forefinger. ‘No cut wrists, no broken marriages, no harsh words afterwards.’ How true this was, nobody would ever know, myself included, but there can be no doubt that the instincts that had guided him through his philanderings came rushing to his assistance as he formed his judgments about the woman.

She was earnest. She was intelligent. She was determined. She was scared, even though her dark eyes were lit with humour. And she had that rare quality which Landau in his flowery way liked to call the Class That Only Nature Can Bestow. In other words, she had quality as well as strength. And since in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves of intuition and experience, he sensed all these things at once and was on terms with them by the time she spoke to him again.

‘A Soviet friend of mine has written a creative and important work of literature,’ she said after taking a deep breath. ‘It is a novel. A great novel. Its message is important for all mankind.’

She had dried up.

‘A novel,’ Landau prompted. And then, for no reason he could afterwards think of, ‘What’s its title, dear?’

The strength in her, he decided, came neither from bravado nor insanity but from conviction.

‘What’s its message then, if it hasn’t got a title?’

‘It concerns actions before words. It rejects the gradualism of the
perestroika
. It demands action and rejects all cosmetic change.’

‘Nice,’ said Landau, impressed.

She spoke like my mother used to, Harry: chin up and straight into your face.

‘In spite of
glasnost
and the supposed liberalism of the new guidelines, my friend’s novel cannot yet be published in the Soviet Union,’ she continued. ‘Mr. Scott Blair has undertaken to publish it with discretion.’

‘Lady,’ said Landau kindly, his face now close to hers. ‘If your friend’s novel is published by the great house of Abercrombie & Blair, believe me, you can be assured of total secrecy.’

He said this partly as a joke he couldn’t resist and partly because his instincts told him to take the stiffness out of their conversation and make it less conspicuous to anybody watching. And whether she understood the joke or not, the woman smiled also, a swift warm smile of self-encouragement that was like a victory over her fears.

‘Then, Mr. Landau, if you love peace, please take this manuscript with you back to England and give it immediately to Mr. Scott Blair. Only to Mr. Scott Blair. It is a gift of trust.’

What happened next happened quickly, a street-corner transaction, willing seller to willing buyer. The first thing Landau did was look behind her, past her shoulder. He did that for his own preservation as well as hers. It was his experience that when the Russkies wanted to get up to a piece of mischief, they always had other people close by. But his end of the assembly room was empty, the area beneath the gallery where the stands were was dark and the party at the centre of the room was by now in full cry. The three boys in leather jackets at the front door were talking stodgily among themselves.

His survey completed, he read the girl’s plastic name badge on her lapel, which was something he would normally have done earlier but her black-brown eyes had distracted him. Yekaterina Orlova, he read. And underneath, the word ‘October’, given in both English and Russian, this being the name of one of Moscow’s smaller State publishing houses specialising in translations of Soviet books for export, mainly to other Socialist countries, which I am afraid condemned it to a certain dowdiness.

Next he told her what to do, or perhaps he was already telling her by the time he read her badge. Landau was a street kid, up to all the tricks. The woman might be as brave as six lions and by the look of her probably was. But she was no conspirator. Therefore he took her unhesitatingly into his protection. And in doing so he spoke to her as he would to any woman who needed his basic counsel, such as where to find his hotel bedroom or what to tell her hubby when she got home.

‘Got it with you then, have you, dear?’ he asked, peering down at the perhaps-bag and smiling like a friend.

‘Yes.’

‘In there, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then give me the whole bag normally,’ Landau said, talking her through her act. ‘That’s the way. Now give me a friendly Russian kiss. The formal sort. Nice. You’ve brought me an official farewell gift on the last evening of the fair, you see. Something that will cement Anglo-Soviet relations and make me overweight on the flight home unless I dump it in the dustbin at the airport. Very normal transaction. I must have received half a dozen such gifts today already.’

Part of this was spoken while he crouched with his back to her. For, reaching into the bag, he had already slipped out the brown-paper parcel that was inside it and was dropping it deftly into his briefcase, which was of the home-filing variety, very compendious, with compartments that opened in a fan.

‘Married, are we, Katya?’

No answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard. Or she was too busy watching him.

‘Is it your husband who’s written the novel, then?’ said Landau, undeterred by her silence.

‘It is dangerous for you,’ she whispered. ‘You must believe in what you are doing. Then everything is clear.’

As if he had not heard this warning at all, Landau selected, from a pile of samples that he had kept to give away tonight, a four-pack of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s specially commissioned reading of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which he placed ostentatiously on the table and signed for her on the plastic casing with a felt-tip pen: ‘From Niki to Katya, Peace’, and the date. Then he put the four-pack ceremoniously into the perhaps-bag for her, and gathered the handles of the bag together and pressed them into her hand, because she was becoming lifeless and he was worried she might break down or cease to function. Only then did he give her the reassurance that she seemed to be asking for, while he continued to hold her hand, which was cold, he told me, but nice.

‘All of us have got to do something risky now and then, haven’t we, dear?’ Landau said lightly. ‘Going to adorn the party, are we?’

‘No.’

‘Like a nice dinner out somewhere?’

‘It is not convenient.’

‘You want me to take you to the door?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I think we’ve got to smile, dear,’ he said, still in English as he walked her across the room, chatting to her like the good salesman he had once again become.

Reaching the great landing, he shook her hand. ‘See you at the book fair, then? September. And thanks for warning me, okay? I’ll bear it in mind. Still, the main thing is, we’ve got a deal. Which is always nice. Right?’

She took his hand and seemed to draw courage from it, for she smiled again and her smile was dazed but grateful, and almost irresistibly warm.

‘My friend has made a great gesture,’ she explained as she pushed back an unruly lock of hair. ‘Please be sure that Mr. Barley is aware of this.’

‘I’ll tell him. Don’t you worry,’ said Landau jauntily.

He would have liked another smile just for himself, but she had lost interest in him. She was delving in her bag for her card, which he knew she had forgotten till this moment. ‘ORLOVA, Yekaterina Borisovna,’ it read, in Cyrillic one side and Roman the other, again with the name October in both renderings. She gave it to him, then walked stiffly down the pompous staircase, head up and one hand on the broad marble balustrade, the other hand trailing the perhaps-bag. The boys in leather jackets watched her all the way down to the hall. And Landau, while he popped the card into his top pocket with the half-dozen others he’d collected in the last two hours, saw them watch her and gave the boys a wink. And the boys after due reflection winked back at him, because this was the new season of openness when a pair of good Russian hips could be acknowledged for what they were, even to a foreigner.

For the fifty minutes of revelry that remained, Niki Landau threw his heart into the party. Sang and danced for a grim-faced Scottish librarian in pearls. Recited a witty political anecdote about Mrs. Thatcher for a pair of pale listeners from the State Copyright Agency, VAAP, till they suddenly emitted wild laughter. Buttered up three ladies from Progress Publishers and, in a series of nimble journeys to his briefcase, presented each with a memento of his stay, for Landau was a natural giver and remembered names and promises, just as he remembered so many other things, with the directness of an unencumbered mind. But all the while he kept the briefcase unobtrusively in view, and even before the guests had left, he was holding it in his spare hand while he made his farewells. And when he boarded the private bus that was waiting to take the reps back to their hotel, he sat with it on his knees while he joined in a tuneful unison of rugby songs, led as usual by Spikey Morgan.

‘Ladies present now, boys,’ Landau warned and, standing up, commanded silence at the passages that he considered too broad. But even when he was playing the great conductor he contrived to keep a firm grip on the briefcase.

At the hotel entrance the usual gaggle of pimps, drug-pushers and currency dealers hung around and, together with their KGB minders, watched the group enter. But Landau saw nothing in their behaviour to concern him, whether over-watchful or over-casual. The crippled old warrior who guarded the passageway to the lifts demanded as usual to see his hotel pass, but when Landau, who had already presented him with a hundred Marlboros, asked him accusingly in Russian why he wasn’t out flirting with his girlfriend tonight, he gave a rasping laugh and punched him on the shoulder in goodfellowship.

‘If they’re trying to frame me, I thought, they’d better be quick about it or the trail will be cold, Harry,’ he told me, taking the part of the opposition rather than his own. ‘When you frame, Harry, you’ve got to move in fast while the evidence is still planted on the victim,’ he explained, as if he had been framing people all his life.

‘Bar of the National, nine o’clock then,’ Spikey Morgan said to him wearily when they had fought their way out at the fourth floor.

‘Could be, could be not, Spikey,’ Landau replied. ‘I’m not quite myself, to be honest.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Spikey through a yawn, and plodded off into his own dark corridor watched by the evil-eyed floor concierge in her horsebox.

Reaching his bedroom door Landau braced himself before putting the key into the lock. They’d do it now, he thought. Here and now would be the best time to snatch me and the manuscript.

But when he stepped inside, the room was empty and undisturbed and he felt foolish for having suspected it of being any different. Still alive, he thought, and set the briefcase on the bed.

Then he pulled the handkerchief-sized curtains as close as they would go, which was halfway, and hung the useless ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door, which he then locked. He emptied the pockets of his suit, including the pocket where he stored incoming business cards, pulled off his jacket and tie, his metal armbands, finally his shirt. From the fridge he poured himself half an inch of lemon vodka and took a sip. Landau was not a drinker really, he explained to me, but when in Moscow he did like a nice lemon vodka to end his day. Taking his glass to the bathroom, he stood before the mirror and for a good ten minutes anxiously examined the roots of his hair for signs of white, touching out offending spots with the aid of a new formula that was working wonders. Having completed this labour to his satisfaction, he bound his skull with an elaborate rubber turban like a bathing cap and showered, while he sang ‘I am the very model of a modern major-general’ rather well. Then he towelled himself, vigorously for the sake of his muscle-tone, slipped into a bold flowered bathrobe and marched back to the bedroom still singing.