Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  Xenia saw it coming. To begin with she refused to listen. “It’s every woman’s nightmare. Why would anyone want to cause pain to a woman when we suffer so much anyway? Only men are capable of cruelty like that.”

  I said in a low voice, “Those eyes of hers—may God have pity on me and never show them to me again.”

  Maybe she’d never understood until then how utterly simple men are. She raised herself onto an elbow. Her huge wise eyes gazed upon me. She traced a path down my nose and round the edge of my mouth. “Go on,” she said.

  “Then I committed an abomination, which was perhaps greater than Glebov’s. It wasn’t a crime or a sin. The God of mercy must surely have looked down at me with approval. But what I did was an abomination. To shoot one’s own wife can’t be anything else. In fact, you could say that of all the disasters that have hit me in Russia, falling in love was the greatest. But she begged me. Do you hear that? It was her wish. Yes, begged... She saw the pistol. Her eyes brightened—the look she gave me was extraordinary. I could never describe it. We said our farewells. She closed her eyes—waiting. I went back a little so as not to powder-mark her skin or cause her fright at the last—in case she suddenly opened her eyes to see how much longer I’d be. She had a mole at the tail of her right eyebrow. I took it as my mark.”

  I wasn’t after Xenia’s approval: I might never see her again. Nevertheless I was like any other man, wishing to be thought of favourably by the woman he’s in bed with. I glanced sideways at her. Her expression told me nothing. She just stared at the ceiling.

  At length she turned her head towards me and said angrily, “That was in March? How could you even think of another woman so soon?”

  “Soon? Is ten months soon?”

  “Yes. It’s not decent. The love you speak of must have been a sham.”

  “You’re the first woman I’ve lain with since her death.”

  It wasn’t good enough for her. “What do you give your women in return?”

  “At my best I’m capable of any sacrifice.”

  “Give me an instance.”

  “I shot Elizaveta.”

  “Is that a sacrifice?”

  “I took the life from the only woman in the world I shall ever love. What else could you call that?”

  Her green eyes interrogated me, just staring into mine in an unnerving way. I said, “Ask me again how I feel about women once Glebov is dead.”

  “That’s me, in case you’re wondering,” she said abruptly, pointing to the photograph.

  I wasn’t. But I was relieved to change the subject. I said, “Do you ever wear jewellery?”

  “No. It doesn’t suit my personality.”

  “Which is? Give me some adjectives to think about during the day.”

  “Number one—tired. It’s a long day for someone on her own. Queuing for food, then work from eight until six with no real break. Then finding—”

  “A man?”

  “And have him eat most of the food? That won’t happen again, Charlie! What comes after Charlie...? Oh, I see, that accounts for the foreign accent... After tired—I don’t know. I’ve never given myself much thought.”

  “I want to pay for the meat. Stay in bed a bit longer. You’ve got plenty of time. I’ll come with you and get you out of any trouble with Zilberstein.”

  “I don’t want to be late. I learn from her. One day I’ll set up my own shop.”

  “So who’s it going to be, me or Zilberstein?”

  “Zilberstein.”

  Then she said, “But you could have taken her to Smolensk, to hospital. The night was fine and the ice hard. You said so. You could have gone like the wind.”

  “The horses were knackered. We’d ridden them into the ground.”

  “Yet you found fresh ones when you wanted to.”

  “I’ve admitted it was a dilemma.”

  “I’d choose a stronger word, whether or not to shoot my wife.”

  “She begged me to do it. The rape—all of them, mind you; the strips of skin razored off her legs. She was at the stage beyond agony. No hospital could have saved her. They had no drugs left, nothing. Do you think I haven’t gone over the scene a hundred times a day?”

  “Are you sure? Charlie Doig, are you absolutely sure? Would you make that declaration on oath to your Maker?”

  “What would He know?” I said sarcastically.

  “God knows everything. It’s His forgiveness that sustains us.”

  I couldn’t tell how sincere she was being. She might have been just mouthing the stuff she learned from her parents. On the other hand it was possible she went to church, knelt, prayed, had visions, believed in everything that was going. I decided this wasn’t the moment to start finding out. Those green eyes— I’d never met them like that before. Cross her and they’d grip you while she was twisting your balls off.

  I said impulsively, “Come on my train. We’ll need a mascot.” But she was clinging to the death of Elizaveta, which clearly fascinated her.

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Misha, Nicholas, Louis and Elizaveta, we buried them side by side in the stable dungheap. It was the only place soft enough to get a spade in. We were working by candlelight. Steam was rising from the pit. It was their souls leaving. It broke me utterly. It was there that I settled up with her.”

  “Then you shot those men...”

  “Yes. It was good. Shooting Glebov’ll be better.” I gripped her to me. “Live your life properly. Have an effect on something. Come on the train with me. You were meant for better than corsets.”

  “You’ve got the wrong woman for a mascot, Charlie.”

  The clock on the chest of drawers chimed seven. She jumped briskly out of bed and disappeared behind the curtain. “Brrr! What would I give for a heater, like you see in magazines!”

  “You’ll never get Lenin to give you one. Equality is all that interests him. Every man as happy as his neighbour, that’s his motto. So where’s he going to get 155 million heaters?”

  She was washing low down, in the warm places, I could tell by the gasps. I said, “My train’ll have hot water throughout the day.”

  The wet sounds ceased. “What?”

  “With me you’ll have hot water all the time. Here’s my plan—”

  “Oh, that again. Listen, the shop opens at eight. The first hour of the day is the most important, when last night’s broken corsets are brought in. Often they have to be repaired by lunch. I don’t have time for your plan.”

  “I’ll pay for everything. You don’t need to even think about money.”

  “If you get killed, what then? I’ll have given up my job. I’ll be stranded in some provincial town, all mud and duckboards. I’m not interested. Kiss your elbow to the idea.”

  She came out glowing, the springy black bush doing handstands. She stepped into her woollen knickers and pulled on a woollen vest. She was speaking before her head came out. “As for finding this man Glebov, it’s not possible. How many people did you say there were in Russia—155 million? That’s one five five zero zero zero zero zero zero—six zeros of humans and you’re going to stumble across him? The death of your woman has fevered your brain.” She was bent at the mirror, teasing out her hair. “Mascot! Only a prick’d say a thing like that.”

  She was going to wear a little dark felt hat today. She settled it carefully—in an instant was the shopgirl on the tram.

  “Lenin’ll always need corset shops. Think of that Krupskaya woman of his, what’s going to hold her in place? Anyway, that’s all I know about.”

  She picked up a tin off the chest of drawers and rattled it at me. “Here we have whalebones from one-sixteenth of an inch to three inches wide. Krupskaya will take the largest, we can be sure. In the next compartment, binding tape. Twenty-four yards a piece, six pieces to the gross. Some manufacturers give you short yardage. You have to watch out . . .” (She wagged the cardboard tape holder at me.) “Here’s stay silk for the stitching... This is my life, Charli
e. Don’t get me involved in your adventures... If you want to shit, you should do it now. I’m leaving.”

  On the street she stood against me and fingered my greatcoat—suddenly looked up. There was great knowledge in those eyes. I couldn’t hold it against her if she believed in God. She said, “A little less of the high and mighty and I might have taken you seriously. Goodbye.”

  I watched her go: a small solid woman in a brown coat and a tit of a hat—a corset seller. No one seeing her would have guessed her secret—her vice, her genius.

  Nineteen

  THE FRIVOLITY and pranks didn’t last long in St Petersburg. Soon from every street vent there rose the hateful stench of Bolshevism. It was the worst sort of craze—a philosophical one, which meant it had to be imposed by force. You couldn’t walk anywhere without seeing a gang of ruffians bearing rifles and red cockades. An ordinary educated man could be accosted and ordered to justify the French novel under his arm or his porpoise-leather bootlaces, in fact the tiniest middle-class thing in his appearance. One morning I saw a man in a polushubok or winter coat, which had a really ancient fineness to it, forced to his knees and made to kiss the boots of one of these men. That coat of his could have come from the Middle Ages, perhaps from some Mongol khanate. The leather was on the outside, scarred and weathered like an old hunting dog. The stitching was still tight. At the neck, the cuffs and the skirt, where the wool was showing, it wasn’t bedraggled as if the man had slept in the coat but was trimmed and combed in the modish way that one sees in portraits of Peter the Great’s courtiers. It was a fantastic coat, still supple, and its owner had been wearing it in the manner it had always been worn, with an upright carriage and a swagger.

  The friends of the man whose boots he’d had to kiss thought it very funny. He was forced to kiss them all, and to do so in a prescribed way, making obeisance to each man with outstretched palms. After this he was hauled up and had one arm of that stylish coat cut off at the shoulder. Then he was sent, weeping silently, on his way. He’d been humiliated in public and the coat, that boorjoi totem, had been ruined. The common man was in the ascendant.

  Boltikov, who was now my permanent guest in the palace, saw what was happening and began to calculate how long it would take for all the stolen treasures to navigate the traditional economic processes and be re-offered for sale—in a different place, with a different owner, maybe in a different shape.

  “We should be there, Charlie,” he said, waving a cigarette around as he reclined in the chrome chair with his feet up and an atlas spread across his thighs. “Constantinople, that’s where the stuff’ll pop up. Europe’s blocked by the war so Berlin and Paris are out. Leipzig doesn’t have the money it used to. Where else is there? No one’ll want to send valuable goods across the Atlantic with German submarines waiting for them. They’ll find their way south. Moscow—Kiev—Odessa, and across the water to the Turk. Whatever the common man can’t eat, drink or fuck he’ll sell. Just think of all those furs and pictures and jewels going down to Byzantium.”

  He leaned forward—“Become a trader with me, Charlie. It’s a chance in a thousand. Think of your Scottish father. Think of your mercantile inheritance. Forget revenge.”

  “How’ll the effendis take to you being among them? They’ll want the business to themselves.”

  “Not with you beside me. They’d soon see things our way if they had to deal with you. Imagine it: the docks at Galatea— a foggy dawn—a fast sloop from Odessa about to berth—the effendis won’t argue if it’s a man like you striding down the gangplank. They respect character.”

  I supposed that Boltikov was missing his wife and boy: it’d be inhuman to believe otherwise. With them were all his most valuable possessions. His factories—gone. Liselotte, servants, the Ortega cigars—gone. Even as we spoke, the common man was trying out his bath, his cellar, his wardrobe, his capitalist shoes and Madame’s jewelled garters, sniffing his pomade, testing his gold cufflinks between his teeth—wallowing in luxury. Boltikov had been reduced to a shred, to a few rouleaux of ten-rouble gold coins that he’d kept buried in his garden. Yet here he was, in all his fat cheerfulness, already up to his ears in schemes.

  I didn’t know whether I liked him 100 per cent. But it was impossible not to feel something positive.

  “Glebov first,” I said, smiling because he’d suddenly reminded me of my boisterous father.

  He crinkled his big face and clapped his hands. “So be it. A tour of Russia! Put an extra wagon on the train. I’ll fill it somehow, and once you’ve dealt with Glebov . . . you know, Charlie, if we managed to collar the Tsar’s gold reserves, even you’d go cool on Glebov. Terrific purity, my friends tell me, and a wonderful red colour from the copper in it. Picture it, gold flaming like a girl’s hair... and, Charlie, just consider for a moment all that purity. If you got a hundred women in the same room, you’d never—”

  “Glebov first,” I said again, laughing.

  “Very well. The show’s yours. But afterwards . . .” He opened his eyes wide and raised his eyebrows as far as they’d go. “There’s good money to be made somewhere.”

  Then he waddled off to see if his father’s jeweller was still in the city. Something valuable had once been left in his safe... His homely thighs brushed against each other as he walked. He had leather facings on the inside of his trousers as if he were a cavalryman. His head moved incessantly to alert him to the dangers from which he could never hope to escape by running.

  In the corridor he halted. His footsteps came padding back. He stuck his head inside the door. “First proposition: there is only one God. Right? Second proposition: there is only one big chance in life. Right? Which do you believe in more, Charlie?”

  Thinking of Xenia, I told him that some people would believe that his two propositions were in fact one, that God was the only big chance.

  He wasn’t prepared to debate that, saying he preferred to think about the Tsar’s reddish gold. I said we’d be moving out in thirty-six hours—at dusk the following day. If he wasn’t at the palace then, we’d go without him.

  Twenty

  GOING BACK to the question of extinction, there were Rykov relics that I very much wanted to take on my train. One day the tide would turn for me and I wished to have mementos of these good-bad times for my children.

  For instance: silver banqueting sconces, a stuffed bear with eyes of red glass, two French kettledrums from Napoleon’s war, banners captured during the Caucasian campaign against Shamil, Uncle Igor’s chrome chair and a life-size wooden jockey in the Rykov racing colours (black with pink sleeves) holding out a tray in which visitors to the palace could leave their cards. They weren’t valuable, but to each a story was attached.

  However, the SR lodgers, whose revolutionary bile was increasing daily, were incensed by the sight of Joseph trundling the jockey out of the palace. It was demeaning to the nobility of man, averred the twats. Having confiscated the figure, they posted an armed guard outside the storeroom, which they also sealed.

  I was not to be defeated. Did they expect me to slice myself down the middle and throw away the Rykov half, to abandon my Russianness?

  My last afternoon in St. Petersburg arrived. It was getting dark. Boltikov—God knows where he’d got to. Joseph, Valenty and I were loading the cart to take to the station. I’d put Kobi on guard duty. He’d taken up position behind the plinth holding up the bust of the Emperor Tiberius. From it he could cover the whole of the front of the palace.

  “Take care of the old Roman. I’ll be back one day. Me or my kids.” The SR leader to whom I’d spoken looked down from the palace steps, at the three of us beside the cart.

  I went on, “Bet you never thought you’d be standing where you are.”

  He had a famished, black-stubbled face—said: “All layers of society should be shaken up once every century. In that way no one bears a grudge for too long. None of this would have happened if more aristocrats had been killed.”

  “Thanks, pal,” I said, thin
king of Elizaveta.

  Relenting, he said, “Take the Emperor with you. It’s nice work. It’ll only get smashed if it stays here.”

  Extraordinarily, he then helped Kobi carry the bust of Tiberius down to the cart. The only suitable place for it was behind and above the driver’s bench, so that he became our figurehead, gleaming palely in the dusk.

  Kobi climbed aboard. Valenty took up the reins. Joseph, who’d gone to the gates, lifted the centre pin and glanced out, up and down Nevsky. He raised his hand. All clear—then he darted over to the flagpole.

  I stood and faced the palace. I saluted it. In the corner of my eye I saw the Rykov flag set out up the pole. In a second— yes, there it was, the searchlight we’d rigged up with a stolen battery. Joseph trained it upon the slinking wolf of the Rykovs. The animal writhed and snapped in the breeze—bared its fangs at the common man. Having saluted the palace again, I saluted the wolf.

  I looked across at my little Joseph. He too was at the salute, crying unashamedly.

  It was far too precious to leave behind. “Take it down,” I said, “and make sure you keep it somewhere dry.”

  “Lupus has had his day,” said the SR man, not having heard what I said.

  “Don’t you believe it,” I said.

  He sighed, the sort of noise one expects from a half-hearted anarchist. “You and I, for instance, our levels of society could have enjoyed a true meeting of minds had circumstances turned out otherwise. It’s the Bolsheviks—and Lenin, they’re the problem. They’re so unbending.”

  To hell with Lenin! Maybe we’d go and the palace gates’d close behind us and a new breed of historians would write kaput to all nobles. But they’d be wrong.

  I climbed on to the cart. “Good luck,” I shouted up to the palace, to all the Rykov spirits that still inhabited it. “You’ll need it with these bastards on the throne. Let’s go.”