Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  He slid into the chair beside me. “Indeed, Doig, but what Valenty says is that the locomotive is armour-plated.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” I was already on my feet.

  “Apologies, Excellency.” He pressed his palms together and bowed, his brown eyes glancing humorously up at me.

  I said, “Joseph Culp, you’re a dark dog. Go fetch the lady to me.”

  My peacheroo sauntered up, arched her back, stuck out her breasts—saluted. She was in good fettle, despite that we’d had our first real argument the night before—God.

  A quiet unpretentious God’s fine by me. Like Buddha. When I was in Burma, I’d noticed the locals had a good relationship with him, no fawning or unhealthy behaviour. But to go at it blindly as Xenia did and kowtow to Him as if every minute of your life He was standing above you with His hand on the guillotine lever and if you didn’t have the right answer Crash! and the 140-pound knife’d slice your head off, well, that was patently nonsense.

  (She’d sat quite still, hands folded over her fanny, as I let rip.)

  Moreover, if God was capable of making such evil bastards as Glebov, didn’t He have to have some evil in Himself? How did He know what to put in him otherwise?

  She smiled—I would say pityingly. She mentioned a few things that were central to her beliefs. Hogwash, I said. She smiled again, knelt to say her prayers. Afterwards she asked if I wished to make love to her.

  Of course, I said, and we fairly went at it, continuing our argument by other means.

  Now she said with a grin, “You’ve converted, that’s why you’ve got me here.”

  “My spirituality has always been visible to those who know where to look. Listen, Miss X,” (which I said in English, the letter being an aggressive sound in Russian) “there’s an armoured train at the station ahead. I want it. You and I, we’re going to discover how mighty it’d be as an enemy. I’ll take Valenty and quiz the driver. You see what you can get from the passengers.”

  We stopped to plug a bullet hole in the boiler so that we wouldn’t arrive looking like a cripple. Valenty brought us up casually behind this train with its nice grey locomotive. No whistling at it or getting furious, all very friendly.

  The money was bolting. I knew what was going on as soon as I saw the passengers wandering around. Which they were doing languidly but at the same time looking over their shoulders. Not convinced that the Bolsheviks would actually slit their throats but feeling a good long train journey was a sensible precaution until the storm blew over.

  The question was whether they’d got bodyguards in there with them.

  Valenty and I strolled down the platform. All these refugee aristocrats studied me in their covert way, checking me off against the Romanovs they knew.

  We got to the loco. It was a devil of a thing with a four-wheel bogie and six driving wheels. The armour-plating was backed by two inches of concrete. I wanted it immediately. I lusted after it, yearned to be howling down the open track behind its grey steel baffle plates. No one could put a bullet through the boiler or shoot the driver. In a machine like that we’d pierce the walls of Jericho at the first go.

  Valenty walked over to the cab and engaged its driver in trade talk.

  I leaned against a post and watched the passengers saunter round smoking their Northern Lights cigarettes.

  It wasn’t clear to me why they’d halted in Tulpan, which was the sort of plains town that’s reproduced a hundred thousand times in Russia. One railway station, two churches, four hundred wooden houses of one storey, twenty of two storeys, and mud streets. The main sounds in these places are the wind in the telegraph lines and lonely men shouting at their wives.

  Valenty came over with the driver. He was fat but carried his weight better than Boltikov. One felt that the fat was necessary to him. His name was Yuri Shmuleyvich. “He believes as we do,” said Valenty. “He’ll do anything to defeat the Bolsheviks.”

  We got talking. It turned out that one of the passengers had had a heart attack while dancing and had died, that was why they’d stopped in Tulpan. The undertaker was there. Someone was dealing with the paperwork.

  Shmuleyvich said to me, “If you fart in this country there’s a paper to be signed.”

  “Dancing?” I said. “He snuffed it while dancing?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Xenia working her way up the platform. I’d had her prink herself up with some rouge and a little rose water. She hadn’t wanted to but I persuaded her by saying she’d meet a better class of traveller if she looked the part. That did it: she was a snob, no point in pretending otherwise.

  “Yes, dancing,” Shmuleyvich replied.

  “So you’re carrying musicians, not soldiers, then?”

  “These are the bravest men on the train,” he said humorously, nodding towards the carriage door that was just opening.

  A man, black as the back of a fireplace, six foot six in Uncle Sam pants, dithered on the step. His great white eyes appealed to me: “Mister, can you tell me why I ever agreed to come on this goddam trip?” Behind his shoulder was another much smaller Negro.

  Shmuleyvich, winking, said to me, “Jazz, barin, Americanski jazz. You understand now?” He raised his arms and wiggled his backside. “That’s how he died dancing.”

  The giant called out, “Hi, Shmuley,” and in his long glossy black shoes and short white socks came gingerly down the steps, put his arm round Shmuleyvich’s shoulder and held him tight. “Holy shit, what an asshole of a place you’ve got here. Couldn’t we have just pitched that guy over the side, you know, opened the door and said, Out you go, feller?”

  Shmuleyvich, laughing, not trying to get out of the black man’s grip, said to me, “You deal with his foreign talk, barin.”

  Which I did, and it turned out that the man had died doing a jazzed-up polka and that he’d been seventy-six years of age.

  But this was not the first thing on the black man’s mind. He was so glad to find someone other than his friend who spoke English that he nearly cried. Then, “Now what’s really bugging me is this—man, it’s so good not to have these savages babbling at me—here it is, like I read in the papers back home. What’s your name? Charlie? OK, Charlie, there’s this King of Russia and he’s a really bad piece of work, putting people in prison and shooting them and really treading on them, yeah, pounding them into the ground and stopping them from voting. Then this other guy, another Russki, the baldish feller, comes along and says, Fellers, this old King of yours is a piece of shit and no mistake. I’m gonna give you equality, and land, and education, all for free. You don’t get to pay one red cent. Yup, free! No more stomping, no more bad times for any of yous.

  “I says to myself, Isn’t that to be commended? Look at it how you will, those are great ideas. But what happens? My President and your President and lots of other presidents, they get together and say, The bald number’s a real bad feller, we’ll have to send our armies against him, he’s a threat to the entire world... I mean, Charlie, can you explain that for me?”

  The corpse was lowered from the train. The undertaker appeared holding his hat: the doctor put his on. The first whistle went. The passengers drifted closer to the doors.

  The smaller of the jazzmen said, “Who’d want to have a war over a town like this? I mean, fancy being killed for—”

  “You keep out of it, fat face. I got to Charlie first. Didn’t I, Shmuley?”

  The second whistle went. Shmuleyvich patted the black man on the cheek and walked off to his cab. Xenia glanced at me. She’d trawled through the passengers and was now only a few yards away. A neat white hand was beckoning to her from the train door. She shook her head at him—hatless, oh, that rich swag of hair, worth a fortune at the wig-makers.

  The big man said to his pal, “C’mon, let’s hop back on. I don’t trust these Ivans. They’d dip us in shit any day.”

  The black men waved at me and made a run for the train. The giant scrambled up the steps. White socks, three four inc
hes of bare flesh, bruised to purple by our Russian winds, then the Uncle Sam stripes leading the eye to the long fat crack. The third whistle went and the train began to move as the last of their stripy buttocks, like the flank of a vast tropical fish, toiled through the door.

  The giant stuck his head out of the window. “I mean, Charlie, what does it all add up to? Is the rest of the country as bad as this? Like my friend said, what the hell are they fighting over?”

  His smile and his white teeth grew smaller. Black smoke began to billow down the side of the carriage towards him. Ruefully I spread my arms.

  Twenty-four

  WE SPENT the night at Tulpan getting our hands on a couple of coal tenders. Coal was always a worry. Even a full tender took us only five hundred miles. If I came across a heap of the stuff, I had to have somewhere to put it.

  Also Xenia had to be taken into town to post letters. I said to her, “How perverse, during a revolution.” But the stationmaster had assured her the posts were still moving and she’d seen for herself a couple of trains heading towards Moscow. So she was determined to do it: farewells to her sister and mother whom she might never see again, that’s what she said.

  Then we set out in pursuit.

  You know how it is with time, its metre varies: now plodding, now squirting out the seconds like it’s going to lead you right to the end of the world just as soon as it can. In central Russia it scarcely budges, the country is so featureless.

  However, in the middle of the afternoon the brakes came on, quite gently. Thinking the armoured loco was in sight, I pocketed my Luger and went up to the cab.

  In front of us, about half a mile away down the dead straight track, was a tiny wayside stop. A length of grassy platform, a small shed for waiting passengers, a loading bank—and one would have said nothing else because emptiness was what the mind expected.

  Not so, very much not so.

  On the platform stood a gentleman in a long fur-edged coat, even though it was early summer. God had given him a round red face and long blond moustaches. He was leaning on a knotty cane in the manner of Voltaire.

  To his left were a couple of peasants. Each had a station flatbed on which were lined up a succession of dark blue and dark red leather suitcases, one colour per barrow. They were ranked by size, the largest being nearest the edge of the platform.

  Additionally—astonishingly—in the centre of our track, standing four square on a sleeper was a pin of a woman with foxtails round her neck and on her head a swooping green straw hat. She was waving us down with short, hysterical, flapping motions of one hand. At her bosom, in among the furs, was a dog, only its white head visible.

  Valenty said, “Could be an ambush?”

  Kobi got ready to shoot.

  Valenty: “Run her down, Excellency? This isn’t a refugee train.”

  But I’d spotted a mansion house set back among trees and I remembered Uncle Igor saying that he never spent the night at anyone’s house unless they had a hundred tons of coal in the backyard. I said to myself, Igor, old duck, come to my aid this day and give these people a hundred tons. No, double it. We’ll shift it somehow.

  To Valenty I said, “No, but give her a fright.”

  I’d no idea precisely where she was standing since I couldn’t see round the front of the engine. We could easily have gone a foot too far with a bad result for the lady. But Valenty had taken his side bearings perfectly and when I climbed down I found her anchored to the sleeper, eyes tight shut, the palm of one outstretched arm warding us off, wraiths of steam rising round her as if she were being burned at the stake.

  I lifted the brim of the green hat. She had a pinched, narrow face beneath greying hair. She was murmuring a prayer of some sort. Her lips—I couldn’t tell if she had a deformity somewhere round her mouth or not. They made a strange shape as she muttered away.

  “You can look now,” I said.

  Her eyes opened like a blast of phosphorus—small, greeny-blue chips, nothing soft about them. The dog, a poodle, inspected me.

  She said, “You’ve got to help us.”

  I said, “Why?”

  “We have money.”

  “Coal’s what I want,” and saying this I took her by the elbow and helped her across the rails to her husband. He bent down and pulled her up by the hand. Russian platforms are low to the ground, but it wasn’t dignified.

  She straightened, reasserted herself. “Oskar, it’s you who must explain matters to the young man.”

  He had medals on his chest—good ones, St. Andrew and St. Alexander Nevsky. They swung and clanked as he bowed to me. “Count Oskar Benckendorff at your service, sir, Gustavus Order 1st Class in the Swedish nobility, family resident at this place for two hundred years. My wife—the Countess Delicia, née de Conde. She has always been the braver of us. She was for staying, telling me she’d poke their eyes out. But my instinct for the correct balances in society have prevailed. We are leaving our home. Two hundred years we have worked these lands, two hundred honest years. The present can be so spiteful to older people. But there it is. We must say thank you to the past for what has been good and not become morbid about the bad— not stay growling in our beds. We have decided to travel to Vladivostok. There we shall winter and see how the wind blows. It may be a seven-day wonder, you can never tell in Russia.”

  “And I’m to help you?”

  “Any assistance, however small... I heard what you said to my wife. Please take our coal. Obviously we cannot carry it.”

  I felt sorry for the old boy. He’d seen trouble coming three years before, when Russia had marched on Germany and got pasted at Tannenberg. He’d made it his policy never to have less than three hundred tons of best-quality coal on hand. With that he’d thought he could sit out anything in comfort—could die in peace and quiet and warmth. But it had been the wrong danger he’d foreseen.

  It took us the remainder of the day to move that coal. By the end we were filthy. The last ton we used to fire up the mansion boiler and wash ourselves.

  What on earth had Oskar and Delicia done in that vast elephant-footed cast-iron tub? Did they have swimming contests? We stripped and piled in two at a time; lathering, laughing, singing while waves of black water slopped over the Countess’s lemon-and-grey-tiled floor and disappeared via a trap and gulley into a gurgling cavern that was very soon rimmed with a scum of coal dust. We were like boys. Three hundred tons! The glee that Joseph’s first fart provoked as it echoed eerily off the iron hull was infectious.

  While we were at the coal, the Benckendorffs had supervised the loading of their luggage onto the train, then clambered in and sat down with their books. As I’d shovelled, I’d been able to see them reading. They clearly had no idea about survival. Having ploughed through their Dumas they probably reckoned they’d picked up all the tips that were necessary for handling risk and danger. Russia had lots of educated people in that position.

  I watched them in the train as I towelled myself dry, thinking how well the Countess had done to trap Oskar, who was clearly a decent gent. When I said that her lips were deformed, I meant that she had a square mouth. One could see how this had come about when one saw the exceptional length of her incisors, which were like planks. The mouth had to be like that, pushing her lips out in a bunch, or she’d never have got to speak. The first time Oskar kissed her must have been out of curiosity. Of course she’d swallowed him whole thereafter.

  Joseph’s voice called to me up the staircase (which was a very fine double one, bare wood, the risers being made of a much darker wood than the banisters). He’d set out on a tour of the house to evaluate the status of the Benckendorffs vis-à-vis his old employers, the Rykovs. When I found him he was in the conservatory.

  In stoking the boiler for the bath, we’d also put heat into the pipes of this long high room of glass and iron. The dank, decadent aroma of warm air mingled with rotting humus was straight from the tropics. There was a memory in all this for me.

  Resting my hand on the
back of a warped bamboo chair and having in my ear the plink-plink of the tap that fed a little rill of strange cuspidate rock plants, I murmured to Joseph, “The whore on the boat, the boat on the lake . . . that night in Burma—all night I was at her, a great backlog of lust to be worked off. You can have no idea of my frenzy . . . That was just before I discovered my beetle and became famous. And now this smell—the smell of Burma—the musk of that woman! Oh, Joseph, those were better times! This world we’ve reached disgusts me.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  “At that time I alone held the key to my future.”

  But my jungle experiences were too difficult for a native of St. Petersburg. Either that or they were so far removed from the present as to be completely without meaning to him. “Indeed, but Excellency, look up there! To join the Emperor!”

  He was pointing up at a pedestal of which I could see only the base on account of a cascade of bright green ferns, ledge upon ledge of them. Moving to a different angle, I saw it was a bust of Louis XVI (it said so on the plinth). Looking farther down that gallery of weird spiked plants and bulbous stems and lianas writhing like tortured snakes up into the metal cross ties of the roof, I discovered the Count owned an entire avenue of French monarchs.

  Joseph said, “We could get four more heads on the front of the loco.”

  I said, “Do what you want,” and sitting down at a small round bamboo table, I put my fists to my head.

  The Benckendorffs had lived easefully on their estate for two hundred years amid the public duties of the provinces and the customary sins of the wealthy. Now they were leaving—were sitting in a Pullman carriage with a white poodle named Kiki and were boiling to be gone.

  Already they’d forgotten their comfortable bed, the names of their gardeners and how the conservatory smelt. They’d probably forgotten what they had for breakfast. What was important to them was the future. The calculation having been made, they’d discarded this entire section of the past—had done it mutually, looking into each other’s eyes, like a suicide pact.