“That’s the second problem. The first one is to get this dreary business of revenge out of your head . . . But let me tell you the story. When the German war started, our monarch did a wise thing and sent half the country’s gold stock to Samara in case things went badly with the Hun. From Samara it was shifted to Kazan to join up with a small quantity of gold that was already there. That’s how it got to these parts. Then the things happened that we know happened, like the Whites capturing Kazan. Now the Reds want to grab it and the Whites want to keep it and our brave friends in the Czech legion think they’re owed it for all the fighting they’ve done.”
“What’s it worth?”
“United States dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Three hundred and thirty million.”
I said, “That has to be hypothetical. Some will have gone missing. It always does.”
“Wrong word. Celestial, that’s what it is.”
“Weighing? Even a million dollars’ worth sounds heavy.”
“At $17.80 per troy ounce it comes in at 690 tons. Four-hundred-ounce bricks. That’s thirty-three pounds each. The Russian double eagle on every single one. Purity—98 per cent as assayed. As fine as Britain’s. Each brick stamped and dated.”
“Year?”
“Nineteen fourteen.”
“And the reddish colour to it, is it a stigma?”
“No. The British have taken shiploads of it in payment for arms... Why so negative, Charlie? Do you have a bad relationship with money?”
“I was a naturalist. I’ve never had any money.” I couldn’t think why I should tell him about the diamonds in my boots.
Going on: “I’ll tell you what makes me especially negative. Getting 690 tons of gold out of Russia without being hacked to pieces.”
“We don’t have to take the lot. Ten million dollars would start me off. In five years it’d be twenty. Five-year doubling, that’s my rule of thumb. What about you?”
His financier’s eyes were trained on me saying, What sort of a problem is this that you have, and hurry up, and just think of a figure that’ll give you everlasting happiness. Anyway say something, that’s what his impatient stare said to me.
He continued, “You’ve shot Glebov or strangled him or pushed him through the ice. Now what? Going to retire and live out your life in poverty, are you? Of course not. Now’s the time to think about your future. Test the horizon. Think of all the women you want to make love to, the wines you want to drink. Racehorses, bung a few of those in while you’re about it. A decent house or two. Yacht? Of course, with a crew of a dozen and your own flag at the masthead. Don’t stint yourself, man!”
Anyone who can’t admit to wanting money has a blocked nature. But I foresaw trouble with that quantity of gold.
However, he was in no mood to listen. “Glebov’ll be after the gold as well. He’s only got to pop down from Ekaterinburg. Two for the price of one, that’s what we could be talking about here. Looking at it from your point of view, of course, Charlie.”
The door opened. It was Xenia, come to look for me. I kissed the side of her neck, plunging at it. She smelt great, of laundered cotton.
“What were you talking about hidden away like this?” she said.
“Oh, the price of coal,” Boltikov said. But the words didn’t ring true, and my girl stared long and hard at him as he went out into the corridor.
Twenty-nine
WE WERE approaching the Urals, which are the frontier between Europe and Asia, between Russia proper and a lower degree of civilisation. Beside us, bumping up against the railway from time to time, was the dusty old track used by exiles since God knows when—the Road of Sorrows.
Romantically for a change, her nose pressed to the window, Xenia exclaimed, “Look! I can see their footprints of blood. Their tears were so salty they made holes in the ice! You can even see the scuff marks of their chains in the dust. In the ditches are their bones. But their dreams—I don’t know where you’d look for those. Exile, forever and ever: it’s a horrible idea. How their women must have suffered.”
“Often they went with their men.”
“As I’m going with you? Is that it? To Siberia? To a free sort of exile?”
I buried her questions in silence. Exile—the fatal question, the one that had killed Elizaveta, Nicholas, Misha, all of whom I loved. I had difficulty speaking about it. The truth was too deep, even if I could recognise it when I got there. And Xenia was a stickler for the truth.
She was perfect for me, my corsetière. I’d had enough of beauty. What I wanted was a solid, faithful woman: quiet, neither imposing nor annoying. You can find women who are not attractive in a popular sense yet who radiate an inner beauty and a potential for loving a man until the world comes to an end. That was the sort of woman I wanted. I deserved her. I had a lot to give in return.
Xenia was all of those things. I was growing fonder of her every day. Yet there was a piece of grit in our relationship that I couldn’t put my finger on. It never reached the surface. But I was aware of it. Something behind those huge green-grey eyes, something undisclosed. I didn’t think it was to do with our disagreement about God. But there again it could have been. That subject is so vast and delicate that I could easily have dropped a clanger without knowing it.
The matter of exile wasn’t the only reason I got dispirited travelling next to the Road of Sorrows. Lenin had walked it and probably Glebov too, the creature who haunted me. Its existence bore too closely upon the Revolution. It stood as the symbol for our war, for the reason we were tearing each other apart, Russian versus Russian. Moreover, every time we rounded a bend and found it appearing before us, the sight of it would provoke those ardent Tsarists among us—Mrs. Davidova, Joseph and Shmuleyvich—into the most pessimistic discussion imaginable concerning the fate that awaited the Tsar and his family and what the repercussions would be for all the ordinary, God-fearing people of Russia.
It got me down. Where was the end to it all? Life after Glebov—what would it look like? Where would I fit in? How should I prepare myself?
In this way I started to think more closely about the Tsar’s gold. And I was still thinking about it when we steamed into Strabinsk, the headquarters of General K. I. Muraviev and the 6th Siberian Army. The date: the evening of 26 July 1918.
Strabinsk was very much a frontier town. Colonel Zak, though wounded and obliged to lead his Czech legionnaires from a hired droshky, had captured Ekaterinburg the day before. A rumour was now spreading that he’d found evidence that the Tsar had been murdered. Drunken White soldiers were roaming the streets on the lookout for women, a fight, tobacco—mischief. Their officers were shooting anyone they didn’t like the look of. Gunfire echoed through the dusk, and women’s screams.
Boltikov and I kept to ourselves as we made our reconnaissance. In the end we found a man sober enough to guide us to the house of Muraviev’s aide-de-camp, whose name was Blahos. By then it was late. Blahos, who was not over thirty and had a weak mouth and waves of auburn pomaded hair, was down to a vest and cavalry breeches, scarlet braces hanging below his waist. He had a female companion. I told him who I was and requested an appointment with Muraviev the following morning.
“Busy, busy—can’t you see?” He must have been from our borderlands, maybe from Galicia with a name like that.
We were to return in the morning. He already knew about me—said I was a troublemaker. He’d obviously heard about the Fokker’s attack on the train.
We looked vaguely for somewhere for Xenia to start a corset shop, that being a constant desire with her, had a beer in Strabinsk’s big hotel, the Moderne, and returned to the station.
I kept guards posted throughout the night. Soon after dawn, Boltikov came and woke me. The night had been so hot he’d had difficulty sleeping. He said, “Muraviev won’t want us here. The reason he’ll give is that you’re too dangerous to have around. Because the Reds are obviously after you and that’d make trouble for him, that’s what he�
��ll say. But the real reason is the gold. He’ll be in on it. Same as Glebov. Doesn’t want the competition.”
I muttered, “Christ, are we going to have to stand in a queue?” Then I nuzzled up to Xenia, both of us naked in the heat, and went back to sleep.
Thirty
BLAHOS WAS waiting for us outside the Moderne, a creamy, three-storeyed building that took up the whole of one side of the main square. The sun by then was brilliant, almost white in colour. The shadows in the folds of the Tsarist flag above the hotel were so harsh that it appeared to be made entirely of black cloth. The morning breeze had died. By mid-afternoon it’d be stifling. It was a typical Siberian summer’s day.
He saluted, to put us at a loss, and bowed insolently to Xenia. He said to me, “I am instructed to tell you that the General does not wish you to remain in Strabinsk. He has given your train priority and immediate clearance to Uralsk, which is as far as his jurisdiction reaches. You are to leave by midnight.”
“Why’s that?” said I.
“The man you’re seeking is operating in the area to the west of Uralsk. So the reason you have come here is no longer valid. Another reason is the murder of the Tsar. We only await word from the Supreme Commander for our foremost regiments to march forward and afflict the Bolsheviks with such a wall of flame, bomb and bayonet that they will be wiped from the earth. In the circumstances, your presence will be a distraction. Those are the reasons, Doig.”
“Sure there’s nothing else?” Boltikov asked.
“Nothing.” He bowed, showed us his pink scalp beneath his crinkly hair. “Come to my office, please. Your exit papers need to be dated and stamped. They must also carry your signature as well as mine to be in accordance with the General’s regulations.”
We fell in behind him, trudging across the hot square with the hotel behind us.
A troop of round-shouldered cavalrymen appeared, kicking their nags along. Many of them had strips of linen tied over their mouths against the dust, which was hanging in the air like a tattered brown curtain. The horses moved wearily, not picking their hoofs up properly, behaving like slippered old men. Their heads drooped: they were not even interested in the jangle of their own harness. Everyone was listless, everyone was expecting the worst.
“These foremost regiments of yours are quite something,” I said to Blahos.
Only the small, shoeless boys who were running behind the horses to scoop up the dung had any energy. They were going to dry it and sell it in cakes for fuel.
A few minutes later and another troop went past—then a third. There were about twenty men in each, some with rifles and some without. None were carrying lances. One could never have said what regiment they were part of.
When the dust collapsed in the intervals between them, one could see on the wooden sidewalks men curled up asleep, or begging or praying or smoking or arguing or just watching all the things that will happen in a revolution when everyone is helpless except the sponsors, in whose interests this helplessness is. Homeless mothers were giving the tit, at the same time flapping at the flies that swarmed over the milk dribbling from the infants’ mouths—
I want to say more about these flies, which were making everyone’s life a misery. They were small, about the size of a spring raindrop and extraordinarily quick. I think they were Sarcophaga carnaria, or flesh flies. It was impossible to say for certain without a microscope. To attempt to kill them was pointless. I only ever saw White officers trying to do that and took it as proof of their stupidity. The sole solution was to ignore them. But this was difficult for men, and here’s the reason. Whenever a man pissed they gathered round his cock, even settling on it—for the usual reason, that the ammoniacal smell reminded them of rotting flesh, from which they draw their protein. No blame can attach to them for this: it’s what nature taught them to do. But let me say that the tickling sensation of their feet is extraordinarily disagreeable. I’ve often thought of the diseases they carry and even woken in the night convinced that what I was feeling was an egg being hatched in one of my passages. Once this has entered your mind at two in the morning nothing can come between you and the ravages of syphilis. Boltikov also suffered the same discomfort.
My girl, however, was untroubled by them.
Blahos turned and said to me, “I’m sure that Jones, the American cipher expert, will confirm that People’s Commissar Glebov is not in the province. Nothing gets past him. You’ll find him in the Moderne.”
We walked on. Blahos said in an aggrieved tone, “He has a room to himself. So does the other one. They always have clean clothes.”
“Where’s he keep his wireless stuff?” said Boltikov.
“At the station. It’s in a wagon, heavily guarded at all times... Down there, that’s my office.”
Nothing could have been more dismal than the centre of Strabinsk on that day, when people were still digesting the news of the Tsar’s murder.
Over there: a mongrel licking the face of a child sleeping on a mat—guiltily, glancing up every few seconds.
Beside it: a man sitting on a stool and begging—holding out a tin. One temple had a terrific dent in it, like a dew pond, and his eyes were completely skewed. His tongue was hanging out in a great pink strip—or what would have been pink had it not been covered with flies. I don’t know how he took food. Maybe it was only liquids. But managed he must have, for he was a fleshy fellow.
Xenia wanted to give him money but we wouldn’t let her, saying that the man was faking it, how else could he be so fat.
Still on dogs: on the sidewalk leading to Blahos’s office the ugliest mastiff in Siberia was humping a gasping pop-eyed King Charles spaniel which had a blue ribbon round its neck. We had to step round them. The mastiff had an identically guilty expression to the mongrel licking the child’s face. It was going at the spaniel with the desperation of a dog experienced in the ways of man and fearful of being booted off before he could spill his seed. Its tongue was hanging out of the side of its mouth, which gave it an additional expression, one of conceit. Its hot yellow eyes darted left and right as it worked its loins.
As we drew level, the dog spent itself, arching its head upwards and giving off an eerie howl. “Wolf in it,” Blahos said.
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. Th
e 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.
Thirty-one
Cold Blood Page 14
