Boltikov was the driver. With Mrs. D. and Shmuley in a turret apiece, I had to squeeze in beside him. Getting in and out of those Austin armoured cars was hell. Only a snake would have found it easy. I was on the point of inserting myself (which had to be done feet first) when Stiffy shouted over, “Can’t read this, sir. Is it Lola? What comes after that? Lola who?”
“Lola shit. Lobachevsky, idiot. Has a statue near the French Hotel, off the main street. Where I’m planning that Glebov and I will meet. You cock that up and I’ll strangle every breath in your neck. Repeat the guy’s name.”
“Lobachevsky, SIR!”
Boltikov engaged gear as I slipped in beside him. The windscreen was open, up on struts, and I kept it that way. Boltikov had brought one of the machine guns from the train and had Shmuley rig it up so that it could be fired from the driver’s seat.
We went rumbling up the stony lane. When we reached the top of the hill it was to find the whole of Kazan revealed to us.
“A gun emplacement up here and you’d soon force an enemy out,” I shouted to Boltikov over the roar of the engine. “This is where Trotsky should be.”
Which made me wonder why the Reds hadn’t made a beeline for it, but it was too late to turn back now as the monastery’s iron-studded gate was bang in front of us and if a regiment of Bolshies were only waiting until they could see the whites of our teeth, they’d be opening fire any minute now.
Boltikov was fingering the gun, wanting to give the gate a burst. But I knocked his hand away. We halted facing the gates. Boltikov said, “They’ll open inwards?”
I pointed at the judas gate in the left-hand one and told him to cover me.
Inside was a small wooden lodge house with a window to receive food and alms and all that keeps a monastery functioning and monks plump. Peering in I made out a night-watchman, asleep in front of the remains of a coal fire. Not an old man, but getting that way. I rapped on the glass. He gave a great start, looked around in alarm and seized his rifle.
He came out full of hostility. I said if I’d been a Bolshevik I’d have shot him as he slept. He quietened down, and a small present of money completed his surrender. He replenished his fire and as he did so began to tell me about his previous job, which had been keeping the birds out of a grove of apricots with a wooden rattle, how his son had been his assistant, how the grove had belonged to an Armenian, how it had been valued at fifty thousand roubles per desyatin, how that was a lot more than the value of the monks’ apple orchards—
The door behind me flew open. It was Boltikov, angry as a swarm of bees. “What are you doing, for God’s sake, reciting the Bible? You tell us dawn, and then slow everything down yourself. The horse is here, with Kobi and the woman. Come on, man, come on.”
“How many monks are there?” I asked the nightwatchman.
“Eleven, Excellency, and the Archimandrite. I was coming to that.” He bowed to me, palms conjoined below the tip of his brushwood beard.
Boltikov hustled him out. Lame and muttering, he shuffled over and unbarred the gates. Kobi riding beneath the old vaulted archway with Xenia hanging onto him, the old man took his bow so low that you’d have supposed he’d mistaken my Mongolian killer for Christ the Redemptor.
He wanted to get going with more stories but I grabbed him. Gesturing round the compound, I said that if he wanted to live, he should tell me what the buildings were used for.
On the north side was the refectory, dormitories and offices, a long low building on two floors. On the other side, its towers, turrets, crosses and cupolas lording it over the city, was the main church of Zilantov—All Souls.
There were no lights showing anywhere, not even a glim where some late-night praying could have been going on. In fact, that nightwatchman could have been the greatest humbugger in existence with all that stuff about guarding apricots: there could have been a thousand Bolsheviks lying in wait for us. At any moment we could have heard the snickety-snick of their rifle bolts driving home the bullet. At any moment, Glebov’s soupy voice, “At last, Doig.”
We were grouped in the shadows of the gateway, the four of us and the horse. Behind was the armoured car with Shmuleyvich and Mrs. D. The gunfire down at the wharves was brisker than ever.
Boltikov nudged me. “A racing man would give longs odds against any of us being alive in twenty-four hours. Just a feeling I have.”
I said back to him, “Yeah, the numbers aren’t particularly in our favour. Any time you want to quit—the train’s down below. I don’t mind.”
Now whispering in case there really were a thousand Reds in front of us, he said, “You’re a bastard, Charlie. Not one of us can leave and you know it.”
“You could get killed if you stay.”
“You’re crazy. This whole business with Glebov and Elizaveta has rotted your brains. It’s mush, that’s what you’ve got in there now. I should have got out when I could—should have jumped from the train.”
I didn’t mind what he said. After a year and a half I’d got within maybe a mile of Glebov—and I wasn’t going to give up on him now. On this day, 7 September, I’d been born and since I couldn’t have myself a cake with thirty candles I was going to have Glebov’s head, and furthermore I was going to help myself to a pinch or two of the Tsar’s gold so that in twenty-four hours I was not going to be a corpse thank you very much but at the helm of the future, which’d make a change so help me God it would. I may have been crazy. But I was doing all right so far.
“Go, conqueror!” I shouted at Tornado and whacked him on the butt so that he reared and gave my girl a nasty turn.
The cobbles crackled under his dancing iron-tipped hoofs. The walls behind which the eleven monks were enjoying their last manly pleasures before the avalanche of atheism arrived, threw back the echo. Lights were winking in the maddening sky—the green and red tails from signal rockets. Something was about to happen down at the wharves.
Kobi brought Tornado curvetting back to where I stood. Xenia had recovered. She called down to me, “Thank you, Charlinka, thank you from every vessel in my body. Such a place has always been my dream.”
“For Christ’s sake listen to that,” muttered Boltikov, looking at Xenia in disbelief. Then to the nightwatchman, “Hey, whatever your name is, toll the big bell, let’s get some action round here.”
The sound made me shiver, that big-bellied pot of iron from the time of Peter the Great booming through the violet night. Even the Marxists down at the river must have had second thoughts about God on hearing it.
Heads appeared like magic from the casement windows of the dormitory building, all shaggy-looking as if they’d been taken completely by surprise, as if they’d never heard a single rifle shot and knew nothing about a war going on.
“God will protect them,” said the nightwatchman mildly.
From a window in the central part of the building, which jutted out from the rest and was probably the council chamber, a thin imperious voice called out, “What is it, Sergei Sergeivich? Have the dogs of Satan come for us?”
I strode over and stood a little way out from him. Eyes closeset above a bent and bony beak and a cleft chin stared down at me. He had to be the Archimandrite. “Well, have you come to shoot us? Is there enough light to shoot accurately or do you expect us to provide candles?”
“Old man,” I said, “stop your nonsense. I have a train waiting for you below. It has coal, some food, and the firebox is still hot.”
“Where’s it going?”
Kobi, joining me on foot, said, “So much for staying in Kazan with his God.”
“Strabinsk—Irkutsk—then America if you feel like it. It’s yours. Go wherever you want.”
Kobi: “That way you’ll get to keep your guts inside you.” The abbot fellow shouted down, “Why are you doing this?”
“Want me to change my mind? Want a taste of martyrdom?”
He looked around, I suppose to gauge the feelings of the monks. But the other heads had all vanished, every one
of them. They weren’t going to miss the chance to escape. He said, “I see. This is what the skunks were always after, to save their skins. It’s being left to me, God’s ambassador, to proselytise among these Communist heathen—”
“Let me shoot the buzzard,” said Kobi. “That’ll make them hurry.”
“But don’t hit him,” I said, and as the sound of the shot died away I turned to the nightwatchman: “Count them out for me. I want the place emptied.”
They assembled in the courtyard. When they were all spoken for, I sent them waddling down the track with their suitcases and homespun grips. One had a carpet flexing fore and aft of his shoulder, another was clutching an ornate samovar—an heirloom never to be abandoned, like my Rykov flag.
“God go with you,” I shouted, in particular to this man with his samovar.
The Archimandrite, going last, was pulling a handcart. “Our holy books,” he said. He embraced and kissed me. “God will reward you. May you scatter our enemies.” He faced the monastery and bowed to it.
The nightwatchman said, “But my wages—”
“Take them in kind. There’s plenty of stuff lying around,” said the man and then he fairly scampered off, the cart bouncing behind him.
Boltikov said, “Why did you do that, Charlie? How are we going to get out if things go badly?”
They were all here now, including Jones and Stiffy with the wireless van. “Listen up,” I said, “that’s a fine question Alexander Alexandrovich has just asked. The reason I gave them the train is this: so that no easy way out is left to us. We have to succeed. If we don’t capture a gold barge, we’ll die here.”
What I didn’t say was that that train of ours had no chance of getting out of Kazan without being attacked by the Reds. Trotsky would snap it up and then those monks’d be dead soldiers of Christ.
Fifty-one
SHE’D CHAFED, she said, her skin wasn’t used to that sort of thing—and sat down on a bench with her thighs parted.
I wanted to leave and get on with the business. But—this was a bad few moments for me. Fact was that I’d removed her from her straightforward life in St. Petersburg, had made her follow the flag almost to Siberia, and was now going to dump her in a monastery under the guardianship of Smiler and a nightwatchman whose last job had been scaring birdies off apricots.
Something greater was owed to her. Marriage would square her away when the time came. But Odessa was fifteen hundred miles distant and none of them likely to be peaceful. While now was now and Trotsky and his army of rapists were at our heels. She was risking her life—
“You should have left me,” I said, taking her hand. “Said, ‘Goodbye, Charlie,’ and found your way back to St. Petersburg.”
The idiot nightwatchman was hovering around us instead of going to look for valuables. He started up, “Their bees, that’s what they were most concerned about, and the profit from their skeps. The monastery honey! Big money in the city, barin! In the summer they’d sit where the lady’s sitting—”
“Scram!” I shouted at him.
“Leaving you... yes, I’ve often thought about it,” she said, yawning. Then in a light, dreamy voice, “The fighting, it seems unreal from up here. In fact, everything has been unreal since I left home... Oh, I’m so sleepy.”
“Give in,” I said. “There’ll be a bed somewhere for visitors. Jones’ll wake you up when the time comes and then we’ll slip down the river—invisibly—with the hand of God pointing the way—and—and God at the tiller also.”
I believe I’ll remember it forever how she looked at me, this girl who’d rescued me from the most horrible of my memories and who now sat on the bench with her chafed thighs, those eyes staring up at me—those great balls of eyes, more out than in, fantastically soft in their grey green, which was like the underdown on a finch that’s its final and most secret layer of warmth, the eyes which were completely heart-conquering and pleading for love, protection, babies and steadiness in a man. Everything about her was soft at that moment: lips, cheeks, eyes—her whole wonderful and uncommon face—which characteristics were magnified by the great bundle of her hair, on which Moses could have floated for months.
She said, “But in reality I could never have left you,” and put her other hand over mine. “Don’t be impatient with me. I can see it in your eyes. Open them wider, I’m not a Red about to shoot at you. Look at me, Charlie.”
I said—I’ve no idea what it was.
Then she said with such sweet simplicity that my breath fell back into my lungs as if it had tumbled down a staircase, leaving my brain gasping for air, exactly the same as when I clinched it with Lizochka—she said: “God knows but you’re a hard man to love. But I love you, I love you a million times over. Perhaps it could only have happened in these circumstances. Living in an apartment would have been fatal to us.”
She paused for my rejoinder or for some movement. I tightened my grip on her hand. The small-arms fire swelled and faded down at the wharves. Boltikov should have got Shmuley and Mrs. D. there by now. They’d be picking their way through the abandoned stores and the rubbish and the stunted alder bushes on the river’s edge...
She went on, “Yet at the same time I despise myself. There are limits to what a woman who has no money can do. Remember that always. Whenever you think of me, Charlie, say to yourself, But she never had a chance to be the woman she really was. Promise? Say it out loud, then—”
“Why, Colonel Doig, this is a great castello you’ve got yourself up here. I’ve been in a few places since I left Grand Rapids but this beats them all. Some money in religion, I’m athinking—”
I said to the brute, “Thanks for knocking.”
“Hey, did I interrupt something? But you know, Colonel, this is no time for spooning. That’s for idle folk, that’s what me and the little lady’ll be doing while you go out to work. Lean on the battlements and watch the pretty lights, shall us, lady? Quite a spectacle down there. Glad I don’t have to be part of it.”
“How’s Trotsky to make contact with you, Jones? You going to wave flags at each other?” I said, getting back to the job.
“Don’t you go worrying your head about me. These Reds, they’re not short of a dollar or two between the ears.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Figure of speech, old boy.”
Suddenly I had the feeling that something had passed out of my hands. I’d been nudged over and someone else had taken a grip on the lever. Was there another issue of which I knew nothing? Was it the rustle of betrayal I was hearing?
I searched Jones’s face for a sign of the dagger—some lack of control round the mouth, an aversion of the eyes, impudence, satisfaction, I wasn’t sure what.
Stiffy came lounging up, saying he and Joseph had got the wireless ready for removal from the van and what next. I told him to go and find something else useful to do and to bloody well keep his helmet on in a battle zone—speaking from the corner of my mouth, not leaving off my scrutiny of Jones, not giving him the chance to change his face.
Xenia now said, Where was this nice warm room for her lie-down, and I had difficulty concentrating on that as the thought was ripping through my mind, But is Stiffy also part of the betrayal? Are he and Jones acting in consort, partners for Uncle Sam in some act of political chicanery? It was queer that the two of them should have been sent on a mission to the centre of Russia with only book knowledge of the language.
I looked at him, our ginger-haired Peter Panski... I thought, If Stiffy, why not Joseph, why not Boltikov? Could they all be against me?
I thought, Shoot first: shoot before you’re shot. What was the point in thinking of myself as ruthless if I wasn’t prepared to be ruthless? I looked round wildly. They had me surrounded: were obviously waiting for a signal. Jones would be their leader—that “old boy” stuff. I thought: I’ll shoot Jones and see where it gets me.
I went for my pistol holster, scrabbling at the metal catch.
“Doig!” protest
ed Joseph, just managing to get a tray with a glass of tea on it out of the way of my elbow. I looked down at him, at his slight, dark, upturned face. The tea was strong and at the bottom, glowing sullenly, was a huge clot of the monks’ cherry jam.
“You need it, Doig. You are our leader.”
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.”
Cold Blood Page 24
