White Blood

by James Fleming

  His men edged closer to him, bunching for the fun. The horses jangled their bits, tested the iron of their hoofs on the cobbles.

  "That's what's going on in this part of Smolensk. But we could change our minds, Mister Friend-of-the-nobility. We could catch cowards instead. So you run off to your dainty-arsed count. If the street's not empty by the time I've picked my nose I'll have my men whip the scabs off your back as was done to our Lord Christ."

  I ran. I ran like anything down the deserted street and leapt into the cab. It was already on the move.

  Kobi said, "They'd have minced you."

  The cabby said, "13th Army Corps. Every one a Satan. That's why you don't see many women in the street these days."

  I said to him, "Why did you say it was the dynamite store? Terrorists would have stolen it, not blown it up."

  "What does it matter where it was? The bolsheviks are under everyone's bed, that's my meaning."

  I told him not to speak like an idiot. So he repeated himself, slightly differently. "But, barin, what does anything matter? Look at my horse's ear. Most of it's gone. Has anything about the horse changed because of it? Is it less of a horse? Of course not. You or I, intelligent men like us, would say an ear is important to a horse. We'd be wrong. So if an ear doesn't matter, what does?"

  He'd bought the animal from the cavalry, at their annual clean-out. It had been used to give recruits sword practice at clay figures placed on top of a line of posts. The riders had to gallop weaving through the line and take the heads off the figures first on one side, then the other—forehand and backhand. "What they say, those Cossack barbarians, is that if you swing the blade properly it goes right through the clay so cleanly that you'd never know it had touched it. The blade sings, that's what they told me. But the man who had this horse was a clodhopper and he swiped one of its ears off. So it had to be sold. Has it made a difference? Not a pennyworth. See what I mean? Nothing matters really."

  I said my friend Mikhail Baklushin at Zhukovo had chickens missing their legs. But the cabby wasn't interested in that, only in what he was talking about himself.

  Thirty-nine

  We exchanged a winter's afternoon for the darkening forest. The road wandered in five or six tracks to the ford over a deep-cut stream. We went awkwardly down the bank, through water that came to the axle hubs, and up the other side. The tunnel of trees stretched in front of us.

  These were Misha's firs; straight, trim and correct. Snow clung to the branches. They sloped gracefully away from the trunks like skirts and their tips swept the margins of the road. Since Misha drew an annual income from them the road was kept in reasonable shape for the timber wagons—a new skim of road metal, properly built culverts, a top-side ditch. We bounced and jolted on the frozen ruts behind our one-eared horse. The two coaches and the luggage wagon had left faint marks in front of us in the snow.

  After two miles we came to the end of Misha's plantation. Now the ancient style of forest took over: birch and oaks— white on dark, slim on stout—and the chestnuts that knocked Timofei's hat off in the summer.

  We hadn't gone more than a short distance when Kobi said to me, "Count Nicholas is coming. Galloping."

  "Where? You're seeing things. He'd never leave the baggage alone with the carters."

  I was slumped in the back of the mildewed cab with my arms crossed and my chin tucked into the top of my greatcoat.

  The day was closing in on us. The light sprawling through the oaks had a green tinge drawn from their bark. Nothing was growing under the trees except brambles, stunted berries and those quaking mosses that are fond of bog water. There was a suggestion of sprites, of an awfulness to match my mood. That's why I told Kobi he was seeing things.

  "You wait, Doig," he said.

  The cab-horse flickered his surviving ear.

  "There," said Kobi, leaning across me and pointing.

  The cabby hauled in, pushing to one side of the road to give Nicholas room. "Someone's in a hurry," he said.

  Through the dank underlight Nicholas galloped. We heard his shout. He disappeared from view as the road went round the contour and cut into the back of the ridge in front of us.

  "Broken axle," said the cabby. "Coach gone off the road, bound to be."

  The pale flash of Nicholas's shirt: why should he be riding in shirt sleeves in January? And it was never the axle. Timofei was a stickler for inspecting them.

  Then his face was at the window, his sweating, frightened, haunted face. His neckcloth had gone, his collar was wide open. Blood was on his neck, printed in fingermarks, and on his forehead. It was on his hands, which looked like meat, and on his forearms and God knows how, on the white blaze of his crazy-eyed horse.

  He leaned panting against the side of the cab. His mouth filled—he turned his head and vomited down the door panel. He spat out the bits: wiped his mouth on his arm.

  "Have you got a pistol?"

  I showed him my Luger.

  "Then for mercy's sake hurry up and shoot the animal. The bastards! It must have been down a culvert and triggered by someone hiding in the wood. I'm going to town for the soldiers. We can catch them yet. The bastards! The cowardly stinking suki!

  He rammed his spurs in and disappeared into the firs.

  "Dynamite store be damned—as fast as you can go," I shouted at the cabby.

  His beard went lop-sided as he produced an ingratiating smile for us. Now was the moment the fool chose to argue, believing he'd got us in a pinch. Bolsheviks—police—soldiers—papers— his permit—the endless trouble for him and his family . . . thus his wheedling as he sat in front of us on the box, not offering to budge. So I got out one side and Kobi the other and we slung him down the verge and into the brambles where he set up a great yelping. Kobi took the reins. One-ear went well for him, head up and looking all around it. I expect it remembered having been in the cavalry from the smell of the blood. A bugle call would have done just as well.

  I'd say the time was about half-past three on this January afternoon when we reached the scene. A little sunset pinkness had crept into the sky, an underlay of fleshy tints behind the drifts of grey. In the glade where we halted, the air was perfectly still and green, and bitter with the stink of cordite.

  In front of us was the luggage wagon, deserted. Then the carriage Nicholas and the steward had been in. Then the wreckage.

  No living person was visible. First thing I said to Kobi was, "Where are the baggage men?"

  "Legged it," he said without hesitation, surveying everything.

  The bomb had been placed in a culvert that took the stream under the road where it made a steep bend. That way the coach that Andrej and Uncle Igor were in would have been going at its slowest. To judge by what was left of the wreck, it had been detonated beneath Timofei.

  "Two men," said Kobi. "One to give the signal, the other to fire it." He depressed a plunger.

  I didn't see how else it could have been done so accurately.

  The explosion had ripped a huge crater in the road. The grass had been blackened and branches ripped off the oaks leaving scars so stark and white that I thought at first glance they could be pieces of flesh. Other branches were broken and hanging down limply, attached by a twist of bark. Looking upwards I observed that a hole of perfect circularity had been created in the tree canopy. Through it I could see the first star of the night.

  Typed papers were plastered round the trunks of the oaks like posters for a new set of civic laws. Blown from Andrej's business case—had he and Igor been discussing the war?—and still gripping the bark. Torn, disfigured, charred at the edges. The scarlet Imperial crest was there, upside down, a paper with Andrej's signature, something headed "Memorandum"—

  "Report"—"Final Draft." A document I couldn't make out had been speared by the jagged prong of a branch.

  A piteous noise came from the foal of the trace-horse whose back parts had been broken. The two had been among those hidden by Timofei from the Remount Commission. This was an
outing for them. I expect the foal had been gambolling beside its mother, sticking its nose into the snow and examining everything with its wide glistening eye. Now it wanted to get at its mother's milk but whenever it got close it smelled the gore and danced back out of range, revolted. It was hysterical—bleating, crying, pawing the ground, its nostrils distended.

  There was no sign of life in the mare's eye, though its diaphragm was still pumping. I put my pistol in its ear and shot it through the brain. The sound rang out in the empty forest like a pick striking metal. The heap of carcass tensed. Its legs stiffened, and it died.

  Kobi cut a length out of the traces and fashioned a halter. I caught the foal round the neck and we tied it to a tree. The creature stood there shivering, looking from us to its mother's milk-bag with uncomprehending eyes.

  This is how it is with the unexpected. There are the initial moments in which one forms the photographic plates for memory storage. Then one attends to whatever practicality sends out the most powerful demand.

  The foal dealt with, I turned my attention to the coach.

  My first thought was that the detonation had been a yard premature. For the shafts and box were shattered and of that good man Timofei no identifiable lump was visible. Even his impregnable dark blue greatcoat had been blown to smithereens. Had a bomb of that size gone off under the passenger part, the coach would have been in matchsticks and the fate of its occupants beyond doubt.

  It was lying on its side, mangled, torn and splintered. Nicholas had had it tarted up specially for the bridegroom. Now its fresh green paint was scorched and the wheel rims gone: the spokes hung loosely, like a derelict umbrella. The window on the top side had been blown out. The Rykov wolf, so carefully picked out by the paint shop in the golden lozenge of the door panel, was totally disfigured: its haunches had been smashed and its snout and piggy eyes besmirched by nitroglycerine. The only undamaged part of it was its ribcage, which by itself looked like a cat's.

  How did I feel? Was I horrified? Bewildered? Squeamish? Keenly interested, that's what I recall best. Keen and growing keener by the moment. The possibility of a glorious death slapped me across the face like a douche of spring water. My skin stung with excitement. My heart raced, shaking my ribs with its vast leaps.

  Andrej—gone?

  Kobi was on top of the carriage, gingerly dismantling the wreckage to get at sound timbers. He didn't want the thing to collapse beneath him. He called down, "There's someone inside. I can make out his hand." I climbed up and joined him, standing on the edge of a leaf of the springs. But there was only room for one of us at a time.

  "Dead?" I asked.

  "Looks it."

  "Who?"

  "Count Igor, I think. Once I can get my arm properly inside, I can clear away the mess and see better. Skin's all flabby, though."

  "There should be two men in there."

  "I know that," Kobi said, looking at me in a certain way. (He was fishing round with his hand, his face flat against the panel.)

  The problem was that the rear cross-member securing the chassis to the coach work had become unseated. The bolts at one end had sheared and the free end of the tie had got wedged into the road. If it collapsed the vehicle would fall to pieces. We didn't have to be engineers to realise that. Kobi was right to go slowly. But I was hot with impatience, I was like a sinner desperate to find the key to heaven before it gets too dark. "Hurry up—here, it's quicker with two," and I began to wrench the planking away so forcefully that the whole edifice rocked.

  Kobi, who by now had got his head and shoulders inside the coach, called up, "Be careful, Doig." A little later: "Only one man, Count Igor."

  I didn't believe him. I pulled him out and got in there myself.

  As for the horse, so for this harmless old pederast. The blast had caught him at the knees and shattered him from the fundament outwards. I mean shattered, not just bruised. I could make out his rouged cheeks at the bottom of the death trap. His face was unmarked. But the rest of him was a bloody mash.

  I got Kobi to pass me a stick. I prodded Igor around to see if there was anything of Potocki somehow squeezed in beneath him. It wasn't edifying, poking around in that loose flesh. I was glad my mother was dead and not seeing me.

  The exercise was unprofitable: it was all Uncle Igor.

  I was disappointed by this turn-out. I'd puffed up my hopes— crossed the "t" of his death—already taken Liza into my arms. I'd felt the lithe length of her body against mine. Andrej had been pushed at her, I'd been her real love since that day at Balaclava. We'd embraced in a state of delirium. Total victory had been mine. I'd married and occupied her. All this had I done in my mind. But now there was no corpse—and no victory.

  He couldn't have vanished. Come on now, Charlie, do some thinking. Had he got out unharmed and walked to Popovka with the steward? I didn't think so. Had he been thrown yards away by the blast? The steward would have dragged him somewhere handy . . .

  The steward, that was it. I had to consider his actions. He was the key.

  He'd gone. Therefore he'd known Potocki to be dead. If he hadn't been, he'd have stayed with the injured man until Kobi and I arrived. That Andrej was dead was the sole tenable conclusion. But where was he then?

  I thought, suppose he'd been up there on the box with Timofei, chatting, joking, sharing the reins, showing what a good chap he was? Well, if that were the case, I ought to be looking for very small pieces.

  I peered more carefully into the upper branches. And before many moments had elapsed I came to understand that the bomb had not been detonated even an inch too soon.

  One: snagged in the crotch of two branches and virtually the same colour as the bark, the brownish-green panel from the back of an army officer's greatcoat with the two buttons still attached. Kobi fetched the hatchet that our cabby kept under his seat and cut down a sapling. I hoisted him onto the lowest branch from where he could climb within range. Stretching, he fiddled down the scrap of coat. It fell flopping from branch to branch and as it did the dark yellow moire of its silken lining winked at me and filled me with encouragement. That wasn't the style of Timofei's coat, my God it wasn't.

  I needed more. His pocketbook, epaulettes, the box containing Liza's wedding ring, even the balding head with its atoll of electrified hair—I needed absolute proof of his death.

  "Someone's hand," Kobi said, pointing down into the brambles. "Timofei's?"

  I said we'd make a pile of the oddments, parcel them up and hang them in a tree until morning. Night was coming in fast. At some stage a doctor and officialdom would appear, directed here by Nicholas. But what if it wasn't until the morning? What if the wolves ate the evidence overnight? Andrej was no use to me as a missing person. I wanted him in the ledger of the dead. If he got into the history books as a victim of the terrorists, well and good. He'd have his footnote and I his woman, which was the better trade by ten million roubles times ten.

  Forty

  There entered my mind a conversation with Goetz in Turkestan. He was washing slime off his forearms after dealing with some skins; standing in his shorts, stockings and boots at a pistachio-green enamel basin resting on a wooden stand. I was cooking our meal, upwind so the smoke would keep the insects off him.

  "You know that the best collectors in the world are doctors of medicine? No question of it. They're nerveless, you see, Doig. They observe everything related to life and death with both dispassion and curiosity. How did it happen? What went wrong? They always want to know. Macabre doesn't come into it— can't. Science is supreme."

  I remembered that remark of his as Kobi and I tried to match our haul of limbs. We were in a hurry. I had to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that we had the remains here of two men and that one of them was Potocki. And I had to have the evidence assembled before some minor official arrived with ideas of his own.

  The most encouraging clue was the first one we found: the hand with Timofei's thumb. For he'd been the Popovka fiddler and had the flattened thum
b pad of the business, from a lifetime stopping his strings with it. Kobi lit the lantern on the front of the cab and we noted the characteristics of that thumb: a wide brown stump with the nail well down the quick and ingrained with dirt. I said to Kobi, "Nothing like Potocki's."

  Nor was it. We soon found Andrej's right index finger, the tip stained with ink, and his left hand complete with his little pinkie and signet ring.

  We arrayed them side by side beside the lantern. I could scarcely restrain my glee. Kobi said in the most matter-of-fact way, "You can tell from the fingers who had the happier life." I glanced at him. He was quite serious.

  There was the sound of creaking leather and the bustle of horses. Out of the darkness of the fir trees our Cossack patrol of earlier trotted briskly. The trooper riding beside the sergeant was carrying a storm lantern swinging from the hook at the end of a pole.

  We stood back from the remains. The sergeant stared suspiciously around him with his yellow eyes. His gaze came to rest on me. "You again. Trust my luck. Why not some peasant that I can arrest and sell back to his family?"

  I walked over and laid my hand on his horse's bridle. I explained what had happened and what we'd done so far. I said I was afraid the wolves might carry off the body parts in the night. "Good," he said several times as he counted up all the things that he and his men wouldn't have to do.

  He nodded when I asked if he'd witness my identification of Potocki's ring finger. He dismounted and picked up the hand. He inspected the ring under the lantern. I thought he was going to draw it off and pocket it, but he just tossed the hand onto the ground, so casually that I was compelled to stare at it: rather podgy, the veins still blue, a flap of bloody skin hanging from the wrist tendons. Kobi turned it over with his foot to prove he was the sergeant's equal in callousness. I leaned against a tree, got out my pocket journal and in the back wrote down the circumstances of Potocki's death. I read it out to the sergeant. He nodded. We both signed it, he with his name in full—Pyotr Sergeyevich Vastok. He picked the hand up and held it out to me. "Say goodbye to him, then." I said it'd bring me bad luck. But Kobi thought it a fine joke and shook Andrej's hand vigorously. The Cossacks standing around were also amused and a couple of them shook it in order to be able to tell their sons they'd shaken hands with the war hero Potocki.