White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  ***

  I didn’t keep our date until eleven-thirty. I spent an uncomfortable half-hour having my ears burned by Ronald Cartland Simmonds, my delegation chief, about my conduct two evenings back; then he unloaded on me a couple of Bulgarian scientists and a Czech data processing team, prospecting the British stand for computer software. I had to fill their heads in their own language with details of our digital and analogue computers with their programming and print-out accessories, adapted for both Roman and Cyrillic scripts.

  Maybe I should explain I worked for the Board of trade as a so-called expert in commerce with the Soviet Bloc and had to stand-to at agricultural and scientific exhibitions all over the Soviet empire and its satellites. I had diplomatic Status, which came in handy for minor social transgressions like the fandango with the Soviet ambassador’s wife and even a Foreign Office creep like Simmonds agreed that the gulag atmosphere in the Eastern Bloc made even British embassy padres want to cut loose from time to time.

  After emptying several ritual slivovas (plum brandies) with the Bulgarians, I groped through the labyrinth of small pavilions and marquees to the Russian sector and the stall where she had deployed her wares. Marxism-Leninism wasn’t doing brilliantly that morning and she was breathing on the glass cases where they exhibited their twenty-five volume complete works of the Communist leader and polishing them.

  When she turned. I noticed the maroon blouse she wore had cancelled out the violet in her eyes, making them a deeper blue. Below the French-tartan skirt, she had a well-turned calf and ankle.

  “You wish to see the works of Comrade Lenin?” she asked as though she had never clapped eyes on me before. Caught off-guard for a moment, I spotted her gaze fasten on the loudspeaker system over the doorway of the pavilion, hinting it might be bugged.

  “I wondered if you had a pocket edition,” I said, defensively, eyeing the twenty-five tomes for more dedicated dialectical materialists.

  “We have this on rice-paper,” she replied, stepping across to a table and pointing to half a dozen volumes in English. Her fingers were trembling as she flipped through its pages. “This is the most popular edition.” She handed me a book. “Do you know that works by Vladimir Llyich Lenin have sold four hundred and thirty-two million, eight hundred and fifty thousand copies in eighty-two different languages since the revolution?”

  “And people read them, too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged away the question. “Just think, in another thousand years he’ll be giving the bible a run for it.”

  Her eyes made another pass at the public address system, reminding me that nobody this side of the Iron Curtain blasphemed about Lenin. So I let her ream off her statistics about his immense contribution to the human ethos.

  “Did you know that two hundred goatherds from the Kirghiz Red Banner Collective Farm clubbed together to buy the collected works of V. I. Lenin?”

  “It’s all they’re talking about in the London salons and discotheques,” I replied. “And bound in goatskin, too, I suppose.”

  “Take the cheap, popular edition.” she put in, quickly, moving us out of earshot of the loudspeaker. “Only forty-five dollars.”

  “Forty-five dollars!” I gasped, grimacing at the half-dozen unreadable tomes. “I haven’t got that sort of money, and anyway I wanted to buy other things, for instance, Bulgarian attar of roses.”

  At that, her head came up. “Attar of roses. Who do you want that for?” She had a direct way with her.

  “I promised to take some back.”

  “To a girl—you have a girlfriend,” she insisted.

  “No,” I lied. “It’s for my mother.”

  “Harasho (good),” she said. Then without giving me the chance to protest, she started wrapping the quintessential Lenin in a cardboard box and writing a bill. “Your name and address in Sofia?”

  “Alan Churchill. I’m at the Balkan Hotel.”

  She wrote this down as though familiar with it. “You will pay in dollars?” she asked.

  “You didn’t give me time to say I haven’t got forty-five dollars on me.”

  For a full minute that fazed her; it didn’t seem to have occurred to her that any Westerner walked around Sofia with less than forty-five dollars in his pocket. “Then you pay in Bulgarian 1ev,” she said. “Ninety 1ev.” she pointed across the alley to a branch of the Bulgarian national bank. “You can change money there. I shall accompany you.”

  I got her message. She slipped into the office and I overheard her inform someone she was going to complete a sale and would return in quarter of an hour. We walked towards the bank, though once out of sight of her own stand, she pointed us towards the West German official pavilion. “There’s a small bar and the Germans are—how to say it?—more thorough at disinfecting their premises.”

  “You mean, debugging?”

  She nodded. When we had taken a few more steps, she halted under some oriental plane trees and lifted her face to gaze at me.

  “You are Mr. Alan Churchill. Do you have any kinship with Churchill?”

  “What Churchill?”

  “You know—THE Churchill.”

  I lifted my chin, curled my upper lip then my nostrils. “Ah, yes,” I murmured. “I believe now you mention it, one of the minor branches of the family did rather well. Produced a duke and a prime minister.” I paused for effect. “But we have never cared to have much to do with them.”

  That really perplexed her, and her violet eyes paraded over my face, wondering what to think. Only later would I realize what significance she had pinned on that name, Finally, she shrugged and walked into the German pavilion where we threaded between various stands of electronic and electrical equipment to a small bierstube in the far corner.

  She had chosen well, for it resembled a million German bierkellers with fat barrels, axe-hewn tables and stools, few people and minimal light sieved through slit windows. I fetched her a glass of Rhine wine and myself a stein of beer, carrying them back to the obscure corner where she sat, reflecting how the atmosphere of complicity was thickening.

  You know how some women run the rule over you, undress you with their eyes then tilt you horizontal. That was how she looked at me. Lighting a cigarette, she somehow managed to leave a lipstick fleck on one of her front teeth which were remarkably white.

  Why did that scarlet slash fascinate me?

  “I must pay you for this,” she said, pointing to the wine then, ignoring my headshake, opened her handbag and slipped something under the table and into my hand.

  I stared at it, incredulous. It was a bundle of dollars, worth three or four times what the books had cost. “The forty-five dollars I owe you, personally, for tricking you into buying those useless books.”

  “And the rest?”

  “There are two hundred and twenty dollars left,” she whispered, then hesitated as though debating whether to trust me before going on. “I wish you to buy me a camera, the smallest there is. At the CORECOM tourist shop in Kalojan Street, they have Japanese, German and American cameras with automatic rewind about so large.” She ran a sharp nail along her cigarette packet, dividing it in half. “This is the kind I want.”

  I gazed at the money, wondering where she had acquired so many dollars. Certainly not legally. That meant she’d paid up to ten times their normal value on the black market. And risked imprisonment for speculation. “But surely you can buy one yourself here, or in the Jap or East German pavilions.”

  “I cannot spend dollars without being noticed, They would discover I had bought a miniature camera and question me about why I want it.”

  “Why do you want it?”

  “If I answered that, you would not believe me.”

  “Try.”

  She shook her head. “I shall explain everything when you come to Moscow in three months for the industrial faire”

  “How did you know I was coming to Moscow?”

  “I have a friend in the visa section.”

>   “So you knew quite a bit about me before you accosted me yesterday. You probably followed me into that morgue.”

  “No. I learned about you, but I did not follow you.”

  “Yet now you’re trying to bribe me with Lenin’s collected works and trying to suborn me into breaking the law. Why?”

  “I want a camera.”

  “Is that all?” When she did not reply, I said, “You want me to risk jail and I don’t even know your name.”

  “It is Bukova - Larissa Viktorovna Bukova.”

  “All right, Larissa, how do I know you’re not setting a trap for me so that the KGB or its Bulgarian minions can pick me up and accuse me of spying or subversion?”

  To answer that, she rummaged in her handbag and produced a newspaper clipping with yellowing, brittle edges. It was from the Moscow evening paper, Vechernyaya Moskva and, at a glance, I could see it was the report of a trial before the judiciary college for penal affairs of Moscow city.

  My eye lighted on the name of the first defendant, Aleksandr Viktorovich Bukov, obviously Larissa’s brother. He and three other men, Yevgenni Stalnov, Vladimir Arakelyan and Alexei Chernov had been charged with producing and circulating a samizdat (self-published) underground magazine which had printed articles and information about Soviet leaders, KGB activities, dissident movements and Party scandals which the court had considered anti-soviet or illegal or both.

  Bukov had also joined dissidents like Charansky and Orloff to set up the Helsinki Group and monitor civil and human rights conceded by the Soviet Union at the international conference in the Finnish capital.

  Without entering into details of the prosecution or defense evidence, the paper reported all four had been sentenced to ten years’ forced labor in a camp, plus five years’ internal exile, meaning they were banned from Moscow. Larissa was lighting another cigarette.

  “They sent them to the worst gulag in Siberia,” she murmured. “Kolyma, where they have to work when the temperature goes down to sixty below zero without proper food or clothing.

  I looked at the newspaper date. “He won’t be out for another nine years, then.”

  “He’ll never come out.” She sank those white teeth into her lower lip. “Sasha, my brother, has a patch on one lung and an ulcer they cannot or will not operate on because they have no medical staff and no facilities.” She paused to drag deeply on her cigarette before screwing the stub into the ashtray. “He will die if nobody does anything.”

  She drained her glass and rose, saying, “But I will get him out…somehow, I will get him out.”

  Chapter 2

  Larissa had a room in the Sobranye, an old hotel with a conspiratorial smell which could have served, untouched, as a film set for a Balkans cloak-and-dagger mystery. She had given me strict instructions. Dress like a comrade in open-necked shirt and old suit and leave all identity papers at my hotel. Come to the back entrance. When I got there, she pulled me inside and grabbed the miniature camera and fast film.

  “Kostia will look after you,” she whispered, disappearing to her room. Kostia, a moon-faced, barrel-bellied barman, sat me in a corner booth, brought a liter of Polish vodka, two glasses and a plate of zakusi (hors d’oeuvres). I felt conspicuous, but realized I could have passed for any one of the half dozen men there with my square face, fair hair and blue eyes.

  I was sipping the chilled vodka when Larissa returned. She stared at me, contemptuously. “No wonder you got drunk and danced the gopak with that mujhik commissar woman,” she said, pouring two full vodkas. “Listen with both ears. First, breathe out.” She breathed out to show me how. “Then as you breathe in, throw the vodka to the back of your throat. That way, it goes straight into the stomach without being breathed into the lungs. Like so.” She flicked the fiery liquor down in one gulp.

  I wondered about her dubious physiology, but tried to copy the wrist flick and quick swallow. I finished writhing and coughing. She refilled the glasses. “Try again,” she ordered. I breathed out then in, closed my windpipe, opened everything else and threw back the liquor—and still wound up in contortions.

  “Now, you take an onion and an olive to keep the fumes from rising to your brain,” Larissa said as though believing this drunkard’s lore. She chose a small onion, incising it with her strong teeth.

  “That’s proletarian superstition,” I protested. “Anyway, how do we ever get near each other through something that smells as unromantic as an onion?”

  “If you try to be romantic, our collaboration ends here,” she said. “Romantic people are highly untrustworthy.” While we waited for the moussaka, she grilled me like some management selection head-hunter about myself, my job, my life in Britain.

  “Do you have girl friends?”

  “You asked me before and I told you, No.”

  “You are lying.”

  With my index finger, I made a cross over my heart and said very solemnly, “No, it’s the truth.”

  She had a way of scanning your face with those striking eyes, working them over it by the millimeter. I must have passed the scrutiny, for she said, “Do not think I am posing such questions because I am a jealous person. Jealousy does not enter into the matter. People in love are not to be trusted with secrets, or anything else.”

  “Tell me about your brother. Why did they throw the book at him and his friends. Ten years is a long sentence for distributing literature.’

  “They had Lebedev, the most sadistic judge in Moscow.” From her handbag she produced several typed sheets and handed them to me. They were samizdat transcripts of the trial, compiled by witnesses who had run the KGB blockade of the Moscow court and made notes from memory. All four men had put up a spirited defense, but Sasha Bukov seemed to have gone out of his way to antagonize the judge. When Lebedev interrupted him, he quoted Article 243 of the Soviet penal code, protesting that the president would not let him express himself. “What are you, Bukov?’ the judge asked. “A street-corner lawyer?”

  “Better than a party-line judge,” Bukov answered. And for half an hour he had cited the cases of twenty people, imprisoned or sent to labor camps for political disagreement with Communist doctrines. “What do you do with these dangerous men who might infect Russia with the truth virus? You treat them like rabid dogs or smallpox carriers and send them into isolation or shut them up in madhouses.”

  “That’s why he got ten years,” Larissa muttered when I had finished.

  “Any chance of getting them out legally?” She shook her head. “Illegally, then?”

  “Do you know what these camps are like? Have you any idea? Nobody ever escapes from them. Those that try finish dead from hunger and exposure. And nobody’s ever released before his time, unless…”

  She seized a knife and banged the point into the table so hard that several people stared our way. Kostia grimaced a warning. “And even then, they don’t get out,” she whispered. “They keep the bodies and bury them there.”

  “Yet you still think you can get your brother out.”

  “I don’t think—I know I can.”

  “How?”

  Those violet eyes fixed on mine. Her moussaka-laden fork paused, halfway to her mouth. “I do not know I trust you,” she murmured.

  “Trust me!” I got out. “When I’ve risked my neck buying your camera and film. When everybody here’s a potential spy and there’s a thousand miles of hostile ground between me and the free world!”

  My indignation bounced off her. She emptied her fork, stabbing it, at my face. “You get drunk too easily.”

  “That was just inexperience,” I came back. Without stopping to consider how she was maneuvering me into a corner and forcing me to prove myself to her, I refilled my glass with vodka and emptied both my lungs; I sucked in a deep breath and, like some fairground fire-eater, wrist-flicked the potent liquor down my throat. It seared down my gullet like pain-stripper. But I held my breath, clamped my lips tight and screwed my face shut to tamp and contain the explosion. Like that, I stayed
down for a full thirty seconds. “See,” I gasped, finally. “I can do it.” For good measure, I repeated the act, this time raising my glass with an ironic toast. “To the Soviet people, architects of Communism and proletarian internationalism.”

  “Bullshit,” Larissa said, and I was to learn it was her favorite Anglo-Saxon oath. “There is one other thing I wish you to do—bring me a good cine-camera from London and at least half an hour of ultra-fast film for it.”

  “No,” I snapped. “Not unless you trust me by telling me what you’re going to do. I’m not an errand boy.”

  For a long moment she thought about that, blotting the moussaka gravy with a wedge of bread like some peasant; then I noticed what powerful hands she had, with spatulate fingers under the painted and pointed nails. “If I reveal something, will you get the camera?” I nodded assent. She leaned across the table and hissed in my ear. “I am going to take a hostage.”

  “A hostage,” I whispered. “But you’re Russian enough to know the KGB will laugh at you—they never play the hostage game.”

  “When I have the man I am after they will have to.”

  “Who is it—Chernenko, Gromyko, Gorbachev?” I tried several other Communist leaders but each got a stonewall look. So did Maya Plisetskaya and several other ballet stars, then cosmonauts and writers like the poet, Yevtushenko. None of them raised so much as a flicker across her beautiful face.

  “Bring me that camera,” she said.

  “Will you tell me then?”

  “I shall consider it.”

  “I’ll bring it,” I said after a pause.

  We had to toast that in vodka before she said, “There is something else I want.”

  “Look, I can’t get a whole shopping-list.”

  “But this is for me, myself,” she said, smiling. “I would like two wigs, a black one and a red one.” A dreamy look came into her eyes. “A bright red,” she said.

  “But your hair is beautiful as it is.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve always wondered what it is to be a real redhead,” she murmured. “I mean, its effect on men.” She must have felt sure of me even then, for she gave me her exact head measurements and the sort of wigs she wanted then pressed fifty dollars on me to pay for them. When I came to settle the restaurant bill, she whispered. “Pay Kostia with dollars—ten dollars.”