White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  Only one thing stopped me from getting off my chair, fighting my way to the door and bolting all the way back to Red Square. Vodka. Anybody who has ever experienced the pile-driver vodka effect will know the symptoms. That liquor has a way of rabbit-punching you, pole-axing you in the nape of the neck so that your head and your spine go completely numb; at the same time, it liquefies your ankles and knee joints then freezes them, stopping you in your tracks. You’re a zombie. I have the feeling I tried to joist myself erect but failed.

  I seem to recollect the two girls preparing several shakedowns on the floor for the three other men and myself, then rolling my paralyzed body into one of them.

  Until I fell asleep that night, phantasmagoria had been just another long word. Now, a procession of ghoulish pictures plied through my mind, inflamed by vodka and sheer terror. Lenin, lying in his granite vault, became the central character of these nightmares.

  We pulled it off. On a night too cold for snow and so inky we couldn’t see the silhouette of the Spassky Tower, three of us in full KGB uniforms marched like real sentinels to the mausoleum, rifles balanced on white-gloved fingers. We swapped places with the real sentries.

  Larissa and Raya materialized and we went into the crypt…We were bearing Lenin’s remains over Red Square on a stretcher when the shroud slipped. I gazed at the mummified body. But it wasn’t Lenin’s face. It was my own face. Shriveled and reptilian and dead, with glassy eyes glaring at me. Larissa had disappeared I went back to the mausoleum to hunt for her. Though we had a key, somehow that heavy bronze door wouldn’t budge.

  Vanya and I rolled away the huge boulder blocking the crypt entrance. It wasn’t the Traurny Zal (Lenin’s funeral room). Only a cave. And the figure wasn’t Lenin, but a more familiar one with dried blood on his side and hands and deep wounds on his palms and feet.

  “Don’t touch him,” I yelled. “Don’t touch him.” I seemed to be screaming myself hoarse. Then my screams woke me.

  Larissa and Raya were bending over me. Larissa was holding my face between her hands. “Somebody was walking over your grave,” she whispered.

  “You were yelling something terrible,” Raya said. “You went on and on.”

  My fuddled brain took long seconds to reassemble and recognize their faces and the room and furniture around me.

  “But…but you’re all crazy,” I finally got out. “It would be like stealing Christ.”

  “Well, somebody did that, didn’t they?” Larissa said in that matter-of-fact way of hers. “It caused quite a sensation.”

  “You’re all round the bend.”

  I let my head flop back, heavily, on the bolster.

  “Round the bend, the lot of you,” I repeated before I sank into oblivion.

  Chapter 4

  What I knew about Lenin would not have filled a postcard. To me, he was a benign intellectual who had applied Marxist theories to Russia after the Revolution. Had he lived, Russia would have become a real democracy. It was the villainous Stalin who had twisted Lenin’s Communism into a dictatorship. “So, that’s the naive story they believe in England,” Larissa said, scornfully. “Lenin was a cold-hearted sadist who was obsessed with power.” However, she did not try to brainwash me, but persuaded Shapirov to show me round the Kremlin, guessing I would learn enough about Lenin’s sinister side to cancel any respect I had for the Red Christ.

  Not my favorite man, Lev Davidovich Shapirov. Too many chips on his narrow shoulders. He openly detested me, his little rat eyes shifting, suspiciously over my face, his thin lips curling. However, he was obviously a key figure in Larissa’s scheme. He also knew the Kremlin like the inside of his two-roomed flat near Krasnopresneskaya metro station. During two years as a junior architect in the Kremlin office of the commission for national monuments, they had given him the free run of the place.

  Shapirov picked me up at Manège Square and we trudged over the snowbound moat bridge, through Troitskaya Tower and into the new congress palace where the Supreme Soviet had its sessions. Shapirov knew every room, every passage; he led me backstage and we climbed three flights of stairs, still behind the scenes. Those few maintenance men who passed us nodded to Shapirov and ignored the man in shabby coat and cloth cap who accompanied him.

  A covered passage took us into the Grand Kremlin Palace. Shapirov hardly spoke. But he set my nerves twanging with his habit of whistling or hissing tunelessly through his crooked teeth. I climbed several backstairs after him into the palace cupola from where the whole Kremlin lay before us. Shapirov broke his silence to point out various buildings—the Annunciation Cathedral, the Arkhangelsky Cathedral where the Tsars were buried and, above us, the Assumption Cathedral.

  “Down there,” Shapirov grunted and pointed. Beneath the Spassky Tower, two guardsmen had appeared with a corporal who inspected them and their rifles. At precisely two minutes to the hour on the Spassky clock, they marched out to the mausoleum, out of our view. In just four minutes, the relieved guardsmen returned. “Have a shufti next door to the guardhouse,” Shapirov said in his slang Russian. “There’s a first-aid post inside that door. Remember that.” He lit his fourth Mazurka, drew in smoke and resumed his nerve-racking whistling.

  Snow began to fall, soft, furry crystals dropping through the leaden day on to the Kremlin roofs already sheathed white from the previous snowfalls. It acted like a signal on Shapirov; from an overcoat pocket, he jerked out a steel flask, unscrewed the cap with gloved hands and passed it to me with a drink-tossing gesture. I gulped some of the liquor before realizing it was raw vodka and stoppered the flask with my tongue. I coughed and handed back the flask. Shapirov took a quick slug and pocketed it. “Where did you meet Reeza?” he asked, suddenly, as though the Vodka had thawed the air between us.

  “Reeza?”

  “Larissa.” His gimlet eyes glinted at me behind the tinted glasses he wore against the snow glare. He listened intently to my account of meeting Larissa. “All right, what do you think of her?”

  I hesitated. “She’s a highly intelligent girl—and attractive.”

  “But does she turn you on?”

  That question in his Russian slang floored me. “I…well…I suppose…”

  “No need to spell it out—so she turns you on.” As though he had heard enough, he produced the flask and went through the drinking ritual again in that blood-brotherly way Russian tipplers have. My cheeks stung with the cold and the potent liquor I had to swallow.

  Shapirov began to identify the rest of the Kremlin buildings, even going into detail about the architecture and the interior layout and furnishings. I discovered later he had copied many of the plans while working in the fortress and knew some buildings better than the civil servants and politicians who worked there. He indicated the various tourist tracks, the places to make for if you wanted to lose yourself in a crowd of casual visitors. “If you have to use this place to make a getaway you’ll always find tourists on open days in the Grand Palace and the armory near the Borowitsky Tower.” His finger led my eye along the crenellated wall flanking the river to another, small tower. “There’s a secret passage under that from the Kremlin Palace. They built it in the old days to bring water from the Moscow River during sieges.” He paused as if wondering whether to tell me, then shrugged. “The main entrance to that passage is blocked, but there’s a side way in.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be using that.”

  “You never know, you might even have to swim for it.”

  Even the idea gave me the creeps. When Shapirov had finished his account of the place, I followed him down the winding stairs. Passing through a courtyard, we skirted the Congress Hall. Hardly a thing moved in the fortress. Shapirov paused for a few minutes to describe the layout of the building where the Politburo had its sessions before making a circuit past the great, cracked bell in front of the embossed cannon outside a cathedral; its four snowcapped cannon balls looked for all the world like gigantic Christmas puddings. We crossed an open space and headed f
or the old Senate buildings, which backed on to the wall running along Red Square.

  Suddenly, Shapirov stopped in a small clearing with a phalanx of spruce trees, their branches sagging under fresh snow. Through the falling snow, he pointed to where the triangle of senate buildings came to a point. Two narrow projections ran up the outside wall of the three-story structure, containing a small loggia on the second and third floors. Shapirov nodded his fur-capped head at the third story where I noticed two small, blinded windows. “His study,” he hissed, then pointed to left-hand side of the triangle. ”His living quarters.”

  “Whose?”

  “Lenin’s, you idiot.”

  I trudged through the snow after him between the old senate buildings and the new construction housing the Party general-secretariat. Again, he knew a side entrance that admitted us to the south side of the senate building. Up two flights of stairs we climbed to the third floor. Opening a lavatory door, he pulled me inside and locked it. From the small window, we looked across the tree-covered courtyard to the long, narrow leg of the triangle where Lenin had lived and worked during his last years. Shapirov turned his gaze on a point of the building level with the courtyard where there were no windows but what looked like garage doors. He brought a clenched fist down on the snow-covered window ledge, and from the set of his face and the working of his jaw muscle, I could see he was under great tension. I heard him mutter the words as though I did not exist. “To think they carried the sadistic bastard from his rooms over there so he could gloat over her and see her shot.”

  “See who shot?”

  My question provoked a glare of disgust and scorn. As if he didn’t expect an effete Englishman to understand what he was talking about. Or maybe he was too choked to utter. Shapirov seemed one of those egocentrics who couldn’t imagine anyone not sharing his feelings.

  And those who didn’t, he discarded. I recalled our first meeting when he would have killed me ruthlessly with that knife.

  “If she’d only aimed a couple of inches lower, she’d have finished the bastard,” he said.

  “Who was she, for God’s sake?”

  Shapirov heard me, but he had fallen silent and I had to wait for him to unwind. He took off his tinted glasses and ran them over his coat lapel to dry them. At that moment, I saw that Shapirov, the ruthless Shapirov was weeping. Tears tracked all the way to his chin. He blinked several times and wiped them away, angrily, with a gloved hand.

  “Her name was Roid—Fanya Roid. And don’t you forget it, Englishman.”

  “And she shot Lenin?”

  “She did—but she didn’t kill the bastard, unfortunately.”

  “Then Lenin had her shot, is that it?”

  “They carried him to that window over there.” He pointed to a third-floor window overlooking the garage part of the courtyard. “And he watched his Kremlin boss, Malkov, shoot her. Like a dog. Like a dog. Like a dog.”

  He mumbled that refrain obsessively as though it had already reverberated a million times in his mind. He produced his vodka flask and took a long gulp, though this time without offering me any. He did not speak another word until we said, Do Zvedanya at the Borowitsky Tower and parted company.

  It seemed Lev Davidovich Shapirov had several good reasons for belonging to Larissa’s group.

  Chapter 5

  Not even the KGB guards could have suspected Larissa and me of being other than one of the dozens of genuine brides and grooms queuing to pay respects to Lenin. Larissa wore a white gown with a lace jacket, head-dress and veil and carried the traditional flower spray. As a disguise, she wore her russet wig. Getting ‘married’ was her idea. So many Saturday couples made this pilgrimage to the Unknown Soldier’s tomb in Alexander Gardens alongside the Kremlin Wall, then the mausoleum that they got preference. We stood less chance of being recognized. I fell in with the idea, perhaps because it gave me the illusion of possessing Larissa.

  When she had placed her flowers on the Unknown Soldier’s tomb, we walked across Red Square to pick up Anastas and Raya who had shuffled to no more than fifty meters of the mausoleum. An autumn sun lit the crenellated walls and glittered on the pink granite of the tomb. Two KGB guards slipped us into the queue fifteen yards behind our friends. Raya wore a dark wig and a silk headscarf as well as horn-rimmed glasses; Anastas had hidden his eyes behind thick, dark glasses and carried a blind man’s white stick. We could hear Raya and others describing Red Square to him.

  Anastas and Vanya had disguised me with a fuzzy, dark beard, had tinted my blonde hair dark and fitted me with heavy glasses; they had muffled the small hand camera I had bought in Sofia, strapping it under my wedding suit and leaving a tiny hole for the lens; they had taped a remote-control lead and switch along my arm into my hand. All I had to do was open my jacket, press the stud in my palm and the camera would do the rest. “And that’s all,” I said, ironically, asking why me. Larissa explained if anything went wrong I had diplomatic status and could talk my way out of it.

  Near the entrance, the queue quickened, for the guards had orders to keep everyone moving inside the funeral hall to give nobody time to create trouble, or perhaps to look closely at the Red Christ.

  Descending into the crypt, Larissa clutched my arm and pressed against me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat, as rapid as mine. At the bottom, we turned right and right again, mounting several steps to the viewing balcony. Larissa edged between one of the dozen guards and myself. I undid my jacket. Ahead of us, shuffling along slowly, tapping with his white stick, Anastas turned to Raya, “Tell me, dear, where is Vladimir Ilych (Lenin) now?” Larissa squeezed my arm and, masked by Anastas’ voice, I pressed the stud in my palm and set the camera in motion.

  “There he is, darling,” Raya whispered.

  She wheeled him round slowly then tapped his stick on the marble balcony. Not even the guards could complain about a blind man making such a difficult pilgrimage to his hero. For a moment, Anastas halted to bow and the hundred people in the crypt stopped to watch him. In the silence, the ratcheting din of the camera filled my head with sound and my body with a cold fear. Even the minute vibrations of the instrument through my ribs seemed to rattle like a road drill. I could see one of the guards flick a glance in our direction. All I could think of doing was cough and, at the same time, press the toggle to stop the camera.

  “Spaseebo, Vladimir Ilych,” Anastas said, loudly, then more softly to thank the guard who had helped him, “Spaseebo, tovarich.”

  As he clicked his way towards the door and the shuffling and scuffing resumed, I switched on the camera again for twenty seconds, canting forward slightly to vary the shots from different angles. With the queue moving more quickly now that Anastas had left the crypt, I risked another sequence of pictures from the outgoing balcony.

  When we emerged and followed the crowd along the Kremlin Wall, I had to hang on to Larissa. My legs had that numb vodka feeling. Dumbly, I watched Larissa place her remaining lilies on one of the graves, though not Stalin’s. “What did you think of him?” she asked. “Is he real? Or wax as a lot of people believe?”

  “I didn’t even see him,” I stammered.

  It was true. So intent had I been in steering the camera, in watching the guards watching us, so unnerved by the fear of being discovered that I had no recollection of the figure in the glass coffin, or anything else in that crypt.

  We strolled the two blocks to where Vanya had parked his borrowed car behind the Lenin Library in Kalinin Street. “Sorry I can’t offer you both a wedding lunch or supper,” he said, grinning, as he drove north-west past the racecourse to the hospital where Anastas was an orderly. Vanya knew his way around, leading us through the Outpatients to a staff room. “This is where Anastas earns his living,” he said. “You can change in there.” He pointed to the toilets. Lana emerged in a print dress and I stripped off my beard, Sunday suit and donned an old pair of slacks and a pullover. Vanya bundled together our wedding gear while I unloaded the camera spool and handed it t
o Larissa.

  “I can get that developed by a friend,” Vanya suggested. Larissa hesitated then shook her head.

  “Too risky,” she murmured. Taking my hand, she placed the steel cassette in it. “Alan is leaving for London in a week and there they will need copies of those pictures.” She looked at me. “Can you find someone you can trust to develop them and make several sets?”

  “I suppose so—but it’s a crazy scheme.”

  “You don’t even know what the plan is.”

  “You won’t tell me.”

  “She hasn’t told Raya and me much either.” Vanya crimped a papirosa between his hairy fingers, lit it and fixed Larissa with what I thought was a hostile gaze. “You’ve got to trust some of us sometime.”

  “It’s for your own protection, in case one of us is taken and interrogated by the KGB,” Larissa snapped back. “You must understand that, Vanya, and the others, too.”

  However, Vanya resented being kept in the dark, saying this implied a lack of trust. A few minutes later, Raya appeared and broke up the argument. When she and Vanya dropped us at the Byelorussian station I made to separate from Larissa, but she pulled me after her into the tube station and bought two tickets. “Alan, you don’t believe I’m going to take Lenin hostage and exchange him for the boys in the Gulag, do you?”

  “Well, it’s a bit like stealing a hippopotamus. It’s almost impossible, and what do you do with it once you’ve got it?”

  We boarded a tube train and left it at Prospekt Marksa to surface by the history museum on Red Square. Crowds were still wandering through the vast rectangle. “You get the best view from GUM tearoom,” Larissa said and headed for the department store which filled almost the length of the square opposite the Kremlin. Larissa pushed through the packed galleries into the tea-room and found a window seat overlooking the square

  At that moment the crowd was thickening to watch the guard change at three o’clock. It was striking, the goose-stepping, the ritual, the precision. I grimaced at Larissa. “They do that every hour round the clock, they have fifty guards to marshal and search the crowds visiting the place. So, nobody’ s ever going to pinch Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and you and the others had best forget all about it.”