White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  She shook her head. “A year ago somebody got through with a bomb and let it off in the crypt, killing himself and two other people. There were as many guards then.”

  “A madman—even crazier than we are.” I aimed my dessert fork at the mausoleum. “I’d bet they have every electronic device ever thought of to protect that blockhouse—photoelectric cells, radar traps, listening microphones, alarm bells, the lot.”

  “You are right—they have.”

  “And you imagine, with a hospital orderly, a maintenance man, a tame architect, an airline girl and a third-rate British civil servant, you can somehow spirit that body out of its vault!”

  “You are forgetting Lev.” Larissa squashed the lemon slice in her tumbler with a spoon, sipped some of the tea and sucked in her cheeks at its bitter flavor. “Lev worked for the ministry department that looks after state museums and monuments.”

  “So, he knows how the place is wired and when the alarm systems are switched on and off. And he knows his way through the Kremlin.”

  “That is true, but it is unimportant.”

  “Well, what else has Lev got?”

  Larissa did not answer; her eyes flicked to the man who had taken the next window table and was reading a copy of Krokodil, the satirical magazine. He looked innocuous, but then THEY always do. I took the hint and we rose, went to the cash desk and paid our bill. We walked past the first tube station to the one near the Bolshoi theatre. As we went down with the escalator, Larissa held out her hand. “Alan, I forgot to ask you to give me the pictures we took.”

  “But I thought you wanted me to get them developed and printed in London.”

  She shook her head. “No, I just wanted Vanya to think that.”

  I passed her the cassette. At the booking office, she pushed past me and asked for one ticket to Sokolniki then held out her hand to say goodbye. I held on to it. “I thought on a night like this, you’d want to come and have dinner with me.”

  “It is much too dangerous. Somebody might see us and remember.”

  “Isn’t there a small restaurant near your district, somewhere I can buy you dinner?” Perhaps there was a longing or a plea in my voice, for her violet eyes tracked over my face, then narrowed as if she were trying to resolve her own doubts. Suddenly, she fumbled in her purse for a few more kopeks and bought another ticket. As we strolled to the platform, she said, “I have something I can cook in my own flat. But you must give me a promise.”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “You must not try to make love to me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Or even try to kiss me.”

  “I won’t try and kiss you.”

  In an indirect way, Larissa seemed to be admitting how vulnerable she felt, how uncertain of her own resistance had I tried to seduce her. So, she shied away from any sexual bond. I felt flattered. However, when I reflect on it all, I realize Larissa might have used that occasion to show she trusted me as much if not more than Vanya and even the others. Perhaps she had another motive, wanting to pull me into an intricate conspiracy within the conspiracy and tie me closer to her without involving sex. Anyway, her intuition probably told her she had me on a string.

  For Larissa really bewitched me. Psychologists have a word—cathexis—for the way my whole body and mind, my mental and sexual will-power focused on this woman and her ideas. Everything about her fascinated me: that frayed, husky voice, the sure, undeviating way she put her feet down, the rhythmic roll of her skirt over those beautiful legs, how in repose her lips just failed to meet leaving a glimpse of white teeth and seeming an invitation to kiss her or make love. Funny thing, I could describe in detail everything about her down to the wen just under the neckline of her dress, and the mole on her back; I could mimic the way she said, “Bullshit,’ and the toss of her head; but I have never been able to put words to Larissa in a way that satisfied me or anybody who knew her. She was all of a piece to be taken that way, and even when she betrayed me, I could not condemn her.

  After dinner that Saturday night she disappeared for an hour, and again on Sunday when she returned with the pictures I had taken. We flipped through them, feverishly. Some were blurred by camera movement even though we had used ultra-fast film; others were either overexposed or underexposed slightly; but we had two dozen reasonably good color shots of the crypt interior and Lenin from every angle. Larissa spread them on the table and we both drew up the rickety chairs to crouch over them, taking turns with the magnifying-glass. I located the two lenses in both corners of the mausoleum. TV cameras. But probably switched on only to survey the crowds going through the crypt. However, we also spotted four photoelectric sensors, or radar scanners, their beams cross-crossing in the crypt center. “We’d have to avoid those,” I murmured. “And they’ll probably have some sort of pressure sensor which triggers if there’s the slightest disturbance around the mausoleum.” Larissa shrugged her shoulders as though that did not perturb her.

  We measured the body and sarcophagus in a dozen pictures, then measured the walls, setting these figures against the known dimensions of the crypt interior. A simple proportion sum gave us the length of the body and even the size of the head and arms and hands. We noted the type of black suit, the red ribbon or the Order Lenin wore in his button-hole, the flag of the Communist International and the standard used by the Paris Communards during the rebellion in the French capital in 1871, presented by France’s Communist Party in the Twenties.

  From the twenty really good negatives, Larissa selected half a dozen, all showing Lenin from the three main angles, two profile shots from both sides of the crypt and another from the feet. She scanned them with the magnifying lens then handed them to me. “You can get good enlargements made in London,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “So that you can have two waxwork dummies of Lenin made exactly like the photographs.” She took one of my cigarettes, lit it and stabbed at the photographs. “They must be exactly like that with all the right measurements.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to start.”

  “There is a waxworks in Britain, I am told. A very famous one.” She vanished into her bedroom to return with a deed box stuffed full of dollars and pound notes. “You had better have dollars,” she said, counting out four thousand dollars.

  “Where’d you get all that money?”

  “Never mind. If they cost more, I shall pay when you have delivered the two wax sculptures here.”

  “Delivered here’.” I got up and strode backwards and forwards across the small living-room. “Are you crazy? How can a temporary member of Her Majesty’s diplomatic corps possible trundle two Lenin replicas through the customs shed at Moscow Airport?”

  She placed herself in my path, stopping my demented trek over the floor. She took my hands in hers and when I made to continue protesting, she placed a finger on my lips. “Alan, you are a Churchill and I know you will find a way.” She kissed me on the lips, a brush-kiss but enough to rouse me and pull her into me. She drew back. “You promised not to try to kiss me,” she whispered.

  “But you started it.”

  “That’s different.”

  Larissa knew she could have asked me to do anything. For her, I believe I would have braved a hundred KGB guards, burgled that granite blockhouse in Red Square and stolen what was left of Lenin single-handed.

  Chapter 6

  LONDON. A different universe from the alien snowscape I had just left. Yet, fragments of its chill atmosphere clung to me and I still felt wary of men in long raincoats and outsize soft hats, imagining them camouflaging KGB agents. It took three long days before I discarded that hunted feeling. However, things had changed e Was I deluding myself, or did I notice Ministry colleagues staring at me with crinkling eyes, wondering if I’d sold the pass? In a sense, I had. For two things haunted me. Larissa and Lenin.

  Of course, I had lied to Larissa when I denied having girlfriends. I ran two girls in London and they rotated through my flat
behind Sloane Square. Maureen was a Harley Street medical secretary, a rangy, moist-eyed blonde with bouffant hair and ideas about marriage. Patricia was a partner in a West End travel agency who wanted sex and didn’t give a damn about love and marriage.

  But Maureen had an Irish spae-wife’s sixth-sense that might pick up a whiff of Larissa’s spoor even at fifteen hundred miles; and Patricia had a flair for small-talking people into incriminating themselves. What if I talked in my sleep and blurted out Lenin, or even worse, Larissa? In any case, though it may sound naive and sentimental, I felt I would be betraying Larissa if I slept with another woman.

  I had other things on my mind. Somehow or other I had to get Larissa those two dummies. She had tossed out Madame Tussaud’s name, as though you could buy a couple of off-the-peg Lenins over the counter there. “After all, a lot of people here believe somebody from that wax-works made the one we have when the real body rotted in 1930,” she declared “They’ll still have the mould.”

  “That’s just a story.”

  “All right, but they must have Lenin in their museum.”

  I had no intention of going anywhere near Tussaud’s. Dickson-Barnet, head of the Eastern Bloc export department, would blow a gasket if he learned Churchill had just purchased two waxwork manikins of Lenin. Especially after the memo from Sofia about my drunken gopak with the Russian ambassador’s wife. Moscow would be out-of-bounds and myself out of a job.

  On my first long weekend, I flew to Paris and spent an hour in the Musée Grévin. Buttonholing an official, I asked, casually, why Lenin wasn’t on display. He was in the atelier, Monsieur, for a minor overhaul, but if Monsieur wished to see him… I dropped the man a hundred francs and trotted after him to the basement. Lenin sat in a workshop room with nothing but a dust-sheet over his wax body, head thrusting through as if in a barber’s having his reddish beard and receding hair trimmed. His detached arms and hands lay on a table. I noticed that crooked right index finger which showed up on our photographs—meaning the man who had constructed this effigy was a master craftsman and had worked from the right documents.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing much. Needs a bit of touching-up and a few hairs that have dropped from his eyebrows and beard need replacing. After a while, the wax gets dark and discolored, and we have to use a bit of rouge and water-color.” He looked at me with a grin. “They tell me they’ve got to do it with the original model as well.”

  “Original model?”

  “The Moscow one.”

  “You don’t mean…?” I pointed to the wax dummy.

  He shrugged. “Don’t ask me if it’s really one of theirs or one of ours. I don’t know.”

  Across the Boulevard Montmartre, over a well-irrigated lunch in a small restaurant, he opened up. Everybody in the trade had heard the story that a wax sculptor from their museum, or perhaps Tussaud’s, had been flown secretly to Moscow to make the clay model of Lenin from the embalmed remains; he had also cast the first wax model. Yes, it would be about 1930. I waited until we had finished our second bottle of wine before I asked who had made THEIR Lenin. He whispered a name and address off the Rue d’Alésia on the south side of Paris, in the fourteenth district.

  His name was on the iron gate. Jean-Christian Melville. I pushed a bell which opened the gate and I walked up the narrow, cement pathway. A smell of burning coke and hot wax and baking clay hung in the cold air. A window lay open, and I came to a dead stop before a familiar face. Georges Pompidou, a former French president, his head impaled on something like a brush shaft. A glance told me the sculptor had captured Pompidou‘s heavy, jowly features with his thick dewlap.

  Beyond the window, a blue-smocked individual was working in a studio dominated by a massive, round stove and cluttered with wax, clay and bronze statues. He was shaping a head and shoulders on a potter’s wheel. His neck and face had deep corrugations, stippled or ingrained with clay. Engrossed in his work, the sculptor had not even spotted me. In his left hand he was kneading wet clay which he applied to the head with a deft thumb or the small palette knife in his right hand; he also used this as a scalpel to pare off excess clay and refine the nose, eyes, mouth. He worked very quickly with nervous movements; but from time to time, he halted to compare the bust with photos and drawings on an easel to his right.

  For several minutes, I watched. Evidently, he had worked through his lunch hour, for a half-eaten stick-loaf sandwich lay on his bench. He must be a dedicated Frenchman to miss his long and copious lunch, I reflected. However, he did have a bottle of good wine and a half-full glass beside him. I had been told he was seventy, but he looked nothing like it.

  “Hmm . . .hmm?”

  My throat-clearing brought his head round. “What do you want?” he said.

  When I had verified he was Melville, I explained. Cocking his head like someone hard of hearing, he listened then pointed his knife at the door for me to enter. “Where did you see Lenin?”

  “In the Moscow mausoleum and the Musée Grévin. They look alike.”

  He thought about that for a minute. ”If they did, then mine wasn’t much good, or they doctored theirs.”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “The Moscow one’s a mummy. Mine’s supposed to be the effigy of a live Lenin.” His voice, with that throaty ring of the Jura or Burgundy area, rose in pitch and volume. “Anyway, what do you want with Lenin?”

  “I’d like you to do me two models like the one in the Grévin—but with the exact measurements.”

  “Why?”

  I had anticipated the question. “They’re for someone who wants a perfect replica—a very prominent Party man and I can’t tell you who or where he is.”

  “No matter, since I’m not interested in your commission.”

  “Not even if I pay you double what the museum usually pays?”

  “I’m an artist…I don’t make masks.” Melville produced a squashed Gaulloise packet from his smock. Tapping a cigarette against his palette-knife blade, he lit it then pointed the knife at a plaster head on the shelf. “That’s a death-mask. And the one beside it’s a life-mask of the same fellow two years before he died. He was a friend.”

  I gazed at the heads. “The death-mask’s got more life in it than the life-mask.”

  “They always do—but they’re both masks. If that’s what you want, spend your money elsewhere.”

  “My client wants two Lenins like the one in the Grévin, and that looks like the Moscow original.”

  “Original, eh! Some artist must have done a lot of work to give that figure the kiss of life,” Melville muttered. “A dead body’s a dead body—every muscle, every bit of tissue, every cell has broken up and lost its life shape. Lenin had a series of strokes, so that altered his face, and probably his body. Somebody, either a sculptor or an embalmer, had to remodel him, or remake him as he was.”

  Beckoning me to follow, he went up a flight of wooden stairs as spryly as a man twenty years younger. We entered a room shelved on three sides. On one side there must have been a hundred heads, some in bronze, others in plastic that resembled bronze until Melville flicked it with his fingernail and it sounded flat. He acted as though his own work was alive, fondling several of the bronze, clay and plaster statues with a sensuous caress of that rough, clay-grained hand; he ran his fingertips over eyes, noses and other features like a Braille reader as though recollecting the living, human face these models represented.

  On the left-hand shelves stood scores of plaster moulds of heads, held together with wire or cord like deathbed faces. Melville clambered on a stool to retrieve two of these. Carefully, he broke open their five sections, then reassembled the facial halves.

  Even in those hairless, beardless negatives, I discerned the flat face with its wide, Tartar cheekbones and eyes, jut chin, oval face and high forehead. Melville was separating four other moulds of hands and wrists. I saw both right hands had the same bent index finger that I had noticed in Moscow and the Grévin.


  “So, you do have the Lenin mould,” I said.

  “I was pleased with it, so I made two of him.”

  “What about the body?”

  “It’s dressed, so it doesn’t matter as long as it’s the right size. Anyway, they’re made in plastic now.”

  “How long would it take to make copies of these?”

  “How many did you say–two?” He pinched and pulled at the gray stubble on his chin and upper lip. “Say three weeks to a month.”

  That threw me. I had the notion I could leave Paris in a couple of days with two Lenins in two suitcases and no other problem than getting them through the Russian customs into Moscow. “But don’t you just have to mould them?” I asked.

  In answer, Melville pointed downstairs to the clay model he had been sculpting. “You’re damned lucky I kept these moulds. If I’d had to model your man in clay it would have taken double that time.” Treading on his Gaulloise stub, he led me into a smaller room. There, a fully-sculpted man’s head sat on a swivel board, though it was hairless and only half the gray moustache had been done. Switching on something like an inspection lamp, Melville tried its heat on his wrist before bringing it close to the model’s lip to soften the wax. With tweezers, he selected several gray hairs from one of half a dozen tiny boxes on the swivel board and embedded them, one by one, into the melting wax. “That’s why it takes so long and costs so much,” he murmured. However, he charged me only half what Larissa had estimated.

  “How do I carry them?”

  “Bring a couple of suitcases, medium size."

  He poured me a glass of his vintage Burgundy, topped up his own and we drank to our bargain before he saw me to the gate and shook hands, leaving the clay imprint of his palm on mine.