White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  A good ten minutes of film concentrated on the foreign and official delegations taking their place in the stands either side of the mausoleum and on the fourteen members of the ruling cabal as they shuffled from the Spassky Tower to the granite tomb and laboriously hoisted themselves up the short flight of steps to the well of the tribune running round the mausoleum.

  “Poor Leonid Ilyich (Brejhnev).” Raya gave a mock sigh. “Even then, he looked on his last legs.”

  “Brejhnev was dead years before he died,” Shapirov commented with a snigger. “But only he knew it.”

  “I wonder who had the courage to unplug his life-support system,” Vanya said.

  Larissa reran the film to give us a closer view of the mausoleum and the Politburo procession. “Just look at them. They’re all nihilists and atheists—but if you want proof of the resurrection and life after death, there it is—fourteen examples of it.”

  Nobody laughed as the camera panned over Brejhnev, Chernenko, Grishin, Ustinov, Andropov, Tichinov and we glimpsed the lesser faces behind them.

  In a huge ring all round the Kremlin and Red Square, the camera lighted on various checkpoints set up under KGB supervision. Krimsky Bridge, Smolensk Boulevard, Kalinin Avenue, Gorki Street and the great boulevard circling the city and fringing the suburbs. “But even the KGB cannot handle all the intersections,” Larissa commented. “They have to recruit helpers.”

  Several times she stopped the film to indicate landmarks and streets where the surveillance seemed thin. After stealing Lenin’s body, two main ways were open to them; either to head south until they hit the outer boulevards, turn left and make round the eastern half of the city until they could branch right on Peace Street to the Yaroslavl road and the dacha; or to make for the Lenin Hills and the western circuit which would take them past the exhibition park and out to the dacha. In any case, they mustn’t tangle with the huge crowds spilling out of Red Square during and after the parade.

  “But whichever way we go, we’re bound to fall on one of two checkpoints—with or without the body,” Vanya put in. “If they search us and find either the dummy or the thing in the mausoleum, we’re done for.”

  “Yes, how do we get through?” Anastas insisted.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow night.”

  “Why the suspense—and why only a day to learn our parts?” Shapirov screwed his cigar butt into his coffee dregs then lit a papirosa, gulping the smoke into his lungs and spraying it down his twisted nose. “Why the cloak-and-dagger act between ourselves.”

  “It’s for your own protection,” Larissa countered. “You all have a part to play and that’s all you need to know. More, and you become a danger to the group.”

  “What about you?” Vanya said. “You know everybody’s bit of the action.”

  “If you object, you needn’t go any further. Just sit here and wait until we’ve done the job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vanya muttered.

  Again, we turned to the film to watch the procession coming uphill into Red Square from Manège Square and Marx Prospekt; she gave us the time of the main delegations and military units so that we could site our own action later; in both May Day films, the routine scarcely varied with much the same delegations of workers and sportsmen marching past the Politburo podium, followed by the soldiers; they came from the Baku oilfields, the Kirghiz collectives, the Tajik cotton-fields, from the great cites like Novosibirsk and Magnitogorsk beyond the Urals, from the Ukraine wheat-fields and the Caspian Sea caviar factories. Then came the military with their tanks and self-propelled artillery, their rockets with nuclear warheads. And as the rockets went past, the screen suddenly filled with a squadron of MIG 24 fighter which swept overhead, trailing smoke and followed by another squadron of fighters and bombers.

  At this point whoever had taken the pictures panned to the crowd on the GUM side then to the granite benches both sides of the mausoleum. Every face had turned skywards to watch the impressive fly-past. This signaled the end of the parade, and the crowd converged on the tribune to hear the Party Secretary deliver the May Day address. For obvious reasons, this did not interest us, and Larissa switched off the project. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

  “I suppose you have a plan,” I suggested. “It’ll have to be brilliant,” Vanya said.

  “I just don’t see how you can do it.” Raya rose to turn up the flame under the two samovars, still talking. “I mean, all those people…how do we get through the checkpoints…how do we get near the place to begin with let alone inside…and how do we get out?” Perplexity spread over her round features and into her big eyes “I never imagined you’d do it on May Day.”

  “That’s precisely why we’re doing it then, because nobody would ever imagine it,” Larissa said. “I give you the plan tomorrow and we go through it tomorrow night so we all know exactly our role on the day.”

  Our last exhibits were the blown-up snapshots of the mausoleum interior I had brought back from London. Everyone agreed that our wax heads were identical with the Lenin face in the pictures. “Do we have a black suit like that one?” Vanya asked, and Larissa nodded, saying we had to thank Shapirov for it.

  “It’s a better suit than the bastard ever had when he was alive,” Shapirov remarked, raising a laugh all round and releasing some of the charge in the atmosphere. “I need a nip of something,” he said and was rising to fetch a bottle from wherever he cached them.

  Larissa grabbed him. “We’re all going to split your bottle when we’ve got back here with Lenin—not before.” Shapirov shrugged and held out his coffee cup to Raya who filled it. He swigged some, gazed at Larissa with that wry smile of his. “You might just get away with it. You know what it reminds me of—that Hitchcock film where everybody at the tennis match is watching the ball go back and forth except the murderer who’s staring at the hero. Remember?”

  “Of course we’ll get away with it,” I said, surprising myself and everybody else with the loudness of my voice. I was thinking Larissa had shown a touch of genius in planning to pull off the theft of a lifetime in front of several hundred million potential witnesses.

  A glance at my watch told me it was just after two-thirty in the morning. We couldn’t believe we had spent three solid hours watching those films and listening to Larissa; it seemed like a tenth of that time. We left a butane stove burning in the living-room and opened the attic bedroom doors to let in some heat while we gave a hand with the washing-up.

  I don’t know how the others felt, but although I had done a days work and had been on the go for twenty-four hours, I didn’t have a tired bone in me. In fact, I was on top of the world. I sensed we would pull everything off.

  Chapter 12

  We had a long day to wait, and on Larissa’s orders no-one could venture far from the dacha. After breakfast, Anastas and Shapirov spent most of the morning playing chess while Kolya immersed himself in a worn, leather bible until the girls brought us coffee at eleven o’clock Then, he crossed to where I sat and warmed his scrawny hands at the butane stove. “An Englishman must find Russians and Russia very strange he said. It took me ten seconds to grasp that the priest had uttered the statement in unaccented English.

  “Where did you learn English?” I asked.

  “We had an old priest at the seminary who had spent twenty years in England and was courageous enough to return to preach here and finish in a camp. This is his English bible.”

  I looked at it, then at him. “Who told you I was English, Kolya?” Not once had I spoken English with this man, or any of the others in the group.

  Kolya hesitated. “You couldn’t be anything else,” he said. “What decided you to help us?”

  Who had told him, and why? Larissa, Raya, the gossip, Vanya? I felt sure one of the people in this dacha was a traitor, and I suppose I was getting suspicious of everybody.

  “It wasn’t because I consider Lenin an anti-Christ,” I replied, deciding to needle him and see how he jumped. “For me, Communism and t
he Church are two sides of the same racket—you have your crucifixes and icons and they have their immortal ‘mummy in the museum’ to worship like some God.”

  Kolya kept his temper. He even smiled. “There is nothing incorrupt or immortal about that thing in the mausoleum. He signifies no more or less than the models you had made.” He took off his wire-frame glasses to breathe on them and polish them. “The English do very fine work,” he said.

  “French,” I corrected.

  “May I ask where?”

  “You may—but I’m not at liberty to tell you,” I said to end the conversation.

  Nobody bothered about lunch, for everybody drank endless cups of tea and went to help themselves in the kitchen if they felt hungry. Shapirov and Vanya disappeared to look at the cars and warm the engines through. It must have been just after midday when I missed Larissa and asked Raya where she had gone. She shook her head. “She’s tired, I expect she’s lying down in the attic,”

  Anastas looked up from his chessboard. “No, she went out just over half an hour ago,” he said, and I saw Raya glare at him.

  “I feel like stretching my legs, too,” I said.

  “I’ll come with you.” Raya didn’t wait for the invitation but was already pulling on her felt boots, then tucking her blonde hair under her chapka and looking for her coat.

  It was one of those diamond-bright days heralding the Russian spring; overhead, a blue sky fretted with wispy clouds looked so like a frosted-glass pane you could have wiped it with your sleeve; you could smell the approaching thaw. Underneath, the snow crackled and Raya said another day or two would change everything, for the birches would shake off their snow and green turf would appear underfoot. She knew this part of the forest as little as I did, but she led us north then to show how easy it was to get lost in this white wilderness, she had backtracked and was heading south without realizing it. I had to point us towards the dacha, relying on the sun.

  We were hunting for the small track leading to the dacha when I heard the throb of a car engine. “That’s pretty near,” I remarked, knowing how snow muffled sounds. We stopped to listen and orientate ourselves and, in that clean air, I caught the tang of exhaust fumes. Pointing upwind, I started to trudge for the car.

  Behind me, Raya was tripping along, panting, “But Alan, that’s not the way to the dacha.” I ignored her.

  Suddenly, the birch trees opened into a small clearing and there it sat, the yellow Moskovich she had driven three weeks before; its engine was running and blue smoke was pluming from the exhaust with a drip of water. Its windows were misted over and, from twenty yards away, I could see nothing of the inside.

  But I did not need to see. All I had to do was look at the car. It was bucking up and down in the deep snow. Slowly, then faster as I watched. I could imagine everything. Everything. As I turned, Raya came plowing through the trees. She gazed at the car, then at me. Her lips parted as though she meant to say something, but she checked herself.

  I was blundering back through the forest, blindly, not caring whether I hit the track to the dacha. “Shapirov, that verminous little runt, that bastard,” I was muttering over and over to myself in English. “What does she see in him?” Raya was slithering along behind me, trying to keep pace. I turned to face her. “And you knew last night he was in her room. You made room for that little Yid to spend the night with her. Why, why, why did she do it?” I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

  “Alan, listen to me. Larissa’s like that. She’s a whore.”

  “She’s not a whore.” My voice rang with rage through that snowbound wood. I shook Raya even harder, taking it out on her. “Larissa’s not a whore.” Cold tears welled in my eyes, blinding me. Pointing south in the rough direction of the track, I pushed Raya forward. “Go on back to the dacha.”

  “What are you going to do?” She sounded fearful

  “I’m not going to kill them both. Go on. I’ll follow you.”

  I had to be alone, to think. When Raya had disappeared, my stomach heaved, abruptly, and I clung to a birch tree while I vomited bile that stained the snow yellow. Picking up a handful of snow, I scrubbed my face with it to revive me. If she was a whore, why didn’t she sleep with me? Why keep me on a string? It had turned gray, the day, as though someone had drawn a soiled curtain across the sun; the snow had lost its glitter and the birches seemed to be crowding me, crashing in on me.

  Although I felt weary, like sitting down and going to sleep in the snow, I dragged one foot after the other back to the dacha. Vanya and Anastas were alone. No, they had not seen Raya recently. But they knew something had gone wrong from the way Anastas spat on his index finger and threw the spittle over his left shoulder, symbolically. It was one of his superstitions. So, Raya had backtracked to warn Larissa. I went upstairs to throw my things into my handgrip. Now they could have Lenin all to themselves.

  When I came downstairs into the living-room, Larissa stood there, alone. Under her shapka, her face appeared wan, shrunken. Her eyes fell on the handgrip. She pointed her lit cigarette at it. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my hotel.”

  “You know we cannot let you do that.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill me.”

  “Alan, I need you. More than all the others here put together.”

  “More than your lover boy, Shapirov.”

  “Yes, more than that.” For the first and only time I ever knew her, Larissa seemed at a loss, embarrassed, disorientated. “One of these days you’ll understand,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to understand since I saw it all. You kept me on the hook while you were making love with Shapirov.”

  Larissa shook her head. Throwing her cigarette into the cold fireplace, she crossed the two yards separating us to take my face in her hands; her fingers felt glacial, brittle, like icicles, “I can’t tell you why,” she whispered, “but I had to let Shapirov… well, make love to me, if that is the way I should put it.”

  “It’s the way I saw it,”

  “But you didn’t have to feel it, to go through with it.” She paused and bit her lower lip and her eyes moistened. “For him it’s no more than an animal thing, and I was just an object.” She dropped her hands. “For me, it was nothing, nothing. And afterwards I felt unclean, polluted and ashamed.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “I cannot tell you that.” She lit another cigarette with trembling fingers. “What I can tell you is I’d sleep with the whole Politburo if it got Sasha and the others out of their camp and saved their lives.”

  “But you wouldn’t sleep with me.”

  “Alan, you’ve got to believe me…with you, it’s different… with you, I might not be sure of myself.”

  “So, you’ll never find out.”

  In the entrance hall, I got my things together while she watched me in silence. I pulled on my galoshes, then my anorak and heavy coat and checked through the things in my handgrip. As I was finishing someone banged and scraped his feet at the door and Shapirov and Kolya came in. Both stared at me then at my handgrip.

  “What’s happening?” Shapirov said.

  “Alan is leaving.”

  “Leaving: He’ll ruin the whole operation. He can’t do that.”

  “Try and stop me.”

  Shapirov took a step forward. “Kolya, give me a hand,” he shouted then made a grab for my handgrip and lunged at me. I sidestepped and as he barged past me, I bunched my fist and brought it down on his face. Bone crunched on bone as I hit the angle of his jaw, spinning his head round and sending him sprawling on the floor. Up in a second, he sprang at me like some wild animal, a snarl on his face, his fists flailing, Using my handgrip as a shield, I took most of the blows on it before swinging the heavy bag backhanded and catching him on the head. His sunglasses flew off, and for several seconds he stood, stunned. I dropped the case and seized him by his thin shoulders, threw him against the timber wall and started banging his head on it.

 
; I had lost all sense of proportion and didn’t realize Shapirov had gone limp in my hands when Larissa and Kolya succeeded in dragging me away. I caught Larissa staring at me, horrified, as Kolya helped Shapirov into the living-room.

  Without a word or a backward glance, I picked up my handgrip, opened the door and marched into the snow. I had little idea of how to get back into Moscow, but I knew roughly where the main Yaroslavl highway lay and if I could reach that before dark, someone would give me a lift. Trudging through the trees, I kept the sun on my left shoulder. Behind gray clouds, the sun looked like a wet spittle. I felt soul-weary. I had one of those heartaches that I thought I had long ago mastered, or left behind with my childhood or my school-days when my parents had forsaken me. Wet snow began to fall, running down my neck, adding to the weight of my coat and obliterating everything. Why shouldn’t I sit down and never get up again? However, I kept going, stopping now and then to knock the clotted snow off my galoshes and bang my stiff arms against my body to provoke some warmth. How many miles had Vanya done from the main road? How far before the track cleared the forest?

  I had been marching for an hour and a half when I heard the car behind and caught the glimmer from its side-lamps. Thinking it might be Shapirov with Vanya and Kolya as reinforcements, I plodded off the track into the forest. But from twenty yards, I recognized Larissa in her Moskovich. I jumped into her track and she slithered to a halt a yard from me. Winding down the window, she called, “Jump in.”

  “That depends where you’re going.”

  “That way—to Moscow.” She pointed down to the main road. I got into the passenger seat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You always ask too many questions.” Larissa drove to the main road where we stopped to remove the chains before continuing towards Moscow. Just this side of Kolkhov Square, she turned left into a complex of high-rise flats and parked the car under a street-lamp.