White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  We walked through this new suburb, turning every fifty yards right or left and I guessed Larissa didn’t want me to find the place again on my own. Finally, we came on a street with older, smaller flats. We entered a block that smelled of beet soup, cabbage and several kinds of stew. It had no lift and we had to hoist ourselves up six flights of stairs. There, Larissa knocked softly at one of four doors; it edged open, showing part of a man’s face.

  “It’s me, David Viktorovich,” Larissa whispered. In a second, the door opened and shut behind us before the other occupants of the floor could spy on us.

  Inside, the flat was square with a living-room about five meters by five and a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen taken out of the same area.

  “Nadya,” the man called, gently, towards the kitchen. “Larissa Semyonova Fotyeva has come to see us.” From the kitchen where she had evidently taken discreet refuge, a woman appeared; I put her at around sixty, but she must have suffered from some cruel complaint, for her skin was sallow and bloodless and her face so pouchy I can only describe it as looking like a string bag stuffed with foam rubber.

  She crossed to embrace Larissa, sized me up with a disappointed glance, then murmured, “Lev isn’t with you, dushka?”

  Larissa shook her head, turning to me. “He might have told you about an Englishman.” To me she whispered, “These are Lev’s parents.”

  I shook hands. Shapirov’s father had a gaunt, lined face and grizzled hair. He went to a sideboard, a massive bit of furniture with carved, convoluted legs and produced a bottle of vodka from which he poured four small glasses. He drank our health. We sat down in sagging leather armchairs while Mrs. Shapirov, at her husband’s behest, went and produced some sweet biscuits. Like many Russian Jews, they spoke a mixture of Russian and Yiddish.

  “Alan is one of us,” Larissa said. “He knows what we are doing, but he does not know about the key. Tell him, Nadezhda Khovanskaya.”

  In halting phrases, she told her story. Until five years ago when she fell ill, she had worked as one of the small army of cleaners in Red Square and the Kremlin. (So, she was one of the midnight squads of ladies in white smocks and black boots who swept the square with their twig brooms. On about ten occasions, she had earned the special distinction of cleaning the floors and walls of the traurny zal, the Lenin mausoleum crypt. She and two other women were allowed an hour to do the job. A guard lieutenant or sergeant opened the side door, let them in, supervised the work then locked the door and returned the key to the Spassky Tower guardroom.

  However, one of the guard sergeants had a great thirst for vodka and used most of their hour to slip off to the gastronom just off Tsverskaya Street (she called Gorki Street by its old name) and fill up with anti-freeze as he put it. On the second night that he disappeared, Nadezhda Khovanskaya Shapirova found the key to the side door on the stairs; she slipped it under her skirt and into her bloomers. When the sergeant returned they looked everywhere, then he swore them to secrecy under the threat of losing their job or worse. For him, it would have meant Lubyanka and some gulag beyond the Urals. She thought he had perhaps borrowed another key and had a duplicate made.

  “How long ago was this?” I asked.

  “Six years ago.”

  I turned to Larissa. “But haven’t the locks been changed since then?”

  “No. When Lev was working in the Kremlin, he went through the passage under the old senate building into the crypt and tried the key. It’s still the same.”

  “And we have that key?”

  Larissa nodded. We finished our vodka and some of the small, sweet biscuits before taking our leave. Outside, it had grown dark. Larissa took my arm and we walked back to the car.

  “So Lev has that key.”

  “Yes, Lev has the key,” she repeated. “And now you know he has the key, he must not know I took you to see those two old people until the job is done, you understand. I found you wandering around the forest, lost, and I brought you back. That’s all they need to know.”

  Realizing how hermetic Larissa’ s mind was and how she planned the operation so that no-one possessed more information than he or she required, I appreciated the trust she had placed in me. She did not attempt to justify what had happened in this car earlier that day, leaving me to draw my own conclusions about why she had allowed Shapirov to make love to her. However, as we got back to the car and drove past the exhibition towards the Yaroslavl road, a couple of things niggled at my mind.

  “Why did they call you Fotyeva when your name’s Bukova?” I asked. It seemed the headlights wobbled slightly as she digested that question.

  “You don’t miss anything, do you?” she said.

  “Not that sort of thing.”

  “It’s the name we gave them—what would you say?—a trade name. They are old people. If they were caught and questioned they would not hold out very long. That’s why.”

  It sounded a genuine explanation, and but for the hints from Anastas and Raya, I would have swallowed it whole. “They’re still taking a risk, the Shapirovs. What do they get for their key?”

  “Ask Lev.”

  “I’m asking you, and I want honest answers.”

  “Why? You do not trust me?”

  “I trust you—but not all the others.” She listened while I repeated what I had explained to Anastas about my misgivings because nobody had bothered to tail me. “And if I had to make a guess, I’d say the sekoty (KGB collaborator) might be Shapirov.”

  Larissa laughed. “Even if your theory were right and there is an informant, it could never be Lev. Never.”

  One other thing niggled at me and sent my mind backtracking to that day in the Kremlin when Shapirov had inducted me into some of the mysteries of the fortress, and had then turned peculiar. I could remember him looking across at the garage doors in the senate courtyard, I could hear that twangy voice, saying, “Her name was Roid…Fanya Roid, and don’t you forget it.”

  We drove in silence to the junction of the country road where we had to stop and fit rear-wheel chains. When we got back into the car and Larissa inserted the ignition key, I pulled it out before she could start the engine. “I’m not going back until you tell me about Lev Shapirov and those two old folk back there—and about Fanya Roid.”

  She looked at me then fumbled for her packet of papirosa and her lighter; she crimped the end, lit the cigarette and sucked so hard that I could see the set of her face in a red halo. “What did Lev tell you that day?”

  “He showed me where Fanya Roid was shot on Lenin’s orders, and told me how the great man insisted on coming to witness the execution. By the way, I looked up the Roid case in London. The official Tass version says Lenin spared Roid’s life and she finished up as a prison librarian in Siberia and didn’t die until l958.”

  “No, she was shot in that courtyard in 1917 by the Kremlin commandant, a man named Malkov, on Lenin’s orders. Not only did Lenin watch the murder, but one of his friends, the proletarian poet, Demyan Bedny, came down from his rooms beside Lenin’s to spectate as well. They put out the Siberian tale to show how magnanimous Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was in sparing the woman who had shot him.”

  Something clicked in my mind. While Larissa was talking, I was estimating the Shapirovs’ ages; he would be in his late sixties and she a few years younger, perhaps, or even about the same age. I dangled the ignition key in front of her.

  “Now, all you have to do is tell me which of the Shapirovs is Fanya Roid’s child.”

  “However did you guess that?”

  “It wasn’t too hard.”

  “Well, keep it to yourself.” When I had solemnly promised, Larissa said, “Fanya Roid did have a child though nobody knew who the father was. Probably one of her Social Revolutionary group comrades. When she was arrested after shooting Lenin, her political friends hid the child in case the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, got to know about him. They’d have murdered him, too, and destroyed his body with hers. So, her friends and political colleagues hid the
eighteen-month-old boy, then gave him to a childless couple to rear.”

  “A couple called Shapirov.”

  “Yes, they were far-out relations of the Roids.”

  So, old Shapirov whom we had just left had been that eighteen-month-old boy, and Lev Shapirov was the grandson of Fanya Roid. I had another question. “What is Shapirov’s game—just getting his own back on Lenin, is that it?”

  “It’s only part of the story. Those Jews who hi-jacked the plane were his friends and he wants to get them out of prison and labor camp. His parents have no family left in Russia and want to end their lives in Israel—that’s his other motive.”

  I pushed the key back into the ignition slot and we trundled along the country lane between snow banks that had thawed and refrozen in places. A mile or two along the road, Larissa reached out her gloved hand to grasp mine and squeeze it. “Alan, if I hadn’t found you and you hadn’t come back, I would have cancelled the whole thing.”

  ***

  All the others seemed delighted at my return, even Shapirov who came up and shook my hand and we both apologized to each other. Raya and Kolya were preparing our evening meal and from somewhere in Moscow Larissa had procured steak which they were cooking over a gas grill. Just before we sat down, Shapirov went to one of his many caches and conjured a bottle of vodka from it.

  He looked askance at Larissa who nodded her head; he poured seven small glasses from the unlabelled bottle, probably filled from some home-made still. He showed he, too, was superstitious by lighting a couple of pages of Pravda in the open fire then throwing the first glass of vodka on this and watching the iridescent flame spurt then die. “An old pagan sun-worshipping custom,” he said, grinning at Kolya, who merely shrugged. It was superb, that vodka.

  When we had eaten, we watched the series of films again. But this time, Larissa handed us several typewritten sheets, stapled and bearing our names. ‘You’ll have all day tomorrow to study your parts,” she said.

  Running an eye over the document, I realized she had worked out each individual phase of the plan and timed this to the minute for each of us. Still, she had kept several aspects of her scheme secret, saying she would reveal these tomorrow on the eve of May Day.

  Chapter 13

  Just before midnight we gathered in the living-room to check the papers Larissa had issued and go over the part she had assigned each of us. Even though icicles hung like stalactites between the windows and the thick shutters, I wondered if anybody noticed my flushed face, Anastas and Vanya looked fidgety as though they, too, felt a bit scared.

  My new domestic passport with its grim, proletarian picture told me I was Josef Feodorovich Kuzin, hospital orderly, born in Vladimir twenty-eight years before. Now, I lived in the Zamoskvoryech district of Moscow over the river from the Kremlin and behind the British Embassy. Already, I had memorized details of my previous addresses, my local hospital training and various jobs in case I was questioned by militiamen.

  We had our own militiaman, Shapirov, who was wearing the black uniform, black coat and brassard of a volunteer policeman, one of thousands that day. He grinned, holding up his passport. “First I’ve ever handled without ‘Jew’ branded on it…Think I’ll pass for a goy?”

  “In that get-up, no problem,” Anastas murmured.

  Shapirov went round shaking hands with Kolya, Anastas and myself then kissing Larissa on both cheeks before he, Raya and Vanya said goodbye; they were leaving first, cutting round behind the exhibition park and following a different route from us so that we did not pass the same checkpoints. We gave them half an hour, sipping the tea Kolya brewed; he was staying behind and gave us each his benediction at the door as we went out.

  Plodding through the snow towards the Moskovich, I sensed the temperature had lifted a degree or two, for the going was heavier; overhead, a million bright stars glittered and a moon was climbing behind the birch trees. “It’s going to be fine,” Larissa whispered.

  At that hour on the main road, hardly anything moved. At ten to one, we encountered our first checkpoint, two cold, bored militiamen manning a sentry-box at Kolkhoz Square. Yet, their torches lit our faces and they compared them with our domestic passport picture. “Your spravka,” the sergeant demanded then scrutinized the three permits according us access to the parade area for duty.

  “Lucky comrades to have a grandstand view of our greatest day,” the sergeant said.

  “If we don’t have too much work,” Anastas replied.

  “Long live the memory of Vladimir Ilyich,” the man replied, stamping our papers and returning them.

  “Bullshit to you,” Larissa murmured when we had moved away.

  Even on the short run along the circular boulevard to Mayakovsky Square then right, up Gorki Street towards the hospital, we had to halt five times, though now the recent stamps took us through painlessly. Anastas navigated us through side-streets to approach the Botkin Hospital through the back entrance where nobody bothered with us.

  Vanya and Raya were waiting in the outpatient department staff-room, closed until eight in the morning; they issued the kit Anastas had collected and hidden and we donned the ambulance crew uniforms, light-green overalls, trousers, rubber boots and gray-green uniform coats. Only Raya did not change but remained in her best clothes, a well-cut woolen coat, a fetching fur hat, a silk foulard and leather calf-boots. She looked pretty.

  Anastas nodded to me and we walked down the deserted corridor to the lifts. Under my hospital smock, I had one car number plate, Anastas the other. Like hospitals the world over, the Botkin had a soporific, drugged atmosphere in the small, morning hours and we only met two sleepy nurses. In the basement garage, the little Armenian went to one of five ambulances, a converted Chaika with Cyrillic initials signifying its use for medical emergencies. Quickly, Anastas changed the front and back number plates knowing that every militiaman for twenty miles around Moscow had a record of the plates of cars allowed into the May Day parade area.

  “And if we meet the genuine ambulance with those plates?” I asked. Anastas explained that, once inside the Kremlin, he would change these plates for others differing by only one figure so that KGB men would assume someone had made a mistake.

  As we accelerated out of the garage ramp, Larissa’s Moskovich dropped into our tracks; we cut through several back streets, crossed Kalinin Avenue and stopped before a block of flats in Voroby Street. There, in a lockup garage, we transferred Lenin from his suitcase to the ambulance and covered the dressed, wax model with sheets and blankets on one of the bunk beds.

  Now, Raya had to climb under the other bed since we were leaving the Moskovich in the lockup. Vanya sat with Anastas who drove while Larissa and myself stayed in the back. With the window curtains drawn we could see little as we crawled along Kalinin Avenue in light traffic. At Arbat, somebody roared at us to halt. Anastas braked so violently that Raya’s head jolted against the driver’s cabin and she gasped with pain.

  “Domestic passports and spravka,” the voice boomed. My heart thumped, but Larissa twitched her head, reassuringly, under her nurse’s cap.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re on duty at the Spassky Tower,” Vanya replied.

  “Who’ve you got in the back?”

  “An orderly and a nurse from the Botkin Hospital, comrade.”

  “Open it up, anyway.”

  Vanya dismounted and came to open the back hatch. A hand thrust him aside and a crouching figure pushed inside, between the beds. From his militia greatcoat, he pulled out two newspapers which I noticed were last evening’s Izvestia and that morning’s Pravda; he slipped these to Larissa who pushed them under the bed blankets. Then I realized the face, half-hidden under the peaked cap and greatcoat collar, was Shapirov’s. He rounded on Vanya. “Get back in the front seat and make room for me. I’ll take you through.”’

  “Where to?” I whispered.

  “The Kremlin, of course.”

  How was he going to do it? Between us and t
he Kremlin, the military units with their heavy vehicles, and the massed delegations had taken up their positions from Manege square along the Kremlin west wall. It would be an almost solid barrier. But Shapirov must have calculated that no-one would question an ambulance, escorted by a militiaman, pushing through these crowds and into the fortress. In fact, only one man did, and Shapirov handled him like a master, saying our ambulance might save the life of one of their revered leaders. To my astonishment, the crenellated walls of the Kutafya then the Troitskaya Tower slid past and we were inside the Kremlin.

  Larissa let out a great sigh. So, she had been just as scared as I’d been.

  We skirted the apartments in the inner west wall, passing several Chaikas, Politburo staff cars since they had no number-plates. Between the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Congress Palace, a small passage led into one of the churches, the Redemption, I think. There, Raya could get out without being spotted by the palace guard. Shapirov escorted her round the palace gable and they disappeared through what must have been a fire-door. Anastas knew what to do; he drove slowly under the bridge between the two palaces, round the small garden facing Lenin’s old apartment then between the senate building and the Arsenal; we turned into the Arsenal, stopping before a lockup garage which Vanya opened with a key allowing us to drive inside.

  “We walk through the south door,” Larissa whispered. I followed her and the two men along the tree-lined courtyard and out through the Arsenal archway opposite the congress hall. Without breaking stride, Larissa walked to the door Shapirov had used; it lay an inch open and yielded; we entered and climbed three flights of concrete emergency stairs.

  Shapirov waited on the landing and we followed him through a tangle of pulleys and ropes behind the stage of the top-floor theatre where six thousand members of the Communist Party élite came to celebrate their revolution on November 7 each year.

  Behind the velvet curtain and through the wings we walked, on tiptoe taking our cue from Shapirov. A line of dressing-rooms lay beyond. I had seen them before, the day Shapirov gave me his guided tour. He opened a dressing-room door and there we found Raya, sitting on a plush stool like some actress, touching up her face with powder and paint as though about to go on-stage to play some role.