White Pawn on Red Square

by Hugh McLeave

  This room was a windowless box, its only decoration pinup pictures. Signed pictures of Alla Tarasova, Ulanova and Zhdanov, Plissetskaya, the inevitable Red Army choir, Irma Skobtseva and other artists who had performed before the Party chosen.

  “You can wait here until I give the word, or until eight o’clock,” Shapirov told us. We synchronized watches at eleven minutes past five then he left to take up his duty post.

  From her first-aid satchel, Larissa produced a flask of coffee and sandwiches and Vanya did likewise. While we shared the food, from the other side of the Kremlin wall, on Manege Square, the sound of musicians rehearsing fragments of the Soviet anthem and the International filtered to us; then the din of military vehicles revving their engines and assembling in columns. I could hardly credit the fact we had reached to within a hundred yards or so of the Lenin Mausoleum and were sitting in the Kremlin.

  “What are you thinking?” I whispered to Larissa.

  “About the next five hours,” she replied.

  She had brought a transistor with an earpiece and we took turns to listen to the news bulletins about the great May Day rally. Announcers listed the units and their march-past times which we checked with the information we had already culled in Pravda and Izvestia.

  Just before seven, Shapirov returned and beckoned Raya to follow him. He would conduct her through the Spassky Gate to her place in the grandstand. Too many KGB eyes on that faked pass might unnerve her, he thought. He also reassured us that the genuine ambulance bearing our number plates must be elsewhere in the capital that day, so we could breathe easy. Half an hour after Raya left we moved back to our garage and drove the ambulance round to a point between the Spassky Tower and the Kremlin Gardens. We had just over an hour to wait before the parade began, for me the worst moment of the whole operation.

  Until we were sitting by the Spassky gate, I didn’t believe we could ever pull the thing off. I suppose I had made the whole plot a sort of abstraction in my mind. Now, I realized we were actually going to steal the most sacred relic in the Communist world, their equivalent of Christ. It scared the daylights out of me, and I wondered if the others were sitting in the ambulance trying, like me, not to look too terrified.

  Through the gate archway, we watched Shapirov in his drujina (militia) uniform checking papers as guests entered; he was even invited into the guardhouse for a ten-minute tea-break and a stiffener of brandy. No sooner had he resumed his place than the incident occurred that looked like compromising the whole plan. We saw Shapirov and a KGB lieutenant come through the gate at the double, beckoning to us. “You’ll need a stretcher,” Shapirov called. Vanya and I grabbed a stretcher off a bed and ran after them with Larissa tailing us. A crowd had collected round a man who had fallen between the last two granite stands. He looked about sixty; his mouth hung open and his face had a bluish-white hue. We placed him on the stretcher.

  “Get him out of here,” the KGB officer ordered, more concerned about the parade than the man.

  “Into the guardhouse,” Shapirov whispered as we carried him through the gate.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I whispered to Anastas who had arrived to take a stretcher handle.

  “Looks like his ticker.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Shapirov said, callously. “We’ll have to get rid of him damned quick.”

  “No,” Larissa whispered. “It’s got to look as though we’re doing our job.”

  While we laid him on the guardhouse table, she ran to fetch our portable oxygen bottle and mask. Three guardsmen had come to watch; one looked at the man and made a thumbs-down gesture. Anastas, the only one with medical experience, stripped off the man’s coat and jacket, opening his shirt. With the heel of both hands, he began to thump and press the chest, over the heart. It looked impressive, professional. Larissa had returned and placed the oxygen mask over the man’s face. On Anastas’s instructions, she bent his head back to give him more air.

  To my amazement, the man gasped then coughed. His eyes flicked open and he stared at us, bewildered. Larissa removed the mask and his mouth twitched as though he were trying to say something. Anastas was still massaging his chest, though more gently.

  We were all staring at him, at a man who had apparently come back from the dead.

  “Bravo!” muttered the skeptical young guardsman. We did not share his jubilation. What if we had this heart case on our hands when the parade started? However, the guard’s compliment had hardly died away before the man convulsed, his head rolled sideways and his mouth fell open. Again, Anastas and Larissa repeated their act, but after quarter of an hour they looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “What do we do with him?” asked the guardhouse sergeant, pointing to the corpse.

  “Phone this number.” Anastas wrote down the hospital number. “Ask for Dr Boychenko, the pathologist, who’ll send a van for him later and inform the next-of-kin.”

  “Can’t you take him?”

  Anastas glared at him. “We have more important duty,” he snapped. “What happens if a comrade member of the Politburo has an attack.”

  That settled the issue. We recovered our stretcher and went back to the ambulance. I looked at Vanya, who had hardly done anything. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and the match quivered as he lit a Mazurka. “A near one,” he murmured.

  “He did us a good turn,” Larissa said. “Those guards and the KGB won’t even look twice, and it’ll be easier next time.”

  She was right. When Anastas advanced the ambulance nearer the gate to give us a view of the parade through the archway, neither KGB officers nor Spassky Tower guards bothered us.

  Just before nine, a fleet of Chaikas rolled slowly towards the gate. Bodyguards opened the doors and the Politburo dismounted and formed ranks before marching through the gate towards the mausoleum. All wore the same heavy coats and chapkas. Chernenko led with that stiff, shuffling walk, then Kuznetsov, the defense minister. Gromyko and the others, kept formation, probably knowing that one step out of line would set every Kremlinologist speculating about a government or Party purge. They disappeared from our view.

  At nine o’clock precisely, something like thunder reverberated over the square as invisible artillery batteries fired several salvoes; almost before the echo died away, we heard a clatter and hundreds of peace doves climbed into the air above the square; the bands struck up and the first delegations began the climb over the cobbles with their huge, red banners taut in the cold wind.

  We had a keyhole view of the parade through the gateway. From the back of the ambulance, I could see little of it, but I had watched it all before; I could imagine the square, more than a thousand meters long by a hundred and fifty broad jam-packed with marching men and the more faithful spectators; I could envisage the huge Lenin, Marx, Engels posters, and the mausoleum with its sides six feet deep in flowers, placed there by the Party devout. (Those flowers would come in handy for us).

  Through the gate, as each delegation passed, the huzzahs struck our car like so many blows. Cheers for the Frunze Red Banner collective farm and answering shouts of Slava Trudu (Glory to Labor). Ringing applause for the Potemkin Tractor Factory from Volgograd, decorated with the Order of Lenin for pulverizing its own production records. Thunderous shouts for the gymnasts in bright-scarlet track suits.

  And so it continued for an hour before the heavy equipment began to roll on the other side of the Kremlin. Even through our Chaika suspension, we felt a thrumming and the Kremlin and Red Square quivered with the weight of tanks, self-propelled guns and rocket-launchers as they lumbered into position behind us in Manege Square.

  In just forty minutes, the first of those heavy units would rumble round the triangular Kremlin wall and climb the hill then trudge slowly across the immense square between the mausoleum and the visiting delegations on one side and the crowd on the other. Between now and then, we had to seize the mortal remains of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, or whatever represented them in that crypt, in one of the grea
test body-snatches of all time.

  I was waiting with a dry mouth and a taut stomach for the ripping, whining racket of the two MIG fighter squadrons, timed for thirty-five minutes before the armored regiments. We knew they’d swoop low over the square at subsonic speed, so we would hear their jet engines fifteen seconds or so before sighting the planes. Five minutes would separate both squadrons.

  Larissa glanced at her watch, then at me. She leaned forward to tap the window of the driver’s compartment. Vanya nodded. He screwed his umpteenth cigarette into the ashtray. Anastas started the Chaika engine to ensure that was working. Now, every one of us was gazing at Shapirov, just beyond the gate. He would make the first signal. Larissa put out a hand to grasp mine, as much to reassure herself as me.

  Then it came, a high-pitched whine above the din of the rocket launchers. As though borne on their own sound-wave, the swept-wing fighters flew in low, filling the square and the Kremlin fortress with their racket and trailing a dozen blood-red smoke plumes behind them. Shapirov signaled by tugging on his right earlobe, then we noticed him striding quickly towards the mausoleum. No more than twenty seconds later, he returned to halt in the middle of the archway and beckon us to advance, at the same time indicating we would need a stretcher.

  Vanya and I seized the stretcher, heaped with blankets, and marched rapidly to the gate where Shapirov was pointing towards the mausoleum. “A lady has had a fit,” he said, loud enough for the KGB guards to hear. “She looks to be in a bad way.”

  How Raya managed it, I never did find out, but in those first seconds that I saw her writhing and twitching on the ground, I changed my mind about her. She was an actress giving the performance of her life and revealing unsuspected histrionic talent. Like most distinguished guests in that last row of spectator seats, I had never witnessed an epileptic fit and Raya made me never want to encounter the real thing.

  Her eyes were orbiting in their sockets as though sightless; bubbles of froth streamed from her lips and she looked as if she were biting her tongue; she was whimpering and twitching; her silk-clad legs lay at odd angles and her arms were stuck out straight and stiff. She had urinated on the ground.

  “I saw her get up from there and walk several steps, then she fell,” a squat little man said, pointing to where Raya had been sitting in the seventh and back row. Shapirov snarled at him to return to his seat and mind his own business. No-one much had noticed, for the marching thousands were still shouting their slogans, the crowd was answering and waiting for the most spectacular phase of the May Day parade, the planes and rockets.

  Raya had fallen just by two spruce trees on the corner of the mausoleum. Two KGB officers stood bracketing her. “Get this person out of here,” one of them barked.

  Larissa got on her knees to examine Raya. She lifted her head to look at the KGB officer. “Comrade lieutenant,” she said, “this lady is suffering from an epileptic fit. If we move her before we give first-aid, she may die.”

  While the two KGB men were digesting this, Vanya had bent over to force open Raya’s mouth and slip a gauze swab between her teeth to prevent her from biting her tongue; then he loosened the scarf and clothing round her neck. I was searching in her handbag for her medical card and domestic passport. I handed the passport to Larissa who studied it then turned to the KGB lieutenant.

  “It’s General Gribov’s wife,” she said.

  That got home, even though like us he didn’t know who or what General Gribov was. We noticed him glance at Raya’s coat, good clothes and silk stockings and almost saw him thinking, “If anything should happen to a general’s wife…”

  “What do we do?” he said, dubiously.

  “Go and get the ambulance driver to bring oxygen, more warm blankets and the medicine bag,” Larissa replied.

  She turned to Shapirov. “And you, comrade, can you help us over that wall into shelter so that we can treat her properly?” She indicated the low wall surrounding the mausoleum and behind the clump of spruce trees between the building and the Kremlin Wall.

  “But that’s the mausoleum, it’s…” Shapirov was stuttering when Raya uttered a long, moaning sound. Larissa cut him short. “If we don’t act immediately, she might die here.”

  With Shapirov’s help, we rolled Raya on to the stretcher and lifted her over the wall and under cover behind the trees. Larissa sent the KGB sergeant to tell Anastas to bring screens to protect the sick woman. When these arrived, we could move her into the lee of the back door of the mausoleum. Even now, we were unsighted from almost everywhere; only someone on the Kremlin Wall would have spotted us, and Shapirov had already assured us that only the two towers on either side had KGB guards on them to watch the tribune and the crowd.

  Anastas arrived with the stretcher, the screen and the medical bag just before the second wave of MIG fighters flashed low over the square, filling the sky with sound and smoke. All eyes went to the planes, then to the heavy tanks and self-propelled artillery coming over the rise. Shapirov helped us to rig the screen round Raya in the doorway. He whispered, “You’ve got quarter of an hour… twenty minutes at the most…I’ll keep them busy.”

  Quickly, I checked the two cameras I carried under my hospital smock. I had thirty-six shots in the hand camera, all color with a spare spool; I had three cassettes for the cine-camera, giving me just over half an hour of filming. Larissa was opening the medical bag in which the waxwork head and hands of Lenin were concealed while Vanya was extracting the torso and arms from one of the stretchers, the legs from the other. Larissa handed me the key.

  “Open the door slowly,” she whispered. I thrust the key into the heavy lock, turned it and pushed on the door. Nothing happened.

  “It won’t open.”

  Larissa put her shoulder to the door. It still held firm.

  “They’ve bolted it on the other side,” I suggested.

  “No. Lev told me, No.”

  She tried it again, then turned to stare at me. “How many turns did you give?”

  I held up one finger.

  “Idiot,” she said between her teeth before grabbing the key and turning it once more. Now, the bronze door swung open at a touch. We picked up the stretcher containing the dummy Vanya had assembled, entered the mausoleum and shut the door behind us.

  We moved cautiously behind my flashlight. Although we knew where the lights were, we could not risk the possibility that the three TV cameras in the crypt might still be connected; all the other pressure-sensing, radar and photo-electric devices were disconnected during May Day since the noise and movement would have triggered them. Inside the crypt we laid down the stretcher and I hoisted Larissa on to my shoulders while she taped the three TV lenses. “The lights,” she whispered. I soft-footed upstairs and pulled the two switches. Even from there, I heard her gasp and ran down to find out what had happened.

  Larissa was staring at the black marble slab and the glass sarcophagus. Tears were coursing down her cheeks and her shoulders were heaving with the effort of weeping.

  There was nothing under the glass case. Nothing but that eerie, pinkish glow from the concealed lighting in the catafalque.

  She turned to me, still sobbing “Sasha, where is it…What have they done with it…What do we do, Sasha?…We’ve been betrayed..”

  Did she know she was talking to her brother, six thousand miles away in the gulag? Blindly, she put out a hand to grasp my arm as though she thought herself about to fall. At that moment, I could not have held her up, for my own legs felt watery. “We’ve been betrayed,” she repeated.

  “Larissa, get a grip on yourself.” I caught her by the shoulders and shook her. “We’ve got to do something,” I said.

  “Where is he?” She pointed to the empty catafalque.

  “They’ve probably taken him away for routine repairs because the place is shut for May Day and some days either side.” I said this to reassure her, but I was wondering myself whether one of the group had been working with the KGB all along. However, I couldn�
�t see why they hadn’t rounded us up before we got anywhere near the mausoleum.

  “What do we do, Alan?” Larissa pleaded. She sounded helpless.

  She had thought of everything. Everything except this one possibility—that Lenin himself might not keep the rendezvous with us. I had not followed all the moves in the plot since she had revealed only so much to each of us. But I had given some consideration to what happened if we were arrested and questioned—before or after the theft.

  Now, I glanced round. Lenin had gone, but some of the sparse crypt trappings remained. For instance, the Communard flag of 187l, presented to the Soviet Union by French Communists, and Lenin’s own Communist International banner which had wrapped his body after death. “We take those,” I whispered.

  Larissa pulled herself up and went to remove them from the wall.

  I stopped her. “Wait, we want a record of them here. And everything else. Including ourselves.”

  “But that’s crazy. They’ll recognize us.”

  “If you’re right about the sekoty (KGB collaborator) they’ll have a complete dossier on all of us.” I handed her the cine-camera and a spare film spool. “It doesn’t matter what you take as long as you get everything in.” For several seconds I posed by the crystal sarcophagus, then with the two flags draped over me without attempting to hide my face. Larissa fumbled in the stretcher for that day’s Pravda and the previous day’s Izvestia. I held them up as props which would confirm the date while she photographed them. Using half the film, I repeated these scenes with her in the action.

  While she reloaded the cine-camera and used the hand camera to take some of the thirty-six color shots of the crypt and its trappings, I arranged the Lenin dummy. Lifting the glass cage, I placed Lenin underneath and wrapped him in the Communist International flag. I gave Larissa the signal to start filming while I removed the glass cover, unwrapped the flag to show Lenin in his black suit with the red rosette as he had been seen by scores of millions of people; then I undressed the dummy, holding up the various parts while Larissa, big-eyed with surprise, kept the camera whirring.