The Yermakov Transfer

by Derek Lambert

  She glanced down at Libby and smiled. “Hurry up,” she said, “or the men will be back while you’re undressed.” She seemed completely unconcerned about her nakedness. She stood there for a few moments and Libby smelled her cologne – all Russian cologne smelled the same.

  “Perhaps,” Libby Chandler said, “there would be more room if you got into bed first.”

  The girl shrugged. “As you wish.” She pulled on a pink cotton nightdress, climbed into her bunk and lay watching Libby as she manoeuvred herself into her pyjamas feeling as if she were undressing in the convent where she had been educated, where one’s anatomy was not supposed to be visible to anyone – even God.

  * * *

  When Viktor Pavlov entered his compartment after meeting Stanley Wagstaff in the corridor he found that the breezy stranger, Yosif Gavralin, who had arrived last had occupied his berth. He looked up as Pavlov came in and said: “Hope you don’t mind. It was difficult climbing up there.” He slapped his thigh under the bedclothes. “A hunting accident.” Pavlov who knew there was nothing he could do said he didn’t mind, but during the night he dreamed a knife was coming through the mattress, sliding between spine and shoulder blade.

  * * *

  By 22.00 hours on the first day, the two K.G.B. officers had searched the next three cars to the special coach attached to the end of the train. They had re-examined the papers of every passenger and attendant, they had removed and replaced panelling, checked luggage and taken two Russians into custody in a compartment like a cell guarded by armed militia. The Russians had committed no real crime; but there were slight irregularities in their papers and the police couldn’t afford to take chances; they would be put off the train at Kirov.

  They started on the fourth coach. They took their time, apologising for getting passengers out of their beds, knowing that this was the best time to interrogate and search. They were very thorough and, although they were in civilian clothes, they looked as if they were in uniform – charcoal grey suits with shoulders filled with muscle, light grey ties almost transparent and wide trousers which had become fashionable in the West. One had a schoolboyish face, the other was shorter with slightly Mongolian features.

  “Quite trendy,” said a young Englishman on his way to Hong Kong, pointing at their trousers.

  “Your papers, please,” said the officer with the schoolboy features. He stared at the young man’s passport photograph. “Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me. Who do you think it is? Mark Phillips?”

  The other policeman examined the photograph. “It doesn’t look like you.”

  Fear edged the young man’s voice. All he had ever read and ridiculed was coming true. “I’ve got my driving licence,” he said. He looked suddenly frail in his Kings Road nightshirt, his long hair falling across his eyes.

  The first officer said: “We’re on a train not in a car. When did you have this photograph taken?”

  “When I left school.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two years.”

  The one with the Mongolian face stared hard at the photograph. Finally he said: “You weren’t quite so trendy – is that the word? – in those days.” He handed the passport back to the young man.

  Outside in the corridor the two officers smiled at each other.

  Before they entered the next compartment they were overtaken by Colonel Yury Razin who was in charge of the whole security operation. He was a big man, a benevolent family man, a professional survivor who had once been close to Beria and retained his rank even after Stalin and his stooges had been discredited; to maintain his survival record he allowed none of his paternal benevolence to affect his work.

  The two junior officers stopped smiling and straightened up. One of them made a small salute.

  The colonel was holding the list of names marked with red crosses. “Any luck?”

  “Two doubtfuls,” said the shorter of the two. “We wouldn’t have bothered with them normally. Minor irregularities in their papers.”

  Colonel Razin nodded. He had soft brown eyes, a big head and a blue chin which he shaved often. During the Stalin era he had been involved in fabricating charges against nine physicians – the infamous “Doctors’ Plot” exposed in Pravda on January 13, 1953. Six of the accused were Jews and they were charged with conspiring not only with American and British agents but with “Zionist spies”. One month after Stalin’s death Moscow Radio announced that the charges against the doctors were false. Colonel Razin, the survivor, who didn’t see himself as anti-Semitic – merely an obedient policeman – helped indict those who had fabricated the plot.

  He rubbed the cleft in his chin, which was difficult to shave, and prodded the list. “Leave the next compartment to me.”

  The two officers nodded. They didn’t expect an explanation, but they got one.

  The colonel said: “This man Pavlov. I know him. He’s given information against Jewish agitators in the past. A brilliant mathematician. Married to Anna Petrovna, heroine of the Soviet Union. Odd to find him on the train today?”

  The two officers looked at each other. Finally one of them asked: “Why’s that, sir?”

  The other said respectfully: “He’s got authorisation from the very top – from Comrade Baranov – and a letter from the State Committee of Ministers for Science and Technology.”

  Razin silenced them. “I know all that. And he’s going to meet his wife in Khabarovsk.” He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “He and I are old friends. I’ll talk to him.” He blew out a lot of smoke. “But it’s odd just the same.” He didn’t enlighten them any more.

  He opened the door and switched on the light.

  Pavlov wasn’t surprised to see him: he wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone. He shaded his eyes and said: “Good evening, Comrade Razin.”

  “Good evening,” Razin said. “A pleasant surprise.”

  “Pleasant,” Pavlov said. “But surely no surprise?”

  The Tartar general glared down from the top bunk. “What now? What the hell’s going on?”

  Razin said: “You must excuse me, General. I am only doing my duty. We have a very important guest on board.”

  The general’s wife stuck her head out from beneath her husband’s berth. Her hair was in curlers and there was cream on her face. Her chest looked formidable. She said: “You’re surely not suggesting …”

  Colonel Razin held up his hand. “I wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything. You and your husband are well known to us. But there are others in the compartment.”

  The general and his wife stared at the breezy stranger and Pavlov knew that a small charade was about to be acted.

  Colonel Razin said: “Can I see your papers, please?”

  The stranger sighed and reached for his wallet. A smell of embrocation reached Pavlov: the stranger had been working on his cover – but he had forgotten to limp when he first arrived.

  Colonel Razin thumbed through the papers while he addressed Pavlov: “I understand you’re meeting your wife in Khabarovsk.”

  Pavlov, head on his hand, nodded. “First I have some business in Novosibirsk and Irkutsk.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “I know,” Pavlov said. “I hope to hear the speeches.”

  “Do you, Comrade Pavlov? Do you indeed?” He handed the stranger’s papers back to him with a perfunctory “Thank you.” To Pavlov he said: “We must meet and have a drink for old-time’s sake. In the restaurant car, perhaps, at eleven tomorrow morning?”

  “That would be fine,” Pavlov said.

  “Are you making the whole journey?”

  ‘I’m leaving the train at Khabarovsk. I presumed you knew that, Colonel.”

  Razin looked annoyed: he didn’t like to hear his rank used. Particularly in the presence of a general. Even if his status was superior when the chips were down.

  Pavlov asked: “Don’t you want to see my papers?”

  “It won’t be necessar
y. The husband of a Heroine of the Soviet Union shouldn’t suffer the indignity.”

  He bowed as if he were in uniform, a Prussian officer’s bow. “Good-night, ladies and gentlemen. Pleasant dreams.”

  After he had closed the door the general’s wife asked: “Is it true that your wife’s a heroine … ?” Her voice sounded as if her mouth was full of food.

  Pavlov said: “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  He lay quietly listening to the soporific sound of wheels on rails – the 5 ft. gauge! Could anything go wrong before the plan was actually put into action? With the appearance of Colonel Razin one more imponderable had been used. He worried about it for an hour, then fell asleep. By that time it was 1.13 a.m. Moscow time and they were just leaving Kirov at the beginning of the second day of the journey.

  * * *

  The special coach was a mixture of styles. A functional office, two soft-class sleeping compartments for guards and staff, a K.G.B. control room with radio and receiving equipment for the microphones planted on the train, a cell, a larder and two compartments knocked into a large deluxe sleeper with mahogany panelling, thick pink drapes, a chair made of buttoned red satin, a Chinese carpet, washbasin and mirror with frosted patterns round the edge, a mahogany table and chair, and a bed with pink plush curtains controlled by a gold cord with a tassel.

  Despite the luxury, the Kremlin leader couldn’t sleep. He lay alone, guarded in the corridor by two armed militia. It was always at night that the power left him to be replaced by doubt. He was sixty-six, entering the period of self-appraisal when the past presents itself for assessment. He saw the faces of those whom he had executed; he remembered the way he had hacked his way to absolute power. And he tried to equate it all with achievement: the prestige of the Soviet Union, the fear it struck into the bowels of other powers; the standard of living of the people. When he concentrated – when he recalled the tyranny of Tsarist days, the twenty million lost in World War II, the massive injustices of the Stalin era – the equation sometimes worked.

  It was for these searching reasons – and the fact that a younger man was snapping at his heels in the Kremlin hierarchy – that he had decided to make the journey across Siberia. To see for himself the “heroic achievements” which his writers monotonously inserted into speeches until they had no impact at all and to re-affirm his popularity. But tonight he wasn’t so sure that it had been a good idea. He felt as if the train was plunging him into bloodshed and oppression. He thought of the camps on the steppes where enemies of the State still languished; he felt that when he looked out of the windows at the dark shadows that he was seeing his conscience drift past.

  He turned to the diminishing future. He wished there was a God who would understand; but he had helped to banish him from the land.

  He reached towards the table, a bulky figure in striped pyjamas, not impressive now during the naked small hours of the morning, and found his sleeping pills. He took one, held it on his tongue and washed it down with a draught of Narzan water. It burned for a moment in his stomach; then he slept to awake a leader once more.

  * * *

  The train nosed through the night, an express only in name, but inexorable with its steady speed, bumping a little but hardly swaying.

  Soon it would reach the Urals, the gateway to Siberia. Near the Chusovaya River it passed a striped post, the boundary between Europe and Asia; on this boundary, at a point known as the Monument of Tears, the exiles used to bid farewell to their families before marching, manacled, into Siberia where the law was the three-flonged plet, where home was a sod hut and work was a mine sunk in perm frost. They had died by the thousand but millions had survived, the Russian way. And, with commuted sentences as the incentive, they helped to build the great railway carrying Train No. 2.

  In the 1890s, five million were estimated to have travelled east to start new lives. There was another exodus between 1927–39; then, during World War II, as the Germans drove deep into European Russia, another 10½ million – the greatest evacuation in history.

  When dawn broke the train was burrowing through valleys over which, it was said, there wasn’t a patch of blue sky without its own eagle.

  CHAPTER 3

  After queuing for half an hour Harry Bridges took his place for breakfast in the dining car. He sat opposite Libby Chandler and smiled at her.

  “Look,” he said, “we might as well be friends.”

  She smiled back. “Why not. I was tired yesterday.”

  His professional instincts took over again. “And nervous?” She didn’t look so frightened this blue-and-gold morning; but he knew the fear was still there.

  “Just excited,” she said.

  He ordered a hard-boiled egg, coffee and toast. The waitress, wearing a tiara of paper lace, brought him a soft-boiled egg, tea and bread.

  She laughed. “They’re not very efficient, are they?”

  He jumped to the defence. “You’re not in Highgate Village now,”

  She flushed. “I wasn’t ridiculing them. I’ve always admired the Russians.”

  “You have? You’re one of the few. Most tourists see the Kremlin, the Winter Palace and GUM and go home complaining that there wasn’t a plug in their bath.”

  “I’m not one of those, Mr. Bridges.”

  “Harry,” he said. He dipped his spoon into his liquid egg. “It’s fear really,” he said. “People make fun of things they’re scared of. They made fun of the Kaiser and Hitler,” he added.

  She ordered more coffee. “Do you live in Moscow, Harry?”

  He nodded. “I have an apartment there. I’m a journalist in case you’re wondering.”

  “I guessed as much. Do you find it difficult? I mean with the restrictions and everything?”

  He was silent for a moment, thinking that this beautiful girl with her long blonde hair and blue eyes was very perceptive. Unconsciously, perhaps, but with an unerring knack of asking the pertinent question – sensing that he had a special status. He also thought she was tough, like one of those pioneering Englishwomen who had traversed the steppes and taiga at the turn of the century; therefore her fear had a formidable source.

  He dodged the answer by saying: “It’s usually me who asks the questions. What are you doing crossing Siberia?” he asked.

  “Escaping,” she said, staring out of the window.

  “We’re all doing that,” Harry Bridges said. “Escaping from what? The police? A jealous lover?”

  “Just escaping.” She pointed at a railway siding called Naked Boy Halt. “It looks as if I’ve made it.”

  “The Wild East,” Harry Bridges said. “Wilder than the West ever was. Especially farther east. Escaped convicts, Cossacks, gold barons, bandits. In Irkutsk they used to have six murders a week until the whole town was burned down because the firemen were all drunk.”

  “Look,” she said. They gazed at gentle hills covered with birch and red pine, running with streams. Beside the railway stood a log-cutter’s hut with red and blue, fretworked eaves. An old woman with a hard, ancient face was feeding geese beside a pond tissued with ice.

  “Your first Siberian,” Bridges told her.

  “Let’s take a walk down the train and see some more. They got on at the last stop. They’re travelling hard class.”

  “You make them sound like animals.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” She was through his defences again. “They’re the toughest people in the world. And the most honest. Do you know what they say in Siberia?”

  She shook her head.

  “They say that in the taiga only bears steal.” He decided that he sounded naïve so he added: “And to get over that in the old days they used to put food out for the escaped convicts – the brodyagi – so that they didn’t have to steal.”

  She looked at him over the top of her coffee cup. “Are you an honest man, Harry?”

  Hell! he thought. “As honest as most. More than some, less than others.”

  She nodded without belief, with
out disbelief.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Then tell me what you’re doing on this train.”

  “I’m an adventuress,” she said.

  “I guess dishonesty isn’t just a question of telling lies,” Bridges said. “It’s also a question of evading the truth.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Libby Chandler said, lighting a cigarette with a gold Dunhill.

  They were joined by Viktor Pavlov who ordered lemon tea and toast and said to Bridges: “I think we’ve met before.”

  Bridges said: “Have we? I don’t remember.”

  “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”

  Bridges said he was.

  “And American?”

  “This morning,” Bridges said, “people seem to be asking a lot of questions.”

  “I’ve read your stuff and we both live on Kutuzovsky. Maybe we haven’t actually met. You’ve written some … some glowing reports.” He chose his words carefully.

  Bridges seemed to take exception to the remark; although Libby Chandler couldn’t see why. She felt the hostility between these two men; and yet they hardly knew each other. If there had been time for anything but her own crisis it would have worried her.

  Bridges said: “You mean I’ve written some good assessments of Soviet policy?”

  Pavlov shrugged, squeezing lemon into his tea. “I said glowing reports. That’s a compliment, surely?”

  “Then you’ve missed the critical aspects.”

  “No,” Pavlov told him, “I haven’t. I thought they were inserted by your editors in America.” He smiled. “I must have been wrong.” He sipped his tea. “Are you covering the tour, Mr. Bridges?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “And you?” Pavlov turned to Libby Chandler.

  “A holiday,” she lied.

  “You’ve chosen an auspicious occasion.”

  “So has Comrade Yermakov,” Libby Chandler said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Because I’m on the train. Just a joke.”