Shard Calls the Tune

by Philip McCutchan

  “Yes, I see.”

  “And it does not weigh on my mind, not really. For release of tension there is the singing — the choir I belong to — and the preaching itself, you see. Or there was. That freshens the mind, you might say.”

  Shard lifted an eyebrow. “And the rugby?”

  “Oh, the rugby, yes! I follow the rugby. Who does not, in Wales? Whenever possible I was there at the Arms Park to watch Wales win, and went to Twickenham too to watch England lose. There were wonderful days for a Welshman.” A wistfulness had come into his voice. “And there was the singing at the games, you see. ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ and ‘Cwm Rhondda’ … I used to join in, of course, with all the others. It was almost like being at chapel, you know. There was a difference when the English sang. The words … they do not have God in England as we have him in Wales.” Hughes-Jones paused, then added, “I would like to see another international while I am in Wales, but you see it is not the season.”

  They entered a small township called Baltov where there was a petrol pump. With the tank filled they drove on through mountain country, following the course of the Desna river.

  *

  Hedge was furious: the Maltese wouldn’t let him through into the airfield buildings or indeed any part of the airfield at all.

  “What the devil do you mean?” he stormed at a short, fat policeman. “I’m British!”

  “Yes, you are British.” The policeman grinned rudely, and placed a dirty hand on his chest. “No one is allowed in yet.”

  “Why not?”

  The man gave a disinterested shrug. “It is orders, that is all I can tell you.”

  “But look here, I said I’m British. I’m not going to blow the wretched airfield up, am I?”

  “For all I know, perhaps yes.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” Hedge fumed. “I’ll go straight to my High Commissioner and report your non-co-operation and impertinence —”

  “Yes, I advise this.”

  Hedge gaped. “You do?”

  “Yes. Otherwise you will stay and be arrested for impeding the police in the course of their duty. Please go away at once.” Hedge shook with anger and frustration; Kolotechin was due in less than half an hour now, and the British government was being blocked by a filthy Maltese policeman! But arrest — and the man clearly meant what he had said — was naturally not to be considered. It was undignified and from a cell he couldn’t do a thing about Kolotechin — or that man Hockaway, who would be sure to turn up before long if he hadn’t already. But of course Hockaway wouldn’t be allowed in either; if the Maltese didn’t let a British subject in, then they certainly wouldn’t let an American in. That stood to reason. Hissing, Hedge turned his back on the policeman and the gate into the airfield. The High Commissioner would soon settle … but when? Hedge’s face went a very deep red indeed: the damn gharry had gone, tottering off behind its horse.

  What now?

  Wait, of course, willy-nilly. He might be able to do something, though he doubted it strongly. And what would Kolotechin think, for heaven’s sake? There he would be, waiting for his contact so he could defect without fuss, and that contact was hanging about the distant gate, classed as an unwanted person by a blasted proletarian of a former British colony! Hedge dithered; should he after all attempt the walk to the High Commission and get Sir Humphrey to settle a few peoples’ hashes, or should he wait? The decision to wait held; the walk was a very long one and by the time he had made it, Kolotechin would have landed. Besides, Sir Humphrey hadn’t been very helpful all along and it was quite likely he wouldn’t beany more forthcoming now. In due course, a report on that would be made to the Foreign Office. Meanwhile Hedge waited, at a distance from the gate and watched closely by the policeman. He walked up and down, seething. He was being made to look a complete fool. He wouldn’t be able to do a thing about Kolotechin and the whole well-laid plan would go astray. The Head of Security … but the Head of Security’s reaction didn’t bear thinking about. Hedge would be unfairly blamed for the impertinent action of a Maltese policeman and that would be that. The Foreign Office could be extremely harsh.

  Time passed: Hedge, looking at his watch, found that it was now five minutes past eleven. Kolotechin was late. Usually the Russians were very efficient and punctual. Another half an hour passed; all the VIPs and officials waited still but there was no Russian delegation to be welcomed. This was most tiresome; had Hedge been where he should have been, with the welcoming committee, he would doubtless have overheard the reason. As it was, he could only speculate. He grew more and more angry, and more and more anxious. Something had obviously gone wrong, but what? Well, there was one thing: no-one could blame him for Kolotechin’s lateness. Indeed, if Kolotechin didn’t come at all, he would stand blameless. No one could receive a defector who didn’t defect. An unworthy hope visited Hedge: the hope that it was all off.

  Noon came and went, and still no Kolotechin. Hedge waited, so did the officials in all their distant dignity. At 1300 hours something happened: all the VIPs departed at once, streaming from the now opened gates in their expensive black cars. Through the windows Hedge saw the angry Maltese faces: they had been stood up and they didn’t like it.

  Hedge walked back, footsore and weary from a long wait, into Valetta. He was passed by a Fiat and he recognised the driver: Gloster B. Hockaway. The American didn’t stop to offer him a lift. Vengefully, Hedge shook a fist at the cloud of dust.

  *

  “I’ve no more idea than you have,” Sir Humphrey said, and looked at Hedge closely. “I dare say you could do with a drink?”

  “Yes!”

  “Whisky?”

  “Thank you.”

  The High Commissioner pressed a bell and a servant appeared. Whisky and a soda siphon were brought. Hedge imbibed deeply and felt less dry and dusty. “What do we do now?” he asked plaintively.

  “Wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Kolotechin, I suppose. He may yet come. Or anyway, word from the Foreign Office. I assume they’ll keep you informed, won’t they?”

  “I hope so,” Hedge snapped. “As a matter of fact, you’d think they’d have sent word through already.”

  “Perhaps they don’t know yet. I suppose you know your own business best, but wouldn’t it be a good thing to tell them he hasn’t arrived?”

  “But I’m waiting to be told why he hasn’t arrived!”

  “Yes, indeed. Whitehall may not know yet. If you’d tell them he hasn’t come, then they could put feelers out. I’m sure you take my point?”

  Hedge shifted about irritably in his chair. “Oh, very well. I’ll draft a despatch to be put into Foreign Office cipher.”

  This was done. After the message had gone, there was another wait, this time not a long one: an incoming cipher arrived from the Foreign Office and when this had been broken down, it appeared as though the messages had crossed in transit. Hedge was informed that the aircraft carrying Kolotechin had returned to Moscow. This had been shortly after take-off. There was no further information available but Hedge would be contacted as soon as anything emerged. In the meantime he was to remain in Malta and keep a low profile. The low profile was important; the time-lag was of itself a danger now. If word happened to get back to Moscow that Hedge was lurking in Malta, there might be trouble. No one was supposed to know who Hedge was, of course, but that couldn’t be relied upon.

  “Better keep clear of the Gut,” Sir Humphrey said, grinning.

  Hedge disregarded the remark. He said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if that man Hockaway has something to do with this.”

  “What could he do?”

  “Inform Moscow. I always suspected he might be a Russian agent.”

  “Oh, rubbish, my dear chap. He’s well vouched for, at any rate as an American reporter.” Sir Humphrey coughed. “I contacted his Embassy this morning. Just to be on the safe side —”

  “You might have told me!”

  “I’m sorry. Anyway, he’s
in the clear.”

  “And wants Kolotechin?”

  “I didn’t go into that, for obvious reasons.”

  *

  Shard and Hughes-Jones spent the second night in one of Kolotechin’s ‘safe houses’ not far inside the frontier with Hungary. This was a lonely farm nestling in a valley in the western foothills of the Carpathians. It was run by a middle-aged man named Igor Rashidov; with him lived his mother, an old lady not far off being a centenarian. After a good supper they all sat around a flaring log fire and the old lady talked; she couldn’t be stopped, though her son looked uneasy throughout, she had affinities with Miss Brown, though she was much more interesting. Once, she had been in service with an aristocratic family, back in the days of the Tsars and Imperial Russia. A Grand Duke, no less. It had been a family tradition: her father had been coachman to the Grand Duke’s father, her mother had been a lady’s-maid to the Grand Duchess. There had been, she said to Hughes-Jones who had acquired a good understanding of Russian, plenty of happiness then. The servants had been reasonably treated when they served good masters and she had had no complaints. Since the revolution times had been hard, and though they had improved of recent years there was too much interference from authority and the commissars; and she had no love for the collectives. Independence was much better.

  “Do you agree?” Hughes-Jones asked the son.

  “I am content,” he answered, giving his mother a hard look. “I do not complain. We live well enough and the interference does not worry me.”

  “And Comrade Kolotechin?”

  Shard stiffened when he heard the name. He had warned Hughes-Jones that names were better kept out of any conversation, but the Welshman seemed to be a law to himself in many ways. And Igor Rashidov answered the question easily and naturally. He said, “Comrade Kolotechin spends holidays here on occasions. He loves the countryside, and our peace and quiet, our sunrises and sunsets. Comrade Kolotechin is a good man and we have grown friendly.” He turned to his mother for confirmation. “Is this not so?”

  The old woman nodded, her seamed face working with her burden of age. “Yes, my son, it is so. Comrade Kolotechin has mellowed with the years and is a good man. At first it was not so, but now yes.” She stared at Hughes-Jones. “You have been in prison. Your hair shows this. And you are British. Perhaps you have Comrade Kolotechin to thank for your release.”

  “Perhaps, yes.”

  The old woman was silent for a while, then said, “I ask no more questions. We have been asked to give you shelter. We do this willingly. Yet there is danger in it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “In Russia today there is always danger, always fear. And Comrade Kolotechin himself … I fear for him also, for he has grown too good. It is not safe for a man to do that.” She said no more; the son saw to that. He got to his feet and took her arm roughly, upbraiding her for a long, loose tongue that would be better off in bed. She was removed, protesting at first and then accepting the man’s superior strength and wisdom. When the two of them were alone for a while before the son’s return, Shard got a full interpretation from Hughes-Jones; his own Russian had failed to stand the test all the way through.

  “I wonder what she meant about Kolotechin,” Hughes-Jones said.

  “Maybe she was suggesting he was nearing the end of his rope. And maybe he is … which is why he’s for out. It’s better to go than be purged.”

  “He would have gone anyway, I believe.”

  Shard nodded. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. As for us, we’re slap bang in the danger zone timewise from now on.”

  “Kolotechin may not have shown his hand yet, in Malta.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Shard said.

  Igor Rashidov came back into the room and said, “Old women lose their senses and their memories, they forget the bad times. I am a loyal member of the Party.”

  “Of course.”

  “As also is Comrade Kolotechin. You must forgive my mother.”

  “I understand very well,” Hughes-Jones said. “I, too, had an old mother.”

  The Russian nodded and suggested it was time for all to go to bed. He wanted them to be up early in the dawn, and away. There could be misunderstandings and never mind the clearance given by Comrade Kolotechin. He took Shard and Hughes-Jones up a ricketty flight of stairs to a small room with two beds. A window was set flat in the roof, and through this the moon was shining to cast weird greenish shadows across the narrow beds, two chairs, and a chest of drawers bearing a photograph of Lenin in life and a depiction of the embalmed Lenin in the Kremlin. There was no Stalin. It was an eerie room, and the moon on the picture of the dead figure made it more eerie. Though close now to the frontier — which in any case led only into more Communism — Shard felt entombed like Lenin, entombed in the great Russian land mass, all set up for the kill if anything should go wrong.

  Comrade Rashidov left them. He left them lightless, but there was no curtain across that flat roof-window and the moon gave enough light for undressing and for washing in the pitcher of cold water that they found, with a basin, in a comer of the room. With the moon full on dead Lenin, Shard failed to find sleep quickly: there was too much on his mind. Hughes-Jones fell asleep almost at once, and thereafter snored. Despite the sound Shard fell into a light sleep, from which he awoke suddenly to hear a vehicle pulling up outside and then the rattle of firearms.

  9

  Shard put a hand over Hughes-Jones’s mouth. The snore became muffled and then ceased. “Quiet,” Shard whispered, and removed the hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Someone’s arrived.”

  “Who?” The Welshman sat up, eyes wide in the moonlight.

  “I don’t know yet. We must be ready.” Shard had his automatic in his hand with the slide drawn back. “I need you awake, but you’d better carry on snoring. Just to lull them, whoever they are, all right?”

  “All right,” Hughes-Jones said, and snored. Shard listened intently but heard nothing more. He wondered whether they should try to find a way out of the back and scarper fast, but a moment’s thought showed him this would be folly. They could never bring it off unheard, and the back might well be watched now; and for all he knew the collective farmers could merely be assembling for a dawn duck shoot, like any bunch of English country squires. Or something like that, anyway. Hughes-Jones snored on. Then Shard heard movement below, a sound of stealth and imminent danger. He moved to the door of the attic room and stood immediately behind the jamb, his automatic ready. Silence came again, then more movement, then further silence. This time it was shattered by a piercing scream, a woman’s scream Shard fancied, then a deep-voiced shout of anger. After this, the sound of a blow of bone on flesh. Then a stutter of gunfire from an automatic rifle and another scream, quickly bitten off. After that, a fast mounting of the rickety old stairs.

  Hughes-Jones came out of bed with a leap, seemed to turn a somersault, and vanished beneath the bedstead. Shard waited; the door crashed open, flying back upon him, and a black uniform entered. In the moonlight Shard saw the glint of steel as an automatic rifle was fanned around. He came out from behind the door, meaning to shove his gun in the uniformed man’s spine, but he was spotted, and the rifle swung in a flash and he saw the whitening knuckles round the trigger as the squeeze was put on. Never mind Hedge’s order — there was no time for anything else now: Shard was quicker than the intruder. A short burst and the lungs almost went out through the backbone. The body fell forward and as it did so Shard grabbed the automatic rifle, a beauty capable of 600 rounds per minute, and swung to cover the stairs. Four men charged up, firing as they came. Bullets zipped into woodwork and one smashed Lenin, who died a second time. Another took flesh off Shard’s right ear, but all four of the men took the full blast of the rifle. It was carnage. Four bodies flopped and fell. The firing stopped as suddenly as it had started and gunsmoke drifted like a pall, filtering up the stairs into the moonbeams. There was a total silence, broken by Hughes-Jones clam
bering out from under the bed.

  “Goodness gracious me,” he said.

  *

  They searched through the house. They found Igor Rashidov and his mother, both dead. The old lady seemed to have been dragged from her bed and hit in the face before being shot. The son had no doubt gone to her aid, and that must have been when the shooting had started. There was blood everywhere and no one living. Nor were there any explanations, and it was impossible to answer Hughes-Jones’s urgent questions other than with guesses.

  “Maybe the old lady had opened her mouth too wide in the past,” Shard said. “Maybe a lot of things. Russia’s like that.”

  “But why?”

  “No God.”

  “Yes, I think you are right after all, perhaps. This has been a terrible experience, very terrible indeed. So many dead.” The Welshman’s voice shook with emotion and his body was trembling: he was all of a twitch but there was a funny light in his eye, a look almost of interest in violent death rather than of the revulsion Shard would have expected of him. “I saw nothing like this, not in prison, you know.”

  “Probably not. Don’t let’s dwell on it.” Shard’s voice was taut and hard: just for a moment he had fancied Hughes-Jones was seeing Evan Evans lying bloody like those bodies were lying and it was not a happy thought for the future if he’d been right. “Now we go, and fast. This place is remote, very remote. I doubt if anything’ll have been heard. On the other hand, someone’s going to come looking for those police when they don’t report back to base. If they haven’t already — after I shot the first one.”

  “You mean —”

  “I mean by transceiver. This.” Shard held up a pocket-size receiver and transmitter which he had removed from a body on the staircase. “He may just have had time — we can’t be sure.”

  “So what do we do, Mr Shard?”

  “First, stick to calling me Rowlands. It’s a good habit to get into. Second, we head for the frontier, fast. Very fast. I’ll drive from now, if you don’t mind. We may just make it in time.”