by Dick Francis
‘What a fuss over a little cough.’ She looked at the fearsome array of life-support systems with all the superiority of the naturally healthy.
‘Gloomsville,’ I agreed. ‘And put them all back.’
She humoured me by replacing them with excessive care.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘surely all these things are for asthma, not bronchitis.’
‘When I get bronchitis, I get asthma.’
‘And vice versa?’
I shook my head. ‘How about hopping into bed?’
‘At half-past four on a Sunday afternoon with an invalid?’
‘It’s been done before.’
‘So it has,’ she agreed: and it was done again, with not a cough or a wheeze to be heard.
Rupert Hughes-Beckett, in his London office, the next morning, handed me an air ticket, a visa, a hotel reservation, and a sheet of names and addresses. Not enough.
‘How about my answers?’ I said.
‘I’m afraid… ah… they are not yet available.’
‘Why not?’
‘The enquiries are still… ah… in hand.’
He was not meeting my eyes. He was finding the backs of his own hands as fascinating as he had in my sitting-room. He must know every freckle, I thought. Every wrinkle and every vein.
‘Do you mean you haven’t even started?’ I said incredulously. ‘My letter must have reached you by last Tuesday at the latest. Six days ago.’
‘With your visa photographs, yes. You must understand there are… ah… problems in obtaining a visa at such short notice.’
I said, ‘What is the point of a visa if I don’t have the information? And couldn’t you have got both at once?’
‘We thought… ah… the telex. At the Embassy. We can send you the answers as they reach us.’
‘And I trot around there every five minutes to see if the carrier pigeon has fluttered into the loft?’
He smiled austerely, a miniscule movement of the severely controlled lips.
‘You can telephone,’ he said. ‘The number is on that paper.’ He leaned back a little in his five-star office chair and looked earnestly at his hand to see if the knuckle-to-wrist scenery had changed at all in the last half minute. ‘We did of course have a word with the doctor who attended Hans Kramer.’
‘Well?’ I prompted, as he seemed to have stopped there.
‘He was the doctor in attendance at the Three-Day-Event. He was seeing to a girl with a broken collar-bone when someone came to tell him that one of the Germans had collapsed. He left the girl almost immediately, but by the time he reached him, Kramer was already dead. He tried heart massage, he says, and a suitable injection, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but all to no avail. The body was… ah… cyanosed, and the cause of death was… ah… cardiac arrest.’
‘Or in other words, heart attack.’
‘Ah… yes. There was an autopsy, of course. Natural causes. So sad in someone so young.’
None of this present caper would have been necessary, I thought moodily, if Hans Kramer had not been so inconsiderate as to drop in his tracks. There was nothing like death for spawning and perpetuating myths, and it looked certain the Alyosha crop had circulated simply because Kramer hadn’t been around to deny them.
‘The names and addresses of the rest of the German team?’ I said.
‘To follow.’
‘And the names and addresses of the members of the Russian team which came over for the International Horse Trials at Burghley?’
‘To follow.’
‘And of the Russian observers?’
‘To follow.’
I stared at him. The most hopeful lead I’d unearthed in several telephone calls to people in the Event world had been the frequent reference to ‘the Russian observers’: three men who in a semi-official capacity had attended a number of horse trials during the past season, not just the International Event for which their team had been entered. The reasons for their presence had been described variously as ‘spying’, ‘seeing how Events should be run’, ‘nicking our best horses’, and ‘assessing the standard they had to reach to make the West look stupid at the Olympics’.
I said to Hughes-Beckett, ‘The Prince told me you had agreed to do some of the spadework.’
‘We will,’ he said. ‘But on the scene of international politics your errand is of limited importance. My office has been working this week on matters of greater urgency than… ah… horses.’
The same faint undisguisable contempt coloured his voice and pinched his nostrils.
‘Do you expect me to succeed in this task?’ I said.
He studied the back of his hand and didn’t answer.
‘Do you wish me to succeed?’
He lifted his gaze to my face as if it were a two ton weight.
‘I would be grateful if you would bear in mind that clearing the way for Lord Farringford to be able to be considered for the Olympics, always supposing that he or his horse should prove to be good enough, is not something for which we would willingly sacrifice any… ah… bargaining positions with the Soviet Union. We would in particular not wish to find ourselves in the position of having to tender an apology.’
‘It’s a wonder you asked me to go,’ I said.
‘The Prince wished it.’
‘And he leaned on you?’
Hughes-Beckett folded his mouth primly. ‘It is not a totally unreasonable request. If we altogether disapproved of your errand we would not have helped in any way.’
‘All right,’ I said, rising to my feet and stowing the various papers into pockets. ‘I take it that you would like me to go, which will prove you are not obstructive, and to ask a few harmless questions, and get some inconclusive answers, and for the Prince not to buy the German horse, and for Johnny Farringford not to be picked for the team, and for no one to make waves?’
He regarded me with all the world-weariness of a senior civil servant, saying nothing but meaning yes.
‘We have reserved a room for you for two weeks,’ he said. ‘But of course you can return earlier if you wish.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And if you read that sheet of paper, you will find we have given you one or two… ah… contacts, who may be helpful.’
I glanced at the short list, which was headed by the British Embassy, Naberezhnaya Morisa Teresa 12.
‘One of those lower down is a man concerned with training the Soviet team for the Olympic Three-Day-Event.’
‘Well,’ I said, pleasantly surprised, ‘that’s better.’
He said with faint smugness, ‘We have not been entirely idle, as you supposed.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The last name on the list is that of a student at Moscow University. He is English, and is there on an exchange visit for one year. He speaks Russian, of course. We have written to him to tell him you will be coming. He will be helpful if you need an interpreter, but we ask that nothing you do will prejudice his… ah… continued acceptance for the rest of the academic year.’
‘As he is more important than horses?’
Hughes-Beckett achieved a remote and frosty smile. ‘Most things are,’ he said.
The tickets he had provided found me the next day sitting comfortably in the first class on an Aeroflot flight which arrived at six in the evening, local time. Most of my fellow-travellers in the privileged cabin were black: Cubans, I idly wondered? But then, in a shifting world, they could be from anywhere: today’s ally, tomorrow’s exterminee. They wore superbly-tailored suits with white shirts and elegant ties, and were met at the doors of the aeroplane on landing by extra-long limousines. Those of less note went through normal immigration procedures, but without, in my case, any great delay. The customs men waved me through as if uninterested, though on the next bench they seemed to be taking apart a man of much my age. Every scrap of paper was being read, every pocket emptied, and the lining of the suitcase closely examined. The object of these attentions bore them stolidly, without expression. No protest, no indi
gnation, nor, as far as I could see, any apprehension. As I went on my way, one of the officers picked up a pair of underpants and carefully felt his way round the waistband.
I was thinking purposefully of taxis, but it transpired that I, too, had been provided with a reception committee. A girl in a brown coat and a fawn knitted hat approached me tentatively, and said, ‘Mr Drew?’
She saw from my reaction that she had the right man. She said, ‘My name is Natasha. I am from Intourist. We will be looking after you during your stay here. We have a car to take you to your hotel.’ She turned towards a slightly older woman standing a pace or two away. ‘This is my colleague, Anna.’
‘How kind of you to take so much trouble,’ I said politely. ‘How did you know me?’
Natasha glanced matter-of-factly at a paper in her hand. ‘Englishman, thirty-two years old, dark wavy hair, glasses with mottled brown frames, no moustache or beard, good clothes.’
‘The car is outside,’ Anna said. I thought that that wasn’t totally surprising, as cars usually were, at airports.
Anna was short, stocky, and soberly clad in a grey coat with a darker grey woolly hat. There was something forbidding in her face, a stiffness which continued downwards through the forward-thrusting abdomen to the functional toes of her boots. Her manner was welcoming enough, but would continue to be, I reckoned, only as long as I behaved as she thought I should.
‘Do you have a hat?’ Natasha said, solicitously. ‘It is cold outside. You should have a fur hat.’
I had already had a taste of the climate in the scamper from aircraft to bus, and from bus to airport door. Most of the passengers seemed to have sprouted headgear on the flight and had emerged in black fur with ear-flaps, but I was huddled only into my fluffy scarf.
‘You lose much body-heat through the head,’ said Natasha seriously. ‘Tomorrow you must buy a hat.’
‘Very well,’ I said.
She had splendid dark eyebrows and creamy white skin, and wore smooth pale pink lipstick. A touch of humour would have put the missing sparkle into her brown eyes, but then a touch of humour in the Soviets would have transformed the world.
‘You have not been to Moscow before?’
‘No,’ I said.
There was a group of four large men in dark overcoats standing by the exit doors. They were turned inwards towards each other as if in conversation, but their eyes were directed outwards, and none of them was talking. Natasha and Anna walked past them as if they were wallpaper.
‘Who asked you to meet me?’ I asked curiously.
‘Our Intourist office,’ Natasha said.
‘But… who asked them?’
Both girls gave me a bland look and no answer, leaving me to gather that they didn’t know, and that it was something they would not expect to know.
The car, which had a driver who spoke no English, travelled down straight wide empty roads towards the city, with wet snow-flakes whirling thinly away in the headlights. The road surfaces were clear, but lumpy grey-white banks lined the verges. I shivered in my overcoat from aversion more than discomfort: it was warm enough in the car.
‘It is not cold for the end of November,’ Natasha said. ‘Today it has been above freezing all day. Usually by now the snow has come for the winter, but instead we have had rain.’
The bus stops, I saw, had been built to deal with life below zero. They were enclosed in glass, and brightly lit inside; and in a few there were groups of inward-facing men, three, not four, who might or might not be there to catch a bus.
‘If you wish,’ Anna said, ‘tomorrow you can make a conducted tour of the city by coach, and the next day there is a visit to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements.’
‘We will do our best for tickets for the ballet and the opera,’ said Natasha, nodding helpfully.
‘There are always many English people in your hotel visiting Moscow on package holidays,’ Anna said, ‘and it will be possible for you to join them in a conducted tour of the Kremlin or other places of interest.’
I looked from one to the other and came to the conclusion that they were genuinely trying to be helpful.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but mostly I shall be visiting friends.’
‘If you tell us where you want to go,’ Natasha said earnestly, ‘we will arrange it.’
My room at the Intourist Hotel was spacious enough for one person, with a bed along one side wall and a sofa along the other, but the same sized area with twin beds, glimpsed through briefly opened doors, must have been pretty cramped for two. I also had a wide shelf along the whole wall under the window, with a telephone and a table lamp on it; a chair, a built-in wardrobe, and a bathroom. Brown carpet, reddish patterned curtains, dark green sofa and bedcover. An ordinary, functional, adequate hotel room which could as well have been in Sydney, Los Angeles or Manchester for all its national flavour.
I unpacked my sparse belongings and looked at my watch. ‘We have arranged your dinner for eight o’clock,’ Anna had said. ‘Please come to the restaurant then. I will be there to help you plan what you want to do tomorrow.’ The nursemaiding care would have to be discouraged, I thought, but, as it was no part of my brief to cause immediate dismay, I decided to go along meekly. A short duty-free reviver, however, seemed a good idea.
I poured scotch into a toothmug and sat on the sofa to drink it; and the telephone rang.
‘Is that Mr Randall Drew?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Come to the bar of the National Hotel at nine o’clock,’ said the voice. ‘Leave your hotel, turn right, turn right at the street corner. The National Hotel will be on your right. Enter, leave your coat, climb the stairs, turn right. The bar is along the passage a short way, on the left. Nine o’clock. I’ll see you, Mr Drew.’
The line clicked dead before I could say, ‘Who are you?’
I went on drinking the scotch. The only way to find out was to go.
After a while I took out the paper Hughes-Beckett had given me, and because the telephone seemed to be connected directly to an outside line, I dialled the number of the English student at the Russian university. A Russian voice answered, saying I knew not what.
‘Stephen Luce,’ I said distinctly. ‘Please may I speak to Stephen Luce?’
The Russian voice said an English word, ‘Wait,’ and I waited. Three minutes later, by what seemed to me a minor miracle, a fresh English voice said, ‘Yes? Who is it?’
‘My name is Randall Drew,’ I said. ‘I…’
‘Oh yes,’ he interrupted. ‘Where are you calling from?’
‘My room at the Intourist Hotel.’
‘What’s your number? The telephone number, on the dial.’
I read it out.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d better meet you tomorrow. Twelve o’clock suit you? My lunch hour. In Red Square, in front of St Basil’s Cathedral. OK?’
‘Er, yes,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have to go now. Bye.’ And he rang off.
It had to be catching, I thought. Something in the Moscow air. I dialled the number of the man concerned with training the Soviet team, and again a Russian voice answered. I asked in English for Mr Kropotkin, but this time without luck. After a couple of short silences at the other end, as I repeated my request, there was a burst of agitated incomprehensible speech, followed by a sharp decisive click.
I had better fortune with the British Embassy, and found myself talking to the cultural attaché.
‘Sure,’ he said in Etonian tones, ‘we know all about you.
Care to come for a drink tomorrow evening? Six o’clock suit you?’
‘Perfectly,’ I said. ‘I…’
‘Where are you calling from?’ he said.
‘My room at the Intourist Hotel.’ I gave him the telephone number, unasked.
‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Look forward to seeing you.’
Again the swift click. I finished the scotch and considered the shape of my telephone calls. My naïvet
y, I reflected, must, to the old hands in the city, have been frightening.
Anna waited, hovering, in the dining-room, and came forward as I appeared. Unwrapped, she wore a green wool suit with rows of bronze-coloured beads, and would have fitted un-remarkably into the London business scene. Her hair, with a few greys among the prevailing browns, was clean and well shaped, and she had the poise of one accustomed to plan and advise.
‘You can sit here,’ she said, indicating a stretch of tables beside a long row of windows. ‘There are some English people sitting here, on a tour.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Now,’ she said, ‘tomorrow…’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said pleasantly, ‘I thought I would walk around Red Square and the Kremlin, and perhaps GUM. I have a map and a guide book, and I’m sure I won’t get lost.’
‘But we can add you on to one of the guided tours,’ she said persuasively. ‘There is a special two-hour tour of the Kremlin, with a visit to the Armoury.’
‘I’d honestly rather not. I’m not a great one for museums and so on.’
She looked disapproving, but after another fruitless try, she told me that my lunch would be ready at one-thirty, when the Kremlin party returned. ‘Then at two-thirty there is the bus tour of the city.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’
I saw as well as sensed the release of tension within her. Visitors who went their own way were clearly a problem, though I did not yet understand why. My semi-compliance, anyway, had temporarily earned me qualified good marks, and she said, as if promising sweeties to a child, that Bolshoi tickets for the opera were almost a certainty.
The tables, each set for four, began to fill up. A middle-aged couple from Lancashire joined me with enquiring smiles, closely followed by the man who had been picked clean by the customs officers. We all exchanged the sort of platitudes that strangers thrust together by chance use to demonstrate non-aggression, and the Lancashire lady commented on the extent of the airport search.
‘We had to wait ever such a long time on the bus before you came out,’ she said.
The unasked question floated in the air. The object of her curiosity, who was uniformed in jeans, jersey and longish hair, spooned sour cream into his borsch and took his time over replying.