by Dick Francis
‘They took me off and searched me down to my skin,’ he said finally, enjoying the sensationalism.
The Lancashire lady said ‘ooh’ in mock terror and was flatteringly impressed. ‘What were they looking for?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. There was nothing to find. I just let them get on with it, and in the end they said I could go.’
His name, he said, was Frank Jones. He taught in a school in Essex and it was his third trip to Russia. A great country, he said. The Lancashire couple regarded him doubtfully, and we all shaped up to some greyish meat of undiscernible origin. The ice-cream coming later was better, but one would not, I thought, have made the journey for the gastronomic delights.
Duty done, I set off to the National Hotel in overcoat and woolly scarf, with sleet stinging my face and wetting my hair and a sharp wind invading every crevice. Pavements and roadway glistened with a wetness that was not yet ice, but the quality of the cold was all the same piercing, and I could feel it deep down inside my lungs. All it would take to abort the whole mission, I thought, would be a conclusive bout of bronchitis, and for a tempting minute I felt like opening my arms to the chill: but anything on the whole was probably better than coughing and spitting and looking at hotel bedroom walls.
The bar of the National Hotel was a matter of shady opulence, like an unmodernised Edwardian pub or a small London club gone slightly to seed. There were rugs on the floor, three long tables with eight or ten chairs round each, and a few separate small tables for three or four. Most of the chairs were occupied and there was a two-deep row in front of the bar which stretched across one end of the room. The voices around me spoke English, German, French and a lot of other tongues, but there was no one enquiring of every newcomer whether he was Randall Drew, newly-arrived from England.
After an unaccosted few minutes I turned to the bar and in due course got myself a whisky. It was by then nine-fifteen. I drank for a while standing up, and then, when one of the small tables became free, sitting down; but I drank altogether alone. At nine thirty-five I bought a second drink, and at nine-fifty I reckoned that if all my investigating were to be as successful I wouldn’t need bronchitis.
At two minutes to ten I looked at my watch and drained my glass, and a man detached himself from the row of drinkers at the bar and put two fresh tumblers on the table.
‘Randall Drew?’ he said, pulling up an empty chair and sitting down. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, sport.’
He had been there, I remembered, as long as I had; standing by the bar, exchanging words now and then with his neighbours and the barman, or looking down into his glass in the way of habitual pubbers, as if expecting to see the wisdom of the ages written in alcohol and water.
‘Why did you?’ I asked. ‘Keep me waiting?’
The only reply I got was a grunt and an expressionless look from a pair of hard grey eyes. He pushed one of the tumblers my way and said it was my tipple, he thought. He was solid and in his forties, and wore his dark double-breasted jacket open, so that it flapped about him and hung forward when he moved. He had flatly-combed black hair going a little thin on top, and a neck like a vigorous tree trunk.
‘You want to be careful in Moscow,’ he said.
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Herrick. Malcolm Herrick.’ He paused, but I’d never heard of him. ‘Moscow correspondent of The Watch.’
‘How do you do,’ I said politely, but neither of us offered a hand.
‘This is no kid’s playground, sport,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you for your own good.’
‘Kind,’ I murmured.
‘You’re here to ask damnfool questions about that four-letter Farringford.’
‘Why four-letter?’ I asked.
‘I don’t like him,’ he said flatly. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve asked all the questions there are to ask about that shit, and there’s damn all to find out. And if there’d been a smell there, I’d’ve found it. There’s no one like an old newshound, sport, if there’s any dirt to be dug up about noble earls.’
Even his voice gave an impression of hard muscle. I wouldn’t have liked to have him knock on my door, I thought, if I were caught in a newsworthy tragedy: he would be about as compassionate as a tornado.
‘How come you’ve been looking?’ I asked. ‘And how did you know I was here, and on what errand, and staying at the In-tourist? And how did you manage to telephone me within an hour of my arrival?’
He gave me another flat, hard, expressionless stare.
‘We do want to know a lot, don’t we, sport?’ He took a mouthful of his drink. ‘Little birds round at the Embassy. What else?’
‘Go on,’ I said, as he seemed to have stopped.
‘Can’t reveal sources,’ he said automatically. ‘But I’ll tell you, sport, this is no new story. It’s weeks since I did my bloodhound bit, and the Embassy staff have also put out their own feelers, and if you ask me they even set one of their Intelligence bods on to it on the quiet, on account of the queries that were popping up everywhere. It all turned out to be one big yawn. It’s bloody silly sending you out here as well. Some fanatic in London doesn’t seem to want to take “no story” for an answer, and “no story” is all the story there is.’
I took off my glasses and squinted at them against the light, and after a while put them on again.
‘Well,’ I said mildly, ‘it’s nice of you to bother to tell me all that, but I can’t really go home straight away without trying, can I? I mean, they are paying my fare and expenses, and so on. But I wonder,’ I went on tentatively, ‘if perhaps you could tell me who you saw, so that I wouldn’t duplicate a whole lot of wasteful legwork.’
‘Christ, sport,’ he exploded, ‘you really do want your hand held, don’t you?’ He narrowed his eyes and compressed a firm mouth, and considered it. ‘All right. There were three Russian observers in England last summer going round these damnfool horse trials. Officials from some minor committee set up here to arrange details of the equestrian events at the Games. I spoke to all three of them along at that vast Olympic committee centre they’ve got on Gorky Street, opposite the Red Army Museum. They had all seen Farringford riding at all the horse trials they had been to, but there was absolutely no link at all between Farringford and anything to do with Russia. Niet, niet and niet. Unanimous opinion.’
‘Oh well,’ I said resignedly, ‘what about the Russian team which went to the International trials that were held at Burghley?’
‘Those riders are unavailable, sport. You try interviewing a brick wall. The official reply that was given to the Embassy was that the Russian team had no contact with Farringford, minimum contact with any British civilians, and in any case did not speak English.’
I thought it over. ‘And did you come across anything to do with a girl called Alyosha?’
He choked over his drink at the name, but it was apparently mirth, and his laugh held a definite hint of sneer.
‘Alyosha, sport, is not a girl, for a start. Alyosha is a man’s name. A diminutive. Like Dickie for Richard. Alyosha is a familiar version of Alexei.’
‘Oh…’
‘And if you fell for all that guff about the German who died having a boy friend from Moscow, you can forget it. Over here they still throw you in jug for it. There are as many homosexuals here as warts on a billiard ball.’
‘And the rest of the German team? Did you reach them too, to ask questions?’
‘The diplomats did. None of the Krauts knew a thing.’
‘How many Alyoshas in Moscow?’ I said.
‘How many Dickies in London? The two cities are roughly the same size.’
‘Have another drink?’ I said.
He rose to his feet with the nearest he’d come to a smile, but the brief show of teeth raised no echoing glimmer in the eyes.
‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You give me the cash.’
I gave him a fiver, which did the trick nicely with change to
spare. Only Western foreign currency, the barman had told me, was acceptable in that bar. Roubles and Eastern bloc equivalents were no good. The bar was for non-Curtain visitors, who were to hand over as big a contribution to the tourist trade as possible, all in francs, marks, dollars and yen. The change came back meticulously, and correctly, in the currency in which one had paid.
Malcolm Herrick loosened up a little over the second drink and told me a bit about working in Moscow.
‘There used to be dozens of British correspondents here, but most of the papers have called them back. Only five or six of us left now, except for the news agency guys. Reuters, and so on. The fact is, if anything big breaks in Moscow it’s the outside world that hears about it first, and we get it fed back to us on the world news service on the radio. We might as well not be here for all the inside info we get for ourselves.’
‘Do you yourself speak Russian?’ I said.
‘I do not. The Russians don’t like Russian speakers working here.’
‘Why ever not?’ I said, surprised.
He looked at me pityingly. ‘The system over here is to keep foreigners away from the Russians and Russians away from foreigners. Foreigners who work here full time have to live in compounds, with Russian guards on the gates. All the journalists, diplomats and news agency people live in compounds. We even have our offices there. No need to go out, sport. The news comes in, courtesy of telex.’
He seemed to be more cynical than bitter. I wondered what sort of stories he wrote for The Watch, which was a newspaper more famous for its emotional crusades than its accuracy. It was also a paper I seldom read, as its racing columnist knew more about orchids than good things for Ascot.
We finished the drinks and stood up to depart.
‘Thank you for your help.’ I said. ‘If I think of anything else, can I give you a ring? Are you in the phone book?’
He gave me a final flat grey stare in which there was a quality of dour triumph. I was not going to succeed where he had failed, his manner said, so I might as well retire at once.
‘There’s no telephone directory in Moscow,’ he said.
My turn to stare.
‘If you want to know a number,’ he said, ‘you have to ask Directory Enquiries. You probably have to tell them why you want the number, and if they don’t approve of you knowing it, they won’t give it to you.’
He pulled a spiral-bound reporters’ notebook out of his pocket and wrote down his number, ripping off the page and handing it to me.
‘And use a public telephone, sport. Not the one in your room.’
I scurried the two hundred yards back to the Intourist in heavier sleet which was turning to snow. I collected my keys, went up in the lift, and said ‘good evening’ in English to the plump lady who sat at a desk from which she could keep an eye on the corridor to the bedrooms. Anyone coming from the lifts to the rooms had to pass her. She gave me a stolid inspection and said what I supposed to be ‘goodnight’ in Russian.
My room was on the eighth floor, looking from the front of the hotel down to Gorky Street. I drew the curtains and switched on the reading lamp.
There was something indefinably different in the way my belongings lay tidily around it. I pulled open a drawer or two, and felt my skin contract in a primaeval ripple down my back and legs. While I had been out, someone had searched my room.
4
I lay in bed with the lamp on and looked at the ceiling, and wondered why I should feel so disturbed. I was not one of those spies in or out of the cold who was entirely at home with people ferreting through their belongings, and probably felt deprived if they didn’t. I had read and enjoyed all the books, and had hoisted in some of the jargon: mole, sleeper, spook, et al. But as for that world affecting me personally: that was as unexpected as a scorpion on the breakfast toast.
Yet I was in Moscow to ask questions. Perhaps that made me a legitimate target for irregular attention. And of course the most immediate questions remained unanswered, and so far unanswerable.
Who, exactly, had done the searching? And why?
There had been nothing of significance for anyone to find. The paper with potentially useful names and addresses had been in my pocket. I had concealed in my luggage no guns, no codes, no tiny technology, no anti-Soviet propaganda. I had been told it was illegal to import bibles and crucifixes into Russia, and had not done so. I had brought no forbidden books, no pornography, and no newspapers. No drugs…
Drugs…
I fairly bounded out of bed and yanked open the drawer in which I’d stored my box of assorted air freight. Heaved a considerable sigh of relief, once the lid was open, to see the pills and inhalers and syringe and adrenalin ampoules all more or less in the positions Emma had given them. I couldn’t for certain tell whether or not they had been inspected, but at least nothing was missing. A hypochondriac Emma might well call me, but the sad fact remained that at certain dire times the contents of that box were all that held off the Hereafter. The fates that had given me wealth had been niggardly on health: a silver spoon that bent easily. Even at my age, if one was prone to chest troubles, insurance premiums were loaded. If one’s father and grandfather had both died young for lack of salbutamol or beclo-methasone dipropionate, or sundry other later miracles, one discovered that actuaries’ hearts were as hard as flint.
In between times, and to be fair there were far more in between times than troubles, I was as bursting with health and vigour as any other poor slob living in the damp, cold, misty, bronchitic climate of the British Isles.
I shut the box and replaced it in the drawer: climbed back into bed, switched out the light, and took off my glasses, folding them neatly to hand for the morning. How soon, I wondered, could I decently make use of my return ticket?
Red Square looked greyish brown, with snowflakes blowing energetically across it in a fiendish wind. I stood in front of St Basil’s Cathedral taking photographs in light dim enough to develop them by, wondering if even the deep intense red of the huge brick walls of the Kremlin would make a mark on the emulsion. The vast slush-covered expanse, where sometimes the self-aggrandising parades beat hell out of the road surface for newsreels, was on that day trodden only by miserable-looking groups of tourists, shepherded in straggling crocodiles to and from a group of buses parked nearby.
The Cathedral itself was small, a cluster of brilliantly coloured and encrusted onion-shaped domes on stalks of different height, like a fantasy castle out of Disney. Snow lay on the onions now, dimming the blues and greens and golds that sparkled on the picture postcards, but I stood there wondering how a nation which had produced a building of such joyous, magnificent imagination could have come to its latter-day greyness.
‘Ivan the Great commissioned that cathedral,’ said a voice behind my right shoulder. ‘When it was finished he was overwhelmed with its beauty; and he put out the eyes of his architect, so that he should not design anything more splendid for anyone else.’
I turned slowly round. A shortish young man stood there, wearing a dark blue overcoat, a black fur hat, and an unexpectant expression on a round face.
Round brown eyes full of bright intelligence, alive in a way that Russian faces were not. A person, I judged, whose still soft outlines of youth hid a mind already sharply adult. I’d had a bit of the same trouble myself at the same age, ten years or so ago.
‘Are you Stephen Luce?’ I said.
A smile flickered and disappeared. ‘That’s right.’
‘I would rather not have known about the architect.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t like horror movies.’
‘Life is a horror movie,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see Lenin’s tomb?’ He half turned away and pointed an arm to the middle distance, where a queue were waiting outside a large box-like building halfway along the Kremlin wall. ‘The Cathedral isn’t a church now, it’s some sort of store. You can go into the Tomb, though.’
‘No, thank you.’
He moved
off, however, in that direction, and I went with him.
‘Over there,’ he said, pointing to one side of the Tomb, ‘is a small bust of Stalin, on a short pillar. It has recently appeared there, without any ceremony. You may think this is of no great note, but in point of fact it is very interesting. At one time Stalin was with Lenin in the Tomb. Revered, and all that. Then there was a spot of revisionism, and Stalin was the ultra persona non grata, so they took him out of the Tomb and put up a small statue outside, instead. Then they did a spot more revisionism, and removed even the statue, leaving nothing but a curt plaque in the ground where it had been. But now we have a new statue, back on the same spot. This one is not the old proud glare of world domination, but a downward-looking, pensive, low-profile sort of thing. Fascinating, don’t you think?’
‘What are you reading at the University?’ I said.
‘Russian history.’
I looked from the rebirth of Stalin to the dead cathedral. ‘Tyrants come and go,’ I said. ‘Tyranny is constant.’
‘Some things are best said in the open air.’
I looked at him straightly. ‘How much will you help me?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t you take some photographs?’ he said. ‘Behave like a tourist.’
‘No one thinks I’m a tourist, unless having one’s room searched is par for the packages.’
‘Oh gee,’ he said quaintly. ‘In that case, let’s just walk.’
At tourist pace we left Red Square and went towards the river. I huddled inside my coat and pulled my scarf up over my ears to meet the fur hat I had bought that morning, following Natasha’s instructions.
‘Why don’t you untie the ear-flaps?’ Stephen Luce said, untying a black tape bow on top of his own head. ‘Much warmer.’ He pulled the formerly folded-up flaps down over his ears, and let the black tape ties dangle free. ‘Don’t tie the tapes under your chin,’ he said, ‘or they’ll think you’re a pouff.’
I pulled the flaps down and let the tapes flutter in the wind, as he did.