by Dick Francis
‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.
‘Come with me to see some men about some horses.’
‘When?’
‘Mornings are best, for horse people.’
He took a minute over replying, then said doubtfully, ‘I suppose I could cut tomorrow’s lecture, just for once.’
How like Hughes-Beckett, I thought sardonically, to equip me with an interpreter whose time was measured in lunch hours and missed lectures. I glanced at the round, troubled face in its frame of black fur, and more or less decided then and there that my whole mission was impossible.
‘Do you know Rupert Hughes-Beckett?’ I said.
‘Never heard of him.’
I sighed. ‘Who was it who wrote to you, asking you to help me?’
‘The Foreign Office. A man called Spencer. I know him. They are sponsoring me, sort of, you see. Through college. The idea being that eventually I’ll work for them. Though I might not, in the end. It’s all a bit suffocating, that diplomatic waxworks.’
We reached the approach to the bridge over the river, and Stephen threw out an arm in another of his generous gestures.
‘Over there is the British Embassy,’ he said, pointing.
I couldn’t see much for snow. I took off my glasses, dried them as best I could on a handkerchief, and enjoyed for a minute or two a clearer look at the world.
‘Turn off right at the far side of the bridge,’ Stephen said. ‘Go down the steps to the other road running beneath it, along beside the river, and the Embassy’s that pale yellow building along there, giving a good imitation of Buckingham Palace.’
I told him I was going for a drink with the cultural attachés and he said the best of British luck, and not to miss seeing the Ambassador’s loo, it had the best view of the Kremlin in the whole of Moscow.
‘I say,’ he said, as we went on over the bridge, ‘do you mind telling me what you’re actually here for?’
‘Didn’t they say?’
‘No. Only to interpret, if necessary.’
I shook my head in frustration. ‘Chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Looking for a rumour called Alyosha. Some say he doesn’t exist and others that he doesn’t want to be found. All I have to do is find him, see who he is and what he is, and decide whether he poses any sort of threat to a chap who wants to ride in the Olympics. And since you asked, I will now bore your ears off by telling you the whole story.’
He listened with concentration and his ears remained in place. When I’d finished he was walking with a springier step.
‘Count me in, then,’ he said. ‘And hang the lectures. I’ll borrow someone else’s notes.’ We turned at the end of the bridge to go back, and between the snowflakes I saw his dark brown eyes shining with humorous life. ‘I thought you were here just fact-finding for the Games. In a general way, and semi-official. This is more fun.’
‘I haven’t thought so,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Ve have vays of making you sit up and enjoy yourself.’
‘Ve had better have vays of keeping it all very discreet.’
‘Oh sure. Do you want the benefit of the immense experience of a lifetime of living in Moscow?’
‘Whose?’I said.
‘Mine, of course. I’ve been here eleven weeks. Lifetimes are comparative.’
‘Fire away,’ I said.
‘Never do anything unusual. Never turn up when you’re not expected, and always turn up if you are.’
I said, ‘That doesn’t sound very extraordinary.’
I received a bright amused shot from the brown eyes. ‘Some English people touring here by car decided to go to a different town for a night from the one they had originally booked. Just an impulse. They were fined for it.’
‘Fined?’ I was amazed.
‘Yes. Can you imagine a foreign tourist being fined in England because he went to Manchester instead of Birmingham? Can you imagine an English hotel doing anything but shrug if he didn’t turn up? But everything here is regulated. There are masses of people just standing around watching other people, and they all report what they see, because that’s their job. They are employed to watch. There’s no unemployment here. Instead of handing a bloke dole money and letting him spend it in civilised ways like soccer and gambling and pubs, they give him a job watching. Two birds with one stone, and all that.’
‘Standing in groups at airports and in bus shelters, and dotted around outside hotels?’
He grinned. ‘So right. Those guys in bus stops are there to stop all foreign-registered cars going out of Moscow, to check their destinations and visas, because all foreigners need a visa to go more than thirty kilometres from the centre. Sometimes they stop Russian cars, but not often. Anyway, there’s a joke here that you always see at least three Russians together when they’ve any regular contact with foreigners. One alone might be tempted, two might conspire, but if there are three, one will always inform.’
‘Cynical.’
‘And practical. What did you say you’d do today? I take it you have Intourist girls looking after you?’
‘Natasha and Anna,’ I said. ‘I told them I’d be in the hotel to lunch and go on a bus tour of the city afterwards.’
‘Then you’d better do it,’ he said judiciously. ‘I’m not sure they don’t get into trouble if they lose their charge, so to speak.’
I paused at the centre of the bridge to look over the parapet at the iron grey water. Snow speckled everything and filled the air like torn tissue-paper. To the right along the river bank stretched the long red beautiful walls of the Kremlin, with golden towers at intervals and vistas of golden onion domes inside. A walled city, a fortress, with defunct churches and active government offices and the daily tread of millions of tourists. To the left, on the opposite bank, the British Embassy.
‘Better move on,’ Stephen said. ‘Two men standing still on a bridge in the snow… that’s suspicious.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
We walked on, however, and went back up the incline to Red Square.
‘Job number one,’ I said. ‘Will you make a call for me?’
I showed him the Olympic team trainer’s name and number, and we stopped at a glass-walled telephone box. Telephone calls, it appeared, were cheap. Stephen brushed away my offered rouble and produced a two kopek coin.
‘What shall I say?’ he asked.
‘Say I’d like to see him tomorrow morning. Say I was very impressed with the Russian team at the International Horse Trials and would like to congratulate him and ask his advice. Say I’m frightfully important in the horse world. Lay it on a bit. He doesn’t know me.’ I gave him some well-known Eventing names. ‘Say I’m a colleague of theirs.’
‘Are you?’ he said, dialling the number.
‘I know them,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was sent. Because I know the horse people.’
Someone answered at the other end, and Stephen launched into what was to me a vague jumble of noises. A softer-sounding language than I had for some reason expected. Pleasing.
He talked for quite some time, and listened, and talked, and listened, and talked, and finally rang off.
‘Success,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock. Outside the stables, round the far side of the racecourse.’
‘The Hippodrome,’ I said.
‘That’s right.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘The Olympic horses exercise there on the track.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said, astounded. ‘Bloody incredible.’
‘And you were wrong about one thing,’ Stephen said. ‘He did know who you are. He said you went to ride in a race called the Pardubice in Czechoslovakia, and he saw you finish third. He seemed in point of fact to be quite pleased to be going to meet you.’
‘Nice of him,’ I said modestly.
Stephen spoilt it. ‘Russians love a chance of talking to people from the outside. They see so few, that they love it.’
We agreed that he should meet me outside the hotel the following m
orning, and his cheerfulness was catching.
‘When you go on that bus tour,’ he said as we parted, ‘you’ll stop in Derzhinsky Square. With a statue of Derzhinsky on a tall column. There’s a big store for children there. What the guide won’t tell you, though, is that the building next to it, across the street, is the Lubianka.’
There were taxis waiting outside the hotel but none of the drivers spoke English, and either they didn’t understand the words ‘British Embassy’, or the address written in English script, or they understood but refused to take me there. In any case, I got a chorus of shaken heads, so in the end I walked. It was still snowing, but wetly, and what lay on the ground was slush. After a mile and a half of it my feet were soaking and icy and my mood deepening from cross to vile.
Following Stephen’s instructions, I found the steps at the far side of the bridge and descended to the lower level, walking along there with dark heavy buildings on my left and the chest-high river wall on the right. When I at length reached the gateway of the Embassy a Russian soldier stepped out of a sentry box and barred my way.
An odd argument then took place in which neither protagonist could understand a word the other said. I pointed vigorously at my watch, and to the Embassy door, and said, ‘I am English,’ several times very loudly, and got even crosser. The Russian finally, dubiously, stood back a pace and let me through into the short driveway. The huge front door of the Embassy itself was opened, with a lot less fuss, by a dark blue uniform with gilt buttons and braids.
Inside, the hall and stairs and visible doorways were rich with the glossy wood and glass and plaster mouldings of more elegant ages. There was also a large leather-topped desk behind which sat a one-man reception committee, and, standing near him, a tall languid man with noble bones and greying hair combed carefully backwards.
The dark blue uniform offered to relieve me of my coat and hat, and the man at the desk asked if he could help me.
‘The cultural attaché?’ I said. ‘I’ve an appointment.’
The grey-haired man moved gently like a lily in the wind and said that the cultural attaché happened to be himself. He extended a limp hand and a medium smile, and I responded with the merest shade more warmth to both. He murmured platitudes about the weather and air travel while he made some internal judgements about me, but it appeared that I had passed his private tests, because he suddenly changed mental gears and asked with some charm whether I would care to see over the Embassy itself before we went to his office for a drink. His office, he explained, was in a separate building.
We climbed the stairs and made a tour of the reception rooms, and duly inspected the loo with the best view of the Kremlin. The cultural attaché, who had identified himself as Oliver Waterman, kept up a genial informed chatter as if he showed visitors round this route every day of the week: which, on reflection, perhaps he did. We ended, after a short windy outside walk, in a more modern-looking first-floor suite of carpeted book-lined offices, where he wasted no time in pouring hefty drinks.
‘Don’t know what we can do for you,’ he said, settling deep into a leather armchair, and waving me to one similar. ‘This Farringford business seems to be a fuss over nothing.’
‘You hope,’ I said.
He smiled thinly. ‘True. But there’s no fire without smoke, and we haven’t had even a whiff.’
‘Did you yourself interview the three Russian observers?’ I asked.
‘Er,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking concerned. ‘Which observers would those be?’
Resignedly I explained. His expression cleared gradually as if a responsibility had been taken from him.
‘But, you see,’ he said pleasantly, ‘we in the Embassy would not speak to them ourselves. We approached our opposite numbers for relevant information, and were informed that no one knew anything of any significance.’
‘You couldn’t have spoken to those men face to face in their own homes?’
He shook his head. ‘It is actively discouraged, if not positively forbidden, for private contacts to take place.’
‘Forbidden by them, or by us?’
‘Bit of both. But by us, definitely.’
‘So you never really get to know the Russian people, even though you live here?’
He shook his head without any visible regret. ‘There is always a risk, in unofficial contacts.’
‘So xenophobia works both ways?’ I said.
He uncrossed his legs and recrossed them left over right. ‘Fear of foreigners is older than the conscious mind,’ he said, smiling as if he had said it often before. ‘But, now, about your enquiries…’
The telephone at his elbow interrupted him. He picked up the receiver in a leisurely fashion after the third ring, and said merely, ‘Yes?’
A slight frown creased his high smooth forehead. ‘Very well, bring him round.’ He replaced the receiver and continued with his former sentence. ‘About your enquiries, we can offer you telex facilities, if you need them, and if you’ll give me your room’s telephone number I can ring you if any messages arrive for you.’
‘I gave you the number,’ I said.
‘Oh, did you?’ He looked vague. ‘I’d better take it again, my dear chap.’
I repeated the number from memory, and he wrote it on a notepad.
‘Let me see to your glass,’ he said, splashing away with a lavish hand. ‘And then perhaps you might meet one or two of my colleagues.’
There were the noises of people arriving downstairs. Oliver Waterman stood up and brushed his smooth hair back with the insides of both wrists; a gesture of preparing himself, I reckoned, more than any need for grooming.
There was one loud intrusive voice rising above a chorus of two others, one male, one female, and as they came up the stairs I found myself putting a name to it. With no sense of surprise I watched Malcolm Herrick advance through the doorway.
‘Evening, Oliver,’ he said confidently, and then, seeing me. ‘Well, sport, if it isn’t our sleuth. Made any progress?’
From a fleeting glance at Oliver Waterman’s face I gathered that his reaction to Malcolm Herrick was much like mine. It was impossible not to attend to what Herrick said because of the physical force of his speech, the result no doubt of years of journalistic necessity; but there was no visible warmth behind the sociable words, and possibly even a little malice.
‘Drink, Malcolm?’ Oliver suggested, with true diplomatic civility.
‘Couldn’t be better.’
Oliver Waterman, bottle and glass in hand, made introducing motions between me and the other newcomers. ‘Randall Drew… Polly Paget, Ian Young. They work here with me in this department.’
Polly Paget was a sensible-looking lady in flat shoes, past girlhood but not quite middle-aged, wearing her hair short and her cardigan long. She gave Oliver Waterman a small straightforward smile and accepted her drink before Herrick, as of right. He himself looked as if he thought attache’s assistants should be served after him.
If I hadn’t been told Ian Young’s name or heard him speak, I would have taken him for a Russian. I looked at him curiously, realising how familiar I had already become with the skin texture and stillness of expression of the Moscow population. Ian Young had the same white heavyish face in which nothing discernable was going on. His voice, when he spoke, which at that time was very little, was unremarkably English.
Malcolm Herrick effortlessly dominated what conversation there was, telling Oliver Waterman, it seemed to me, just what he should do about a particularly boring row which had just broken out over a forthcoming visit of a prestigious orchestra.
When Polly Paget offered a suggestion, Herrick interrupted without listening and squashed her. Oliver Waterman said, ‘Well, perhaps, yes, you may be right,’ at intervals, while not looking Herrick in the eye except in the briefest of flashes, a sure sign of boredom or dislike. Ian Young sat looking at Herrick with an unnerving lack of response, by which Herrick was not in the least unnerved: and I drank my
drink and thought of the wet walk back.
All possible juice extracted from the music scandal, Herrick switched his attention back to me.
‘Well, then, sport, how’s it going?’
‘Slow to stop,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Told you so. Too bad. That whole ground’s been raked fine and there’s not a pebble to be found. Wish there was. I need a decent story.’
‘Or indecent, for preference,’ Polly Paget said. Herrick ignored her.
‘Did you talk to the chef d’équipe?’ I said.
‘Who?’ said Oliver Waterman. I saw from Herrick’s face that he hadn’t, but also that he wasn’t going to admit it unless forced to: and even then, I guessed, he would pooh-pooh the necessity.
I said to Oliver Waterman, ‘Mr Kropotkin. The man who oversees the training of the horses and riders for the horse trials. The non-playing captain, so to speak. I was given his name by Rupert Hughes-Beckett.’
‘So you’ll be seeing him?’ Waterman said.
‘Yes, tomorrow morning. He seems to be all that’s left.’
Ian Young stirred. ‘I talked with him,’ he said.
Every head turned his way. Thirty-five or so, I thought. Thick-set, brown-haired, wearing a crumpled grey suit and a blue and white striped shirt with the points of the collar curling up like a dried sandwich. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his mouth, which for him was an excessive change of expression.
‘In the course of the discreet preliminary enquiries required by the Foreign Office, I too was given his name. I talked with him pretty exhaustively. He knows nothing about any scandal to do with Farringford. A complete dead end.’
‘There you are then,’ Waterman said, shrugging. ‘As I said before, there’s no fire. Not a spark.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘It would be best that way. But there is a spark. Or there was, in England.’ And I told them about Johnny Farringford being beaten up by two men who warned him to stay away from Alyosha.
Their faces showed differing levels of dismay and disbelief.
‘But my dear chap,’ said Oliver Waterman, recovering his former certainty, ‘surely that means that this Alyosha, whoever he is, is absolutely determined not to be dropped into any sort of mess? So surely that makes it all the safer for Farringford to come to the Olympics?’