by Dick Francis
‘All right.’
He turned into a wide, well-lit dual-carriageway which at eighty-thirty held as much traffic as four in the morning back home.
‘And don’t get them into trouble,’ he said. ‘Evgeny and Boris.’
‘Or you’ll kill me.’
‘Yeah…’ He laughed awkwardly. ‘Well… it sounds stupid, out here.’
I didn’t ask if he really meant it. It was a question to which there was no answer, and I hadn’t any intention of putting him to the test.
With the image of Ian Young in my mind I glanced across the table at Frank Jones: the one who looked Russian and walked carefully on the wrong side of the regulations, and the other who looked English and harmless and could throw you to the spikes.
Natasha brought her marvellous eyebrows to the table and drew up a chair. She wore a neat pink wool dress, which went with the lipstick and displayed curves where they looked best. Her voice had a small disarming lisp, and she was achieving a slightly anxious smile.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘the Exhibition of Economic Achievements…’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said, providing my best giving-no-offence expression, ‘I’m going to see some horses. I’m sure the exhibition is great, but I’m much better at horses, and I have this absolutely wonderful chance to see some of your very best, your really top horses, the ones that are being trained for the Olympics, and that will be such a treat for me that I simply can’t miss it.’
The floweriness more or less did the trick, and it was Frank who asked, with natural-looking interest, where the horses were that I was going to see.
‘At the racecourse,’ I said. ‘They are stabled near there, I believe.’
I saw no point in not telling him. It would have looked odd if I hadn’t, and in any case he could have found out by following.
Stephen Luce appeared promptly at ten the following morning outside the hotel, his round cheerful face the brightest thing under the grey Moscow sky. I made the passage from hot air to cold through the double entrance to join him, passing at least six men standing around doing nothing.
‘Metro and bus to the Hippodrome,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ve looked up the stops.’
‘Taxi,’ I said firmly.
‘But taxis are expensive, and the metro’s cheap.’
‘And the far side of the Hippodrome could be two miles’ walk from the front entrance.’
We took a taxi. Pale greeny-grey saloon, with a meter. Stephen carefully explained where we wanted to go, but the driver had to stop and ask twice when we reached the area. Passengers, it appeared, very seldom asked to be driven to the back of the racecourse. I resisted two attempts to decant us with vague assurances that the place we wanted was ‘just down there’, and finally with a scowl or two and some muttering under the breath we drove right into the stable area, with the track itself lying a hundred yards ahead.
‘You’re very persistent,’ Stephen said, as I counted out the fare.
‘I don’t like wet feet.’
The air temperature must have been about one degree centigrade and the humidity ninety-five per cent: a damp icy near-drizzle. The slushy snow lay around sullenly melting, lying in puddles on the packed clay surface in the centres of the stable roadways, banked up in ruts along the edges.
To left and right a double row of lengthy stable blocks stretched away, built of concrete on the barn principle, with the horses totally enclosed, and not sticking their heads out into the open air. Ahead the stable area led directly out through a wide gap on to the railed racing circuit, which was of the grey sticky consistency of dirt tracks the world over.
In the distance, over on the far side, one could see the line of stands, grey and lifeless at that time of day. All around us, where the morning action lay, horses and men trudged about their business and paid no attention to us at all.
‘It’s staggering,’ Stephen said, looking around. ‘You practically can’t get into anywhere in the Soviet Union without talking your way past some sort of guard, and we just drove straight in here.’
‘People who work with horses are anti-bureaucratic.’
‘Are you?’ he said.
‘Every inch. Stick to essentials, and make your own decisions.’
‘And to hell with committees?’
‘The question nowadays is whether it’s possible.’ I watched some horses without saddles being led by on their way from a stable block out towards the track, their feet plopping splashily in the wet. ‘You know something? These are not racehorses.’
‘It’s a racecourse,’ he said, as if I were crazy.
‘They’re trotters.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Trotting races. The driver sits on a little chariot thing called a sulky, and the horse pulls it along at a fast trot. Like that,’ I added pointing, as a horse and sulky came into view on the track.
It wheeled up speedily to the entrance of the stables, and there the handlers unfastened the harness which held the shafts of the sulky, and led the horse away. The sulky was harnessed to the next horse to be exercised, and the driver took up the reins and got on with his job.
‘Don’t you think we ought to look for Mr Kropotkin?’ Stephen suggested.
‘Not really. We’re still a few minutes early. If we just stand here, maybe he will come and find us.’
Stephen looked as if life were full of surprises but not altogether bad ones, and several more horses slopped past. The stable hands leading them all seemed to be small weatherbeaten men with unshaven chins and layers of uncoordinated clothes. None of them wore gloves. None of them even looked our way, but shambled on with stolid unsmiling faces.
A new and larger string of horses appeared, coming not from one of the stable blocks, but across the road we had arrived by, and in through the unguarded, ungated entrance. Instead of being led, these were ridden; and the riders were neatly dressed in jodhpurs and quilted jackets. On their heads they wore not leather caps but crash helmets, with the chin-straps meticulously fastened.
‘What are those?’ Stephen said, as they approached.
‘They’re not thoroughbreds… not racehorses. I should think those might be the eventers.’
‘How can you tell they’re not racehorses?’
‘Thicker bones,’ I said. ‘The more solid shape of the head. And more hair round the fetlocks.’
Stephen said ‘Oh’ as if he wasn’t much wiser, and we noticed that behind the horses walked a purposeful man in a dark overcoat and a fur hat. His gaze had fallen upon us, and he changed course ten degrees to starboard and came our way.
Stephen went a step to meet him.
‘Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin?’ he said.
‘Da,’ said the newcomer. ‘That is so.’
His voice was as deep as chocolate and the Russian intonation very pronounced. He looked at me closely. ‘And you are Randall Drew,’ he said, carefully stressing each word separately.
‘Mr Kropotkin, I am very pleased to meet you,’ I said.
He clasped my outstretched hand and gave it a good pump with both of his own.
‘Randall Drew. Pardubice. You are three.’
‘Third,’ I said, nodding.
Words failed him in English and he rumbled away in his own language.
‘He is saying,’ Stephen said, his eyes grinning, ‘that you are a great horseman with a bold heart and hands of silk, and he is honoured to see you here.’
Mr Kropotkin broke off the exaggerations to shake hands in a perfunctory way with Stephen, giving him the fast head-to-toe inspection of a horseman for a horse. He said something to him abruptly which Stephen said afterwards was ‘Do you ride?’ and on receiving a negative treated him henceforth merely as a translating machine, not as a valued friend.
‘Please tell Mr Kropotkin that the Russian team rode with great courage and skill at the International Trials, and the fitness of his horses here today does his management great credit.’
Mr Kropotkin’s appre
ciation of the compliments showed in a general aura of pleased complacency. He was a big man of about sixty, carrying a good deal of excess weight but still light on his feet. A heavy greying moustache overhung his upper lip, and he had a habit of smoothing the outer edges downwards with his forefinger and thumb.
‘You watch horses,’ he said, his way with English putting the words half way between a command and an invitation. I would be pleased to, I said, and we walked forward on to the track.
His five charges were circling there, waiting for the instructions which he gave decisively but briefly in his rolling bass. The riders stopped circling and divided into two groups.
‘Horses canter,’ Kropotkin said, sweeping out an arm. ‘Round.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He and I stood side by side in the manner of horse-watchers the world over and eyed the training exercises. There was a lot of muscle, I thought, and all five had good free-flowing actions; but it was impossible to tell how good each was at Eventing, because speed alone had little to do with it.
Kropotkin launched into several sentences and waited impatiently for Stephen to translate.
‘These are a few of the Olympic possibles. It is too soon to decide yet. There are other horses in the south, where it is warmer. All the flat racehorses from the track have gone south to the Caucasus for the winter. Some horses are training there for the Olympics also, but he will have them back in Moscow next summer.’
‘Tell him I am very interested.’
Kropotkin received the news with what I took to be satisfaction. He too had the inexpressive face and unsmiling eyes which were the Moscow norm. Mobility of features, I supposed, was something one did or didn’t learn in childhood from the faces all round; and the fact that they didn’t show, didn’t conclusively prove that admiration and contempt and hate and glee weren’t going on inside. It had become, I dared say, imprudent to show them. The unmoving countenance was the first law of survival.
The horses came back from circling the mile-long track without a flutter of the nostril. The riders dismounted and spoke to Kropotkin with respect. They didn’t look to me like Olympic material either on horseback or on their feet: nothing of the self-confident presence of Boris: but I asked all the same.
‘Niet,’ Kropotkin said. ‘Misha is young. Is good.’
He pointed at a boy of about nineteen who was, like the others, leading his horse round in a circle under Kropotkin’s stony gaze. Kropotkin added more in Russian, and Stephen translated.
‘He says they are all grooms, but he is teaching Misha, because he is brave and has good hands and can get horses to jump.’
A dark green horse box drove in through the stable area behind us, its engine making an untuned clatter which stirred up the horses. Kropotkin stolidly watched while it made a bad job of reversing down between the two rows of stable blocks, its old-fashioned wooden sides rattling from the vibration of the engine. The noise abated slightly once it was out of sight on the other side of a concrete barn, and when Kropotkin could once again make himself heard, he said a good deal to Stephen.
‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen said, ‘that Misha went to the International Trials in September as a groom, and perhaps you would like to talk to him also. Mr Kropotkin said that when a man from the British Embassy came to ask him some questions about Lord Farringford and Hans Kramer, he said he knew nothing, and that was true. But he has remembered since then that Misha does know something about Hans Kramer, but not Lord Farringford, and he arranged for Misha to be riding this morning in case you should wish to see him.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’
Kropotkin made a small inclination of the head, and addressed himself to the riders.
‘He’s telling them to lead the horses back to the stable, and to be careful crossing the road outside. He’s telling Misha to stay behind.’
Kropotkin turned back to me and stroked his moustache. ‘Horse of Misha is good. Go to Olympics,’ he said.
I looked at Misha’s charge with interest, though there was no way in which it stood out from the others. A hardy chestnut with a white blaze down its nose, and two white socks: a rough coat, which would be normal at that time of year, and a kind eye.
‘Good,’ Kropotkin said, slapping its rump.
‘He looks bold and tough,’ I said. Stephen translated and Kropotkin did not demur.
The four other horses were led away, and Kropotkin introduced Misha formally but without flourish.
‘Mikhail Alexeevich Tarevsky,’ he said, and to the boy added what was clearly an instruction to answer whatever I asked.
‘Da, Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said.
I thought there were better places for conducting interviews than in near-freezing semi-drizzle on an open dirt-track, but neither Kropotkin nor Misha seemed aware of the weather, and the fact that Stephen and I were shifting from one cold foot to the other evoked no offers of our adjourning to a warm office.
‘In England,’ said the boy, ‘I learn little English.’
His voice and manner were serious, and his accent a great deal lighter than Kropotkin’s. His eyes, unexpectedly blue in his weather-tanned face, looked full of unguarded intelligence. I smiled at him involuntarily, but he only stared gravely back.
‘Please tell me what you know of Hans Kramer,’ I said.
Kropotkin instantly rumbled something positive, and Stephen said, ‘He wishes Misha to speak in Russian, so that he may hear. He wishes me to translate what you ask.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Ask Misha what he knows of Kramer. And for God’s sake let’s get on. I’m congealing.’
Misha stood beside his horse, pulling the reins over the chestnut’s head to hold them more easily below the mouth for leading, and stroking his neck from time to time to soothe him. I couldn’t see that it was doing any good for an Olympic-type horse to stand around getting chilled so soon after exercise, but it wasn’t my problem. The chestnut, certainly, didn’t seem to mind.
Stephen said, ‘Mikhail Alexeevich – that is, Misha – says that he was near Hans Kramer when he died.’
It was amazing how suddenly I no longer felt the cold.
‘How near?’
The answer was lengthy. Stephen listened and translated.
‘Misha says he was holding the horse of one of the Russian team who was being weighed – is that right? – and Hans Kramer was there. He had just finished his cross-country, and had done well, and people were there round him, congratulating him. Misha was half watching, and half watching for the rider of the horse.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
Misha talked. Stephen said, ‘Hans Kramer staggered and fell to the ground. He fell not far from Misha; about three metres. An English girl went to help him and someone else ran off to fetch the doctor. Hans Kramer looked very ill. He could not breathe properly. But he was trying to say something. Trying to tell the English girl something. He was lying flat on the ground. He could hardly breathe. He was saying words as loudly as he could. Like trying to shout.’
Misha waited until Stephen had finished, clearly understanding what Stephen was saying and punctuating the translation with nods.
‘Hans Kramer was saying these words in German?’ I said.
‘Da,’ said Misha, but Kropotkin interrupted, wanting to be told the question. He made an assenting gesture with his hand to allow Misha to proceed.
‘And does Misha speak German?’
Misha, it appeared, had learned German in school, and had been with the team’s horses to East Germany, and knew enough to make himself understood.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What did Hans Kramer say?’
Misha said the words in German, and then in Russian, and one word flared out of both like a beacon.
Alyosha.
Stephen lit up strongly with excitement, and I thought there was probably a good deal to be said for a face that gave nothing away. His enthusiasm seemed to bother Kropotkin, who made
uneasy movements as if on the point of retreat.
‘Cool it,’ I said to Stephen flatly. ‘You’re frightening the birds.’
He gave me a quick surprised look, but dampened his manner immediately.
‘Hans Kramer said,’ he reported in a quiet voice, ‘ “I am dying. It is Alyosha. Moscow.” And then he said, “God help me.” And then he died.’
‘How did he die?’I said.
Misha, via Stephen, said that he turned blue, and seemed to stop breathing, and then there was a sort of small jolt right through his body, and someone said it was his heart stopping; it was a heart attack. The doctor came, and agreed it was a heart attack. He tried to bring Hans Kramer back to life, but it was useless.’
The four of us stood in the Russian drizzle thinking about the death of a German in England on a sunny September day.
‘Ask him what else he remembers,’ I said.
Misha shrugged. ‘The English girl and some of the people near had understood what Hans Kramer had said. The English girl was saying to other people that he had said he was dying because of Alyosha who came from Moscow, and other people were agreeing. It was very sad. Then the Russian rider came back from being weighed, and Misha had to attend to him and the horse, and he saw from a little way off that the ambulance people came with a stretcher. They put Hans Kramer on the stretcher and put a rug right over him and over his face, and carried him off.’
‘Um,’ I said, thinking. ‘Ask him again what Hans Kramer said.’
Hans Kramer had said, ‘I am dying. It is Alyosha. Moscow. God help me.’ He had not had time to say any more, although Misha thought he had been trying to.
‘Is Misha sure that Hans Kramer did not say “I am dying because of Alyosha from Moscow”?’
Misha, it seemed, was positive. There had been no ‘because’, and no ‘from’. Only, ‘I am dying. It is Alyosha. Moscow. God help me.’ Misha remembered very clearly, he said, because Alyosha was his own father’s name.
‘Is it really?’ I said, interested.