by Dick Francis
‘Dragons like that guard doorways all over Russia,’ Stephen said. ‘The only way past, is to be expected. Short of slaying them, of course.’
We went for a long walk which ended one floor down in a help-yourself foodshop. All the packages were unfamiliar, and owing to the Cyrillic alphabet, which made restaurants look like ‘PECTOPAH’ to Western eyes, I couldn’t even guess at the contents. Stephen went round unerringly, choosing what later turned out to be crisp-sided cream cakes and ending with a bottle of milk.
A girl stood at the cash desk before us, paying for her groceries. A pretty girl, with light-brown hair curling on to her shoulders, and the sort of waist Victorian young ladies swooned over. When Stephen greeted her, she turned her head and gave him a flashing smile with a fair view of excellent teeth. The smile, I saw, of at least good friends.
Stephen introduced her as Gudrun, and the unpretty lady behind the cash register pointed to her packages and clearly told her to pick them up and go.
The girl picked up her bottle of milk, and the bottom fell out of it. Milk cascaded on to the floor. Gudrun stood looking bewildered with the whole-looking bottle still in her hand and milk stains all over her legs.
I watched the pantomime that followed. Stephen was saying she should have another bottle. The unpretty lady shook her head and pointed to the cash register. Everyone engaged in battle, and the unpretty lady won.
‘She made her buy another bottle,’ said Stephen, disgusted, as we set off on another interior tramp.
‘So I gathered.’
‘They make the bottles like tubes here, and just stick a disc in for the bottoms. Anyway,’ he finished cheerfully, ‘she’s coming along to my room for a cup of tea.’
Gudrun was West German, from Bonn. She filled and illuminated Stephen’s tiny cell, which was eight feet long by six across, and contained a bed, a table covered with books, a chair, and a glass-fronted bookcase. On the bare wooden floor there was one small imitation Brussels rug, and at the tall narrow window, skimpy green curtains.
‘The Ritz,’ I said ironically.
‘I’m lucky,’ Stephen said, taking three mugs from the bookcase and making a space for them on the table. ‘A lot of the Russian students are two to a room this size.’
‘If you had two beds in here you couldn’t open the door,’ I said.
Gudrun nodded. ‘They stand the beds up against the wall in the daytime.’
‘No protest marches?’ I said. ‘No demos for better conditions?’
‘They are not allowed,’ Gudrun said seriously. ‘Anyone who tried would lose his place.’
She spoke English perfectly, with hardly a trace of accent. Her Russian, Stephen said, was just as good. His own German was passable, his French excellent. I sighed, internally, for a skill I’d never acquired.
Stephen went off to make the tea.
‘Don’t come,’ he said. ‘The kitchen is filthy. About twenty of us share it, and we’re all supposed to clean it, so nobody does.’
Gudrun sat on the bed and asked me how I was enjoying Moscow, and I sat on the chair and said fine. I asked her how she was enjoying her course, and she said fine.
‘If the Russians are so keen to keep foreigners at arm’s length,’ I said, ‘why do they allow foreign students in the University?’
She glanced involuntarily round the walls, a revealing glimpse into the way they all lived. The walls had ears; literally.
‘We are exchange students,’ she said. ‘For Stephen, there is a Russian student in London. For me a Russian student in Bonn. Those students are dedicated communists.’
‘Spreading the gospel and recruiting?’
She nodded a shade unhappily, again glancing at the walls and not liking my frankness. I went back to harmless chit chat, and Stephen presently arrived to distribute the goodies, which, for me at least, nicely filled an aching void.
‘Show you something,’ he said, stuffing the last of the cake into his mouth and shifting along to the end of the bed, on which he was sitting. ‘A little trick.’
He picked up what I saw was a tape-recorder, and switched it on. Then with a theatrical flourish he stood up and pressed it against the wall beside my head.
Nothing happened. He removed it and pressed it to another spot. Again nothing. He took it away, and put it delicately against a spot above his bed. From the tape-recorder came a high-pitched whine.
‘Abracadabra,’ he said, taking the tape-recorder down and switching it off. ‘From ordinary walls, you get nothing. From a live mike inside a wall, you get feedback.’
‘Do they know?’ I said.
‘Of course they do. Like to borrow it?’ He pointed to the recorder.
‘Very much.’
‘Then I’ll dash to get a chit to take it out.’
‘A chit?’
‘Yes. You can’t just walk out of here carrying things. They say it’s to stop people stealing, but it’s just the usual phobia about knowing what goes on.’
I glanced at the wall behind his head. Stephen laughed. ‘If you don’t complain about the whole bloody repressive Soviet system they suspect you’re putting on an act.’
In the corridor, from the telephone installed for the students, I called Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky. The telephone was safe, Stephen said. The only telephones which were tapped were those in the houses of known dissidents: and Yuri Chulitsky would be anything but a dissident, if he had been sent to England as an observer.
He answered at once.
‘I talk with Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said. ‘I meet you tomorrow.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I drive car. I come outside National Hotel, ten o’clock, tomorrow morning. Is right?’
‘Is right,’ I said.
‘Ten o’clock.’ Down went the receiver with the same crash, before I could ask him how I would know him or his car. I supposed that when I saw him, I would know.
Stephen tried the other number. The bell rang hollowly at the far end, and after ten rings we prepared to give up. Then the ringing stopped and there was suddenly a breathless voice on the line.
‘It’s Misha,’ Stephen said.
‘You talk to him. It’s easier.’
Stephen listened. ‘He wants to see you again, and it must be tonight. He says he is going to Rostov tomorrow with two horses. The snow is coming, and the horses are going south. Nikolai Alexandrovich – that is, Mr Kropotkin – is going next week. It was decided today.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When and where?’
Stephen asked, and was told. He wrote it down, and the directions took some time.
‘Well,’ he said, slowly replacing the receiver and looking at what he had written, ‘it is miles out of the centre. I think it must be an apartment block. He says he will wait outside, and when you arrive, don’t speak English until he says it’s OK.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘You don’t really need me. Misha does speak some English.’ He handed me the address, written in Russian script. ‘Show that to a taxi driver. He’ll find it. And I’ll meet you later, at the Aragvi.’
I looked beyond him to the open door of his room. Gudrun half-sat, half-lay, on the bed, her long legs sprawled in invitation.
I hesitated, but finally I said, ‘I wish you could come. Someone did try to kill Misha or me this morning. I expect you’ll laugh, but if I’m going off into the wilds to meet him, I would feel safer with a back-up system.’
He didn’t laugh. He said goodbye to Gudrun, and came. He also said, ‘Ve have vays of postponing our pleasures until tomorrow,’ and made a joke of it: and I thought that for plain good nature he would be hard to beat.
‘It’s very difficult to think of a good meeting place, if you’re an ordinary Russian and you want to talk to a foreigner,’ Stephen said. ‘There are no pubs in Russia. No discreet little cafés. And there are always watchers, with tongues. You’d have to be pretty solid with the hierarchy to be seen anywhere public with a foreigner.
’
We flagged a passing taxi, again without much of a wait.
‘No shortage of these,’ I said, climbing in. Then, as Stephen’s mouth opened, I interrupted. ‘Don’t say it. Taxis are dear, the metro’s cheap.’
‘And the taxi charges have practically doubled recently.’
‘Ask the driver to go via the Intourist Hotel, so that I can drop off the recorder.’
‘Right.’
We sped down the Komsomolsky Prospect and I looked two or three times out of the back window. A medium-sized black car followed us faithfully, but we were on a main road where that was likely to happen anyway.
‘When we get to the Intourist,’ I said, ‘I will get out and say goodnight to you unmistakably. I’ll then go into the hotel, and you and the taxi will drive off, and go round the corner, and wait for me outside the National Hotel entrance. I’ll dump the tape-recorder, and come and meet you there.’
Stephen looked out of the rear window.
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re being followed?’
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘Most of the time.’
‘But… who by?’
‘Would you believe, the K.G.B.?’
For all his guided tour to the prying state, he was staggered. ‘What makes you think so?’
‘The Sphinx told me.’
It reduced him to silence. Ve have vays of making you stop talking, I thought facetiously. We arrived in due course at the Intourist, and went through the act.
I spent some time on the pavement talking to Stephen through the taxi window, and then bade him Goodnight in ringing tones, and waved a farewell as I went through the double glass entrance; overdoing it, no doubt. I collected my key from the desk, removed hat and coat, and went up in the lift. Then I parked the tape-recorder in my room, and without hurrying, so as not to alert the old biddy sitting watchfully at her desk by the lifts, walked back, still carrying outdoor clothes, and descended to the ground floor. There were several routes from the lifts to the front door, as it was a very large hotel: I took the most roundabout, putting on hat and coat on the way, and wafted at an ordinary pace out again on to the pavement. No doubt the watchers there took general note, but no one broke away to bob in my wake.
I stopped at the corner and glanced back. No one seemed to be peeling off to look in non-existent shop-windows. I walked on, thinking that if the followers were determined as well as professional, my amateur attempts at evasion would have been useless. But they would have had no reason to suppose I knew they were there, or that I would try to duck them, as I had given no signs so far of wanting to; so perhaps they might think I was still somewhere inside the hotel.
The taxi-driver was agitated and grumbling at having had to wait a long time where he was not supposed to. Stephen greeted my arrival with sighs of relief, and we set off again with a jerk.
‘Your friend Frank went into the hotel just after you,’ Stephen said. ‘Did you see him?’
‘No,’ I said tranquilly.
He didn’t pursue it. ‘The driver says the temperature is dropping. It has been warm for November, he says.’
‘It’s December, today.’
‘He says it will snow.’
We motored a good way northwards, and then north-east, through the wide well-lit mostly empty streets. When the roads became narrower I said, ‘Ask the driver to stop for a moment.’
‘What now?’ Stephen said.
‘See if we’ve a tail.’
No car stopped behind us, however, and when we went on, we found no stationary car waiting ahead. I asked Stephen to get the driver to circle a fairly large block. The driver, thoroughly disillusioned by these junkettings, began muttering under his breath.
‘Get him to drop us before we reach the address,’ I said. ‘We don’t want him undoing the good work by reporting our exact destination.’
A large tip on top of the big fare cured most of the driver’s grumbles, but wouldn’t, I guessed, keep his mouth shut. He sped off back to the brighter lights as if glad to be rid of us. But no black cars, or any others, passed or stopped. As far as we could tell, we were on our own.
We stood in an area which was being developed. On each side, end on to the road, were ranks of newly-built apartment blocks, all about forty feet thick and nine storeys high, clad in grey-white pebbledash and stretching away into the darkness with ranks of windows front and back.
‘Standard issue housing,’ Stephen said. ‘Egg boxes for the masses. Six square metres of floorspace per person; the maximum regulation allowance.’
We walked along the slushy pavement, the only people in sight. The block we were currently passing was unfinished, with its walls in place but empty holes for windows. The one after that, although still uninhabited, had glass. The one after that looked furnished, and the one after that had residents. It proved also to be where we were going.
A last look at the street showed no one taking the slightest notice of us. We wheeled into the broad space between the two blocks and discovered from the numbers that the entrance we wanted was the second door along. We went towards it without haste, and stopped a few paces short.
We waited. A minute ticked past, and another. No Misha. With every lungful the wet freezing air chilled from the inside out. If we had travelled all this way for nothing, I thought, I would be less than amused.
A voice spoke softly, from behind us.
‘Come.’
9
We turned, startled. We hadn’t heard him, but there he stood in his leather coat and his leather cap, young and neat. He made a small beckoning movement with his head, and turned on his heel. We followed him out into the street, along the pavement, and round into the space between the next two blocks. He made steadily for one of the entrances, and in silence we traipsed in his footsteps.
Inside, the brightly lit and warm hall smelled of new paint. There were two lifts, both not working, and a flight of stairs. Misha addressed himself to the stairs. We followed.
On the landing above there were four doors, all closed. Misha continued up the stairs. On the next landing, four identical doors, again all closed. Misha went on climbing. On the fourth floor, we stopped for breath.
Between the fifth and sixth floors we came across two young men struggling to carry upwards an electric cooker. They had ropes and protective wadding around it, and leather straps with carrying handles to help them, but they were both sweating and panting from exertion. They stopped work, with the cooker poised precariously half on and half off a step, to let us pass. Misha said something which sounded consoling, and on we went at a slower and slower pace.
It had to be the ninth floor, I thought. Or the roof.
The ninth floor. Misha produced a key, unlocked one of the uninformative doors, and led us in.
The apartment consisted of kitchen, bathroom, and two meagre rooms, and was almost unfurnished. There were some rather gloomy green tiles in the kitchen, and nothing much else; certainly no cooker. The bare necessities in the bathroom. Bare floors, bare windows and bare walls in the two rooms, with two wooden chairs and a table in one of them, and the frame of a bed in the other. But, like everywhere indoors in Moscow, it was warm.
Misha closed the door behind us, and we took off our hats and coats. Misha swept an arm around, embracing the flat, and Stephen translated what he said.
‘It is his sister’s flat. When the flats are ready, the people on the list draw lots for them. His sister and her husband drew the ninth floor, and she hates it and is very depressed. They have a baby. Until the lifts are working she will have to carry the baby and her shopping up nine floors all the time. The cooker for the flat is provided, but it has to be carried up, like we saw the others doing. All the furniture has to be carried up, by friends.’
‘Why don’t the lifts work?’ I said.
Misha said (via Stephen) that it was because the caretaker said the interiors of the lifts would be damaged if people used them for taking up cookers and furnit
ure, so the lifts would not be switched on until all the flats were furnished and occupied. It seemed monstrous, but it was quite true.
‘Why don’t they put an extra, temporary, lining inside the lifts, and remove it later?’ I said.
Misha shrugged. It was impossible to argue, he said. The caretaker would not listen, and he was in control. He gestured to us to sit on the chairs, and he himself perched half on and half off the table. He was thin but strong, fit rather than undernourished. The vivid blue eyes in the tanned face looked at us with more friendliness than in the morning and reinforced my belief in his brains.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, I go. I speak again.’
‘Tell Stephen in Russian,’ I said. ‘It will be easier for you. And you can say more.’
He nodded a shade regretfully, but saw the sense of it. He spoke in bursts, waiting for Stephen to catch up, and again nodding as he heard his intentions put into English.
‘Later, after we had gone,’ Stephen translated, ‘Nikolai Alexandrovich, Mr Kropotkin, had more visitors; your friend the English journalist, Malcolm Herrick, and someone who sounds like the Sphinx. They came together. Mr Kropotkin got Misha to repeat to them what he had just told us. Misha thinks that Mr Kropotkin knew the Sphinx quite well…’
‘His name is Ian,’ I said. ‘And yes, they had talked together before.’
‘Mr Kropotkin thinks you need help,’ Stephen went on. ‘He sent Misha to fetch his little book with telephone numbers, and he telephoned to several people to ask if they knew anything about Alyosha, and if they did. to tell him, and he would tell you. Boris Dmitrevich Telyatnikov, who is one of the possible Olympic riders, came in the afternoon to see the horses, and Mr Kropotkin asked him also. Boris said he didn’t know anything about Alyosha, but Misha thinks Boris was worried.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Carry on.’
‘Practically everyone in Moscow who has anything to do with the Olympic equestrian games now seems to be looking for Alyosha.’
‘My God,’ I said.
Misha looked a little anxious. ‘Nikolai Alexandrovich help,’ he said. ‘You save horse. Nikolai Alexandrovich help.’