Trial Run

by Dick Francis

  My room looked calm and sane, as if to reassure me that hotel guests could not be frighteningly attacked in one of the main streets of the city.

  It could happen in Piccadilly, I thought. It could happen in Park Avenue and the Champs Elysées and the Via Veneto. What was so different about Gorky Street?

  I threw my coat and room key on to the bed, poured a large reviver from the duty free scotch, and sank on to the sofa to drink it.

  Two attacks in one day. Too bloody much.

  The first had been a definite attempt to cripple or kill. The second had been – perhaps – an attempt at abduction. Without glasses, I would have been a pushover. They could have got me into the car. And after the drive… what destination?

  Did the Prince expect me to stick to the task until I was dead? Probably not, I thought; but then the Prince hadn’t known what he was sending me into.

  More than anything, I’d been lucky. I could be lucky again. Failing that, I had better be careful. My heart gradually steadied. My breath quietened to normal. I drank the scotch, and felt better.

  After a while I put down my glass and picked up the tape-recorder. Switched it on. Started methodically beside the window, and made slow comprehensive sweeps of the walls. Top to bottom. Every inch.

  There was no whine.

  I switched the recorder off and put it down. No whine was inconclusive. It didn’t mean no listening probe embedded in the plaster, it meant no listening probe switched on.

  I went slowly to bed and lay awake in the dark, thinking about the driver and the passenger in the black car. Apart from general awareness of their age, twenty – thirty, and height, five-nine, they had left me with three clear impressions. The first was that they knew about my eyesight. The second, that the savage quality I had sensed in their attack was a measure of the ferocity in their minds. And third, that they were not Russian.

  They had not spoken, so their voices had given me no clue. They had worn only the sober garb of the Russian man-in-the-street. Their faces had been three-quarters covered, with the result that I had seen only their eyes, and even those, very briefly.

  So why did I think…? I pulled the duvet over my shoulders and turned comfortably on to one side. The Russians, I thought drowsily, didn’t behave like that unless they were K.G.B., and if the K.G.B. had wanted to arrest me they would not have done it in that way, and they would not have failed. Other Russians were tamed by deterrents like labour camps, psychiatric hospitals, and the death sentence. Frank’s voice drifted back to me from breakfast. ‘There are no muggings in Russia. The crime rate is very low indeed. There are practically no murders.’

  ‘Repression is always the outcome of revolution,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got it the right way round?’ Mrs Wilkinson asked me, looking puzzled.

  ‘People don’t actually like being purged of their lazy and libertine old ways,’ I said. ‘So you have to force their mouths open, to give them the medicine. Revolutionaries everywhere are by nature aggressive, oppressive, and repressive. It’s they who have the power-over-others complex. All for your own good of course.’

  I got no rise out of Frank. He merely repeated that in a perfect socialist state like Russia there was no need for crime. The State supplied all needs, and gave to the people whatever it was good for them to have.

  Sixty years or so on from the October Revolution (now confusingly celebrated in November owing to the up-dating of the calendar) its wind-sown seeds were germinating their bloody crops around the world, but way back where it all started the second and third generation were not given to acts of private violence.

  The eyes looking out of the balaclavas had burned with a hunger for a harvest yet to come: sixty years younger than the blank dull look of a people for whom everything was provided.

  10

  Frank followed me to GUM the following morning.

  When I had gone in through the main door without once looking back, I stood still in the shadows, and watched, and presently he appeared, hurrying a little.

  At breakfast, upon Natasha’s insistent enquiry, I had said I was going to see some more horse people, but before that I was going to GUM to buy a new hat, as I had lost my last one.

  The tiniest frown crossed Frank’s face, and he looked at me with a shade of speculation. I remembered that when he had followed me into the hotel the evening before, after I had ostensibly said good-night to Stephen, I had been wearing the hat. How careful one had to be, I thought, over the most innocent remarks.

  ‘Where did you lose your hat?’ he said, showing only friendly interest.

  ‘Must have dropped it in the foyer or the lift,’ I said easily: ‘I don’t really know.’

  Natasha suggested I ask at the desk. I would, I said; and did. One learned. If not fast enough, one learned in the end.

  I turned away from GUM’s main door while Frank was still a little way off, and saw the red woollen hat with a white pompom immediately. Below the hat there were two blue-grey eyes in an elfin face, and straight hair in escaping wisps. She looked too young and slight to be married and a mother, and I could see why nine storeys up with no lifts was a crying disaster.

  ‘Elena?’ I said, tentatively.

  She nodded a fraction, and turned to walk purposefully away. I followed a few paces behind. For talking to a foreigner she would have to pick her own moment, and it suited me well for in to be out of Frank’s sight.

  She wore a grey coat with a red scarf falling jauntily over her shoulder, and carried a string bag with a paper-wrapped parcel inside it. I shortened the distance between us and said so that she could hear, ‘I want to buy a hat.’ She gave no sign of understanding, but when she stopped it was, in fact, outside a shop selling hats.

  The inside of GUM was not a department store along Western lines but like those in the Far East; a huge collection of small shops all under one roof. A covered market, two storeys high, with intersecting alleys and a glassed roof far above. Drips of melted snow fell through the cracks in the heavens and made small puddles underfoot.

  I bought the hat. Elena waited outside in the alley displaying no interest in me, and set off again when I came out. I looked carefully around for Frank, but couldn’t see him. Shoppers blocked every long perspective; and it worked both ways. If I couldn’t see him, very likely he couldn’t see me.

  Elena squeezed through a long queue of stolid people and stopped outside a shop selling folk arts and crafts. She transferred the plastic carrier to my hand with the smallest of movements and no ceremony whatsoever. Her gaze was directed towards the goods in the window, not at me.

  ‘Misha say give you this.’ Her accent was light and pretty, but I gathered from the disapproval in her tone that she was on this errand strictly for her brother’s sake, and not for mine.

  I thanked her for coming.

  ‘Please not bring trouble for him.’

  ‘I promise I won’t,’ I said.

  She nodded briefly, glancing quickly at my face, and away.

  ‘You go now, please,’ she said. ‘I queue.’

  ‘What is the queue for?’

  ‘Boots. Warm boots, for winter.’

  I looked at the queue, which stretched a good way along one of the ground-floor alleys, and up a staircase, and along the gallery above, and away out of sight. It hadn’t moved a step forward in five minutes.

  ‘But it will take you all day,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I need boots. When boots come in shop, everyone come to buy. It is normal. In England, the peasants have no boots. In Soviet Union, we are fortunate.’

  She walked away without any more farewell than her brother had given on the metro, and attached herself to the end of the patient line. The only thing that I could think of that England’s bootless peasantry would so willingly queue all day for would be Cup Final tickets.

  A glance into the tissue-wrapped parcel revealed that what Misha had sent, or what Elena had brought, was a painted wooden doll.

 
Frank picked me up somewhere between GUM and the pedestrian tunnel under Fiftieth Anniversary et cetera Square. I caught a glimpse of him behind me underground: a split second of unruly curls and college scarf bobbing along in the crowd. If I hadn’t been looking, I would never have noticed.

  It was already after ten. I lengthened my stride and finished the journey fairly fast, surfacing on the north side of the square and veering left towards the National Hotel.

  Parked just beyond the entrance was a small bright yellow car, with, inside it, a large Russian in a high state of fuss.

  ‘Seven minutes late,’ he said. ‘For seven minutes I sit here illegally. Get in, get in, do not apologise.’

  I eased in beside him and he shot off with a crash of gears and a fine disregard for other traffic.

  ‘You have been to GUM,’ he said accusingly. ‘And therefore you are late.’

  I followed the direction of his gaze and began to feel less bewildered by his clairvoyance: he was looking at the printed tissue-paper inside the string bag which Elena had given me. How cautious of her, I thought, to have brought Misha’s souvenirs in a wrapping to suit the rendezvous, in a bag any foreign tourist could acquire. A bag, too, I thought contentedly, that friend Frank would not query. The secret of survival in Russia was to be unremarkable.

  Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky revealed himself, during the time I spent with him, as a highly intelligent man with a guilt-ridden love of luxury and a repressed sense of humour. The wrong man for the regime, I thought, but striving to live honourably within its framework. In a country where an out-of-line opinion was a treachery, even if unspoken, he was an unwilling mental traitor. Not to believe what one believes one should believe is a spiritual torment as old as doctrine, and Yuri Chulitsky, I grew to understand, suffered from it dismally.

  Physically he was about forty, plumply unfit, with pouches already under his eyes, and a habit of raising the centre of his upper lip to reveal the incisors beneath. He spoke always with deliberation, forming the words carefully and precisely, but that might have been only the effect of using English, and, as on the telephone, he gave the impression that every utterance was double-checked internally before being allowed to escape.

  ‘Cigarette?’ he said, offering a packet.

  ‘No… thank you.’

  ‘I smoke,’ he said, flicking a lighter one-handed with the dexterity of long practice. ‘You smoke?’

  ‘Cigars, sometimes.’

  He grunted. The fingers on his left hand, resting on the steering-wheel with the cigarette stuck between them, were tanned yellowish brown, but otherwise his fingers were white and flexible, with spatulate tips and short well-tended nails.

  ‘I go see Olympic building,’ he said. ‘You come?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘At Chertanovo.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Place for equestrian games. I am architect. I design buildings at Chertanovo.’ He pronounced design like dess-in, but his meaning was clear. ‘I go today see progress. You understand?’

  ‘Every word,’ I said.

  ‘Good. I see in England how equestrian games go. I see need for sort buildings…’ He stopped and shook his head in frustration.

  ‘You went to see what sort of things happened during international equestrian games, so that you would know what buildings would be needed, and how they should best be designed for dealing with the needs and numbers of the Olympics.’

  He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘Is right. I go also Montreal. Is not good. Moscow games, we build good.’

  The leisurely one-way system in central Moscow meant, it seemed to me, mile-long detours to return to where one started, but facing the other way. Yuri Chulitsky swung his bright little conveyance round the corners without taking his foot noticeably off the accelerator, the bulk of his body making the car’s skin seem not much more than a metal overcoat.

  At one point, arriving at a junction with a main road, we were stopped dead by a policeman. Yuri Chulitsky shrugged a trifle and switched off the engine.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  The main road had, I saw, been totally cleared of traffic. Nothing moved on it. Chulitsky said something under his breath, so I asked again, ‘What’s the matter? Has there been an accident?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘See lines in road?’

  ‘Do you mean those white ones?’

  There were two parallel white lines painted down the centre of the main road, with a space of about six feet between them. I had noticed them on many of the widest streets, but thought of them vaguely as some sort of no-man’s-land between the two-way lines of traffic.

  ‘White lines go to Kremlin,’ Chulitsky said. ‘Politburo people drive to Kremlin in white lines. Every people’s car stop.’

  I sat and watched. After three or four minutes a long black car appeared, driving fairly fast in lonely state up the centre of the road, between the white lines.

  ‘Chaika,’ Chulitsky said, as the limousine slid lengthily past, showing curtains drawn across the rear windows. ‘Is official car. Chaika, in English, is seagull.’

  He started his engine, and presently the policeman stepped out of the middle of the side road and waved us on our way.

  ‘Was that the Chairman?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Many politburo peoples go in Chaika on white lines. All people’s cars always stop.’

  Democratic, I thought.

  The small yellow car sped south of the city, along what he told me was the road to Warsaw, but which to my eyes was plainly labelled M4.

  He said ‘Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin say tell you what you ask. You ask. I tell.’

  ‘I’m looking for someone called Alyosha.’

  ‘Alyosha? Many people called Alyosha. Nikolai Alexandrovich say find Alyosha for Randall Drew. Who is this Alyosha?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, and I haven’t been able to find out. No one seems to know who he is.’ I paused. ‘Did you meet Hans Kramer, in England?’

  ‘Da. German. He die.’

  ‘That’s right. Well… he knew Alyosha. The autopsy said Kramer died of a heart attack, but people near him when he died thought he was saying that Alyosha had caused him to have a heart attack. Er… have I said that clearly enough?’

  ‘Yes. Is clear. About Alyosha, I cannot help.’

  I supposed I would have been surprised if he had said anything different.

  ‘You have been asked before, about Alyosha?’ I said.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘An Englishman came to see you at the Olympic committee building. He saw you and the two colleagues who went with you to England.’

  ‘Is right,’ he agreed gruffly. ‘Is writing for newspaper.’

  ‘Malcolm Herrick.’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘You all said you knew nothing at all about anything.’

  A long pause; then he said, ‘Herrick is foreigner. Comrades not say things to Herrick.’

  He relapsed into silence, and we drove steadily along the Warsaw highway, leaving the city centre behind and making for another lot of egg-box suburbs. Some light powdery snow began to fall, and Yuri switched on the windscreen wipers.

  ‘Today, tomorrow, it snow. This snow not melt. Stay all winter.’

  ‘Do you like the winter?’ I said.

  ‘No. Winter is bad for building. Today is last day is possible see progress of buildings at Chertanovo. So I go now.’

  I said I would be most interested in the buildings, if he felt like showing me round. He laughed in a small deep throaty rumble, but offered no explanation.

  I asked him if he had personally known Hans Kramer, but he had spoken to him only about buildings. ‘Well… Johnny Farringford?’ I asked.

  ‘Johnny… Farringford. Are you saying Lord Farringford? Is a man with red hairs? Ride in British team?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I said.

  ‘I see him many times. Many places. I talk with him. I ask him about buildings. He i
s no good about buildings. I ask other peoples. Other peoples is more good.’ He stopped, obviously unimpressed by the planning ability of earls, and we drove four or five miles while he seemed to be thinking deeply about anything except my mission: but finally, as if coming to a difficult decision, he said, ‘Is not good Lord Farringford come to Olympics.’

  I held my breath. Damped down every quick and excited question. Managed in the end to say without even a quaver, ‘Why?’

  He had relapsed however into further deep thought.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, without pressure.

  ‘It is for my country good if he come. It is for your country not good. If I tell you, I speak against the good for my country. It is difficult for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  After a long way he turned abruptly off the M4 to the right, along a lesser, but still dual-carriageway road. There was, as usual, very little traffic, and without much ado he swung round in a U turn across the central reservation to face the way we had come. He pulled in by the roadside and stopped with a jerk.

  On our left the road was lined as far as the eye could see with rows of apartment buildings, greyish white. On our right there was a large flat snow-sprinkled space bordered on the far side by a stretch of black-looking forest of spindly young trees packed tightly together. On the side near the road there was a wire fence, and between the fence and the road itself, a wide ditch full of white half-melted slush.

  ‘Is there,’ Yuri said, pointing into this far from promising landscape with a gleam of relaxed humour, ‘equestrian games.’

  ‘Ye gods,’ I said.

  We got out of the car into the bitter air. I looked away down the road in the direction we had originally been travelling. There were tall concrete lamp standards, electricity pylons, dense black forest on the left, white unending impersonal apartment blocks on the right, a grey double road with no traffic, and, at the side, wet white snow. Over it all softly fell the powdery forerunners of the winter freeze. It was silent and ugly and as desolate as a desert.