by Dick Francis
‘In summer,’ Yuri said, ‘forest is green. Is beautiful place for equestrian games. Is grass. Everything beautiful.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said.
Further along, on the side of the road where we had stopped, there were two large hoardings, one bearing a long announcement about the Olympics, and the other sporting a big picture of the stadium as it was one day going to be. The stands looked most ingenious, shaped like a Z, with the top and bottom ranks of the seats facing one way, and the centre rank facing the other. Events, it appeared, would take place on both sides of the stands.
Yuri gestured to me to return to the car, and he drove us through a gate in the wire, on to the site itself. There were a few men there driving mechanical earth-movers, though how they knew what they were moving was a mystery to me, as the whole place looked a sea of jumbled mud with pools of icy slush amid the usual broken white blanket of half-melted snow.
Yuri reached into the space behind my seat and brought forth a huge pair of thigh-high gumboots. These he put on by planting them firmly outside the opened car door, removing his walking shoes, wrapping his trousers round his legs, and sinking his feet into the depths as he stood up.
‘I talk to men,’ he said. ‘You wait.’
Superfluous advice, I thought. Yuri unfastened his ear-flaps against the chill wind and talked to his men, trudging about and making sweeping gestures with his arms. After a fair while he returned and reversed the gumboot process, tucking the now wet and muddy objects in behind his own driving seat.
‘Is good,’ he said, lifting the centre of his lip and giving me a gleam of teeth. ‘We finish foundations. In spring, when snow melt, we build quickly. Stadium,’ he pointed. ‘Stables.’ He pointed again. ‘Restaurants, buildings for riders, buildings for officials, buildings for television. There,’ he waved an arm at a huge slightly undulating area bordered by forest, ‘is crosscountry for trials, like Badminton and Burghley. In summer, is beautiful.’
‘Will everyone who wants to come to the Games get visas?’ I said.
‘Da. All peoples have visas.’
‘It isn’t always like that,’ I said neutrally, and he replied in the same level tone. ‘For Olympics, all peoples have visas. Stay in hotels. Is good.’
‘What about the Press?’ I said. ‘And the television people?’
‘We build Press building for foreign Press. Also television building for foreign television peoples, near Moscow television building. Use same…’ He described a transmitting mast with his hands. ‘Foreign peoples go only in these buildings. In England, we ask Press peoples about Press buildings. We see what Press peoples need. We ask many Press peoples. We ask Herrick.’
‘Herrick?’ I said. ‘Did you ask him in England, or in Moscow?’
‘In England. He help us. He come to Burghley. We see him with Lord Farringford. So we ask him. We ask many peoples about buildings. We ask Hans Kramer about buildings. He was…’ Words failed him but gestures did not. Hans Kramer, I gathered, had given the Russian observers a decisively rude brush-off.
He tied up the ear-flaps of his hat without taking it off. I spent the time scanning the road for anything that looked like a following car, but saw nothing of note. A bus passed, its tyres making a swishing noise on the slushy tarmac. I thought that the low level of traffic on most roads would make a following car conspicuous: but on the other hand there seemed to be very little variety in make, so that one car tended to look exactly like the next. Difficult to spot a tail. Easy, however, to follow a bright yellow box on wheels.
‘What sort of car is this?’ I said.
‘Zhiguli,’ he said. ‘Is my car.’ He seemed proud of it. ‘Not many peoples have car. I am architect, have car.’
‘Is it expensive?’ I asked.
‘Car expensive. Petrol cheap. Driving examination, very difficult.’
He finished the bow on his hat, checked that his boots were inside, slammed the door, and backed briskly out on to the road.
‘How is everyone going to get here?’ I said. ‘Competitors and spectators.’
‘We build metro. New station.’ He thought. ‘Metro on top of ground, not deep. New metro for Chertanovo peoples. Many new buildings here. Chertanovo is new place. I show you.’
We set off back towards the Warsaw highway, but before we reached it he turned off to the right, and drove up another wide road where apartment blocks were springing up like mushrooms. All whitish grey; all nine storeys high, marching away into the distance.
‘In Soviet all peoples have house,’ Yuri said. ‘Rent is cheap. In England, expensive.’ He shot me an amused look as if challenging me to argue with his simplistic statement. In a country where everything was owned by the state, there was no point in charging high rents. To enable people to pay high rents, or high prices for electricity, transport and telephones, for that matter, it would be necessary to pay higher wages. Yuri Chulitsky knew it as well as I did. I would have to be careful, I told myself, not to underestimate the subtlety of his thoughts because of the limitations of the English they were expressed in.
‘Can I make a trade with you?’ I said. ‘A bargain? One piece of information in exchange for another?’
For that I got a quick, sharp, piercing glance, but all he said was, ‘Car need petrol.’ He pulled off the road into a station with pumps, and removed himself from the car to talk to the attendant.
I found myself taking off my glasses and polishing the already clean lenses. The playing-for-time gesture, which was not at that moment needed. I wondered if it had been intuitively sparked off by Yuri’s purchase of petrol, which seemed hardly urgent as the tank was well over half full, according to the guage.
While I watched, the needle crept round to full. Yuri paid and returned to the car, and we set off back towards the city centre.
‘What information you exchange?’ he said.
‘I don’t have it all yet.’
A muscle twitched beside his mouth. ‘You diplomat?’ he said.
‘A patriot. Like you.’
‘You tell me information.’
I told him a great deal. I told him what had really happened at the Hippodrome, not Kropotkin’s watered-down version, and I told him of the attack in Gorky Street. I also told him, though without names or places or details, the gist of what Boris Telyatnikov had overheard, and the inferences one could draw from it. He listened, as any faithful Russian would, with a growing sense of dismay. When I stopped, he drove a good way without speaking, and in the end his comment was oblique.
‘You want lunch?’ he said.
11
He took me to what he called the Architects’ Circle and in the big basement restaurant there, gave me food I hadn’t believed existed in Moscow. Prime smoked salmon, delicious ham off the bone, tender red beef. An apple and some grapes. Vodka to toss off for starters, followed by excellent red wine. Good strong coffee at the end. He himself ate and drank with as much enjoyment as I did.
‘Marvellous,’ I said appreciatively. ‘Superb.’
Yuri leaned back at last and lit a cigarette, and told me that every profession had its Circle. There was a Writers’ Circle, for instance, to which all Soviet writers belonged. If they did not belong to the Circle, they did not get published. They could of course be expelled from the Circle, if it was considered that what they wrote was not suitable. Yuri’s manner dared me to suggest that he didn’t entirely agree with this system.
‘What about architects?’ I asked mildly.
Architects, I gathered, had to be politically sound, if they wished to be members of the Architects’ Circle. Naturally, if one did not belong to the Circle, one was not allotted anything to design.
Naturally.
I drank my coffee and made no remark. Yuri watched me, and smiled with a touch of melancholy.
‘I give information,’ he said, ‘about Lord Farringford.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You are clever man.’ He sighed and shrugged r
esignedly, and kept his side of the bargain. ‘Lord Farringford is foolish man. With Hans Kramer, he go bad places. Sex places.’ Distaste showed in his face, and the top lip lifted even further off the incisors. ‘In London, is disgusting pictures. In the street. All people can see. Disgusting.’ He searched for a word. ‘Dirty.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Lord Farringford and Hans Kramer go into these places. Three, four times.’
‘Are you sure it was more than once?’ I said attentively.
‘Sure. We see. We… follow.’ The confession came out on a downward inflection, drifting off into silence, as if he hadn’t quite said what he had.
Wow, I thought: and what I said, without any emphasis of any sort, was, ‘Why did you follow?’
He struggled a great deal with his conscience, but he told me what I was sure was the truth.
‘Comrade with me, he look in England and in many country for foolish peoples. When foolish peoples come to Soviet Union, comrade use… make…’
‘Your comrade makes use of them through their liking for pornography?’
He blew out a sharp breath.
‘And if Farringford comes to the Olympics, your comrade will make use of him?’
Silence.
‘What use could Farringford be? He isn’t a diplomat…’ I stopped, thought, and went on more slowly. ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that in return for not… embarrassing the British people, for not exposing a scandalous misdemeanour into which your comrade has lured him, your comrade will demand some concession from the British government?’
‘Say again,’ he said.
I said it again, more forthrightly. ‘Your comrade traps Farringford into a dirty mess. Your comrade says to the British government, give me what I want, or I publish the mess.’
He didn’t directly admit it. ‘The comrades of my comrade,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Those comrades.’
‘Farringford is rich man,’ Yuri said. ‘For rich man, comrade feel…’ He didn’t know the word, but his meaning was unmistakable, and it was contempt.
‘For all rich men?’ I said.
‘Of course. Rich man bad. Poor man good.’ He spoke with utter conviction and no suggestion of cynicism, stating, I supposed, one of humanity’s most fundamental beliefs. Camels through eyes of needles, and all that. Rich men never got to heaven, and serve them right. Which left absolutely no hope of eternal bliss for Randall Drew, who had an unequal share of this world’s goods… If I warned Johnny Farringford, I wondered, putting a stop to my dribbling thoughts, would it be enough? Or would it really be wiser for him to stay at home.
‘Yuri,’ I said, ‘how about another bargain?’
‘Explain.’
‘If I learn more here, I will exchange it for a promise that your comrade will not try to trap Farringford, if he comes to the Olympics.’
He stared. ‘You ask things impossible.’
‘A promise in writing,’ I said.
‘Is impossible. Comrade with me… impossible.’
‘Yeah… Well, it was just a thought.’ I reflected. ‘Then if I learn more, I would exchange it for information about Alyosha.’
Yuri studied the tablecloth and I studied Yuri.
‘I cannot help,’ he said.
He stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyes to meet mine. I was aware of a fierce intensity of thought going on behind the steady gaze, but upon what subject I couldn’t guess.
‘I take you,’ he said finally, ‘to Intourist Hotel.’
He dropped me in fact around the corner outside the National, where he had picked me up, implying, though not saying, that there was no sense in engaging the attention of the watchers unnecessarily.
It was by that time growing dark, as for various reasons our lunch had been delayed in arrival and leisurely in the eating, not least because of a wedding party going on in the next room. The bride had worn a long white dress and a minuscule veil. Did they get married in church? I asked. Of course not, Yuri said: it was not allowed. Pagan rituals, it seemed, had survived the rise and fall of Christianity.
The powdery snowfall of the morning had thickened into a determined regularity, but by no means into a raging blizzard. The wind, in fact, had dropped, but so had the temperature, and there was a threatening bite to the cold. I walked the short distance from one hotel to the other among a crowd of hurrying pedestrians and no men in black cars attempted to pick me off.
I arrived at the Intourist entrance at the same time as the Wilkinsons and their package tour, fresh back from the coach trip to Zagorsk.
‘It was quite interesting,’ said Mrs Wilkinson gamely, pushing through into the suddenly crowded foyer. ‘I couldn’t hear the guide very well, and it seemed wrong somehow, guided tours going in through churches, when there were people in there praying. Did you know that they don’t have any chairs in Russian churches? No pews. Everyone has to stand all the time. My feet are fair killing me. There’s a lot of snow out in the country. Dad slept most of the way, didn’t you, Dad?’
Dad morosely nodded.
Mrs Wilkinson, along with nearly everyone else on the bus tour, carried a white plastic bag with a green and orange swirly pattern on it.
‘There was a tourist shop there. You know, foreign currency shop. I bought ever such a pretty matroshka.’
‘What’s a matroshka?’ I said, waiting beside her at the desk, to collect our room keys.
‘One of these,’ she said, fishing into the white plastic depths and tearing off some tissue-paper. ‘These dolls.’
She produced with a small flourish an almost identical double of the fat brightly-coloured wooden doll I too carried in the string bag dangling from my left hand.
‘I think matroshka means little mother,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you know, they pull apart and there’s another smaller one inside, and you go right down to a tiny one in the middle. There are nine inside here. I’m going to give it to my grandchildren.’ She beamed with simple pleasure, and I beamed right back. If only all the world, I thought regretfully, were as wholesome and as harmless as the Wilkinsons.
Wholesome and harmless did, I supposed, describe the outward appearance of my tidy room upstairs, but this time, when I swept the walls with the tape-recorder, I heard the whine. High-pitched, assaulting the ear, and originating from a spot about five feet up from the floor, and about midway along the bed. I switched off the recorder and wondered who, if anyone, was listening.
The matroshka doll which Elena had handed me proved, on a closer look, to be a well-worn specimen with paint scratched off all over her pink-cheeked face and bright blue dress and yellow apron. In shape she was a very large elongated egg, slightly smaller round the head than lower down, and flat at the bottom, in order to stand. In all, about ten inches high and rotund in circumference.
Pull apart she should, Mrs Wilkinson had said, and pull apart she did, across the middle, though either the two halves were a naturally tight fit, or else Misha or Elena had used some sort of glue. I tugged and wrenched, and the little mother finally gave birth with a reluctant jerk and scattered her close-packed secrets all over the sofa.
I collected Misha’s souvenirs of England and laid them out on the dressing-table shelf; a row of valueless bits and pieces brought home by an unsophisticated young rider.
Easily the largest in size was the official programme of the International Event, printed in English but with the results and winners written in, in several places, in Russian script. The programme had been rolled to fit into the matroshka doll, and lay in an opening tube with the pages curling.
There were two picture postcards, unused, with views of London. A brown envelope containing a small bunch of wilted grass. An empty packet of Players cigarettes. A small metal ashtray with a horse’s head painted on the front, and ‘Made in England’ stamped into the back. A flat tin of mentholated cough pastilles. Several pieces of paper and small cards with writing on, and, finally, the things which had come from the
vet’s stolen case.
Stephen had been right in thinking that Misha’s share had not been very much, and I wondered what in fact he had made of it, with all the wording on the labels being in English.
There were four flat two by two inch sachets of a powder called Equipalazone, each sachet containing one gram of phenyl-butazone B Vet C, otherwise known succinctly in the horse world as ‘bute’.
I had used the drug countless times myself, in ten years of training my own horses, as it was the tops at reducing inflammation and pain in strained and injured legs. In Eventing and show jumping one could give it to the horses up to the minute they performed, but in British racing, though not in some other countries, it had to be out of the system before the ‘off’. Bute might be the subject of controversy and dope tests, but it was also about as easy to get hold of as aspirins, and one did not have to get it through a vet. The amount that Misha had brought home was roughly a single day’s dose.
There was next a small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which was useful for putting on wounds, to dry and heal them: and a sample-sized round tin of gamma benzine hexachloride, which, as far as I could remember, was anti-louse powder. There was a small, much folded advertisement leaflet extolling a cure for ringworm; and that was all.
No barbiturates. No pethidine. No steroids. Either Kramer, or the German lad, had cleaned out the lot.
Well, I thought, as I began to pack everything back into the doll; so much for that. I went through everything again, more thoroughly, just to make sure. Opened up the sample-sized tin of louse powder, which contained louse powder, and the small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which contained sulphanilamide powder. Or at least I supposed they did. If the two white powders were actually LSD or heroin, I wasn’t sure that I would know.
The Equipalazone sachets were foil-packed, straight from the manufacturers, and hadn’t been tampered with. I stuffed them back into the doll.
There was nothing lodged between the leaves of the programme. I shook it; nothing fell out. The writings on the pieces of card and paper were some in Russian and some in German, and I laid these aside for a translation from Stephen. The empty cigarette packet contained no cigarettes, or anything else, and the small tin of cough lozenges contained… er… no cough lozenges. The tin of cough lozenges contained another piece of paper, much handled and wrinkled, and three very small glass phials in a bed of cotton wool.