by Dick Francis
The phials were of the same size and shape as those I had for adrenalin: tiny glass capsules less than two inches in length, with a much-narrowed neck a third of the way along, which snapped off, so that one could put a hypodermic needle through the resulting opening, and down into the liquid, to draw it up. Each phial in the tin contained one millilitre of colourless liquid, enough for one human-sized injection. Half a teaspoonful. Not enough, to my mind, for a horse.
I held one of the phials up in the light, to see the printing on it, but as usual with such baby ampoules it was difficult to see the lettering. Not adrenalin. As far as I could make out, it said 0.4 mg naloxone, which was spectacularly unhelpful, as I’d never heard of the stuff. I unfolded the piece of paper, and that was no better, as whatever was written there was written in Russian script. I put the paper back in the tin and closed it, and set it aside with the other mysteries for Stephen to look at.
Stephen himself had planned to spend the day between lectures and Gudrun, but had said he would be near the telephone from four o’clock onwards, if I should want him. It frankly didn’t seem worthwhile for me to traipse up to the University, or for him to come down, to decipher Misha’s bits of paper, without first seeing if it could be done by wires; so I rang him.
‘How’s it going?’ he said.
‘The walls are whining.’
‘Oh cripes.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘if I spell some German words out to you, can you tell me what they mean?’
‘If you think it’s wise.’
‘Stop me if you don’t think so,’ I said.
‘OK.’
‘Right. Here goes with the first.’ I read out, letter by letter, as far as I could judge, the three lines of German handwriting on one of the cards.
Stephen was laughing by the end. ‘It says “With all good wishes for today and the future, Volker Springer”. That’s a man’s name.’
‘Good God.’
I looked at the other cards more attentively, and saw something I had entirely missed. At the bottom of one of them, signed with a flourish, was a name I knew.
I read out that card too, letter by letter.
‘It says,’ Stephen said, ‘ “Best memories of a very good time in England. Your friend…” Your friend who?’
‘Hans Kramer,’ I said.
‘Bull’s eye.’ Stephen’s voice crackled in my ear. ‘Are those by any chance Misha’s souvenirs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Autographs, no less. Anything else?’
‘One or two things in Russian. They’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.’
‘I’ll be with you at ten, then. Gudrun sends her love.’
I put the receiver down, and almost immediately the bell rang again. A female English voice, calm, cultured, and on the verge of boredom.
‘Is that Randall Drew?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Polly Paget here,’ she said. ‘Cultural attaché’s office, at the Embassy.’
‘How nice to speak to you.’
I had a vivid picture of her; short hair, long cardigan, flat shoes and common sense.
‘A telex has just come for you. Ian Young asked me to phone and tell you, in case you were waiting for it.’
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘Could you read it to me?’
‘Actually, it is complicated, and very long. It really would be better, I think, if you came to collect it. It would take a good half hour for me to dictate it while you write it down, and to be honest I don’t want to waste the time. I’ve a lot still to do, and it’s Friday evening, and we’re shutting down soon for the weekend.’
‘Is Ian there?’ I asked.
‘No, he left a few minutes ago. And Oliver is out on official business. There’s just me holding the fort. If you want your message before Monday, I’m afraid it means coming to get it.’
‘How does it start?’
With an audible sigh and a rustle of paper, she began, ‘Hans Wilhelm Kramer, born July 3rd, 1941, in Dusseldorf, Germany, only child of Heinrich Johannes Kramer, industrialist…’
‘Yes, all right,’ I said, interrupting. ‘I’ll come. How long will you be there?’ I had visions of uncooperative taxis, of having to walk.
‘An hour or so. If you’re definitely coming, I’ll wait for you.’
‘You’re on,’ I said. ‘Warm the scotch.’
Having grown a little wilier I engaged a taxi to drive me to the far side of the bridge, pointing to a street map to show where I meant. The road over the bridge, I had found, extended into the Warsaw highway and was the road we had taken to Chertanovo. In another couple of days I would have Moscow’s geography in my head for ever.
I paid off the driver and stepped out into the falling snow, which had increased to the point of flakes as big as rose petals and as clinging as love. They settled on my sleeve as I shut the taxi’s door, and on my shoulders, and on every flat surface within sight. I found I had stupidly forgotten my gloves. I thrust my hands in my pockets, and turned down the steps to the lower road, to turn there along to the Embassy.
It had seemed to me that I was unfollowed and safe; but I was wrong. The tigers were waiting under the bridge.
They had learned a few lessons from the abortive mission in Gorky Street.
For a start, they had chosen a less public place. The only sanctuary within running distance was now not the big bustling well-lit mouth of the Intourist Hotel, but the heavily-closed front door of the Embassy, with an obstructive guard outside at the gate.
They had learned that my reflexes weren’t the slowest on record, and also that I had no inhibitions about kicking them back.
There were still only two of them, but this time they were armed. Not with guns, but with riot sticks. Nasty hard things like baseball bats, swinging from a loop of leather round the wrist.
The first I knew of it was when one chunk of timber connected shatteringly with the side of my head. The fur ear-flaps perhaps saved my skull from being cracked right open, but I reeled dizzily, bewildered, not realising what had happened, spinning under the weight of the blow.
I had a second’s clear view of them, like a snapshot. Two figures in the streetlights against the dark shadows under the bridge. The snow falling more sparsely in the bridge’s shelter. The arms raised, with the heavy truncheons swinging.
They were the same men: no doubt of it. The same brutal quality, the same quick ferocity, the same unmerciful eyes looking out of the same balaclavas. The same message that human rights were a laugh.
I stumbled, and my hat fell off, and I tried to protect myself with my arms, but it wasn’t much good. There’s a limit to the damage even a riot stick can do through thick layers of jacket and overcoat, so that to an extent the onslaught was disorientating more than lethal, but bash numbers three or four by-passed my feeble barriers and knocked off my glasses. I stretched for them, tried to catch them, got hit on the hand, and lost them entirely in the falling snow.
It seemed to be all they were waiting for. The battering stopped, and they grabbed me instead. I kicked and punched at targets I could no longer properly see, and did too little damage to stop the rot.
It felt as though they were trying to lift me up, and for a fraction of time I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered where we were. On the road beside the river… which flowed along uncaringly on the other side of the breast-high wall.
Desperation kept me struggling when there was absolutely no reasonable hope.
I had seen the Moscow River from several bridges, and everywhere its banks were the same. Not sloping grassy affairs shading gently into the water, but grey perpendicular walls rising straight from the river bed to about eight feet above the surface of the water. They looked like defences against flooding more than tourist attractions: designed to keep everything between them from getting out.
I clung grimly to whatever I could reach. I tore at their faces. At their hands. I raised from one of them a grunt and from the other a muttere
d word in a language I didn’t recognise.
I didn’t rationally think that anyone would come along the road and beat them off. I fought only because while I was still on the road I was alive, but if I hit the water I would be as good as dead. Instinct and anger, and nothing else.
It was hopeless, really. They had me off my feet, and I was being bundled over. I carried on with the limpet act. I pulled the knitted balaclava clean off one of them, but whatever he might have feared, I still couldn’t have sworn to a positive identification. One of the streetlights was shining full on his face and I saw him as if he’d been drawn by Picasso.
In my racing days I had kept my glasses anchored by a double head strap of elastic, a handy gadget now gathering dust with my five-pound saddle. It had never crossed my mind that it might mean the difference between life or death in Moscow.
They pushed and shoved, and more and more of my weight was transferred over the wall. It all seemed both agonisingly fast and painfully endless: a few seconds of physical flurry that stretched in my mind like eternity.
I was hanging on to the parapet and life with one hand, the rest of me dangling over the water.
They swung, as I had time to realise, one of the riot sticks. There was an excruciating slam on my fingers. I stopped being able to use them, and dropped off the wall like a leech detached.
12
Winter had already penetrated the Moscow River. I went down under the surface, and the sudden incredible cold was the sort of numbing punching shock which Arctic Ocean bathers don’t survive.
I kicked my way up into the air, but I knew in my heart that the battle was lost. I felt weak and half-blind, and it was dark, and thickly snowing. The temperature made me breathless, and my right hand had no feeling. My clothes got heavier as they saturated. Soon they would drag me under. The current carried me down river, under the bridge and out the other side, away from the Embassy; and even while I tried to shout for help I thought that the only people who would hear me would be the two who wouldn’t give it.
The yell, in any case, turned into a mouthful of icy water; and that seemed the final reality.
Lethargy began slowing my attempts to swim and dulling my brain. Resolution ebbed away. Coherent thought was ending. I was anaesthetised by cold: a lump of already mindless matter with all other bodily systems freezing fast to a halt, sinking without will or means to struggle.
I began, in fact, to die.
I dimly heard a voice calling.
‘Randall… Randall…’
A bright light shone on my face.
‘Randall, this way. Hold on…’
I couldn’t hold on. My legs had given their last feeble kick. The only direction left was downwards into a deep numbing death.
Something fluffy fell on my face. Fluffier and of more substance than snow. I was past using a hand to grab it, past even thinking that I should. But somewhere in the last vestiges of consciousness an instinct must still have been working, because I opened my mouth to whatever had fallen across it, and bit it.
I held a lot of soft stuff between my teeth. There was a tug on it, as if something was pulling. I gripped it tighter.
Another tug. My head, which had been almost under water, came up again a few inches.
A sluggish thought crept back along the old mental pathways. If I held on to the line I might be pulled out on to the bank, like a fish.
I should hold on, I vaguely thought, with more than my teeth.
Hands.
There was a problem about hands.
Couldn’t feel them.
‘Randall, hold on. There’s a ladder along here.’
I heard the words, and they sounded silly. How could I climb a ladder when I couldn’t feel my hands?
All the same, I was awake enough to know that I had been given one last tiny chance, and I clenched my jaws over the soft lifeline with a grip that only total blackout might loosen.
The line pulled me against the wall.
‘Hold on,’ yelled the voice. ‘It’s along here. Not far. Just hold on.’
I was bumping along the wall. Not far might be too far. Not far was as far as the sun.
‘Here it is,’ shouted the voice. ‘Can you see it? Just beside you. I’ll shine the torch on it. There. Grab hold, can’t you?’
Grab hold. Of what?
I lay there like a log.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said the voice. The light came on my face again, and then went off. I heard sounds coming nearer, coming down the river side of the wall.
‘Give me your hands.’
I couldn’t.
I felt someone lift up my right arm, pulling it by the sleeve out of the water.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said again; and dropped it back.
He pulled my left arm out.
‘Hold on with that,’ he commanded, and I felt him trying to curl my fingers round some sort of horizontal bar.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to climb out of the bloody river. You’re bloody nearly dead, do you know that? You’ve been in there too bloody long. And if you don’t get out within a minute, bloody nothing will save you. Do you hear that? For Christ’s sake… climb.’
I couldn’t see what I was supposed to climb, even if I had the strength. I felt him put my right arm up again out of the water, and I thought he was trying to thread my right hand behind the horizontal bar until I had the bar against my wrist.
‘Put your feet on one of the steps under the water,’ he said. ‘Feel for them. The ladder goes down a long way.’
I began vaguely to understand. Tried to lodge a foot on an underwater horizontal bar, and by some miracle found one. He felt the faint support to my weight.
‘Right. The bars are only a foot apart. I’ll pull your left hand up to the next one. And whatever you do, don’t let your right hand slip out.’
I dredged up the last remnants of refrigerated strength and pushed, and rose twelve inches up the wall.
‘That’s right,’ said the voice above me, sounding heartily relieved. ‘Now keep bloody going, and don’t fall off.’
I kept bloody going and I didn’t fall off, though it seemed like Mount Everest and the Matterhorn rolled into one. At some point when half of me was out of the water I opened my mouth and let the fluffy but now sodden thing fall out: and there was an exclamation from above and presently the line was tied round my left wrist instead.
He went up the ladder above me, still cursing, still instructing, still yelling at me to hurry up.
Step by slow step, we ascended. When I reached the top he was standing on the far side, grabbing hold of me to roll me over on to the flat solid land. My legs buckled helplessly as they touched down, and I ended in a dripping heap on the snow-covered ground.
‘Take your coat and jacket off,’ he commanded. ‘Don’t you realise cold kills as fast as bloody bullets?’
I could crookedly see him in the streetlights, but it was his voice I at last conclusively recognised, though I supposed that at some point up the wall I had sub-consciously known.
‘Frank,’ I said.
‘Yes? Get on with it. Look, let me unbutton this.’ His fingers were strong and quick. ‘Take them off.’ He tugged fiercely and stripped off the clinging wet sleeves. ‘Shirt too.’ He ripped it off, so that the snow fell on to my bare skin. ‘Now put this on.’ He guided my arms into something dry and warm, and he buttoned up the front.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’ll bloody well have to walk back to the bridge. It’s only about a hundred yards. Get up, Randall, and come on.’
There was a sharp edge to his voice, and it struck me that it was because he too was feeling cold, because whatever it was that was sheltering me had come off him. I stumbled along with him on rubbery knees and kept wanting to laugh weakly at the irony of things in general. Didn’t have enough breath, however, for such frivolities.
When I nearly walked into a lamp post he said irritably, ‘Can’t you see?’
‘Lost my g-glass
es,’ I said.
‘Do you mean,’ he said incredulously, ‘that you can’t even see a bloody big lamp standard without them?’
‘Not… reliably.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Inside his coat my whole body was shuddering, chilled deep into the realms of hypothermia. Although they were apparently functioning, my legs didn’t feel as if they belonged to me, and there was still a pervading wuzziness in the thinking department.
We arrived at a flight of steps and toiled upwards to the main road. A black car rolled up and stopped beside us with amazing promptness. Frank threw my wet coats into the back of the car and shovelled me in after them. He himself sat in the front, instructing the driver briefly in Russian, with the result that we went round the by now familiar and lengthy one-way system and arrived in due course outside the Intourist Hotel.
Frank took my coats and escorted me through the front doors into the embrace of the central heating. He collected my room key without asking me the number. Shovelled me into the lift, pressed the button for the eighth floor, and saw me to my door. He fitted the key, and turned it, and steered me inside.
‘What are you going to do, if you can’t see?’ he said.
‘G… got as… spare pair.’
‘Where?’
‘T… top drawer.’
‘Sit down,’ he said, practically pushing me on to the sofa; and only the tiniest push was necessary. I heard him opening the drawer, and presently he put the reserves into my hands. I fumbled them on to my nose and again the world took on its proper shape.
He was looking at me with unexpected concern, his face firm and intelligent: but even while I watched the hawk-like quality dissolved, and the features slackened into the mediocrity we saw at meals.
He was wearing, I saw, only a sweater over his shirt, and, wound round his neck, his long striped college scarf. My lifeline.