Trial Run

by Dick Francis

  The main roads had already been cleared of the overnight snow, but the Hippodrome itself was white. There were horses there all the same, exercising on the track, and even one or two trotters pulling sulkies. We paid off the taxi practically at the stable door, and went inside to inquire for Kropotkin.

  He was waiting for us in a small dark office used by one of the trainers of the trotters. There were heaps of tyres everywhere, which seemed stunningly incongruous in a stable until one remembered the sulkies’ wheels, and apart from that only a desk with a great deal of scattered paperwork, and a chair, and large numbers of photographs pinned to the walls.

  Nikolai Alexandrovich cordially grasped my hastily offered left hand and pumped it up and down with both of his own.

  ‘Friend,’ he said, the heavy bass voice reverberating in the small space. ‘Good friend.’

  He accepted the gift of vodka as the courtesy it represented. Then he set the chair ceremoniously for me to sit on, and himself lodged comfortably with his backside half on the desk. Stephen, it seemed, could stand on his own two feet: and, via Stephen, Kropotkin and I exchanged further suitable opening compliments.

  We arrived in due course at the meat inside the pastry.

  ‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen said, ‘that he asked everyone in the world of horses to give any help they could in the matter of Alyosha.’

  I expressed my warmest appreciations and felt the faintest quickening of the pulse.

  ‘No one, however,’ Stephen continued, ‘knows who Alyosha is. No one knows anything about him.’

  My pulse returned to normal with depressing speed.

  ‘Kind of him to try,’ I said, sighing slightly.

  Kropotkin stroked his moustache downwards with his thumb and forefinger and then set off again into a deep rumble.

  Stephen did a dead-pan translation although with more interest in his eyes.

  ‘Mr Kropotkin says that although no one knows who Alyosha is, someone has sent him a piece of paper with the name Alyosha on it, and the piece of paper originally came from England.’

  It hardly sounded the ultimate solution, but definitely better than nothing.

  ‘May I see it?’ I said.

  It appeared, though, that Nikolai Alexandrovich was not to be rushed. Bread and butter first; sweeties after.

  ‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen translated, ‘that you should understand one or two things about the Soviet system.’ His eyebrows went upwards and his nostrils twitched with the effort of keeping a straight face. ‘He says it is not always possible for Soviet citizens to speak with total freedom.’

  ‘Tell him I’ve noticed. Er… tell him I understand.’

  Kropotkin looked at me broodingly and stroked his moustache.

  ‘He would like it,’ Stephen said, relaying the next wedge of rumble, ‘if you could use everything you have learned here at the Hippodrome without explaining where you heard it.’

  ‘Give him my most solemn assurance,’ I said sincerely, and I think Kropotkin was probably convinced more by my tone than the actual words. After a suitable pause, he continued.

  ‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen faithfully reported, ‘that he doesn’t know who sent him the paper. It was delivered to his flat by hand yesterday evening, with a brief note of explanation, and a hope that it would be handed on to you.’

  ‘Does he sound as if he really doesn’t know who sent it, or do you think he’s just not telling?’

  ‘Impossible to know,’ Stephen said.

  Nikolai Alexandrovich showed signs at last of producing the goods. With great deliberation he drew a large black wallet from an inside pocket and opened it wide. His blunt fingers carefully sank into a deep section at the back, and he slowly drew out a white envelope. He accompanied the hand-over ceremony with a small speech.

  ‘He says,’ Stephen said, ‘that to himself this paper does not seem to be of much significance. He wishes it were. He would like it to be of some use to you, because of his earnest desire to express his thanks for your speed in saving the Olympic horse.’

  ‘Tell him that if it should not turn out to be a significant paper, I will always remember and appreciate the trouble he has taken to help.’

  Kropotkin received the compliment graciously, and slowly parted with the envelope. I took it from him at the same unhurried pace, and drew out the two smallish sheets of paper which were to be found inside.

  They were fastened to each other with a small paper-clip. The top one, white and unremarkable, bore a short paragraph written in Russian.

  The lower, also white but torn from a notebook and ruled with faint blue lines, was chiefly covered with a variety of geometric doodles, done in pencil. Near the top there were two words: For Alyosha, and about an inch lower down, surrounded by doodled stars, J. Farringford. Underneath that, one below the other, as in a list, were the words Americans, Germans, French, and below that a row of question-marks. That seemed to be more or less all, though near the bottom of the page, in their own individual doodled boxes, were four sets of letters and numbers, which were DEP PET, 1855, K’sC, and 1950.

  On top of all the scribbles, across the whole page from top to bottom, there was the wide flowing S-shaped scrawl of someone crossing out what they had written.

  I turned the small page over. The reverse side bore about fifteen lines of what must have been handwriting, written in ballpoint, but this had been meticulously scribbled over, line by line, also in ballpoint but in a slightly different colour.

  Kropotkin was watching me expectantly. I said, ‘I am very pleased. This is most interesting.’ He understood the words, and looked heavily satisfied.

  The business at that point seemed to be over, and after a few more compliments on both sides we stepped from the office into the central corridor of the stable block. Kropotkin invited me to see the horses, and we walked side by side along to where each side of the corridor was lined with loose boxes.

  Stephen made choking noises behind me as we reached them, which I guessed was because of the smell. My own nose twitched a bit over the unusually piercing stink of ammonia, but the trotters seemed none the worse for it. They would be racing that evening, Kropotkin said, because the snow was not yet too deep. Stephen manfully translated to the end, but gulped at the eventual fresh air as if it were a fountain in the desert.

  There were still several horses exercising on the track, and to my eyes they came from lower down the equine class system than racehorses or eventers.

  ‘All the riding clubs are here,’ Kropotkin explained through Stephen. ‘All stables for horses in Moscow are in this district, and all exercising is done at the Hippodrome. All the horses are owned by the State. The best horses go for racing and breeding, and the Olympics; then the clubs share what is left. Most horses stay in Moscow all winter, because they are very hardy. And I wonder,’ added Stephen on his own account, ‘what it smells like in these barns come March!’

  Kropotkin said a solemn goodbye at the still unattended main entrance. He was a great old guy, I thought, and through him and Misha I had learned a good deal.

  ‘Friend,’ I said. ‘I wish you well.’

  He pumped my hand with emotion in both of his, and then gave me the accolade of a hug.

  ‘My God,’ said Stephen as we walked away. ‘Talk about schmaltzy sob-stuff…’

  ‘A little sentiment does no harm.’

  ‘Ah… but did it do any good?’

  I handed him the envelope and coughed all the way to the taxi rank.

  ‘To Nikolai Alexandrovich, by hand,’ said Stephen, reading the envelope. ‘So whoever sent it, knew Kropotkin fairly well. You’d only use that form of someone’s name… the patronymic Alexandrovich without the last name Kropotkin… if you knew him.’

  ‘It would be more surprising if they didn’t know each other.’

  ‘I guess so.’ He picked out the two small clipped-together pages. ‘This paragraph on the front says, “Note paper”… sort of jotting paper, that is…“
used at International Horse Trials. Please give it to Randall Drew”.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s the lot.’

  He peered at the second page, and I waved uninhibitedly at a taxi cruising with its windscreen light on. Once more on our way, Stephen handed back the treasure trove.

  ‘Not much cop,’ he said. ‘A case of the lion straining to produce a gnat.’

  The taxi driver spoke into my thoughtful silence.

  ‘He wants to know where we’re going,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Back to the hotel.’

  We stopped however on the way at a shop he identified as a chemist. The Russian letters on the shop-front, when approximated into English, read Apotek. Apothecary… what else? I went inside with him, seeking dampeners for the troubles in fingers and chest, but ended only with the equivalent of aspirins. For his own purchase, he leaned across a counter and spoke low to the ear of a buxom battleaxe.

  She replied very loudly, and all the nearby customers turned to stare at him. His face was a scarlet study in embarrassment, but all the same he stood his ground and brought the transaction to the desired conclusion.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked, as we left.

  ‘She said “This foreigner wants… preservativy…” And don’t bloody laugh.’

  My chuckle anyway ended in a cough. ‘Preservativy being contraceptives?’

  ‘Gudrun insists.’

  ‘I should darned well think so.’

  At the hotel we went straight through the foyer to the lifts, as I had taken my room key with me to the University so as not to advertise my absence to the reception desk.

  Up to the eighth floor, past the watchful lady at the desk, and along the corridor… and the door of my room was open.

  Cleaners?

  Not cleaners. The person who was standing inside was Frank.

  He had his back to the door and was over by the dressing shelf under the window, head bent, looking down at something in his hands.

  ‘Hello, Frank,’ I said.

  He turned round quickly, looking very startled: and what he was holding was the matroshka. Intact, I saw, with all her secrets still inside. His fingers were still tight with the effort of trying to open her.

  ‘Er…’ he said. ‘You didn’t come to breakfast. I… er… came to see if you were all right. After last night. I mean, falling in the river…’

  Not bad, I thought, as a spot of thinking on the feet.

  ‘I went to the Hippodrome to see the horses work,’ I said, playing the game that anyone could play if they had a lying tongue.

  Frank relaxed his grip and put the painted doll slowly down on the shelf, giving his best weak-schoolteacher laugh.

  ‘Right on, then,’ he said. ‘Natasha was worried about you not coming to breakfast. Shall I tell her you’ll be in for lunch?’

  Lunch… the prosaically normal in the middle of a minefield.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘And I’ll have a guest.’

  Frank looked at Stephen with sustained dislike, and took himself off; and I descended a bit feebly on to the sofa.

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said.

  ‘Scotch or vodka?’ He pulled the morning’s newly-bought bottle out of his overcoat pocket and stood it on the shelf.

  ‘Scotch.’

  I took two of the Apotek’s pills with it, without noticeable results.

  Looked at my watch, now miraculously ticking again despite immersion. Eleven-thirty. Picked up the telephone.

  ‘Ian?’ I said. ‘How’s the hangover?’

  From the sound of it, on the mend. The hair of the dog had bitten an hour ago, no doubt. I said I couldn’t make it after all before lunch, and how about him tottering along to my room at the hotel at about six?

  Totter, he said, might just about describe it, by then: but he would come.

  Stephen was sweeping the walls with the tape-recorder, trying to find the tender spot. I pointed to it, but again there was no whine. And then, just as he was about to give up, the whine suddenly began.

  ‘Switched on, by God,’ he said under his breath.

  ‘Let’s have some music.’

  He pulled the three tapes from his obliging overcoat and slotted in an energetic rendering of Prince Igor.

  ‘What next?’

  ‘I brought some paperbacks… which would you like?’

  ‘And you?’ he said, looking at the titles.

  ‘Drink and think.’

  So the bug listened for an hour to Stephen turning the pages of The Small Back Room against the urgencies of Borodin, and I listened inside my head to everything I’d been told, both in England and Moscow, and tried to see a path through the maze.

  Lunch seemed unreal.

  The Wilkinsons were there, and Frank was there. Frank hadn’t told the Wilkinsons he’d saved my life the evening before, and behaved throughout as if nothing of the sort had ever happened. What he thought of my silence on the subject was a mystery.

  Natasha and Anna tried by a mixture of scolding and persuasion to make me promise to stop disappearing without telling them where I was going and I helpfully said I would do my best, without meaning a word of it.

  Frank ate my meat.

  Mrs Wilkinson talked. ‘We’ve always voted Labour, Dad and me, but isn’t it funny, in England it’s always the far left people who want more and more immigrants, but here, where it’s about as far left as you can get, there aren’t any. You don’t see black people walking around in Moscow, do you?’

  Frank took no notice.

  ‘It just strikes me as funny, that’s all,’ Mrs Wilkinson said. ‘Still, I don’t suppose there’s much of a queue in India for wanting to live in Moscow, come to think.’

  Mr Wilkinson muttered to his small-sized chips, ‘They’ve got more sense.’ He wouldn’t say much else for the rest of the day.

  Frank came to life with a routine damnation of the anti-black policies of the National Front.

  Mrs Wilkinson gave me a comical look of bewilderment and despair at never being able to get through to Frank.

  ‘Front,’ I said mildly, ‘is an overworked word. A cliché. We have Fronts for this and Fronts for that… One should always ask what… if anything… is behind a Front.’

  It was again ice-cream with blackcurrant jam. I quite liked it.

  Stephen ate like Frank and told me afterwards that the Intourist Hotel food was high class luxury compared with the students’ grub.

  Apart from all that, which seemed to be going on in a separate life, I was more positively hearing the voices of Boris and Evgeny, and Ian, and Malcolm, and Oliver, and Kropotkin, and Misha and Yuri Chulitsky, and Gudrun and the Prince and Hughes-Beckett and Johnny Farringford… and the dead voice of Hans Kramer: I could hear them all clearly.

  But where, oh where, was Alyosha?

  15

  Upstairs in my room Stephen balanced the chair on my bed, my suitcase on the chair, and the tape-recorder on the suitcase: and switched on. The whine came forth, alive and healthy.

  He switched off the ‘record’ button and pressed the ‘play’, and the listeners got a close earful of a tape of Stravinsky which seemed to be suffering from wow if not flutter.

  I spent the time pondering the pieces of paper Kropotkin had given me; the back as much as the front.

  ‘You don’t happen to have any blue glass handy, I suppose?’ I said. ‘Of a certain particular shade?’

  ‘Blue glass?’

  ‘Yes… a blue filter. You see all this handwriting which has been scribbled out? It was written in a darker colour of blue than the scribble… you can see the dark loops underneath.’

  ‘Well… so what?’

  ‘So if you looked at the page through some blue glass which was the same colour as the lighter scribble, you might be able to see the darker blue writing. The colour of the glass, so to speak, would cancel out the colour of the scribble, and you could read what was left.’

  ‘For crying out loud…’ he
said. ‘I suppose you could. And where would that get you?’

  ‘I might guess who sent this to Kropotkin, but I’d like to be certain.’

  ‘But it could be anybody.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll show you something.’

  I opened the drawer which contained my private pharmacy and brought out the folded piece of paper which lay beneath it. Opening it, and smoothing out the crease, I laid it on the dressing shelf, and put Kropotkin’s paper beside it.

  ‘They’re the same!’ Stephen said.

  ‘That’s right. Torn from the same type of notebook: white paper, faint blue lines, spiral binding.’

  The two notebook pages lay side by side with their ragged torn-off fringes at the top. On one, ‘For Alyosha’, ‘J. Farringford’, and all the rest. And on the other, the name Malcolm Herrick, and a telephone number.

  ‘He gave that to me the first night I was in Moscow,’ I said. ‘In the bar of the National Hotel.’

  ‘Yes… but… Those notebooks are universal. You can buy them everywhere. Students… typists… Aren’t they especially printed to take shorthand?’

  ‘And constantly used by newspaper reporters,’ I said. ‘Who have a great habit of crossing out pages when they’ve finished with them. I’ve seen them over and over, at the races, talking to me maybe when I’ve won a race. They flick over the pages to find a fresh one… they go all through the pad one way, and then they turn it over and start on the backs. And to save themselves looking through endless pages afterwards to find just the bits they want, they put a scribble or a cross over the whole page when they’ve finished with it… just like this one, which we got from Kropotkin.’

  I turned over the sheet Malcolm had given me with his telephone number on, and there, on the back, were some notes about a visiting puppet theatre, sprawlingly crossed through with a wide flowing S.

  ‘Malcolm,’ said Stephen, looking bewildered. ‘Why should Malcolm send this to Kropotkin?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think he did. Maybe he just gave it to whoever did that writing on the back.’

  ‘But why should he?’ Stephen said frustratedly. ‘And what does it matter? It’s all crazy.’

  ‘It’s unlikely that he’ll remember who he gave an odd piece of paper to nearly three months ago,’ I said. ‘But I think… we might ask him.’