by Dick Francis
‘He’s hardly breathing,’ Stephen said. ‘And he’s unconscious.’
I snapped the neck of one of the ampoules of naloxone. Stood it with shaking hands upright on the shelf. Mustn’t… mustn’t knock it over. Needed two good hands, two hands working properly and not shaking.
I picked up the syringe in my right hand and the ampoule in my left. I was right-handed… I couldn’t do it at all the other way round, though I would have done, if I could. Lowered the needle into the precious teaspoonful of liquid. Hauled up the plunger of the syringe, sucking it in. My fingers hurt. So what, so what. Ninety seconds… all but gone.
I turned to Malcolm. Stephen had pulled the trousers down to expose a bit of rump. I shoved the needle into the muscle, and pressed the plunger: and God, I thought, could do the rest.
We lifted him on to the bed, which was no mean task, taking off his jacket and tie and ripping open the front of his shirt. His colour and breathing were still dreadful, but no worse. He was conscious again, and terrified, and he said, ‘Bastards,’ between his teeth.
Along by the bathroom Ian began groaning. Stephen went over to him, and found him rapidly regaining consciousness and trying to rise to his feet. He helped him up and supported him, and got him as far as the sofa.
The little glass jar lay near the sofa on the carpet, and Stephen almost automatically bent down to pick it up.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I said, my voice going high with alarm. ‘Don’t touch it, Stephen. It’ll kill you.’
‘But it’s empty.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘And I think a few drops would be enough.’ I picked up the fallen chair and planted it over the jar. ‘That’ll have to do for now… Don’t let Ian touch it.’
I turned back to Malcolm. His breathing seemed to be slightly stronger, but not by much.
‘How do we get a doctor?’ I said.
Stephen gave me a despairing look which I interpreted as dismay at getting ourselves enmeshed in any form of Soviet officialdom, but he picked up the telephone and dialled through to the reception desk.
‘Tell them the doctor should bring naloxone.’
He repeated the request twice and spelled it out once, but looked troubled as he replaced the receiver. ‘She said she would call a doctor, but about the naloxone… she said the doctor would know what to bring. Unhelpful. Obstructive. The more you insist, the more they just stick their toes in.’
‘Randall…’
Malcolm’s lusty voice came out as a weak croak.
‘Yes?’ I bent over him, to hear better.
‘Get… the… bastards.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Why did they throw the stuff at you, and not at me?’
He seemed to hear and understand, but he didn’t answer. Sweat stood out suddenly in great beads all over his face, and he began gasping again for air.
I filled the syringe from the second ampoule of naloxone, and pushed the needle into his haunch. The reaction came again, sluggish but definite, taking the laboured edge off the breathing but leaving him in a dangerous state of exhaustion.
‘The bastards… said… I… robbed them.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I sold them… the stuff. They said… it wasn’t worth… the money.’
‘How much did they pay you?’ I said.
‘Fifty… thousand…’
‘Pounds?’
‘Christ… sport… of course. They said… this afternoon… I’d robbed… them. I told them… to come here… finish you… too clever… by half. Didn’t know Ian… would… be here.’
I reflected that when he had found Ian and Stephen with me he had attempted to leave and intercept his friends before they reached my room. No one could tell whether the outcome would have been much different if he’d succeeded. The friends were about as predictable as forked lightning.
I took a toothmug to the bathroom, half filled it with water, and brought it back to hold to Malcolm’s mouth. It did little more than wet his lips, but that seemed to be all he wanted.
Looked at my watch. It was two minutes since I’d given him the second injection: four since the first. It seemed a lifetime.
Ian was recovering fast and beginning to ask questions. It was extraordinary, I thought, that no one at all had heard the fracas and come running. No one had heard… or reacted… to Malcolm’s scream, and I would have thought they would have heard Malcolm’s scream in the Kremlin. When the bugs were switched off, the walls were deaf.
Malcolm went into another sudden and devastating collapse. I grimly filled the syringe from the last ampoule and injected the teaspoonful into his muscles.
There was no more naloxone: no safety margin for any of us.
16
The upswing came again. He breathed a little more positively and regained consciousness, although his skin was still greyish blue and his pupils remained pinpoints.
‘I feel… dizzy,’ he said.
I gave him a few sips of water and said casually, ‘Was it you or your friends who poured the stuff on Hans Kramer?’
‘Christ, sport… not me. I’m no killer…’
‘What about the horse box?’
‘Only meant… to hurt you… frighten… send you home.’ He took another sip. ‘Reckoned you wouldn’t stay…’
‘But your friends weren’t fooling,’ I said. ‘Not in Gorky Street, and not by the river.’
‘They said… not safe… with Kropotkin helping… you might… find out… things.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘And that was after you told them that I knew what Hans Kramer had said when he was dying?’
‘Bloody boy… Misha…’
‘Was this deadly liquid your idea, or Hans Kramer’s?’ I said.
‘I learned of it… by chance. Got Hans… to steal it.’ He achieved a faint sneer. ‘Stupid bastard… conned him… he did it for nothing… for his ideals…’
‘He went to the Heidelberg Clinic,’ I said.
‘Christ…’ Even in his cooperative state, he was unpleasantly surprised. ‘In the telex… didn’t think you’d spot that, but it was… risky. They wanted to prevent… you from seeing it.’
‘So why did they kill Hans? Why Hans, who had helped you?’
He was tiring visibly. His voice was faint, and his breathing was still slow and shallow.
‘Cover… all… tracks…’
Ian stood up restlessly and came over to the bed. It was the first close view he’d had of Malcolm since the attack, and the shock penetrated the inscrutability of his face.
‘Look, Randall,’ he said, horrified, ‘leave all these questions until he’s better. Whatever he’s done, it will keep.’
He had no idea, I thought, of the sort of thing we were dealing with, and it was hardly the moment to tell him.
I gave Malcolm some more water, and because of Ian’s intervention he began to reflect and regret that he had so willingly answered. Reactivated hostility sharpened visibly in his pin-point eyes, and when I took the glass from his lips his whole face settled into the old stubborn mould.
‘What are their names?’ I said. ‘And their nationality?’
‘Sod off…’
‘Randall!’ Ian protested. ‘Not yet.’
‘One of them is Alyosha,’ Stephen said, steering a careful path round the chair, and crossing to join us. ‘Didn’t you hear? Malcolm called one of them Alyosha.’
There was almost a laugh from the bed. A large sardonic sneer twisted his mouth. His voice, although almost a whisper, came out loaded with spite.
‘Alyosha, sport,’ he said. ‘Will kill you yet.’
Stephen looked at him incredulously. ‘But your friends tried to kill you… It’s Randall who saved you.’
‘Balls.’
‘He’s confused,’ I said. ‘Just leave it.’
‘Christ…’ Malcolm said. ‘I feel sick.’
Stephen looked rapidly around for a suitable receptacle, but there wasn’t one, and it wasn’t needed.
‘Do something,’ Ian said urgently.
‘We can try artificial respiration,’ I said. ‘But not mouth to mouth.’
‘Why not?’
‘That stuff was thrown at his face… You can’t trust it.’
‘Do you mean he’s dying?’ Stephen said. ‘After all?’
Ian energetically began pulling Malcolm’s arms up and backwards in the old method of artificial respiration, refusing to let him go without having done everything possible.
Malcolm’s neck and hands and bare chest turned from bluish grey to dark indigo. Only his face stayed pale.
Ian persevered, hauling the rib cage up and down, trying to get air into the lungs mechanically. Stephen and I watched in silence for what seemed a very long time.
I didn’t try to stop him. Stopping had to be his own decision. And I suppose some quality in Malcolm’s total lack of response finally convinced him, because he reluctantly laid the arms down to rest, and turned to us a blank and Sphinx-like face.
‘He’s dead,’ he said flatly.
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause while no one could quite bring themselves to say what was in all of our minds, but Ian at length put it into words.
‘The doctor’s on his way. What do we tell him?’
‘Heart attack?’ I suggested.
The others nodded.
‘Let’s tidy up, then,’ I said, looking round at the aftermath of battle. ‘What we desperately need is some rubber gloves.’
The small glass jar still lay on its side under the guarding chair. I reckoned it would have to be shovelled somehow into a toothmug, and was looking around for a suitable long spoon for supping with the devil when Stephen brought out his packet from the chemist.
‘What about these?’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to be impermeable.’
On any other occasion we’d have laughed too much to make it possible. Instead, I quite seriously dressed the thumb and fingers of my left hand in preservativy, keeping them in place with an elastic band round my knuckles.
Stephen had protested that as they were his preservativy, it should be he who used them, especially as I was proposing a left-handed operation. Shut up, I said, and let’s get on. It was my job, I thought. It was where the buck stopped. A matter of the beginning and the end of responsibility.
He removed the chair. I knelt on the floor, and, summoning up an act of faith in the baggy and improvised rubber glove, picked up the little jar and stood it upright in the tooth glass.
My mouth, to be honest, was dry.
The jar had looked more or less empty when it lay on its side, but this had been deceptive. There was now clearly about a dessertspoonful of pale golden liquid lying in the bottom. Pale gold… a pretty shade of death.
‘The cap of the jar must be somewhere,’ I said. ‘But don’t touch it.’
Ian found it under the sofa. He shifted the end of the sofa, and I picked up the small screw-top and put it in the glass alongside the jar.
‘What will you do with it?’ Stephen said, looking at the remnants with understandable awe.
‘Dilute it.’
I took the toothmug into the bathroom and stood it in the centre of the bath. Then I put in the plug, and turned on the taps. The water poured in in a tumbling cascade and the level quite soon rose to cover the glass. The little jar floated out like a bathtime toy, still holding its fearsome cargo. I pushed it, with my covered fingertips, into the depths.
Turned off the taps. Stirred the jar around in the water briskly with the handle of my toothbrush, and then pulled out the plug to let the water run away. When it had gone, the washed jar, the cap, and the toothglass lay in harmless wet heaps on the clear white enamel. I picked them out of the bath and put them into the wash basin, and immersed them once again, to make doubly certain.
Then I stripped off the preservativy and flushed them appropriately down the loo: and took a great deep breath of relief.
In the room Stephen and Ian had straightened and restored everything to order. The syringe and the empty ampoules were out of sight. The matroshka stood with her two halves joined. The broken bottle and its scattered fragments had vanished. The chair stood quietly by the dressing shelf. The tape recorder stood upon it harmlessly. My suitcase was back in the wardrobe. All tidy. All calm. All innocent.
And Malcolm… Malcolm lay in his permanent silence with his trousers up and fastened, and his shirt buttoned to near the top. His jacket and tie lay on the sofa, but folded neatly, not in the heap into which we’d thrown them. Malcolm dead looked a deal more peaceful than Malcolm dying.
The Russian doctor came with an expressionless face and unemotionally began to roll out the red tape. Stephen and Ian gathered that he took a poor view of foreigners who keeled over on Saturday evenings when all services were at a low ebb.
We drifted around as we were told, waiting mostly in the chairs by the lifts and not speaking much. The stumpy lady at the desk came and went several times, and Stephen asked her if she found her work boring.
She said stolidly that nothing much ever happened, but her job was her job. Stephen translated question and answer, and we nodded sympathetically and guessed she’d been away from her desk when Malcolm’s friends called.
The doctor was unsuspicious. In England, Hans Kramer’s death had been adjudged a heart attack even after an autopsy, and with luck it would happen again. The doctor had not mentioned having been asked to bring naloxone, and it appeared that the reception desk had not, in fact, passed on Stephen’s request: fortunately, as it turned out.
Ian developed a thundering headache from the effects of vodka and concussion and sat moaning gently with his eyes shut.
Stephen bit a couple of fingernails.
I coughed.
There were a good many unsmiling faces coming and going, some of which finally said we could return to my room, for Stephen and Ian to retrieve their hats and coats, and me to pack to remove to another room in the hotel.
Ian groaned off home at that point, but Stephen helped to carry my belongings up in the lift to the fifteenth floor. The new room was identical in lay-out; slightly different in colour: and there was no stiff shape lying under a white sheet on the bed.
Stephen cast his gaze round the walls and put two fingers to his mouth. I nodded. It didn’t seem worthwhile fiddling about with the tape-recorder. We made one or two suitable and shocked remarks about heart attacks, just in case, and left it at that.
I had found that in his fast tidying he had rolled all the broken glass and ampoules and the syringe in my dressing-gown and stowed it in the suitcase. We had judged it sensible, in discussion while walking along the corridor, to get rid of them altogether, so we put them all in the outermost shell of the new matroshka, leaving a smaller little mother beaming upon the shelf. We put the rubbish-filled doll into the string bag, and picked up the tape-recorder, and very quietly let ourselves out of the room.
The lady at the fifteenth floor desk gave us an uninterested stare. We smiled at her as we waited for the lifts, but smiling back wasn’t her habit.
Made it to the ground floor. No trouble. Strolled unhurriedly around the longer route to the door, unaccosted. Walked outside under the watching eyes, which did nothing more than watch.
Climbed into a taxi. Travelled trustfully, and arrived safely at the University.
There was nowhere private to suffer from reaction. Stephen and I were both shaking after we’d taken off our hats and coats in his room, and we felt a great compulsive need to talk. I had seldom found anything so difficult as making asinine conversation with a mind stuffed with the evening’s horrors, but the recorder had proved definitely again that we were not alone. The unreleased tension made us both uncomfortable to the point of not being able to meet each other’s eyes. In the end he said a shade violently that he would brew tea and empty the m
atroshka into the students’ communal rubbish bin: and I went into the passage and made a long telephone call to Yuri Chulitsky.
17
Yuri picked me up in the wan December light of nine o’clock on a Sunday morning from outside the National Hotel.
There had been a fresh fall of snow during the night, and the roads had not yet been cleared, so that everything lay like Malcolm under a white shroud, and my spirits were as low as the air temperature.
The bright yellow car zoomed up like a golden cube, and I slid into the passenger seat beside him, coughing violently.
‘You have illness?’ he said, letting in the clutch as if cogs were made of titanium.
Death warmed up, I thought: but it wasn’t the best of similes.
‘You say,’ Yuri said, ‘you want very important comrade.’ The familiar accent rose above the engine noise. The bags under his eyes looked heavier and there was a slumped quality in his body. The upper lip rose convulsively two or three times, giving me the gleams of teeth. He lit a cigarette, one-handed, expertly, dragging the smoke urgently into his lungs. There was a fine dampness on his forehead.
He had come dressed, as I had, in his neatest and most formal suit, with clean shirt, and tie. He was nervous, I thought: which made two of us.
‘I get Major-General,’ he said. ‘Is very high comrade.’
I was impressed. I had asked him for a comrade of sufficient rank to be able to make decisions: although from what I’d known before and seen since I’d arrived, it had seemed that there was no one at all of that stature. The Soviet method seemed to be ‘action only after consultation’, or ‘until the committee’s met, just keep saying Niet’. No official would make a decision on his own, for fear of it being wrong.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Architects’ Circle.’
So even the Major-General wasn’t sure enough to meet me upon official ground.
‘He say,’ Yuri said, ‘you call him Major-General. He not say his name.’
‘Very well.’
We drove a little without speaking. I coughed a bit and thought of the night gone past, much of which I had spent writing. It had been a laborious process physically, as I couldn’t hold the pen properly. In the heat of battle I’d picked up a chair and gripped it hard to cut and thrust; but the anaesthesia of hot blood was definitely missing in the cold hours after midnight. In the morning, when he had returned from Gudrun. I had given Stephen the explanatory sheets to read, while I put the telex, the formula, and the two pages of Malcolm’s notebook into a large envelope.