by Len Deighton
When the canvas was open one of the men climbed inside.
‘That’s Ivan,’ said the bald man, ‘he’s a dangerous bastard.’ There was a glow from a flashlight and Ivan’s voice read off the markings on the boxes. The bald man translated his words to me. There was a babble of Russian. ‘Dried milk,’ said the bald man. More Russian: ‘Tea,’ said the man ‘and a sack of fresh lemons.’ More Russian: ‘Excrement,’ said the man, ‘he has found a machine-gun.’ He leaped over the tailboard of the lorry like greased lightning. It didn’t need a Russian scholar to understand that the bald man was claiming that the documents and the guns were for him, only food and drink for the ‘businessmen’. They both jumped down from the lorry, they were still arguing loudly. Ivan was carrying the machine-gun. He began to prod the bald man with the barrel of it. They stood swearing at each other, both aware that everyone was watching. The bald man said, ‘The Americans see what you do.’ He pointed at me. ‘There will be no more money from the Americans.’ Ivan grinned and stroked the gun. The bald man repeated his threat. I wished he would shut up. It seemed like a good argument for eliminating me. The other men were standing well to one side expecting violence and the soldier finished his cigarette and put his hands into his pockets instead of holding them high. The bald man screamed loudly at Ivan. They were both standing very still and the snow built a lace-like pattern over them. For one moment it seemed that the bald man would carry the situation through by sheer force of character. But he didn’t. He aimed a swift blow at the gun. It wasn’t swift enough. A burst of fire cut the bald man in two at point-blank range and propelled him headlong into the ditch like a blow from a sledge-hammer. Ivan fired again, short experimental bursts as if he’d got a new power-drill from the Christmas tree. The magazine ended and there was only a faint click from the trigger mechanism. The smoke drifted on the air and the sound echoed like a football rattle across the silent snow. Only the bald man’s foot was visible over the ditch. Ivan lifted the sling of the gun and slipped it over his head. He wore it like a sommelier’s key, an order of merit or a symbol of kingship. From his pocket he produced a new magazine. He fitted it with care.
No one spoke; they began to unload the cases from the lorry. They made the driver help them, but I stood to one side stamping my feet to keep warm and watching the horizon with keen interest.
Two heavy bombers moved across the sky at about ten thousand feet. Ivan brought me a battered metal box from the driver’s cab. He opened the lid to show me a batch of dirty, dog-eared cards inside. He gave me a flamboyant salute. I smiled. He smiled too, and stabbed me in the gut with the gun-barrel hard enough to make me suck in my breath. He still smiled. His friends called to him, they had finished transferring the boxes from the lorry to the two taxi-vans. I could see no reason for keeping me alive. So I smiled nervously and slammed him in the mouth with the metal box, trying to kick him in the groin as he sagged, but his heavy overcoat protected him well. I held the metal box and chopped at him with the side of my hand, but it struck the sharp metal of the gun and I felt the flesh tear as one round fired. The men scattered and the bullet whined away into the snowflakes. Ivan backed away from me. I kicked at his leg but almost overbalanced. Ivan smiled. There was blood on his mouth but he kept smiling because he had the machine-gun. Boy-wonder karate expert, I thought, and I hoped that my sister would get the hi-fi and the record collection; some of the Goodman discs were valuable.
That was when the soldier hit Ivan with a tyre lever. Ivan toppled towards me, creaking like a rusty hinge. I ran. I didn’t look behind. I blundered through the dark forest bumping into tree trunks and stumbling over roots. The Russian soldier was just ahead of me. From the road came the sounds of men shouting and then a long burst of machine-gun fire. The soldier dropped. I went flat. There was more firing and I could hear chips of wood being torn from the trees. I crawled over to the soldier. His eyes were closed. The gun fired again. It seemed closer. The forest was dark and low upon me, and only the gunfire gave me any sense of direction. I remained still. There was more shouting, and about twenty yards to my left a man ran noisily. More shooting, then there was no movement. I guessed it was the bald man’s son. I had cut my hand on the gun: it wasn’t bleeding much but the little finger was bent sideways and I couldn’t move it. I wrapped a clean handkerchief round it. It was black under the trees and a white mist of dislodged snow hung close to the ground. It was quiet. I prodded the inert soldier, but he seemed pretty dead so I got to my feet and moved slowly and quietly away from the noise and excitement.
I walked almost to the edge of the forest, then I heard the voice. Something was moving through the trees. Something larger than a man. Something much larger than a man. I stared into the gloom. The noise of breaking twigs stopped but the breathing continued. It wasn’t human breathing. I hugged a tree-trunk, and became as thin as a Blue Gillette. The large breathing thing out there began to speak. The voice was metallic and resonant. It spoke Russian. It came nearer, still speaking and almost invisible: a white-cloaked cavalry officer on a horse.
‘Approach carefully,’ said a metallic voice, ‘they have guns.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the rider. He was speaking into a two-way radio-phone.
Through the trees I could see the valley. A large cavalry patrol moved across it stage by stage like bedbugs across a clean sheet. I put the metal box containing the army ration-strengths down on the ground.
The horseman was watching me, he switched off the radio and nudged his horse closer. The leather creaked but the hooves were silent in the snow. Built into the saddle was a small Doppler radar set. Above his head the aerial sang gently in the cold wind and the screen shone blue in the rider’s face. It was not a pleasant face. He moved his heels slightly and the horse edged towards me like a police horse controlling a crowd. I pushed against its hard muscles, the nerves twitched under the smooth coat. The icy metal of the stirrup stuck to my fingers and the sour breath of the horse was hot upon my face. The rider swung his map-case away from his thigh and opened his revolver holster. I knew a few useful words of Russian.
‘Don’t shoot,’ I called. The horse, reluctant to hurt me, fidgeted and kicked up clods of snow, but the rider urged him nearer until the pistol was inches from my face. He raised the gun and without hurry brought it down upon my skull. The horse shied a little and the butt cleaved into the side of my head, almost taking my ear off. My vision went red and I groped towards the stirrup and stuck to the icy metal. Frost-bite, I thought, then the gun butt came down more accurately and everything split into two like a badly adjusted range-finder, and I slid into the black snow.
Chapter 14
I moved very slowly out of unconsciousness—not into consciousness, but into delirium. My hand was as large as a football and throbbed with a pain that extended to the shoulder blade. All was dark except for a tiny glimmer of red light. Was it a tiny light close to a gigantic light far away? I tried to move, but the pain from my hand was overwhelming. I lapsed into unconsciousness. Many times I moved from one state to the other until I mustered the strength to cling to the twilight zone without slipping back into darkness.
Upon me rested heavy cold weights and under me was a smooth, curved surface like the bottom of a gargantuan test-tube. I ran my good hand across the surface. The weights moved, tumbling over me like a cold sack of potatoes, and I eased my head round them in order to breathe. Near to my face a human hand was moving. The hand was attached to an arm and the arm belonged to one of the weights. The hand moved slowly nearer to the edge of a blanket that was over us. It moved slowly and almost imperceptibly, its finger and thumb poised greedily, ready to grip the frayed edge. It was a bath I was in. The hand continued to move. A large stained bath-tub. The hand moved faster, passed the blanket-edge and stopped, bobbing gently in space like a mascot hanging from a carmirror. It was a dead hand, waving a tiny, posthumous good-bye. Two dead bodies were heaped upon me. I wondered if this was the pipeline to hell. I moved slowly letting the tw
o dead men slide under me. One was the bald-headed man and the other was his son.
I climbed over the dead bodies and looked around the washroom; my eyes had grown used to the dim red emergency lights by now. Cisterns were belching and gurgling near by and a tap on the wall dripped into a bucket with a deep musical note. There were three washbasins fixed to the far wall; over the centre one was a pocket mirror one corner of which had broken and swung away on the screw to live a life of its own. There was a sudden noise of a toilet flushing. The door of a WC opened and a soldier emerged, buckling his belt. He stared and came slowly towards me. He had trouble fixing his belt-buckle but his eyes did not leave mine. As he neared me his steps became more deliberate until he was in slow motion. I was stretched full-length upon the bodies, my battered hand resting on the rim of the tub. The soldier looked at my swollen hand and then back at my face. His skin was dark and his eyes bright and moist. An Armenian perhaps. He held his trouser-front with one hand and with the other he reached forward to prod me.
Had he prodded any other part of my anatomy I would not have yelled. My hand was lacerated, deformed, and bulbous with pus. I screamed. The soldier leaped away, crossing himself and gibbering; some ancient prayer, perhaps, or a magic sign. His back thudded against the wall and he scraped along it towards the door, still giddy with fear. As he got to the door he snatched his eyes away and blundered through the doorway. His unbuckled trousers slid and tripped him headlong into the corridor outside. I heard him scramble to his feet and his metal-tipped boots took him down the stone corridor at better than the track record.
Very slowly I took my weight on the good hand and slid my feet over the rim of the tub. I had aches in muscles I never knew I owned. From a standing position the bathroom was even colder and smellier than it had looked before. I went across to the dripping tap and held my swollen hand under the cold running water. I splashed more over my face. It looks therapeutic in movies but it made me feel worse than ever. My hand hurt just as much and now I was shivering with cold. I tried to turn the tap off but it still dripped. I staggered across to the washbasins. I looked in the mirror. I don’t know what I expected to see, but as always when you have a tooth out or get kicked half to death the change in appearance is nowhere like commensurate with the pain. I touched my swollen lips and my ears and had a roll-call of my limbs, but apart from my hand, an incipient black eye and a few abrasions there wasn’t much evidence of my encounter with Russian free enterprise and Soviet cavalry.
I was ill. I was in pain. I was frightened. Upon all there was the overwhelming pall of failure. I stared at myself and wondered what I was doing there. I didn’t identify with the tired, frightened failure that stared back at me from the mirror. I wondered if Harvey had arranged the whole thing, betrayed me to Stok. Perhaps Signe had told him that we had made love. That was the sort of thing she would delight in saying, but would Harvey believe her? Yes he would. Or perhaps London had betrayed me. It had been done before, it would be done again. Who was responsible? I wanted to know. If this was how it was going to end I wanted to know. The responsibility for failure rests upon the one who fails. I failed. I shivered and reached for the hot taps but changed my mind. The basin was spattered with bright, fresh blood. A dirty hand-towel had blood on it. Splashes of it had hit the wall behind the basin and there were three oval blots of it on the floor. It was bright and shiny, very fresh and not at all like tomato ketchup.
I tried to be sick in the toilet, but even that I failed to do. I sat down. I shivered. Psycho-shock, I told myself, a way to soften you up for interrogation. Psycho-shock, having you regain consciousness piled under corpses, don’t succumb; but I continued to shiver. In the corridor there were orders given and monosyllabic assents. Colonel Stok swung the door open with a crash. He was shirtless, a great hairy muscular figure with bad scarring on his upper arms. He was dabbing at his face with a large wad of cotton wool. ‘I always do it,’ he said. ‘I cut myself when I am shaving. Sometimes I think I will go back to using my father’s razor.’ Stok leaned towards the mirror and bared his teeth at his reflection. ‘I still have some of my own teeth,’ he said. He prodded his teeth. ‘I have a good man—a good dentist—these state dentists are no good. It’s better to have a private dentist.’ Blobs of blood had reappeared on his chin. ‘They take an interest in you, private dentists.’
Stok seemed to be speaking only to his own scrubby reflection in the pockmarked mirror, so I said nothing. He tore small pieces of cotton wool off the wad and stuck them to his face with blood, while singing ‘The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows’ in a scratchy basso. When he was satisfied with the blood-staunching, Stok turned round to me.
‘So you did not heed my advice.’
I said nothing, and Stok walked across and looked down upon me.
‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie, O what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa’ sae hasty, Wi’ bickering brattle.’
Stok quoted it with an excellent Highland accent, ‘Robert Burns,’ pronounced Stok, ‘“To a Mouse”.’
I still didn’t say anything, but I had my eyes open and I looked at Stok calmly.
‘Are you not going to speak?’ said Stok mockingly. I said,
‘Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race.
Robert Burns, “To a Haggis”.’
Stok joined in the last three words as I said them, and then he laughed so loud that I thought he would shake some of the cracked tiles off the wall. ‘“To a Haggis”,’ he said again, the tears of delight welled in his eyes. He was still laughing and saying ‘To a Haggis’ when the guard came to take me downstairs and lock me up.
Stok’s temporary office was at the end of a long corridor lined with dusty panes of glass that almost permitted you to see beyond them into the honeycomb of bureaucracy. One door had ‘Health Bureau’ stuck on to its glass panel in raised letters. Parts of some letters had been chipped away, but a careful paint job had cured them. Inside the office there were midget desks and a huge plans chest and a poster about putting fires out and another that showed two wooden-faced men and artificial respiration. Beyond this opened a small glass-sided cubicle from which a senior clerk could watch for frivolity among the underlings. Stok was sitting there speaking to a telephone that looked like a prop from The Young Mister Edison.
My clothes had been dried and rough-ironed. They had that smell of coarse soap that is as endemic to Russia as the smell of Gauloises and garlic to Paris. I sat in a small easy chair, the stiff clothes seeking out the bruises and abrasions of the night, my hand throbbing with pain.
Stok replaced his phone. His uniform was clean and pressed and his buttons were shiny. Behind him through the thin curtains the sky was beginning to grow dark. I must have been unconscious a long time. The guards saluted. Stok pulled a small chair close, and rested his big shiny jackbooted feet upon it, then he lit a cigar and threw a cigar and matches to me. The two guards watched this with surprise.
Stok said ‘Spasibo,’ to the guards, and they said ‘Tovarich Polkovnik Stok’ to him and withdrew.
‘Smoke it,’ said Stok. ‘Don’t smell it.’
‘If it’s just the same to you,’ I said, ‘I’ll do both.’
‘Cuban. Excellent,’ said Stok.
Then we spent five minutes blowing cigar smoke at each other, until Stok said, ‘Lenin didn’t smoke, hated flowers, never had a soft chair in his office, had only the simplest food, liked reading Turgenev and always had his watch fifteen minutes slow. I am not like that. I like all things that grow from the soil. The first thing I demand when I move into a new office is one soft chair for myself and another for my visitors. I like rich bourgeois food on the rare occasions that I have it. I don’t much like Turgenev—I think the death of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons is unconvincing and unfair to the reader—and I always have my watch fifteen minutes fast. As for smoking, there are nights when it’s been friend, fire and food to me. Many such nights.’
I smoked and nodded and watched him. The small pimples of cotton wool were still stuck to his bright new chin but his eyes were dark and old and tired.
‘Exciting friends you have,’ said Stok. ‘Gay, temperamental and devoted to private enterprise.’ He smiled.
I shrugged.
Suddenly Stok said, ‘They tried to kill you. Fifteen of them. We arrested ten, including two that died. Why did they try to kill you? Have you been meddling with someone’s girlfriend?’
‘I thought you had spent all night asking them.’
‘I have. I know why they tried to kill you. I just wondered if you did.’
‘I’ll always welcome a second opinion.’
‘Your old friend Newbegin wants you dead and out of the way.’
‘Why?’
‘You were sent to spy on Newbegin and he doesn’t like it.’
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘No interrogation I conduct ends until I get a story that I believe.’ Stok opened a brown dossier and looked at it in silence, then closed it again. ‘Trash,’ said Stok. ‘The people I arrested last night are trash.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means they are anti-social elements. Delinquents. They are not even people with political errors. Trash.’
There was a tap at the door and a young officer came in. He addressed Stok by his rank alone—usually a sign of friendship in the Soviet Army—put another limp file of papers upon the desk, and then whispered into Stok’s ear. Stok’s expression was unchanging, but I had an idea he was working hard to keep it so. Finally Stok nodded and the Guards major stood to one side of the desk.