COLD BLOOD
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION IS BREAKING OUT ALL AROUND HIM, but Charlie Doig has a private war to fight. Even if he dies in the attempt, he’s going to track down and kill Prokhor Glebov, the Bolshevik who murdered Doig’s beautiful wife, Elizaveta. Certain that Glebov will sooner or later turn up at Lenin’s side, Doig makes his way to St. Petersburg. There, amidst the chaos of the Revolution, Charlie discovers that Glebov has been put in charge of the political re-education of the Tsar and his family in Ekaterinburg. The chase begins.
Having captured an armored train, Charlie and the ragtag private army he has recruited fight their way toward Siberia. Near Kazan, he hears rumors that the Tsar’s gold reserves are in the city and that Glebov is also after them. He determines that he’ll avenge Elizaveta and grab the gold in one swoop.
James Fleming is one of modern fiction’s great stylists. His prose is marvelously robust and vivid, his plot breathtaking in its pace and excitement, and his protagonist, as the Independent said of the previous Doig novel, White Blood, is “the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous.”
Praise for James Fleming’s White Blood
“An extraordinary novel. . . . Readers will surely welcome its author to the ranks of our greatest living story-tellers.”
—The Literary Review
“Crackling, flamboyant . . . [White Blood] is funny, sad and magical.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fleming captures the contradictions of the period and the rich flavours of elegance and terror compellingly. This is a tense, thrilling and at times darkly comic novel with a complex central character who, in the best passages, bursts off the page.”
—Time Out London
“A pulse-pounding read . . . The action sequences virtually sing with energy, and the novel’s blistering pace never lets up for a moment.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A historical novel with the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous.”
—The Independent (London)
“A meticulously researched act of reconstruction. . . . The narrative, the dialogue and the intensity of Doig’s emotions drive the story to a savage climax that reads like a modern thriller . . . The best sort of historical novel.”
—The Spectator (London)
“Beautifully written with baroque energy and style.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
ALSO BY JAMES FLEMING
The Temple of Optimism
Thomas Gage
White Blood
COLD BLOOD
James Fleming
A Novel
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Originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Jonathan Cape,
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COLD BLOOD
One
HAVING BEEN hailed as a genius at the age of twenty-three, I got too cocky. Everything had yielded to me. Fame had become my companion—lived in my pocket.
I was a naturalist. Old man Goetz was my mentor. Just the two of us—a team, like father and son. Museums competed for our services. Goetz & Doig: our names rolled off the tongue as if we’d been a shipping line. No one was better than us at discovering birds and insects that were new to science. In the name of progress we battled through jungles, waded torrents, scaled peaks, tramped through all the outer territories of civilisation.
The day everything changed for me we were in western Burma for the Field Museum. Our head porter had been murdered. We were obliged to remain in Chaungwa, a small trading town on the River Chindwin, while the matter was investigated.
I went to the post office to get a letter off to my mother, who was on an extended visit to her family in Russia. The humidity was oppressive to my northern blood. Listlessly I approached the clerk, wondering what rigmarole was in store as the passage of a letter from Chaungwa to Smolensk was considered.
It was here that Luck singled me out.
She was up there in the rafters, couldn’t have been anywhere else. A stout lady with dimpled knees, spying on the throng. To get herself into the proper mood, she closed her eyes, sang her witching song and on opening them found it was I, Charlie Doig, she was staring at. Six foot two, strong across the shoulders and through the loins. Stubborn blue eyes, lumpy nose, awkward hands. Cropped hair. Travel-stained legs—scars, sores, etc. High curling instep and bouncing stride. Chest forty-two inches.
She couldn’t have missed me. Goetz was out and about somewhere. There was only me and the brown fellows.
She took pity on me. She knew all about Goetz’s temper, about malaria and the beige curse, that I’d had a hard time of it on the expedition. She weighed it on her scales—and smiled upon me: touched my shoulder with her wand. Then she instructed a certain jewel beetle to burrow out of the teakwood pillar on the far side of the post office, the pillar where it had been laid as an egg four years ago. Yes, four years growing and nibbling its way through the wood and into the world of man— into my world and my killing bottle.
It was the first of its sort ever to be captured by humankind. Noah had missed it and Abraham and all the merry crowd until the day that I sauntered into the Chaungwa GPO.
The glory was mine alone. Goetz never had a look-in. When the museum naming committee sat, that beetle went down in the annals of science as Chrysochroa doigii Brendell 1912.
Many times I studied the letter of award. Was I to be immortal? It could mean nothing less.
In return for a decent sum, this fantastically coloured beetle got to be the property of the Field Museum. They were looking for a show-stopper. Wiz, as they called him, fitting the bill, they dolled up my story and fed it to the newspapers. That Goetz and I had only been in Chaungwa because Hpung had been murdered there (throat cut) was the icing on the cake.
“A good killing sells,” wrote Amy Carson, the museum publicist. “So mind you send us a photograph that makes you look as if you belong to the tale.”
The studio fixed me up with a patch of jungle and had me pose unshaven in my Empire shorts. The cameraman caught me crouching, my front knee sprung—the quarry was just ahead, I was holding my breath. At the last mo
ment he made me grasp a stage rifle. In the proof I sent Amy, I appeared vigilant, murderous and decisive.
The Field mounted Wiz in a spectacular fashion, striding up a tilted piece of grey bark, looking back over its shoulder, its huge eyes liquid with nostalgia for the privacy I’d stripped from it forever. Over two thousand people showed up the day the exhibition opened.
Modesty would have served me well at that point. But I was young and bold with conceit. Had not the beetle been named after me?
Once I’d started on this line of thought, nothing could hold me back. I’d out-Darwin Darwin, go for the record—get fifty-eight doigii to my name and so beat the hero by one. I’d find a hidden-away island. All the firsts I needed would be there. I didn’t know how this would happen, but having no concept of failure, I didn’t worry. Somehow or other I’d get to fifty-eight species bearing the name of Charlie Doig. Medals would be struck for me. Mount Doig would make its appearance on maps. Or a glacier. Or a new island. Thank you, I’d say in my acceptance speech, thank you, messieurs, I always had these good feelings about myself. Success was inevitable.
But the world was not ready to submit to me. I should have taken the hint when it was offered, when Amy rejected the proof I’d sent her.
“I know what I said, but the fact is that it’s a beetle, not a tiger,” she wrote and had me do something tamer, with a butterfly net.
She was right, and in another sense too. I should have been content to be a name on a museum label, should have allowed the idea of smallness to find a home with me. All my troubles have stemmed from that, my troubles, my joys, my loves.
Two
ON THE strength of Wiz, I was appointed in the summer of 1914 to document the passerines—birds that perch— of Russian Central Asia. Skins of every species that bred there were to be obtained. The expedition was mine, Goetz being over fifty by then and crabbier than ever.
Disaster struck immediately. Thereafter they followed each other like sheep.
First: the European war broke out, causing old Hartwig Fartwig Goetz to remember the Germanness of his soul. He deserted me: presented me with all his collecting equipment, stepped onto a train in Bokhara and went to a patriot’s death.
Next: the Academy of Sciences stopped sending me money. The Tsar had none to spare because of the cost of the war.
Shortly after this, I broke my leg.
These sufferings were not sufficient. As soon as I was better I abandoned the passerines and set out across Russia to the Pink House, Popovka, province of Smolensk, the home of my mother’s family, the Rykovs. For company I had a young Mongolian who’d attached himself to me as a bodyguard. His name was Kobi.
The train I was on contained only recruits and their lice. I caught typhus, or “tif” as it’s known with us. An inch of my life was all that remained by the time Kobi got me to the Pink House. An inch, as close as that: a few dozen breaths away from the mortician’s trolley, which in my case would have been a shove out of a military wagon with a heavy boot.
But I pulled through, my will to live being stronger than the tif.
When I awakened in the Pink House, the hot summer sun was streaming through the open windows, I could smell the greenish scent of the Fantin-Latour that had been growing against the wall when I was a boy and was still growing there, and my cousin Elizaveta was writing a letter at a desk by the window. A bee came off the rose and loitered noisily half in and half out of the room.
She spoke to it: “Kind and gentle bee, keep your distance, for here we have tif.”
I called out. She came to my bedside. Her dark, finely boned face bent over me. I said weakly, “What have you done with your hair, then, Lizochka?”
Smiling at me, who was her patient, from the bottom of her black eyes: “Four days a week I nurse our wounded soldiers in the hospital. None of us are allowed to keep our hair because of the lice. So we are alike, you and I, Charlinka.”
And I, who had until then treated women as a hobby, fell instantly in love. There was nothing of the dewy-eyed, walks-in-the-wood romance about it. The love I had for Elizaveta Rykov was gross. It concerned one thing only: complete possession of her, inside and out, until the day I died.
However, she was already affianced. The man was one of our most dashing young officers, a real idol. He had all a soldier’s advantages: medals, fame, rank and, not least, the wardrobe of a colonel in the Garde à Cheval, which included trousers tight enough to make a maiden gasp.
Still, I went for her. Stuck my chin out and tightened my arse.
And I won her, led her from the altar as mine. She declared that her heart had belonged to me all along.
For seven days this woman was my bride—was Mrs Doig. Black hair, black eyes, brainy, angular, a small refined bosom— of greater beauty than is comfortable for most men. There can’t have been a woman like her in the entire province of Smolensk, probably not in Russia itself. I’ll bet you could have searched the ballrooms and apple orchards from Vladivostok to the Baltic and not found her equal. She had to be in the top twelve of Europe itself for beauty, intelligence and domesticity.
That I, who am imperfect, should have been found acceptable by such a woman filled me to bursting with pride. She was the sun, the moon and the milk of the stars, she was the purest treasure in existence. Sobbing with love, I’d dip my head between her sleek breasts and go back and forth kissing their nipples and murmuring of rubies, garnets and the rest of them until I ran out of words. Her eyes were jet, her skin like alabaster and her navel was folded like a cowrie.
Exclaiming, I would explore every inch of her as we lay on the bear cubs’ skin in front of the bedroom fire.
One night towards the end we were on the bearskin, she naked except for the Rykov pearls. My great-uncle Igor had given them to her. They were famous throughout Russia, the largest weighing three ounces.
I was impatient and as stiff as a guardsman. She wanted to see how long I could hold out. Laughing, she lassoed my cock and garlanded it with the pearls so that it gleamed in the firelight like an elephant’s tusk. This led her to thinking how tall our children would be. I said I’d have to measure her. Smiling— fireglow in her eyes, it was what she’d been hoping for—she reclaimed the cock-hot pearls (which had certainly seen nothing of the like when owned by homosexual Uncle Igor) and laid them out of harm’s way. She reached back with her arms, right over her head. Using the top knuckle of my thumb as an inch measure, I started off at the ball of her heel. I went slowly, paying no attention to her squeals and giggles as I passed over dells and dimples, plains, forests and peaks. Up her neck I went and over her determined chin and nibbling lips. I balanced like a mountaineer on the ridge of her nose, made a detour to take in her upstretched arms and on reaching her fingertips and kissing them, one by one—
“How many?” she whispered, by then not interested in my answer.
I sat back on my heels. Now it was her turn to wait. She placed both hands round my cock and tried to draw me down.
“How many do you think?” I said.
“A thousand, I don’t care.”
“Seventy-five inches to your fingertips. When you raise your arms like that, you’re taller than I am.”
Squirming beneath me: “What’s important... do you want me to beg? Come down here, Charlinka.”
I looked at her long white body on the bearskin. I smoothed my palms over her flat stomach. She made way and I entered her with a rush, the deepest penetration in the entire history of love.
We were one person that night, when Dan Doig was conceived. She declared that the thud of my sperm hitting her egg travelled all the way up her spine. She’d felt it in her brain. More than just a tingle, she said: a definite crackle, like electricity.
To celebrate Dan’s conception, she refastened the pearls round her neck. They grazed my chest as she smiled down at me, leaning on her elbow, tracing the grooves between my ribs with her forefinger.
“It was as though you fertilised me in two places simult
aneously. Mighty Doig!”
All the happiness that had been lying around in the world unused was ours. It was drawn to us by the force of our love. I had only to put out my hand to feel it surrounding and protecting us like a soft warm billowy paradise.
Three
HOW THE gods must have detested our bliss. “Break them,” they roared. “Do it properly this time. Leave nothing to chance.”
The man they sent to do this was Prokhor Fedorovich Glebov. Pretending to be a Tsarist officer, he sought refuge in the Pink House just as our honeymoon and a week-long blizzard began. We were duped, all of us—my cousin Nicholas, his servants, my godfather Misha Baklushin, my wife. One night he murdered her ancient tutor in the room above ours. I was woken by the scream. He rode away into the forest, trailing his coat, inviting me to follow him. He was joined by a gang of deserters. Kobi tracked them through the snow. I shot and killed a man, believing him to be Glebov. It was not. Too late did I realise the depth of his deception. By the time I got back, he’d done his butchering.
He did it on behalf of Bolshevism, in the name of the common man. To compensate for the bad deal that this wretch has received from history.
It took Kobi and me two days to catch him. What I wanted to do was to cut off his eyelids so that he’d be unsleeping for the remainder of his life. Why not? Kobi wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Not one person in humanity would have blamed me.
I did not. Instead, because I suddenly visualised his eyelids fluttering on the palm of my hand, I handed him over to some wounded White officers to let them torture him as they wished. When a couple of Zeppelins bombed their hospital wagons, he escaped. Even with a broken leg, the slippery bastard managed to crawl away and hide.
Cold Blood Page 1