Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  “Not a martyr?”

  “Never.”

  “You can’t hide class,” he said reflectively. “Something will give you away, however much you try to conceal it. You can start speaking like a really stupid peasant, you can make the palms of your hands as rough as bark, but you’ll still get nailed. Intelligence will mark you out. Breeding too—”

  I laughed. “My mother pointed out your father on the train. She told me there was no bigger snob in the world than your father.”

  “But what do you expect? Out of shit he turned himself into gold. From nothing, Doig! From a handful of kopeks! And having made his fortune, he couldn’t think of what to do with it. He expected to meet kings and queens every day. ‘What else is money for?’ he’d say to me. Or to a cabinet minister whose family had been around as long as the Romanovs, ‘We who are at the top should confer daily as to how we’re to stay there.’ Things like that. He was right—but pretentious. Liselotte darling, sit closer to me, I like your smell.

  “Have you been caught up in a revolution before, Doig? What about those South American countries you went to?”

  By this time we’d motored to the east end of Nevsky, circled the statue of Alexander III and had started back up towards the Admiralty. It was the direction I wanted to go. I was content to be Boltikov’s passenger. He was doing the right thing. A man on the point of going into exile should say a full set of goodbyes and do so in company, to ensure he doesn’t become maudlin. He should be tender with his self-esteem. If he thinks poorly of himself on departure, how will he ever prosper in a foreign country?

  Waving his cigar around, Boltikov continued on his previous theme.

  (Liselotte had opened the window to let the smoke out. We could hear the occasional outburst of shooting quite clearly.)

  “It may be the way we walk, as simple as that. Class will always show and the vermin’ll spot it. That’s why I’m getting out. Helsinki tomorrow. Eighty miles an hour the entire way. That’s what it says on the clock so that’s what we’ll do. Eighty miles—that’s—what’s that in Russian?”

  “Fifty versts.”

  “Sensational! I love speed. I’ll pick up my family and go to Stockholm and from there take a boat across to Wick thanks to Mr. Thomas Cook and his wartime bravado—God willing! Then we’ll catch a train to London. I have business friends in London. Also money with a gentleman called Mr. Baring. Do you know this man?”

  He stopped. His face crinkled with the foretaste of adventure and corporeal pleasures. “We heard all about your travel adventures from your old uncle. You know, you could have had the pick of our Russian women when the stories got around—”

  “I did.”

  “You mean... that was a horrible experience. But it’s what we must expect from these people... Doig, why not escape with me? You’re strong. You’re ruthless. You want to win... I’d pay you well.”

  I said I’d think about it. It’d mean writing off my life so far— my childhood, Elizaveta, my lovely father, my descendance from the man who’d sent Napoleon packing. Did I want that—to erase the past? To deny myself?

  I whistled vexedly—only a bar.

  “Stoy! Stop! It’s bad luck in the house. This car’s a house for me... By the way, no one liked my father. It was a great relief to Mamasha when he died in the street. Walking along like you or me... he was so fat... You can see how fat I am, Doig. It comes from having been fed from the start on the best products sugar could make. I was in Einem’s every day. He named a chocolate after me. It was called a Bombe Boltikov. Seventy-two per cent cocoa and in a compartment in the centre the strongest apricot brandy that Bols make. A little candy peel on top for ladies to pick off. Shaped tout à fait comme un suppositoire—it was a huge success. I expect I’ve eaten several tons of my Bombe... Of course Einem was German and so had to sell when this war started. His shop was never the same with the new people... The thing about the Germans is first the Kaiser, and second, sending that bastard Lenin to us. It’s Germany that’s brought us to our knees. Liselotte, do shut that window. It’s Russia and the end of October, not June in Paris.”

  He produced a flat silver flask of cognac. Liselotte took a good swig, coursing it round her mouth and smacking her lips. She passed me the flask. But I declined, saying it was a night to be sober.

  They finished the flask between themselves. He said, wiping his lips, “I’m disappointed in you, Doig. That was Reserve Royal 1825, from the Tsar’s Summer Palace in the Crimea.”

  He turned on the reading light on his side. It made him no thinner or more handsome. And Liselotte looked a hard nut, even though the light was coming from behind a scalloped shade of the most feminine hue.

  He said, “When you crashed in here waving your pistol, I thought I was certain to be shot. Then you told me your name and I thought, Here’s a man worth saving. Strong, brisk, cruel, those were the adjectives I chose, going by your reputation. But someone who doesn’t have the sense to drink the best cognac ever made—well, it speaks for itself. I’ll take you to the cemetery and then you can walk.”

  I said, “Mama was right. Snobbery can be inherited, just the same as blue eyes. That’s a poor reason, to turn against me because I wouldn’t drink your brandy.”

  “You think I made the decision because I’m a snob?”

  I shrugged.

  “I was only testing you, that’s all. To see if you’d speak up for yourself. Tell you what, come with me as far as Stockholm. A week, a month, as long as you wish. We’ll share Liselotte.”

  The car stopped. We were at the cemetery—the Nobles’ Entrance, as I’d told the shuvver.

  He came round and opened the door for me. I stepped into the pool of light from the lantern hanging outside the night porter’s lodge. From the city below came the slap of small-arms fire.

  To speak to me Boltikov had to lean right over Liselotte. He sprawled on her, like a bear—I saw her wince. He called out of the door, “You mean, you’re getting out and leaving, just like that? Well, I’ll tell you what you are—a simpleton. One way or another they’ll get you. I’ve owned factories, I know how the Bolsheviks work. Your height, even the words you use— yes, a decent vocabulary will be an automatic sentence of death. Doig, you’re a sitting duck—see, I know a little English, I can look after myself without you. What do you say to that? Eh, Charlie? What do you say to me not wanting you any more? What’s your next move?”

  He was determined to see the effect on me and getting hold of the passenger strap began to haul himself over Liselotte. “Look out, woman,” he said. She tucked in her chin and flattened herself against the back of the seat. He got to the point where he was sitting sideways, feet out of the door.

  “That’s me, Alexander Alexandrovich Boltikov. If I want to do something, I do it the shortest possible way. I’m not one for preening and prancing and saying one thing and doing another. You all right, liebchen?”

  He took a cigar from his case. Red spores grew beneath his lighter and burst briefly into flame. He puffed from the corner of his mouth and spat. “Don’t be obstinate, Charlie. Make a journey, come with the boy Boltikov. He knows his way around. Permits, passports, train tickets, he can get them—snap, just like that. Light espionage? Name your need.”

  He beamed on me, this short fat fellow. The yellow lantern light was on his face at an angle. “There must be something you want.”

  I said, “Yes. I want to know what job Lenin gives Glebov.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can find him and kill him.”

  He sighed. “You’re a brave man. All right, I’ll do it. For you. Because I like you . . .” He drew on his cigar and fixed me with a puffy blue optic. “Tomorrow I want to get all of Russia with me in this car—the air, the soil, even the stinking breath of our people. Their oaths, their bedtime prayers, the flowers in their little gardens—God, how I love this horrible country of ours.”

  I knew the score from my efforts to get Elizaveta to leave. Boltikov would be the
same. There’d be tears as big as summer raindrops, howling, tantrums and such emotional self-mutilation that the situation could be rectified only by the 1825 cognac and the slippery lips of liebchen.

  “You’ll never leave,” I said.

  He took out a huge English handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

  I could see Liselotte watching us suspiciously, afraid that her employer was getting into some typically Russian entanglement that would prevent their departure.

  He and I embraced. She made room for him and he climbed back in. The shuvver closed the door on him. The car rolled away on its fat tyres. After twenty yards it halted. The back door flew open. Hanging on to the strap with one hand, he called out, “I’ll get what you want and cable you. At the Rykov Palace? Think it’ll get through?”

  I waved him my thanks. The huge car vanished, exhaust pipe fluttering.

  Turning, I found the entire episode had been witnessed by the night porter standing in the shadow of his own door. It shocked me that he should have remained silent throughout. He said, No, he wasn’t a Bolshevik spy: he was more interested in the dead than the living.

  Twelve

  I FOLLOWED him into his lodge to sign the register.

  “Pychkin—Razumsky—Rykov—here we are, barin.” He inked the pen and passed it to me. But the nib being new and still in its anti-rust dressing would leave only a watery trail. He handed me a newspaper on which I scribbled until the nib worked. It was farewell: it was important that everything was right.

  All our family visits were recorded, nearly a century of them. From December 1821, a month after the Founder’s death, to last December when my cousin Nicholas had signed in with his two spoilt brats.

  I filled in the columns: 3.45 a.m., Friday October 26th, 1917. Number in party—“one.” In the section for Comments, I wrote: “The night of the Bolshevik uprising (Lenin). The evening started damp and foggy. Shortly after midnight the sky cleared. A bad sign.”

  On reading this over my shoulder, the porter said, “Our soldiers’ll soon chase him out. I’d be joining them if it wasn’t for my leg.” He took the key to the Rykov mausoleum off the hook and dusted it in a pannikin of graphite; clipped on a long metal tag so that I wouldn’t forget to bring it back.

  “It’s something having your own burial chamber,” he said, leaning comfortably against the counter. “The upstarts come and say, This is a fine outlook over the city for when I’m gone, how do I buy a plot? I say, The last one we sold was in 1881, so you don’t. They don’t like that. Upstarts don’t like being buried in the suburbs.”

  He remembered Uncle Igor’s visits well. I said that I myself had been in charge of sending up what remained of him after the bomb blast.

  “Many more Rykovs to come, are there, sir? Is yours a fecund family, if I may enter the enquiry? You see, sir, I like to keep track of our noble families. In fact, I’m thinking of writing a little book about my years here.”

  I told him of Nicholas’s death at the Pink House. The last I’d heard of his sons they’d gone to Paris with their mother. “That’s it,” I concluded.

  “You’re the end of them in Russia, sir?”

  “The very end. Full stop.”

  “No children anywhere, sir?”

  “No. My son Daniel is also dead.”

  “What date was—”

  I turned on him. His sallow quizzy face swam up to me out of a mist. I grabbed at his coat and pulled him close.

  “He was never born. He never got that far, the poor little bugger, on account of the teachings of Mr Lenin, who has just taken control of your life and the lives of millions like you.”

  My strength was mighty. He hung from my hands like a strip of damp cloth. “ ‘Dan Doig, dead in the womb of his mother, who was born Elizaveta Rykov and is also now dead.’ Write that in your book of toadying. You and your sort... I hold you in absolute contempt.”

  His cheeks were bulging out, red and shining from the pressure of my grip. “So now you know not to ask about the Rykovs. When I die we are extinct. Extinct—is that plain enough? Done for. Shit in the pit.” So saying, I dropped him.

  He began to whimper about who’d pay for the tomb’s upkeep and so on. I said he could grind up our bones for fertiliser. Then I grabbed the oil lamp, made as if to cuff him when he tried to speak and went out into the night.

  Extinct! Not obsolete or out of fashion or temporarily extinguished like a candle but gone for eternity. The thick salty spunk that produces men of legend had got thinned out. It had been used too frivolously. The Rykovs were to blame, with their passion to be modern and European—lawn tennis, gardeners, all that consumed money. “A little fun”—that had been the cry among my uncles and aunts when I was growing up. They’d forgotten that sperm and character deteriorate together. You had only to look at my cousin Nicholas: a noble death but a disaster in all other respects. If you want to have successful children, you must get it right at the beginning. What comes out depends on what goes in. Humans forget that when it comes to insemination; they think that the rules apply only to farm animals.

  Or was it the fault of the Rykov ovaries? Too encrusted with the fatty consequences of the good life to get the full whack?

  However, had Elizaveta lived and carried Daniel to the full term, to the standard length of twenty inches, which could have been a trial for her narrow hips—

  I slipped the key into the great iron padlock of the mausoleum. The door grated on its hinges as I pushed it open.

  The smell of my family: cold, musty, like a larder that’s been empty for a long time. These people were dead in every conceivable sense. For there to be an afterlife, there had to be a God. And had God existed, there would have been some emanation of His presence: a blue pilot light burning above the door, for example. The odour would have been different. There would have been uplift of some nature.

  The coffins were neatly racked according to the various branches of the family. Uncle Igor had an ivory label that said simply: “Count Igor Rykov, born 18 May 1842 and died 6 March 1917.” He’d lived for seventy-five years. It was long enough.

  “Cheerio,” I said. “Cheerio, all of you. Thank you for your gifts. Especially thank you, Papa. None of you thought such a day as this would arrive. You believed in monarchs, the Church and the values of a civilised world. Well, they’re all gone. Cheerio again.”

  I left the key at the foot of the door and scaled the palisade into the general cemetery. I found a piece of wasteland not yet cleared for graves. In the centre was a patch of wild lilac scrub. It was dry beneath them. I took out my pistol, wrapped my coat snugly round myself and lay down. It was good.

  It’s only Russians, with our melancholia, who actually gaze at the stars. Some nationalities are happy with a quick glance, others want nothing more than to classify them by size, brightness or their distance from the Earth. No one spends as much time in conversation with them as we do. This is because our stars are more brilliant than anyone else’s. In consequence, a feeling of intimacy can be acquired. They become our friends. As a matter of fact the stars are a vital part of the Orthodox religion and even the clergy acknowledge this.

  All our great novelists have found the night skies an irresistible subject. They call on their services whenever the hero is searching for inspiration or forgiveness. They rarely demand that anyone is slain by starlight or, come to that, by the light of the new moon—though both are possible and happen frequently in real life.

  Hands behind my head, I looked into their eyes. I said to them, Is it possible for me to sink any lower without being dead? It’s not my fault I was born into this dire epoch. I know that tonight history has been smashed. I know that nothing can ever be the same again. Tomorrow will dawn upon a way of doing things of which not one person in mankind has any experience. The question is, will the old behaviour be of any use to me at all? One must suppose not. However, very few people know anything about revolutions. Only very rarely does a man have a chance to practise. I shall try to
act honourably, as my father would have. But there is also this: I wish to survive. Maybe only one of these is possible. Do you know which it is?

  I picked up my pistol and aimed it at the Great Bear.

  No, don’t say, I expect I’ll find out for myself. Just help me get to the shore. Don’t be ungracious. You’ve favoured many more unpleasant men than myself. Real vipers. That tick Napoleon, for instance...

  The stars eyed me comfortingly, bright with their wry humour, not a bit upset about my pistol being pointed at them. As one, they nodded to me, Get Glebov, then you’ll find a real difference in your situation.

  It was what I wanted to hear. I turned onto my side and worked a hollow for myself in the dead leaves—pulled my hat down over my ears.

  Sleep should have come instantly. But it didn’t, and the reason was this: had Glebov seen me at Smolny or had he not? That was the point at which we stuck, those stars and I.

  Thirteen

  THE NEXT event in the Bolshevik Revolution: the arrest of Alexander Alexandrovich Boltikov. He failed even to get to the border with Finland.

  On entering Viborg on the Katarinegata—the cobbles slippery beneath a dusting of snow, the red flag hanging limply from the neck of Torkel Knutson, heroic on his plinth, and the town-hall clock on the dot of ten, exactly on schedule for a tiptop lunch at Helsinki’s Hotel Societetshus—he’d noticed the unusual number of soldiers lounging around.

  Liselotte was on one side of him. His secretary was in front, with the English shuvver. Liselotte had been uncomfortable in Russia. The Revolution had been the last straw. She couldn’t get out fast enough. The nearer they got to Finland, the more she quivered. She’d brought some knitting but had several times missed the pickup stitch her hand was so unsteady. A little before Viborg she put her gloves on so that he shouldn’t see the whiteness of her knuckles.

  It was she who’d understood immediately why a van was waiting up one side street and a cavalry patrol up another. (Boltikov admitted that he’d been thinking about a plate of oysters.)