Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  “Get us out of here,” she screamed at the shuvver, opening the window in the division and stabbing him in the back with her finger.

  But it was the secretary who answered. He smiled as he’d never done before. His face lit up like the morning sun and his eyes, previously so dead, danced like gnats on a warm spring day. He’d shopped them.

  The leaders of the Viborg Soviet approached wearing suits and overcoats. Behind marched a company of Bolshevik soldiers. The snow started to fall again, making everything quite silent, even the steps of the marching soldiers.

  “Oh my Gawd,” said the shuvver, tipping his plastic-visored cap onto the back of his head.

  The secretary got out, briskly and joyfully. The leader of the Soviet embraced him. They all did. He made an ironic bow to Boltikov and disappeared.

  The door was opened on Liselotte’s side. She clung on to Boltikov, screaming, her arm clamped round his neck. It made no difference. Two of the soldiers were ordered to drag her out. They climbed into the Rolls, treading mud and snow into the carpet on which she had so often knelt to pleasure him.

  Defiantly, he lit a cigar.

  With infinite gentleness, making emollient clucking noises, as if dealing with a recalcitrant child, they unpeeled Liselotte from him, each clutching finger in turn. No brutality, no ripping. They’d been told to get her out in good condition, and they did.

  She was led away. Then he, Boltikov, got out of the car.

  Jaw cocked, his eyes unholy in their defiance, Alexander Alexandrovich continued: “The Soviet boss took the cigar from my mouth, had a puff, and handed it to an underling. I watched it circulate among these ignorant factory workers who’d only ever smoked papirosi. My Ortega Grande was too much for some of them at that hour. It got wetter and wetter. It can have given no pleasure to the last couple of men.”

  Their luggage was in the rear compartment. They made him unlock it and lay his nice pigskin cases in the snow. They forced him to undo the straps himself. He had to kneel on the cobbles in the smart trousers he’d put on for his family lunch.

  When they’d finished—his silk dressing gown, pomade, razor strop, stud hook, medicines, and God knows what frippery from Liselotte’s cases spread out on the suitcase lids and loudly haggled over—the head of the Soviet put his hand on Boltikov’s shoulder, turned him round to face St. Petersburg and said, “Walk, comrade. When you get to the city say to your friends, ‘Greetings from the Viborg Soviet! World Friendship to All!’ Now go.”

  “I’d only gone ten yards when he called me back. ‘That coat of yours is a good one, comrade. It’ll give warmth to a night-worker.’ When I demurred, he threatened to have me branded on the forehead, M for millioner. Think of it, Charlie. Scarred for life, the flesh all livid and puckered. Later it occurred to me that Lenin might have been planning to have all us industrialists branded. If that had happened I’d have gone up to Pabst, whom everyone knows to be the meanest man in Russia, and said, ‘My dear fellow, you hid it from us so well!’ But it would have been poor compensation for the pain. A corpse has more sense of humour than Pabst... The fizzle and then the smell. Horrible! Horrible!

  “I didn’t want to be seen any more in my smart clothes. I wandered round the station area and found a man who was as fat as I am. I offered him one hundred roubles for the clothes on his back. We did the swap in the waiting room—the firstclass one. He was in such a hurry to get the money that he was stripped before I had my shirt off. He wanted my studs and links too, saying they were part of my clothing. I refused. His clothes smelt. Then I wound his scarf round my face as a disguise and stepped aboard a train back to town.”

  There, his first thought had been to establish a new identity. He was on a Bolshevik list, a marked man.

  He’d gone to his forger and within a day had become a new man. Then he’d set out to collect his funk money, which he’d sprinkled in small amounts among his business friends.

  The idea had been that when he turned up and presented an IOU, they’d pay him. But the reality turned out to be far different. Many of these businessmen had already fled. And the others pretended they didn’t recognise him when the only papers he could produce were under a name that was totally unknown to them.

  “‘My dear sir, it would be quite wrong to give this money to you. In an hour, Mr Boltikov himself may appear and sit in that very same chair. What would I say, that I gave his cash to a stranger, just because there was a similarity in appearance?’”

  He’d scraped up a bit of liquidity. There were still some honest men left. But mostly his so-called friends were vermin. What was he to do?

  “And the answer came to me in a flash: ‘Doig will think of a way forward. Doig’s the man for a tricky business.’ So here I am, Charlie, a beggar at the palace door.”

  Inspecting Alexander Alexandrovich Boltikov and noting the worldly tenor of his eyes, and their usedness, and the tightness round his mouth, a man could easily say to himself, even a man who knew nothing about his Rolls-Royce, there goes a capitalist shit if ever I saw one. But I liked what I’d seen of him. As my father once said (I believe attempting a reference to himself), genius only does clever things: it’s enthusiasm that makes the world spin.

  Helping him out of his Viborg coat, I said, “OK, so long as you can tell me about Glebov.”

  “It wasn’t easy. But for Charlie Doig... your friend is now People’s Commissar for the Political Re-education of Prisoners. He was Lenin’s second appointment.”

  “Trotsky first?”

  “Yes. Glebov has left the city already to work with the army at the front. When the war’s over, he’s to start work on the Tsar and all those fat children of his. That’s what my spies are saying.”

  Fourteen

  MURAVIEV WOULDN’T employ Kobi in his army because he didn’t own a horse. “Get one and I’ll give you a squadron but until you do... well, frankly, my dear fellow, you’ve spent so much of your life on a horse that you scarcely know how to walk. Next!” That’s what Joseph, sparkling with glee, told me Muraviev had said to our Mongolian killer.

  Kobi prowled round the palace sullen and rebellious, picking quarrels with the SR lodgers and itching to have a fight with somebody. He’d fixed up a system of weights and pulleys to keep his sabre arm in tone. I listened outside the door. The swish of his sabre thrashing the air was like a palm tree in a gale.

  From somewhere he’d picked up an old cavalry greatcoat with narrow lapels, shoulders made for a blacksmith and a skirt that brushed the floor. (I may remark that within a week of Lenin’s coup every conceivable style of Tsarist costume was for sale on the streets.) Beneath it he had an officer’s dark blue dress trousers with a sash of faded scarlet covering the patch where some of the brocade had been ripped off. I caught him parading in front of a mirror.

  Intending to humour him, I said, “You could be the Prince of Siberia.”

  He strutted, flaunted, glided his palms down his hard thighs, flashed his oriental eyes at himself in the mirror. He looked at me sideways, which with those eyes he was able to do without moving his head.

  “Prince? I believe so too. ‘Prince, here are your female prisoners.’ Such words would fill me with pride—my parents also, whoever they were. Every Mongolian envies a ruler who takes female prisoners. The men they don’t bother with.”

  He saluted himself, standing rigidly. Or maybe he was practising taking the salute from his troops.

  “You’re too young to lead a revolution,” I said. “What you need first is a spell shovelling coal.”

  He circled me, drawing the sabre a little way out of its scabbard and then thrusting it back in so that it gave off an admonitory hiss.

  “You’ll blunt it,” I said.

  “Keep that coal piddle to yourself,” he growled. “Me, a Mongolian horseman? What’s more... I’ve been thinking... who’s to say I’m not of noble birth? Those missionaries who brought me up didn’t know. You don’t either. You’re the one who should do the shovelling.”
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br />   I waited until he settled, which he did as soon as I mentioned the Trans-Sib railway and his manifest destiny as Prince of Siberia. Then I told him I was going to buy a train—the whole lot: locomotive, tender, carriages. The marshalling yard behind the Nicholas Station was choked with them. A bold man wouldn’t even have to take his wallet with him, that’s what people were saying. This done, we’d cruise the tracks until we picked up Glebov’s trail.

  “But General Muraviev—” he began in protest.

  “—has now left to gather an army in the Urals. That’s where we’ll be going, east towards Siberia. We’ll armourplate the train and mount machine guns on the forward platform. We’ll have a hell of a time, shoot every Bolshevik we see.”

  I painted a picture of our huge grey locomotive shuddering through the snow-storms as he crouched behind a mashinka and shot to ribbons the hordes of Red cavalry. Of course it appealed to him. Suddenly he saw that as a means of warfare, being on an armoured train was greatly superior to being a horseman with a sabre.

  His eyes lit up. “Every single Bolshevik—dead!” He counted the categories on his fingers. Men, women and children—that went without saying. Then, “cripples, the insane and the pregnant, even if they come out waving a white flag. Gun them down. Ta-rat-a-tat-tat. Throw the bodies in the river.”

  Joseph coming in heard the last few sentences. When Kobi had left, he said, “In a world of equality such as Vladimir Ilyich talks of, will butlers still be expected to risk their lives on behalf of their masters? In Your Excellency’s train, for instance...” He’d been ruminating about the dangers he’d faced on the night of Lenin’s coup, when we went to Smolny.

  “Yes. You stole a bar of my uncle’s gold, that’s why.” “Excellency! He presented it to me! It was my reward for having saved him from disgrace.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He made friends with a young man from the racecourse—”

  “The usual?” The only fame my uncle achieved was through his assassination—blown up in his coach. Otherwise his life had been spent in seclusion, listening to the murmurs of his chronic hypochondria as he whiled away the hours turning the wondrous folio-sized pages of Redouté’s Roses and glancing from his library window in the hope that some passing street Adonis would catch his eye and leading him upstairs by the wrist, would teach him everything.

  “The boy tried to blackmail him.”

  “A jockey?”

  “Yes, Excellency. Your uncle fell in love with the colours he rode in. He wanted to make each of his footmen wear silk shirts in those same colours and carry whips jutting out of their boots. I had to deal with the boy. When he cooled down, your uncle saw his error. That was when he gave me the gold.”

  I couldn’t be angry with Joseph. He hadn’t tried to deceive me, had come straight out with the truth.

  I said, “Then you’re a rich man, Joseph. Why are you still here?”

  “I gave it to my mother. She owed money for my father’s burial, despite that he ran away and left her.”

  “It must have been a funeral on a royal scale.”

  “There were debts also. You know about debts, Doig...”

  His eyes glinted. He shook his dissolute locks at me challengingly. Everyone knew about my father’s borrowings. Kobi had probably told him I was soft. Joseph wanted to see if I’d compel him to pay it back somehow. It was what a proper Russian boyar would do.

  I let it pass—smiled instead, for I wanted something tricky of him.

  Fifteen

  CONTRARY TO popular opinion, it wasn’t a buyer’s market at all in the marshalling yard. In fact, it was hard to find a rig in any sort of condition. The best price Joseph could obtain was two thousand Tsarist roubles for a modest locomotive, its coal and its driver, an enthusiastic young Tsarist called Valenty.

  A good riding horse was priced at around six thousand—or three locomotives. You’d have thought the economics were out of kilter until you considered the expense of coal. Whereas a ton of hay would have got a riding horse from Moscow to Warsaw and halfway back, a ton of coal only took you sixty miles.

  Later that afternoon I added the Pullman carriages that had carried the Grand Duke Dmitry into exile and a tender with a connecting passage beneath the coal between the driver’s cab and the front coach. When men get killed in the cab you don’t want to have to halt to replace them.

  Those Pullmans were quality. It was a truly dismal St. Petersburg day—fog, a light drizzle, the acridity of coal smoke, apathy as heavy as lead. But the carriages were gorgeous in their yellow-and-chocolate livery and equally splendid inside, with the Romanov coat of arms everywhere and photographs of their palaces in the sunny Crimea screwed to the walls—in a charming family sequence there was one of the Tsar on a yacht that showed clearly the tattoos on his upper arms.

  The business completed, I told Joseph we were quits over the gold bar he’d stolen and sent him home. I had a useful conversation with Valenty, then left the yard by the main signalling box and walked along the rails into the cavern of the Nicholas Station. The public having given up on the possibility of using the railways, it was quite empty—no passengers, no officials, no porters, no pigeons.

  A deserted railway station can eat into a man’s soul more deeply than rust. But the idea of travel—of movement, of the unknown—was good after the months of hanging around in St Petersburg. I was like any Russian. While earthing up our potatoes, we may suddenly be struck by the notion of going five hundred miles to call on an aunt or a childhood friend. We down tools and surrender instantly, walking however far it is to the station with a smile in our eyes and an absolutely clear picture of the engine, scarved in smoke, that’s going to carry us there.

  Light-headed, idly debating how I’d find Glebov and kill him, I walked through the echoing iron-spanned hall and out into Znamenskaya to catch the no. 5 tram.

  “Every end doth not appear in the hour of its beginning.” My godfather Misha Baklushin—who, let me remind you, was himself murdered by Glebov—latterly read only two authors. After a certain age (which he put at fifty) one comes to realise, he said, that most writers’ texts are virtually identical. Read one and you’ve read twenty. His exceptions were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Herodotus, whom I’ve here quoted in the version that Misha had me read. The words may not be correct but the meaning is.

  I’m referring in this context to my tram journey up Nevsky.

  Sixteen

  THE IDEA of freedom from the system of Tsarist government was infectious. To be living in St. Petersburg during those confused weeks after Lenin’s coup was like being among children let out of school early.

  So when the light fingers first took a pinch of my trousers, the inside leg no less—but let me go back a moment, to the tram stop.

  At long last a no. 5 rounded the statue of Alexander III. There was a crowd of us waiting, and more came running out of the shadows as the tram glided to a halt in its creaking galleon style. Its rubber jaws peeled back with a yawn and I elbowed my way inside with all the others. There was no reason why I should have paid attention to any of them.

  The cigarette smoke, the gabble, the steam rising from the unwashed bodies and the liveliness written across those faces were glorious. It was the Russia I loved. I surveyed it happily from my six foot two as we all swayed, lurched and jolted to the same tempo. Like a firework party, screeching and throwing off squibby blue sparks, the tram bore us north-west up Nevsky.

  But not for long. As we rattled over the intersection with Liteyni Prospekt, the usual happened and the pole connecting us to the overhead wires flipped out of its socket. People went on with their chatter or mocked the conductor, whose job it was to climb the outside steps onto the roof and fiddle the pole back in with a rubber-handled trident kept up there for the purpose.

  He passed the strap of his scarred leather change-pouch over his head and locked it in his cubbyhole—bending awkwardly since its key was on a ring at his waist. He buttoned his jerk
in, said something with a laugh to a babushka, and went out.

  The roof groaned beneath his footsteps. We all stared upwards, not convinced that we wouldn’t suddenly see the studded sole of his boot and perhaps his ankle appear through the metal.

  Two sailors wearing Aurora bonnets were telling everyone around them, whether they wanted to listen or not, about the shell that the cruiser had fired as the starting signal for the Revolution.

  I looked down at the shapkas and shawled heads, at the flat naval bonnets, at the beards and the sunken eyes and the blanched northern faces. I smelt the odours lifting off them— onions, tobacco, horses, oil, humanity. So where was a woman’s perfume to be found in our new Utopia? Nothing was the same nor ever would be without the possibility that on entering a room one might catch the drift—of which one? Elizaveta had worn Soir de Paris and none other. Had Glebov smelt it on her when he—

  Ting-ting! It was the conductor who’d come in from the roof, removed his gloves and thumbed the bell. He opened his locker and slung the change-pouch over his shoulder. He pushed his way through to the woman he’d been called away from, the babushka wearing pink mittens. They resumed their conversation.

  A child was squirming his paw through the press of bodies to anchor himself to his mother. I felt it snag my left trouser leg.

  The tram stopped: more people piled on. I held my ground. We were squashed up against each other like herrings in a barrel. I was unable to move. I was standing with my arms folded across my chest, like Octavian at the Battle of Actium when he saw Cleopatra’s flagship turn tail and bolt.

  Extinct! I’d show that gravedigging swot what Rykov spunk could do. When I’d sired a large and boisterous family from the docile Swede who was waiting for me in Chicago, I’d bring them all back and parade them in front of the fellow. I’d ask him how the research for his book was going, play with him for a bit. Then I’d push the children forward and say, “There, there’s extinct for you, Mac.”