Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  Should I be dealing with Elizaveta in the same way? Should I say, “That’s it, my darling,” dust off my palms and abandon her? Was her memory becoming a drag? A nuisance—even a danger to us as we searched Russia for Glebov?

  The thought was so loathsome that I cried out and knuckled my temples.

  I went out into the clean summer’s day. Standing on the terrace I drew in chestfuls of our Russian air. If I forsook Elizaveta, I forsook Russia. It was not what I wanted, I knew that now. My cousin Nicholas and my godfather Misha Baklushin had both been right. I’d tried to persuade them to leave before it was too late. They’d wracked themselves, wept torrents—and refused. Because the world could never contain a second Russia, and they knew it. I’d cursed Elizaveta for baulking at exile, oh how I’d shouted at her on that last night. Yet she too had been right. And all my countrymen and women who’d tarry too long would be right also. Exile was for shirkers. I would follow my heart, would avenge my bride with Glebov’s blood or be killed doing so.

  It was my answer.

  Boldly down the carriage drive I now went, the train in front of me. Oskar’s reddish, tobacco-soaked moustaches and the rat-like incisors of Delicia were pressed against the window, urging me to hurry. Kiki jumped off the Countess’s lap onto the table and began to yap at me. Her breath made an oval of smoke on the pane. The cockatoo tuft on her head quivered from her efforts. Oskar’s blond-haired hand angrily scooped the creature onto the floor and he tried a smile on me.

  Going straight into the Pullman, I said to her, “Lady, that dog is your death sentence. Without it a Bolshevik might let you go. With it you’re sunk. My advice is to throw it out or give it to Valenty for the firebox. You wouldn’t hear even a squeak.”

  I left her scowling. The way her mouth was shaped she couldn’t clamp her lips. She tied them up into a sort of knot and shook them at me.

  Joseph had taken me at my word and with Boltikov had pressed Oskar’s men into their service. One was pushing the heads of four French kings in a barrow and behind him another two were making heavy weather of a consignment of pictures in large gilt frames. I waited until they were aboard, until the pistons were hissing and the wheels tugging. Then I went and lay down. Xenia was gone, cooking us a meal. I slumped across the bed feeling unhappy again. Maybe finding Glebov was an impossible task, like everyone said.

  I was in some halfway house between sleep and waking when I heard footsteps, not Xenia’s, coming down the corridor. The Countess’s knuckles rattled on the door like Spandau fire. Her voice had the metallic screech of a shipyard in full employment.

  “I wish to protest. It is my right. Even in these illegal times, every person has the right to protest... I know you’re in there.”

  A pause—and the handle began to whip back and forth. She was using both hands on it.

  “Under our noses did they do it! Even as we watched they stole our property. It is an outrage. I shall inform the Governor of the province. I shall demand full compensation in the courts. Or you can take us to Vladivostok for nothing. I don’t mind. Do you hear me, you inside?”

  My unhappiness redoubled. If she couldn’t forget the busts and pictures, which she’d abandoned in any case, how was I ever to forget Elizaveta? Everything seemed hopeless, and not just hopeless but intrinsically bad, like a piece of meat that is rotten through to the centre of the bone.

  I leapt off the bed. “Woman”—I was at the door attacking it. The bronze turnlock came away in my fingers as I hurled it open. “Woman,” I roared, gripping the throat latch of her coat and twitching her up till she was on tiptoes and her jaw horizontal. I bent my face towards hers. Her eyes had become tiny, folded around with loose skin. From somewhere in there she fluttered the lids at me. I said, “Don’t play games with me, French baggage, you’d left those things forever, chucked them away. What are you talking about?”

  She closed her eyes, showing me her lilac eyeshadow. Her lips began to slither around. She hung there in my grip. I thought, I’m becoming a true beast, that’s what this life without hope is doing to me.

  She whispered, “I adore masterful men,” and as the train rocked, she pressed her loins against mine and showed me the tip of her tongue, which had a grain like the back of a Burmese river slug, whose pink and fleshy young I have often eaten. I said, “Keep it for the Reds,” pushed her away and went to feel sorry for myself with Xenia.

  Twenty-five

  THOSE ARISTOS were such idiots. Thinking to hide from the Revolution and make merry with American jazz, they’d sauntered down a spur into the forest without remembering to switch the points back behind them. They might as well have painted a trail of arrows in the Romanov colours. I sent Kobi to reconnoitre.

  He slipped away into the fir trees like a ghost, looking up just once, to see where the sun was. When he returned, he tricked us, creeping up beside the train and suddenly showing his Mongolian face to the Countess from a distance of three or four inches, flattened against the window. She tried to shriek but Oskar’s big red hand was over her mouth in a flash. They were learning.

  The line stopped at a quarry that had been used for ballasting the rails. There was a turntable. They’d managed to get their train turned round, but that was all. Kobi had heard the throb of loud music. He’d seen the two black men through the window, one at the trumpet, the other playing a double bass. There’d been a third man at the drums. He couldn’t understand why they’d stayed in the coaches and not had a regular dance outside, a festivity, as they did in Mongolia.

  The quarry was less than a mile away. I said we’d go in at dawn.

  Boltikov was unusually quiet. He was busy estimating the bales of stoles and capes that would shortly be his, the fur-lined coats, the muffs, cloaks, mantles, pelures, busbies, bootees and other furry items that would be snug on a woman and warm with her smell. He was thinking about how to get them down to the warehouse in Constantinople that in his mind was already his.

  I took him aside and quoted our proverb: “ ‘One can decide whether a horse is good or whether a horse is bad only after one has ridden it.’ ” Maybe there’d be no booty. Maybe there’d be a different problem, one that was altogether more complicated.

  “Suppose,” I said, “that some of these people turn out to be old friends. Maybe your best school friend ever is among them . . . An old flame, think of that . . . Or a woman you once treated badly and whom you remember with shame. That would be the worst of all. She looks imploringly at you . . . Or maybe she’s too proud to be a supplicant so that you have to take the full weight of shame upon yourself. What are you going to do then? Shall we abandon old chums to the wolves?”

  “I’m still young. A man with money can always find new friends.” He’d lost weight, was tauter and meaner than I’d ever seen him.

  “Still, I’d try a disguise, Alexander Alexandrovich. You know how friends can be when they’re in a tight corner.”

  The Countess took up my theme: “Oskar—darling—suppose it is not Alexander Alexandrovich but we ourselves who find that we know people on that train. Suppose, my dear, suppose that that scheming bitch, Sophia Elektrovina”—her hand went to her mouth but couldn’t quite stifle the gasp—“we’d have to hide. I couldn’t trust myself to keep quiet. I might cry out— she’d recognise my voice, come looking, and then what would we do...? I mean, people who’ve been our neighbours for centuries, what if they’re on that train? We can’t just leave them to their fate—can we?”

  Slowly she looked round at all of us in turn. “How thrilling that would be!”

  She melted coyly into Oskar’s side. He put his arm around her. One could tell from the formality of his expression that duty was at work. It would be impossible ever to know what he was thinking. I believe he was made of a baulk of redhaired wood in which there were a number of small slits his parents had cut to contain information notes on certain aspects of existence: economics, the orders of the Swedish nobility, pleasure and food. The Countess Delicia would be the doer in
that union.

  I mistrusted leaving the main line. An enemy could come along behind and shut me in. But I wanted that locomotive: I badly wanted its armour-plating backed by concrete and the power of all those wheels.

  At dawn we slipped at crawling speed onto the spur line and halted in the forest. We were five effectives: Kobi, Joseph, Boltikov, Valenty and myself.

  Joseph was nervous, asked if he could remain behind and help Xenia with breakfast. His eyes had the glitter of fish scales in the half-light. I reminded him that it hadn’t gone so badly for him the night of Lenin’s coup, when we went among the soldiers at Smolny. But he wasn’t persuaded. He told me again that nature hadn’t made him brave. He was wearing a black woollen hat. His hair was down to his shoulders. His cheeks were green and hollow. Ah, Joseph, my Joseph...

  I had no intention of taking Oskar, despite his medals. I could hear him snoring as we moved out, our boots noiseless on the litter of spruce needles.

  A wisp of steam was showing from the chimney of the armoured loco. Valenty nudged me. I knew what he meant: it’d have taken three hours to get away if the firebox had been cold. We’d agreed he’d be a useful fellow, that other driver—Yuri Shmuleyvich. He was a Tsarist. His interests were the same as ours. We’d take him as stoker, whether he wanted to come or not.

  I doubted they were up to posting sentries—and was right. We just walked straight up to the train and stepped aboard.

  We had to fight our way through to the dining car so thick was the miasma of debauchery. Joseph threw open the doors at each end. When the haze cleared, I found the double bass propped in a corner wearing a scarlet dressing gown. Beside it was the set of drums. Joseph drew back the curtain to the pantry and there, sitting in the white enamel sink, his greyish legs and bony kneecaps hooked over the edge, was the unclothed corpse of an elderly man. His head was propped at an angle—wedged between the taps. On it was the cap and insignia of a senior colonel in a Hussar regiment.

  “Must have been the heart,” said Joseph, tapping his own.

  “Climbed up and undressed and said, OK, I’ll die now?”

  “No,” he said in agreement. “Maybe shot?”

  We looked all around that man and were still wondering about him when Boltikov entered. The cause of death didn’t interest him for a moment. But the cap of a Hussar colonel did and finding it fitted, he kept it on. Shmuleyvich was definitely on our side, he reported. Valenty had gone back to bring up our own train. Kobi had discovered a light machine gun plus ammunition. And he’d yet to find anyone awake on the train.

  “Dead men and women. We could go up to any of them and shoot them as they lie there. Easy meat. For the Reds as well as us.”

  I sent him to tell Shmuleyvich to give the coaches a good to-and-froing.

  That got them on the move. They began to creep into the dining car, broken and bitched, in their last night’s outfits. Pretty soon the room was filled with the stink of their exhausted pleasures.

  Kobi had been going through the train checking everyone was up. He came back to the dining car and nodded. He emptied his rifle and reloaded it. Every Russian knows what that oily rattle stands for, also the snap of the bolt as it locks, also the instant of silence as a man curls his finger round the trigger.

  “Who are you?” shouted a bold voice.

  “Charlie Doig.”

  “What do you want from us?”

  “You’re going to run a race round the coaches. First two past the post get lucky.”

  “And the others?”

  “Won’t get my full attention. Now get moving. Quickly there, zhivo, zhivo.”

  I got out and was scraping the finishing line with my heel when Valenty appeared with our old train. Xenia waved to me through the dining-car window, then came swankily down the steps. She was wearing a blouse I hadn’t seen before. Her arms were bare to just below the shoulder. She sashayed over and kissed me in the ear—in front of all those people. It was terrific, like a water bomb going off. I was anyway awash with adrenaline. Every fibre was singing like the telegraph wires: heat was coming off me in clouds. She’d have had only to glance at me in a certain way or shift her breasts and I’d have been at her.

  She looped an arm round my neck—drew my head down to her level—whispered: “Now I know what they mean when they say that all victorious leaders have a strong physical odour.”

  Chortling, she retired a couple of paces.

  I had the giant black man play the call for Assembly on his trumpet. Boltikov in his red colonel’s cap lined them up, all this nightclub riff-raff. Forty-two souls in all. Kobi had our new machine gun trained on them.

  “All of you!”—I spread my arms wide—“You are alive! Be grateful for that. The clouds are high and the light is good. A reasonable day is in prospect. Be grateful for that also. I’m leaving you your warm beds, your food, your drink, your snow. I am leaving you your money and your dignity. Everything that you value most will remain in your possession. All I’m taking are your weapons, which in any case you have no idea how to use, and your locomotive. In return I give you ours. You’ll travel slowly in it until you can find someone to put a weld on the bullet hole in the boiler. That’s all that’s bad about this day as far as you’re concerned—all that I know about. The rest will be of your own making.”

  Well, that’s all right then! You could see the relief on their faces.

  Just behind me Xenia hissed, “Watch out, Charlie!”

  Simultaneously there was a shrill call from the direction of the Pullmans, “You can’t go without us, wait!”

  It was the Benckendorffs, the Countess Delicia leading. Behind stumbled Oskar, furnace-faced in his heavy coat, a large suitcase in each hand and a small one under each arm.

  Everyone watched in silent amazement as the Countess, cool, commanding and elegant in a frothy white blouse buttoned at the sleeves, grey skirt to the ankles, deep black belt and that saucered green hat, came tinkling through the mess of quarry rubble. The sun had come out in force. It was going to be a belter of a day.

  Boltikov said to me, “Does she think she’s at the racecourse? Trouble’s coming. Let’s get the competition wrapped up and be on our way.”

  Xenia was at my elbow again. “If you allowed them their footwear, it’d be a better test. Look at those broken bricks they’ve got to run over. Glass as well, I expect. And some of them are old people. Don’t be an ogre, Charlie.”

  But it wasn’t softies I was after. I wanted people who’d figure out the jagged bricks and the shards of glass and the bits of the old iron stone-crusher that were lying around. I wanted clever dicks, two of them. Besides, if I allowed them their boots, the losers’d come running after us and catch us if we had to stop to switch the points onto the main line. Then we’d have to club them down, as sailors do when the lifeboats are full. There’d be shooting, it’d turn ugly. I didn’t want a battle. There could be Reds somewhere in the forest who’d get curious.

  Some of the people had heard Xenia, had watched my lips and read refusal in them. Now I saw hatred in their faces. The old, the fat, the ill: those who’d had tuberculosis or had once broken a leg, the ones with diarrhoea. How were they supposed to compete?

  Two women looked at each other and then at me. I saw in succession hope, fear, despair. “Us too?”

  “Yes... no... wait! Anyone volunteering to go on the slow train can drop out of the race. No point in busting your balls in this heat.”

  The black jazz players sauntered over in their Uncle Sam pants, daintily picking their way through the bricks. “I reckon Tom and me’ll do just that. We got the tunes. Everyone loves tunes. Them Reds ain’t no exceptions. As for running... no one I know does that.”

  They wandered back to their carriage. Others joined them. Only six were left in the end. They gathered in a bunch in front of me. I explained the rule, which was to finish first—and felt the brim of a hat graze my ear. I leaned away. It didn’t stop her. She spoke like a cat stalking a mouse, quietly, each s
yllable falling in its precise place.

  “Darling, that couple on the left are the Davidovs. They bought a house from us in Moscow five years ago. There is money still owed to my husband. How I would adore it if they failed to win.” She craned her neck forward and sneered at them, baring her camel’s teeth from gum to gum. “It’s him. He deserves to be shot. All swindlers should be shot. Without a trial—you know.”

  Disgusting but honest was Delicia Benckendorff. I dropped my handkerchief to start the race.

  Twenty-six

  THE DAVIDOVA woman was a roomy sort, big-boned and yellow-haired, not obviously nimble. Except maybe in the water: I could see her as a powerful swimmer, full of natural buoyancy. It was obvious that she’d given the business some thought and had decided she was going to ride on the fast train and to hell with the others. Her husband was a thin, pallid fellow, with a trimmed black beard. By himself he’d have been nothing. But she was loyal as well as determined and was clearly going to carry him if necessary.

  Holding her nightgown up, not caring what anyone saw, she struck out into the trees, a completely different direction from the others: a slow start to be sure, and they’d be going the long way round, but once on the soft bed of needles, they flew. Like a scene from a classical legend, they sprinted through the firs, heads tossed back, her pink limbs pumping amid a flurry of white garments.

  The other four, all men, scrabbled over the rubble, jostling and cursing.

  I knew immediately who the clever dicks were.

  It was the Davidova woman who appeared first round the end of the train, her breasts swinging like church bells. A murmur of disbelief rose from the spectators. They’d been betting on the result. The weight of money had been on one of the men.

  She’d cut her leg badly. Her feet didn’t look too good. But she kept going—not looking back at the competition, just glancing across at me, to judge where the finish was. I admired her. And I admired her even more when the Countess rose from her ambush and began to call Mrs D. out for being a crook, all in her shrillest shipyard voice. Mrs D. veered to her right, to pass close to her. She drew back her arm—let fly— pam!—fetched the Countess one in the gob with a backhander.