I sat silently, trying to work out if that told me anything more about Blahos than he was a liar.
Jones snowed me with those teeth of his. “That’s first-class information I’ve just given you. See, Charlie, there’s not much around here that I don’t know. Do a deal with me and there’ll be more.”
It enriches the spirit of mankind to be desired, especially after a period of down. Pressure builds again in the heart cavity and in the lungs. We are invigorated by a new form of oxygen, that of popularity. Our organs swell, our blood fizzles, our kidneys grind like fury and smash the toxins to pieces.
I smiled like a prince on Jones. Nevertheless I said, “Glebov first.”
“Here’s what I say to that,” he said, and sent a bullet between Boltikov’s head and mine, shattering the window.
A scarf of blue smoke curled past the jagged ends of the glass. He said, “Without our information you’d still be at base camp.”
“Without us you’ll be digging latrines to hold red piss for the rest of your life.”
Stiffy said, “The room was getting too warm anyway.”
I said to Jones, who was still in his chair, still holding his pistol, “A bullet’s a poor argument. Maybe it’s a big thing in America, but in this country loosing off like that is a way of saying good morning.”
He said, “Glebov’s chasing the gold as well. I know it for a fact. Come with us and you’ll get to meet him face to face. Is that a better argument?”
I said, “But I give all the orders, understood?” and saw him nod. I said, “And we split the proceeds four equal ways, understood?” and saw him nod. We shook on it. Then the door started to rattle and the handle to turn.
It was Xenia, in a state of high alarm after the shot. I scooped her up and kissed her until she squealed and the others went out grinning into the corridor.
I told her what had been said about Princess Anastasia. Her hand went to her throat. “The poor love! I shall pray for her,”— which is what she did while I idly watched Mrs. D., who’d been joined on patrol by Shmuleyvich.
Thirty-three
BUT HOW, practically, were the deaths of Jones and Brown to be faked?
“Why fake them?” said Xenia, who saw the Americans as competition. “Why not do it for real?”
However, that wasn’t the way to get at Glebov so I declined her proposal. As it happened, it was Jones himself who solved the problem of his own death.
Strabinsk gaol was on the far side of the city. From its hanging shed a cart track led to the burial pits about half a mile outside the city. At the moment the gaol was full, all the Bolsheviks captured at Ekat having been sent down for Muraviev to interrogate.
“Why didn’t they shoot them there?” said Boltikov one afternoon. He’d come to tell me of Joseph’s latest report, that a huge new pit was being dug at the burial grounds. I called Jones in. It could only mean one thing: that the gaol commandant was going to exact his own revenge for the murder of the Tsar.
“That’s old Lev Stupichkin. He was born in the days when the heroes of Russia danced mazurkas with their spurs on,” said Leapforth. “If he’s going to exterminate a crowd of Bolshies, that’s our chance. Stiffy and I’ll slip in there with the corpses. Get it done in a flash.”
I thought, Christ, cartloads of bodies going to the dump and he and Stiffy are going to volunteer to get in there among them? To be tipped out higgledy-piggledy, legs and arms all over the place? Uninhibited death and he wants to mimic it?
I looked up at him, washed, crisp, tanned, wearing his easy American smile. “How’s that going to be, lying in a burial pit with a lot of Red stiffs?”
“You squeamish? Only needs to be done once. It’ll be worth it. Smichov’ll take some photographs as proof of our death. ‘Two of our gallant boys being chucked on the heap by the barbarians,’ that’s what Consul Gray’ll say to himself when he gets them. He’ll have his clerk read out the covering note. ‘Captain Jones and Wirelessman Brown, that’s who they are, sir,’ the fellow’ll say. ‘Murdered by the Bolsheviks. That’s them being buried.’ ‘Enter them as died on active service. Next!’ says Gray. That way we’ll vanish from the records. Nothing easier.”
But Stiffy was having none of it. “I don’t want to lie in other men’s blood. My clothes’ll stink. All right, sir, I know we’ll burn them but I’ll still have the smell in my mind. It’ll stay with me till I die. I’ll never be able to smell flowers ever again, not properly, know what I mean. Not roses, nothing like that.”
“Cut it out, Stiffy. Your share of the gold is worth eighty-two million US dollars. That’s worth one hell of a pong.”
Stiffy snapped to attention, saluted. “Beg pardon, sir, but I cannot do it. You know I was brought up as a Boy Scout. Courteous, kind, obedient, smiling, trusty, loyal, helpful, brotherly, thrifty: pure in body and mind, that’s what our patrol banner read. Furthermore, sir, I must tell you that those dead men will have infectious diseases. I already have eczema behind my knees.”
“Stiff, I don’t care about the Boy Scouts. I don’t care about behind your knees. For eighty million bucks you’ll jump in and get your tootsies dirty, you bet you will. Don’t be so goddam sensitive. They’re not going to bite you or breathe all over you, they’re goddam corpses. What’s got into you? For money like that?”
Two men work side by side for a time and there’s always a price to be paid if one of them won’t budge. Stiffy’s price was that the baths at the station that had been lately closed down should be fired up again. He’d scrub the filth off, that’s what he’d do, and then he’d have himself scourged with birch twigs. His strange blue eyes lit up. His buttocks would be of a spectacular whiteness, I knew it. Except for a strip of pink pockmarks up his crack where the fleas had been jostling for the extra warmth. Probably a little rasped where he’d been itching them. A hefty babushka’d lay into his meagre Christlike flesh with a besom and he’d go dancing and leaping and yelling, bollocks flapping...
He wasn’t finished. “I’ll take that bottle of Vladimir that Mr Doig’s got hidden in the water cistern.” He looked at me challengingly, but I thought, Good luck, and said nothing.
That satisfied him and we started to plan the folder of death that I would cause to arrive on the desk of Consul Gray.
“Leave some blanks,” growled Jones. “This isn’t just any old war, this is a war fought between savages in the centre of Russia. Who’d expect the reports to be apple pie?”
That said, he went off to find Smichov, the man who was to take the photographs, and to get the ground spied out. Xenia and I took a horse cab to look for her corset shop again. When I had my way she’d be settling down thousands of miles from Strabinsk but I wasn’t telling her about that now. I was happy to be with her. So long as she wasn’t in one of her Jesus moods, she had a neat, hard mind.
“If every woman could afford a corset, every woman would own one.” That was her philosophy. What woman wouldn’t want to present the best figure possible to the world?
“Look at Krupskaya—where did she spend the first pay cheque Lenin got? Down at the corset shop, you can be sure of it. What have we got here in Strabinsk? Corsetable women— about twelve thousand. Put your mind to work on that, Charlie. Madame Zilberstein had only three hundred. That’s what she grew fat on, three hundred women. She grew enormous. When she sat down she was like a rowing boat upright in the chair. So why do you think I’m mad? I can tell you do from your mouth.”
The cab jolted us over the dusty potholes. Strong black hair bulging out from under her lilac dust scarf, the huge green eyes, the bubbling lips, the downy jawline. Strabinsk was a vile place and her idea rotten. But I was enjoying her independence, her strength—her very presence. I adored it, didn’t want to stop the words coming out of her. And thinking this to myself, plus being inundated by the absolute force of my delight in her, which left me gasping for breath, made me say something that I’d not intended.
Walking her away from the cab, hand in hand, I
said, “Moya dusha, when this is over, I’m going to get you to Odessa. The British Consul... I still have papers proving who I am—the old documents from the expeditions with Goetz. There shouldn’t be a problem. Then—”
“Then? Tell me, Charlinka.”
“Then I’ll marry you.”
That’s how it came out, crudely, not a bit like I’d meant. I gabbled on: “I was thinking . . . if there’s trouble... it’s this, my plan. The Whites aren’t going to win the war. The Bolsheviks have the discipline and what they think of as the just cause—the flame of righteousness and all that. And here’s the point—should anything happen to me, then you, as Mrs. Doig, would be able to get passage on a British ship. Just walk up the gangplank and wave goodbye to Russia. Tough, but at least you’d be safe.”
I raised her hand and kissed her knuckles. “Does it make a man feeble if he loves his woman?”
She looked carefully into every corner of my face. She raked me with that look, cleaned me off down to the bone. She said, “I never thought that I’d receive an offer of marriage from any man. Are you sure that’s what you meant?”
“Yes.”
“Not something connected with Elizaveta, is it?”
Those eyes, I could hide nothing from them. And the truth of the matter was that she was right. Marrying her was my atonement for having killed Elizaveta. The whole thing was for my benefit. The instant the words had started to come out, I’d understood what I was trying to do. I’d taken one life, now I’d be saving one life.
And she’d picked up on it in a flash—had got me confused, made me falter. Beginning to sweat, I said, “Your whole position would be improved. Dramatically.”
She was still looking straight into me. I knew what she was thinking: “That’s not a great line in a proposal of marriage.”
I said, “I’m not a saint and never will be. But I love you. I’ll give you protection. In times like these, that’s what a woman needs most.”
“Love?” That’s what she said, that one word, with a flick of an eyebrow.
Then she put her arm through mine and walked me over to where the cab was waiting. Quite gaily, she said, “You’re an attractive man, Charlinka. But would you be an attractive husband? I have to think about that.”
Thirty-four
WE SLUNK along the rails through the hot evening dust. On our right—to the south—lay the teeming mass of the city, brooding revenge not only on the murderers of the Tsar but on all associated troublemakers—semi-fanatics, sympathisers, waverers, even those who just believed that some adjustment to the system would be beneficial.
Stiffy, Jones and myself, just the three of us. Plus Smichov, whom Jones had arranged to meet where the railway track crossed the lane going up to the burial pits.
A little way past this point was the siding for the brickworks. Its owner had fled. Shmuleyvich was going to lay up there while we were busy.
Smichov was waiting beside the track with his brown leather suitcase and tripod. We got down from the train. Jones introduced him. I passed round a bottle of juniper brandy. We made some jokes. Shmuleyvich departed.
Bang on 7.30 p.m., just as we’d been told, the staccato rattle of machine-gun fire shattered the evening.
“Listen to that! Better than Strauss, better than the best music ever written!” Smichov stood to attention. “God bless the Tsar and his family! God bless the Romanovs forever and ever!”
We waited. Presently there came a few pistol pops—the wounded were being finished off.
A little later the tumbrils creaked into view, three of them, horse-drawn. No black plumes here, no boots backwards in the stirrups, no muffled drums. Blood was dripping between the planks into the dust, that was the tone of this burial parade. The bodies were moving of their own accord as the carts rolled along—in particular the heads of those on the topmost layer, which were wagging and nodding.
A short distance behind was a small black carriage drawn by a white horse. A soldier sat on the bench beside the driver.
“Stupichkin, the prison governor,” said Jones. “Probably has to sign a report to say he’s seen them go into the pit.”
Stupichkin’s guard waved us forward and we stepped into line behind the carts.
Stiffy was sweating like a brook, his cheeks the colour of wallpaper paste. Jones was upright and silent, chewing on something. Smichov was the talkative one among us. By counting the corpses he could see, which was in effect the top layer, and multiplying by the vertical number of layers, he was trying to establish how many Reds had been executed.
Conversationally he remarked, “Look how many horizontal strokes there are in bodies when a pile of them’s lying flat. Two arms and two legs for each to start with. Then the lines that originate from their boots—if they’ve been left with them. Even their hair makes lines. A photographer notices these details— hey, HEY, watch out, that bastard’s still alive!”
It was a man in the second cart who’d chosen this moment to be resurrected. A clenched and bloody fist was rammed into the air. A second or two later—groans, very deep, from the bottom of the scale, as of a cow calving. Tousled hair appeared over the side as he strove to raise himself: bandaged forehead, eyes as blue as gentians, nose, mouth, beard—they appeared in turn, his face streaming blood except for those eyes, which were of so startling a blue that they might have been screwed in by a jeweller.
He hauled himself up. The blood, somebody’s blood, was down his neck and down the front of a once white shirt. Backwards and forwards he swayed, bubbles of blood forming at his mouth as he attempted to speak.
The carts bumped to a halt. The fellow was jolted off balance. He slumped forward over the side of the cart, his body folded at the waist and hanging down—his arms in their white martyr’s shirt, his long dirty brown hair, the loose end of the bandage round his head, all of them pointing at the dust.
Smichov had his tripod up in a tick, I never knew it could be done so fast. He came out from under his black cloth and started shouting, “Yes! Yes! Kiss the cart, whore! Your last kiss before you get to the Devil’s arse.” Running over to the man, he seized him by his hair and started to crash his face into the side of the cart—one, two: one, two, rhythmically. “Watch his teeth fly out, boys! You over there,”—to one of the carters— “get ready for a catch.”
He paused in his rhythm to speak to the wretch. “Have I broken your nose, Mr. Lenin? Pray pardon, for I am but a clumsy boorjoi.” The bloodied face, in which only the eye surrounds were white, which Smichov was holding up by the hair to speak to, suddenly convulsed. A spout of blood flew from his mouth, spattering Smichov’s linen trousers. He jumped back: “You filthy Red traitor... you dirty little sod, you... Look what you’ve done to me.”
The man somehow raised his head. I could see right into his mouth, could see the struggle his tongue was having to get the words out, all its knots and contortions:
“Long live the people of Russia! All power to the Soviets!”
And then, even more extraordinarily, this so-called corpse shook his head and, by pressing his hands flat against the top rail of the cart, started to push himself erect.
Kneeling on the bodies beneath him, he faced me. I had the impression that it was me alone he was speaking to. “Svoboda! Ravenstvo! Bratsvo! Believe nothing else! I shall not die!”
“Oh yes, you will,” cried a soldier, clambering up the mound of slippery corpses.
“My strength is greater than the sun, my words are a library, the force that is within me will never perish...”
Now the soldier was balancing above him, feeling for a foothold. The setting sun was directly behind the soldier. He was in its very centre and thus was turned from a shoddy conscript into a statue of black marble in which no feature of his face was discernible. He stood poised, magnified by the sun. His rifle was at an angle above his head, the butt readied to club the man beneath him. The military cap, the vindictive nose, the thick spraddled legs wound round with puttees, they were abov
e me—then down they came and there commenced the barbaric pounding at the man’s skull and the sounds arising from this, which included not even one small prayer or sigh of regret but consisted solely of thuds ranging from hard to soft and interspersed among them the unceasing and stupid oaths of the soldier.
I looked away. Each blow was terrible. The man must have died immediately. But still the blows rained down. I heard someone retch behind me. Turning I saw Stiffy sitting on the ground with his hands over his ears. Jones—I can’t remember.
But beside me Smichov was egging the soldier on, driving his fist into the palm of his hand. At the end he said to me, “Do you know what the Reds did to that man’s family, in front of his very eyes? If you did, you wouldn’t blame him. No one could.”
The soldier climbed down grinning. The carters returned to their tumbrils. We started off again to the burial pits.
Behind followed Stupichkin in his black box, like a priest.
The flies arrived in their millions. Their noise was unbelievable. A roar, that was how it reached me.
We came to a stinking rivulet coated with a yellow mousse of foam from the brickworks. The carter cracked some grisly joke as we hopped up beside him to save getting our feet wet, but I couldn’t understand his accent. Laughing, he pointed with his whip at the sleek, waterlogged shapes of dead rats drifting beneath the foam as the passage of our wheels stirred it up.
At the top of the bank was one of Strabinsk’s slums. Pyedogs came slinking out from underneath the huts. They were after the human blood, to get their fill of protein. No one made any attempt to keep them away. When the horses began to trot, so did the dogs, their loose, ringwormed dugs jiggling in time to the slapping hoofs. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so disgusting.
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