Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  “Before I get him.”

  “It’s what I’d do if I were Glebov.”

  I said, “I wonder if he has a conscience. Does he ever wake up in the difficult hours of the night and think to himself, I shouldn’t have done that to her?” Then I went down the train to have a word with Shmuleyvich. There were only two ways to get to the centre of Kazan—and I wasn’t going to have us walking.

  He’d just put into a siding for the night and was banking off the fire. I looked round to see what extra protection he might need. We’d fixed up our two machine guns forward of the cab, on either side of the boiler. Kobi and Vaska, the new boy, were going to be firing them. So Shmuley’d be covered from in front. And the wings of our armour-plating should protect him from the side. But I wanted to be certain. I didn’t have a spare Shmuley.

  He said, “Where are we going, boss? Kazan for the gold?”

  “You too?”

  “Small train, big ears,” and he laughed, a terrific rumble that made his stomach quiver. “You’ll need to hurry. The locomen in Strabinsk said Muraviev is after it as well. And the Czechs, to pay their way to Vladivostok. Also—your enemy.”

  This surprised me. “Glebov?”

  “That’s what they were saying. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

  “Especially mine?”

  “Yes. Gold easy to get at, is it, boss?”

  “On barges lying on the Volga. That’s what the Americans tell me. They listen to the Whites’ wireless messages.”

  “If it was me, boss, I’d wait till they’ve put it onto a train and then move the train. Get someone else to do the lifting. That’ll be sore work.”

  “I hear you. But first we have to get into Kazan. How do we do that, Shmuley?”

  “Not in a hurry. There’s only one way in from this side, on the Sarapul line. That’s a one-track railway. We want to have it to ourselves. Follow me? We don’t want to be meeting stuff head-on.”

  “Sure. Once the fighting starts in earnest, there’ll be refugees coming out in their thousands. We’ll park up in a siding while their trains go through.”

  He put his python’s arm around my shoulders. “I’ll get you in, no need to worry about that. But will you get us out? At the end of this I want to be rich and I want to be alive. The wife died on me. I need a mate and it works better if the man has money. Get me? So the big question for me is this: How are you going to get us out with the gold if we get caught between thirty thousand Reds fighting thirty thousand Whites? You a magician, barin Doig?”

  I said I’d figure that out.

  But actually he was asking the wrong question. What he should have asked was how I was going to get Glebov alone for long enough to kill him—and then get out. Get them all out. Right down to Vaska the sixteen-year-old with his fluffy cheeks.

  Jones was at me first thing next morning, he and Stiffy together. “What could he have been thinking of using Anastasia as a keyword? I got it in seven minutes precisely. See here, Charlie, keywords aren’t usually chosen at complete random. They’re almost always things that are on a guy’s mind. ‘Armistice’ or ‘Bolshevik’ would be good examples for right now.”

  I said, “He was turning a knife in my hip joint. You don’t know Glebov like I do.”

  Stiffy opening his mouth to speak, I said, “You didn’t respond, did you? For one thing you’re meant to be dead and for the other the Reds’ll have a range-finder somewhere.”

  “No one likes to have us around,” he said plaintively.

  “Of course not. Wherever you set up your kit, shells will surely follow. Shells or planes, comes to the same thing. So keep your dabby fingers off the sending key. I don’t want another black Fokker—Hey, you smile like that again, Leapforth Jones, and you can run out and switch a set of points over while I shoot at you. It was no fun. Nor for the guys he killed.”

  “They’ve got spies everywhere,” said Jones.

  “Why make it easier for them?”

  I glowered at Stiffy, who was back to twining a lock of hair round his finger. I knew he’d find it hard to resist that sending key. “If your fingers get an itch for something, stick them in your fly.” I bared my teeth like a dog and growled at him.

  Jones said, “There’s something else. ‘Anastasia’ was yesterday. Today we have ‘Elizaveta.’ I thought that’d interest you. Note the repetition again. And the ‘z’—only beginners use a rarity like that. Up to now their keywords have been real snorters. I’ve had to lever them open letter by letter. Here’s an example: the last one they used before ‘Anastasia,’ I found it meant a drawing of a staircase that has an ambiguous perspective—”

  “‘Schröder,’ “ put in Stiffy. “The umlaut was doing duty as a null, but it wasn’t really a null, so the Captain was thrown completely. Very clever.”

  “You see what I mean?” said Jones. “We’re going along with these keywords that have a real sarcastic twist to them, and now they give me a couple of sitters. What’s the story, Charlie? What’s with this Elizaveta? Anastasia was just a tease, you were right there. But this other dame—”

  “Let it go, Jones.”

  “I would, but I have to know whether it’s going to affect my operation. That’s fair, isn’t it? All I get from Joseph are hints. Whenever I press him about the exact reason you’re gunning for Glebov, he dreams up some urgent duty. Urgent, in Russia! So’s my asshole. Whatever it is between you and Glebov, I reckon it’s pretty gruesome. Got to be about money or a woman. Isn’t nothing else in the whole wide world that could fly so far. Am I getting warm here, Charlie? Do I feel a little heat rising ...? OK, you’re taking the Fifth, that’s up to you. But you know, vendettas, sideshows, they mess up everything.”

  I said again for him to let it go. Boltikov entered the room.

  “This Elizaveta—beautiful name. Really gets my balls twitching. Was that the lady in the contest, la belle Russki dame?”

  The smile had gone. His look was as hard as flint, those languid brown eyes of his having shrunk to the size of centavos. “If it’s that personal, like a duel between the two of you—and I’m not forgetting you’re half-Russki yourself and that you guys are a riddle to the rest of us—then I don’t want to get caught in the mesh. Out-of-plan things’ll happen. That’s no way to win a fight.”

  He eyed me like a bull eyes a small dog. No trace of pretty boy Jones now.

  “I’m thinking, Charlie, that maybe something happened to this Elizaveta that where I come from would land a man in gaol for a century. Now is that getting warm or am I baking fucking hot?”

  Smoothly, as if opening a packet of cocktail sticks, I unbuttoned my holster and took out my Luger. He was right across the table from me. I pointed it at the cartilaginous knob at the base of his breastbone—four feet away.

  Stiffy stopped twiddling his hair. The handful of kopeks that Boltikov was jiggling in his pocket lay still.

  The blood had left my face as all the poundage of my love came thundering up from my heart. Hard on its heels was anger that this smiler, whose idea of love would be having the fat girl from next door over the sofa arm once a week, should take it on himself to defame my woman.

  I said to him, “Elizaveta Rykov was my wife for exactly seven days. On the eighth day I was lured out of the house by a trick. By the time I discovered my mistake she had been raped by Glebov and a gang of soldiers. Why? Because she was the daughter of a nobleman, no other reason. Then they tortured her. Don’t think of the worst, think past it. I shot her to put her out of her agony. At present I have only one purpose in my life: to find Glebov and kill him. If you mention her name again, I shall kill you also. With this pistol, the same one that I used on her. You have my word for it, the word of Charlie Doig.”

  But he still held me with his eyes, probing. “So you shot her, huh. I guess she’d have been lying down... Pretty dramatic, snow on the ground and so forth. Yeah, snow, blood all over it, the smoke from the shot... that’s hellish.” His face softened a little. �
��Hellish,” he said again.

  Then briskly, turning over a new leaf, “Charlie, I don’t want to mess with you now or at any time. I’ll tell you straight out what’s bugging me. You’re after Glebov and we’re after the gold. How do we get those two things reconciled? I only want to deal fairly with you.”

  It was the second time he’d used the word. But the fact was that from rich to poor, from dunce to genius, no one in Russia had the smallest interest in fairness, hadn’t even any knowledge of the word. Power, that was the brew in the black bottle. Trample the common man. To hell with fairness. Surely Jones knew enough about the country for that.

  There was a fiction in him, maybe two or three or four.

  Looking directly at him, I said, “Someone here is after something I don’t know about. And that’s too bad for him, cos I’m only making plans for myself and my payroll. Shmuleyvich! In here!”

  When he came I told him to take a no. 22 screwdriver and dismantle the armature of Stiffy’s sending key and bring it back to me. That or break up some of his nice soldering.

  “No!” Stiffy grabbed Shmuleyvich by the arm and held him fast. “It’s my life! It’s given me friends all over the world—a family. Without it I’d be a null. The wireless, it’s who I am.”

  Boltikov growled at Stiffy, “In what way are you necessary to us? Why don’t I just shoot you and take your share of the gold?”

  With an upward, preening, corkscrew movement of his neck, Stiffy said, “I’ll tell you why. Because you want to know the exact date Trotsky’ll attack Kazan, that’s why.”

  Boltikov said, “I’m waiting.”

  Stiffy looked at him with total disdain. “3247813127829311T. The ‘T’ is a null to complete the series of digraphs. I’m not just a secretary taking down shorthand, you know, some stupid little polly.” He made Boltikov a tiny bow, a lovely piece of rudeness.

  Jones said, “It’s the usual checkerboard cipher with the transposition coming from the keyword. Like a Vigenère with reversed alphabets. An altogether better class of cipher than a Beaufort.”

  “That’s shit,” bristled Boltikov.

  “You think so? You think I’m bluffing?”

  “How do you know it’s from Trotsky?”

  “Came from Stavka. His HQ. Can’t be anyone else.”

  “How do you know it’s for attacking Kazan?”

  “Short is always orders. Decipher what Stiffy just told you and you’ll find an abbreviation that stands for ‘Treat this as confirmation of the tactics already discussed.’ The rest is date and time and target coordinates.”

  “Who’s he speaking to?”

  “Kreps. He’s leading another army up from the south... Gee, you’re a quick man on the draw, Mr Boltikov.”

  I sort of shouted at Stiffy, quite a release of breath, “So what the hell day is it in September? I’m not interested in your schoolboy number games.”

  Stiffy asked Jones if he could tell me the date. Jones nodded.

  It was to be 5 September. On that day the Reds were going to pile in with every man they could lay their hands on. Trotsky and his armies were closing in from the west, were attacking the Romanov Bridge even as we spoke. Kreps and the 6th Army’d be the other arm of the pincers.

  I said to Jones, “Was this another Elizaveta message?”

  “No.”

  “So this date isn’t part of their game? They’re not leading us up the garden path?”

  He shook his head. “It’s for real. Stavka wouldn’t play games with Kreps. It’ll be on the night of the 5th because the Whites don’t care for night fighting. The Anastasia and Elizaveta messages are probably being sent by Propaganda Bureau. They put out all the dummies—create false armies, sow suspicion, get the other guys jumpy . . . Mr. Boltikov, mind if I ask you something? Where does the paranoia come from in your countrymen?”

  “In the nation’s milk, from titties.”

  But it wasn’t paranoia that was tapping out my wife’s name. What I was hearing was a whore rattling the curtain rings of her booth and the name of the whore was Glebov. The golden rule: a man is never more easily hunted than when he believes he’s hunting another. A cold tremor rippled from my heart into my arms and legs and down to their very tips.

  Forty-three

  CHIRILINO WAS the place I chose to lie up until the time came. We cruised quietly into the station one evening with men at both machine guns to show we meant business. We needn’t have bothered. The only person who hadn’t got out was the stationmaster.

  His name was Blumkin: short, stout with a chipped front tooth and a gold watch chain as thick as a skipping rope hanging between his waistcoat pockets.

  His story was a sad one the first time we heard it. Every evening he’d take out his stepladder and light the twin rows of oil lamps that stretched the length of the platform. Every hour of every day he expected to hear again the thunder of the TransSiberian expresses and see his lamps set a-swaying by their billowing bow wave. He loved the expresses, he loved the little stopping trains, he loved the ladies in woollen scarves who popped out from town to sell glasses of tea and offer napkincovered baskets of warm piroshkas to passengers who were delayed. Bells, whistles, coded messages on the railway telegraph, locomotives on the potter (columns of sooty smoke like mushrooms in the grey sky), changing the date on his ticket machine, triple-stamping dockets for the shipment of heavy goods, all such matters were his life blood to exactly the same extent that the wireless was Stiffy’s.

  He wasn’t downcast by the fact that we were his first train for over a week. He was one of those people who are on top form throughout the day. He and Jones were like twins, smiling away at each other from the moment dawn broke.

  One particular reason he was so cheerful was that he too had worked out what the fall of Kazan would mean in terms of refugees. The ticket office and both waiting rooms were crammed with everything from blankets to jars of kerosene, not forgetting the Kapral cigarettes that he was going to sell at five kopeks each to these desperate people instead of the usual five kopeks for twenty. When he’d sold three-quarters of his stock, he was going to jump aboard the next train and make a run for America.

  So his story became less sad and I foresaw that his chipped tooth was in line to become golden.

  I got Blumkin to give us one of his sidings so I could observe the refugee trains passing. It’s not every day one hits off a revolution plumb in its spinning eye. Wasn’t I going to sire kids sometime? Wouldn’t they say to me, “Hey, Pa, what did all those escaping princes look like? Were they crying their Russian eyes out, dressed in the family furs, had emeralds up their asses?”

  Blumkin said, “Why be interested by them? They’ll soon be poor or dead.”

  “Damned right they will if they buy anything from you,” I said. Then I got Kobi to persuade him to fill my coal tenders.

  Hearing the roar of the stuff coming down the chute, Jones stuck his nose into my affairs. “What’s all that for?” he asked. “It’ll take us miles past Kazan. Isn’t the idea that we board the gold train and use their coal? Why buy more than you need?”

  Here I became certain that he was either a dope or a fraud. First, I wasn’t paying for the coal. Second, if all that gold, 690 tons of it, left Kazan on a train, everyone in the province’d be after it. There’d be spies hidden in culverts, snipers, bombardiers, army commanders, tarts, lawyers, dentists, jewellers, makers of weighing scales, assaying agents—Christ, there’d be no limit to the number of spoons in the stew if 690 tons of gold got loose. To stay anywhere near such a train would be fatal. Yet Jones hadn’t thought of that?

  I tapped my nose. “All part of the plan, Leapforth.”

  Then I had Shmuley take the train down into our siding, which ran alongside a lake with ducklings (a second brood) strung out like commas behind mamasha, who’d be tomorrow’s dinner if I knew Kobi. Chivvying the ducklings along, lowering its neck and hissing at them, was a swan, compensating for its bad temper by the snow-white elegance of its p
lumage and its stateliness.

  It was like a real Russian summer paradise down there. Stupichkin should have been with me, should have lain down and died there so he didn’t need to look upon any more awfulness. At any moment Chekhov could have strolled out from the shimmering birch trees in his crumpled linen jacket and scuffed brown shoes and said something witty to us. The hand coming from his trouser pocket to take out his notebook would have been hot and moist. Shoving his cap onto the back of his head, he’d have shown his brown hair to be lax with sweat. He’d have leaned against a birch and lit up. Mrs. D. would have come to the door of the galley. Skillet in hand, warm fat dripping onto her apron, she’d have stood there gazing upon him, eyes soft with admiration. In her mind she’d have been murmuring to him, “Come and have a little breakfast with me, dovey.” With a smile he’d have pushed himself upright and shrugged his jacket straight. (That would have been the moment for his witty remark, not earlier.)

  The birds sang softly, the wasps shone with health, the crickets chirruped and the bees were happier than they had been for years now there were no peasants left to steal their honey. In the evening the mosquitoes would be bad but it wasn’t evening yet and next to the lake was a meadow full of grass and bursting white clover for Tornado.

  The ramp of his wagon came down. Out he trotted, the horny old bruiser, with his head up and his big bold eye on full alert. He halted to sound his trumpet. Greetings, girls! went out to the mares of Chirilino and when he had no reply he lowered his head in resignation and strode off in step with Kobi, whose shoulder he rubbed affectionately with his muzzle. Better than hauling the Strabinsk death cart, that’s what my charger was thinking.

  Kobi loosed him in the meadow, slapping his dusty rump.

  I was at the bottom of a telegraph pole chatting to Stiffy, who was up there with his headphones listening to the traffic between Strabinsk and Kazan. We watched Tornado roll, we watched him drench a couple of molehills with a volley of glittering sun-blest piss. Then Stiffy said to me in a most ordinary voice, “Horses are easy to understand. But none of you get me.”