Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  “Xenia’ll be in the monastery. Annushka has volunteered to go swimming.”

  “Annushka?” he said.

  “Shmuley has got familiar with our good doctor. It’s Annushka and Yuri now. One moment there was nothing between them and the next . . . That’s how things happen, whether there’s a war on or not. Anyway, the two largest people on the train turn out to be the strongest swimmers, how’s that?”

  “Sounds like true love.”

  “They’ll be too busy for love.”

  Boltikov, daintily scratching his nostril with his pinky then clearing his throat: “Now—hmm—ha ha—know something, Charlie? That we’re within a rifle shot of the greatest fortune in the world? I’m not suggesting we give up on Glebov. But the thing is—one small barge—do we really have to be so frugal? Listen, if we were to cut the Yanks out of the loop, then it’d be you and I alone as principals. That’d be 330 million dollars more for us. Huh, Charlie? I mean, we’re men, aren’t we, Charlie? To anyone with his full quota of spunk it’s got to be tempting. The whole caboodle. The entirety of one hundred per cent, that’s what I’m referring to.”

  “How’d we get it out of Russia? Then how are we to find a buyer for such a quantity? Think I haven’t thought about it?”

  “You just leave all that to me. You get the stuff and I’ll deal with the rest.”

  “Get through this rail block first, shall we?” I said.

  “One thing at a time,” he said, mimicking me.

  Shmuley tooted twice. It was my signal. Slowly, in an appeasing way, he brought the train to a halt about fifty yards in front of the barrier of red lamps strung across the rails.

  I said to Boltikov, “You can pray they haven’t torn any of the track up. On your knees. Proper praying.”

  Then I opened the carriage door and dropped onto the clinker—stayed there crouching, waiting for the challenge.

  The sky and the clouds still had the same queer violet tinge, which was even reflected onto the rails at my feet. Because the shot was late in coming, I had time to notice that. Plus the smoke drifting across the sky from the burning warehouses.

  The sentry must have been uncertain what he’d seen. His bullet plashed against a rail some distance away and went whining into the night.

  “Friend,” I shouted, thickening my Estonian accent. “Comrades escaped from Strabinsk with stores—food and ammunition. Don’t shoot.”

  Now I could see him, a boy with a rifle at his shoulder and his head too high to aim it properly: looking at where he wanted the bullet to go rather than looking down the sights. “I’m going to walk slowly towards you. Please fetch a comrade of the officer type.”

  I walked with my hands as high as they’d go. It was just dark enough to have stumbled over a shovel or something and got myself shot. I poked holes in the sky and approached him gently.

  Below me, along the wharf area of the riverside, the gunfire was heavy. Nothing seemed to be happening elsewhere, only down at the river. Right now the gold was being unloaded from the barges. The Czechs would have occupied fixed positions in the warehouses alongside the wharves so they could give cover during the operation. When the gold train had left, they’d drop back, abandon the city and follow in their own trains. Meanwhile the Reds’d be trying to worry them out of their positions before they were prepared to leave, that was how I read it.

  In front of me there was a flurry of movement. The sentry had got an officer down from one of the lorries parked on the crossing. The two of them were waiting.

  I could tell from his accent that the officer was one of those who’d been making no headway in the Tsarist army and had turned their coats. He’d be worse than a Bolshevik if he rumbled me.

  But it was all right, he only wanted to get back to sleep.

  He rubbed his chin and yawned. “Suppose I’d better inspect your lot, though God knows we’d take help from the Devil if it included ammunition. Make your driver a signal to come in. I’m not walking all the way down there.”

  It’d been Joseph’s idea to tie a couple of crossed red flags to the front of the train. The officer liked that. He had the sentry shine his lantern over our propaganda pictures and liked them too. He liked Mrs. D.’s madeleines even though they had no coconut on them. Best of all was the tumbler of vodka.

  Tornado whinnied eerily within his wagon.

  I shouted, “Kobi, how often have I told you, keep the horses quiet when we halt. You’re just telling the enemy there’s a train-load of horse reinforcements arriving, that’s all you’re doing.” I thumped the wagon with my fist. “Hold still, damn you.”

  The officer scratched himself. “All horses?”

  “Yes, Comrade Excellency.”

  “Pass. I just want the rest of my sleep. Can I bunk in one of these wagons of yours? No, best not to try it. Might get nabbed by that swine Piatnitsky. He’d have me flogged, wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  Joseph offered the officer another slug. Shoving his tumbler forward, he said, “Coal tenders as well, I see. They’ll be useful. Go on down the track for a couple of miles and you’ll come to Stavka—headquarters. You’ll find Comrade Trotsky’s train at the junction with the westbound line. He’ll tell you what to do.”

  “Fine fellow, Comrade Trotsky!”

  “Fine, fine man. Dedicated. Wholly without scruple. That’s how we want our leaders. No namby-pamby stuff for us, eh!”

  “That’s right! Men of steel, men like Comrade Prodt!” I said, and when I saw the blank expression on his face—“or Glebov, whichever name he’s using now. Muraviev’s men are as afraid of him as they are of Comrade Trotsky.”

  “Ah yes, People’s Commissar Glebov! The stories one hears about that fellow! Enough to make one’s hair curl!”

  The violet of the sky seemed to have got into his eyes and made them weird, as if he had rabies. But it was only the sentry playing with the lantern, which was one of those with coloured slides—white, green and orange. “Look, Comrade whatever your name is, just get on down to Stavka and report there. I’ll send this boy with you in case you meet another blockade.”

  The lad unshouldered his rifle and climbed into the cab. Shmuleyvich caught my eye and nodded. Then he showed him the wire to sound the whistle and had him give a toot-toot for the lorries to get themselves shifted off the crossing. Nice touch that by Shmuley, giving him one last treat.

  We glided down the glinting rails between rectangular wooden houses, vegetable gardens, small horse pastures and sheds for a milking cow. The sky was at a standstill, scarcely breathing. I went in to see how Xenia was. The clock showed half past two. We had four hours in hand.

  Forty-nine

  BELOW AND in front of us was the Volga, wide enough to take an entire fleet steaming abreast. In that strange light it was gleaming like a huge strip of salmon-coloured tin.

  At a sharp angle on our left was the Zilantov Monastery. The way the railway line was curving round, the closest we’d get to it would be at the back, at the foot of its hill. We dawdled along until we came to its private siding. I switched the points to get us in and switched them back afterwards. Then I sent Kobi to reconnoitre the track up to the monastery.

  The Bolshevik boy soldier was shitting himself. As soon as Shmuley and I had started to talk he’d have known what was coming. I felt sorry for him, ridiculously sorry. I said to him, “It’s the luck of the draw, as it was for my wife.” Shmuley let him go and as he scrambled down the ladder from the cab I shot him from above, through the top of the head. We took him by the ends and lugged him into the bushes. There was no weight to him, must have had worms.

  Anyone who thinks that this civil war of ours had any element of chivalry needs his brain hosed out. It was an affair so purely Russian that when other nations attempted to intervene, they retired, baffled. Being for our purposes and ours alone, it reflected on the one hand our national temperament and on the other our history. The first ensured that it would be disorganised and provincial and the second that
it would be marked by instances of unspeakable viciousness, so cruel as to fall into the realm of medical experimentation or even vivisection in some cases. I’m not referring directly to the fate of Elizaveta, though obviously hers is one such example.

  What’s it like to fight in a war when so terrible a thing can happen to someone’s wife? Or where a prisoner risks being fed head first into the firebox of a locomotive, as happened to General Staklo? I’ll tell you. It means that when one’s skin depends on killing a man promptly, one does it, as I did that boy at the foot of the Zilantov Monastery. He wasn’t old enough to have seduced his sister or shot a policeman. Maybe he’d never even got round to stealing apples. Morally, he’d done nothing whatsoever to deserve his death. Yet he had to die, because had he lived he could have compromised my plans—and then I would have died.

  God’s will is the only answer. One cannot blame history for everything.

  But who am I to talk about morals? By others’ standards I’m the most despicable creature alive. I’ve seen the revulsion in the eyes of people who know what I did. But I don’t really understand what is meant by the word “morals”—that is, I don’t understand its precise meaning, one that can be applied at any time on any day without having a dictionary in one’s hand. I ask myself, What’s the point of having a word that only fifty people in the world completely and thoroughly understand without arguing? I didn’t need a grounding in morals to see that she was in agony, that her body, her mind, her very life, were all of them ruined. Nor did morals have any relevance to what happened next—to what I did. Any half-decent man would have done the same.

  Xenia informs me that my vocabulary is stocked only with imperatives and the selfish words like must, me and ought. I say, What do you expect? The fact is that they come to me like the most faithful of dogs. I don’t even have to whistle: they’re there all the time and have been since my father died of the plague and left me and my mother with a minus sum in everything that matters for modern living.

  Only Elizaveta was capable of tempering my selfishness.

  Her death has intensified my feelings of againstness. Inevitably so when daily I have to consider the rawest of all our words, which is survival. My grandparents on both sides would have had no concept of it. The closest the Doigs would have got to it was rubbing along, which would have been second nature to them. Until my mother’s generation, the Rykovs were wealthy enough to be immune.

  I now see that survival is too lofty an idea for the bourgeois. It’s only when travelling in the bilges that one can perceive with total clarity what the alternative is.

  Bread is survival. I’d rather have bread than morals.

  That boy—the look on his face moments before I shot him. He knew he was doomed, yet hadn’t there been a residue of hope in that quick lick of his lips as he decided to try escaping down the ladder? Some tiny notion of survival?

  Or was it my fancy? Was I trying to make out I’d given him a chance?

  I said sorry to him again, I said it twice.

  Then I went to the compartment to tell Xenia that I was leaving her in the monastery till I’d finished. She was on her knees, praying—had been crying. I said, “No time for that,” raising her and kissing the tip of her nose.

  “What was that shot for?” she said, knowing very well what the answer would be.

  “The boy we picked up from those Reds—our safe conduct to Stavka.”

  “Did you have to?”

  “It was him or us. That means you as well.”

  It wasn’t the first death she’d been close to. Maybe it was the boy’s age that was affecting her.

  She said, “I saw his soul going up to Heaven wrapped in a grey cloth—like a bubble released from the floor of the ocean. I heard the shot—then I saw him, split seconds afterwards.”

  She had her case packed. She was good like that. I picked it up. She said, “Charlinka, do you believe you’re going to meet Elizaveta when you die?”

  I thought I knew where she was heading, that she’d been dwelling on her position as my future wife and was jealous of Lizochka and my love for her.

  I said jocularly, “Are you afraid you’re going to be the wife who didn’t make it to Heaven?”

  She gave me a confused look. She disapproved of my attitude to religious matters though still acknowledging the advantages of being married to me. That was how I interpreted it.

  We went along to the dining car where everyone except for Shmuley was gathered, all in Red Army uniforms. Mrs. D. pulled the hem of her skirt up to show me her bathing costume. Strong legs, getting stronger as they rose, well able to sustain Shmuley.

  “Black was the only colour my mother allowed me,” she said. “None of us could have guessed how important red would become.”

  I said it looked fine.

  “This OK too?” She shook a lilac bathing cap at me.

  “Yes, but black your face and arms. Engine grease or soot from the stove, get Shmuley to do the same. Kobi?”

  He’d been quiet of late, there being no demand for heroics until now. He was leaning against the door to the galley, his face as cruel as a cat’s. I asked him about the track to the monastery. He said, “There were two men guarding it. I cut their throats. Neither was in uniform. Impossible to say which side they were on.”

  “Tornado?”

  “Look outside. But the lady’ll have to ride him astride, legs apart. There’s no woman’s saddle for her.”

  Beside me Xenia drew in her breath sharply. It hadn’t occurred to me that my little shopkeeper might never have been on a horse before. “Just this once, no distance to speak of,” I said to her. To Kobi, “Where’s the Rykov flag, the one we brought from the palace?”

  “In the same place it always was,” he replied, a little nettlesome.

  I checked with Jones that the wireless van was running properly.

  Stiffy said, Did I have any further duties for him, by which he meant sending out messages but not wanting to say as much in case the women thought about black Fokkers homing in on us and got jumpy. Yes, I said, the most important one of the lot. He blew on his fingers and did a little exercise with them as if preparing to play the piano.

  All that remained was the armoured car and even as the thought crossed my mind, I heard a great rumble as Shmuley took it down the wooden ramp to the platform.

  I said to my people, “Got everything? If things go right, we won’t be seeing the train again.”

  They were silent at this, thinking about the alternatives, about how the hell I was going to get them out of Kazan.

  Fifty

  THE HILL rose above us, on top of it the monastery within its battlemented walls, the domes of its churches robed not in their usual nocturnal shimmer but in that violet colour that had been with us since Chirilino. Then it had been something of meteorological interest. Now it was sinister, even a portent.

  Xenia looked up at the monastery. She looked up at Tornado. She looked at me. “I refuse.”

  I said, “You’ll be riding pillion behind Kobi. All you’ve got to do is hang on. There’s the track. There’s the monastery. Half a mile max.”

  One would have said there were no bones to Kobi, just old tanned leather, supple as the wind. When on horseback he became part of a horse. They loved him. Even as I was pondering over Xenia’s little rebellion, Tornado turned his head to Kobi and snuffled among his clothes—for food, reassurance, or maybe hinting at a need for orders. Kobi spread his fingers round Tornado’s muzzle. The horse and the hand made love to each other as Kobi waited for my command and Xenia stared up at the monastery.

  She began to say something—pugnacious by the way she set her mouth.

  I nodded to Kobi. In an instant he had one hand gripping her coat collar and the other cupping her ankle and had flipped her onto Tornado’s back. Squealing and terrified, she clung to the reins, to his neck, his mane, to anything.

  “Don’t look down,” I said to her cheerfully.

  Kobi said, “Sh
e’s OK. She’s that frightened she won’t dare try moving.”

  But she did. Gingerly getting herself upright—but not letting go of a thing—she yelled at me, “Why don’t I get to ride in the car like any other woman would?”

  I said what was true, that Stiffy and Jones didn’t want a woman in the wireless van. No offence but that’s the way it always was in the armed services, the presence of women being liable to lead to a loss of concentration. I myself would be going in advance in the armoured car with Boltikov, to force our way into the monastery. “It could be dangerous,” I said. “There’s no knowing if the Reds aren’t already in there. And if they are... well, my little peach, I’m just not going to let you do it.”

  “So how’s Annushka getting to the river? You’re going to make her ride horseback as well?” Her dander was up. She was enjoying looking down on me, which was certainly a change. “And on the way back?”

  That last bit was getting too clever. I said, “Don’t blow your knickers off, lady. Everything’ll work out fine for Annushka . . . Kobi, if you hear nothing, follow in five minutes. Mrs. D., Shmuley, fit yourselves into the armoured car. Boltikov’ll sneak you down to the river after we’ve taken the monastery.”

  “Yeah, first let’s beat up some monks, get our eye in,” Boltikov said to Kobi.

  “Joseph, you stay with Stiffy. When he’s finished transmitting I want you to help him start dismantling the wireless. We won’t be taking the van with us. Leapforth, you come with them as far as the monastery. You’re going to be Xenia’s bodyguard while I deal with Glebov.”

  He smiled. I’d have needed to be a decrypt expert myself to have made anything of that smile.

  I went on, “Remember, everyone, darkness is our friend. We need to be out by dawn and not a second later. Any questions?”

  “Well?” said Stiffy. “What about it then?”

  I realised I’d failed to give him what was crucial—the last message for Glebov. So I did that, stuffed it crumpled into his hand and ran to the armoured car for I was in a hurry now that I’d reminded myself about the dawn deadline.