Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  Fifty-two

  STIFFY CALLED to me from the wireless van. He and Joseph were considering how easy it’d be to remove the wireless from its baseplate, whether in fact it’d be possible.

  I asked him if he could still transmit. He said, Had I gone crazy, with the Reds just round the corner? I took him by the nape of his neck, squashed him into his chair and turned the switch to Send.

  “LOBACHEVSKY MEETING HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE SO NO MONKEY BUSINESS. Send it and don’t argue.”

  Stiffy said, “Pardon me, but would a man with Glebov’s command of English understand ‘monkey business’?”

  “He knows what a monkey is. Just do it. I’m tired of being thwarted.”

  When he’d finished, I had him unscrew the armature and give me the sending key. I said that when I came back for the girl, I’d be in a hurry. He and Joseph were to follow me in the van, to stick tight up my arse or they’d get lost and then what would happen to them—“Eh, Stiffy, eh? What’ll the Reds do to old ginger-knob from Bristol, which name they know only in connection with the grandest hotels in Europe?”

  This I said glaring at him from close range. I was fairly certain that somewhere among all his cardboard boxes and tins of odds and ends would be a spare sending key, that, if he wished, he could be up and running again within seconds. But I wanted absolute radio silence from now on. I was going to enforce obedience one way or another.

  He agreed, Joseph being my witness and as a Russian understanding everything about intimidation.

  Boltikov came roaring up to the monastery having delivered Shmuley and Mrs. D. Kobi stuck his head out of his turret, laughing, so I knew there’d been fighting. He shouted, “Vaska’s had it.” I saw that the machine gun in the right-hand turret was somehow lolling. I thought to myself, That’s going to be awkward dragging his corpse out, but thank God, he’d fallen on the field of battle—where Boltikov had also been wounded, in the arm. He was steering with one hand, the armoured car bouncing off the topside bank as if he were drunk.

  I shouted to Joseph, “Zhivo, tea for them both,” and while this was happening learned that Shmuley and Mrs. D. had been set down close to the river and that the last few barges were being unloaded in the godown. A derrick was hoisting the cases of bullion out of the hold and swaying them straight into the rail wagons alongside. The barges were being taken out of the godown as they were emptied and anchored in the river. There was a whole row of them, Boltikov said, bristling with weapons in case Trotsky’s torpedo boats tried anything.

  “Christ,” he said, as Joseph handed him his tea, “you can do better than that. Bring me the Vladimir. If the monks haven’t got a reserve of it somewhere I’ll chew my cock off.”

  I said to him, “No sign of that submarine they were talking about in Strabinsk?”

  He said, “Not even a Bolshevik dickhead’s going to sink the gold. Think of fishing it up again, brick by brick. However... a submarine on the Volga . . . well now . . . we should think about that, Charlie.”

  I said, “How many barges still to be unloaded?”

  “Three at most. From where I dropped Mrs. D. and Shmuley, I could see through the godown from one end to the other. There are two wharves, each with its own railway line.”

  “Only one railway is shown on Jones’s map,” I said.

  “They become one a few hundred yards from the godown. The reason they have two is so they can load and unload from two wharves at the same time. But they’re only using one wharf for the gold.”

  “So only one of the lines is being used?”

  “Correct.”

  “We could capture all three barges?”

  “That’d be sixty tons. Enough to die for.”

  I said it looked like he almost had, nodding at his arm.

  Pinked only, he said, and told me how. They’d met a White patrol—it being no-man’s-land down there—and Vaska had forgotten he was in a Red uniform. He’d leaned out of the turret to greet one of the patrol, thinking he recognised his brother. That had been the end of him, just like that. In his death throes he’d jackknifed out of the turret and come slithering down the bonnet. He, Boltikov, had—that selfsame instant, no joking— changed down a gear to get the hell out. Whoosh! had come Vaska’s bloody corpse clatter-bang past his head. Instinctively he’d bobbed to one side. It had saved his life. If he hadn’t, the shot would have hit him slap in the chest.

  “Luck’s running along beside me,” he said, and gestured as if patting the head of a dog.

  “What are you waiting for, Doig?” shouted Kobi from his turret. “He can fill himself with drink afterwards.” He traversed his machine gun through its full horizontal range of 240 degrees, going “bup-bup-bup-bup” like a child.

  I wriggled into Vaska’s turret. Boltikov waved Joseph away. He was going to keep the Vladimir bottle with him, keep it under close supervision.

  As we rattled down the hill, I bowed my head:

  “Father in Heaven, Lord of my life this night, look after me. Preserve me from the bombs, bullets, cannon and bayonets of my enemies, from all their shit. Preserve especially my cock. Allow me to come through it in one good working piece. Bring Glebov into my power. Spare my people. Keep the pigs away from my woman. This is the prayer of Charlie Doig with his eyes shut. He knows he has sinned the full roster.”

  Coming out of the monastery gates at the bottom of the hill, I beat on the outside until Boltikov stopped. I’d forgotten to check the dynamite. Yes, he shouted back, the box was under his seat, the Bickford cord all over the place as usual, like clothes line.

  What about the signal cartridges for Shmuley and Mrs. D.?

  “Do you take me for a child?” he yelled. “Yellow, yellow, white, all lying here in the right order. Have a look for yourself.”

  Craning my neck I saw them, cartridges as thick as Bologna sausages. I said, “See you don’t get them wet. That paper’ll swell if you do and they won’t fit in the breach.”

  By way of a reply he farted, a tinny blast within that car.

  I said, “Lay off the Vladimir. Better still, chuck the bottle out.”

  He laughed at me, but he drove down to the docks as I’d instructed, warily, not rushing it, so that it would appear to any onlooker as though we’d conquered the place and were on a tour of inspection.

  Fifty-three

  STIFFY HAD told me the latest: the Whites held the docks and the surrounding warehouses. The Czechs, their allies, held all the southern railway system up to the point where they’d run out of men. The northern section of the railway, where we’d entered Kazan, had been the centre of the thrust by the 3rd and 4th Red Armies. These men were pushing south all the time, palpating the Whites at every point, probing for weak flesh.

  “Good luck, sir, that’s what I say. Good luck to us all, come to that,” Stiffy had said nervously.

  The key to the gold was the railway. Ownership of one was useless without control of the other. And the key to the railway was the position of the locomotive that was to haul out the laden wagons. It had to be waiting there with steam up or what the Whites were doing was pointless.

  Wholly in doubt was the disposition of the forces around this locomotive. It was here, I guessed, that the White and Czech command structure would be at its weakest. The Whites had the docks, the Czechs had the railway. So who’d be responsible for the actual point at which the two met— at the locomotive?

  There’d be tension. The Whites would be afraid that they’d load up the railway wagons only for the Czechs to make off with the gold. The Czechs would be blaming the Whites for not unshipping the gold quickly enough. On the one side would be men too watchful to function and on the other side men shouting, “Hurry, you bastards!”

  Were I Trotsky, that would be the point at which I’d drive in a wedge and work it round, harassing and worrying this jealous, tender junction. It was the obvious place to attack.

  Perhaps he’d be there himself: have donned his trademark greatcoat and wise-owl spectacle
s, emerged from his personal train with his hair standing on end as per the photos, and gone to gloat. He’d be in the shadows. A spare, vicious figure. Five foot seven, 150 pounds of bitterness and spite. He’d think himself invisible. But his spectacles would be glinting red from the flames, the explosions and the gouts of blood that’d start flying when I got going. I’d recognise him all right, Mr. Shitsky.

  “Doig,” I’d say, arriving from behind his shoulder and offering the simplest introduction. “Your chum Glebov raped my wife, he and his gang.”

  “What of it?”

  “You dare say that, ‘What of it’?”

  “They were justified on account of their poor allocation by history. Women must learn about the necessity of class warfare as well as men. They must be educated in reality. The days of the Smolny dancing classes are over.”

  He’d look me over with contempt, not knowing that in my hand, in my pocket, in my heart’s most absolute intention, was Kobi’s Mongolian stabbing knife.

  He’d say, “I know you. You were at Smolny on that historic night, you were the mushroom seller. Oi! You men over there! Arrest Charlie Doig, the notorious criminal and descendant of latifundists. The usual bourgeois-liberal tendencies are at work within him like termites. Let us hasten the process of disintegration. Put him in a space vehicle and let science look after him. Up there amid the ice fields and meteorites and the graves of his obsolete gods.”

  “You value your ideas too highly,” I’d cry, and whipping out Kobi’s knife I’d have his scalp off in one swift and gleaming motion and be tossing it, hairy and dripping, with his smartass eyes hanging down like buttons on a thread, to his dog, probably a German shepherd. All men of history have been dog lovers and most of these very same men have also been unprincipled liars and self-enrichers, if not psychopaths. Starving, the disloyal carnivore would gulp down its master’s scalp in a oner. Then it would start to howl in terror and Trotsky’s eyeballs would come pinging out of its anus boiling over with all sorts of clever-dick arguments about the inalienable right of syphilitic Bolshevik soldiers to rape women.

  Yes, I’d do for Trotsky as well as Glebov and then I’d go into exile. It’d be heigh-ho for the good life in Chicago, not having to wonder every minute if my woman was still alive, sinking a beer when I felt like it in one of those steep-staired cellars where talk could be had with normal people like the salts from the days of windjammers and harpooners who’d been towed for weeks in their rowboat by a Leviathan—

  It was on the good ship Lockjaw,

  Well nigh a fortnight out of port,

  Our engines dead, the sea a-tremble,

  And lifelong water running short,

  That V., our luscious commodore,

  Laid aside her snow-white snort,

  And said, “So I shall be our SOS,”

  And stripping off her naval dress,

  Her sword, her pants and epaulettes,

  She angled nude across the shrouds,

  Angelic imprint on the clouds...

  Boltikov shouted up that he’d heard it all before, when I was in my cups, the entire performance. Was I going crazy? Was it all too much for me? Should he pass the Vladimir?

  I said it must be the strain of keeping the show on the road, meaning drunks like him. Why didn’t he and Kobi sing something to keep me awake?

  “From Don Carlos?” he shouted back. “That fantastic aria— it was Chaliapin at his best—you remember, the night that Lenin struck—”

  I said No, in case the Reds heard him—which was ludicrous since we were five tons of metal bouncing over cobbles, but it was what I said. Then, “Do that new one of Lenin’s, the Internationale,” I said. “It’ll make a good impression if things go wrong.”

  But he and Kobi couldn’t bring themselves to do anything so disgusting, even though they were wearing Bolshevik uniforms. The only tune we all knew was “God Save the Tsar” so that was what we sang as we rumbled through the ancient Admiralty Quarter.

  We were in the eye of the storm. Not much of life was in evidence. A couple of looters, then nothing more until a White cadet officer jumped out at a street corner and levelled his pistol at us. A burst from Kobi’s Maxim did for that show of courage, the youth spinning round and his military cap flying off like a discus. Rounding the corner, we came across his patrol running for their lives. Kobi wanted to pepper them even though they posed no threat to us. He’d no idea of right and wrong. Killing was his pleasure. If he could, he would. But here there was nothing to be gained. He’d already shot the officer and by doing so had put our credentials on a proper footing if any Reds were around.

  I shouted over to him, “You’ll have your fun later.”

  Boltikov teased the cork from the Vladimir bottle with his teeth and started in on Don Carlos. I leaned down, grabbed the bottle and chucked it over my shoulder, in among the spare wheels and tyre levers.

  “Forget the bloody opera, just get going, lickety-split—you see the fire-watching tower over there?”

  My head had suddenly cleared—it was the incompatibility of Verdi and Karl Marx. I was no longer thinking of being dead or alive by dawn but alive only.

  Alive, alive O!

  And the O was the oxygen that was a light blue streak in front of us, the flare still gleaming from the top of the firewatching tower to tell everyone, in peace and war, that the building was too useful to be destroyed. Earlier in the night the Reds had captured it. The last Stiffy had heard it was still in their hands. If the Whites had regained it or the Czechs, we were cooked, turning up as we were in full Bolshevik regalia.

  “Hang on,” shouted Boltikov, and with his bad arm dangling, one-handedly dropped down a gear, wrenched the wheel over and slewed our armoured car to a halt beside a brazier.

  I made out the dull shapes of five men sitting round on wooden warehousing cases. They could have belonged to any of the armies.

  Pulling down the peak of my colonel’s cap, I leaned on the edge of the turret and regarded them in silence. It was a good feeling to be holding them down by my eye alone. I said in a low voice, “What the fuck are you doing on your butts? Who’s in charge?”

  This man idled out of the gloom, smoking. A Czech would never have behaved so casually, would have shot at me on the spot. So now the odds were fifty–fifty, Red or White.

  Hands on hips, insolently, he began to walk round the car. “What name have you given to this heap of yours?” he said, not removing his cigarette. Its paper was stuck to his lower lip. The cigarette’s glowing end bobbled as he spoke.

  “Chort,” I said—the Devil—breathing again, for he was clearly a Red.

  “Indeed, Chort is it,” he said, coming round to below my turret and looking truculently at my colonel’s tabs.

  Swifter than a swallow at flies, I plucked the cigarette off his lip. “Open,” I commanded. And when he did so, as I knew he would on account of Bolshevik discipline, I popped the cigarette into his mouth, and catching and twisting his lips, held him fast. His mouth was vertical, like that of a child who’d suffered from the midwife’s forceps.

  “Listen, comrade, I am Colonel Sepp of the Estonian Mechanised Regiment. I’ve fought over one thousand miles to give succour to the proletariat of Kazan. That man up there, who’d shoot you as soon as spit, has come from Mongolia. We are the world, yes, the fucking great future, the unquenchable spirit of the working classes. Who are you? A nasty, mannerless oaf. Unless you’re looking for a bullet, you’ll one, respect an officer’s uniform, and two, tell me when you had the last report from the tower.” I gave his lip another hitch to encourage him.

  A second man came out of the shadows. He spoke his name fawningly, but it could have been anything as he had a thick peasant’s accent and the engine was still running.

  Kobi covered me as I got out of the car. I said, “Where’s your officer? Is that him up the tower?”

  When the fellow said it was, I clicked my fingers and held out my hand for the field telephone. There had to be one. T
hese squaddies were just the messengers. The man at the top of the tower’d phone down some shift in the White position and off one of them would trot to Stavka.

  It was answered immediately. I expect the observer had got lonely after his initial excitement up there, looking out over the docks and the shooting.

  “Sepp, commanding the Estonian Mechanised Regiment. New orders from Stavka, to be delivered in person. Stay at your post. My man will bring them up.”

  Kobi had pulled down the lid of his turret. I could see his flat Mongolian face peering at me through the slit. I said, “Get out. This is your job.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” his voice disembodied and metallic, like Boltikov’s fart.

  Leaning against the hull of my armoured car—Chort, the Devil, good name for it—and him standing in front of me rather sloppily, I said, “Tell Boltikov what’s happening. Say he can blow these men to pieces any time he feels like it.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  I called the messengers over, got them standing in front of me, smouldering, eager to pick a fight. I said to the man whose lip I’d had, “Look, comrade, rank matters. Because I’ve never feared death and have positive ions between my ears, I’m a colonel. Because I’m a colonel I command an armoured car with two 7.62mm Maxims—water-cooled, six thousand rounds apiece. But you just have popguns and a couple of rounds each. Think about the difference before you try anything.”

  Kobi—hell, can those Asian guys be impassive. I took a paper from my inside pocket and handed it to him.

  “There’s the orders, take them to the top and report back to me.” I pointed him at the metal ladder.

  He said, “He’s the only man up there, is he, Colonel?”

  His dark eyes flickered. He was trying me. OK, Kobi, but don’t overdo it.

  “Yes, the only one. Off you go, quickly now, man.”

  He made me a deliberately cockeyed salute. I stepped forward and gripped him by the slack of his coat. There was no need to be saucy, no advantage to be gained of any sort. I stuffed my face into his—eyes popping, hissing, spattering him: “For Christ’s sake get up there and bowstring the bastard. Then look round and see what’s happening.”