Cold Blood

by James Fleming

  “Well, where is he? Don’t keep me hanging around.”

  The door behind them was opened from the inside—and this time left open. The same bright light poured out. I found I was looking directly into the abbot’s private chantry, at the altar wall and thus at a portrait gallery of their saints, one next to another, a row of halos and garish costumes. To the left, a rood screen plastered with gold leaf. All the trappings of divinity were on display, in which I must include the person I saw at my very first take.

  Who was meant to be seen first.

  Who was seated on the abbot’s throne wearing an evening dress of pink satin and long white gloves.

  Who was idly swinging the leg crossed at her knee, who was tapping the ash off her cigarette onto the silver communion plate—who was the woman I loved.

  She’d been eating caviar off the knife, which she was licking slowly, like a cat. The pot was on the altar table with a silver ladle sticking out of it.

  The guards parted, making a frame for her.

  My heart, what can I say about that poor pained lump? What can I say about the sudden weight in my eyelids, my shoulders, my knees, about the anguish that came flooding up from my lower stomach, about the death of self-esteem, about the sheer pointlessness of living if this was all that was going to happen to me every time I got going?

  “So it was you all along. From when you touched me up in the tram. And there I was, thinking what a lucky chap I was. Bitch.”

  I moved forward. Part of me wished to strangle her. I got my hands ready. I can see them now, out there in front of me, like claws. But another part insisted that too much had passed between us. I knew immediately which was right. My hands fell away, I shook my head.

  I didn’t want to be fair to her. Who had been fair to me? However, we had lived together as man and woman should. She had brought my soul contentment and my body relief. In return I had borne her to safety and made her a promise of freedom. Love had passed between us. It was the right word. Neither of us had been faking it.

  But somehow Glebov had a grip over her. Either he’d seen me at Smolny or his spies had heard I was living in St. Petersburg. So he’d sent her into action. She’d snared me because she had to.

  I squinched up my eyes and examined her face.

  There was no triumph there, no glitter in those green eyes, no malice. What I saw was sadness. She was being forced to act out a role. The bright colour of her dress, the fancy shoes, the cigarette, the pose—none of those belonged to the Xenia I knew. And to have made her sit in the abbot’s throne and use the communion plate as an ashtray—it must have wrung her heart dry to do it.

  I stepped towards her. The guards closed ranks against me. But I’d been up against far worse that night. Imposing on them my height and sheer force of character, I prised the scum apart. They grunted to each other in their wretched dialect but quietened down when they saw I wanted only to speak to her.

  Leaning against the door frame I watched her smoke. We’d been together a year and I’d never seen her even touch one before. She’d rouged her cheeks and used a light tone of lipstick, again things I’d never thought part of her. She was wearing sheer white stockings too—showing them off to me as she waved her dainty foot around. Where there were stockings’d be a garter belt, with pouches for money and hooks for scalps.

  How sorry for her should I feel? How sorry for myself?

  Be realistic, Charlie. Don’t over-consider the lady. Think about getting out of here and think quickly.

  That was what the less exhausted part of my brain said. But the rest of it was sluggish and coarse and saying to me, How come you got cunted again, Charlie?

  I said, “Got a different name now?”

  Of course she didn’t reply, just drew on her cigarette and pouted. She was waiting for Glebov. He’d do the talking for both of them.

  “Frightened, were you? He’s not nice with his women, you know.”

  In a low voice she said, “Thank you for showing me what love is. Thank you for your heart, your honesty, your strength. I would rather have chosen death than this.”

  “Why, that’s good to hear,” I said, wishing to show her the extent of my hurt.

  “God is the only real man in my life. You know that. What I did with my lovers was for my personal pleasure. Except you, Charlinka.”

  So God was in there as well as Glebov. It didn’t surprise me. She’d said her prayers twice daily, undertaken the correct periods of fasting and stood in freezing churches for hours at a time, chanting and bleating with the breath coming out of her mouth as white as manna. Who in their right mind would volunteer for such discomfort?

  Everything in this era was so mixed up when you thought about it, so stood on its head.

  And so unfavourable to me, what with the six animals behind me and some other disadvantages to my situation.

  I said to her, not having moved from the doorpost, “Life’s a spittoon, no question about it.”

  Her eyes shifted. The black jackets rustled. A voice behind me said, “And you, Comrade Doig, are going to have to drink from it.” It came from below my shoulder level because he was such a dwarfish runt.

  Sixty-one

  FIVE FOOT five or a little more. Dark slicked-back hair, going bald on the crown. Pale blue eyes. Tufty, truculent moustache, something of the badger about it.

  The moustache was an obvious difference. Also there was something new in his eyes. Where before they’d been shifty they were now firm, and where there’d been jealousy I saw confidence. Otherwise I’d got in front of me the same Glebov as the man Kobi and I had tossed screaming into the back of a White hospital wagon.

  Or maybe not quite the same. There was his broken leg to be considered.

  “You running again yet?” I said.

  “I even dance,” he said back.

  “No amount of dancing’ll help you get away from me.”

  “But I have my Fokker.” If he hadn’t been some ways shorter than me, he’d have been able to smile down on me. That’s what he was trying to do.

  “You flying it yourself then?”

  “Sometimes. But in general I just give the orders. You must remember who I am.”

  He had a bearskin cloak lined with dark blue cotton draped round his shoulders. Beneath it he was naked except for a red towel round his waist and a pair of loose leather slippers. He’d got here, shot Jones, fixed up his welcome for me, had his men stoke the furnace in the bathhouse—and had been enjoying Xenia, both of them slippery with steam, while I’d been groping up that dank staircase.

  I said, “You’ve been busy.”

  The fat was hanging from him in corrugated rolls of creeping black hair. His bosoms quivered as he chuckled. “Life is always busy for those at the top.”

  We were so close our bodies were almost touching. I thought, This was what lay on my Elizaveta?

  He said jauntily, “You look clapped out, Comrade Charlie. You should model yourself on me. Half an hour in the baths works wonders for a man’s energy. I’m going to need all mine again in a few moments, for my chick. She’s ravenous for my body. All women appreciate a good lover. Seems you were too eager, comrade . . . Doesn’t she look sophisticated smoking through that amber holder! It belonged to royalty, of course. I had quite a few knick-knacks from their rooms.”

  “Including Anastasia?”

  “For three days only. Then she died—the bayonet had gone in too deep. You know, she was fatter than I am—and only seventeen. She’d have been a royal mountain if she’d had the chance. And the other thing I was going to say about the woman you know as Xenia but who is actually Nadya is that she told me you always smell. Isn’t that right, darlingka? And I agree with her. You smell like a loser, Doig.”

  He padded off into the chantry, yanked Xenia out of the abbot’s throne and took it himself. He flapped his hand disparagingly at the portraits of the saints. “So many baubles, such unnecessary riches. No wonder the people detest their priests... Comrade, close th
e door, will you? No point in bewildering these baboons with conversation that’s over their heads . . .” He shouted to them, “Play a game of Riga poker. Recite Lenin’s April Theses. I don’t care. But stay handy—do you hear me?”

  I pulled the door to.

  “Latvians, good for only one thing—killing people.”

  “You’ve gone up in the world. Was rapist, now People’s Commissar.”

  “You never thought it would come to this, did you? You thought the bourgeois principles of your class were certain to prevail, as they always have done in the past. That’s why you came after me with such obstinacy, saying to yourself, Reason must out. But ours is the reason you should have listened to. What you lacked was the intelligence to see that destiny was against you. I myself spotted her coming a long way off and let her give me a ride. A certain breed of man has this gift. Oh yes, I’ve licked and licked and licked. That’s the way to get on, knowing where to lick. I don’t mind talking to you like this. Things are going my way. The fact is that you’re of no importance, a minor figure, like a junior captain in the old army. Luck doesn’t want to know you any more. If I don’t have you killed, someone else soon will.

  “I may call you comrade but I don’t mean it. You’re not one of us. You don’t even have the excuse of being a Jew... Pass me that cigarette, Nadya... This day’s been so good to me... The reason I call you comrade is purely out of habit. We all call each other comrade—like brother. It’s a healthy custom.”

  It was obvious he wanted to talk about himself—and I had nowhere to sit. I stuck my nose out of the door. The Latvians were lounging on the desk playing cards. I told one of them to tip Jones onto the floor and fetch me his chair.

  Anyone stealing my pistol would be shot, I added.

  “Through the stomach,” Glebov yelled. “I’ll have no thieving in my units.”

  The Latvian carrying the chair looked from Glebov to me. I told him to place it opposite Glebov’s throne.

  “Wipe the blood off it before he sits down, animal,” Glebov said to the man. “There’s a rag on the hook over there,” pointing to a stole embroidered in cream and gold.

  Xenia lit another cigarette and lay on her back on the altar. Her shoes stuck up vertically. They were lime green. The colour went better with her pink dress when she was standing.

  Glebov said, “Vladimir Ilyich has decreed that God no longer exists. Therefore all religion ceases to have a meaning except in the context of historical error. Unless an American will pay a good price for these tapestries and so forth, they’ll be cut up and used for blankets in our hospitals. Something like that. It’s not my business.”

  Xenia said dreamily, looking up at the chambered turquoise roof, “Am I your business?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

  “There was a rumour in Strabinsk that the new government intends to nationalise women,” she said. “That’s pure spite. They may be the wives and daughters of the boorjoi but that sort of woman deserves as much respect as the rest of us. It’s we who bring children into the world. We are the future, not you, Prokhor Federovich.”

  “Enough of the lecturing. Leave a man’s work to men.” To me he said, “She’s angry because when she was young she knew nothing about the vinegar douche. A girl called Lili was the result. I made Lili my captive—my pawn, comrade. She was the lever I used to get her mother to enslave you.”

  I looked up sharply, surprised. I said to Xenia, “I did you an injustice.”

  Grinning, Glebov said, “And she trapped you with her body, didn’t she? She’s got an aptitude for that line of work. Haven’t you, woman?”

  She said, “He’s a bastard. They all are. One chink and they rip you open like a can of beetroot. I’ll give you a tip though, Charlie—he’s afraid of spiders. Would you believe it? Tiny little insects, a fraction of his size... So you thought I did it for the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did it for my daughter. I do everything for her. I went to the baths with him for her. I’m wearing this dress for her. Soon I’ll be sucking his stinking cock for her. But the worst thing of all I’ve done for her is to lie on this altar and mock God. May He open His merciful heart and forgive me.” She crossed herself twice. “He’s the vilest man in Russia.”

  “Comrade Trotsky is far worse,” Glebov said. “The most common words in his orders are ‘Shoot them’. Not March or Halt but ‘Shoot them.’ In comparison, I—I am a saint.”

  I laughed at him. I didn’t mind if he shot me for it. Russia was strewn with corpses, its rivers and weirs blocked with them. If death was so commonplace, it had to be easily suffered. I laughed with all the bitterness I could summon, leaning forward in my chair, right into the face of the man who’d ruined my life and now pronounced himself a saint.

  He held up his hand like some Roman emperor. “I and my comrades, Vladimir Ilyich and Lev, we are in the process of changing the world. We are doing this for the benefit of all its peoples. The class system has to be destroyed for that benefit to be released. Therefore this war is taking place. War means necessity. There can be no exceptions, not even for young brides.”

  Was I going mad? Glebov lounging in his bearskin, Xenia rigid on the altar—and these stupid, barbaric assertions—

  I rose, kicking back the chair. Automatically I patted my pistol holster.

  He said, “On the desk out there. Minus its bullets or heads will fall.”

  God, how I detested that knowing grin of his. I eyed his neck. Would the guards hear anything? Would Xenia start howling?

  He said, “That Mongolian youth of yours does all the murdering, not you. You don’t have the experience, so don’t look at me like that. See, I know everything about you. She kept me well informed. No detail was omitted. Because of her daughter... You mustn’t blame her, Doig. You know how it is between women and their children.”

  “I should have killed you.”

  “But you’re weak. When the moment offers itself, you fluff it. They never come again, those moments. But yes, you should have.”

  I’d had him, trussed, in the forest. I could have killed him in one of ten different ways, at my leisure. Then I’d backed down. And this was the consequence: defeat, humiliation, maybe death.

  I said, “Next time there’ll be no mistake.”

  That was what I meant, but in another part of my brain I was thinking, Hang on, Charlie, that’s for the future. The short-term problem is how to improve your situation. I said with a sigh, “You’re right, I am weak. It’s from my mother’s side, her female reserve.”

  “You’ve inherited the aristocrat’s typical ignorance of the rules for survival. Because he’s read a stirring tale in a novel, he thinks he can easily battle through. Of course he does! There he is turning the pages before a good coal fire while upstairs his fattest housemaid is rolling in his bed to get it warm. Such a man believes sincerely that in a contest for existence he can perform as efficiently as a plate-layer on the Siberian railway. That’s rubbish. First, his hands let him down. They’re too soft to chop enough wood to keep the fire going for even one night. Here! Look at mine! Look at the pad on that thumb, how hard it is . . . Then there’s his lungs—servants have done all the running for him. Pouring out his coffee, that’s all he can manage. Maybe a walk in his garden. Thereafter he’s exhausted. The weakness of his body spreads to the mind. It takes hold. He can’t form his words properly. He’s finished. He dies.”

  “So what am I to do?”

  He wagged a finger at me. “That’s a better tone. You’ve stopped speaking through your nose. When I was in Berlin, ‘on leave’ as we exiles called it, I heard people speaking like that everywhere. The effeteness of wealthy European industrialists disgusts me. However, now that you’re prepared to accept that you’re inferior—there, you don’t even bristle when I say that... Bring your chair close to me. Nice and close. There’s something I want to say.”

  I obeyed. I found his knee between mine. He’d just shoved
it there.

  “There are only three of us who matter in Russia today. I count Vladimir Ilyich and the Jew as my absolute comrades— comrades in the most spiritual sense, you understand. We have taken vows, have mingled our blood before witnesses. We have one goal. Nothing can come between us.

  “That said... Well, Vladimir Ilyich is in the capital and the Jew is completely engrossed by his desire to film the capture of this city. No one loves him more than I do but there are times when he goes too far. Stavka is like a caravanserai. All the specialists in Russia are there. Eight men at the wireless sets, two in his private cinema, one in his darkroom waiting for film, another four grinding out tracts on the duplicators—and so on. It’s not right. Action first, then the propaganda. It’s a beaten foe that makes the best believer. Another thing... You know that I have my men everywhere—”

  “And women,” said Xenia in a voice husky from the cigarettes.

  “Trotsky owes his life to me. That man you knew as Jones— he was an American assassin. He was sent to kill Lev because the Americans thought him the most dangerous of us. A complete amateur, of course. It was going to be poison. We found it on him. Lev was going to be poisoned like some sort of vermin.”

  Sixty-two

  HE CONTINUED: “I know the minds of the counter-revolutionary swine as well as a mouse knows its wainscoting. Nothing can be concealed from me. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Wireless telegraphy and the Russian brain are like that—twins!”

  I said, “You’re a big man. I bet you had Jones’s messages unscrambled in—what was the longest one took?”

  “They were all easy. My men watched his train like they watched yours. Watched till you put up your aerial. Then they listened.”

  “And now?”

  I said it encouragingly. Something was on his mind, something prickly, something like a plot. I wanted him to get there soon and to include among the details a safe conduct out of Kazan. I didn’t fancy playing a leading role in Trotsky’s film.