The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve acquired a certain prescience over the years.’

  No one quite knew what those years had entailed. But as he had been in the top echelon of British Intelligence it was safe to assume that he had blown great holes through many Western spy networks.

  But he doesn’t know what I know. The knowledge gave Calder an edge over the enigma that was Austen Dalby; it also scared him. He was about to look over his shoulder again when Dalby, gripping his arm, said: ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Why would they want to follow me?’

  ‘You would know b … better than me. After all, you’re from another generation of … let us say idealists. Perhaps you know secrets to which I couldn’t possibly have had access.’

  Did he – could he – know?

  Calder directed the conversation into safer waters. ‘Idealists? A cosy euphemism.’

  ‘Then how would you describe us? Traitors?’

  ‘There isn’t a tag,’ Calder said. ‘We merely followed our convictions. We had our own sets of values but they weren’t necessarily idealistic.’

  ‘Values … you make Moscow sound very different from London or New York. Is it so different?’

  ‘It’s different all right,’ Calder said. He half-turned his head with exaggerated nonchalance. The crow-like figure was alone on the avenue. Perhaps he was just a lone walker – parks could be the most desolate places in the world.

  ‘Mmmmm. Outwardly, perhaps, but what about the equation?’

  Always the equation. Vodka in the Soviet Union versus drugs in the West. Scarcities versus surfeits. Spartan flats versus chic apartments. Full employment versus unemployment ….

  Dalby who, like most defectors, tilted the equation in Moscow’s favour, said: ‘Here a police state, in the West freedom. Such freedom. A g …gutter press that incites violence, encourages promiscuity. A political system hellbent on self-destruction. I sometimes wonder which is the CIA’s greatest enemy, the KGB or Congress.’

  When they reached the birch trees and the silence made conspirators out of them Dalby said: ‘All right, out with it. Kreiber?’

  ‘He looked so … puzzled. Even in death he seemed to be saying, “Now what the hell was that about?”’

  ‘I should imagine everyone thinks that before they meet their maker, defectors, priests, gangsters.’

  ‘I doubt whether they ask themselves if they’ve wasted their lives by taking a wrong turning when they were too young to understand.’

  ‘Don’t they? I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’ Ice-sheathed twigs slithered together like busy knitting-needles. ‘But that isn’t what you really want to talk about, is it?’

  Calder said abruptly: ‘Do you figure it was an accident?’

  ‘Kreiber? Why not? He had enough alcohol in his blood to fuel an Ilyushin from Moscow to Berlin.’

  ‘He’d been fishing from that hole in the ice all winter. He wasn’t likely to fall in.’

  ‘People can die falling over their own doorsteps.’

  ‘There was blood on the rim of the hole.’

  ‘Sharp stuff ice, especially in minus twenty degrees.’

  ‘And bruising on one arm.’

  ‘You don’t fall down a well without touching the sides.’

  ‘It must be wonderful to be so sure of everything.’

  ‘Why doubt? We’re here. There’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it. Let’s enjoy our elected way of life.’ Dalby tore a strip of paper bark from a thin tree and began to shred it.

  ‘And Maclean?’

  ‘Cancer, surely. ‘Dalby threw tatters of bark into the air. ‘Ah, you mean euthanasia. A possibility,’ he admitted. ‘Compassionate people, the Russians. Just listen to their choirs.’

  ‘And Blunt?’

  ‘Poor old Anthony? He hadn’t even defected.’

  ‘He was blown,’ Calder pointed out. ‘And he died within three weeks of Maclean.’

  The American newspapers, part of the material analysed by Calder and his staff at the Institute, had given a lot of prominence to Blunt’s death. Queen’s art adviser and Establishment figurehead, he had been exposed in 1979 as a one-time Soviet agent and died four years later.

  ‘Aren’t we being a little m … melodramatic? Paranoic even? Blunt died from a heart attack.’

  ‘They can be faked.’

  ‘True.’ Dalby knew about such things. ‘An injection of potassium chloride, usually into the main vein in the penis where it isn’t readily detectable. It alters the ionic balance between potassium and sodium and the heart febrillates. If the body isn’t found for five or six hours the potassium chloride isn’t detectable. But who would want to kill poor old Anthony? He wasn’t of any use to anyone any more.’

  Somewhere a twig cracked.

  ‘I guess I’m getting morbid,’ Calder said.

  ‘Positively funereal. Anthony wasn’t neurotic. He would have been tickled pink to think that he was buried on Spy Wednesday – the Wednesday before Good Friday when Judas asked how much he would be paid to betray Jesus.’

  ‘Okay, I’m stupid.’

  ‘Not stupid, you just listen too much to Institute gossip.’

  ‘You’re right, let’s get out of here. I’m purged.’

  As they emerged from the wood the figure on the avenue turned abruptly and began whistling to an invisible dog.

  When they reached the fountain Calder asked: ‘Why weren’t you at the funeral?’

  ‘I find my enjoyment elsewhere,’ Dalby replied. ‘I don’t read obituary columns either.’ Smiling, he pointed at a group of tipplers who had begun to sing The Sacred War – ‘Arise enormous country, Arise to fight till death’ – and said: ‘I was once asked by a fellow traveller from London with bum-fluff still on his cheeks why Russians drank so much. Do you know what I told him?’

  Calder shook his head although he could have hazarded a guess – Dalby’s contempt for naïve Communists from the West who, like penguins, gulped every morsel of doctrine tossed to them, was well-known.

  ‘I told him, “Because they like to get drunk.”’

  They shook hands, confessor and penitent. Behind them park and sky were a black-and-white print. And chords of sadness could be heard in the strutting voices of the vodka choir. Compassion? For whom? Themselves?

  Briskly, Calder walked to his Zhiguli outside Sokolinki metro station. Kreiber, Maclean, Blunt … stupid! He put the car into gear and drove down Rusakorvskoe Road towards the Sadovaya, the highway ringing central Moscow.

  The Estonian at the wheel of the battered cream Volga who had been keeping Calder under surveillance in the park gave him a five-second start before following.

  CHAPTER 2

  March 8th. Women’s Day in the Soviet Union.

  From the ice wastes of the north to the deserts of the south, from mid-Europe across eight time zones to the Pacific, women reigned in the country comprising one sixth of the world’s land masses.

  In fretwork villages becalmed in Siberia, in the splendid dachas of the privileged outside Moscow, men made love with unaccustomed tenderness, dressed the children, cooked dinner, washed the dishes and bought carnations at ten roubles a blossom.

  Beaming, Mother Russia loosened her stays and relaxed. Until the following day when the men became goats again. Or so the feminists asserted.

  On a platform in a wooden hall that smelled of resin and carbolic to the south-west of Moscow near the Olympic Village on Michurinsky Prospect, the girl from Personnel was poised to make just such an assertion. As it was her first speech, apprehension fluttered inside her like a trapped bird.

  While the introductory speaker, mannish and indignant, barked hatred of all men, Katerina Ilyina nervously smoothed her blue woollen dress, fashionable but not provocative in case it upset the clucking hens in the audience.

  Svetlana Rozonova, sitting on the chair beside her, patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll slay them.’

  Contemplating the forty women listening impassively to the
speaker, Katerina thought that was extremely unlikely. If, like Svetlana, you were leggily tall with wild blonde hair and didn’t give a damn what people thought about you then, yes, you could slay them.

  Katerina shifted on her rickety chair. It creaked so loudly that the speaker turned and glared. The trapped bird beat its wings with renewed agitation.

  It was daunting enough making a first speech but when you knew that three women had already been expelled from the Soviet Union for promoting the same cause …. Like her they had been loyal to their country, like her all they had wanted to do was improve the lot of its women. Their expulsion had been wicked and it had sharpened the protest within her.

  From her vantage point in the hall in which a stove was burning incandescently in one corner, Katerina surveyed her small band of rebellious womanhood. The turn-out was disappointing but what did you expect with an icy breeze still at large? Come the thaw and the women of Moscow would unfurl their banners of feminism.

  The women were mostly young but there were one or two of the older generation among them padded with valenki boots and heavy coats, scarves folded on their laps.

  Svetlana, wearing a wolfskin coat bought in Vladivostok by an Aeroflot pilot – when you were employed by Intourist as a courier you had such luck, not when you worked with foreign defectors – nudged her. ‘That one over there who looks like a maiden aunt. KGB – bet you five roubles.’

  The maiden aunt, pepper-and-salt hair combed into a bun, was writing busily in a blue notebook. ‘No bet,’ Katerina whispered. Through a window she could see the fur hat and bulky shoulders of a militiaman. Ten policemen to control forty women. What did they expect, an armed uprising?

  The speaker sat down. Katerina stood up. The bird’s wings beat inside her. ‘Good luck,’ from Svetlana. The faces had become a blur, stationary white moths.

  When she opened her mouth the bird flew out. Her voice rang and words bore little resemblance to the ones she had rehearsed. She astonished herself. This Katerina Ilyina was a stranger. She crumbled her notes into a ball and dropped it on the floor.

  ‘Today is Women’s Day and today your man will be kind and charming. Perhaps he has already prepared the breakfast, bought you a carnation …. How very considerate of him. Perhaps even now he is making the beds, queuing at the gastronom ….’ She paused with the cunning of a seasoned orator. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he did just one of those things for the other 364 days of the year?’

  Some women smiled at such an improbable vision. That was the trouble: too many women were indulgent; their plight was a radio and TV joke alongside absenteeism from work and graft.

  Katerina hurried on. ‘They say we enjoy equality with men. They being men. All right, there is equality during the day when you and your husbands are both at work. But what about those long evenings after work. Is there equality then? Well, is there?’

  A few heads shook.

  ‘While you scrub and sew and cook they enrich their minds in front of the television and refuel the inner man with firewater. What sort of equality is that? How can they talk about emancipation when fifty-one per cent of the work force are women? When eighty-three per cent of all doctors and health workers are women? When seventy-four per cent of all teachers are women?’

  ‘And what are you?’ a tough-looking woman wearing a red shawl demanded.

  ‘An adviser,’ Katerina retorted. My first heckler, she thought. ‘A seeker of women’s rights. Your rights,’ pointing at the woman. She felt quite capable of handling her. ‘Sad, isn’t it, that Soviet women are still cowed, yes cowed, by the fear of pregnancy. Not because you don’t want children,’ hastily, ‘because every woman wants children, but because you can’t afford them. Granted a mother is given twelve months off work after she’s had a baby. But if she wants to continue giving the child the care it needs she loses her job. And what does the State do about that? It provides facilities for abortion, that’s what. Only the other day I read about a woman in Kiev who had fifteen ….’

  The woman with pepper-and-salt hair scribbled furiously.

  The heckler in the red shawl shouted: ‘Tell her old man to buy some goloshes.’

  A few women smirked at the reference to sheaths spurned by most men because the latex was so thick that it spoiled pleasure. For the first time Katerina faltered. Smut she hadn’t anticipated. Then she decided to invoke it. She was amazed at her adaptability.

  She said resonantly: ‘In a truly liberated society there won’t be any place for remarks like that. Sex isn’t dirty, you know. Smut is merely a by-product of suppression.’

  There, that should put paid to the potato-faced heckler. If she wasn’t interested in the movement why had she come? A paid trouble-maker?

  Svetlana clapped her hands. ‘Hear, hear!’

  Face screwed up with fury, the heckler rose to her feet and pointed a stubby finger at Svetlana. ‘I bet she’s fitted a few goloshes in her time.’

  Svetlana had this effect on some women. Innocently she reminded them of girlhood dreams never fulfilled. Once she had worn a mini-skirt in the Arbat and women had leaped from doorways bunching their fists.

  This time no one smiled and that might have been the end of it if Svetlana had allowed the heckler to get away with it; but that wasn’t Svetlana’s style. ‘What can she know about sex?’ she asked Katerina in a penetrating whisper. ‘Except on a very dark night.’

  The heckler planted her hands on her hips. ‘Night,’ she proclaimed, ‘is for the modest, daytime for the shameless. There are some,’ glaring at Svetlana, ‘who don’t care whether they see the sun or the stars when they’re lying on their back.’

  From the other side of the hall came a voice: ‘Sit down you with the face like a boot.’

  Svetlana was rising to her feet but Katerina restrained her; sometimes she was wiser than her friend. What I need, she thought, is a rallying cry. She flattened her hands against her audience. ‘By arguing among ourselves we are playing into the hands of the male chauvinists.’

  Chauvinistas pigs in the West. But Katerina didn’t feel that way about them: she liked men’s company. It was injustice that angered her.

  The heckler, now under attack from her neighbours, finally sat down and Katerina moved triumphantly onto divorce – its alarming popularity – and the plight of the housewife with children abandoned by a husband for a rival down the assembly line.

  She had intended to finish as she had started with an ironic reference to Women’s Day. Instead she heard herself saying: ‘The Revolution was supposed to have given women equality. It failed. Now another Revolution is under way. Women of the Soviet Union arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’

  Desultory clapping. Well, there was surely nothing wrong with adapting Marx. Or was there? At that moment the militia moved in, three of them in long grey coats, from a door behind the platform.

  Hands on the pistols at their hips, they stood beside the speakers menacing the audience.

  Tossing her blonde hair, Svetlana said: ‘Hallo boys, and what can we do for you?’ while Katerina shouted: ‘Go on, shoot us.’

  A fourth militiaman materialised, a tired-looking officer who needed a shave. He addressed the meeting. ‘Leave quietly by the door over there,’ pointing at the exit by the stove, ‘and you won’t come to any harm.’

  Svetlana blew him a kiss.

  Katerina, still raging, turned to the audience. ‘Take no notice of him: it’s Women’s Day.’

  The officer nodded to a militiaman with a Tartar face and pock-marked skin. He clapped one hand over Katerina’s mouth and trapped her flailing arms with the other. Svetlana hit him on the head with her handbag before she, too, was pinioned.

  More militiamen came onto the stage and Katerina thought: ‘This is monstrous, the way foreigners see us. ‘She bit one of the Tartar’s fingers. He swore but didn’t release his grip; oddly there was something gentle about his strength.

  Two militiamen jumped from the stage, jackboots exploding
puffs of dust on the floorboards. The women backed away knocking over chairs.

  The officer shouted: ‘Take it easy, don’t panic. No action will be taken against you.’

  Katerina continued to struggle but the Tartar’s arms were steel bands. The hand clamped to her mouth smelled of onions; perhaps he had been preparing a Women’s Day supper before being called out to put down a riotous assembly of female hooligans. Beside her Svetlana was vigorously kicking her captor, young with fat cheeks, with the heels of her magnificent boots.

  The militiamen on the floor advanced steadily but placidly on the women. Regaining some of their dignity, they turned and made an orderly exit.

  As the door opened the breeze brushed sparks from the glowing stove.

  When the women had all gone – all, that was, except for the scribe with the pepper-and-salt hair – Katerina and Svetlana were released.

  ‘Well done, comrade,’ Svetlana said to the officer. ‘A great job, terrorising a handful of women. Guns against handbags. They’ll make you a Hero of the Soviet Union for this.’

  The officer regarded her impassively.

  While the Tartar sucked his bleeding finger, Katerina, fight gone out of her, said: ‘So what are the charges?’

  They had several to choose from, the officer told her in his tired voice. Creating a breach of the peace, holding an assembly without permission, inciting violence. And how about hooligan behaviour for good measure? But he made no move to arrest them.

  The exit door banged shut tossing dust and woodshavings against the stove.

  The scribe mounted the platform and showed the officer a red ID card. He nodded and departed with his men.

  ‘After all, it is Women’s Day,’ she said, smiling at Katerina and Svetlana. ‘And now may I see your papers, please?’ She smelled of lavender water.

  They showed her their blue work passbooks and internal passports containing their propiskas, their residential permits. The woman studied them cursorily, as though confirming what she already knew.

  ‘And now,’ Svetlana said, ‘may we examine your identification?’

  ‘If you wish.’ The woman dug in her handbag again. The red ID was militia, not KGB; that was something. ‘You know, my dear,’ she said to Katerina as she replaced the ID, ‘I agree with everything you say but not with the way you say it.’