The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  He picked up Katerina’s handbag and pillaged it. Compact, lipstick, crumpled one-, three- and five-rouble notes, a few kopeks, tissues, punished wallet, ballpoint pen. A nondescript mess.

  Spandarian opened the wallet. Flipped through the plastic-sheathed ID cards hinged inside. A couple of ten-rouble notes, photograph of her mother and step-father at a camping site at Adler on the Caucasion coast road, a few visiting cards and a couple of invitations. Spandarian examined one of these. Frowning, he asked: ‘Where did you get this?’ He was surprised, and that with Spandarian was a small victory.

  Realising that it was the card the young man on the bus had given her and realising that Spandarian was impressed, she said: ‘From its owner, of course.’ She wished she had read the card.

  ‘I wasn’t aware you knew him.’ Him. Who? Spandarian was patently furious that the name hadn’t featured in the blue folder. Someone would fry! ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘Since childhood.’ They would boil!

  Spandarian timed his revenge nicely. ‘By the way, your mother and father – apologies, step-father – are quite comfortable in their jail.’ He slid the invitation back into the wallet.

  ‘You bastard. What have they done wrong?’

  ‘Let’s think. Harboured a known hooligan?. How about that?’ He gave a stage bow and walked out of the cell.

  When he had gone Katerina allowed herself to cry. ‘A good man … my mother, always hardship … What right?’

  Svetlana sat beside her again. ‘Never mind, pussycat. They won’t come to any harm. It’s us they’re gunning for.’

  Me, Katerina thought. ‘I never dreamed they would expel me without you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there too. ‘And curiously: ‘Who was that invitation from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on, Kata, I’m not a Georgian bandit.’

  ‘Honestly.’ Katerina extracted the card from her wallet. ‘My God!’

  ‘Hand it over.’ When she did Svetlana whistled. ‘How did you get to know him?’

  Katerina retrieved the card. It was an invitation to a pop concert. A personal one with the star’s name embossed on the bottom right-hand corner. Leonid Agursky. Pop idol, sex symbol …. And I met him on a bus!

  Spandarian returned the following day. Picking up the expulsion order, he said: ‘You have read and understood it?’

  ‘I realise I’m being expelled for preaching Leninism.’

  ‘Ah, the rights of women. A worthy cause, Katerina Ilyina.’ He stroked his moustache downwards and outwards. ‘But you do understand the document?’

  ‘I’m not an imbecile.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He was pensive for a moment; Georgian spice reached Katerina strongly. ‘By the way you will be pleased to know that your mother and step-father have been released from jail. After all, why hold them? I’m sure you’re not going to be a hooligan any more.’

  He tore up the expulsion order.

  Striding past Petrovka’s shops in the direction of Sverdlov Square metro station, Svetlana said: ‘So it’s a different game from football. Two yellow cards and we’re still on the pitch.’

  ‘My parents … the son of a bitch.’

  ‘We were being given the treatment,’ Svetlana said. ‘The expulsion order – a phoney.’

  Judas counselled Katerina. Would it really harm Calder if I processed what he told me and passed on innocuous trivia?

  ‘What I want you to concentrate on,’ Spandarian told her later in his office, ‘is Calder’s state of mind, what he plans to do with the rest of his life. Any secrets he’s kept to himself ….’

  Why, she wondered, was Calder so important? She hoped she never found out.

  CHAPTER 8

  In summer mushrooms proliferate in the green and silver countryside outside Moscow as urgently as that short season itself. And armies of gribniki, mushroom-hunters, leave their sweating city in search of Little Foxes, Shaggy Parasols, Caesar’s Mushrooms, Horns of Plenty …. The fungi are eaten raw, cooked, pickled or salted; they are also measured with a fisherman’s elastic rule and toasted exuberantly – brown vodka for the milk mushroom, pellucid and ice-cold firewater for a russala. The pastime is pursued exhaustively because there has to be a little exquisite suffering in most experiences; photographs of mammoth fungi are printed in the Press; doctors in hospital casualty departments stand by with stomach-pumps for the first imprudent gribniki.

  At the Institute the Twilight Brigade went mushroom-hunting with qualified enthusiasm. Few of them had ever hankered after anything more exotic than the cultivated mushroom, on the other hand the younger recruits were keen to take part in anything characteristically Russian. It was all part of adapting, being accepted, and if long-serving members of the Brigade were sceptical about this they nevertheless accompanied the alien gribniki because there was not a lot to be said against supping a few grams of Stolichnaya in the cool of a birch forest.

  In charge of mushroom-hunting was Mrs Lundkvist from Sweden. In fact she was in charge of most Russian-orientated pursuits managing through perseverance and unrelenting good humour to drum up support for her activities.

  She was a once-beautiful blonde who was being remorselessly converted by the years into a matron. A decade earlier her husband had fled to Moscow bringing with him the secrets of Swedish submarine surveillance in the Baltic and his wife had followed him. The unkind asserted that if he had known this he would have stayed where he was and faced the music.

  On this particular June morning Mrs Lundkvist, seated at the head of Table No. 5 during mid-morning break in the Institute canteen, was finding it difficult to sustain interest in mushrooms because another subject was vying for attention. A subject that is always discussed with animation in any expatriate society. Death.

  Just as speculation about the death of Alfredo Bertoldi had begun to wane a Dutchman named van Doom had disappeared.

  Mrs Lundkvist, sipping lemon tea and speaking in English because she had long ago discovered to her chagrin that Russian would never be the lingua franca of the defectors, began to list to her audience the ten articles they would have to take with them into the country.

  ‘Basket, waxed paper, tins, notepaper, stick ….’

  Fabre, the Frenchman, said to Calder: ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’

  ‘How should I know? It’s not the first time he’s gone missing ….’

  ‘True. Once he meets the pretty boys outside the Bolshoi he seems to stick with them.’ The nodding of Fabre’s creased old face acquired an obscene air.

  Dalby said: ‘He’ll be back.’ As usual he spoke with nonchalant authority. He had retired from the Institute two years ago and had stopped by for coffee on his way to the Pushkin Museum.

  ‘Unless he’s dead.’ The speaker was Langley, the Canadian who had been talking to Katerina at Kreiber’s funeral. A bright young hope in the RCMP he had elected to stay in Moscow when the KGB had shown him photographs of himself with two girls which they planned to show to his boss and his wife unless ….

  ‘Dead?’ The slanting pouches on Dalby’s face took up the question. ‘Why should he be d … dead? You younger people do tend to be terribly dramatic’

  ‘Well he won’t be the first this year,’ Langley said defensively. He was thirty-ish and followed Western fashions as best he could, managing with his mussed fair hair and moustache to look like a shop-worn model for a cigarette advertisement.

  ‘True. Natural causes, accident, suicide …. We all have to go some time you know. Even you.’

  ‘A whole lot of people seem to have been going-some-time recently.’

  ‘Coincidence, my dear fellow. Would you have preferred their deaths to have been staggered tover the year?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ Langley said, ‘when van Doorn shows his face.’

  Mrs Lundkvist said loudly: ‘You must pick out mushrooms with care. Never, never experiment. Peasants will tell you’ – Calder suspected that anyone outside
Stockholm was a peasant – ‘that there are ways of testing fungi to see if they are edible. Take no notice, consult the experts.’ She laughed gaily. ‘In this case me.’

  ‘Do you really think,’ Langley went on, ‘that Bertoldi committed suicide?’

  Dalby sighed. ‘How many times have we been through this? There is no evidence to the contrary. He left a note, he was seen to jump.’

  ‘Fall,’ Calder said.

  He was keeping his eye on the Russians coming into the canteen to see if Katerina was among them. He had been to the Maly Theatre with her the previous evening and he wanted to discuss the play – and to be near her. The Russians veered away from the corner of the canteen occupied by the defectors: that was alien territory.

  ‘Very well, fall. That’s what happens when you jump, I believe. Do you m … mean you still have doubts?’

  ‘I believe nothing, disbelieve nothing.’

  ‘A rather negative philosophy, don’t you think? But then you have had other things on your mind ….’ The pouches took on knowing angles.

  ‘Lucky bastard, ‘Langley said.

  ‘I wish I were younger,’ Fabre remarked. If he were, his tone implied, Calder wouldn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Be careful, Bob,’ Dalby said. ‘Be very careful.’

  Mrs Lundkvist said: ‘Did you know mushrooms contain more protein than other vegetables?’

  China broke behind the metallic food counter. Heads swivelled. A young man with burning cheeks knelt to pick up the pieces.

  Katerina was wearing a blue linen dress. It was simple but to Calder she looked like a model in Vogue. Her black hair had been cut shorter for summer; her face was still pale because, unlike most Muscovites, she didn’t abandon herself to the sun; as usual the tilt of her head challenged, but she was also looking for him. She found him, smiled. The smile warmed him. He felt younger, looked it. He had even taken to jogging with Jessel along the river bank.

  ‘And very strong in Vitamin B,’ Mrs Lundkvist said.

  Calder bit into a biscuit coated with pink, lacquer-hard icing. However much younger he looked he was still too old for her. Why did she bother with him? This sometimes worried him during the night. At other times he awoke with a flash of light and there smiling at him from a Polaroid photograph were Ruth and Harry. At the racecourse at Suffolk Downs. In Fenway Park. On the manicured lawns of his father’s house – he could hear the feathered patter of the sprinklers. Harry then only three, his face happy with trust.

  Then a page in the photograph album turned and there again was Katerina Ilyina. Riding the ferris wheel in Gorky Park with Robert Calder. Moscow spread beneath them. Trust on Calder’s face just as there had been trust on Harry’s. Harry had been betrayed.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Dalby’s voice intruded. ‘We seem to have lost you ….’

  ‘And I know where he was,’ said Langley without quite leering.

  Fabre’s head bobbed.

  ‘As a general rule,’ Mrs Lundkvist said loudly, ‘beware of fungi with thin stems. Our friends, call them poganki. Ugh!’ She shuddered, swishing greyish blonde hair across broadening shoulders. ‘And beware the Avenging Angel. And the Death Cap, of course. It smells of honey, the brute.’

  At the word death she rekindled group interest. For a moment, unaccustomed to undivided attention, she was nonplussed. Then, adroitly, she used it.

  ‘But that’s not for another two weeks of course. Even that’s very early for mushrooms but I seem to have a way of finding their haunts. Tomorrow Russian classes. Saturday, ballet lessons for the girls. ‘Not one of them under forty, Calder thought. ‘Tuesday, a minibus trip to the diplomats’ beach at Uspens-koye.’ The foreign diplomats will love that, Calder reflected; generally speaking they disliked defectors even more than the Russians. ‘Bridge on Wednesdays as usual. And chess – but there I bow to my superior. Over to you, Mr Calder.’ She smiled winningly.

  Before the advent of Katerina, Calder had intended to organise a chess tournament. No longer. ‘Chess as usual on Thursday. Here in the recreation room.’

  ‘Nothing more, Mr Calder?’ voice seeping with disappointment.

  Calder shook his head and Langley murmured: ‘The lucky sonofabitch has other recreations in mind.’

  Katerina was sitting beside Lev Koslov, her plump and moist boss, and her colleague, Sonya Ivanovna, a fair-haired girl with the naked gaze of someone who has just removed their spectacles. Calder caught Katerina’s gaze. She nodded gently.

  Fabre lit a French-smelling cigarette. ‘Poor old van Doom,’ he said. ‘C’est très triste.’

  Dalby, rippling fingers through his soft grey hair, said: ‘I think you’ve all summoned the Reaper a little prematurely.’

  ‘The gays stick together,’ Langley said. ‘I’ll give you that. Outside creed or colour.’

  ‘Until they’re warned off,’ Calder said.

  Van Doorn, wistful features jaded, walked up to the table and said: ‘Can I get anyone another coffee?’

  At 4.38 that afternoon Calder, brooding on the death of Bertoldi, entered the vision of a sniper peering through the telescopic sights of his rifle.

  Calder, being a creature of habit, was a gift to a marksman. Every weekday afternoon after finishing work he walked home through Pushkin Square. A dead duck if you had a good vantage point. And what could be better than the big grey building where Izvestia projected luminous news flashes?

  To make sure that neither his aim nor concentration were disturbed the sniper had asked his boss for authority to extinguish the neon lights flickering around the window where he had mounted his tripod.

  Calder, head down, approached the cross-hairs of the sight. He looked up once, features registering mild surprise at the absence of news, then returned his gaze to the pavement.

  The sniper, waiting until Calder was separated from other pedestrians in the great square containing the Rossia Cinema and the Pushkin Monument, stroked the trigger of the rifle. On the other side of the street from Calder an ambulance kerb-crawled, stretcher-bearers waiting to pick up the body before anyone realised what had happened.

  4.39. Calder was clear of other pedestrians, in the centre of the cross-hairs.

  The sniper’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  4.40. An indignant George Sokolov, corpulent Director of Illuminated Intelligence, who had taken a day off to attend his daughter’s wedding, punched the button that switched on the news. Lucky that he had been astute enough to make a surprise return. Heads would roll.

  Huge letters burst into radiant light around the marksman. US BLOCKS DISARMAMENT TALKS. Dazzled, he lowered the barrel of the rifle.

  He peered through the telescopic sight once more but of Calder there was no sign.

  Lately Calder’s reading matter had diversified. In addition to airmailed newspapers, The New York Times, Washington Post … and magazines, Time, Newsweek, Fortune … he was being given books to analyse, among them a few novels. Even espionage, always well-thumbed en route. Le Carré in particular. ‘Any idea who Smiley’s based on?’ Calder had been asked by a junior Soviet analyst.

  Well he didn’t know that. But if he had told the analyst what he did know the analyst would have retreated stunned. In fact his knowledge was shared only at a rarified level. Two, three heads of KGB directorates at the most. Sparidarian wouldn’t know. He doubted whether the Secretary of the Communist Party knew.

  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday … such beautifully simple codenames. But who was Saturday? That he had never known.

  As he made his way through the Institute to his office the following day Calder, stooping slightly, glanced into the book-lined chambers of specious deduction on either side of him. Scandinavian, Mid-European, Australasian – a surprisingly large section – Great Britain, Central America, South America ….

  What did the Soviets make of all this dubious speculation, much of it wildly concocted the way students contemplating an incomprehensible examination paper fill a sheet of paper in the hope of ge
tting at least something right? Shredded it, probably. The Twilight Brigade were only given these duties to give them a sense of importance.

  He was now directly above Katerina’s office. The new, younger Calder straightened his stoop. What had she asked him last night in the interval? ‘Do you ever feel you want to return to the United States?’ That was it. ‘Not any more,’ he had replied. What a tantalising relationship. No sex. Was she really attracted to him? It was difficult to accept. Thirty-eight was young enough, but to a girl of nineteen an elder. Worse, a traitor.

  So why did she profess to enjoy his company?

  Come on, Calder, it’s not unknown for a young girl to be attracted to an older man.

  He was still tormenting himself when he pushed open the door bearing the words, white on black, ROBERT E. CALDER, DIRECTOR OF UNITED STATES STUDIES, and sat at his desk.

  Sunlight peering through the slatted blinds made quivering tiger stripes on the green metal surface. He could hear traffic, the whine of a high-flying jet. He felt detached, suspended.

  ‘Do you ever feel you want to return to the United States?’

  If he blamed anyone – other than himself, that was – he blamed Holden.

  All those golden words, those shining ideals over the chess board. While Calder’s elder brother, Dean, was away fighting Holden talked.

  And, boy, could he ever talk. Lean and crisp and outraged, he dispatched INJUSTICE snivelling into the wilderness. Bostonian privilege, Capitol Hill corruption … anti-black prejudice, American intervention in Vietnam ….

  Off with their heads.

  But although Gary Holden was an orator he was no Bobby Fischer. So to add piquancy to his inevitable defeats at chess at the hands of Calder, his junior, he invented a game within a game.

  Beneath each other’s major pieces they stuck tabs naming personalities they considered to be particularly obnoxious. So you didn’t know the identity of your own rook or bishop until it was captured. Hitler, Churchill, Henry Kissinger, Al Capone, Doris Day … even Donald Duck made a guest appearance.