The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Calder who regarded chess as intellectual poetry – he subsequently became more practical – condoned such levity in deference to Holden.

  Holden was in his third year at Harvard while Calder was still being prepared for that august campus. But their families on Beacon Hill had been close for more than a century.

  When Dean went to war Holden became Calder’s mentor. And if Calder’s father noticed that he had been usurped he didn’t protest; with one telephone call he could have stopped Dean’s call-up but, by enlisting, Dean had defied him and his voice at the end of the dinner table became an echo that lost itself in mountains of outrage.

  Dean came home from Vietnam once during that heady period. He was highly decorated but his medals were tarnished with disillusion. He spoke of carnage and the slaughter of innocents and the brutalising of youth, but mostly he spoke about futility. ‘A war we can’t win and everyone knows it but we go on fighting to feed Washington egos.’

  Dean was main-lining drugs too.

  And Vietnam became the spearhead of Holden and Calder’s crusade. They took part in demonstrations, they even joined a far-out left-wing society in Cambridge.

  The intoxicating round of protest continued until a couple of days after Holden graduated. Until he sold out.

  Chin cupped in his hands over the chess board in Calder’s den, he explained why. Protest was a part of maturing, no less worthy for that. It was youth’s contribution to democracy.

  Hand poised above a belligerent white queen, Calder said: ‘What is all this shit, Gary?’

  Leaning back fingering his striped college tie – Calder had never seen him wear one before – Holden elaborated. At a certain age you had to abandon dissent otherwise you became an anarchist. ‘We don’t want anarchy, we want equality.’

  ‘Who got to you, Gary?’

  ‘No one got to me, for Chrissake.’ Holden tugged at the knot of his tie. ‘I have to earn a living, you’ll grant me that. So my old man came up with this job in Washington.’

  ‘Conservation?’ Calder asked without hope – that had been part of the crusade too.

  ‘Pentagon.’

  The crucible of Vietnam.

  A pause.

  Then: ‘I’m very pleased for you, Gary.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Sure.’ Calder picked up the queen.

  ‘Then you won’t mind me asking you a couple of things. You know, I may have been a little indiscreet. Maybe you could forget some of those indiscretions.’

  Calder moved the queen. ‘Check-mate.’

  ‘Do you still have the membership cards for that society we joined? You kept them, remember?’

  ‘I have them.’

  ‘Do me a big favour and destroy mine.’

  ‘Sure thing, Gary.’

  Moving the queen briskly and unnecessarily, he knocked over Holden’s black king. Picking it up, smiling fiercely, he showed Holden the name underneath it.

  LYNDON B. JOHNSON.

  After the earnest young man had approached him three years later at Elsie’s, on Mt Auburn Street, Calder blamed his subsequent actions more on Gary Holden, already going places in Washington DC, than on the Viet Cong soldier who had cut his brother in half with a burst from a submachine gun.

  Drunks at dusk, joggers at dawn.

  As first light explored the peaceful city – night barely an intermission at this time of year – Calder struggled to keep up with Jessel as they loped through Krasnaya Presna Park.

  Close by a pilot boat pushing its way along the river towards the canal linking the docks with the Volga dispatched rippled messages to the waterside. Calder smelled the burnt-paint breath of the ship’s funnel and the mossy odour of the deep brown water.

  ‘Don’t overdo it,’ Jessel warned. ‘Not at first. Stop here if you like.’ His breathing was regular, stride rhythmical; only the ear-to-ear strands of hair were in disarray.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. Got to get fit.’ Calder whose chest ached shaved his words to save breath.

  ‘I don’t have to ask why.’

  Jessel seemed to increase his stride, the bastard. It was the third week that Calder had accompanied him and each morning the stress got worse instead of better. But he stayed with him. Ahead lay the oasis in the self-inflicted suffering, the bench where Jessel rested.

  Heel and toe, heel and toe. Other joggers ran with them, against them, some wearing shorts but most, like himself, in blue track suits.

  ‘So how is Katerina Ilyina?’ Jessel asked.

  ‘She’s okay.’ He was panting like a thirsty dog.

  ‘She seems to be showing you the city. You’re a lucky guy. Not many of us get to see the genuine article.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t try hard enough.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re being given the treatment. Why?’

  ‘Old-fashioned charm?’

  The bench was a hundred yards away. Pray God he didn’t collapse before he reached it. On the grass he noticed a crumpled heap of blue; jogger or drunk left over from the night before, you could never be quite sure.

  Swallows dipped over the river pecking arrows in the water ahead of the pilot boat.

  Fifty yards. Three middle-aged men in blue flopped onto the bench. And Jessel would never share a bench, part of his training. Another hundred and fifty yards before the next casualty clearing station. He’d never make it. A legacy of booze and cigarettes and eroding self-pity. He continued to run on bending knees.

  ‘There,’ said Jessel, sitting down. ‘Relax. Breathe deeply.’ He smoothed his hair. ‘We’ll take it easy going back.’

  Calder sucked in night-cooled air. Around him the city, an early riser, was waking in the timid light, lime green on the horizon. Lights stuttered into life on bleak-walled apartment blocks and the spike of the Ukraina Hotel wedding cake reached for the last stars, and soft sparks fell from an acetelyne welder on Novo-Arbatsky Bridge and the air smelled of new bread. Soon the sleep-drugged pulse of the city would quicken as the serpentine heads of trains nosed out of the great stations, burrowing into European Russia, plunging south to the Orient and north to the Arctic and east to the Pacific, and swarms of Muscovites, blooming in the fragile sunshine, poured into buses, trolleybuses, collective taxis and metro trains to take them to their five-year plans.

  For the first time Calder felt affection for the city that had rejected him. He knew why.

  When his breathing had steadied Jessel asked him if Katerina had asked any pertinent questions of late.

  ‘Pertinent to what? I mean what the hell could I know that would interest her?’

  ‘Questions about yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Calder lied. ‘And how’s Harry making out? No more falls?’

  ‘He’s fine, just fine. Taken to sailing.’

  ‘Does he ever ask about me?’

  Jessel shook his head. ‘You know something? You squeeze much more out of me than I ever get out of you. You’re supposed to be filling me in on Twilight Brigade gossip. Who’s screwing who, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Who’s thinking about re-defecting?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘How’s Ruth?’

  ‘Where is Katerina Ilyina taking you next?’

  ‘To a concert.’

  ‘Cosy.’ Jessel stretched. ‘Ruth’s okay. The handicapped children love her apparently.’

  They had planned another child. A girl, they’d hoped, but if it had been another boy they would have loved him just as much, so they had said. A long time ago. ‘Maybe three,’ she had said, ‘I’ve got child-bearing hips.’ And short red-gold hair that skipped in the breeze coming off the ocean and well-muscled, tennis-playing leg’s which she braced against adversity and grey eyes that gazed with astonishment upon deceit.

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘Always last, huh? He’s well enough except for the speech impediment. He’ll always have that. But he’s lucky, I guess – he’s got your mother.’

  So she’s come into her o
wn at last, Calder thought. Affection for her family had always been governed by her husband’s rules.

  Jessel said: ‘A friendly word of warning, Bob. Be careful of this girl. She’s what, twenty years younger than you? Hasn’t it occurred to you that she might have ulterior motives? Information?’

  ‘What information, for Chrissake?’

  What I know they. know. But not many of them. Intelligence operatives made it their business to spy on each other – they couldn’t help themselves – and a lot of KGB executives would be neurotically curious about his privileges. Span-darian ….

  Jessel said: ‘How about breakfast?’ and when Calder looked surprised: ‘Laura’s in Helsinki with the kids,’ as though they were far enough away from contamination.

  The kitchen of Jessel’s apartment, near the steam-shrouded, open-air swimming pool, was all-American; an imported electrical showroom that operated at half-strength because the UPDK electricians couldn’t get the parts.

  Jessel poured orange juice, made coffee, fried ham and eggs. In his castle he seemed much more menacing, soft-shell camouflage removed and hung on a hook.

  Sitting at the breakfast bar, he prodded his knife at Calder and said: ‘I want you to tell me what the hell’s going on. You’ve got a tail, you know that?’

  ‘I guess we all do from time to time. Don’t you follow Russian defectors in the States?’

  ‘You’ve got one all the time. Even jogging just now.’

  ‘I hope he managed to keep up with us.’ Calder was surprised at the thoroughness of the surveillance; there was an ominous determination about a dawn shadow. He knifed his egg and watched the yolk spread from the wound. ‘How do you know he wasn’t tailing you?’

  ‘He drove up behind you. All ready in his tracksuit. He’ll be waiting outside.’

  ‘Doesn’t that worry you? That State Security knows you’ve been visited by an American defector?’

  ‘Why should it? They know you want to keep tabs on Ruth and Harry. They hope you might pick up a trick or two from me. After all you are working for them. And now they have a go-between.’

  ‘Katerina?’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself, you’re not God’s gift to a girl of that age. Now you tell me – what are they after?’

  ‘There’s nothing to be after.’ Calder smiled at Jessel through the steam rising from his coffee. ‘This apartment ….’

  ‘Is clean. You’re safe. Is there anything you want to tell me?’ Wary lines at the corners of his eyes like sparrow’s claws.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The claws sharpened. ‘Don’t leave it till it’s too late …. They don’t put a tail like that on you for nothing. And they don’t simultaneously fix you up with a swallow.’

  Swallow, KGB parlance for female plant, seductress, whore. Could anyone be less like a swallow than Katerina? He almost felt sorry for Jessel, snared inescapably in suspicion.

  He pushed his plate away, yolk congealing. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘Don’t get too paranoic about surveillance or one day you might find yourself staring into a mirror.’

  He drove to Byelorussia Square. Katerina lived to the left down Leningradsky. He smiled into the driving mirror: his eyes were clear and there was a sheen to his skin. He picked up a pack of cigarettes, returned them to the glove compartment unopened.

  He turned right down Gorky. 7 am. The first metro trains would be prowling the city’s bowels; above ground traffic was sparse but picking up, his tail among it. So? A black Zil, curtains primly closed across the rear window, sped down the reserved centre lane towards the Kremlin; that was privilege for you. Calder crossed Pushkin Square, passing through the ring of green boulevards, and parked the Zhiguli outside his apartment block.

  He ran a finger along the compact’s dusty flanks. It was coated with summer dust. A rouble fine on the spot for a dirty car. Not so long ago the possibility of such fussy retribution would have irritated him; not today – he determined to hose down the car.

  In the apartment he opened the heavy drapes to let the day come in, drank a glass of Narzan water. Then he lay down on the sofa and fell asleep.

  He was awoken at nine by Lidiya. She had purchased croissants at Gastronom No. 1 and she brought them with a dab of white butter, a glass of apple juice and coffee on a tray.

  ‘Jogging again?’ She shook her head reprovingly. ‘You should have a medical.’ She belonged to that generation – but only just – that still expected their menfolk to eat hugely, spend their leisure hours in the bath-house drinking beer and eating salted fish and exercising in abrupt bouts of athleticism or sex.

  This morning she brought him a small pot of African violets. They were on the coffee table beside him, placed there gently while he slept. They made him feel guilty.

  Since that first party at Katerina’s home he hadn’t made love to Lidiya. Did she feel slighted, hurt? He had no way of knowing. He didn’t want to wound her; on the other hand she might be relieved that she was no longer expected to go to bed with him.

  ‘Thank you for the flowers,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t know whether to buy carnations or violets. Then I thought, the carnations will die soon like our summer but these will live throughout winter.’ She touched the mauve cups, each containing a jewel of water.

  Did the violets symbolise her desire for permanency? Russian women believed implicitly in symbolism. And superstition. Yesterday a sparrow had flown in the window and she had screamed. When Calder had managed to let it free she had explained that a bird inside a home was an omen of death.

  Her scream had been all the more startling because she was normally so composed.

  ‘And how’s Yuri?’ he asked.

  She would have dropped him on the way to the apartment at Work-Polytechnical Middle School No. 28. Yuri was eleven years old; he was a Young Pioneer – an Octobrist before that – and one day he would join the Komsomol. He looked very much like Lidiya’s husband who had died in an accident on an ice-breaker on the Volga and he was her life.

  She smiled the wondrous smile that visited her when she spoke about Yuri. ‘In good spirits. I told him last night that he can go to summer camp. I shall miss him but he has to learn to be independent.’

  She began to dust the table. Splinters of coloured light from the chandelier played at her fingertips.

  Sipping his coffee, Calder looked at her fondly. She didn’t look like the mother of an eleven-year-old boy. She looked unfulfilled. Placid features, slim body settling into angles; only the surprisingly full breasts gave any hint of sensuality.

  Calder remembered their firmness in his hands.

  Why didn’t she ever ask why he no longer wanted her?

  She straightened up, a patch of coloured light shifting on her face like moving water. And he had the answer: she knew why.

  CHAPTER 9

  The sniper couldn’t believe his luck: Calder was going to trade in his car.

  That meant that when he left the field on the south-west limits of the city he would have to drive down a steep hill towards Simonovskaya Quay on a fat curve of the Moscow River. Above the final descent was a ledge of rock curtained with creeper, a sniper’s dream. A bullet through Calder’s head and the car would plunge into the river. Much better than Pushkin Square.

  Mikhail Boldin followed Calder’s Zhiguli in his old, souped-up Moskvich. He was twenty-two years old with a cleft chin, and brown eyes; his eyes always surprised strangers who expected them to be ice-blue.

  On the back seat of the grey Moskvich were three rifles sheathed in khaki canvas. He had licences for all three. Two he used for shooting bear and deer in the game reserves of the Caucasus; the third he used for homo sapiens. It was an old Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 fitted with a PE telescopic sight. His grandfather had used it at Stalingrad in the Great Patriotic War when he and a crack German sniper had stalked each other in the pitiless streets of the besieged city. A vendetta within an epic. Boldin’s grandfather, catching a flash of winter sunlight on the barrel o
f the German’s rifle, had won.

  The rifle had been handed down to Boldin’s father, also a sniper in the Red Army, and finally to Mikhail, a marksman in another sort of army.

  Calder’s Zhiguli began its climb to the bartering field. Boldin wondered what sort of car he intended to buy. An old American limousine, perhaps, abandoned by a long-departed diplomat, to remind him of the country he had deserted. Boldin enjoyed killing traitors.

  The impulse to trade in his travel-worn Zhiguli had seized Calder over lunch. Sitting in a café near the Institute eating blinis and drinking beer, he had stared out of the window at the black compact parked at the kerb and been ashamed of it.

  In the States automobiles had been his one indulgence. He had owned a Mercedes and a Stingray. In Moscow he had ceased to bother about cars as he had ceased to bother about many things.

  Suddenly he wanted to impress a girl.

  As a foreigner he could have bought a new car within a few days. But as a Soviet citizen it could take two years. So the only solution was to meet the spekulyanty in the bartering field.

  He drove there the following morning, the first Saturday in July. On the horizon a summer storm was gathering irritably; thunder grumbled, lightning blinked. He had once been advised never to buy a car in the rain because the water polished the bodywork with false promises; well, if the storm broke he would also be selling a car in the rain.

  He parked on the edge of the balding grass. Most of the cars looked as if they had come to die but among the terminally ill were a few glossy fledglings, the property of the true speculators who had bought them defitsitny and would sell them at a criminal mark-up. But all the cars would be sold: to own a car however senile was to have made it in the Soviet Union.

  A swarthy man with garlic breath wearing a white shirt and black trousers approached him. A Georgian, Calder guessed. Uzbek as it happened. He offered Calder four thousand roubles for the Zhiguli. Calder laughed indulgently. Five thousand. Calder settled for six. They drove down a cul-de-sac to clinch the deal out of sight of informers sent to the field to try and make sure State-controlled prices were observed.