The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Bennett was sitting on the grass with his back to his car, a little Zaparozhet; Fellows was fiddling with a radio trying to find out how England were faring against the West Indians –‘Badly,’ he prophesied; Fabre was breathing into an asthma inhalant. Mrs Lundkvist, basket brimming with fungi, was talking animatedly to two of the younger defectors; she liked the company of younger people because, she was wont to say, they kept her young; of Mr Lundkvist there was no sign.

  Dalby produced a bottle of Ukrainian pepper vodka, Barzhomi mineral water, black bread and red caviar. ‘Half p … peasant, half prince,’ he said.

  They tossed back the firewater, doused its flames with Barzhomi and swallowed lifebelts of red-smeared black bread. Calder lay down to take the sun; Katerina lay beside him; their hands touched and were still.

  Jessel wandered into the forest. Dalby slept. Bennett sang songs from the outback. Insect noise was sonorous around them.

  An hour later Calder and Katerina drove back to Moscow in the new, slightly chipped Volga. Jessel dropped into Calder’s apartment for a beer, stayed five minutes and left. Then Calder and Katerina made love.

  Katerina left at five just before Lidiya, who had volunteered for the specialised job of preparing the mushrooms, arrived.

  When Katerina arrived home Sasha was watering the geraniums on the narrow balcony and her mother was preparing dinner.

  Sasha, dripping watering-can in his hand, asked: ‘Is everything all right, dochka? You seem to have been troubled lately.’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘The American?’

  ‘A good friend.’

  ‘Be careful, dochka. We are different people.’

  ‘Then we shouldn’t be,’ Katerina said with spirit.

  He looked at her with the ancient wisdom that occasionally sobered his exuberance. ‘Perhaps one day you will tell your mother and me the truth about Gaspadeen Calder.’

  She went to her room and lay on the bed. She could still feel Calder inside her. She had never believed that love could be so sensitive and so raw. And as for loving a foreigner, a middle-aged man, a defector … it was absurd.

  But the lines on his face were finding direction again and he moved with purpose and now he appreciated this city of hers and his strong hands were tender.

  And she was betraying him.

  Soon I will tell him.

  She gazed at her possessions. Dolls, a painting of poppies in a wheatfield, a balalaika, a champagne cork slotted with a kopek, posters of Lenin and Yuri Gagarin and the Rolling Stones, a photograph of Svetlana and one of her boyfriends, samizdat tracts on feminism bought in a park not far from the Kremlin, one of Sasha’s recordings, a poem from a boy long ago.

  All pre-Calder.

  And the strange thing was that if she had ever been asked to describe the man she would one day love he wouldn’t have looked unlike Leonid Agursky.

  She turned her head into the pillow; it smelled of lavender and cleanliness. And she consoled herself: ‘I haven’t told Spandarian anything that could have harmed Calder. Never will. Just snippets of useless information. Such as the time and place of the mushroom hunt. How could that hurt anyone?’

  Calder’s contact from the Second Municipal Hospital arrived while Lidiya was cleaning the mushrooms in the kitchen before cooking some of them for Calder’s supper.

  He was a student pathologist named Talin who intended to specialise in forensic investigation. He was the brother of a Russian in Calder’s section at the Institute and Calder had paid him fifty roubles to examine the flakes of paint from the chip in the Volga.

  Calder nodded towards the kitchen, put his finger to his lips and led Talin into the living room. Talin, bearded and precise, said: ‘You needn’t worry, it’s all here,’ handing Calder a buff envelope.

  The analysis was exhaustive. Composition of the paint, number of coats …. The gunshot came at the bottom of the sheet:

  Faint traces of lead, steel and nitrocellulose compatible with client’s theory that indentation was made by a bullet. If estimates of indentation and restricted range are correct impact was probably caused by a 7.62 mm bullet.

  Talin was going to go far.

  Calder handed him twenty-five roubles, the balance of his fee.

  When Talin had gone he sat on the sofa.

  Why had the attempt on his life been bungled? As Dalby had pointed out the KGB would have employed a pro. Perhaps lightning had struck as the marksman pulled the trigger. They would make sure there wasn’t any threat of a thunderstorm next time!

  Now? He stared through the window across dusty tree-tops.

  He drank some vodka and, when the bottle was half empty, went to sleep in the coffin that was his bed leaving his supper untouched.

  Lidiya, Calder learned later, became ill seven hours after she left the apartment. She had stomach pains and vomited but assumed that she was suffering from gastro-enteritis to which she was prone.

  She died three days later in Golitsin Hospital from irreparable damage to the liver and kidneys caused by cytolytic poisoning.

  There was absolutely no doubt, the casualty officer told Calder, that she had died from eating amanita phalloides, the Death Cap mushroom. The KGB, he confided, had asked him to falsify the cause of death ‘but I told them to get fucked.’

  Calder remembered the curls at the nape of her neck and her patient ways and her love for the little boy who wore his red Young Pioneer scarf with the pride he inherited from his mother and, knowing that he was the cause of her death, wept.

  The following day he drew ten thousand roubles from the Bank for Foreign Trade on Neglinnaya Street and handed it to Lidiya’s stricken parents who shared her apartment. ‘For the boy,’ he said and left.

  He asked Talin to analyse the untouched mushrooms in the refrigerator. They were mostly arvensis, horse mushrooms, he reported, but amanita phalloides was there in small but deadly quantities.

  Most peasant women would have spotted the lethal interloper which was the same height as the horse mushroom but not Lidiya: she was city.

  Accident? Calder didn’t even consider the possibility. It was the second attempt on his life. The killer fungi must have been put into the basket when he and Katerina had left it in the field. And Mrs Lundkvist, occupied with the younger generation, had only made a cursory inspection of its contents.

  For a while Calder fatalistically accepted the inevitable. He had caused Lidiya’s death. Let the assassins get on with it before any more innocents died.

  Then two unrelated events occurred which irrevocably changed his character.

  ‘He knows,’ said the Estonian. He was blond with a weight-lifter’s physique and a high-pitched voice and he irritated Spandarian.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Spandarian ran his hand through his glistening hair; when he withdrew it his fingers were dressed with oil and spices.

  ‘A student pathologist named Talin visited him twice. I stopped him the second time.’

  ‘Why not the first?’

  ‘After the incident with the sniper you warned me to be careful.’

  ‘Incident! Anyone would think you bumped into him in a crowd, not kicked him off a cliff and half killed him.’

  ‘He’s dead now,’ the Estonian told Spandarian. ‘Complications set in.’

  ‘How unfortunate,’ said Spandarian who knew this to be true because he had arranged for the life-support machine to be disconnected from the marksman in the Golitsin, the same hospital where Calder’s woman had died. They had been unlucky there: if Calder had eaten his supper as he normally did at 8 pm he would be dead now. ‘What did this Talin tell you?’

  ‘That Calder knows someone tried to shoot him. That he also knows that someone tried to poison him.’

  ‘So he’ll be ducking.’

  But not, Spandarian thought, scented fingers toying with a 1980 Olympics cigarette lighter on his desk, from accident or natural causes. You couldn’t duck the unseen, the unsuspected.

  If
Katerina Ilyina could be persuaded to lure Calder to some little love nest in an apartment high enough to ensure death on impact with the ground … multiple injuries ….

  They said that Bertoldi seemed to have floated. Spandarian saw Calder floating, death snarl on his face. Not as subtle as he would have wished but time was running out.

  As Kirov had pointed out when he had summoned Spandarian to his office in Dzerzhinsky Square. Staring at him across a battery of coloured telephones on his desk, the Chairman of the KGB had said: ‘You have three days left. If Calder isn’t dead by then I shall hand the contract to the Executive Action Department.’

  And I, brooded Spandarian, will never be head of the First Chief Directorate. Or reach the Politburo for that matter.

  As usual Jessel, wearing earphones, swept Calder’s apartment with a bug detector. He paused beneath the painting of mauve flowers growing in Siberia and, without speaking, pointed at the wall. From his executive briefcase he took an electronic microphone eliminator and, placing it beneath the painting, switched it on.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘our friends really are interested in you. Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘Because they want me dead,’ Calder said. He told Jessel about the positive ballistics test. And about Lidiya’s death.

  ‘That could have been an accident …. But no, I guess you’re right. But why do they want to kill you?’

  Calder didn’t reply.

  ‘It’s odd,’ Jessel said. He sat down and lit his pipe. ‘One botched shooting, one poisoning. It’s as though two different brains were at work.’

  Calder remembered the smell of Lidiya’s borsch wafting from the kitchen. The sparrow that had flown into the apartment, an omen. He shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. There’s not a lot I can do about it either way.’

  ‘A sitting target? That’s not like you, the re-born Robert Calder. What about Katerina?’

  ‘A dream. I’m twice her age.’

  ‘Bullshit. In twenty years you’ll be fifty-eight. Young if you keep jogging.’ The sparrow’s claws guarding his eyes were sheathed. ‘And she’ll be forty.’

  ‘Last time we met I was her grandfather.’

  ‘Go to her,’ Jessel said. ‘You’re going to need her ….’ His soft voice trailed; he stared at the bowl of his pipe. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t brought good news.’

  ‘Harry?’

  Jessel nodded. ‘He was hit by the jib of a sail. He’s in hospital. A fractured skull.’

  Calder began to shiver. ‘Is he going to be okay?’

  Jessel said carefully: ‘His condition is critical.’

  And I don’t even know him.

  But Jessel was right: he needed Katerina.

  He drove blindly towards the second occurrence that was to change him.

  As he cut the engine in the parking lot on Leningradsky he noticed Katerina talking to a man at the entrance to the apartment block.

  Who was the man? Wavy hair, luxuriant moustache … for one ridiculous moment he reminded him of Spandarian, the KGB officer whom the Twilight Brigade knew to be their real but little-seen general. Calder had seen him once climbing into his black curtained Volga outside the Institute.

  Whoever he was he was talking animatedly to Katerina. Until, abruptly, he turned on his heel and walked towards the parking lot.

  A driver opened the door of a black curtained Volga for him.

  When Spandarian had gone Calder drove, more calmly this time, to a bar near Red Square called the Chaika. It wasn’t unlike the public bar of a British pub. Workers from a building site were guzzling beer, snapping at shrimps and tiny crabs and dropping the shells and scales on the floor.

  Calder ordered a beer.

  So that was how the gunman had known he would be at the used car mart.

  That was how a killer had known he would be on the mushroom hunt.

  So simple. He should have guessed.

  In America his own people were against him. In Russia the one person he had trusted was against him. That was equality for you.

  A terrible exhilaration overcame Calder.

  He finished his beer and strode out of the bar.

  Calder was running.

  CHAPTER 13

  Calder had for some time been vaguely aware of a blur in his vision while driving. As dormant instincts for survival surfaced the blur came into focus in his driving mirror. A battered cream Volga.

  After finishing his beer in the Chaika he parked his own Volga near Manezh Square. His freshly kindled intuition told him that he could never drive it again – they might even put a bomb under it. He walked across Red Square and went into the Government Department Store, GUM.

  Lunchtime shoppers and tourists thronged the arcades and galleries linked by bridges beneath vaulted glass roofs. He walked casually, paused beside a woman wearing a rainbow-hooped dress and a small boy with cropped hair staring at the fountain.

  Accelerating, he elbowed his way to a flight of stairs, climbed them three at a time and ran along the second-floor gallery of shops. Half way down it, before any pursuer could have reached the gallery, he turned abruptly onto a wrought-iron bridge and jumped onto the ground-floor arcade.

  Startled shoppers jumped aside.

  He ran for the exit leaving outrage in his wake. In Razin Street he hailed a taxi with a green light on its windshield and told the driver to take him to Gastronom No. 1 on Gorky Street.

  He approached his apartment block warily on foot. He needed documents, ID, money. Another taxi, identifiable by the chequered pattern on the door, was parked near the arch. The militia used souped-up cabs. Two men sat in the back; they both wore lightweight topcoats; only policemen wore coats on a day stunned with heat.

  He continued down Gorky Street. Without ID – workpass and internal passport – he was impotent.

  He took a cab to Komsomolskaya metro station and telephoned Jessel.

  Jessel arrived at Komsomolskaya – with its ornate ceilings and chandeliers, more like an underground cathedral than a subway station – half an hour later. Calder met him, as arranged, under the third chandelier from the foot of the escalators.

  When he heard what Calder had to say he said: ‘You must be out of your skull.’

  Calder said: ‘Bring me temporary ID and cash. I’ll meet you in two hours.’

  Beside them two women remonstrated with a youth who had thrown an apple core on the marble floor. Heads lowered, crowds streamed towards escalators and trains.

  Jessel said: ‘Don’t you understand? We can’t help you. You betrayed your country. You aren’t wanted back there.’

  ‘In Sokolinki Park,’ Calder said. ‘By the fountain.’

  ‘You’re crazy. Give me one good reason why Washington should help you to re-defect.’

  Calder gave him six.

  If I were Calder what would I do?

  First go to ground in Moscow until the heat dies down, Spandarian decided. But just in case Calder reasoned differently he put a cage round Moscow.

  He spread a map of the city and its environs across his desk. Then he telephoned orders for all airports, railway stations, and militia road patrols on the 40-kilometre limit for visitors to be alerted. He also requested militia assistance to watch all exits where the metro burrowed outside the cage.

  He replaced the receiver and lit a cigarette; the smoke made devious grey patterns in the afternoon sunlight. The most dangerous man in the world. What the hell had Kirov been talking about?

  The phone rang. Kirov. He already knew that Calder had made a break for it. His words dropped in Spándarian’s ear like pellets of ice. Spandarian had failed … forget the time limit … the Executive Action Department had now been ordered to liquidate Calder. But if Spandarian killed him first? Then, Kirov conceded, there was still a remote chance that he might become head of the First Chief Directorate.

  Spandarian put down the telephone and gazed through the window towards the Kremlin. Then he applied himself to the inside of the cage.

&n
bsp; He summoned a deputy to the office and told him to alert all KGB informants in hotels, hostels, restaurants, cafés, bars, thieves’ kitchens, cinemas, parks, sports stadiums, anywhere that stukachi were planted.

  The Executive Action Department would be doing the same but in the case of Calder he had the edge because he had his own informants within the Twilight Brigade. He called his driver and told him to take him to Dalby’s apartment on Prospect Mira near the Ostankino television tower.

  Although it was long past lunchtime Dalby was still wearing a dressing gown, once rich and red but now threadbare. Like its owner, Spandarian thought, accepting a glass of Armenian brandy and settling himself in a punished leather chair.

  To the rest of the defectors Dalby was a mentor, an idealist who had found fulfillment in jaunty retirement. But not to Spandarian who made it his business to confront him before he had donned his mask. Dalby had one of those faces that invited you to peel back the years. Erase the slanting lines, re-texture the flesh, restore the pigment of the hair and there was the young Dalby quick with hope. Not many older faces encouraged this transition, only those on which a knowledge of waste had settled.

  The living room was a mirror of the man. Crumbs of toast beneath the broken teeth of the gas-fire; a leaning pile of copies of English magazines Country Life and Private Eye; on the wall a speckled photograph of a family group staring defiantly through the passage of time and a black and white sketch which, according to Dalby, was an Aubrey Beardsley original. It was as though Dalby had tried to recreate the rooms in which he had lived when he was at Cambridge.

  Spandarian had often wondered why Dalby had renounced his sunny heritage in favour of the haunted realism of espionage. Had he truly hoped to promote an alternative to fascism which, when he was young, was enslaving Europe? Hadn’t he realised that the Soviet Union was also enslaved? Or had he believed that there was still time for true Marxism to arise from the ashes of the Revolution?

  Unlikely – Dalby would have been too shrewd to accept such generalities. What had happened, Spandarian believed, was that a grand deception had been staged: Dalby, troubled by his own irresolute character, had deceived himself into accepting such beliefs. The Cause had become a substitute for moral fibre, intrigue the drug that sustained the deception.