The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  She swung her handbag, her skirts swirled. A sailor whistled, healthy music. How squalid Spandarian seemed on this fragrant evening. Asking her to entice Calder to a high-rise apartment. Why? To photograph them, compromise them? Never. The brave future, shared equally between men and women, was no place for such seedy plots. But she would warn Calder.

  Her summer-short black hair bobbed, her thighs thrust, her blouse felt taut across her breasts. Observing these phenomena, the driver of a small and dusty Zaparozhet drove across a red light and was stopped by two militia.

  She turned into the arch leading to Calder’s block and took the wheezing elevator to his apartment. Outside the door stood a bulky man wearing a rumpled blue suit and punished shoes.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. She tried to ring the bell but he held her arm and the sunlight drained from the evening. ‘I want to see Gaspadeen Robert Calder,’ she said, ‘and please take your hand off me,’ but he didn’t.

  He said: ‘Gaspadeen Calder doesn’t live here anymore.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I don’t care whether you believe it or not. He’s gone. And now you must go.’

  ‘What right … ?’

  ‘Every right,’ he said, leading her to the elevator. He thrust her inside, closed the gate. The elevator descended slowly to the ground floor where a man with a thinning crew-cut was waiting.

  He said: ‘You would be well advised not to call here again,’ and led her outside.

  She walked like a woman at her lover’s funeral. When she finally raised her head she went to a public call-box and telephoned Leonid Agursky.

  The face of the Estonian lying in bed in Medsandtrud Hospital was a battlefield. Black and yellow, pitted with craters, black-stitched with barbed wire. Two eyes stared from the trenches.

  ‘You were lucky,’ Spandarian said. ‘Unlucky to have your face scatter-gunned with lead but lucky to keep your eyes. Was Calder with anyone?’

  The Estonian nodded, blond hair crusted with dried blood.

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  The battlefield shifted from one side to the other.

  ‘Any of these?’ Spandarian showed him photographs of defectors currently in No Man’s Land between their beliefs, Jessel, two CIA fieldmen at the Embassy, a visiting NSA agent posing as an adviser on wheat production and a chauffeur at the British Embassy.

  A shell crater at the bottom of the battlefield opened. Spandarian bent to catch the words.… don’t …know.’

  Spandarian straightened up, stroked his moustache above the smile on his lips. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t bought any grapes but I have bought good news: your transfer to Siberia has been confirmed.’

  As he walked away listening to his footsteps sharp on the floor of the old hospital he thought: ‘Calder is near, I sense it. Sense? Know. Because it is what I would have done. Kept my head down before making a break. Now there is only one man to catch this American renegade. I, Spandarian.’

  He drove back to his office to transfer himself to the chase.

  The principal hit-man of the Executive Action Department of the KGB was a veteran named Maxim Tokarev, a distant relative of the Tokarev who designed so many of the Red Army’s guns in the ’twenties and ’thirties. In fact he still carried a 7.62 mm Tula-Tokarev pistol, CCCP erased from the walnut grip and replaced with MT.

  Only Tokarev would have dared to make such a treasonable erasure. But Tokarev was Tokarev. Death.

  He was a big untidy man in his late fifties with loose black hair laced with grey, and strangler’s hands. He had no known vices – unless you considered killing to be one – and, a true Muscovite, hastened to the country when he wasn’t working.

  It was in the hunting grounds of the Caucasus that he had learned his trade, stalking boar and bear in forests guarded by snow-crested mountains. He regarded human quarry as animals believing that there was little to choose in the behavioural patterns of the doomed. Especially when the prey was aware that it was being hunted; then he put himself in the position of an animal and anticipated its flight.

  He killed dispassionately. His favourite weapons were his hands but he was equally proficient with knives, guns and explosives.

  The Chairman of the KGB summoned him to his dacha at about the same time that Spandarian was standing at the Estonian’s bedside.

  As Kirov limped towards the river glinting through the birch trees he said to Tokarev: ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’m briefing you instead of your own director.’

  ‘Because the last wet job was fouled up?’

  ‘And I want the best man there is so that it doesn’t happen again.’

  ‘I am the best.’

  ‘And I want to make sure personally that you understand just how important this hit is.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tokarev said. ‘A job’s a job. You needn’t worry: I’ll kill him.’

  Tokarev, the Chairman reflected, was probably the only man in the Soviet Union who would address him so casually.

  Tokarev was watching a squirrel looping through the trees. They reached the stretch of river where Kirov had conferred with Spandarian. What a difference between the two men. But if one assassin fails I have a back-up, an elementary precaution.

  A river-smelling breeze ruffled Kirov’s silver hair. Anglers still stood thigh-deep and motionless in the water, Japanese print undisturbed.

  But what if both fail? Then Soviet penetration in the West is castrated – the Shannon woman had already been blown and murdered – and I am doomed.

  A fish leaped, flashed in the sunlight and splashed back home. A blue dragonfly hovered over the water. The squirrel sat on a branch looking inquisitively at the two men.

  ‘He knows I don’t want to hurt him,’ Tokarev said pointing at the squirrel. ‘If he sensed that I did he would be round the other side of the trunk like that.’ He snapped finger against thumb.

  ‘And what would you do then?’

  ‘Nothing. I would have killed it already.’

  Kirov took a document from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Here’s everything you need to know about Calder. What he looks like, characteristics, habits ….’

  ‘And he’s on the run?’

  Kirov nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Tokarev said.

  The squirrel darted to the other side of the trunk.

  ‘So far you’ve omitted to tell me one thing,’ Jessel said. ‘How you got these names.’

  He and Calder had moved to a tombstone marking the grave of one of Napoleon’s officers, Lieutenant Paul de Rougement who had died at the age of twenty-six.

  ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Calder told him. ‘I was at a conference in London and I met a KGB colonel there. He knew I was working for the Soviets, naturally I didn’t know about him. Anyway he got very drunk and started hinting that we were both on the same side. I said, “I don’t think so,” and he got angry. You know, every spy yearns for recognition.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not right now …. Anyway he invited me back to his hotel room for a last drink and I went along because I was curious. When we got there he really flipped. Did I think all he cared about was material success? Position? I of all people, he said, should understand. And then he spilled the lot – because we were both working for the same great cause.’

  ‘But no Saturday?’

  ‘He didn’t know who Saturday was. I doubt if anyone apart from Kirov and maybe a couple of his deputies know. He’s the key to the whole Soviet operation. Their whole policy if you like.’

  Finally, Jessel delivered his plan.

  The Soviets, he told Calder, would expect him to take the shortest and easiest escape route i.e. west. And Calder would oblige them by doing just that. But not for long. Just as far as Kalinin, a hundred and fifty miles away on the Moscow-Leningrad road on the banks of the Volga.

  What the Soviets would NOT be looking for would be a fugitive returning to Moscow. Calder would confound them by doing just that.<
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  Nor would the Soviets be looking for an American tourist. Calder would be just that.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Calder said.

  ‘You will go to Kalinin as Ivan Yacob. There you will become William Stephenson from Milwaukee making the journey of a lifetime across the Soviet Union. Here’s your passport.’ Jessel handed him an envelope. ‘And biographical details and documents. And don’t forget to carry a camera if you want to look authentic’

  ‘What about travel papers, hotel reservations? They can only be obtained through Intourist.’

  ‘We have a man at the Travel Office in Sverdlov Square. Your tickets and reservations are also in the envelope. And dollars. And while you’re on your way to Kalinin start growing a moustache, you’ve got one in your new passport.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind? I can’t grow a moustache in a couple of days.’

  ‘Ten days,’ Jessel said. ‘You’re going by river-steamer.’

  CHAPTER 16

  The river-steamer Tobolsk was an old lady, a faded dowager. Her lines were sagging, her cosmetics rusty. But at night she recaptured the graces of youth, prow noble in the moonlight, portholes the eyes of trysts, lifeboats and masts her jewellery.

  She was a three-decked, diesel-powered vessel that had once cruised the Irtysh and Ob, part of the Soviet Union’s vast network of connecting waterways, before receiving the summons to Moscow.

  She now sailed the Volga, leaving the Moscow River by the 128 kilometre-long canal which enabled ships to ply from the capital to Russia’s five seas – Baltic, Black, White, Azov and Caspian.

  Older Muscovites preferred the new boats but young couples preferred Tobolsk because she was slow and there was plenty of time to enjoy each other in her cabins. Tobolsk understood.

  Calder took a bus to Khimki River Port where she was berthed. It took him down Leningradsky, past Katerina’s apartment. He wondered if Sasha was singing. He hoped Sasha never knew the truth about him: trust was rationed. He looked the other way at the Bolshevik Sweet Factory: he didn’t want to see a light in her window.

  He was relieved he had come by bus when he alighted because uniformed militia were waiting at the metro terminal. He went to a dockside café and ordered a beer; no one took any notice of him, least of all the barman, all interest aimed at the Spartak v. Tbilisi football match on the television. The pitch was psychedelic green and the players’ faces were sweating strawberries.

  When the last bus and subway train had departed, Calder joined a stagger of drunken river-sailors and, showing his forged pass to the dock militia at the gates, walked into Khimki.

  At night stationary ships seem more alive than during the day and this was certainly true at Khimki: cabin lights beckoned, hulls trembled impatiently, engines throbbed.

  At each gangway stood a militiaman.

  Calder, shrinking from the quayside lamps, skirted the dock offices and their spire, said to resemble the spire of Leningrad Admiralty, and made his way to the wharf from which the passenger ships departed. There was Tobolsk at the end of the line and there, sitting on a capstan and smoking a cigarette, was a militiaman wearing a peaked cap. He smoked indulgently, long drags with the burns lighting a young face: fugitives didn’t escape on dawdling old pleasure boats like Tobolsk.

  Calder, wearing a blue reefer jacket, soiled white vest and rubber boots over blue jeans, hid his battered suitcase in the darkness, took out a bottle of Jubilee vodka, opened it and, whistling, approached the militiaman.

  The young policeman threw away his cigarette and jumped to his feet, hand on his gun-holster. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘A friend,’ Calder said. ‘I felt sorry for you: I’ve got a son your age in the militia in Khabarovsk.’

  ‘ID.’ He held out his hand. ‘Irkutsk, huh? That accounts for your accent. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sailing for Rostov in the morning. Apparently the Rostselmash factory needs my expertise. I’m on loan for a couple of weeks.’ He handed the militiaman the bottle of vodka. ‘Here, take a nip.’

  The militiaman took the bottle. ‘Jubilee? The best. How did you get hold of this.?’ He took a two-gulp swig and handed the bottle back to Calder.

  ‘From the skipper of the ship. I’ve got a crate. I can let you have half a dozen bottles for a song. Interested?’

  ‘Because I remind you of your son?’ He licked his lips.

  ‘Because I can get another crate from the skipper. You see, I’ve got dollars. A lot of Americans come through Irkutsk on the Siberian Railway.’ He handed the bottle back. ‘Here, have another snort.’

  When the bottle was almost empty and the militiaman was dramatically drunk Calder retrieved his suitcase. When he returned the young man was lying beside the capstan snoring at the stars.

  The distance between the quayside and the deck of the Tobolsk was about six feet. Calder threw his suitcase first, then leaped. He slipped back, grabbed the rail and was on board.

  He went down two flights of stairs into Tobolsk’s womb. The door of his cabin, No. 13, was open. Two bunks, locker, washbasin. Calder chose the one at floor level; beneath the mattress he found a red rose, pressed and dried, and a pink packet contained one unused feather-light condom manufactured in Los Angeles. Therein lay a tale.

  He locked the door, stripped off his clothes and lay down. The air was like soup. Outside the water talked and far away a ship’s siren broke the night with sadness. He closed his eyes and the note of the siren was Harry calling to him from Boston.

  When he awoke Tobolsk was making her arthritic way down the canal. Water threshed past the porthole but, despite the commotion, you could feel the dawn, milk-quiet.

  Calder washed and shaved and put on the black trousers and white shirt he had packed in the suitcase. Then he went to look for the steward.

  He had intended to slip him twenty-five dollars, paper gold, to leave him in peace in the cabin but the steward, a long-faced Kazakh with opium eyes, anticipated him.

  ‘You want to be left alone, comrade. I understand.’ He became a conspirator. ‘Our friend with Intourist made it quite clear. A passport and a probiska aren’t always what they seem … I, too, worked for State Security in Alma Ata. If there’s anything I can do ….’

  ‘You can get me some breakfast,’ Calder told him.

  The Kazakh brought him singed bread, two runny fried eggs, a slice of goat’s cheese, lemon tea from the samovar at the end of the corridor, an orange and a 500-gram carafe of brandy. I must be at least a colonel, Calder thought.

  For two days he confined himself to his cabin and the lowest of the three decks which wasn’t popular because the view was limited. But he could see that the Volga was crowded, August holiday traffic buzzing the freight barges and getting out of the way of the 60 mph hydrofoils. The beaches were also crowded; behind them small hills climbed gently to the horizon. The air smelled of mud and oil and heat.

  He spent much of this time sitting in the rest area in the stern furnished with rickety cane furniture that imparted a faint air of decadence. He drank cold beers, ate zakuski and read samizdat paperbacks provided by the steward – Harold Robbins and Agatha Christie. Occasionally he was joined by exhausted lovers who were quickly lulled to sleep by the churning propellers.

  On the morning of the third day, while trying to concentrate on the deductions of Hercule Poirot, he became aware from the creaking of cane behind him that another visitor to the lower deck had joined him.

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘G … good grief,’ said the newcomer. ‘What on earth are you d … doing here?’

  Calder jumped ship that night at a pier on the south bank of the Volga, ordering the Kazakh not to mention his disappearance.

  He found himself in a wooden village. Televisions flickered behind lace curtains moving in the river breeze in fretwork windows. He walked towards the silhouette of a church; it was also made of wood with two button-mushroom cupolas growing from its roof.

  He pushed
the door. It opened with a sigh. The nave, lit with dusky light by dying candles, was empty. Calder made his way to the vestry; in one corner was a pile of vestments. He lay down on them, sinking into incense-smelling depths.

  He wondered when Dalby would report his presence on the Tobolsk. He should have remembered that Dalby had been engaged in a long love affair with Mother Volga and frequently visited her. Perhaps Dalby had even been anticipating that he would escape by riverboat.

  He closed his eyes. For the first time since he had been on the run he didn’t feel alone. He wasn’t a religious man but it was comforting.

  He was awoken by rain. He looked up from the vestments into black undergrowth. It took him a few moments to identify it as the beard of a priest, a fine square beard knitted in black and silver.

  His explanation – he had missed the boat – was stark and unembroidered and the priest, stout and fleshy-nosed, didn’t believe a word of it. It was hard to lie in a House of God.

  ‘You are on the run?’ the priest asked.

  Calder said he was. But from what? He could hardly tell the truth; but half-truths were more difficult to muster than swashbuckling lies.

  ‘Have you done anything of which you’re ashamed?’

  ‘I did once,’ Calder said. ‘Now I’m trying to put the record straight. My son is ill,’ he added.

  ‘Where are you heading for?’

  Kalinin, Calder told him.

  ‘You want to leave immediately?’

  The last thing he wanted to do: he wasn’t due there for three days. ‘Not immediately.’

  ‘You want sanctuary?’ Brown eyes regarded him knowingly. And when Calder said he did: ‘On one condition. Do you play chess?’

  Calder nodded.

  ‘Then you can stay.’

  In Moscow, Spandarian, sensing that Calder had escaped from his cage, asked himself: ‘Where would I go?’

  West.

  ‘By what route?’

  That depends on how I got out of the cage.

  He stared at a map of the Soviet Union.

  ‘How?’

  Ask the computer.

  Spandarian was wary of the computer: he knew that sooner or later it would tell him where he had fucked up.