The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  ‘I’ve never played it,’ Calder said.

  ‘Then read it up. It can’t be all bad: Spassky used it in the world title eliminator against Tal in ’65.’

  ‘Very neat. But supposing the Russians know that Grainger died?’

  They were outside the cinema again, beginning their second circuit of the square. Cinema-goers who had been shut out prompt at 10.45 pm stood in disconsolate groups.

  ‘A calculated risk,’ Jessel said. ‘But it’s doubtful. Grainger wasn’t big enough to figure in their chess calculations and his death wasn’t reported in the media.’

  ‘But they knew he was coming here.’

  ‘He was taken ill, that’s all. We didn’t cancel any of his bookings.’

  ‘Not even when he died at the tournament?’

  ‘He died much later in hospital. We were just about to make the cancellations when you cropped up.’ Jessel paused to light his pipe. ‘The bookings for Grainger and me were made weeks ago. Too late to change them now.’

  ‘Any reason why you should?’

  ‘Not if you like trains. We’re going on the Trans-Siberian Express.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. Don’t be late. The Trans-Siberian never is.’

  The modernist Hotel Rossiya is a monument to the statistics Intourist scatter like confetti. It has 5,738 beds and if you can’t sleep there are ten miles of corridors in which to pursue Morpheus.

  Close-by stands another awesome pile, the Kremlin. From some of the Rossiya’s rooms you can see its illuminated red stars thrust into the night sky staking a claim to the heavens.

  From Room 308 Calder stared at one of the stars. It was the colour of power. In movies fugitives in hotel rooms were lit by blinking neon lights. But they were only hunted by a police force – ‘We know you’re in there, come out nice and easy ….’ I’m pursued by twenty million KGB contacts.

  But not, he remembered, Franklin Grainger. Which was why, Jessel had reasoned, it was preferable to occupy Grainger’s room in the Rossiya: in the Soviet Union a neglected booking was suspicious.

  ‘How,’ Calder had asked, ‘did I get into Russia?’

  ‘By air. You broke your journey in London. Arrived in Moscow this evening on British Airways Flight 710 which landed at Sheremetievo at 16.45 hours.’

  ‘What happened to me then? I presume I wasn’t a ghost.’

  ‘Your look-alike was taken to the United States Embassy on Tchaikovsky Street in a car bearing CD plates to meet me.’

  ‘And where the hell am I now?’

  ‘Still in the Embassy. We haven’t worked out how we’re going to get him out again yet.’

  ‘You’ll manage,’ Calder said. ‘But what about his passport? I suppose he looked like me – and Grainger.’

  ‘Not a bad likeness. His passport is forged, yours is genuine. What happened to your moustache?’

  Calder told him about Dalby.

  ‘He’d pick his own pockets,’ Jessel said.

  Calder drew the curtains and, lying on the bed in the clinically clean and comfortable room, studied Intourist brochures on Siberia and its railway.

  In the first place Siberia – forget the rest of the Soviet Union – would swallow all of the United States plus half Canada. Traversing seven time zones and 5810 miles of track he would arrive in Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan in 170 hours and five minutes on the eighth day of his journey.

  If he arrived. Sooner or later the KGB would realise that he hadn’t gone west. And the Trans-Siberian was an obvious escape route east. Hopefully they were still looking for Ivan Yacob with a moustache. Hopefully they would assume that if he was on the train he would change at Khabarovsk in the Far East for Nakhodka, the exit port for Japan.

  Or was he under-estimating State Security? He suspected he was.

  He undressed and lay in bed, head cradled in his hands. Lenin returned his gaze from the white wall. He remembered the Robert Calder who had once lived in Moscow. He had been a flabby-minded fellow. This Calder, this Grainger, was different.

  He uncradled his hands and touched his temples. A head full of secrets. They could change the balance of the world. A far cry from the simple ideas of equality he had once nursed in his youth. He frowned.

  Then he switched off the light. Through the drapes he could still see the glow of the red star. He slid one hand under the pillow and touched the pistol he had taken from the militiaman on the quayside at Khimki River Port.

  Everyone was looking at him. Receptionist, cashiers, porters; the cab driver, through his mirror, on the way to Komsomol-skaya Square, site of three of the city’s main railway stations; a grey-uniformed militiaman as he paid off the cab outside the Hans Andersen extravagances of Yaroslavl station. He felt as though he had a sticker on his forehead WANTED. Had the KGB discovered the deception? Were they waiting for him at the ticket barrier?

  He dived into the ethnic adventure that is Yaroslavl. Shoals of minorities – Mongolians, Tartars, Moldavians, Yakuts, Kazakhs, Tajiks – swarmed around him like startled fish. He was the shark, hunted.

  He glanced at his watch. He was fifteen minutes early. He made for the waiting room. It was a refugee camp. Almond eyes beside Slav cheekbones. Babies at the breast. Vodka passing from hand to hand. A game of cards. Guitar strumming. Mounds of parcels and battered suitcases. They looked, Calder thought, as if they were there to stay. He stood beside a couple of lounging soldiers with cropped hair and dusty boots.

  He waited seven minutes then shouldered his way past the black pillars of the chandelier-lit station to the platform where Train No. 2, maroon coaches pulled by a green electric locomotive with a serpent’s nose, was waiting.

  ‘Grainger!’

  He swung round.

  Jessel.

  Together they walked down the platform and boarded the train to the other side of the world.

  CHAPTER 19

  It was at this stage of the chase that Tokarev drew marginally ahead of Spandarian. It was, after all, his time, the time for instinct. Animal instinct.

  Instinctively he knew that in Kalinin the trail had gone cold. But where would I, a hunted animal trapped in a city, have hidden before breaking cover?

  In a substitute for forest depths. In a cool hotel room in the heart of the city.

  Big hands bunched in his trouser pockets, shaggy head low and questing, Tokarev went first to the Siliger Hotel where he terrified the receptionist. Blank.

  The receptionist at the hotel Tsentralnaya, a pale young man with a sharp Adam’s apple, was abrasive and Tokarev sensed that he was lying: no call for truculence with the KGB if you have nothing to hide. Tokarev, his own lie-detector, looked for proof. Rapid throat pulse, any nervous mannerism – in this case flicking thumb against finger as though squashing aphids – that long, unwavering stare that is supposed to beam honesty. ‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘When was he here?’

  ‘One of your people has already ….’

  Tokarev leaned forward, placed his thumbs on the receptionist’s Adam’s apple, fingers round the back of his neck, and squeezed gently. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday. Room 23.’ He coughed as Tokarev released his grip.

  Tokarev held out his hand and the receptionist gave him the key.

  In the room he could smell Calder. The faintest traces. Aftershave, sweat, hotel soap – TSENTRALYNAYA was slightly worn on the red bar – camphor … a change into clothes stored with a preservative? He would know Calder’s smell in the future.

  He examined the plug-hole in the washbasin where the vortex of escaping water usually left a deposit. A few black and grey bristles, longer than the normal residue of a shave. So Calder had grown a moustache. Did Spandarian know? Quite possibly. What he didn’t know was that Calder had shaved it off. Calder grew in his estimation.

  He got times of arrival and departure and a description of Calder from the receptionist. ‘Did anyone else see him?’

  The receptionist told him about the party of Americans.<
br />
  Think like an animal.

  Herd instinct!

  Tokarev was hunting bear in the Caucasus. What did bears do? Why, they turned back on their tracks ….

  The red and white Moscow-bound coach.

  Spandarian, you stupid prick.

  Tokarev made his way calmly but purposefully to the nearest call-box.

  Spandarian’s secretary Yelena answered the phone when he made a check call to Moscow from Kalinin.

  She said urgently: ‘Comrade Kirov wants to speak to you. He has been very insistent.’

  ‘What did you tell him, Yelena?’

  ‘That you were looking for the American Calder.’

  ‘In Kalinin?’

  ‘I didn’t specify ….’

  ‘Thank you, Yelena. What would I do without you?’

  He called Dzerzhinsky Square. Swat – straight through to the chairman’s office.

  ‘Progress report please, Comrade Spandarian.’

  ‘We have Calder in our sights.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I do. And the Executive Action Department operative.’

  ‘According to my intelligence you haven’t been in contact with the Executive Action Department.’ A pause, an intake of breath – the old wound. ‘Let’s not play games, Spandarian. Are you in Moscow?’

  Kirov knew perfectly well that he wasn’t: Tokarev had told him. You’re lagging, Spandarian. ‘No, Kalinin.’

  ‘Calder’s there?’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘You lost him?’

  ‘We’ll get him, Comrade Chairman. You have no cause to worry ….’

  ‘He’s back in Moscow,’ Kirov said.

  ‘We know that. Kalinin was a diversion,’ Spandarian said quickly.

  ‘We?’

  ‘It looks as though he’s going to strike east.’

  ‘As from now,’ Kirov said, ‘you and Tokarev will collaborate. Closely. Georgian cunning and a huntsman’s instincts. Together you should be unbeatable. Get back to Moscow. Meanwhile surveillance on all exits from Moscow has been re-imposed. And Spandarian ….’

  ‘Comrade Chairman?’

  ‘No arrests. I want him good and dead.’

  On one point Georgian cunning and animal instinct coalesced: Calder, like a dog after a bitch on heat, might have tried to see Katerina Ilyina.

  Spandarian and Tokarev faced each other across mugs of coffee in the canteen of the KGB building on the Sadovaya Ring.

  ‘I’ll interrogate her if you like’ Spandarian offered.

  ‘I’m sure it’s an art in which you excel.’

  Hostility condensed in the steam from the coffee.

  ‘I’m sure you excel in other arts, comrade. How do you like to kill? With your hands?’

  ‘How do you interrogate comrade? With your hands?

  ‘Or a knife perhaps?’

  Tokarev regarded him patiently. ‘It depends on the hit. The circumstances in which he’s run to earth. If he were a wily customer, dangerous when cornered, then he would die with a bullet through his eyes. The quicker the better. You see I don’t enjoy killing; it’s the hunt that absorbs me.’

  ‘You must be having one hell of a time at the moment.’ Spandarian sipped his coffee; it tasted like a third pressing.

  ‘I’m lucky. Ninety per cent of the people on this earth do jobs they dislike. Clock-watchers all. What a way to waste your life. Do you enjoy your work, comrade Spandarian?’

  What I shall enjoy most, Spandarian decided, is authorising your execution when I become head of the Second Chief Directorate.

  He finished his foul coffee. ‘If you’ll excuse me, comrade, I will go and interrogate the bitch.’

  Apart from a few unfortunate stains on the walls, the room on 25th October Street that Spandarian used for occasional interrogations wasn’t unwholesome. With its khaki filing cabinets, tubular steel chairs and pinewood table, all covered with a patina of dust, it was more like a spare room whose function had yet to be decided. There was even a threadbare carpet on the floor; beneath this was a floor safe in which Spandarian kept the lives of those who could assist him on his ascent to pre-eminence – copies elsewhere in case the owners of any of those lives took it into their heads to search the interrogation room.

  Prowling the room, addressing her from all angles, Spandarian questioned Katerina skilfully, hot and cold, lies and facts, benevolence and menace, and hit her only once.

  ‘At what time did he come to your apartment?’

  ‘He didn’t.’ She moved her legs from the cold steel of the chair. Good legs, Spandarian noted. He saw her for a moment naked.

  ‘It was dark?’

  ‘He didn’t come.’

  Spandarian picked up some papers from the table. ‘I see you held a feminist meeting near the firemen’s barracks on Kropotkin Street yesterday.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Rowdyism, hooligan behaviour …. It really won’t do Katerina Ilyina.’ He clucked disapprovingly. ‘In fact you’re going to be confined to your apartment. Unless …. Was Calder there when you got back from the meeting?’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t see him.’

  ‘Did he screw you?’

  ‘No ….’

  ‘In the park?’

  She didn’t reply but her lips trembled.

  Spandarian stood behind her and placed one hand gently on her shoulder. ‘He’s going west, isn’t he? Going to cross the border into Finland.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The blow knocked her from her chair. As she knelt on the carpet he noticed that the rings on his fingers had stamped an instant bruise on her cheekbone.

  He helped her back to the chair and said amiably: ‘Please stop lying, Katerina Ilyina, we know you saw him, we know he’s going east, and there’s no way he can escape. Every railway, every road, every airport is being watched. But it would help if we knew his destination. Nakhodka, I assume ….’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  He lit one of his yellow cigarettes and blew smoke into a shaft of exhausted sunlight.

  ‘Perhaps your good friend Svetlana might refresh your memory.’

  She was on her feet. ‘You keep her out of this. It’s nothing to do with her.’

  ‘Such spirit,’ he said and opened the door and the glory that had been Svetlana stood there, eyes slitted, hair matted, lip split.

  In the room adjoining his office Spandarian conferred with his computer. From time to time Tokarev, sipping a glass of tea, glanced in.

  Once he said: ‘Calder isn’t in Moscow; you must know that. He used the time we wasted in Kalinin to make his real break. And if I were him I would lose myself in the taiga in Siberia.’

  Spandarian ignored him. But he had been right on the first point: Calder must have returned to Moscow – with the party of archaeologists. He consulted the computer: they had been given accommodation in the Métropole, Rossiya and Minsk hotels.

  He called the hotels on the phone. Only one guest answered Calder’s description. Franklin Grainger in Room 308 at the Rossiya. Moustache? Not as far as the receptionist could recall.

  Where had he gone? The receptionist hadn’t the faintest idea: all he knew was that he hadn’t returned although he had been booked for three nights.

  Spandarian thought like a Georgian, like Lazishvili, like Beria, like Stalin. What chance did animal instinct stand against such distilled cunning?

  So, Katerina Ilyina had virtually confirmed that Calder was heading east. By air? Impossible. Surveillance had never been lifted from airports. Road? Not across Siberia! River? Not again, for God’s sake. Train ….

  Spandarian summoned the latest Intourist programming on the computer – sub-dividing it into FOREIGNER ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES MOSCOW and then again into TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY.

  Jessel. The name leaped at him. Why was the United States intelligence chief in Moscow who used Calder as his Twilight Brigade informant travelling across Siberia?

  He picked up the telephone, dialled 52 0
0 11, the US Embassy and, posing as an official of UPKD, the State agency that caters for diplomats’ needs, asked to be put through to Information. Jessel, he was told, was playing in a friendly chess tournament in the Far East and had a special permit to visit the closed city of Vladivostok.

  So the Foreign Embassy Department of the Second Chief Directorate was laying on a misinformation junket for Jessel.

  ‘Is he travelling alone?’

  The voice on the other end of the line sounded surprised as though UPKD should have known. ‘No, he’s been joined by a guy named Grainger. Another chess fanatic’ Franklin Grainger the American who had vanished from the Rossiya! Names were hammer blows today.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Tokarev asked from the doorway.

  ‘Coming together.’ He wished he could double-cross Tokarev here and now; but in Moscow that would be suicide – Kirov would get to hear about it and break him. He would have to fix him later.

  Grainger. Green letters as tremulous as leaf shadows in sunlight appeared on the screen. Arrived BA 710 at 16.45 hours yesterday.

  Calder would have got back from Kalinin yesterday. Spandarian telexed Immigration at Sheremetievo and asked for the KGB extension. How had Franklin Grainger been transported to the city centre? A pause. Then: ‘By US Embassy limousine.’

  Spandarian made his penultimate call to the militia post outside the American Embassy. Another pause while the NCO consulted ARRIVAL and DEPARTURE records.

  Arrived 18.42 hours. Departed 19.37. And yes, the figure in the passenger seat had been indistinct.

  Of course it had. An embassy official with a coat-collar turned up. An imposter had been flown to Moscow from the United States and taken to the Embassy. Grainger, alias Calder, had booked into the Rossiya after the limousine had left at 19.37 hours. The man who had flown the Atlantic via London was still in the Embassy.

  Spandarian made his last call – to the radio compartment on the Trans-Siberian. He ordered round-the-clock surveillance on Jessel and Grainger. ‘No positive action until I arrive unless an escape bid is made.’