The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Smiling, Spandarian returned to his office and took a railway time-table from a shelf. The obvious place to join the train was Novosibirsk, an easy flight from Moscow. Train No. 2 arrived there at 15.50 Moscow time, 19.50 local on the third day of its journey.

  He was about to pick up the phone to reserve two flights when Tokarev said: ‘Let’s not over-book. I made the reservations a couple of hours ago.’

  CHAPTER 20

  From the window of the train the steppe, black-earth and birch-wood, reached for the horizon and beyond. A hamlet of wooden cottages wearing fretted pink and blue bonnets drifted past. A girl in a gypsy skirt standing in a field of lush grass waved.

  Calder yawned. It was 5 pm. In fifty minutes they would be in Novosibirsk, the Chicago of Siberia, more than two thousand miles from Moscow. Jessel was asleep on his bunk in the two-berth, soft-class compartment. It wasn’t difficult to fall asleep lulled by the slow rhythms of the Trans-Siberian – express, never. But even in sleep Jessel, thin hair undisturbed, seemed watchful, compact.

  Calder left the grey-walled compartment to get a cup of tea from the girl with the blonde, sugar-spun hair in charge of the samovar at the end of the corridor.

  She handed him a cup and he gave her five kopeks for the lump of sugar. He made a joke about the concrete-hard cube but she didn’t smile. Was it his imagination or had her attitude changed? As the train passed through the Urals crossing from Europe to Asia she had been a flirt: now she seemed possessed by spirits of the doomed legions of exiles who had once trekked across Siberia to die in the gold, silver and coal mines.

  To encourage her to talk Calder said: ‘What time are we due at Novsibirsk?’

  ‘There are eighty-three stops on the line,’ she said. ‘I can’t be expected to know what time we arrive at each of them.’

  Once she would have pouted her bosom and replied: ‘Time to get to know each other,’ with a flash of steel teeth deep in her smile. She had changed.

  He glanced down the corridor. A man in a blue track suit was leaning against a compartment door gazing out of the window. Calder felt as though he were suspended on a thread held by the girl and the man. Stupid. The girl had quarrelled with her boyfriend, one of the cooks on the train, and as for the man – the train was full of Russians in blue track suits. But what was he doing here? Few Russians, Red Army generals or influential apparatchiki mostly, travelled soft-class. He had developed a persecution complex: the man, lean and dark and unshaven, was probably Party Chairman of the Novosibirsk Oblast.

  A train coming from the east raced past startling him. A troop train by the look of it. Burrowing through rustic tranquillity, you forgot that the border with China was only five hundred miles to the south. In the Far East it almost hugged the track.

  Calder walked along the corridor of a hard-class coach of four-berth compartments; three samovars later he reached the dining car. He bought fruit and plain chocolate from a girl wearing a paper tiara at the glass cabinet at one end of the car and sat at a table next to a man in a red T-shirt reading a book about bridge construction. He bit crisply into a green-skinned apple.

  The samovar girl had depressed him. He felt like one of the brodyagi, the convicts who had managed to escape from their manacles after they had said farewell to their families at the Monument of Tears in the Urals. Escaped in the winter into desolation so cold that the permafrost never melted and trees exploded. Millions of convicts had been dispatched and many had helped to carve the Trans-Siberian through the wilderness.

  Staring out of the window Calder saw an old woman feeding geese beside a pond.

  The man in the red T-shirt snapped his book shut and produced a half-litre bottle of vodka. ‘A little nip, comrade? They don’t sell it on this train – the peasants might start a riot.’

  Calder declined; his companion tilted the bottle down his throat and gave a deep, hot sigh. ‘Mother Russia’s milk. The fuel of the Soviet Union.’ He slid the bottle back into his travelling bag; it chinked against another bottle. ‘So you’re not superstitious, comrade?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Because in the good old, bad old days it was considered unlucky to take the Trans-Siberian on a Monday and we did just that ….’

  Calder looked over his shoulder. The unshaven man in the blue track suit was sitting four tables away. A coincidence, of course. Why shouldn’t he come to the dining car?

  The train pulled into a small station with pink and white petunias growing in beds of soot-fine soil. Two women wearing headscarves were selling meat pastries, bowls of raspberries and ice-cream from a canvas-covered pushcart. Eagles watched from the high blue sky.

  As the train moved away Calder stood up and continued his journey towards the engine. Four samovars later he was in one of the cheap dormitory coaches. Fifty-seven bunks arranged in tiers. The aisle was a back street of a New York ghetto at the turn of the century. Dripping laundry strung between bunks; blankets on the floor laid with bread and cheese and beer; babies crawling on nut-shells and sunflower seeds among chess players lost in their gambits.

  The woman attendant for the dormitory confronted him. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

  ‘Just looking.’

  ‘You don’t belong here. Out.’

  ‘I thought this was a classless society.’

  She pointed a stubby finger at the door. Shrugging, Calder turned and walked into the man in the blue track suit.

  The attendant beamed at him. ‘Comrade Ragozin. Welcome back.’ The man in the blue track suit lay down on a bunk and closed his eyes.

  When he got back to soft-class Jessel was arranging the chess-pieces on a magnetic board that folded in the middle like a small, chequered briefcase.

  ‘We’d better get in some practice,’ he said. ‘Especially if you’re going to play like Marshall. He was a real bruiser on the board except that he sometimes led with his chin. A boozer, too. Died in ’44.’

  ‘I know,’ Calder said sitting at the table, ‘I once played at the Marshall Club in New York on West Tenth. Even though I don’t know much about the Marshall Attack I don’t figure I have to change my style too much.’

  He chose white and they moved into a Dutch Defence, Staunton Gambit. He played purposefully, cheered by the man in the blue track suit’s indifference.

  Jessel resigned on the twenty-ninth move. He stared out of the window. ‘Siberia,’ he said, ‘the biggest treasure trove in the world. Six million square miles of it. Gas, oil, uranium, diamonds …. These days a young man goes east. Have you ever been to any of the new cities?’

  ‘Boston is the only city I want to see.’

  ‘Well right now you’re about to see Chicago.’ Jessel pointed out of the window. Factory chimneys trailing thick banners of smoke fingered the sky. Train No. 2 passed over a bridge spanning the Ob and they were in Novosibirsk station.

  Calder and Jessel went into the corridor. Another man in a blue track suit was standing at the end of the corridor. This one had shaved.

  As they alighted from the coach a clerk from the radio compartment handed Jessel a cable. He scanned it and said: ‘I’ll go back to the compartment to decode. You take a walk.’

  Calder bought a plastic cup of kvas and, sipping it, queued for a copy of Krokodil at a magazine stall. Down the platform passengers clustered round a food-stall like ants trying to drag a crumb of cake back to their nest.

  Clutching his magazine, the only one that dared to satirise Authority, Calder walked the length of the train to the green serpent that was hauling it. He wondered what the cable said. Before they left Moscow he had asked Jessel to find out about Harry.

  The train stayed in Novosibirsk for twenty-two minutes. There were still twelve minutes left. He sauntered back past the maroon coaches embossed in gold with CCCP and hammers and sickles and, underneath, Moscow-Vladivostok in Cyrillic.

  From one of the windows a small boy thumbed his nose at him. Calder glanced up and down the platform. Blue track suits everywhere.<
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  When he got back to the compartment Jessel was staring at the decoding. Light from the window shone through the original cable paper and Calder could see the outlines of the strips of ticker-tape; there were a lot of them.

  Jessel folded the two sheets, original and decode, with nimble fingers and slid them into his wallet.

  ‘Good news?’

  ‘Not bad, not good.’

  Jessel’s attitude had changed. The sweet coating had been licked from a pill and he was tasting the kernel.

  ‘Harry?’

  Jessel nodded. ‘Just a one-liner – he’s still unconscious, as well as can be expected.’

  He was lying: there had been several strips on the cable. Why was he lying?

  ‘Anything else?’ Calder asked to give him a chance.

  Jessel shook his head.

  Spandarian and Tokarev boarded Train No. 2 one minute before it was due to depart and went straight to an empty hard-class compartment reserved for them four coaches from the soft-class car bringing up the rear.

  Spandarian lay on a bunk and watched Tokarev as he checked the fittings. There was a certain heavy grace about the man. And those hands – he could pull your head off with them.

  But at last they were in accord. On the plane from Moscow they had agreed that it was stupid to compete for the privilege of killing Calder. Much more practical for Tokarev, the professional assassin, to do the job.

  Smiling at Tokarev, he thought: ‘And then I will kill you.’

  In the days of doubt, before he had met Katerina, Calder had taken strong sleeping tablets. He palmed one now as, with his back to Jessel, he poured their nightcaps – bourbon which Jessel had brought from Embassy stock. The tablet fell into Jessel’s glass and stayed there insoluble as a tooth. Calder swirled the whisky.

  Jessel, sitting at the table reading an old copy of the Wall Street Journal, said ‘Hurry up, I don’t want it with my breakfast coffee.’

  Calder dipped one finger into the bourbon and pressed the tablet. It broke up; the fragments hesitated then they, too, dissolved. Calder handed the glass to Jessel.

  Jessel, wearing pyjamas and a blue towelling robe, raised his glass. ‘Here’s to Saturday.’ He held the glass high. ‘Why the days of the week? You never told me.’

  Drink!

  Calder tossed back half his whisky. ‘There were seven of them. It was an obvious way to codename them.’

  ‘I guess so.’ Jessel sniffed his drink, held it up to the ceiling light. ‘How much water did you put in this? It looks as though it could pole-axe a Siberian tiger.’

  Calder topped up the drink with water from a plastic jug.

  Jessel sipped it. He usually tossed his liquor back like cowboys did in Westerns. ‘When we get to Vladivostok,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to play a couple of games. Then we’ll smuggle you on a boat to Yokohama. It’s all been arranged.’

  Calder finished his whisky in one more gulp.

  Jessel drank his in slow swallows; but down it all went. Then he took off his robe and climbed into his bunk.

  Calder lay on his berth on the other side of the compartment and waited.

  Jessel rustled his Journal a lot. Finally he stroked the long strands of his hair and glanced inquiringly at Calder. ‘Okay?’

  Calder nodded. Jessel turned down the ceiling light to a dim, ghostly blue. ‘No jogging in the morning,’ he said. He slept.

  Calder gave it half an hour. Jessel’s wallet was under his pillow. Calder edged his hand underneath. The wallet slid out easily.

  Calder read Jessel’s decode.

  The words were bullets.

  MARION SHANNON LEAD FALSE STOP MUST ASSUME THAT CODENAMES MONDAY TO FRIDAY ALSO FABRICATIONS AND SUBJECT ATTEMPTING ELABORATE DECEPTION STOP HANDLE WITH UTMOST CAUTION AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS EN ROUTE VLADIVOSTOK.

  The signature in Jessel’s decode was garbled so presumably it was in the original. But obviously it didn’t matter to him: he knew who had sent the cable.

  Calder made a note of the scrambled signature, replaced encode and decode in the wallet and replaced it beneath Jessel’s pillow.

  Calder returned to his bunk. But he didn’t sleep. Instead he wrestled with the anagram of the garbled signature because he knew it had to be the name of The Man Who Was Saturday.

  CHAPTER 21

  By morning the blue sky had vanished and the steppe with it. Rain fell mistily dribbling rivers and tributaries down the windows of the train, and the taiga, pine and swamp and mist, crowded the track on either side.

  Tokarev, planning Calder’s death over a boiled egg, tea and toast in the dining car, loved the predatory atmosphere of the taiga and was grateful to the American for leading him here.

  He sensed animals watched the train from dark depths and the prospect of returning to Moscow depressed him. Perhaps, after the killing, they would be allowed to continue the journey to the east, the domain of shaggy tigers, wolves, mink, sable, squirrel and elk. To trap a Siberian tiger, felis tigris, now that would be something.

  Thank God Spandarian, who had stayed in the compartment in case Calder spotted him, wasn’t sitting at the same table spoiling the mood. Tokarev detested the narcissist Georgian, and the stink of male cosmetics and stale tobacco smoke in the compartment turned his stomach.

  And what conceit! Did Spandarian really believe that his concession had been accepted? That I don’t realise he intends to murder me after I’ve killed the American?

  Tokarev finished his tea and, pushing his way past sleepy passengers queueing for tables, made his way to the compartment where the Director of Train No. 2 ruled.

  The Director, plump with soap-shined cheeks and gold-chain looped across a tight waistcoat, stared woefully at Tokarev’s red ID and asked without enthusiasm how he could help.

  Tokarev sat opposite him at a table and told him. He wanted Jessel and Calder to be told that tonight their meal could not be served in their compartment: they would have to eat in the dining car with the less privileged passengers.

  The Director made a note with a fractured ballpoint pen. ‘No trouble. Is that all?’ he asked hopefully.

  No, Tokarev told him, there was more, much more. He pointed at a wall map of the Trans-Siberian greased by many prodding fingers. ‘We arrive at Irkutsk at 05. 12 hours?’

  ‘On the dot,’ the Director said.

  ‘So when we stop at Cheremkovo two hundred kilometres this side of Irkutsk it should still be dark?’

  Surprised, the Director said: ‘Of course. But you don’t want to get off there, surely. There’s nothing there but coal-mines.’

  ‘I don’t want to get off there: I want someone else to stay there. There are sidings?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Good. Now while the two Americans are having dinner I want all soft-class passengers evacuated to hard-class.’

  The Director was appalled. ‘I can’t do that. We have very important passengers in soft-class.’

  ‘How important?’

  ‘The Deputy Director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from Akademgorodok ….’

  ‘Not very important. The top scientific brains went back to Moscow years ago.’

  ‘A cosmonaut.’

  ‘He’s only important up there.’ Tokarev jerked his thumb skywards.

  ‘A Red Army general ….’

  ‘Get them all out,’ Tokarev said, bored.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ the Director said with nervous importance. He pulled a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and spun it on the chain.

  ‘You’ll do what you’re told,’ Tokarev told him.

  ‘I’m in charge of this train.’

  ‘Not anymore. Now let’s go to the radio car and call Moscow.’

  ‘Moscow?’ The Director grimaced; cracks appeared in his shining cheeks. ‘Why Moscow?’

  ‘I want you to speak to someone there.’

  ‘Supposing I don’t want to speak to anyone in Moscow?’

  ‘He’ll want t
o speak to you. His name is Kirov, Chairman of State Security.’

  The gold watch stopped gyrating. ‘I’ll clear the soft-class coach,’ the Director said.

  ‘We’ll go to the radio car just the same. You will call the stationmaster at Cheremkovo. I want a quick turnaround and I want the soft-class coach uncoupled and shunted into a siding. Then I want the station cleared of all staff.’

  On the way to the radio car the Director asked, ‘May I ask, Comrade Tokarev, why all this is necessary?’

  ‘You don’t want a death on the Trans-Siberian, do you comrade?’

  When Tokarev got back to the compartment Spandarian was washed, shaved and pommaded. He looked what he was, a gangster with a beat between a barber’s and a funeral parlour. These Georgians with their thick accents were all the same: they all thought they were Stalin.

  ‘All fixed?’ Spandarian asked.

  ‘04.45 hours when it’s still dark.’

  ‘Calder and Jessel?’

  ‘Of course. No witnesses, no complications. They both disappear in the taiga, simple as that.’

  Spandarian said: ‘Calder shouldn’t present any problems. He’s supposed to be Grainger and the Americans can’t get too indignant about someone who doesn’t exist. But Jessel … that’ll have them howling for blood.’

  Tokarev shrugged. ‘So, he disappeared. What are we supposed to do about it?’

  Spandarian lit one of his foul cigarettes. Tokarev coughed, opened the window and sat in a corner cleansed by rain-wet air.

  Spandarian said: ‘Have you any idea why Calder is so important?’

  Tokarev shook his head slowly. In the depths of the taiga he saw a glint of water. Siberia, with its abundance of rivers and lakes, had once been compared to an ocean silted with steppe and taiga. Maybe when they reached Irkutsk and Lake Baikal he would be able to go duck shooting.

  ‘Obviously,’ Spandarian said, ‘Calder has access to vital information. But he hasn’t obtained it in the Soviet Union: I know that because he’s been under surveillance ever since he arrived. Presumption: it must be some intelligence he brought with him. Conclusion: Calder knows the identity of top Soviet agents in the West and is running home to blow them. Doesn’t any of this interest you?’ he asked Tokarev irritably.