The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Like a periscope the tip of the bone protruded from the dark blood and pus filling the cavity in the plaster. And beneath the plaster the flesh swelled so that, two days after Calder had fallen, the doctor had to cut it away.

  When he saw what lay beneath he sighed. He shot Calder full of antibiotic but by now Calder’s body had built up a formidable resistance.

  He told Raisa he would return from Nizhneangarsk in two days. Before he came back Yury Petrov returned having ‘goldmailed’ the authorities in Irkutsk.

  ‘You should have seen the face of that cocky little whippersnapper from the Border Guards,’ he said but Raisa didn’t smile and said: ‘One day, Yury, you will be weighted to the bottom of Baikal by gold,’ and ‘I’m worried about Calder.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Yury said, full of golden optimism, ‘he’ll pull through,’ and of the Border Guard officer, with true Siberian feeling: ‘May he have ulcers on his soul.’

  When the doctor returned and examined Calder’s leg he shook his head. Later that day he operated.

  Calder was in Fenway Park discussing the latest Red Sox triumph over Cokes and hot dogs with Ruth and Harry and Dalby and Yury Petrov.

  Casually he slid his hand down his thigh towards the fracture.

  His hand reached his knee. After that there was nothing.

  CHAPTER 25

  Sometimes youth departs in a moment. Dispatched by the lack of interest in a pretty girl’s eyes, a lost game of tennis, a snapped tooth, a young boss. Thirty years of making it and, click, middle-age.

  With Spandarian it took a little longer than a moment but it was abrupt just the same. Click, he was sacked from his job with the Second Chief Directorate and assigned to Registry and Archives. Click, he was thrown out of his smart apartment and given a one-roomer overlooking Danilovsky Cemetery. Click, when he tried to hit the slut with the pouting lips she drew a knife on him and left the view of the gravestones for ever.

  To seek rejuvenation Spandarian took a vacation in Georgia, keeping in touch with his former secretary, Yelena, who had taken an instant dislike to her new boss, a dull Slav who kept count of the number of cubes of sugar she used in the tea and told her to remove the rouge from her thin cheeks.

  From Yelena he learned that, by the end of October, Kirov had dismissed Calder as ‘missing, presumed dead.’ Spandarian didn’t believe that. Calder had jumped – the image of the American silhouetted against the framework of the bridge at Cheremkovo was printed on his vision – and disappeared. If he had dropped into the river his body would have been swept north before sinking or becoming snagged. Before his disgrace and recall from Siberia, Spandarian had supervised the dragging of the river and dropped body-weight objects from the bridge to see where they went. He had found nothing.

  Reluctantly he had concluded that Calder must have jumped onto a passing ship; he should have considered the possibility earlier. He had checked all shipping movements on the night Calder had vanished and found that an old steamer named the Ulianov towing coal barges had passed through Cheremkovo at about the time Calder had jumped.

  He had interviewed the skipper, a spade-bearded river-sailor who had struck Spandarian as being suspiciously honest. But even in the interrogation room in Irkutsk, spitting out teeth, he hadn’t remembered anything untoward on that dark, rainswept night. Spandarian would have continued the interrogation – electrodes on the testicles had a way with defective memories – but the summons to Moscow had cut short his investigation.

  Then on top of everything the bitch had disappeared. And all he had to show for his efforts were the corpses of Jessel, who had once co-operated in the liquidation of restless members of the Twilight Brigade, and Tokarev.

  ‘And I thought Georgians were supposed to be cunning,’ Kirov had said as he sacked and demoted him and Spandarian had thought: ‘Fuck your mother, I’ll be back.’

  But as the November days shortened and snow dusted the Georgian Military Road so the prospects of a comeback dwindled: the intrigues and vendettas of Tbilisi weren’t exerting their therapy and, middle-aged, he was beginning to accept that the seats of power had been kicked from beneath him. Not even flying in his old Lavochkin fighter plane with the aero club had any effect.

  What he needed was an incentive. A lead that would resurrect the drive of his recently departed youth.

  He got it one evening early in December.

  He was seated in a café near the foot of the funicular leading to the summit of Holy Mountain drinking Armenian brandy, smoking a thin cheroot and playing Zhelezhka. But the serial numbers on the rouble notes with which they were playing were not co-operative and in five disastrous minutes he had lost two hundred and fifty roubles. In the old days when he had revisited Tbilisi from Moscow, the living proof that an astute Georgian could outwit those dolts in the capital, he had usually managed to pick the highest digits. But now he had lost his confidence – and the respect of his countrymen.

  In fact he suspected that his old cronies would have liked him to return to Moscow. What was he doing back here behaving like a whipped cur? Spying? An agent provocateur?

  In one corner of the smoked-hazed café a group of tailors were singing songs from the crumpled peaks of the Caucasian Mountains. In another a bevy of barbers and shoemakers were conspiring. A girl with tortoiseshell combs in her seal-sleek hair and flirtatious eyes peered into the café; she recognised Spandarian but looked away. He couldn’t blame her: his face was blotched with brandy, his moustache a ragged memory of its former splendour.

  ‘Sixteen,’ said his friend Lazishvili, related to the still-venerated Godfather. ‘Can anyone beat that?’

  No one, least of all Spandarian. He paid up another fifty roubles. Thank God he had salted away a few thousand when he ruled at 25th October Street.

  The telephone rang behind the bar. ‘It’s for you,’ the barman shouted to Spandarian. Once, before Calder, he would have presented himself at the table. ‘Moscow on the line, Comrade Spandarian. Are you here?’ As though Moscow were no more important than a predatory wife.

  He picked up the receiver. It was Yelena. ‘I may have something for you,’ she said. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

  It was generally safe enough with Yelena: the information she imparted was so innocuous that it didn’t matter a monkey’s toss if the wire was tapped. But he was touched by her loyalty; the flowers on Women’s Day had been a good investment.

  ‘As safe as it ever will be,’ he said as the barman moved away. These days he didn’t even try to eavesdrop. ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s important ….’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  ‘The Americans are sending a new man to their Embassy.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It looks as though he’s taking over from Jessel.’

  ‘Someone has to.’

  ‘But apparently Comrade Razin, head of the First Chief Directorate, doesn’t think he’s career CIA.’

  ‘That happens, Yelena. They dispatch a decoy to take over the position of the departed Company man. The real operator fills a vacancy in another section.’

  ‘But the new man is or was a member of the National Security Council.’

  Spandarian held the receiver away from his ear for a moment. Dormant instincts awoke. He put his lips closer to the mouthpiece. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Comrade Razin seems to be sure,’ a suspicion of a sniff over the line.

  ‘What’s this new man’s name?’

  A pause. She was consulting a note. Then: ‘Shoemaker.’

  Shoemaker was the President’s Personal Assistant on Security. Spandarian frowned, uncertain of the implications’, but his instincts surged and in the past they had seldom been wrong.

  ‘And another thing, Comrade Spandarian?’

  ‘Yes, Yelena?’ A clincher, please make it a clincher.

  ‘He’s coming to Moscow via Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railway.’


  ‘Any stops?’

  ‘Just one. Irkutsk.’

  So Calder was alive: Moscow was sending a man to make contact with him. Spandarian’s heart thudded.

  ‘Yelena?’

  ‘Yes, Comrade Spandarian?’

  ‘I love you,’ he said and hung up.

  The following morning he caught a flight from Tbilisi to Moscow.

  Spandarian was young again.

  He had more than twelve hours to kill before the night flight from Domodyedovo Airport to Irkutsk. He decided to find Dalby and put out feelers among the Twilight Brigade.

  From his apartment he telephoned Dalby but there was no reply. He then called Koslov, head of Personnel at the Institute, and asked him where Dalby was.

  A pause, a gritty clearing of the throat. ‘Ah, Comrade Spandarian … I don’t know … you see things have changed ….’

  Spandarian said pleasantly: ‘Did you hear about the recent case in Murmansk in which a man was executed for large-scale dealing in definsitny goods? How’s the caviar business, Lev?’

  ‘He’s at his dacha,’ Koslov said.

  Dalby’s dacha lay twenty kilometres outside Moscow. Spandarian put on a sable hat and sheepskin coat and, leaning into the falling snow, went looking for a taxi.

  As they drove east along Enthusiasts’ Road, the route along which exiles banished to Siberia had once tramped, the snow fell in soft Christmas flakes. By the time they reached Izmailovo Park it was faltering; when they reached the old wooden house it had spent itself and cross-country skiers were already pushing their way across tranquil white fields.

  Small grubby cars were parked on the roadside and the dacha, grey with a single onion dome perched on the roof, was full of light. Dalby was throwing a party.

  Spandarian banged the brass knocker on the door and when Dalby opened it pushed past him and was gratified to observe the effect his intrusion had upon the guests. He was a switch: for a moment all noise stopped.

  In the past he had heard about parties like this from informants. Dismal occasions by all accounts. Disparate individuals forced by exile to seek each other’s company. A few drinks and they embarked on their incestuous quarrels, intrigues and affairs.

  As they started to talk and move again, as though their puppeteer had returned, Spandarian, accepting a brandy from Dalby, appraised his erstwhile flock.

  The Canadian Langley, fading stud, seeking sexual reassurance with the young wife of a Belgian electronics expert, practising for the occasion with railway station whores; finding locker-room innuendo in the most innocent remark. At the moment he was drinking beer from a can and winding up a story, probably about his days as an ice-hockey player and sexual athlete, to Mrs Lundkvist who, although plainly perplexed, was smiling gamely.

  Lundkvist himself, the owner of a small wagging beard and a hoard of moth-eaten secrets about Swedish submarine surveillance, was standing at the window staring at the snow-covered garden, seeing, perhaps, the abandoned past. Lundkvist wasn’t really a party-goer; he collected postage stamps.

  Spandarian scanned the room with theatrical deliberation. A log fire was burning in a cavernous grate; beads of aged resin shone from timber walls; the Christmas card collection had begun to assemble on the bookshelves – Twilight Brigade members sent each other cards early to make sure they were reciprocated – even though the birth of Christ wasn’t celebrated in the Soviet Union.

  In one corner, apart from the other guests, van Doorn, the Dutch homosexual, was talking wistfully to a muscular German who pumped iron. Even in this enlightened age homosexuals were still vulnerable to blackmail; therefore they were numerically high in the espionage stakes. In Moscow, despite the lenient view taken by the KGB, they also seemed more vulnerable to loneliness. Unless ordered otherwise by the KGB the gays outside the Bolshoi and elsewhere took them to the cleaners.

  There was Fellows, rewarded for fighting with the Red Army with five years in a labour camp, using one of the lines on his old face to fashion a smile, boring the arse off a KGB plant in the UPDK with a description of a cricket match. Cricket! What had made this archetypical Englishman leave his serene pastures at a time when Hitler was threatening to trample all over the cricket pitches? According to his dossier, Spandarian remembered, it was a distaste for patronage; what they called in Britain The Old Boy System. Rebellion against the old order: Spandarian could understand that: what he couldn’t understand was the abandonment of one’s country. No Georgian could, no Russian for that matter.

  Then there was Bennett, the Australian, face already burning with booze, spouting dogma. At least he still believed in the dreams of equality that hadn’t quite materialised in the Soviet Union.

  Spandarian sipped his brandy. Outside there were trailers of night in hollows in the snow. Inside the Twilight Brigade were picking up the strands of their village gossip, glancing at him surreptitiously, wincing like sea-anenomes when he fielded the glances.

  Spandarian wondered if any of them had found justification for their actions. Certainly some of them worked at seeking fulfillment, enthusiastically promoting the benefits of the system. Full employment, cheap holidays, cramped but adequate housing, good education … and, eyes fluttering with Cyrillics, did battle with the Russian language. But even they remained in the twilight.

  Of the defectors who had tried to find purpose Calder had been outstanding. Unlike the others who, like retired businessmen, invented incentives, he had possessed a secret fuel.

  Glass in hand, Spandarian approached van Doorn and the ageing, over-muscled German. ‘So, what’s the latest gossip?’ he asked. ‘Who’s sleeping with who? Wife-swopping must become a problem when you run out of swops. But of course that wouldn’t concern you two gentlemen.’

  Not quite true: the German was ambidextrous, frantically seeking any sexual diversion as his virility waned.

  The German, already a little drunk on beer and schnapps imported from Finland, asked: ‘What brings you here Spandarian?’ rasping his awful Russian with intrusive vowels and consonants.

  ‘I thought you might be able to help me.’

  ‘Help you Spandarian? We thought you had left us. Rumour has it that you have been demoted.’

  ‘I want to know if you’ve heard anything from Calder,’ Spandarian said pleasantly.

  ‘Ah, the one that got away.’ The German moved some muscles in his grotesque chest. ‘What does it feel like to be outsmarted, Spandarian?’

  Spandarian stroked his ragged moustache. Then he said: ‘I understand you two have been seeing a lot of each other recently.’

  Van Doorn said eagerly: ‘We have a lot in common.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  ‘No,’ van Doorn said, ‘you don’t understand. We’re playing a lot of chess.’

  ‘Your move,’ the German said to Spandarian.

  ‘My move? Not too subtle I’m afraid. You are both aware that under Article 121 of the criminal code homosexual acts between males are punishable by a maximum of five years imprisonment?’

  ‘You haven’t got any proof.’

  ‘Oh yes I have,’ Spandarian lied. ‘And in your case,’ to the German, ‘there is always the possibility of an eight-year sentence if minors have been involved.’

  Van Doorn, touching the German’s arm, said: ‘Of course we’ll co-operate, won’t we Ernst?’

  The German nodded briefly and flung schnapps down his throat.

  Spandarian, still smiling, moved purposefully towards Langley and Mrs Lundkvist. Mrs Lundkvist, he recalled, had a penchant for young men and indeed a willowy KGB gigolo had been startled by the exuberance of her matronly passion. But within the parish of defectors young people were thin on the ground and, as Langley still retained some green sap, he was, Spandarian supposed, the next best thing to rampant youth.

  She said gaily: ‘How wonderful to see you, Comrade Spandarian. I always hoped that one day you’d join our little circle,’ and Langley, interrupted in full flood of some raunchy memoir, said: �
��We thought you’d left us,’ hopefully.

  ‘A vacation,’ Spandarian told them. ‘Siberia. Hunting. I’m going back.’ And to Langley: ‘Calder, have you heard from him?’

  ‘Me? Why the hell should I? We weren’t close.’

  ‘He’s got to get in touch with someone. If he calls you call me.’

  ‘Any reason why I should?’

  ‘Many,’ Spandarian told him. ‘The illegal exchange fifteen months ago of Canadian dollars for roubles at three times the official rate on the black market at Katilnikovskaya Street …. How’s that for an introductory offer?’ and before Langley could answer returned to Dalby who was remonstrating with a Dane for feeding a Bing Crosby tape into a battered recorder.

  ‘Do I g … gather you’re making a comeback?’ Dalby asked pouring himself a Stolichnaya vodka.

  ‘What makes you think I ever left? I never made a point of intruding into your activities.’

  Dalby shrugged. Inside the recorder Bing Crosby began to dream about a white Christmas. In their corner van Dorn and the German were arguing furiously.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Dalby asked. ‘Calder?’

  ‘He’s alive. Gone to ground. He’s going to need help and if he contacts anyone it will be you.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  All around him defectors were immersed in Christmases past. In the untrammelled snow of childhood. Spandarian wondered what Dalby’s childhood had been like. Lonely, he suspected. The loneliness that only the English upper class knew how to inflict upon their offspring.

  ‘They always come to you,’ Spandarian said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’

  Why did Dalby still betray? To buttress the betrayal that had been his life, Spandarian assumed. To honour his frayed ideals. At least he remained true to his long-ago visions.

  For a moment Spandarian saw a small boy with bitten fingernails sitting alone at a desk staring through the window at sunlit playing fields ….