The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  If the Georgians have one weakness it’s sentimentality. He said to Dalby: ‘If or when Calder contacts you call me on 4 60 64 – the Angara Hotel in Irkutsk.’

  Spandarian turned abruptly and walked into the dying afternoon that was already bladed with cruelty.

  As the jet flew over the pastures of cloud covering the Urals and the dawn sun splintered orange on the horizon, Spandarian studied a map of Siberia.

  If I were going to make a break, he asked himself, what escape route would I take? Siberia’s ten million square and rugged kilometres were daunting but in a way they made his task easier: with the rivers frozen and the roads, what few there were, blocked with snow, Calder’s choice was limited – air or railway.

  Air? Spandarian doubted it. Although Kirov had officially pronounced last rites on Calder the KGB, according to Yelena, were still watching all airports. You could jump off a train but a plane …. Spandarian gazed down at the cotton-fields of cloud.

  The obvious ports to make for in the extreme south-east, were Vladivostok, his destination with Jessel, or Nakhodka. From either of those he could use his dollars to buy an illegal passage to Japan. But Vladivostok, a naval port, was clamped tight with security at the best of times, and Nakhodka, the tourist exit, would be crawling with militia and KGB.

  Spandarian’s finger hugged the coastline to the north. Magadan? A possibility. But how would he get there? There was only a tiny stretch of road linked with the Chelomdzha River and that would be crammed with pack ice. In any case it was God-knows-how-many miles to Japan and any ship sailing there would have to negotiate patrol boats from Sakhalin Island to the west and the Kuril archipelago to the east. Air? Spandarian shook his head. Magadan airport was small and every passenger would be photographed and identified before his feet touched the ground.

  Ambitiously Spandarian vaulted over the northern limit of wooded country to the point where Russia and the United States almost nudged each other across the Bering Strait, and the International dateline – Monday in the USSR, Sunday in the USA.

  A submarine from the Soviet mainland to the Seward Peninsula of Alaska? So simple. Perhaps Shoemaker was travelling to Irkutsk to make the arrangements with Calder. Spandarian’s excitement flared and died: the Bering Strait was nearly five thousand kilometres from Irkutsk and not a sign of a road or railway in the northern extremity, only reindeer trails.

  The President’s Assistant for Security. Shit, Calder must be important. So important that Kirov had never elaborated. But Spandarian had confidence in his own guesswork – Calder was a reneging defector with the names of the KGB’s spymasters in the West in his skull.

  Kill Calder, produce the corpse, prove that Kirov’s face-saving assertion that he died back in September is false and you’re back in business, Spandarian. Back on the stepping stones to the Politburo.

  A plump but passably pretty stewardess dumped a tin tray in front of him. Narzan mineral water, tea, black bread, anonymous fish and a shiny red apple. Spandarian shuddered and pushed the tray to one side.

  The stewardess said: ‘You must eat.’

  ‘Give it to the pilot,’ Spandarian said.

  ‘You eat.’ She progressed down the aisle waking sleeping passengers.

  He sipped the bubbling water with distaste. Hadn’t Aeroflot heard of the spring waters in Borzhomi? Well, they soon would when the Georgians infiltrated the Kremlin.

  He air-freighted his finger back to Irkutsk. Back west? No, Calder wouldn’t be stupid enough to attempt that. There was only one railway and one main highway west: Europe was infinity and he would be picked up like a vagrant on Gorky Street.

  North? Never. It was gripped with ice, it led nowhere.

  Which left south. Spandarian sent his finger on patrol half way round the world. The Black Sea and Turkey, the Caspian Sea and Iran, Afghanistan – if you could call that a border anymore – the Sinkiang Province of China, Mongolia, then China again with the disputed areas of Manchuria.

  Spandarian favoured the south. True it was impossible to guard all the boundary, true many of the KGB Border Guards had been deployed inland – originally at his behest – but really you only had to consider a relatively short length of demarcation. If, that was, Calder was near Baikal. And Spandarian had every reason to believe he was: the Ulianov had been towing its barges up the lake, Shoemaker was heading for Irkutsk.

  Mongolia.

  A road led from the eastern banks of the lake to the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator; sometimes passable, sometimes not. The Selenga River flowed from Mongolia into Baikal. Better, the Peking Express which left Moscow every Thursday at 17.30 and passed through Irkutsk and Ulan Bator.

  Mongolia. It had to be. Perhaps! Spandarian stared at the map until it blurred into a vast snow-field. On this snow-filled waste two black spots hardened. It has come to that – Calder and me. No one else matters. One will survive, one will perish, to be found in the spring thaw, a snow flower.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them there was only one black spot on the white expanse.

  Who?

  The west-bound Trans-Siberian pulled into Irkutsk at 6 am local time.

  Shoemaker was met by an Intourist girl with stiff blonde curls and taken in a green minibus to the Angara Hotel, smart and white and square.

  After breakfast he dodged the blonde and walked the tree-lined streets of the graceful city. Holden had told him to be on the lookout for intensive surveillance – ‘more than you would normally warrant.’

  Thurston had described a high-ranking KGB officer named Spandarian. ‘If you see him then Calder’s alive.’

  Babushkas were abroad, shovelling the night snow from the sidewalks. Shoemaker, ears hidden beneath the flaps of a fur hat he had bought in Yokohama, walked past old wooden houses with fanciful eaves tucked between the straining flanks of modern blocks.

  On Stepan Khalturin Street he came upon Kirov’s house. Sergei Kirov had been a luminary in the abortive 1905 revolution; but the Kirov whom Shoemaker knew about was currently the head of the KGB.

  A little later he stopped outside a mansion with six Corinthian columns. It had once been the home of the Governor-General and it was called the White House.

  Apposite, Shoemaker thought. Ironic, too, that the city should contain the grave of Grigori Sheleknov who in the eighteenth century founded the first settlement in Russian America – Alaska – which was subsequently bought by the United States for less than two cents an acre. He watched a snowmobile race through a snow-covered park. Very Alaskan.

  Parts of the city reminded Shoemaker of Anchorage which he had visited during a winter vacation from UCLA in Los Angeles. That had been at the time of his re-assessment and the snowy challenge of Alaska, The Great Land, had helped to hone his new values.

  Sated with the easy pleasures of his circle in California, he had determined to insert some meaning into his life. And what better place to buckle up the armour of a crusade than Washington?

  It was a professor of economics at UCLA who had suggested the field of his endeavour: the clandestine background to security. With his honest, all-American looks he was, the professor pointed out, a natural candidate for undercover activities.

  So from UCLA he had graduated to the intelligence agencies quartered in Washington. To the Pentagon. To the White House.

  Shoemaker crossed the bridge over the river and headed for the Angara Hotel on Sukhe Bator Street. It was quite possible, he reflected, that a very formidable Russian had walked down this same street: a young revolutionary named Joseph Stalin had once been exiled to Irkutsk.

  She kissed Calder on the lips above his new, grey-stitched beard. ‘Just once more,’ she said. ‘Then you can take a rest.’

  Obediently, Calder toured the house again. The padded rests of the crutches chafed his armpits and occasionally a pain like an electric shock darted through the emptiness below his left knee. But by and large he was making good progress and the doctor was delighted with the amputation – no sepsis, flaps
healing well.

  When finally he sat down awkwardly Katerina brought him salted mushrooms and a dish of bottled bilberries and a shot of vodka.

  Outside dusk was settling. Baikal had conceded defeat early this year and already the ice was thick enough to take a truck and small fir-trees had been frozen into it to mark a safe road; safe, that was, unless a fissure suddenly ripped it open.

  She sat opposite him beside the log fire flickering with butterfly wings of flame. The room smelled of pine. The Petrovs were in Nizhneangarsk and the atmosphere enfolded them. At moments like this they never spoke about the time when he would have to leave.

  A finger of ash fell thickly like snow from a branch. She smiled at him and thought: ‘We’ve come a long way in nine months, we two products of rival creeds.’ Both fugitives now. To what extent had each crafted the other’s fate? If he hadn’t believed that I betrayed him he might not have made a break for it: if he hadn’t made the break the KGB wouldn’t have turned on me.

  And now she had involved a third person, an innocent, Leonid Agursky.

  She had stayed in Agursky’s apartment in Moscow for two weeks. During that time he had obtained permits for her to join his entourage on the Siberian tour. It hadn’t been difficult: Agursky was Agursky, Spandarian had lost all his power since she had escaped and the KGB were delighted that a feminist firebrand should defect to a pop star’s bed. Personal secretary …. That was mistress, wasn’t it?

  In fact, although she knew he was attracted to her, Agursky hadn’t even kissed her. And yet they looked good together and when girls tried to touch him or stroke his silky beard on the train journey east she noticed how they envied her. And at night as the wheels of the Trans-Siberian ground sleepy rhythms on the track she saw herself with Agursky in a photograph on the piano in her step-father’s apartment, his hand on hers.

  Perhaps that was the way it would have been if she hadn’t met an American who wanted to believe in something.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Calder asked.

  ‘About what might have been’

  ‘If I hadn’t eaten redcurrants at a funeral?’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ she said. ‘You should have seen your face.’

  ‘They would make a hell of a mess now.’ He combed his beard with his fingers. ‘Some people grow impressive beards. Like Leonid Agursky ….’ His eyes searched her face. ‘Others grow thickets. Maybe I should shave it off.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s a disguise. That and ….’

  ‘The absence of half a leg? Don’t you think Long John Silver would have been a little conspicuous in the middle of Siberia?’

  ‘This is beard country. Siberians wear them to keep warm. I always thought they made men look older; you’re the exception.’

  ‘You’re sweet,’ he said. ‘You’re also a terrible liar.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  He smiled but the smile was infinitely sad. As he stared into the glowing caverns of the fire she wondered fearfully what he saw.

  When Yury Petrov returned he had found a way for Calder to escape from Russia.

  Standing in the bubble of cold air he had brought in from outside, he said: ‘You wait, it’s pure genius,’ and for the first time Katerina hated him. ‘But first the essentials.’

  While Raisa took off her arctic fox coat bought with gold, Yury returned to the gazik, the jeep, to fetch ice cut from the lake, blocks of milk bought in the market and hunters’ vodka so cold that it would pour like oil from the bottles.

  He took off his shapka and long sheepskin coat and, while Raisa cut wafers of raw fish, deep-frozen on the window ledge, and prepared the mustard dip, he poured them each a slug.

  Then, standing in front of the fire, hands behind his back, the feudal baron, he said: ‘China.’

  When the Trans-Siberian was first built at the end of the nineteenth century, Petrov said, the trains were carried across the lake on two British-made ferries, the Baikal, a great white cliff of a ship with a stateroom and chapel, and the Angara, a demure sister. But in deep winter they were both ice-bound and passengers were hauled across on sledges.

  In 1900 work began on a loopline round the southern shore through impassable terrain. In hurricanes, blizzards, fog and temperatures of minus 40 Fahrenheit teams of Russians, Persians, Italians and Turks, licked into shape by Circassian guards, built two hundred bridges and bored thirty-three tunnels into the cliffs.

  ‘It took thirteen years and four months to build the whole railway from west to east,’ Yury Petrov said as though he had personally laid the track. ‘Can you imagine what it was like when the permafrost thawed on the surface and they walked knee-deep in mud?’

  ‘What none of us can imagine,’ Raisa said, poking the log fire, ‘is what any of this has got to do with escaping to China. His first love,’ she said to Calder and Katerina, ‘is gold. Second Baikal. Third the Trans-Siberian. Fourth – I think – me.’

  ‘Fourth? I suppose so,’ Yury said. ‘But I’m very fond of vodka.’ He drank some. ‘What I’m getting at – indulging myself a little, I grant you – is that the railway is the only route you can take.’

  He fetched a map of Siberia and laid it on the coffee table in front of the fire. ‘Railways, rivers and a few roads. You,’ stabbing his finger at Calder, ‘have to get to Ulan Ude four hundred kilometres from here.’ He transferred his finger to the Buryat capital to the south-east of the lake. ‘And you’re in luck, because the road is close to the lake and still passable.’

  ‘I thought you said I had to take the railway,’ Calder said. His hand reached for the long stump of his thigh; there were times when he couldn’t believe that a part of him had gone.

  ‘Right. From Ulan Ude. You can’t get there by railway from here because there isn’t one.’

  Katerina said: ‘Still passable? Are you suggesting he’s got to go now? Before his leg has healed properly?’

  Petrov said sombrely: ‘I’m afraid so. For two reasons. One, a blizzard could close the road any day now. Two, the enemy is closing in. The Border Guards have never left Baikal – I saw a platoon of them in Nizhneangarsk today. And there’s nothing better that bastard with the moustache would like than to nail me to the door with his bayonet.’ He paused. ‘You,’ to Calder, ‘must be very important, my friend.’

  ‘I wish I could tell you about it,’ Calder said. Would Petrov help him if he knew the truth? He was a brigand but he was a Soviet.

  ‘Do you know?’ Petrov turned to Katerina.

  ‘I only know they want to kill him.’

  ‘A good enough reason to help him.’

  Raisa said: ‘Get on with it, Yury. Why China?’

  ‘Don’t hurry me; we’ve got a long way to go yet.’ He prodded Ulan Ude again. ‘There you pick up the railway south to Mongolia and its capital, Ulan Bator.’

  ‘But the KGB will be watching every train,’ Calder objected.

  ‘But not every automobile.’

  ‘Stop talking in riddles,’ Raisa said. ‘You’re not on television.’

  ‘Robert will drive along the railway,’ Petrov said triumphantly. ‘And here, my darling, we return to my third love, no my fourth,’ kissing his wife on the cheek, ‘the Trans-Siberian. You’re lucky,’ to Calder, ‘that I know every sleeper of its history.’

  Petrov tossed back a shot of vodka and chewed a slice of frozen fish. ‘This part of the line was ruled during the Civil War by Grigory Semyonov, a Cossak paid by the Japanese to cause havoc. And he did that all right – he swooped up and down the line in an armoured car killing and torturing as many locals as he could lay his hands on. In five days his men killed eighteen hundred. They strangled them, shot them, poisoned them or burned them alive. In winter they poured water over them so that they could break off a limb or two as souvenirs.’

  Raisa, lovely slanting eyes narrowed, said: ‘Is this really necessary, Yury?’

  ‘The next bit is. Have you heard of the Peking-Paris automobile race?�
�� And when they shook their heads: ‘Well, Prince Borghese decided that as the road was so bad he would drive his car on the railway.’ Petrov paused, timing perfect. ‘He got permission from Irkutsk, not Moscow of course, and drove his car on the track as though it were an autobahn. He even left instructions on how to do it – left wheels between the rails, right on the outside where the sleepers protrude.’

  Deftly he countered their objections.

  ‘But Robert can’t drive in his condition,’ from Katerina.

  ‘No problem with the gazik – hand-controlled clutch.’

  ‘If he can drive why not go by road?’ from Raisa.

  ‘There’s only one road and it’s probably impassable. If not the Russians will stop every car.’

  ‘But if I go on the railway,’ Calder said, ‘they’ll pick me up in Ulan Bator. Mongolia is as much part of the Russian empire as Siberia.’

  ‘You won’t go to Ulan Bator. You see, my beloved comes from Mongolia.’

  ‘Always beloved when he wants something.’

  ‘And her home is just across the border. Robert will drive off the railway there. No one will have seen him leave Siberia, no one will see him arrive.’

  ‘But why Mongolia?’ Calder asked. ‘Isn’t that one hell of a way to go to China?’

  ‘The only way, my friend. The KGB will be watching every border crossing into Manchuria. It would be relatively easy to get across in summer – the locals do it every day – but not in winter when the exits are limited. So what you do is abandon the jeep in Mongolia and pick up the Peking Express. No one will be watching it over the Chinese border because there is no way you can have got on it. Not even the KGB will anticipate a stroke of genius like that.’

  Raisa said: ‘It was his modesty that first attracted me to him.’

  Katerina said: ‘But what makes you think the Chinese will let him cross the border from Mongolia?’

  ‘Because anyone trying to escape from the Russians can find sanctuary in China.’

  It was left to Raisa to ask the obvious question. ‘And what happens,’ she asked with theatrical innocence, ‘if he happens to meet an oncoming train when he’s driving along the railway?’