The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Petrov had been waiting for that. He was triumphant. ‘There won’t be any oncoming trains,’ he said. ‘We’re going to blow up a bridge.’

  That night Katerina made love to Calder for the first time since she had arrived on the shores of Lake Baikal. She kissed him and stroked him and then, sitting astride him, lowered herself onto him and, moving urgently, brought them both to a climax.

  Afterwards he said: ‘So that’s what they mean about women’s equality,’ and, lying beside him, still feeling him inside her, she said: ‘You didn’t look as if you had any complaints,’ and he said: ‘None, because that’s the way it’s got to be from now on,’ and she thought: ‘But for how long?’

  He switched off the light and opened the wooden slats on the wall to let the cold moonlight in. They could hear the waves on the beach, the wind in the hills.

  He said: ‘Yury’s right, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I wanted us to have an American Christmas,’ she said. ‘And a Russian New Year.’ And, with tears in her voice: ‘Will I ever see you again?’

  ‘Life is now,’ he said.

  ‘Now? That’s the future and the past, even as you speak.’

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Only now,’ and with one hand he stroked her breasts and her belly and the moist hair between her thighs.

  ‘We were meant to be together.’

  ‘Others don’t want us to be.’

  ‘We’re us. No one should be able to interfere. Politicians, police … no one.’

  ‘We slipped by them in the first place,’ Calder said.

  ‘Then we can do it again.’

  ‘You forget, I am the enemy now.’

  ‘No, not you.’

  ‘Me. You don’t understand ….’

  ‘I can guess. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters. I’m doing ….’

  ‘I don’t want to know what you’re doing,’ she said fiercely.

  ‘When I was a kid I had naïve dreams about equality.’

  ‘And you’re about to destroy them? Don’t make me your conscience.’ She turned away from him and stared at the hard-glittering stars. ‘In any case people like you misinterpret equality. It has nothing to do with material possessions.’

  ‘It has to do with the sexes,’ Calder said slyly, slipping his arm round her waist.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to that. While you’re away in America. For ever?’ The tears were wet on her cheeks as she pressed herself against him. ‘If you ever get there. It’s crazy, this idea of Yury’s.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘I could come with you,’ and when he didn’t reply: ‘Just to the border,’ and when, still without speaking, he kissed her shoulder: ‘I wish we’d never met.’

  ‘It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.’

  Then, feeling him hard behind her, she turned and knelt above him and guided him inside her again and the moonlight was warm on their bodies.

  Failure garbs a man like an old and shabby suit. Seeing it on Spandarian people questioned his authority, asked to see his ID. This didn’t aggravate him: it merely emphasised his aloneness, sharpened his singleness of purpose. Calder and me. In the wilderness. One or the other.

  Even the medic on the docks at Angarsk treated him indifferently. ‘Who are you? What right have you to question me?’

  ‘None,’ Spandarian told him. ‘But I do have this,’ producing a Georgian stiletto with a jewelled handle from the pocket of his squirrel coat.

  They stood on the wharf in the privacy of softly falling snow. Ten feet below ice-flows drifted past on dark waters.

  ‘You tricked me,’ reproachfully. Spandarian had told the sad-eyed medic in the dockside bar that he wanted to buy cocaine.

  ‘How astute.’ Spandarian grabbed the medic’s black bag. ‘How much cocaine have you got in here? A thousand roubles worth?’

  ‘Give it back.’

  Spandarian held the bag over the edge of the wharf. ‘Splash goes a week’s pickings. Unless you answer my questions.’

  The medic tugged at the ear-flaps of his moulting shapka. ‘He had a broken leg, I put it in plaster, that’s all I can tell you.’

  Spandarian, who had been told by a docker that the medic had treated some sort of fugitive on a barge on the day that Calder had disappeared, said: ‘Describe him.’

  The medic described Calder.

  ‘How bad was his leg?’

  ‘A bad break. But I fixed it. He’ll be walking now. Running even. Now, please give me the bag back.’

  ‘Where was he going?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Below them two blocks of ice collided ponderously, joined each other and spun away.

  ‘To the lake?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘In fact,’ Spandarian said, lowering the bag to his side, ‘I know the Ulianov was sailing to the northern tip of the lake.’

  ‘Then why ask me?’

  The medic made a grab for the bag but Spandarian stepped aside like a bullfighter and pushed the medic into the snow.

  He stood up slowly. The fall had knocked the defiance out of him and his white, drug-addicted face had collapsed. ‘The skipper did mention a village.’

  I should have made that skipper swallow his teeth, Spandarian thought. ‘Which village?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s all I know. The bag … please.’

  ‘In the north?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘No mention of dropping him off on the way?’

  ‘No mention.’

  Spandarian who knew from experience when a subject had been drained of the truth, when he was approaching that dangerous time when he began to lie to please his interrogator, slid the stiletto back into the sheath in his pocket. Then he dropped the black bag into the water.

  The medic screamed thinly and, as Spandarian walked away into the falling snow, screamed obscenities after him.

  At the met. office on the dockside at Irkutsk where experts attempted, with varying degrees of success, to anticipate the moods of Baikal, Spandarian checked the weather on the day Calder escaped. There had been a storm.

  Today? ‘Cold and clear – as far as we can make out,’ a young meteorologist told him. ‘We’re better at forecasting the weather on the moon; that’s the trouble with this country ….’

  But Spandarian had gone. From the Angara Hotel he called the coastguard on Olkhon Island. The spectre of failure didn’t extend along a telephone line and the coastguard was suitably awed. Yes, there had been a storm that day. Yes, he had seen the Ulianov and its barges; in fact they had sheltered beside the island.

  Any passengers? Funny Spandarian should have mentioned that. He had scanned the barges through his telescope. From beneath a tarpaulin he had noticed what looked like two feet; but he had assumed Baikal was playing tricks.

  ‘You know, the Old Man is a great deceiver. Sometimes I see what looks like a monster ….’

  But Spandarian had hung up.

  So Calder had reached the northern shores of Baikal.

  He left the hotel by a rear entrance. Although Shoemaker’s presence in Irkutsk confirmed that Calder was alive it had soon become obvious that he didn’t know where he was. So I must lose Shoemaker.

  At the next exit he darted through the double doors, slammed them behind him, sprinted through long corridors, emerged at the front entrance and ran across the car park to his rented Volga.

  As he gunned the car past a red and white Intourist coach he saw Shoemaker appear on the steps. Too late, comrade: go back to the beaches of California where you belong.

  Spandarian drove along the road running parallel to the Angara to the port of Listvyanka. From there he took the car ferry across the lake, kept navigable by icebreakers, to Babushkin; then he drove north.

  The action that Calder took that evening was foolhardy. He knew it but he persevered. He had heard nothing about Harry for a long time; if the journey ahead was abortive
then he might never hear again. It had to be done even though the line might be tapped. A terrible, calculated risk.

  While Katerina and the Petrovs were at a cottage at the end of the village trading caviar from a 245-lb Baikal sturgeon for provisions for his journey he picked up his crutches and made his way in the dark to the call-box beside the beach wall.

  The fresh air smelled of cleanliness. The cold stung his nostrils. The call-box was encased in ice.

  He splintered the ice round the door with a slab of granite from the wall and squeezed inside. Then he telephoned Moscow five time zones away. Moscow 52-00-11. The United States Embassy on Tchaikovsky Street.

  He had no idea who had replaced Jessel so he asked for his old extension. ‘Who’s calling please?’ It could have been an operator in New York or Boston.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, just put me through.’

  A Texan drawl answered the extension. ‘Sorry, Mr Jessel isn’t here right now.’

  Calder spoke urgently. ‘My name’s Calder.’ An intake of breath. ‘I haven’t got much time, no time. I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘Sure, but ….’

  ‘No but’s. I want you to call Washington. The White House.’

  A pause. The Texan was patching other extensions into the call. The CIA bureau chief. The Ambassador. Pressing buttons, waving his hands at some flustered secretary. His call would have exploded in the Embassy.

  ‘Okay, Mr Calder. Shoot.’

  ‘Get through to the President. No problems if you give my name.’

  Another pause. Faintly Calder heard: ‘Jesus.’ Then: ‘Okay, got it. What do we, ah, tell the President?’

  ‘You don’t tell him anything. You just ask him how my son is.’

  ‘But ….’

  ‘He’ll understand. Tell him no names unless I get a progress report. He’ll understand that too.’

  ‘Just hold the line a minute, sir.’

  ‘You just hold the line a minute. Call me back on this number 4-93-20 in eight hours. On the button. Got that?’

  ‘Sure I’ve got it. Eight hours. But ….’

  But what Calder never knew. Ice fell in daggers as the door of the call-box shut behind him.

  Shoemaker made his routine call to the Embassy at midnight. The duty officer put him through to Jessel’s replacement, Wade, a one-time FBI agent in Los Angeles, in the consular section.

  Wade snapped short any preliminaries. He said: ‘The subject has surfaced. He gave us a number to call. We checked it out. It’s a village called Oskino on the north-east shore of Lake Baikal. You know what to do ….’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Shoemaker said.

  The call was picked up on a KGB line-tap on the third floor of a 22-storey block of apartments in Vosstanaya Square close to the US Embassy. When its import registered a call was made to Dzerzhinsky Square. A few seconds later the late-night duty officer, voice twanging with nerves, telephoned the Chairman of State Security at home. Calder’s name dispatched the sleep from Kirov’s voice. He told the duty officer to contact the unit of Border Guards nearest to Oskino. ‘And keep me posted, whatever time it is.’ ‘Yes Comrade Chairman.’ The duty-officer’s voice broke like a schoolboy’s, this time with relief.

  CHAPTER 26

  While Katerina, who didn’t know that he was leaving next morning, prepared an evening meal Calder packed his bag. Clothes, roubles and dollars, ten-tola gold ingots the size of small chocolate bars stitched into the lining.

  Thoughtfully he picked up Jessel’s empty briefcase. When had Jessel been ordered to kill him? Even as they jogged along the banks of the Moscow River was he debating the manner of the execution?

  Calder was still bewildered by the duplicity of the soft-spoken spy who returned every evening to an oasis of American respectability. Drink in hand, pipe drawing nicely. ‘Dinner nearly ready, dear?’ and with joyful inspiration: Why don’t I poison the bastard?

  Calder fingered the smooth swelling inside his bag where, beneath canvas, gold gleamed shyly. It was then that it occurred to him that Jessel’s bag might contain secrets. He ran his fingertips along the pigskin lining on the bottom of the black executive briefcase. There was a swelling there too.

  He took a clasp-knife from his own bag and slit the pigskin. A brown notebook. Calder picked it up.

  Five pages of code. But given time any code except a one-time pad arrangement can be broken. And by the look of the spacing, the keywords were names. Then probably addresses. And then numbers. Telephone numbers.

  53-75-47. That was familiar. Calder frowned. The Czech Embassy in Moscow. Another number jangled in Calder’s brain. The Institute! And another – Tyuratam, the Soviet space centre.

  His mind must have slowed up with his incarceration in the dacha because it wasn’t until he had isolated a few more familiar numbers that he realised the significance of the book.

  His fingers slackened, the book fell to the floor. He retrieved it, ripped out the pages of writing, undid the almost-invisible, spider-web stitching round one of the ten-tola ingots in his own bag and slipped them beside the gold.

  The gold, he reflected, was worthless compared with the contents of those pages. So, it could be argued, was all the gold in Fort Knox.

  CHAPTER 27

  Calder waited until the second bottle of Georgian red before he told them about the phone call.

  ‘You’re crazy.’ Petrov’s anger was distilled. Across the table Calder glimpsed the menace beneath the sophistication.

  ‘I know. It was just something I had to do. I’m sorry. You see some values are more important than material considerations.’

  Petrov said coldly: ‘You left it a bit late to reach that conclusion. You abandoned your wife and kid in the States, didn’t you?’

  ‘I had no choice. But a kid … sick … maybe dying … maybe dead …. I can’t explain,’ and he stopped because he could feel the strands of his voice parting.

  ‘Why the hell couldn’t you have waited until we got to Ulan Ude?’

  ‘I wanted to know before I set out. I might not get too far ….’

  Katerina said softly: ‘Yury and Raisa had a child once. I think they understand.’

  Calder said: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  Raisa said: ‘He died on Baikal. An accident when the ice was thin. I can’t have any more children.’

  Petrov said to Calder: ‘Okay, so you were stupid; we’ll just have to adapt.’ He poured Khvanchkara wine while Raisa went to the kitchen to fetch the dessert. ‘We’ve got to face the fact that the KGB will have traced the call. But there’s no way anyone can get here until daybreak.’

  Katerina stared at Calder: ‘You were going tomorrow anyway?’

  He touched her hand. ‘Before the weather makes me a prisoner.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘It was better that way.’

  ‘To go, just like that?’

  ‘I was going to tell you this evening. You knew it had to be soon ….’

  She took her hand away from his; she stared into her wine.

  When Raisa returned with the stakan kiselya, stiff with cranberry sauce, she said to Yury: ‘Now perhaps you’d better explain the we …. until we got to Ulan Ude.’

  At last Petrov smiled, little-boy-caught-out. ‘You guessed, didn’t you? I couldn’t let Hoppalong Cassidy here try and drive the jeep. Impossible. I lied about the clutch.’

  ‘I suppose I knew,’ Raisa said. ‘Even though I can’t drive.’

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ Petrov said. ‘They’ll take this village apart. You,’ to Raisa and Katerina, ‘will have to take the Zhiguli across the ice to Nizhneangarsk and then head north to Bratsk while we go south. And now,’ wiping cranberry dessert from his lips with a napkin, ‘I have work to do.’

  Although he was waiting for the call the ringing of the telephone in the call-box startled him.

  Heavy with foreboding, he picked up the receiver.

  The Texan. ‘Mr Calder, si
r?’

  Harry was dead: he could hear it in the Texan’s tone.

  ‘How’s my son?’

  ‘As well as can be expected, sir.’

  Calder pressed his head against the side of the call-box, breath melting the frost patterns on the inside of the windows.

  ‘Mr Calder, are you there?’

  ‘I’m here. What the hell do you mean, “as well as can be expected.”?’

  ‘That’s all I’m authorised to say, sir.’

  ‘Authorised to say? It’s my son we’re talking about you sonofabitch. Where is he? Is he still unconscious?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything more. But I do have some urgent questions.’

  Calder replaced the receiver. Eleven thousand miles severed.

  He elbowed himself into the iced night and retrieved his crutches. But Harry was alive. There was hope.

  Making his crutches run he returned to the dacha.

  2 am.

  At the time Calder was talking to the Embassy, Spandarian was driving off the end of the main highway at Mogoyto high in the mountains to the east of Lake Baikal.

  To reach the northern tip of the lake two hundred kilometres further on he had to drive through second-class roads and unmade tracks sheeted with ice and clotted with snow. The wind pushed him to the edge of precipices, gusts of hard snow scooped from granite pockets machine-gunned the double-glazed windscreen of the black Volga.

  2.10 am.

  Shoemaker, in a six-seat Chaika hired with magic dollars without the knowledge of Intourist, was leaving the late-night ferry at Babushkin in the south. Ahead, lay Spandarian and Calder. As he stared into the diamond-hard stars glittering in the sky he remembered soft stars over Malibu beach and the slurred call of the waves and the feel of a girl’s body still warm from the day’s sun.

  2.20am.

  The young officer who had arrested Yury Petrov began to round up his men based temporarily in Nizhneangarsk. So this very important American was in Oskino. With Petrov. The officer had no doubt about that.

  They would leave for Oskino, he decided, at first light.

  When he returned to the warm nest of their bed Calder asked Katerina to come with him to America.