The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Holding her from behind, hands cupped round her breasts, loins curving beneath her, he whispered. ‘We could disappear together … I could still see Harry.’

  He felt her heartbeat quicken beneath his hands. She pressed herself against him and said: ‘These are our last hours. We haven’t time for dreams. I shouldn’t have suggested going with you before. That was just dreams, too.’

  ‘Why?’ although he knew.

  ‘It has nothing to do with America: it’s here. I don’t think anyone in the West really understands how we feel about our country. It has nothing to do with Communism, just Russia.’

  ‘But they’ll arrest you. Put you in prison. Maybe expel you.’

  ‘I don’t think they will arrest me. You see Spandarian is in disgrace; he doesn’t have any power anymore. And the movement is on the march. Ever since that day in Red Square.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the movement.’

  ‘I’m part of it. Part of progress. I can’t leave. I can’t desert people like Svetlana.’

  He stared into the darkness looking for truth. Then he said: ‘I know. You can’t escape from what you are. I tried. Now I’m going back.’

  He opened the panels of wood and a bar of cold moonlight fell across the blankets. She turned to him.

  ‘Robert,’ she whispered.

  ‘You never did call me Bob.’

  ‘To me you’re Robert.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Go north with Raisa. Wait. Then come south to Irkutsk.’

  ‘Leonid?’

  ‘He’s in Khabarovsk. But he will go back to Moscow through Irkutsk.’

  ‘And you with him. You know, I think that was always written. I was just an interruption.’

  ‘An interruption?’ She kissed him. ‘You are life.’

  He looked at his watch in the bar of moonlight. Time was accelerating.

  He held her more tightly. He had never intended to make love in this final time but suddenly he was inside her and, as the minutes and seconds pulsed away, they were one.

  First light apricot above the mountains, shafts of it finding the frozen lake and polishing it with dawn. Snow on the kneeling foothills ermine soft, tufted with leafless brush like barbed wire on a deserted battlefield. Ice dust sparkling in the night-cleaned air.

  Jeep packed. Zhiguli panting beside it, facing the opposite direction.

  Raisa clinging to Yury beneath his sheepskin coat. ‘You will come back ….’

  Tilting her face: ‘Like a boomerang – you know where the gold is.’

  Katerina helping Calder into the jeep and not knowing what to say except ‘Dasvidanya’ and wishing that he’d never eaten those redcurrants and rejoicing that he had and knowing that they were losing everything and knowing that they weren’t because it would always be with them and giving him the small parcel she had wrapped for him, and as the jeep moved away with part of her inside it, turning and facing east where the light was strengthening over her land.

  Spandarian saw the horsemen as he was driving the black Volga between the small pine trees marking the track gritted on the ice. At first he thought they were an ice mirage. Then he saw the green piping on their uniforms and realised that they were the KGB Border Guards he had deployed inland when he had still exercised authority. With luck they wouldn’t study his revamped credentials too closely: Moscow, Dzerzhinsky Square, that should be enough on a bitter morning like this.

  As he stopped the car a young officer with a Prussian moustache alighted. Spandarian flashed his ID; the officer was unimpressed but not suspicious. ‘What can I do for you, comrade?’ the officer asked.

  Spandarian explained that he was looking for the American named Calder. He understood he was at the northern tip of the lake.

  ‘North-east,’ the officer corrected him. ‘At a village called Oskino. Turn round and follow us.’

  Half way along the snow-blown road overlooking the lake Shoemaker passed a Russian jeep coming in the opposite direction. The driver was grey-haired beneath his fur shapka, his companion bearded. Shoemaker put his foot down. When he next glanced in his driving mirror the jeep was no longer to be seen.

  ‘So,’ the officer said, ‘they’ve got a six-hour start.’ He had just finished questioning a villager who, peering through the blinds, had seen the jeep take off. He had seen nothing until the officer had threatened to turn him into an ice statue by hosing him down with water.

  The officer, who seemed more interested in Petrov than Calder, said: ‘There’s no way we can catch them unless ….’

  They both looked at the black Volga.

  ‘All right,’ Spandarian said reluctantly. ‘Do you know where he’s heading foŕ?’

  ‘Irkutsk?’ The officer shrugged.

  ‘Only if Calder’s crazy which I’ve discovered he most certainly isn’t. ‘Spandarian opened the door of the Volga, took a road map out of the glove compartment and pointed east of Baikal. ‘Ulan Ude. Then south to Mongolia by rail. That’s the way I would do it.’

  The way a Georgian would do it. God these Slavs were unimaginative. Irkutsk! One phone call and the place would be one vast ambush. Calder – or Petrov – had cut the telephone lines from Oskino but there would be others.

  On the way, Spandarian thought, I should alert Ulan Ude. If I didn’t want Calder to myself …. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked the officer who was dousing Petrov’s dacha with gasolene.

  The officer didn’t reply. He struck a match and applied it to the wall. Flames splashed over the wood. Horses reared and whinnied.

  ‘Why?’Spandarian asked.

  ‘He tried to outsmart me.’

  Not difficult, Spandarian thought as they drove away.

  When Shoemaker reached Oskino villagers were still hosing water onto the smouldering ashes of the Petrov dacha. With dollars he discovered that Calder had departed nine hours earlier, Spandarian three hours ago. He must have missed Spandarian’s Volga when he stopped for gas at Barguzin. Wearily he spun the wheel of the Chaika; at least they were strung out in some sort of order now; that was something but not much.

  CHAPTER 28

  The old part of Ulan Ude, the Buryat capital a hundred miles north of the Mongolian border, is still a frontier town.

  Wooden houses cling to each other in the side streets; men with gooseberry chins support each other outside open-air beer stalls; Buryats with eyes like smiles and polished black hair stride down the poplar-lined Leninskaya Street arm-in-arm with Muscovites and Cossacks; in the foyer of the Selenga Hotel a long-dead bear glassily appraises new patrons.

  After a few vodkas or spirts the sound of Cossack cavalry which once enslaved the peaceful Buryats can be heard and you must take a streetcar to the new town where Lenin rules benign in bronze to escape them.

  Petrov stopped the jeep on a spur overlooking the town built on the junction of the Selenga and Uda Rivers. He told Calder: ‘We’ll have to hide in the old town. I’ve got friends there, we’ll be okay.’

  He wiped frost from the inside of the windshield. It was late afternoon; the temperature outside the sealed panels of the jeep was minus 20.

  On one side of them pine forest, harbouring bear and boar and wolves; on the other permafrosted scrub studded, according to Petrov, with Siberian topaz, beryl, aquamarine and garnet.

  Petrov put the jeep into gear and drove towards the city.

  On the way they passed a group of Buryat girls who smiled flirtatiously from the fur frames of their hats. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Petrov said. ‘And we’ve got Genghis Khan to thank for them. He decided to tame the tribes and of course pretty soon they got around to mating. Result: the Mongols of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘How did you meet Raisa?’ Calder asked.

  ‘On a gold run. I used to take my bullion through Mongolia to China – that’s how I came up with your escape route. One day the Border Guards got too close for comfort and I took refuge in a Buddhist lamasery. The Guards came in of course – Buddhism is d
iscouraged in Mongolia – but they didn’t find me. Do you know where I was hidden?’

  Calder who was untying the parcel Katerina had given him shook his head.

  ‘In a drum as big as an elephant. When the Guards came in a lama began to beat it. I was deaf for a week but the noise got rid of the bastards.’

  ‘And Raisa?’

  ‘She used to take food to the lamas from the village. She came with a van one day – the only one in the village – and went back to her parents’ home with me inside it. And then …. Well, I followed the example of Genghis Khan. I was very lucky …. What the hell’s that?’ pointing at the content of Katerina’s parcel.

  ‘A game I once played,’ Calder said, feeling the soft black leather of the pocket chess-set. He opened it out like a wallet. The pieces were slivers of white plastic stamped with their names. He held it to his face and smelled Katerina.

  ‘Kata?’

  ‘A farewell present.’

  ‘I didn’t know she played. ‘

  ‘We all play,’ Calder said. ‘We’re all pawns.’

  Petrov drove slowly through the darkening streets – ‘No sense in upsetting the militia at a time like this’ – to a warehouse bearing a faded sign: SOBENIKOV and MOLCHANOV BROTHERS, tea and sugar. He unlocked the doors and drove in.

  The door of the wooden house next door was opened by a sinewy old man wearing smoked glasses and a white mandarin moustache. Petrov introduced him as the lama who had once saved his life in Mongolia.

  ‘But what’s he doing in the Soviet Union?’ Calder asked when they retired, after a meal of soup and blinis, to their bedroom.

  ‘Ah, there you have the strength and the weakness of the Kremlin. They’re pretty useful at suppressing a faith in a satellite state: in their own country it’s a different matter; they try to control it rather than extinguish it – you can’t have dissenters five thousand miles from your capital. So the lama stays here, plays the Soviet game and pops back to Mongolia to practise it.’

  ‘He’s not coming with us, is he?’

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s going before us.’ Petrov opened a scuffed briefcase and put a newspaper cutting, maps and documents on the table between the two beds. ‘Forget the lama and concentrate.’

  He opened a map of the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic which included the northern regions of Mongolia. ‘The last town on the Soviet side of the border is Naushki. But long before that, not far from here in fact, I discovered that God – or Buddha – is on our side.’ He handed Calder the clipping.

  Calder sat on the edge of the bed and read: ‘Grave concern has been expressed by railwaymen travelling between Ulan Ude and Ulan Bator at the condition of a bridge ten kilometres south of Ulan Ude ….’

  Calder looked up. ‘The one you’re going to blow?’

  ‘If you read on you’d find that they’re scared that the steelwork’s defective and in extreme cold it might snap. You know, in climates like this a girder can break like an icicle. But apparently bureaucracy has decided in its wisdom – probably quite rightly – that there’s nothing wrong with this bridge.’

  ‘And you’re going to prove bureaucracy wrong?’

  ‘I figured that if we blew any old bridge it would stop all traffic. But at the same time it would alert Border Guards. This way it will just seem like another bureaucratic blunder.’

  ‘When?’ Calder asked.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon. That will give them plenty of time to stop all traffic from the north and south. When it gets dark we’ll put the jeep on the track.’

  ‘You don’t think this is a little too … flamboyant?’

  ‘You tell me another way. The road across the border is impassable, snow-drifts two metres deep. The airport is crawling with KGB. Every passenger on every train will be checked back to the moment he was conceived.’

  ‘You know something?’ Calder sat up and began to undress. ‘You look like Omar Sharif.’

  ‘The difference,’ Petrov said, ‘is that I’m not going to play bridge: I’m going to blow one up.’

  When Calder finally closed his eyes it occurred to him that what he was doing, the information he was taking back to the States, was yet another betrayal. Of people like Yury Petrov. And Katerina.

  But now, thanks to Jessel, there was a way to solve the equation that had plagued him since he had arrived in Russia.

  The Siberian-Express from Moscow arrived at Ulan Ude at lunchtime the following day. And from it stepped recently widowed Mrs Betty Quarrick from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, USA.

  Not for Mrs Betty Quarrick the leisured life of retirement in Florida which, with the collect on her husband’s life assurance, she could easily afford. From the travel books that her husband, a librarian and fireside traveller, had brought home she had acquired an appetite for adventure that had been unrequited until that chair beside the fire had finally become vacant.

  After a decent interval Mrs Quarrick, Visa and American Express to hand, had taken a package trip across Europe, London, Paris, Rome and Madrid, but, apart from an unfortunate interlude when a young Italian who professed himself smitten with older women had departed with her travellers’ cheques and credit cards, there hadn’t been much emphasis on adventure.

  So a little nervously it must be admitted, she had elected to cross enemy territory. To fly to Moscow and take the train across Siberia ‘to see the other side of the coin.’ One of the last volumes her husband had brought back from the library had been a National Geographic special about Russia; the Siberian sequences had conveyed an impression of civilised desolation in which adventure could be sampled without too much discomfort. Besides, she was fairly sure that no one within her circle in Fitchburg had ever been to Siberia of all places.

  But by the time Train No. 2 reached Ulan Ude Mrs Quarrick was even more bored than she had ever been watching her husband turning the time zones of the world on the other side of their imitation log fire. So when a cripple with a grey-streaked beard approached her on crutches as she queued to buy a copy of a horrendously dull English newspaper, the Morning Star, she experienced a tremor of excitement.

  The cripple said: ‘You’re American?’

  A trifle disappointed – before she had left Fitchburg one of her friends had commented: ‘With that hairdo you could be mistaken for a Parisian’ – she confirmed that she was.

  ‘Will you do something for me? It’s terribly important. In fact – and I know this sounds crazy but you’ve got to believe me – the future of the United States depends on it.’

  A nut. Just my luck, thought Mrs Quarrick. And yet there was something compelling about the intensity of his gaze, the refined wasting of his features above his beard.

  ‘It depends what it is,’ she said warily.

  ‘I want you to deliver a package for me in the States.’

  ‘What sort of package?’ A bomb? From Yokohama she flew to LA and then to Boston. Did he have some grievance against American airlines in general?

  He took a package from his pocket. A letter-bomb? ‘This. You can open it if you like. It’s only a chess-set.’

  ‘A chess-set? Now why would a chess-set be so important? And why can’t you post it? No one would dare to interfere with the US mail.’ She hoped it wasn’t just a chess-set.

  ‘Please Mrs ….’

  ‘Quarrick. Betty Quarrick.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘A daughter. Married with one child in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Did you think I had a grandchild?’ She really would have to stop being coy at her age. She wondered how he had lost his leg.

  ‘Then for the sake of your daughter’s future, your grandchild’s future, the future of every young person in the United States, I beg you to deliver this package.’

  She took it gingerly. It was addressed to a Mrs Ruth Calder at an address in Boston. ‘Well, if it’s that important ….’ Even if it did only contain a chess-set its contents could, with a little innocent embroidery, become infinitely more intriguin
g when the incident was recounted in Fitchburg.

  ‘By hand, please.’

  ‘Well ….’

  A voice on the loudspeaker was urging onward-bound passengers to return to the train. Intourist couriers were busily rounding up their charges. Mrs Quarrick turned her back on a proffered Morning Star.

  ‘Here’s something for your trouble.’ He thrust some bills at her.

  ‘That won’t be ….’

  ‘Take them.’ She found the bills in her hand. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  And he was gone. When she counted the bills in her hand as the train picked up speed outside Ulan Ude she found to her astonishment that he had given her one thousand dollars. Was it her imagination or was the package on her lap ticking?

  The horses, high-stepping and breathing smoke, came into the old town of Ulan Ude first, causing more alarm than any tank or armoured car: Russians knew their sabre-slashed history. Then, in cars, militia wearing uniforms and plainclothes; soon you couldn’t walk down a main street without dancing a few steps with some kind of policeman or another.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ the young Border Guard officer asked Spandarian, doubt blunting the blade of his rule-book voice.

  ‘That they’re in the old town? Because that’s where I would be,’ Spandarian told him as, sitting in the black Volga, they watched militia erecting a road block at the end of Leninskaya Street. Not that the officer would understand: he was a prisoner of military logic.

  Once during the long and perilous drive from Oskino the officer had suggested telephoning Ulan Ude but Spandarian, accelerating, had told him the lines were down.

  The officer, half a man without his horse, said: ‘I’m going to call headquarters.’ As he walked briskly towards a call-box, boots martial on the frost-sparkling sidewalk, Spandarian, knowing that he was intent upon checking him out, geared himself for retreat. When the officer’s back was towards him in the call-box, he reversed the Volga round a corner and down a side street and took off.

  He parked near a beer queue. Closed his eyes to clear Slav peasants and Buryat savages from his reasoning. Calder was close. He could feel him.