The Man Who Was Saturday

by Derek Lambert

  Shoemaker, whose Chaika had broken down at Turantayevo where the highway forks south-east to Ulan Ude, arrived in the old town at 1.30 pm when the manhunt had been stiffened by re-enforcements of militia from surrounding areas. If you wanted to pull a heist in Khorinsk now was the time.

  He tried to call Moscow but all the lines were busy and were likely to stay that way, according to an English-speaking operator who appeared to derive considerable satisfaction from this state of affairs. Then he went looking for Spandarian. And Calder.

  Petrov had risen at 5 am. Prepared the explosives, changed the plates on the jeep and driven it from the warehouse to a garage in the new town.

  After handing the chess-set Katerina had given him to Mrs Betty Quarrick, Calder caught a streetcar driven by a woman with a potato face up the hill to the new town and rejoined Petrov outside the opera house where La Bohème was showing.

  ‘Your tiny hand is frozen …. That must get a few laughs with thirty degrees of frost outside,’ Petrov remarked. ‘Any problems?’

  ‘No one seems to be looking for a one-legged man with a beard.’

  ‘Did you do what you had to do?’

  Calder nodded.

  ‘But you’re still not telling?’

  ‘You’ll have to trust me.’

  ‘You can say that again. You know something? Raisa’s right, I am crazy.’ He began to walk towards the garage beneath an apartment block.

  ‘Why are you doing it? I’ve never really understood.’

  ‘Just as I told you when all this started. Kata. Whatever she says goes. We were very close. As you know Raisa and I lost our son. I suppose I still regard Kata as a daughter.’

  Abruptly, like a summer rainstorm, it began to snow. Within seconds it was a blizzard, hard-grained flakes sweeping down from the north, pasting bowed pedestrians instant white.

  Militia, much in evidence but not as thick on the ground as they were in the old town, shrank into doorways and stared at their feet.

  Petrov backed the jeep from the garage and Calder, having thrown in his crutches, climbed in beside him. They drove towards the outskirts of the town.

  They were stopped once by militia with fur hats like iced cakes.

  Petrov showed them the documents that accompanied the new registration number. ‘And who’s he?’ A militiaman with a frozen face pointed at Calder.

  ‘He lost his leg building the BAM,’ the new two-thousand-mile Siberian Railway from Baikal to the Far East which had taken ten years to build. ‘He’s got pains in the stump. I’m taking him to hospital.’

  ‘Ghost pains,’ the militiaman said to Calder. ‘Don’t worry, comrade, it’s all in the mind,’ pointing to his snow-capped head and waving them on.

  ‘So,’ Calder said, ‘where did those documents come from?’

  ‘The old days. The gold run. I thought I’d finished with it.’ He winked. ‘I’m glad I’m not. Does the jeep seem heavy to you?’ The wink still shuttered his eye. ‘It should, I’ve got a load of gold hidden in the back. I wasn’t going to let that shithead with the moustache get his hands on any more of it.’

  ‘It’s all in the back?’

  ‘If it was the axle would have snapped like a matchstick.’ Petrov drove into a skid. ‘Some of it’s in the Zhiguli and the rest’s at the bottom of Baikal. I told you I had work to do that last night – it took me an hour to cut a hole through the ice.’

  They turned south, windshield wipers speed-swatting the snow.

  ‘After I’ve blown the bridge,’ Petrov said, ‘we’ll wait a couple of hours. That will give them time to stop traffic coming from the south. By nightfall the whole track into Mongolia should be clear. This time tomorrow you should be taking it easy in a Buddhist temple.’ He peered through the snow. ‘Look, there’s the bridge,’ waving at a blurred skeleton to the right of the road. ‘It takes the track over a river which at this time of the year is frozen solid from bed to surface.’

  He changed down, braked and the jeep’s chained tyres slid to a halt on the side of the road running parallel to the railway. Then he backed into a parking area screened from the road by birch trees.

  From the back of the jeep, between the provisions and the gold, he took the detonating equipment he had stolen from the gold mine before his retirement. The apparatus was old-fashioned but adequate and, although he hadn’t told Calder, he still felt ill from handling the almond-smelling gelignite in the garage.

  Head down, warding off the buckshot snow with one arm, holding the equipment in the other hand, he ran from the road to the bridge. It was a beauty for blowing, a T-beam single span high above the ribbon of solid ice. A partisan’s dream. Thank God the prudent railwaymen of Ulan Ude had decided it was vulnerable to the cold.

  Petrov crawled on the girders directly below the track. Wind channelled along the river’s gorge clawed him. A south-bound train thundered over him.

  Half way across the bridge he found a demolition chamber. How decent of the constructors. What had they been anticipating half way across Siberia? An attack from the Japanese? A rearguard action against the Germans in the Great Patriotic War? By God, as he prised ice from the chamber, that gave you some idea of the Soviet potential for retreat: Hitler, and Napoleon before him, were lucky to have withdrawn when they did.

  Into the chamber he packed a mixture of gelignite, plastic and ammonal; into another chamber on the other side of the two tracks a similar mixture. A junction box and two time pencils primed with ten-minute delays and Petrov was ready.

  He squeezed the time pencils and ran back to the jeep. He and Calder kept low.

  Five, four, three …. ‘You need armoured-plated balls for this’ Petrov whispered … two, one, zero ….

  ‘Shit!’ spat Petrov. ‘I’ll have to go back,’ as the explosion veined the falling snow and pushed the jeep sideways. When they raised their heads they could still hear metal falling on the ice far below.

  ‘Extreme cold has a curious effect on tired metal,’ Petrov said.

  ‘Supposing,’ Calder said, ‘that a train comes along?’

  ‘It won’t,’ Petrov assured him. ‘I checked. And in half an hour everyone from here to Moscow will know that bureaucracy was wrong about the bridge.’

  ‘Supposing someone heard the explosion?’

  ‘Trees explode in Siberia.’

  Petrov flicked a switch and the windshield wipers thrust the snow aside.

  ‘How far are you coming with me?’ Calder asked.

  ‘Until I get you on the train. You see with the bridge down and the road blocked no one will realise that you can get to Mongolia. When they’ve fixed the bridge then they’ll check all trains at Ulan Ude and at the border. But you will be over the border: they won’t appreciate that. You should have a clear run to China.’

  ‘What about the Chinese border?’

  ‘I know it well.’ Petrov took a bottle of Jubilee vodka, the best, from beneath the dashboard, swigged and handed it to Calder. Somehow Petrov still managed to look composed, as though a stand-in had done the dirty work on the bridge while assistants daubed his long sheepskin coat with dirt and mussed his grey hair. ‘The guards on this side are very fond of gold. Especially if it’s wrapped in dollars. No problems on the other side.’

  Half an hour later the blizzard stopped as abruptly as it had started. A fading sun was uncovered and the snow-white hills cushioning road and rail were tranquil in its light. To the east they could see the crests of the Yablonovy Mountains, creamed and sugared on the horizon.

  A breakdown engine, a rusted antique, approached from the direction of Ulan Ude and stopped on the approach to the bridge. Three men in black coats and fur hats alighted and stared at the fractured girders. Even from a distance they looked mournful.

  ‘Bureaucrats,’ Petrov said happily. ‘Already trying to blame the girl in charge of the samovar.’ He put the jeep into gear. ‘We’d better get out of here before a whole gang of them arrive by road.’

  As he drove south, ch
ained wheels still gripping the driven snow, the signal lights on the railway changed to red.

  He stopped four miles south. The road ahead was blocked by a drift but the rail track on the bed of a shallow cutting had been regularly cleared and the snow from the spent blizzard was only a few inches deep.

  ‘We’ll give it a little longer,’ Petrov said, ‘to allow them time to move rolling stock stranded between here and the border.’

  Calder shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘You were lucky,’ Petrov said. ‘The doctor thought he might have to amputate at the hip.’

  Lucky? Crippled. Part of your body cut away from you like a branch from a tree. Lucky?

  ‘They’ll fix you up in the States. I read about an Englishman named Bader who lost both legs in the war. A flyer. He played golf with tin legs.’

  Lucky? He supposed he was.

  Pain probed the emptiness where his shin had been. But it had lost its scalpel sharpness, just an aching reminder now of flesh and bone.

  When the sunlight had faded to winter-pink and there were mauve shadows in snow-fields Petrov drove down a track leading to the cutting. He stopped on the lip of the shingle slope leading to the line.

  ‘I hope Prince Borghese knew what he was doing,’ he said.

  ‘You forget to tell me – did he win?’

  ‘I never found out,’ Petrov said and engaged first gear.

  The jeep descended ponderously. At the bottom of the slope it slid to one side, leaned to the right on two wheels, then settled.

  Petrov drove over the outer rail, flush with the snow and shining in the last light. With one set of wheels on the sleepers linking the rails, the other on the stubs protruding beyond the outside rail, he began to drive south towards Mongolia.

  Two people in Ulan Ude didn’t believe that cold had wrecked the bridge on the railway.

  For one thing it was too much of a coincidence, reasoned Spandarian, slugging his tea with brandy in a raucous cafe opposite the railway station. Calder makes for Ulan Ude … only possible escape route to Mongolia is the railway … bang, the railway is severed ….

  For another it wasn’t quite cold enough: it took a lung-freezing 40 degrees to make over-stressed metal disintegrate.

  And the clincher: the trail had gone cold. I wouldn’t be in Ulan Ude anymore. But how would I have got out?

  Road? Out of the question. Air? Impossible – there was only one airport in Ulan Ude and there they were even checking out the sparrows.

  So it had to be rail. From the other side of the ruptured bridge? So Calder and Petrov were train drivers?

  Spandarian stroked his sable shapka and thought like a Georgian. Isolated himself from the guzzling cretins around him.

  Through the window he saw a Border Guard jeep … as there was only one route and as it was unlikely that either Petrov or Calder could drive an engine … a four-wheel drive ….

  Spandarian rammed the shapka on his head, pushed his way through a group of indignant Buryats and ran to the railway station.

  According to the Border Guard officer Petrov had once been suspected of smuggling gold through Mongolia to China. But such was his blat with the Irkutsk mafia that the investigation had been dropped.

  Two call-boxes at the station were out of order. In the third he got through to militia HQ, identified himself as State Security from Moscow and gave a detective who spoke in apologies a hard time.

  Who were Petrov’s contacts in Mongolia?

  ‘I’m sorry but ….’

  ‘You’re sorry but? The most dangerous man in the Soviet Union is on the loose and you’re sorry but? Your name, comrade – I’m going to call Moscow.’

  ‘I’m sorry …. Wait a minute, comrade.’

  Impatiently Spandarian waited while the detective consulted Petrov’s dossier on a computer, assuming that the technological revolution had reached Ulan Ude.

  He heard breathing: it sounded as though the detective had run down to the archives and back. ‘I’m afraid ….’

  ‘Don’t be. Petrov’s contacts ….’

  ‘All we know is that he used to hole up in a monastery at Darhan.’

  ‘Where the hell’s that?’

  ‘Halfway between the border and Ulan Bator.’

  ‘Near the railway?’

  ‘On the railway.’

  ‘I’ll speak with Moscow about you,’ Spandarian said ambiguously and hung up.

  After consulting his directory of aero clubs in the Soviet Union he climbed into a taxi outside the station – he had abandoned the Volga because the Border Guard officer would have put out a stop-and-search on it – and told the driver to take him to the airport.

  It was almost dark when he pushed his way through the passengers stranded by the snow to the office of the Airport Director who was also secretary of the local aero club.

  The Director, plump with wispy hair and crinkled eyes, said he had his own small plane on the banks of the Selenga.

  ‘Take me to it,’ Spandarian said.

  The Director’s pet was housed in a small corrugated-iron hangar. It was a veteran. A red-painted biplane with a foraging nose and skis fitted to the undercarriage.

  Spandarian the plane buff recognised it as an Avia 534. A Czech-made fighter which went into full production in 1935 and was flown against the Russians in the Great Patriotic War. But, as Spandarian remembered it, several Czech pilots had defected to Russia with their Avias. This, presumably, was one of them.

  He patted its red fusilage. ‘Hello beauty,’ he said as though he were feeding sugar to a horse. And to the Director: ‘Designed by Nowotny, wasn’t it?’ and when the Director, pleasantly surprised, confirmed that it was: ‘Thank God it’s the model with the closed cockpit. Plenty of juice?’

  ‘Full up,’ the Director said, ‘but you can’t take her out now,’ anxiously, ‘you’d fly straight into a mountain.’

  ‘Unfortunately you’re right. I’ll stay with you tonight and take off at dawn.’ He pointed at the Avia’s 7.92 mm machine guns. ‘Loaded?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But you’ve got ammunition?’

  ‘Old stuff from the war. Useless I should think ….’

  ‘Let’s load her up,’ Spandarian said.

  Shoemaker didn’t believe that the bridge had been wrecked by the cold because the possibility never occurred to him. He understood, after a lot of exasperated miming from a railway official, that there had been an explosion and he immediately thought:‘Calder.’

  The road was impassable, the airport, which in any case was closed, was micro-meshed with security; somehow Calder, with Spandarian behind him, had got onto the railway beyond the bridge.

  Shoemaker parked the Chaika outside the Univermag department store and considered the possibilities from an athletic standpoint. Cross-country skis, horseback, sled – all out of the question with a range of mountains to cross. Then he remembered his teenage expedition to Alaska. Up there everyone flew, even in the winter. Objection: ‘I can’t fly.’ And what was the Alsakans’ alternative to flying by the seat of their pants? Skimming through the countryside on snowmobiles, that’s what.

  Ignoring an outraged militia-woman pointing her truncheon at a No Parking sign, Shoemaker strode purposefully into Univermag.

  Track pale-ribbed in the dimmed beams of the jeep’s headlights. On one side a wall of mountain with stars perching on it, on the other a black abyss. Yellow wolves’ eyes glowing. Snow-dust sparkling.

  Petrov reckoned it was minus 40 outside. ‘Enough to freeze your soul.’

  Suddenly mountains and stars disappeared and the sound of the tyre-chains against snowless sleepers was as loud as the long-ago clank of convicts’ manacles.

  ‘A tunnel,’ Petrov said. ‘We’re getting near the border.’ He switched on the lights and the walls showed soot-black.

  They heard the explosion as they emerged from the tunnel. Petrov cut the engine. They listened. The wind played melancholy music in the pines; smal
l whirlwinds of snow skipped through the headlamp beams.

  Petrov started the engine again, inching the jeep along the track.

  ‘It sounded like a hand-grenade,’ Calder said.

  ‘If it was what I think it was it just goes to show you shouldn’t cheat nature. I took time off from the mine once,’ changing gear and accelerating slightly. ‘I said I had pneumonia. What happened? I got pneumonia, double pneumonia.’

  ‘You mean the bridge?’

  ‘It’s cold enough now for anything with a fault in it to explode. Like a tree,’ he said, pointing at the pine lying across the track in front of them.

  He stopped the jeep. ‘Not as bad as it might have been,’ peering along the headlight beams. ‘Only the tip of it. But we’ll have to cut it before we can move it.’

  ‘You’ve got a saw?’

  ‘Of sorts. A handsaw. For lopping branches.’ Petrov put on a woollen face mask and gloves. ‘Expose any flesh out there and it dies.’

  He pulled a three-foot long handsaw with yellow-greased teeth from beneath some sacking. ‘I always wanted to be a tree surgeon,’ he said and jumped onto the track.

  He sawed for ten minutes, sawdust spurting in the beams; then Calder, face masked and hands gloved, swung himself down the track on his crutches to relieve him.

  ‘Think you can manage? I’ve got to take a break in case my lungs freeze up.’

  Calder knelt on his one knee and slotted the saw into the wound Petrov had made. It was half an inch deep; the trunk was only three feet in diameter; in normal circumstances it wouldn’t have taken long to sever it.

  As Petrov, coughing, returned to the jeep he began to saw. His arms were strong from supporting himself on the crutches but he was out of condition. It was pathetic. His lungs begged for air, his sawing arm burned.

  Five minutes later the wound was a quarter of an inch deeper, both arms were on fire and he was inhaling icicles.

  They worked in shifts until, as dawn glowed green over the mountains, they were within six inches of the break-through. ‘Okay,’ Petrov said, ‘now we make a bulldozer out of the jeep.’

  The fender of the jeep pushed the tip of the pine. The wooden hinge bent, frayed. Petrov backed up and drove at it again; the hinge broke. Petrov kept the jeep going, pushing the tip of the tree along the track; gradually it assumed an angle. He reversed across the oncoming track and hit the pine hard; it slid to the side of the track, crashed through a wooden fence and rolled down a white slope towards a belt of pines far below.