The vehicle was a snow-cleaner which had come to disgorge its first load of the winter. The snow gushed into the air and fell on the blurred shape on the river-bank. Soon snow covered the body.
The Prospector grinned. The body wouldn’t be found until the spring. A hundred years ago, when escaped convicts collapsed in a blizzard to be found perfectly preserved in the spring, they called the bodies snow flowers.
* * *
The first instinct of Harry Bridges, who left the garden of No. 43 when Pavlov came down the stairs, was to sprint to the telephone kiosk and phone a story.
But as he walked rapidly down the street of wooden houses he took a hold on himself. Phoning such a story in Russia was merely fanciful. But what should he do?
He knew now that he was on to a big story, the biggest of his life. If he didn’t tell Razin he was condoning murder and, if his premonitions were right, high treason. It could also be argued that he was an accessory.
He hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Grand Hotel.
I have to toss the coin, he told himself; the decision was being forced upon him. Then it occurred to him that, if he told Razin what he knew, he would be instrumental in foiling the plot. Not only would there be no more bloodshed but he would have an exclusive spread all over the front page and his future in the Soviet Union would be assured. Surely that was journalistic good-sense?
In the lobby of the hotel he met Razin.
Razin said: “Good evening, Mr. Bridges. Have you been exploring Chicago?”
Bridges hesitated. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a fine city.”
He walked up the stairs to his room and stared through the window. It had stopped snowing and, through the glass, he could feel the muffled quiet.
* * *
Libby Chandler shivered in the hot bedroom. This was the city, the appointment was in half an hour and she was scared.
She put on her coat, fur hat and knee-length leather boots which retained the cold. She put an Intourist guide to Novosibirsk in her sling bag and her Pentax camera over her shoulder. The complete tourist.
She opened the door, handed the key to the watchdog who had taken a liking to her and put hot-house dahlias in her room and went downstairs to the Corinthian columns.
On the way she passed Harry Bridges. She greeted him but he answered abruptly and ran up the stairs.
In the lobby she found the Intourist guide from the train, Stanley Wagstaff and a couple of Australians.
The Intourist girl greeted her enthusiastically. “I was just coming to find you. In five minutes we shall make a tour of the city.” She paused for effect. “This evening we shall visit a typical Siberian restaurant where there will be music and laughter.”
She was in her blue uniform, a little shiny around the rump, but Libby remembered her naked in the train compartment. It gave her an advantage, talking to a naked woman.
Libby said: “I’m sorry. I shan’t be coming with you. I like to see cities by myself.”
The girl’s expression hardened. “But you must come with me. I know everything about this city, the Capital of Western Siberia.…”
“One million inhabitants,” Stanley Wagstaff cut in. “Famous for machine tools, perfumes.… Got the biggest opera house in Russia.”
The Intourist girl said: “Please, Mr. Wagstaff, I am the guide.” There was an edge to her voice. “Miss Chandler, it is my duty to see that you enjoy this beautiful city.”
“I’m sorry,” Libby said. “I really do want to see it by myself.” She started for the door.
“Miss Chandler, I insist.”
Oh no, Libby Chandler thought, don’t let her stop me. Please God, don’t let her call the police. She hesitated and turned, trying to see the girl naked again; but she saw only the uniform. “Don’t worry” she said. “You won’t get into trouble. I’ll explain.”
One of the Australians, who looked like a lifeguard, cut in. “Perhaps you’d like an escort.”
“I could show you as much as her,” Stanley Wagstaff said.
The composure of the Intourist girl was beginning to crumble. “Please,” she said, “let’s all go together.”
“Next time” Libby said. “At Irkutsk maybe. But not here.” She realised it was a stupid thing to say.
The big Australian said: “What about it, Libby?”
She attacked him because she was becoming sorry for the Intourist girl. “I’m going alone. Can’t you understand English?”
The Australian shrugged cheerfully. “Out of every three you win one.”
The Intourist girl said: “Please, this is my first assignment.…”
The Australian put his arm round her. “We’ll look after you, Sheila,” he said.
“Tell me,” Libby said, “is your name Larissa?”
The girl nodded. “How did you know?”
“I just knew,” Libby said, making for the doors, feeling that she had scored.
Outside, the grey sky had a sheen to it and the snow was wet. The streets resounded to the rhythmic scrape of the babushkas’ shovels. Libby walked quickly, her feet crunching in the snow. She felt exposed, as if every militiaman staring at her knew. She remembered her instructions and took the second on the left past the Central Post Office.
She glanced at her watch. Three minutes to go. She stared desperately up and down the narrow street, wondering if she had remembered the instructions properly:
A bookshop. There is only one in the street. Next to the pharmacy, opposite the linen shop.
She couldn’t see a pharmacy. Dear God, what have I got myself into? Suddenly, she saw her parents sitting down to tea in the farmhouse in Devon. She tasted honey and new bread. Libby Chandler, emancipated adventuress, felt the buildings closing in on her. On the opposite side of the road a middle-aged man in a grey overcoat stopped and stared at her. He crossed the street.
I mustn’t panic, she told herself. Mustn’t panic. Despite the cold, she felt sweat trickling down her body.
She remembered the gold brooch shaped like a coiled serpent with amethyst for its eyes and pinned it on the lapel of her coat.
The man in the grey overcoat said: “Excuse me, are you looking for something?” He smiled apologetically. “You are obviously a stranger – from the West? – and you look lost.” He spoke English with a slight lisp.
“A pharmacy,” Libby said. “I was looking for a pharmacy. I was told it had a prominent sign.”
“Ah, they always say that, don’t they.” He gave a curious, high-pitched laugh. “In this case they were right. Except” –he paused – “that the pharmacy was closed down three days ago. Something to do with the black market. You know how it is.…”
One minute to go.
“Thank you,” Libby said.
She turned to go but he laid his hand gently on her arm. “You have dollars, pounds?”
“No,” Libby said, “no money.”
“I have plenty of roubles. I could give you a very good rate. Far better than you’ll get with anyone else.” He fingered the material of Libby’s coat. “Enough to buy good furs. There are plenty of them in Novosibirsk.”
Libby disengaged his hand. “Find another customer,” she said. She walked away, feet slipping a little on the melting snow.
As she turned his expression changed. “Sensible girl,” he murmured. “What a very sensible young lady.”
He shrugged and headed for the main thoroughfare.
The bookshop was there beside the empty shop which until recently had been a pharmacy. She was exactly on time. The young man was standing behind the fourth row of bookshelves. He glanced up as she entered and she fingered the gold brooch. He nodded as if approving something in the book he was reading.
The bookshop was empty except for the two of them and the proprietor, an old man reading a thin vellum book through an eyeglass. Outside, she could hear snow flopping from the roofs.
Libby went to the opposite bookshelves so that she could see part of his face abov
e a row of books. Just a pair of pale blue eyes, like the eyes in a mask. But the eyes spoke to her. He replaced the volume he had been reading and slipped the package across the tops of the books. She thought the eyes smiled; then he was gone.
Shielding the package with a book, she slipped it into her pocket. It was much smaller than she had imagined it would be; later she realised that it was a micro-film.
She took the book she had selected and paid for it without looking at the title. Once outside, she discovered that it was War and Peace.
* * *
Libby Chandler’s plan was drawn up in a boulevard café on the Champs d’Elysées with two members of Amnesty International one hot, sullen afternoon in August, 1973.
But her rebellion began much earlier.
She was born in the White Highlands of Kenya, the only daughter of a farmer and his wife. The house was casually opulent, white with a big terrace, skins on the floors and glass-eyed trophies on the walls; its sounds were the tinkle of ice in drinks as the day faded in lemon light and the slap of servants’ bare feet on stone floors. Libby loved animals, rode a lot and had grown into a beautiful, brown-limbed girl of ten when her father decided to sell out and return to England.
The farmhouse in Devon was big and white and the earth was red like Kenya earth. Her parents spent most of their time regretting their departure from Kenya and irritating locals by comparing Devon with East Africa. The sun-downer drinking hour extended; gardeners, farm-hands and cooks came and went; the Chandlers retreated into moody isolation.
Libby went to a convent, then to Exeter University where the rebellion got under way. She campaigned for the homeless, for criminal law reform, for curbs on pollution and still managed to get a good degree in geography. She was a warm and loving girl and slept with a few boys; but most of them bored her with their self-importance. She didn’t smoke pot, she liked to go riding by herself; she sought achievement beyond conventional boundaries. She returned less and less to the farmhouse where parents still addressed Devonian servants in kitchen Swahili and searched the horizon for the peak of Mount Kilimanjiro.
When she left university she was liberated, but not over-permissive. Tall, with long, fair hair which she pinned up with sun-glasses, and the hauteur which a lot of male admiration breeds. When she went to Paris for the summer she was still in search of fulfilment.
She had a brief affair with a professional Frenchman until she found the weakness beneath his virile assurance. She left him and rented a one-room studio where she cooked and slept and read a lot; sitting in front of the open window, smelling coffee and Gauloises and the honey from the lime trees, listening to the lovers, brawlers and children in the narrow street below, wondering what to do before she started to think about security.
This was the period when she started to read modern Russian novels. Only Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn at that time; she didn’t realise it but they were her tickets to Siberia.
One day, when she was drinking a glass of white wine and reading Cancer Ward, she was joined by a tall, fairhaired young Englishman who said: “Do you mind if I join you?”
Libby said: “I don’t own the table,” and went on reading.
He ordered a beer and asked: “Have you read his other books?”
“Yes,” Libby Chandler replied, turning a page. She considered paying her bill and moving on; but it was pleasant in the boulevard café with the sun throwing coins of light on the tables through the leaves of the plane tree, and the Englishman wasn’t a nuisance, not yet. She glanced at him – blue jeans, faded blue shirt, a shark’s tooth on a gold chain round his neck, languidly assured.
“Have you read Sequel to a Legend?”
“No,” she said, trying to think who wrote it.
He answered her. “Kuznetsov. All about a disillusioned young man who leaves Moscow for Siberia. I’ll lend it to you if you like.”
“Don’t bother.” She closed her book and searched her handbag for change …
He said: “How was Africa?”
She looked at him with surprise. “How did you know I was in Africa?”
He pointed at her elephant-hair bracelet.
She smiled and gave up because the sunlight was pleasant and she sensed he wasn’t on the make. Or, if he was, he was at least subtle about it.
He ordered a carafe of white wine and they drank it; soon their table was an oasis amid the bullying traffic and all the people in a hurry.
He explained that he was a member of Amnesty which concerned itself with the plight of prisoners but that he had a private crusade which he would tell her about later that evening. Libby said she would look forward to hearing about it.
The young man whose name was Richard Harrison looked at her wisely and Libby wondered where all the wisdom had come from because he was only twenty-four.
That evening, he introduced her to a couple of his friends from Amnesty and they drank more wine in another open-air café. They didn’t impress because they talked hysterically about countries they had never visited, because they were as dogmatic as the regimes they abused; because their generalisations were often naïve.
But Richard Harrison was different. When his two friends had left they went back to her studio to drink coffee and discuss his own crusade.
She cooked steaks, tossed salad and found his presence easy. He was, he told her, working for an Italian publishing company which specialised in printing literature smuggled out of Russia. “I used to get the stuff out myself but they rumbled me. No visa – no reason given. All of us in the organisation are in the same boat.”
“I see.” She looked at him carefully across the empty plates. “Why are you telling me all this?”
He said bluntly: “Because they wouldn’t suspect a girl.” He hurried on. “And because you look the sort of girl who could do it. You remind me of a girl called Annette Meakin.”
“Do I?” Despite herself, she asked: “Who was Annette Meakin?”
“She and her mother were the first Englishwomen to cross Siberia by water and rail in 1900, They took the Trans-Siberian Railway. She was a girl of great spirit.” He grinned. “Just like you except that she was older and not half as pretty.”
“Flattery,” Libby said, “will get you everywhere.”
“A little on the obvious side?”
“A little. But I can take it.” She poured more coffee and put a record on. Lara’s Theme. “It has to be, doesn’t it?”
“Annette Meakin,” Harrison told her, “also became a great travel writer and an authority on Schiller and Goethe.” He handed her one of the books he had been carrying. “Here, read this.” It was a book about Siberia with coloured photographs in white, gold and blue; eagles and reindeer, hoar-frost and hardship.
“I’ll see you again tomorrow,” he told her. “See what you think. If you agree then we’ll make some plans.”
He knows he’s made it, she thought. And he hasn’t even tried to get me into bed. Vaguely, this annoyed her because she knew that Richard Harrison was a man who always got what he wanted.
Next day all she wanted to do was to get to Siberia. He knew this when they met in the same, sun-dappled café. “You’re very sure of yourself,” she said.
He shrugged. “I know quality when I see it. I know you’ll succeed.”
They had some coffee while he explained that a book was to be smuggled out of a hard-regime camp 124 miles north of Novosibirsk in the autumn. It would be brought to the city where she would pick it up. All she had to do then was continue her journey across Siberia and mail the package from Japan to Rome.
“And if I get caught?”
“Annette Meakin wouldn’t have got caught.”
“You’re quite ruthless, aren’t you?”
“For the sake of literature.”
They met a couple of times more and the final arrangements were made in the middle of September. He never tried to make love to her and Libby Chandler often wondered about him. He held no particular sexual attraction f
or her; but she admired him and she wasn’t lavish with admiration.
On their last meeting at the café he told her about the bookshop and gave her the brooch with the amethyst eyes. Then he grinned and said: “Take a tip from Miss Meakin’s writings. If you don’t want your mail stolen send it in an envelope with black borders. They’re still very superstitious in Siberia.”
He kissed her and was gone.
* * *
When she got back to her room in the Grand Hotel with the micro-film in her pocket Colonel Yury Razin was waiting for her.
“How did you get in?” she asked.
“Through the door,” he said, introducing himself.
She took off her coat and hung it on the door. Razin, who, she presumed, was K.G.B., stood within three feet of the micro-film. She felt sick and her lips were trembling. “What do you want? Do you usually break into women’s bedrooms when they’re out?”
Razin smiled apologetically. “Only when the women have been misbehaving.”
Libby remembered the man with the lisp. I should have known, she thought. I should have gone back some other time. Instead I’ve been caught like some clumsy tourist trying to smuggle perfume through customs.
Razin sat on the edge of the bed, his big head bowed, his face taut with responsibility, a razor-nick on his dark chin. He lit an American cigarette. He said: “It was the girl from Intourist who told me.”
“Told you?”
“That you had gone out by yourself,” Razin answered impatiently.
Libby recovered quickly, relief like a drug. She wanted to laugh; instead she said: “Surely there’s no harm in that. You’ve nothing to hide in Novosibirsk have you?”
Razin seemed to be apologising for national incompetence. “I don’t think so. But others.… You know how it is. People are too sensitive and they don’t like photographs of our wooden houses, women in shabby clothes. That’s why we try to keep tourists on one, well-trodden path.”
“I think the wooden houses are beautiful,” Libby said. She could feel the menace of the man beneath his manners.
Razin said: “It’s a matter of taste. To these people”– gesturing to the peasants in the city outside – “anything old-fashioned is a sign of failure. They haven’t kept up with the Western world.”
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