“Maybe that’s true,” Gopnik said. “What you forget is that America is only aware of our plight because of our campaigns. The whole world is only aware of it because of us.”
“Caution, caution,” Pavlov said. Had the Israelis who had stormed Beirut sought caution?
“So I beg you not to do anything that will wreck the dreams of three million Jews – certainly many, many thousands of them.”
Pavlov took Gopnik’s arm, feeling the damp material, the thin bone beneath the stringy bicep. “You told my wife I was Jewish. Why?”
Gopnik found a little of his old courage. “Does it matter? You’re not ashamed, are you?”
Pavlov increased the pressure, feeling his thumb rotating on the bone. “No, Professor I’m not ashamed. But you should be.” He released Gopnik’s arm. “You also mentioned that I was a member of a secret organisation. That I was plotting something. How did you know that, Professor?”
Gopnik was flustered, his lower lip trembled. He swabbed his forehead again. “Didn’t you mention something about it?”
The TU 104 was much lower – Gopnik stared at it hypnotised. He had presumed it was taking off; instead it was preparing to land on Russian soil.
Pavlov said quietly: “Your memory is at fault, Professor. I merely said we must show the world that we have balls.” He took hold of Gopnik’s arm again. “Who told you, Professor? Who said anything about a secret organisation?”
“I can’t remember,” Gopnik said. “I only heard vaguely. Someone in the ordinary Jewish underground.”
“Did they tell you what I was supposed to be plotting?” Gopnik shook his head, spraying drops of sweat. Then he slumped forward, face ashen.
Pavlov pushed his head between his knees. In a more kindly voice he said: “Wait here. I’ll get you a drink of water.” He found a cardboard cup on the grass and filled it from a drinking fountain. Gopnik drank thirstily.
Pavlov said: “I’m sorry. I know what you’ve been through. God willing, you’ll get to Israel.”
He helped the prematurely old man back to his black Volga.
He thought: Don’t worry – I’ll avenge you.
* * *
That night Viktor Pavlov consulted the Penman about the leak. By a process of elimination they arrived at the only possible solution. Next day Alexei Mitin, known to the Zealots as the Poet, was knocked down by a car while walking along the Sadovaya Samotetchnaya and killed instantly.
CHAPTER 9
Viktor Pavlov’s ration of imponderables ran out at 03.00 hours on the sixth day of his journey across Siberia. The train ran into Irkutsk exactly eight hours late at 02.42 hours. With delays at the station and the shortage of cabs, it took him just under twenty minutes to reach the steel and concrete Central Hotel. He checked in and took his baggage to room 250. He had understood that Anna would be waiting for him at Khaborovsk, 3,347 kilometres away. Instead she was waiting for him in Room 250. And, before either of them had spoken, he could see that she was pregnant.
CHAPTER 10
Irkutsk is the history, the soul and the spirit of Siberia. Larissa Prestina from Intourist, escorting her party round the city in a mini-bus, missed most of it.
Once Irkutsk was the mecca of the gold and tea barons. A wild city where Chinamen smuggled gold dust in corpses; where convicts, prostitutes and footpads prowled the wooden sidewalks. Before 1879 it was a maze of wooden huts; in July of that year fire broke out and, because most of the firemen were drunk and the hoses were rotten, three-quarters of the city was razed leaving 20,000 homeless. Wooden buildings were forbidden in the centre of the city and a red fire-engine was imported from England.
Larissa Prestina told her group that Irkutsk was situated on 52° 17’ N lat. and 103° 16’ E. Long. at a height of 1,455 ft. on the right bank of the Angara. Stanley Wagstaff corrected the longitude – it was, he said, 104° 16’.
At night, on the streets where, in summer, dust lay inches thick, the footpads garroted their victims. By day they lassoed them from fast-moving sleighs. There was a murder a day and the police had to be bribed before attempting to catch the killers. When the gold-miners came into town they gave their fat bankrolls to whores, confidence tricksters, barmen and cardsharps before returning to the mines.
An American in the Intourist party observed that there was a comparison with present-day New York. Larissa Prestina ignored him, pointing out the House of Soviets in the central square, with passing references to the three adjoining churches which were now a museum, a film studio and a bakery.
The taverns were packed with gamblers playing vint and losing fortunes, high-kicking dancers, soldiers from the 3rd Siberian Army Corps, visiting gunmen and drunks. To the cracked notes of honky-tonk pianos, worn-out burlesque acts from the Bowery, London, Paris and Berlin performed their ravaged acts – baritones fishing desperately for submerged notes, knife-throwers spearing their assistants, conjurors deceiving themselves, performing bears, dogs and cats. In the gold barons’ palaces guarded by wolves, the nouveau riche threw parties in marbled halls hung with Gobelin tapestry; furnished with sandlewood and cedarwood and scattered with ashtrays made from gold nuggets. The parties went on for days with river excursions or sleigh races in the afternoon, boozing, eatings drinking and fornicating at night until the hosts, fully-clothed, went to sleep beneath their gold beds. Many of the hosts were ex-convicts and some of their wives in the Parisian gowns were murderesses.
Larissa Prestina suggested a visit to the Irkutsk Hydropower station on the Angara River.
Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were exiled to this area and in the city the White Russian leader Admiral Kolchak was executed and his body shoved under the ice on the river. Exhibits in an Irkutsk museum include a sledge hammer with which the White Russians killed 31 Red hostages. Irkutsk was also the home of Chekov who praised the music, the gardens, the museums and even the hotels.
Today the city is a storehouse of electricity, machinery, furs, timber and minerals. And on the Intourist programme for the evening was a visit to a musical comedy about the building of a power station.
Libby Chandler sat in the back of the mini-bus beside Harry Bridges trying to persuade herself that she wasn’t double-crossing him. But what would he do with the information? Make a story out of it for his paper or betray Pavlov to the Russians? She still wasn’t sure about Bridges. They held hands in the back of the small coach while Larissa Prestina talked monotonously over her shoulder.
Libby had started the journey with one secret. Now she had two. Like many criminals, she had a compulsive desire to share her knowledge, to boast about it. But she kept her secrets, wondering when Pavlov was going to meet her. He’s got to tell me everything, she thought; I dictate the terms, Annette Meakin.
The micro-film was back inside the wooden doll. A Nobel Peace prize, maybe. Then she thought: What happens if the Pavlov Plan wrecks the Chandler Plan? If they were stranded in Siberia, searched, body-checked.… Perhaps, she thought, I should tell Harry about the micro-film. She glanced at his lean, clever face beneath his fur hat. He would know what to do; if she told him this secret then, she reasoned, the other would be more intact. She squeezed his hand and he squeezed back. She would have to think about it. Maybe tonight. Because tonight she knew that they would make love and to hell with the crone on the landing outside.
Larissa Prestina was pointing out the scientific library of the university, a superb Corinthian-colonnaded mansion once the home of the Governor-general. Larissa Prestina turned round and smiled. Actually smiled! “We call it the White House,” she told them.
Stanley Wagstaff said: “There seems to be a lot of American influence round here.”
The smile lingered. “Perhaps,” she said, “the Americans took the name from Russia. Perhaps,” she went on, addressing the American, a Harvard graduate travelling round the world before settling in real estate in Los Angeles, “you haven’t heard the theory that America was discovered by the Siberians?”
The young American
said he hadn’t. Hadn’t Columbus something to do with it? he asked.
“There is this theory,” she continued, “that the United States of America was discovered by Siberians crossing the Bering Sea to Alaska and moving south. A lot of your Indian tribes bear a great resemblance to Siberian tribes.”
The Harvard man said: “So you founded the United States and Israel.”
“That’s right,” Larissa Prestina said, “both Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir are of Russian extraction.”
* * *
The speech was to be made in a hall and relayed through loudspeakers to the crowds waiting outside in the crisp sunshine. Kirov Square had been cleaned of snow by the babushkas and only the rooftops, grass and trees were still sugared white.
Pavlov joined the crowds around the fountain because they made it easy for him to shake off a shadow. Razin was suspicious and Razin would have him followed. Anna’s presence wasn’t generally known.
The harsh voice boomed through the speakers. Achievement, heroism, the bumper wheat crop. The audience clapped and stamped. They mean it, Pavlov thought, they really mean it. Just as any electorate believes vote-catching promises because that’s what they want to believe.
He edged towards the centre of the crowd looking behind him for any movement. He couldn’t see anything; but, if Razin was using one of his best men, he wouldn’t. The crowd was thick, and Pavlov ducked suddenly, moving quickly at a crouch.
He surfaced a hundred yards away. If there was a shadow then he would report to Razin that Pavlov had taken evasive action. Why would an innocent man do that? If Pavlov was lucky he could get his business done quickly and let the shadow pick him up again near the Grand Hotel, sparing him the unpleasant task of reporting failure to Yury Razin.
One more dive, then he was away. He went down Karl Marx street before heading, as before, for the wooden city. He skirted the blue, wooden synagogue which he had visited once in his student days. Irkutsk had the sixth largest Jewish community in the Soviet Union, and when he went to the synagogue there had been a group of black-shawled women in an ante-room mixing flour for the Passover matzos. The women weighed five kilos of flour, mixed it into a dough and gave it to a man who flattened it. Pavlov had watched fascinated as the flattened dough was taken to another room and repeatedly put through rollers until it emerged tissue-thin. The tissue was cut into squares and thrust into a red-hot brick oven; after a few seconds it was pulled out, crisply baked. Pavlov had tasted some, still warm, and now he tasted it again as he strode past, keeping his distance.
He went straight to the wooden cottage where friends of the Priest lived. The Priest had been a member of the Russian Orthodox clergy; but he had rebelled; not so much against persecution, more against his own elders who crawled to the persecutors. They claimed it was the only way to keep some of their churches open: he saw religion in Russia as a crusade. Despite their different causes he and Viktor Pavlov were much the same sort of men. He wasn’t fighting for the Jews: he was fighting for the right of Man to worship whatever god he chooses.
He was getting old with a grey-flecked, patriarchal beard, and in the process of his crusade, he had, like many church dignitaries before him, became a fanatic. But in a land where the young are brought up as atheists he found little support; so he searched and found Viktor Pavlov and Zionism. He was, he said, working for God, not the Jews.
The Priest was alone in the house.
Pavlov sat opposite him across a scrubbed, pinewood table.
“Has this house been watched?” Pavlov asked.
“No, my son.” His eyes were deep-set, a little mad.
“Are you sure?”
“I wouldn’t bring you here if I wasn’t.”
“Did the Prospector reach you?”
“He did.” The Priest smiled beautifully. “Everything is going well. I told him where the guns were” – as if he were discussing altar candles.
“Did he have any trouble?”
“None.” God was on their side – how could there be any trouble? “He told me there were K.G.B. agents keeping watch on the helicopter. So he took a scheduled flight to Ulan-Ude. He will make the rest of the journey by road.”
“And the men” – Pavlov leaned across the table – “are they assembling?”
“They are, my son. Nothing has been forgotten.”
Pavlov was sweating; this holy calm was unnatural. “What about the timing? I gather the Policeman got through to you from Taishet about the hold-up.”
“He did. But it doesn’t matter. Your stay in Irkutsk will be a little shorter. You leave tomorrow morning at two minutes past nine in the morning as planned.”
Pavlov leaned back in his chair. “I needn’t have bothered to come round,” he said, adding hastily, “You’ve performed miracles.”
The Priest laughed. “I think you overestimate my spiritual powers.”
Pavlov said: “You’re sure everything is all right?”
“Quite sure, my son.”
“Then I’d better be going.” Pavlov stood up, then asked curiously: “Do you mind me asking one impertinent question?”
“I have no fear of any questions.”
Pavlov said: “There’s bound to be killing. What do you think about killing?”
The Priest stood up. The crusader with a flaming red cross on his breast. “Read your history books, my son,” he said.
Pavlos let himself out the back way and headed towards the centre of the city. With luck Yermakov would still be speaking. He was – threats to the Chinese paper-tigers across the border.
Pavlov crossed in front of the hall, letting himself be seen, then made for the Central Hotel. In the crowd he saw a man in a black coat eagerly pushing his way out. Pavlov lingered, giving him time to catch up.
* * *
Now, Harry Bridges thought ruefully, I have two stories. English girl smuggles “another Pasternak” out of Russia, and Our own correspondent unmasks plot to assassinate Kremlin leader.
The first story was all wrapped up in bed beside him. The second needed a lot of work, a lot of ferreting. And the only way to file it would be to get out of the country. And never to return. To hell with that, he thought.
He raised himself on one arm and smiled at the English girl lying naked beside him. “Strangers on a train,” he remarked. “Wasn’t there a movie called that?” He poured himself a measure of Scotch from the bottle beside the bed. “And where’s the micro-film now?” There was no reason to bug an English girl tourist’s room; but he had searched it and it was clean.
“In the wooden doll.”
“You should be in the C.I.A.” he said. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”
“No,” she said. “But it was the day before when the K.G.B. came round. Then I switched it.” She took the glass from his hand and had a drink. “I thought you might peep.”
Harry Bridges, taught to question everything, asked himself: If she didn’t want me to find the micro-film yesterday why is she telling me about it today?
“What happened?” he asked.
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Why are you telling me now?”
She hesitated and Bridges queried that, too. “Because I trust you more now.”
“Because we’ve made love?”
“Not just that,” she replied, feeling her way.
“What then?”
“Just being together today.”
You’re lying, he thought. Something’s happened. Could it be anything to do with the killing in Novosibirsk? The shooting at Sverdlovsk? The plot, whatever it was, that Viktor Pavlov was involved in? “How can I help?” he asked, taking the drink back from her. “You’ve got it all worked out. The boat to Japan. The pick-up when you get there. What can I do? I’m staying here, remember?”
“I want to share it with someone. It was getting too much, keeping it to myself.”
Like hell, Harry Bridges thought, switching the attack. “Why did you come tearing out of the forest
like that?”
“I told you. I wandered too far and then heard the whistle. Would you like to be left alone in the middle of Siberia?”
Bridges admitted he wouldn’t. His mind went on ferreting, all the old instincts rising from the dead. The effect of Siberia, maybe. There was only one way to banish them at this moment. He turned and kissed her breasts, started to make love to her again. This was also disturbing, the feeling he had for this beautiful, candid-eyed, double-crossing girl.
They had been to the musical comedy, laughing in the wrong places, after he’d taken a fixed-time call from his London office and phoned a story on the speech, listening to the copy-taker’s sighs of boredom and sympathising with him. Then they’d gone to a Georgian restaurant and eaten chicken Kiev with a vegetable said to be a kind of grass.
Back at the hotel they bribed the stony-faced watchdog on the landing with a bottle of Stolichnya and went straight to bed.
As a lover, he found her a strange mixture of innocence and passion. Her body smelled of lemons and her eyes seemed to change colour. Frightened, Harry Bridges realised that this act of sex was also an act of love.
He said: “So what happens now? You go to Japan, I stay here.”
“I don’t know, Harry,” she said. “What happens?”
He felt her strength: it had once been his.
“Maybe,” he said carefully, “I could make a trip to London.”
“And meet the girl who smuggled an anti-Soviet manuscript out of Russia?” She looked sad as she said: “It wouldn’t be good for your image, Harry.”
So, he thought, she knows about me. He had sworn to make a decision by the time he reached Irkutsk. He decided to postpone it a day. There was plenty of time.
“Maybe,” he said, pouring more Scotch into the glass, “you could hand this manuscript over to your contact in Japan and come back to Moscow. There’s no reason why anyone should know you’re a smuggler.”
She lay back, hands behind her head pulling up her breasts with the big, nuzzling nipples. “Harry,” she said, “I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing.”
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